Journal: Sam Adams and WikiLeaks

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Analysis, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Law Enforcement, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Policy, Reform

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 7, 2010
4:00 PM

CONTACT: Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA)
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

Ex-Intelligence Officers, Others See Plusses in WikiLeaks Disclosures

WASHINGTON – December 7 – The following statement was released today, signed by Daniel Ellsberg, Frank Grevil, Katharine Gun, David MacMichael, Ray McGovern, Craig Murray, Coleen Rowley and Larry Wilkerson; all are associated with Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

WikiLeaks has teased the genie of transparency out of a very opaque bottle, and powerful forces in America, who thrive on secrecy, are trying desperately to stuff the genie back in. The people listed below this release would be pleased to shed light on these exciting new developments.

How far down the U.S. has slid can be seen, ironically enough, in a recent commentary in Pravda (that's right, Russia's Pravda): “What WikiLeaks has done is make people understand why so many Americans are politically apathetic … After all, the evils committed by those in power can be suffocating, and the sense of powerlessness that erupts can be paralyzing, especially when … government evildoers almost always get away with their crimes. …”

So shame on Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and all those who spew platitudes about integrity, justice and accountability while allowing war criminals and torturers to walk freely upon the earth. … the American people should be outraged that their government has transformed a nation with a reputation for freedom, justice, tolerance and respect for human rights into a backwater that revels in its criminality, cover-ups, injustices and hypocrisies.

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2010/12/07

NIGHTWATCH Extract: Sudan Denounces NGOs

08 Wild Cards, Civil Society, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Gift Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), International Aid, IO Mapping, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Non-Governmental, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Strategy

Sudan: Sudanese media broadcast the following decree on Monday.

Marshal Umer Hassan Al-Bashir the President of the Republic, the president of the National Congress Party has authorized the state governors to expel NGOs and persons that do not respect the country's sovereignty, work guidelines within 24 hours. He added we respect the NGOs that come to assist us and we reject whoever intends to control us. He indicated that some NGOs have spread rumors that they work in Sudan without the need of the government approvals. He directed the governors to expel the NGOs that do not adhere to their authorities on the same day.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: The government in Khartoum remains highly suspicious of western aid organizations that it suspects of encouraging separatism in Darfur and the South. This decree is a manifestation of that suspicion because it mentions rumor mongering. A government has a right to control foreigners without further justification. Odd behavior…

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: This is the beginning of the end for predatory NGO's including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and of course all the religious NGOs and the corporate pseudo-NGOs. They have lost all trust for a good reason. On the one hand, they have been spending less than 10% of what they have collected under the various guises (Katrina, Haiti, etcetera) and on the other they are now demonstrably untrustworthy and ineffective. The next big step forward will be hybrid arrangements in which public intelligence both validates every move, every expense, every bona fides, and harmonizes a diversity of efforts toward a common publicly-appraised and accepted purpose.

2010/12/06

Reference: Has Wikileaks Killed Secrecy?

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Wikileaks: Power shifts from secrecy to transparency

Welt am Sontag in Germany asked me for an op-ed on Wikileaks. Here it is, auf Englisch. Hier, auf Deutsch.

Government should be transparent by default, secret by necessity. Of course, it is not. Too much of government is secret. Why? Because those who hold secrets hold power.

Now Wikileaks has punctured that power. Whether or not it ever reveals another document—and we can be certain that it will—Wikileaks has made us all aware that no secret is safe. If something is known by one person, it can be known by the world.

Full article online.

Reference: Transparency Killer App Plus “Open Everything” RECAP (Back to 01/2007)

Safety copy below the line.

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2010/12/052010/12/05

Reference: On WikiLeaks and Government Secrecy + RECAP on Secrecy as Fraud, Waste, & Abuse

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Secrets, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Policies, Policy, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, True Cost

People are more likely to lie, exaggerate and distort when they know they won’t be held accountable for what they said, and people like to say what their interlocutors want to hear, says Jordan Stancil.

Jordan Stancil

Jordan Stancil is a lecturer in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs of the University of Ottawa.

Phi Beta Iota: This is the single best overview of how secrecy supports corruption. It is consistent with testimony to the Moynihan Commission on Secrecy and with Morton Halperin's findings in Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy in which one of the “rules of the game” was “Lie to the President if you can get away with it.” Today, the “rule of the game” is “Lie to the public if you can get away with it for at least one election cycle.” Newt Gingrich started the decline with his power and ambition, Dick Cheney peaked at 935 documented lies that Colin Powell allowed to stand unchallenged, and now Obama, with Bloomberg in the wings, are the anti-climax of secrecy as fraud Of, By, and For Wall Street. America has become a cheating culture, an unthinking culture, far removed from the essence of a Republic.

Middle East Online

First Published: 2010-12-05

On WikiLeaks and Government Secrecy

The more I think about the WikiLeaks episode, the less I know what to say about it. Unfortunately, too much commentary, right and left, has tried to inject certitude where ambivalence should be.

It is not clear whether the WikiLeaks disclosures will damage our national interest. During the few years I spent as a Foreign Service officer, in Jerusalem and Berlin, I produced and read a fair number of classified cables, and I understand the rather obvious point that diplomats might get more — and more sensitive — information when their contacts believe that what they say will remain secret. We have heard endless appeals to “common sense” about the need for secrecy on these grounds.

But common sense also tells us that people are more likely to lie, exaggerate and distort when they know they won’t be held accountable for what they said, and that people like to say what their interlocutors want to hear. The annals of diplomatic communication, indeed of all communication, are filled with evidence of this banal insight, which many people seem to have forgotten in their rush to defend government secrecy.

