Tag Archive for 'Afghanistan'

Targeting the contracting leeches in the “war on terror”

Published on 12 July 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Since 9/11 countless corporations are making a killing in Iraq, Afghanistan, the US and beyond. It’s a privatised dream, as the US war machine now couldn’t survive without outsourcing help (including, according to a new report, Pentagon contractors writing their own contracts).

Hackers and trouble-makers Anonymous have attacked Booz Allen Hamilton (a company with quite a background in supporting American imperialism) and released the following statement:

Hello Thar!

Today we want to turn our attention to Booz Allen Hamilton, whose core business is contractual work completed on behalf of the US federal government, foremost on defense and homeland security matters, and limited engagements of foreign governments specific to U.S. military assistance programs.

…

For the Lazy we have assembled some facts about Booz Allen. First let’s take a quick look of who these guys are. Some key personnel:

* John Michael “Mike” McConnell, Executive Vice President of Booz Allen and former Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and former Director of National Intelligence.

* James R. Clapper, Jr., current Director of National Intelligence, former Director of Defense Intelligence.

* Robert James Woolsey Jr, former Director of National Intelligence and head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

* Melissa Hathaway, Current Acting Senior Director for Cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils

Now let’s check out what these guys have been doing:

* Questionable involvement in the U.S. government’s SWIFT surveillance program; acting as auditors of a government program, when that contractor is heavily involved with those same agencies on other contracts. Beyond that, the implication was also made that Booz Allen may be complicit in a program (electronic surveillance of SWIFT) that may be deemed illegal by the EC.

The betrayal of whistle-blower hero Bradley Manning

Published on 5 July 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

An interesting feature in New York magazine about the alleged leaker to Wikileaks of countless US documents. Manning is a hero because he saw American illegality in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond and wanted to act. Not remain silent. He was bullied in the US military as a gay man. A troubled soul who has changed the course of history, for the better.

This extract details his exchange with hacker Adrian Lamo, the man who eventually turned him into the authorities:

I wanted to talk to Lamo, and after I tracked him down online, he invited me to the Coliseum, a Long Island motor inn where he greeted me at the door of his small room. He wore a half-smile, quipped that he was staying until he exhausted his finances or died, and made a beeline for the bed—he was unsteady on his feet. And then he shut his eyes. And kept them shut for much of our three-hour conversation. He was articulate, even thoughtful, but didn’t seem entirely present. He often paused for 30-second intervals before speaking.

It was only when I asked about his life as a hacker that Lamo seemed to become fully engaged. “It is the one thing I get excited about,” he told me. Lamo is a high-school and college dropout, but as a hacker he thought of himself as a bold explorer of new worlds, a Columbus. His hacks were at once clever and incredibly dumb—and always sensational. “Why not go in and behave like a user and see what can be made to behave differently than expected?,” he explained. Lamo didn’t damage the systems he entered—“I didn’t want to be malicious”—but left behind a quirky signature, as if to say, “I could have hurt you.” At Yahoo News, he edited a couple of stories. Later, he hunkered down at a Kinko’s copy shop for 24 hours and, with nothing but his laptop, hacked so deep into MCI Worldcom’s computer system that he could have fired then-CEO Bernie Ebbers. “I was tempted,” Lamo told me—but he just took a screen shot.

Lamo’s hacks made him famous mostly because he ran to the press after each one. Unfortunately, the FBI turned out to be an avid reader of his press. In 2003, the govern­ment arrested him for busting into the New York Times’ computers—Lamo had added his name to the list of op-ed contributors and created several Nexis ­accounts, mainly to keep up with news of himself. At the time, Lamo was furious at the government. His arrest “strikes a blow against openness,” he said. Hackers rallied around him. As far as they were concerned, his only crime was “that of outsmarting you”—the government.

In the Coliseum Motor Inn, Lamo lit a cigarette, a Camel with a pellet of menthol in the filter, and sucked on it like a straw. Smoking seemed to make him wistful. “[WorldCom] is a long time ago now,” he told me.

Lamo’s life as a hacker had come to an end at 22, and with it, a part of him seemed to die. He’d been sentenced to house arrest rather than prison, but he told me, “I’ve been diagnosed with major depression that largely began after my clash with the FBI.” (Two weeks before Manning reached out, Lamo had been confined to a mental-health facility.)

If Lamo suffered, he didn’t let on to his public. Hacking was now out of the question, but arrest had enhanced his fame. Young admirers reached out to him, ­including, in 2007, a 17-year-old named Lauren Robinson. “I liked his ideals and such back then,” she told me. Within a year, they were married—Lamo was 26 at the time. At first the romance was exciting. Soon, though, reality set in, Robinson recalled. “We’d sit around on computers all day,” she complained. As she saw it, his main activity was tending “the Adrian Lamo persona,” which existed almost exclusively online. “Eighty-five percent of his time was on a computer,” she said. He refused to work for pay. “I won’t whore out my skills,” he told Robinson. His father paid their rent. In the real world, Lamo was barely hanging on. But as Robinson, now divorced, recalled, online his reputation was intact. “People kind of saw him as a hacker idol,” she said. Bradley Manning must have too.

