On September 11, 2001, within hours of the murderous 9/11 attacks, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney had committed America to what they later called the “War on Terror.” It should more properly, I believe, be called the “Terror War,” one in which terror has been directed repeatedly against civilians by all participants, both states and non-state actors. It should also be seen as part of a larger, indeed global, process in which terror has been used against civilians in interrelated campaigns by all major powers, including China in Xinjiang and Russia in Chechnya, as well as the United States.2 Terror war in its global context should perhaps be seen as the latest stage of the age-long secular spread of transurban civilization into areas of mostly rural resistance — areas where conventional forms of warfare, for either geographic or cultural reasons, prove inconclusive.
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In 2011 an important book by Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, demonstrated conclusively that the withholding was purposive, and sustained over a period of eighteen months.8 This interference and manipulation became particularly blatant and controversial in the days before 9/11; it led one FBI agent, Steve Bongardt, to predict accurately on August 29, less than two weeks before 9/11, that “someday someone will die.”9
Huh? We do not make this stuff up. CIA's Covert Action Staff is evidently having a ball, and David Ignatius has no problem playing the bimbo. Note the built-in pre-excuse on poor syntax. Note the pretense that incoherence was connected to long periods of time between sending, receiving, and responding. The hit on Fox is some kid [or geriatric annuitant]'s idiot idea of being clever — when Bin Laden was alive, he knew full well there is no substantive difference between CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox [or the two political parties in the US that exclude everyone else from access to the public treasure].
All of this is beyond belief for anyone with BOTH intelligence and integrity. When all of the documents are released (after the November elections, of course), they will be torn apart.
Before his death, Osama bin Ladenboldly commanded his network to organize special cells in Afghanistan and Pakistan to attack the aircraft of President Obama and Gen. David H. Petraeus.
“The reason for concentrating on them,” the al-Qaeda leader explained to his top lieutenant, “is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make [Vice President] Biden take over the presidency. . . . Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the man of the hour . . . and killing him would alter the war’s path” in Afghanistan.
Forgive the interruption. I reach out to you on a matter of some urgency, about my dear friend, a former CIA officer, dedicated, stoic, talented … and now in deep and terrifying trouble. What's happening to him is so stunningly crappy, and so unjustifiable, that his defense and support has become a personal priority. Though triggered — I believe — by a personal and political agenda, I see his cause as strikingly apolitical: this is about a man falsely persecuted, and the survival of his family.
Please, please take a minute to look at the below. Any questions, reach out to me, and/or check out the sites at the bottom of this email.
Thanks so much,
Peter Landesman
Dear Friends and Colleagues:
We write to ask you to join us in supporting, protecting and materially helping our friend and colleague, John Kiriakou, a long-time former C.I.A. official and case officer. Incredibly, John has been accused by the Department of Justice of crimes under the 1917 Espionage Act, a charge historically reserved for persons who betrayed their country to foreign governments for money.
Why? The prosecutors have not claimed that John talked to any foreign government, passed any government documents or accepted funds from anyone hostile to the United States. Instead, according to the facts asserted in the indictment, he committed the “crime” of responding honestly to a query from the New York Times related to the agency's interrogation program under the Bush Administration, which included waterboarding.
Back in 2002 while I was at a major Command, Friedman made a pitch to provide “ground truth” intelligence on contract. While some folks went gaga over his presentation, there were many small indicators that all was not well. Apparently Friedman was asked to leave LSU for reasons undetermined. Offically, according to STRATFOR ” In 1997, a small company that would eventually grow into Stratfor—called Strategic Intelligence LLC—left Baton Rouge and LSU, where its founder George Friedman had been a professor. A 1999 profile in Texas Monthly said the company “couldn't thrive” in Baton Rouge, and that's why Friedman took it to Austin, where it blossomed into a global powerhouse.”
Reasoning heard on the street by colleagues active in San Antonio, he was bankrolled by Mossad and they wanted him in an area of hightech.
I have read his comments about OSS and you specifically; his arrogance is unbelievable. His “analysts” are currently UT-Austin students with a couple of “seasoned veterans”, none of whom have an intelligence
background.
He has been described as a neocon and I think that fits. From where I sit, I think STRATFOR is finished, they are trying very hard to regain their client base….with little success…
Surprise, surprise…..such a disaster it could be a blessing in disguise…his replacement? General Flynn, the individual who said intel
in Afghanistan was a failure…..and it is.
Or, then again, he may not. At this stage, all is rumor. So far, we've got three people with good intelligence connections saying Clapper is likely on the way out. We've got one former senior intelligence saying it is not likely.
But as so often with the intelligence community, rumors possess value because they indicate perception as much as fact. There may be senior Obama administration officials who would like to see Clapper gone. He is a career military man heading a “civilian” intelligence community and there's another such fish over at CIA named Petraeus. And we all know how they treated retired Adm. Dennis Blair.
General James Clapper
Also, two of the sources for the rumor may have a strong institutional interest in Clapper's departure. But we can't say more for fear of blowing their cover.
