Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
There are reports of trouble among the restive natives of eastern Anatolia. It seems the Yanks have tried to set up a banana republic down in Mesopotamia. in turn, the quiescent tribal locals of the north, who begrudge their Asian neighbors after many centuries of strife and imposed political submission to the Turk and the Arab, finally see a moment to cut their own path through the highlands.
The Kurds have broken loose of Baghdad's control, and more recently, have taken up arms in great numbers against their Ottoman masters in Constantinople. There's a sense they may yet capture the Kirkuk oil fields from Baghdad, and from there, face their destiny against the Turkish army to liberate their brethren.
Or something like that. (source: check out these maps of the Ottoman empire - thx Texas U!) In reality, any damn fool before the war would have said that Saddam's fall would lead to the Kurds seeking total independence and rebelling against Turkey, as they did in 1920, 1925, 1930, 1937, the 1980s, 1990s.... Apparently, this has escalated into ethnic conflict in Iraq, as the small Turkmen minority – about a quarter of Kirkuk – suffer the ethnic and religious tensions under Kurdish dominion in contemporary Iraq (not to mention getting the shit bombed out of them in Tal Afar). The Turks, meanwhile, will probably "step in" at some point to save their Turkic brethren from Kurdish "consolidation".
Of course, the Kurds have one of the most peculiar distributions of any ethnic group in the world:
This presents the possibility of Turkish military intervention into Iraq – and certainly, they have a presence there. Der Speigel reports:
April 25: Kurdish Intifada? Clashes in Southeastern Turkey on the Rise
Violence is on the rise in southeastern Turkey as the Kurdistan Worker's Party increases its guerilla activity. The government in Ankara is worried about a Kurdish intifada.
It's slowly becoming a regular feature of the news coming out of Turkey these days: clashes between Turkish troops and Kurdish militants in the eastern part of the country. On Tuesday, three Kurdish militants and one Turkish soldier were killed in a skirmish in the Sirnak province near the Iraqi border. Fifteen soldiers, four police officers and more than 40 Kurdish militants have been killed in south-eastern Turkey in recent months. And eight bombings in the past three months have left two dead and 47 injured -- bombings claimed by a group calling itself the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons.
In short, violence is on the rise in Turkey -- and the country's military is concerned that the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), together with the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, is trying to begin a Palestinian-style intifada.
Indeed, the Aksam newspaper reported last Friday that a further 10,000 Turkish soldiers have been sent to the border region, bringing the total number of troops in the area up to about 50,000. "As long as the PKK exists, our operations will continue in ever-increasing intensity," General Yasar Buyukanit, the head of Turkey's land forces, told CNN-Turk television in an interview aired on Sunday.
The Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK, which has been fighting for Kurdish autonomy since 1984, frequently launches its anti-government operations from its bases on the Iraqi side of the border. Since the group took up arms in 1984, some 37,000 people have lost their lives in the fighting -- with clashes generally accelerating in the spring time when the mountain passes on the Turkey-Iraq border become more accessible.
Indeed, to help prevent attacks from being launched across the border, some 2,000 Turkish soldiers are routinely stationed in northern Iraq. Turkey has repeatedly called on the United States to crack down on the PKK bases in northern Iraq, but US commanders have been reticent to divert troops from the struggle against Iraqi insurgents.
Now Turkey seems tempted to take matters into its own hands. The chief commander of Turkey's armed forces, General Hilmi Ozkok, has stressed that Turkey has the right to carry out cross-border operations under international law: "If the conditions arise, like every sovereign country, we will use those rights," Ozkok said on Sunday, according to the AP. Still, such a move would be politically sensitive and diplomats argue that it is unlikely Turkey will put its relations to Washington and to the European Union at risk by staging a large offensive in Iraq. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has likewise recently said that neighboring countries should not meddle in Iraq's affairs -- a statement thought to refer to Turkey.
With the armed clashes between the PKK and the Turkish military heating up, the government of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is also stepping up internal repression of groups suspected of supporting the PKK. Last Tuesday, Turkish security forces raided the offices of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party. Some 50 party members, including five provincial leaders and nine local leaders, were detained, according to the AP. Prime Minister Erdogan had previously urged members of the Democratic Society Party to denounce PKK violence. The leaders of the party have refused to accept the definition of the PKK as a terrorist group, a definition endorsed by Turkey, Washington and the EU.
Other Reporting: The ever-upbeat NY Times says: U.S. Will Help Turks Stop Kurdish Inroads From Iraq. AP: Turkey Deploys More Troops to Contain Kurdish Guerrillas. Juan Cole says:
Turkish military action against the Kurdish Workers' Party along the border with Iraq has heated up, with Turkish mortars falling on the Iraqi city of Zakho, according to this report. That's what we needed, more mortars falling on an Iraqi city from yet another quarter.
This problem is pretty damn obvious, I guess. It's yet another reason why the war in Iraq promised to go regional from day one. Oh wait. Three whole fucking years ago, tomorrow, we had this:
And two years ago, the list of the fallen was "only" this big. Charted today:
The regional war expands, we haven't even gotten to Iran yet, much less the eventually doomed oil terminals of Saudi Arabia...
i found this on David Erickson's blog (Erickson's one of my co-conspirators at Politics in Minnesota and works with Blois Olson at New School Communications).
AllPeers, currently in Beta testing, is some kind of software extension that plugs into FireFox and allows you to share your files in an encrypted way with other AllPeers users - and you can set up a friend network a la Myspace or Facebook - but the catch is that it's a BitTorrent network for moving goodies in a decentralized way. And it's apparently easy enough to use.
I think the basic idea is that your own media will be copied to your friends' computers, so that when someone tries to access a big thing like a movie file, it can be downloaded directly from everyone at once - because it's based on BitTorrent. At least I think that's the idea.
PeerPressure is the official AllPeers developer blog. It will be released for Windows, OS X and Linux. Main features will be free but there will also be some pay services. The info:
AllPeers is a free extension which combines the strength of Firefox and the efficiency of BitTorrent to transform your favorite browser into a media sharing powerhouse. Regain control! You decide which media files you want to share with whom and to maximise your privacy, communications are encrypted.
Forget about complicated setup or obscure user interfaces. If you know how to use Firefox you know how to use AllPeers.
The FAQ says:
Isn't email fine for sharing digital files?
Email has the advantage of being simple and ubiquitous, but it also has many disadvantages. When you share files via email, you don't know exactly when they will arrive. A lot of people use web mail, so they may not be able to receive large attachments. Since email is designed for text, it's tedious to view pictures or watch videos, especially if you receive a whole set of files at one time. And if you want to go back and find a specific file later, you'll find yourself laboriously opening and closing emails and attachments.
AllPeers MediaCenter is designed specifically for … you guessed it, sharing your media! Files are received instantly and are displayed in beautifully laid out albums of convenient thumbnail images. Browsing through new files, or finding old ones, is a breeze. We guarantee you'll never want to go back to email.
With AllPeers, you just drag-and-drop your files right into the program. They're available for sharing instantly! Then decide exactly who you want to share which files with. No uploading, no waiting. Want to browse your existing library? Click on an album and you see the thumbnails immediately. And since your files are stored directly on your computer, it's all completely free.
How can it be free? There must be a catch.
Nope. Because we’re using P2P technology, we don’t need to maintain a large server farm for managing huge files collections as our network grows. On top of that, we don’t think people should have to pay to share with friends. Of course, we are still a company and we need to make money to pay for the luxurious lifestyle of our development team. That’s why we will be deploying new services on AllPeers, some of which will require payment.
You can sign up for beta testing and I damn well have, although the beta programs are being handed out in a random restricted selection kinda way.
Well that is some quality geek stuff at 9 PM. However, it is also worth noting that a program like this, if it included encryption and many small autonomous networks of people, would be almost an almost unbeatable way to get around the copyright enforcement that wants to rain on your party.
From a really good hour-long talk on MPR yesterday that you can catch on RealPlayer:
David Halberstam: Journalist (including in Vietnam) and author, in a speech from the Westminster Town Hall Forum in Mpls. Halberstam recently edited a collection of essays titled "Defining a Nation: Our America and the Sources of its Strength." There was a ton of good stuff about journalism and what actually makes America work.
He advises everyone to see the Battle of Algiers (1966) because if you see it, "you will not want to see American kids go to Iraq." Also he talks about how Iraq is "damaging to the soul of the country." This is crucial - my fuzzy transcription:
Journalists matter when the policy is wrong... When it doesn't work, and that's when journalists really matter in a free society. When I went to Vietnam in 1962 there was a really small group of us and the Kennedy people had upgraded the commitment from 1600 to 18,000 [troops]. They didn't want to send in combat troops but they didn't want - because of what happened in domestic politics - what happened when Chiang Kai Shek fell in mainland China, they didn't want to lose Vietnam as we lost China, as if China was ever ours to own.
So they did this halfway program and it didn't work. And when it didn't work, the people in the field tried to report to their superiors in saigon that it didn't work and when their superiors in Saigon said in effect, don't ever report that way again. Report that we are winning or you will not go from colonel to brigadier general, or light colonel to colonel, which was the backchannel word...
They turned to us, they turned to the journalists, so we became a ventilating system for the bureaucracy. It was not a press struggle, it was a struggle within the United States Army, between those in the field actually fighting the war, and those in Saigon and Washington who were reflecting the political desires of the Kennedy administration. Bad policy, when the policy doesn't work, journalists become infinitely more important.
Anyhow I thought that was pretty damn good. Relevant to the current thing, I gotta say.
There is an organization called the Sunlight Foundation that just got rolled out. It would appear to be one of these combined blog/exposing data/grassroots participation type things. (it runs on the Drupal content management system, if you care) There is also a CongressPedia wiki that is being hosted through the sweet anti-power-conspiracy type site SourceWatch.
Earlier this week, on Wednesday, April 26, the Sunlight Foundation officially opened its doors. Our goal is to use revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy.
Sounds like it could really be a pain for the Powers that Be Corrupt.
About the Sunlight Foundation
The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. We are unique in that technology and the power of the Internet are at the core of every one of our efforts.
Our initial projects – from the establishment of a Congresspedia, the making of “transparency grants” for the development and enhancement of databases and websites, and two separate efforts to engage the public in distributed journalism and offer online tutorials on the role of money in politics efforts – are based on the premise that the collective power of citizens to demand greater accountability is the clearest route to reform.
Sunlight’s work is committed to helping citizens, journalists and bloggers be their own best watchdogs, both by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and websites to enable all of us to pool our intelligence in new, and yet to be imagined, ways.
Well hey, way to go. Check it out....
