09 Terrorism – Page 74 – Public Intelligence Blog

The American Foreign Policy Council’s World Almanac of Islamism is a comprehensive resource designed to track the rise or decline of radical Islam on a national, regional and global level. This database focuses on the nature of the contemporary Islamist threat around the world, and on the current activities of radical Islamist movements worldwide.

Click here to see former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge discuss the value of the World Almanac of Islamism

Tip of the Hat to Berto Jongman.

Phi Beta Iota: This is terribly shallow. It's also so out of context as to be nearly useless. A more sophisticated focus would track where the top Islamic families have their wealth invested; populations of nominally assimilated as well as blatantly non-assimilated Muslims, and future potential for severe disruption from Muslim immigrants, both legal and illegal, growing so rapidly as to be inevitably destabilizing. For over a decade we have been calling for religious intelligence and counter-intelligence. Governments are not taking this seriously, and in the USA at least, do not have a population policy or a credible security strategy for immigration of all sorts.

2011/09/082011/09/08

Chuck Spinney: Bin Laden, Perpetual War, Total Cost + Perpetual War RECAP

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Government, Hacking, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call

Osama bin Laden repeatedly said that his strategy for defeating the US and driving it out of the Middle East was to bankrupt the US by suckering it into a string expensive of never ending small wars. Osama may be dead, but the US remains locked in a state of perpetual wars abroad and shrinking civil liberties at home.

So was Osama right?

The dismaying debt ceiling spectacle in Congress is revealing in one psychological sense: A clear majority of US politicians now believe (I think incorrectly [1]) that the US federal government is bankrupt.

On this anniversary of 9-11, in addition to remembering the dead and the sacrifices of the living, we ought to look in the mirror and ask ourselves if America was taken to the cleaners by a Saudi whack job of Yemeni extraction. One way to start is by trying to figure out what kind of cash hemorrhage was triggered by our reaction to Osama's attack. My good friend Winslow Wheeler has been grappling with this problem, and his answer below is not pretty.

Chuck Spinney
Sanary sur Mer, France

SEPTEMBER 7, 2011

Five Trillion and Counting

What Has Been the Real Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars?

by WINSLOW T. WHEELER, Counterpunch

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Bin Laden, Perpetual War, Total Cost + Perpetual War RECAP”

2011/09/07

DefDog: Nation’s Top Cops Slam US Intelligence

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), Government, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement

Failure, across the board…..implications of this for domestic security abound…..where has all the money gone?

Report: Nation's Top Cops Say U.S. Counterterror Effort Is Lacking

Ten years after 9/11, top cops in the nation's biggest cities feel there
are still significant gaps in the intelligence and analysis they receive
about terrorism, even as the homegrown terror threat looms larger.

A survey of intelligence commanders from America's 56 biggest cities conducted by the Homeland Security Policy Institute found the police chiefs believe the nation's intelligence enterprise is less robust than it could be, and that 62 percent of the chiefs felt this lack left them “unable to develop a complete understanding of their local threat.”

Read full article.

Read full report.

Phi Beta Iota: The “top cops” are great people, they just do not understand that the terror threat is fradulent and that the homeland security industrial complex is working precisely as intended, wasting hundreds of billions on fraudulent dysfunctional white and white-collar employment while channeling hundreds of billions in unearned profits to the homeland security industrial complex.

No More Secrets: Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence

2011/09/052011/09/05

Joseph Stiglitz: The True Cost of 9/11 — Includes 18 Veteran Suicides a Day

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call

The True Cost of 9/11

Trillions and trillions wasted on wars, a fiscal catastrophe, a weaker America.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

Slate, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2011

The Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks by al-Qaida were meant to harm the United States, and they did, but in ways that Osama Bin Laden probably never imagined. President George W. Bush's response to the attacks compromised America's basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security.

The attack on Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks was understandable, but the subsequent invasion of Iraq was entirely unconnected to al-Qaida—as much as Bush tried to establish a link. That war of choice quickly became very expensive—orders of magnitude beyond the $60 billion claimed at the beginning—as colossal incompetence met dishonest misrepresentation.

Indeed, when Linda Bilmes and I calculated America's war costs three years ago, the conservative tally was $3 trillion to $5 trillion. Since then, the costs have mounted further. With almost 50 percent of returning troops eligible to receive some level of disability payment, and more than 600,000 treated so far in veterans' medical facilities, we now estimate that future disability payments and health care costs will total $600 billion to $900 billion. The social costs, reflected in veteran suicides (which have topped 18 per day in recent years) and family breakups, are incalculable.

Read full article…

How focusing too much on the war on terror undermined our economy and global power.

By Anne Applebaum Slate, 4 September 2011

2011/09/052011/09/05

Chuck Spinney: Can USA Move Beyond 9/11 Pathology?

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Media, Military, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Strategy, Waste (materials, food, etc)

CS Note: Lightly reformatted by text unchanged and nothing added

Can the United States move beyond the narcissism of 9/11?

The unity brought about by the tragedy was intense but fleeting. The war on terror has been disastrous abroad and divisive at home

Gary Younge, guardian.co.uk, Sunday 4 September 2011 18.00

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks the then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, called in her senior staff and asked them to think seriously about “how [to] capitalise on these opportunities”.

The primary opportunity came from a public united in anger, grief and fear which the Bush administration sought to leverage to maximum political effect. “I think September 11 was one of those great earthquakes that clarify and sharpen,” Rice told the New Yorker six months afterwards. “Events are in much sharper relief.”

Ten years later the US response to the terror attacks have clarified three things:

the limits to what its enormous military power can achieve,
its relative geopolitical decline and
the intensity of its polarised political culture.

It proved itself

incapable of winning the wars it chose to fight and
incapable of paying for them and
incapable of coming to any consensus as to why.

The combination of domestic repression at home and military aggression abroad kept no one safe, and endangered the lives of many. The execution of Osama bin Laden provoked such joy in part because almost every other American response to 9/11 is regarded as a partial or total failure.

Read original online–safety copy below the line.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Can USA Move Beyond 9/11 Pathology?”

2011/09/032011/09/03

Richard Wright: Mike Vicker’s Trillion Dollar Adventure

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military

Soldier, Thinker, Hunter, Spy: Drawing a Bead on Al Qaeda

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

New York Times, September 3, 2011

EXTRACT:

“I just want to kill those guys,” Mr. Vickers likes to say in meetings at the Pentagon, with a grin.

. . . . . . .

As covert American wars — in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — continue in the second decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, so will the questions of legality, morality and risk that go along with them.

. . . . . . .

In Mr. Vickers’s assessment, there are perhaps four important Qaeda leaders left in Pakistan, and 10 to 20 leaders over all in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Even if the United States kills them all in drone strikes, Mr. Vickers said, “You still have Al Qaeda, the idea.”

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota: The insanity of it all is hard to fathom. Vickers is a male counterpart to Fran Townsend. The US Government, “in our name,” is spending over a trillion a year (that it borrows) for elective wars and global assassinations that are pissing off millions of people, while the “Undersecretary of Intelligence” spends all his time trying to kill the dirty dozen. All we can do at this point is recommend a close reading of Paul Fernhout: Open Letter to the Intelligence Advanced Programs Research Agency (IARPA).

2011/09/03

Berto Jongman: Iraq Suicide Bombing Results + RECAP

09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, IO Deeds of War, Military

Open source assessment of a devastating terrorist tactic.

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or full PDF

2011-09-03 Iraq Suicide Attack Study

200 coalition soldiers were killed in 79 suicide bomb events during 2003–10. More Iraqi civilians per lethal event were killed than were coalition soldiers (12 vs 3; p=0·004).

Suicide bombers in Iraq kill significantly more Iraqi civilians than coalition soldiers. Among civilians,
children are more likely to die than adults when injured by suicide bombs.

Phi Beta Iota: The US Government is delusional if not maliciously deceptive in focusing on Al Qaeda and on suicide bombing as a “threat.” Terrorism is a tactic, and nothing more than a traffic accident in the larger scheme of things. Suicide bombings are also directly correlated with the invasion and occupation of foreign Muslim countries by US forces. Duh. In passing, we grieve to observe that we now have more military personnel committing suicide than are being killed in action.

Category: 09 Terrorism

Reference: World Almanac of Islamism + RECAP