Sabotage

I just saw this unclassified OSS (CIA) document about sabotage techniques during WWII and although it's not new, it's new to me, so I figured I'd share.

If you don't feel like reading a PDF (or visiting the CIA website), I've provided a screenshot of the best part, page 28/29:

I've also taken the liberty of cleaning up the OCRed text for easy reading:

11. General Interference with Organizations and Production
    1. Organizations and Conferences
       1. Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
       2. Make "speeches," Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments.
       3. When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible - never less than five.
       4. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
       5. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
       6. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision
       7. Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
       8. Be worried about the propriety any decision -- raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
    2. Managers and Supervisors
       1. Demand written orders.
       2. "Misunderstand" orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.
       3. Do everything possible to delay the delivery of orders. Even though parts of an order may be ready beforehand, don't deliver it until it is completely ready.
       4. Don't order new working materials until your current stocks have been virtually exhausted, so that the slightest delay in filling your order will mean a shutdown.
       5. Order high-quality materials which are hard to get. If you don't get them argue about it. Warn that inferior materials will mean inferior work.
       6. In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines.
       7. Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. Approve other defective parts whose flaws are not visible to the naked eye.
       8. Make mistakes in routing so that parts and materials will be sent to the wrong place in the plant.
       9. When training new workers, give incomplete or misleading instructions.
       10. To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
       11. Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
       12. Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files.
       13. Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.
       14. Apply all regulations to the last letter.

If any of it looks familiar, you too have worked in a modern American office. From sabotage to standard operating procedure in 70 short years. PROGRESS!

Obligatory soundtrack for this post:

Friday not-so-funnies

Via the Web of Evil we find a really delightful set of super inspiring photos taken on 9/11/2001. A couple of them even had speech/thought bubbles!

(click to make readable)

Oh, wait, no -- I added those.

You know what's missing from all those photos? A single tear. A sign of any emotion other than cold, calculating strategery.

Also, there are exactly two pictures of chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke -- one of which you see here. There are a few more of Prez Shrub, but not a ton. Plenty of pics of the "advisors/speechifiers" though, which were the important folk, natch. Cheney was clearly the main main in charge (as if we didn't know that already). These photos are a really interesting/disturbing look into the behind-the-scenes of that day.

Uh....

I know this show was pretty bad:

But is it really worth going to war over, 40 years later? I mean, The Love Boat seems like a more deserving target, if you think about it.

What year is it?

I may have had too much to drink, but I think I just saw the prez on the TV machine telling me we really need to bomb some brown people across the ocean. I thought we already tried that, but I must be misremembering things -- our beloved political/media class couldn't possibly be feeding us another line of shit, right?

Old Fogey Friday

Yeah, I like Neil Young, and the Le Noise album. Sosumi.

Foreign Policy News

Today in super cheerful news from the "Golly gosh we have awesome allies" news desk is this from Harper's Weekly:

A 15-year-old schoolgirl named Malala Yousafzai was flown from Pakistan to the United Kingdom for medical care after being shot in the head by masked Taliban militants in the Swat Valley. Yousafzai, who at the age of 11 began blogging for the BBC’s Urdu service under the pseudonym Gul Makai (“cornflower”), was targeted for championing girls’ education rights. “She has become a symbol of Western culture in the area,” said a Taliban spokesman. “She symbolizes the brave girls of Swat,” said a local filmmaker. Members of the Pakistani Taliban said they would target journalists for giving the attempted assassination “undue” coverage and for unfairly portraying the Taliban as the “worst people on earth.”

You stay classy Pakistan! Good thing you're not one of our enemies or we'd be bombing the shit out of you right now with drones or something.

Forgotten

With all the fake uproar over the deficit and birthers and all that, it's easy to forget that there are a few wars on.

As everybody (except our feckless press) knew would happen, our latest adventure in killing brown peopleliberation is ramping up toward the seemingly inevitable long-term ground war.

Iraq continues to be a complete cluster fuck that nobody wants to talk about.

And the original forgotten war, rages on.

You'll note all those links go to The Guardian in the UK. That's obviously because the US press is moronic, inane, and vacuous.

Thankfully, there are exceptions. Believe it or not, McSweeney's has been running a great series on Afghanistan written by a US service member serving there. It paints a mostly bleak picture, but is an amazing read. Check it out: In These Deserts.