I'll throw in this bit from Citypages. looks like the news broke that the concert was cancelled yesterday. Fucking weak, it's CheebaDANZA all over again:
City Pages - The Blotter - Kids Don't Follow: April 27, 8:48 PM
Kids Don't Follow
In what is being described by organizers as "the largest youth antiwar demonstration in Minnesota since the Vietnam era," thousands of students are planning to walk out of classes tomorrow in protest of the war in Iraq and military recruitment in schools. But at least two area schools (Central and Jefferson) are threatening students with suspension. The students will hold a press conference this afternoon at 3:30 at Minneapolis Technical and Community College (1501 Hennepin Ave., Mpls.), the site of a proposed peace concert for tomorrow that also got unplugged. Here are the students' statements:
Appeal from Jefferson High students
We are three students from Jefferson High School in Bloomington, MN. We are being threatened with suspension for passing out fliers advertising the April 28 walkout. We aren't allowed to wear shirts that say "I'm walking out for peace." We aren't even allowed to SAY the word walkout.
First we attempted to get posters approved through official ways. We got called in and told that advocating the walkout by distributing any material or voicing any knowledge of it happening was going to cause a disruption to the school learning environment.
We got a National Lawyers Guild lawyer to write a letter to our principal explaining that Tinker vs. Des Moines gives us the right to organize the walkout in school, but this made no difference. In our meeting with the Principal today [4/26] their lawyer had given them a response to the NLG letter, claiming that it does not fall under protected free speech.
Our right to free speech and protest, as well as the rights of our fellow Youth Against War and Racism chapter members, have been denied. Basically we refuse to be censored for our right to practice our political freedoms including telling people an event is going on. We will continue to pass out leaflets and they will probably continue confiscating or suspending people handing them out.
Here's what we'd like for you to do: call our administration. Demand that our rights are supported. Flood their offices with phone calls and emails reminding them that teenagers are people with rights, because they seem to have forgotten. The numbers are below.
Bloomington Schools Superintendent,
Gary Prest
952-681-6402
gprest@bloomington.k12.mn.us
Peace and Love,
Alex Uhrich, Libby Tousignant, Ben Zabel
Jefferson Youth Against War and Racism
Contact us at: nirvanaguy18@gmail.com
Appeal from Central High Students
At St. Paul Central High School, our chapter of Youth Against War and Racism has been planning for the antiwar walkout on Friday, April 28 in solidarity with other Twin Cities YAWR chapters. We are protesting against military recruiters in our schools as well as against the war as a whole.
We have produced a variety of leaflets explaining our cause and encouraging students to join us. Over the past week, we have begun to pass the fliers out more intensely. As a result, our school administrators and our principal, Mary Mackbee, have attempted to prevent us from passing them out.
On Wednesday, April 26, before school, many of our fliers were confiscated by Ms. Mackbee while they were being distributed. We were told that we would be punished if they were found passing out any more fliers. The school staff have been instructed to assign detention to any student caught distributing fliers. Later in the day, when we attempted to get back the fliers that had been confiscated, we were then told that, if we were found passing out leaflets, we would be suspended for "willful disobedience."
Our First Amendment rights cannot be ignored. Regardless of any claims made by the school that we are under their supervision, our fundamental democratic right to freedom of expression cannot be abridged. The schools might claim that we are creating a disruption, however a much greater disruption is being created for us by the military recruiters in our schools and by the loss of funding that our schools must deal with due to taxpayer money being spent on war instead of education.
We cannot allow them to continue to prevent us from expressing ourselves. For this reason, we ask that you help us to protect our democratic freedom and our right to free expression.
We ask that you call or e-mail our District Superintendent, Lou Kanavati, and demand that we be allowed to exercise our basic right to expression and distribute antiwar fliers, brochures, or other documents free of censorship or threats.
Superintendent Lou Kanavati
651/767-8150
Lou.Kanavati@spps.org
Thank you,
Sean Foltin and Shane Davis
Central High Youth Against War and Racism
Contact us at: acolyteofthecpc@yahoo.com
There is another student walkout today and it will wind from the University campus to my very own neck of the woods at Loring Park. I would probably like to take photos, but a certain shady lawyer type has my camera. It's probably just as well, so I can take in the scene, instead of trying to Document it as usual. But the visuals will surely be good.
It is a paradox or something. Street marches are a fairly outdated way of attempting to change policies, and the typical media blackouts – or worse, the caricatures that the participants unwittingly blunder into – really don't move the ball down the field. Just some more fucking students looking for a skip day, as someone put it to me.
But on the other hand, the news is all around us that a war in Iran is already gearing up, the United States has decided to fuck over the Palestinians in another shrewd move, and of course the Iraq meat grinder continues to rip apart families near and far. There has to be a way to transform this crisis into a physical manifestation that can offer resolve and hope to the counter-movements against it.
Some of the people in that crowd will have family and friends inside the machine somewhere, trying to stay alive until the tour is up, and it is the responsibility of those left behind to try to swipe at the war policy. And the protest serves another purpose too: it reminds this oh-so-'radical' – now really a majority – of the American public that we are not alone in this fight, not separate, not just alone, shrouded in the darkness of our computer screens, following the latest disaster.
It reminds us that there is a society with real bonds that can't be broken... Not by recruiters, not by Tony Snow, not by the pervasive fear that blankets this sad nation.
Details from the U AWOL group here:
twin cities antiwar
** W A L K O U T **
Friday April 28
** Noon Rally at University of Minnesota, Northrop Plaza
(map: http://yawr.org/april28/map.html)
** High schoolers: leave class 10:30am. Bus, carpool, or march to U of M rally
* Rally followed by march through downtown Minneapolis to…
* Free Concert at 3pm at MCTC by Loring Park, featuring Desdamona, Kanser, I Self Divine, A New Day, Two Wurds, more. Bring a bag lunch.
We are walking out to demand:
* END the occupation of Iraq NOW! to fund education and social needs
* NO! to military recruitment in our schools
* YES! to equal access to higher education
* YES! to living wage jobs for youth
* STOP racist attacks on immigrants and civil liberties
Last November 2nd, thousands of Twin Cities students - from over 40 schools in 16 districts - walked out to protest the war. Up to 2000 rallied and marched at the U of M, and a new youth movement was born.
But the war has dragged on and the violence in Iraq has increased dramatically. More and more young soldiers are coming home dead or maimed. Conservative estimates suggest over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed in the three years of occupation. Over 70 percent of U.S. troops in Iraq think the occupation should be ended, reflecting the opinion of U.S. workers and youth at home. Yet Congress keeps giving Bush hundreds of billions more for this corrupt war for oil and empire. Meanwhile our schools crumble, tuition rises out of reach, living wage jobs are disappearing, and the politicians are whipping up anti-immigrant racism to deflect the blame for these problems from themselves. Its time to step up our resistance!
Organized by:
** Youth Against War and Racism / 612.760.1980 / http://yawr.org
** U of M Anti-War Organizing League / http://www.tc.umn.edu/~awol/ / umnawol@gmail.com
** Socialist Alternative / 612.226.9129 / http://www.socialistalternative.org/
** MCTC Students Against War and Racism
Endorsed by: La Raza Student Cultural Center, Women's Student Activist Collective, Equal Access Coalition, Belfry Center for Social and Cultural Activities, Anti-War Committee, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Daybreak Newspaper, North Country Co-op, Arise! Books and Resource Collective, Welfare Rights Committee, Twin Cities Peace Campaign, Green Party (4 th and 5 th Districts), Counter-Propaganda Coalition, Jack Pine Community Center
TomMahm, Copperfield Loses Not a Cent, Lots More Stadiums Seats to Put Butts In, I Have a Cat!
The above is an untouched photograph of the view West towards the Tucson mountains from my front yard on a weekday evening. The bar on the left was frequented by Jack Kerouac, I am told.
Introducing: Strega Nona
Abby and I have adopted Strega here, which is to say, Strega's owner forfeited his right to own her through gross negligence and she chose to reside with us instead. She is currently in heat, which has been a treat, as she begins yowling at five in the morning and gets louder until ten or so. Come Friday morning, entering into estrus will forever be a thing of the past for Strega, which is win-win for everyone. Mating screams and the demented rubbing exercises that accompany them notwithstanding, this is a very cool cat- gentle and loving without being needy, small, athletic and quite beautiful, she's ["Smitten Kitten" joke redacted- ed.]
I'm an illusionist!
David Copperfield was robbed at gunpoint in West Palm Beach Sunday night, and managed to convince the three teenage thieves holding a gun six inches from his face that he did not have any on him by performing his "reverse pickpocket" trick and pulling out his pant pockets in from of them without relinquishing possession of his scrilla and celly. He called the cops and the kids were busted "within minutes," and then magically transformed into a scale model of the Gateway Arch in a cloud of smoke. I kid, Mr. Kotkin (his real name), smoke machines are for hacks, of course! In related news, David Blaine is going to perform his next stunt, where he will be dangled from his toes while wearing the Shroud of Turin over a vat of warm marmalade, in New York City. The reason for the change of venue (he spent 44 days in a box starving himself in London two years ago) was the inhospitality of the British, who went so far as to dangle cheeseburgers from RC helicopters to torture him. So, in summary, David Blaine is a baby and David Copperfield belongs in her Majesty's Secret Service. Remember, not only did he fool the thieves and keep the cash, but we still don't know the trick, preserving his Alliance certification.
I don't even know what my point is here, other than that these guys is crazy...
Stadiums for Everyone!
Well, the VIkings' stadium deal is still in its infancy, but the Gophers and Twins are crowning as we speak. Though the Senate shifted around the Gopher stadium plans a bit, (removing the student fee and nixing TCF Bank's $35 naming rights contribution) it is still on track at the very same moment that a Twins stadium bill's passing is looking all but inevitable. I think we can probably call all three of these projects likely, which is exciting news. The Cities had to spruce up their sports infrastructure a bit both for the purposes of major events like the NCAA tournament and the Super Bowl and to, y'know, retain their teams in an era of bazillion dollar excesses on major sports venues. The price tag? $790 million for the Vikes, $522 million for the Twinkies (half a bill and no retractable roof?) and $248 million for Goldie to go toe-to-toe with the newer stadii of the Big 10; silly money, to be sure, but the resulting facilities, and the possibility of Hennepin County pursuing its imagined urban village in the footprint of the Huhuhu Metrodome, make the deal(s) too good to pass up. FYI- The Representative sleeping through the meeting on the allocation of a half a billion dollars is Representive David Dill (DFL-Crane Lake).
Foreign Policy magazine has a blog, with an interesting bit about the Maoist threat...to India, part of their Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2005:
Consistently outwitting and overwhelming Indian police forces, Indian Maoists, also known as Naxalites, have taken control of large chunks of territory in several eastern and southern Indian states, such as Orissa and Andhra Pradesh.
They add:
Many Indian analysts have long been distressed by the central government's indifference to the problem, leaving it to the ill-armed and corrupt state police forces. But New Delhi, now led by Manmohan Singh's government can no longer ignore the insurgency that is growing in strength. Combined with Kashmir and sporadic sectarian violence between Hindus and Muslims, the internal security problem is really serious.
This is interesting because it shows how less-than-unitary such a huge place as India can be – and it shows that a more complex model than traditional International Relations unitary state "Realism" is necessary to look at these things. It also reminds me of a certain stubborn Tamil nationalist who would remind us all where things really stood between Indian ethnicities... Photo from the Wikipedia entry on Naxalites.
