Flynn’s Soft Side

Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan
By Major General Michael T. Flynn, USA, Captain Matt Pottinger, USMC, Paul D. Batchelor, DIA
Voices from the field, Jan. 2010

Major General Michael T. Flynn has been the Deputy Chief of Staff, Intelligence (CJ2), for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan since June 2009. His previous assignment was Director of Intelligence, J-2, for the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. He has three decades of experience as an intelligence officer. He can be reached by email at michael.t.flynn@afghan.swa.army.mil.
Captain Matt Pottinger is serving in Kabul as an advisor to Major General Flynn. He was the 2009 winner of the Lieutenant Colonel Michael D. Kuszewski Award for Marine Corps Intelligence Officer of the Year. He can be reached by email at matthew.f.pottinger@afghan.swa.army.mil.
Paul D. Batchelor, of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Senior Executive Service, is currently serving at ISAF Headquarters as Senior Advisor for Civilian/Military Integration. He has served as the DIA’s advisor to the Secretary of Defense and as manager of current and crisis intelligence support to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He can be reached by email at paul.d.batchelor@afghan.swa.army.mil.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This paper, written by the senior intelligence officer in Afghanistan and by a company-grade officer and a senior executive with the Defense Intelligence Agency, critically examines the relevance of the U.S.

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Death Squad Resumé

Stanley McChrystal: Death Squad Poster Boy & ‘Cheney’s Chief Assassin’
By MediaLens, Dissident Voice, July 1, 2010

The sacking of the head of NATO’s military command in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, caused a surge in coverage of the man described by political analyst James Petras as “Cheney’s chief assassin.”

In May 2009, Petras sampled from McChrystal’s CV. The general had played a central role in directing units involved in “extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions”. He was “the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building”.

Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal commanded the Pentagon’s Joint Special

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Two Anda and A Congo

Will United Nations Cover-Up Rwanda’s Congo Genocide? [Yes]
By Milton Allimadi, 2010

Let’s see how Paul Kagame’s chief apologists, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Ban Ki-Moon, and Tony Blair help the co-architect of Rwanda’s genocide spin his way out of the accusations in a yet-to-be published United Nations report, that his troops committed genocide in Congo during the 1990s.

The report is scheduled to be released in October and according to media accounts it exhaustively documents the massacres of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees who had fled to Congo after Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana was assassinated –a dastardly deed which courts in France and Spain have pinned on Kagame– Rwanda erupted in massacres and the country was overrun by an invading army from Uganda.

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Gladio Timeline

OPERATION GLADIO : The complete story

ITALY : 1947 Origins of Gladio

“As early as 1947, the United States was constructing a clandestine network in Northern Italy to act in the event of a communist insurrection or electoral victory.” (Wolfgang Achtner, Sunday Independent, 11/11/90)

“Though the Stay Behind operation was officially started only in 1952, “the whole exercise had been in existence for a long time, in fact ever since it was born in the head of Allen Dulles,” said the ex-Nato source who has access to files in several West European nations.  According to him, Dulles, the first chief of the CIA, worked out the original plan to build secret anti-communist guerilla forces across Europe when he was based in Switzerland at the end of the second world war. Dulles, Sir Stewart Menzies (SIS) and the Belgian Premier Paul Henri Spaak codified the plan in a secret pact sometime between 1949 and 1952 under the umbrella of the Clandestine Coordinating Committee at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, (SHAPE), which became Nato.

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Art Official Sword

Operation Gladio
From Wikipedia

Operation Gladio is the codename for a clandestine North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) “stay-behind” operation in Italy during the Cold War. Its purpose was to prepare for, and implement, armed resistance in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion and conquest. Stay-behind operations were prepared in many NATO member countries, and some neutral countries. Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organizations, “Operation Gladio” is used as an informal name for all of them. The name Gladio is the Italian form of gladius, a type of Roman short sword.

The role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Gladio and the extent of its activities during the Cold War era, and any relationship to terrorist attacks perpetrated in Italy during the “Years of Lead” (late 1960s to early 1980s) is the subject of debate.

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House of Sand

Saudi Arabia and the Reagan Doctrine
by Jonathan Marshall, MER155

President Reagan came to office with a bold commitment to roll back Soviet gains in the Third World without risking the trauma or cost of another Vietnam-style intervention. The “Reagan Doctrine,” as his policy came to be known, ironically took its cue from Soviet support in the 1970s for leftist insurgencies in Africa and Central America. But the beneficiaries of the Reagan Doctrine were anti-communist resistance and counterrevolutionary insurgencies in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia and Nicaragua.

Outside of the Afghanistan effort, however, the policy has never enjoyed broad, bipartisan support. Financing, arming, training and directing such movements has consistently strained the resources of the CIA and the lobbying abilities of the administration. As a result, the White House put a premium on finding foreign allies on whom it could offload some of the responsibility for these operations. Aside from sharing the burden, such an arrangement would help the administration cloak its role from both a meddling Congress and a divided American public.

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Once Upon That Iran Contra War Time

That Time Ronald Reagan opened Iran and Illegally sold Khomeini Weapons
By Juan Cole, 2015

The Reagan administration in the 1980s was buffeted by two policy drives toward Iran. On the one hand, Reagan ally Saudi Arabia supported Iraq, which illegally launched a war on the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1980 in order to steal its oil-rich Khuzistan Province. Reagan in 1983 sent Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of Searle pharmaceuticals, to make friends with Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

From the other side, a section of the Israeli security establishment wanted Reagan to side with Iran against Iraq and to provide Iran weaponry. Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran had been a major supplier of petroleum to Israel, which was boycotted by the Arab League (Iran is not an Arab country). Israel feared Iraq more than it did non-Arab Iran in that decade. After the 1979 revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini began denouncing Israel and saying he hoped it would vanish from the arena of time.

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