Presidential Candidate Recognized for PSYOP Expertise

Obama The PSYOP President?  Colonel Dietz asks.

In short, Senator Obama appears to have an understanding of PSYOP and IO. Should he get elected, it would be refreshing to see a Commander in Chief who knows a little more about the pen than the sword.

Beggin’ the Colonel’s pardon, but almost all American politicians who started out as lawyers have always known a lot more about the power of the pen than they did about the sword.

Obama The Dezinformatiya agit-prop President.

UPDATE:  Who’s responsible for shutting down a number of anti-Obama Blogspot accounts?

He hasn’t even got in yet and his minions are implementing Counterpropaganda Restrictive Measures and Computer Network Attack on Oppositional Elements.

I can see the handwriting on the wall.  Former Regime Loyalists and unbellyfeelers are to be purged from the blogosphere.

The honor and the reputation of news professionals

L’Affaire Enderlin could happen anywhere in the West.  Dan Rather wishes he was French.

a dangerous American trend of “vindictive pressure groups interfering with news organizations,” now unfortunately crossing the Atlantic.

“Americans have been under the gun of such people for some time, but France used to be free of this kind of thing. [These groups] are paranoid, they’re persistent, they never give up, they sap the energy of good reporters. I can’t imagine how much money France 2 has spent defending this case. Charles Enderlin is an excellent journalist! I don’t care if it’s the Virgin Birth affair, I would tend to believe him. Someone like Charles simply doesn’t make a story up.”

“Look, this whole thing has been a nightmare for Charles. He’s received hate mail, his wife has been threatened, he’s about to have a nervous breakdown. You want the truth? I don’t give a flying monkey about the case. I signed [a petition that was whipped up by his friends at Le Nouvel Observateur, France’s premier left-wing newsweekly] for Charles. In all honesty, I think he edited his film on deadline and was careless, and afterwards he didn’t want to admit he’d screwed up. A one-minute film, and it snowballed from there. Don’t put in anything that might identify me, I don’t want him to think I don’t believe 100 percent in what he says, he’d be devastated.”

“Do I think Charles Enderlin lost a good opportunity to own up to a mistake early in the day, and spare himself this anguish? Of course. You know how we work in a hurry? Guy sends him pictures from Gaza, tells him the Israelis shot the kid, he believes him-I mean, even the Israeli Defense Forces spokesman believed it! But you can’t own up one, two years after the fact. It’s too late, it would mean you abdicate. It’s a nice job Charles has, he’s nearing retirement age. I don’t think he wanted to rock the boat. You know Charles, he’s always been status-conscious; he likes being the France 2 man in Israel. Plus, these people behind their computers, they’re not real journalists, are they? You can’t come from your day job and blog at night and imagine you’ve become a reporter. It doesn’t don’t work like that. There are standards.”

Supercilious pricks are endemic to journalism.

The Right To Keep And Bear Arms Is An Individual Right

From the most excellent SCOTUSblog:

 Held:

1. The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.  Pp. 2–53.

(a) The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms. Pp. 2–22.

(b) The prefatory clause comports with the Court’s interpretation of the operative clause. The “militia” comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. The Antifederalists feared that the Federal Government would disarm the people in order to disable this citizens’ militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. The response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved. Pp. 22–28.

 (c) The Court’s interpretation is confirmed by analogous armsbearing rights in state constitutions that preceded and immediately followed the Second Amendment. Pp. 28–30.

(d) The Second Amendment’s drafting history, while of dubious interpretive worth, reveals three state Second Amendment proposals that unequivocally referred to an individual right to bear arms.  Pp. 30–32.

(e) Interpretation of the Second Amendment by scholars, courts and legislators, from immediately after its ratification through the late 19th century also supports the Court’s conclusion. Pp. 32–47.

(f) None of the Court’s precedents forecloses the Court’s interpretation.  Neither

 

United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542, 553, norPresser v. Illinois, 116 U. S. 252, 264–265, refutes the individual rights interpretation.   United States v. Miller, 307 U. S. 174, does not limit the right to keep and bear arms to militia purposes, but rather limits the type of weapon to which the right applies to those used by the militia, i.e. those in common use for lawful purposes. Pp. 47–54.

2. Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited.  It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.  Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.  Pp. 54–56.

3. The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to self-defense) violate the Second Amendment. The District’s total banon handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition on an entire class of “arms” that Americans overwhelmingly choose for thelawful purpose of self-defense. Under any of the standards of scrutiny the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights, this prohibition—in the place where the importance of the lawful defense of self, family, and property is most acute—would fail constitutional muster. Similarly, the requirement that any lawful firearm in the home be disassembled or bound by a trigger lock makes it impossiblefor citizens to use arms for the core lawful purpose of self-defense and is hence unconstitutional. Because Heller conceded at oral argumentthat the D. C. licensing law is permissible if it is not enforced arbitrarily and capriciously, the Court assumes that a license will satisfy his prayer for relief and does not address the licensing requirement.  Assuming he is not disqualified from exercising Second Amendment rights, the District must permit Heller to register his handgun and must issue him a license to carry it in the home. Pp. 56–64.

478 F. 3d 370, affirmed.

SCALIA, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and KENNEDY, THOMAS, and ALITO, JJ., joined. STEVENS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which SOUTER, GINSBURG, and BREYER, JJ., joined. BREYER, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which STEVENS, SOUTER, and GINSBURG, JJ., joined.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why the Wire Service I’m Boycotting Sucks

Propaganda, Lies, and Wire Service Articles

1. Decide which side is the good guys. This can be based on your ethnic-communal background (unless you are Jewish since then you must lean over backward to prove yourself fair by supporting the other side), political ideology, or–if all else fails–whichever side is weaker. (The word “underdog” might not be PC any more so I will avoid it.)

2. Slant your article completely in favor of the “good guys” because they are after all the good guys. Writing an advocacy article for them is thus a good and moral deed. There can be no compromise with evil and since the bad guys lie all the time why even bother to listen to their arguments.

Incidentally, questions of past credibility are irrelevant. If one side can be shown to have lied repeatedly that doesn’t count. Pointing this out could get you accused of racism or imperialism, while the “good guys,” once so designated, are allowed to lie because they are pursuing a “good cause.” Governments are held to lie always, especially if they are democratic ones.

And be sure to employ as many local stringers with close ties to the “freedom fighter’s” media apparat as you can.  Makes for prize-winning fauxtography.

The great challenge of the 21st century

New John Fonte Article: “Global Governance vs. the Liberal Democratic Nation State: What Is the Best Regime?”

This Is Profound

Next time you get a break, wrap your brain around Politics as Pathology.

Not an easy read, but worth your time.  Some nuggets:

 . . . the contrasting views of man’s essential nature as either innately fixed; self-focused; self-reliant and responsible for his actions and their consequences; or alternatively, as compliant with, and amenable to, improvement under the (assumed benevolent) direction of a “morally superior breed of leaders”.

Much of the contentiousness between the Conservative/Right and the Liberal/Left can be understood on the basis of our re-defined appellations of Conservatives as Logical-Rationalists (objectivists) vs. Liberals as (subjectivist) Emotional-Intuitives. The former assemble available information and reason sequentially to a conclusion based on the available facts. In political matters the latter respond more emotionally to issues and intuitively arc to a conclusion based on feelings. Whatever information seems to support those feelings is selected post hoc and all else rejected as unimportant, wrong or outright lies.  Exasperation is often the only product when the two face-off in debate. No one gets their mind changed.

It has been the extreme Left that has been the socially disruptive, historically deadly, nihilistic and revolutionary political force throughout the twentieth century. It is the radical Left which insists on jettisoning a highly productive capitalist system and replacing it with a collectivism that has been an abysmal failure wherever it’s been tried. [54] It is therefore essential to question the motivations of those who press that agenda.

H/T: Blair at American Thinker, 04:23.

History is Already being Written

And President George W. Bush will come out looking a lot better than most people think.

Why Iraq Was Inevitable

. . . by the time George Bush entered the White House in January 2001, the United States was already at war with Iraq, and in fact had been at war for a decade,

Then came September 11.

