07 Other Atrocities – Page 433 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/09/27

AFIO: Bizarre System of Hiring Intelligence Contractors

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

The Bizarre System of Hiring Intelligence Contractors

Joshua Foust – Joshua Foust is a fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net.

The Atlantic, 20 September 2011

This morning I testified at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs' Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia (a mouthful, I know) about how we can better manage and administer contractors within the intelligence community. I'm pasting a brief excerpt of my written testimony below, followed by a link to the full text of my remarks.

Every contract the government issues for a company to perform work is defined by the Statement of Work (SOW). This is a document that defines the parameters of the work the contractor will perform, including a description of the project, expected duties the contractor must fulfill, and the outputs and metrics by which performance will be measured. These are often poorly written, kept intentionally vague, and wind up not actually addressing the stated intent of the contracts.

As one example, every SOW I've had to either administer, edit, review, or write has stated as a basic metric of performance the number of employees the contractor should hire. That is, the basic means by which the government measures the contractor's performance is based first and foremost on the number of people hired to work on the contract. This has two serious consequences that affect the contracting environment: it removes the distinction between employees that would make work products better, and it confuses the number of employees with contract performance.

The frankly bizarre system of hiring intelligence contractors is born from several interdependent processes: getting a security clearance, getting hired, and getting “read on” to work at a government site. The system of getting a clearance is structured such that those with clearances are given preference above those without clearance, regardless of the relevant experience of either employee. In other words, if two candidates are competing for a job with a contractor, and one has deep relevant experience but no clearance, she will most likely lose to a candidate with less relevant experience but a current and active security clearance.

There is a great deal more to this, and I would suggest anyone interested in this topic to download both my own testimony (At SCRIBD, or PDF here), and checking out the Hearing page, which includes written remarks from Daniel Gordon from the Office of Management and Budget, DHS Chief of Intelligence Charles E. Allen, Scott Amey from the Project on Government Oversight, and Dr. Mark Lowenthal.

2011/09/27

Mini-Mi: DHS Has Not Gotten Its Death Notice — Planning $5 Billion Make-Over of Former Insane Asylum for Hill-Top Empire

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, DHS, Government

The Department of Homeland Security’s New HQ is an Abandoned Insane Asylum

public intelligence.net, 26 September 2011

Five miles southeast of the gleaming Capitol dome, on a scenic bluff overlooking the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, the future office of the secretary of Homeland Security sits boarded up and abandoned.

Four years ago, U.S. officials announced plans to renovate the dilapidated, castle-like structure —opened in 1855 as the Government Hospital for the Insane — to anchor Washington’s largest construction project since the Pentagon was built 70 years ago.

Saint_Elizabeths — Click on Image to Enlarge

The goal was to unite on a single campus the 22 agencies that were stitched together to form the Department of Homeland Security after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But the $3.4-billion headquarters project stalled as Congress tried to cut the federal deficit.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: There is no evidence that in the meantime, the CIA is using the facility as a secret prison for US citizen dissidents. As clear as it is to the public that DHS needs to be eliminated immediately, DHS has clearly not gotten the memorandum. We believe there will be a one-third cut in federal funding and federal employment beginning in 2012. The current leadership of the two parties, of Congress, and of the Executive appears to be grotesquely out of touch with reality, out of control, and operating completely against the public interest.

2011/09/272011/09/27

Koko: American Patriot Del Spurlock Speaks to the NAACP in Oberlin, Ohio

07 Other Atrocities, Blog Wisdom, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics

Koko Signs: A small sign of life within the comatose US democracy.

OBERLIN 2011

A Speech Given to the NAACP

at the Oberlin Inn

September 24, 2011

Delbert L. Spurlock, Jr.

Mr. Spurlock was introduced by Robert K. Jones (B.J.), Chief of Police, Retired Oberlin Police Department.

EXTRACT:

We live in a country that has mutated a new confederate virus, wiping out the rights fought for and won against terrible odds by the NAACP, and the unbelievably brave black plaintiffs of the South.

It is a virus that works to obliterate the memory of the contributions of the white southern judges of the old Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

It is a virus that has spread to Ohio through word of mouth in right-wing mega churches and by hypodermic injections of rigged electronic voting devices.

We live in a country that raises its young to be economic units incapable of escaping from a lifetime of paying off the company store.

The days ahead will be very difficult for our America and worse for its human citizens. The country we bequeath to our young people is a country without bearing, without antecedent, a country with a government most resembling the disfunctionality of the slavocracy, which all people of Oberlin should recognize.

Full Presentation Below the Line.

Continue reading “Koko: American Patriot Del Spurlock Speaks to the NAACP in Oberlin, Ohio”

2011/09/26

Chuck Spinney: Obama’s Shame — & Threat to USA

02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War

President Obama's craven performance at the UN has both humiliated the United States and made a mockery of what little remains of America's pretensions to the principles of freedom, democracy, fair play, and simple human decency. Like Colin Powell, he made the wrong turn at the “to be” or “to do” fork in the road; he put career and short-term ambition ahead of common sense and personal honor; and ironically, he made the same faustian bargain publicly on the same world stage for all to see. For a men of such great promise to stumble so miserably is not only a personal tragedy of Shakespearian proportions: their pusillanimity under pressure opens the door to unpredictable grand strategic* ramifications that menace the wellbeing of hundreds of millions of people at home and abroad.

