Tonight, it just got a whole lot worse. In just a few hours, Americans will wake up to news that exposes the most damaging evidence about our entire military operation. On Sunday, formerly classified military documents became public, and as the scope of our failures become evident to the world, they will hopefully force Obama to make swift decisions about how we end the war. The report, in exhaustive first hand accounts, details Pakistan’s involvement with the Taliban, the use of heat seeking  missiles by the Taliban against Allied Forces, Afghan police raping and killing civilians, and many more gruesome, and incredibly embarrassing details. In addition, there are damaging examples of American troops being completely unprepared for enemy fire, without the proper resources to fight back. The New York Times takes the liberty to conclude, and it does not take an advanced analysis to decipher, that after $300 billion dollars spent on the war, the Taliban has never been stronger.

How bad does it need to get before change happens? Imagine if there was a draft or everyone above a certain age had to join the military. Would this war still exist? Would young American soldiers be tossed into the front-lines of the battlefield without the proper equipment or necessary intelligence to defend themselves? It is clear now, more than ever, that we are not safer. To think of  all the lives that were lost in the name of protecting our country. Imagine waking up tomorrow, a parent of a soldier who was lost while participating in Operation Enduring Freedom, and seeing this report. How would you feel? Your son died, and you were told it was to help protect our country, but after almost a decade of fighting, we  are actually in a worst position.

Almost forty years ago, another damaging report was released by the New York Times. In the Pentagon Papers, the report makes clear that several U.S administrations had deliberately deceived the American people,  escalated the war, and lied about bombings, amongst many other damaging details. Our president and many others, who Americans trusted to have their best interest, was lying. In a reflection piece from twenty five years after the Pentagon papers were released, Time Magazine discussed what Americans should take away from these reports:

If the Government and the public come to understand the atmosphere, the pressures, the false and strained hopes, and the futile decisions that pervade the whole secret history of Vietnam, the wrong decisions may not be made again — or at least not so easily.”

How did the wrong decisions get made so easily once again? In an article by Neal Gabler in the Boston Globe on Sunday, he outlines a theory for these poor decisions: a case of the Best and the Brightest part 2.0. The term, which stems from David Halberstam’s award winning book, which describes how government officials who came from the wealthiest backgrounds and attended the most prestigious schools,  led us into the war in Vietnam, and gave us all the wrong advice, should be part of the conversation again. As Gabler writes,

Like The Best and the Brightest 1.0, these folks — guys like Larry Summers, outgoing budget director Peter Orszag, and Tim Geithner, on the economic side; and William J. Lynn 3d, deputy secretary of defense, and James Steinberg, deputy secretary of state, on the foreign side — are Ivy-educated, confident, and implacable realists and rationalists. Like their forebears, they have all the answers, which is why they have been so unaccommodating of other suggestions on the economy, where economists have been pressing them for more stimulus, or on Afghanistan, where the president keeps doubling down his bets.

We all understand that change is difficult, but there are no excuses anymore. What we are doing in Afghanistan is not working, and now more than ever, our president needs to learn from the history books, and dramatically change the course of action.

In the summer of 2007, the award-winning reporter A. C. Thompson heard about white vigilantes who allegedly murdered black New Orleanians in the days after Katrina. Thompson, who did not live in New Orleans at the time, made a few phone calls to local sources, but could not substantiate the tip with any hard evidence. With help from friend and fellow writer, Rebecca Solnit, Thompson received funding from The Nation Institute and several other nonprofit organizations to research what had happened. Thompson knew he had to spend more time in the city, and for the next 18 months, he aggressively worked every angle. “In New Orleans, you can’t get information over the phone. You need to meet with people face-to-face,” Thompson told me, face-to-face in New Orleans.

