Curveball is Alive
It isn't surprising that Iraqi expatriates like Curveball should be trying to peddle a load of horse manure about Iraqi 'weapons programs' in the early zeroes.
It is not remarkable that Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and its US enablers such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Hannah, David Wurmser, Scooter Libby, Richard Perle, Michael Rubin, Abram Schulsky, etc., should have been running a sting on US intelligence (and most of them have never even been investigated for criminal activity).
What is sad is that we pay $43 billion a year for intelligence, and intelligence analysis should have been about avoiding being stung, not about gullibly buying the horse manure and labeling it caviar to be consumed at all Washington's best cocktail parties.
Perle and Wolfowitz were big advocates in the 1970s of a Team B approach to intelligence on the Soviet Union, whereby you constitute a group of people to look again at the CIA estimates and see if you couldn't find evidence for a darker, more pessimistic picture.
It is obvious that would you actually need is a Team B that is skeptical from the Left.
Daily Kos, Talkingpointsmemo, Eschaton, many others listed below on the libads blogroll, and I, volunteer to do it for free. Is Washington listening?
First item: Let's Team B what is being said in the released official US intelligence on Iran.
It would be easy.
Labels: Iraq
posted by Juan Cole @ 11/01/2007 07:57:00 PM
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I'm Confused 43 Billion and they made 90% of it up. I think Hollywood could have done cheaper.
jo6pac
What I'm wondering about at this point are the casualty statistics from Iraq, for October. It seems truly incredible, and wonderful, that that the US military casualty numbers are down, waaay down (38 dead, 47 wounded?! - those are some of the best numbers since the start of the occupation!!).
Perhaps this shows that by finally taking Shinsecki's advice and ramping up our numbers in Iraq to around the 300,000 level (if you include the contractors, which have also been ramped up during the "surge"), Bush has finally turned the corner in Iraq and peace is on the way.
Given this administration's penchant for lying and for number fudging and for distortion and for hedging, I doubt that we can be so optimistic. My guess is that the administration and the military have been fudging the numbers by using more indiscriminate methods, such as airpower, that put fewer US forces at risk, while counting the dead as terrorists, so that the increased civilian toll doesn't show. That seems to be exactly what has been done in Afganistan, where Karzai has been yelling about it, and we know that US bombing has quadrupled in Iraq in 2007 (according to USA today, anyway), so it seems likely that the same sort of tactic is being applied to Iraq.
This sort of heavy handed method seems to be Odierno's MO. In his previous command he reportedly used artillary to the same affect that bombing is apparently being used now. I don't see how it improves the chances for stability and peace in Iraq, if he and others are simply ramping up such heavy handed tactics.
I also wonder if more contractors are being used for dangerous duty, since thier casualties go unreported.
The decreased US casualties numbers seem to be news to dance in the streets about. I hope they really ARE the good news they seem to be, though we could make such good news even better by getting our soldiers out of Iraq entirely.
I think the idea of any Plan B, left or right, forgets one fundamental rule of intelligence. To borrow from the Army, intelligence is a different kind of kiss: keep it separate, stupid.
Intelligence, even open source intelligence, still has to maintain some degree of compartmentalization away from the participants, i.e. the left and right. I'm not alluding to some sort of sterile, just-the-facts-mam objective collection of data. Rather, I think of intelligence analysts more like judges in a courtroom, separate from the defense and prosecution, not tilted toward either, but rather tilted towards the overarching values of the institution. In other words, it's possible to have intelligence that is both pro-American and objective, while being neither Republican or Democrat.
Bloggers and, ahem, Informed Commenter's like TPM and DailyKos complicate matters when it comes to intelligence. When Josh Marshall compiles his data and then presents his views, is he an open source intelligence analyst or another commenter? When I read Informed Comment, am I reading a type of intelligence analysis?
I don't think they are OSINT. Not exactly. I think the difference is in credentials. Going forward, I think vetting OSINT will be a matter of lack of official credentials compounded with the quantity of intelligence sources. For instance, Informed Comment is straight-forward with its leftist leanings, but not enough to threaten the integrity of the information you're sharing. TPM is more obviously aligned with the Democratic party, but they're still separate enough to contain useful bits. DailyKos is outright affiliated with the Democratic party, and therefore their information is to be considered extremely tainted. They are all intelligence sources, but not intelligence themselves.
