Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 2015 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/03/192013/03/26

Steve Aftergood: Drake Classification Complaint Dismissed and Court Severely Critical of Executive Over-Classification, Arbitrary Classification, and Lack of Accountability for Same

Cultural Intelligence, Government, Ineptitude, IO Impotency, IO Secrets, Military

CLASSIFICATION COMPLAINT ARISING FROM THOMAS DRAKE CASE DISMISSED

In July 2011, J. William Leonard, a former director of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), took the extraordinary step of filing a formal complaint with the Office he once led charging that a document used to indict former NSA official Thomas Drake under the Espionage Act had been wrongly classified in violation of the executive order on classification. (“Complaint Seeks Punishment for Classification of Documents” by Scott Shane, New York Times, August 2, 2011; “Ex-federal official calls U.S. classification system ‘dysfunctional'” by Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post, July 21, 2012)

Last December, in a newly disclosed response, John P. Fitzpatrick, the current ISOO director, concluded that Mr. Leonard's complaint did not warrant the sanctions that Mr. Leonard had urged. Neither the original classification of the NSA document, titled “What a Wonderful Success,” nor its continued classification “rise to the level of willful acts in violation of the Order,” Mr. Fitzpatrick wrote in his December 26, 2012 response.

With that, the matter was officially closed. But the divergent views underlying the complaint remain unresolved and continue to fester.

“I have devoted over 34 years to Federal service in the national security arena, to include the last 5 years of my service being responsible for Executive branch-wide oversight of the classification system,” Mr. Leonard wrote in his 2011 complaint. “During that time I have seen many equally egregious examples of the inappropriate assignment of classification controls to information that does not meet the standards for classification; however, I have never seen a more willful example.”

Continue reading “Steve Aftergood: Drake Classification Complaint Dismissed and Court Severely Critical of Executive Over-Classification, Arbitrary Classification, and Lack of Accountability for Same”

2013/03/192013/03/26

Babette Bensoussan: How Good Is Your Strategy?

Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics

Mutters – How good is your strategy?

Have you heard ….. if you want a decent strategy, you need a firm grasp of reality, which means avoiding bad strategies. How do you define bad strategies? According to Richard Rumelt, author of “Good Strategy Bad Strategy“, they are characterised by one or more of the following factors:

Fluff – defined as a form of gibberish masquerading as strategic concepts or arguments.
Failure to face the challenge – if the challenge can't be defined, that particular quality of the strategy can't be assessed, and then improved or rejected.
Mistaking goals for strategies – arguably this is the most common error ( take a look at this video on “What is Strategy” for more insights).
Bad strategic objectives – the challenge for senior executives is to set out subgoals that are both relevant and practical for the chosen strategy.

Make the above factors part of your strategic reviews and you may avoid some of the prevalent pitfalls!

Adapted from: “What strategy isn't”, Mike Riddiford, Editor, CEO Forum http://www.ceoforum.com.au

2013/03/192013/04/04

Stephen E. Arnold: Which Vendor Will Be the Next Autonomy and Endeca?

Advanced Cyber/IO

Which Vendor Will Be the Next Autonomy and Endeca?

At a recent search conference, I sat in the audience and marveled at the disconnect between the past that was and the present which is unfolding now. Several speakers dismissed the notions of precision and recall. In their place, the search wizards (who shall remain nameless) emphasized that search had to be “good enough.” The challenge, therefore, was to define “good enough.”

I sat quietly. At my advanced age I don’t have the energy to revisit the long and mostly disappointing trajectory of one of the most overhyped and misrepresented enterprise solutions—information retrieval. The list of companies which have spouted grandiose promises of universal information access, real time search, and actionable information reaches back to the early days of RECON and Orbit, STAIRS III, the long forgotten InQuire with its forward truncation, and Smart.

Where are these game changing vendors now?

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2013/03/192013/03/26

John Steiner: Muslim States Agree Violence Against Women and Girls Not Justified by Any Custom, Tradition, or Religious Consideration

Cultural Intelligence

MUSLIM STATES AGREE TO ‘HISTORIC' UN STATEMENT ON WOMEN

Muslim and western nations overcame deep divisions to agree a historic United Nations declaration setting out a code of conduct for combatting violence against women.

Iran, Libya, Sudan and other Muslim nations agreed to language stating that violence against women and girls could not be justified by “any custom, tradition or religious consideration.”

Western nations, particularly from Scandinavia, toned down demands for references to gay rights and sexual health rights to secure the accord after two weeks of tense negotiations between the 193 UN member states.

Some 6,000 non-government groups were in New York for the Commission on the Status of Women meeting. Cheers and wild applause erupted when the accord
was announced in the UN headquarters late Saturday.

