Public Intelligence Blog

Ralph Peters

Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
House Committee on Foreign Affairs
Baluchistan Hearing, February 8, 2012
Testimony of Ralph Peters, military analyst and author

“PAKISTAN AS A FAILING EMPIRE”

2012-02-09 Ralph Peters House Testimony, Baluchistan and Pakistan (8 pages, doc)

Introductory remarks: This testimony arises from three premises.

First, we cannot analyze global events through reassuring ideological lenses, be they left or right, or we will continue to be mistaken, surprised and bewildered by foreign developments. The rest of the world will neither conform to our prejudices nor behave for our convenience.

Second, focusing obsessively on short-term problems blinds us to the root causes and frequent intractability of today’s conflicts.  Because we do not know history, we wave history away.  Yet, the only way to understand the new world disorder is to place current developments in the context of generations and even centuries.  Otherwise, we will continue to blunder through situations in which we deploy to Afghanistan to end Taliban rule, only to find ourselves, a decade later, impatient to negotiate the Taliban’s return to power.

Third, we must not be afraid to “color outside of the lines.”  When it comes to foreign affairs, Washington’s political spectrum is monochromatic: timid, conformist and wrong with breathtaking consistency.  We have a Department of State that refuses to think beyond borders codified at Versailles nine decades ago; a Department of Defense that, faced with messianic and ethnic insurgencies, concocted its doctrine from irrelevant case studies of yesteryear’s Marxist guerrillas; and a think-tank community almost Stalinist in its rigid allegiance to twentieth-century models of how the world should work.

If we do not think innovatively, we will continue to fail ignobly.

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Phi Beta Iota:  The following is a comment posted  to the reviewby Robert Steele of Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul (Carroll & Graf, 2002).  It is a combination of Constitutional and religious counterintelligence commentary that we found to be encouraging–most American Jews are not Zionist sayanim [traitors to the USA, clandestine assets for the Mossad].

FULL EXTRACT:

Oh c’mon as Jew I’m offended. You doing that only proves him right, jeez dude way to be reactionary. It’s more about the state of Israel. There are plenty of American Jews that see Israelis as arrogant to say the least…

I’m an American first. Well….it’s not like the people that run the place have any sense of loyalty beyond money and family so to my own ears they sound hallow, but it’s the only thing we have left right? Anyway Sanayim was removed from wikipedia so waybackmachine led me to a former Mossad intelligence officer Victor_Ostrovsky who actually admitted to it’s existence and wrote at length.

General James Clapper

Intelligence Chief Describes Complex Challenges. America and the world are facing the most complex set of challenges in at least 50 years, the director of national intelligence told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence here today.

James R. Clapper Jr. said capabilities, technologies, know-how, communications and environmental forces “aren’t confined by borders and can trigger transnational disruptions with astonishing speed.”

“Never before has the intelligence community been called upon to master such complexity on so many issues in such a resource- constrained environment,” he added.

CIA Director David H. Petraeus, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Army Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess Jr. and others accompanied Clapper during his testimony on Capitol Hill. Clapper spoke for all agencies in his opening statement.

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All U.S. agencies are combating the complex environment and making sense of the threats by continuing to integrate the community and “by taking advantage of new technologies, implementing new efficiencies and, as always, simply working hard,” Clapper said.

Still, he said, all agencies are confronting the difficult fiscal environment.

“Maintaining the world’s premier intelligence enterprise in the face of shrinking budgets will be difficult,” the director said. “We’ll be accepting and managing risk more so than we’ve had to do in the last decade.”

Terrorism and proliferation remain the first threats the intelligence agencies must face, he said, and the next three years will be crucial. [Read more: Garamone/AFPS/31January2012]

Tip of the Hat to AFCEA.

Below the Line:  Craft of Intelligence for the 21st Century

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Venessa Miemis

As some of you know, I’m in the midst of helping build a chaordic living systems enterprise. Our core group is currently having fascinating conversations about mission, values and the kind of culture we want to cultivate amongst ourselves, which in turn will inform what we model and inspire in the world.

As the days go by, we’re becoming more comfortable opening up to each other and really unpacking our core beliefs. This is helping us find alignment and coherence, which must happen before we construct our shared vision and lay our foundation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about open-source philosophy, creative work, and a passion-driven lifestyle. While on my flight out to San Francisco yesterday, I reread a book from my graduate work called The Hacker Ethic: A Radical Approach to the Philosophy of Business. (a hacker, btw, is defined as “an expert or enthusiast of any kind”). They laid out some core values of the hacker ethic, which felt very much in alignment with the way I operate and how I’d want to interact with my colleagues in this creative economy.

