The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Probably doesn't bode well for return of USB flash drives to DoD computers
See Also:
Dowd says it pretty well. My guess is that because CIA connsiders ISI an “asset”, they insist that no one including themsleves target the ISI. This of course means that ISI can continue using CIA and the U.S. as pawns in thier undeclared cold war against India.
Op-Ed Columnist
By MAUREEN DOWD
The New York Times
Published: November 23, 2010
And we wonder why we haven’t found Osama bin Laden.
Though we’re pouring billions into intelligence in Afghanistan, we can’t even tell the difference between a no-name faker and a senior member of the Taliban. The tragedy of Afghanistan has descended into farce.
. . . . . . .
Just as with Saddam and W.M.D., or groping and the T.S.A., we get no satisfaction for the $80 billion a year we spend on intelligence. Or we get fake information like Curveball that leads us into spending trillions more on a trumped-up war. Last year, seven top C.I.A. officials were fooled by a Jordanian double-agent who got onto an American base in Khost and blew all of them up. Our agents in the “wilderness of mirrors” may not be up to le Carré, but can’t they learn to Google, or at least watch “The Ipcress File”?
Who knows? Maybe we’ve been dealing with bin Laden all along. Maybe he’s been coming and going under a different moniker. As far as our intelligence experts are concerned, a turban and beard are just a turban and beard.
Read entire article…highly recommended.
Phi Beta Iota: What is not properly emphasized above is that most of the budget is spent on technical collection and beltway bandit vapor ware, with no one held accountable for massive failures, be they by Lockheed, SAIC, CSC, or what-have you. CIA is at best $10 billion, of which at least 75% is sheer waste, fraud, and abuse. What it does in the way of “intelligence” we could do for $100 million a year, and we could do it faster, better, cheaper and for 1000 times more individual consumers. Neither are intelligence officials held accountable for failure (96% of the time) by Congress or the White House because both the Intelligence Community and the Pentagon are nothing more than pork gone rancid. Leon Panetta could have been the greatest director of CIA in history with his unique background as White House Chief of Staff, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Representative. Similar Jim Clapper could have been the first real Director of National Intelligence. The lack of vision, initiative, accountability, and productivity at the top of the US secret world is quite extraordinary. This is how the White House and Congress want it to be. This is “blessed dysfunctionality” profitable for those who feast at the taxpayer's expense, and most assuredly not in the public interest. That's how it is. That is how it will remain absent President Obama choosing to remake himself, or America demanding Electoral Reform, a Coalition Cabinet, and a Balanced Budget in 2010. We are in the Dark Ages of modern American faux-governance.
Reference: American Tragedy–Another Free Ride for Pentagon
Journal: Death by a Thousand Cuts? Or Deliberate Elite Murder of the USA?
By Su Qiang and Li Xiaokun (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-11-24 08:02
St. Petersburg, Russia – China and Russia have decided to renounce the US dollar and resort to using their own currencies for bilateral trade, Premier Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin announced late on Tuesday.
Chinese experts said the move reflected closer relations between Beijing and Moscow and is not aimed at challenging the dollar, but to protect their domestic economies.”About trade settlement, we have decided to use our own currencies,” Putin said at a joint news conference with Wen in St. Petersburg.
. . . . . .
The documents covered cooperation on aviation, railroad construction, customs, protecting intellectual property, culture and a joint communiqu. Details of the documents have yet to be released.
“Two Nokia phones, $150 each, two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. That is all what Operation Hemorrhage cost us… On the other hand this supposedly ‘foiled plot', as some of our enemies would like to call [it], will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures.”Thus begins the lead article in the latest issue of Inspire, the English-language online magazine produced by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the jihadi group's Yemen branch, which was released Saturday. The cover features a photo of a UPS plane and the striking headline: “$4,200.” It is referring to the recent cartridge-bomb plot, and specifically the great disparity between the cost of executing a terrorist attack and the cost to Western countries of defending against asymmetric warfare — costs now numbering in the billions of dollars a year and climbing. The magazine warns that future attacks will be “smaller, but more frequent” — an approach that “some may refer to as the strategy of a thousand cuts.”
The slick packaging may be new, but al Qaeda's emphasis on bleeding the U.S. economy is not.Read rest of article online….
Continue reading “Journal: Death by a Thousand Cuts? Or Deliberate Elite Murder of the USA?”
While the automated search produces the relevant results, Jack Davis is the Sherman Kent of our time and deserves a cleaner quicker result. Here is the human in the loop distillation of this great man's contributions as they appear on this web site and the two web sites in Sweden where all our stuff is safely preserved.
Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Jack Davis
Review: Improving CIA Analytic Performance–Four Papers by Jack Davis
2003 Davis (US) Analytic Paradoxes: Can Open Source Intelligence Help?
1997 Davis A Compendium of Analytic Tradecraft Notes
Search: jack davis and his collected memoranda o
Search: The Future of OSINT [is M4IS2-Multinational]
Journal: Opinion on the Failure of “The System”
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Analysis
Review: Assessing the Tradecraft of Intelligence Analysis
Review: Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism That Changed the World
Review: The Landscape of History–How Historians Map the Past (Paperback)
Review: Strategic Intelligence–Windows into a Secret World
2000 PRIMER on Open Sources & Methods
Review: Thinking in Time–The Uses of History for Decision-Makers
1998 Open Source Intelligence: Private Sector Capabiltiies to Support DoD Policy, Acquisition, and Operations
Review: Strategic intelligence for American world policy (Unknown Binding)
By DEXTER FILKINS and CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times November 22, 2010
KABUL, Afghanistan — For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.
But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.
“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”
Read the rest of this very sad story….
Phi Beta Iota: We speculate that the CIA “A Team” consisted of old case officers promoted at least two ranks in person (RIP) past their merit, and completely naive about the language, the culture, and the realities on the ground. The translator(s) may have been from the wrong tribe and may have been in for a slice of the action. We speculate that CIA blew at least $2.5 million on this, in bricks of $500,000. The Afghans are about as inept as the CIA expect for language–they know very little about the Taliban and our training slides for them (and for Iraq) are seriously pathetic–link analysis and the assumptions are wrong. The Chairman of Satchi & Satchi has it right: “Until you get the truth on the table, no matter how ugly, you cannot deal with it.”
See Also:
Journal: Reflections on Integrity
Petraeus Suggests U.S. Suspected ‘All Along' Taliban Negotiator Was a Fake
Phi Beta Iota: Probable spin. The truth teller, which should come in hearings, is exactly how much CIA paid this individual without checking his bona fides, case officering 101. This is right up there with Khost Kathy, with CIA lying to the President of the United States in providing intelligence from a known Soviet agent turned double agent, and so many other things.
China-Burma: Construction of a high-speed rail link between China's southwestern province of Yunnan and Myanmar will begin in two months. The line will link Kunming, Yunnan's capital to Yangon (Rangoon), on the Indian Ocean, according to Wang Mengshu, an academic from the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
Wang said a China-to-Cambodia high-speed rail connection is under discussion as well as a link between Yunnan and Vientiane, the capital of Laos. He said that all three rail connections are likely to be completed with 10 years. Wang said the project aims to boost cooperation between China and its Southeast Asian neighbors and foster the economic development of China's western regions.
China-Bangladesh: China is interested in increasing cooperation with Bangladesh in different sectors including agriculture technology, trade, commerce and communication, according to a report about the 21 November meeting between Lu Hao, leader of a visiting Chinese delegation and a member of the Communist Party of China and Bangladesh President Zillur Rahman, The Daily Star reported. Rahman called for more Chinese cooperation on socioeconomic development, adding that China is a great friend to Bangladesh. Lu said he hopes the new cooperation will strengthen bilateral relations.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: China is creating a sphere of influence that stretches from North Korea to Pakistan, and surrounds India. This is a threat to US interests as well as to the political independence of the states accepting Chinese aid. A rail line to the Burmese port of Rangoon would give China access to two Indian Ocean ports with direct rail links to China. The other will be Gwadar in western Pakistan which was built with Chinese investments and aid.
Rail links from China through the Karakoram Range to Pakistan Rail and then a spur to Gwadar are undergoing feasibility studies. The link to Rangoon is much more advanced.
Phi Beta Iota: We must disagree with our learned colleague whose analytic skills we greatly admire. China's building of infrastructure to the seas is not a threat to American the Beautiful as envisioned by our Founding Fathers–it is only a threat to a predatory imperialist out of control government stupid enough to spend $750 million dollars EACH on three fortresses in Baghdad, Kabul, and Islamabad, at the same time that US infrastructure and US economic competitiveness has been DESTROYED by a two-party tyranny that has sold the American public out–in a word, treason against the public interest. ENOUGH. It is time to shut down the Empire before the Empire shuts down America the Beautiful. Tomorrow we will post a review of Buckminster Fuller's Ideas and Integrities written in 1928. He nailed it. The US Government at the political level is NOT in “friendly” hands….certainly not friendly to the 90% that actually pay their taxes unmindful of how those taxes are funding fraud, waste, and abuse on a global scale. America desperately needs an honest President willing to sponsor Electoral Reform in February in time for the 4th of July recall of anyone who votes against it, and a Director of National Intelligence (DNI) who actually wants to create a Smart Nation and stop going along with $90 billion a year in fraud, waste, and abuse….[less the 4% that General Tony Zinni says is useful].
