Last night the Taliban brazenly tunneled into a major prison in Kandahar and broke out 504 prisoners, including 106 Taliban fighters, according to Al Arabiya.
The 1,050-meter tunnel went from a nearby house into the political wing of the prison.
The Taliban told Al Arabiya it had buses waiting at the end of the tunnel to transport prisoners to Taliban safehouses.
This is the second biggest jailbreak in Afghanistan, after militants blew up the front gates to free around 1,000 prisoners in 2008.
The economic statistics that you are about to read are incredibly shocking, but they are also very, very real. Tonight there are going to be millions of men and women all across America that cannot sleep because they are consumed with anxiety about their financial problems.
2012 is a marvelous opportunity to apply intelligence with integrity. Mature intelligence, with integrity totally ingrained, would integrate history, science, faith, and cultural diversity.
1. Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is a sub-discipline of all of the traditional disciplines, as well as a discipline in its own right, but it is closest to Human Intelligence (HUMINT) and should be managed concurrently with HUMINT, which has fifteen slices, only four of which are classified. Treating OSINT as a technical collection task is ignorant and ineffective for the simple reason that at least 80% of what needs to be collected in the OSINT arena is in 183 languages we do not speak, and not at all in digital form.
2. A properly managed intelligence community would have the national intelligence council comprised of top brains from each of the eight tribes of intelligence (academic, civil society, commercial, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental/non-profit) and a Whole of Government requirements division that is autonomous and replete with integrity that cannot be compromised.
3. Collection management should start with OSINT/HUMINT, and the technical disciplines tasked only when OSINT/HUMINT cannot provide an answer and the requirement is arguably of the most vital importance. This cannot be said for 90% of what is done today with expensive technical collection most of which is never properly processed.
4. Intelligence is on the verge of maturing–instead of denied areas and exaggerated threats to justify the military-industrial complex and its waste–intelligence will henceforth be about all threats, all policies, all demographics, all the time. This is much easier to do that most realize–all it requires is absolute integrity.
A team of 20 developers in Cambridge wants to build a new radio network covering the entire country, but plans to cut costs by only offering connectivity to silicon-based customers.
The team has set up a company called Neul with plans to make use of unused TV frequencies (“white spaces”), and is busy designing base stations for national deployment.
The idea is to connect up all the electricity meters, cars, e-readers and suchlike over a new national network that the team reckons can be built for around the same amount that O2 spends on its network every couple of weeks.
NEW YORK (AP) — Former chief U.N. nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei suggests in a new memoir that Bush administration officials should face international criminal investigation for the “shame of a needless war” in Iraq.
Freer to speak now than he was as an international civil servant, the Nobel-winning Egyptian accuses U.S. leaders of “grotesque distortion” in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, when then-President George W. Bush and his lieutenants claimed Iraq possessed doomsday weapons despite contrary evidence collected by ElBaradei's and other arms inspectors inside the country.
The Iraq war taught him that “deliberate deception was not limited to small countries ruled by ruthless dictators,” ElBaradei writes in “The Age of Deception,” being published Tuesday by Henry Holt and Company.
The 68-year-old legal scholar, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1997 to 2009 and recently a rallying figure in Egypt's revolution, concludes his 321-page account of two decades of “tedious, wrenching” nuclear diplomacy with a plea for more of it, particularly in the efforts to rein in North Korean and Iranian nuclear ambitions.
Phi Beta Iota: We endorse the truth & reconciliation process and believe that if the USA is to restore its promise as a contributor to the international community of nations, it must first disclose the truth. In our view, the investigation should begin three months prior to 9-11, when Dick Cheney first mandated a nation-wide counter-terrorism exercise that assured his complete control over the entire US Government on 9-11….an assurance he and his planners needed to not just let it happen, but to execute all the trimmings and then carry on with the Weapons of Mass Deception that committed America to an elective multi-trillion dollar war against multiple countries. Dick Cheney hijacked the Presidency. We all need the truth on the table.
Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York):When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.
Sustainability experts have called on global regulators to ask companies to report on their sustainable policy and performance, disclosing results in a similar way to financial reporting.
“A ‘report or explain’ approach could persuade more companies to report rather than explain why they don’t,” said Teresa Fogelberg, deputy chief executive of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).
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About 4,000 global companies report their sustainability performance, using reporting guidelines recently updated by the GRI.
These focus on 79 issues including consulting stakeholders on important topics, human rights, the impact on local communities and gender matters.
