IO Sophistry -- 'Infiltrator' Redefined

Another volley in the BS IO.

A NATO study has found that nearly 90 percent of such killings stem from personal disputes or outrage rather than insurgent plots to infiltrate the security forces or use them as cover for attacks.

NFW.

John M. agrees that it is infiltrators.

It is clear that USG + MIL - in order to make their ridiculous IO narrative fly - have redefined "infiltrator" to mean someone who simply puts on a black market uniform and slips behind enemy lines to grease Coalition forces. I'm sure CI folks would object to such a limited definition. Even with such sophistry, the narrative proves false.

As we have argued for years (since the mess hall in Mosul, Iraq was blown up by someone mil announced was wearing a "black market uniform" - and investigation revealed to have been a infiltrated employee of the base), there is a determined information campaign to downplay the infiltrator problem in particular and the seriousness of insurgent challenges to post 9/11 US-led war efforts in general.

Domestic-facing Morale Operations do pay dividends. Ask many Americans who was the winner of the Iraq War and you will discover - to the surprise of everyone in the region - that it was the USA.

Indisputable that something like this is planned for our eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan.

AnglaVakt In Afghanistan

Another initiative, now a priority, is a program named “Guardian Angel.”

Also, notice that they have cleverly modified the "black market uniform" IO narrative. For the last month or so they have claimed that investigations determined that these are mostly not infiltrators (ridiculous on the face of it), but "disaffected" members of Afgh mil and police. They don't bother with the obvious implication if this was true - that treatment from US trainers or the shitty operational atmosphere or something equally bad was causing basically decent recruits to decide to turn on their Western allies.

They still do the "afghan uniform" misdirect in every case. Even when - as WaPo reported - the attacker wasn't even wearing a uniform. (The tea boy mentioned in NYT piece served the Afghan commander more than tea.)

US command has officially changed the designation from "green on blue attacks" to "insider attacks." And now we have this manpower-intensive "Guardian Angel" approach ...

The dire implications for the mission remain the same as when we first discussed the problem a couple of years ago. If our only hope for a decent exit from AF is to stand up a sizable security apparatus, and we have this disastrous "insider attacks" issue, we are fucked.

Hence, the only approach is to have a bullshit information operation to downplay the problem. 

Rwedux Rwednesday -- Losing Rwafghanistan

Posted by SMC 5yrs ago:


Being Modest, Being Newsweek Sep,2006


The United States edition of the October 2, 2006 issue of Newsweek features a rather different cover story from its International counterparts.

The cover of International editions, aimed at Europe, Asia, and Latin America, displays in large letters the title "LOSING AFGHANISTAN," along with an arresting photograph of an armed jihadi.

The cover of the United States edition, in contrast, is dedicated to celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz and is demurely captioned "My Life in Pictures."

Where's the River of Snot?

A senior US law enforcement official asked me if I noticed anything strange about the video footage of the UC Davis incident.

I told him that I had only seen the famous still photo in the press.  I hadn't seen any video.

"You've been exposed to pepper spray before haven't you?", he asked.  I recounted for him the time that I was responsible for a minimal AD from a large canister of the stuff inside a moving vehicle. 

He reached for his IPad and clicked on the first YouTube video he could find.  "What isn't right about this scene?", he asked.  I answered, "the protesters aren't hauling ass out of there. They aren't acting like they have been pepper sprayed."

"Where is the River of Snot?" He continued, "Before riot cops use pepper spray they mask-up.  Do you see any of the cops standing there wearing gas masks?  The stuff that they are spraying is marker.  They are identifying the protesters that they are intending to arrest.  Look right there, that other cop is standing in the mist with no effect."

He got no argument from me there.  That wasn't pepper spray.

"Then why aren't the cops coming to their own defense?," I asked.

Timing is everything.

SMC 101

SMC 101: 1) US Knew. 2) MIL Advisors Went. 3) ISR Yes.

and on the bigger story,

New tactical PSYOP tool operational day before yesterday (was supposed to be rolled out Nov 1). This much good to go, will ID when we get green light.


