The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
McChrystal Sees Victory Ahead In Afghanistan
By Drew Brown, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Saturday, January 2, 2010
“We are not viewed as occupiers now, ” Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, told Stars and Stripes in an interview Friday.
Continue reading “Journal: US “Not Viewed as Occupiers in Afghanistan.” Really?”
Phi Beta Iota: This is worth a look rather than a reference because we have not had time to evaluate it properly. It most certainly is worth a look. Israel is known to have attacked the USS Liberty, and similar to the USA being responsible for Abu Ghraib, such a crime against humanity cannot be forgotten.
We are especially troubled by the USS Cole allegation with respect to the Israeli's using a cruise missile. Unfortunately, the US Government has a track record of covering up “friendly” attacks (USS Liberty) as well as “enemy” attacks (USS Scorpion) so the bottom line is that we have no reliable source of information on any of this.
This material furthers our deep interest in strategic public counterintelligence. It is a certainty that no one is defending the USA from “white collar” domestic enemies, and we are generally doing more to incite foreign enemies than to contain them. We are increasingly seeing the discipline of counter-intelligence as one that demands that we know ourselves–that we look deeply into our soul, and that we find and eradicate all those commiting treason against the Republic, including those who collaborate in the murder of Americans for “higher purposes.”
Separately Christopher Boyllyn, a self-described journalist “without frontier” who has standing with Prison Planet and Mike Ruppert, former LAPD who wrote Crossing the Rubicon, has posted a number of items also worth a look.
To that end, we respectfully post these two links for public consideration.
FYI … I just found this interesting report. While the report focuses almost entirely on the political perspective to this conflict, note how he claims the Taleban increases its cohesion by organizing itself in a decentralized way the marries centralized intent with high degree of autonomy at lower levels. He thinks it is paradoxical that this type of organization improves cohesion, but it is right out of the maneuver warfare tradition, and it is hardly paradoxical that this kind of organization increases the variety, rapidity, and harmony of its OODA loops at all levels organization. Nor should it be surprising, given the sluggish, rigid OODA loops that result our highly centralized, techno-intensive approach to command & control, that the Taleban seized and maintains the initiative, as acknowledged by General McChrystal in his report to President Obama in August. Chuck
35-Page Report includes Executive Summary, Introduction, Roots & Causes, Induced & Internal Factors, Pakistan Factor, Who Are the Insurgents, Talks or Reconciliation, Conclusion, and Recommendations.
High points:
1. Many actors, no strategy
2. Cannot reconcile extremists with corrupt government
3. Time for the UN to be the UN again and lead a 360 “all stakeholders” non-military convergence.
A few more details about the loss of those 7 CIA officers and a lot more questions about tradecraft. Such as in country like Afghanistan where the rocks have eyes should a penetration agent be brought to a major CIA base prior to being rcruited for a mission?
C.I.A. Takes On Bigger and Riskier Role on Front Lines
December 31, 2009
WASHINGTON — The deaths of seven Central Intelligence Agency operatives at a remote base in the mountains of Afghanistan are a pointed example of the civilian spy agency’s transformation in recent years into a paramilitary organization at the vanguard of America’s far-flung wars.
A terrorist war Obama has denied
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, January 1, 2010
. . .
The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration's response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to play down and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face.
. . . . . . .
Any government can through laxity let someone slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy — jihadist is a word banished from the Obama lexicon — turns laxity into a governing philosophy.
Phi Beta Iota: The commentator, an extreme partisan from the right, confuses laxity with partisanship. Both parties are partisan extremists, and blinding America to the reality that it must acknowledge if it is to adapt to the unprecedented complexity that threatens us–many of the threats of our own making and many of the cost of our own volition, bad decisions made in the aftermath of what would otherwise be minor decisions. America lacks a non-partisan intelligence community able to get a grip on the Whole System; America lacks a Whole of Government capacity to balance means, ways, and ends; and America lacks above all any means of restoring comity and consensus in Congress, without which Congress will not fulfill its Article 1 Constitutional duty.
Heads set to roll as Obama goes on attack over security failures that allowed Christmas Day bomber on to plane
A senior aide said Obama would seek accountability at the highest levels for the failure, a remark some observers took to mean that heads would roll.
