CIA gets a free pass for dereliction on multiple fronts. Noteworthy: Neither State nor Africa Command had any idea of the size and scope of the CIA arms smuggling operation based in Benghazi. Also noteworthy that NSA has nothing at all on the attack in the days leading up to it or during the attack. Deja bu.
Much of how DOD will respond to falling budgets and the challenges of 2013 will depend on who President Obama selects to be SecDef. This is why I am hoping that Senator Chuck Hagel will be chosen. Yet he alone will be unable to do much of anything to solve DOD’s systemic problems of incompetence, corruption, and dereliction of duty. He will need to fire the existing senior civilian and military bureaucrats who have made maintaining the dysfunctional status quo an art form and who will fight any change tooth and nail. The senator in short needs to surround himself with people like yourself who will not be afraid to change the moribund operations and culture of DOD.
So what are the Senator’s chances of becoming SecDef? I don’t think they are very good at all. Although I don’t normally agree with Gordon Duff’s opinions, I think he is right about how the pro-Israeli lobbies and neo-cons will oppose the conformation of Senator Hagel. There will also be considerable opposition to him from the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC), who correctly see him as a treat to their gravy train. In addition the DOD military and civilian bureaucracy would fight against his nomination, even if the MICC were not threatened — they KNOW they are over-staffed at the top. Finally the self-referentials that occupy so many seats in the U.S. Congress will oppose him on so-called principles based on paranoid fears, adherence to rigid ideologies, and general opposition to anything the President attempts.
This is a shame because it will cost us yet another good public servant and a thinker who could actually transform U.S. National Security.
By Gordon Duff and Press TV
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”Real or not, Netanyahu feels Israel has been abandoned by the US. Some Americans, I am certainly one of these, Hagel is one also as is Chairman of the JCOS, Martin Dempsey, see Israel as interfering in domestic affairs, American elections and an irresponsible “actor” in the Middle East.”
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Senator Chuck Hagel (ret), a republican from Nebraska, is expected to be nominated by President Obama to the vital post of Secretary of Defense, taking the place of Leon Panetta.
Hagel is the only GOP senator to have stood up to the Israel/AIPAC lobby, the only senator to question sanctions against Iran and a rare and independent voice that is needed to bring Pentagon “adventurism” to an end.
However, Hagel is now under attack and stands accused of “anti-Semitism,” this time by infamous neocon Bill Kristol.
Herewith is a stunning series of reports by Gareth Porter, one of the very best investigative journalists in America. Not only does he show how King David created the myth of his success and became naked in the process, he puts the failures of the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan into a definitive perspective. But perhaps most importantly, at least to my thinking, Gareth also expose the emptiness of real lesson learned by the US military from its failure in Vietnam … namely how protect the institution from criticism by manipulating and controlling the narrative of failing wars and a breakdown of leadership by capturing the thinking and imagination of the press. This manipulation was evident in the uncritical coverage of the First Gulf War, but the superficial appearance of success in those wars masked the rot embedded (pun intended) in the “lesson learned.” Thanks to Gareth, it is now clear to anyone who makes an effort to study this report.
The Petraeus Legacy: Conscious and Unconscious Falsehoods
David Petraeus always demonstrated political agility in his management of the “war of perceptions” in Iraq and Iran, gravitating to story lines that would create an image of success even though the larger picture still looked uncertain, if not unfavorable.
But in Afghanistan, the Petraeus strategy did have the same effect as it had in Iraq. He was never able to show that the Taliban insurgency had been brought under control. As Lt. Col. Danny Davis, who returned from his second tour in Afghanistan in late 2011 after having traveled more than 9,000 miles around the country, reported in an 84-page assessment, the level of Taliban attacks in 2011 was still at or above the 2009 levels that had prompted US officials to fear that the war was being lost.
Davis charged that Petraeus' March 2011 report to Congress was “misleading, significantly skewed or completely inaccurate.” Davis presented a classified version of his report to a bipartisan group of Senators and House members that cited dozens of classified documents in support of his charge. And in a telling reflection of Petraeus' failure of to make a credible case, The New York Times covered Davis' critique in a front page story in January 2012. The only question about his attack on Petraeus' claims was whether Petraeus was knowingly lying or saying what he chose to believe.
The record of Petraeus' command in Afghanistan – especially the case of the Taliban impostor – suggests that his public posture on the progress of his command combined claims he knew were untrue with some that he actually believed were true. His need to maintain the image he had so artfully created had led him to believe increasingly his own myth.
NightWatch Special Comment: A Summary Evaluation of the National Intelligence Council's report Global Trends 2010. Last week NightWatch promised to review the earliest Global Trends report it could find. The first report was published in 1997 and was entitled, Global Trends 2010.
NightWatch has been spending a lot of time just trying to understand the prolix and vague political science jargon of 1997, not to mention the meanings of judgments or predictions written in that language.
The language is imprecise, centered on the word “agendas” which is used repeatedly without definition. Every nation's agenda was to have been changed by 2010, the report asserts. It never explains to what that metaphor refers.
Thomas Leo Briggs is a retired CIA operations officer with 3 years military experience in US Army military police, 3 years as a Special Agent in the Drug Enforcement Administration and 26 years in the CIA. He tried to make use of computer capabilities to aid and assist humint operations in a variety of ways throughout his last 18 years as an operations officer. He is also the author of Cash on Delivery: CIA Special Operations During the Secret War in Laos (Rosebank Press, 2009).
Intelligence Agencies Move Towards Single Super-Cloud by Heny Kenyon, Aol Defense, 17 December 2012
So, what we have here, according to Mr. Kenyon, is an effort to develop a pan-agency set of computer servers so that the analysts of all intelligence community (IC) agencies may share data and resources. One reported hope being that such a system will break down existing boundaries between agencies and change their insular cultures.
The first thing a reader notices is that the alleged motivations for this super-cloud are lower costs and higher efficiency. Secondly, the CIA already operates a cloud slightly separate from an NSA cloud consisting of five other intelligence agencies and the FBI. Is that like being slightly pregnant? Does that provide truly lower costs, higher efficiency, and shared resources and data? Wouldn't one expect to find different data and resources on each cloud, though some data and resources may be the same? Moreover, the NSA cloud incorporates the smaller organization-wide clouds of its partner agencies and, in addition, the National Reconnaissance Office has its own plan to build its own cloud. Seems all of that that does not make for lowest costs and highest efficiencies – nor one super-cloud.