New tool fits seamlessly into existing PSYOP toolkit. SMC twit followers may have to twist in the wind an hour or two to get exact details


Approved for operational use (incl. detainee operations with permission of battalion commander).  Lulu.

Another Whistle Stop for the Caldwellville Express — Registan.net

Fine piece at Registan by Dan Smock. He is right about Caldwell's dog and pony show. And about the manipulation of the numbers.

And on the manip, today's NYT brings us the newest installment of "lets show progress in Afghanistan" (by dropping whole categories of attacks from the publicly released assessments.)

The real numbers are worse. We have this on the best of authority.

Some may think this is merely this generation's version of the "five-o-clock follies", and that the deception of the American citizens is being done for our own good. That would be to put a too charitable interpretation on the situation.

Everyone snickers and shrugs their shoulders at the fact that USG/MIL cannot learn shit (and that they have no institutional memory for lessons learned from past fuckups). Always they are assumed to be covered by the best of intentions. Saw the same thing in Iraq.

Nope, an established pattern like this is malfeasance (and misfeasance too, for any lawyers in the house). Clearly being influenced (even ordered) from the political level.

Not to mention that the people in that part of the world aren't buying it.


PS: In case the above sounds excessively cunty, I just meant to emphasize that there is no legitimate reason for them to pull this kind of shit. They could claim that morale operations - both of allied troops and the home front - are legitimate. Or that they are trying to influence the enemy.

But our troops mostly know the truth, and same with the enemy. This leaves the true audience for the message - the American people. Domestic morale operations today ain't like in WWII. Now they are only for CYA and to keep the $pigot flowing as long as possible.

The Plot is Kosher

Last week, a contact gave us a quick sitrep on the Quds Force/Saudi Amb allegation.

"The plot is kosher."

For a few seconds we were thinking we were off base in our impression that it was sheer bullshittery.

Until the source elaborated.

"YellowCake...IraqWMD...

Curveball...AluminumTubes ... TheBritishGovernmentHasLearned ... ", and about 5 or 6 other plums.  Laughing, we were tempted to ask him to repeat the tirade, but didn't want to be thought of as twats.

We took it as confirmation of our original thesis.

Ray McGovern has reached the same conclusion:

There used to be real pros in the CIA’s operations directorate. One — Ray Close, a longtime CIA Arab specialist and former Chief of Station in Saudi Arabia — told me on Wednesday that we ought to ask ourselves a very simple question:

"If you were an Iranian undercover operative who was under instructions to hire a killer to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington, D.C., why in HELL would you consider it necessary to explain to a presumed Mexican [expletive deleted] that this murder was planned and would be paid for by a secret organization in Iran?

"Whoever concocted this tale wanted the ‘plot’ exposed … to precipitate a major crisis in relations between Iran and the United States. Which other government in the Middle East would like nothing better than to see those relations take a big step toward military confrontation?"

...

Another point on the implausibility meter is: What are the odds that Iran’s Quds force would plan an unprecedented attack in the United States, that this crack intelligence agency would trust the operation to a used-car salesman with little or no training in spycraft, that he would turn to his one contact in a Mexican drug cartel who happens to be a DEA informant, and that upon capture the car salesman would immediately confess and implicate senior Iranian officials?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to suspect that Arbabsiar might be a double-agent, recruited by some third-party intelligence agency to arrange some shady business deal regarding black-market automobiles, get some ambiguous comments over the phone from an Iranian operative, and then hand the plot to the U.S. government on a silver platter – as a way to heighten tensions between Washington and Teheran?

Perfect.

Crucial Piece Re Our Slow-Motion Nightmare Just Hit The Wire

The Journalist and the Spies: The murder of a reporter who exposed Pakistan’s secrets

Dexter Filkins has presented a piece which is just chock full of institutional imperative (from several angles).

