High-risk assignments draw many from U.S. Special Forces
By Greg Miller and Julie Tate
The rapid collapse of a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya exposed the vulnerabilities of State Department facilities overseas. But the CIA’s ability to fend off a second attack that same night provided a glimpse of a key element in the agency’s defensive arsenal: a secret security force created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Two of the Americans killed in Benghazi were members of the CIA’s Global Response Staff, an innocuously named organization that has recruited hundreds of former U.S. Special Forces operatives to serve as armed guards for the agency’s spies.
The GRS, as it is known, is designed to stay in the shadows, training teams to work undercover and provide an unobtrusive layer of security for CIA officers in high-risk outposts.
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Bodyguard details have become so essential to espionage that the CIA has overhauled its training program at the Farm — its case officer academy in southern Virginia — to teach spies the basics of working with GRS teams.
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“They don’t learn languages, they’re not meeting foreign nationals and they’re not writing up intelligence reports,” a former U.S. intelligence official said. Their main tasks are to map escape routes from meeting places, pat down informants and provide an “envelope” of security, the former official said, all while knowing that “if push comes to shove, you’re going to have to shoot.”
We're spending our money in Afghanistan, making their ruling elite, and ours literally pots of money. Meanwhile the Chinese are doing what….? That's right building high speed rail. Meanwhile our passenger trains, when you can find one, average a searing 59 miles an hour across tracks laid when your grandfather was a boy.
BEIJING — China on Wednesday opened the world’s longest high-speed rail line that more than halves the time required to travel from the country’s capital in the north to Guangzhou, an economic hub in southern China.
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Trains on the latest high-speed line will initially run at 300 kph (186 mph) with a total travel time of about eight hours. Before, the fastest time between the two cities by train was more than 20 hours.
The Chinese are transforming themselves economically. But they are using a political system to do it that people flee when they are able. This is a very important insight to keep in mind. Ironically many of these fleeing Chinese end up in the U.S., bring their money with them.
Most countries worry about brain drain. China is worried about millionaire drain.
A new report in China shows that 150,000 Chinese – most of them wealthy – emigrated to other countries in 2011. While that number may not seem high for a country of more than a billion people, the flight of China's richest – and the offshoring of their fortunes – could cost the country jobs and economic growth, according to the study from the Center for China and Globalization and the Beijing Institute of Technology.
At Olduvai Gorge, where excavations helped to confirm Africa was the cradle of humanity, scientists now find the landscape once fluctuated rapidly, likely guiding early human evolution.These findings suggest that key mental developments within the human lineage may have been linked with a highly variable environment, researchers added.
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The researchers discovered that Olduvai Gorge abruptly and routinely fluctuated between dry grasslands and damp forests about five or six times during a period of 200,000 years.
“I was surprised by the magnitude of changes and the rapid pace of the changes we found,” Freeman told LiveScience. “There was a complete restructuring of the ecosystem from grassland to forest and back again, at least based on how we interpret the data. I've worked on carbon isotopes my whole career, and I've never seen anything like this before.”
“Cheating creates its own gravitational force. The very act of cheating and getting away with it significantly increases the chances you'll do it again,” says Michael Josephson, president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Los Angeles. In its annual survey of high school students, 51% admitted cheating on an exam in the past year.
Phi Beta Iota: Cheating by individuals is the enabler of cheating by institutions. The consequences are global — poverty, disease, environmental degradation, wars, financial implosions, weather modification — all from a lack of ethics.
In Reciprocal System (RS) physics, Larson comes up with a better structure for the atom, based on the concept of scalar motion, and as a natural consequence of that structure determines two “destructive limits” for atoms: a thermal limit and an age limit. The thermal limit is the common limit used in thermo-nuclear reactions, but the age limit is unknown to conventional science and concerns the capture of charged, electron neutrinos by the atom that create isotopic mass.7 When the age limit is reached,8 an element becomes radioactive and explodes. When Larson applied those concepts to astronomy, he found a different mechanism for stellar combustion based on those limits. Combustion is based on exploding atoms—fission, not fusion—and that led to
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When you consider these consequences from a corrected stellar evolution, one conclusion is obvious: global warming is not due to flatulent cows, but to the fact the sun is getting hotter, and will continue to get hotter.
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In my opinion, this solar transition is the “harvest” or “ascension” to a new state for life on Earth—not just man—all life on Earth. All the physical properties get “kicked up a notch,” as Emeril would say, commonly known as a “higher density” or a “higher dimension.”
[Editor's Note: The World Brain was proposed in collection of essays by H. G. Wells, wherein Wells describes his vision of the world brain: essentially a free, synthetic, universal, authoritative, and permanent “World Encyclopaedia” very much like today's Wikipedia. Wells imagined this resource would help world citizens make the best use of all available human knowledge and could therefore contribute directly to world peace.]
The Need
Four developments converged in 2009 to suggest the end of the industrial era in which treaties and military force were the principal means of governing human affairs;
Brahimi Report calling for a renaissance in UN decision-making and decision-support
There is an urgent need for a new means of hybrid self-governance that reflects the diversity of human interests and capabilities. We are in the Information Era, but the United Nations (UN) and its Members are still “dumb” and unable to harness the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth. Humanity urgently needs some form of global unified archive system without the current “top down” partitioning and access restrictions, such that all organizations and individuals can contribute their knowledge to a creative commons that leaves no knowledge sidelines, and no fraud undiscovered.
The fragmentation of knowledge, and the gap between people with power and people with knowledge, is the root cause of our universal failure to deal responsibly with the ten high-level threats to humanity.
World Information Summits and Global Knowledge Summits have not addressed the core need: to connect all human minds with one another and with all information in all languages. The UN and its Members cannot be effective in this new era without creating a United Nations Open-Source Decision-Support Information Network (UNODIN) that is “Open” in every possible sense of the word (using open source software and open spectrum, creating open source intelligence), and that allows the harmonization of what the public knows, does, and funds.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Proposed Solution
A single World Brain Institute with an infinitely-scalable online Global Game (actually a Participatory Planning and Budgeting System at all levels of governance) can be implemented immediately at a cost of under Euro $12 million a year, with the almost certain prospect of being self-funded within three years by selling very low-cost subscriptions to the one billion rich, enabling free access to the five billion poor. The World Brain and a Global Game are not new ideas—what is new is the combination of the desperate need for reliable “whole systems” analytics, and the immediate availability of open and hence affordable and scalable information and communication technologies (ICT) to meet that need.
This program, under UN auspices, would encourage regions to establish Regional Information-Sharing and Sense-Making Networks, and Members to create national call centers harnessing the eight tribes of intelligence in each country (academic, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental or non-profit) and able to educate the poor “one cell call at a time.” The UN could ask for US funding of an Office of the Assistant Secretary for Decision-Support, and create an Office of Information-Sharing Treaties and Agreements at the same time. A Strategic Analytic Model has been devised along with a concept for extending the proven concept of Participatory Budgeting while harnessing all interested humans to digitize “true cost” information on all products, services, and behaviors. This is a self-healing self-learning system with an open ethic that guarantees integrity with transparency. Within the Global Game, a Global Range of Needs Table can connect the one billion rich with the item-level needs of the five billion poor, to include free cells phones connecting the poor to knowledge.
Benefits
A (UN) World Intelligence Center was first proposed by Quincy Wright in 1957, this now-achievable program will ride the emergent wave of evolutionary activism that can potentially bypass blocking industrial-era bureaucracies and enable the poor to create infinite stabilizing wealth. The UN can become the administrator of the World Brain and Global Game™, and in this way harness the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth while helping all achieve global learning.
Examples
ClimateGate. Hacktivism leads to public outrage as well as renewed voice by scientists who have been ignored and often repressed by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where 50 core scientists with a strong ideological belief have been able to sway another 150 participating scientists while ignoring over 5,000 dissenting scientists. If a World Brain Institute with an embedded Global Game existed, the Secretary General (SG) would be able to see on a large display a visualization of all scientists as well as public leaders and their relative position—a single institution would not be able to mislead the SG. At the same time the SG and Members would have two other benefits:
1. Climate Change would be presented in relation to ALL ten threats to humanity and in relation to all twelve core policies (Agriculture, Diplomacy, Economy, Education, Energy, Family, Health, Immigration, Justice, Security, Society, Water). It would be understood, in this context, that the social harm to the UN goals of eradicating poverty and infectious disease is greater than the benefit of reducing carbon emission in the poorest of countries, and the misrepresented data could be seen.
2. Intervention strategies could be identified and quickly communicated throughout the world. Wal-Mart, for example, has eliminated $25 million a year in truck idling costs (and the related emissions) by installing small batteries to run truck cabin systems when trucks are not in motion.
Iraq-Afghanistan. It is now clear that the US and UK decisions to invade both IQ and AF were based on ideologically-defined policy preferences, and completely refuted by both secret and public decision support. In the US those of us prepared to pay $100,000 for full-page information advertisements against the war saw our money refused by a captive press. Within the UN, there was no competing voice armed with public information to refute the lies presented to the UN by the US Administration. If a World Brain Institute with an embedded Global Game™ existed, the SG would be able to see on a large display a visualization of all leaders (not just political but religious, economic, and academic) and their relative position—a single government would not be able to mislead the SG. At the same time the SG and Members would have two other benefits:
1. The “true cost” of both invasions could be properly presented to all Members and their publics, and a rich harvest of multi-cultural perspectives factored in—the US leaders for example, were unaware of the Sunni-Shi’ite split in Iraq, or the implications of the Pakistan Sunni nuclear bomb in relation to the Iranian effort to create a nuclear deterrent against Sunnis, not the US or Israel.
2. The legitimate planning concerns of the diplomats and the commercial specialists, as well as the US military officers such as the Chief of Staff of the Army who knew full well the instability that can occur from going in “light,” could have been properly acknowledged, and a multi-national multi-cultural campaign plan developed to leverage the Golden Hour so as not to lose the peace.
Conclusion
The World Brain Institute and Global Game are the means by which the Secretary General can leverage the moral and practical value of “Open Everything,” making it possible to hear all voices, to nurture appreciative inquiry and deliberative dialog at all levels, and to achieve truth & reconciliation across failed states whose poor can be empowered with cell phone connectivity and education “one cell call at a time,” so as to create infinite stabilizing wealth in situ.
Robert David Steele (Vivas) – U.S. Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer for twenty years. Second-ranking civilian (GS-14) in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988 – 1992 and a member of the Adjunct Faculty of Marine Corps University. Also former clandestine services case officer with the CIA. 25-year U.S. military and intelligence career. Currently he is Founder and CEO of OSS.net and a well known proponent of Open Source Intelligence.
