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

Clusterfuck Grim

That Afghan clusterfuck is getting grim. (Just talking about the political stuff, Karzai's openly daring us to GTFO, knowing full well that he would be dead within a week.

That is if he stayed - which he wouldn't.


This means that he knows we ain't going nowhere.

General Dostum is a non-starter. (A worse war criminal than even the U.S. can get away w/ backing. And our boy, Abdullah, is from the wrong tribe.)

Alas.

(I do love tweakin' the gurlz & boyz. Muzt be eazily amuzed.)

PS

So now, -- just how the Devil tastes this particular flavo[u]r of the Victorian? Artifact? [sic, recte artefact] ;)

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.

Indicators List For Instability Auteurs

Thought we'd spring a truncated 101 indicators list as aid to plebs wanting to establish a makeshift baseline for tracking events & developments in NatSec investment properties. This framework could be applied more universally than just to today's problem areas. Remember it's only child's play so have fun with it while always brushing any and all worries aside.

-Quality of leadership/organizational capabilities
-Responsiveness to popular demands
-Ability to deliver basic goods and services
-Internal security capabilities
-Effectiveness of civil/criminal justice systems
-Breadth and depth of political corruption
-Human rights violations
-Weakness of civil society
-Pervasiveness of transnational criminal organizations
-External support for government
-Ethnic/religious discontent
-Military discontent with civilian government
-Popular demonstrations/strikes/riots
-Insurgent/seperatist/terrorist group activity
-External support for opposition
-Threat of conflict with or in neighboring state
-Weakness of domestic economy/unemployment/inflation
-Degree of income disparity
-Capital flight
-Decreased access to foreign funds
-Reduced trade openess
-Extent of environmental degradation
-Food/energy shortages
-Ability to respond to natural disasters
-Contested elections
-Unpopular changes in food/energy prices
-Sudden imposition of unpopular policies
-Coup plotting
-Government mismanagement of natural disaster or national emergency
-Death of key figure

Tripple WTF -- The Khost CIA Bombing

WaPo's Joby Warrick has written a new book about the Khost CIA bombing.
Taking after the uninformed media nomenclature about the incident, he has named his book "The Triple Agent."

Certain CI folks have to be amused at his (and the other media parrots') credulity.

There is no such thing as a triple agent

Counterinsurgency Scorecard: New RAND study on Afghanistan

The failure to disrupt the insurgents' tangible support needs was identified as a biggie. The lack of "good governance" and legitimacy of Karzai government are also bothersome to RAND.

Oh, and about that "scorecard", Afghanistan is given a 3.5, which is lower than the lowest-scoring COIN win [a 5], but higher than the highest-scoring loss [a 0].

So there you have it.

Counterinsurgency Scorecard: Afghanistan in Early 2011 Relative to the Insurgencies of the Past 30 Years [27-page PDF]

The previously published RAND monograph, Victory Has a Thousand Fathers: Sources of Success in Counterinsurgency, used detailed case studies of the 30 insurgencies worldwide begun and completed between 1978 and 2008 to analyze correlates of success in counterinsurgency (COIN). A core finding was that a case's score on a scorecard of 15 equally weighted good and 12 equally weighted bad COIN factors and practices perfectly predicted the outcome of those 30 insurgencies. That is, the balance of good and bad factors and practices correlated with either a COIN win (insurgency loss) or a COIN loss (insurgency win) in the overall case. Using the scorecard approach as its foundation, a RAND project sought to extend the findings to the case of Afghanistan in early 2011. The effort involved an expert elicitation, or Delphi, exercise in which experts were asked to make "worst-case" assessments of the factors to complete the scorecard for ongoing operations in Afghanistan. The consensus results revealed that early 2011 Afghanistan scores in the middle of the historical record in terms of COIN wins and losses: Its score was lower than that in the lowest-scoring historical COIN win but higher than that in the highest-scoring COIN loss. This suggests an uncertain outcome in Afghanistan, but the findings may help provide additional guidance as operations continue.

Cambodia's Curse

From this coming Sunday's NYT Book Review: Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land

A study by the Cambodian psychiatrist Muny Sothara found PTSD "in 47 percent of the population"; another study, of Cambodian refugees in Massachusetts, found that 60 percent of PTSD victims there suffered from sleep paralysis, a half-conscious state of catatonia.

(...)

Social scientists are finding that PTSD is being passed from one generation to the next. Has this become Cambodia's curse?

Or is impunity the curse? In the aftermath of Pol Pot's death in 1998, the United Nations partnered with Cambodia's judges to try the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge. Brinkley explains the logic of the costly proceedings. "If nothing else, Ieng Sary fed the state's omnipresent culture of impunity," he writes of one Khmer Rouge leader. "If he, with the blood of two million people on his hands, faced no penalty, no censure, no retribution, how hard was it to accept the killing of a journalist here, a trade-union official there?"

(...)

The United States did not directly foist the Khmer Rouge on Cambodia. But Brink­ley describes how Lon Nol, who was friendly to Washington, overthrew Prince Sihanouk in a 1970 coup, and how the prince, in frustration, implored Cambodians to join the Khmer Rouge.

Brinkley disputes any further American complicity, even though the United States continued a secret carpet bombing campaign until 1973. But two scholars, Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, have seized on data on the bombing released by President Bill Clinton; beginning under Lyndon Johnson, the United States dropped more bombs on Cambodia than the Allies dropped in all of World War II. Brinkley seems to dismiss the argument that the extensive bombing, with its tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, might have added urgency to Sihanouk's plea to join the Khmer Rouge. Yet Owen and Kiernan report that former C.I.A. and Khmer Rouge officers affirmed the American bombing helped the Khmer Rouge win support.