Below is one thoughtful observer's exploration of some of these ramifications; there will be other assessments … and very few of them will be pretty.

At least LBJ, who tried to do some things, recognized when his time was over, and left gracefully. But in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac at the dawn of the 21st Century, that won't happen again, and Mr. Obama's ultimate disgrace will be to prove that the easy being was far more important than the hard doing when engineering the moral and material decline of a nation.

________
* The criteria underpinning a sensible grand strategy are explained here.

Chuck Spinney
Port Vendres, France

The Third Intifada Targets Israel-America

by Rami G. Khouri

Agence Global, 26 Sep 2011

[CS Note: I reformatted this insightful essay to highlight important points, but did not change any text or the order of presentation]

BOSTON — It remains to be seen what actually changes on the ground in the months ahead following the Palestinian initiative to ask the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state in the 1967 Israeli-occupied territories as a UN member or observer state. The move could be a substantive gain for the Palestinian people, a symbolic victory only, or a measurable setback if the United States and Israel translate their vindictive rhetoric into hard policies. While we wait for the impact of the UN move to become clearer, we should acknowledge nevertheless that this has been a historic week in several ways.

I.The most important new development that future historians will record is that this last week in September represented the moment when the Arab-Israeli conflict structurally transformed into the Arab-Israeli/American conflict, because of the profound and explicit manner in which the U.S. government has come down on the side of Israel. The United States historically has tried, without much success but with visible endeavor nevertheless, to express its support for Israel’s survival and security while also trying to mediate a resolution of the conflict that sees the birth of a Palestinian state in much of the 1967 occupied lands. That balancing act, unconvincing as it was, is formally dead for now — repeatedly shot in the heart by a firing squad of American politicians who have unleashed volleys of shotguns at the weak and doomed phenomenon that was once called “American mediation”.

Robert Steele: Ignored 1994, Ignored 2011–Deja Vu

07 Other Atrocities, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Hill Letters & Testimony, IO Impotency, Legislation, Military, Policies, Standards, Technologies

steele smiling final — Robert David STEELE Vivas

One of our contributors passed this to me and asked me to comment in relation to the alarm that Winn Schwartau, Bill Caeli, Jim Anderson, and I sounded in 1994, in writing, to Marty Harris, then head of the National Information Infrastructure (NII).

First, the item.

From the man who discovered Stuxnet, dire warnings one year later

Mark Clayton

Christian Science Monitor, 22 September 2011

Stuxnet, the cyberweapon that attacked and damaged an Iranian nuclear facility, has opened a Pandora's box of cyberwar, says the man who uncovered it. A Q&A about the potential threats.

EXTRACT:

CSM: How would you characterize the year since Stuxnet – the response by nations, industry and government?

LANGNER: Last year, after Stuxnet was identified as a weapon, we recommended to every asset owner in America – owners of power plants, chemical plants, refineries and others – to make it a top priority to protect their systems…. That wakeup call lasted only about a week. Thereafter, everybody fell back into coma. The most bizarre thing is that even the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Siemens [maker of the industrial control system targeted by Stuxnet] talked about Stuxnet being a wakeup call, but never got into the specifics of what needed to be done.

Continue reading “Robert Steele: Ignored 1994, Ignored 2011–Deja Vu”

2011/09/23

Cynthia McKinney: The Truth on Libya–Another War of Lies

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, IO Deeds of War, Peace Intelligence

LIBYA AND THE BIG LIE: USING HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS TO LAUNCH WARS

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

The war against Libya is built on fraud. The United Nations Security Council passed two resolutions against Libya on the basis of unproven claims, specifically that Colonel Muammar Qaddafi was killing his own people in Benghazi. The claim in its exact form was that Qaddafi had ordered Libyan forces to kill 6,000 people in Benghazi. These claims were widely disseminated, but always vaguely explained. It was on the basis of this claim that Libya was referred to the U.N. Security Council at U.N Headquarters in New York City and kicked out of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

False claims about African mercenary armies in Libya and about jet attacks on civilians were also used in a broad media campaign against Libya. These two claims have been sidelined and have become more and more murky. The massacre claims, however, were used in a legal, diplomatic, and military framework to justify NATO’s war on the Libyans.

Using Human Rights as a Pretext for War: The LLHR and its Unproven Claims

One of the main sources for the claim that Qaddafi was killing his own people is the Libyan League for Human Rights (LLHR). The LLHR was actually pivotal to getting the U.N. involved through its specific claims in Geneva. On February 21, 2011 the LLHR got the 70 other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to sent letters to the President Obama, E.U. High Representative Catherine Ashton., and the U.N. Secretary-General Ban-ki Moon demanding international action against Libya invoking the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. Only 25 members of this coalition actually assert that they are human rights groups.

The letter is as follows:

Continue reading “Cynthia McKinney: The Truth on Libya–Another War of Lies”

2011/09/22