The circumstances surrounding Syed Shahzad's murder were so special that we kinda figured the history books would have to deal with it. Too frickin sensitive for any shorter time frame. We were overly optimistic. When narrative can be furthered, sensitivities go out the window.

His work was sometimes inaccurate, but it held up often enough so that other journalists followed his leads. At other times, he seemed to spare the intelligence services from the most damning details in his notebooks.
Ho ho ho. (Not really funny at all, just reminds us of several people.)


Islamabad was full of conspiracy theories about the Abbottabad raid: ... [that] Kiyani and Pasha had secretly helped the Americans with the raid.

[J]ust after the Abbottabad raid, Shahzad published a report claiming that the Pakistani leadership had known that the Americans were planning a raid of some sort, and had even helped. What the Pakistanis didn’t know, Shahzad wrote, was that the person the Americans were looking for was bin Laden.

Hadn't seen his story [which gets an important detail wrong], but can add some color. There were two separate raids. Two separate targets. Conducted within a fortnight or so of each other (UBL second). That's why we asserted immediately after UBL raid that we have done this before in PAK. PAK command knew all about the deepest incursions ahead of time. Not to mention that there were certain arrangements in place since around 2001 that PAK would assist in any UBL raid. And full deniability was to be enforced.

Now shit gets serious (as if the previous was chopped liver) ...


Shahzad’s journalism may not have been the sole reason that he was targeted. I.S.I. officials may have become convinced that Shahzad was working for a foreign intelligence agency. This could have elevated him in the eyes of the military from a troublesome reporter who deserved a beating to a foreign agent who needed to be killed.
...

There is no evidence that Shahzad was working for any foreign intelligence agency, but mere suspicion on this front could have imperilled him. “What is the final thing that earns Shahzad a red card—the final thing that tips him over from being a nuisance to an enemy?” a Western researcher in Islamabad said to me. “If someone concluded that he was a foreign agent, and that the stories he was putting out were part of a deliberate effort to defame the I.S.I. and undermine the I.S.I.’s carefully crafted information strategy—if anyone in the I.S.I. concluded that, then Saleem would be in grave danger.”
...

Given the brief time that passed between Shahzad’s death and Kashmiri’s, a question inevitably arose: Did the Americans find Kashmiri on their own? Or did they benefit from information obtained by the I.S.I. during its detention of Shahzad? If so, Shahzad’s death would be not just a terrible example of Pakistani state brutality; it would be a terrible example of the collateral damage sustained in America’s war on terror.

If the C.I.A. killed Kashmiri using information extracted from Shahzad, it would not be the first time that the agency had made use of a brutal interrogation. In 2002, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an Al Qaeda operative held by the Egyptian government, made statements, under torture, suggesting links between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden; this information was used to help justify the invasion of Iraq.
...

On May 27th, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Islamabad, and she presented to Pakistani leaders a list of high-value targets. According to ABC News, Kashmiri was on the list. That morning, Shahzad had published the article naming Kashmiri as the perpetrator of the attack on the Mehran base—broadcasting, once again, his connection to the militant leader.

As if to make amends for this rather inflammatory suggestion, Filkins then forwards what is clearly institutional spin from the IC (ours this time):

As with nearly all drone strikes, the precise number and nature of the casualties were impossible to verify. The high-level American official told me that the “tribal elders” were actually insurgent leaders. But he offered another reason that the Pakistani officials were so inflamed: “It turns out there were some I.S.I. guys who were there with the insurgent leaders. We killed them, too.” (The I.S.I. denied that its agents were present.)

What were I.S.I. agents doing at a meeting of insurgent commanders? The American official said that he did not know. [That last bit cinched it as a community info product. LMAO]

Lots of other interesting stuff in this long article, including a glimpse of a metanarrative involving the wider regional conflict.

Our business has always been to poke at metanarratives, just (usually) not explicitly identifying who are the targets or even which metanarrative is in play.

