An official report last week reveals weaknesses in our effort to prevent another 9/11.
Gordon Grovitz
L. GORDON CROVITZ
Monday, September 21, 2009
The U.S. is the only country whose laws mandate the release of details of its intelligence goals and operations. Every four years, the National Intelligence Strategy document discloses the priorities of the usually hidden operations of the country's 16 intelligence agencies.
A key theme of last week's report is that we're now in what might be called an information arms race, driven by technology.
. . . . . . .
One previously top-secret disclosure last week was the amount the U.S. spends across its civilian and military intelligence operations. Mr. Blair said this is $75 billion a year, including 200,000 intelligence professionals. These details alert other countries to what it would take to close the intelligence gap.
. . . . . . . .The Central Intelligence Agency is deploying teams of spies, analysts and paramilitary operatives on top of the nearly 700 employees it already has in the war-torn country in parallel with a military expansion that will see 68,000 US troops in Afghanistan by year's end. . . . . . . . The incoming spies are receiving a broad range of assignments, including working in tandem with special forces units hunting high-value targets, tracking public sentiment in regions seen as shifting support toward the Taliban and gathering intelligence on corruption in the Afghan government, the Times said.
Roger Martin is Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the
University of Toronto
Amazon Page
Pre-order his forthcoming book
In response to the question: What does Wall Street have to change to produce better leaders, a different culture and a more long-term focus?
Forget about it. Don't even waste time thinking about it. The purpose
of Wall Street firms is to trade value for their own benefit not to
build value for the economy either short-term or long-term. While at
one point in its history, a non-trivial part of Wall Street's activity
involved financing the growth of American companies, that is now a
minor piece of its business. Wall Street is primarily engaged in
encouraging individuals and companies to trade value between one
another and tolling the parties for the service, and trading against
the outside economy for its own account.
Phi Beta Iota: This author not only gets it, he provides a solution. Wall Street, and the Fed, need to be creatively destroyed, and we need to restore bottom-up Human Scale locality-based business. Government “regulation” of financial crime is idiocy on top of illusion.
1) Chuck Spinney on how our partisan “leaders” are disconnected from reality and leading us over a cliff, with reference to John Boyd.
2. An extract and link to the always brilliant CounterPunch where David Michael Green discusses the core issue: Can America be salvaged?
3. A Phi Beta Iota editorial commentary on Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), Robert Steele (Paradigms of Failure, Data Pathologies), and Howard Zinn (A Power Governments Cannot Repress).
CHUCK SPINNEY: The article in Counterpunch by David Michael Green, “Can America be Salvaged?” is an brilliant expository argument describing what are in effect the destructive outcomes of self-referencing/incestuously amplifying OODA loops that are becoming ever more disconnected from reality.
The Obama Administration means well, no question about it. They simply do not know what they do not know, and no one within the US Intelligence Community appears capable of speaking truth to power.
The truth that needs to be spoken is that Washington lacks both integrity and intelligence (as in thoughtful holistic decision-making). Washington lacks a strategic analytic model, it lacks a commitment to eradicating the ten high-level threats to humanity (terrorism is ninth, a traffic accident, nothing more), and it lacks a process for harmonizing budgets and behavior across twelve core policy domains as illustrated below.
We were surprised this morning to learn that Ray McGovern, a CIA veteran whose credibility we respect, is saying that Leon Panetta and Barack Obama may be treating CIA with kid gloves for fear of being assassinated by the “insider” CIA that itself fears criminal prosecution for the death of over 100 detainees in CIA custody. Food for thought. Read McGovern's thoughts at The Media Consortium, “Ray McGovern Warns of ‘Two CIA's.'”
There are two sides to this matter. How many CIA's? Does CIA assassinate U.S. citizens including leaders?
Below is a simple illsutration of what a proper national health policy should address.
Printable Powerpoint Slide (1997-2003) with Notes
This illustration is freely available under Creative Commons non-commercial license except that media outlets are gladly given a waiver and may make free use with attribution to “Phi Beta Iota, Public Intelligence Blog.”
Below is a simplified question and four-point answer that any serious person should be able to comprehend.
