Algeria-Libya: Algerian soldiers found a large weapons cache on 24 October in Illizi in east central Algeria, near the border with Libya. The weapons included 100 anti-aircraft missiles, more than 500 MANPAD shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles and hundreds of rocket launchers, rifles, landmines and rocket-propelled grenades.
Comment: Algerian authorities have not commented about whom they suspect stored the weapons, except to suggest they came from Libya. Illizi is on the road several hundred kilometers southwest from Tripoli, Libya. This is one of the routes used to smuggle Libyan weapons to militants and terrorists in Mali.
The cache contents help confirm where some of Libya's large store of man-portable shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles (MANPADS) went after the weapons depots used by Qadhafi's forces were ransacked and their contents carried off. This is an important discovery, but only a portion of the weapons that are unaccounted.
Five hundred MANPADS would be more than enough to neutralize French air superiority in Mali, had they reached the militants there. Libya has become the arsenal of Muslim terrorists.
Gordon Duff first reported in Veterans Today another financial scandal motive for the Repubs wanting to hold up Obama Care. New regulations were going into effect to stop the cross collateralization of insurance company reserves, who are all owned by banks, so they could be market traded. The sums involved were astronomical.
“The Obama Care issue is about ‘funds in management.’ The health insurance industry, through investment banks and hedge funds, accounts for 35% of the entire investment capital of the United States.
This sector has been totally unregulated with, not just individual policyholders but industries and government forced to subsidize a health care Ponzi scheme where in some cases fewer than 3% of policy premiums were paid back in benefits.”
When people criticize overclassification of national security information, what exactly are they talking about? Is it too much secrecy? The wrong sort of secrecy? Classifying something at too high a level? Oddly, there is no widely-accepted definition of the term.
But since the solution to overclassification, if any, will naturally be shaped by the way the problem is understood, it is important to specify the problem as clearly as possible.
In 2010 Congress passed (and President Obama signed) the Reducing Over-Classification Act, which mandated several steps to improve classification practices in the executive branch. But in a minor act of legislative malpractice, Congress failed to define the meaning of the term “over-classification” (as it was spelled in the statute). So it is not entirely clear what the Act was supposed to “reduce.”
Among its provisions, the Act required the Inspectors General of all classifying agencies to perform an evaluation of each agency's compliance with classification rules.
“Over-classification,” according to ISOO, means “the designation of information as classified when the information does not meet one or more of the standards for classification under section 1.1 of
.” If something is classified in violation of the standards of the executive order– then it is “over-classified.”
So, for example, information that is not owned by the government, such as a newspaper article, cannot be properly classified under the terms of the executive order. And neither can information that has no bearing on national security, such as an Embassy dinner menu. And yet information in both categories has been known to be classified, which is indeed a species of overclassification.
Unfortunately, however, this ISOO definition presents the problem so narrowly that it misses whole dimensions of overclassification.
Here is what I believe is a correct assessment concerning the creation of the national security state in which we live today. Absurd amounts of money have been spent, and civil liberties abridged to an unprecedented degree, on the basis of a threat consisting of little gangs. It is transparently disproportionate, there has to be something underneath that.! I believe it results from a long-term strategic assessment of what is going to happen with climate change. Since 1991 I have been following and publishing stories on this trend. It's very clear, on the basis of the scientific research in the open literature, that it is going to cause massive disruption, and social disorder. I am sure there are lots of other studies that are classified that say the same thing, perhaps in greater detail, and with a security perspective not usually found in open research literature
Over the years we have seen numerous cases of various abuses and outright crimes by private military and security contractors (PMSC). True, they don’t happen every day, and don’t reflect the actions of the vast majority of the contractors working overseas but it would be foolish to say it is just the actions of a few bad apples either. Why these crimes happen says as much about the overall framework of accountability that various governments have set up and, with varying degrees of effort and resources, have enforced. But that is not the point of this post.
David Isenberg
What is the point is this. When, in the past, crimes have become public, governments have brought cases against the accused offenders with varying degrees of success. To name a few:
the killings of Iraqi civilians by Blackwater contractors at Nisoor Square in 2007, the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by Titan reportedly aided by Titan and CACI contractors, DynCorp contractors, being accused of rape and running underage prostitution networks in association with their security duties under contract with the US military in Bosnia; PMSCs accused of killing Ecuadorian peasants by spraying their villages with toxic defoliants and accidentally shooting down a missionary plane incorrectly suspected of drug trafficking.
But it is still fairly rare for the perpetrators to get convicted and go to prison. Why is that?
The paper Protecting the Victims of the Privatization of War by Willem van Genugten, Marie-José van der Heijden, and Nicola Jägers, published earlier this year by the Tilburg Law School in the Netherlands offers some answers.
– Downsize, transition, and then sustain a smaller, but ready and capable Total Army that provides Joint and Combined forces with expeditionary and enduring landpower for the range of military operations and features unique competencies such as operational leadership, mobility, command and control, and theater logistics at all echelons.
Raymond T. Odierno
Phi Beta Iota: To downsize effectively you have to have ethical evidence-based decision-support immediately applicable to strategy, policy, acquisitions, and operations. This does not exist. NGIC once upon a time had Tim Hendrickson and GRAND VIEW but they never made the leap to holistic analytics and true cost economics. Army flags — including the very best of them — simply do not know what they need to know to demand of the intelligence “professionals” what the latter have no clue how to produce. We have not seen a single useful strategic, policy, or acquisition document come out of DIA in the past twenty years…nor CIA. All these people are still in the cut and paste fluff mode that Col Mike Pheneger, USA (SOF) blew the whistle on in 1988. Nothing has changed in substance — just more people, more money, more (retarded) technology, and much less useful thinking.
Click on Image to Enlarge
[ENABLERS; EXPEDITIONARY; UNIFIED ACTION PARTNERS (UAPs)] – Support the Joint Force with critical enablers such as aviation, intelligence, engineers, logistics, medical, signal, and special operations, both while enroute to, and operating within, expeditionary environments alongside Unified Action Partners.
Phi Beta Iota: The Marine Corps led the way with Planning and Programming Factors for Expeditionary Operations in the Third World, and then lost its integrity and started chasing money instead of producing ethical evidence-based decision-support relevant to what General Al Gray wanted in the first place, compelling support for honest light-footprint low-cost acquisition (something the other four services need but refuse) along with strategic and operational support to what he called “peaceful preventive measures.” The Navy has imploded — as many Admirals as ships, and the whole lot of them are not worth anything in terms of rapid precision response, this leaves the Marine Corps both 4-6 days away from anywhere, and totally exposed (e.g. no Naval Gunfire, rotten CAP) once they get there. Army cannot do what it wants to do without an honest long-haul Air Force and a complete make-over of close air support (to include transfer of CAS to the Army) as well as reconnecting to reality at the geospatial, cyber, and cultural levels.
Protecting the Victims of the Privatization of War