As one conversation in New Orleans led to another, Thompson was able to connect with Donnell Herrington, who claimed he was the victim of a police shooting. When Thompson spoke to him, he revealed that no police officer had ever shown up at his door, despite a testimonial of the shooting captured by Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke. Numerous white vigilantes admitted to Thompson their role in the random shootings. After the story was first published in The Nation in December 2008, Warren Riley, the police chief, told reporters he was going to begin an Internal Affairs review of the alleged shootings—but little to no action was taken by the NOPD.

Teaming up, reporters from Frontline, The Times-Picayune, and ProPublica created a powerful interactive website featuring in-depth interviews and a way for the public to share tips and their own experiences with police brutality. The reporters were able to find six different victims of either police shootings or cover-ups. As attention mounted, the entire investigation was overtaken by the FBI.

AC Thompson

At the end of the NewsHour interview, Margaret Warner says, what many others have been thinking, including the countless citizens of New Orleans who have been victims of police abuse, “All right A.C Thompson, thank you so much. And keep up the good work.”

Read the rest of the story, here

After spending time in Kabul, the general returned to his boss, with a simple response: there was no way to win the war. Any chance of leaving with dignity relied solely on the country’s ability to close the Irani and Pakistani borders, thus preventing shipments of arms, and keeping the enemy trapped in Afghanistan. This was practically impossible since it required hundreds of thousands of additional troops to support a conflict that had dragged on for too long, and was losing considerable political support at home.

The president agreed. It was no longer a question the war had to end, it was about how. He kept saying to close associates that this was a previous administrations’ war, and the longer it lasted, it would become his war. Despite his complaints, and a general consensus by experts that the war was unwinnable; he continued to delay action.

To begin the exit plan, the president first had to meet with the man leading the Afghanistan government, so he summoned him to the capital.  During a secret meeting, he made clear that by next summer, his troops would be out of Afghanistan, and the local leadership would need to defend their own cause. Despite controlling the capital and other cities, the rebel forces held a majority of the rural areas. The President’s military brass had also grown tired of supporting a leader, who everyone knew was “weak, capricious and indecisive.” In closing, the president gave the leader some parting words: “If you want to survive you’ll have to broaden the base of the regime. Make a deal with the truly influential forces in the country. Try to show the people some tangible benefits.”

Following the meeting, the president sternly told his staff, “it’s time to make a decision on Afghanistan.” He  proceeded to  read a  series of heartfelt letters from mother’s of dead and wounded soldiers:

They ask: International Duty? in whose name?” Do the Afghan people really want it? Is it worth their lives of our boys, who don’t even know why they are sent there. What are they defending?

Sound familiar? Unfortunately, once again, our country  failed to learn from past mistakes. The above anecdote is not from a recently discovered U.S meeting, but a story from when Gorbachev took power in the winter of 1986, which is described in Victor Sebestyen’s book, “Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire.” Fellow True/Slant blogger, Jonathan Curiel writes about how

“A country that has seen war and bloodshed for almost 10 years is still no closer to peace, despite billions of U.S. and international dollars that have poured in to rebuild Afghanistan.

And even worse, Americans know little about a war that has killed more than a thousand American troops, and thousands of more Afghanis. When the Soviets were contemplating a sound exit plan from Afghanistan, they promised to not leave the same way the U.S left Vietnam. Hopefully, our exit does not resemble Saigon, and maybe, if we had not skipped over the chapter on Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, we would never have sent troops there in the first place.

“Do your children agree with your politics?
They know that what I’m doing is for the sake of their own future. I want to know that when I die I leave them something more than a bank account — a state to live in, to be proud of.

Are you dying?
It’s not part of my plan for now.”

Really? I understand she is trying to be edgy, but the editors of the New York Times Magazine should know the difference between thoughtful and immature probing. At the top of each interview, the name of the respondent is  featured in bold, and then Solomon gets her byline. This is misleading. Solomon is always the star. The person she interviews always comes second fiddle to what she probably assumes are clever questions, but which in the end simply detract from what could be an intelligent interview.

This question is addressed to Michelle Obama’s brother, Craig Robinson

“Why did you hire a co-writer for the book? You went to Princeton. You can write.”

