Afghanistan: Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, published his annual Id al-Fitr address, which commemorates the end of Ramadan. The address contained several familiar themes. Most important for NATO forces is that Omar urged the Taliban to continue to attack foreign forces in the name of all Afghans. He said he would support only a fully Islamic government and denounced the current government in Kabul as a bunch of “hirelings” and urged Afghans not to work with them.
“I reiterate once again that we do not think of monopolizing power,” he said in the statement. “Those who truly love Islam and the country and have commitment to both, whoever they may be or whichever ethnicity or geographical location they hail from, this homeland is theirs.” He also denounced democracy as a waste of time.
Western media coverage of the address cherry-picked the headlines. Some interpreted the quote above as an assertion that the Taliban no longer intend to take power after NATO forces depart. That is wishful thinking that takes the comment about monopolizing power out of the context of establishing a fully Islamic state.
Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez used the opportunity of presiding over the U.N. Security Council for the first time Tuesday to take aim at the veto power of its five permanent members _ the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France.
Fernandez also criticized member states that don't implement U.N. resolutions, citing unheeded demands for a Palestinian state and Britain's refusal to engage in talks about the disputed Falkland Islands, which Argentina calls the Malvinas.
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Argentine President at UN
She said the veto was a safeguard during the Cold War to prevent “nuclear holocaust” _ but today the United States and Russia sit at the same table “and we can't deal with the problems in this new world with old instruments and old methods.”
Fernandez pointed to two Latin American organizations _ the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States and the Union of South American Nations _ which take decisions on the basis of unanimity when there is a conflict. By contrast, she criticized the use of vetoes by the permanent members of the Security Council.
Russia and China have vetoed three Western-backed resolutions to pressure Syrian President Bashar Assad to end the 2 1/2 year conflict that has killed more than 100,000 people, and the United States, Israel's closest ally, has vetoed numerous resolutions over the years on the Palestinian conflict with Israel.
Fernandez strongly supported the Arab League's U.N. observer Ahmed Fathalla who said all 193 U.N. member states must implement U.N. resolutions
With one-liners like, “We are excellent at launching Tomahawk missiles; we need to get better at launching ideas,” it is not hard to appreciate whyĀ TheĀ New York TimesĀ labeled recently retired Admiral James Stavridis a “Renaissance admiral.” Labels like “innovator” and “thought leader” may be overused, but Stavridis lives up to the hype, nudging the U.S. military not only to be more adaptive and less insular, but also to re-examine its role in international conflict resolution in places like Latin America and Afghanistan.
The former Aircraft Carrier Group Commander,Ā TED Talk guest, author and overlord of all NATO missions, including the 2011 NATO-led operation in Libya, champions a revolutionary approach to the most vexing conflicts of our day. Stavridis has challenged the stagnant military culture and pushed for the transformation of organizations like U.S. Southern Command from an old school military planning citadel to an agile organization better able to “plugĀ ‘n play” with non-traditional partners. The admiral believes the U.S. can help partners to end conflict quickly, reconstruct and then develop through the application of “smart power”:Ā the effective combination of soft power (diplomacy and development) and hard power (military might).
Harry Truman spoke in the U.S. Senate on June 23, 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning,” he said, “we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”
Did Truman value Japanese lives above Russian and German?Ā There is nothing anywhere to suggest that he did.Ā Yet we debate, every August 6th or so, whether Truman was willing to unnecessarily sacrifice Japanese lives in order to scare Russians with his nuclear bombs.Ā He was willing; he was not willing; he was willing.Ā Left out of this debate is the obvious possibility that killing as many Japanese as possible was among Truman's goals.
A U.S. Army poll in 1943 found that roughly half of all GIs believed it would be necessary to kill every Japanese person on earth. William Halsey, who commanded the United States' naval forces in the South Pacific during World War II, thought of his mission as “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs,” and had vowed that when the war was over, the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell. War correspondent Edgar L. Jones wrote in the February 1946 Atlantic Monthly, “What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished offĀ the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.”
