Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 2897 – Public Intelligence Blog

UPDATED 2014-01-29 to add the following new links:

2012 Robert Steele: Practical Reflections on UN Intelligence + UN RECAP

References: NATO Transformation Process Documents — and Gaps + Peace from Above RECAP

Search: phd topics on the role of intelligence in peace support operation + Peacekeeping RECAP

Phi Beta Iota: We are detecting a fascinating evolutionary process within the United Nations “system” which is not a system at all, more like an archipelago with a different cat in charge of each island. Information-sharing is coming into vogue, but more importantly, the United Nations, perhaps stimulated by the report of the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, A more secure world: our shared responsibility, appears to finally be realizing that all threats are connected and that poverty is the foundation for all of the other threats thriving–one cannot defeat transnational crime (threat #10) without first addressing poverty (threat #1).

Security Council Calls for Strengthened International, Regional Cooperation to Counter Transnational Organized Crime, in Presidential Statement

With the top United Nations anti-drug official urging concerted global action to “break the vicious circle between insecurity and underdevelopment” being increasingly fuelled by criminal networks, drug smugglers and human traffickers, the Security Council today called on the world body’s Member States to increase international and regional cooperation to tackle transnational organized crime.

The Council invited Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who opened today’s meeting, to consider transnational threats as a factor in conflict prevention strategies, conflict analysis, integrated missions’ assessment and planning and to consider including in his reports, as appropriate, analysis on the role played by those threats in situations on the Council’s agenda. [Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis Added.]

Maturity New — UN Intelligence = World that Works for All

Global gangs exploit blind spots for trafficking: U.N.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – International criminal gangs and traffickers are exploiting large geographic blind spots where radar, satellite or other surveillance is minimal or nonexistent, the U.N. crime and drugs czar said on Wednesday.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), told members of the 15-nation U.N. Security Council that countries must improve their systems of sharing intelligence to reduce these surveillance gaps.

“We need a change in attitude,” Costa told the council. “It is time to regard information sharing as a way of strengthening sovereignty, not surrendering it.”

Continue reading “Journal: United Nations and Information-Sharing”

2010/03/082011/01/03

Journal: Israel Starts 112 New Settlements

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards

Yet another contemptuous snub to US “peace” efforts. Biden ought to tell them to go to hell and turn around and fly home … but he won't, thus confirming again the our pusilanimous acquiescence to Israeli policies that hurt and humiliate the United States

Chuck

Israel OKs new settlement work despite slowdown

By AMY TEIBEL, Associated Press Writer, 8 March 2010

JERUSALEM – Israel authorized the construction of 112 new apartments in the West Bank despite a pledge to slow down settlement building, the government disclosed Monday — enraging the Palestinians just a day after they reluctantly agreed to resume peace talks.

Full Story Online

Phi Beta Iota: The time has come to crush Israeli genocide against the Palestinians and Israeli theft and waste of water from Arab aquifers. We protest the continued use of taxpayer funds to arm and supply dictators in the Middle East and the Israeli genocide machine. A regional water authority and a two-state solution that leaves Jerusalem as an international neutral zone wouild appear to be called for, and easily affordable if we divert the money we now waste on war to waging peace in the Middle East. Gandhi said it best: “Palestine is to the Palestinians as France is to the French.”

2010/03/082010/03/08

Journal: C/JCS Shines on Iran-Israel

05 Iran, 08 Wild Cards, Military, Peace Intelligence

Mullen Wary of Israeli Attack on Iran

by Ray McGovern

Phi Beta Iota: We strongly recommend McGovern's article be read in its entirety. Key points:

1. US has no mutual defense treaty with Israel and no order to the US military to support Israel is Constitutionally valid without a Senate validation.

2. Israel will not get away with a USS Liberty atrocity on Admiral Mike Mullen's watch.

3. Washington is remains a moral and intellectual cesspool with the White House lacking a strategic analytic model, intelligence (decision-support) or any clue as to how to restore democracy and prosperity in America and peace in the rest of the world. Partisanship–uninformed partisanship–is what runs the White House today and it is NOT WORKING.

4. C/JCS has the right idea but the wrong company–no one now working in the US national security “establishment” has the combination of brains and integrity to actually propose a strategic analytic model; a reconstruction of secret intelligence so it provides non-secret decision-support to everybody now flying deaf, dumb, and blind in the NCA; and a redirection of the Pentagon so its budget funds the four forces after next–reform can be revenue and jobs neutral!

President Obama is at a fork in the road. He can stick with business as usual–partisanship, polling, and proxies that pay lip service to concepts like “national security,” or he can commit to creating a national strategy that gets a grip on reality and then connects means, ways, and ends to achieve a prosperous world at peace. From where we sit, C/CJS is the only person with both the right idea and the courage to speak the truth in public. Three immediately useful references:

2009 Perhaps We Should Have Shouted: A Twenty-Year Restrospective

2010: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Trilogy Updated

Search: QDR “four forces after next”

2010/03/072010/03/07

Journal: Reasons Big Banks Are Bad for Democracy

03 Economy

Why Exactly Are Big Banks Bad?

By Simon Johnson, Baseline Scenario, 4 March 2010

Just over 100 years ago, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, big business in America was synonymous with productivity, quality, and success. “Economies of scale” meant that big railroads and big oil companies could move cargo and supply energy cheaper than their smaller competitors and, consequently, became even larger.

But there also proved to be a dark side to size and in the first decade of the 20^th century mainstream opinion turned sharply against big business for three reasons. [Click on headline for complete original post.]

