How Should We Measure Intelligence Community Performance?, by Joseph Mazzafro. As the Congress and the DC dignitary debate if health care is affordable given the nation's first trillion dollar annual debit incursion, I am wondering where the money would come from should the United States need to defend its national interests against another Al Qaeda attack or worse. The President has already frozen budgetary growth for all discretionary spending not related to national security, but can the Defense Department and Intelligence Community remain fenced for much longer given the increasing national debt – the size of which already is a national security concern in its own right?
This is a dynamite op-ed written jointly by my good friend Marshall Auerback and Rob Parenteau.
Chuck
Coming to a Country Near You
Let a Dozen Latvias Bloom?
By MARSHALL AUERBACK and ROB PARENTEAU
The article's bottom line conclusion:
It is now time for the rest of us to follow the Lilliputians of Iceland: to take the rentier juggernaut down before it completes the task. Time to pry the vampire squid off our faces so we can see the light of day again and allow some semblance of humanity to flourish again. Hopefully, Iceland represents the future, not Latvia.
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Phi Beta Iota: Iceland has led the way. It is time to start closing down the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the outrageous misbehavior of Goldman Sachs and the other banks. Nations need to start nationalizing ill-gotten gains, refusing to pay predatory loan interest, and beginning to think for themselves. We certainly encourage judicial activism in confiscating foreign-owned land and structures and in blocking both the privatization of water and other commonwealth resources, while also blocking predatory and often hazardous or poisonous importations. Top-down government has been corrupted and does not work. The only means to achieve resilience is bottom-up “home rule.” We salute Iceland for its intelligence and its integiryt.
Phi Beta Iota: We are detecting a fascinating evolutionary process within the United Nations “system” which is not a system at all, more like an archipelago with a different cat in charge of each island. Information-sharing is coming into vogue, but more importantly, the United Nations, perhaps stimulated by the report of the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, A more secure world: our shared responsibility, appears to finally be realizing that all threats are connected and that poverty is the foundation for all of the other threats thriving–one cannot defeat transnational crime (threat #10) without first addressing poverty (threat #1).
With the top United Nations anti-drug official urging concerted global action to “break the vicious circle between insecurity and underdevelopment” being increasingly fuelled by criminal networks, drug smugglers and human traffickers, the Security Council today called on the world body’s Member States to increase international and regional cooperation to tackle transnational organized crime.
The Council invited Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who opened today’s meeting, to consider transnational threats as a factor in conflict prevention strategies, conflict analysis, integrated missions’ assessment and planning and to consider including in his reports, as appropriate, analysis on the role played by those threats in situations on the Council’s agenda. [Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis Added.]
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – International criminal gangs and traffickers are exploiting large geographic blind spots where radar, satellite or other surveillance is minimal or nonexistent, the U.N. crime and drugs czar said on Wednesday.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), told members of the 15-nation U.N. Security Council that countries must improve their systems of sharing intelligence to reduce these surveillance gaps.
“We need a change in attitude,” Costa told the council. “It is time to regard information sharing as a way of strengthening sovereignty, not surrendering it.”
Yet another contemptuous snub to US “peace” efforts. Biden ought to tell them to go to hell and turn around and fly home … but he won't, thus confirming again the our pusilanimous acquiescence to Israeli policies that hurt and humiliate the United States
Chuck
Israel OKs new settlement work despite slowdown
By AMY TEIBEL, Associated Press Writer, 8 March 2010
JERUSALEM – Israel authorized the construction of 112 new apartments in the West Bank despite a pledge to slow down settlement building, the government disclosed Monday — enraging the Palestinians just a day after they reluctantly agreed to resume peace talks.
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Phi Beta Iota: The time has come to crush Israeli genocide against the Palestinians and Israeli theft and waste of water from Arab aquifers. We protest the continued use of taxpayer funds to arm and supply dictators in the Middle East and the Israeli genocide machine. A regional water authority and a two-state solution that leaves Jerusalem as an international neutral zone wouild appear to be called for, and easily affordable if we divert the money we now waste on war to waging peace in the Middle East. Gandhi said it best: “Palestine is to the Palestinians as France is to the French.”
