What’s Happening in Syria?

[tabatha]

4. 5. The fifth revelation is that often Stratfor analysts did not know what they were talking about

5. The fifth revelation is that often Stratfor analysts did not know what they were talking about and had an extreme rightwing bias. For instance, this memo on the revolution in Egypt attempts to argue that the officer corps was behind the revolution against Hosni Mubarak and that the masses were insufficiently mobilized to account for it. It is alleged that only 750,000 people came out in Tahrir Square, a small number for a country of 82 million. But in fact that was only in Tahrir. People demonstrated elsewhere in Cairo. And they were in the streets in Alexandria, Suez, Asyut and other cities. Even small towns saw burnings of police stations and HQs of the National Democratic Party. This memo makes a grassroots revolution that shook Egypt from Alexandria to Aswan into an officers’ putsch. While the officers tacked with the wind and did end up siding with the demonstrators against Mubarak, they were clearly playing political catch-up. It was revolutionary groups like April 6 that made the revolution in the cities, and the Muslim Brotherhood in the rural areas. The memo is frankly obtuse and if this is what Booz Allen was paying $20,000 a year for, they should demand their money back.

This fifth point, about the one percent interpreting the world for the one percent as being about the one percent, is a dire problem in our information system, since the one percent has the resources and can try to overwhelm reasoned analysis that recognizes the agency of the people. Ultimately, the political struggle here is an epistemological one (epistemology being the study of how we know what we know).

http://www.juancole.com/2012/02/top-5-stratfor-revelations.html

And Goldmann Sachs funds Stratfor, and Bibi was a contributor 2007-2010.

EDIT - to add one of the comments:

Luther Bliss 03/01/2012 at 6:48 am
Let’s hope, if nothing else, these leaks finally put to rest the idea that Stratfor gives anything like a neutral, non-ideological analysis.

It has been obvious for a decade that Stratfor’s claims of neutrality were like South Park and FoxsNews’s similar claims – all three were marketing attempts to disguise their right-wing, warmongering corporatist BS as some sort of ‘real men doing real thinking’ alternative to the ‘liberal’ (i.e warmongering corporatist) media.

Stratfor was successful because (as they frankly admit in these emails) the corporate flunkies who brought their subscriptions were gullible wannabe Tom Clancys who’d pay $10,000 for a powerpoint snake-oil show.

The fact the US Marines have anything to do with these guys speaks poorly of them – but in the post-911 private intelligence pork-barrel feeding frenzy anything seems to go…