Journal: CIA Seeks to Influence Opinion on Wars

02 Diplomacy, 04 Education, 10 Security, 11 Society, Ethics, Government, Media, Peace Intelligence
Berto Jongman Recommends...

Wednesday 31 March 2010

by: Daan de Wit  |  DeepJournal

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(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Patrick Hoesly, CIA)

The CIA recommendations for influencing the European public into continuing their support for the mission in Afghanistan is receiving a lot of attention both in The Netherlands and beyond. But in a military conflict, war is only one stage of the struggle. The biggest struggle is for the hearts and minds of the public at large. What's special about the case of the document is not so much its content, but the fact that it is now available for all to see.

At the top of the CIA-document it states: ‘Why counting on apathy might not be enough'.

Phi Beta Iota: CIA and the Pentagon both stink at Information Operations because neither is interested in putting the truth on the table and working from there, only in manipulating perceptions to achieve ends that are neither strategic nor just.  For an alternative perspective that treats the truth with respect, see INFORMATION OPERATIONS:  All Information, All Languages, All the Time (OSS, 2006), and more recently, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability (EIN, 2010).

Journal: CIA Leads the “Walking Dead” in USA

04 Education, 10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

Full Story Online

Marcus Aurelius Recommends...

A Dagger to the CIA

On December 30, in one of the deadliest attacks in CIA history, an Al Qaeda double agent schemed his way onto a U.S. base in Afghanistan and blew himself into the next life, taking seven Americans with him. How could this have happened? Agency veteran Robert Baer explains, offering chilling new details about the attack and a plea to save the dying art of espionage

If we take Khost as a metaphor for what has happened to the CIA, the deprofessionalization of spying, it's tempting to consider that the agency's time has passed. “Khost was an indictment of an utterly failed system,” a former senior CIA officer told me. “It's time to close Langley.”

I'm not prepared to go quite that far. The United States still needs a civilian intelligence agency. (The military cannot be trusted to oversee all intelligence-gathering on its own.) But the CIA—and especially the directorate of operations—must be stripped down to its studs and rebuilt with a renewed sense of mission and purpose. It should start by getting the amateurs out of the field. And then it should impose professional standards of training and experience—the kind it upheld with great success in the past. If it doesn't, we're going to see a lot more Khosts.

Phi Beta Iota: Robert Bear, a most-respected colleague, only scratches the surface.  While we endorse his condemnation of Clinton and Deutch specifically, Robert misses the  deeper history and the broader implications.  CIA was “Flawed by Design” as Amy Zegart puts it so well, and has always been a loose-cannon shoot from the hip organization with what Tim Weiner now calls the “Legacy of Ashes”.

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Afghanistan Hashish, (not only opium) Declared World’s Largest Producer

01 Agriculture, 01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 04 Education, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, 12 Water, Threats
read the article
By VIVIENNE WALT

It's hardly news that Afghanistan's huge opium crops supply more than 90% of the world's heroin. But now U.N. officials say Afghanistan is also the world's biggest producer of another drug – hashish. In its first attempt to calculate how much cannabis is grown in the country, the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime says in a report released in Kabul on Wednesday that Afghan farmers earned up to $94 million last year from selling between 1,500 and 3,500 tons of hash – the resin extracted from cannabis crops.

U.S. and NATO officials believe that at least part of this revenue goes to insurgent groups to finance their attacks against coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, where almost all of the 139 soldiers killed this year have died. The report found that farmers grow about 17,000 hectares (about 42,000 acres) of cannabis in half of the country's 34 provinces – largely in the south. That is where Afghanistan's most fertile land is, the report says, and its rich soil produces an “astonishing yield” of potent hashish of about 320 pounds per hectare – more than three times the yield from cannabis grown in Morocco, another big hash producer. “Afghanistan is using some of its best land to grow cannabis,” says Antonia Maria Costa, director of the U.N. drug office in Vienna. “If they grew wheat instead, insurgents would not have money to buy weapons and the international community would not have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on food aid.” (See pictures of cannabis culture.)

  • Afghanistan Cannabis Survey (Full report) (pdf)
    Income from cannabis per ha (gross/net) US$ 3,900 / US$ 3,341
    Income from opium per ha (gross/net) US$ 3,600 / US$ 2,005
    Income from wheat per ha (gross/net) US$ 1,200 / US$ 960

Journal: Pentagon as VERY Slow Learner….

03 Economy, 04 Education, 10 Security, 11 Society, Government, Military

Time.com    March 18, 2010

To Battle Computer Hackers, The Pentagon Trains Its Own

By Mark Thompson, Washington

“More than 100 foreign intelligence organizations are trying to hack into U.S. systems,” Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn warned last month. “Some governments already have the capacity to disrupt elements of the U.S. information infrastructure.” So the Pentagon recently modified its regulations to allow military computer experts to be trained in computer hacking, gaining designation as “certified ethical hackers.” They'll join more than 20,000 such good-guy hackers around the world who have earned that recognition since 2003 from the private International Council of E-Commerce Consultants (also known as the EC-Council).

Continue reading “Journal: Pentagon as VERY Slow Learner….”

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.

NIGHTWATCH: Pakistani Education as Weapon Against USA–The Failure of US Militarization

04 Education

Pakistan: Memorizing the Qur’an, but not learning multiplication or even how to write

Pakistan: Special note. The second part of yesterday’s PBS show Frontline concerned the condition of the public school system in Pakistan. It has collapsed in nearly every respect.

The video report noted that nearly half of the 65 million school age kids in Pakistan do not attend public schools. It did not follow-up that datum to report that a large percentage of the children not in public school learn to read and write in religious schools associated with mosque. The madrasah teaches boys and girls to read, write and recite the Quran, among other basics. In many regions and cities of Pakistan, attendance at the madrasah is the only path to semi-literacy for the children of the poor.

The collapse of the public school system has been the subject of editorials and studies for decades.  The video report was not newsworthy on that account. It was significant that the overcrowded, open air school that was the subject of the video is in Lahore, one of the largest cities of Pakistan. The visual setting looked like a remote tribal village, not part of a large urban center.

Of great interest were the reporter’s brief interviews with a pre-teen Pakistani girl who attended the open air school in Lahore.  The girl believed in education and said she wanted to be a teacher. Concerning the US, she said her teacher told her to hate America.

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Journal: MILNET Selected Headlines

03 Economy, 04 Education, 05 Iran, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Communities of Practice, Ethics

Obama’s Credibility Gap (New York Times)

Americans are still looking for the answer, and if they don’t get it soon — or if they don’t like the answer — the president’s current political problems will look like a walk in the park.

Public Rifts On Afghanistan: Leaks suggest that the administration is divided, endangering Obama's strategy (Philadelphia Enquirer)

A divided administration will produce an incoherent policy.

U.S. school bans the dictionary (Many Sources)

A California school district has added a new book to the controversial list of literature that is considered unfit for young eyes. . . . It's the dictionary.

Pentagon Report Calls for Office of ‘Strategic Deception’ (WIRED)

The Defense Department needs to get better at lying and fooling people about its intentions. That’s the conclusion from an influential Pentagon panel, the Defense Science Board (DSB), which recommends that the military and intelligence communities join in a new agency devoted to “strategic surprise/deception.”

Continue reading “Journal: MILNET Selected Headlines”