Public Intelligence Blog

Truth, lies and Afghanistan

How military leaders have let us down

LT. COL. DANIEL L. DAVIS

Armed Forces Journal,

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

. . . . . . . .

Tell The Truth

When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.

Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start. AFJ

Read full article.

See Also:

Marcus Aurelius: Col Paul Yingling, Departing

Jim Sinclair Discusses “Positive Economic News Psy-Op” And Fraudulent Economic Figures

In this interview, Ellis Martin speaks with Jim Sinclair about the “positive employment outlook” reported by the government and the media and the exuberance associated with it. Where do these numbers come from? Mr. Sinclair also has compelling advice for the listener regarding how to protect oneself from the ultimate endgame related to Quantitative Easing and the decline of the dollar. What is China’s direct influence or input in QE 3? Is it in their best interests to prop up the dollar and the US economy? How relevent is the Yuan? Listen to another unedited interview.

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.

Berto Jongman

Al Qaeda in Iran

Article Summary and Author Biography

Phi Beta Iota:  There are two competing narratives, neither of which is properly researched and documented.  Narrative A (our tentative preference) has all of these Al Qaeda stories as part of a contrived joint Israeli-led but US supported disinformation campaign to justify armed force against Iran.  Narrative B (equally plausible, but the point is we do not actually know) has Iran — these are Persians, not ragheads — well-prepared to do asymmetric attacks via multiple channels including the remnants of Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda posers.  This would including exploding apartments in Tel Aviv.  We really don’t know, and it is a rather important question.

Berto Jongman

Terrorist Attack Map Shows Terrorism ‘Hot Spots’ Across U.S.

Can science predict where terrorists will strike? Not quite. But researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the University of Massachusetts, Boston (UMB) have created a detailed map of where terrorism attacks have occurred since 1970 – and it reveals some big surprises.

The map’s accompanying study, conducted at the UMD’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), found that while certain areas (those surrounding Manhattan and Los Angeles, for example) have endured as terror ‘hot spots’ throughout the study, others have come and go. In the 2000s, for example, there has been a higher-than-average rate of attacks in Maricopa County, AZ, Phoenix’s county. King County, WA, on the other hand, was a terror hot spot in the 1970s and 1980s, but has been largely quiet since.

Click on Image to Enlarge

The START researchers called 65 of the nation’s 3,143 counties hot spots, although that only means that these counties experienced higher than the national average of 6 attacks from 1970-2008.

The study, which looked at all 3,143 U.S. counties, also found that terrorism hot spots and motivations have changed dramatically from decade to decade. Where do terrorists come from? In the last decade, many politicians have conjured the image of Islamic fundamentalists from the Middle East. But in the 1970s, many attacks classified as ‘terrorist’ came from left-wing groups in Berkeley, San Francisco and surrounding areas.

The research showed a strong association between the county in which a terrorist attack occurred and its motivation. “For example,” a University of Maryland statement notes, “Lubbock County, Texas, only experienced extreme right-wing terrorism while the Bronx, New York, only experienced extreme left-wing terrorism.”

Similarly, particular ideologies’ inclination to terrorist attacks varied over the years.

“The 1970s were dominated by extreme left-wing terrorist attacks,” co-author Bianca Bersani, assistant professor of sociology at UMB, said. “Far left-wing terrorism in the U.S. is almost entirely limited to the 1970s with few events in the 1980s and virtually no events after that.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, domestic left-wing terrorism overwhelmingly took place in the San Francisco Bay area during the Vietnam War.

Other interesting findings include the fact that “religiously motivated attacks occurred predominantly in the 1980s, extreme right-wing terrorism was concentrated in the 1990s and single issue attacks ['e.g., anti-abortion, anti-Catholic, anti-nuclear, anti-Castro'] were dispersed across the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.”

The researchers hope that the insights from the study can be used to determine the relationship between terrorism and ordinary crime, which has historically been much easier to predict.

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

Berto Jongman

Does Terrorism Really Work? Evolution in the Conventional Wisdom Since 9/11 (Max Abrahms)

What Terrorists Really Want: Terrorist Motives and Counterterrorism Strategy (Max Abrahms)

Why Terrorism Does Not Work (Max Abrahms)

Max Abrahms Website

Phi Beta Iota:  Terrorism is a tactic.  Both Israel and the USA have used it to great effect, and evidently continue to use it today, not only as a flag political tactic, but in the case of Isreal, to sell security services (warn of car bomb; car bomb; sell tons of cameras and security services to morons that don’t realize they’ve been had).  Terrorists want what we all want: dignity for themselves and legitimacy in any government that pupports to be responsible for their liberty and general welfare.  The Preamble to the Constitution is always a useful touchstone–Ron Paul does not get three of the four parts:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

See Also:

Read the rest of this entry »

Syria a Satellite of Iran? Nah….

NIGHTWATCH: Syria, Iran, and the Regional Context

NIGHTWATCH: US Invades Iraq, Creates first Arab Shi’ite State

NIGHTWATCH: Push-Back on US Across AF PK IR SY

Mini-Me: Smoking Gun Documents on Iran From Israel Mossad?

Josh Kilbourn: Dollar Disappearing, US Sidelined on Syria / Iran

Journal: Turkey’s Emerging Grand Strategy

Journal: Turkey Emergent

Journal: The Rise and Rise Further of Turkey (Along with the Collapse of Israel and the NeoCons)

Journal: Stupid Is As Stupid Does–Israel…Again

Journal: Nuclear War Against Iran…Again

Journal: Here’s a Great Idea–Lets Piss Off Turkey

Iran–and the USA–Blew Arab Spring, Both Irreleva

Iran–and the USA–Blew Arab Spring, Both Irrelevant

Chuck Spinney: Israel, Not Iran, is Central Threat in Middle East

Chuck Spinney: Middle East New Geopolitical Map

Chuck Spinney: Paris-Berlin-Moscow Axis Reinstated

Chuck Spinney: Should We Fear Nuclear Iran or Nuclear Israel?

23 Worst Tyrants/Dictators (Yes, there’s more than 23) and Oops, there’s Saudi Arabia..

Phi Beta Iota:  Does not include relevant book reviews.

Perry Bezanis

“All governments and economic policies as we know them so far, are ‘mere artifacts of intellectual development so far’. Genetic imperative, meanwhile, drives the human life-form as a whole to ‘live as long as possible’ – but the only way of doing that is through science and science alone. American free-enterprise, capitalist democracy, in other words, is doomed -like it or not”.

http://www.condition.org/index3.htm

“Economics has evolved out of fundamentally natural mechanisms of human diasporation and eventual trade. For the greater part of history, these mechanisms were more or less satisfactory in the sense that it was not possible to foresee problematic consequences from underlying dynamics. Economics and economic theory, in this respect, have evolved as less concerned with consequences than with ‘invisible hand’s, ‘economic growth’ and abstract market properties more or less ignorantly conjured into ‘existence and importance’.

Critically missing therein is any reference to the biological nature of man and the nature of his influence on what is a closed-earth system -four considerations:

The parent website is http://www.condition.org.