It wasn’t even much of a hack, Manning told Lamo, according to the logs. The Army’s “infosec”—Manning used the military term for information security—was so sloppy that a lowly intel analyst could sift through the government’s most closely held secrets. “it was vulnerable as fuck,” he wrote to Lamo. Manning downloaded data onto a CD marked “Lady Gaga,” lip-syncing as he supposedly did his job: “pretty simple, and unglamorous,” he wrote. No one had ever taken note of him, and no one did now: “everyone just sat at their workstations … watching music ­videos / car chases / buildings exploding … and writing more stuff to CD/DVD.” Then, the government alleged, he fed it to WikiLeaks.

In their online conversations, Lamo wanted to know more and encouraged Manning any way he could. He flirted. The two exchanged photos, assuring one another of their “sexiness,” according to a person who read the unedited portions of the chat logs, sent each other emoticon hearts, and used endearments like “sweetie.”

But Lamo wasn’t Assange, offering Manning a part in a noble cause. Even as he flirted, Lamo contacted a friend connected with military counterintelligence. Lamo didn’t want to find himself on the wrong side of the FBI again. Also, as Lamo saw it, Manning posed a threat to the nation. Manning said he leaked hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables: “holy fracking crap, 260,000 documents, do you think you could go through those and say they’re not going to cause any lives to be lost.”

Lamo, who soon started working with the authorities, led Manning on.

bradass87: “i think im in more potential heat than you ever were.”

“Not mandatorily,” Lamo reassured him.

Manning isn’t a classic whistle-blower. Disturbing information didn’t cross his desk, prodding him to act. Manning snooped—according to the timetable he proposed to Lamo, he’d been at it since almost the moment he arrived in Iraq. “i had always questioned how things worked, and investigated to find the truth,” he said. One of Manning’s first discoveries was a troubling 2007 video of an Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad. In the video, the viewer watches through the crosshairs of a .30-caliber gun—almost complicit—as the gunner killed two ­Reuters journalists, mistaking a Tele­photo lens for a weapon, and wounded two children. For Assange, the meaning of the video was clear, and to make his point he edited the video into a version he called “Collateral Murder.” It caused a worldwide scandal and overnight gave WikiLeaks, a tiny group of activists, credibility.

“What is your endgame?” Lamo asked Manning.

Manning didn’t have one. He’d started leaking as a way to protest the conduct of the war. The Apache helicopter killings were “wrong,” he wrote to Lamo. But soon he embraced a broader principle: Open the drawers. “information should be free,” he told Lamo, reciting the hacker mantra. According to the chat logs, Manning said he leaked Iraq and Afghan war logs, reports on Guantánamo prisoners, and a cache of diplomatic secrets. “explaining how the first world exploits the third, in detail, from an internal perspective,” Manning thought of himself as honorable, even heroic—“I guess I’m too idealistic,” he said. “i want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are … ­because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” He hoped to provoke “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms … if not … then we’re doomed as a species.” He added a personal coda: “i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens.”

Lamo played Manning, reassuring him while, in reality, he had nothing but disdain for him. When Lamo was arrested, he’d been offended by the government prosecution—“criminalizing curiosity,” he called it. Now he was offended by Manning. “He’s a traitor at best,” Lamo said. And, worse, a child. “He was almost eager to explain his leaks, current, past, and future. Like a kid showing off a new toy,” Lamo told me. He was disgusted by the way in which Manning conflated his own precious moral awakening with the future of U.S. diplomacy. The leaks could “compromise our ability to make the world a better place, which we do in a lot of ways,” Lamo later said.

How legally unprepared was Australia for invading Afghanistan?

Published on 4 July 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

According to new evidence, clearly deeply. Of course, we’ve seen countless examples in the US of senior government officials escaping any kind of punishment; it’s all about targeting individuals low down the food chain. When a so-called democracy refuses to take responsibility for illegal actions in war, little stops future leaders doing exactly the same thing. Besides, there are masses of evidence of occupation forces serially abusing prisoners in the “war on terror”:

Australia went to war in Afghanistan without a clear policy on how to deal with enemy detainees, secret papers reveal.

When a policy was adopted, the then chief of the Defence Force, Admiral Chris Barrie, expressed reservations about the legality of the agreed approach.

The documents also show another former Defence Force chief, General Peter Cosgrove, informed the Howard government of the death of an Iranian man captured by Australian troops in 2003, but the Australian public was never told.

The papers, obtained under freedom of information laws by the Public Interest Advocacy Centre and made available to the ABC, reveal utter confusion at the highest levels of the Howard government and the Department of Defence over how to deal with enemy detainees.

On February 25, 2002, as Australian troops fought in Afghanistan, Admiral Barrie wrote to then defence minister Robert Hill complaining his commanders were being put at risk.

“There is currently no clear government policy on the handling of personnel who may be captured by the ADF … Defence and in particular ADF commanders are currently accepting the risk flowing from the lack of government policy,” he wrote.

Admiral Barrie proposed a set of interim arrangements, such as asking for American help to move captives from where the Australians were in Kandahar to a US detention facility, where an ADF team could supervise any prisoners captured by Australians.

Robert Hill gave permission for Admiral Barrie to negotiate with the United States and added a series of handwritten comments at the end of Admiral Barrie’s missive.

“I don’t understand why I didn’t get this brief before the Afghanistan operation,” he wrote. “We clearly should have sorted out this issue with the US as leader of the coalition months ago.”

What emerged from the negotiations became Australia’s detention policy in Afghanistan and Iraq: that if even a single American soldier was present when Australian forces captured enemy fighters, the US and not Australia would be recognised as the “detaining power”.