The Obama Administration’s clear-hold-build-leave strategy in Afghanistan is crucially dependent on the Afghan’s central government’s ability to displace the Taliban with clean local governance throughout a rugged country larger than Texas, with a population of 28+ million, where the vast majority of people live in small hamlets and villages. To this end, the combined forces clearing operation in Marjah, a poppy growing area of home to about 80,000 in southern Helmand Province, was to be a model operation. After clearing out the Taliban and setting up a “Hold” zone (a series of positions outside of town occupied by two battalions Marines and Afghan forces to secure the area), the operation was to be followed by the cookie-cutter installation of what the commander, General Stanley McChrystal, called a “government in a box” — which to work, must be an honest government that will immediately go to work at improving the lot of the locals.
As usual, the Taliban, like all competent guerrilla forces when faced with superior firepower bugged out ahead of the combined Nato-Afghan sweep through Marjah. Now, as Jeffrey Fleishman reports in the 7 Mar 2010 issue of the LA Times, it is beginning to look like McChrystal’s “government in a box” will be led by a typical thuggish representative of the morally challenged Karzai clique, which has a history of plundering those they rule. It turns out that the new leader, Abdul Zahir, a man who vowed “to bring back dignity and prosperity” to Marjah (a fertile opium growing area), stabbed his own son, was convicted of manslaughter, and served time in a German slammer. Just the sort of man to win the hearts and minds of those he rules.
The Marjah operation is off the front pages, and recent reports indicate the next target in our new strategy is the much more formidable Pashtun city of Qandahar, with population of about a million. But Marjah is not over. The people of Marjah know the Taliban are lurking in the shadows, waiting to install a another shadow government, when the US inspired “government in a box” does not win their hearts and minds and the US focus of effort is elsewhere.
The new civilian leader, installed after the Taliban was swept out of its southern Afghanistan stronghold, vowed to ‘bring back dignity.' Now reports surface about a conviction in Germany.
By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times, March 7, 2010
EXTRACT (1 of 2 Innovations): If you combine CO2 with seawater, or any kind of briny water, you produce CaCO3, calcium carbonate. That is not only the stuff of corals. It is also the same white, pasty goop that appears on your shower head from hard (calcium-rich) water. At its demonstration plant near Santa Cruz, Calif., Calera has developed a process that takes CO2 emissions from a coal- or gas-fired power plant and sprays seawater into it and naturally converts most of the CO2 into calcium carbonate, which is then spray-dried into cement or shaped into little pellets that can be used as concrete aggregates for building walls or highways — instead of letting the CO2 emissions go into the atmosphere and produce climate change.
If this can scale, it would eliminate the need for expensive carbon-sequestration facilities planned to be built alongside coal-fired power plants — and it might actually make the heretofore specious notion of “clean coal” a possibility.
Stepped-up surveillance technology may be tipping the scales in the cat-and-mouse game between spies and their targets. Robert Baer on the current state of spycraft.
EXTRACT:
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I can only speculate about where exactly the hit went wrong. But I would guess the assassins failed to account for the marked advance in technology. Not only were there closed-circuit TV cameras in the hotel where Mr. Mabhouh was assassinated and at the airport, but Dubai has at its fingertips the best security consultants in the world. The consultants merely had to run advanced software through all of Dubai's digital data before, during and after the assassination to connect the assassins in time and place. For instance, a search of all cellular phone calls made in and around the hotel where Mr. Mabhouh was assassinated would show who had called the same number—reportedly a command post in Vienna. It would only be a matter then of tracking when and where calls were made from these phones, tying them to hotels where the team was operating or staying.
Phi Beta Iota: Robert Baer, who spoke to the international OSINT conference before the movie was made about his life as a case officer, is a most valued colleague who apart from being a speaker of truth and an author, has doubts about the 9/11 Commission and the general veracity of the U.S. Government. He is a “tough love” patriot. His newest opinion piece exposes the rapidly narrowing space for covert actions including assassinations and other behaviors that can no longer pass undetected. As we pointed out a decade ago, it is no longer possible to create solid covers–instead of stealing or misappropriating them, we have been preaching 1) hire mid-career officers who have already built their covers unwittingly, and keep them in those real-world covers; and 2) stop doing the stupid shit. 95% of intelligence (decision-support) should b e legal and ethical. All its takes is integrity and a leadership that actually knows something about full-spectrum intelligence and the point of it all: to create a Smart Nation.
