Journal: Haiti Update from Marine Eyes On–America is Shaming Itself and Opening Door to a Crime Against Humanity of Catastrophic Proportions

01 Poverty, 02 Infectious Disease, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Uncategorized

Chuck Spinney

Attached is an important eyewitness assessment of the current situation in Haiti.  It was written by William McNulty, a retired marine who is a volunteer member of Team Rubicon, a self-financed and self-deployed group of former Marines, soldiers and health care professionals currently providing emergency relief in Haiti.

McNulty paints a grim picture of condition in Haiti and especially, as he puts it, “… the impotence of western power to deal with disasters/emergencies;for either out of lack of compassion, political correctness, or because the institutions set up to take care of emergencies are so overburdened with layers of bureaucracy that they are ineffective.”

Phi Beta Iota: Team Rubicon is a self-financed and self-deployed group of former Marines, soldiers and health care professionals currently providing emergency relief in Haiti.  Unlike the Red Cross and others, they do not skim 50% for overhead, they are there now, and every penny goes straight into Haiti.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Deputy TL McNulty, AAR. “This is a disaster on a catastrophic scale!” , please read and pass on!

2010-01-24 13:57

Short After Action Review due to time-constraints…more to follow. I´m currently in Santo Domingo about to hop a flight back to DC.

For the last six days I was operating in refugee camps in the worst hit areas of Port au Prince. I was the Asst Team Leader for Team Rubicon, a team of former Marines, soldiers, firefighters, doctors, and nurses operating in the supposed ´denied areas´ of Port au Prince. We were – and the team continues to be – FIRST RESPONDERS to wounds now over ten days old.

. . . . . . .

Sensationalist journalism prevented aid from getting to Port au Prince.   . . .   There were no mobs of bandits, the media was wrong. But…if the world doesn´t get there fast, there will be. People get very desperate without food and water. I would too. But since bureaucratic institutions are reactive, not proactive (by their very nature), the irresponsible journalism and circular reporting of the traditional media made even the military scared to respond in a timely fashion. I was personally told by a friend of mine at SOUTHCOM to not deploy until the security situation improved. He´s a very good friend and good at his job, but couldn´t have been more wrong.

. . . . . . .

Immediately remove anyone in the military chain of command who becomes part of the problem, or move them off base and into town so they can learn the hard way.   . . .  This is a disaster on a catastrophic scale, and it doesn´t have to be this bad. Hold your leaders responsible.

Read the original post at Team Rubicon Blog.

Journal: Haiti Rolling Directory from 12 January 2010

Journal: Haiti History, Interim Report, Prognosis

01 Poverty, 07 Other Atrocities, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Key Players, Methods & Process, Peace Intelligence

To Heal Haiti, Look to History, Not Nature (New York Times)

On Jan. 1, 1804, when Dessalines created the Haitian flag by tearing the white middle from the French tricolor, he achieved what even Spartacus could not: he had led to triumph the only successful slave revolt in history. Haiti became the world’s first independent black republic and the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Alas, the first such republic, the United States, despite its revolutionary creed that “all men are created equal,” looked upon these self-freed men with shock, contempt and fear. Indeed, to all the great Western trading powers of the day — much of whose wealth was built on the labor of enslaved Africans — Haiti stood as a frightful example of freedom carried too far. American slaveholders desperately feared that Haiti’s fires of revolt would overleap those few hundred miles of sea and inflame their own human chattel.

Haiti Numbers (Daily Gleaner Canada)

* Number of homeless in Haiti: 2 million, European Commission estimate.

* Total death toll roughly 200,000, estimate by the European Union, quoting Haitian officials.

* Other aid: UN World Food Programme has distributed 1.4 million ready-to-eat food rations, says 100 million will be needed over next 30 days to reach three million people in desperate need.

Major aftershock hits Haiti; assessment team making contact (Baptist Press)

The team arrived in Port-au-Prince Wednesday (Jan. 20) after a 17-hour, 160-mile trip in a four-vehicle caravan from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

More than 40 significant aftershocks have hit since the Jan. 12 quake killed an estimated 200,000 people, injured 250,000 and left 1.5 million homeless.

The truck drivers are less and less willing to [drive into the city] as the situation in Port deteriorates.

Officials are concerned that the desperation people feel will boil over into violence. Looters by the hundreds have been fighting each other with broken bottles, clubs and other weapons over whatever goods they can still find in damaged stores.

