The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    The Blurring of the CIA and the military: recent analysis

    By artappraiser on Sat, 06/11/2011 - 5:46pm |

    The blurring of CIA and military
    By David Ignatius, Washington Post, June 1, 2011
    One consequence of the early “war on terror” years was that the lines between CIA and military activities got blurred. ...The Obama administration is finishing an effort to redraw those lines more carefully....

    Rewriting Rumsfeld’s rules
    By David Ignatius, Washington Post, June 3, 2011
    Sensitive intelligence missions now need Obama approval....The Rumsfeld-era orders have been rewritten over the past several years, at Gates’s insistence. The review was begun by James Clapper, a former undersecretary of defense who’s now director of national intelligence. Michael Vickers, who is Clapper’s successor, is finishing the rewrite....

    This Week at War: Rise of the Irregulars
    By Robert Haddick, Small Wars Journal @ foreignpolicy.com,  June 10, 2011
    The U.S. isn’t militarizing intelligence, it’s civilianizing the military. Last week, the Washington Post's David Ignatius discussed how the line between the Central Intelligence Agency's covert intelligence activities and the Pentagon's military operations began blurring as George W. Bush's administration ramped up its war on terrorism....Ignatius missed the larger and far more significant change that continues to this day....

    Panetta: Escalate Shadow Wars, Expand Black Ops
    By Spencer Ackerman, Danger Room @ wired.com, June 9, 2011
    ....At his Thursday confirmation hearing to become secretary of defense, CIA Director Panetta made a broad case for expanding the U.S.’ already extensive shadow wars...In his written responses to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Panetta endorsed a command scheme that would place select U.S. military personnel temporarily under the authority of the CIA director for the most sensitive counterterrorism operations.....

    Comments

    This is awfully complicated!

    The U.S. isn’t militarizing intelligence, it’s civilianizing the military..

    Of course half of our military is outsourced to international corporations anyway!

    Good thing Cheney and Rummy had editors...I mean that's my guess!


    by Richard Day on Sat, 06/11/2011 - 7:45pm

    And it comes round full circle, cause the civilians running intell are ex military. (cf wild bill donovan


    by jollyroger on Sat, 06/11/2011 - 7:57pm

    The U.S. isn’t militarizing intelligence, it’s civilianizing the military. 

    I've seen many, many blog posts worrying about the growing surveillance state but not all that many on the extensive counter-insurgency training our military and para-military are receiving.  I find that much more worrisome.



    by EmmaZahn on Sat, 06/11/2011 - 8:12pm

    In a related vein, I found this an interesting take on the political right's utilization of CIA tactics from the past to destabilize the US government.


    by miguelitoh2o on Sun, 06/12/2011 - 11:24am

    This is perhaps more than interesting.   ;o)  We are so easy to manipulate, I swear.  People who don't think Chomsky's take on advertising in our current conversations are silly.  Now it's not even 'the message' that's powerful, but individual words and names like "Iran"; "Al Qaeda", and the entire message-push comes into Americans' minds, gets 'em peein' their pants.


    by we are stardust on Sun, 06/12/2011 - 12:38pm

    Excellent essay.  Thanks.


    by brewmn on Mon, 06/13/2011 - 12:58am

    Must depend where you read, Emma.  TomDispatch covers it; Turse and Englehart watch that CIA/JSOC/Blackwater unholy alliance a lot.  Jeez; come to think of it, I've written about it several times.  Congress doesn't want to know about it except in the most perfunctory fashion, IMO. 

    And come to think of it, the NGOs and social-psychologists used for instance, in Afghanistan, that really blur the lines.

    My stars; I forgot Jeremy Scahill.


    by we are stardust on Sun, 06/12/2011 - 12:50pm

    25,000 hits?

    Shouldn't you receive some sort of award or something?