The IMF is supposed to fix major trade imbalances now.
AIPAC case: Condi Rice denies that she leaked the same variety of classified information to AIPAC lobbyists as Larry Franklin. They are trying to get people to believe that "everyone does it", trading secret government deliberations among the right-wing foreign lobbies in DC. I wish I was a powerful rightwing foreign lobby, then everyone would kiss my ass!!
Not international but fun! Joementum evaporating: more and more people are pissed at Joe Lieberman for fucking over the Democrats constantly. His indicators are falling among independents, as well. It is entirely possible that Lamont will steal the Democratic primary nomination from him, which is basically unheard of. Hit up the Lamont Blog for more on the insurgency against this p0nk.
William Arkin at the Washington Post blog Early Warning is coming up with a lot of goods on upcoming Iran madness, but he thinks its kinda funny how he has personally been pegged as a conspirator for Global Zionism, the left, right, neocons, who knows what. He's got some cool stuff about how some damn defense contractor is going to be paid to cough up terror warnings because the government is pathologically retarded:
The database is produced by IntelCenter, one of a cottage industry that has sprung up since the early 1990's to feed at the counter-terrorism trough. According to the group's website, the IntelCenter's "primary client base is comprised of military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the US and other allied countries around the world."
Space Command wants to obtain 20 licenses to the IntelCenter's U.S. Government Terrorism Threat Intelligence Package ($1650.00 per license according to the IntelCenter website).
This database, according to Space Command, includes "weekly and or real time email notifications of all significant terrorist, rebel group and other related activity, including bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, significant dates, threats and organizational changes within groups." IntelCenter will also provide warnings relating to "developments concerning intelligence agencies around the world including operational issues, organizational developments, new initiatives, espionage trials, new technologies and other related issues." And finally, IntelCenter will receive "real-time dissemination of raw statements, fatwas, announcements, and other messages directly from terrorist, rebel, extremist, and other organizations themselves."
The immediate question is: isn't this what all of these new "long war" commands and reorganized and beefed-up intelligence agencies with all of their new databases and data mining and authorities supposed to do? Okay, by government standards, $32,000 annually is petty cash. But there must be dozens of additional agencies and commands buying the IntelCenter product and hundreds if not thousands of licenses paid for with your and my tax dollars.
Everyone senses that we have a contractor crisis in our national security community, too many contractors acting like wild west prospectors in Iraq and the Middle East, contractors doing what we used to think of as "mission essential" jobs in headquarters and agencies.
Right on dude, right on.
Special Operations command, SOCOM, is apparently the new heart of the "war on terror" and there are all kinds of plans getting put together to shift intelligence and shadowy combat type stuff into SOCOM - and also, a decisive shift to allow military operations without an ambassador's approval. Are they also coordinating Psychological Operations such as Zarqawi "letters?" (More on that in a bit, we do have a couple goodies...)
WaPo: New Plans Foresee Fighting Terrorism Beyond War Zones
Pentagon to Rely on Special Operations By Ann Scott Tyson Sunday, April 23, 2006; Page A01
Details of the plans are secret, but in general they envision a significantly expanded role for the military -- and, in particular, a growing force of elite Special Operations troops -- in continuous operations to combat terrorism outside of war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Developed over about three years by the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in Tampa, the plans reflect a beefing up of the Pentagon's involvement in domains traditionally handled by the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department.
For example, SOCOM has dispatched small teams of Army Green Berets and other Special Operations troops to U.S. embassies in about 20 countries in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America, where they do operational planning and intelligence gathering to enhance the ability to conduct military operations where the United States is not at war. [orwellian phrase of the day]
And in a subtle but important shift contained in a classified order last year, the Pentagon gained the leeway to inform -- rather than gain the approval of -- the U.S. ambassador before conducting military operations in a foreign country, according to several administration officials. "We do not need ambassador-level approval," said one defense official familiar with the order.
This plan details "what terrorists or bad guys we would hit if the gloves came off. The gloves are not off," said one official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject..... Special Operations Command, led by Gen. Doug Brown, has been building up its headquarters and writing the plans since 2003, when Rumsfeld first designated it as the lead command for the war on terrorism. Its budget has grown 60 percent since 2003 to $8 billion in fiscal 2007. President Bush empowered the 53,000-strong command with coordinating the entire military's efforts in counterterrorism in 2004.
"SOCOM is, in fact, in charge of the global war on terror," Brown said in testimony before the House last month. In this role, SOCOM directs and coordinates actions by the military's regional combatant commands. SOCOM, if directed, can also command its own counterterrorist operations -- such as when a threat spans regional boundaries or the mission is highly sensitive -- but it has not done so yet...
Stratfor: US is planning post-Musharraf Pakistan: Arkin has some goods on a planned spring offensive against Taliban-style guys in Pakistan, but alarmingly, The Pakistan Daily Times reports:
April 21, 2006: US now viewing Pakistan without Musharraf: Stratfor | By Khalid Hasan
There are indications that the Bush administration is now imagining a Pakistan without Gen Pervez Musharraf, according to Stratfor, an American news and analysis service.
In two commentaries in the wake of Richard Boucher’s April 5 statement in Islamabad about America wishing to see the ascendancy of civilian rule in Pakistan, Stratfor says this shift in Washington’s thinking will create further domestic problems for the Pakistani leader, since his political opponents view the US statements as a signal to intensify their efforts to oust him. The analysis also noted US National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley’s comment that the Bush administration will work with Musharraf to ensure that Pakistan’s 2007 elections are “ free and fair,” as well as Condoleezza Rice’s congressional testimony earlier this month.
“These statements from the highest echelons of the Bush administration illustrate that the United States is no longer fixated on supporting Musharraf,” says Stratfor. “This is probably because Musharraf’s usefulness to the United States is fast becoming negligible. The principal reason the Bush administration supported the Musharraf regime was due to Pakistan’s critical role in the US-jihadist war. It would appear Washington believes it does not need Musharraf at the helm for the United States to continue to prosecute its struggle against militant Islamism, and no longer believes the Pakistani state would collapse without Musharraf. Moreover, the Bush administration likely feels Musharraf is no longer able to keep domestic affairs in order, and sees pinning Washington’s entire Pakistan policy on one individual as a liability. Thus, Washington has decided to put some distance between itself and the Pakistani president.”
The analysis cautioned that this does not mean that Washington would like to see Musharraf ousted. Instead, it reflects a decision to initiate a contingency plan to avoid being caught off guard in light of political instability in Pakistan in the months ahead. Not supporting Musharraf the way it has before will allow Washington to ascertain potential alternative political players capable of stepping in and filling the void in the event Musharraf is no longer able to maintain his position.
On the other hand, if they bomb Iran, well Pakistan will probably get all fucked up, and we better rationalize that chaos now, hadn't we?
Want to see what Iranians are saying about the whole situation? Check out the Iran Defence Forum. With such speculation as will the usa use ground forces in war against iran? Check out, if you will, the thread about "the true iran and its people," a collection of snapshots of what looks like a frickin sweet civilization with lots of beautiful women.
Note that they wear funny hats in their legislature. The "hat problem" has been the secret root of a great many conflicts.
Alright, I think we can all pretty much agree that Tehran is the Central Asian version of Manhattan + Paris. That's all for now.......
Big Poppa Doom informed everyone that, in a handy and expedient combination of Apocalyptic middle eastern wars and invisible men with booming voices, God is determining our foreign policy. What could go wrong? Catch the video. Editor&Publisher and the WaPo on it.
Bush: I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true. One, I believe there's an Almighty. And, secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody's soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free.
Also the following statement:
One decision he questions: After the successful invasion, "preparing an Iraqi army for an external threat. Well, it turns out there may have been an external threat but it's nothing compared to the internal threat." He did not explain what external threat the Iraqis were being trained for.
FDA 420 political diktat: Last week the FDA published a fancy condemnation of marijuana medical studies -- and in an odd example of a federal bureaucracy trying to dictate rules to state legislatures, condemned efforts at the state level to reform marijuana laws. It's kind of improper for federal agencies to order state legislatures to Jump. Scientific American on it, and here's the FDA statement.
As more than a few people are noticing these days, this is another example of fake politicized science, like ordering NASA scientists to shut up about global warming (read the damn NASA memo). (don't forget that national parks are falling apart and of course the government doesn't care about global warming) Go hang out at smokedot to compensate, and don't forget all those tax dollars flushed down the toilet for the war on drugs.
Net Neutrality: Couple more articles about the impending cancellation of the internet's egalitarian structure. Fortunately, Nancy Pelosi is supporting an amendment that would save Net Neutrality. You can become a "citizen co-sponsor" about it here. The attempt to fix it is called the Markey Amendment. Despite having a serious uphill battle, the word seems to be spreading:
We now have over 75 coalition partners, everyone from the Parents Television Council to the Texas Internet Service Provider’s Association to Consumer Action, and the blogosphere is on fire. We launched yesterday, and net neutrality is just blowing up.
Comic book collectors, video gamers, librarians, hip hop sites, music fans, more video gamers, designers, small business owners, and nonprofits have heard of the issue and are very angry at the telecom cartel’s move.
And now the tech companies have chimed in with Don’t Mess with the Net.
Iraq for Sale: The liberal documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed and others) is working on a new film, Iraq for Sale, about corrupt defense contractors, in time for the election this fall. However, they are trying to get $50 donations to finance production. I advised them that the trailer on their website doesn't seem to work on Mac.
Air Force censors liberal websites: According to someone at the DailyKos, the Air Force is blocking the DailyKos, Atrios Eschaton and TalkingPointsMemo. The roughly equivalent (although more hateful, I would say) rightwing sites FreeRepublic and LittleGreenFootballs are not blocked. More on this. If you are in the military and are trying to circumvent ideologically tainted censorship, try these tips on Peacefire. You can see if a program called SmartFilter is blocking URLs here (we are classed as "personal pages"). There is something odd about how the Air Force seems to be the most fundamentalist branch of the military.
It is also interesting that Armed Forces Radio is extremely tilted towards rightwing commentary that is rebroadcast from civilian sources. It's like 90% conservative. More on Armed Forces Radio bias here and here. This has bad effects, wherein for example, Rush Limbaugh tells soldiers through Armed Forces Radio that the Abu Ghraib torture was basically acceptable to "blow some steam off".
This website is clearly not blocked at many military installations, including the Air Force. However, I have also been sent screenshots of this site being blocked on military internet at a particular place that I won't elaborate on.
MZM meta-scandal: Corrupt defense contractor trying to start a war in Iran, and pretty much everything else too:
Disgraced defense contractor planned to promote democracy in Iran: March 24
By Warren P. Strobel - Knight Ridder
WASHINGTON - In a new example of disgraced defense contractor Mitchell Wade's attempts to exert influence in Washington and beyond, Wade and two business partners formed a nonprofit group in 2004 to promote democracy in Iran, according to documents and interviews.
