• "My very first recruiting officer was G.I. Joe,"
• "Only later would I learn   just how enmeshed G.I. Joe's manufacturer, Hasbro, was with the military. One   instance of this close association came to me in 2003 when the Department of   Defense shared the specifications for their Future Force Warrior concept  with the toy company, even before awarding the contract to General Dynamics.   More important to the military these days are its ties to video game manufacturers.   The latter turn tax-payer-funded combat simulators into first-person shooters   that, in effect, pre-train youngsters in small-unit military tactics and irregular   warfare."
• Turse also talks of the Microsoft Xbox game "Close Combat: First to Fight,"     which was originally a training tool developed for the US Marine Corps by civilian   contractor Destineer Studios.   His book reveals that the game "was created under the direction of more   than 40 active-duty Marines, fresh from the frontlines of combat in the Middle   East [who] worked side-by-side with the development team to put the exact tactics   they used in combat into "First Fight."
• The process of brainwashing and desensitization by the military begins affecting   children in the US from a very early age. It is not insignificant that little   boys wear camouflage and run around playing with toy guns whenever they get   an opportunity.
• Another irresistible agent that the US military has deployed in its recruitment   and support drive is films. Turse elaborates the point, "In addition to   toys and video games, the military has also strengthened its ties to Hollywood   in recent years. Turning back to G.I. Joe, we can see this with the new movie:   'G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.'
• By glamorizing and   sentimentalizing warfare and camouflaging the truth behind unprovoked aggression,   these films have served their purpose well. To name a few of these, we have:   "Pearl Harbor," "Behind Enemy Lines," "Letters From   Iwo Jima," "We Were Soldiers," "Saving Private Ryan,"   "Black Hawk Down," "Clear and Present Danger," and a host   of others. If one looks at Hollywood's history of films that glamorize the US   military, there are literally hundreds more.
• "By co-opting the civilian 'culture of cool' the military   corporate complex is able to create positive associations with the armed forces,   immerse the young in an alluring, militarized world of fun, and make interaction   with the military sound second nature to today's Americans. The military is   now in the midst of a full-scale occupation of the entertainment industry, conducted   with far more skill (and enthusiasm on the part of the occupied) than America's   debacle in Iraq."
• The successful integration of "culture of cool" and the culture of   military is evident in the language of the veterans when they return home and   speak of their actions against the people of Iraq. Expressions straight out   of video game vocabularies like "lit you up," and "smoked 'em"   are commonplace in their speech.
• All available avenues have been explored by the Pentagon in its quest for a   wide-based acceptance of its policies. Social networking sites like Facebook   and Twitter have also been utilized for the tasks of seeking out young recruits   and spreading its message.
•  That the US military has made blatant use of the Media and the entertainment   industry to indoctrinate the young American mind is common knowledge. What has   perhaps gone unnoticed is how the military is insidiously infiltrating our social   and public lives. Earlier this summer, on Memorial Day weekend in Times Square,   New York City, the military showcased weaponry while recruiters posed for pictures   and engaged in small talk   with women, men, children and families. Women fondled rocket launchers, small children pretended   to fire heavy machine guns, young boys posed with   assault rifles,   and even housewives enjoyed the act of aiming rocket launchers.
• The militarization of US culture in the minds of US citizens has grown ubiquitous.
• Author/journalist Chris Hedges articulated the issue for Truthout, "Well,   the myth of war, at its core, is really a very visceral form of self-exaltation.   It is about the empowerment of our nation, of our society, and by extension,   our own empowerment. In the coverage, for instance, of the invasion of Iraq,   this was clearly evident on the cable news channels where the way the war was   covered was to bring in retired military to explain the power and precision   and might of our own weapons. And I think, very much, one was made to identify   with the power of those weapons and the power of the state. So war has a kind   of seductive appeal. The entertainment industry makes a lot of money off it.   The politicians perpetuate the myth of war, they romanticize war, they use words   like glory, honor, courage, manhood, to appeal to desires on the part of large   segments of the population who feel relatively powerless and relatively anonymous.   And war is a way of elevating them, or at least so they believe, into a kind   of nobility that peace time existence doesn't offer them."

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• newly released Strategic Communication Science and Technology Plan, April 2009:
• We are in a global “now media” information environment. Understand the difference between public diplomacy and strategic communication
• Science and Technology solutions do not generally discriminate based on geographic location, nor should they
• The domains of strategic communication can not be limited to those with public affairs authority – everyone should be viewed as a strategic communicator
• Brilliant. This report has found a way to work around the Smith-Mundt clause prohibiting the domestic dissemination of public diplomacy. Just call it "strategic communication."
• I've listened to IO people talk about Strategic Communications, and no one has a clue what it actually means because it actually doesn't mean anything. It is a euphemism at best, and at worst the latest in a long line of re-brands for the good, honest word "propaganda
• Strategic Communications exists as a discursive construct to bring propaganda activities outside the regulatory grasp of a long history of (albeit toothless and ineffective) laws against the use of domestic propaganda.
• Chapter 8 of FM 33-1-1 (Psychological Operations Techniques and Procedures):
  

  Inevitability Themes. These themes stress that the opponent will inevitably lose and the friendly side will inevitably win. They capitalize on the successful programs or military actions of friendly forces
• To the extent that Strategic Communications coincides with the rise of the counterinsurgency paradigm of warfare, the move to Strategic Communications seems consistent with the move to undemocratic forms of governance.

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• most troubling aspect of international security for the United States is not the killing power of our immediate enemies, which remains modest in historical terms, but our increasingly effete view of warfare
• Fourth, an unholy alliance between the defense industry and academic theorists seduced decisionmakers with a false-messiah catechism of bloodless war. In pursuit of billions in profits, defense contractors made promises impossible to fulfill, while think tank scholars sought acclaim by designing warfare models that excited political leaders anxious to get off cheaply, but which left out factors such as the enemy, human psychology, and 5,000 years of precedents.