Ahmed Wali Karzai’s Killer Taliban Foe

Can you imagine what this would look like to President Karzai if he was a conspirato​rially-ori​ented nutjob? ;-)

Ahmed Wali Karzai’s killer had been a Taliban foe

Mohammad also met with U.S. and British military officials, and would be introduced to the new commanders when they rotated into Kandahar, the relatives said. Two of Mohammad’s brothers-in-law said they work as guards at a Central Intelligence Agency base in Kandahar — situated on a hillside at the former home of Taliban leader Mohammad Omar — as part of the agency-run paramilitary group called the Kandahar Strike Force.

These relatives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mohammad was not a member of the strike force, which Karzai helped recruit to fight the Taliban, but that he shared intelligence with U.S. officials and arrested hundreds of insurgents over the years.

“If there was something Sardar could do that the Americans couldn’t, they would ask him to do it,” Malik said. “If American forces were suspicious of someone, they were asking Sardar to make the arrest.”

(Thank goodness Hamid Karzai is a solid citizen, or else we might just have more problems with him than we do already.)

The Unbearable Lightness of Iraq

NYT is preparing a piece for tomorrow's print edition about the Iraq clusterfuck that states that the PR war is crucial to success (or lack therof) of the US endeavor.

To make this palatable to the citizenry in Iraq and the United States, the public relations game is to draft language that is politically acceptable yet obscures the reality that American soldiers will continue to face an enemy, will need to defend themselves and will almost certainly continue to die.

Also, article says that a US col. got pissed off and went off the narrative by issuing his own press release about a probably routine miscarriage of justice there. Embassy wants him to STFU. LMAO.

The fact that we have enabled an Iraqi regime to come to power that is antithetical to US interests is lost on the "we won the Iraq War" crowd.

Who's The Smelliest Dude In The Iraqi Homeless Shelter -- Taking On Iran

<>Fresh off a glorious day of hot dogs, water fights, and fireworks, they go and get us all grumpy again. This bullshittery is orchestrated as usual. (see SMC Maxim)

Iran's elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has transferred lethal new munitions to its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent months, according to senior U.S. officials, in a bid to accelerate the U.S. withdrawals from these countries

The Revolutionary Guard has smuggled rocket-assisted exploding projectiles to its militia allies in Iraq, weapons that have already resulted in the deaths of American troops, defense officials said. They said Iranians have also given long-range rockets to the Taliban in Afghanistan, increasing the insurgents' ability to hit U.S. and other coalition positions from a safer distance.

Such arms shipments would escalate the shadow competition for influence playing out between Tehran and Washington across the Middle East and North Africa, fueled by U.S. preparations to draw down forces from two wars and the political rebellions that are sweeping the region

The narrative is that Shiite militias are attacking U.S. forces - with the requisite help from Iran - as we pull out in order to get a leg up on other "anti-government Shiite militias" for the big sorting out that will occur when we draw down.

Apparently some tard in the IC predicted this would happen, so they think this is serious business. But of course it is bullshit. Reason: we have already succeeded in enabling a very pro-Iranian regime to take power there. The idea that there is a competition for being the smelliest dude in the homeless shelter is kinda exaggerated.

They hope that enough repetitions of the the now-revived "Iran is arming our enemies in Iraq" narrative and they will have the American public eating out of their hands.

But with 6 active interventions going at the moment (and counting), their goal of taking on Iran ain't gonna be in the cards any time soon. So they will settle for an extension of our commitment in Iraq

Trying to sound reasonable (but fails due to avoidable errors)

Kinda ignoring some basics here, but what can we expect (government-defined reality and all).

See The Heimat Formulation in XXXXXXXXXXXX and Influence Operations [S/NF]

And while we're checked in here at the shack of ill repute, a tribute: Robert Morris, Pioneer in Computer Security, Dies at 78

His son's case was all over the media, I'm sure y'all recall.

Black Market Narrative Breaking Down?

Concerned over the growing pattern of Afghan soldiers and police officers attacking their coalition counterparts, the American military is sending 80 counterintelligence agents to Afghanistan to help stem the threat of Taliban infiltration in the Afghan National Security Forces, military officials said Friday. 

