RESTORED with modified Author Bio. OSS1997-02-15-Bonthous Fixed
The matter of unrepresented peoples and nations, the voices not heard, may prove to be the single most important element to be addressed by 21st Century Intelligence.
We now know that prior to the arrival of Columbus in 1492, the indigenous peoples of the Americas had devised a breadth and depth of knowledge that was destroyed by European deseases and predatory invasions.
We now know that the voices of gender, of poverty, of minority, when not heard, cost society diversity of persception and feeling.
With the arrival of the Internet, and of the Nokie cell phone that does not need to be charged (it recharges with ambient energy), the people are, as Howard Zinn has anticipated, “a power government cannot suppress. ” We live in an “unconquerable world” as Jonathan Schell writes so ably.
Richard Falk, among others, is to be recognized for the pioneering work in the 1970's on the need for assemblies of peoples and of religions. Similarly, Philipp Allott, in “Health of Nations,” addresses the cosmic damages of the Treaty of Westphalia. As this is being written, Africa may be emerging as a continent finally able to create an African by, of, and for Africans.
Human Intelligence–all humans, all minds, all the time–NOT technical intelligence–is the future.
Jan Herring, as National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Science & Technology (S&T) at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), tried in the 1970's to adddress the “severe deficiencies” in access to open sources of information. Historically, it has been the S&T analysts that understood the availability and value of open source information in all languages. He failed within government, but did not give up. He went into the private sector and created the Academy of Competitive Intelligence (click on his photograph to learn more) with Ben Gilad and Leonard Fuld, two of the half dozen “top guns” in the English-seaking competitive intelligence community world-wide. If Stevan Dedijer is the father of business intelligence (qua decision-support), then Jan Herring is surely the father of business intelligence in the USA, and a global pioneer in training people to use unclassified analytic sources and methods of inestimable value to any group.
Unlike most, Jan Herring also understand the vital relevance of intelligence to the devleopment of strategy. Below is one of his seminal papers on this topic. See also his short paper on Business Intelligence.