Haiti DR planning slated Jan. 26 in Miami (Baptist Press)

Another assessment team member, Don Gann, disaster relief director for the Mississippi Baptist Convention, said the situation in Haiti remains fluid, chaotic and difficult. “[T]he traffic in Port-au-Prince is unbelievable,” Gann said. “Today, it took us three hours to go seven miles.

“There are security issues the teams need to be aware of. The situation is still precarious. A medical team or a feeding team could be overrun just because the people here have such great needs.”

Another assessment team member, Don Gann, disaster relief director for the Mississippi Baptist Convention, said the situation in Haiti remains fluid, chaotic and difficult. “[T]he traffic in Port-au-Prince is unbelievable,” Gann said. “Today, it took us three hours to go seven miles. ”

Haiti Earthquake update: cardboard communities

In this Haiti Earthquake update, The Christian Science Monitor reports that Haitians are building new homes after the earthquake with little more than cardboard and plastic in refugee camps. It's estimated that there are 250 such camps in existence.

The rich have left Haiti's capital city of Port-Au-Prince, leaving the poor to fend for themselves. Haiti Earthquake relief efforts are building, but with 3 million people in need of aide and a crumbled infrastructure, it's a challenge.

Update From Haiti: A Little Hope Today

Today felt like we made more progress and were able to create a little hope. We received some food from the United Nations and the Sisters of Charity, but most isn't getting to the people. Most is still in warehouses

Updates on the Crisis in Haiti

The volume of cases was truly overwhelming. We ran 2-3 operating rooms for 12-14 hours at a time, and didn’t even make a dent in the case load.

He added that “it was somewhat unclear” who was in charge of bringing patients injured to the hospital from hte earthquake zone. “

Update on the Progress of the US “Invasion”

Members of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit launched two helicopters to resupply a U.N. distribution site with water.

Then came the earthquake victims, injured one week ago, ferried onboard by several helicopters. In all, the ship took in 19 patients after getting three Tuesday.

Phi Beta Iota Prognosis: In our over-all experience, absent a sea change in how the world community is approaching this, at least half the aid will be stolen or misappropriated; half the remaining aid dollars and materials will never get to the Hiatians at all.  The prospects of a plague, riots, and other human break-downs increase every day.  At this point in time neither the US nor Brazil nor the Cubans appear to have any of the following:

1.  Multinational Information-Sharing and Sense-Making Center

2.  Multinational Strategy, Operations Plan, or Tactical Lines of Engagement

3.  Phase Plan for leveraging every air and sea entry point that makes sense

4.  Phase Plan for actually getting minimal water and food to each of three million people for each of the next 30, 60, 90 days

5.  Strategy, Campaign Plan, or Logistics for applying aid dollars to the bottom-up reconstruction of Haiti in a manner that aggressively relocates 400,000 people not to temporary camps but to permanent opportunities with a virtually infinite supply of building materials aided by every Red Hat, See Bee and Army Engineer unit we can muster.  This needs a Berlin Airlift degree of seriousness, a Marine Expeditionary Force level of complex simultaneous attention to detail, and a Whole of Government Multinational Engagement mind-set that we are simply not seeing.

6.  We know that the US Government is trying to share imagery and other information with selected partners both national and non-governmental but we don't see a coherent island-wide Information Operations (IO)  endeavor, and we see ZERO in the way of “Strategic Communications” outlining in militarily precise terms where the bodies are, what percentage have been fed, etcetera.  The absence of this information causes us great sadness, for it suggests that in all probability the US military is not treating this matter with the deep seriousness that it merits from a multinational public information-sharing and sense-making point of view.

Journal: Haiti Rolling Directory from 12 January 2010

Journal: MILNET US Muscles South, Islamic Genocide

01 Brazil, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 06 Genocide, 07 Venezuela, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Government, Military

Image and Full Story Online

Muscling Latin America: The Pentagon has a new Monroe Doctrine (The Nation)

In September Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, delivered on an electoral promise and refused to renew Washington's decade-old, rent-free lease on an air base outside the Pacific coast town of Manta, which for the past ten years has served as the Pentagon's main South American outpost. The eviction was a serious effort to fulfill the call of Ecuador's new Constitution to promote “universal disarmament” and oppose the “imposition” of military bases of “some states in the territory of others.” It was also one of the most important victories for the global demilitarization movement, loosely organized around the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, since protests forced the US Navy to withdraw from Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 2003. Correa, though, couldn't resist an easy joke. “We'll renew the lease,” he quipped, “if the US lets us set up a base in Miami.”