Saddam’s ties to terrorist groups . . . Hamas, the Palestine Liberation Front, and Yasir Arafat’s private army (Force 17) . . . Islamic Jihad . . . Saddam was willing to work with any terrorists who targeted the United States and its allies, and he reached out to al-Qaeda-affiliated groups (and vice-versa) whenever the occasion warranted.

Saddam had the WMD know-how, as well as probable stockpiles, that terrorist groups like al Qaeda might want for future operations.

Saddam’s declared antipathy toward the United States. In 1993 he had hatched a plot to assassinate his then-nemesis, former President Bush, during a visit by the latter to Kuwait. A “general suspicion” among Clinton-administration officials, in Pollack’s words, was that Saddam was also “working on a variety of terrorist contingencies” in the event that the United States ever tried to topple his regime. He was the only world leader who actually applauded the attacks of 9/11.

Saddam was emerging, like a great malignant moth, from the containment regime in place since the end of the first Gulf war. By the end of the 1990’s, sanctions had become a joke, proving less a liability to Saddam than an asset in rebuilding his power. In October 2000 a supposedly “contained” Iraq had boldly renewed its military cooperation with Syria, moving divisions to the Syrian border and even deploying troops into Syria itself to put pressure on Israel. Since then, Saddam’s attacks on American and British air patrols over Iraq had grown more intense.

President Bush didn’t kick the can down the road. 

He is almost out the door, a double-amputee Mallard, and I quit carrying his water, but for all his errors of omission and commission, for all his failures, he deserves better than what he is getting.  Being the focus of so much negative psychic energy from so many Americans has taken its toll.  The idea that Americans can deny legitimacy to an administration and emotionally secede from the Union because their hatred for the President has been inflamed by agit-prop heats up the Cold Civil War, and eventually the Long War and the Hot Civil War merge in a great cleansing of the wicked, near and far, foreign and domestic.

Who will the BDS-afflicted hate when he’s gone?  People like me.  Feuds have gone out of style in the Amriki tribe,  but the ancestral memory remains in some of us. 

Starry-eyed, leg-tingling hopeful changers would do well not to awaken that memory. 

They WANT You Depressed

“They” who want you depressed are a conglomeration of people and organizations who seek to emiserate you until in your despair you cry out for deliverance.  And they just happen to have The Deliverer for you.

A most egregrious example of psychological warfare recently disseminated by “They” through Their wire service to hundreds of newspapers targeting the domestic audience in order to influence our emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of our governments, organizations, groups, and people will likely not be addressed by counterpropagandists boycotting this wire service over Their douchebaggery.  I’m boycotting Them, too, so a conventional fisking of excerpts from the egregrious example will not be forthcoming from me.  

Don’t fall for Their FUD. 

‘They’?…Caught you didn’t they, eh? Tied a tin can to your tail. Let you in and waltz you out again. Ha, ha, ha. Oh my, what a bunch. Big, tough one, eh? Ha, ha, ha. Here you are, with a handful of holes, a thumb up your ass, and a big grin to pass the time of day with. They? Who the hell is they?

I love that movie.

UPDATE: Media to America: Disaster Seen as Catastrophe Looms

Demographic warfare closely aligned with psychological warfare

Fjordman posting at Gates of Vienna on multiculturalism, Marxist feminism and dhimmitude in Scandinavia:

A nation is never conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground….

Turning Western women, especially white women, into weapons of mass destruction against their own civilization

What we are dealing with in the Western world is demographic warfare closely aligned with psychological warfare, aimed at breaking down our self-confidence and self-awareness to the point where our technological superiority is rendered useless because we are ashamed of ourselves or incapable of articulating what we should fight for. Sun Tzu in The Art of War said that wars are won in the temples before they are fought. The mass media are the temples of our time, which means that we are currently losing badly.

The Hug A Hadji Program in Sweden in which Muslim rapists are coddled, Swedish women are encouraged to give it up quietly so as not to inconvenience the government, and Swedish boys are taught to squat to pee.  Coming soon to America.

H/T:  Cyber Scout suek

American Protective League

The Web:  A Revelation of Patriotism by Emerson Hough

“A. P. L” means the American Protective League. It means a silent, unknown army of more than a quarter million of the most loyal and intelligent citizens of America who did indeed spring to arms over night. It fought battles, saved lives, saved cities, saved treasures, defended the flag, apprehended countless traitors, did its own tremendous share in the winning of the war. It saved America. It did protect. It was a league.

 

It did all this without a cent of pay. It had no actual identification with the Government. Yet it has won scores of times the written and spoken thanks of our most responsible Government officials. Its aid in the winning of the war cannot be estimated and will never be known. Not even its full romance ever can be written. May these hurrying pages save all these things at least in part, though done in the full consciousness that their tribute can be but a fragment of the total due. 

The American Protective League was the largest company of detectives the world ever saw. The members served without earlier specilialized training, without pay, without glory. That band of citizens, called together overnight, rose, grew and gathered strength until able to meet, and absolutely to defeat, the vast and highly trained army of the German espionage system, which in every country of the globe flooded the land with trained spies who had made a life business out of spying. It met that German Army as ours met it at Chateau-Thierry, and in the Argonne, and on the Vesle and on the Aisne. Like to our Army under arms — that Army where any of us would have preferrd to serve had it been possible for us to serve under arms — it never gave back an inch of ground. Growing stronger and better equipped each day, it worked always onward and forward until the last fight was won.     

 

 

Times have changed. Societal evolution marches on. The A. P. L. persecuted some of my Swiss ancestors because of their Schweitzerdeutsch names, tarring all Dutchmen with the same brush. I am not oblivious to their excesses. Still, they did combat underminers, slackers and saboteurs, and hounded the forerunners of today’s Left, the Wobblies, (p. 133) into jail. That’s why you haven’t heard much good about the A. P. L.
Piss off a Lefty, and learn things they would rather you didn’t know.

Spiritual invasion

Underlining added by me.

As there has never been a country which devoted itself so ruthlessly to espionage as Germany, so there has never been a country which offered so wide and varied a field for it as America. The German attack on the United States began long before this country dreamed of entering the war. Influences were set to work to stifle all legislation looking toward preparedness. Press campaigns of the most elaborate sort were carried on to bias public opinion, to moderate or misdirect the indignation aroused by German methods of conquest, and to persuade the country to inaction.

The immunity of ambassadorial officers was used as a shelter for conspiracies against American life and property, and against the life and property of our neighbor countries.

Efforts to stir up other nations against the United States have been incessant, and are still made.

Through neutral channels, often by the most devious courses, American banking and commerce have been and are still employed to the injury of American interests.

Schemes have been practiced for checking the adoption of the principle of conscription and universal service; later, for preventing its success by corrupting members of exemption boards, or by encouraging resistance to the draft and desertion. Supplementary to this activity is the placing of spies or propagandists among the regiments in camp or proceeding to the battleground.

Every true patriot is a believer in peace, provided it is not purchased at the price of freedom or honor.  The word “pacifist” is applied generally to a believer in peace at any cost, an immediate peace, though it may in the end grow intolerable and compel another war. Pacifists have been so played upon by German agents, that they have been more or less unwittingly recruited as active agents of the German cause, and have become a dangerous element of the population, since it is manifest that any activity whatsoever which retards or diminishes the maximum efficiency and enthusiasm of a country at war, is inimical to the success of that country, and gives the enemy aid and comfort.

Whenever you see the word “German” in this piece, substitute your favorite term for the enemy in this war and you will begin to hear history rhyme.

Besides the actual physical menace to the personnel, the equipment, or the efficiency of our national force, there is what might be called the spiritual invasion. Anything that tends to diminish the ardor, the conviction, the optimism of the people at large, is hardly less destructive of effectiveness than an actual defeat on the battleground. The poisonous gas attack is practiced by the Germans, not only against our soldiers, but also against our citizens.

At a time when the whole nation must bend every energy and make every sacrifice, discouraging rumors gain an incalculable power. It is of the greatest importance to the health of our troops that sweaters, socks, wristlets, and “helmets” should be knitted for them by the devoted women of the land, and an enormous quantity of these articles provided from the countless hand looms. Suddenly a story appeared somewhere that a woman who had knitted a sweater and sewed into it a bank note for the further comfort of the wearer, found that sweater on the back of a Red Cross agent, or on the counter of a department store. This story reappeared with inconceivable frequency in the United States. It was almost always told as the experience of a friend of a friend, and had just transpired in each instance. Questionnaires were sent out concerning rumors of this sort, and disclosed that this particular libel was quoted as of personal knowledge in every community, from the largest cities in the east to the mining towns in the Nevada desert.

Every woman who hears and believes this circumstantial story is inclined to give up her work. The sum total of such a diminution of output cannot be computed. In times of peace such examples of wireless gossip are merely amusing encouragements to satire. In a time of war, they constitute a serious danger.

In many cases it is impossible to trace such stories directly to German sources, but they are no less dangerous for being of American origin. The misbehavior, disloyalty, or indifference of native Americans is as important a material of military intelligence as any other. The activities of many elements in the pacifist movements, the extremists among the socialists and the IWW, are as proper subjects for investigation and repression as mutinous soldiers, deserters or traitors in the ranks.

Stories of naval disasters to our fleet, quotations from eye-witnesses, once-removed, of hundreds of wounded sailors seen being smuggled into hospitals; tales of hardships and cruelties and immoralities– all these tend, not only to distress the families of our soldiers and sailors, but to diminish enlistment, to strengthen the pacifists and the aliens, to encourage resistance to the draft. Statements that Liberty Bonds and Thrift Stamps are worthless and will be repudiated have a direct financial menace.

People and societies of loudly proclaimed sincerity, have promulgated the most outrageous slanders proclaiming the immorality of Red Cross nurses and the drunkenness and viciousness of our troops abroad and at home. Such libels left unpunished, not only reward the noblest patriots with unmerited dishonor, but they discourage sacrifice and instil a paralyzing cynicism.

The running down of such rumors takes time and labor and organization, but it is vital to our efficiency, not only to stamp out such libels, but to bring home to our population, native and foreign, that they manufacture and disseminate such rumors at their peril.

THE FUNCTION OF THE MILITARY INTELLIGENCE DIVISION, October 1, 1918
U.S. Army Military Intelligence History: A Sourcebook, pp. 113-115.

Woodrow Wilson gave us the American Protective League and the Creel Commission.

The Battle of Guantanamo

Walid Phares at Counterterrorism Blog:

. . . the conglomeration of all anti-American political forces, including many radical circles within the United States, will unleash its attacks against Guantanamo and what it represents, meaning the existence of the “War on Terror”. A significant ideological segment of the political establishment in America has been pushing the slogan of an “orchestrated war” which must be ended. To them, the trial of the terrorists in Guantanamo is an opportunity to bleed U.S. efforts in the confrontation, thereby enhancing their own domestic political fortunes and agendas.

This is worse than the bombing of the Golden Mosque. This severe set back was dealt to my tribe by the highest court in the land.

“I, Robert Parker Parrott, having been appointed an officer in the Army of the United States, as indicated above in the grade of Second Lieutenant, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of The United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter. SO HELP ME GOD.”

Help me, God. The designated interpreters of that which I have sworn to support and defend are looking a lot like domestic enemies to me.

Less Habeas, More Corpses

 

Jacksonians have had it.

Civilizations fall because the people inside the Sanctuary throw open the gates.

UPDATE:  Is the US Constitution a suicide pact after all?

SCOTUS disgrace: Foreign terrorists captured abroad held to have same rights under U.S. Constitution as U.S. citizens

A Supreme Error Fred said:

What remedy do people have now if they don’t like the court’s decision? None.

This is a fight, we the people, must win for them.

Losing the Information War with Amendment 56

The victory of lawfare over the traditional and proven rules of warfare and national survival

Bruce Kesler gets it.

The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays
upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war
harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans
to be killed.

Henceforth, as today’s opinion
makes unnervingly clear, how to handle enemy prisoners
in this war will ultimately lie with the branch that knows
least about the national security concerns that the subject
entails.

What drives today’s decision is neither the meaning of
the Suspension Clause, nor the principles of our precedents,
but rather an inflated notion of judicial supremacy.

. . . the
Court’s ultimate, unexpressed goal is to preserve the
power to review the confinement of enemy prisoners held
by the Executive anywhere in the world.

Today the Court warps our Constitution in a way that
goes beyond the narrow issue of the reach of the Suspension
Clause, invoking judicially brainstormed separationof-
powers principles to establish a manipulable “functional”
test for the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus
(and, no doubt, for the extraterritorial reach of other
constitutional protections as well). It blatantly misdescribes
important precedents, most conspicuously Justice
Jackson’s opinion for the Court in Johnson v. Eisentrager.
It breaks a chain of precedent as old as the common law
that prohibits judicial inquiry into detentions of aliens
abroad absent statutory authorization. And, most tragically,
it sets our military commanders the impossible task
of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards
this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports
the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.
The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done
today. I dissent.
SCALIA, J., dissenting

The Constitution is not a suicide pact. It is through such travesties as this that patriotism, devotion to duty and keeping of oaths is diminished.

Rocco DiPippo — Remember That Name

When the Cold Civil War goes hot and you don’t understand how everything went to hell, it will be because you didn’t read Rocco DiPippo’s history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

Go read it.

After you read it, DO something.

I cleaned my guns. The aroma therapy of Hoppes #9 lowered my blood pressure.

UPDATE: The Time Has Come to Say, “Stop!”

What’s it going to take? How long is it going to be before you all have had enough of the encroachment of your freedom and your liberty? How long is it going to be before you stand up and tell the leftists in this country, “Stop, shut up. Go back home. We are not going to let you ruin this country.”

They have done their best to demoralize and destroy every institution for good that they can get their hands on, all for the purposes of weakening the resolve of the American people and destroying the confidence the American people in their own country, thereby setting up the 2006 elections and setting up Barak Obama as their standard-bearer.

.

Phony Ops

James Lewis coins a term I hadn’t heard before. Staged photo-op. Tie-in to fauxtography.

Read the whole thing, and learn about Decembrists and Leni Riefenstahl and Boris Godunov.

See also Political Warfare.

Civilian Irregular Market-State National Security Operators

The new SERVIAM is out. Commander Joseph A. Gattuso, USN (Ret.) has an article in it entitled Trading Places:
How and Why National Security Roles Are Changing which fits in nicely with recent discussions on this blog and elsewhere of non-military, non-governmental responses to threats to the security of the United States. Don’t agree with all of it, but here are the good parts. Bolding added by me.

. . . the nation-state (1860–1990), which had as its legitimizing basis welfare of every individual. This is the form of governance with which most are familiar. In the nation-state, a collection of individuals gives the governing entity power to govern; in turn, the governing entity agrees to ensure the material well-being of the governed.
Like the state-nation before it, the nation-state form of governance is rapidly losing its legitimacy because it can no longer execute its fundamental purpose: to assure the material well-being and security of those it governs.

What he calls a nation-state sounds like a welfare-state to me.

There are many reasons for this erosion of the nation-state’s ability to keep its people either safe or prosperous: the ubiquitous nature of information; the ease with which money, culture, and disease cross national borders; the increase in transnational threats such as famine, migration, environmental problems, and weapons of mass destruction; a globalized economy eroding middle-tier wages; and the concept that human rights transcend a nation’s sovereignty and that human values are best determined by the calculus of apportioned economic advantage. The nation-state form of governance is disappearing, and a new form is emerging.

The welfare-state promised more than it could deliver. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is the bargain. The welfare-state implies actually obtaining happiness is something the state should guarantee.

This new kind of governance is known as a market-state, described fully in Philip Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History. Where the nation-state derived its legitimacy from an agreement to provide for the material well-being of its constituents, the market-state derives its legitimacy from an agreement that it will maximize opportunity for its citizens.

Because of computers, communications, and weapons of mass destruction, the enemies of our civilization live in the private sector. They express their anger and frustration in the private sector, against private citizens, and against our civil infrastructure, most of which is now in the hands of the private sector. When attacking those in the public sector— for instance, attacks against coalition soldiers in Iraq—they attack while swimming in Mao’s private sector sea. They do not attack on a conventional battlefield in ranks with tanks; they shoot from houses, rooftops, or alleys, or they fire mortars from the midst of martyr-minded women and children, all within the private sector. If Iran or North Korea attacks us, do we seriously think they will attack our military? National security has been removed from the unambiguous, ordered realm of governments and thrown squarely into the bitter, bloody, goldfish-bowl arena of the private sector.

For example, within hours of a surgical Israeli airstrike, Hezbollah knows which families need blankets, food, power, water, or medical attention and supplies. Hezbollah faithful are on the ground immediately, distributing $100 bills to families (in the private sector) who have suffered loss or damage. Hezbollah will race in with dead bodies of women and children in an ambulance, demolish the structure to make it appear as though there was wanton destruction, remove the bodies from the ambulance, place them dramatically in the rubble, invite the media in to film the scene, and then gather their grisly props and race to another media opportunity. The world gasps.

With significant hesitation, most market-state nations, the United States and Britain as the main examples, have decided that they will conduct a proxy fight, using private sector elements to outsource the fight against their private sector enemies. Times have changed: assuring national security requires fighting for it in the private sector, with the force most suited to that battlespace.

That’s us, people. We are the Civilian Irregular Information Operators we have been waiting for.

Market-state entities are operating according to their (new) nature. Elected representatives of the people have made a market in which solutions to national security issues are the products, and an enterprising, entrepreneurial, ambitious, patriotic private sector has responded to provide those products and services.

Consider that the warrior in this new era may be motivated by something that is not attached to the uniform—maybe it is something that does not disappear when the warrior steps across a thin border into civilian life. Maybe that which motivates warriors to do what they do has little to do with the size or source of their paycheck and everything to do with the ultimate purpose and characteristics of their activity. Consider that maybe the true warriors—the professional, altruistically motivated warriors for whom the profession of battling evil is a calling—are warriors regardless of the sector in which they serve. If what they do is altruistic, if it serves or benefits their fellow man, if it defends the defenseless, protects the innocent, and pursues and punishes the guilty, then it will be an acceptable occupation. The public sector must find ways to leverage this national resource, regardless of the sector in which these warriors serve.

There is more at this link. Read the whole thing.

See also Buccaneer.com about the for-profit private sector role in Information Operations/Computer Network Defense/Information Assurance.

President Bush tolerated disloyalty and paid the price

Bing West reviews Feith.

First, poisonous leaks by senior CIA and State officials corroded trust inside the administration and damaged its public image. Feith cites leak after leak aimed at undercutting him personally, the Defense Department in general and the neoconservative political philosophy. The Bush administration was systematically undercut and trashed by its own senior officials. President Bush, who bragged he did not read newspapers, and his NSC adviser, Condoleeza Rice, tolerated disloyalty and paid the price in plummeting public approval and increasing political opposition.

If McCain gets in, will he purge the disloyal?
You can bet your ass Obama will. Former Regime Loyalists better not drop any soap.

Facts rarely change ideological attitudes. The leakers effectively appealed to the liberal instincts of many journalists to shape narratives around presumptive political philosophies. Once Feith, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld were branded with the scarlet word ‘neocon’, then the substance of their positions – and the credibility of the leaks degrading them – became secondary.

Neocon, chickenhawk, BDS — all part of the fish rots from the head meme for Non-kinetic Decapitation, character assassination, undermining the chain of command and denying legitimacy.

CIA and State officials, disagreeing with Bush’s policies, leaked false stories impugning so-called neocons in order to enlist the press. Journalists who pride themselves on healthy skepticism should read this book to understand how they can be played.

“Journalists” are played less often than they willingly and knowingly participate.

“I now see more clearly,” Feith wrote, “the intense animus behind the systematic leaking and “backgrounding” that undermined President Bush and others who supported him. Our failure – as targets – to heed the attack, to protest it, and to fight back, was a form of unilateral disarmament that did not serve the interests of the President, the country, or truth.”

What goes around comes around. Payback is a Mike Foxtrot and karma is a Bravo.

The headline grabbing, mass media version will be out first, and it will largely be wrong

Surefire Spy Scandals

Kind of makes you wonder why anybody would spend decades working for a government like ours.
How do you retain any vestige of patriotism or idealism under such conditions?