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Seymour Hersh on The Killing of Osama bin Laden, with Christian Lorentzen

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQNakvgY1CM

 

Hersh at the Brooklyn Public Library:

www.youtube.com/live/IulC6HcCCJU

 

For more Seymour M. Hersh articles published by the London Review of Books, go to:

www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/seymour-m.-hersh

 

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n10/seymour-m.-hersh/the-kill...

 

The Killing of Osama bin Laden

Vol. 37 No. 10 · 21 May 2015

 

It’s been​ four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

 

The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

 

This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

 

‘When your version comes out – if you do it – people in Pakistan will be tremendously grateful,’ Durrani told me. ‘For a long time people have stopped trusting what comes out about bin Laden from the official mouths. There will be some negative political comment and some anger, but people like to be told the truth, and what you’ve told me is essentially what I have heard from former colleagues who have been on a fact-finding mission since this episode.’ As a former ISI head, he said, he had been told shortly after the raid by ‘people in the “strategic community” who would know’ that there had been an informant who had alerted the US to bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad, and that after his killing the US’s betrayed promises left Kayani and Pasha exposed.

 

The major US source for the account that follows is a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. He also was privy to many aspects of the Seals’ training for the raid, and to the various after-action reports. Two other US sources, who had access to corroborating information, have been longtime consultants to the Special Operations Command. I also received information from inside Pakistan about widespread dismay among the senior ISI and military leadership – echoed later by Durrani – over Obama’s decision to go public immediately with news of bin Laden’s death. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

 

It began​ with a walk-in. In August 2010 a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer approached Jonathan Bank, then the CIA’s station chief at the US embassy in Islamabad. He offered to tell the CIA where to find bin Laden in return for the reward that Washington had offered in 2001. Walk-ins are assumed by the CIA to be unreliable, and the response from the agency’s headquarters was to fly in a polygraph team. The walk-in passed the test. ‘So now we’ve got a lead on bin Laden living in a compound in Abbottabad, but how do we really know who it is?’ was the CIA’s worry at the time, the retired senior US intelligence official told me.

 

The US initially kept what it knew from the Pakistanis. ‘The fear was that if the existence of the source was made known, the Pakistanis themselves would move bin Laden to another location. So only a very small number of people were read into the source and his story,’ the retired official said. ‘The CIA’s first goal was to check out the quality of the informant’s information.’ The compound was put under satellite surveillance. The CIA rented a house in Abbottabad to use as a forward observation base and staffed it with Pakistani employees and foreign nationals. Later on, the base would serve as a contact point with the ISI; it attracted little attention because Abbottabad is a holiday spot full of houses rented on short leases. A psychological profile of the informant was prepared. (The informant and his family were smuggled out of Pakistan and relocated in the Washington area. He is now a consultant for the CIA.)

 

‘By October the military and intelligence community were discussing the possible military options. Do we drop a bunker buster on the compound or take him out with a drone strike? Perhaps send someone to kill him, single assassin style? But then we’d have no proof of who he was,’ the retired official said. ‘We could see some guy is walking around at night, but we have no intercepts because there’s no commo coming from the compound.’

 

In October, Obama was briefed on the intelligence. His response was cautious, the retired official said. ‘It just made no sense that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad. It was just too crazy. The president’s position was emphatic: “Don’t talk to me about this any more unless you have proof that it really is bin Laden.”’ The immediate goal of the CIA leadership and the Joint Special Operations Command was to get Obama’s support. They believed they would get this if they got DNA evidence, and if they could assure him that a night assault of the compound would carry no risk. The only way to accomplish both things, the retired official said, ‘was to get the Pakistanis on board’.

 

During the late autumn of 2010, the US continued to keep quiet about the walk-in, and Kayani and Pasha continued to insist to their American counterparts that they had no information about bin Laden’s whereabouts. ‘The next step was to figure out how to ease Kayani and Pasha into it – to tell them that we’ve got intelligence showing that there is a high-value target in the compound, and to ask them what they know about the target,’ the retired official said. ‘The compound was not an armed enclave – no machine guns around, because it was under ISI control.’ The walk-in had told the US that bin Laden had lived undetected from 2001 to 2006 with some of his wives and children in the Hindu Kush mountains, and that ‘the ISI got to him by paying some of the local tribal people to betray him.’ (Reports after the raid placed him elsewhere in Pakistan during this period.) Bank was also told by the walk-in that bin Laden was very ill, and that early on in his confinement at Abbottabad, the ISI had ordered Amir Aziz, a doctor and a major in the Pakistani army, to move nearby to provide treatment. ‘The truth is that bin Laden was an invalid, but we cannot say that,’ the retired official said. ‘“You mean you guys shot a cripple? Who was about to grab his AK-47?”’

 

‘It didn’t take long to get the co-operation we needed, because the Pakistanis wanted to ensure the continued release of American military aid, a good percentage of which was anti-terrorism funding that finances personal security, such as bullet-proof limousines and security guards and housing for the ISI leadership,’ the retired official said. He added that there were also under-the-table personal ‘incentives’ that were financed by off-the-books Pentagon contingency funds. ‘The intelligence community knew what the Pakistanis needed to agree – there was the carrot. And they chose the carrot. It was a win-win. We also did a little blackmail. We told them we would leak the fact that you’ve got bin Laden in your backyard. We knew their friends and enemies’ – the Taliban and jihadist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan – ‘would not like it.’

 

A worrying factor at this early point, according to the retired official, was Saudi Arabia, which had been financing bin Laden’s upkeep since his seizure by the Pakistanis. ‘The Saudis didn’t want bin Laden’s presence revealed to us because he was a Saudi, and so they told the Pakistanis to keep him out of the picture. The Saudis feared if we knew we would pressure the Pakistanis to let bin Laden start talking to us about what the Saudis had been doing with al-Qaida. And they were dropping money – lots of it. The Pakistanis, in turn, were concerned that the Saudis might spill the beans about their control of bin Laden. The fear was that if the US found out about bin Laden from Riyadh, all hell would break out. The Americans learning about bin Laden’s imprisonment from a walk-in was not the worst thing.’

 

Despite their constant public feuding, American and Pakistani military and intelligence services have worked together closely for decades on counterterrorism in South Asia. Both services often find it useful to engage in public feuds ‘to cover their asses’, as the retired official put it, but they continually share intelligence used for drone attacks, and co-operate on covert operations. At the same time, it’s understood in Washington that elements of the ISI believe that maintaining a relationship with the Taliban leadership inside Afghanistan is essential to national security. The ISI’s strategic aim is to balance Indian influence in Kabul; the Taliban is also seen in Pakistan as a source of jihadist shock troops who would back Pakistan against India in a confrontation over Kashmir.

 

Adding to the tension was the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, often depicted in the Western press as an ‘Islamic bomb’ that might be transferred by Pakistan to an embattled nation in the Middle East in the event of a crisis with Israel. The US looked the other way when Pakistan began building its weapons system in the 1970s and it’s widely believed it now has more than a hundred nuclear warheads. It’s understood in Washington that US security depends on the maintenance of strong military and intelligence ties to Pakistan. The belief is mirrored in Pakistan.

 

‘The Pakistani army sees itself as family,’ the retired official said. ‘Officers call soldiers their sons and all officers are “brothers”. The attitude is different in the American military. The senior Pakistani officers believe they are the elite and have got to look out for all of the people, as keepers of the flame against Muslim fundamentalism. The Pakistanis also know that their trump card against aggression from India is a strong relationship with the United States. They will never cut their person-to-person ties with us.’

 

Like all CIA station chiefs, Bank was working undercover, but that ended in early December 2010 when he was publicly accused of murder in a criminal complaint filed in Islamabad by Karim Khan, a Pakistani journalist whose son and brother, according to local news reports, had been killed by a US drone strike. Allowing Bank to be named was a violation of diplomatic protocol on the part of the Pakistani authorities, and it brought a wave of unwanted publicity. Bank was ordered to leave Pakistan by the CIA, whose officials subsequently told the Associated Press he was transferred because of concerns for his safety. The New York Times reported that there was ‘strong suspicion’ the ISI had played a role in leaking Bank’s name to Khan. There was speculation that he was outed as payback for the publication in a New York lawsuit a month earlier of the names of ISI chiefs in connection with the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008. But there was a collateral reason, the retired official said, for the CIA’s willingness to send Bank back to America. The Pakistanis needed cover in case their co-operation with the Americans in getting rid of bin Laden became known. The Pakistanis could say: “You’re talking about me? We just kicked out your station chief.”’

 

The bin Laden compound​ was less than two miles from the Pakistan Military Academy, and a Pakistani army combat battalion headquarters was another mile or so away. Abbottabad is less than 15 minutes by helicopter from Tarbela Ghazi, an important base for ISI covert operations and the facility where those who guard Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal are trained. ‘Ghazi is why the ISI put bin Laden in Abbottabad in the first place,’ the retired official said, ‘to keep him under constant supervision.’

 

The risks for Obama were high at this early stage, especially because there was a troubling precedent: the failed 1980 attempt to rescue the American hostages in Tehran. That failure was a factor in Jimmy Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan. Obama’s worries were realistic, the retired official said. ‘Was bin Laden ever there? Was the whole story a product of Pakistani deception? What about political blowback in case of failure?’ After all, as the retired official said, ‘If the mission fails, Obama’s just a black Jimmy Carter and it’s all over for re-election.’

 

Obama was anxious for reassurance that the US was going to get the right man. The proof was to come in the form of bin Laden’s DNA. The planners turned for help to Kayani and Pasha, who asked Aziz to obtain the specimens. Soon after the raid the press found out that Aziz had been living in a house near the bin Laden compound: local reporters discovered his name in Urdu on a plate on the door. Pakistani officials denied that Aziz had any connection to bin Laden, but the retired official told me that Aziz had been rewarded with a share of the $25 million reward the US had put up because the DNA sample had showed conclusively that it was bin Laden in Abbottabad. (In his subsequent testimony to a Pakistani commission investigating the bin Laden raid, Aziz said that he had witnessed the attack on Abbottabad, but had no knowledge of who was living in the compound and had been ordered by a superior officer to stay away from the scene.)