• Having No Say When Washington Tries to Increase your Population by 25%
• The United States and the Chinese governments have some remarkable similarities when it comes to colonization. The Chinese government has sent a huge Han population to inhabit Tibet and overwhelm the Tibetan population, even building the world's highest railway to get people and materials there.
• 8,000 U.S. Marines, their dependents and associated logistics units and personnel-a total of 42,000 new residents-will be moved to the small Pacific island (barely three times the size of Washington, DC) that has a current population of 175,000. The move will have a tremendous impact on the cultural and social identity of the island.
• Lands were taken after World War II from the native Chamorro population without compensation by the US military to construct major air and naval bases which the US military still uses. Currently, there are 3,000 US Air Force and 2,000 US Navy personnel and 1,000 employees of other federal security agencies assigned to Guam.
• Three Guam legislators told us that the Guam government has not been properly consulted in the discussions between the US and Japanese governments on the relocation of the large US Marine force. Guam officials have been given little firm information about the military expansion plans. They are very concerned about the impact of further militarization of their island as its major income is provided by hundreds of thousands of Japanese tourists who visit the tropical island annually.
• They are disturbed by rumors of proposed forced condemnation of another 950 acres of land owned by members of the native Chamorro population for a live fire range for the incoming Marines.
• plus the possibility that artillery shells and other munitions made from depleted uranium will be used on their island
• In order to get the 8,000 US Marines out of Okinawa, the Japanese government is paying $6 billion to the US government for their relocation.
• Japanese members of our delegation were shocked when they learned from local Guam activists that the relocation budget calls for the Japanese government to pay $650,000 for the construction of each new house on the base, while Guam activists told us the cost of a middle class home on Guam is around $250,000
• The current cultural divide of those living in relative luxury inside the bases with better housing, schools and services has been a source of friction between the US military and the local population over the years.
• The officials said they were amazed and horrified when they learned that the Air Force recently built an on-base animal kennel for $27 million, with each animal space costing $100,000, when locally, the government is unable to provide sufficient infrastructure for its citizens, much less animals.
• Professors and students at the University of Guam expressed concern that there will be a sharp increase in sexual assault and rape on the island due to the relocation of US Marines.
• one of the reasons the Japanese government finally was able to get the US government to move some military forces out of Okinawa was because of major citizen mobilizations that occurred in response to rapes by US military personnel

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• CHRIS TOMLINSON | 02/ 5/09
• WASHINGTON — As it fights two wars, the Pentagon is steadily and dramatically increasing the money it spends to win what it calls "the human terrain" of world public opinion. In the process, it is raising concerns of spreading propaganda at home in violation of federal law.
• 
• over the past five years, the money the military spends on winning hearts and minds at home and abroad has grown by 63 percent, to at least $4.7 billion this year, according to Department of Defense budgets and other documents
• This year, the Pentagon will employ 27,000 people just for recruitment, advertising and public relations _ almost as many as the total 30,000-person work force in the State Department.
• The newsroom of the Joint Hometown News Service in San Antonio, Texas is seen on Thursday, Jan. 8, 2009. In a growing attempt to win what it calls "the human terrain," the Pentagon plans to spend more than $4.8 billion and employ more than 27,000 people this year to shape public opinion around the world. But critics worry that the Pentagon is using vast amounts of public money to shape the opinions of the American public. They dismiss the military's assertion that it is trying to educate rather than manipulate the American people. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
• "We have such a massive apparatus selling the military to us, it has become hard to ask questions about whether this is too much money or if it's bloated," says Sheldon Rampton, research director for the Committee on Media and Democracy, which tracks the military's media operations
• the military argues it is well-spent on recruitment and the education of foreign and American audiences
• Military leaders say that at a time when extremist groups run Web sites and distribute video, information is as important a weapon as tanks and guns.
• "We have got to be involved in getting our case out there, telling our side of the story, because believe me, al-Qaida and all of those folks ... that's what they are doing on the Internet and everywhere else," says Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., who chairs the Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee. "Every time a bomb goes off, they have a story out almost before it explodes, saying that it killed 15 innocent civilians."
• On an abandoned Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas, editors for the Joint Hometown News Service point proudly to a dozen clippings on a table as examples of success in getting stories into newspapers.
• What readers are not told: Each of these glowing stories was written by Pentagon staff. Under the free service, stories go out with authors' names but not their titles, and do not mention Hometown News anywhere. In 2009, Hometown News plans to put out 5,400 press releases, 3,000 television releases and 1,600 radio interviews, among other work _ 50 percent more than in 2007.
• the Pentagon's rapidly expanding media empire, which is now bigger in size, money and power than many media companies
• The Associated Press interviewed more than 100 people and scoured more than 100,000 pages of documents in several budgets
• AP included contracts found through the private FedSources database and requests made under the Freedom of Information Act
• Actual spending figures are higher because of money in classified budgets.
• The biggest chunk of funds _ about $1.6 billion _ goes into recruitment and advertising. Another $547 million goes into public affairs, which reaches American audiences. And about $489 million more goes into what is known as psychological operations, which targets foreign audiences.
• Staffing across all these areas costs about $2.1 billion
• Recruitment and advertising are the only two areas where Congress has authorized the military to influence the American public. Far more controversial is public affairs, because of the prohibition on propaganda to the American public.
• "It's not up to the Pentagon to sell policy to the American people," says Rep. Paul Hodes, D-N.H., who sponsored legislation in Congress last year reinforcing the ban.
• "There is no place for spin at the Department of Defense."
• But on Dec. 12, the Pentagon's inspector general released an audit finding that the public affairs office may have crossed the line into propaganda. The audit found the Department of Defense "may appear to merge inappropriately" its public affairs with operations that try to influence audiences abroad. It also found that while only 89 positions were authorized for public affairs, 126 government employees and 31 contractors worked there.
• Another audit, also in December, concluded that a public affairs program called "America Supports You" was conducted "in a questionable and unregulated manner" with funds meant for the military's Stars and Stripes newspaper.
• he program was set up to keep U.S. troops informed about volunteer donations to the military. But the military awarded $11.8 million in contracts to a public relations firm to raise donations for the troops and then advertise those donations to the public. So the program became a way to drum up support for the military at a time when public opinion was turning against the Iraq war.
• In 2003, for example, initial accounts from the military about the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch from Iraqi forces were faked to rally public support. And in 2005, a Marine Corps spokesman during the siege of the Iraqi city of Fallujah told the U.S. news media that U.S. troops were attacking. In fact, the information was a ruse by U.S. commanders to fool insurgents into revealing their positions.
• The fastest-growing part of the military media is "psychological operations," where spending has doubled since 2003.
• Psychological operations aim at foreign audiences, and spin is welcome. The only caveats are that messages must be truthful and must never try to influence an American audience.
• He says that in the 21st century, it is probably not possible to win the information battle with insurgents without exposing American citizens to secret U.S. propaganda.