Funny. Then Washington answered with a show of force: take away one, we'll grab seven. In late October the United States and Colombia signed an agreement granting the Pentagon use of seven military bases, along with an unlimited number of as yet unspecified “facilities and locations.”

MAY: Islam's war against others: Ethnic cleansing spreading in Muslim world (Scripps News)

Connect these dots: In Nigeria this week, Muslim youths set fire to a church, killing more than two dozen Christian worshippers. In Egypt, Coptic Christians have been suffering increased persecution including, this month, a drive-by shooting outside a church in which seven people were murdered. In Pakistan, Christian churches were bombed over Christmas. In Turkey, authorities have been closing Christian churches, monasteries and schools. Recently, churches in Malaysia have been attacked, too, provoked by this grievance: Christians inside the churches were referring to God as “Allah.” How dare infidels use the same name for the Almighty as do Muslims!

Journal: Open-source hydrogen car

03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, Commerce, Earth Intelligence, Methods & Process
Full Story Online

Alex McDonald 20th January, 2010

Cars are evil, right? But what if they ran on hydrogen, did 300 miles per gallon, were leased rather than owned, and were produced under an open source business model…

Riversimple’s network electric car is a hydrogen fuel cell powered car, with unique technologies that enable it to run on a 6kW fuel cell, with a fuel consumption equivalent to 300 miles per gallon and greenhouse gas emissions at 30g per km, well-to-wheel – less than a third of that from the most efficient petrol-engine cars currently available.

It also has the potential to be 10 times cleaner still if the hydrogen is produced from renewable energy.

Phi Beta Iota: “Open Everything” is not just a meme, it is the gameplan for the simple reason that open everything abolishes scarcity and makes it possible to create a prosperous world at peace.  Intelligence-driven peace and prosperity.  What a concept.

See Also:

Continue reading “Journal: Open-source hydrogen car”

Journal: Intelligence & Innovation Support to Strategy, Planning, Programming, Budgeting, & Acquisition

Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Geospatial, History, InfoOps (IO), Information Operations (IO), Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Policy, Real Time, Reform, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools, True Cost
Robert David STEELE Vivas

Chuck Spinney is still the best “real” engineer in this town–almost everyone else is staggering after fifty years of government-specification cost-plus engineering.  Also, as Chuck explores in the piece on Complexity to Avoid Accountability is Expensive we in the “requirements” business are as much to blame–Service connivance with complexity has killed acquisition from both a financial inputs and a war-fighting relevance outcome point of view.  The Services have forgotten the basics of requirements definition and multi-mission interoperability and supportability.

The Marine Corps Intelligence Center (MCIC) was created by General Al Gray, USMC (Ret), then Commandant of the Marine Corps, for three reasons:

1.  Intelligence support to constabulary and expeditionary operations from the three major services was abysmal to non-existent.

2.  Intelligence  support to the Service level planners and programmers striving to interact with other Services, the Unified Commands, and the Joint Staff was non-existent–this was the case with respect to policy, acquisition, and operations.  The cluster-feel over Haiti and the total inadequacy of our 24-48 hour response tells us nothing has changed, in part because we still cannot do a “come as you are” joint inter-agency anything.

Continue reading “Journal: Intelligence & Innovation Support to Strategy, Planning, Programming, Budgeting, & Acquisition”

Reference: BGen McMaster at ODNI on Afghanistan

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Memoranda, Military, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence

Memo corrected to remove (Ret).  BGen McMaster was promoted to his present rank on 29 June 2009 after being twice passed over (2006, 2007), presumably for having the integrity to be outspoken.  He is the author of the widely-admired book Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.

Nine key factors are examined by BGen McMaster in his talk to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).  Answers question on why we were so unprepared.  Final paragraph of trip report:

Can’t get much from a database and IT networks, but contractors keep pushing and we keep buying.   But what really need is experts from anywhere, context, and also need to ask the soldiers!  Make Phebe Marr a general!  Also pay attention to: Charles Tripp, R. Kadeiri, Sarah Chayes, Barnett R. Rubin and Ahmed Rashid, Michael Howard, Frontline piece on Children of the Taliban, Fariad Ali Han on borders.  Educate analysts (and self-educate) on the place, don’t waste time training them on the process.