Journal: Understanding Iran…and the future of IO

02 Diplomacy, 05 Energy, 10 Security, 11 Society, 12 Water, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Strategy, Threats

Stakelbeck on Terror | Inside Iran's Revolutionary Guards

CBN (Christian Broadcast Network), 14 December 2010

On this week's special edition of Stakelbeck on Terror, CBN News goes inside Iran's fearsome Revolutionary Guards Corps with Reza Khalili, a former member who worked undercover for the CIA to bring down the Iranian regime.

The Revolutionary Guards Corps is the most powerful and influential force behind Iran's secretive and radical regime.

Over the past 30 years, its structure has been nearly impossible for Western intelligence agencies to penetrate. Yet, Khalili put his life on the line to gather sensitive information for the CIA about the inner workings of the Iranian regime.

Watch as he shares his story in an exclusive interview with Stakelbeck on Terror.  Khalili also wrote about the experience in his book,

A Time to Betray.

Because of the nature of his work, Khalili is forced to disguise his identity and alter his voice for safety reasons.

Visit article to view an extremely thoughtful interview.

Phi Beta Iota: There is a remarkable coincidence of message between this specific witness/author and the work in the 1990's of Steve Emerson, whose 1994 PBS video on the domestic threat exposed both the ignorance of the US Government about what was going on within the US homeland, and the naivete of the US Government with respect to intentions.  Now we are seeing a persistent ignorance at the highest levels of the deeply-rooted messianic nature of the Iranian regime, a persistent naivete of the deep corruption within the arab countries as well as Israel, a persistent and blissfully self-destructive refusal to embrace Turkey as a a stabilizing Islamic power….and on and on and on.  The US Government is, in one word, IGNORANT with arrogance driving incoherence rooted in ideological naivete.  Iran (and China) should be the focus on a 360 degree “whole of government” Information Operations (IO) campaign intended to explore and then develop concepts, doctrine, plans, programs, and budget for fully integrated intelligence, information operations, operations support to multinational hybrid task forces, and communications.  The problem that we see immediately, apart from the US Government being incompetent–not trained, equipped nor organized for inter-agency or multinational operations–is that there is severe confusion, even denial, about where cyber starts and stops.  Cyber is not about bits and bytes running through computers.  It is about the mind of man–the mind of entire cultures, tribes, and regions.  In that context, cyber should be the “driver” for all kinetic plans, programs, and budgets, by dictate with the US Government and by use of shared information and shared intelligence (decision-support) across all eight tribes and all other nations both allied and not.

See Also:

18 Dec  Journal: Spies, Lies, and Diplomatic Disorder

21 Aug Odierno weighs in on Iraq's immediate future, Iran's intentions

30 Mar Iran's Intentions Are Clear

03 Feb Obama Carries Forward Carter’s Failed Iran Policy

Journal: Spies, Lies, and Diplomatic Disorder

02 Diplomacy, 07 Other Atrocities, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process

Hillary Clinton's handling of the WikiLeaks exposé has been pompous in the extreme

Robert Fisk: Stay out of trouble by not speaking to Western spies

The Independent, 18 December 2010

Almost 30 years ago, a British diplomat asked me to lunch in Beirut.

Despite rumours to the contrary, she told me on the phone, she was not a spy but a mere attaché, wanting only to chat about the future of Lebanon. These were kidnapping days in the Lebanese capital, when to be seen with the wrong luncheon companion could finish in a basement in south Beirut. I trusted this woman. I was wrong. She arrived with two armed British bodyguards who sat at the next table. Within minutes of sitting down at a fish restaurant in the cliff-top Raouche district, she started plying me with questions about Hezbollah's armaments in southern Lebanon. I stood up and walked out. Hezbollah had two men at another neighbouring table. They called on me next morning. No problem, they said, they saw me walk out. But watch out.

. . . . . .ABSOLUTELY WORTH A FULL READ. . . . . .

More and more, WikiLeaks is exposing the hopeless nature of US foreign policy and that of its supposed “allies”. Attack on the international community indeed!

Read full article….

From the ABOUT section of this website.

Continue reading “Journal: Spies, Lies, and Diplomatic Disorder”

Journal: Whole of Government Competence & Contractors

02 Diplomacy, Government, Peace Intelligence

David IsenbergDavid Isenberg

Author, Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq

Posted: December 17, 2010 11:17 PM

Will the Real Hillary Clinton Please Step Forward?

It appears that the old Hillary Clinton, the one who ran for president of the United States has managed to travel forward in time and merge with the current Hillary Clinton, the one who is Secretary of State.

For those who don't remember, the old Clinton vowed to ban the use of private security contractors. As perennial PMC critic Jeremy Scahill of The Nation reported back in July, “”These private security contractors have been reckless and have compromised our mission in Iraq,” Clinton said in February 2008. “The time to show these contractors the door is long past due.” Clinton was one of only two senators to sponsor legislation to ban these companies.