But if we judge by left or right leanings, doesn't that make almost everyone tainted? No, and again I reference the courtroom judge analog. If Josh Marshall is going to analyze OSINT, he must disconnect himself from TPM and any other professional credentials. The same would go for anyone at Informed Comment. That would satisfy OSINT's need for a lack of credentials.
The final hurdle for OSINT would be in trust. We trust the CIA's credibility because we trust the Constitution's credibility. I've been studying NATO's guide to OSINT and I personally believe we need to create a sort of open source constitution, a GPL-General Public License laying out precisely the terms and behaviors of open source intelligence. This would be what OSINT analysts effectively take an oath to, much like the CIA takes an oath to the constitution. Anyone in violation of this license/constitution would simply cease to be OSINT and become, itself, an intelligence source to be scrutinized and analyzed as normal by licensees.
At least that's what I'd personally like to do, anyway. Essentially I'd like to see Open Source Intelligence borrow more than simply it's namesake from Open Source Software Development. You could call it Team B, but it makes the whole world Team A.
I really like the idea of serving horse manure labeled as caviar to be consumed at all Washington's best cocktail parties. However using cow manure with certain naturally occurring mushrooms attached would probably result in massive improvements in the philosophical and intellectual outlooks of the attendees of said cocktail parties.
The whole whuptidoo about Curve-Ball is meant to con the public into believing that a rogue Iraqi nobody single-handedly fooled the Bushiites into invading Iraq...
The fact of the matter is, if CurveBall hadn't existed, he would have been invented...
Come to think of it - didn't they invent him? How else does one explain the administration's desperate faith in his accounts when his German handlers and many in the CIA reported him to be a fake and a liar?
In 2002, a cock could have coughed in some barn in Djibouti and the Bushiites would have pretended to have heard proof of Iraq's WMDs.
" ... US enablers such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Hannah, David Wurmser, Scooter Libby, Richard Perle, Michael Rubin, Abram Schulsky, etc. ... "
just curious ( and i do not want to be labeled an anti-semite ) but how many of these people are of the jewish persuasion and/or have dual isreali citizenship ?
Team B? Well, we're trying. In the grassroots. But, that said, there is precious little support out there to help low level liberal milbloggers or intel folks--your grassroots Team B--get going. There isn't a heck of a lot of interest by the rank and file liberal person (your average dailykos citizen) in military/intel affairs (a venue where even a slight bit of added knowledge/familiarity would be an enormous help when the right wing cows DC with a bunch of bogus (or semi bogus) seemingly-facts-based defense claptrap.
We cave too easily under a welter of seemingly truthy factoids. Think back. Why was Zell Miller so effective? Nobody in the party had the knowledge to take his twisted factoids and fight back.
So please, support your liberal milbloggers. Every A-list Team B member--Danzig, Sam Nunn and so forth--needs support from us backbench bloggers.
springboarder.blogspot.com/
Please do so, any and all who can counteract the administration's push for attacking Iran. So far, I have seen only scattered responses to claims that Iran is- whatever they're saying today, the greatest threat to humankind in history...For example, on the roadside bombs question, the efp's, when first announced early this year, there was a strong initial challenge of scant evidence. They kept repeating the charge, but the challenge faded. Last week I came across a post somewhere that pointed out efp's can be made anywhere, not just in Iran. But someone, you, us, needs to keep saying this everyday, repeating it even more often and through more media than the administration uses. Otherwise they win and we all pay.
Sadly, Bush-II admin can be viewed as a huge government IT project gone bad. Everybody knows that, too much money was spent, contractors from many companies made loads of money, they met the dead lines and provided NOTHING but a huge design document, older system with paper backup was a lot more efficient than the monster in place now.
But IT director keeps having "All Hands Meetings" to show, what is accomplished and how constituents would be better off with the new system in place. But the career officer knows very well, that after ten years or so a new RFP will be prepared by his staff to "modernize" the system once again, and so does the cycle begins as it has always been.