In a paragraph with words redacted, Admiral Barrie expressed reservations about the legality of this approach.

“Such an arrangement may not fully satisfy Australia’s legal obligations and in any event will not be viewed as promoting a respect for the rule of law,” he concluded.

Line up to see yet another “liberal” academic back key victim state Israel

Published on 2 July 2011 in Israel. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

The first rule of liberal Zionism is never talk about what liberal Zionism means. The second rule of liberal Zionism is never acknowledge the inherent blindspots within liberal Zionism.

Hence an essay in this month’s Monthly magazine by Australian academic Nick Dyrenfurth – yes, the man does spend an amazing amount of time policing the “left” and telling us what views are acceptable towards Israel, terrorism, bananas and coconuts – attacks the awarding of the Sydney Peace Prize to Noam Chomsky this year. Chomsky is too extreme. He doesn’t love Israel enough. He blames many Jews for backing apartheid-policies in Palestine.

This is clearly too much for Dyrenfurth who informs us that everybody knows what must happen in the Middle East:

Leaving aside his myopic, conspiratorial views on American foreign policy (the United States is “a leading terrorist state”), it is difficult to reconcile Chomsky’s peacemaking efforts with this laudatory description, in particular those pertaining to Israel–Palestine.

Most fair-minded observers agree that a negotiated peace settlement based upon a two-state solution will only be attained by bringing together moderates on both sides of the equation and sidelining extremists, whether Greater Israel Zionists or Arab–Palestinian militants committed to a ‘one-state’ solution. Aside from practical steps such as ending the construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Palestinian leadership recognising Israel’s right to exist, in simple terms what is required is a rhetorical sea change. Ending the demonisation of the Palestinians by sections of the Jewish and Israeli community must be accompanied by ending the demonisation of Israel by much of the Arab world and, notably, sections of the western Left.

Few individuals have contributed more to the Left’s vilification of Israel than Chomsky, who adopts the central tropes of what left-leaning Jewish intellectual Philip Mendes terms “anti-Zionist fundamentalism”.

Nowhere in this piece is there any discussion about what Israel has become rather than some fantasy world imagined by liberal Zionists the world over. Religious fundamentalism is accepted and normalised. Occupation deepens every day. Mainstream Israel largely only knows violence and threats.

But not to worry, Dyrenfurth argues, Israel is a glorious nation that must be backed against critics of all sorts. It’s comical to read the academic arguing against the decision of Chomsky because he’s critical of the entire political and media elites. Dyrenfurth is part of that establishment and he knows the boundaries. He knows his role. Court academics like to enforce public debate and damn anybody who steps out of line (on Bin Laden’s death, Zionism, terrorism, war, Afghanistan, Iraq, monkeys etc).

Then this:

Why has the SPF [Sydney Peace Foundation] lent unwarranted credibility to Chomsky’s extremist politics? The SPF, and its academic arm, the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPACS), shares Chomsky’s kneejerk anti-Americanism and anti-Israel worldview. Jake Lynch, the CPACS director and a former BBC journalist, is a leading Australian BDS campaigner and perpetuates a Chomskyite binary view of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The SPF – itself headed by Professor Stuart Rees, and whose executive officer is the current general secretary of the Communist Party of Australia, Hannah Middleton – clearly seeks to legitimate anti-Zionist fundamentalism as well as resuscitating a discredited brand of far-left politics by juxtaposing extremists such as Chomsky (and John Pilger, Israel critic and 2009 prizewinner) with respectable previous recipients such as Indigenous leader Patrick Dodson and former Governor-General Sir William Deane. The decision to decorate Chomsky also hallmarks another strategy deployed by anti-Israel activists, whereby the views of a tiny minority of far-left Jewish anti-Zionists – the journalist Antony Loewenstein being the most notorious local example – are promoted so as to avoid charges of anti-Semitism.

I’m notorious? I better tell my minders immediately. Liberal Zionism is in moral turmoil. Israel is a racist state that is not blindly backed by anybody these days except religious fundamentalists and hardline Zionists. People like Dyrenfurth have too much invested in an imaginary Israel, a nation that must remain Jewish no matter what. Human rights of Palestinians are violated on a daily basis? Would he like to write anything about that in depth? Of course not, it’s far easier (and intellectually lazy) to simply attack the messenger.

Finally, it should be noted that the Jewish publisher behind the Monthly, Morry Schwartz, never publishes anything on Israel/Palestine because he’s a big supporter of the Zionist state. Over many years across his various publications, Israel is barely discussed, a blindness that reveals a great deal about many Jewish progressives the world over; they can care about the human rights of East Timorese or Iraqis or Afghans, but when it comes to the Palestinians…

Obama’s war in Afghanistan simply becoming more privatised

Published on 30 June 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

It’s occupation by another name. Pratap Chatterjee explains:

The number of contractors in Afghanistan is likely to increase significantly in the next year as the Obama administration pulls back some of the extra 68,000 troops that it has dispatched there since January 2009.

Typically, the U.S. pays one contractor to support every soldier that has deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. The ratio of contractors to troops increases dramatically during a military surge as well as during a drawdown, and often stays higher than troop levels when military numbers are low, i.e. down to 30,000-50,000.

