Public Intelligence Blog

Who, Me?

A model for all of us.

General James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis Email About Being ‘Too Busy To Read’ Is A Must-Read

Geoffrey Ingersoll

In the run up to Marine Gen. James Mattis‘ deployment to Iraq in 2004, a colleague wrote to him asking about the “importance of reading and military history for officers,” many of whom found themselves “too busy to read.”His response went viral over email.

Security Blog “Strife” out of Kings College in London recently published Mattis’ words with a short description from the person who found it in her email.

General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, USMC (Ret)

Their title for the post:

With Rifle and Bibliography: General Mattis on Professional Reading

[Dear, "Bill"]

The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s experience), i.e. the hard way. By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

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Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Debunking Civil War Myths – Long Proven Wrong

The Victors Write the War History, but Should Their Lies be Immortal?

[Veterans Today Editors Note: I was 46 before I learned that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave  anywhere ....Jim W. Dean]

… by  Steve Scroggins

The most persistent and pernicious Big Lie regarding the so-called “Civil War”— more properly called the “War to Prevent Southern Independence”— is this:

Noble and saintly yankees fought the war to abolish slavery; evil Confederates fought to preserve it. 

The historical record incontrovertibly refutes this Big Lie and yet it lives on, repeated incessantly by many who know better, and by many, many more who accept without challenge what they were taught in government schools.

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April 4, 2012
Who Killed Dr. King? Free the Files, Find the Truth

On the 44th anniversary of the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. COPA will hold a vigil with banners and handout sheets at the new Martin Luther King Memorial site on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The event will start at 9:00 am and last until 10:00 pm in the Forecourt entrance to the Memorial, off Maine Avenue south of the Lincoln Memorial. We want to commemorate the event because we cannot remember his life if we forget his death. Our flyer will focus on the evidence of James Earl Ray’s innocence, the Memphis Civil Trial ruling, and our efforts to release the classified government records on his life and death. The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Records Act is still pending introduction by Senator John Kerry and Representative John Lewis, and people attending our event are encouraged to visit their offices near the Capitol that day to urge them to move on the bill. We have been assisting in an effort to get the Memphis trial transcript up on the web, since it has been removed in large part at the Martin Luther King Center site. I hope you will join us there for a shift. RSVP.

Also see:
+ Videos of William Pepper (King friend and family attorney)
+ Audio interviews + book “An Act of State” by William Pepper
+ Review: An Act of State–The Execution of Martin Luther King, New and Updated Edition

Robert David STEELE Vivas

I have begun drafting my portion of the new Handbook of Intelligence Studies (Routledge, 2013), it is a chapter early on entitled “The Craft of Intelligence.”  I pick up where Allen Dulles and Sherman Kent left off.  My graphic on Intelligence Maturity captures the essence of my thinking at the strategic level, but of course there is more to come, including the desperate need to restore integrity to all that we do.

In 1988 I ghost-wrote for the Commandant of  the Marine Corps an article that he enhanced and signed, “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990′s.”  At that time my focus was on the difference between the conventional threat and the emerging unconventional threat.

Now my focus is on the purpose and process of intelligence as decision-support.  We must — we will — move from secret intelligence for the few to open intelligence for the many; from expensive centralized largely worthless intelligence to free and low-cost distributed intelligence relevant to every person at every level on every issue; from intelligence as window-dressing for channeling $80 billion a year to banks and corporations, to intelligence as an integral element of every aspect of a Smart Nation.

Today Owl sent me a link to an article, Philip E. Tetlock and Barabara A Mellers, “Intelligent Management of Intelligence Agencies,” American Psychologist, 2011, pp. 1-12.  I  respect Owl, so I printed it and read it twice.

This article is completely out of touch with reality and the authors have not bothered to familiarize themselves with the literatures pertinent to their endeavor.  Out of 89 cited sources 12 are non-intelligence-related prior publications of the lead author, 1 is a prior publication of the second author, and 11 are ostensibly about intelligence but truly marginal selections.  So 12% sources on the subject, 13% self-citation, and 75% escoteric psycho-babble irrelevant to the actual challenge.  As an intelligence professional, I am offended that two ostensibly erudite individuals would dare to publish this trype without even a semblance of understanding of the subject under discussion.

See Also:

Robert Steele: The Craft of Intelligence – OLD vs. NEW

Here are a few comments and additional links:

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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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+ SaveJejuIsland.org

+ Article 1 , Article 2

+ Photos of resistance

+ Videos of resistance: One, Two, Three

Patrick Meier

On Genghis Khan, Borneo and Galaxies: Using Crowdsourcing to Analyze Satellite Imagery

My colleague Robert Soden was absolutely right: Tomnod is definitely iRevolution material. This is why I reached out to the group a few days ago to explore the possibility of using their technology to crowdsource the analysis of satellite imagery for Somalia. You can read more about that project here. In this blog post, however, is to highlight the amazing work they’ve been doing with National Geographic in search of Genghis Khan’s tomb.

Read full post with varied illustrations and links.

The memorandum “Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001” has been circulating for years on the Internet, studiously ignored by most.  It was previously posted as a journal item on this website.  Since then, the public has learned a great deal more about both gold and greed, and the memorandum is once again circulating.

This is by no means the complete story, and there are some leaps of imagination and speculation that must be deeply investigated or discounted.  Central to appreciating the magnitude of the government cover-up is the FACT that MONTHS before 9/11 Dick Cheney set in motion the national counter-terrorism exercise that gave him complete control on “the day” of 9/11.

What is clear is that there is a great deal more investigation to be done, and that a truth and reconciliation commission should be created in  time to put Dick Cheney and the others on the stand before they either die a natural death or are assassinated by foreign governments righteously angry over what has been done to them by American children playing with fire.

Here are a few extracts that today have a greater likelihood of being appreciated for their substance.

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John Steiner

Best of TomDispatch: Chalmers Johnson, Dismantling the Empire

Chalmers Johnson (RIP)

TomDispatch.com, 7 August 2011

EXTRACT

Three Good Reasons to Liquidate Our Empire and Ten Steps to Take to Do So

1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism

2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us

3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases

. . . . . . . .

Chalmers Johnson

10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire (Abridged)

Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key places to begin:

1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.

2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the “opportunity costs” that go with them — the things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can’t or won’t.

3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture.  Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad.

4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters — along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth — that follow our military enclaves around the world.

5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.

6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world’s largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism.

7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.

8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Ending empire would make this possible.

9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.

10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.

Read full article with many links…

The Impact Today and Tomorrow of Chalmers Johnson

Steve Clemons

The Washington Note, 21 November 2010

Read full summary….

Phi Beta Iota:  The second article is a stunning review of the intellectual life of Chalmers Johnson, who was among many things a net assessments analyst for Allen Dulles.  He pioneered the study of “State Capitalism” and considered the US to be a greatly under-performing economy for its failure to move away from military unilateralism and toward sustainable development.