SHERLOCK HOLMES once remarked that: “It is my business to know what other people don’t know.” These days, detective work is a huge business. Thanks to globalisation, there is a lot that companies would like to know but don’t, such as: is our prospective partner in Jakarta a crook?
Corporate detectives sniff out the facts, analyse them, share them with clients and pocket fat fees. Yet, oddly for a multi-billion-dollar industry devoted to discovering the truth, little is known about private investigators. So your correspondent took up his magnifying glass and set off in pursuit of the bloodhounds of capitalism.
The Real Challenges Facing the Next Secretary of Defense
FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, This essay appeared in Counterpunch (12 Dec 2012) and Time's Battleland (3 Jan 2013)
EXTRACT:
The problem is not just a strategic one of extracting our forces with dignity; nor is it a political one of fingering who is to blame, although there is plenty of blame to go around. It stems from deep institutional roots that reveal a need for reform in our military bureaucracies and particularly our leadership selection policies.
That is because the next Secretary of Defense must deal with the consequences of a strategic oversight that was made by and approved at the highest professional levels of the American military establishment — a plan which it then imposed on its weak and insecure political leaders. This suggests a question: Will the new defense secretary succumb to business as usual by sweeping the dysfunctional institutional causes of the Afghan debacle under the rug or have the courage and wisdom to use this sorry affair as a reason to clean out the Pentagon’s Augean Stables?
. . . . . . . . .
A far more significant challenge will be posed by the need to sort out the programmatic chaos in the Pentagon’s hugely bloated defense budget, which, while not unrelated to the Afghan debacle, is caused primarily by out-of-control institutional prerogatives and bureaucratic game playing. Notwithstanding its bloat, the current defense budget plan cannot modernize the military’s weapons inventories on a timely basis; nor can it insure our shrinking, aging equipment will be maintained in a state of combat readiness, while providing sufficient funds for training troops. Most importantly, the Pentagon’s accounting systems are a shambles. The Pentagon’s budget and program planning books can not even pass the most basic constitutional requirements for accountability, much less provide the management information needed to fix the aforementioned modernization, force structure, and readiness problems.
As I explained here and here, these dysfunctional problems are connected and have deep behavioral roots. Fixing these problems will require harmonizing and reining in the disparate factions making up the dysfunctional political-economy of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex — a heretofore intractable problem President Eisenhower first warned America about in his farewell address in January 1961 (note: the reference to Congress was included in the first draft of his speech but subsequently dropped).
What I find depressing is that not one of these pressing issues has been the subject of speculations about the choice of a new defense secretary. Au contraire, the press has been obsessed with the lobbying concerns of the discredited neocons on the right who helped to create Afghan and Iraqi messes, proponents of continuing American empire in the middle (who are now promoting our intervention in Syria and the budget busting pivot to the Pacific), and gender balancers on the left.
Reveal the system and you reveal options. Conceal the system and you slam doors of opportunity and weld them shut.
One of the best quotes I've ever come across is by Peter Fryer:
“I have found that in nearly all situations I can view what is happening in Complex Adaptive Systems terms and that this opens up a variety of new options which give me more choice and more freedom.”
That means is that anyone who is preventing the citizens of humanity from seeing the actual operations of the greater system is limiting the options of humanity at a time when we have few enough options as it is, because they are preventing us from viewing what's happening in the system.
Through their actions they are collectively digging the grave of humanity.
Of course this is why transparency and openness are so vital. This applies to nations, political parties, corporations, and any other institution that routinely hides the truth from the people and that expends massive amounts of effort to keep us from seeing what's really going on. And even they don't see the greater system because other human collectives are hiding things from them too.
Everyone is hiding a part of the global system for one reason or another, usually for self-interest or for the benefit of the corrupt network of mutual back-scratchers to which they belong. And they think they're being clever. But because the collective actions of agents within a system change the environment in which they all operate, they're only hiding the operation, not the catastrophic consequences of their actions, which will become all too apparent in time.
By blinding us, the rest of humanity, to what they do . . . by putting our eyes out . . . those who conceal the system from us are slamming the doors of opportunity that might be the only hope for our continued survival as a species
UPDATE: Brannan nominated. We wish him well. The drone program will be his death unless he wises up quickly and transfers the drone program to the military. During his tenure CIA will face legal challenges in world courts, direct assassination of not-so-secret CIA case officers operating with impunity, and a president very disappointed that CIA cannot spell fracking, much less understand the brave new world.