Phi Beta Iota: The earlier literature represented by Small is Beautiful and Human Scale has now been dramatically reinforced by literatures on civilization building, collective intelligence, common wealth, and so on (other lists). They all boil down to keeping power at the lowest level possible. Aggregated power is bad for democracy–this applies to big government just as it does to big banks, and it applies especially to the ludicrous notions of world government (as opposed to a world brain, where every node is unique and independent).

2010/03/07

Journal: USG Clears Way in AF for “Thug in a Box”

05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism

The Obama Administration’s clear-hold-build-leave strategy in Afghanistan is crucially dependent on the Afghan’s central government’s ability to displace the Taliban with clean local governance throughout a rugged country larger than Texas, with a population of 28+ million, where the vast majority of people live in small hamlets and villages. To this end, the combined forces clearing operation in Marjah, a poppy growing area of home to about 80,000 in southern Helmand Province, was to be a model operation. After clearing out the Taliban and setting up a “Hold” zone (a series of positions outside of town occupied by two battalions Marines and Afghan forces to secure the area), the operation was to be followed by the cookie-cutter installation of what the commander, General Stanley McChrystal, called a “government in a box” — which to work, must be an honest government that will immediately go to work at improving the lot of the locals.

As usual, the Taliban, like all competent guerrilla forces when faced with superior firepower bugged out ahead of the combined Nato-Afghan sweep through Marjah. Now, as Jeffrey Fleishman reports in the 7 Mar 2010 issue of the LA Times, it is beginning to look like McChrystal’s “government in a box” will be led by a typical thuggish representative of the morally challenged Karzai clique, which has a history of plundering those they rule. It turns out that the new leader, Abdul Zahir, a man who vowed “to bring back dignity and prosperity” to Marjah (a fertile opium growing area), stabbed his own son, was convicted of manslaughter, and served time in a German slammer. Just the sort of man to win the hearts and minds of those he rules.

The Marjah operation is off the front pages, and recent reports indicate the next target in our new strategy is the much more formidable Pashtun city of Qandahar, with population of about a million. But Marjah is not over. The people of Marjah know the Taliban are lurking in the shadows, waiting to install a another shadow government, when the US inspired “government in a box” does not win their hearts and minds and the US focus of effort is elsewhere.

Chuck Spinney

New leader in Marja reportedly has violent past

The new civilian leader, installed after the Taliban was swept out of its southern Afghanistan stronghold, vowed to ‘bring back dignity.' Now reports surface about a conviction in Germany.

By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times, March 7, 2010

Continue reading “Journal: USG Clears Way in AF for “Thug in a Box””

2010/03/072010/03/07

Journal: Three United Nations (UN) Memes Emergent

01 Agriculture, 04 Education, 07 Health, 12 Water, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence

Meme 1: Separate Agency Budget Intelligence (SABI). The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) may be within a year of a huge management advance, understanding, with decision-support, the relative return on investment (ROI) of its investments in relation to the ten high-level threats, many of which it is uniquely positioned to address. Understanding that clean water and sanitation is the most important medical advancement since 1840, UNESCO is poised to call into question its excessive investments in vaccinations that yield little return and often create broader health issues, as opposed to focusing on micro-education (see meme 3) and micro-financiing of clean water initiatives.

Meme 2: integrated missions’ assessment and planning. This is the United Nations (UN) equivalent of Whole of Government planning, programming. and budgeting. While non-existent within most governments, the UN appears to be realizing that with its back to the fall and the fate of over 175 “failed states” on the table, it might be time to add intelligence (decision-support) to how it does business. This means understanding that all threats and all policies have to be evaluated together and in relation (the Eastern way), and that all budgets and behaviors must be planned–harmonized–so as to achieve integrated outcomes, not outcomes in isolation that undermine “rest of system” stability.

Meme 3: micro-education. This is a brand new meme but it defines practices that already exist and could be brought together. With the vast majority of subsistence farmers still using ancient methods such as furrow irrigation, and many not recognizing the value of rain harvesting, there is a route opening for UNESCO by which it can leverage Alvin Toffler's insight and substitute information for capital, labor, time, and space. Put bluntly, some micro-education is vastly more important than a complete (albeit mediocre) elementary education. Micro-education on water and health appears to be the center of gravity for jump-starting the entrepreneurial possibilities among the extreme poor. What no one has done is create a stacked list of “Essential Elements of Information” (EEI) that should be taught to the poor in priority order as part of “any and all” encounters.

2010/03/07

Journal: “Dumb” Government versus Smart Humans

03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

Op-Ed Columnist

Dreaming the Possible Dream

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

March 6, 2010

EXTRACT (1 of 2 Innovations): If you combine CO2 with seawater, or any kind of briny water, you produce CaCO3, calcium carbonate. That is not only the stuff of corals. It is also the same white, pasty goop that appears on your shower head from hard (calcium-rich) water. At its demonstration plant near Santa Cruz, Calif., Calera has developed a process that takes CO2 emissions from a coal- or gas-fired power plant and sprays seawater into it and naturally converts most of the CO2 into calcium carbonate, which is then spray-dried into cement or shaped into little pellets that can be used as concrete aggregates for building walls or highways — instead of letting the CO2 emissions go into the atmosphere and produce climate change.

If this can scale, it would eliminate the need for expensive carbon-sequestration facilities planned to be built alongside coal-fired power plants — and it might actually make the heretofore specious notion of “clean coal” a possibility.

Continue reading “Journal: “Dumb” Government versus Smart Humans”