A source with excellent intelligence community access had a specific piece of information. “Clapper was told he is no longer valued….back in October. General Cartwright was offered the job but declined,” this source said in an email.
A former senior Pentagon intelligence official told us that Clapper has said “how much he values working for this President and this administration” and tells him that the administration has demonstrated “their respect for and understanding of the business of intelligence. I¹d be quite surprised to see Jim step down if either a re-elected Obama or newly elected successor asked him to stay on.”
This source also made a key point. The DNI job carries so few benefits and so many responsibilities and is so disliked or distrusted by so many in the intelligence community that, “few qualified people” would “even remotely yearn for the DNI position.” Given all that, this source said, “I think we should all hope that Jim hangs in there.”
In the brief introduction to a review of the book, Very Special Intelligence, Dolphin noted that the successful tactical doctrine of using combined intelligence and combat troops in tightly organized teams was being seriously diluted by the U.S. IC (read CIA, DIA, NGA and NSA) who were moving to fold the intelligence elements involved into the bureaucratic mainstream and to automate the intelligence processes involved.
As I noted in an earlier article (The Triumph of Tactical Intelligence) U.S. Forces engaged in counter-insurgency operations (COIN) in both Iraq and Afghanistan have developed an innovative tactical concept, which Dolphin noted was based on research and development work done at the U. S. Naval Post Graduate School by a team under General Dell Daily. The essence of this concept is the High-value Target Teams (HTT) which integrates special operations forces fighters with military and civilian intelligence analysts into tightly organized teams in which immediate tactical intelligence is essential to identifying so called high value targets (usually individuals) and guiding war-fighters to their locations. This apparently was not a case of intelligence support being provided by folks sitting far from the action phoning in information, but of intelligence support being very much part of the operation itself with the war fighters. At a recent hearing of the House Armed Services Committee on Special Operations Forces, Michael D. Lumpkin, Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense said, “USSOCOM [U.S. Special Operations Command] and the CIA currently coordinate, share, exchange liaison officers and operate side by side in the conduct of DOD overt and clandestine operations and CIA’s covert operations.”
Sun Tzu or Bismarck: Who will Prevail in the 21st Century?
[Note: this first appeared in Time's Battleland Blog (here)],
The first three chapters in Sun Tzu’s timeless classic “The Art of War” describe how to make net assessments by comparing your strengths and weaknesses and those of your adversary and how to formulate strategy. Near the end of Chapter 3, he sums up his advice, saying, “Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle.”
The fundamental problem in the American military and foreign policy elite lies in an incestuously amplifying, self referencing orientation that makes it ignorant of both of Master Sun’s categories of knowledge. (I explain how incestuous amplification hijacks a decision cycle in this essay.) Briefly, the American policy elite’s self-referencing Orientation causes it to Observe what it wants to see.
This kind of one-way shaping isolates the decision-making mind from what is really going on in its external environment. As the American strategist Colonel John Boyd showed, Decisions flowing out of an Orientation that overwhelms Observations become disconnected from reality, and therefore, the Actions consequent to those decisions inevitably become irrelevant at best, and more often counterproductive, in that they amplify themselves to drive the collective decision cycle or Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action (OODA) loops ever further away from reality.
Left uncorrected, the result is an inexorable descent into disorder, and eventually a magnification into chaos leading to overload and collapse. (Interested readers will find a short summary of Boyd’s theory in the last part of this essay. A more extended description of the man and his work can be found in Robert Coram’s excellent biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, now in its 7th printing. Boyd’s entire Discourse on Winning and Losing — his art of conflict — can be downloaded here.)
Self-referencing behavior is clearly evident with regard to ourselves, for example, in the entirely predicable — and predicted — chaos of the Pentagon’s uncontrollable long-range budget plan (which is grounded on a combination of inwardly focused power games as well as a deliberately corrupted accounting system — explained here, here, and here). Put bluntly — we know that we do not know ourselves — indeed the evidence I compiled during my 25+ years of research in the the Pentagon’s pathological decision making practices, while employed in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, suggests we do not want to know ourselves and will go to great lengths to avoid doing so (unclassified reports can be found here).
Not only does our elite not want to understand itself, it also does not know its adversaries. That was clearly the case in Vietnam and Iraq and currently in Afghanistan. Consider this farcical, were it not so serious, report in Sunday’s New York Times; it describes how the Taliban and impostors are scamming us in Afghanistan. Bear in mind, this report is just the tip of a huge iceberg of evidence describing the self-inflicted — dare I say incestuously delusional — ignorance: see, for example, like that described by Lieut. Colonel Daniel Davis in his 87 page report, “Dereliction of Duty II” (a summary by ace investigative journalist Gareth Porter can be found here).
But Sun Tzu is a voice from 500 B.C., and his musing may be irrelevant in the 21st Century. Perhaps that’s because, as Otto von Bismarck is alleged to have predicted, just before he died in 1898, there is a “special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America.” As Francis Urquhart would say: “You might very well think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.”