 

Bargaining continued over the way the mission would be executed. ‘Kayani eventually tells us yes, but he says you can’t have a big strike force. You have to come in lean and mean. And you have to kill him, or there is no deal,’ the retired official said. The agreement was struck by the end of January 2011, and Joint Special Operations Command prepared a list of questions to be answered by the Pakistanis: ‘How can we be assured of no outside intervention? What are the defences inside the compound and its exact dimensions? Where are bin Laden’s rooms and exactly how big are they? How many steps in the stairway? Where are the doors to his rooms, and are they reinforced with steel? How thick?’ The Pakistanis agreed to permit a four-man American cell – a Navy Seal, a CIA case officer and two communications specialists – to set up a liaison office at Tarbela Ghazi for the coming assault. By then, the military had constructed a mock-up of the compound in Abbottabad at a secret former nuclear test site in Nevada, and an elite Seal team had begun rehearsing for the attack.

 

The US had begun to cut back on aid to Pakistan – to ‘turn off the spigot’, in the retired official’s words. The provision of 18 new F-16 fighter aircraft was delayed, and under-the-table cash payments to the senior leaders were suspended. In April 2011 Pasha met the CIA director, Leon Panetta, at agency headquarters. ‘Pasha got a commitment that the United States would turn the money back on, and we got a guarantee that there would be no Pakistani opposition during the mission,’ the retired official said. ‘Pasha also insisted that Washington stop complaining about Pakistan’s lack of co-operation with the American war on terrorism.’ At one point that spring, Pasha offered the Americans a blunt explanation of the reason Pakistan kept bin Laden’s capture a secret, and why it was imperative for the ISI role to remain secret: ‘We needed a hostage to keep tabs on al-Qaida and the Taliban,’ Pasha said, according to the retired official. ‘The ISI was using bin Laden as leverage against Taliban and al-Qaida activities inside Afghanistan and Pakistan. They let the Taliban and al-Qaida leadership know that if they ran operations that clashed with the interests of the ISI, they would turn bin Laden over to us. So if it became known that the Pakistanis had worked with us to get bin Laden at Abbottabad, there would be hell to pay.’

 

At one of his meetings with Panetta, according to the retired official and a source within the CIA, Pasha was asked by a senior CIA official whether he saw himself as acting in essence as an agent for al-Qaida and the Taliban. ‘He answered no, but said the ISI needed to have some control.’ The message, as the CIA saw it, according to the retired official, was that Kayani and Pasha viewed bin Laden ‘as a resource, and they were more interested in their [own] survival than they were in the United States’.

 

A Pakistani with close ties to the senior leadership of the ISI told me that ‘there was a deal with your top guys. We were very reluctant, but it had to be done – not because of personal enrichment, but because all of the American aid programmes would be cut off. Your guys said we will starve you out if you don’t do it, and the okay was given while Pasha was in Washington. The deal was not only to keep the taps open, but Pasha was told there would be more goodies for us.’ The Pakistani said that Pasha’s visit also resulted in a commitment from the US to give Pakistan ‘a freer hand’ in Afghanistan as it began its military draw-down there. ‘And so our top dogs justified the deal by saying this is for our country.’

 

Pasha and Kayani​ were responsible for ensuring that Pakistan’s army and air defence command would not track or engage with the US helicopters used on the mission. The American cell at Tarbela Ghazi was charged with co-ordinating communications between the ISI, the senior US officers at their command post in Afghanistan, and the two Black Hawk helicopters; the goal was to ensure that no stray Pakistani fighter plane on border patrol spotted the intruders and took action to stop them. The initial plan said that news of the raid shouldn’t be announced straightaway. All units in the Joint Special Operations Command operate under stringent secrecy and the JSOC leadership believed, as did Kayani and Pasha, that the killing of bin Laden would not be made public for as long as seven days, maybe longer. Then a carefully constructed cover story would be issued: Obama would announce that DNA analysis confirmed that bin Laden had been killed in a drone raid in the Hindu Kush, on Afghanistan’s side of the border. The Americans who planned the mission assured Kayani and Pasha that their co-operation would never be made public. It was understood by all that if the Pakistani role became known, there would be violent protests – bin Laden was considered a hero by many Pakistanis – and Pasha and Kayani and their families would be in danger, and the Pakistani army publicly disgraced.

 

It was clear to all by this point, the retired official said, that bin Laden would not survive: ‘Pasha told us at a meeting in April that he could not risk leaving bin Laden in the compound now that we know he’s there. Too many people in the Pakistani chain of command know about the mission. He and Kayani had to tell the whole story to the directors of the air defence command and to a few local commanders.

 

‘Of course the guys knew the target was bin Laden and he was there under Pakistani control,’ the retired official said. ‘Otherwise, they would not have done the mission without air cover. It was clearly and absolutely a premeditated murder.’ A former Seal commander, who has led and participated in dozens of similar missions over the past decade, assured me that ‘we were not going to keep bin Laden alive – to allow the terrorist to live. By law, we know what we’re doing inside Pakistan is a homicide. We’ve come to grips with that. Each one of us, when we do these missions, say to ourselves, “Let’s face it. We’re going to commit a murder.”’ The White House’s initial account claimed that bin Laden had been brandishing a weapon; the story was aimed at deflecting those who questioned the legality of the US administration’s targeted assassination programme. The US has consistently maintained, despite widely reported remarks by people involved with the mission, that bin Laden would have been taken alive if he had immediately surrendered.

 

At​ the Abbottabad compound ISI guards were posted around the clock to keep watch over bin Laden and his wives and children. They were under orders to leave as soon as they heard the rotors of the US helicopters. The town was dark: the electricity supply had been cut off on the orders of the ISI hours before the raid began. One of the Black Hawks crashed inside the walls of the compound, injuring many on board. ‘The guys knew the TOT [time on target] had to be tight because they would wake up the whole town going in,’ the retired official said. The cockpit of the crashed Black Hawk, with its communication and navigational gear, had to be destroyed by concussion grenades, and this would create a series of explosions and a fire visible for miles. Two Chinook helicopters had flown from Afghanistan to a nearby Pakistani intelligence base to provide logistical support, and one of them was immediately dispatched to Abbottabad. But because the helicopter had been equipped with a bladder loaded with extra fuel for the two Black Hawks, it first had to be reconfigured as a troop carrier. The crash of the Black Hawk and the need to fly in a replacement were nerve-wracking and time-consuming setbacks, but the Seals continued with their mission. There was no firefight as they moved into the compound; the ISI guards had gone. ‘Everyone in Pakistan has a gun and high-profile, wealthy folks like those who live in Abbottabad have armed bodyguards, and yet there were no weapons in the compound,’ the retired official pointed out. Had there been any opposition, the team would have been highly vulnerable. Instead, the retired official said, an ISI liaison officer flying with the Seals guided them into the darkened house and up a staircase to bin Laden’s quarters. The Seals had been warned by the Pakistanis that heavy steel doors blocked the stairwell on the first and second-floor landings; bin Laden’s rooms were on the third floor. The Seal squad used explosives to blow the doors open, without injuring anyone. One of bin Laden’s wives was screaming hysterically and a bullet – perhaps a stray round – struck her knee. Aside from those that hit bin Laden, no other shots were fired. (The Obama administration’s account would hold otherwise.)

 

‘They knew where the target was – third floor, second door on the right,’ the retired official said. ‘Go straight there. Osama was cowering and retreated into the bedroom. Two shooters followed him and opened up. Very simple, very straightforward, very professional hit.’ Some of the Seals were appalled later at the White House’s initial insistence that they had shot bin Laden in self-defence, the retired official said. ‘Six of the Seals’ finest, most experienced NCOs, faced with an unarmed elderly civilian, had to kill him in self-defence? The house was shabby and bin Laden was living in a cell with bars on the window and barbed wire on the roof. The rules of engagement were that if bin Laden put up any opposition they were authorised to take lethal action. But if they suspected he might have some means of opposition, like an explosive vest under his robe, they could also kill him. So here’s this guy in a mystery robe and they shot him. It’s not because he was reaching for a weapon. The rules gave them absolute authority to kill the guy.’ The later White House claim that only one or two bullets were fired into his head was ‘bullshit’, the retired official said. ‘The squad came through the door and obliterated him. As the Seals say, “We kicked his ass and took his gas.”’

 

After they killed bin Laden, ‘the Seals were just there, some with physical injuries from the crash, waiting for the relief chopper,’ the retired official said. ‘Twenty tense minutes. The Black Hawk is still burning. There are no city lights. No electricity. No police. No fire trucks. They have no prisoners.’ Bin Laden’s wives and children were left for the ISI to interrogate and relocate. ‘Despite all the talk,’ the retired official continued, there were ‘no garbage bags full of computers and storage devices. The guys just stuffed some books and papers they found in his room in their backpacks. The Seals weren’t there because they thought bin Laden was running a command centre for al-Qaida operations, as the White House would later tell the media. And they were not intelligence experts gathering information inside that house.’

 

On a normal assault mission, the retired official said, there would be no waiting around if a chopper went down. ‘The Seals would have finished the mission, thrown off their guns and gear, and jammed into the remaining Black Hawk and di-di-maued’ – Vietnamese slang for leaving in a rush – ‘out of there, with guys hanging out of the doors. They would not have blown the chopper – no commo gear is worth a dozen lives – unless they knew they were safe. Instead they stood around outside the compound, waiting for the bus to arrive.’ Pasha and Kayani had delivered on all their promises.

