WASHINGTON – David Petraeus, the former general who led the Afghanistan war and now heads the CIA, has ordered his intelligence analysts to give greater weight to the opinions of troops in the fight, U.S. officials said.
CIA analysts now will consult with battlefield commanders earlier in the process as they help create elements of a National Intelligence Estimate on the course of the war, to more fully include the military's take on the conflict, U.S. officials say.
Phi Beta Iota: On the surface, this is a good order. Understanding both sides, however, suggests that this is a repeat of the Sam Adams – Westmoreland dictated fraud. The US military and NATO are lying to the public and to their respective legislative and executive branches about the continuing failures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and across Africa. We no longer post the recurring slams on the falsehoods being purveyed. It is so very sad when our senior officials are so blatantly lacking in integrity and depriving us all of the intelligence that we are paying for.
James Bond-style weapons found on North Korean assassin
Weapons straight out of a James Bond film have been put on display in Seoul after authorities found them on a North Korean assassin.
EXTRACT
The weapons include an innocent-looking black torch, complete with a wrist strap and the word “Police” along one side, that is actually a gun capable of firing a bullet.
Prosecutors in the South Korean capital say the weapon had a range of around 30 feet and was loaded with a bullet that was coated in a poisonous chemical. A mere 10 milligrams of the poison is sufficient to cause breathing problems or heart failure, they said.
In a televised demonstration of the gun, a bullet fired from the torch penetrated deep into a mattress from a distance of 16 feet.
Phi Beta Iota: The contrast to the Iran plot farce in the USA could not be sharper, especially when the bloated insane US budget of pasty-faced white guys engaged on “domestic security” is taken into account.
9-10 November 2011 – Ottawa, Canada – “New Frontiers in Security and Intelligence” is theme of 2011 CASIS Annual International Conference
CASIS is the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies.
DRAFT AGENDA may be viewed here. It is a Word document.
Location: Fairmont Château Laurier Hotel, Ottawa, Canada
To register for the 2011 CASIS Annual Conference please click here. CASIS reserves the right to limit registration.
To book a room at the Chateau Laurier for the 2011 CASIS conference, please click here. This block of rooms provides a discounted rate, but all expenses will be covered by the guest.
September 2006. Violence levels are spiking in Iraq. Every day brings reports of more suicide bombings, more IEDs, more death and destruction. So bad has it gotten that the Washington Post reveals that a senior Marine intelligence officer has concluded “that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there.”
This was the situation when I was among a dozen conservative pundits escorted into the Oval Office for a chat with President George W. Bush. I asked him why he didn't change a strategy that was clearly failing. He replied that he had no intention of micromanaging the war like Lyndon Johnson, who was said to have personally picked bombing targets in Vietnam. This commander in chief vowed to respect the judgment of his chain of command.
Phi Beta Iota: Full text with added links below the line. This review and the book are largely crap. Viet-Nam was lost for two reasons: because all historical and indigenous influences were for the residents and against the occupiers; and because the US Government was corrupt and was in direct support of a Catholic mandarin and his sister who took corruption, torture, and exploitation of a Buddhist et all land to new heights. The review misses two of the most important books on the matter, one, Triumph Foresaken that supports the “we could have won” argument, the other, Who the Hell Are We Fighting? that makes it clear that the corruption of intelligence and the corruption of military and political planning were at the heart of America's failure in Viet-Nam. Westmoreland was not a bad man, but he represented–as most Army leaders do today–the orthodox, the West Point Protective Association, the Army above Republic, the “go along to get along,” and of course the toxic brew of “leadership” that is arrogant, inattentive, poorly educated, and not at all concerned about the welfare or their troops. In the US Army today, “education” is for show or ticket punching, not to actually learn anything useful to the future.
Joshua Foust – Joshua Foust is a fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net.
The Atlantic, 20 September 2011
This morning I testified at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs' Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia (a mouthful, I know) about how we can better manage and administer contractors within the intelligence community. I'm pasting a brief excerpt of my written testimony below, followed by a link to the full text of my remarks.