...

Since March 2009, at least 57 people, including 32 American troops, have been killed in at least 19 attacks in which Afghan service members have turned their weapons on coalition forces. Another 64 were wounded. The totals do not include the attackers, many of whom were killed in shootouts or in suicide blasts. 


(Wha? Thought it was just a matter of black mkt uniforms. Narrative breaking down?)


The attacks have continued despite efforts to improve screening of recruits and crack down on the illegal sales of police and army uniforms. 
...

Whether the infiltration is widespread, the claims are hard to contest, and serve to shake popular confidence in the growing army and police forces. 

Adding to that distrust is the problem of Afghan soldiers and police officers — and impostors dressed like them — attacking military installations and government compounds. 

(Whew, thats better.  Gotta have that rigor in messaging.)

Hess This, Hess That

My [self-redacted] referral for security violation was from DIA Col [self re-dacted] (once commander of Spandau prison, knew Hess), dead now - would have been interested in this.

Hess's flight to Britain almost exactly 70 years ago has remained one of the great mysteries of World War II to this day. What compelled the Führer's right-hand man to risk his life on a spring day when 500 German bombers were carrying out their heaviest attack yet on London? Why did he offer peace to Great Britain at a time when it was the Wehrmacht's last fighting enemy and Hitler was preparing to attack the Soviet Union?

Until now, historians had assumed that Hitler's deputy was acting on his own. "Hess acted without Hitler's knowledge, but in the deep (if confused) belief that he was carrying out his wishes," British author Ian Kershaw wrote in his 2008 book, "Hitler: A Biography". But now a previously unpublished document is casting Hess's notorious one-way trip in a new light: A 28-page, handwritten report that historian Matthias Uhl of the German Historical Institute Moscow discovered in the State Archive of the Russian Federation.

CATCH-ALL Revisited

From an important new Jane Mayer piece:

When Binney heard the rumors, he was convinced that the new domestic-surveillance program employed components of ThinThread: a bastardized version, stripped of privacy controls. “It was my brainchild,” he said. “But they removed the protections, the anonymization process. When you remove that, you can target anyone.” He said that although he was not “read in” to the new secret surveillance program, “my people were brought in, and they told me, ‘Can you believe they’re doing this? They’re getting billing records on U.S. citizens! They’re putting pen registers’ ”—logs of dialled phone numbers—“ ‘on everyone in the country!’ ”

(Our insights went even further - scarfing everything - is still too hot for anyone else but SMC to have discussed.)

Aid, the author of the N.S.A. history, suggests that ThinThread’s privacy protections interfered with top officials’ secret objective—to pick American targets by name. “They wanted selection, not just collection,” he says.

...

Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”

DOMEX, And The Hard & Fast Of BS-Detection

Absurd -- Now they expect us to believe that the SEALs could have "fought their way out of Pakistan."

WaPo is running with the same story. We are covering for our helper(s) high up in Pak mil.  Anyone with access to Jane's ain't gonna buy it.

Also, the more they trumpet the DOMEX narrative the more it looks like we didn't get shit from the compound.

The formula that deals with the (inverse) ratio of bullshit to actionable intel is another hard and fast rule.

We warned them a week ago. They used to listen. Thinking of (at least) one Iraq war IO narrative that met its deserved early end after we shot it down. Seems the DOMEX BS is being handled at the political level (the pros know better).

Double-Crossed Into Lending That Promised Hand

Paks were involved, but were double-crossed as to target. (BTW, the media is saying how brave it was for Obama to have ordered the SOF assault instead of dropping bombs. They do not know that there have been other similar raids.)

Pak-based terrorist groups know Pakistan was involved in op, and shit's about to get real over there. You can understand them for asking just what the Pak mil was up to during the "40 minute firefight" and exfil when they had their "West Point" right next door?

