Attached is a really first rate assessment of the real benefits and costs of the American infatuation with drone warfare. The writer, Patrick Cockburn, is one of the very best reporters now covering the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia.
World View: The use of unmanned aircraft to assassinate its enemies is guaranteed to backfire on Washington
Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, Sunday, 10 June 2012
As the US and its allies ponder what to do about Syria, one suggestion advanced by the protagonists of armed intervention is to use unmanned drones to attack Syrian government targets. The proposal is a measure of the extraordinary success of the White House, CIA and Defense Department in selling the drone as a wonder weapon despite all the evidence to the contrary.
The attraction of the drone for President Obama and his administration five months before the presidential election is self-evident.
The US Department of Justice has released new files about convicted spy Jonathan Pollard’s bid for presidential clemency. Pollard was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 after passing more than a million highly classified documents to Israel while working as an intelligence analyst for the US Navy. Documents in the Freedom of Information Act response (PDF) reference 32 pages of government agency deliberative communications and 37 pages of new communications between Pardon Attorney Ronald Rogers and Pollard’s legal team — all produced since July of 2011. While the contents have been withheld, their existence signals that the Pollard commutation request may be nearing a conclusion within the Obama administration. June 18 could mark the culmination of a massive lobbying campaign for release. Obama’s dismal record on Israeli accountability suggests Pollard will soon walk free.
Registration is live for the 2012 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation, at www.ncddseattle.eventbrite.com. Be sure to register soon to take advantage of the $350 early bird rate.
We’re so excited about NCDD Seattle! We’re coming together October 12-14 (Fri through Sun) at the beautiful Hyatt at Olive 8 in downtown Seattle for a great event that will bring together hundreds of the most active, thoughtful, and influential people involved in public engagement and group process work across the U.S. and Canada.
After organizing 5 regional events in 2010, we’re going back to holding our biennial national gathering. Spending three days with some of the most amazing people in our field and exploring together how we can shape the future of this important movement… there’s really nothing like it. I hope you plan to join us.
Check out our FAQs page for lots of details about registration fees, conference venue, and much more.
Complete our Interest Form for NCDD Seattle to let us know if you’re interested in getting involved in the planning process, helping out at the event, sponsoring, publicizing the conference, presenting a workshop, etc.
Ever since the beginning of the financial crisis and quantitative easing, the question has been before us: How can the Federal Reserve maintain zero interest rates for banks and negative real interest rates for savers and bond holders when the US government is adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt every year via its budget deficits? Not long ago the Fed announced that it was going to continue this policy for another 2 or 3 years. Indeed, the Fed is locked into the policy. Without the artificially low interest rates, the debt service on the national debt would be so large that it would raise questions about the US Treasury’s credit rating and the viability of the dollar, and the trillions of dollars in Interest Rate Swaps and other derivatives would come unglued.
In other words, financial deregulation leading to Wall Street’s gambles, the US government’s decision to bail out the banks and to keep them afloat, and the Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy have put the economic future of the US and its currency in an untenable and dangerous position. It will not be possible to continue to flood the bond markets with $1.5 trillion in new issues each year when the interest rate on the bonds is less than the rate of inflation. Everyone who purchases a Treasury bond is purchasing a depreciating asset. Moreover, the capital risk of investing in Treasuries is very high. The low interest rate means that the price paid for the bond is very high. A rise in interest rates, which must come sooner or later, will collapse the price of the bonds and inflict capital losses on bond holders, both domestic and foreign.
The question is: when is sooner or later? The purpose of this article is to examine that question.
My colleague Robert Kirkpatrick from Global Pulse has been actively promoting the concept of “data philanthropy” within the context of development. Data philanthropy involves companies sharing proprietary datasets for social good. I believe we urgently need big (social) data philanthropy for humanitarian response as well. Disaster-affected communities are increasingly the source of big data, which they generate and share via social media platforms like twitter. Processing this data manually, however, is very time consuming and resource intensive. Indeed, large numbers of digital humanitarian volunteers are often needed to monitor and process user-generated content from disaster-affected communities in near real-time.
Meanwhile, companies like Crimson Hexagon, Geofeedia, NetBase, Netvibes, RecordedFuture and Social Flow are defining the cutting edge of automated methods for media monitoring and analysis. So why not set up a Big Data Philanthropy group for humanitarian response in partnership with the Digital Humanitarian Network? Call it Corporate Social Responsibility (CRS) for digital humanitarian response. These companies would benefit from the publicity of supporting such positive and highly visible efforts. They would also receive expert feedback on their tools.
My colleague Jeannine Lemaire from the Core Team of the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) recently pointed me to Geofeedia, which may very well be the next generation in crisis mapping technology. So I spent over an hour talking with GeoFeedia's CEO, Phil Harris, to learn more about the platform and discuss potential applications for humanitarian response. The short version: I'm impressed; not just with the technology itself and potential, but also by Phil's deep intuition and genuine interest in building a platform that enables others to scale positive social impact.
Situational awareness is absolutely key to emergency response, hence the rise of crisis mapping. The challenge? Processing and geo-referencing Big Data from social media sources to produce live maps has largely been a manual (and arduous) task for many in the humanitarian space. In fact, a number of humanitarian colleagues I've spoken to recently have complained that the manual labor required to create (and maintain) live maps is precisely why they aren't able to launch their own crisis maps. I know this is also true of several international media organizations.
There have been several attempts at creating automated live maps. Take Havaria and Global Incidents Map, for example. But neither of these provide the customi-zability necessary for users to apply the platforms in meaningful ways. Enter Geofeedia. Lets take the recent earthquake and 800 aftershocks in Emilia, Italy. Simply type in the place name (or an exact address) and hit enter. Geofeedia automatically parses Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa and Instagram for the latest updates in that area and populates the map with this content. The algorithm pulls in data that is already geo-tagged and designated as public.
From beginning, have not felt Petraeus as D/CIA was optimal for either man or institution. I see it as politically-driven POTUS strategic move to sideline potential political opponent who, right now, should be serving as Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff.
CIA Director David Petraeus spoke first at an April 19 memorial dinner for agency officers killed in action. He delivered well-scripted remarks and an evocation of the agency’s heroes. Then came Leon Panetta, his predecessor at the CIA and the evening’s main honoree, who delivered a stem-winding emotional speech to fervent applause.
The freewheeling Panetta, now secretary of defense, has been a tough act to follow at the CIA, especially for a former four-star Army general who thrived in the disciplined, resource-rich world of the military. And in his first year at the agency, Petraeus’s transition has sometimes been bumpy, as the CIA’s finicky workforce struggled to adapt to its new director.
“I hear the rumblings” from mid-level CIA officers, says one senior administration official. But he says Petraeus gets high marks from the White House, which took the unusual step of naming the prominent general to the post.
Read full article. Phi Beta Iota: Reading between the lines, Patraeus has accepted being sidelined, is making changes on the margins, not within the base, and may or may not emerge from this a wiser man. The clandestine service remains unrepentant and impotent–official cover, liaison hand-outs, legal traveler debriefings in the USA–while the analytic service remains childish, scatter-brained, and largely useless. Such “triumphs” as he achieves will handed to him by selected foreign services including the Israeli's with their broad false flag menu, or be in the science & technology arena, at great cost for marginally useful innovations. Nothing of import will be done on human intelligence, open source intelligence, all-source processing, whole of government decision support, or multinational clandestine, covert, and analytic operations.