The reason is simple — the military needs extra workers to build new bases as well as to shut them down. Just like a hotel or restaurant, a military base also needs a minimum number of people to do the basics like janitorial or food service work. And as troops withdraw, U.S. diplomats are likely to hire extra security contractors as they are doing now in Iraq.

Using a range of 1.3 to 1.4 (based on what Afghanistan needed before the surge and Iraq needed after the drawdown), I would project that if the Obama administration draws down to 68,000 troops in Afghanistan by September 2012, they will need 88,400 contractors at the very least, but potentially as many as 95,880.

Hands up who knows the enemies in the false “war on error”?

Published on 27 June 2011 in General. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Robert Fisk on the “terrorists” so needed by the West to assist them in their own “war on terror”:

If you held a mirror up to the vast “anti-terrorism” conference in Tehran this weekend – the anti-Iranian version of terrorism, of course – you would see three men sitting down in private to discuss what happens when the US and its Nato partners stage their final retreat from Afghanistan.

Messieurs Ahmadinejad of Iran, Karzai of Afghanistan and Zardari of Pakistan – all jolly presidents sharing the stage with Talabani of Iraq, Rahmon of Tajikistan and (speak it in hushed tones), that elderly wanted man, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan – spent time discussing how all would react when the West ends its adventure in the graveyard of Empires.

Ironies were legion. The modern-day descendant of the Persian empire, so often accused by America of helping the “terrorists” of Iraq to kill US troops, is none too keen on the “terrorists” of the Taliban – at the very moment when the Americans are keen to talk to the very same Taliban so that they can high-tail it out of Afghanistan.

The flamboyantly cowled President Hamid Karzai, whose speech to conference delegates lasted a mere four anodyne minutes – anyone can condemn “terrorism” of any variety in that amount of time – is keen to have Iran help reconstruct his country, which was supposed to be what the Americans and the Brits and everyone else who loved democracy were keen to do after the Taliban’s brief defeat in 2001.

America’s drone wars are wonderful earner for conflict addicts

Published on 22 June 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Disturbing New York Times feature which barely touches on the ethical question of killing “terrorists” (and more often innocent civilians) from a great height thousands of miles away. Murder is still murder:

Two miles from the cow pasture where the Wright Brothers learned to fly the first airplanes, military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air: shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan, to the size of insects and birds.

The base’s indoor flight lab is called the “microaviary,” and for good reason. The drones in development here are designed to replicate the flight mechanics of moths, hawks and other inhabitants of the natural world. “We’re looking at how you hide in plain sight,” said Greg Parker, an aerospace engineer, as he held up a prototype of a mechanical hawk that in the future might carry out espionage or kill.

Half a world away in Afghanistan, Marines marvel at one of the new blimplike spy balloons that float from a tether 15,000 feet above one of the bloodiest outposts of the war, Sangin in Helmand Province. The balloon, called an aerostat, can transmit live video — from as far as 20 miles away — of insurgents planting homemade bombs. “It’s been a game-changer for me,” Capt. Nickoli Johnson said in Sangin this spring. “I want a bunch more put in.”

From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less widely known are the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.

The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago. Within the next decade the Air Force anticipates a decrease in manned aircraft but expects its number of “multirole” aerial drones like the Reaper — the ones that spy as well as strike — to nearly quadruple, to 536. Already the Air Force is training more remote pilots, 350 this year alone, than fighter and bomber pilots combined.

“It’s a growth market,” said Ashton B. Carter, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer.

What Murdoch offers; Afghans don’t care about living poor lives

Published on 22 June 2011 in General. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

Praising Sri Lanka for murdering countless Tamils

Published on 18 June 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , .

Oh what a glorious war.

After killing up to 40,000 Tamils civilians during the end of the country’s civil war, Colombo recently organised a conference to show the world the wonderful techniques used to silence, intimidate and destroy Tamil hopes for a homeland.

Naturally, many other countries were keen to hear such wise words, including the US, whose official seemed to deny that government forces had deliberately targeted surrendering Tamil Tigers. The facts show otherwise.

Then Australian-born counter-terrorism “expert” David Kilkullen – I discussed his failures before and wondered how a man who has helped the US get crushed in Iraq and Afghanistan is asked by the media to comment on such matters – opined on the war and started with this:

Defense Secretary Rajapaksa, Professor Peiris, General Jayasuriya, distinguished officials, officers, and delegations: Good morning. Thank you for organizing this important conference, and for your kind invitation to talk frankly with you about Sri Lanka’s experience in Eelam War IV.  As I said when I accepted the invitation to attend, I believe your defeat of LTTE is a remarkable achievement that deserves to be studied. At the same time, the international community has legitimate questions about human rights and about the way operations were conducted, and it is in Sri Lanka’s interest to be as open as possible in answering those questions. I am not known for being diplomatic, so let me say from the outset that I do believe Sri Lanka has achieved a great success, but before you can put forward your approach as a model for others, it’s extremely important to address some important human rights critiques, and consider how to turn a military success into a sustainable peace. I don’t believe we are there yet.

Before I begin, let me also note that none of my comments today are or can be definitive. It would be arrogant and presumptuous for me to lecture you on “proper” tactics and strategy. All I can do is to provide an outsider’s perspective, and to share some of the lessons I’ve learned in the campaigns of the last decade: it is for you to decide how, and indeed whether, these insights apply to you.

