As a result of several gaps in reporting by the DOS and modifications to the Department’s reporting criteria, the researcher was unable to obtain the total number of attacks that targeted U.S. missions between 1979 and 2012.
. . . . . . .
This thesis detailed the general security environment within Tehran, Islamabad, Beirut, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Jeddah, Damascus, Sana’a, and Benghazi at the time the U.S. diplomatic missions located in those cities were attacked. Particularly relevant to this thesis were the details that made it possible to assess the receiving nation’s capability and willingness to protect the U.S. mission in their country when it was attacked; factors that this thesis has revealed to be key to the outcome of an attack being significantly more positive. Regarding the U.S. Government’s response to attacks on its diplomatic missions, the researcher noted three themes of particular concern: (1) inadequate existing DOS physical security standards, (2) inadequate funding in the DOS budget, and (3) inadequate consideration of site selection for diplomatic missions.
As Congress bumbles on with 2014 budget limits and appropriations, the narrative of American armed forces as “the best in the world” continues as the de rigueur and foppish test of patriotism at House Armed Services Committee hearings. Being what passes for “pro defense” requires blindness, and lots of money, in the current political system we endure.
Yet more disgusting news about what is happening to the American food system. I just can't say strongly enough: You must give serious consideration to the food you eat. Your health, and your life, and the health and lives of your family depend on your choices.
Phi Beta Iota: Water War is old news, but the dilitantes around government finally seem to be taking notice. The DNI and CIA are still incapable at serious futures studies, in part because they lack a holistic analytic model and just cannot get a grip on true cost economics. The good news is that any government with integrity is immediately able to combine solar power with water desalination and hydroponic agriculture to rapidly solve multiple challenges at once. Finding an honest government is the hard part. See also Robert David Steele,”Water: Soul of the Earth, Mirror of Our Collective Souls,” Huffington Post (5 January 2011).
Freedom of the press has not, in my lifetime, been under such serious threat as it is now. In some ways it is already too late, because today's corporate media is so corrupted that the freedom to say something is pre-compromised by the fact that few in media address the substantive issues of the day. Most of the reports you see in SR you won't see on your evening news — turn on the news any night and you can see this for yourself.
This is an essay published in one of the major foreign policy journals. Although it makes some good points, where it is appearing is one of the most important.
Pakistan:Update. Prime Minister Sharif said Thursday that talks with the Pakistani Taliban have started. He provided no details, however, on participants, venues or agendas. Sharif's comments came during a meeting in London with the British deputy prime minister and were released in a statement by the Pakistani High Commission.
Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, briefing Pakistani lawmakers Thursday, said details of the agenda and the location of government-Taliban talks are being finalized.
Comment: Sharif's assurances to his foreign audiences seem ahead of the facts told his domestic audiences. Talks are not yet taking place, mainly because the Pakistani Taliban have not agreed to them. That is the message of the Interior Minister.
5.0 out of 5 starsThe best collection in English — bold, innovative, essential, October 31, 2013
Routledge's managing editor for this collection, and the contributing editors themselves, one of whom I know personally, have created the single best collection in the English language, and explicitly superior to the Oxford counterpart that is lacking in scope of coverage and diversity of authorship. This is the first book to fully satisfy me in one book (for the five volume standard in the field see Strategic Intelligence [5 volumes] (Intelligence and the Quest for Security) (v. 1-5).
The book is opened by Loch Johnson, long one of my heroes (and with Britt Snider, one of two people to serve on both the Church and Aspin-Brown Commissions). His section concludes that intelligence studies still lacks deep credible understanding of how intelligence does (or does not) influence policy (and strategy and acquisition and operations), when intelligence works or does not, and how, exactly intelligence producers an consumers get on. I have my own answers, shared with General Tony Zinni, USMC, among others: intelligence does NOT influence anything of substance; it costs too much for what little it produces (4% “at best”), and it ignores 90% of the potential consumers of intelligence (see my free online article, “Intelligence for the President — AND Everyone Else.”
From Lock we move to Michael Warner on theories of intelligence, this is a seminal piece both a stellar and nuanced definition of what intelligence is, and consideration of intelligence risk. In this section I am also captured by R. Gerald Hughes on “Strategists and Intelligence,” this is a thoughtful read to which I would add the opening of Ada Bozeman's Strategic Intelligence and Statecraft: Selected Essays (Brassey's Intelligence & National Security Library).
7 Stars — Documents Presidential Perfidy – Life Transformative for This Reason
I broke with the Republican Party over Iran-Contra and belatedly, the one trillion a year that Reagan started shamelessly borrowing to fund the dual welfare system — a dysfunctional military-espionage-industrial complex for the right, and a dysfunctional regulatory myopic and equally toxic individual welfare system for the left, all while ignoring banking and corporate predation. Fox News broke with me when I said, on live Fox, that the Global War on Terror was a fraud. Fox may be getting smarter, certainly this book causes me to reconsider where the right might be. I like the book very much. Although an Op-Ed book that lacks the eye candy (the Constitution as an appendix, and charts showing the specifics of Roosevelt's and Wilson's violations, maps of global and domestic depravities carried out in the public name and at the public's expense), this is a superb primer, a superb eye-opener, not just for the normal American with little time to read, but also, absolutely, for those like myself who read a great deal but may not have been well grounded in the areas where Judge Napolitano has spent hard time in the trenches.
I notice immediately that among his many books are two that resonate with everything that I and others do at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog (“The truth at any cost lowers all other costs”):
This book is a measured and hence valuable overview of thirteen unconstitutional turns in our last century and a half. I thought, with all the other excellent reviews already up, that the best contribution I could make is single out the one where I learned the most, and then offer an additional recommended reading in each of eight other areas where the author has sharpened my understanding and heightened my patriotic anger.
EYE OPENER: I never gave much thought to the 17th amendment that took states' right away by taking away the role of the Senators as representatives of the State, instead turning them into the standard mob mouthpieces of the two-party tyranny. Now I am in Afghanistan, where a federal system has made corruption the central fact of life, destroyed the diversity and integrity of the provinces, and set the stage for another civil war when the US limps out. The older I get and the more I learn, the more I treasure grass-roots diversity down to municipal and county rights — NO from the bottom must trump “because I say so” from the top. I am adding reversal of 17th Amendment to my “to do” list at We the People Reform Coalition, joining my view that secession is the right of every state, and nullification in the public interest is the OBLIGATION of every Governor and state legislature.
Now here are eight of the thirteen chapters, each a lesson plan on its own, my only contribution here is to add a short blurb and one recommended additional reading for each of these chapters (I have reviewed each, my reviews are summary in nature for those who do not have the time or do not wish to purchase the books).
The Long Journey to Dallas Texas, October 31, 2013
Herbert L. Calhoun
The Long Journey to Dallas Texas
Spoiler alert: This is neither the shortest version, nor the shortest route to understanding the JFK assassination. But it is as close to the complete canonical text and understanding of the assassination as there is ever likely to be. It is told by an insider, the high priest of understanding about the JFK assassination if you ask me (or Oliver Stone), one who has been around long enough, and has resided deep enough inside the bowels of the US government to know where all the skeletons are buried.
Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty was also a member of “The Secret Team,” which he wrote a very revealing book about, of the same name. It has proven to be a critical part of the unfolding of the 50-year old drama of the JFK assassination. (Read my Amazon review of it.)
The Long Journey to Dallas Texas, October 31, 2013