Here she makes the assumption that all Princeton graduates can write. They may be smart, but sometimes, those who study business, could use some help writing, something complicated, like a memoir. She should know this since she went to Columbia School of Journalism and did not learn how to conduct a proper interview.  Further along, she asks Robinson, what appears to be her default question, when interviewing a man– something about his divorce:

“You and your wife, Kelly, are the parents of a 4-month-old son, and you also have two teenage children from your first marriage, which ended in divorce.”

Again, with Charlie Crist;

“You were married nearly 30 years ago, but the marriage lasted less than a year. Do you prefer living alone?”

Last week, she could not help sliding it in, this time with Eminem:

“Happy Father’s Day, by the way. As a divorced father of three daughters, are you a good dad?

A few months ago, she sat down with renowned author, Chinua Achebe, only to ask him what pre-schoolers sing at birthday parties:

“How old are you now?”

Please, someone make it stop. The NY Times brand opens many doors, and Solomon takes full advantage. She gets to sit down with a lot of interesting people that many other writers would  spend weeks researching, in order  to get the most substance from the interview. With her mystifying need to ask petty questions, she makes a mockery of this  process.

The next time she makes herself the center of the interview, with little regard for the readers’ interest in the person being interviewed, we should all ask the Times, “when do we get to pull the plug on Solomon?” Hopefully, the answer to, “Are you dying?”–Deborah Solomon’s column, that is–is a simple; “Yes. It will now be called ‘Marriage Therapy with Deborah,’ in US Magazine.”

These were some of the business problems Claire Flanagan, a CSR Senior Manager presented to  a group of attendees at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston yesterday. The title of the session was called “Enterprise 2.0: It’s no Field of Dreams: A CSC test study.”

In the old days (early 2009), a manager could send an email to someone they thought would have the knowledge on a specific problem, and receive a reply. Sometimes they would get the answer, but it usually required a few networks to receive an adequate response. One email would lead to a suggestion to email another person, and so on. To combat the problem, Claire and others in the IT innovation department started testing other models. In a company so large, there was no way of knowing  all the best practices, and no easy way to train new employees. There was clearly room for innovation.   In the spring of 2009, they created an online collaboration tool called c3 (connect, communicate and collaborate). But simply building the new tools was not enough in making it successful.

The  key to an increase in productivity  lay in the subject of Flanagan’s presentation title. Without an effective adoption plan, the new platform would fail. The CSC manager could not simply “build it,” and expect, in reference to Field of Dreams, users “to “come.” The premise of her argument lay in the idea that any new website or technology that is introduced must have a marketing and outreach plan to become successful.

In order to encourage activity, CSC identified key managers in their company to start adding content to the website. They wanted  people who had influence on other employees to invest in the success of the site.  If the managers felt this new system could increase productivity, they would spend a lot of time encouraging their team members to join and add content. They also included very thorough and precise manuals for how to use the site, and asked different executives to blog about their experiences, which were then featured on the site. Not only were managers pleased with the potential for productivity increase, but they were also seeing the fruit of their labor. The problems they were addressing in countless private emails, were now being broadcasted to thousands of employees all over the world. The site was built, the adoption plan executed, and the employees began to frequent the site in large numbers. Within twenty weeks, they had over 25,000 users, and a year after launch, they had close to 50,000 users. Employees are now  able to quickly identify answers to problems by posing questions to the community and managers can easily track the message board threads.

Flanagan’s session was part of the The Enterprise 2.0 conference, which brings together hundreds of people in the “email liberation movement.” For three days, people from all over the world  come to discuss best practices for finding online solutions to replace older methods of online communication. There are over 100 speakers in 60 plus sessions. Visit the conference twitter hashtag, here. The conference runs through tomorrow.

The NY Times wrote today about an interesting relationship that came to surface. Apparently, the only person to understand the plight of Tony Hayward is none other than the billionaire Mayor of New York City. On his weekly radio address, which is far removed from Roosevelt’s fireside chats, he took the side of another very, very rich man.

“Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg defended Mr. Hayward on Friday, saying that the public should not rush to fault BP executives for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

“The guy that runs BP didn’t exactly go down there and blow up the well,” Mr. Bloomberg said during his weekly radio segment with WOR-AM’s John Gambling.”

Is Bloomberg so out of touch that he believes defending the man who runs the company that is dumping 30,000 barrels of oil in the Gulf per day is a reasonable response? Or is he simply assuring Wall Street that if he was President, BP would never get attacked?  Yes, Mr. Bloomberg, Hayward did not blow up the well, but he sure as hell did not take any of the proper actions to prevent it from happening. He was hired to implement stricter safety controls, but in 2009 OSHA cited BP for more than 87 million dollars worth of violations. Nathan Yau, writes, “Between June 2007 and February 2010, there were 761 egregious citations issued in total. All but one of them were issued to BP. In the same time period, 69 of the 91 willful citations also belonged to BP.”  For BP, this was merely the price of doing business. In 2009, they made 42 billion dollars in profit.

Maybe, the whole idea of having rich politicians is not the greatest of ideas. Too bad Republican voters in California did not get the message. On Tuesday, Meg Whitman became the Republican nominee for Governor, and pledged to  spend 150 million dollars of her own money on the race. Also, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina, won the primary in the Senator’s race. Do voters think these politicians can take the elevator down from their 30th story penthouses and slash the deficit? Gail Collins, in an editorial this week, thinks otherwise:

“The people of California may be hoping that if she wins, she’ll just pay off their deficit. As a resident of New York City, which has had a billionaire chief executive for some time, I would like to say: Don’t hold your breath.”

Hayward, who only wishes he could return to the life he had before April 20th, will thank Bloomberg later with maxed out campaign contributions, and bundles of cash for whatever PAC Bloomberg chooses. Who will the average citizen get to thank this November with their votes? Hopefully, none of these millionaire candidates.

With less than a minute to go in Game 4, Kobe Bryant easily evaded Ray Allen’s defense. Nobody in the Garden was surprised. The Lakers were down by six, and still within striking distance. Every one in the building expected him to pull up and punish the Celtics with another jumper that would bring the Lakers closer to mounting a comeback and put a dagger in the Celtics hopes for a series comeback. Instead, he went up, and, while in mid-air passed it in the back-court. Rondo stole the ball, sealing the game, and tying the series.

Imagine Michael Jordan being guarded by a Ray Allen defensive caliber player of his era, and passing up a shot, when it counts the most. Never. Imagine Michael breaking one of the most fundamental rules in basketball: not passing while in the air. Never.

Michael Jordan would also never create a Zoolander-like look to exemplify his ferocious side. He would run down the court grinning, or better yet, like in the 1992 finals against Portland, shrug his shoulders, smile, and laugh at at the excellence of his performance. Nobody doubted his composure under pressure, or his mental and physical toughness. In Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals, Jordan had the flu, and still finished with 38 points. Kobe, after hitting big shots in the third quarter, ran down the court growling with his bottom teeth stuck out. It is incomprehensible to think of Michael doing such a juvenile act during any game, let alone the NBA finals.

It is still not clear who will win the 2010 NBA finals, but one debate has surely been put to rest.

A CNN story today asked, is “Another deep water disaster looming?” If there was ever a time to believe that major reform is on the (deep water) horizon, it would be now, but adequate changes are not happening soon enough. Our country’s federal agencies believed big oil when they said their wells’ were fail-safe, but that was hardly the case.

“They’re certainly not fail-safe because they didn’t close this well,” said Paul Bommer, a petroleum engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “If they had been 100 percent fail-safe they would have sealed, they would have closed.,”

A 2002  report handed to the Mineral Management Services showed there were major faults in oil companies’ emergency preparedness plans. In 2003, another report told MMS the last resort safety precautions were  flawed. In the following year, MMS created a strict guideline preventing deep water oil drilling in  “relatively untested deep water.” Despite the warnings, MMS made an exception to allow  Deepwater Horizon to drill 5,000 feet under water, in  ”untested deep water.” Shockingly, since the BP disaster in April:

“MMS authorized over 20 new categorical exclusions for exploratory oil drilling operations in the Gulf, at least eight of which would be at depths deeper than the Deepwater Horizon.”