How do these 7 values strike you?

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David Swanson

The Betrayal of the Nobel Peace Prize

Alfred Nobel’s will, written in 1895, left funding for a prize to be awarded to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

The first such prize, awarded in 1901, went to Jean Henry Dunant and Frédéric Passy, two men who held and promoted peace congresses, two peace activists, two men who were not elected officials.  Nor were they war makers who had exercised restraint in some instance or other.  In 1902, again, the peace prize went to two peace activists.  In 1903 the prize went to a member of the British Parliament, but one who had worked for peace and not for war.  In 1904, the laureate was what we would now call an NGO, but one that had worked for peace and not for war.  In 1905, a woman who had played a role in the creation of the prize, an author and a peace activist, someone who indeed held and promoted peace congresses, was the first female winner.  And then came 1906.

In 1906, the Nobel prize for peace was awarded to a lover of war by the name of Theodore Roosevelt.  He had up to that point done, and would continue until his death to do, more to promote war than peace.  Was it possible that he had nonetheless done the most or the best work for international fraternity, demilitarization, and peace congresses?  Frankly, no.  He was prominent.  He was a president of a rising empire.  Those, and his negotiating a peace between two other nations, were not sufficient qualifications.  A disastrous trend had begun in the very mixed history of the peace prize.

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Syria: Special comment. Readers are rightly perplexed about conditions in Syria. Syrian press restrictions inhibit any neutral or balanced coverage. Everything reported from opposition sources and activists is biased and some reports of massacres include manufactured images, according to eyewitnesses.

International news descriptions of a worsening crisis receive no offsetting coverage of testimony from non-Sunni and non-opposition sources that little is occurring. The massacres are not taking place, occurring to sources that receive messages from Orthodox Christians living in Homs, for example. Life goes on in all of the towns and ports.

Skirmishes at checkpoints are the most common form of clash. That means four or five people fire a few rounds at four or five soldiers or policemen. Defectors are Sunni conscripts. The Syrian Army is about 60% conscript. Desertion is common in conscript armies. Defectors from the professional, full-time, non-conscript core of the force, most of whom are Alawites, have not been reported.

The point is that western media present one side of the struggle — that of the exiled Sunni politicians and activists with cell phones. Clips from social networking media are heavily one-sided and some are not authentic.

Limited communications from people caught in the middle, non-Muslims, suggest there is a lot less fighting and fewer deaths. Reports of carnage and massacres of hundreds do not seem to be accurate, except in opposition propaganda media.

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DEADLY SPIN: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans

Since Wendell Potter walked away from his executive position at a top health insurance company in May of 2008, he has worked tirelessly as an outspoken critic of corporate PR and the distortion and fear manufactured by America’s health insurance industry. It is a PR juggernaut that is bankrolled by millions of dollars, rivaling lobbying budgets and underwriting many “non-partisan” grassroots organizations. How would Potter know? He wrote many of the industry’s talking points himself.

Source

DefDog

A Battle the President Can’t Win

His decision on Catholic charities makes Romney’s big gaffe look trivial.

What a faux pas, how inept, how removed from the essential realities of America. Yes, I’m referring to President Obama. But let’s do Mitt Romney first.

. . . . . .

EXTRACT:

But the big political news of the week isn’t Mr. Romney’s gaffe, or even his victory in Florida. The big story took place in Washington. That’s where a bomb went off that not many in the political class heard, or understood.

But President Obama just may have lost the election.

The president signed off on a Health and Human Services ruling that says that under ObamaCare, Catholic institutions—including charities, hospitals and schools—will be required by law, for the first time ever, to provide and pay for insurance coverage that includes contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization procedures. If they do not, they will face ruinous fines in the millions of dollars. Or they can always go out of business.

In other words, the Catholic Church was told this week that its institutions can’t be Catholic anymore.

Read full article.

300 Million Talons...

Our naked, obese, rather retarded Emperor is “outed.”

Is US democracy being bought and sold?

How corporations, unions and political action committees are shaping the candidate pool.

Read full article with many video and other links.

See Also:

Review: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy