Thomas Leo Briggs is a retired CIA operations officer with 3 years military experience in US Army military police, 3 years as a Special Agent in the Drug Enforcement Administration and 26 years in the CIA. He tried to make use of computer capabilities to aid and assist HUMINT operations in a variety of ways throughout his last 18 years as an operations officer. He is also the author of Cash on Delivery: CIA Special Operations During the Secret War in Laos (Rosebank Press, 2009).
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Further reflection on HUMINT and OSINT. I see them as complementary to both operations (HUMINT collection) and analysis. I also see that they should be looked at differently for operations and analysis.
In operations, which I know more about than analysis, there is the general need for HUMINT operators (so as to not bias this toward any one member of the intel community, I use HUMINT operators rather than case officers) to know as much as as possible about the country, region, culture, etcetera where they will be working. Operators collect raw intelligence and it is turned into field intelligence reporting. Someone in the field must review and vet that raw intelligence – we used to call them reports officers. The review must be able to determine if the alleged raw intelligence is really that and not openly known information somewhere in the country or region. Obviously, there must be one or more officers in a field office with knowledge of as much about the open source information as possible, or has the tools at hand to check open source information, and also with knowledge of the secret intelligence that has already been reported, so as to avoid duplicative raw intelligence reporting.
This post is by Dr Katherine Firth who works in Academic Skills at the University of Melbourne, with a particular interest in research student literacies. Basically, Katherine is a Thesis Whisperer, like me. Unlike me, Katherine is still an active researcher in her field of 20th-century poetry. Over coffee Katherine told me about the ‘Cornell Method’ and kindly agreed to write a post. I found it enlightening, I hope you do too.
I take a lot of notes. Even when I was doing my PhD and I was taking thousands of pages of notes, I took them by hand. I tried using a computer, but there are so many things that are really hard to do on screen (drawing an arrow to make a connection between points, for example) that are really quick on paper. Also, you only need one hand to write notes, but two hands to type. And that free hand comes in useful for holding open books, grasping coffee cups, or stuffing your face with Gummi bears.
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Click on Image to Enlarge
Firstly, the template gives you less space to write notes. You aren’t supposed to record everything you see, or even everything that is interesting. Having fewer lines to write notes encourages you to be selective—just to chose the quotes or paraphrases or details you expect to include in your thesis. It’s so liberating. And it’s so quick. In under an hour, I went from opening the book for the first time to producing the notes in Figure 2.
Secondly, the template gives you a bigger margin than in a usual ruled note book. This is where you put key words, identify themes, or recurrent patterns. This is great to helping you to analyse what you’re putting down, and to find the relevant quote when you go back to it. It also helps you to stay on track. You can check: ‘are my key words the same as the ones in my research question / thesis title?’
But thirdly, and most valuably, the template gives you a big space at the bottom to write sentences that summarise the page. That is, you start writing your critical response on the notes themselves.
1. In an earthquake, there may be violent ground shaking; it will seem to last much longer than it actually does.
2. Fires will occur, caused by electrical shorts, natural gas, fireplaces, stoves, etc.
3. Fires in collapsed buildings will be very difficult to control.
4. The extent of the disaster will be difficult to assess, though this will be necessary to assure proper commitment of resources.
5. Emergency equipment and field units will commit without being dispatched. There will be an air of urgency and more requests for aid than units available to send.
6. Communications will be inadequate; holes will appear in the system and air traffic will be incredibly heavy.
7. Trained personnel will become supervisors because they will be too valuable to perform hands-on tasks.
8. Responding mutual aid units will become lost; they will require maps and guides.
9. Water will be contaminated and unsafe for drinking. Tankers will be needed for fire fighting and for carrying drinking water.
I put this first bit together to make it easier to grasp the depth and breadth of this scholarly and legal indictment.
Scholar Names Top US War Criminals
More Than Thirty Top U.S. Officials Guilty of War Crimes
According to the distinguished American international law authority, Francis Boyle, a Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois, Champaign, and the author of numerous books on the subject, “More than 30 top U.S. officials, including presidents G.W. Bush and Obama, are guilty of war crimes or crimes against peace and humanity,” and “legally akin to those perpetrated by the former Nazi regime in Germany.” “In international legal terms, the U.S. government itself should now be viewed as constituting an ongoing criminal conspiracy under international law,” Boyle said in an address Dec. 9th to the Puerto Rican Summit Conference on Human Rights at the University of the Sacred Heart in San Juan. The serial aggressions of the U.S. violate such basic documents of international law as the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles, Boyle said. As well, they violate the Pentagon’s own U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 on The Law of Land Warfare, which applies to the President himself as Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Armed Forces under Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. U.S. administrations since 9/11 may be charged with “crimes against peace” for their attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria, “and perhaps their longstanding threatened war of aggression against Iran,” Boyle said. Boyle said the so-called “targeted killing” of human beings in a non-battlefield situation is “pure murder” under basic principles of Anglo-American common law and international criminal law. And in this case, where these murders are both widespread and systematic, these murders constitute a Crime against Humanity under Article 7(1)(a) of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court. Although the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute, Boyle said, “nevertheless President Obama is subject to the jurisdiction of the ICC and its Prosecutor for murdering people in ICC member States.”
Boyle's List of War Criminals:
Civilian Both presidents since 2001
Their vice-presidents – Dick Cheney and Joseph Biden
Secretaries of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta
Secretaries of State Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and Hillary Clinton
National Security Advisors Stephen Hadley, James Jones, and Thomas Donilon
Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and James Clapper
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Directors George Tenet, Leon Panetta, and David Petraeus
Military
Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Some Regional Commanders-in-Chiefs, especially for the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), and more recently, AFRICOM
Chairman General Martin Dempsey, U.S. Army
JCS members including Admiral James Winnefeld Jr.; General Raymond Odierno, Chief of Staff of the Army; General James Amos, Commandant of the Marine Corps; Admiral Jonathan Greenert, Chief of Naval Operations; and General Mark Welsh, Chief of Staff of the Air Force
Central Command heads since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan include Lt. General Martin Dempsey; Admiral William Fallon; General John Abizaid; General Tommy Franks; Lt. General John Allen; and current commander General James Mattis. General Carter Ham of AFRICOM bears like responsibility.
Violent crime rates have been falling in recent years, but the number of people killed by firearms in the United States remains high. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report, between 2006 and 2010 47,856 people were murdered in the U.S. by firearms, more than twice as many as were killed by all other means combined.