    WOW


    by Richard Day on Sun, 06/12/2011 - 3:35pm

    Search engines trolling the internets?  Throw in some more acronyms and see how high it will go. 


    by EmmaZahn on Sun, 06/12/2011 - 4:23pm

    I'm trying to figure it out--Genghis said some posts go viral, but damn...


    by jollyroger on Sun, 06/12/2011 - 6:38pm

    Do I need to get shots or something?

     


    by Richard Day on Sun, 06/12/2011 - 6:51pm

    Some webbot seems to have gone bonkers on this post. The hit counter filters out most automated web spiders and bots, but some bots don't announce themselves for what they are, so the hit counter doesn't know to ignore them. It happens from time to time but not usually to this extent.

    You can tell when the hit count is inflated by bot traffic if you go to the track tab at the top of a post. Most human visitors show some url in the "referrer" column. The bots tend to show blanks in the column.


    by Michael Wolraich on Sun, 06/12/2011 - 11:31pm

    Not that it's not an excellent compilation.


    by Michael Wolraich on Sun, 06/12/2011 - 11:32pm

    I was wondering if they were spook-bots. Some people on usenet used to put certain words in every post just to attract those bots, thus making life a little more difficult for big brother.


    by Donal on Sun, 06/12/2011 - 11:39pm

    Not sure why a spook bot would need to hit the same page 40,000 times. Not sure why anyone would for that matter.


    by Michael Wolraich on Mon, 06/13/2011 - 12:25am

    Though as I think about it, given the context, it's a smart suggestion. I'll do some research next week.


    by Michael Wolraich on Mon, 06/13/2011 - 12:34am

    All the agent ip addresses are from google. One forum user suggested:

    One your competitor or potential advertiser was extracting keywords from your site using a Google tool:

    https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal (AdWords)

    http://www.google.com/sktool/

    I ran a test search from the AdWords and confirmed that the ip was indeed the same as one of the ones that targeted this blog: 64.233.172.1

    Of course, when you manually use the tool, it only generates a single hit. Some software app must be using the tool to hit the site repeatedly. I surmise that it's some search engine marketing app that's trying to calculate keyword value, but I still don't see why it would do so repeatedly.


    by Michael Wolraich on Tue, 06/14/2011 - 11:13am

    So.... what are you saying, Genghis? You don't understand why ArtA is being hit on so repeatedly?

    Man, that is some kind of obnoxious.

    Sounds to me like someone's getting a little threatened, with is reigning hit champion "Who Hijacked Yahoo" only at 88,299... and ArtA's little gem closing fast.

    This site just get crueller and cruller.

    Mmmmmm..... cruller.

    Where was I again?


    by quinn esq on Tue, 06/14/2011 - 11:35am

    artappraiser, this is the most interesting compilation I have seen.  It is also frightening, but so is everything I see or read.  The difference is that your citations are undeniable.  Good job!


    by CVille Dem on Sun, 06/12/2011 - 8:32pm

    The CIA is the Military in leisure suits.


    by cmaukonen on Sun, 06/12/2011 - 11:50pm

    Last Count: 51556 reads

    Art, bubba, you have hit a homerun, with a series of quotes... I am eating my liver out.


    by David Seaton on Mon, 06/13/2011 - 2:43am

    So you do write for hits!   I remember some here suggesting that, and didn't quite get the drift.  Dunno what it gets you unless you sell ad space.


    by we are stardust on Mon, 06/13/2011 - 8:03am

    I think we all like some feedback that a piece is successful, meaning that it is being read. I don't think hits are the perfect measurement, because who knows if people actually read or just scan two lines and move on. But hits and comments are all we have.


    by Donal on Mon, 06/13/2011 - 8:09am

    Shoot, you can probably get hits just based on the title of a piece.  Many sites don't even display reads or hits; I've never noticed that My.fdl does.  The number of hits, IMO, is the blogging equivalent of a drug.  Comments are the food; the only way you learn from readers.  Guess it must depend what a writer's purpose for blogging is.