Poor CIA. Poor DNI. All that money and no respect. Here are the leading candidates and their flaws.
John Brennan. Honest — for all his flaws including having no idea what it takes to create a good analyst. Rotten attention to detail, but he has the confidence of the President, could be a compromise with the Zionists, and if he picked a couple of seriously deep aides, would set the stage for closing down the DNI and restoring the Director of Central Intelligence position, an immediate savings of several billion dollars. QUALIFIED
Director, Wall Street CIA. A Catholic, trusted by the Zionists, he would get along with the Secretaries of State and Defense, knows clandestine operations better than anyone else now serving, with the right team he could both resurrect all-source intelligence and set stage for termination of the DNI. QUALIFIED
Jane Harman. In the wings as the trade-off for Zionist silence on Chuck Hagel. More ego than brains, would be a figurehead kept busy with dinner parties. CIA would have to enlist the FBI for assistance in making sure all her guests show up, she really, really does not like empty seats at “her” table. DISQUALIFIED
Michael Morrel. Acting Director. Personally brilliant, without any knowledge of operations, easily lied to, and had no idea that Global Trends 2030 was a rotten piece of work. DISQUALIFIED.
The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come
Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone, 17 January 2013
It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?
Wrong.
It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.
Apart from death and taxes, one other thing has also appeared inevitable, at least for the past two decades: Iran will acquire a nuclear weapons capability.
Yet, despite all the near frantic demands for sanctions, clandestine action, sabotage, and outright military strikes to prevent Iran’s presumed inexorable march towards that capability, one thing keeps getting overlooked: Iran has not managed to develop a nuclear weapon.
How is that possible? As states go, Iran has a reasonably well-developed scientific and industrial infrastructure, an educated workforce capable of working with advanced technologies, and lots of money. If Pakistan, starting from a much lower level, could develop nuclear weapons, why hasn’t Iran?
Stupid title but the attached piece by Spencer Ackerman is quite relevant for sorting out the implications of a Hegel nomination for Secretary of Defense.
I am ambivalent over this choice. The central question is how an incoming Secretary of Defense will deal with cleaning out the Pentagon's Augean Stables. Nothing in Hagel's record (or in the records of the alternative choices) suggests an appreciation of or a desire to fix the problems at the roots of this mess (see here or here). That is not a show stopper for Hegel in itself, but more troubling is the fact that there is no indication anyone in the press, Congress, or the White House is aware of the need for (or wants?) a defense secretary with the background and cajones to take on this task. Moreover, no single person can do this alone. A serious effort to clean up the Pentagon will require committed deputies, but the lack of debate of over any choice of 2nd or 3rd level political appointees suggests the current ineffectual team will remain in place.
My guess: a lot of noise and smoke and mirrors in the debate of the next defense secretary will mask the decision to continue business as usual in Versailles on the Potomac. We will see.
It’s looking like President Obama will nominate former Senator Chuck Hagel to run the Pentagon on Monday. It’ll mean a fight: for the last month, conservative critics of the former Republican senator have called him a wimp, insufficiently bellicose toward Iran, Hamas, Syria, the Taliban and other global malefactors. All of that overlooks the Vietnam combat veteran’s record in the Senate.
Spying on Americans’ communications without warrants? Have at it, said Hagel. A ballistic missile shield? Yes, please, and who cares if it angers the Kremlin. NATO’s 1999 war in Kosovo? Hagel was willing to flood it with U.S. soldiers.
Hagel earned his reputation as a skeptic of American military adventurism, as anyone who remembers his consistent criticism of the Iraq war will remember. But that criticism has blown Hagel’s reputation for dovishness out of proportion: after all, he voted in 2002 to authorize the war. National Journal’s Michael Hirsch insightfully argues Hagel’s reward for asking hard questions about the war is to have official Washington forget the rest of his record. So consider this a refresher.
Even as Hagel was making himself George W. Bush’s least favorite Republican, he aided Bush in crucial moments in congressional showdowns over the limits of presidential power in wartime.