Counterfactual Friday -- How Hitler Could Have Won

Keep the enemy penned in and ruthlessly finish them off before they make sanctuary to fight another day. Avoid vast, unrealistic aims that get you inextricably enmeshed...whoops, there we go again -- ranting like imbeciles about checkables, and this shamelessly off of somebody's splendidly studied counterfactual history  .

From this coming Sunday's NYT Book Review:

How did the Wehrmacht, the best fighting force, lose World War II?

(...)

The title of the book, “The Storm of War,” conceals an answer to Roberts’s central question about the reasons for the German defeat. The notion of war as a storm summons up the Nazi idea of a blitzkrieg, a lightning victory that would somehow resolve all of the political and economic problems of the German state.

(...)

Roberts, the author of several books of English history, maintains the tension in his narrative by suggesting that if the war had been a purely military rather than a political contest, fought without errors on the German side, then the Germans might have won. If one considers the categories of martial endeavor from bottom to top, from the bunker to Berlin, one can see what he means. The Germans enjoyed advantages in weaponry, engagement, tactics and sometimes strategy. But at the moments when strategy was linked to politics, the German advantage was lost. Hitler’s war aims were vast, unrealistic and inextricably enmeshed in an ideology that celebrated destruction, above all of Jews and other racial enemies, but also of Germans when they failed to win. The quick successes in Poland in 1939 and France in 1940 convinced many of the generals that Hitler was indeed a genius.

(...)

Throughout the book, Roberts notes errors that, if avoided, might have helped the Germans to win battles and perhaps even the war itself. Hitler, he says, should have begun the war three years later than he did, in 1942 rather than 1939. He should not have allowed the British to escape at Dunkirk as France fell.

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.

The Hiroshima Files

This Sunday's NYT Magazine will publish for the first time AFAIK some of the pictures of Hiroshima taken by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey.

Picture #1 I have seen before. But none of the rest.

Two months after an atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey commissioned by President Harry S. Truman began to study the extensive structural damage done to the city, from the reinforced-concrete buildings at its center to the traditional wooden ones on its outskirts. Truman’s goal was to collect information that would help U.S. architects and civil engineers design structures able to withstand a nuclear attack. The secretive report included 700 images of Hiroshima. Robert L. Corsbie, executive officer of the Physical Damage Division, which conducted the survey, kept the prints until his death, in 1967; their odyssey afterward included being rescued by a neighbor from the curb after being put out with the trash, eventually ending up at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2006. On May 20, the center is opening a three-month exhibition of the work. The government’s caption to slide No. 4 (above) refers to ‘‘air zero,’’ the site of the blast, and says, ‘‘Shows partly burned coat of boy who was in open near City Hall (Building 28) 3,800 feet from AZ.’’  [NYT]

"At the instant it happened, the pale Virgin was rising in the east, head, shoulders, breasts, 17° 36' down to her maidenhead at the horizon. A few doomed Japanese knew of her as some Western deity. She loomed in the eastern sky gazing down at the city about to be sacrificed. The sun was in Leo. The fireburst came roaring and sovereign...."  [Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow. pp.707-708]

4GW, Hamas, And Saatchi & Saatchi

Why Hamas has no need for Saatchi and Saatchi

There is little evidence that suggests that sanitizing or transforming the Palestinian brand produces much of a return, at least not for Palestinians.

Media-savvy westerners arrive in Gaza with usually just one stunning piece of advice for Gaza’s evolving de-facto government: you need a good PR firm. Hamas’s biggest problem, apparently, is not the 63-year illegal occupation: it’s branding.

(Article for some reason reminds me of all those online douche-bags who we had to educate in 4G war basics during the 2006 Izzzy/Hizzy dustup.)

Believe It Or Not -- Head Of State In Twitter-Catfight W/ Journalist

The other day I stumbled upon a live battle royal on Twitter between a head of state (President of the Republic of Rwanda, Paul Kagame) and a journalist (Ian Birrell).Since then, Ian Birrell has penned a piece about the spat.

There's simply too much to say about this gem of an event so I'll just let it rest by saying that this is some heavy shit. Kagame probably should have just sucked it up and kept quiet. If he had better advisors (like everyone else has) he would have been okay.

H/T to @chrisalbon for tipping off his peeps about the fracas while it was still raging.

Below is our on-the-fly cut 'n paste job of the exchange. Update: Just discovered that the folks over at A View From A Cave transcribed the event. Trust their version for fidelity - ours most certainly jumbled & stumbled on not a few of the salvos bursting in this remarkable curtain of fire.

Update: Just decided to delete our own sloppy & static transcript and instead link you to a dynamic post over at A View From The Cave. They've done a stand-up job of tracking the conversation and promise to update w/ any future developments. Can't beat that!

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).

Burns is the name, Bullshit is his game

A few goodies, much BS.  (Page 1 NYT Sunday Week in Review)


Gotta love the part about his warning piece sitting unused on 9/11. Just a nibble - Burns says Abu Zubaydah was #4 in AQ.  He was never a AQ member. This is known by IC.


Lest we forget to offer note, Albert Bachmann, a Colorful Swiss Spymaster, Dies at 81.LMAO

Dude's a pro compared with much of current crop of Ameritards

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.

Uncropped (You Might Have Noticed)

We could/should have released it way ahead of WaPo. Instead, we wasted head starts on celebratory stiff drinks.We should be excused. (Don't neglect to click-the-pic)