The Bay of Pigs’ unfinished battle

By George F. Will, Published: September 13

At 4 a.m. on Jan. 1, 1959, an hour when there were never commercial flights from Havana, David Atlee Phillips was lounging in a lawn chair there, sipping champagne after a New Year’s Eve party, when a commercial aircraft flew low over his house. He surmised that dictator Fulgencio Batista was fleeing because Fidel Castro was arriving. He was right. Soon he, and many others, would be spectacularly wrong about Cuba.

According to Jim Rasenberger’s history of the Bay of Pigs invasion, “The Brilliant Disaster,” Phillips was “a handsome 37-year-old former stage actor” who “had been something of a dilettante before joining the CIA.” There, however, he was an expert. And in April 1960, he assured Richard Bissell, the CIA’s invasion mastermind, that within six months radio propaganda would produce “the proper psychological climate” for the invasion to trigger a mass Cuban uprising against Castro.

The invasion brigade had only about 1,400 members but began its members’ serial numbers at 2,500 to trick Castro into thinking it was larger. Castro’s 32,000-man army was supplemented by 200,000 to 300,000 militia members. U.S. intelligence was ignorant of everything from Castro’s capabilities to Cuba’s geography to Cubans’ psychology.

Fifty-two years and many misadventures later, the invasion still fascinates as, in historian Theodore Draper’s description, “one of those rare events in history — a perfect failure.” It had a perverse fecundity.

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: George Will on Bay of Pigs — the Unfinished Battle”

2013/09/152013/09/15

Berto Jongman: Cyber Front Line, Iran Cracks CIA Drone Command Center, Captures CIA Spy Sent Into Iran from Afghanistan

Drones & UAVs, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency

Cyber security: The new arms race for a new front line

Cyber war leads to capture of CIA spy in Iran

2013/09/152013/09/15

Berto Jongman: Twitter and the Transformation of Democracy

Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Idiocy, IO Impotency

Twitter and the transformation of democracy

The social networking service has the power to control the expression of public opinion in political debate

John Naughton

The Observer, Saturday 14 September 2013

The news that Twitter has taken the first steps towards a stock marketflotation has triggered a predictable storm of speculation about the valuation of the company. How much is a corporation with 200 million monthly users actually worth? How does it compare with Facebook, with its billion users?

The answer is: nobody knows. But that doesn't matter because it's not the important question. Although Twitter and Facebook are categorised as social networking services, in fact they are as different as chalk and cheese. And, of the two, Twitter is more important in one respect: its impact on the arena in which societies discuss their political issues.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Not so fast, Cantinflas! Twitter is stupid….Kum Ba Ya on steroids, which is to say, lots and lots of people holding each others hands digitally, but all largely unintelligent in the decision-support sense of the word. Yes, Twitter has the ability to harness collective intelligence, but when that collective intelligence is drugged up, dumbed down, clueless on true cost economics, and largely devoid of ethical holistic understanding of systems dynamics, cause and effect, and so forth, Twitter has to be considered the equivalent of a billion drunk teen-agers all trying to drive the same car via a shared joy-stick. Without an honest Wikipedia and an honest Google (just to be explicit, both corrupt to the bone), Twitter is noise.

2013/09/142013/09/15

Graphic: Global Unions (versus Global Networks or Global Confederations)

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics

Source

Phi Beta Iota: This simple graphic has enormous implications for the evolving craft of intelligence (decision-support). When considered in relation to absolute scale limits on the depletion of non-renewable resources, and the absolute valuation of diversity of life forms, it recasts how “truth” should be considered in the context of the whole, distinguishing between truth for the whole versus truth for the individual and truth for the nation-centric collective. This is a variation of the discovery made by Robert Steele when he co-founded the Marine Corps Intelligence Center and led the study on planning and programming factors for expeditionary operations in the third world: the threat changes depending on the level of analysis. This degree of sophistication and accomplished holistic reasoning is not yet present in any intelligence community that we know of.