 

The backroom argument​ inside the White House began as soon as it was clear that the mission had succeeded. Bin Laden’s body was presumed to be on its way to Afghanistan. Should Obama stand by the agreement with Kayani and Pasha and pretend a week or so later that bin Laden had been killed in a drone attack in the mountains, or should he go public immediately? The downed helicopter made it easy for Obama’s political advisers to urge the latter plan. The explosion and fireball would be impossible to hide, and word of what had happened was bound to leak. Obama had to ‘get out in front of the story’ before someone in the Pentagon did: waiting would diminish the political impact.

 

Not everyone agreed. Robert Gates, the secretary of defence, was the most outspoken of those who insisted that the agreements with Pakistan had to be honoured. In his memoir, Duty, Gates did not mask his anger:

 

Before we broke up and the president headed upstairs to tell the American people what had just happened, I reminded everyone that the techniques, tactics and procedures the Seals had used in the bin Laden operation were used every night in Afghanistan ... it was therefore essential that we agree not to release any operational details of the raid. That we killed him, I said, is all we needed to say. Everybody in that room agreed to keep mum on details. That commitment lasted about five hours. The initial leaks came from the White House and CIA. They just couldn’t wait to brag and to claim credit. The facts were often wrong ... Nonetheless the information just kept pouring out. I was outraged and at one point, told [the national security adviser, Tom] Donilon, ‘Why doesn’t everybody just shut the fuck up?’ To no avail.

 

Obama’s speech was put together in a rush, the retired official said, and was viewed by his advisers as a political document, not a message that needed to be submitted for clearance to the national security bureaucracy. This series of self-serving and inaccurate statements would create chaos in the weeks following. Obama said that his administration had discovered that bin Laden was in Pakistan through ‘a possible lead’ the previous August; to many in the CIA the statement suggested a specific event, such as a walk-in. The remark led to a new cover story claiming that the CIA’s brilliant analysts had unmasked a courier network handling bin Laden’s continuing flow of operational orders to al-Qaida. Obama also praised ‘a small team of Americans’ for their care in avoiding civilian deaths and said: ‘After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.’ Two more details now had to be supplied for the cover story: a description of the firefight that never happened, and a story about what happened to the corpse. Obama went on to praise the Pakistanis: ‘It’s important to note that our counterterrorism co-operation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding.’ That statement risked exposing Kayani and Pasha. The White House’s solution was to ignore what Obama had said and order anyone talking to the press to insist that the Pakistanis had played no role in killing bin Laden. Obama left the clear impression that he and his advisers hadn’t known for sure that bin Laden was in Abbottabad, but only had information ‘about the possibility’. This led first to the story that the Seals had determined they’d killed the right man by having a six-foot-tall Seal lie next to the corpse for comparison (bin Laden was known to be six foot four); and then to the claim that a DNA test had been performed on the corpse and demonstrated conclusively that the Seals had killed bin Laden. But, according to the retired official, it wasn’t clear from the Seals’ early reports whether all of bin Laden’s body, or any of it, made it back to Afghanistan.

 

Gates wasn’t the only official who was distressed by Obama’s decision to speak without clearing his remarks in advance, the retired official said, ‘but he was the only one protesting. Obama didn’t just double-cross Gates, he double-crossed everyone. This was not the fog of war. The fact that there was an agreement with the Pakistanis and no contingency analysis of what was to be disclosed if something went wrong – that wasn’t even discussed. And once it went wrong, they had to make up a new cover story on the fly.’ There was a legitimate reason for some deception: the role of the Pakistani walk-in had to be protected.

 

The White House press corps was told in a briefing shortly after Obama’s announcement that the death of bin Laden was ‘the culmination of years of careful and highly advanced intelligence work’ that focused on tracking a group of couriers, including one who was known to be close to bin Laden. Reporters were told that a team of specially assembled CIA and National Security Agency analysts had traced the courier to a highly secure million-dollar compound in Abbottabad. After months of observation, the American intelligence community had ‘high confidence’ that a high-value target was living in the compound, and it was ‘assessed that there was a strong probability that [it] was Osama bin Laden’. The US assault team ran into a firefight on entering the compound and three adult males – two of them believed to be the couriers – were slain, along with bin Laden. Asked if bin Laden had defended himself, one of the briefers said yes: ‘He did resist the assault force. And he was killed in a firefight.’

 

The next day John Brennan, then Obama’s senior adviser for counterterrorism, had the task of talking up Obama’s valour while trying to smooth over the misstatements in his speech. He provided a more detailed but equally misleading account of the raid and its planning. Speaking on the record, which he rarely does, Brennan said that the mission was carried out by a group of Navy Seals who had been instructed to take bin Laden alive, if possible. He said the US had no information suggesting that anyone in the Pakistani government or military knew bin Laden’s whereabouts: ‘We didn’t contact the Pakistanis until after all of our people, all of our aircraft were out of Pakistani airspace.’ He emphasised the courage of Obama’s decision to order the strike, and said that the White House had no information ‘that confirmed that bin Laden was at the compound’ before the raid began. Obama, he said, ‘made what I believe was one of the gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory’. Brennan increased the number killed by the Seals inside the compound to five: bin Laden, a courier, his brother, a bin Laden son, and one of the women said to be shielding bin Laden.

 

Asked whether bin Laden had fired on the Seals, as some reporters had been told, Brennan repeated what would become a White House mantra: ‘He was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in. And whether or not he got off any rounds, I quite frankly don’t know ... Here is bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks ... living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield ... [It] just speaks to I think the nature of the individual he was.’

 

Gates also objected to the idea, pushed by Brennan and Leon Panetta, that US intelligence had learned of bin Laden’s whereabouts from information acquired by waterboarding and other forms of torture. ‘All of this is going on as the Seals are flying home from their mission. The agency guys know the whole story,’ the retired official said. ‘It was a group of annuitants who did it.’ (Annuitants are retired CIA officers who remain active on contract.) ‘They had been called in by some of the mission planners in the agency to help with the cover story. So the old-timers come in and say why not admit that we got some of the information about bin Laden from enhanced interrogation?’ At the time, there was still talk in Washington about the possible prosecution of CIA agents who had conducted torture.

 

‘Gates told them this was not going to work,’ the retired official said. ‘He was never on the team. He knew at the eleventh hour of his career not to be a party to this nonsense. But State, the agency and the Pentagon had bought in on the cover story. None of the Seals thought that Obama was going to get on national TV and announce the raid. The Special Forces command was apoplectic. They prided themselves on keeping operational security.’ There was fear in Special Operations, the retired official said, that ‘if the true story of the missions leaked out, the White House bureaucracy was going to blame it on the Seals.’

 

The White House’s solution was to silence the Seals. On 5 May, every member of the Seal hit team – they had returned to their base in southern Virginia – and some members of the Joint Special Operations Command leadership were presented with a nondisclosure form drafted by the White House’s legal office; it promised civil penalties and a lawsuit for anyone who discussed the mission, in public or private. ‘The Seals were not happy,’ the retired official said. But most of them kept quiet, as did Admiral William McRaven, who was then in charge of JSOC. ‘McRaven was apoplectic. He knew he was fucked by the White House, but he’s a dyed-in-the-wool Seal, and not then a political operator, and he knew there’s no glory in blowing the whistle on the president. When Obama went public with bin Laden’s death, everyone had to scramble around for a new story that made sense, and the planners were stuck holding the bag.’

 

Within days, some of the early exaggerations and distortions had become obvious and the Pentagon issued a series of clarifying statements. No, bin Laden was not armed when he was shot and killed. And no, bin Laden did not use one of his wives as a shield. The press by and large accepted the explanation that the errors were the inevitable by-product of the White House’s desire to accommodate reporters frantic for details of the mission.

 

One lie that has endured is that the Seals had to fight their way to their target. Only two Seals have made any public statement: No Easy Day, a first-hand account of the raid by Matt Bissonnette, was published in September 2012; and two years later Rob O’Neill was interviewed by Fox News. Both men had resigned from the navy; both had fired at bin Laden. Their accounts contradicted each other on many details, but their stories generally supported the White House version, especially when it came to the need to kill or be killed as the Seals fought their way to bin Laden. O’Neill even told Fox News that he and his fellow Seals thought ‘We were going to die.’ ‘The more we trained on it, the more we realised ... this is going to be a one-way mission.’

 

But the retired official told me that in their initial debriefings the Seals made no mention of a firefight, or indeed of any opposition. The drama and danger portrayed by Bissonnette and O’Neill met a deep-seated need, the retired official said: ‘Seals cannot live with the fact that they killed bin Laden totally unopposed, and so there has to be an account of their courage in the face of danger. The guys are going to sit around the bar and say it was an easy day? That’s not going to happen.’

 

There was another reason to claim there had been a firefight inside the compound, the retired official said: to avoid the inevitable question that would arise from an uncontested assault. Where were bin Laden’s guards? Surely, the most sought-after terrorist in the world would have around-the-clock protection. ‘And one of those killed had to be the courier, because he didn’t exist and we couldn’t produce him. The Pakistanis had no choice but to play along with it.’ (Two days after the raid, Reuters published photographs of three dead men that it said it had purchased from an ISI official. Two of the men were later identified by an ISI spokesman as being the alleged courier and his brother.)

 

Five days​ after the raid the Pentagon press corps was provided with a series of videotapes that were said by US officials to have been taken from a large collection the Seals had removed from the compound, along with as many as 15 computers. Snippets from one of the videos showed a solitary bin Laden looking wan and wrapped in a blanket, watching what appeared to be a video of himself on television. An unnamed official told reporters that the raid produced a ‘treasure trove ... the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever’, which would provide vital insights into al-Qaida’s plans. The official said the material showed that bin Laden ‘remained an active leader in al-Qaida, providing strategic, operational and tactical instructions to the group ... He was far from a figurehead [and] continued to direct even tactical details of the group’s management and to encourage plotting’ from what was described as a command-and-control centre in Abbottabad. ‘He was an active player, making the recent operation even more essential for our nation’s security,’ the official said. The information was so vital, he added, that the administration was setting up an inter-agency task force to process it: ‘He was not simply someone who was penning al-Qaida strategy. He was throwing operational ideas out there and he was also specifically directing other al-Qaida members.’