Michelle Bachelet, executive director of UN Women, said it had been an “historic” meeting. It was announced straight after that Bachelet would be
leaving her post. She is expected to return to politics in Chile where she has already been president.

Read full article.

2013/03/192013/03/26

Paul Craig Roberts: Iraq Invasion at 10 Years — The legacy of “the war on terror” is the death of liberty.

08 Wild Cards, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, Media, Military, Peace Intelligence

March 19, 2013. Ten years ago today the Bush regime invaded Iraq. It is known that the justification for the invasion was a packet of lies orchestrated by the neoconservative Bush regime in order to deceive the United Nations and the American people.

The US Secretary of State at that time, General Colin Powell, has expressed his regrets that he was used by the Bush regime to deceive the United Nations with fake intelligence that the Bush and Blair regimes knew to be fake. But the despicable presstitute media has not apologized to the American people for serving the corrupt Bush regime as its Ministry of Propaganda and Lies.

It is difficult to discern which is the most despicable, the corrupt Bush regime, the presstitutes that enabled it, or the corrupt Obama regime that refuses to prosecute the Bush regime for its unambiguous war crimes, crimes against the US Constitution, crimes against US statutory law, and crimes against humanity.

In his book, Cultures Of War, the distinguished historian John W. Dower observes that the concrete acts of war unleashed by the Japanese in the 20th century and the Bush imperial presidency in the 21st century “invite comparative analysis of outright war crimes like torture and other transgressions. Imperial Japan’s black deeds have left an indelible stain on the nation’s honor and good name, and it remains to be seen how lasting the damage to America’s reputation will be. In this regard, the Bush administration’s war planners are fortunate in having been able to evade formal and serious investigation remotely comparable to what the Allied powers pursued vis-a-vis Japan and Germany after World War II.”

Continue reading “Paul Craig Roberts: Iraq Invasion at 10 Years — The legacy of “the war on terror” is the death of liberty.”

2013/03/192013/03/26

Winslow Wheeler: Iraq Invasion at 10 Years — Learning from the Past

08 Wild Cards, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Media, Peace Intelligence

The media is doing its usual vapid tour of the 10th “anniversary” of the American invasion of Iraq. Far better to consider how the nation permitted the disgrace to happen. Mike Lofgren cites three important lessons to learn.

For myself, I believe it most important to consider the domestic politics and careerist posturing that drives civilian (and military) leaders to beat the drums of war in order to manipulate political (and budgetary) decisions, or worse to simply advocate war.

Consider Mike's lessons below as you read in the morning news articles of the current US B-52 exercises over the Korean peninsula and the hysteria of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in reacting to a historically minor budget correction. Given the nature of the North Korean regime, is this the time to bait them? Have the Joint Chiefs shown they are capable to dealing with budget events they have only had a year and a half to prepare for? Is there an American domestic political (and budgetary) content to the US escalation of events in Korea?

As you read Mike's important column below, it is useful to think about such questions.

Michael S. Lofgren

Former Congressional Staffer, author of The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

Iraq: 10 Years After, Have We Learned a Thing?

On the decennial of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the persons responsible have shown remarkably little guilt over launching an unprovoked war of aggression, even when the lamentable results might be expected to give one pause to rethink the enterprise. Marveling at the complacency about Iraq of America's foreign policy elite as they are fawningly interviewed on the Sunday talk shows, columnist Alex Pareene says that “[p]eople who were integral in the decision to wage that war sat there and opined on what the United States should do about Iran and China and North Korea and no one laughed them out of the room. It was disgusting.” Disgusting, but hardly surprising here in the United States of Amnesia.

Are there any lessons to be drawn from the debacle? Here are three tentative conclusions:

Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: Iraq Invasion at 10 Years — Learning from the Past”

2013/03/192013/03/26

Who’s Who in Peace Intelligence: Colman McCarthy

Alpha M-P, Peace Intelligence

Colman McCarthy (born March 24, 1938 in Glen Head, New York), an American journalist, teacher, lecturer, pacifist, progressive, an anarchist and long-time peace activist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C. From 1969 to 1997, he wrote columns for The Washington Post. His topics ranged from politics, religion, health, and sports to education, poverty, and peacemaking. Washingtonian magazine called him “the liberal conscience of The Washington Post.” Smithsonian magazine said he is “a man of profound spiritual awareness.” He has written for The New Yorker, The Nation, The Progressive, The Atlantic, and Reader's Digest. Since 1999, he has written biweekly columns for National Catholic Reporter.

Continue reading “Who's Who in Peace Intelligence: Colman McCarthy”