Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 2922 – Public Intelligence Blog

Some journalists are observing that the US response to Haiti is starkly representative of the modest change in US emergency Preparedness since Katrina. Here are a few lessons from Haiti:

1. Get eyes on the ground immediately. Do not rely on the media for situational awareness (or the CIA or the Embassy, they are holed up and have no clue). Do the wide-area surveillance on day one.

2. Carpet-bomb the place with water, emergency rations, charcoal, plastic, light rope, and enough light lumber or rods to create shelter in a land without timber. NOTE: include enough water to cook the rations, don't assume water is available.

3. Have Peace Jumpers ready to go–mix of medical, military police, combat engineers, landing zone flight directors.

4. Have a mix of body registration photographers, body handlers, and deep ditch mass grave diggers with air-droppable equipment.

5. Do NOT try to micro manage from above instead use the military as a “core force” to assure mobility, communications, and general support to a massive influx of volunteer teams able to bring stabilization & reconstruction to one neighborhood at a time.

6. Start the flow of helicopters, landing craft, field hospitals, and water units on day one.

7. From Day One, create a global public understanding, in detail, of the situation on the ground, along with a Global to Local Range of Needs Table that can be updated using UNICEF's Rapid SMS as well as Twitter Support Networks.

2010/01/252010/01/26

Journal: Haiti–Perspective of Georgie Anne Geyer

08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence

CAN HAITI SURVIVE?

The United States and many other nations across the globe are sending water, food and troops to benighted Haiti. Charity groups and NGOs from New York to San Francisco are collecting money. The French are calling for a “conference on Haiti's reconstruction and development.” At least in these first few weeks following the horrific earthquake that shook the once-beautiful Caribbean isle, it seems that the world wants to give Haiti everything — except the truth.

Safety Copy of Entire Opinion Below the Line + Full Story Online (While It Lasts)
Continue reading “Journal: Haiti–Perspective of Georgie Anne Geyer”

2010/01/252010/01/25

Reference: Ailments Afflicting Returning Veterans

07 Health, DoD

2010/01/252010/01/26

Journal: Haiti Op-Ed, Maps and Data, SOUTHCOM

08 Wild Cards

Phi Beta Iota: Following up on Zbigniew Brzezinski's articulate expression of concern on CNN, we asked around and here's what we got back, put as bluntly as we heard it: 1. Not my job. 2. SOUITHCOM has the lead. 3. Brazil who? 4. UN what?

There are three million people in desperate straits including dehydration, two million of them homeless, at least a million at high risk of disease and starvation. From where we sit, this is Katrina times 10,000, and SOUTHCOM is playing sand-lot ball rather than rising to the big leagues and actually leading a multinational intelligence-driven Stabilization & Reconstruction Mission.

It could and should be the Marshall Plan of the 21st Century in which for the first time a unified network of all possible stake-holders uses open source information to connect aid from the one billion rich to the desperate needs of the three million extreme poor in Haiti, and in so doing, creates the model for state leadership (military central) of non-state campaigns for peace and prosperity. This is a change to take STRONG ANGEL global and to implement the distributed virtual translation network that allows everyone to channel in French and Creole via broadband assistance.

Right now the Red Cross and all the other “major” NGOs appear to be ripping off the public in the single greatest financial scam since Katrina. Most of the money being collected is NOT going to get to Haiti. SOUTHCOM could mobilize Presidential authority to have the Internal Revenue Service audit all Haiti aid funds, and create a means for SOUTHCOM to “draw” on that financial aid by presenting bills for payment sourced from all multinational state and non-state partners.

aa haiti maps — UC Berkeley Library Maps Online

In the wake of the devastating earthquake that took place in Haiti on January 12, 2010, here is a list of some Haiti map and data resources at the Earth Sciences and Map Library, UC libraries, and around the web.

The U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) is in charge of the U.S. Government response to Haiti. Good people who have traditionally been the runts of the litter, we sense that they are not operating at a global level and have not recognized that another 80% is available for the asking.

C–130s have not been mobilized. All available landing craft and heavy lift helicopters have not been mobilized. There has been no call to the private sector for any kind of Dunkirk in reverse. Everyone we talk to seems to be treating Haiti as just another “business as usual” situation. It is not. Haiti could well go down in history as the book-end to 9/11, the other side of the coin of Empire lost.

Journal: Haiti Rolling Directory from 12 January 2010

2010/01/252010/01/25

Journal: MILNET Selected Headlines–Epoch A Ending

IO Mapping

Phi Beta Iota: What all of these headlines have in common is the failure of Epoch A “leadership” or what Peggy Noonan has called the failure of institutions and Robert Steele called the paradigms of failure.

Top-down command & control is incapable of meshing with bottom-up complexity that demands clarity, diversity, integrity, and legitimacy in order to achieve adaptive sustainable resilience.