"I, volunteer to do it for free. Is Washington listening?"
The problem with 'intelligence' is the means by which people will define the word. The question remains whether or not 'intelligence' is something that is being offered by 'intelligent' people. There are varying degrees of 'smart,' ranging from the well-groomed and fashionable to those who shun the trappings of image-consciousness, opting for something that is internal and intellectual, integral. Unfortunately, too many at all levels of the empowered prefer to look 'smart' rather than be 'smart.' The preference for 'eyewash' is obvious to many who are really able to 'see,' understanding that there may be an overlapping yet often little or no readily discernable distinction between what is offered for image and that which can be relied upon for substance.
Certainly, when one gets into a politically charged atmosphere, the best impressions are the ones that get the most mileage. Any more, it is the plastic (i.e., malleable, changeable) features that provide the incentive for attraction and affection. Yet, once the fake nails and boobs and hair and other cosmetic enhancements have been stripped away, what is left? Is there any reality between the advertisement and the actual product or service? Once the Armani Army has been relieved of its uniforms, do we find nothing more than a mere softness and flabbiness that has been disguised by some flashy threads and trends? We wonder if one of the elected Congressmen (House or Senate) would be any less 'real' or 'effective' if s/he wore jeans and tie-dye shirts to work than some over-priced suit of clothes. We know that HillBillary was scolded when she first went into the Senate for not meeting the observable image requirements, perhaps resembling more her constinuency but chided for doing so. How even she has changed for - what? - better ... or worse!
We know that what passes for 'intelligence' even in the academic worlds has to be dressed up and made attractive before it will be accepted and sponsored. The likes of Norman Finkelstein and others who don't meet some predetermined criteria are purged from the cliques' ranks, ensuring that the institutionalised images are not scratched or otherwise defaced, but kept pristine as possible, the facades unmarked and unmarred. This is something that the military does as well, a long-held tenet of the institution that has given the uniform its appeal, publicly displaying anything but the horrors of war and combat. The denial of coverage of the returning remains of the military's dead from Iraq and Afghanistan contributes to this false imagery, regardless of how many veterans jog with Younger George on their springy attachments to their lower limbs or other prosthetic devices.
The 'people' who have taken over the government have overlain the real sense of 'intelligence' with their standards of image over substance. 'Curveball' and Chalabi as well as many others who supported the warmongers' drive to the initiation of hostilities were merely the car polishers and other sorts of domestics ('aliens'? Another oxymoronicisticality) who made sure that the wax jobs were done well and their uniforms were of such a quality as to project some sort of genteelness when they probably couldn't produce any bonafide credentials if asked. Certainly, the Iraqi (and other) contacts had some certifications but we have to wonder how suspect these might be, given the unreliability of the claims and the catastrophic results of their possessors' influence. But, having one Yale graduate who completed a history degree with a legacy 'C' and another a Yale drop-out as the numbers one and two men in the government, it is not hard to understand how the eyewash of diplomas has ruined diplomacy. We are left with not much more than a pretty package once the all-too-easily consumed empty calorie contents were long ago ingested and excreted.
What should be as solid as 'native' intelligence has been hollowed out, reflected by poor but accurate spelling, becoming 'naive' intelligence, demonstrating that some fancy paperwork will leave many awestruck, especially in this era of 'drop-out factories.'* Senators like South Carolina's Graham must be revered as gods given that state has the worst high school graduation (and expected college accession) rate in the country. Take a fellow who has finished the merest of educational pursuits, send him off to some law school, put a part-timer's military uniform on him, then run him through the gubmint, and, Lo! and Behold!: a god! Whether the lawmaker in question is indeed legitimate and credible is not at issue. What is the point is the impression of those electing him and their inability to put things in perspective simply because their intelligence is continually and constantly, institutionally, undermined.