 

These claims were fabrications: there wasn’t much activity for bin Laden to exercise command and control over. The retired intelligence official said that the CIA’s internal reporting shows that since bin Laden moved to Abbottabad in 2006 only a handful of terrorist attacks could be linked to the remnants of bin Laden’s al-Qaida. ‘We were told at first,’ the retired official said, ‘that the Seals produced garbage bags of stuff and that the community is generating daily intelligence reports out of this stuff. And then we were told that the community is gathering everything together and needs to translate it. But nothing has come of it. Every single thing they have created turns out not to be true. It’s a great hoax – like the Piltdown man.’ The retired official said that most of the materials from Abbottabad were turned over to the US by the Pakistanis, who later razed the building. The ISI took responsibility for the wives and children of bin Laden, none of whom was made available to the US for questioning.

 

‘Why create the treasure trove story?’ the retired official said. ‘The White House had to give the impression that bin Laden was still operationally important. Otherwise, why kill him? A cover story was created – that there was a network of couriers coming and going with memory sticks and instructions. All to show that bin Laden remained important.’

 

In July 2011, the Washington Post published what purported to be a summary of some of these materials. The story’s contradictions were glaring. It said the documents had resulted in more than four hundred intelligence reports within six weeks; it warned of unspecified al-Qaida plots; and it mentioned arrests of suspects ‘who are named or described in emails that bin Laden received’. The Post didn’t identify the suspects or reconcile that detail with the administration’s previous assertions that the Abbottabad compound had no internet connection. Despite their claims that the documents had produced hundreds of reports, the Post also quoted officials saying that their main value wasn’t the actionable intelligence they contained, but that they enabled ‘analysts to construct a more comprehensive portrait of al-Qaida’.

 

In May 2012, the Combating Terrorism Centre at West Point, a private research group, released translations it had made under a federal government contract of 175 pages of bin Laden documents. Reporters found none of the drama that had been touted in the days after the raid. Patrick Cockburn wrote about the contrast between the administration’s initial claims that bin Laden was the ‘spider at the centre of a conspiratorial web’ and what the translations actually showed: that bin Laden was ‘delusional’ and had ‘limited contact with the outside world outside his compound’.

 

The retired official disputed the authenticity of the West Point materials: ‘There is no linkage between these documents and the counterterrorism centre at the agency. No intelligence community analysis. When was the last time the CIA: 1) announced it had a significant intelligence find; 2) revealed the source; 3) described the method for processing the materials; 4) revealed the time-line for production; 5) described by whom and where the analysis was taking place, and 6) published the sensitive results before the information had been acted on? No agency professional would support this fairy tale.’

 

In June​ 2011, it was reported in the New York Times, the Washington Post and all over the Pakistani press that Amir Aziz had been held for questioning in Pakistan; he was, it was said, a CIA informant who had been spying on the comings and goings at the bin Laden compound. Aziz was released, but the retired official said that US intelligence was unable to learn who leaked the highly classified information about his involvement with the mission. Officials in Washington decided they ‘could not take a chance that Aziz’s role in obtaining bin Laden’s DNA also would become known’. A sacrificial lamb was needed, and the one chosen was Shakil Afridi, a 48-year-old Pakistani doctor and sometime CIA asset, who had been arrested by the Pakistanis in late May and accused of assisting the agency. ‘We went to the Pakistanis and said go after Afridi,’ the retired official said. ‘We had to cover the whole issue of how we got the DNA.’ It was soon reported that the CIA had organised a fake vaccination programme in Abbottabad with Afridi’s help in a failed attempt to obtain bin Laden’s DNA. Afridi’s legitimate medical operation was run independently of local health authorities, was well financed and offered free vaccinations against hepatitis B. Posters advertising the programme were displayed throughout the area. Afridi was later accused of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison because of his ties to an extremist. News of the CIA-sponsored programme created widespread anger in Pakistan, and led to the cancellation of other international vaccination programmes that were now seen as cover for American spying.

 

The retired official said that Afridi had been recruited long before the bin Laden mission as part of a separate intelligence effort to get information about suspected terrorists in Abbottabad and the surrounding area. ‘The plan was to use vaccinations as a way to get the blood of terrorism suspects in the villages.’ Afridi made no attempt to obtain DNA from the residents of the bin Laden compound. The report that he did so was a hurriedly put together ‘CIA cover story creating “facts”’ in a clumsy attempt to protect Aziz and his real mission. ‘Now we have the consequences,’ the retired official said. ‘A great humanitarian project to do something meaningful for the peasants has been compromised as a cynical hoax.’ Afridi’s conviction was overturned, but he remains in prison on a murder charge.

 

In his address​ announcing the raid, Obama said that after killing bin Laden the Seals ‘took custody of his body’. The statement created a problem. In the initial plan it was to be announced a week or so after the fact that bin Laden was killed in a drone strike somewhere in the mountains on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border and that his remains had been identified by DNA testing. But with Obama’s announcement of his killing by the Seals everyone now expected a body to be produced. Instead, reporters were told that bin Laden’s body had been flown by the Seals to an American military airfield in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and then straight to the USS Carl Vinson, a supercarrier on routine patrol in the North Arabian Sea. Bin Laden had then been buried at sea, just hours after his death. The press corps’s only sceptical moments at John Brennan’s briefing on 2 May were to do with the burial. The questions were short, to the point, and rarely answered. ‘When was the decision made that he would be buried at sea if killed?’ ‘Was this part of the plan all along?’ ‘Can you just tell us why that was a good idea?’ ‘John, did you consult a Muslim expert on that?’ ‘Is there a visual recording of this burial?’ When this last question was asked, Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, came to Brennan’s rescue: ‘We’ve got to give other people a chance here.’

 

‘We thought the best way to ensure that his body was given an appropriate Islamic burial,’ Brennan said, ‘was to take those actions that would allow us to do that burial at sea.’ He said ‘appropriate specialists and experts’ were consulted, and that the US military was fully capable of carrying out the burial ‘consistent with Islamic law’. Brennan didn’t mention that Muslim law calls for the burial service to be conducted in the presence of an imam, and there was no suggestion that one happened to be on board the Carl Vinson.

 

In a reconstruction of the bin Laden operation for Vanity Fair, Mark Bowden, who spoke to many senior administration officials, wrote that bin Laden’s body was cleaned and photographed at Jalalabad. Further procedures necessary for a Muslim burial were performed on the carrier, he wrote, ‘with bin Laden’s body being washed again and wrapped in a white shroud. A navy photographer recorded the burial in full sunlight, Monday morning, May 2.’ Bowden described the photos:

 

One frame shows the body wrapped in a weighted shroud. The next shows it lying diagonally on a chute, feet overboard. In the next frame the body is hitting the water. In the next it is visible just below the surface, ripples spreading outward. In the last frame there are only circular ripples on the surface. The mortal remains of Osama bin Laden were gone for good.

 

Bowden was careful not to claim that he had actually seen the photographs he described, and he recently told me he hadn’t seen them: ‘I’m always disappointed when I can’t look at something myself, but I spoke with someone I trusted who said he had seen them himself and described them in detail.’ Bowden’s statement adds to the questions about the alleged burial at sea, which has provoked a flood of Freedom of Information Act requests, most of which produced no information. One of them sought access to the photographs. The Pentagon responded that a search of all available records had found no evidence that any photographs had been taken of the burial. Requests on other issues related to the raid were equally unproductive. The reason for the lack of response became clear after the Pentagon held an inquiry into allegations that the Obama administration had provided access to classified materials to the makers of the film Zero Dark Thirty. The Pentagon report, which was put online in June 2013, noted that Admiral McRaven had ordered the files on the raid to be deleted from all military computers and moved to the CIA, where they would be shielded from FOIA requests by the agency’s ‘operational exemption’.

 

McRaven’s action meant that outsiders could not get access to the Carl Vinson’s unclassified logs. Logs are sacrosanct in the navy, and separate ones are kept for air operations, the deck, the engineering department, the medical office, and for command information and control. They show the sequence of events day by day aboard the ship; if there has been a burial at sea aboard the Carl Vinson, it would have been recorded.

 

There wasn’t any gossip about a burial among the Carl Vinson’s sailors. The carrier concluded its six-month deployment in June 2011. When the ship docked at its home base in Coronado, California, Rear Admiral Samuel Perez, commander of the Carl Vinson carrier strike group, told reporters that the crew had been ordered not to talk about the burial. Captain Bruce Lindsey, skipper of the Carl Vinson, told reporters he was unable to discuss it. Cameron Short, one of the crew of the Carl Vinson, told the Commercial-News of Danville, Illinois, that the crew had not been told anything about the burial. ‘All he knows is what he’s seen on the news,’ the newspaper reported.

 

The Pentagon did release a series of emails to the Associated Press. In one of them, Rear Admiral Charles Gaouette reported that the service followed ‘traditional procedures for Islamic burial’, and said none of the sailors on board had been permitted to observe the proceedings. But there was no indication of who washed and wrapped the body, or of which Arabic speaker conducted the service.

 

Within weeks of the raid, I had been told by two longtime consultants to Special Operations Command, who have access to current intelligence, that the funeral aboard the Carl Vinson didn’t take place. One consultant told me that bin Laden’s remains were photographed and identified after being flown back to Afghanistan. The consultant added: ‘At that point, the CIA took control of the body. The cover story was that it had been flown to the Carl Vinson.’ The second consultant agreed that there had been ‘no burial at sea’. He added that ‘the killing of bin Laden was political theatre designed to burnish Obama’s military credentials ... The Seals should have expected the political grandstanding. It’s irresistible to a politician. Bin Laden became a working asset.’ Early this year, speaking again to the second consultant, I returned to the burial at sea. The consultant laughed and said: ‘You mean, he didn’t make it to the water?’