The emphasis on DOCEX narrative is clearly to spook AQ associates - good move, but they are laying it on way too think. When dingbat local radio announcers are proclaiming expertise in the matter, time to tone it down. Transparent as hell.

Noteworthy is the hilarious walking back of more and more details. Particularly Brennan's shameless bullshittery about UBL hiding behind a woman. Amateur hour at the PSYOP shop? Also, the "living in luxury" theme. I've seen auto repair shops in Alhambra that were more luxurious than the Abbottabad blockhouse. Real deal is that UBL probably was bedridden and hooked up to a dialysis machine.

Pressing issue now (h/t ZH) is whether the currents will take the body close enough to the East coast of Japan for the radiation to revive him - thus making him unkillable, and twice as pissed off. Oh, and the courier business is just the cover story. UBL was tracked down from his PSN account information. ;-)

Seriously though, we are gonna have to see an asset issue -- an official edict that burials at sea are OK for Muslims. Apparently it is only kosher when the believer dies at sea too far from land to hygienically keep the body for later land burial. Under no circumstances is someone to be taken from land out to sea to be dumped.

I personally couldn't care less if the body was ritually washed by the piss of US servicemen, but there is trouble brewing if OGA strat PSYOP boyz don't get on the job ASAP. 

So, if it is true that Pakistani intelligence was abetting (even if double-crossed to such aid) in offing bin Laden, and kept that matter secret, then we can begin to sort out our fraught relationship with that troubled country on a more equitable, trusting basis. If that turns out not to be the case, then there will be a dreadful reckoning to come.

And it looks like someone has to be cutting his honeymoon short.

More "Black Market Uniform" bullshittery

Gunman Kills Foreign Troops at Kabul Airport

Six NATO service members were killed on Wednesday by a gunman wearing an Afghan Air Force uniform while attending a meeting of foreign and Afghan officers on the military side of Kabul International Airport, according to statements from Afghan and NATO spokesmen.

It was the fourth incident in the past two weeks in which a person wearing an Afghan security force uniform attacked from within a government compound.


Lemme guess, was the inside help Taliban received in the Kandahar jailbreak provided by "persons wearing prison guard uniforms"?

That we are getting Af spokesmen to tow our narrative line following recent incidents is evidence of a thus far well executed IO matrix, although this article does show some slippage

Painstakingly crafted BS, aimed at D.C. -- Too Bad (Would've Been Such An Uplifting Story)

Painstakingly crafted BS, aimed at D.C.

In Afghanistan’s south, signs of progress in three districts signal a shift

If this isn't a good enough tell:

“We start this year in a very different place from last year,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top coalition commander in Afghanistan, said in a recent interview.
...

Petraeus has not provided his withdrawal recommendation to Obama. The four-star general said the progress across southern Afghanistan remains “fragile and reversible,” although he also has made it clear to his subordinates that he thinks it can be cemented with enough time and military pressure.

Then this seals the deal:

Intercepted Taliban communications suggest insurgent commanders are increasingly demoralized, according to military intelligence officers.

The SMC maxim isn't something to be fucked with. Apparently they think most readers cannot imagine what would happen to above ref'd "military intelligence officers" [plural] if they had - without authorization - discussed this type of intel product with a reporter (even from WaPo).

And if intercepts really were showing this, it would be operationally imprudent in the extreme to advertise same.

Since the bullshittery meter has registered a positive, the baby must be thrown out with the bathwater.

Too bad, and it would have been such an uplifting story.

More On The Boundary Break

Security researchers, meanwhile, say Anonymous has changed the game. "The bar has been raised" with the targeted attack and breach of HBGary, says Marc Maiffret, founder and CTO at eEye Digital Security, who did some black-hat hacking as a teenager. "They may start to do more of that versus just DDoSing."


Maiffret says Anonymous has a large, global identity that includes political activists and hackers. "Rather than different people, they are gravitating to a central identity," he says.

Entirely predicted by the theory. Also, theory does not predict kumbaya environment. Precisely the opposite.