IDA's 21st-Century Irregular Warfare Planning and Experimentation Studies

The Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA]’s Studies and Analyses Center has been conducting weapons research studies for the Bush Administration’s war in Iraq and Afghanistan in the area of irregular warfare planning and experimentation during this 21st-century “era of permanent war and blogging.” As IDA’s web site (www.ida.org) notes:

“Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have produced most of the recent battle casualties among U.S. and Coalition forces in Iraq… In 2005, the Joint IED-Defeat Task Force asked IDA to review existing DoD organizations and processes established to defeat the IED threat and to identify opportunities for improvement.

“IDA formed a team of more than 30 researchers from six research divisions, including the military component of IDA’s Joint Advanced Warfighting Program (JAWP). The study’s main source of information was the IED-Defeat community itself – from soldiers and Marines in the field to home-based organizations supporting their efforts.

“The team formed task groups that focused on functional dimensions of the IED challenge. JAWP’s senior military officer led a team of military and civilian analysts in Iraq for five weeks that collected warfighters’ perspectives throughout the region, ranging from headquarters to combat patrols. A complementary effort in the United States visited training installations and gathered insights from recently returned veterans. Other teams addressed the following: the adequacy of IED training programs; the intelligence community’s support to the warfighter; the process for identifying, developing, and rapidly fielding new counter-IED technologies; the process for developing and disseminating new IED-defeat tactics; the process for tracking and analyzing operational performance in order to gauge progress and determine the effectiveness of tactics or technologies; and DoD’s capacity to integrate these elements into a coordinated and responsive program.

“In each area, teams made recommendations, which DoD is considering as it refines its approach to defeating the IED threat.”
University of South Carolina President Emeritus John Palms is the Chairperson of the IDA board of trustees. MIT Institute Professor Sheila Widnall, MIT and Harvard University Broad Institute Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Programs Director Jill Mesirov, Harvard University JFK School of Government Lecturer in Public Policy John White and University of Texas at Austin LBJ School of Public Affairs Professor Edwin Dorn also sit on the IDA board of trustees these days.

Next: Columbia University’s DARPA War Research

How Hillary Clinton Got Her Law Firm Job

Although Hillary Rodham-Clinton apparently planned long ago to use her husband’s special influence within the patriarchal Democratic Party Establishment to become the first woman president of the United States in 2009, she did not get any of her 20th-century jobs by being chosen in an election by U.S. voters. Hillary: Her True Story by Norman King describes how the 2008 Democratic Party presidential candidate obtained, for instance, her lucrative corporate lawyer job at Arkansas’s Rose Law firm during the 1970s:

“When her husband took the oath of office in January 1977 and prepared for two years of dealing with the enforcement of law in the state of Arkansas. Hillary looked around for some kind of legal work…She was pleasantly surprised to land a place at the Rose Law firm…

“Conflict-of-interest questions frequently arose because the Rose organization was so ingrained in the Arkansas establishment…The firm specialized in…business litigation…Many of its clients were corporations, including General Motors,…the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, and Tyson Foods.

“…According to partner George Campbell of Rose, `Herb [Rule] was responsible for getting her’…Clinton and Rule, a former member of the Arkansas House of Representatives, had been friends since Rule’s campaign for the 1974 congressional seat. `I was the point person on recruiting,’ Rule recalled, `and I got the word that she was coming, and I tracked her down.’” (Downtown 12/22/93)

Between 1985 and 1992, the Clinton Administration in Arkansas, coincidentally, dished out over $240,000 in Arkansas government contracts to the Rose corporate law firm that employed Hillary Clinton, according to the April 27, 1992 issue of U.S. News & World Report. Of the $240,000 in state contracts Hillary Clinton’s law firm received from her husband’s administration, $135,000 came from Arkansas state agencies and $109,000 came from Arkansas state bond counseling work. Although Bill Clinton’s economic program in Arkansas enabled his family to accumulate over $1 million in assets during the 1980s, in 1991 only seven other states had a greater percentage of people living in poverty than had Arkansas. (Downtown 9/23/92) Only four other states had a lower average income than Arkansas in 1989, when Arkansas’s average income was over $5,000 less than the U.S. national average and nearly $10,000 less than the average income in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. (Downtown 3/25/92)

Next: IDA’s 21st-Century Irregular Warfare Planning and Experimentation Studies

Hillary Clinton and Laila al-Attar's Death

In his April 12, 2006 “Fulbright Prize Address” at the IMF headquarters in Washington,D.C., the husband of 2008 Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, recalled what happened the last time the Clintons occupied the White House:

“We used to have meetings in the White House sometimes, when we thought we might have to have military action on occasion. We did. We bombed Kosovo for seventy-seven days…The United Kingdom and the United States bombed what we thought were Saddam Hussein’s storage sites for chemical and biological materials when he kicked our inspectors out.”

One military action that Hillary Clinton’s husband ordered which he didn’t mention, however, was the June 27, 1993 U.S. missile attack on Baghdad which killed Laila al-Attar and her husband, as well as other Iraqi civilians. As Dennis Bernstein noted in a 1998 Salon article (www.salon.com/news/1998/02/23newsa.html), Laila “was a director of the Iraqi National Art Museum and a powerful force in gaining recognition for women artists throughout the Middle East.”

[The following additional information about the Clinton White House’s decision to attack Iraq on June 27, 1993 previously appeared in Downtown (7/21/93)]:

Among the Iraqi civilians killed by some of the 23 cruise missiles which Bill Clinton ordered to be launched against Baghdad was a prominent woman painter, Laila al-Attar. According to the New York Times (6/28/93), “She and her husband were found dead under debris at their home” after some of the Clinton White House’s missiles “blasted craters as deep as 30 feet in Al Manour, an exclusive residential area.” The Times reported on its back page that “A German opposition spokesman on Middle East affairs, Dieter Schinzel of the Social Democratic Party charged that the attack was counter to international law.”

Although former CIA Director Bush was no longer the U.S. Establishment’s commander-in-chief in 1993, according to the Times, “Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton talked by telephone for about 15 minutes…before the raid” and “later that day, Mr. Bush met with” the Clinton Administration’s first secretary of state, Warren Christopher “and an aide for about 30 minutes at Mr. Bush’s home in Kennebunkport, Maine.” The Times also reported that the Clinton White House’s June 27, 1993 missile attack “came after weeks of preparation and was planned with such secrecy that no more than five top White House aides knew of the discussion, administration officials said.”

Perhaps Hillary Clinton should now fully describe the historical role she played in helping to determine the Clinton White House’s militaristic foreign policy in relation to Iraq and Yugoslavia during the 1990s?

Next: How Hillary Clinton Got Her Law Firm Job

"They Killed The Rosenbergs"

They killed the Rosenbergs
They killed them on the electric chair
They killed the Rosenbergs
They killed them to make people scared.
They arrested the Rosenbergs
They broke into their home
They jailed the Rosenbergs
They ignored their sons who moaned.
They framed the Rosenbergs
They used false evidence
They tortured the Rosenbergs
They used a lying witness.
They smeared the Rosenbergs
They charged them with "conspiracy"
They sentenced the Rosenbergs
They sent them up to Sing Sing.
They murder the innocent
They execute the powerless
With barbaric hands they pulled their switch
For the Rosenbergs would not submit.

To listen to "They Killed The Rosenbergs" protest folk song, you can go to following music site link:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Biographical+Folk+Songs/They+Killed+the+Rosenbergs

Many years after the Rosenbergs were executed on June 19, 1953 by the U.S. government and no longer alive to deny that they were guilty of any crime, some U.S. academics and mainstream journalists claimed that de-classified KGB documents “prove” that the Rosenbergs were not framed. Yet, as I noted in Downtown (2/17/93), during the 1980s, former Village Voice writer Deborah Davis came into possession of a set of revealing U.S. Justice Department documents. The de-classified documents apparently indicated that, when he worked as a Press Attache’ in the U.S. embassy in Paris, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee “was a central figure” in “a State Department/CIA campaign against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg” which “was designed to persuade Europeans that the Rosenbergs were guilty of espionage and deserved to be put to death,” according to the second edition of Davis’s book, Katharine The Great: Katharine Graham and The Washington Post.

According to Davis, “the documents show” that in the early 1950s “Mr. Bradlee went to the Rosenberg prosecutors in New York under orders of `the head of the CIA in Paris,’ as he told an assistant prosecutor, and that from their material he composed his `Operations Memorandum’ on the case, which was the basis of all propaganda subsequently sent out to foreign journalists.”

In an April 1, 1987 letter to Deborah Davis, however, Bradlee (currently a vice-president of the Washington Post Company media conglomerate) wrote:

“I worked for the USIA as the Press Attache’ of the United States Embassy in the early 1950s. I never worked for the CIA. I never participated in a `CIA propaganda campaign’…”

Yet a December 13, 1952 U.S. Government Memorandum from Associate Prosecutor Maran to Asst. U.S. Atty. Myles Lane apparently stated:

“On December 13, 1952 a Mr. Benjamin Bradlee called and informed me that he was Press Attache’ with the American Embassy in Paris, that he had left Paris last night and arrived here this morning. He advised me that…he was sent here to look at the Rosenberg file…

“He advised me that it was an urgent matter…He further advised that he was sent here by Robert Thayer, who is the head of the C.I.A. in Paris…”
For more information on the Rosenberg Case, you can check out the web site of the Rosenberg Fund for Children at www.rfc.org/case.htm .

Next: Hillary Clinton and Laila al-Attar’s Death

Kunstler's Advice To Young Lawyers

In 1971, the now-deceased William Kunstler offered the following advice to young lawyers in the Radical Lawyers: Their Role In The Movement And In The Courts anthology:

“If you lose sight of the goal, or begin to think that you’re foolish when you see your friends driving expensive motorcars, or living in expensive apartments or homes, so foolish and such a misfit that you must start to re-enter the system, then you are in danger. That is what will destroy the young lawyer.”

In his 1994 autobiography, My Life As A Radical Lawyer, Kunstler also made the following reference to Harvard University Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz:

“I would also never represent an individual like Leona Helmsley, who, although she has the same civil rights as anyone, is a rather detestable character with few redeeming qualities. This mogul could well afford a hired gun and did, in fact, eventually hire Alan Dershowitz; a frequent critic of mine, he is not one of my favorite people. I find it reprehensible when a man presents himself as a civil rights attorney, then represents wealthy clients for huge fees…If I’m going to be sensitive about disapproval from…a lawyer like Alan Dershowitz, who once called me the David Duke of the legal profession, I should have been a real estate salesman. Actually, criticism makes me feel that I’m doing exactly the right thing.”

(Downtown 9/20/95)

Next: They Killed The Rosenbergs lyrics

Columbia University's MURI War Machine Connection

As a Defense Industry Daily web site posting of May 2, 2007 noted, the U.S. “Department of Defense Multi-disciplinary University Research Initiative [MURI] is a multi-agency Department of Defense program” that supports university research teams, which is “especially interested in efforts” that “hasten the transition of basic research findings to practical applications.” In April 2007, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research awarded 10 MURI contracts, worth about $60 million, to research teams at 29 U.S. universities. Among the U.S. universities where research teams are working on these new MURI war research contracts are Harvard University, MIT, Princeton University, Brown University, Northwestern University, University of Michigan, Stanford University, Boston University, University of Colorado, University of Virginia, University of Minnesota, George Mason University and Columbia University.

Columbia University is a team member institution on University of Minnesota researcher Richard Kiehl’s “Biologically Assembled Quantum Electronic Arrays” MURI project. Columbia University is also a team member institution on George Mason University researcher Anup Ghosh’s “Autonomic Recovery of Enterprise-Wide Systems After Attack or Failure with Forward Correction” MURI project. In addition, Columbia University is a team member institution on University of Pennsylvania researcher Sampath Kannan’s “Foundational and Systems Support for Quantitative Trust Management” MURI project.

MIT is the lead institution for MURI’s “Cognitively Compatible and Collaboratively Balanced Human-Robot Teaming in Urban Military Domains” project on which Stanford University, Vanderbilt University, University of Washington and University of Massachusetts-Amherst are also team member institutions. Research teams at MIT, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, University of Minnesota, Pennsylvania State University, University of Rochester, University of California-San Diego, Carnegie-Mellon University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are also working on MURI’s “Exploiting the Documented Plasticity of the Adult Brain to Create Superior Warfighters in Fast-Paced Close quarter Combat” war research projects.

Next: Kunstler’s Advice To Young Lawyers

IDA's 21st-Century Urban Warfare Research Work

The Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] has been developing the weapons technology that the U.S. war machine requires to wage urban warfare in places like Baghdad more effectively during this 21st-century “era of permanent war and blogging.” As the IDA notes on its www.ida.org site:

“U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) asked IDA to provide technical assistance as a follow-on to the Urban Resolve Phase I experiment conducted in 2004. This new work focused on improving current joint operations in an urban environment.

“Our researchers designed and conducted the 2005 experiment to identify and evaluate potential near-term improvements in command and control, sensors, and intelligence to support operations in Baghdad. In the process, IDA helped JFCOM develop an advanced synthetic experimentation environment to explore current issues in simulation.
In addition, JFCOM initiated the Urban Resolve 2015 Experiment, which will build on the 2005 environment to identify more effective concepts for future stability operations than those currently available for Iraq and Afghanistan. IDA participated in a series of workshops that defined the kinds of information needed to attack insurgent networks, the most effective means for obtaining that information, and the details needed to incorporate these concepts into supporting models used to execute the event.

“We developed a concept involving tags and unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with advanced sensors that blends both human and technical means for detecting insurgent activities, tracking their vehicles and personnel, and locating their facilities. Tag and sensor models were developed to take advantage of the existing JFCOM simulation suite in order to bring the concepts to life in the Urban Resolve 2015 human-in-the-loop simulation. The goal is to refine and quantify the battlefield utility of these and other concepts, providing a guide for the DoD science and technology community that will lead to advanced concept technology demonstrations and transition to field operations.”
University of South Carolina President Emeritus John Palms is the Chairperson of the IDA board of trustees. MIT Institute Professor Sheila Widnall, MIT and Harvard University Broad Institute Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Programs Director Jill Mesirov, Harvard University JFK School of Government Lecturer in Public Policy John White and University of Texas at Austin LBJ School of Public Affairs Professor Edwin Dorn also sit on the IDA board of trustees these days.

Next: Columbia University’s MURI War Machine Connection