'Intelligence' as a means of extracting information and rendering it to some usable form is not a pretty business. It does not always meet the certifiable 'slam dunk' standard, requiring attention be paid to every nuance and subtlety that comes along, not subject to predetermined preconditions. It can be boring and uninspiring, leaving the workers and students numb without any perceptible or tangible recognition or rewards other than continued employment and a corresponding paycheck. Yet, for those of us who actually do pay attention and perform our daily chores - and literally for free - there is something to be gained by remaining true to our purpose, realising at the end that 'Curveball' and others are their own - and our - worst enemies, always having to burnish their images and acquiring medals while foregoing the real work of mustering and maintaining any sort of mettle. Mencken's Law has been proved, the government is being led by nitwits and incompetents who must perpetuate their lies in order to avoid being completely exposed and undermined. The functionaries' 'intelligence' has been reduced to creating a big and ugly mess that others, the truly capable, will have to clean up. Of course, the janitors will be vilified for making the spaces habitable once again, the ad-men trying to find their upteenth wind to keep their colourful balloons aloft, filled with nothing but stale hot air.
* http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,,-7035050,00.html
1 in 10 Schools Are 'Dropout Factories'
Team B estimates of Iran? A brilliant, simple, and "time-tested" idea. If it "worked" for conservatives on the USSR and Iraq, why not a progressive Team B for Iran? Absolutely brilliant -- especially if a publication could be ginned up, a la the "Committee of Santa Fe" on "tyranny" in Latin America.
What is surprising and utterly remarkable to me is how un-informed people are when it comes to what the Administration did with the so called “information” from Ahmad Chalabi and other Iraqi expats.
A few months after 9/11 I remember reading an article in the Economist that laid out the entire situation of how Chalabi was feeding the CIA intel on WMD. The article basically laid out that Chalabi had an axe to grind with Saddam Hussein and how he would do anything to get back at him not to mention Chalabi’s own grab for power. The article went on to describe how the Administration was using this type of information for its case to invade Iraq.
So if the Economist was exposing the intelligence sting in the early zeros, why on earth have the informed people in American been so apathetic to this type of activity by this administration?
"That is not a sequence of operations that is beyond
the feasible or doable,far from it. If this kind of
sequence of raids, of missile aircraft attacks are not
possible for a super power like the united states,
what's the point of having a military?"
BBC Radio 4, Today Program, at 7:21 this morning. The
words are from Uzi Arad, former director of
intelligence at Mossad. It's a brief interview, but
one which is replete with the similar 'curveball'
intel, such as that Iran is now a YEAR away from
having a nuclear weapon, and that the military
operation would differ from the 1981 Osirak strike
against Iraq's nuclear plant, in that it would be an
air, sea and land campaign, targeting Iranian
military, intelligence and regime facilities. Listen
for yourself:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/
But it turns out that Rafid Alwan "Curveball" is not the brother, or relation, of any of Ahmad Chalabi's people. Shouldn't you have at least tried to correct that massive mischaracterization that was peddled in the media for years when you mentioned "Curveball" and Chalabi in the same post?
"BELIEVE THE CIA" You gotta be kidding! Actually we probably don't know what they believed on Iraq. The public image "Slam Dunk" was what we got. In the back of our minds though we thought "If this is straight forward why did they set up a separate intelligence agency in the basement of the Pentagon?" Where did we go for answers at the time. My sources were "Team B" folks who were saying completely different things. In my mind Team B is a more reliable source because in most cases you can verify what they are saying from other sources. In our present case , you can't check the Government sources because everything they say can be verified to be untrue. EVERYTHING.
A Team B could be a cooperative effort supported by all of us. We all can do research from our keyboards with a little guidance on information needed it's hard to tell what we could dig up.
When I depended on some folks named for this Team B in the run up to Iraq their information provided me with all I needed to vehemently oppose this war when 80% of the country was for it. 50% of them had to change their minds in awhile. Suppose they had a Team B to look at. Would things have been different.
I wish that Informed Comment, Daily Kos, etc. would vet the story about the bombing of the Syrian facility. In the latest installment, the JPost passes along an anonymously-sourced story from Al Jazeera claiming that the US participated in the bombing and used tactical nuclear weapons.
This sounds like total manure to me, but since Al Jazeera has only posted the story in Arabic, it's difficult for this non-Arabic speaker to even get a handle on it. Clearly this is an important story to the Murdoch press.
Charles of MercuryRising
www.phoenixwoman.wordpress.com
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