• The danger of psychological operations reaching a U.S. audience became clear when an American TV anchor asked Gen. David Petraeus about the mood in Iraq. The general held up a glossy photo of the Iraqi national soccer team to show the country united in victory.

    

  Behind the camera, his staff was cringing. It was U.S. psychological operations that had quietly distributed tens of thousands of the soccer posters in July 2007 to encourage Iraqi nationalism.
• The emphasis on influence operations started with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In 2002, Rumsfeld established an Office of Strategic Influence that brought together public affairs and psychological operations. Critics accused him of setting up a propaganda arm, and Congress demanded that the office be shut down.
• "I went down that next day and said, 'Fine, if you want to savage this thing, fine, I'll give you the corpse,'" Rumsfeld said on Nov. 18, 2002, according to Defense Department transcripts of a speech he delivered. "'There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.'"
• In 2003, Rumsfeld issued a secret Information Operations Roadmap setting out a plan for public affairs and psychological operations to work together. It noted that with a global media, the military should expect and accept that psychological operations will reach the U.S. public.

• In February, the Army released a new eight-chapter field manual that puts information warfare on par with traditional warfare.

    

  The title of an entire chapter, Chapter 7: "Information Superiority."

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• U of R professors against Project Hero scholarship for dependents of fallen soldiers
• JOSH CAMPBELL, Leader-Post: Wednesday, March 24, 2010
• 
• REGINA — A scholarship program offered to dependents of fallen Canadian soldiers has raised eyebrows among some University of Regina professors.
• "We think this program is a glorification of Canadian imperialism in Afghanistan," said Jeffrey Webber, political science teacher and one of 16 U of R professors who drafted an open letter to U of R President Vianne Timmons stating their concerns.
• The program, called Project Hero, provides financial aid for children of Canadian Forces personnel who have lost their lives while serving in an active mission. Individual universities establish the terms and conditions for the scholarship including value, duration, and application process.
• Barb Pollock, a U of R spokesperson said, starting in the fall of 2010, the U of R will waive tuition and course fees and provide $1,000 per year to successful applicants of Project Hero. Applicants must be under age 26, full-time students in an undergraduate degree program and maintain an average of 75 per cent each semester to remain eligible.
• "It's about associating heroism with the military intervention of Afghanistan," said Webber. "We think it's aligning a public university — without any consultation with its students or staff, or the broader community — with support for this war."

• Webber said the name "Project Hero" has dangerous cultural underpinnings, implying that Canada's military activity in Afghanistan is "heroic".

  "We disagree with that. We think it's a military occupation of a sovereign country," he said. "It's not the position of the university administration to take a position in favour of this war."
• The open letter, endorsed by Webber and his colleagues, asked for three things: the immediate withdrawal from "Project Hero", public pressure on government to provide funding for universal access to post-secondary education and a public forum on the war in Afghanistan and Canadian imperialism to be held before the end of semester exams.

• Pollock said that the U of R doesn't "usually" run its awards and scholarships available past faculty members.

  "The decision was made by the executive of the university," said Pollock. "Other universities whom we respect are involved in it and we thought it was a good thing to do."

  She didn't expect the reaction from the group of protesting professors.

  "We have diverse opinions on moves the university makes all the time and the decision has been made at this point... That's where it's at," said Pollock, noting that the U of R will "not have a debate" and has made its decision to go through with the program.

• Andrew Tyler, a fourth-year history major and naval reservist — who said his opinions are his own, not that of the Canadian Forces — said he was "upset" and "irritated" by the professors' letter.

  "This is providing to the children whose mothers and fathers have been lost in overseas operations," said Tyler. "Why make a big deal about this?

  "These are ultra left-wing people who have no idea what its like to be in the boots of a soldier," he said of the professors. "I'm tired of (them) pontificating to us about what we should do."

• "I don't think it was the families who asked for this help," said a grateful Walsh, grandfather of three. "But it's not fair to students who need financial help and don't have soldiers in their families."

  Walsh said that university's should "match" help to dependents of fallen soldiers with other needy students who don't have any military connections.

  He also wondered if universities talked to families with fallen soldiers prior to program implementation.

  "It's honourable, but they should've talked to some of the families to get their feelings on it."

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• PATHWAYS TO AND FROM VIOLENT EXTREMISM: THE CASE FOR SCIENCE-BASED FIELD RESEARCH [3.10.10]
    By Scott Atran

   

  Statement Before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats & Capabilities
    March 10, 2010

   

  “Pathways to and From Violent Extremism:
    The Case for Science-Based Field Research” 

   

  A Statement by 

   

