The government's relentless pursuit of people suspected of mishandling or leaking classified information underscores the need to combat the misuse of classification authority, wrote J. William Leonard, the former director of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times today.
“The Obama administration, which has criminally prosecuted more leakers of purportedly classified information than all previous administrations combined, needs to stop and assess the way the government classifies information in the first place.”
“Classifying information that should not be kept secret can be just as harmful to the national interest as unauthorized disclosures of appropriately classified information,” he wrote. See “When Secrecy Gets Out of Hand” by J. William Leonard, Los Angeles Times, August 10.
Mr. Leonard recentlyfiled a complaint with the new ISOO director, John Fitzpatrick, based on his assessment that a document that served as a basis for criminal prosecution in the case of Thomas Drake should never have been classified at all.
Phi Beta Iota: This report, while responsible (unlike the current food fight a year later), does not go far enough. It allows the borrowing of one trillion a year to continue, while observing that interest on the debt could reach one trillion a year by 2020. The principle recommendations, all sound but insufficient, are listed in the Overview section.
Washington: The Pentagon's top intelligence official has ordered the Air Force to set up a new intelligence unit to analyze the behavior of foreign-based commercial aircraft and integrate intelligence from the combatant commanders as the planes move through American airspace.
Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike Vickers has tasked Air Force Secretary Michael Donley to hand pick a chief for the new intelligence cell.
While USD(I) will be the “focal point in DoD for intelligence on foreign civil aviation-related entities associated with illicit activities or posing a threat to the United States, its allies or its interests,” the Air Force will handle day-to-day operations through the Civil Aviation Intelligence Analysis Center, according to a July 29 memo from Vickers.
The rhetoric of people rushing to rescue Pentagon spending from “completely unacceptable” cuts is quite hysterical. Leading the chorus has been Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. He termed the possible defense budget cuts (about $850 billion over 10 years according to most) a “doomsday mechanism,” if the automatic sequestration trigger of Obama’s debt deal with the Republicans in Congress is pulled. Some think tank types, opining in the Washington Post and the New York Times, have deemed these reductions “indiscriminately hacking away” at the Pentagon’s budget and something that could “imperil America’s national security.” Their defense spending allies, including multiple generals and admirals sitting atop various Pentagon bureaucracies, confirm it all with descriptions like “very high risk” and “draconian.”
It should be pointed out that these people are underestimating the size of the potential cuts the new debt deal could theoretically cause. The $850 billion supposition measures the reductions against an artificial “baseline” from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that does not include the actual budget growth the Pentagon had scheduled for itself. Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments tells us in a useful analysis (“Defense Funding in the Budget Control Act of 2011”) that the debt deal’s automatic sequesters, if implemented, would mean $968 billion in cuts over ten years from the DOD budgets heretofore planned – over $100 billion more in cuts.
Here is a presentation by David Eaves (from three years ago), on the importance of collaboration, facilitation, and conflict resolution skills for successful free and open source software and content projects (as well as the need for better on-line tools to support all that):
His key point is that “facilitation” (enabling the community) is an essential part of open source software collaborations or open content collaborations, and that we have not prioritized for “facilitation” either in who runs such projects, the companies built around them, how people are trained, or what our online tools are actually good at supporting.
He makes a point that (in round numbers) written text over the web only conveys about 10% of human communication intent, with about another 40% being intonation and the last 50% being body language (so, 90%+ of communicated intent is lost by using text).
He says this is a reason a lot of web communications go wrong with various emotional-related misinterpretations of what people wrote, especially when people have no common face-to-face history together. He presents a model of negotiation where people build “relationship” and “communication”, and then iteratively explore “interests”, “options” to pursue those interests, and “legitimacy” (or likelihood an option will succeed) to find common ground they can work together on as a “commitment” instead of pursuing “alternatives” to the collaboration.
He contrasts that with a competitive up-front take-it-or-leave it style of advocacy for specific actions by others (a style which does not first explore broader common interests that are behind why the specific actions are desired, where common ground might be easier to find by taking a step back from the specific apparent conflict to see a bigger picture of common interests and creative ways to pursue those together).
He suggests that every conversation has four aspects (Inquire, Paraphrase, Acknowledge, and Advocate) and says people spend too much time on “Advocate” to the exclusion of these other important aspects and related skills. In general, he suggests these communications issues are why so many free and open source projects have problems and that we need better tools to support this sort of facilitation across all aspects of a project (coding, marketing, fundraising, tracking defects, providing support, etc.).
Three Good Reasons to Liquidate Our Empire and Ten Steps to Take to Do So
1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism
2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us
3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases
. . . . . . . .
Chalmers Johnson
10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire (Abridged)
Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key places to begin:
1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.
2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the “opportunity costs” that go with them — the things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can't or won't.
3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture. Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad.
4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters — along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth — that follow our military enclaves around the world.
5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.
6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world's largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism.
7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.
8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Ending empire would make this possible.
9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.
10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.
Phi Beta Iota: The second article is a stunning review of the intellectual life of Chalmers Johnson, who was among many things a net assessments analyst for Allen Dulles. He pioneered the study of “State Capitalism” and considered the US to be a greatly under-performing economy for its failure to move away from military unilateralism and toward sustainable development.
