zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — classification, impropriety, and a concept pretty much unique to Meister Eckhart ]
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First, here’s what I call a DoubleTweet, juxtaposing two tweets for the resonance between them — and juxtaposing two thoughts for the resonance between them is about as simple a way of demonstrating the whole being greater than the sum of its parts as I can think of.

Take 1, Obama is slippery with words:

In Playbook: Obama, re Hillary email: ‘There’s classified, and then there’s classified’: https://t.co/CTp8Hn8X5l pic.twitter.com/bvRdwxmwmj

— Mike Allen (@mikeallen) April 10, 2016

Take 2, the Europeans outbid and finesse him:

Best excuse ever for failing to respond to a terrorist threat that you were literally emailed about in advance. pic.twitter.com/vHASPbCSD7

— Gartenstein-Ross (@DaveedGR) April 15, 2016

I don’t actually know if you can outbid and finesse while playing Bridge, but you can in metaphor.

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There was also a DoubleQuote that sprang to mind, but Patti Brown got to it first, so I’ll just copy her tweet here:

.@POTUS "There's classified and then there's classified." .@billclinton ""It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

— Patti Brown (@pattibrown) April 12, 2016

Lawyers — the Clintons & POTUS.

Compare philosophers, poets, native speakers, natural language processors.

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Also worth taking into consideration here:

Mark Stout, War on the Rocks, Were Hillary Clinton’s emails classified? Where you stand depends on where you sit:

the uproar about the Clinton email server ignores the reality that, for very good reasons, the CIA and the State Department have different approaches to classification and classified information. These different approaches result from the different functions of the agencies.

Cory Bennett, The Hill, Clinton emails reveal murky world of ‘top secret’ documents:

The watchdog [IG] said it found a number of Clinton’s emails that currently contained “classified intelligence community information.” But the State Department has said it did not consider that language classified at the time those emails were sent.

Both sides can be correct, said several former officials.

And that’s enough hipbonish excitement for one post.

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen”]

I have a new piece up at War on the Rocks ( which, by the way, is doing an important Indiegogo fundraising drive):

THERE ARE NO TEA LEAVES TO READ ABOUT THE “MOSUL PLAN” 

A mostly forgotten Arab adversary of American influence in the Mideast, the late Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser, once said “The genius of you Americans is that you make no clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them we are missing.”

The Obama administration appears determined to live up to Nasser’s estimation of our strategic acumen.

The latest evidence for this proposition would be the ill-fated affair of the administration’s former battle plan to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from the butchers of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Problems began at the inception when the anonymous but official Central Command (CENTCOM) briefer revealed a plethora of sensitive operational details to reporters, a move described by journalists in their stories as “odd,” “very unusual,” “rare.” The stories provoked a firestorm of criticism from members of Congress, the Iraqis, and within the Pentagon itself which predictably led the administration’s numerous admirers in the media to mobilize andtake up a defensive crouch, speculating as to the clever hidden motives for releasing the plan. [….]

Read the rest here.

The dust-up over the Mosul Plan is, in my view, symptomatic of dysfunctional organizational problems, especially with the senior White Hose staff and NSC.  The latter of which is now of enormous size, estimated 400-500 people, depending how you count various civil service employees and military personnel on “loan” from their agencies and departments ( a “mini-State Department”, in the words of one member of the natsec community).

By contrast, Brent Scowcroft helped the collapse of the USSR to a soft landing and managed the Gulf War with an NSC of about 50.

[ by Charles Cameron — two recent posts elsewhere, and two forthcoming posts here on ZP ]
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About LapidoMedia, including a great short Simon Schama clip

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My second post for LapidoMedia went up a couple of days ago, along with my first appearance on War on the Rocks.

The LapidoMedia piece summarizes much that I have written here about the Islamic State / Daesh and its apocalyptic view as expressed in Dabiq magazine. From Lapido’s statement of purpose:

Many news stories do not make sense – whether to journalists or policy makers who feed off what they report – without understanding religion. Lapido Media is an internationally networked, British-based philanthro-media charity, founded in 2005, that seeks to increase understanding among journalists and opinion formers of the way religion shapes world affairs.

It’s called religious literacy. We run media briefings, publish research and essays and work with journalists around the world. Our stringers practise on our website the kind of religiously literate journalism we wish to see, going deeper to the sources of social motivations, and providing a resource for other journalists. And we work with civil society groups on campaigns and media strategy to improve the flow and quality of stories with a religion dimension.

My Lapido piece, ANALYSIS: ISIS’ magazine Dabiq & what it tells us, begins:

THE TITLE, and much of the content, of the Islamic State’s magazine, Dabiq, emphasises the ‘end times’ nature of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s so-called caliphate.

The beheadings, crucifixions and most recently the burning of 45 people in Al-Baghdadi, grab the West’s attention, and are intended to trigger a military over-reaction, proving to those who are willing to believe it that the West is in a ‘war with Islam’.

But the Islamic State’s English-language magazine Dabiq has a different audience and a distinctly different message.

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I was also delighted to make a small appearance at War on the Rocks, thanks to both August Cole and Ryan Evans. WotR is working closely with the Brent Scowcroft Center’s Art of Future Warfare project, and it was my piece for that project’s first Challenge that landed me on WotR’s pages.

My story was excerpted on WotR with a link to the whole thing, and since I really like the opening, I’ll repost it here:

Flashing across my sub-eyes and a few dozen others today, those tiny edge of vision thunderclouds that when my saccade leaps to them indicate increasing war chance – lit by a single bolt of miniscule lightning. As my transport turns itself into its parkplace, too far from the Ed’s for me to throat her a quick morning buzz, I flipvision up and “Temple” appears in yellow and red across the sub-world, and an accompanying jolt from the adrenals gets me out of the comfort of my now stationary pod, through visual check-in and up to my console where I can dig into deets..

Not my usual Zenpundit style, but great fun to write!

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I want to note in passing that I am working on a few major posts, though they may take a while.

I intend to comment in detail on Graeme Wood‘s major piece, What ISIS Really Wants in The Atlantic. It gets one huge piece of the puzzle right, and for that reason I’m delighted to see some of the things Tim Furnish and I have been pounding away at for years getting visibility. Various scholars have weighed in, and one very interesting comment has come from JM Berger — I’d definitely like to weigh my response to his view, too. So that’s one forthcoming piece.

Another, which would have been teh major piece for me this month all on its own if Wood’s article hadn’t appeared, will cover “countering violent extremism” — the topic, the White House event, the many interesting comments from Humera Khan, Clint Watts and others.

Also worth mentioning — in response to a suggestion from T Greer, I have a piece in the works listing the best books to read on Islamic apocalyptic, both for its content and context. But first, my responses to both Graeme Woods and the current interest in CVE — with a few quick posts along the way, while those twon are in preparation.