Why are we approving oil companies to drill in even more dangerous waters, when we still have not plugged the largest oil gusher in our country’s history?

As our professorial President would say, there is a teachable moment here. The lack of coordination and accountability over government agencies has led to  major disasters in the past decade. Before Hurricane Katrina, there were many studies presented to the Army Corps of Engineers detailing  flaws in the federal levee system. No changes were made, and the failure of the levees caused eighty percent of the city of New Orleans to flood, and with it, billions of dollars of damage to the Gulf Coast.

If these environmental disasters still do not resonate, let us look back at June 11, 2001. 6/11 is a day we should use to commemorate and memorialize the lives lost because of a private sector run amok, and a government that fails to hold people accountable.

In Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Looming Tower, he tells a story about a meeting on June 11th, 2001 that could have prevented the events on 9/11. The CIA met with the FBI  in order to share information about the U.S.S Cole bombing. A photo  displaying a suspected terrorist was shown on the projector. The FBI asked if anyone in the room knew any of these faces. The CIA members knew the men in question, but were not given clearance to divulge any information.  CIA officials did not want to turn over their case to the FBI, afraid they would give up their sources, and ruin their international investigation. As it turns out, in the photo was a man named Khalid al-Mihdhar. Three months later, Mihdhar would hijack a plane and steer it into the Pentagon, but on June 11th, he was a name the CIA would not turn over. As Wright explains; this photo presented “the fact that al-Qaeda was inside the US and planning to strike.” If the CIA named the suspect, the FBI could have matched him with their suspected terrorist list, and mostly likely arrest Mihdhar.

It is almost too much to bear to think of how different our country would be, and how many lives and dollars  saved, if all the evidence was made transparent. While 9/11 teaches us about the dangers of religious extremity, and 4/20/10 teaches us about the need for stricter environmental protection, 6/11 teaches us about the need for government agencies to work together, and if nothing else, do their jobs.

Bill Clinton, who graduated from Yale Law School thirty-seven years ago, was selected to give the Yale Class of 2010 words of wisdom, but he almost did not make it to the podium today:

“Three vehicles in a motorcade taking former President Bill Clinton to Yale University to give a speech on Sunday afternoon were involved in a minor accident, the Connecticut State Police said.

The vehicles from Mr. Clinton’s motorcade and two other vehicles were involved in the accident, which took place on the Merritt Parkway just north of New Haven, Lt. J. Paul Vance of the State Police said. One person was taken to a hospital with a minor injury.”

Despite the scare, Clinton was all smiles, as the  families and friends of the graduates  enthusiastically applauded his arrival on stage.  He began  by peering out at the crowd and shaking his head in amusement, first  grinning,  then a smile, followed by a hearty laugh. The Yale tradition is for graduates to wear a hat during class day, and some of the head gear was very creative, even funny. “I was given this Yale napkin,” Clinton told a crowd that sat at the edge of their seats as they hung on  every word, patiently waiting for him to expand their intellect. He lifted it up for everyone to see, “and if it was a little bigger, I would have used it as a doo rag.” The crowd roared in laughter, and since he now had their full attention, he spent the next thirty minutes hammering down his talking points like he was at a Little Rock Democratic fundraiser.