  Scott Atran
• SCOTT ATRAN, an anthropologist, is Director of Research, ARTIS Research and Risk Modeling; Research Associate and Visiting Professor, Psychology and Public Policy, University of Michigan; Presidential Scholar, Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Director of Research, Anthropology, National Center for Scientific Research, Paris; and author, In Gods We Trust.
• I've been with would-be martyrs and holy warriors from Morocco's Atlantic shore to Indonesia's outer islands, and from Gaza to Kashmir. My field experience and studies in diverse cultural settings inform my views.
• This an apt moment for such a hearing, given the recent uptick in homegrown terror activities, the failed Christmas Day airliner attack, and further rooting of Al Qaeda's viral social movement in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Maghreb, and the worldwide web.
• At present, we spend tens of billions of dollars to equip and protect our service members, but only fractions of that are spent on understanding the pathways to and from violent extremism, which maybe even more important for keeping our country safe and our service men and women out of harm's way.
• The concept of science-based field research — embedded in potential hotspots and open to public verification and replication, with clear ways and means to falsify what is wrong — is often misunderstood in Washington. Most legislators and policy makers think that we have a great deal of this type of research being undertaken and funded. We don't.
• I f you want to be successful in the long run where it counts — in stopping the next and future generations of disaffected youth from finding their life's meaning in the thrill and adventure of joining their friends in taking on the world's mightiest power; if this committee is to be truly relevant in solving the radicalization problem that it poses, then you have to understand these pathways that take young people to and from political and group violence. Then, knowing these pathways, you can do what needs to be done.
• Quality field-based scientific research can help save lives and treasury. Here is how it works. With assistance from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Air Force Research Lab, the Army Research Office, the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation, my associates and I put anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, mathematicians, and sometimes even physicists and chemists into interdisciplinary teams in a conflict region. We then begin to explore the nature of the conflict with leaders, community members, and youth. We follow up with an experimental design — which allows ready replication of initial results or falsification of our hypotheses — to understand pathways to and from violence.
• The main security concern no longer comes from any organization, or from well-trained cadres of volunteers who typically had some advanced education, often in engineering and medical studies. The threat today is from a Qaeda –inspired viral social and political movement that abuses religion in the name of defending a purist form Sunni Islam, and which is particularly contagious among Muslim youth who are increasingly marginalized — economically, socially, politically — and are in transition stages in their lives, such as immigrants, students, and those in search of friends, mates and jobs.
• Today's most virulent terrorism is rooted in rootlessness and restlessness. This gives an opening for embrace by the radical fraternity that preaches the jihadi cause, whose oxygen is the publicity provided by global media. The Qaeda movement is largely a diaspora phenomenon of people who enlist, rather than are recruited, outside their country of origin.
• Violent extremism represents a crash of traditional territorial cultures, not their resurgence. Individuals now mostly radicalize horizontally with their peers, rather than vertically through institutional leaders or organizational hierarchies. They do so mostly in small groups of friends — from the same neighborhood or social network — or even as loners who find common cause with a virtual internet community.
• Entry into the jihadi brotherhood is from the bottom up: from alienated and marginalized youth seeking out companionship, esteem, and meaning, but also the thrill of action, sense of empowerment, and glory in fighting the world's most powerful nation and army.
• Gallup and Pew surveys indicate that perhaps 7 percent of the world's Muslim population — nearly 100 million people — sympathize with jihadi aspirations. But of those many millions, only a few thousands actually commit to violence. Our data show that a reliable predictor of whether or not someone joins the Jihad is being a member of an action-oriented group of friends. It's surprising how many soccer buddies join together.
• The boundaries of the newer terrorist networks are very loose and fluid, and the internet now allows anyone who wishes to become a terrorist to become one, anywhere, anytime. More and more, terror networks are intertwined with petty criminal networks: drug trafficking, stolen cars, credit card fraud, and the like. This development is in part an unintended consequence of two of our successes: financial policing forced would-be terrorists to rely on local, low-cost, informal, underground methods of financing; and disruption of their organizations meant that terrorists would have to find new clandestine means for acquiring weapons and managing logistics.
• Given half a chance to take up a moral cause, they can be even more altruistically prone than others to give up their lives for their comrades and cause. This is one indication — and our research reveals others — that economic opportunities alone may not turn people away from the path to political violence. (Indeed, material incentives, whether "carrots" or "sticks," can even backfire when they threaten core values, as our recent research has shown for Israel, Palestine, Indonesia, and Iran). Rather, youth must be given hopes and dreams of achievement, and plausible means to realize such hopes and dreams.
• We're winning against Al Qaeda and its associates in places where antiterrorism efforts are local and built on an understanding that the ties binding terrorist networks today are more about social connections than political or ideological. I recently argued in the New York Times ("To Beat Al Qaeda, Look to the East," Dec. 13, 2009) that using knowledge friendship, kinship and discipleship has been very successful in Southeast Asia, and shows promise for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in its January 20, 2010 report on "Al Qaeda in Yemen and Somalia" also recommends, as part of U.S. strategy, the understanding that I outlined, although I believe that more research is needed there to support that recommendation.
• Recent proposals by the FBI's Community Relations Unit hold reasonable promise for preventing radicalization by building resilience in potential hotspot communities. I have asked the FBI to provide a summary of its program to you, and it is has been made available as a handout.
• Recent community outreach programs in the UK, the Netherlands, and Denmark are trying to build resilience within their Muslim communities to radicalization, and they are experimenting with a variety of different local initiatives to see what works best. A drawback is that in some cases they use anti-democratic interlocutors (Salafis and Wahhabis) to reach out and bring back would-be jihadis into the non-violent fold. That has given Islamist groups prestige in the community and validated them to some degree.
• a pressing need for fieldwork by social scientists in actual and potential conflict zones.
• There is also compelling case for involving social scientists in helping to form cultural and social awareness in the military theater
• social scientists should not be directly embedded with military units in theater.
• For example, I do not think that efforts like the Human Terrain System experiment in Afghanistan are all that promising. It is the infantry units themselves that should be trained before they go in theater to be culturally sensitive, and not have to rely on temporarily embedded "combat ethnographers" who move from unit to unit, thus undoing the personal connections that may have made them effective with the local population by providing medical aid and other needed non military services.
• More important for our nation, such efforts as these, small as they are, are potentially quite counterproductive. They only further alienate most social science academics from the military or, indeed, from any involvement in U.S. policy decision making that involves projection of power or conflict. The military and cultural reality of the terrain may favor having embedded social scientists be uniformed and armed (in part, because unarmed Western civilians would more likely draw fire as high-value targets). But the possibility that social scientists themselves would have to fire their weapons and perhaps kill local people — indeed, the mere sight of armed and uniformed American social scientists in a foreign theater — is guaranteed to engender academia's deep hostility.
• Ever since the Vietnam War, there has been mutual antipathy and antagonism between most academic social science — at least at the outstanding universities — and U.S. military operations and military-related policymaking. But unlike the case with the Vietnam War, many social scientists today believe that violent extremism is a danger that needs to be dealt with. Training and rewarding soldiers for being culturally knowledgeable and socially savvy — which goes beyond learning a language or studying a checklist of cultural preferences and habits — could be so much more effective for achieving our country's political and military mission. Moreover, involvement of top social scientists in deliberations such as these, and in publicly transparent field projects, could help heal the divide between some of our best thinkers and policymakers and operators.
• Preventing radicalization to violence — especially among youth and the next generation.
• Countering radicalization that has progressed to violence, by de-coupling the Qaeda movement from the local and cultural grievances and national movements that Qaeda tries to co-opt. For example, the Taliban and Somalia's Islamic Courts, unlike Al Qaeda, are interested in their homeland, not ours, and all need to be dealt with very differently.
• De-radicalizing those who have committed to violence. Although a "public health" approach to radicalization would be hard to legally implement in the USA, it has been part of the apparent success of the de-radicalization program initiated by General Douglas Stone in Iraqi prisons, which gives families and communities responsibility for keeping former detainees out of trouble. In a reversal of the policies that led to the abuses of Abu Ghraib, that program has seriously addressed the cultural sensitivities of detainees and respect for their persons.
• then you see that what inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Koran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world that they will never live to enjoy.
• If we can discredit their vicious idols (show how these bring murder and mayhem to their own people) and give these youth new heroes who speak to their hopes rather than just to ours, then we've got a much better shot at slowing the spread of jihad to the next generation than we do just with bullets and bombs.
• In the long run, perhaps the most important anti-terrorism measure of all is to provide alternative heroes and hopes that are more enticing and empowering than any moral lessons or material offerings. Jobs that relieve the terrible boredom and inactivity of immigrant youth in Europe, and with underemployed throughout much of the Muslim world, cannot alone offset the alluring stimulation of playing at war in contexts of continued cultural and political alienation and little sense of shared aspirations and destiny.
• It even could be a 21st-century version of what the Boy Scouts and high school football teams did for immigrants and potentially troublesome youth as America urbanized a century ago.
• Ask any cop on the beat: those things work.