See Also:

Source: 2012 PREPRINT: The Evolving Craft of Intelligence 3.5

Source: Graphic: Threat Level Changes Depending on the Level of Analysis

2013/09/142013/09/15

Berto Jongman Et Al: NSA & Digital Malfeasance

Ethics, IO Impotency

Cloud Services Cannot Be Trusted

Data Brokers — Opening the Kimono

Digital Islam – Digital Jihad

How NSA Puts All of Us (and US Commerce & Technology) At Risk

NSA Not Behind the Diginotar Hack

NSA Undermining Internet Security

Stewardship of the Internet

USG (NIST) Warns Against Using USG (NSA) Weakened Encryption

US Standards Agency Strongly Suggests Dropping Its Own Encryption Standard

2013/09/142013/09/14

Stephen E. Arnold: Navy Project Pulls Military into the Nineties [Just 20 Years Behind State of the Art]

Ineptitude, IO Impotency, Military

Navy Project Pulls Military into the Nineties

September 13, 2013

Sometimes an initiative comes along that causes me to perk up and declare, “wait, you mean they weren’t doing that already?” That is my response to Slashdot‘s article, “Navy Version of ‘Expedia’ to Save DOD Millions.” I know, I should no longer be surprised by the gross inefficiency of large bureaucracies.

The set of bureaucracies that makes up our military, though, is taking a welcome step toward efficiency with this project being tested by the Office of Naval Research. The system would use “an Expedia-like” search to correlate freight and personnel travel needs with open slots worldwide. Writer Kevin Fogarty reports:

“The Transportation Exploitation Tool (TET) is a little more sophisticated than online-travel sites such as Expedia or Travelocity were in 1996: The system consolidates travel schedules and capacity reports for both military and civilian carriers to give logistics planners a choice of open spaces in ships, planes, trucks, trains or other means of travel, along with information about cost, estimated time of arrival and recommendations of the most efficient route. Previously, logistics planners trying to get an engine part to a Navy ship stranded in a foreign port, for example, might spend hours or days looking through separate databases to find a ship or plane able to carry the part that could deliver it within a limited window of time.”

Though it has taken our government seventeen years to take advantage of this technology, I suppose the fact that they finally are is worth celebrating. The TET system is part of the Logistics Information Technology(LogIT) project, which aims to combine information “from separate systems for travel planning, asset tagging, tracking, location, monitoring and analysis of travel options into a single interface.” Logic is a beautiful thing!

The article includes a few details about how the system will work, as well as expectations for the project’s impact. See the article for more information about this belated but important initiative.

Cynthia Murrell, September 13, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

2013/09/132013/09/13

Open Mind: CIA PSYOP Against US Public – Labeling Truth-Seekers as “Conspiracy Theorists?”

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, IO Deeds of War, Peace Intelligence

CIA Responsible For Labeling Honest Research Into Finding the Truth As “Conspiracy Theories”

Boy does this article by Foster Gamble fit on this blogsite. For more than 40 years anyone attempting to find out the truth about anything that the “controllers” wanted to keep secret, was labeled a “conspiracy theorist”. Of course, then, propaganda was used to discredit any “conspiracy theorist” so no one would take them seriously. Now, the CIA admits what many have known for a long time. There is also a good little video near the bottom of this article where Foster and Kimberly offer suggestions about how to talk to others about “conspiracy theories”.Tom

News Flash — CIA Invents “CONSPIRACY THEORY” Wed, 11 Sep 2013 By Foster Gamble

It is a little-known though well-documented fact that the origin of the campaign to ridicule research into conspiracies was initiated by the CIA in 1967 to undermine the credibility of those who questioned the official claims of the Warren Commission regarding the so-called facts of the Kennedy assassination. Given the challenge we and others feel when speaking out about conspiracies, I think Lance deHaven-Smith is right when, in his new book Conspiracy Theory, he suggests “the CIA’s [covert and illegal] campaign to popularize the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility must be credited…with being one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time…”

Of course not all proclaimed conspiracies are true. There are competent conspiracy analysts and incompetent ones, just as there are skilled and shoddy reporters, historians or practitioners of any discipline.

Continue reading “Open Mind: CIA PSYOP Against US Public – Labeling Truth-Seekers as “Conspiracy Theorists?””