can this group be rational, please?

I will summarize the situation as I see it, and hope that this group can be rational.  Otherwise I will go to Jimbo Wales and ask that this page be locked AFTER I reinsert the links some fool keeps deleting.

1.  In 1992 after four years experience in creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Center, I persuaded the Marine Corps to sponsor an international conference on OSINT.  CIA refused to attend unless it was secret and open only to US citizens.  Admiral Bill Studeman, then Deputy Director of Central Intelligence agreed with my appeal and ordered CIA to attend the event, open to all.  Instead of the usual 150 "insiders" we attracted just over 650, including 15 from Sweden led by Stefan Dedijer, the father of modern business intelligence.

2.  I was forced to quit government service in order to keep running the annual event.  The Marine Corps lawyers refused to give me permission for a second one, claiming that the phenomenal success sof the first was due to my insider status.  I have walked away from three retirements to pursue this public service campaign.

3.  As soon as Admiral Studeman moved on CIA refused to attend these events and began refering to "Open Sources."  I know these people well.  The FBIS crowd is a mix of grandmothers and young kids that would never cut it in either clandestine operations or all-source analysis (I have served in three of the four directorates).

4.  The end result is that over 20 years I was able to attract 750 international speakers, including KGB generals, the director general of the Red Cross, the military advisor to the Secretary General of the UN, and many many othes.  I did not allow vendors to speak, only exhibitthis has been a non-commercial and break-even event over the years.

5.  Those people, not me, produced the 30,000 pages of information on all aspects of open source information and open source intelligence (the two are different, something this page does not reflect), all I have been is the host.  The web site is public, free, and hence a public service.  It really surprises and irritates me to find that anyone considers links to the page to be self-promotional.

6.  The fact that I have written the seminal articles on OSINT (see www.oss.net/OSINT-S and www.oss.net/OSINT-O) should not interfere with their being acknowledged.  This is like saying that Buckminster Fuller should not have a link from a World Game page to his seminal article on the topic.

7.  I find it amusing that links to the NATO documents are accepted but great lengths are gone to in concealing the fact that I wrote the first, provided 85% of the material for the second.  I note that the links to the DIA OSINT Handbook and the Special Operations OSINT Handbook have never survived.

Bottom line: this page has been taken over and corrupted by three specific vandal groups:

1.  CIA/FBIS light-weights who cannot stand to be shown up
2.  Alan Simpson, a world-class fool
3.  Well-intentioned but ignorant wikipedia groupies that seem to have decided that for all of my accomplshments (which they have no clue, my personal page reflects less than 25% of what I have done for the public, but I avoid trying to fix that) that anything I put on this page is somehow self-promotional.

I have decided to persist on the matter of the specific reference as well as the Forbes ASAP article on Reinventing Intelligence.

Wikipedia is now achieving critical mass, but these editing wars are infantile, stupid, and counter-productive.  If anyone wants to have a conference call on this, I will gladly participate.  The REASON there is no international play on this page is because the three vandal groups have totally turned off a community of 7,500 I have trained (who now manage 25,000 practitioners of government open source intelligenceCIA talks to 11 countries, I interact with 90-120 in any given year).  If you as a group want this page to be real, to be truly helpful, to be professional, then you have to shut down the three vandal groups.

With best wishes,
Robert Steele

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