Scahill was upset that Clinton had since moderated her views and that she was “presiding over what is shaping up to be a radical expansion of a private, US-funded paramilitary force that will operate in Iraq for the foreseeable future–the very type of force Clinton once claimed she opposed.”

But on Wednesday the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (AID) unveiled the much-awaited Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review entitled “Leading Through Civilian Power.”

The report seeks to put some distance between State and the private sector.

Read rest of article…

Journal: Sun Tzu is with the Taliban in Afghanistan

02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Military, Non-Governmental, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence
Chuck Spinney Sounds Off....

December 14, 2010

Memo From Sun Tzu to President Obama

Who is the Wise General in Afghanistan?

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY Counterpunch

In the first treatise written on the art of war, sometime around 450 BC [1], Sun Tzu explained why “the wise general sees to it that his troops feed on the enemy,”

EXTRACT:  The militarization of development aid is a central pillar of General Petaeus's counterinsurgency strategy to buy the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, ninety per cent of whom are spread out in remote rural areas. So it should not be surprising that the military is controlling the bulk of the billions of dollars in aid money flowing into (and being smuggled out of) Afghanistan.

In the very important CounterPunch report on 13 December, Patrick Cockburn, certainly one of the most informed observers of insurgencies in the Middle East and Central Asia, described how the militarization of development aid in Afghanistan is riven with corruption.

Read full article….

Journal: Appeal to Obama on Afghanistan

02 Diplomacy, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military
DefDog Recommends...

Obama ‘must talk to Afghan Taliban'

By Staff Reporter
AFP Global Edition

Dec 11, 2010 11:36 EST

A group of influential international experts on Afghanistan Saturday appealed to US President Barack Obama to radically change his strategy in the war-ravaged nation and negotiate directly with the Taliban.

. . . . . . .

“It is better to negotiate now rather than later, since the Taliban will likely be stronger next year.”

“The situation on the ground is much worse than a year ago because the Taliban insurgency has made progress across the country,” the letter said.

“The Taliban today are now a national movement with a serious presence in the north and the west of the country.”

. . . . . . .

“Like it or not, the Taliban are a long-term part of the Afghan political landscape and we need to try and negotiate with them in order to reach a diplomatic settlement. The Taliban's leadership has indicated its willingness to negotiate and it is in our interests to talk to them.”

Full article….

Reference: Lying is Not Patriotic–Ron Paul

02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Government, Hill Letters & Testimony, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Media, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Movies, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Videos/Movies/Documentaries, YouTube
Chuck Spinney Recommends....

Several truths, nine questions.

Ron Paul on YouTube

Phi Beta Iota: Here are the questions as asked:

01  Do the American people deserve to know the truth regarding the on-going war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen?

02  Could a larger questions be how can an Army private gain access to so much secret information?

03  Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange the publisher and not  our government's failure to protect classified information?

04  Are we getting our money's worth from the $80 billion dollars per year we are spending on intelligence gathering?

05  Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths?  Lying us into war, or WikiLeaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?

06  If Assange can be convicted of a crime for information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the First Amendment and the independence of the Internet?

07  Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?

08  Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death, and corruption?

09  Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?

See Also:

Journal: Politics & Intelligence–Partners Only When Integrity is Central to Both

Journal: US Internationally Illiterate

02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 04 Education, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Key Players

David Del VecchioDavid Del Vecchio

Owner, Idlewild Books, New York City

February 17, 2010 04:10 PM

10 Books 10 Countries: The Best Translated Books of 2009

If you're reading this, it's probably because literature matters to you, because you agree with the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa that literature is “one of the common denominators of human experience through which human beings may recognize themselves and converse with each other, no matter how different their professions, their life plans, their geographical and cultural locations, their personal circumstances.”

Yet here in the United States, we seem to be conversing mostly with ourselves. Even among those of us who love to read, we are largely cut off from the great dialogue that connects so much of the world (and missing some damn good books) due to the fact that less than three percent of what's published in this country is translated from other languages.

Three percent is low: in France and Spain, for example, both of which produce prodigious amounts of their own literature, more than half the new books published in a given year are translated from other languages. And even among the small number of foreign-language books that do make it into 
English in this country, about 300 to 400 titles in an average year, how many do you hear about?

If your main source for book news is mainstream media, the answer is: not many. Nine of the ten books on The New York Times's “Best Books of 2009” list were written by Americans (the tenth was by a Brit), as were nearly all the titles on their year-end list of 100 notable books. And very few of the books reviewed in any major American newspaper come from beyond our borders.

Read full article with list of books by country.

Phi Beta Iota: The author makes an very important point.  Read the entire post to see his thoughtfully selected examples of books Americans should be but are not reading.