Wade and the two partners, who have been large contributors to Republican political campaigns, formed the Iranian Democratization Foundation in April 2004, according to incorporation papers filed in Washington.
....In November 2004, Congress approved spending $3 million to promote democracy in Iran. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last month asked Congress for a large boost in funding, to $75 million. Behrooz Behbudi, who helped incorporate the foundation, said in a telephone interview that Wade "was supposed to get funds from the Congress" for the project. The two later fell out over business dealings in Iraq, Behbudi said.
Wade, who headed contractor MZM Inc., pleaded guilty last month to bribery-related charges and making illegal campaign contributions. His chief congressional patron, former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, pleaded guilty in November to taking bribes. Wade's dealings, which include contracts MZM received from Pentagon intelligence agencies, are under investigation.
MZM is a fun one. It is interesting how there are so many scandals around Washington, they sort of blend into and overlap each other. MZM was one of Duke Cunningham's corrupt companies, but in the Jack-Abramoff-of-all-trades go-get-em style of DC operators, MZM shadiness has also been a major cause of Katherine Harris' Senate campaign disintegration in Florida, and MZM contractors helped cover up the fake Iraq intelligence in one of the Congressional investigations, by working for the Silberman-Robb Commission for WMD Whitewashing, as TPMmuckrakers have dug up. Isn't DC great? The muckies also said that MZM helped select bombing targets early in the Iraq war:
In addition to its work at CENTCOM, MZM is known to have had contracts to support CIFA, the Pentagon's domestic spying operation; the FBI's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force; the Department of Energy's Counterintelligence Office; the White House's Robb-Silberman Commission to study WMD intelligence; the Homeland Security Department's watch center; and the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center.
Check out PrivateForces.com for more on privatized military firms, the sector of the economy that's gonna eat all the others.
Gas Temperature Map: You gotta check this out. It's getting hot out there.
Another great moment for freedom. Sit back, have a couple shots, and use the power of your Imagineering (© Disney Corp), for a world where only your own ass can be Xeroxed™ is coming. It will be a federal crime to tell someone how to break a DMCA-protected copyright technology. This would also make it illegal to get rid of that Sony Audio CD rootkit thing. If the new expansion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act goes through Congress, we're pretty much all as fucked as the undocumented migrants -- if by fucked, you mean, federal criminals. And computers could be seized DEA-drugbust style.
Another tech story (which I shoulda mentioned a while ago) is the potential splitting of the Internet's egalitarian structure into a kind of tiered fee or other privileged system. One of the Internet's core design principles is called "net neutrality", which basically means your residential ISP can't allocate bandwidth unfairly to websites you visit. Nor can they try to jam Internet-based phone services. But net neutrality is also about to fall apart due to a bill in the Congress from Hell. Watch the Net Neutrality Video to see how it works. See SaveTheInternet.com. More on it here and here. Even the Gun Owners of America want to save net neutrality!
These bills are coasting through a Congress that is messed up in every way, but still willing to go with Big Media to buy themselves some breathing room. It is pretty shitty that both the new DMCA and the Net Neutrality bills are totally off the media radar because -- guess what? Vested interests from CNN on down want to make more money for their digital cable services, and of course thoroughly terrorize all those fucking movie and music downloading kids.
Gee, do I smell information warfare?
CNET: Congress readies broad new digital copyright bill
By Declan McCullagh
Story last modified Mon Apr 24 10:28:06 PDT 2006
For the last few years, a coalition of technology companies, academics and computer programmers has been trying to persuade Congress to scale back the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Now Congress is preparing to do precisely the opposite. A proposed copyright law seen by CNET News.com would expand the DMCA's restrictions on software that can bypass copy protections and grant federal police more wiretapping and enforcement powers.
The draft legislation, created by the Bush administration and backed by Rep. Lamar Smith, already enjoys the support of large copyright holders such as the Recording Industry Association of America. Smith, a Texas Republican, is the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees intellectual-property law.
A spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee said Friday that the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2006 is expected to "be introduced in the near future." Beth Frigola, Smith's press secretary, added Monday that Wisconsin Republican F. James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the full House Judiciary Committee, will be leading the effort.
"The bill as a whole does a lot of good things," said Keith Kupferschmid, vice president for intellectual property and enforcement at the Software and Information Industry Association in Washington, D.C. "It gives the (Justice Department) the ability to do things to combat IP crime that they now can't presently do."
During a speech in November, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales endorsed the idea and said at the time that he would send Congress draft legislation. Such changes are necessary because new technology is "encouraging large-scale criminal enterprises to get involved in intellectual-property theft," Gonzales said, adding that proceeds from the illicit businesses are used, "quite frankly, to fund terrorism activities." [i.e. the Al Qaeda branch of LimeWire]
The 24-page bill is a far-reaching medley of different proposals cobbled together. One would, for instance, create a new federal crime of just trying to commit copyright infringement. Such willful attempts at piracy, even if they fail, could be punished by up to 10 years in prison.
It also represents a political setback for critics of expanding copyright law, who have been backing federal legislation that veers in the opposite direction and permits bypassing copy protection for "fair use" purposes. That bill--introduced in 2002 by Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat--has been bottled up in a subcommittee ever since.
A DMCA dispute
But one of the more controversial sections may be the changes to the DMCA. Under current law, Section 1201 of the law generally prohibits distributing or trafficking in any software or hardware that can be used to bypass copy-protection devices. (That section already has been used against a Princeton computer science professor, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov and a toner cartridge remanufacturer.)
Smith's measure would expand those civil and criminal restrictions. Instead of merely targeting distribution, the new language says nobody may "make, import, export, obtain control of, or possess" such anticircumvention tools if they may be redistributed to someone else.
"It's one degree more likely that mere communication about the means of accomplishing a hack would be subject to penalties," said Peter Jaszi, who teaches copyright law at American University and is critical of attempts to expand it.
Even the current wording of the DMCA has alarmed security researchers. Ed Felten, the Princeton professor, told the Copyright Office last month that he and a colleague were the first to uncover the so-called "rootkit" on some Sony BMG Music Entertainment CDs--but delayed publishing their findings for fear of being sued under the DMCA. A report prepared by critics of the DMCA says it quashes free speech and chokes innovation.
The SIIA's Kupferschmid, though, downplayed concerns about the expansion of the DMCA. "We really see this provision as far as any changes to the DMCA go as merely a housekeeping provision, not really a substantive change whatsoever," he said. "They're really to just make the definition of trafficking consistent throughout the DMCA and other provisions within copyright law uniform."
The SIIA's board of directors includes Symantec, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Intuit and Red Hat.
Jessica Litman, who teaches copyright law at Wayne State University, views the DMCA expansion as more than just a minor change. "If Sony had decided to stand on its rights and either McAfee or Norton Antivirus had tried to remove the rootkit from my hard drive, we'd all be violating this expanded definition," Litman said. [Your computer would belong to them! Nice.]
The proposed law scheduled to be introduced by Rep. Smith also does the following:
• Permits wiretaps in investigations of copyright crimes, trade secret theft and economic espionage. It would establish a new copyright unit inside the FBI and budgets $20 million on topics including creating "advanced tools of forensic science to investigate" copyright crimes.
• Amends existing law to permit criminal enforcement of copyright violations even if the work was not registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
• Boosts criminal penalties for copyright infringement originally created by the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 from five years to 10 years (and 10 years to 20 years for subsequent offenses). The NET Act targets noncommercial piracy including posting copyrighted photos, videos or news articles on a Web site if the value exceeds $1,000.
• Creates civil asset forfeiture penalties for anything used in copyright piracy. Computers or other equipment seized must be "destroyed" or otherwise disposed of, for instance at a government auction. Criminal asset forfeiture will be done following the rules established by federal drug laws.
• Says copyright holders can impound "records documenting the manufacture, sale or receipt of items involved in" infringements.
Jason Schultz, a staff attorney at the digital-rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the recording industry would be delighted to have the right to impound records. In a piracy lawsuit, "they want server logs," Schultz said. "They want to know every single person who's ever downloaded (certain files)--their IP addresses, everything."
(the entire article has been copied for ironic value, which was a part of "fair use" in the 20th century)
WASHINGTON TIMES: CIA mines 'rich' content from blogs
By Bill Gertz April 19, 2006
President Bush and U.S. policy-makers are receiving more intelligence from open sources such as Internet blogs and foreign newspapers than they previously did, senior intelligence officials said.
The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin.
"A lot of blogs now have become very big on the Internet, and we're getting a lot of rich information on blogs that are telling us a lot about social perspectives and everything from what the general feeling is to ... people putting information on there that doesn't exist anywhere else," Mr. Naquin told The Washington Times.
I'm gonna throw some random stuff at you. It's not a waste of time to look at, but it won't tell you one coherent story, so much as some shades of what went down over the last week while I was wrapped up in all the Macalester festivities... which I will elaborate on later.
Tony Snow for WH press sec.?: Lying water carrier for Republicans + doesn't stammer or sweat so much == why not? Tony Snow's many lies make him an unacceptable press sec'y
New protest album: NEIL YOUNG - Living With War, reviewed positively. Won't be in stores until the beginning of May, but online purchases later this week.
A.Norman sends along the following cartoon:
Spam keywords auto-pass NSA filter?: The odd internet journalist Wayne Madsen offered that
April 20, 2006 -- Beating Bush's NSA e-mail surveillance simple. According to NSA sources, there is a simple method to avoid having one's e-mail captured by NSA Internet filters that have been installed within major Internet exchanges, such as the AT&T facility in San Francisco, which is the subject of a class action suit against AT&T. By typing "Viagra" or "Cialis" in the message text, the filters will automatically identify the e-mail as spam and ignore it. The e-mail could contain the words "Al Qaeda" or "Bin Laden," but as long as Viagra or Cialis are also contained in the text, the e-mail will pass through the filters without being intercepted.
(Madsen's site design now looks much better, BTW)
Execrable writing: Powerline has an odd poop fetish. They use 'execrable' to describe everyone from Rybak to Kofi. I will have to remember to give Scott Johnson a wedgie when I see him.
Earth Day: This House site is fucking crazy: On Earth Day website, House Republican Committee seeks to 'dispel environmental myths'. Really crazy.
Time to kiss some Caucasian ass as the rather autocratic president of Azerbaijan visits the White House. Bush still claims that final Iraq war decisions happened after an ultimatum. Rolling Stone features: is Bush the worst President in History?
A really long article in the American Prospect (a liberal mag) about how the Democrats need to find some values and stuff. It may have been a good article but it was too long even for me.
If you have an online group, try Frappr to map them globally.
Rice is getting roped into AIPAC case: A lot seems to be transpiring in the AIPAC case for this summer, and we'll have to dig into the AIPAC angle a lot later. But for now, AP reports:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice leaked national defense information to a pro-Israel lobbyist in the same manner that landed a lower-level Pentagon official a 12-year prison sentence, the lobbyist's lawyer said Friday.
