Martin – Page 2 – Public Intelligence Blog

Brilliant, Sensible, Noteworthy, First-Rate, Truth in Your Face, February 10, 2008

Víctor Huggo Martin

I come to this movie as the son of an oilman, with 30 years spent all over the world, flying around the world at the age of 16 alone, and then moved on to the Marine Corps, the CIA, and other stuff. Over-all, I have spent close to 15 years in Latin America.

Bottom line: Fidel kicks US ass while also being a mixed blessing for the Cuban society.

There are an awful lot of individuals in denial, but the raw facts are these:

1) Castro overthrew a dictator that sold out the Cubans to US companies.

2) The US did everything in its (impotent) power to assassinate him while also imposing a brutal and probably illegal embargo on Cuba.

3) Now that we are all conscicous about both sustainability and health:

++++ SURPRISE: Cuba and the Amish are the TWO–the only two–models for sustainable development; and

++++ SURPRISE: Cuba not only has better health care than the US, but they can afford to send 10,000 doctors to Venezuela.

This is a great movie that Americans should watch, but will no5.

As a fine side note, the Bay of Pigs, an operation that was ill-conceived and badly supported, drove Fidel into Kruschev's arms, and led to the Soviet effort to install nuclar ballistic missiles in Cuba.

I do not believe in socialism and top-down elite control, which both the US and Cuba suffer from, but I do believe there is a third way between the US, Cuba-Venezuela, Costa Rica, and others. We are close to being able to use the Internet for digital deliberative dialog and real-time science as well as real-time decision-support.

If I had the ear of an honorable intelligent President, I would create a special envoy for Cuba and Venezuela, and find a way to create a Western Hemisphere Prosperity & Peace initiative with Venezuelan oil, Cuban health care, and US communications technology brought together.

CRYSTAL CLEAR: The US has been the rogue elephant. ENOUGH.

El Pueblo Avanca!

2000/04/082009/10/24

Review: Wilderness of Mirrors

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

No Winners or Losers, Only Victims,

April 8, 2000

David C. Martin

This book goes a long way toward explaining CIA's intellectual and operational constipation in the 1950's through the 1970's. It follows James Jesus Angleton, who tied the Agency in knots and went so far as to privately tell the French that the CIA Station Chief in Paris was a Soviet spy, and William King Harvey, who literally carried two six-guns both in the US and overseas “because you never know when you might need them.” Included in this book are some serious details about the operations against Cuba, a chapter appropriated titled “Murder Corrupts”, and a good account of how Harvey, in perhaps his most important achievement, smelled out the fact that Kim Philby was indeed a Soviet spy. The concluding thought of the book is exceptional: “Immersed in duplicity and insulated by secrecy, they (Angleton and Harvey) developed survival mechanisms and behavior patterns that by any rational standard were bizarre. The forced inbreeding of secrecy spawned mutant deeds and thoughts. Loyalty demanded dishonesty, and duty was a thieves' game. The game attracted strange men and slowly twisted them until something snapped. There were no winners or losers in this game, only victims.”

2000/04/072009/11/08

Review: Top Secret Intranet: How U.S. Intelligence Built Intelink – the World’s Largest, Most Secure Network

4 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Good Efforts by Good People Buried in a Bunker,

April 7, 2000

Fredrick Thomas Martin

I was given this book at Hacker's (the MIT/Silicon Valley legal and largely very rich group, of which I am an elected member) by a NASA engineer, went to bed, could not get the book out of mind, got up, and read it through the night. If it were not for the fact that Intelink is largely useless to the rest of the world and soon to be displaced by my own and other “extranets”, this book would be triumphal. As it is, I consider it an extremely good baseline for understanding the good and the bad of how the U.S. Intelligence Community addresses the contradictions between needing access to open sources and emerging information technologies while maintaining its ultra-conservative views on maintaining very restricted access controls to everything and everyone within its domain. I have enormous regard for what these folks accomplished, and wish they had been able to do it openly, for a much larger “virtual intelligence community” willing and able to share information. For a spy, information shared is information lost-until they get over this, and learn that information not only increases in value with dissemination but is also a magnet for 100 pieces of information that would never have reached them otherwise, the U.S. Intelligence Community will continue to be starved for both information and connectivity….an SGML leper in an XML world.

Tag: Martin

Review DVD: Fidel

Review: Wilderness of Mirrors

Review: Top Secret Intranet: How U.S. Intelligence Built Intelink – the World’s Largest, Most Secure Network