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STEVE PIECZENIK TALKS: Volume II 

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Instant/Pablum Knowledge Provided to Dr. Ben Carson by Ex-CIA Operative Dewey Clarridge—To No Avail!

The Presidential candidates are acting like parrots who are cramming for a test!
Enough!

In the midst of all the hoopla about the French/Belgium terrorist arrests of Islamic Terrorists, I found an article in the NY Times which highlighted a problem that I have noticed in this circus called, “the presidential debates’. None of the candidates are truly qualified for the Presidency; because there is no particular course or professional path that is specifically designed to prepare someone for the panoply of jobs involved in becoming POTUS.

At best, we, citizens, might entertain some thoughts [or wishes] as to what we might think are relevant skills to becoming POTUS: 

▪ management of a large bureaucracy replete with inertia.

▪ extensive hands-on foreign policy experience with successful outcomes. 

▪ an impressive military experience so that we can avoid unnecessary wars; or, we have to go to war then make certain that we can win.

▪ a strong economic/banking/business background.

This wish list could go on and on. The perfect future candidate has not yet been realized;  because, at best, any person running for that Presidency brings her/his unique experiences to a position which has never been properly delineated. It’s the only job in America which has never had a classical job description; unlike any position in the federal bureaucracy which is replete with minutiae that might entail tons of paper work [just for the Top Secret clearance].

Therefore, we have obtained candidates who have never been properly vetted like Barack Obama. We, Americans, entrust our faith to a self-selected group of people who can parrot the necessary words that the media feels might suit the American public, irrespective of the true merit or the past accomplishments of that particular candidate.

Recently, the NY Times [Nov. 17, 2015], had an article entitled “Ben Carson Is Struggling To Grasp Foreign Policy, Advisers Say.” By Trip Gabriel. Gabriel points out that a former well known, highly experienced ex-CIA operative, named Duane R. Clarridge felt that as ‘an advisor’ to Ben Carson on foreign policy, the “good doctor” was not ‘properly briefed’ on foreign policy.

More importantly, Dewey [his nickname] said the following:

“Nobody has been able to sit down with him [Carson] and have him get an iota of intelligent information about the Middle East.”

Now that is quite a damning statement! Fortunately, I have known about Dewey and his stellar if not, unusual career in the CIA. He was kind enough to offer me a job in the presence of former DCI Bill Casey. I respect Dewey; and more importantly, his assessment jives with my past blog that Carson has a major problem telling the truth; or, more importantly, assimilating new knowledge, especially when the issues are completely out of his purview. Similarly, I can say the same things for Cruz, Rubio and Jeb [whose ‘new advisors’ gave us 9/11].

What we hear, if we are still tuned in [I am tuned out by now] are not the thoughts or feelings of a real person; but of a contrived entity [human robot] who is filled with an assortment of content which most of the time is rarely relevant to a profession entitled, POTUS. We hear nothing but an endless repetition of words that drone on without any meaning, or merit. Bereft of serious content or any real talent, each candidate, performs according to the cues of his instant stream of twitter, Instagram or some other binary internet message. There is much ‘sound and fury signifying nothing’.

The process of selecting a President, must change in the 21^st  century in such a way that we, Americans, have some inkling of whether that person is real; knowledgeable; or even talented in something other than self-aggrandizement.There was a time when the citizen-soldier who had another profession [other than politics] were inaugurated. Our Founding Fathers understood that the creation of a new country was far more important than their own personal ambitions.

Perhaps, that moment of history can be repeated spontaneously without the prompting by some paid consultant or advisor. I would love to see a candidate who changed the rules of the game… right now.

Donald Trump—this would be your proper introduction to the game called, the “Presidency”.

Grab it and close the deal…now! In your own way… and not in the prescribed, artificial way that has no bearing to the present day realities of immediacy and crisis management.

Homer wrote :
“Achilles absent, was Achilles still!” 

The Most Effective Counter-Terrorist Fighters Against ISIS [Sunnis]: 

▪ Revolutionary Guards [Iran]

▪ Hezbollah [Lebanon]

▪ Alawites [Syria]

Once again, mass hysteria and inane pronouncements about declaring war against ISIS fill the airwaves. Nothing enhances the dramatic effects of a terrorist attack than the uncontrolled rage fulminating in the mouths of French leaders and so-called ‘experts’ on terrorism. More fighter planes and armed policemen with German Shepard dogs wandering about does nothing more than increase the fear factor that permeates a post-terrorist attack.

Instead of cooling down the rhetoric in order to minimize the effects of a terrorist attack, the political elite has enhanced the dramatic effect of the Paris attack to the point that they are inadvertently magnifying the power of terrorism to change routine life around the world. Terrorism has been around for centuries. Nothing is new in creating fear.

However, with the internet that small amount of fear in relation to other world problems [wars, drought, hunger, infectious diseases, poverty, pollution et. al.]  has been disproportionately enhanced beyond credulity. I think it wise for our leaders around the world assure their citizens through a tempered rhetoric that whatever has to be done to counter-act ISIS, will be done in time. I recommend that we ally ourselves with the efforts of Iran, Hezbollah, Bashar Assad and Russia in their present war with ISIS. In my opinion, only these tried and tested soldiers whose own countries are really impacted by ISIS have been successful in combating ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

More importantly, I would take Hezbollah off the list of ‘terrorists’ in a State Department declaration.

For some time now, I have been a supporter of Nasarallah and his Hezbollah Shi’ite fighters who hark from all over Lebanon and quite frankly, are some of the most ruthless, effective fighters I have encountered in decades in the Middle East. How can anyone match the passion and vigor of 8000 young fighters who are trying to defend their homeland [Lebanon] which is only ten minutes away from the ISIS battle fields?

Next, I would support the Iranian Revolutionary Guards [IRG] fighting under the command of the General Qasem Soleimani who has had more experience defeating an assortment of different combatants over the past twenty years than all of our Navy, Air Force and Army Generals/Admirals combined. Let the combat tested Shi’ite fighters who continue to degrade the Sunni fighting forces of ISIS stay on course. In addition, we know that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, U.A.E. fund ISIS so we must cut off the supply lines and money from the Salafists supporters in Saudi Arabia; even if that means a major military coup against the inept, lazy Royal Saudi Family [which is neither royal nor a family—simply a British creation after WWI].

Remember: this ISIS mess on Syrian/Iraqi battlefields and beyond is a result of the Bush/Cheney disaster of the initial Iraq invasion.

Terrorism can be easily defeated if one has the will and ruthless capacity to engage in surgical assassinations and neutralizations of Sunni Leaders [including clerics, scholars et.al.] wherever they may be found supporting ISIS. I would make certain that Russia and especially Vladimir Putin has our full cooperation irrespective of our minor differences in the Ukraine or anywhere else. America will have no better ally than the Russians.

In times of danger and war, Russia has always fought alongside Americans to defeat a common enemy i.e. Nazi Germany. The Russians are formidable fighters and will stop at nothing to extract revenge against those who may have hurt their innocent victims –as in the MetroJet explosion over the Sinai Desert.

Lastly, the refugee flow must stop now. Our State Department cannot be trusted to vet out the different refugees who might want to enter the USA. Unfortunately, that is the sad truth. For now, we, Americans, cannot accept refugees until we create a system that is far more effective than what the State Department currently has.

I do not trust Obama nor Kerry when they say anything related to this present crisis. Neither one has a coherent strategy in place to deal with the multitudes of problems with which we, Americans, are presently confronting. I am also leery of our new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr [Marine] who in his confirmation hearings declared that our number one enemy was ‘Russia’ ?!?.

Really ???

It’s time to take a deep breath and realize that the best antidote to terror is leading a normal life which signals to the world that nothing will stop us from building our country even in times of a clear and present danger.

Let me end with the wise words of the great American poet, Robert Frost:

“Americans are like a rich father who wishes he knew how to give his son his hardships that made him rich.” 

Should be on Alex Jones in a few minutes.

Good one, thanks Tony Unplugged http://timshorrock.com/?p=2259

Bombing and Boots-on-the-Ground are Not the Antidote to World-Wide Terrorism!

HUMINT/Psychological Warfare are far more Appropriate. 

The recent tragic terrorist attacks in Paris showed once again that those Belgian/French citizens involved in the different raids were, as I had predicted from Algeria, Morocco and other parts of North Africa. What is confusing the picture is the fact that they grew up in France, Belgium or some other part of Europe. Also, the fact that they may or may not have trained in Syria is certainly relevant but not really essential to the defeat of ISIS or some 100 other known terrorist groups fighting in Syria.

One thing that I have learned from my thirty years in counter-terrorism is that nothing surpasses the effectiveness of acquiring Human Intelligence [HUMINT] on the ground, be it in France, Belgium, Syria or wherever potential terrorists might reside. Most terrorist groups have a distinct signature of operations. They may have arisen de novo; or, they may have been trained in certain locations which have been monitored for some time –like the Taliban in Afghanistan; Al Qaeda in Iraq; ISIS in Syria.

For the most part, our collective capability to monitor signal/electronic [SIGINT/ELINT] communications from around the world, have been quite impressive.We, Americans, have been able to penetrate most of the internet chatter occurring worldwide on a 24/7 basis. What we are sorely deficient in is having developed a cadre of intelligence operatives who can and will penetrate different terrorist groups in Syria or wherever they may arise. It’s a major problem that we have had in the Intelligence Community for several decades as the internet arose in a burst of glittering innovation.

HUMINT is a tedious, boring, time-consuming statecraft that does not really reward the particular operatives who have dedicated their lives to it. It’s not a statecraft that is sexy anymore. Granted, HUMINT has been portrayed in the past by flippant novelists like myself, Tom Clancy, Brian Geller [Mission Impossible] or others; as something that a  Jack Ryan or a Bourne would utilize in order to eventually resolve the particular crises with his gun or with his physical prowess. That’s called fiction, dear readers.

We, ordinary citizens, rarely appreciate the fact that some of the best intelligence operatives were simply those people [women, men, children] who could penetrate a culture; subsume his/her identity; and then assume the statecraft technique of gathering mundane intelligence [which is not usually hidden in a triple-sealed vault]. In the past, many of our actors have acted as quite effective spies doing very ordinary jobs in distant places. For example, Julia Child was an operative in China helping to train the Viet Minh anti-Japanese fighters. David Niven was a brilliant German linguist and military operative who could penetrate enemy intelligence and then be able to predict what the Nazi Luftwaffe would do.

Again, HUMINT, requires different types of people who are able to speak a particular foreign language; understand the culture of those people with whom we want to monitor; and then be able to manipulate or anticipate their subsequent behavior. During the Iraq War, the US Marines hired a group of women anthropologists who went into the various areas of conflict and as a result of their ability to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of those Muslim women, acts of terrorism and fighting went down over 90%. It’s not rocket science. Yet, HUMINT is a very particular kind of skill where psychology, anthropology, and nation-state behavior converge into one discipline.

I received my first taste of this statecraft at the Political Science Department at M.I.T during the early 1970’s. I was trained by sophisticated Professors who had been taught by the OSS; and then the CIA. Unlike any program at Harvard or anywhere else, the discipline of strategic thinking alongside of ‘out-of-the box’ conceptualization was highly encouraged.

The teachers in MIT department were literally intellectual giants:

▪ Harold Lasswell[ Politics and Personality]

▪ Lucian Pye [Mao And The Cultural Revolution] 

▪ Ithiel de Sola Poole [ The Internet, Social Media and Their Political Consquences]. 

▪ Prof. Kaufmann [Strategic/Tactical Nuclear Wars].

The aforementioned department/program was funded by the CIA/DARPA. Unfortunately, the political science dept. at MIT is now engaged in heuristic concepts based on big data and simplistic notions of human/nation-state behavior. Clearly, programs change. Different times demand different ways of thinking. However, as far as I am concerned, human behavior and nation-state behavior has not and will not change. More importantly, the terrorism problem of today is the same one we had twenty and thirty years ago—and for centuries.

We, Americans, should remember that the American Revolution started with a terrorist act: the Boston Tea Party’s defiance of British Law, throwing tea into the Charles River. Those of us who were involved in the Lebanese Civil War during the 1970’s-80’s know that ISIS is no different from the various Sunni Palestinian groups [PLO, PLFP, PLA] who were fighting each other; as well as, the Christian Phalangists in Beirut proper. The quicker we use effective HUMINT penetration of the various fighting groups in Syria [ISIS], the sooner we can resolve that tragedy.

More bombings will do nothing; except make us, naïve observers, feel that something bold and destructive has been done. Unfortunately, aerial bombardment has never been shown to be effective-- either during WWII, the Vietnam War, or now. Let’s go back to basics of human behavior: who, what, where, when and why. At least let’s give psychological warfare a chance! Terrorist groups have never been destroyed using outside forces. Most of them have been eviscerated from within.

Plus ca change; moins ca change!

The more that things change; the less they really change.