This is a permanent reference. Read the rest below the line, followed by links.

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2010/12/032010/12/03

Journal: CIA and the Culture of Corruption

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, Intelligence (government), Methods & Process

CIA and the Culture of Corruption

by: Melvin A. Goodman, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

CIA Deputy Executive Director John Brennan. (Photo: CSIS: Center for Strategic & International Studies / Flickr)

Last month, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released a blistering report that documented a secret drug interdiction program in Peru that was responsible for the death of an American missionary and her infant daughter in 2001. The report provided a detailed study of the efforts of senior CIA leaders, including Deputy Director John McLaughlin and Deputy Executive Director John Brennan, to cover up the crime by stonewalling the White House, the Congress and the Department of Justice (DOJ) on the flaws of the interdiction program.

Brennan, who was President Obama's original choice to be CIA director until the report complicated the confirmation process, is currently the deputy director of the National Security Council (NSC).McLaughlin was the “villain” in the politicization of intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, according to the chief of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay. Few people remember that it was McLaughlin who actually delivered the “slam-dunk” briefing to the president in January 2003. Nevertheless, the Obama administration named McLaughlin to lead the internal investigation of the CIA's intelligence failures in the attempted bombing of a commercial airliner and the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.

The detailed report on Peru documents a culture of corruption and deceit at the highest levels of the CIA as well as the interventions of CIA lawyers to stop the DOJ from pursuing prosecutions in the case. The CIA office of general counsel's aggressive campaign to prevent a criminal prosecution of the agency officers culminated with Deputy Director McLaughlin's letter to the assistant attorney general that promised “significant disciplinary action” if CIA officers “lied or made knowingly misleading statements” to the Congress, DOJ, the NSC or office of inspectors general (OIG) investigators. The report carefully documents the lies and the stonewalling, but there was never any genuine punishment.

Read rest of this detailed article….

Melvin A. Goodman is national security and intelligence columnist for Truthout. He is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. His 42-year government career included service at the CIA, State Department, Defense Department and the US Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

See Also:

Journal: Mel Goodman on CIA Myths

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Intelligence (Lack Of)

and especially;

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2010/11/282010/11/28

Journal: US Secret Intelligence Tasking US Diplomats

02 Diplomacy, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Secrets, Methods & Process, Officers Call

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius Recommends

Insofar as I know, the DoD military Services remain under broad and explicit proscription from accessing the Wikileaks site or the Wikileaks releases in any form. Some of the Service directives are very intimidating, threatening court martials for military members, loss of security clearances, etc., etc. From the broadcast media, it appears that major lockdowns of information will shortly follow. And SPC Bradley Manning, currently confined at Quantico, will probably walk as, I suspect, will Hasan at Fort Hood. MA

Phi Beta Iota: This demonstrates that the National Clandestine Service (NCS) is completely ignorant of what can be known through open sources, and that the Secretary of State is not doing her job of assuring that diplomacy is not micro-tasked into what are clearly clandestine and covert operations support functions absolutely not appropriate to diplomatic status. These people should not have message release authority. The US Government needs a total make-over. First, however, CIA needs a director that is fully capable on day one.

U.S. Expands Role of Diplomats in Spying

By MARK MAZZETTI

November 28, 2010

WASHINGTON — The United States has expanded the role of American diplomats in collecting intelligence overseas and at the United Nations, ordering State Department personnel to gather the credit card and frequent-flier numbers, work schedules and other personal information of foreign dignitaries.

Revealed in classified State Department cables, the directives, going back to 2008, appear to blur the traditional boundaries between statesmen and spies.

The cables give a laundry list of instructions for how State Department employees can fulfill the demands of a “National Humint Collection Directive” in specific countries. (“Humint” is spy-world jargon for human intelligence collection.) One cable asks officers overseas to gather information about “office and organizational titles; names, position titles and other information on business cards; numbers of telephones, cellphones, pagers and faxes,” as well as “internet and intranet ‘handles’, internet e-mail addresses, web site identification-URLs; credit card account numbers; frequent-flier account numbers; work schedules, and other relevant biographical information.”

Philip J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman, on Sunday disputed that American diplomats had assumed a new role overseas.

Read the rest of this sad story….

2010/11/282011/06/20

Reference (2): United Nations Intelligence in Haiti

05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Ethics, Government, Historic Contributions, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Law Enforcement, Methods & Process, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Real Time

MINUSTAH1001 JPEG Small — Peace Operations: Seeing

MajGen Eduardo ALDUNATE Herman, Chilean Army (Ret), served as the Deputy Force Commander of the United Nations Force in Haiti (MINUSTAH) in the earliest rounds, and was instrumental in both sponsoring the Joint Military Intelligence Analysis Center (JMAC) concept in its first modern field implementation, but also in evaluating most critically both the lack of useful intelligence from allies relying on secret sources and methods that did not “penetrate” to achieve gangs and neighborhoods; and the astonishing “one size fits all” propensity of the allies to treat every “threat” as one that could be addressed by force.

His contributions are helpful in understanding the more recent failure of allied relief operations in Haiti that again assumed that the use of armed bodies would address the problem, without making provision for real-world ground truth intelligence (CAB 21 Peace Jumpers Plus) or intelligence-driven harmonization of non-governmental assistance (Reverse TIPFID).

Reference: Civil Military Operations Center (CMOC)

2003 PEACEKEEPING INTELLIGENCE: Emerging Concepts for the Future

Books: Intelligence for Peace (PKI Book Two) Finalizing

Reference: Intelligence-Led Peacekeeping

Review: International Peace Observations

Search: UN intelligence peace intelligence