It is difficult for any intelligent moral citizen to stand by and watch their country self-destruct. Between the ideological idiots on the extreme right and the mere idiots on the extreme left, America is in a pickle. Elsewhere I have posited a solution for 2012.
Here I am obliged, from a sense of duty to the Republic that has been betrayed by our serving flag officers and senior executives, to point to and then demolish a book that is beneath contempt among real professionals, but all the rage among the loosely-educated and macho-shit crowd–this sadly includes a number of ranking Special Operations Force (SOF) officers that should know better. It came out in early 2010 and crap from this book is now making the rounds among the wing-nuts of the right and the uniformed officers that have never actually done any form of successful clandestine intelligence or counterintelligence. I refer to Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama is Inviting the Next Attack.
Here is a copy of the garbage that is circulating now via email among military officers:
Turkey-Iran: A senior Iranian official recently said Iran is willing to share its nuclear technological capability with neighboring, friendly countries, which could include helping Turkey build an atomic power plant.
For years Turkey has tried to build a nuclear power plant, but no Western country has been willing to help, the official said, adding that this is true for other countries in the region. Iran is also willing to cooperate with Brazil in the nuclear field, he said.
Comment: Energy policy provides a basis for an expansion of Iranian influence and presence in the Middle East and Brazil.
Phi Beta Iota: The insanity of US foreign and security policy is breath-taking, and only explainable in the context of an out of control government that is advancing pathological short-term corporate interests. Brazil does not need Iran's help on nuclear energy. What is interesting here, in combination with the French-German-Russian Axis [and more distantly, India-Pakistan and China-Asia] is the isolation of the US Government – the world is beginning to isolate the pathogen.
CIA runs all-source analytic competition for universities — neither the Open Source Center nor Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) are anywhere to be found.
Phi Beta Iota: This was probably a variation of the superb Mid-Career Course (CIA's mini-war college) analytic exercise but lacking the meat that is to be found in the Mid-Career Course: the opportunity to learn that walking around and talking to PEOPLE is what fills in the gaps and leads to a more complete view. Also lacking here, as it is in the Mid-Career Course, is any tutorial on analytic tradecraft, or any reference to external legal ethical human, online, and analog sources that generally have the 80% or more of the knowledge that CIA is simply not able to access because of its secrecy blinders.
Monday, November 7, the Washington Post editorial board published its take on the extreme rhetoric the country has been hearing on the defense budget since Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta starting talking about the “doomsday mechanism” that would reduce defense spending. Quoting the newer extreme rhetoric of several members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff defending their budget ambitions to the eager-to-listen House Armed services Committee, the Washington Post positioned itself foursquare in favor of hysterics. It was with an editorial titled “Defense on the Rocks: Mandated spending cuts could decimate U.S. military might.” Find it here (although at the web link they toned down the title with the more sympathetic “US Defense on the defensive.”) Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: Military Spending versus Competence”
Washington: The Pentagon is offering field commanders control of counterintelligence operations to cope with the never-ceasing efforts by countries such as China, Iran and Israel to gain access to classified information and technology.
Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike Vickers approved the plan in an Oct. 5 memorandum. Groups such as Central Command and Special Operations Command can now choose to do their own CI work within their organizations, according to the memo. Formal investigations are still handled by the services.
“We gave the [combat commands] an option to develop an organic CI capability… or to rely on [the Defense Department],” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. James Gregory said. “We did not want to legislate either way but instead wanted to give [them] an option.” The decision comes as the Pentagon and intelligence community are preparing for a $25 billion to $40 billion budget cut over the next decade.
Phi Beta Iota: At the tactical level intelligence has always been the runt, generally one rank down from operations, and within intelligence, counterintelligence is where the runts of the runts go. Marty Hurwitz destroyed tactical intelligence with his consolidation of the General Defense Intelligence Program (GDIP) and the well-intentioned but badly conceived Joint Intelligence Center (JIC) concept. While Jim Clapper destroyed Marty Hurwitz, he did not make tactical intelligence (counterintelligence silent as in non-existent) healthy again, going on to make national consolidation every worse. There is a huge difference between security and defensive counterintelligence – they are not the same but ignorant commanders will treat them as one. There is a huge difference between defensive counterintelligence and offensive counterintelligence – no one in the US national intelligence community is competent as offensive counterintelligence, and the commanders will be oblivious to this until such time as we finally eliminate the regional commands and reset national defense and multinational information-sharing and sense-making. The budget cuts are trivial – $40 billion over ten years is $4 billion a year, that is a 4% cut on $90 billion a year, while at least 50% of what the IC spends now is fraud, waste, and abuse, 70% of that on contractor vapor-ware. The greatest enemy of America is a dishonest intelligence community that cannot do holistic analytics relevant to everything we need to know.
More practically, COCOMs consist of headquarters staffs and operational units sourced from the Services. Counterintelligence is currently a functional support service provided to the COCOMs by the Services and perhaps DIA. I know of no joint CI force structure designed for COCOMs. So, for COCOMs to run their own CI operations, they will require resources to be sourced, either permanently or temporarily, from the Services or from DIA, which itself gets its military personnel from the Services and competes with the rest of the Intelligence Community to hire civilians. That would serve principally to exacerbate existing shortages in counterintelligence personnel and force structure. In other words, Mike Vickers is not leading, he is scamming.
It's really sad when journalists want to print the truth, but are prevented from doing so because of concerns about keeping their jobs. It seems that is the situation today with the video that shows that all of the Libya destruction was built on a pack of lies. The video done by Julien Teil called “The Humanitarian War” demonstrates, in the words of the author of the original lie, that there was no evidence at all to back up the allegation that thousands were killed by the Jamahirya government, but that instead, a small circle of friends “worked” that lie throughout the various organs of the United Nations and the result is genocide of a people and contamination of a land.
Now, here's my request to you. Can you become a journalist for a day and post the video link to just a few of the sites that you visit regularly? If the real journalists won't do it, then could you? It is clear that we have to become the journalists that we seek.
Please post this video link to Daily Kos, Common Dreams, OpEd News, Democracy Now!, and the rest that we visit regularly. But could you also please visit FOX, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBC, Russia Today, PRESS TV, etc. and post it there?
I'll do my part, too, and make sure that it's posted to my sites or sites that I'm supposed to have control over. Only, I have to learn how to post! (That's another matter!)
Finally, if you haven't taken the time to watch this video, please do. It will take your breath away that all of this has been done by NATO to Libya and its foundation is a lie. What kind of people would do that to their own country?