Goss CIA analyst crackdown: RawStory: The CIA announced today that it has fired an employee for leaking classified information to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest. Also a big story in the NY Times on it. Pretty fucked up. Juan Cole compares how in DC these days, it is good to leak Valerie Plame's name, but bad to inform the American public about a network of secret prisons in eastern Europe.
Secret torture flights: There is a global shadow detention gulag of sorts, and all kinds of rumors about it around the Internet. Perhaps we'll stir up a little trouble later with some of those exotic stories, but in the meantime consider: Amnesty International claims CIA used private airlines to hide CIA torture flights (from a couple weeks ago).
Apple lawyers say blogs not journalism: Apple is trying to sue some blogger-type guy at PowerPage.org and say he's not a journalist with journalist-style credentials because of a story about Apple developing a consumer-oriented Firewire-based GarageBand music interface - codenamed 'Asteroid' according to AppleInsider.
Corporate dudes are suing against NSA wiretaps along with the ACLU. NSA wiretaps were a prominent part of Sunday's West Wing episode, wherein President-elect Santos calls up the Chinese premier to do some saber rattling over Kazakhstan – I don't know why the hell Bartlett, or anyone, would place thousands of US troops between the Russian and Chinese armies, but to the West Wing's credit, Santos doesn't like it either.
I loathe that Clifford May and his neocon ways. But "What to make of the anti-antis?" is a pretty sublime exercise in Orwellian labeling and slanders. Also the Zarqawi psyops story makes an angular appearance I don't really understand – but it appears that he supports the psyops because it manipulates perceptions against "anti-antis"... WTF?
The media, too, have more than their share of anti-antis, and I'm not talking here only about the left-wing blogs that compare President Bush unfavorably to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Recently, the top story on the Washington Post's front page was headlined: "Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi: Jordanian Painted as Foreign Threat to Iraq's Stability."
Is there anyone -- even Ward Churchill -- who would argue that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the commander of Al-Qaida in Iraq, is not a "foreign threat to Iraq's stability"?
A seemingly more cogent reason for the Post to object to what it blasts as a U.S. military propaganda campaign: An American colonel is quoted as saying that Zarqawi and other "foreign insurgents" are only "a very small part of the actual numbers" of those fighting Iraqi government forces and the American-led coalition.
The Moussaoui case distracts from profound problems in the legal system that need to get unraveled.
Is Bush ripping Beatles onto his iPod? The RIAA is arguing in court that turning your own CDs into MP3s is not fair use, which is insane. But since you can't buy Beatles digitally at all, this means that Bush must have been ripping them. Should the RIAA bust his yarblockoes? Well as this guy says, "They nailed Al Capone for tax evasion, didn't they?"
Boston Globe says Bloggers fanning the controversy over Rumsfeld. Describing a few milblogs, the blogs in turn hasten to redefine themselves. I am in favor of military blogs, as they open new and interesting channels of information. Among those mentioned: COUNTERCOLUMN: All your bias are belong to us, and Guidons. OPFOR is apparently the standard bearer these days. Is it part of military.com? Features such bits as "Somalia Remains Free of US Imperialism, Food, Laws, Prosperity, Peace…" under the category "The Long War." Real progressive. The mil blog wire is an aggregator which looks interesting.
The Blackwater lawsuit: Those Defense contractor guys hung on the bridge probably shouldn't have been in Fallujah -- but can their widows sue over it? After the Fallujah hangings, did Blackwater cover up their own negligence and fake documents to protect their Pentagon contract? More on it here in the DailyKos. In the broader context, it's evidence that these private companies treat their employees like shit while causing the military industrial complex to spiral out of control:
The Nation: Blood Is Thicker Than Blackwater by JEREMY SCAHILL [from the May 8, 2006 issue]
It is one of the most infamous incidents of the war in Iraq: On March 31, 2004, four private American security contractors get lost and end up driving through the center of Falluja, a hotbed of Sunni resistance to the US occupation. Shortly after entering the city, they get stuck in traffic, and their small convoy is ambushed. Several armed men approach the two vehicles and open fire from behind, repeatedly shooting the men at point-blank range. Within moments, their bodies are dragged from the vehicles and a crowd descends on them, tearing them to pieces. Eventually, their corpses are chopped and burned. The remains of two of the men are strung up on a bridge over the Euphrates River and left to dangle. The gruesome image is soon beamed across the globe.
In the Oval Office the killings were taken as "a challenge to America's resolve," according to the Los Angeles Times. President Bush issued a statement through his spokesperson. "We will not be intimidated," he said. "We will finish the job." Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt vowed, "We will be back in Falluja.... We will hunt down the criminals.... It's going to be deliberate. It will be precise, and it will be overwhelming." Within days of the ambush, US forces laid siege to Falluja, beginning what would be one of the most brutal and sustained US operations of the occupation.
.....
Shortly after Helvenston left that message, the men left the base and set out for their destination. Without a detailed map, they took the most direct route, through the center of Falluja. According to Callahan, there was a safer alternative route that went around the city, which the men were unaware of because of Blackwater's failure to conduct a "risk assessment" before the trip, as mandated by the contract. The suit alleges that the four men should have had a chance to gather intelligence and familiarize themselves with the dangerous routes they would be traveling. This was not done, according to Miles, "so as to pad Blackwater's bottom line" and to impress ESS with Blackwater's efficiency in order to win more contracts. The suit also alleges that McQuown "intentionally refused to allow the Blackwater security contractors to conduct" ride-alongs with the teams they were replacing from Control Risk Group. (In fact, the suit contends that Blackwater "fabricated critical documents" and "created" a pre-trip risk assessment "after this deadly ambush occurred.")
AP: Israel Preparing to Retake Gaza Strip. Probably saber rattling, but the situation is getting really bad. Some other newsbits:
Senate Bill Shorts Gear for Troops By ANDREW TAYLOR, AP Thu Apr 20, 3:46 PM ET
WASHINGTON - A Senate measure to fund the war in Iraq would chop money for troops' night vision equipment and new battle vehicles but add $230 million for a tilt-rotor aircraft that has already cost $18 billion and is still facing safety questions.
Kyrgyz Leader Threatens to Expel US Troops By KADYR TOKTOGULOV , 04.19.2006, 10:36 PM
Kyrgyzstan's president threatened Wednesday to expel U.S. troops if the United States does not agree by June 1 to pay more for stationing forces in the Central Asian nation.
Some random DailyKos goodies: What is the 'center' in American politics? What of the innocent people in Guantanamo? (and what of that Abbasi guy?) Are we becoming the Republic of Gilead?
Some random Israel goodies: "We could lose the next war" - an interview with idiosyncratic Likud hawk Yuval Steinitz, wherein he suggests that the Israeli military leads its government, not vice versa. Really interesting stuff. He is also paranoid about Egypt. Editorial: The UN versus Hezbollah. Hebron settlers assault two female international aid workers. I had some more links but they disappeared because of that damn Haaretz auto-reload thing.
I promise that the Big Lebowski-themed Iran exegesis is on its way. It's a new week now... Gotta get real before oil goes $80+/barrel.....
From the Desk of Leroy Babolian:
If this letter reaches you, it is likely that I am already dead. After careful deliberation, I have chosen the only operative in my stable of practitioners of the deadly arts capable of conducting the most daring mission yet planned in the history of the battle between good and evil: myself. Once again, I put myself in harm’s way, the ritual of taping my fists and feet for battle my only comfort in the face of almost certain annihilation. Despair not, though, dear friend, for though I may well die, I shall die executing my grandest design yet; a strike upon the rotten core of the forces of evil and iniquity in this world, a draining of the swamps of injustice in the name of the grasslands of righteousness.
Yes, my sweet compatriots, though there is no hope for me, I am undaunted. You see, in my training, I have subjugated fear completely, transforming it from enemy to ally like the pharaohs of Egypt’s land did so many crocodiles, pandas and lions. Fear is now a weapon in my scabbard, honed to a glistening sheen and beautiful in its lethal architectonics. I shall strike with both blades of my fearsome implement, fending off crashing tsunamis of feculent enmity with the twinned pair of strength and justice.
Tomorrow, at daybreak, I shall leave the sewers of this vulgar, sprawling megalopolis. By high noon, the combat prowess that I have spent so many countless hours honing will either have gained me entry into the hushed halls of insidious influence or failed me, leaving my broken, easily disposed-of body as the only testament to the great reserves of courage and self-sacrifice that drove me to attempt such a fool’s errand.
Wish me luck, dear chum, for I will need every ounce I can get.
Goodbye,
Leroy.
Afghan poppy growers want protection from Cdn forces
Richard Foot, CanWest News Service
Published: Tuesday, April 18, 2006
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- A large group of Afghan poppy farmers has handed Canadian soldiers an unusual offer, pledging not to grow the illicit flowers next year if they're allowed to harvest their poppy crop this year with no interference from Afghan officials intent on smashing the country's opium trade.
More than 15 village elders, representing hundreds of local farmers, recently made the plea to soldiers at Canada's remote firebase near the town of Gombad, in the rugged countryside north of Kandahar.
"They're afraid of the government plowing up their fields," said Maj. Kirk Gallinger, who commands a company of Edmonton-based troops trying to fight the Taliban and bring security to the district around Gombad.
"They came and asked us to support them, and to pass on a request to the (Afghan) government not to eradicate their crops this year. In return, they'll pledge not to grow any poppies next year."
OPIATES FOR THE MASSES == VICTORY!!!
For 4/20, the Cheeba organization at Macalester College is throwing a CHEEBAdanza for Social Justice at 4:20 PM. However, the student organizers, who tried to coordinate over weeks with the school administration, late in the evening of the 19th, suddenly found themselves apparently without festival approval after a surprise meeting with administration personnel. However, as of this late hour in the A.M., the event is still listed on the online events calendar:
It seems that the administration is trying to pull the plug after a rather boisterous article in the Pioneer Press Wednesday (also picked up in KR's Duluth paper). There is a lot on the line at Mac today, as the disappointed and angry students who have worked for weeks to pull together an elaborate festival that was (is?) set to include several bands, a comedy routine, the African Music Ensemble, a 100-pound roasted pig, juggling, a bouncy castle, and fire throwers.
The Pioneer Press story which alarmed the administration, although evidently they have been getting pressure from all sorts of sources, including faxed copies of their fliers, from the U and other schools:
It's, like, a pot fest, dude
The CHEEBA Club's celebration of marijuana is 'part entertainment (free food and dodge ball), but it's also about social justice.'
BY MATT PEIKEN Pioneer Press Apr. 19
So, like, check this out.
These dudes at Macalester College are throwing this righteous party Thursday. They're calling it CHEEBAdanza — "the Twin Cities premier marijuana festival." Says so right on the green flier. This isn't one of those mediocre pot fests — it's A-grade all the way.
Excellent.
First of all, OK, you have the date, right? Thursday, April 20. That's 4/20. And you know the party starts at 4:20 p.m. That's the legendary tokin' hour, my friends.