…

It seems to me that the best hope for long-term peace, following the remarkably successful defeat of the Tigers in Eelam IV, lies in robust political and economic reform at the local, community-level in all former insurgent-controlled areas. A government that brings peace, justice, and reconciliation to its people will be defended by its people, regardless of ethnic group.

In reality, and Kilkullen would know this by appearing at an event that celebrated Colombo’s “victory” over the Tigers, Sri Lanka is moving in the opposite direction and his presence simply gave tacit backing for the government’s brutal activities.

We buy oil from Saudi regime and they hate women

Published on 14 June 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Our addiction to the black gold has made us morally complicit in horrific discrimination. Farzaneh Milani writes in the New York Times:

The Arab Spring is inching its way into Saudi Arabia — in the cars of fully veiled drivers.

On the surface, when a group of Saudi women used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to organize a mass mobile protest defying the kingdom’s ban on women driving, it may have seemed less dramatic than demonstrators facing bullets and batons while demanding regime change in nearby countries. But underneath, the same core principles — self-determination and freedom of movement — have motivated both groups. The Saudi regime understands the gravity of the situation, and it is moving decisively to contain it by stopping the protest scheduled for June 17.

The driving ban stems from universal anxiety over women’s unrestrained mobility. In Saudi Arabia that anxiety is acute: the streets — and the right to enter and leave them at will — belong to men. A woman who trespasses is either regarded as a sinful “street-walker” or expected to cover herself in her abaya, a portable house. Should she need to get around town, she can do so in a taxi, with a chauffeur (there are 750,000 of them) or with a man related to her by marriage or blood behind the wheel.

Although the Islamic Republic of Iran could not implement similarly draconian driving laws after the 1979 revolution, given that women had driven cars there for decades, the theocratic regime did denounce women riding bikes or motorcycles as un-Islamic and sexually provocative. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, proclaimed in 1999 that “women must avoid anything that attracts strangers, so riding bicycles or motorcycles by women in public places involves corruption and is forbidden.”

The Saudi regime, like the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the military junta in Sudan and the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, ordains the exclusion of women from the public sphere. It expects women to remain in their “proper place.”

Indeed, the rulers in Saudi Arabia are the most gender-segregated in the world today. In official ceremonies, and in countless photographs, posters and billboards, the royal family seems to be composed solely of men.

Global dissidents may not want US openly backing them

Published on 13 June 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Promoting web freedom is a noble idea, especially since so many autocratic regimes and Western multinationals are working together to stop citizens accessing the glories of information on the internet.

But this idea is full of potential problems (via the New York Times), not least because Washington has a shocking record of supporting dictatorships at the expense of democracy and this won’t stop anytime soon. It’s called hypocrisy. Besides, being funded by the US to challenge US-backed regimes will likely end in tears, torture or worse:

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.

Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.

The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.

In one of the most ambitious efforts, United States officials say, the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will.

The effort has picked up momentum since the government of President Hosni Mubarak shut down the Egyptian Internet in the last days of his rule. In recent days, the Syrian government also temporarily disabled much of that country’s Internet, which had helped protesters mobilize.

The Obama administration’s initiative is in one sense a new front in a longstanding diplomatic push to defend free speech and nurture democracy. For decades, the United States has sent radio broadcasts into autocratic countries through Voice of America and other means. More recently, Washington has supported the development of software that preserves the anonymity of users in places like China, and training for citizens who want to pass information along the government-owned Internet without getting caught.

But the latest initiative depends on creating entirely separate pathways for communication. It has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler.

…

Mrs. Clinton has made Internet freedom into a signature cause. But the State Department has carefully framed its support as promoting free speech and human rights for their own sake, not as a policy aimed at destabilizing autocratic governments.

That distinction is difficult to maintain, said Clay Shirky, an assistant professor at New York University who studies the Internet and social media. “You can’t say, ‘All we want is for people to speak their minds, not bring down autocratic regimes’ — they’re the same thing,” Mr. Shirky said.

He added that the United States could expose itself to charges of hypocrisy if the State Department maintained its support, tacit or otherwise, for autocratic governments running countries like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain while deploying technology that was likely to undermine them.

Murdoch logic; backers of war should receive a peace prize

Published on 3 June 2011 in General. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Noam Chomsky has won the 2011 Sydney Peace Prize over his legendary support for human rights and challenging power it all its forms. That makes him an enemy of a Murdoch empire that spends its entire time wanting to be intimate with government and business. The poor dears can’t understand why a man who opposes war is so feted. Why can’t war-mongers be given equal public billing?

Today’s editorial in the Australian is a classic example of a genre known as war lovers unite in fury/envy/bitterness/comedy:

Linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky is the perfect choice for this year’s Sydney Peace Prize. Not only is he in step with previous winners such as journalist John Pilger and Palestinian activist Hanan Ashwari, but the intelligentsia who gave David Hicks a standing ovation at the Sydney Writers’ Festival will no doubt rise to the occasion again. Chomsky is an especially interesting choice for a peace prize in the 10th anniversary year of the World Trade Centre attacks — as an apologist for Osama Bin Laden.

The Sydney Peace Foundation has shown its true values and vision in honouring a man foundation director Stuart Rees describes as “inspiring” and whom he expects will attract thousands of admirers who will want to express their gratitude. Perhaps in some sort of Mexican wave of self-loathing.

Others share Professor Rees’s enthusiasm. In 2007, Osama Bin Laden praised the US academic for his “sober words of advice prior to the (Iraq) war” and said he was “among the most capable of those from your side”. Not to be outdone, Chomsky recently denounced the killing of bin Laden by US forces as the “political assassination” of an “unarmed victim”. Perhaps it’s hardly surprising that Chomsky also believes that the “crimes” of George W. Bush “vastly exceed bin Laden’s”, that he lamented the West’s treating Muammar Gadaffi’s Libya as a “punching bag” and erroneously described Ronald Reagan’s great legacy as that of a “scared bully”.

Sydneysiders might also like to honour Chomsky for his wit and wisdom in defining education as “imposed ignorance”, a concept he helped turn in to reality with his theories about “universal grammar”, which contributed to the erosion of English teaching in US and Australian schools from the 1960s onwards.

Unlike one of Chomsky’s acerbic US critics who recently branded him “a two-nickel crank”, we look forward to his Sydney speech, where he will be among friends collecting his $50,000 gong. But we hope he leaves the Hezbollah military cap he wore in Lebanon at home. If the Sydney Peace Foundation wants to turn its back on its usual puerility, it should consider awarding next year’s prize to The Australian’s Greg Sheridan, whose cogent case against continuing the war in Afghanistan made Chomsky’s rantings look pedestrian.

How Serco thrives by failing constantly

Published on 29 May 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Australia’s immigration detention system is in chaos and yet the company running them, Serco, is about to be rewarded. Again. The perverse logic of privatisation:

The federal government is believed to have signed a contract to outsource the management of defence base operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan to the foreign company running Australia’s immigration detention centres.

Sources claim there was concern within the Australian Defence Force about a private foreign company taking over behind-the-wire operations to support troops in Afghanistan. The ADF said it would announce the successful contractor shortly but would not confirm if that company was Serco.

Serco, which is run by David Campbell, would neither confirm nor deny it had been given the contract.

It is believed the multi-million-dollar contract will be to manage all base operations including catering, cleaning, asset hire and mess facilities at the Al Minhad Air Base in the United Arab Emirates.

Foreign private contractors would also replace uniformed personnel in the provision of maintenance, accommodation and mess services for the first time in Kandahar and Tarin Kowt in Afghanistan.

Even some in the Murdoch press (in this case, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph) are worried about the madness of an uncontrolled capitalist system (well, for a few minutes, anyway):

The man in charge of Australia’s detention centres lives in this Sydney Harbour waterfront apartment – a world away from detainees living in overcrowded conditions just 30km away at the Villawood detention centre.

David Campbell, the boss of Serco, lives in the $2.5 million three-bedroom apartment at McMahons Point.

With estimates the highly-secretive Serco will make $1 billion from running detention centres until 2014, it is expected, with bonuses, that Mr Campbell’s salary will only rise.

Fisk on why Arabs rightly only see bowing down to Zionism

Published on 21 May 2011 in Israel. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Robert Fisk on the oh-so-predictable speech by Barack Obama to inject the US back into relevance in the Arab world. It should fail, as Muslims there know full well what America’s role has always been; repression:

It was the same old story. Palestinians can have a “viable” state, Israel a “secure” one. Israel cannot be de-legitimised. The Palestinians must not attempt to ask the UN for statehood in September. No peace can be imposed on either party. Sometimes yesterday, you could have turned this into Obama’s forthcoming speech to pro-Israeli lobbyists this weekend. Oh yes, and the Palestinian state must have no weapons to defend itself. So that’s what “viable” means!

It was a kind of Second Coming, I suppose, Cairo re-pledged, another crack at the Middle East, as boring and as unfair as all the other ones, with lots of rhetoric about the Arab revolutions which Obama did nothing to help. Some of it was positively delusional. “We have broken the Taliban’s momentum,” the great speechifier said. What? Does he really – really – think that?

Permanent occupation of Muslim countries great for Western capitalism

Published on 19 May 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Any serious draw-down of US troops from Afghanistan will affect the massive industry that’s expanded post 9/11; private military contractors. Joshua Frost on PBS contemplates the future and the likely push by major interests to maintain the occupation in the war-ravaged land; business will be negatively affected if things change too radically:

Very few who are pushing for immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan contemplate the economic consequences of ending the war. The economy can probably handle 100,000 underemployed war contractors, but it will take some adjustment. It’s not just the psychological cost of seeing the Taliban use equipment we leave behind to crack jokes about us. The war in Afghanistan is more than just the troops and contractors who are deployed: there is a vast ecosystem of small, medium and large companies back here that support those deployed workers. Without a hundred billion dollars in war costs every year, those companies will struggle to stay in business.

An executive at a small defense contractor recently joked to me, “Afghanistan is our business plan.” I asked him what he would do if the war ended. He stared at me for a moment and said, “Well, then I hope we invade Libya.”

This executive wasn’t actually hoping to occupy Tripoli. But he was expressing a worry many in the defense industry have about how they will run their companies and employ their workers once the wars are over. Ten years of war have established a discrete class of entrepreneurs, mid-level workers and administrators who are completely reliant upon the U.S. being at war to stay employed.

Dark words of a private contractor in Afghanistan

Published on 14 May 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Writer David Isenberg sets up the scene:

I received the following email from a Dyncorp contractor working in Afghanistan. He works as a trainer to the Afghan National Police. His comments below are worth reading.