Every contract the government issues for a company to perform work is defined by the Statement of Work (SOW). This is a document that defines the parameters of the work the contractor will perform, including a description of the project, expected duties the contractor must fulfill, and the outputs and metrics by which performance will be measured. These are often poorly written, kept intentionally vague, and wind up not actually addressing the stated intent of the contracts.
As one example, every SOW I've had to either administer, edit, review, or write has stated as a basic metric of performance the number of employees the contractor should hire. That is, the basic means by which the government measures the contractor's performance is based first and foremost on the number of people hired to work on the contract. This has two serious consequences that affect the contracting environment: it removes the distinction between employees that would make work products better, and it confuses the number of employees with contract performance.
The frankly bizarre system of hiring intelligence contractors is born from several interdependent processes: getting a security clearance, getting hired, and getting “read on” to work at a government site. The system of getting a clearance is structured such that those with clearances are given preference above those without clearance, regardless of the relevant experience of either employee. In other words, if two candidates are competing for a job with a contractor, and one has deep relevant experience but no clearance, she will most likely lose to a candidate with less relevant experience but a current and active security clearance.
There is a great deal more to this, and I would suggest anyone interested in this topic to download both my own testimony (At SCRIBD, or PDF here), and checking out the Hearing page, which includes written remarks from Daniel Gordon from the Office of Management and Budget, DHS Chief of Intelligence Charles E. Allen, Scott Amey from the Project on Government Oversight, and Dr. Mark Lowenthal.
The Chinese government’s ‘vacuum cleaner’ approach to espionage is worrying foreign governments, companies and overseas dissidents. They’re right to be concerned.
Phi Beta Iota: China graduates more honors students from high school than the USA graduates from high school across the board. China has also made the leap away from English toward all the other languages that the US refuses to be serious about. China is further along toward being a “Smart Nation,” aided by its outposts in Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, as well as Diasphora, while the US diddles around not even understanding its own preconditions of revolution. There is only one non-zero solution, and the US government, two-party tyranny, and Wall Street have absolutely no interest in going there.
The number of persons who held security clearances for access to classified information last year exceeded 4.2 million — far more than previously estimated — according to a new intelligence community report to Congress (pdf).
The report, which was required by the FY2010 intelligence authorization act, provides the first precise tally of clearances held by federal employees and contractors that has ever been produced. The total figure as of last October 1 was 4,266,091 cleared persons. See “Report on Security Clearance Determinations for Fiscal Year 2010,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence, September 2011.
In 2009, the Government Accountability Office had told Congress that about 2.4 million people held clearances “excluding some of those with clearances who work in areas of national intelligence.” (“More Than 2.4 Million Hold Security Clearances,” Secrecy News, July 29, 2009). But even with a generous allowance for hundreds of thousands of additional intelligence personnel, that estimate somehow missed more than a million clearances.
Likewise, one of the many startling findings in the 2010 Washington Post series (and 2011 book) “Top Secret America” by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, was that “An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.”
But remarkably, that too was a significant underestimate, according to the new report. In actual fact, as of October 2010 there were 1,419,051 federal employees and contractors holding Top Secret clearances.
As high as the newly determined total number of clearances is, it may not be the highest number ever. In the last decade of the cold war, a comparable or greater number of persons seems to have had security clearances. In those years the size of the uniformed military was much larger than today, and a large fraction of its members were routinely granted clearances. Thus, as of 1983, there were approximately 4.2 million clearances, according to 1985 testimony (pdf) from the GAO. But that was an estimate, not a measurement, and the actual number might have been higher (or lower). By 1993, the post-cold war number had declined to around 3.2 million clearances, according to another GAO report (pdf) from 1995.
The unexpectedly large number of security clearances today can presumably be attributed to several related factors: the surge in military and intelligence spending over the past decade, increased government reliance on cleared contractors, and intensive classification activity that continues today.
Phi Beta Iota: For $80-90 billion a year, $15 billion or so of which is the cost of maintaining one of the most extraordinarily inept and unreliable secrecy systems on the planet (much much larger than those of all dictators combined), we get, “at best” 4% of the intelligence (decision-support) that the President or a major commander needs, and nothing for everyone else.
