I've seen so many credible stories of the utter military incompetence of the Bush Admin, that something just occurred to me:
The conduct of this Administration is virtually indistinguishable from conduct that would be intended to a) lose the war, and/or b) substantially weaken or damage the United States military.
If that's true, it's huge. Deliberately de-clawing our military capabilities is arguably as serious as tampering with elections. Or worse.
If you have specific information to either support or counter my hypothesis, post it here. Nothing classified please. Let's get it all compiled in one place. And then figure out what's to do about it.
By analogy: someone pushes a loaded shopping cart right past the grocery store checkstand and out to the parking lot. Are they just plain stupid and don't know they're supposed to pay for their groceries? Or are they trying to shoplift in a manner that's so blatant it gives them plausible deniability...?
The Bush Admin has screwed up the war on so many fronts, it almost looks like it's deliberate. But why on Earth would a bunch of neo-cons (with their clearly imperial designs) want to de-claw the United States...? The actions sum up to a conclusion that seems to contradict their stated motives. Something isn't right.
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Here's what I have in mind for this discussion: Compile relevant data and see which hypothesis they support most strongly.
By data I mean facts and analysis that are of good quality. Verifyable news stories, or direct observations by people on the ground who are known credible here. The more expertise you bring to your observations, the better. For example, someone in the military who's trained for a specific MOS could bring in new facts based on their experience in the war, or could comment on a news story relevant to their area of specialization. Or someone who's engaged in civilian contracting could comment on a bidding procedure for a similar type of contracting. Etc.
Even if your expertise or knowledge are less than perfect, or less than first-hand, that's OK as long as you say so and qualify your data accordingly. It may be that in certain areas, we have to rely on less than the highest grade of data (e.g. less than first-hand), at least for now (until someone who is better-qualified comes forward with more well-substantiated data).
Don't post anything that's classified.
If you have something "really important" to disclose to the public, go to one of the established whistleblower channels at a media outlet that's big enough to have lots of lawyers, because you'll probably need them.
Unclassified data and observations should be quite sufficient to support or counter the going hypothesis. But then comes the question, "if this seems to be true, what do we do..?" I don't have an answer for that. Maybe we can discuss it in a subsequent diary.
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Here's my piece of the puzzle:
The subject matter is signals intelligence (SIGINT) which includes all manner of electronic interception, cryptanalysis (codebreaking), traffic analysis, and similar disciplines that aim to develop actionable intel from electronic and communications sources.
Ordinarily, the details of SIGINT activities are highly classified. This is because SIGINT is an extremely vulnerable source of information.
For example, if you have an encryption system, it might take me years to break it so I can read your traffic. But then if you find out I've broken your system, you can upgrade to a new system. It's easy for you to upgrade, but it might take years for me to break your new system. During that time, I'm in the dark.
Or, let's say you're using a cellphone on a Middle Eastern carrier called (for example, using a fictitious company name) Insurgency Telephone & Telegraph. Let's say I've got a backdoor into their central office switch so I can pick up all your phone traffic. Now if you find out, you can switch carriers. Maybe you switch to Jihadi Cellular (again, I'm making up the company names for purposes of the illustration). And maybe I don't have intercept capabilities on Jihadi Cellular yet. So now I'm in the dark again.
In other words, it's easy for you to change your communications behaviors, and it takes more effort -sometimes a very large amount of effort- for me to catch up. Major battles have been won and lost on that basis, and one could argue that those outcomes were critical to the final outcome of wars. For those reasons, details related to SIGINT are highly classified, and everybody in government and the military know it. Anyone who has studied military history knows about MAGIC and ULTRA in WW2, and knows the extremes to which Roosevelt and Churchill went to protect those sources. ULTRA (successful cryptanalysis of Axis encryption systems) remained a secret right up until the late 1970s.
So here we have two items from the news:
Item one: "Picking up chatter."
Shortly after 9-11, I noticed Administration spokespeople frequently making statements about having "intercepted communications" from terrorist cells, and saying that they were "picking up terrorist chatter." The phrase "picking up chatter" is basically slang for "intercepting communications." There is no other interpretation for it; it's like the word "fixed" in that line of the Downing Street minutes (the intel was "fixed" around the policy).
I was irritated as hell about this, and it stuck in my craw to the point that I started making noise about it in various places. I noticed that the phrase "picking up chatter" kept being used, over and over and over again. It was obvious to me that loose talk about "picking up chatter" would eventually cause Al Qaeda to stop using electronic communications.
Then came the news that we were having trouble getting good intel on Al Qaeda because they were "using hand couriers."
I submit to you that there was a causal relationship between those two circumstances. Al Qaeda heard the Admin spokespeople saying they were listening in, so they stopped using electronic communications and switched over to hand couriers! Just as I expected, which is no surprise because anyone with a shred of competence should have known that this was going to happen.
If anyone here wants me to document the two pertinent facts (one, admin spokes saying "picking up chatter" often; and two, Al Q switching from electronic comms to hand couriers), I'll go do the dig and come up with some citations. Though, if you've been following the news, you should recognize the relevant items from memory because they both got fairly wide coverage.
Item two: "Chalabi and the Iranian Crypto."
This one came out in, among other places, the issue of Time Magazine last year that had the Chalabi affair on the cover. And then it was promptly forgotten.
According to the story in Time, Chalabi had plenty of "associates" with whom various people in the Administration were friendly.
And, according to the story in Time, one of those friendly Administration people went out drinking with one of Chalabi's buddies. While drunk, the Admin official revealed to the Chalabi associate that the United States had successfully broken Iran's high level diplomatic and military encryption systems.
Note here, it is now widely acknowledged that Chalabi had been working as an agent of the Iranian government. In other words, he was spying for Iran. And on that basis it can be logically inferred that his little clique of associates was a nest of Iranian spies. So in effect, someone from the Bush Admin leaked a major secret to an Iranian spy.
Folks, that is as bad as telling one of Mussolini's buddies that we've broken Hitler's encryption system. In fact, that was the ULTRA secret from WW2, and as I said earlier, it remained classified until the late 1970s. If someone had leaked that item to Mussolini, they would have been put up on charges of high treason.
Material of that type -details of successful cryptanalysis of the cryptosystems of hostile foreign entities- is classified Top Secret, with the additional designation "SCI CRYPTO," which means "Sensitive Compartmented Information - Cryptological." SCI also means that the information is only shared on a need-to-know basis, with a very very small and carefully selected group of specifically-named individuals. Each SCI document is associated with a list of the named individuals who are to receive the document, and each of those individuals has to sign for it.
In other words, there is a list of names of individuals within the Administration who were aware that we had successfully broken Iran's cryptosystems.
And yet, to date there has been no announcement of an investigation, much less an arrest or prosecution, of the individual from within the Administration who leaked that item to Chalabi's guy.
As I've said in previous comments on this board, you have to understand exactly how important this leak is. Immediately after Chalabi got the information, you can be quite sure it went up the chain to relevant individuals in Iran's defense establishment. The result that would have followed, with 100% certainty, would have been that Iran upgraded its encryption systems. And not only Iran, but other regimes in the region that are friendly to Iran and hostile to the US. Regimes, in other words, that support terrorism. And you can also be quite sure that any terrorist groups supported by any of those regimes would also have upgraded their own crypto. I suspect it will take at least a couple of years before we are able to successfully break whatever encryption those hostile entities are now using.
In other words, the US would have suddenly gone quite deaf with respect to communications within and between the relevant hostile states, and the relevant terrorist groups. This, at precisely the time when it's absolutely vital to know more about Iran's nuclear intentions, foreign insurgents going into Iraq, and other questions of supposed vital importance to the Administration in its military and diplomatic plans for the region.
And yet, no investigation, no prosecution. Why the hell not? Is the Administration simply protecting its own? Or was the leak calculated? Would the Admin's plans go better if it could scare various factions in Washington by saying we were in the dark about what those scary hostile entities were up to...? Or was the Admin deliberately trying to shoot American intelligence in the foot (again)...? Why? Why on God's green Earth would they do a thing like that...?!
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So add that to the mix. Not enough troops, not enough armor, not enough planning, screwing the intel community (as per my examples above), etc. etc. goes the long list for which I'm seeking more specifics here and now. The list has by now gotten so long that it's starting to look like either world-class abject incompetence, or like deliberate efforts to lose a war and/or de-claw our military and intel services.
So let's hear your information. And let's try to make sense of the pattern. And then let's see what we can do about it.