The terrorist plot to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 exposed a near-catastrophic failure at every level of our government,' the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, John Boehner, said in a statement.
Phi Beta Iota: This would be a good time for President Barack Obama, President in name only, to either be the President and introduce the Electoral Reform Act of 2010, or to resign in ackinowledgement of the fact that he simiply is not up to the job because we live in a two-party tyranny that makes decisions on the basis of nakedly amoral partisan interests, not the public interest. If he also introduced the Smart Nation – Safe Nation Act, with a nod of respect to Congressman Rob Simmons, then (R-CT-02) and today the challenger to Wall Street fixer Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), he would instantly restore the integrity of the Constitution, the Republic, and the US Government.
The FACT is, as we have observed in so many books, articles, chapters, briefs, and postings over the course of 21 years, that we have a corrupt national intelligence “system,” a corrupt national security acquisition & policy “system,” a corrupt (non-existent) Whole of Governance “system,” and underlying all three, a corrupt electoral system that excludes a majority of the eligible voters and their eligible candidates. We need the four reforms, or a Second American Revolution. The Paradigms of Failure are multiple sucking chest wounds.
We do not lack for knowledge of what to do. HUNDREDS of authorities are on record with good ideas that have not been implemented (e.g. the Aspin-Brown Commission). We lack for INTEGRITY in acknowledging reality and getting a grip on all that we need to do that is markedly different from the past.
We predict that President Obama will do something really stupid, such as fire Blair (who is non-partisan) and promote partisan Panetta to his maximum level of incompetence, while ignoring the reality, as we pointed out in ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA, 2000), that firing the engineer does not change the train built to run on a single track between Moscow and DC into what we really need–10,000 open source bicyles, 1,000 open source motorcycles, and 100 assorted small-size secret cars, most of them with multinational passengers. What is new is that Homeland Security was built on the old train model, and is just as useless. The USA today is on the cusp of a historic era where we can stick with the simple-minded Weberian stove-pipes of the past, Epoch A command & control “central planning,” or we can ride the wave and embrace bottom-up Epoch B collective intelligence and distributed resilience. From where we sit, no one in Congress or the White House reads or thinks–they are all on auto-pilot, and their definition of progress is to take that next step over the cliff.
The truth at any cost reduces all other costs. We're not there.
See also:
Journal: Director of National Intelligence Alleges….
Journal: Death of CIA Personnel in Afghanistan
Journal: The Demise of US Intelligence Qua Brains
Journal: Underpants Bomber Shines Light on Naked USG–Without Four Reforms, USA Locked in Place
Very important article from one of the very best reporters covering the Middle East
Walking Into the Al-Qaeda Trap
Touch Yemen, Get Burned
It is extraordinary to see the US begin to make the same mistakes in Yemen as it previously made in Afghanistan and Iraq. What it is doing is much to al-Qa’ida’s advantage. The real strength of al-Qa’ida is not that it can ‘train’ a fanatical Nigerian student to sew explosives into his underpants, but that it can provoke an exaggerated US response to every botched attack. Al-Qa’ida leaders openly admitted at the time of 9/11 that the aim of such operations is to provoke the US into direct military intervention in Muslim countries. It is a formula which worked under President George W Bush and it still appears to work under President Barack Obama.
In Yemen the US is walking into the al-Qa’ida trap. Once there it will face the same dilemma it faces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It became impossible to exit these conflicts because the loss of face would be too great. Just as Washington saved banks and insurance giants from bankruptcy in 2008 because they were “too big to fail,” so these wars become too important to lose because to do so would damage the US claim to be the sole super power.
In Iraq the US is getting out more easily than seemed likely at one stage because Washington has persuaded Americans that they won a non-existent success. The ultimate US exit from Afghanistan may eventually be along very similar lines. But the danger of claiming spurious victories is that such distortions of history make it impossible for the US to learn from past mistakes and instead to repeat them by intervening in other countries such as Yemen.
Patrick Cockburn is the author of ‘The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq‘ and ‘Muqtada! Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq‘.
Continue reading “Journal: Walking Into Al Qaeda's Trap in Yemen”