    by we are stardust on Mon, 06/13/2011 - 8:47am

    It is always fun to see the numbers mount... just a rush. Also, it means that Google treats you in  a different way if many people link to you. And Art's post is about a definite subject, not a search engine fly trap.... it will be interesting if this effects the ratings of Dagblog (all the rest of us)


    by David Seaton on Mon, 06/13/2011 - 8:55am

    Nice work, artappraiser, regardless of the reasons for the huge number of hits. Even if some or many of them do not reflect individual humans reading the post, obviously many of them reflect just that. What you wrote about is a very good and important topic and you added a lot of value for folks thinking about these issues by pulling together the information you did.

    What do you make of the extraordinary number of hits for the post?  Are you surprised? How do you feel--any different?  I'm intrigued by the fact that so far you have not chosen to comment in the thread.  


    by AmericanDreamer on Sun, 06/26/2011 - 10:46am

    I'm intrigued by the fact that so far you have not chosen to comment in the thread.

    I didn't answer you because I wasn't up to getting into it as it regards meta and I really don't wish to discuss it much. I am still hesitant to do so now, but what the heck. I don't want you imagining again that I have some special resentment towards you.

    Just so happens I made a quick comment on another thread, by Dickday, around the time it started happening, and the reply to me from someone on that thread really really turned me off. It didn't upset me, it was more like this: wow, last straw, really this place is not for me, how clueless can I be to continually post here--for the most part, the audience is simply not interested in the same things I am, and what I like to do and say actually irritates some of them. And there was another reply from one of the proprietors of the site that just struck me dumb as to not being on the same wavelength as my interests and I thought: why continue to participate so much, it's not a good fit, it's just dumb of me.

    Before that I was planning on making a "WTF?!" comment here on this thread, but by the time I came back, it was clear that the hits were coming from bots of some kind.

    It's not at all a case of this thread going "viral" as you put it in your query to me on another thread. If you look at the " tracking" tab on this thread, you can see it's repeated IP addresses. So it really has nothing to do with me, it probably has something to do with some of the links or keywords. (Aside to David Seaton: if you ever come back to this thread: sheesh when are you going to learn that hit counters are not the same thing as number of readers?)

    Subsequently when lurking, I saw that there is 0% interest by others in posting or discussing the kind of info. that interests me and without other input, it just reverts once again to very much being another "angry outrage at Obama vs. his defenders" site.*

    I don't really find it useful or a wise use of time to read that day-in, day-out for months on end.  Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge others who have a passion for spending their time that way, it's just not for me most of the time. It's the same discussions over and over and over and over. Mildly interesting if someone with some savvy introduces a new twist on the same old, but still mildly interesting. I also happen to find it very damaging to an understanding of what's going on in the world to skew one's news reading so heavily that way; it's like listening to a political spinner whispering in your ear 24/7 and tinting everything a certain color.

    It's funny, I really would find it far more interesting to see someone with the knowledge necessary (I don't have it, Genghis?) dig into and investigate the reason for the enormous number of bot hits on this thread and why they happened (especially as there is the possibility that it might have to do with the intel agencies,) than read yet another thread of opinions about Obama or the tea partiers. But clearly the two latter topics are the main ones people want to talk about here. I find it a bit more tolerable right now partly because some of the more passionate are on hiatus and the more analytic are more prominent.  But that doesn't really change the part about the audience having clear preferences here.

    *Except Donal, of course, who happens to be passionate about another topic that only mildy interests me--green energy--and one that doesn't interest me at all--tennis. Then there's those basketball posts in season (not just yawn how about active dislike)....smiley


    by artappraiser on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 11:40am

    Well I thank you for replying.  And I hope that you find what you are looking for.  I have to think it is out there somewhere on the net and if anyone is capable of finding it, I'd say it's probably you.  Best, AD


    by AmericanDreamer on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 8:20pm