So anyway, there's gonna be all kinds of free munchies and jam bands playing on the Old Main Lawn, probably well past 7, and they promise, somehow, to parade up Grand Avenue to Fairview Avenue to Summit Avenue and back to Grand.
"It's pretty short. We're pretty lazy about these kinda things," said Spencer Edelman, a Macalester senior from Boulder, Colo., and a festival co-founder. "Marching long ways isn't really our thing."
No worries.
Just even having the festival, man, it's like, how'd you pull this off? Turns out Edelman and his buddy Reid Lustig and some other Macalester dude — think his name is Stefan — two years ago formed an official campus CHEEBA Club (Creating a Harmless Environment to Enjoy Buds Appropriately).
Kofi Annan himself is coming to speak this weekend, and Springfest, on Friday, is only a half-day long – which is part of the reason that the festival was widely supported for Thursday.
I will have to go see what is going on with this scene tomorrow. Obviously, it would be a shame to let yet another Macalester event die a swift and brutal death. What will happen? Will an army of stoners be cast out? Will Macalester's spirit finally wither and die, or rise again like the phoenix? Will security clear the green space? Was the Constitution written on hemp?
Can this be spun into a public relations victory and some spiritual relief at the same time? Or is everything these days doomed to end in disaster?
Craigslist: 4/20: CHEEBADANZA---Marijuana Re-Legalize Festival
CHEEBADANZA, a free marijuana re-legalization festival open to the public will commence at Macalester College on April 20th at 4:00 pm
St. Paul, Minn. –Hundreds, if not thousands of community members are expected to congregate at the Macalester College campus on April 20th at 4:00 pm for the 2nd annual CHEEBADANZA, a free and inclusive concert celebration in support of the re-legalization of marijuana.
CHEEBA (Creating a Harmless Environment to Enjoy Buds Appropriately), is hosting this event in collaboration with Minnesota NORML and numerous other social justice organizations located in the Twin Cities.
“CHEEBA consistently creates memorable moments that we can share with all our buds in the context of social justice” organizer Cameron Garcia said.
Homegrown musical talent will entertain the crowds starting at 4:15. The bill currently includes headliner Possibly Bailey with support from The Suspects, Scholax and Boxhead, Kontrast and Outside the Bachs. During a brief intermission, there will be a quick, peaceful march along Grand Avenue in St. Paul at 4:40. Activists will return to Macalester’s campus for more music and plenty of free food until 7:00.
Other fun and games include horseshoes, a dodge ball tournament, four-square, lawn bowling and an inflatable bouncy castle. Tentative plans also incorporate a pig roast and bonfire.
By demonstrating that people who smoke marijuana and people who do not smoke marijuana can have fun together in peace and solidarity, CHEEBADANZA shows that legally restricting marijuana enjoyment is cruel and unnecessary. This entire event is free and open to all supporters of the cause in the metropolitan area.
CHEEBA (Creating a Harmless Environment to Enjoy Buds Appropriately), is a popular and influential student group funded by Macalester College since 2004.
email cheeba@macalester.edu
Few parts of Iraq are stable, report finds
By Eric Schmitt and Edward Wong
The New York Times (April 9)
WASHINGTON — An internal staff report by the U.S. Embassy and military command in Baghdad provides a snapshot of Iraq's political, economic and security situation in each of the 18 provinces, rating overall stability of six provinces "serious," one as "critical" and only three as "stable."
As everyone knows there has been a burst of rebellion among the retired generals' ranks, as lots of them have suddenly spilled out to criticize the staggering incompetence of dear Rummy. NY Times: As Policy Decisions Loom, a Code of Silence is Broken. While this seems to be a good airing of serious grievances that could finally kill the old snake, one DKos contributor suggests that a more outspoken military officer corps could, in the end, jeopardize civilian control.
Retired CIA dude (and Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson ally) Larry Johnson says on his blog No Quarter: Throwing Rummy from the Train:
Don Rumsfeld may want to stick it out, but stick a fork in him. His goose is cooked and his reign will soon be over.
Johnson also offers A) a fresh timeline of the Valerie Plame scandal; B) Tommy Franks apparently no longer believes Douglas Feith is the "fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth", but that's not too relevant right now.
Patrick Cockburn bravely reports from Iraq that the "Situation in Iraq could not be worse". The ugly predictions of a Saudi minister on how Iraq would spin apart have grimly come true, BBC reports.
Insurgents in Ramadi are clever. Huge surprise:
Ramadi Insurgents Develop Clever Tactics
By TODD PITMAN - The Associated Press
Sunday, April 9, 2006; 4:34 PM
RAMADI, Iraq -- On an eerie, battle-scarred street in this blown-out urban war zone, a mannequin with painted black hair stares silently at U.S. Marines hunkered down in sandbagged observation posts atop buildings a few blocks away.
....Insurgents in Ramadi recently have flown kites over U.S. troops to align mortar-fire, released pigeons to give away U.S. troop movements and staged attacks at fake funeral processions complete with rocket-stuffed coffins, U.S. forces deployed here say.
That apparently bore true one day last week, when an assault on Government Center - two mortars, two RPG rounds and some small arms fire - was preceded by a funeral announcement broadcast from minarets.
Goetz said insurgents in Ramadi have held full-blown funeral processions carrying a coffin through the streets. They set the coffin down behind a wall, whipped out assault rifles and rocket-launchers and began attacking U.S. positions, Goetz said.
Associated Press points out that perhaps American arms for Iraqi security orgs implicated in human rights violations might be illegal:
U.S. officials are doling out millions of dollars of arms and ammunition to Iraqi police units without safeguards required to ensure they are complying with American laws that ban taxpayer-financed assistance for foreign security forces engaged in human-rights violations, according to an internal State Department review.
The previously undisclosed review shows that officials failed to take steps to comply with the laws over the past two years, amid mounting reports of torture and murder by Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces. The review comes at a time when the U.S. military emphasis in Iraq has switched to training and equipping Iraqi forces to replace U.S. troops.
As Iraq slides deeper into sectarian violence, the performance of U.S.-supported Iraqi units could be crucial, because some are infiltrated by militias believed responsible for much of the current strife.
The laws in question are called the Leahy Amendments for their author, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Unless the administration reports to Congress that "effective measures" are being taken to bring abusers to justice, it is supposed to cut off support for any unit in a foreign security force whose members commit serious human-rights violations. Units also are supposed to be vetted before receiving assistance.
Nir Rosen is an extremely brave independent reporter who has been kicking around Iraq for a while. "On the Ground in Iraq: The roots of sectarian violence" is a very lengthy article that describes as well as anyone could the degenerating sectarian violence, the various political leaders that don't trust each other, a civilization shaking itself to pieces. I had trouble finding a quote to pull out, but this letter he got from a friend sums it pretty well:
I’m living here in the middle of shit, a civil war will happen I’m sure of it. People became more aggressive, in the way they talk, before they would care a little bit about Shia or Sunni, but now it is like you can’t be comfortable talking with a man until you know if he was Shia or Sunni, the situation is like this, and beside what do you need to start a civil war? Religious difference (Shia, Sunni), Weapons, Militias, Politicians don’t trust each other, People don’t trust each other, Seeking Revenge, Weak government, Separate regions for the opponents, some mixed regions from both with a lot of problems inside, Tribal feelings and loyalty. To be clear, now Shia are Iranians for the Sunni, and Sunni are Salafi terrorists for the Shia. We have a civil war here; it is only a matter of time, and some peppers to provoke it.
As always, Prof. Juan Cole's Informed Comment is the essential source for what is happening with the fucked-up attempts to generate a new Iraqi government. His stuff on the Valerie Plame scandal, including the recent Bush-classified-leak-thing is also helpful. Cole's little picture-based explanation of the flow of Niger forgeries is also really pretty nice. Cole advises that Muqtada al-Sadr is a "key to success in Iraq" and I would generally agree. Cole also had some sweet insights on the Zarqawi Pentagon propaganda scheme - I have to admit that my thinking on this has long been colored by his:
The over-emphasis on the role of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the US and even Iraqi press is the direct result of a concerted Department of Defense propaganda campaign, according to the Washington Post. Military correspondent Thomas Ricks writes, "Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist."
Long-time readers know that I have long railed against the "Zarqawi myth." (Click on the Billmon link for more). Mostly the US has been fighting Iraqi guerrillas, especially those with a background in the Fedayee Saddam, military intelligence, and the officer corps. Contrary to the fevered fantasies of VP Richard Bruce Cheney, the Baath regime was afraid of Zarqawi and once put out an APB on him when they thought he might have come into Iraq. Another piece of proof that propaganda usually betrays itself.
Ex-CIA analyst Mike Scheuer says Pakistan is being pushed to the brink: Don’t push Islamabad too far, ex-CIA official tells govt:
WASHINGTON, April 7: A former head of CIA’s Al Qaeda unit, and now a political analyst, has warned the Bush administration not to push Pakistan too much to do things that are against its national interests as it can lead to the collapse of a major US ally in South Asia.
In a hard-hitting opinion piece published in the Washington Times on Friday, Michael F. Scheuer, a 22-year CIA veteran, describes Pakistan as an ally that did far more and took more lethal risks to accomplish America’s ‘dirty work’ than any other of its allies, including all of Nato, in the war against al Qaedaism.
Mr Scheuer, who created and served as CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit head, says that while Pakistan’s internal political contradictions, economic problems and the Homeric venality of its politicians have (also) long caused a steady downward spiral, America’s shabby treatment of this close ally also had done a great harm. “US officials believe they can add untold pressures to the Pakistani leader’s burden and still find him eager to do America’s most important dirty work: Killing Osama bin Laden. Well, think again,” warns Mr Scheuer.
....“To date, Pakistan has lost more soldiers killed and wounded than the US-led coalition in Afghanistan. More dangerously, the offensives … are stoking the fires of a potential civil war between Islamabad and the Pashtun tribes that dominate much of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.”
That's all for now. Coming soon, a Big Lebowski-tinted explanation of what the fuck is happening with Iran. Walter is definitely agitated.
Mordred sent over a nice bit about what happens when some military guys at Ellsworth AFB test the emergency flame control foam in a hangar. And they lose control and can't shut it off, so the entire hangar fills up with foam. It's one of those things that would make working in the military really cool if there weren't any wars. Here's a writeup from the Air Force, wherein they claim that it was not an accident. Here is another place to see the photos at strategypage.com.
Also, on HumpingFrog.com, we find out why the occupation of Afghanistan continues: the weed is pretty good. The vast amounts of opium help, too.
Strange dream last night. I was hanging around at some house in Minneapolis and chillin with a few guys. Mike Flanagan was there, talking about how he'd been at some festival where things got crazy. He was doing all right, up to his usual thing. His voice is the same as ever, laughing about some dumb bastards.
You've been gone for a while, I say.
Just keepin' busy.
Yeah man, that's cool, it's great to have you back in town again.
The laugh was there, the sound of his voice. He, Blake and I plot to purchase a case of beer. Everything is perfectly normal, low keyed, another afternoon.