But before you do you might remember that DynCorp is a member of the International Stability Operations Association, which has an elaborate Code of Conduct detailing how its companies are supposed to treat its employees. But judging from the below it appears DynCorp missed or ignored Part 6.11.

“Signatories shall provide their personnel with the appropriate training, equipment and materials necessary to perform their duties.”

“For whatever reason Dyn upper management has a severe disconnect between them and the actual workers on the ground. They have, so far, provided very little support in either equipment or services to us. I don’t think I would choose to work for them again.

“My job here is to train and assess the Afghan National Police. They want us to train them in “community policing” and teach them how to run a professional police department.  The soldiers themselves are happy to have me because I provide a lot of experience many of them don’t have. As for the success of the mission, I am skeptical. The Afghans do not think like us and they have a very different culture. I feel that they know we will eventually leave and that things will go back to the way they were prior to our arrival. Therefore they intend to get as much from us as possible while we are here. Were I in their shoes I imagine I would do the same. But ultimately I think our mission here will fail.

“As for Dyn, here is how they handle things. The original contract I signed on for was through the Dept. Of State and it was for one year with the pay being $158,000 and 52 days of leave. After 6 months here Dyn told us the contract was being cancelled and taken over by the DOD. They told us we would be getting a new contract soon that we would have to accept or we could go home. The new contract was for $117,000 and 28 days of leave, for the same job. You should know that we are considered embedded mentors. We live and operate in shitty conditions for the most part. Dyn did a horrible job of transitioning to the new contract and lost most of the contractors, who were disgusted with their lies and unethical handling of things. Dyn meanwhile lied to the DOD, telling them that they had more than enough contractors lined up to meet the requirements of the contract when they didn’t. The new contract has taken effect and Dyn still has nowhere near the number of people they need to fulfill the contract. Due to that they recently raised the pay for the job to $144,000 and 30 days of leave. It remains to be seen if that will be enough to get more people.”

Pro-settler Zionist says young Jews love fundamentalism, too

Published on 12 May 2011 in Israel. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

This is so desperate it’s comical. Those backing Jewish colonies who live in the Zionist Diaspora want nothing more than no debate over the growing numbers of young Jews turning away from Israeli occupation policies.

American Ted Lapkin (who used to work for the Zionist lobby AIJAC and now lurks with a right-wing think-tank) once wrote regularly in the Australian media about the glories of the Iraq war, the Afghan war, war on Iran, Israeli wars on Palestine, wars on Arabs and just war in general. He seemed oblivious to the fact that such rabid views made Jews seem like war-mongers who couldn’t help kill Arabs at any opportunity. Great PR for Zionism.

He’s now back, writing on the ABC today that young Jews still love Israel and people like me simply can’t accept that Israel is a glorious place. Any mention of the West Bank occupation? Of course not. Siege on Gaza? Hardly. Rampant Israeli racism against Arabs? No chance. Any understanding that mainstream debate in the US is rapidly changing? Fat chance.

Debate about Israeli crimes is now mainstream.

Onto the delusions:

The ‘disaffected Jew’ meme also popped up last year in the pages of the Leftwing NewMatilda magazine. “The Jewish Disaspora is Turning on Israel”, proclaimed the headline of an article by Antony Loewenstein, John Docker and Ned Curthoys.

But the recent publication of two academic research surveys has cast the theory of Jewish detachment from Israel into serious intellectual disrepute. The American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) 2010 Annual Survey of Jewish Opinion found that 74 per cent of American Jews felt “fairly close” or “very close” to Israel. This figure is entirely consistent with the findings of previous surveys done over the past decade.

…

The more extreme version of the Jewish disaffection thesis peddled by Loewenstein, Docker and Curthoys is relatively easy to dismiss. After all, these are self-avowed enemies of Zionism who oppose a Jewish state both in concept and reality. And as we have observed, their argument flies in the face of objective polling reality.

…

Since the 1967 war, it is undeniable that Left-of-centre opinion has moved away from support for Israel towards empathy with mortal enemies of the Jewish state. This is most pronounced amongst radical academics and rent-a-mob protestors who march arm and arm with Hezbollah supporters in street demonstrations.

But these currents have also taken their toll within the more moderate currents of the centre-Left. And as a result, support for Israel is far less pronounced these days amongst progressives than it is amongst conservatives.

Beinart attributes that erosion to Israel’s abandonment of its original sublime ideals. He claims that it isn’t he who left Zionism, but that Zionism left him.

But the true act of defection has been on the part of Western progressives who have cast by the wayside the only full-fledged democracy in the otherwise benighted Middle East.

The greatest supporters of Israel these days are Christian fundamentalists and those who love a charming settlement in the middle of Palestinian land. That’s quite a future Zionism is building for itself.

Liberal hawks should hang heads in shame over Libya

Published on 9 May 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The Western-assisted war in Libya isn’t going too well. So much for a quick victory against Gaddafi forces. The utterly confused strategy, even with US-led bombing runs, has not overwhelmed government troops.

Gary Younge writes in the Guardian that such missions should force “liberal interventionists” who backed this war to question (yet again!) their belief in our governments to carry out noble wars without crimes and errors:

The problem is not mission creep, it’s the mission. There are only so many times their governments can reasonably keep doing the same thing and expect different results and there can be only so many times liberal hawks can “trust” their governments to do differently.

Despite Obama’s initial foreboding, Libya is not Iraq. It came with legal sanction, European insistence, Arab cover, a credible, if not exactly viable, resistance on the ground, and the immediate threat of massacre. Iraq had none of those.

UN support makes the bombing legal, it does not make it legitimate. This is no mere semantic matter. Just because something is within the law does not make it a good idea. International law should be a prerequisite for action, not the basis for it. The Iraq war would still have been a disaster even if the UN had endorsed it. It would just have been a legal disaster.

…

One of the more pathetic aspects of this misadventure is how it has exposed the discrepancy between their imperialist rhetoric and postcolonial decline. Obama hoped the US would play a “supporting role”; in reality it is centre stage. Indeed the show could not go on without Washington. However, even at this early stage, American domestic support for this war is fragile. Most believe the US should not be involved and that it does not have a clear strategy – and, in any case, they are not that interested. This is not a question of the ends justifying the means. As both Iraq and Afghanistan have shown, the west does not have the military or political means to achieve its ends even on its own terms.

The Libyan rebels’ demands are important. But solidarity does not involve unquestioningly forfeiting responsibility for one’s own actions to another, but rather it is a process of mutual engagement demanding an assessment of what is both prudent and possible. It is now clear that the Libyan uprising, like other revolutions in the region, could not succeed militarily.

Imagining an America that doesn’t invade and occupy

Published on 9 May 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

This is a moving piece. Written by US journalist Michael Hastings (a friend and colleague) about the real opportunity that should be taken with the death of Osama Bin Laden.

An imperial nation that continues to believe it can rule by brute force and invade Muslim nations is delusional:

Osama bin Laden’s actions, and our reactions to them, have defined my adult life. I was in New York City on September 11th, 2001, a senior in college. After the towers collapsed, I walked 95 blocks to get as close to Ground Zero as possible, so I could see first-hand the destruction that would define our future. By the time I got to Baghdad four years later, very few Americans believed that the people we were fighting in Iraq posed a threat to the United States. Even the military press didn’t bother lying about it anymore, referring to our enemies as “insurgents” rather than “terrorists.” A woman I loved was killed in Baghdad in January 2007 — Al Qaeda in Iraq took credit for it — and my younger brother fought for 15 months as an infantry platoon leader, earning a Bronze Star. Other friends, both American and Iraqi, suffered their own losses: homes, limbs, loved ones.

By the fall of 2008, when I had moved on to Afghanistan, bin Laden and Al Qaeda were barely footnotes to what we were doing there. “It’s not about bin Laden,” a military intelligence official told me. “It’s about fixing the mess.” This added to the growing despair Americans felt about the war: If it wasn’t about bin Laden, then what the fuck was it about? Why were we fighting wars that took us no closer to the man responsible for unleashing the horror of September 11th? A top-ranking military official told me last year that he didn’t think we’d ever get bin Laden. Yet each time our presidents and generals told us why we were still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, they always used bin Laden and September 11th as an excuse. As long as they insisted on fighting these wars we didn’t need to fight, the wound to the American psyche wasn’t allowed to heal.

Right from the start, the idea of the War on Terror was a fuzzy one at best. We were promised there would be no “battlefields and beachheads,” as President George W. Bush put it. It would be a secret war, conducted mostly in the dark, no holds barred. And that’s how it might have played had we got bin Laden early on, dead or alive. But that’s not what happened. Instead, we went on a rampage in the full light of day. We got our battlefields and beachheads after all. Kabul, Kandahar, Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramadi, Najaf, Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra, Kabul and Kandahar again — the list went on and on. We couldn’t find bin Laden, so we went after anyone who looked like him, searching for other monsters to put down: the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

In the end, bin Laden got the carnage he had hoped to unleash. Nearly 3,000 Americans were killed on September 11th. Since then, 6,022 American servicemen and women have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than 42,000 have been wounded. More than 3,000 allied soldiers have died, along with some 1,200 private contractors, aid workers and journalists. Most of the killing didn’t take place in battles — it was in the dirty metrics of suicide bombs, death squads, checkpoint killings, torture chambers and improvised explosive devices. Civilians on their way to work or soldiers driving around in circles, looking for an enemy they could seldom find. We may never know how many innocent civilians were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, but estimates suggest that more than 160,000 have died so far. Al Qaeda, by contrast, has lost very few operatives in the worldwide conflagration — perhaps only “scores,” as President Obama said this month. In truth, Al Qaeda never had many members to begin with. Not since Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand, setting off World War I, has a conspiracy undertaken by so few been felt by so many.

After learning of bin Laden’s death, I congratulated my friends in the military and the intelligence community, tweeted my appreciation to President Obama and his team, then sat back and listened to the horns honking outside my apartment in Washington. I thought of all the dead, and what adding this fucker’s name to the list actually means. My hope — and it is not one I have much hope in — is that our political leaders will use bin Laden’s death to put an end to the madness he provoked. Withdraw our remaining troops from Iraq, a country that never posed a threat to us. End the war in Afghanistan, where we will spend $120 billion this year to prevent the country from becoming a hideout for Al Qaeda. As bin Laden’s death makes clear, our true enemies will always find a hideout, no matter how many people we torture and bribe and kill. For the past 10 years, we have used the name Osama bin Laden to justify our wars. Perhaps, now that he is dead, we can use it in the cause of peace.

Solving world’s problems requires first identifying them

Published on 9 May 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .