Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 2318 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/02/202012/02/20

Winslow Wheeler: “Defense” Budget – the Full Enchilada

03 Economy, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, IO Impotency, Military, Office of Management and Budget, Officers Call

WinslowWheeler Cropped — Winslow Wheeler

Last Monday, after the Pentagon released its 2013 budget materials, just about every news article I read inaccurately reported the totals. These articles did not just miss some significant bits not in DOD's press release; they ignored another $380 billion in spending for US national security spending if you take the time to parse through OMB's far more complete and accurate budget materials.

AOL Defense ran my explanation; it is at

Which Pentagon Budget Numbers Are Real? You Decide!

How do I get to a $1 trillion US small “d” defense budget; real it below:

The Real “Base” Pentagon Budget and the Actual “Defense” Budget

Winslow T. Wheeler

When the Pentagon released its budget materials and press releases last Monday, the press dutifully reported the numbers. The Pentagon's “base” budget for 2013 is to be $525.4 billion, and with $88.5 billion for the war in Afghanistan and elsewhere added, the total comes to $613.9 billion. (See the two DOD press releases ONE and TWO).

Indeed, if you plowed through the hundreds of pages of additional materials the Pentagon released Monday, you would come up with little reason the doubt the accuracy of those numbers as the totality of what Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was seeking for the Pentagon. It would also seem reasonable that those amounts constitute the vast majority of what America spends on “defense,” defined generically.

You would be quite wrong to think so.

Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: “Defense” Budget – the Full Enchilada”

2012/02/202012/02/20

Dolphin: How Are Terrorists Like Submarines? How is the US IC Like the Maginot Line?

Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, IO Impotency

Richard Wright's contribution is more interesting to me since the origins of the entire effort to develop this high value targeting was undertaken by General Dell Daily at the Naval Post Graduate School. I knew the research team, there were joint to the bone.

Unfortunately the IC as a whole has tried to automate the process, move it to mainstream and dilute it beyond belief.

Attached are a couple of articles regarding the effort….

2012-02-20 Manhunting Small Worlds

2012-02-20 Manhunting A Methodology for Finding Persons of National Interest

Summary review of book below the line.

Continue reading “Dolphin: How Are Terrorists Like Submarines? How is the US IC Like the Maginot Line?”

2012/02/202012/02/21

Michel Bauwens: Life of the Internet or Internet as Our Life?

Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Ethics

220px-Michel_Bauwens_crop — Michel Bauwens

Below by Nick Mendoza is recommended!

Up front extract:

With the decline of state capitalism, capitalist governments and corporations now dream of the internet as the tool for corporate growth through ontological colonialism, free to expand within the mind and the planet, exploiting everyone alike.

Metal, code, flesh: Why we need a ‘Rights of the Internet' declaration

The internet, as a living being which is part human, should have rights of its own.

Nicolas Mendoza

Nicolas Mendoza is a scholar, artist and researcher in global media from The University of Melbourne.

Al Jazeera, 15 February 2012

Chiang Mai, Thailand – “OH $%#@!”, reads the caption under the image depicting a group of protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks and holding both humorous and denunciatory signs, “The internet is here”. The caption not only conveys the sentiment that drove US congressmen to drop their support of the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) bills, but can also be said to summarise the analysis of the January 18 blackout by several of the most prominent media experts and scholars.

Larry Downes eloquently describes the January 18 events as “the dramatic introduction of bitroots politics”. In case the leaks, springs and occupations of 2011 left any room for doubt, the recognition of the internet as a political force in itself has moved from academic theoretical discussion to hard tangible reality. Lawrence Lessig portrays this sense of general underlying bewilderment by using the haunting metaphor of “a giant” when describing the web as a political force:

For the first time ever, the internet had taken on Hollywood extremists and won. And not just in a close fight: the power demonstrated by internet activists was wildly greater than the power Hollywood lobbyists could muster. They had awoken a giant. They had no clue about just how angry that giant could be.

However, the “January 18 blackout” victory guarantees “the internet” nothing. As Clay Shirky explained a few days before the blackout, rather than the end of this struggle, the SOPA/PIPA incident is just one chapter in the greater project of crippling the internet to eliminate its autonomy:

The hard thing is this: get ready, because more is coming. SOPA is simply a reversion of COICA [Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act], which was proposed last year, which did not pass. And all of this goes back to the failure of the DMCA [Digital Millenium Copyright Act] to disallow sharing as a technical means. And the DMCA goes back to the Audio Home Recording Act, which horrified those industries. (…) PIPA and SOPA are not oddities, they're not anomalies, they're not events. They're the next turn of this particular screw, which has been going on 20 years now. And if we defeat these, as I hope we do, more is coming.

Continue reading “Michel Bauwens: Life of the Internet or Internet as Our Life?”

2012/02/20

John Pilger: The War on Democracy Comes Home

06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, DoD, Earth Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Military, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

John Pilger describes the reality hidden behind the cloak of anglo-american “democracy.”

Phi Beta Iota: This describes the crime against humanity, the atrocity, of cleansing the population of the islands now known as Diego Garcia. If We the People do not hold our government accountable, then We the People are complicit in all that is done “in our name.”

The World War on Democracy

January 20, 2012 — Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, “Keep smiling girls!”

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, “I didn’t have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That’s why they couldn’t legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving [then] they spread rumors we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs.”

In the early 1960s, the Labor government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be “swept” and “sanitized” of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. “They knew we were inseparable from our pets,” said Lisette, “When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks’ exhausts. You could hear them crying.”

Continue reading “John Pilger: The War on Democracy Comes Home”

2012/02/20

Sepp Hasslberger: Russian Team Water-Fueled Engine

05 Energy, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

Stefan Hartmann of Overunity.com has posted two videos of a Russian group (friends of Tariel Kapanadze) apparently powering a stand-alone engine on water. They drink from a bottle of water (of course, it could be Vodka), then pour the liquid into what appears to be a fuel tank. Then they start up the engine.

As it's running, they show the exhaust being clean. As they hold a cup at the exhaust, it collects liquid (assumed to be water), which they then drink.

Reference Page 2 Videos Many Links

Phi Beta Iota: Imagine the good we could have done if the banks and energy, health, military, prison consortiums did not own our crooked politicians. Open Source Everything is leading toward an Autonomous Internet, an end to mega-corporations, and Panarchy. Slowly. These things have come up before, but in the prior era the powers could kill the inventor and steal the idea in order to lock it up. Now there are too many of us, ideas are moving fast and replicating, we are in for an agonizing transition period, but absent the deliberate unleashing of plagues and the deliberate poisoning of food such as may have been tested on the European cucumbers, in the end a new era will begin. The real challenge now is to keep the 1% from freaking out and lashing out — they need to understand a commitment to non-violent change and to truth & reconciliation rather than revenge. They remain the biggest threat to all of us.

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, & Trust

2012/02/192012/02/19

Worth a Look: AVAAZ Movement 13 Million and Growing

Worth A Look

Click to Visit

Dear Amazing Avaazers,

It feels like everything is happening exponentially.

In the last 30 days, our community has grown by 2.5 million people. We were already the largest political web movement ever, and yet we're growing faster than anyone has seen before! We're taking more actions, winning more victories, donating more and generating thousands more media hits in one month than we used to in a year. It's thrilling, even a little scary, especially when we see that the pace is still accelerating…

Just to give a snapshot of the last few weeks —

5 million of us stood up to the ACTA and SOPA internet censorship bills, helping to put SOPA on ice, and putting ACTA under threat, with the President of the European Parliament and Germany, Poland and many other countries reconsidering their positions.
we smuggled $1.8 million worth of medical supplies into Syria when no one else could, and raised $1.5 million more in donations, while our citizen journalists provided much of the world media's information and images.
we generated thousands of news articles on 20 different campaigns.
our sex trafficking hotline generated information that will result in a major set of arrests this week (can't say which country yet).
we raised over 4 million dollars/euros/yen online to supercharge our work, and are growing our staff team like mad to keep up with the need.
we ran over 40 campaigns, took over 10 million actions and told 25 million friends about campaigns we care about, on everything from deforestation in Brazil to the Murdoch scandal in the UK — and made a serious impact on many of these.

If all that wasn't enough, we're about to launch a couple of big projects (stay tuned) that will take our community to a whole NEW level!

It's a thrilling privilege to serve this amazing community, and while the challenges we face are growing, the surge of spirited people rising to meet these challenges is growing even faster and stronger. We've come together and built something special, and it's taking off. Let's shoot for the stars.

With hope and excitement,

Ricken, Stephanie, Wen, Emma, Wissam, Veronique, Heather and the entire Avaaz team

PS – here's some recent features on our community in the Economist, Times and Guardian. And here's a radio piece by NPR on our work in Syria, and an LA Times article on our Internet freedom campaign.

2012/02/192012/02/20

Richard Wright: Tactical Intelligence Killing Strategic Intelligence

Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Military

Richard Wright

The Triumph of Tactical Intelligence

The Andrew J. Bacevich article, “Slouching Toward Persistent War” (NYT 19 Feb 2012) points among other things to the rise of Special Operations Forces (SOF) as the instrument of choice to carry out clandestine warfare against individual and groups designated enemies of the U.S. (or close U.S. allies i.e. Israel). It also cited the rise of Michael Vickers to be Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence as further evidence of the growing importance of SOF.

Vickers is a ten year veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces and then served three years at CIA as principal logistic manager for support going to the anti-Soviet Taliban resistance fighters in Afghanistan. These experiences along with a PhD apparently were felt to qualify Vickers to head up DOD intelligence.

What Bacevich failed to take note of was a new and successful tactical concept that was developed by the U.S. Forces, mainly Army and Marine infantry, in the course of the counter insurgency (COIN) operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. This concept has been the subject of a careful study by two researchers at the Institute of National Strategic Studies of the DOD’s Defense University: Dr. Christopher Lamb and Mr. Evan Munsing produced a study titled, “Strategic Perspectives entitled “Secret Weapon: High-value Target Teams as an Organizational Innovation.” In the study they examined the repeated successes of the High-value Target Teams in eliminating al Qaeda and insurgent Taliban leaders. The secret according to the two authors was the combination of special operations forces fighters with military and civilian intelligence analysts into tightly net teams in which immediate tactical intelligence was essential to guiding the fighters to their targets. This apparently was not a case of intelligence support being provided by folks sitting far from the action phoning in information, but of intelligence support being very much part of the operation itself with the war fighters. CIA has increasingly become part of this new concept and the move of General David Petraeus to be Director of CIA may reflect this involvement of the agency with real time support to military operations.

Of course this also means that the probability is that CIA will continue to ignore strategic intelligence or what Robert Steele describes as Whole of Government Decision-Support and also multinational information-sharing and sense-making. In other words, CIA has become MIA (pun intended).