Journal: US Attorney General Homegrown Terror Threat Increasing

10 Security, 11 Society, Government

Eric Holder
Eric Holder Full Story

In ABC News Exclusive, Attorney General Eric Holder Says ‘American People Would be Surprised by the Depth of the Threat'

By PIERRE THOMAS, JASON RYAN and THERESA COOK

WASHINGTON, July 29, 2009

Attorney General Eric Holder told ABC News in an exclusive interview today that he is increasingly concerned about Americans becoming radicalized and turning to terrorism.

“I mean, that's one of the things that's particularly troubling: This whole notion of radicalization of Americans,” Holder told ABC News during an interview in his SUV as his motorcade brought him from home to work. “Leaving this country and going to different parts of the world and then coming back, all, again, in aim of doing harm to the American people, is a great concern.”

Holder said the ever-changing threat of terror and the pressure to keep up with it weighs heavily on his mind as he tries to ensure that the government has done all it can to anticipate the moves of an unpredictable enemy.

“In some ways it's the most sobering part of the day,” Holder said of his morning intelligence briefing, in which he gets the latest report on the landscape of “the organizations, the people who are bound and determined to do harm to our nation.”

+++++++Phi Beta Iota Editorial Comment+++++++

NEWS FLASH FOR THE ATTORNEY GENERAL:  There is a “Harvest of Rage” buidling up in America, and is is not from jihadists against the Nation, but rather normal, sober, average Americans full of common sense who are angry at the long list of high crimes and misdemeanors committed by a corrupt Congress and a White House that–regardless of occupant–represents Wall Street instead of Main Street.

The Watts riots by people of color will look like a kiss on the cheek if the white people of Middle America ever decide to march on New York and Washington.  With all due respect to the good intentions of the Attorney General, he is out of touch with reality and with America.  This is a Republic.  The government is failing.  It is time to fix it or abolish it.  We favor the fix, and the fix is easy: the Electoral Reform Act of 2009.

American is going clinically insane because the federal government as a service of common concern to the United STATES of America is so busy transferring wealth from the individual taxpayer to the banks and special interests that it has failed to do its job: mind the public interest, nurture the public soul, and guard the public commonwealth.

Cheney and Rice equated informed patriotic objections to the elective war on Iraq at “treason”–General Tony Zinni in particular was tarred with that brush.  Today the Obama Administration seems to equate opposition to its sophmoric efforts to do good while continuing to loot the Treasury for Goldman Sachs as “the radicalization of Americans.”  Yes, America is being radicalized.   The public intelligence question to be asked and answered is this: are We the People being radicalized by external or internal circumstances?  Phi Beta Iota believes that our radicalization is caused by a government that has lost touch with the public it is meant to serve.  Our good people trapped in a bad system have forgotten that their oath is to the Constitution, to defend America against all enemies, domestic as well as foreign, and that sometimes it is the integrity of the individual in the chain of command who remembers the Constitution, that prevents the abuse of power by political appointees who have been bought and paid for by Wall Street.

Journal: Marcus Aurelius Flags “The Losers Hang On”

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 10 Security, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence
Full Story Online
Full Story Online

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: July 25, 2009

After spending a week traveling the frontline of the “war on terrorism” — from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ronald Reagan in the seas off Iran, to northern Iraq, to Afghanistan and into northwest Pakistan — I can comfortably report the following: The bad guys are losing.

Yes, the dominos you see falling in the Muslim world today are the extremist Islamist groups and governments. They have failed to persuade people by either their arguments or their performances in power that their puritanical versions of Islam are the answer. Having lost the argument, though, the radicals still hang on thanks to gun barrels and oil barrels — and they can for a while.

. . . . . . .

To the extent that the radical Islamists have any energy today, it comes not from the power of their ideas or examples of good governance, but by stoking sectarian feuds. In Afghanistan, the Taliban play on Pashtun nationalist grievances, and in Iraq, the Sunni jihadists draw energy from killing Shiites.

The only way to really dry up their support, though, is for the Arab and Muslim modernists to actually implement better ideas by producing less corrupt and more consensual governance, with better schools, more economic opportunities and a vision of Islam that is perceived as authentic yet embracing of modernity. That is where “our” allies in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have so consistently failed. Until that happens, the Islamist radicals will be bankrupt, but not out of business.

+++++++Phi Beta Iota Editorial Comment+++++++

Most readers will focus on the beginning of Friedman's story and completely miss the ending.  What Friedman does not state that needs stating over and over again is that the U.S. taxpayer is being cheated by a foreign policy that substitutes technology for thinking, military sales for strategy, and convenient dictators for democracy.  Until we have an Undersecretary of State for Democracy with one Assistant Secretary for those dictators that agree to a five-year exit strategy, another for those that do not; and a counterpart Undersecretary of Defense for Peace who can move beyond the lip service that Defense continues to give to Operations Other Than War (OOTW), Stabilization & Reconstructions (S&R), Humanitarian Assistance (HA), and the mother of all military strategies, Irregular Warfare properly defined as Waging Peace by All Means Possible,  we will continue to betray the public interest at home as well as abroad.

Click on NYT Logo Above for the Full Story Online.

Journal: Health Care 101 and the Implosion of Washington

07 Health

Below are links to two stories on health care, both offering strong points of view, neither being completely accurate or particularly coherent in stratgic analytic terms.

Health Care 101:

Health Care is a four-part affair, and any policy proposal that fails to address all four parts is unaffordable, unsustainable, and a betrayal of the public trust.

Holistic National Health
Holistic National Health

Health Care is part of the mosaic of threats and policies that demand coherency and holistic handling by the President and Congress.  Although President Obama knows that a strategic analytic model exists (it was put under his hotel room door in Des Moines) he has chosen to allow the Democratic partisan mafia to manage policy in the old way, as ideologically-driven pork, rather than in the new way,  as an intelligence challenge.  In the below graphic, please note that if cow shit is poisoning spinach (Agriculture) and Water from the tap is now “Blue Death” in many places, at the same time that energy and electronmagnetic polution are inflicting all poor urban children with severe asthma, then “health care” in narrow (nearly idiotic) manner now being considered by Congress is a fiction.

Strategic Analytic Matrix
Strategic Analytic Matrix

Finally, health care is unaffordable and unsustainable for as long as three conditions exist:

1) it is not a public service and is driven by profit (withdrawals of cash from the system)

2) it allows for 50% of every dollar to be waste as documented by PriceWaterHouseCoopers and

3)  it seeks to control inputs rather than outcomes

Online Story and Link to PWC Report
Online Story and Link to PWC Report

Below are today's two stories, each offering a perspective not the whole picture properly analyzed.

Hidden Healthcare Nightmare
Hidden Healthcare Nightmare

The Hidden Healthcare Nightmare

When an insurance firm boss saw a field hospital for the poor in Virginia, he knew he had to speak out. Here, he tells Paul Harris of his fears for Obama's bid to bring about radical change

Obama Lied the Economy Died
Obama Lied the Economy Died

Obama Lied—The Economy Died

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery