Threats – Page 634 – Public Intelligence Blog

2010/12/212010/12/21

Reference: Frog 6 Guidance 2010-2020

About the Idea, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Policies, Strategy, Threats

From Virtual Secretary of Defense

Purpose

The purpose of this memorandum is to establish priorities for my strategic objectives through 2012 and pending the concurrence of a new president with a proper staff, 2020. There is no such thing as strategic guidance for one year. This document informs without directing anyone.

Intent

My intent is to establish a baseline of truth–the truth at any cost reduces all other costs–so as to return our Armed Forces to a condition of readiness, responsiveness, and effectiveness in the face of all threats to the Republic, both domestic and foreign. At a minimum this means an Air Force capable of long-haul lift; a Navy capable of distributed littoral operations; an Army able to fight uncomfortable wars while also reinforcing legitimate governments and where appropriate helping insurgents holding the moral high ground to displace despotic regimes. It also means a Marine Corps able to put air-land-sea forces on any spot in 24 hours (platoon landing team), 48 hours (company landing team) and 72 hours (battalion landing team), along with a Coast Guard able to fulfill all of its homeland safety and security missions. Underlying my intent for the Armed Forces is a strategic intent to demand clarity, integrity, and sensibility from the Whole of Government–sustainable legal orders consonant with our public's culture.

Our blood must only be shed when our brains are engaged and all other means–cultural, diplomatic, economic, educational, and political–cannot achieve the objectives that are open, legal, ethical, moral, and validated by both Congress and the public. My intent therefore consists of creating the conditions for getting a grip on reality and being able to deal with reality, with a particular emphasis on assuring that all information necessary to inter-agency effectiveness and multinational engagement is both known to us, and shareable with others.

Continue reading “Reference: Frog 6 Guidance 2010-2020”

2010/12/212010/12/21

Reference: Private Military Corporations–A Non-State Actor-Nuclear Terror Nexus?

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

Private Military Corporations: A Non-State Actor-Nuclear Terror Nexus?

Robert L. Brown
Temple University

August 16, 2010

Abstract:

The risk of nuclear terrorism is hyped by some as possible and high consequence (Allison 2006) while others dismiss the strategy as too difficult and too risky for terrorist organizations (Jenkins 2008). However, analysts have no data from which to directly analyze the probability of terrorist acquisition and use. One methodological solution is to extend the range analysis to include analogous cases: private military corporations (PMCs) are one class of non-state actors (NSAs) who may possess the capacity and autonomy to pose a risk of nuclear terrorism for their state masters. I find that the while the technical and military capabilities of PMCs may be greater than those of terrorist organizations with respect to nuclear weapon construction or delivery, they are still be insufficient (and PMCs must also somehow acquire fissile materials). Also, PMCs benefit from agency slack, as demonstrated by Blackwater’s performance in Iraq, but this autonomy does not appear sufficient to carry out an illicit nuclear plot. Therefore, PMCs may be more capable than most terrorist organizations if they sought to acquire nuclear weapons but they are still unlikely to succeed.

Keywords: Nuclear Weapons, Terrorism, Private Military Corporations, Blackwater, Xe

Working Paper Series
Brown, Robert L., Private Military Corporations: A Non-State Actor-Nuclear Terror Nexus? (August 16, 2010). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1659785

See Also:

David Isenberg, Jack Bauer Beats Blackwater, Huffington Post 20 december 2010

Journal: Near-Term Demise of Private Military Contractors

2010/12/202010/12/20

Journal: Corporate Hijacking of Cyber-Space

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Mobile, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Privacy, Reform, Standards, Strategy, Technologies

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius Recommends

The Wall Street Journal

OPINION
DECEMBER 19, 2010

The FCC's Threat to Internet Freedom

‘Net neutrality' sounds nice, but the Web is working fine now. The new rules will inhibit investment, deter innovation and create a billable-hours bonanza for lawyers.

By ROBERT M. MCDOWELL WS

Tomorrow morning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will mark the winter solstice by taking an unprecedented step to expand government's reach into the Internet by attempting to regulate its inner workings. In doing so, the agency will circumvent Congress and disregard a recent court ruling.

How did the FCC get here?

Read entire article….

Phi Beta Iota: The public is now much more aware that neither of the two political parties can be trusted, and that trust for any given government element, policy, or point of view is contingent on a much deeper examination of bias and motive than many would wish. There are two sides to this issue, irrespective of the competency and good faith of government: on the one side are the corporations, including Google and Verizon, that wish to hijack cyber-space and claim that they own it. This will allow them to charge premium prices for access to high-speed services. On the other are those whose taxes paid for the creation of the Internet in the first place, the US taxpayer–they see the vital importance of open spectrum, open source software, and open source intelligence as the tri-fecta of cyber-freedom. At OSS '92 John Perry Barlow said that the Internet interprets censorship as an outage, and routes around it. Our view is that the corporations will succeed in hijacking cyberspace in the near term, but in the mid-term and beyond OpenBTS and other bottom-up public innovation solutions will restore the noosphere to its rightful owners, the human minds that comprise the World Brain.

2010/12/202010/12/20

Journal: Ron Paul C-SPAN’s Newsmakers + Ron Paul RECAP

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Corporations, Ethics, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

Focus on tax package, Republican future, focus on Federal Reserve and oversight if not termination of the Federal Reserve. Focus on danger of central economic planning. Do not attack individuals, but rather the “system.” It's going to get a lot worse. Need more transparency. Everything Fed does is secret and they have a budget bigger than US Congress. They bail out the insiders, not America. Bad economics and not legal under the Constitution. He is pressed hard by interviewers on bubbles existing before the Fed. You pay the price of SHORTER recessions. The debt is liquidated. Today our whole goal is to perpetuate the mistakes. Only thing worse than the Fed would be a “One World” currency. Explicit prohibition against printing money (applies to BOTH the Fed and to Congress). What is really at issue here is NOT the Fed, but rather the role of government in the eyes of the people. Stopping the Fed stops the US Government from being a world policeman and a regulator of our lives and the world.

C-SPAN VIDEO (31.:05) “Newsmakers” Interview of Ron Paul

Books by Ron Paul

Review: The Revolution–A Manifesto . . . . . . .Review: A Foreign Policy of Freedom–Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship (Paperback). . . . .End the Fed . . . . . . .Liberty Defined: The 50 Urgent Issues That Affect Our Freedom . . . . . . .Pillars of Prosperity . . . . . Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. . . . .Ron Paul Speaks. . . . . .Case for Gold: A Minority Report of the United State Gold Commission. . . . . .Mises and Austrian Economics: A Personal View

2010/12/192011/01/01

ClimateGate Rolling Update CLOSED

03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Education, 05 Energy, 12 Water, Academia, Collaboration Zones, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Key Players, Non-Governmental, United Nations & NGOs

REMINDER: Environmental Degradation, not Climate Change, is High-Level Threat #3. Climate Change is less than 10% of that, and within Climate Change, mercury and sulfer are more important than carbon. Furthermore, it is not possible to address any one threat without addressing the other nine (e.g. #1 Poverty) with harmonized policies from Agriculture to Water, so the bottom line is that these talks are isolated and worthless. The world needs a serious global strategy with serious analytics, a commitment to understanding true costs of every product and service, and a commitment to bringing the five billion poor into a prosperous world at peace. Anything less is a betrayal of the public trust.

19 Dec Top 10 Bad Developments For Global Warming Alarmists (HumanEvents)

Continue reading “ClimateGate Rolling Update CLOSED”

2010/12/192010/12/19

Journal: US Southern Command New “Campus”

04 Inter-State Conflict, 10 Security, 11 Society, Methods & Process, Military

For those of us who served at Quarry Heights….

….and shared the one outdoors faucet to “bathe” after noon hour PT!

Miami Herald

December 18, 2010

Southern Command Opens New HQ

Military brass and local dignitaries cut the ribbon on the Pentagon's new campus-style Southern Command headquarters.