• A key problem with proposals on what to do about radicalization to violent extremism is lack of field experience with the context-sensitive processes of selection into violence within these scenes. To understand and manage the local pathways to and from violent extremism requires science-based field research that is open to public verification and replicable, with clear ways and means to falsify what is wrong so as to better and better approximate what is truly right.

   

  I am at your disposal to work with you on understanding how these processes and pathways to radicalization operate in the field in potential conflict regions around the world.

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• Scott Atran

   

  Professor and author

   

   
• October 10, 2009
• Barack's Nobel: A Symbolic Gesture of Hope to the World's Youth
• The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama is a symbolic gesture to youth all over the developing world who have a new hero, our symbol.

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• A killing further erodes Afghan faith in leader 

   

     
   Wednesday, 21 Apr, 2010
• In a recent survey, Kandaharis favored negotiations with the Taliban by a margin of 19 to 1 over continued fighting. Five of six Kandaharis viewed the Taliban as “our Afghan brothers,” while four of five also said most members of the Taliban would stop fighting if given jobs.
• KABUL: As American and Nato troops prepare for a summer offensive in Kandahar — what could be their most critical push in more than eight years of war — any sense of safety in the area is being worn away by assassinations, bombings and other attacks on American and Western contractors, political officials and religious leaders, reported the New York Times.
• The violence has further eroded support for the government and foreign forces among a population in Kandahar that remains broadly sympathetic to the Taliban and that more than anything seems to fear continuing conflict.
• In a recent survey, Kandaharis favored negotiations with the Taliban by a margin of 19 to 1 over continued fighting. Five of six Kandaharis viewed the Taliban as “our Afghan brothers,” while four of five also said most members of the Taliban would stop fighting if given jobs.
• Those views seem certain to complicate the planned large-scale offensive in Kandahar, which aims to use a surge of new foreign troops — and the prospect of more fighting — to drive the Taliban to the negotiating table.
• The survey was commissioned by the United States Army’s Human Terrain System, a program intended to help the military better understand the social and cultural underpinnings of regions where troops are deployed.
• The study polled almost 2,000 residents in the city of Kandahar and the surrounding Kandahar Province, examining security in nine districts of Kandahar, excluding the most dangerous areas. Conducted by Glevum Associates, a Massachusetts research firm, the poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points.
• In five districts of Kandahar, the Taliban have more influence than the government, the study found. And by December — when the survey was conducted — residents were already saying that security was deteriorating.

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• Army Researchers: Why the Kandahar Offensive Could Backfire

    
   
   
  •   By Nathan Hodge      
   
  •   April 16, 2010
• a poll recently conducted by the Army’s controversial social science program, the Human Terrain System (HTS), is warning that rampant local corruption, and a lack of security, could undermine coalition efforts to win the support of the local population.
• The unclassified report (.pdf) is worth examining for several reasons. For starters, it addresses many of the questions raised by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the top U.S. intelligence officer in Afghanistan. In an assessment made public earlier this year, Flynn complained that the coalition lacked a real understanding of the cultural context of the insurgency, and said troops needed richer information about the communities they were trying to engage.
• That’s where HTS is supposed to come in. Originally, the program was focused on embedding social scientists and anthropologists within brigades. But as several people close to the program tell Danger Room, there is now an emphasis on larger-scale polls run by local contractors as a way to obtain a larger picture of the situation.
• The survey draws on a total of 1,994 interviews covering nine of Kandahar Province’s 16 districts. But it leaves out seven crucial districts: As the survey’s authors note, there are “inherent dangers associated with conducting surveys in a conflict zone” like Kandahar Province, and interviewers stayed out of areas with active violence.
• In other words, the survey leaves out the populations that most need to be understood, at least from the coalition’s perspective.

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• UNO program immerses soldiers in Afghan culture
• By KEVIN ABOUREZK / Lincoln Journal Star  | Posted: Saturday, April 10, 2010
• . Many HTS members receive training at a three-week Afghan immersion program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

• So ends the final class in this 19th session of an innovative educational program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

     

  The university's Center for Afghanistan Studies hosts the program, which consists of three weeks of Afghan language, cultural and historical immersion.
• As the U.S. works to deploy 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan, the Center for Afghanistan Studies has become a major player in efforts to train soldiers and military contractors to better interact with the Afghan people.
• Nearly 300 people have completed the center's Afghan Immersion Training program, which began in April 2008.
• Soldiers, military contractors, academics and others have participated in the program. Nearly all were destined for Afghanistan, where they were to serve as cultural advisers to military units, Gouttierre said
• "We don't want Afghanistan to be returned to what it was prior to 9/11," he said.

• Efforts to understand the Afghan people and include them in reconstruction efforts have proven effective in preventing attacks on the U.S. military, Gouttierre said.

     

  An important component of those efforts is the Army's Human Terrain System, which is aimed at organizing small teams of military personnel, linguists and civilian social scientists and attaching them to military units.
• But for three weeks, they get training at the Center for Afghanistan Studies.

• Among the first members of a Human Terrain team was Maj. Robert Holbert, a former social studies teacher at Lincoln High School.

     

  Holbert now serves as regional training coordinator for the Human Terrain System at Fort Leavenworth.
• Holbert met Gouttierre after spending five days at UNO before being deployed to Afghanistan in January 2007. After returning to Fort Leavenworth, Holbert invited Gouttierre to visit the base for two-hour seminars on Afghan history and culture.

• Gouttierre said he told Holbert the short seminars weren't effective, to which Holbert asked him what amount of time would be sufficient.

     

  Five weeks, he responded.

     

  "I didn't expect to hear from him," Gouttierre said.

     

  Not long after they spoke, however, Holbert contacted Gouttierre to tell him the Army had agreed to a three-week training program at UNO.