SEC mulled national security status for AIG details

US audit attacks Iraq police dea: A watchdog has accused the US state department of grossly mismanaging the oversight of a $2.5bn (£1.5bn) contract for training Iraq's police force.

On the trail of the Taliban in Quetta

Gates Strikes out In Pakistan; Obama's AfPak Policies in Disarray

How Google's Nexus One censors cuss words

2010/01/242010/01/26

Journal: Haiti Health Situation, Short-Term View

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards

Sewage runs, garbage piles up at Haiti quake camps

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – A child squats to defecate yards away from a sidewalk where women press plantain into bite-sized pieces for frying and a naked toddler plays with a pile of rice on the filthy ground.

Nearby, a dead body has been dumped on the street, right in front of a sea of morose people sitting on grubby mattresses, and a garbage collector uses a shovel to scoop up soggy black mounds of putrid trash composed of plastic water bags, polystyrene plates, orange peel and tin cans. Stray dogs forage.

Lack of sanitation nurturing diseases in Haiti's myriad tent cities

Earthquake survivors transformed the church school soccer field, like nearly every open space in Port-au-Prince, into yet another of the city's impromptu survivor camps.

But “survivor” — unless the coming public-health disaster festering in these squalid camps can be stanched — may become a brutally ironic term. These are potential death camps.

As the two boys played, a third child emerged from the jumble of makeshift tents, carrying the family slop bucket. He dumped the fetid contents, an accumulation of human waste, just at the edge of the field. He illustrated the city's sanitation crisis in microcosm.

Dr. André Vulcain of the University Of Miami Miller School of Medicine, back from seven days with the UM medical team in Port-au-Prince, talked about the horrible potential brewing in camps that have become the semi-permanent address for a million, maybe two million people.

. . . . . . .

There's talk of flu. Dr. Greg Elder, deputy operations manager for Médecins sans Frontie`res in Haiti, told reporters that he has seen death in those awful camps from septic and gangrene from wounds in the Jan. 12 quake.

Other doctors have reported signs of salmonella, shigella and campylobacter and bacterium leptospirosis, a skin disease.

Dr. Vulcain said scabies, caused by a mite that burrows into the flesh, will flourish in the camp squalor. He talked about an urgent — life-and-death urgent — need to bring not only some measure of sanitation into the camps, but a renewed emphasis on hygiene, given the circumstances. Bringing fresh, clean water and soap into the camps without emphasizing the heightened necessity of frequent hand-washing, he worried, won't stave off the second disaster stalking Haiti.

“Even before the earthquake, Haiti's children had a high mortality rate from diarrhea,” he said. “Now, children in the camp are at a very high risk. We're going to have children die.”

Continue reading “Journal: Haiti Health Situation, Short-Term View”

2010/01/242010/01/26

Journal: Zbigniew Brzezinski BRILLIANT on Haiti Now

01 Poverty, 02 Infectious Disease, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Uncategorized

Zbigniew Brzezinski, appearing on CNN with Fareed Zakaria today, Sunday, 24 January 2010 at 1300, has just turned in the single most brilliant and statemanlike precise (on Haiti) that we have been privileged to witness in over a decade.

We've been down on Brzezinski during that period because he has not given up his compulsion to punish the Russians, push the Chinese back, and generally assume that Epoch A leadership will allow the US–and the Obama Administration that he has been advising on foreign and national security policy–to continue to weild the “Big Stick” that we can no longer afford.

We don't take that back, but we stand in praise of the single most intelligent, most urgent, and most helpful public statement we have heard in a long time. Below are our notes on what he said.

+ Frustrated, no one visibly in charge

+ Relief effort is slow moving, lacks evidence of direction

+ Total government collapse requires a UN Trusteeship immediately

+ Haiti has Human Capital, a “remarkable resource” with an “impressive tradition of self-development.

Phi Beta Iota: Of course it helps to have him agree with what we have been saying from day one, see the specific headlines below and the rolling update last. Haiti is an OPPORTUNITY. No one now in charge appears to have the correct Epoch B mind-set, this is what needs to change Monday. No more excuses. We need to treat Haiti as the global opportunity to change the way we do business.

Journal: Haiti History, Interim Report, Prognosis

Journal Haiti: Silly Question–Regional Traffic Management? Strategic Resettlement?

Reference: Reverse TIPFID for Haiti

Journal: Haiti Earthquake Unconventional C4I

Journal: US Response to Haiti Reveals Old Mindsets

Journal: Haiti Highlights Death of US C4I

Journal: Haiti Multinational Decision-Support Challenge

Journal: Haiti–Ready for a Rapid-Response Open-Source-Intelligence-Driven Inter-Agency Multinational Multifunctional Stabilization & Reconstruction Mission…

Journal: Haiti Earthquake CAB 21 Sequence of Events