By Carol Rosenberg

The Air Force staged an F-16 flyover. A Navy chaplain declared it a place of “justice” and “peace.” And military brass joined with local leaders Friday to officially open the Pentagon's $402 million state-of-the-art Southern Command headquarters in Doral.

The new hub for military and diplomatic operations in Latin America and the Caribbean has been years in the making, noted a succession of speakers.

Some thanked special guest Archbishop Thomas Wenski for lining up picture-perfect weather for the event, attended by several hundred guests.

Others paid tribute to former Gov. Jeb Bush and the South Florida Congressional delegation (none present), for lining up the finances and 55 acres of state-leased land for the Category 5 hurricane-proof facility.

It has a maze of specially secured offices, built next to the 13-year-old original building, plus a gym, small clinic and commissary. It also has a 200-seat auditorium in a structure called the Conference Center of The Americas, with technology to enable multilingual meetings that bring together military officers from the region.

Featured speaker Adm. James Stavridis, the previous Southcom chief, came from his current post as Supreme Allied Commander of Europe to declare the new facility a place of “partnership” and “promise.”

About 2,300 people work there, mostly members of the U.S. military; other U.S. government agencies and Latin American nations also send military and civilian liaisons to the facility.

Continue reading “Journal: US Southern Command New “Campus””

2010/12/182010/12/18

Journal: Understanding Iran…and the future of IO

02 Diplomacy, 05 Energy, 10 Security, 11 Society, 12 Water, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Strategy, Threats

Stakelbeck on Terror | Inside Iran's Revolutionary Guards

CBN (Christian Broadcast Network), 14 December 2010

On this week's special edition of Stakelbeck on Terror, CBN News goes inside Iran's fearsome Revolutionary Guards Corps with Reza Khalili, a former member who worked undercover for the CIA to bring down the Iranian regime.

The Revolutionary Guards Corps is the most powerful and influential force behind Iran's secretive and radical regime.

Over the past 30 years, its structure has been nearly impossible for Western intelligence agencies to penetrate. Yet, Khalili put his life on the line to gather sensitive information for the CIA about the inner workings of the Iranian regime.

Watch as he shares his story in an exclusive interview with Stakelbeck on Terror. Khalili also wrote about the experience in his book,

A Time to Betray.

Because of the nature of his work, Khalili is forced to disguise his identity and alter his voice for safety reasons.

Visit article to view an extremely thoughtful interview.

Phi Beta Iota: There is a remarkable coincidence of message between this specific witness/author and the work in the 1990's of Steve Emerson, whose 1994 PBS video on the domestic threat exposed both the ignorance of the US Government about what was going on within the US homeland, and the naivete of the US Government with respect to intentions. Now we are seeing a persistent ignorance at the highest levels of the deeply-rooted messianic nature of the Iranian regime, a persistent naivete of the deep corruption within the arab countries as well as Israel, a persistent and blissfully self-destructive refusal to embrace Turkey as a a stabilizing Islamic power….and on and on and on. The US Government is, in one word, IGNORANT with arrogance driving incoherence rooted in ideological naivete. Iran (and China) should be the focus on a 360 degree “whole of government” Information Operations (IO) campaign intended to explore and then develop concepts, doctrine, plans, programs, and budget for fully integrated intelligence, information operations, operations support to multinational hybrid task forces, and communications. The problem that we see immediately, apart from the US Government being incompetent–not trained, equipped nor organized for inter-agency or multinational operations–is that there is severe confusion, even denial, about where cyber starts and stops. Cyber is not about bits and bytes running through computers. It is about the mind of man–the mind of entire cultures, tribes, and regions. In that context, cyber should be the “driver” for all kinetic plans, programs, and budgets, by dictate with the US Government and by use of shared information and shared intelligence (decision-support) across all eight tribes and all other nations both allied and not.

21 Aug Odierno weighs in on Iraq's immediate future, Iran's intentions

30 Mar Iran's Intentions Are Clear

03 Feb Obama Carries Forward Carter’s Failed Iran Policy