You pulled a fast one, man. People thought you were dead. It's sweet these things are reversible.
Mike shifts in the recliner, uneasy, looks at me with those piercing blue eyes. The rooms shimmers and dissolves.
My eyes open, back in the bedroom. I reach for my water. Before I can lay back down, reality kicks me. It's not reversible, it's a one-way flow.
I close my eyes but the scene doesn't come back.
Dammit, two things that can't be reversed. Death and taxes. I gotta mail the returns today. Fuck.
Maybe he's like Hotblack Desiato, the rock star from Disaster Area in Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, just spending a year dead for tax purposes.
The whole psy ops thing last week distracted me from what I wanted to write about, the immigration rally in St. Paul a week ago. I randomly ran into Eliot Brown in an alley in St. Paul on Saturday and he said he'd happened to take a photo of me among the crowd. Thanks!
I have gotten a haircut since the photo. But anyway. I gotta go to Wisco now for a family dinner; my uncle Dan got engaged, which is nice. On Wednesday I took the PSY OPS case to my Republican boss' call-in radio show on KTLK. In a segment about 7 minutes long, I was somewhat surprised to receive a Sean Hannity-style 7 or 9 blathering ad hominem attacks from my employer that I had no opportunity to rebut. I have the recording and will probably post it up, but altogether it was disheartening yet somewhat amusing. I informed the ClearChannel audience that the military was doing psychological warfare on their brains, and there's evidence out there. This made her panic, and my age (22) and my status (graduated) from a college (Macalester) were the only available battering rams to attempt to discredit what I was saying and fill up time.
Upon hearing the recording, a wise friend pointed out to me she's right, what the hell have I got to back up my credibility? The same basic bag of tricks will be employed against people like me, and it requires a more agile response, simply because the truth, in and of itself, rarely works these days.
Yah, it was disheartening. But the clanging bells of the Basilica last night and today helped remind me what Hunter Thompson entered on his typewriter before he blew his brains out.
Counselor.
This seems to have been a reference to the Gospel of John (ch. 14), as a contributor to RawStory explained.
“And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you.”
As the RawStory guy said (and I posted last August):
Thompson surely would have felt drawn to the Gospel of John, the most lyrical and mystical of the four Gospels. It’s there that we find the pronouncement: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It is a decree that has resonated with writers from Twain to Whitman to Fitzgerald to Miller—a revelation that words are transcendent, that a writer’s vocation is more than just a job. It should be a calling, wherein the “Spirit of truth” (Counselor) is followed unfailingly. No mean trick.
For following your Counselor often means discovering things that aren’t fit for polite company. It’s never pleasant to find evil growing among the peonies. Or in the hearts of your elected officials. Better to be “vaguely happy” than uncomfortable. Thompson, though, never fell for that devil’s lie. He knew that even though the truth often cuts like a razor, it also serves as a “Comforter” when the jackals begin circling. Because as Thompson recognized, the jackals don’t really give a damn whether you speak the truth or not. They are coming after us all one day. But facing the bastards down is a whole lot easier when you’ve got the truth by your side.
We are faced with annihilationist ideology, applied for partisan Republican political purposes. I find it plainly disturbing that my education on the Holocaust has been the key to unlocking the meaning of the Zarqawi figure. Those rare occasions when I have caught the current of history and made it halt for a moment, have been among the key times I really felt fully alive, intervening in the flow of events. The radio bit doesn't rise to that level, but it shows me how rocky and difficult the road ahead will be.
The top defenders of the Republican empire know their myths are shallow and evaporating daily. I know because I can hear the fear in their voice.
At that level, the truth makes a good Counselor.
On the heels of HongPong's eminently successful revelation of government brainwashing, I want to briefly discuss a few of the issues he raises.
I start from the assumption that the purpose of PSYOPs in America is to mould public opinion enough that the White House can carry on its military operations unhindered. Personally, I feel that this is a low bar, since many "Joe Six Pack's" would need some significant negative revelations in order to dislodge his opinion enough to make it unpleasant for Bush - after all, responding negatively on an approval rating takes almost no effort, demonstrations, letters, etc. all take significantly more effort. This administration has shown us that feedback and accountability impose very little restrictions on the activities of the executive - that is, until voting season (hopefully, unfortunately we can't be confident about this either).
All of this brings me to my real point, which is to discuss the issue of "What the fuck are we supposed to do?" Of course I do not know the answer to that question, so instead I'll tackle the question of what WILL people do.
Awhile ago I wrote a paper in which I developed a statistical model for forecasting the results of presidential elections, which ended up having pretty good statistical power (r-squared > .97, std. dev. approx. 1 percentage point). It predicted that Bush would win 2004, though it predicted about one percent of the vote more than he got (popular vote, not electoral). Anyhow the model involved predictors like per capita GDP, inflation, approval rating, unemployment and changes in the size of the armed forces.
I haven't adapted it for senate or house races, simply because I don't want to gather the data (especially for the house districts), but I can make some general predictions. First of all, GDP and general economic health were big indicators, which fits nicely with a common sense evaluation of government. These indicators have been slowly taking off since the mini-recession of 2000, which does not bode well for Dems. However, inflation remains higher than in the recent years likely to weigh most heavily on voters' minds.
The only social indicators for which I was able to find appropriate variables were overall approval rating and armed forces shifts. In order to sweep the republicans out of the leglislature, the Dems will have to rely on the effects of these "psychological" variables. Approval rating is obviously working in their favor. The only comparably low rating was posted by Jimmy Carter just before getting his clock cleaned by Reagan.
I originally thought to include the armed forces variable in order to measure the effects of popular or unpopular wars and foreign policy in general - Vietnam and Johnson vs. WW2 and FDR. Given that we fight wars so differently now and that foreign policy figures to be a big part of approval rating, this won't have an effect unless there is a really big change. Incidentally, the model predicts a negative reaction for small positive changes, and a positive reaction for huge changes (no doubt the pull of WW2 on the data).
So, what implications for strategy - particulary PSY OPS on both sides? The right clearly needs some form of norming in order to counteract the many failures represented by their abysmal approval ratings. For them, this "norming" amounts to manipulation ala Zarqawi. I think the Dems will embarrass themselves yet again if they neglect to negate the effects of a strong economy - especially given that they haven't really found anything approaching a viable alternative on the foreign policy front. Inasmuch as the Zarqawi campaign is successful it will garner tacit support for the conservative platform - especially because the flip side of the "we need 'Publicans to defeat evil" ideal is the "Democrats are girly-men (sp?) and will give terrorists your home, job, and convert you to Islam" argument. Dems really need to highlight what a failure Bush has been on the domestic front - social security what? corporate malfeasance who? His stance on environment, energy, global warming, education etc. has been that of an ostrich with his head in the sand.
The essence of the conservative platform is that it appeals to self-interest. Any media manipulation is designed with this in mind. The Zarqawi story fits this because it attempts to force a decision between clear alternatives in a life or death situation. In addition to showing that a Democratic choice is a self-interested (and therefore rational) choice by emphasizing advantages in close-to-home, objective characteristics, some attempt needs to be made to show that their vote doesn't represent a binary, life or death decision, because the public has shown what choice it will make in that situation, and they would like to ask them to do the same this fall and in 2008. This is difficult to for a number of reasons, some rather obvious, that I will not go in to.
Basically, the left needs to get on the same playing field as the right if they want to compete. Base manipulation of public opinion through unethical means has become par for the course. Unfortunately, the moral high ground is reserved for the losers.
"While I don't doubt any word of Hong Pong's diary, I have to wonder...hmmm...is Hong Pong actually just playing the part of a nice Minnesota conspiracy buff with a web log...but he is actually holed up deep inside a secret bunker in rural Virginia, with dark sunglasses and a black jumpsuit on, sucking us deep inside a complex web of psyop war games designed to further alienate the most politically informed American progressives from the public at large. Behind him, Dick Cheney stands, rubbing his hands together, cackling gleefully..."
--DailyKos member themank - eerie, isn't it
My computer is acting a little dodgy so I'm a bit concerned right now. Hopefully one of the interested parties that's been around Hongpong this week didn't hack my shit.
I crossposted Monday's Zarqawi PSY OPS story to the DailyKos and The Agonist, where it got read by thousands of people! (and featured on the Agonist's front page!) Within a few hours, as I slept Monday morning, my DailyKos entry had been voted up by dozens of people as a "recommended diary," which caused it to be listed in a privileged spot on the front page. Also a top DailyKos contributing writer, SusanG, included a plug for my story in her main frontpage story at 12:15 PM. Which was sweet:
If you think "leveraging xenophobia," as the Washington Post article examined by Hong Pong claims the military is doing in Iraq, is confined to our Middle East policy, think again.
The story sparked a lively discussion in which all could take a certain freaky pride in the fact that in this case, Paranoia is Right. All could agree that this Psychological Warfare planning against the American public is some fucked-up shit, and since my sources were Sy Hersh and the Washington Post, it was pretty hard to refute what I was saying. It got more than 160 comments. A huge counterintelligence success!
I wrote a poll for "Favorite Pentagon PSY OP of the war", which 887 people voted in. Results:
"It's like every day is an October Surprise!" polls really well. Though my veiled suggestion that the Nick Berg decapitation video was faked also did surprisingly well. (I don't really believe it was faked, but its worth considering how it could fit into a PSYOPS "marketing strategy"). And of course Jessica Lynch's fabricated Pentagon tale is still a classic favorite.
So within the 24 hours of Monday, a deluge of hits came mostly from the DailyKos. Damn, it sure caught the interest of some Big Wheels. And lots of government agencies. So these were some of more interesting visitors: either some random worker was surfing around, or else the word got passed and the story was Monitored by Gray Actors. Or a good bit of both.
Readers In 24 Hours: Most of the cabinet? Including the federal courts, NASA, the FAA, the FCC, the Postal Service, NOAA, NIH, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Health and Human Services, the State Department, Treasury, Homeland Security, many Army, Navy and Air Force computers, iraq.centcom.mil, army.pentagon.mil. And "croydon.gov.uk".
Many esteemed members of the military industrial complex, such as Boeing (several different hits), Halliburton, ChevronTexaco, the Citadel Group, SAIC, Northrop Grumman, the Shaw Group (of Katrina contract-hustling), Raytheon, Citgo (Chavez!) and even the Rendon Group. Now they are some shady cats.
Some in the media liked it too: E Entertainment, Disney, CBS, ESPN, NBC, NY Times, Scripps, Al Hurra (the American-funded mid-eastern TV network: [are they also tied to Zarqawi ops?]), TimeInc.com, Reader's Digest, Sony Pictures, RandomHouse, the Prague Post, McGraw-Hill, Discovery.com, PR Newswire, Union Tribune, HarperCollins...
Why not? WalMart, Napster, Intel, Microsoft, PlayBoy, Adobe, Apple, Ford, Kodak, Philips, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Progressive.com, Blockbuster, and a ton of random law firms.
