References – Page 65 – Public Intelligence Blog

Deja vu — over and over again.

In Kim’s Death, an Extensive Intelligence Failure

New York Times, December 19, 2011

EXTRACT:

For South Korean, Chinese and American intelligence services to have failed to pick up any clues to this momentous development — panicked phone calls between government officials, say, or soldiers massing around Mr. Kim’s train — attests to the secretive nature of North Korea, a country not only at odds with most of the world but also sealed off from it in a way that defies spies or satellites.

Read full story.

Phi Beta Iota: There is a huge disconnect between how the US secret intelligence community spends money, and what it produces. 4% “at best” of what a major commander needs to know, and nothing for everyone else. Until the secret world has leadership focused on requirements definition, collection management, holistic analytics, multinational information-sharing and sense-making, and direct constant support to decision-makers at all levels across all issue areas, it will continue to administer (not mange, not lead) the world's most expensive Potemkin Village.

See Also:

Graphic: Tony Zinni on 4% “At Best”

Graphic: Intelligence Maturity Scale

Journal: Reflections on Integrity UPDATED + Integrity RECAP

2010: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Trilogy Updated

2008 COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

2006 INFORMATION OPERATIONS: All Information, All Languages, All the Time

2002 THE NEW CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE: Personal, Public, & Political

2000 ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World

2011/12/192011/12/19

Reference: US Veteran Suicides – 1000 Attempts Each Month, 18 Actual Deaths by Suicide Each Day

07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, DoD, Government, Military, Officers Call

veterans_suicide — 12,000 Attempts a Year, 18 Deaths a Day

“Shh” Email: 1,000 Suicide Attempts per Month, 18 Suicides per Day

On April 21, the first day of trial, the now-infamous VA internal December 2007 email written by Dr. Ira Katz, the VA’s mental health director, was submitted as evidence. The email states that 12,000 veterans per year under VA care were attempting suicide. Widely circulated within the VA, the email, titled “Not for the CBS News Interview Request” told a tragic tale.

“Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities,” Katz wrote. The email concludes: “Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?”

In November Katz told CBS, “There is no epidemic in suicide in VA,” and that there were only 790 attempted suicides in all of 2007, a fraction of Katz’s estimate stated in the internal email. In the same email Katz wrote there “are about 18-suicides per day among America’s 25 million veterans.”

Update 18 December 2011 (CNN)

Tip of the Hat to Bill Golden at LinkedIn.

2011/12/19

Chuck Spinney: Greece in Freefall, Preview of USA in 2013?

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Office of Management and Budget

Europe in crisis: Greece in chaos

Personally and collectively, the Greeks don’t understand and can’t cope with what’s happening now, let alone what will happen next. The welfare state is being swiftly and deliberately dismantled without any time to set up replacements

Noëlle Burgi

Le Monde diplomatique, December 2011

EXTRACT:

The Greeks struggle to see a way out of what a social worker described as a return to a “barbaric” way of life. They feel abandoned and unable to cope. Strong family ties are buckling under the pressure of diminished incomes and a collapsing welfare state. Those who can leave, do so. The options for those remaining are limited. Some turn to the Church, which arranges soup kitchens and other social services. In Salonika, Father Stefanos Tolios of the Orthodox church, is swamped by desperate people looking for work. Residents of several cities (Volos, Patras, Heraklion, Athens, Corfu, Salonika) have set up community-based informal economies, based on local exchange systems. Families are bringing their elderly back from retirement homes, to recover the monthly charge of € 300-400.

No country could withstand this. Greece is worse equipped to deal with the social consequences of the austerity measures imposed with a “scientific cruelty” (7) by the national and transnational elites.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: The level of detail in this article is superb. The author provides a gripping preview of what could befall the USA in 2012 — Obama will cook the books and spend borrowed money to create a semblance of stability in support of his bid to be President but the bottom line is clear: whoever is elected will deal with a near-total collapse of the economy and the government in 2013. If America does not elect a team with a governance philosophy that places We the People first, we are in for four more years of elite loot-fest and the implosion of what is left of the USA.

2011/12/18

Chuck Spinney: German Economic Imperialism Killing Europe?

01 Brazil, 02 China, 03 Economy, 03 India, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Transnational Crime, Analysis, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Policy, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, White Papers

Will Germany Kill the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg?

Since the middle of the 19th Century, the central questions in European politics have been been have been the closely connected questions of nationalism and the rise of German power. As my good friend and eminent historian Gabriel Kolko shows in the brilliant essay attached below, the post war solutions of NATO and the European Union, together with the exigencies of the Cold War, put these questions on hold, but their fundamentals remained, sleeping beneath the surface, and today, the conflicting questions of nationalism and German power are again coming to the fore to create ominous problems for Europe and the world.

There can be no question that, until 2007 or so, the European Union — particularly the opening of borders, the free flow of labour and capital, the disappearance of tariffs, and diminution of non-tariff trade restrictions, etc. combined to make life better for the mass of average Europeans. Standards of living rose steeply and social services improved in parallel. This was particularly evident in the poorer EU countries on the southern rim. I saw and experienced this astounding improvement in the quality of life on a very personal level, living on a sailboat in southern Europe since the summer of 2005. I will never forget the comment made to me by an Italian psychologist in Calabria in 2006, which is the heart of the provincial south of Italy, “It is a great time to be a European.” To be sure, he was an educated member of the upper middle class, and not representative of the average Calabrian, but it struck me that this Calabrian saw himself as a European. It was not very long ago, that such a person would only loosely consider himself to be an Italian, not to mention a European.

2011/12/172011/12/17

Bojan Radej: Movement 99%, Self-Organizing Complex Bodies

White Papers

“Movement 99%: Through Exclusion to the Community”
Slovenian Evaluation Society, Working paper 4/4(Nov. 2011), Bojan Radej

“Understanding and Self-Management of the Complex Society”
Slovenian Evaluation Society, Working paper 2/4(2011), 30 pp.

Bojan Radej is a methodologist in social research from Ljubljana. Master degree in macroeconomics, University of Ljubljana – Faculty of Economics (1993). Professional Experience Record: Governmental Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development (1987-04; under-secretary to the government), areas of work: sustainable development (1998-04), chief manager of the modelling department (1993-5); initiator and the first editor of Slovenian Economic Mirror (1995-8); Co-Editor of IB journal (2001-04). Chairman of Slovenian Evaluation Society (2008-).

Below the line: abstracts and links.

Continue reading “Bojan Radej: Movement 99%, Self-Organizing Complex Bodies”

2011/12/172011/12/17

TEDxAmsterdam 2011 – General Peter van Uhm

04 Inter-State Conflict, 10 Security, DoD, Ethics, IO Deeds of Peace, Methods & Process, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Strategy

Tip of the Hat to Berto Jongman.

Phi Beta Iota: Below is a typical comment. Sadly, for this to be true, INTEGRITY in government is required. As we have seen from Dick Cheney's hijacking of the US Government — and Obama's continuation of the Bush-era “war as a racket” policies now including the murder and imprisonment of US citizens without due process — sometimes the government's monopoly on force is the basis for a failed state, not its anti-thesis.

Very inspiring talk, i listened in silence to him and that doesn’t happen often.

As an ex VN soldier i fully support the generals opinion.

Even after losing his own son in Afghanistan he still firmly believes in his ideals and knows how to express them on a way that is understandable and inspiring to allot of people, i can only say general van Uhm made me proud to be Dutch today, and proud i served in the Dutch armed forces.

2011/12/13

David Isenberg: PMC Oversight? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’….

DoD, Hill Letters & Testimony

For the latest on the effectiveness of oversight on private military and security contractors (PMSC) people should take a moment to peruse the hearing of the National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. On December 7 it held a hearing titled “Oversight in Iraq and Afghanistan: Challenges and Solutions,” chaired by Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT).

. . . . . .

Boiled down to a single question, the issue is whether taxpayers are getting their money's worth when the government uses PMSC. In this hearing the inspectors general community shared its perspective together on one panel. Ironically, the Defense Department, State Department, USAID and SIGAR will not have IGs in January and President Obama has yet to nominate any replacements.

Phi Beta Iota: The taxpayers are not getting their money's worth from the Department of Defense or any other Cabinet Department–contractors are imply an order of magnitude worse.

Category: References

DefDog: Extensive Intelligence Failure Over Korea