     

  "I still don't think three weeks is enough time," Holbert said. "It's better than five days."
• In March 2008, the first class attended the UNO immersion program.

• "These soldiers and civilians want to talk to Arabs and Afghans before they go," he said. "It makes sense."

     

  Those Afghan educators include President Hamid Karzai's former scheduler, an Afghan-American who graduated from the West Point Military Academy.

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• Understanding Counterinsurgency

   

  by Thomas Rid on 8 April 2010

   

   

   

  Understanding Counterinsurgency, co-edited with Thomas Keaney,
   London: Routledge, 280 pages, $39.95
• This textbook offers an accessible introduction to counterinsurgency operations, a key aspect of modern warfare.
• Featuring essays by some of the world’s leading experts on unconventional conflict, both scholars and practitioners, the book discusses how modern regular armed forces react, and should react, to irregular warfare. The volume is divided into three main sections:
• • Doctrinal Origins: analysing the intellectual and historical roots of modern Western theory and practice
   
  • Operational Aspects: examining the specific role of various military services in counterinsurgency, but also special forces, intelligence, and local security forces
   
  • Challenges: looking at wider issues, such as governance, culture, ethics, civil-military cooperation, information operations, and time.
• 11. Intelligence
   David Kilcullen
• 14. Culture
   Montgomery McFate
• 15. Ethics
   Sarah Sewall
• 16. Information Operations
   Andrew Exum

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• The Doctor and the Anthropologist

   

  by Thomas Rid on 12 April 2010
• The network of “Concerned Anthropologists” has collected signatures to block Congressional funding for the Human Terrain System, the program that recruits social scientists to help understand the human terrain the counterinsurgency forces in Afghanistan and Iraq operate in.
• The reasons for the concerned anthropolgists’ opposition are outlined in an open letter to Congress (.pdf). They say the HTS doesn’t work, that it’s dangerous, and a waste of money. But the most significant criticism, we hear from Hugh Gusterson, a member of the American Anthropological Aassociation’s executive board, is that the HTS “threatens the ethical integrity of anthropology.” The letter adds that the Human Terrain System is “unethical” for “other social scientists” as well.

• These are strong words. And they rest on a highly questionable assumption:

   

  Like medical doctors, anthropologists are ethically bound to do no harm. Supporting counterinsurgency operations clearly violates this code.

• That comparison to medical doctors is rather revealing.

   

  Anthropologists are not “like medical doctors.”
• Anthropologists are conservative — doctors are progressive. Not in a political sense, of course. But the goal of anthropology is observing societies and communities to better understand them, to document their time-honored ways, and perhaps to help conserve them. For medical professionals, understanding and documentation are nothing but instruments to the real goal, and that is change: to heal a patient, or even to make a community resistant to diseases. Doctors want to improve the human predicament, in the service of progress.
• For many anthropologists it is a preeminent problem that by observing reality, even if done professionally, you always affect it
• the line between observation and participation is difficult to draw — but the less interference, the better.
• For doctors, that is not even a problem; the point of their profession is to affect reality, to be invasive, the more functional and the more efficient the better.
• Anthropologists are often relativists — doctors tend to be universalists. A key tenet of many anthropologically trained social scientists is that you can only understand a community by immersing yourself, through participation, by speaking their language, in a literal as well as in a metaphorical sense. The researcher is not supposed to impose his or her judgment on what is right and wrong, good and bad. These values are relative to a given community.
• Two things are unnerving about this letter. First its seeming naiveté. Inaction is not risk free. In this case, it might actually cause more harm. Just face it: there is no ethically clean choice. Both risk and moral complicity cannot be avoided, they can only be managed.
• Then there’s the obvious contradiction. Some anthropologists don’t seem to understand counterinsurgency and they don’t seem to understand the military. The mission’s goal is not “occupation” and the army’s task is not to “do harm.” Perhaps their own advice is not too bad after all? Don’t pass out judgments about communities you haven’t immersed yourself in.
• You’d think this is obvious? 1,000 “concerned” anthropologists apparently didn’t and signed.
• * The chapter’s author, Montgomery McFate, has neither read nor discussed this post with me.
• Graeme Wood 12 April 2010 at 23:20 

   

   

   

  HTS can “threaten the ethical integrity of anthropology,” even if the analogy to medical ethics is false. (And it is false, for the reasons you give.)

   

  Perhaps a more apt analogy is to my own profession, which is journalism. If HTS were hiring journalists, I would be concerned as well, for predictable reasons. People talk to journalists because they assume the journalist’s work is for public consumption, and not for the advantage of one side in a war. This is one thing that differentiates us from spies. If Evans-Pritchard (to adduce one well-known example) announced that he intended to use his anthropological research among the Nuer as a recruitment tool for his side in a war — and he used his research in exactly this way — his subjects would have been less forthcoming.

   

  I know of no cases where suspicion of working with the military has thwarted an anthropologist from doing his work. But that could happen. There are good reasons for anthropologists to want to guard the impartiality of their profession, even if they are not naive about the nature of the military and counterinsurgency
• Thomas Rid 13 April 2010 at 10:41
• (1) Of course serving only one side can threaten the ethical integrity of anthropologists, although I don’t think that the entire profession of anthropology would be affected in a wholesale fashion
• Is the entire profession compromised because some doctors serve one side in a conflict, say in MEDEVAC units? No. Would it be better not to serve? But at the same time it is obvious that doctors can do morally highly questionable things in a conflict. Their knowledge can be abused in horrid ways.
• Demanding inaction for an entire profession does not extricate you from a moral dilemma; it might make it worse.
• Hunter Keith 13 April 2010 at 11:40 

   

   

   

  I agree in principle with the idea that journalists might do damage to the profession as a whole, should they put themselves in the position of taking pay from the same check-writer that salaries warfighters. And can we agree that pay is the central issue here? If it weren’t, we’d certainly have to debate the professional implications of “embedded” journalism on the same terms that we do the Human Terrain Program. They’re shades of one-another perhaps, but not usefully similar.
• The most damaging are plain-clothes contractors like the Lincoln Group, whose “journalism” was exposed for the manufactured propaganda that it was. I don’t know how the Lincoln Group’s exposure affected the forthcoming-ness of would-be sources, but the loss of confidence in specific writers and newspapers themselves was plain for everyone to see.
• HTT anthropologists are uniformed in the battle-field and unambiguously part of the fighting force. My gut tells me that as long as social scientists keep their employment relationships with the military clearly discernible, then there’s no greater risk to anthropology than there is to history, economics or, for that matter, engineering, construction or truck driving – all professions that the military employs and deploys in the battlefield. What’s needed before we conclude outright that anthropologists do or do not belong in war is a recognition that they are already there, and that they, as a tribe, could use some anthropological looking-into.
• I think the key is not to call HTTs anthropologists. A few reasons for that: almost no HTTs are trained anthropologists (a few are, but they are a tiny minority since HTS desperately hires anyone with a Ph.D. on any topic); the things they write do not resemble anthropological research products in any way; and the purpose of it all is not to enhance knowledge in the abstract way that academics know and love. Also, if Montgomery hadn’t called it “social science” in the first place, this debate would never have taken place, but then it also would have been a much harder sell to the generals.
• The AAA has come to this themselves in their last report, where they admit that HTS has almost nothing to do with anthropology anyway, but if it did, they would abhor it. I’m paraphrasing.
• Graeme Wood 13 April 2010 at 13:57 

   

   

   

  “Military journalists” and Lincoln Group operatives are simply not journalists, and are not acknowledged to be journalists by other journalists or by their readers. They are military p.r. agents — an honorable calling, perhaps, but not journalism.

   

  And this leads us to the comment of “I.” HTS’s anthropologists are simply no longer anthropologists, if they ever were. One can imagine the Concerned Anthropologists taking a quasi-takfiri view of anthropologists who work for HTS, and arguing that they have removed themselves from anthropology, for good or ill. In most ways I think this would be a better tack for the Concerned Anthropologists to take.
• Laleh 13 April 2010 at 00:36

• the anthropologist *does* have access to the kind of knowledge that can so easily be weaponised (and it is. Robert Pelton’s newest article tells us that the HTS teams’ knowledge-gathering which is ostensibly supposed to be only used for providing services to the population and for making them more amenable to “us” is indeed used to knock down doors and arrest [and kill] people).

   

  As for the charge of ‘naivete’, that is just a cliche. If as a social scientist I don’t want to be involved in making imperialism (or neo-colonialism, or plain old military aggression) any more efficient than it already is, I am not naive.
• As part of COIN and HTS, anthropologists are supposed to be progressive, to make a difference, to ‘heal a society’ and to (or contribute to) make it resilient against social and political ‘diseases’ such as fundamentalism and terrorism.
• And therefore, they cannot afford to be ‘relativist’ anymore, as they serve the national interest as defined by the US military. Sure, they try to understand local culture, but certainly with a particular perspective that assumes a certain universality – ‘our’ model can be applied ‘over there’.
• So I think you actually, if inadvertently, provided a rather powerful critique of the uses and abuses of anthropology in COIN.

• Maybe there is a reason why RTS hasn’t been rolled into miitary intel and just been done with.

   

  Perhaps it has something to do with the comments mentioned above about people being a bit more guarded if they thought they were under observation by people who would then be using that information to do damage to them later on.
• Also McFate (TM) brand RTS needs to be viewed with a bit more skepticism by the OP given the track run its had in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
• I 13 April 2010 at 13:15 

   

   

   

  Rereading your post, I also noted this line: “anthropologists tend to ignore power.” I’m quoting without the context, of course, but if you honestly think that, it looks like you understand anthropology as poorly as anthropologists understand the military–but I don’t believe you really think that, it’s clearly for the sake of your analogy. My anthropological study is pretty self-directed and pretty much limited to reading the ethnographies of Pashtuns and other Afghans, but the research on these things is *all* about power.

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• Army Intelligence Expert to Address EMP Threat at Homeland Security and Defense Symposium
• U.S. Army intelligence expert Mr. Gary E. Phillips will speak about the threat of Electromagnetic Pulse or EMP, to our nation’s infrastructure at this year’s NATIONAL SYMPOSIUM on Homeland Security and Defense™, Oct. 27-29.
• Apr 08, 2010 – U.S. Army intelligence expert Mr. Gary E. Phillips will speak about the threat of Electromagnetic Pulse or EMP, to our nation’s infrastructure at  this year’s NATIONAL SYMPOSIUM on Homeland Security and Defense™, Oct. 27-29.  Mr. Phillips will discuss the nature of the EMP threat and what industry and governments can do in response.
• Mr. Phillips serves as the Senior Intelligence Advisor for the TRADOC G-2 Intelligence Support Activity (TRISA).
• Mr. Phillips also provides direction and oversight for training of Human Terrain System team

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• (U//FOUO) U.S. Marine Corps Information Operations April 2010

• National Marine Corps Council

   
   
  • Lt Col Mitch “Rico” Rios, Executive Officer, MCIOC
   
  • 32 pages
   
  • For Official Use Only
   
  • April 17, 2010
• 
• 

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• Governmental and NGO Sector

  The target applications for this segment are coastal surveillance, search and rescue, covert operations, drug interdiction, disaster relief, humanitarian, medical and missionary work.

  • Seastar has the unique capability to combine in a single operation surveillance and intervention by landing on water next to the target. On water, Seastar features the maneuverability and speed of a powerboat.
  • The Dornier-typical sponson platforms facilitate personnel, equipment or stretcher ingress and egress on water.
  • Seastar can mask itself from radar at sea (within sea clutter) by loitering on water remotely offshore and close to the target area for extended time periods. Thus, Seastar enables surprise interventions, paramount for the success of many operations.
  • Seastar's capability to combine joint operations of different transport means like helicopters, vessels and fixed wing aircraft in one single mission results in drastic cost savings and increase in operational efficiency.
  • Routine single engine surveillance operation extends on-station endurance to up to 10 hours.
  • Seastar is an electronically quiet aircraft because of its all-composite construction. Radome(s) can be integrated into the fuselage structure (front or side). Seastar inherently eliminates rotor modulation common with helicopters.
  • Composite structure is highly damage tolerant. Wing and fuselage hard points can be added for external stores.
  • Large cabin facilitates multiple sensor consoles and crew member stations. External visibility from the cockpit is well suited for Night Vision Goggles operations.
  • Seastar (with its high horizontal stabilizer) can be flown with a modified cabin door to deliver airdropped material.

• Andrew Garfield
  Founder

   

  In 2006, Andrew Garfield founded Glevum Associates LLC, which specializes in conducting Face-to-Face Research and Analysis (F2RA™) in conflict and post conflict societies. Currently a permanent U.S. resident, Mr. Garfield served as a British military, then senior civilian intelligence officer. He finished his U.K. government service as a policy advisor in the U.K. Ministry of Defense (MOD). His professional specializations include Counter Terrorism (CT), Counter Insurgency (COIN), Psychological Warfare (PSYOP), Information Operations (IO) and Strategic Communications (SC). Between 2005 and 2006, he was head of operations for a U.S. Strategic Communications company providing direct IO and public relations support to Multi National Corps Iraq (MNC-I). Since 2004, he has worked exclusively for US clients including the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), U.S. Army, and the Department of State. Mr. Garfield lectures extensively in the U.S. including for the U.S. Army, National Defense University, and the Naval Post Graduate School. He has been a regular contributor on CT and COIN issues for CNN, the BBC, Sky Television and many U.S. and U.K. newspapers and periodicals including the Wall Street Journal, ORBIS and Middle East Quarterly. Mr. Garfield has led a number of major groundbreaking DoD funded research projects on CT and COIN. Most recently, he led a joint U.S. and U.K. study that recommended a new strategy to reform the Afghan National Police and wider Afghan justice sector. Mr. Garfield is a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) and the U.S. Director of the Royal United Services Institute. He is also a senior lecturer for a Naval Postgraduate School sponsored cultural education program for senior deploying U.S. Army commanders and their staffs.

• Laurie J. Adler
  Senior Public Affairs Advisor

   

  Laurie J. Adler is the Senior Public Affairs Advisor for Glevum Associates. Mrs. Adler specializes in strategic communications, public relations, crisis communications, international affairs, defense, marketing, government relations, lobbying and branding. Her extensive experience includes managing complex high profile crisis and international public affairs’ issues which involve government relations, lobbying and public relations components. She is also currently the Senior Public Affairs Advisor for the Dornier Seaplane Company. Previously, she was the Strategic Communications Advisor, Human Terrain System (HTS), US Army TRADOC, where she was responsible for all Strategic Communications and Public Affairs. Mrs. Adler has held numerous marketing, government affairs, public relations and crisis communications positions including: Director, Strategic Marketing and Legislative Affairs, DRS Technologies; Consultant, Strategic Defense Marketing and Crisis Communications, Development Alternatives International (DAI); Associate, Burdeshaw Associates; Vice President, Cassidy & Associates, the government relations arm of Weber Shandwick Worldwide; Director, V-22 Business Development, Bell-Boeing; and Manager, Public Affairs, Burson-Marsteller. Prior to this, she served for six years as Manager, International Affairs, Aerospace Industries Association of America (AIA), where she developed and wrote aerospace and defense industry positions, tracked Congressional initiatives, and lobbied on commercial and defense trade issues. Before joining AIA, Mrs. Adler was the Associate/Acting Director of The Korea Society and worked as a Political Analyst/Writer for the Korean Government in their Embassy in Washington. She holds a B.A. from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and an M.A. in International Relations from The University of Chicago.

• Clients

   

  Our research and analysis services have been used by numerous government and private clients around the world. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Glevum Associates has supported decision makers engaged in combat operations, while other organizations have benefited from our insights in the United States and elsewhere. A few of our F2RA™ clients are listed here:
• United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM)
• United States Special Operations Command Joint Military Information Support Command (USSOCOM JMISC)
• BAE Systems
• U.S. Department Of State
• U.S. Embassy, Kabul, Afghanistan
• PYSOP Task Force (POTF) Afghanistan
• U.S. Department of Defense
• Combined Security Transition Command Afghanistan (CSTC-A)
• PYSOP Task Force (POTF) Iraq
• Human Terrain System (HTS), U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC)
• Multi National Corps Iraq (MNC-I)
• Counter IED Task Force
• Counter IED Task Force Iraq
• Leadership Development and Education for Sustained Peace (LDESP), Naval Post Graduate School (NPS)
• United States Forces Iraq (USF-I)
• International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)

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• INGOs and NGOs: Let’s talk about a Mercy Corps, a Peace Corps in Crisis Corps mode or an Intelligence Agency (Central or otherwise); of which one, a Mercy Corps which donates cycles to school students in a place like Trincomalee, bath basin, blanket, mosquito net, food, and soaps for tsunami affected pregnant mothers, more than one million rupees worth tools of trade (TOT) for tsunami affected persons in a place like Nilaveli or conducts two day Food Processing Fair in a place like Akkaraipattu; a Peace Corps in Crisis Corps mode volunteers working as Civil Engineers for water sanitation and reconstruction projects, Community Liaison Officers assisting in the coordination of regional relief and reconstruction efforts, Field Officers, Evaluation Specialists, Livelihoods Assistants, Community Health Assistants and Capacity Building Specialists or an intelligence agency spooks ‘pumping iron’ in a hotel gym in the morning, trash talking about their favorite NFL (National Football) Team or doing the Monday morning quarterbacking at breakfast, talking about their ‘Harleys ‘ at lunch and whining, dining in business attire and fornicating with local girls to their hearts’ content using intelligence slush funds at night, are YOU AFRAID MOST? An intelligence agency (central or otherwise), right? If the answer is yes, you have no sense about the intriguing world of intelligence gathering!
• I am dead scared of a Peace Corps or a Mercy Corps team wanting to help a strategically important country affected by a natural disaster than a CIA team stationed in normally embassy or a very safe house. These Peace Corps, Mercy Corps teams consist of academics, experts and intellectuals, they basically are Human Terrain Teams that have ‘social scientists’ who map relationships and create databases of local leaders, economic issues, social problems, castes and political disputes as well as using mapped knowledge and cultural insights to advise military commanders. For CIA team they kill time and get hold of a rascal like ‘Curve Ball’ and file a Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) report pushing a nation to a war baselessly or welcome an AQ double agent without frisking him prior to his entry to a base and wait in a receiving line to be blasted to smithereens by him.
• I have put out a lot of details to get to my point. Though Sri Lankans and the government friendly or patriotic media, deliberately or not, bashed or pilloried all International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) without an iota of mercy but how do you know that some of these INGOS or NGOs paved the way for the wiping out the tiger terrorist by providing very vital information about locations, activities, equipments and movements of LTTE top rung in real time so that GOSL or Security Forces could take ‘timely’ action? As every Tamil is not a bad Tamil, every INGO is not against unitary state of Sri Lanka. Please remember that.
  
  That is why Pakistan in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) earth quake in 2005 asked only for material aid, not for INGO personnel by plane loads.

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