On August 6, 1945, President Truman announced: “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. Ā It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British ‘Grand Slam' which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.”Hiroshima was, of course, a city full of people, not an Army base. But those people were merely Japanese. Australian General Sir Thomas Blamey had told the New York Times: “Fighting Japs is not like fighting normal human beings. The Jap is a little barbarianā¦. We are not dealing with humans as we know them. We are dealing with something primitive. Our troops have the right view of the Japs. They regard them as vermin.”
Some try to imagine that the bombs shortened the war and saved more lives than the some 200,000 they took away. And yet, weeks before the first bomb was dropped, on July 13, 1945, Japan sent a telegram to the Soviet Union expressing its desire to surrender and end the war. The United States had broken Japan's codes and read the telegram. Truman referred in his diary to “the telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” Truman had been informed through Swiss and Portuguese channels of Japanese peace overtures as early as three months before Hiroshima. Japan objected only to surrendering unconditionally and giving up its emperor, but the United States insisted on those terms until after the bombs fell, at which point it allowed Japan to keep its emperor.
There is nothing new about open source information.Ā What is new about open source intelligence
(ethical evidence-based decision-support based solely on open, legal, ethical sources and methods)
is the attempt to fully integrate the proven process of intelligence
(requirements definition, collection management, source discovery and validation, multi-source fusion (both machine and human), visualization (both machine and human), analytic tradecraft, and communication to those who wish to make an informed decision).
Intelligence is DECISION-SUPPORT.Ā It is required at four levels (strategic, operational, tactical, technical) across all mission areas, and is best when it is holistic — most of what the secret world does is NOT intelligence, it is merely classified spending with very little decision support resulting.
Note: the hardest problem for any intelligence professional is finding a customer with integrity who actually wants to make a decision based on ethical evidence-based decision support.Ā Ā Most customers are arrogant, ignorant, and generally corrupt to the bone, making decisions on the basis of what they think they know, or what someone has paid them to think is in their selfish interest.Ā This is why we have wasted so much blood, treasure and spirit (the national soul is black right now) since 2000.
The second hardest problem is achieving the moral and intellectual mind-shift away from drowning in money and inputs that emphasize technology, and migrating toward the more professional focus on humans and outputs — decision-support.Ā That is the second hardest because it can be achieved without demanding that the consumer have integrity — only the intelligence professional needs to reconnect with their integrity (in the holistic all source sense).
When I first began to travel professionally, when I started working for National Geographic, we used to be warned about not drinking the local water from the tap. Today I would be more concerned about the tap water in parts of American than I would be in much of the rest of the world. Here's why. My suggestion to all of you is to have your water tested by a! n independent lab. It only costs a few dollars, and it may give you a surprise.
Right now there is another blown-out rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and FOUR major tar sands pipeline leaks in Alberta, Canada. We are experiencing a major continent wide slow motion environmental disaster going on within the carbon energy infrastructure and, as far as I can see, the only person in corporate media who is even talking about it is Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. And today! , the Republicans in the House gutted support for non-carbon energy.
The budget crunch is hitting everyone. IT departments are being asked to slim down and do more with less. Apparently the government is no exception. The affordability of open source has the governmentās attention and is changing the content management and enterprise playing field. Read more about the changes in the Information Week article, āFeds Move To Open Source Databases Pressures Oracle.ā
The piece begins:
āUnder implacable pressure to slash spending, government agencies are increasingly embracing open source, object-relational database software at the expense of costly, proprietary database platforms. Thatās putting new pressure on traditional enterprise software providers, including Oracle, to refine their product lineups as well as their licensing arrangements.ā
So giants like Oracle are feeling the crunch, and it is trickling down throughout the proprietary world. But many organizations might not feel comfortable going completely open source, as in creating their own customized solution. So many are turning to a smart compromise, a value-added open source solution like LucidWorks. Customers get the affordability and agility of open source, but the support and expertise of an industry leader. Check out their support and services for assurance that going open source does not mean you will be left out on your own.