 

The retired official said there had been another complication: some members of the Seal team had bragged to colleagues and others that they had torn bin Laden’s body to pieces with rifle fire. The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so the Seals claimed. At the time, the retired official said, the Seals did not think their mission would be made public by Obama within a few hours: ‘If the president had gone ahead with the cover story, there would have been no need to have a funeral within hours of the killing. Once the cover story was blown, and the death was made public, the White House had a serious “Where’s the body?” problem. The world knew US forces had killed bin Laden in Abbottabad. Panic city. What to do? We need a “functional body” because we have to be able to say we identified bin Laden via a DNA analysis. It would be navy officers who came up with the “burial at sea” idea. Perfect. No body. Honourable burial following sharia law. Burial is made public in great detail, but Freedom of Information documents confirming the burial are denied for reasons of “national security”. It’s the classic unravelling of a poorly constructed cover story – it solves an immediate problem but, given the slightest inspection, there is no back-up support. There never was a plan, initially, to take the body to sea, and no burial of bin Laden at sea took place.’ The retired official said that if the Seals’ first accounts are to be believed, there wouldn’t have been much left of bin Laden to put into the sea in any case.

 

It was inevitable​ that the Obama administration’s lies, misstatements and betrayals would create a backlash. ‘We’ve had a four-year lapse in co-operation,’ the retired official said. ‘It’s taken that long for the Pakistanis to trust us again in the military-to-military counterterrorism relationship – while terrorism was rising all over the world ... They felt Obama sold them down the river. They’re just now coming back because the threat from Isis, which is now showing up there, is a lot greater and the bin Laden event is far enough away to enable someone like General Durrani to come out and talk about it.’ Generals Pasha and Kayani have retired and both are reported to be under investigation for corruption during their time in office.

 

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s long-delayed report on CIA torture, released last December, documented repeated instances of official lying, and suggested that the CIA’s knowledge of bin Laden’s courier was sketchy at best and predated its use of waterboarding and other forms of torture. The report led to international headlines about brutality and waterboarding, along with gruesome details about rectal feeding tubes, ice baths and threats to rape or murder family members of detainees who were believed to be withholding information. Despite the bad publicity, the report was a victory for the CIA. Its major finding – that the use of torture didn’t lead to discovering the truth – had already been the subject of public debate for more than a decade. Another key finding – that the torture conducted was more brutal than Congress had been told – was risible, given the extent of public reporting and published exposés by former interrogators and retired CIA officers. The report depicted tortures that were obviously contrary to international law as violations of rules or ‘inappropriate activities’ or, in some cases, ‘management failures’. Whether the actions described constitute war crimes was not discussed, and the report did not suggest that any of the CIA interrogators or their superiors should be investigated for criminal activity. The agency faced no meaningful consequences as a result of the report.

 

The retired official told me that the CIA leadership had become experts in derailing serious threats from Congress: ‘They create something that is horrible but not that bad. Give them something that sounds terrible. “Oh my God, we were shoving food up a prisoner’s ass!” Meanwhile, they’re not telling the committee about murders, other war crimes, and secret prisons like we still have in Diego Garcia. The goal also was to stall it as long as possible, which they did.’

 

The main theme of the committee’s 499-page executive summary is that the CIA lied systematically about the effectiveness of its torture programme in gaining intelligence that would stop future terrorist attacks in the US. The lies included some vital details about the uncovering of an al-Qaida operative called Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who was said to be the key al-Qaida courier, and the subsequent tracking of him to Abbottabad in early 2011. The agency’s alleged intelligence, patience and skill in finding al-Kuwaiti became legend after it was dramatised in Zero Dark Thirty.

 

The Senate report repeatedly raised questions about the quality and reliability of the CIA’s intelligence about al-Kuwaiti. In 2005 an internal CIA report on the hunt for bin Laden noted that ‘detainees provide few actionable leads, and we have to consider the possibility that they are creating fictitious characters to distract us or to absolve themselves of direct knowledge about bin Ladin [sic].’ A CIA cable a year later stated that ‘we have had no success in eliciting actionable intelligence on bin Laden’s location from any detainees.’ The report also highlighted several instances of CIA officers, including Panetta, making false statements to Congress and the public about the value of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ in the search for bin Laden’s couriers.

 

Obama today is not facing re-election as he was in the spring of 2011. His principled stand on behalf of the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran says much, as does his decision to operate without the support of the conservative Republicans in Congress. High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no.

Intelligence artificielle et composition avec Photoshop et ACDSee Ultimate

Intelligence artificielle et composition avec Photoshop et ACDSee Ultimate

Paste-up street art in New York, New York, which says "His Intelligence is Artificial" in the form of an eye chart.

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Are you looking for an artificial intelligence customer experience? Visit bridgei2i.com. These specialists can help independent ventures set up tweaked AI-based client investigation arrangements. Computer-based intelligence apparatuses can be utilized to deal with a huge piece of email-related duties. For more details, visit their site.

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Maharashtra State Intelligence Department (SID) has for now given a clean chit to preacher Zakir Naik, conceding that there is simply no case to be made out against the televangelist. Sources in the special SID team handling the probe ordered by the State government said Dr. Naik will not be...

 

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The Intelligence Corps Depot moved from the wartime Maresfield Barracks, Uckfield, to Ashford in about 1968. Subsequently, in the 1990s, after their real estate was needed for the Channel Tunnel Terminal, they moved to the former RAF Chicksands base in Bedfordshire. This was taken during a visit to Templer Barracks by the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh. Because of this visit, Squad 36 lost their adventure training week, traditionally organised for all squads passing through training. We were allowed to paint the Corps yacht in Repton Manor instead though!

 

Across the square, the MT and indoor drill shed, behind, Repton Manor and to the right, the Sergeants’ Mess.

Rolls-Royce created this concept under FIMECC (Finnish Metals and Engineering Competence Cluster) user experience and usability program, UXUS. This future bridge operation experience concept (oX) for remote operated vessels is envisioned together with VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland in 2012-2014.

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A billion people in India will go online in the next decade. CMU’s alumni living there are not only shaping their future but that of the world. As part of CMU President Suresh’s first official visit events including panel discussions and a gala dinner took place.

June 2014

Illustration of The Armed Man composed by Karl Jenkins

June 2014

Illustration of The Armed Man composed by Karl Jenkins

 

SECTION 1: L'Homme Arme

This piece is based on the 15th century French Renaissance song of the same title. It is thought to have been composed for the lead up to a new crusade against the Turks. It roughly translates to ‘The man, the man, the armed man, the armed man, the armed man should be feared, should be feared. Everywhere it has been proclaimed, that each man shall arm himself, with a coat of iron mail.’ As chainmail is so heavily referenced, I decided to start with this. I went to the National Army Museum in Chelsea and looked at different kinds of uniform and armour, but found most of it was too contemporary for this piece, although much of it was of use for later sections of the scroll. I then went to the Wallace Collection, also in London, and looked particularly at the European armour and chainmail. I drew some examples and wrote notes about which types were particularly useful for the design I wanted to create, so I looked at the 4-1 method of chainmail manufacture, as it was used closest to the time of the song, and also looks aesthetically pleasing. From the 14th century onwards, rivets were used so that the structure of the mail is strong, enabling it to stand the blows of swords and arrows. The repetitive structure of the chainmail links well to the music, as it is a repeated melody. The actual score of the music has repeated motifs, the notes are equidistant and follow a pattern. This instantly made me look into print making, in order to achieve the effect of chainmail and demonstrate my understanding of rhythm in the composition and the music. I also looked into Morse code as this is a typical ‘language’ associated with warfare. However, I found that circles of chainmail was more effective to use when printing. I measured my section of the scroll and found that in order to have a successful pattern, I needed to have each circle roughly 1 inch diameter and a half drop pattern, fitting in with the 4-1 pattern of chainmail. I also used imagery from a famous World War One photograph, showing exhausted soldiers walking in a line. I chose to show just their silhouettes, and to rip the paper to show the damage war has inflicted on them, and to contrast with the cleaner prints of the chainmail.

 

SECTION 2: Adhaan

This piece is the Islamic call to prayer, or Adhaan, sang by a Muezzin soloist. My choir performed this in a church, which gave an interesting contrast to the traditional Christian architecture and imagery, by having this beautiful Arabic voice praising Allah. I went to the V&A museum in London to look at the screens and tiles on display, focusing mainly on geometric repeating patterns. I happened to discover the Jameel Prize exhibition on my way out, which is a collection of modern Islamic art, often inspired by more traditional pieces. One piece was an installation looking at a prayer’s soundwaves, and how the sound looks when printed out. Another looked like a huge, moving machine made up of many different pieces of calligraphy arranged in circles. I found these pieces extremely influential to my work, and used both traditional and contemporary research to develop my own pattern and design for this section. Also, in the summer, I went to an exhibition in Amsterdam on Escher and his works relationship with Islamic art. I found one particular screen that I felt captured the essence of war; the pattern is beautiful, yet the shape used could be seen as an axe, a hammer or another weapon. I tried to replicate the pattern using graph paper, like Islamic architects used when designing their patterns, then used stencil card, string blocks and tracing paper to transfer the design onto the scroll. I also used a photo of a typical Islamic skyline to break up the pattern, and give a border to the two tones used; a sandy earth colour, and grey scale.

 

SECTION 3: Kyrie

Kyrie refers to a lamp lighting ceremony in Jerusalem, so I decided to look at effects of dark and light in contrast. I used ink, paint and charcoal for the dark, and wax, paint and bleach for the light. It reminded me of a quote from Anne Frank, ‘look how this candle both defies and defines the darkness’, which I thought summarises this section perfectly. You cannot have light without dark, just as you cannot have peace without war. This piece is probably the most influenced by my mark making drawings of the music. The direction for the piece is ‘compassionate, pitying’, and I wanted to reflect this in my work. ‘Kyrie eleison’ (lord, have mercy) is the main repeated phrase, which I found had a particular set of marks in my drawing, so I used these lines to represent each time the phrase is sang. When at the V&A I noticed a display highlighting the similarities in a sun motif between a catholic priests robe and an Islamic pattern. I wanted to show that my motif was similar to written Arabic, particularly to the call of prayer. This links Islam and Catholicism in my work, also as the two sections are next to each other. Impressionism was the style I was aiming to reference, as the music is blurred and beautiful, and I wanted to suggest a feeling, rather than state one. Debussy’s view on impressionist music supports my ideas, as he used chords for the colours, and harmonies for tone. Music and art are the same thing, just using different words.

 

SECTION 4: Save Me From Bloody Men

This piece uses text from the Book of Psalms, documenting a plea for God’s help. The piece is sung in the style of a Gregorian Chant, so all male voices (TB) and no orchestra. It is extremely powerful and sounds incredible in a church, as it echoes and creates a feeling of menace and foreboding. The percussion beat at the end made a lot of people jump when we performed it, as it’s incredibly loud and sudden, like a gunshot. I wanted to focus on this key moment, so I looked at William Klein’s Tokyo series of a boxer punching a wall with paint. I wanted to recreate this violence, so made myself a boxing/paint brush, and experimented by listening to the track and punching the wall on the drum beat. I used lots of paint on the glove to give a spattering effect, to show the echo of the music, but also of war. War is not a single clean battle, it is the echoes of conflict that continue the destruction. I used my mark making to describe the voices singing, and found that sharp lines and square shapes worked best for the rich, low tone of the music. It also reminded me of morse code, so I combined some words in code into the marks. I wanted to find a way of incorporating the punch, so I used fragile tissue paper as an overlay. This is in contrast to the strong, thick lines and large punch mark.

 

SECTION 5: Sanctus

This piece is also a part of the traditional Catholic mass, but uses a repeating bass line of ‘Sanctus’ (Holy) as a beat, giving it an ever more sinister and menacing feel as the music goes on. For this reason, I decided to use red paint sparingly at the left side, then more frequently and finally culminating in a frenzy of slashes and spatters. To reference the Catholic roots, I decided to observe church spires, both locally and worldwide, as traditionally these were very high to link God and the congregation, or heaven and earth. This also links to the line ‘Hosannah in excelsis’ which is sudden, loud and high pitched, especially in the part I sing as I am a first soprano. I used very careful observations of church spires and towers to the left, then gradually getting more fractured and shattered as the piece goes on. Both the music and art get steadily more sinister and abstract, giving a sense of unease to the viewer, and suggesting that battle is imminent.

 

SECTION 6: Hymn Before Action

The text from this piece is taken from the first two stanzas of Rudyard Kiplings poem of the same title. The words conjure a lot of imagery surrounding war, preparing for battle and patriarchy. The last line, ‘lord grant us strength to die’ is repeated three times, highlighting the plea and linking to the previous piece, ‘Save Us From Bloody Men’. I have been inspired by ‘The Book Thief’ by Markus Zusak, in which Death, the narrator, describes his experience of war. This book has been very influential, as its descriptions use colour and strong imagery to describe war, rather than conventional writing techniques, for example, ‘A single hour can consist of thousands of different colors. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses. In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them. ‘ I wanted my work to give a similar effect; not using figurative studies, instead creating a feeling using colours and shapes. I went to the Wallace Collection and looked at mostly Iranian, Indian and European daggers and swords, both functional and ceremonial. I drew some of these, and found the detail used on these horrific weapons to be incredibly intricate, which caused a juxtaposition of creation and destruction on the same object. There was even a gun, beautifully carved with inlay of gold, pearl and coral, which had a small detail on the barrel of a couple having sexual intercourse. I felt this shocking contrast was important to explore in my work, so experimented by using destructive techniques to create art. Destruction is creation. After all, a drawing is a destroyed pencil and paper. I used a white background of acrylic paint to give a base to this section, as I wanted a greater contrast between black and white, war and peace. I simplified the intricate swords into simpler shapes suitable for printing, and cut stencils. I used black and crimson to symbolise blood, giving the viewer a sense of foreboding about the next section.\

 

SECTION 7: Charge!

I chose to use this piece of music for my final piece because it is central to the message of the music. It is the 7th in 13 songs, so in the middle, and is also the longest and most dramatic. It covers the lead up to battle, preparations and arming, and then the charge, increasing in tempo and volume until 8 drum beats, then a crescendo of screaming. The direction in the music score has no notes; just a written description, ‘sing any notes and randomly gliss. up & down until ‘J’, then hold. Breathe individually as necessary. Convey horror.’ Jenkins culminates this section with an ffff direction for all voices and instruments- very very loud. Then, a roughly 30 second long silence gives time for the audience to reflect, and the echoes to die down. A lone bugler plays ‘The Last Post’ offstage. I left a large space of blank wood to symbolise the silence, then interpreted The Last Post into small black marks around the edge.The other side features camouflage typically used by the French in the Somme in the First World War. Continuing on this theme, I researched the trenches and incorporated a map of Flanders into the left side. This emotionally harrowing piece struck me as something that was not contained in the bounds of the scroll, and therefore I decided to use a larger piece to convey the emotion, horror and overall power that this piece has. I chose a circle because it remarks on the fact that war and peace are a never ending cycle, and that you cannot have one without the other. I also wanted it to look similar to some of the weapons I have been researching, chiefly the shields in the Wallace collection. I noticed that a great deal of them had large spikes pushing out from the centre. From the side, these were sharp and but not particularly menacing; yet from the front on, it seemed that the spike was coming directly at you, giving an extremely threatening feel. I wanted to recreate this feeling of terror when something is advancing straight for you, and so made my own spike for the centre of my shield. I chose a particular shape when creating it, to reference how a crescendo is written in music (<) as this piece continually gets louder towards the climax. I experimented with the Ready Morse method typography to write ‘Charge’ on the spike, and used photograms to capture it. I felt this was appropriate because a photogram switches black and white, light and dark, just as war turns everything on its head. I want the viewer to feel frightened, confused and like they are in the middle of the conflict. For this reason, I chose to incorporate a broken mirror into my design, as the viewer will move along the scroll, feeling somewhat separate from the action, as none of this horror happened in their life. Then, at eye level, a broken mirror puts them directly inside the artwork, and they see that anyone can be affected by war. I broke it because I wanted to explore violence in creation, and the act of smashing something creates a new effect. It also means that the viewer may not initially recognise themselves in the reflection, as they are distorted and manipulated, similar to wars effect on people and nature. Broken mirrors were also used by a group of rebel fighters, The West Side Boys, in the Sierra Leone conflict. They used the mirrors to deflect attention from their positions and confuse the enemy. Additionally, I want to remind people that war is not something separate to humans; it is started, fought and ended by us. Yet the effects of war render us dehumanised. As Death, the narrator of The Book Thief remarks, ‘A small but noteworthy note. I've seen so many young men over the years who think they're running at other young men. They are not. They are running at me.’

 

SECTION 8: Angry Flames

Angry flames was written by Sankichi Toge, who survived the Hiroshima bombings. It documents the destruction he saw, and his feelings. I have always been interested in photojournalism, particularly work by Don McCullin, so decided to research more photos like his. I focused mainly on black and white ones, and most importantly, images that told a story. I compiled all these images using pinterest (www.pinterest.com/pshelleysmith/the-armed-man/ ) and used emulsion printing to capture these on my scroll. This printing technique symbolises the strange effect that the atomic blast had on humans; it would cast a sort of black shadow of their form onto the ground, wherever they fell, as the heat of the explosion was so great. I chose to use white paint to capture the images to contrast with this horrific phenomenon, photographs of this can be seen on my pinterest board. I then used charcoal, as it is burnt wood, to draw a mushroom cloud over the images, and chalk to create highlights. When standing back, the full mushroom cloud is visible, and when up close, the photographs come into focus. This is similar to how the bomb was created; it was designed to destruct, but the true horror is only visible when up close. Photojournalism is the bridge between the victims and the public, just as my work is a bridge between music and art. I also wanted the photos incorporated in my piece to create a sort of memorial to the suffering that was endured in the lead up to each photo, during, and afterwards; not just the subject of the photo but also the photographer, who is often forgotten. A great many journalists risk and sometimes lose their lives to report on conflict.

 

SECTION 9: Torches

This piece has text taken from the Mahabharata, an Indian epic narrative thought to date back to 400BC. It is the longest poem ever written, and documents the conflict of the Kurukshetra War and the fates of the Kaurava and the Pandava princes. This particular section describes animals and humans fleeing from a fire. At the Wallace Collection, I looked at a great deal of armour, particularly European. The helmets were intimidating and dehumanising, showing only a glimpse of eyes beneath a towering mass of metal. They were often distorted and given sharp points and exaggerated features to scare the enemy. Horses were also concealed in this way, given horns or tusks perhaps as weapons, or just decoration. I read poetry documenting the First World War, particularly poems by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. One poem, Mental Cases, compares the soldiers to animals, ‘Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish, Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked’ I found this poem extremely powerful and hard hitting, as it shows that war is not a human affair. Therefore I developed unhuman, monstrous creatures to show a more abstract vision of war and destruction, inspired by the helmets, poems and work by Francis Bacon. Another piece that influenced this decision is Guernica by Picasso. The scale of the work is colossal, and must be intimidating to view. I wanted to capture this feeling of discomfort when viewing something truly horrific. I again used charcoal, as it is living flesh destroyed by fire. The majority of this piece of music seems fairly bland in comparison to the other sections; it uses a fairly regular rhythm, and emphasises a few of the phrases, with alto and soprano dominant and occasional use of all four parts. However, at the end, percussion and an ff direction causes the repetition of ‘torches’ to shock the audience. In a way, the slow, chanting rhythm of the rest of the piece bares a contrast to these last few bars, and makes it seem more horrific. A Hindu method of storytelling is to remain completely detached from the story, and let the words speak for themselves. Perhaps Jenkins was using this technique to emphasise the horror.

 

SECTION 10: Agnus Dei

This piece is also based on the traditional catholic mass, where Agnus Dei translates to ‘Lamb of God’. I decided to look at influential figures and words of war, from both sides as it were, so ranging from Hitler to Anne Frank, Gandhi, Churchill, J.F. Kennedy, protesters boards, Wilfred Owen, Vera Brittain, many other war poems, songs, films and books, and even biblical passages. I separated these by having the more destructive, pro war quotes on the left, towards the destruction, and the positive, pacifist ones on the right. I see this section of music as the turning point in the piece, as it begins to introduce a more positive sound, and soft, lilting melody. It reminded me of rivers or the sea, and the marks I made while listening to it also had this look of ripples and swirls. Therefore, I grouped the text in a similar way, sketching out first then filling in the quotes. They do not all read perfectly in order, as I chose to mix them up slightly. This has the effect of showing that after war, even though the right intentions are there, the world is forever in turmoil, and the order of peace cannot be restored.

 

SECTION 11: Now The Guns Have Stopped

The lyrics of this piece were written by Guy Wilson, the master of the Royal Armouries museum, as part of a display on the guilt that was felt by surviving soldiers of WW1. It reminded me of the poetry I had studied from the First World War, and I decided to find out more about this time. I researched uniforms, cap badges, gas masks and memoirs, particularly English ones about guilt and grief. I felt the most powerful imagery of this time was the mass graves in France and Belgium, the rows of white crosses. I decided to draw these recognisable symbols, but do so in a style that was rough and free, rather than perfectly measured crosses. I experimented ways of creating these iconic crosses using a variety of media; I used masking tape, masking fluid and wax to leave areas white, and then a black ink wash, and finally white acrylic paint and bleach to reveal sections. The bleach reacted with the paint to give a rusty red colour, reminding the viewer of blood. The dark ink gives a stark contrast to the sections either side of it, and makes the crosses seem even brighter. Appropriately, this is the 11th section of the music and my artwork.

 

SECTION 12: Benedictus

This piece starts with a long and stunningly beautiful cello solo, with a repeating melody that the choir sings later. However, it also has a sad undertone, specifically when the choir sings ‘Hosanna in Excelsis’. I went to a talk hosted by the Royal British Legion to draw, which had three speakers; a Naval officer from the Cold War, an intelligence worker responsible for electronic CSAR units (combat search and rescue) used from the Vietnamese war up to today’s conflict in Afghanistan. The last speaker impacted me the most, as he was a rear gunner in the RAF. He was 94, yet stood for the duration of his speech, and told many jokes, despite his difficult subject matter. He described his training and first operations, and how he signed up; he went to the registry office, gave his true age, 17, to the officer. The officer told him to walk outside and try again. He came back, said he was 19, and was immediately accepted. I drew him as he spoke, and the sketch that is most poignant in my opinion is the one when he was speaking about the death of his childhood best friend, and his feeling of guilt that he would come home to his family, while at his friend’s house, there would be a feeling of emptiness. His eyes started to water at this point, even after 70 odd years. I felt my drawing captured the beauty and sadness of this piece, and so scaled up and developed the sketch for the final draft of the scroll.

 

SECTION 13: Better Is Peace

The final piece is a reprise of L’Homme Armé, but is in a major key, giving a more positive sound. The lyrics are sometimes replaced with ‘better is peace than always war’, and the piece is sung by soloists and choir SATB. I chose to look at traditional symbols of peace, particularly the dove, as this is used as the album artwork and on posters relating to the music. I looked at symbolism of birds flying upwards to indicate peace, positivity and happiness, and a bird flying down being a bad omen for war, death and destruction. I therefore decided to draw birds. Unfortunately, while I was studying birds, perhaps as another strange moment of fate, my mum ran over a pure white pigeon (by accident). We took it home and I photographed and drew this beautiful and tragic creature, and developed my idea of having two birds in the image; one to the left, dead and seemingly flying down, to indicate the death and destruction that my piece has journeyed through, and a second bird to the right, flying upwards in a burst of light to symbolise the new hope for peace expressed through the lyrics. Between the two, I decided to give a reprise of the chainmail print from the first section, like the reprise in the music, but this time printed using very light grey and pure white. Additionally, I included the marks I made when listening to the piece, this time done in a white oily pencil. The second part of this piece, ‘God shall wipe away all tears…’ strips back the orchestra for the choir to sing a capella in beautiful harmonies. For our performance, the orchestra joined in to sing with us. In the music score, there is an optional solo part at the very end of this piece for the soprano soloist. The official The Armed Man CD does not include this last note, but in our performance, the soloist decided to do it. It is right at the very end, when all other parts gradually fall into a beautiful harmony, one voice soars above the rest, a very pure and high note. This reminded me of the dove flying upwards, and I wanted to recreate this ascent, perhaps to heaven, to peace, and to hope.

Colorized by Artificial Intelligence Algorithm Tool from originally scanned hi-res photo from the respective source.

 

Credit: www.flickr.com/photos/183991717@N03/50797872447/

 

Credit disclaimer: I do not own the original scanned image and believe that it is in the public domain. These images have been collected from Flickr search results. If you know the link to the original image, please kindly put it into comment section as I will update the description to give full credit to the respective owner.

 

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Sept 8th and 9th, www.singinst.org/summit2007/

"Jerry Cornell is the exact opposite of a super sleuth.

 

"Always careful to choose a case that will solve itself so he can spend most of his agency's time in bed with his bird.

 

"But his luck runs out when he accidentally takes on the assignment codenamed DEVIL RIDER.

 

"The hilarious, detective thriller sequel to THE CHINESE AGENT."

 

The Russian Intelligence by Michael Moorcock. Savoy Books, 1980. Illustrated by Harry Douthwaite. Cover lettering by John Mottershead. Introduction by Jack Trevor Story.

 

ISBN 0 86130 027 0

U.S. Army Africa photo by Sgt. 1st Class Kyle Davis

 

U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) hosted its second annual C4ISR Senior Leaders Conference Feb. 2-4 at Caserma Ederle, headquarters of U.S. Army Africa, in Vicenza, Italy.

 

The communications and intelligence community event, hosted by Brig. Gen. Robert Ferrell, AFRICOM C4 director, drew approximately 80 senior leaders from diverse U.S. military and government branches and agencies, as well as representatives of African nations and the African Union.

 

“The conference is a combination of our U.S. AFRICOM C4 systems and intel directorate,” said Ferrell. “We come together annually to bring the team together to work on common goals to work on throughout the year. The team consists of our coalition partners as well as our inter-agency partners, as well as our components and U.S. AFRICOM staff.”

 

The conference focused on updates from participants, and on assessing the present state and goals of coalition partners in Africa, he said.

 

“The theme for our conference is ‘Delivering Capabilities to a Joint Information Environment,’ and we see it as a joint and combined team ... working together, side by side, to promote peace and stability there on the African continent,” Ferrell said.

 

Three goals of this year’s conference were to strengthen the team, assess priorities across the board, and get a better fix on the impact that the establishment of the U.S. Cyber Command will have on all members’ efforts in the future, he said.

 

“With the stand-up of U.S. Cyber Command, it brings a lot of unique challenges that we as a team need to talk through to ensure that our information is protected at all times,” Ferrell said.

 

African Union (AU) representatives from four broad geographic regions of Africa attended, which generated a holistic perspective on needs and requirements from across the continent, he said.

 

“We have members from the African Union headquarters that is located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; we have members that are from Uganda; from Zambia; from Ghana; and also from the Congo. What are the gaps, what are the things that we kind of need to assist with as we move forward on our engagements on the African continent?” Ferrell said.

 

U.S. Army Africa Commander, Maj. Gen. David R. Hogg, welcomed participants as the conference got under way.

 

“We’re absolutely delighted to be the host for this conference, and we hope that this week you get a whole lot out of it,” said Hogg.

 

He took the opportunity to address the participants not only as their host, but from the perspective of a customer whose missions depend on the results of their efforts to support commanders in the field.

 

“When we’re talking about this group of folks that are here — from the joint side, from our African partners, from State, all those folks — it’s about partnership and interoperability. And every commander who’s ever had to fight in a combined environment understands that interoperability is the thing that absolutely slaps you upside the head,” Hogg said.

 

“We’re in the early stages of the process here of working with the African Union and the other partners, and you have an opportunity to design this from the end state, versus just building a bunch of ‘gunkulators.’ And so, the message is: think about what the end state is supposed to look like and construct the strategy to support the end state.

 

“Look at where we want to be at and design it that way,” Hogg said.

 

He also admonished participants to consider the second- and third-order effects of their choices in designing networks.

 

“With that said, over the next four days, I hope this conference works very well for you. If there’s anything we can do to make your stay better, please let us know,” Hogg said.

 

Over the following three days, participants engaged in a steady stream of briefings and presentations focused on systems, missions and updates from the field.

 

Col. Joseph W. Angyal, director of U.S. Army Africa G-6, gave an overview of operations and issues that focused on fundamentals, the emergence of regional accords as a way forward, and the evolution of a joint network enterprise that would serve all interested parties.

 

“What we’re trying to do is to work regionally. That’s frankly a challenge, but as we stand up the capability, really for the U.S. government, and work through that, we hope to become more regionally focused,” he said.

 

He referred to Africa Endeavor, an annual, multi-nation communications exercise, as a test bed for the current state of affairs on the continent, and an aid in itself to future development.

 

“In order to conduct those exercises, to conduct those security and cooperation events, and to meet contingency missions, we really, from the C4ISR perspective, have five big challenges,” Angyal said.

 

“You heard General Hogg this morning talk about ‘think about the customer’ — you’ve got to allow me to be able to get access to our data; I’ve got to be able to get to the data where and when I need it; you’ve got to be able to protect it; I have to be able to share it; and then finally, the systems have to be able to work together in order to build that coalition.

 

“One of the reasons General Ferrell is setting up this joint information enterprise, this joint network enterprise . . . it’s almost like trying to bring together disparate companies or corporations: everyone has their own system, they’ve paid for their own infrastructure, and they have their own policy, even though they support the same major company.

 

“Now multiply that when you bring in different services, multiply that when you bring in different U.S. government agencies, and then put a layer on top of that with the international partners, and there are lots of policies that are standing in our way.”

 

The main issue is not a question of technology, he said.

 

“The boxes are the same — a Cisco router is a Cisco router; Microsoft Exchange server is the same all over the world — but it’s the way that we employ them, and it’s the policies that we apply to it, that really stops us from interoperating, and that’s the challenge we hope to work through with the joint network enterprise.

 

“And I think that through things like Africa Endeavor and through the joint enterprise network, we’re looking at knocking down some of those policy walls, but at the end of the day they are ours to knock down. Bill Gates did not design a system to work only for the Army or for the Navy — it works for everyone,” Angyal said.

 

Brig. Gen. Joseph Searyoh, director general of Defense Information Communication Systems, General Headquarters, Ghana Armed Forces, agreed that coordinating policy is fundamental to improving communications with all its implications for a host of operations and missions.

 

“One would expect that in these modern times there is some kind of mutual engagement, and to build that engagement to be strong, there must be some kind of element of trust. … We have to build some kind of trust to be able to move forward,” said Searyoh.

 

“Some people may be living in silos of the past, but in the current engagement we need to tell people that we are there with no hidden agenda, no negative hidden agenda, but for the common good of all of us.

 

“We say that we are in the information age, and I’ve been saying something: that our response should not be optional, but it must be a must, because if you don’t join now, you are going to be left behind.

 

“So what do we do? We have to get our house in order.

 

“Why do I say so? We used to operate like this before the information age; now in the information age, how do we operate?

 

“So, we have to get our house in order and see whether we are aligning ourselves with way things should work now. So, our challenge is to come up with a strategy, see how best we can reorganize our structures, to be able to deliver communications-information systems support for the Ghana Armed Forces,” he said.

 

Searyoh related that his organization has already accomplished one part of erecting the necessary foundation by establishing an appropriate policy structure.

 

“What is required now is the implementing level. Currently we have communications on one side, and computers on one side. The lines are blurred — you cannot operate like that, you’ve got to bring them together,” he said.

 

Building that merged entity to support deployed forces is what he sees as the primary challenge at present.

 

“Once you get that done you can talk about equipment, you can talk about resources,” Searyoh said. “I look at the current collaboration between the U.S. and the coalition partners taking a new level.”

 

“The immediate challenges that we have is the interoperability, which I think is one of the things we are also discussing here, interoperability and integration,” said Lt. Col. Kelvin Silomba, African Union-Zambia, Information Technology expert for the Africa Stand-by Force.

 

“You know that we’ve got five regions in Africa. All these regions, we need to integrate them and bring them together, so the challenge of interoperability in terms of equipment, you know, different tactical equipment that we use, and also in terms of the language barrier — you know, all these regions in Africa you find that they speak different languages — so to bring them together we need to come up with one standard that will make everybody on board and make everybody able to talk to each other,” he said.

 

“So we have all these challenges. Other than that also, stemming from the background of these African countries, based on the colonization: some of them were French colonized, some of them were British colonized and so on, so you find that when they come up now we’ve adopted some of the procedures based on our former colonial masters, so that is another challenge that is coming on board.”

 

The partnership with brother African states, with the U.S. government and its military branches, and with other interested collaborators has had a positive influence, said Silomba.

 

“Oh, it’s great. From the time that I got engaged with U.S. AFRICOM — I started with Africa Endeavor, before I even came to the AU — it is my experience that it is something very, very good.

 

“I would encourage — I know that there are some member states — I would encourage that all those member states they come on board, all of these regional organizations, that they come on board and support the AFRICOM lead. It is something that is very, very good.

 

“As for example, the African Union has a lot of support that’s been coming in, technical as well as in terms of knowledge and equipment. So it’s great; it’s good and it’s great,” said Salimba.

 

Other participant responses to the conference were positive as well.

 

“The feedback I’ve gotten from every member is that they now know what the red carpet treatment looks like, because USARAF has gone over and above board to make sure the environment, the atmosphere and the actual engagements … are executed to perfection,” said Ferrell. “It’s been very good from a team-building aspect.

 

“We’ve had very good discussions from members of the African Union, who gave us a very good understanding of the operations that are taking place in the area of Somalia, the challenges with communications, and laid out the gaps and desires of where they see that the U.S. and other coalition partners can kind of improve the capacity there in that area of responsibility.

 

“We also talked about the AU, as they are expanding their reach to all of the five regions, of how can they have that interoperability and connectivity to each of the regions,” Ferrell said.

 

“(It’s been) a wealth of knowledge and experts that are here to share in terms of how we can move forward with building capacities and capabilities. Not only for U.S. interests, but more importantly from my perspective, in building capacities and capabilities for our African partners beginning with the Commission at the African Union itself,” said Kevin Warthon, U.S. State Department, peace and security adviser to the African Union.

 

“I think that General Ferrell has done an absolutely wonderful thing by inviting key African partners to participate in this event so they can share their personal experience from a national, regional and continental perspective,” he said.

 

Warthon related from his personal experience a vignette of African trust in Providence that he believed carries a pertinent metaphor and message to everyone attending the conference.

 

“We are not sure what we are going to do tomorrow, but the one thing that I am sure of is that we are able to do something. Don’t know when, don’t know how, but as long as our focus is on our ability to assist and to help to progress a people, that’s really what counts more than anything else,” he said.

 

“Don’t worry about the timetable; just focus on your ability to make a difference and that’s what that really is all about.

 

“I see venues such as this as opportunities to make what seems to be the impossible become possible. … This is what this kind of venue does for our African partners.

 

“We’re doing a wonderful job at building relationships, because that’s where it begins — we have to build relationships to establish trust. That’s why this is so important: building trust through relationships so that we can move forward in the future,” Warthon said.

 

Conference members took a cultural tour of Venice and visited a traditional winery in the hills above Vicenza before adjourning.

 

To learn more about U.S. Army Africa visit our official website at www.usaraf.army.mil

 

Official Twitter Feed: www.twitter.com/usarmyafrica

 

Official YouTube video channel: www.youtube.com/usarmyafrica

 

How to start learning Artificial Intelligence? This is a comprehensive guide that is the ideal starting point on how to start learning AI.

itenterprise.co.uk/start-learning-artificial-intelligence/

OSP can create customized AI video analytics software solutions utilizes the combined capabilities of artificial intelligence, supervised machine learning and deep neural networks together to offer accurate video analysis in real-time.

Website:- www.osplabs.com/ai-video-analytics/

Free to use but please give credit to www.modup.net/

Rolls-Royce created this concept under FIMECC (Finnish Metals and Engineering Competence Cluster) user experience and usability program, UXUS. This future bridge operation experience concept (oX) for remote operated platform supply vessels is envisioned together with VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland in 2012-2014.

What We Have Now

[brew note - four preconditions for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or at least what I made of it]

1. Better machines

- Fast computers internetworked, compute clouds

- Hardware is not the problem

 

2. Basic understanding of human cognition and brain

- basic understanding of human cognition and architecture.

- A cruder but useful understanding of brain structure and dynamics

 

3. Embodiment – Virtual and Physical

- Decent virtual worlds for AI embodiment

- Halfway-decent robot bodies

 

4. Theoretical understanding of AGI

- Lots of AI algorithms and representations

- often useful in specialized areas

- often not very scalable on their own

- a theoretical understanding of general intelligence under conditions

of massive computational resources

 

From the opening session: Review of AI and AGI Past Present and Future by Ben Goertzel of Novamente at the The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-08) Ben Goertzel was one of the conference organizers and is a driving force in the AGI community.

  

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research focuses on the original and ultimate goal of AI -- to create intelligence as a whole, by exploring all available paths, including theoretical and experimental computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, and innovative interdisciplinary methodologies. AGI is also called Strong AI in the AI community.

 

Another good reference is Artificial General Intelligence : A Gentle Introduction by Pei Wang

  

I030108 546

21 May 2019: Artificial Intelligence: Next Steps

 

Moderator: Dirk Pilat, Deputy Director, Science, Technology and Innovation, OECD

 

Scene Setting: Anne Carblanc, Head of Division, Division for Digital Economy Policy, Science, Technology and Innovation, OECD

 

Speakers:

Jim Kurose, Assistant Director, National Science Foundation (NSF) Wonki Min, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Science and ICT, South Korea; Chair, Digital Economy Policy Committee, OECD, Chiara Tomasi, Public Policy and Government Relations Senior Analyst, Google

Closing keynote speech :

Michael Kratsios, Deputy Assistant to the President for Technology Policy and Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer

 

OECD Headquarters, Paris.

 

www.oecd.org/forum

 

Photo : © Hervé Cortinat / OECD

2020 INSA Achievement Awards

2022 Intelligence & National Security Summit September 15-16, 2022.

2022 Intelligence & National Security Summit September 15-16, 2022.

2022 Intelligence & National Security Summit September 15-16, 2022.

I dreamed about a human being is is part of a project exploring the use of artificial intelligence as applied to photography by using online open source code and data.

More information at fransimo.info/?p=1100

 

ID:338d8a144e3b0323ce33ca3408879cfd

 

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2022 Intelligence & National Security Summit September 15-16, 2022.

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CORAL SEA (July 25, 2021) - U.S. Marines with S-2 Intelligence, 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) deploy a Backpackable Electronic Attack Module (BEAM) into the water at an expanded range aboard the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock USS New Orleans (LPD 18) in the Coral Sea, July 25, 2021. This is the first time the BEAM has been used to showcase its capabilities in a maritime environment. The 31st MEU is operating aboard ships of the America Expeditionary Strike Group in the 7th fleet area of operations to enhance interoperability with allies and partners, and serve as a ready response force to defend peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Grace Gerlach) 210725-M-ST547-1154

 

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