Clinton began slowly, letting his momentum build. He started with an unoriginal, but important maxim, “our commonalities are much great than our differences.” The students looked at each other and could agree, that yes, they were different, but what did they have in common? Clinton hoped what they shared was not simply a Yale diploma, but also a commitment to public service. He was optimistic about the future, but also warned the crowd about the problems, ” There are three problems in the world today; it is too unequal, too unstable and completely unsustainable.” After he recited a plethora of devastating data ranging from global warming facts  to poverty issues in Rwanda, he returned to his major point.  “I’ve always believed that cynicism is a cop out- nobody remembers the naysayers people remember the doers.” He challenged the class to read opinions they do not agree with and to have a more civil public discourse. While the idea sounds great, it was too easy to recount a time when Clinton’s health care agenda was stymied by the Republican congress. Similar to the 2009/10 health care debate, the U.S Chamber of Commerce spent millions to drive the agenda. Many of their talking points, then and now, were filled with more lies than alternative solutions. Despite all the problems and naysayers, Clinton said, “we need to continue to ask the right questions in order to find the right answers.”  Clinton thanked the Yale community for what he learned, and who he met (Hilary) and when he was finished,  everyone in attendance graciously rewarded him, with a standing ovation.

Jacmel, Haiti via Wikipedia

What are you doing there?

This is my second trip down to the Jacmel, a port town on the southern coast of Haiti.  Its a 2 hour drive from Port au Prince via a mountain pass.  Our team consists of a variety of professionals, from nurses to electricians to planners to carpenters.  On our last trip, we were able to secure the donation of a the services of a sea-worthy barge from New Iberia, Louisiana, which we were able to fill with transitional shelters, medical equipment, heavy machinery, solar energy systems, and food/medicine/water. Most of the goods are destined to various NGO’s operating in the Jacmel area, which is inaccessible by large freighters, and soon to be inaccessible via the mountainous roadway, due to the threat of landslides during the upcoming rainy season. A major purpose of our trip is to see the barge into port, and to coordinate distribution of various goods.  Beyond that, we will be deploying our various skillsets in whatever ways we can determine are best suited to the people of the region.

Who are you working with?

The Louisiana Haiti Sustainable Village Project, which represents something like 40 different groups.  The organization was formed to provide assistance to Haiti post-quake, much like Haiti and Haitian-Americans were able to respond to Hurricane Katrina.  Our team is made up of folks who  lived through the storms of 2005 or were in New Orleans soon after to assist with recovery efforts. A major goal of the project is to convey recovery lessons learned to the people of Haiti.

What is most shocking about being there?

It’s hard to put it into a single “shock.” Here’s three thoughts.

Three revolutions have occurred in the past decade: widespread importing of cheap Chinese motorcycles (transportation), widespread adoption of cellular phones and internet access (communication), and massive importation of plastic products (consumption). People are realizing that they can improve their lives. 80% of young people understand that energy/water/environment are critical issues that need to be addressed in their lifetimes for Haiti to become self-sustaining.

Most shocking: how poor building practices are, and how there are so little building permitting or construction standards.  Rock is everywhere, a better concrete block manufacturing process, and better understanding of construction isn’t far off.  Unfortunately, many of the examples for reconstruction are based on timber-construction, something which is very very expensive in Haiti, due the deforestation of the island.

Diesel runs everything.  Jacmel’s power grid runs off diesel. Individual homes and hotels and schools are run by diesel.  The opportunity for renewable energy is amazing.  Energy is everywhere! They’ve got great options, too: Tidal, Wind, Solar, Geothermal, Hydro, and biodiesel are all feasible.
How do locals respond to your help?

The Haiti/New Orleans connection, plus the Katrina/quake connection are very powerful, and have given us a lot of access that we probably wouldn’t ever have.  There is a shared bond in the pain and struggle of disaster and recovery that can’t be simulated or fabricated.
With that said, it’s still very early in the recovery process, and people inquire about the length of our commitment to the people of Haiti, and have expressed their frustration with various commitments of the larger, international aid groups who are operating in the region.  That commitment, and the obvious questions regarding capacity and resources to continue work in Haiti, is still being worked through.

What should Americans know about what is happening in Haiti?

Recovery isn’t about buying more shelters, it is about helping a country rebuild itself economically, politically, environmentally.

You can see photos from the trip, here