Traffic Tuesday was back down to normal levels. Oh yah, check out Rolling Stone's National Affairs Daily page, in which Tim Dickinson uses the same opening quote for a fine piece along my lines -- Hyping Zarqawi, and also The "Selective Leak", about how Dexter Filkins at the New York Times was made into a cut-out for Pentagon disinformation about Zarqawi.
So the story has not been missed by the mainstream, I think it's safe to say (see above). I wonder if this counts as a dangerous counterintelligence effort?
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt: "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."
I have billed this website to be about spinstorms, Information Operations and latent contradictions. Here are two crucial elements of the current political environment that have to be fully confronted.
One: There are clandestine U.S. military operations in Iran today - which Congress really has no clue about, and are not at all in our country's interests. This is insane.
Two: The military has a specific psychological warfare campaign to manipulate the perception of the "Abu Musab al Zarqawi" figure in Iraq - and the American audience is an official target of this psychological warfare, the Washington Post rather explosively confirms today. This indicates that PSY OPS planning and operations are integrated into the basic structure of how the U.S. media is fed information by the Pentagon. Your brain is currently contaminated with the results of military psychological operations. This is also insane.
Sy Hersh has been telling us for a while that the situation between the United States and Iran is getting hot very quickly. A new report: The Iran Plans: Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb? is decidedly alarming. There are plenty of horrible things in here, but why not mention the beginning:
The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.
One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”
Surely we'll get back to this. But it seemed an appropriate thing to throw in right before I go to bed and start a new week, pondering how these ethnic minorities will be manipulated -- who will be the next Hmong-like ethnic group, used and abused as a tool of American war policy, then left to twist in the wind? Azeris? Baluchis? Turkmen? Kurds?
What could possibly go wrong?!!!? Note Khuzestan, down there next to Iraq. Apparently, since it has many (Shia) Arabs, it is considered a prime area for ethnic fragmentation that will somehow serve American interests.... (And Baluchistan is another key angle for stirring up trouble). Get your popcorn ready, the new Great Game with Nuclear Chips will really be an entertaining one.
By the way, isn't it interesting to live in a country that launches preemptive covert operations into various places without informing Congress or the public it is supposed to serve? What is the appropriate response from Iran? What of this American public, swiftly led into yet another strange and ugly Eurasian trap? What the fuck are we supposed to do?
Now a turn to the even more surreal. Today, The Washington Post confirms that "Abu Musab al Zarqawi", the vaunted evil terrorist, has officially been used as an instrument of psychological warfare by the Pentagon. Last September I posted "Zarqawi == Emmanuel Goldstein". I said:
The image of Senior Demon Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is an essential element of the Bush Administration's strategy to manage perceptions of their disastrous war - diverting blame and creating an attractive 'negative image'. Zarqawi is one of the principle Hollow Lies of the war.
.....Let me offer a theory: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may actually exist, but his "existence" in the media is an essential element of the Bush Administration's Public Relations strategy to manage perception of the war. He is a personification of malevolent intent: if he wasn't around, we are told to believe, things would sort themselves out, so our motive has to be to crush him instead of confronting the Pentagon's essentially racist, disastrous policies.
.....There's probably a real Zarqawi figure out there, but basically, these days I generally believe he is a media construction designed to provide a narrative that Joe Six Pack can understand. The exciting Zarqawi Chase (with, say, captured laptops and narrow escapes) is the kind of story that the NASCAR dad needs to stave off cognitive dissonance.
Now the Washington Post sets this off:
Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi: Jordanian Painted As Foreign Threat To Iraq's Stability
By Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 10, 2006; Page A01
The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.
For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.
[Sidebar: Two slides from a briefing prepared for Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describe a U.S. military propaganda campaign that was intended to highlight the role of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, in the Iraqi insurgency. By emphasizing his foreign origin, the "psychological operations" effort sought to play on a perceived Iraqi dislike of foreigners and so split the insurgency.]
The military's propaganda program largely has been aimed at Iraqis, but seems to have spilled over into the U.S. media. One briefing slide about U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home audience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war.
That slide, created by Casey's subordinates, does not specifically state that U.S. citizens were being targeted by the effort, but other sections of the briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins's resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.
Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare.
.....It is difficult to determine how much has been spent on the Zarqawi campaign, which began two years ago and is believed to be ongoing. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million, but that included extensive building of offices and residences for troops involved, as well as radio broadcasts and distribution of thousands of leaflets with Zarqawi's face on them, said the officer speaking on background.
The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work.
One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."
Damn, skippy. I have rarely seen better evidence that we will have to defend our brains from military psychological operations directly. The public mood is a battlespace (which of course is exploited for Republican partisan political gains).
I can't wait to see if this gets the proper bounce in the media this week - and better yet, hopefully Republicans will explain why military propaganda is good because it makes us feel good.
Strange times. Stay sharp. We could run out of space real fast.
Technorati Tags: baluchistan, cia, covert, iran, PSYOPS, propaganda, spin, war, zarqawi
This is apparently the 701st entry on HongPong.com. I'll be damned.
First the Boondocks. The Creative Mafia Syndicate will prolly get me for this, so enjoy it now. Boondocks is now running their very first comics so if you want to see where it started, check that out.
What happens when you combine Legos and Counterstrike? At Techeblog, Genius.
This site is full of modern marvels, including the Whiskey Bottle PC, a pen-sized scanner, and a sweet Top 20 collection of gadgets including a clock propelled by a mouse, an RSS feeder that prints onto toilet paper, pseudo-skin gear and cardboard speakers. (via the time-wasting genius of GM)
I've got a strange day ahead of me and I don't know where I'll be at. But this should provide some amusement. And check out the new links under "allied operations & sites of interest", I guarantee you'll find something interesting.
The recent adventure in Arizona, (of which I still have some nice bits to put up), provided a few minutes of video that I want to get edited together. That will have to wait for the weekend, if I get ambitious.
In the meantime, I just made some tweaks to the site layout, adding a block of links to various places that friends are at. If I left some people out (i know i did) let me know and up it goes. I also shrank down those avatars to 40 pixels, and made a nice little table, so they are iconic yet not intrusive.
To inspire me to try a video blog, consider MNspeak.com's Videoblogging Week 2006. On an unrelated but cool note, see City Pages: 30 years of Minneapolis punk.
Well that is all for this evening. It seems that a swing through St. Paul is in order......
Genetically engineered bladders have been created in labs from host samples. Then the bladders have been successfully implanted. Excellent. The eschaton is at hand.
I was just given word that Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, of MyDD.com and DailyKos.com respectively, will be at Arise! on Tuesday, May 2, at noon.
The event is confirmed! Tuesday, May 2nd at noon.
Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga will be speaking and signing copies of their new book, Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics. Markos is the founder and editor of The Daily Kos--the largest and most popular progressive blog in the country.
(Check it out at: http://www.dailykos.com)
This event could be seriously huge. The blog is read by a crazy amount of people, including everyone from left-leaning Democrats to the far left. I'm going to start with publicity today. So, we may start to get some calls at the store about the event. Please confirm the date and time w/people, provide directions, etc. If anyone has any other questions about the event, please give them my cell # and email address.
Thanks!
maddy
as was noted to me:
its gonna be crazy big, probably way bigger than we can handle, but thank goodness we are about the last option for independent bookstores in the twin cities.
I read Crashing the Gate on my way down to Arizona, and it was pretty good, if a bit uneven, as reviewed earlier. Interesting stuff. I gotta say what up to Kos and get the book signed. Sweet.
I got a raise at my other part-time job yesterday - while driving down Nicollet with A. Cheng, who returned from China for a few days to deal with immigration matters (such timing). Anyhow this is good news but it means I have stuff to do right now.
I am listening to Unknown Prophets' latest CD, 'The road less traveled'. There is a lot of weird stuff going on right now. HAMAS and the Fatah/Old Guard Palestinian factions are locked in a weird conflict as Abbas tries to set up 'parallel structures', according to a HAMAS guy. Bush authorized Libby to leak, Homeland Security guys are internet child molesting freaks, Carl Pohlad is at CostCo.
MPR had a really good lineup today. Religion, oil, debt and American politics was the subject of a recorded talk from Kevin Phillips (author of American Theocracy and the author of 1969's Emerging Republican Majority) at the Edina Barnes & Noble. He took head-on the financial-services-debt complex, the moral delusions of empire across history, the estimated 55% of Bush voters that believe in the apocalypse, and the weird sense that God speaks through Bush doesn't bother these people (idolators?!). Also mentioned how more extremist Jewish sects like the Lubovitch folks are voting for Republicans - and this is intertwined with Christian apocalyptic views of the West Bank. Reminded us that the Southern Baptists refused to reunify after the Civil War, but have since then taken over Union southern states like Missouri. He talks about the symbolic antichrist and how the Antichrist in Pop Apocalyptica (Left Behind especially) ties into Iraq and oil, thus providing a 'message problem' between the wartime White House, pursuing the oil, and the base, who needed to hear a quasi-apocalyptic or near-eschatological kind of message to rationalize the war.
Which is what we've been saying out here on the internet for a while now... But Phillips really brings it together. With a broad historical scope of the patterns of declining empires, crossing lots of really excellent currents, and a cynicism towards religion that I found extra nice, this one was damn sweet. (RealPlayer stream here)
Midmorning had a segment on the hip-hop nation I heard part of. And of course they were all over the Libby thing today. Thumbs up for another fine day for Minnesota Public Radio.
Lastly the Book of Judas - a testament discovered on papyrus in Middle Egypt - is apparently out and about, turning a good chunk of Christianity sideways. Should he be the most revered disciple because he set the spirit free from the body (which is apparently in this text)??
Oh yeah, Apple is releasing a system called Boot Camp ("enter the Alt Reality" they say) that allows people to boot between OS X and Windows on Intel-based Macs. Suddenly the Windows foundation is missing a pillar. Apple:
More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.
As elegant as it gets
Boot Camp lets you install Windows XP without moving your Mac data, though you will need to bring your own copy to the table, as Apple Computer does not sell or support Microsoft Windows.(1) Boot Camp will burn a CD of all the required drivers for Windows so you don't have to scrounge around the Internet looking for them.
Ah I gotta take care of stuff now. We'll get some more substantive goodies up sooner, rather than later. :-/
Over the weekend, our man Peter got a story about retiring Wyoming mine workers picked up by the Associated Press & the Casper Star Tribune. Peter works at the Gillette News-Record these days. The last 14 days of Peter stories are here.
Aging in the coal mines
By PETER GARTRELL
The (Gillette) News-Record Monday, April 03, 2006
GILLETTE (AP) -- Meet Lee Yake. He has 25 years of experience working in Powder River Basin coal mines.
A couple of years ago, he decided he'd had enough of the long hours and that it was time to retire. At 59, he is his own boss after buying Industrial Alternators and Starters. If offered him a good change of pace, and provides him with a business he plans eventually to turn over to his son, Terry.
Standing in front of shelves filled with rebuilt starters and alternators for every size of vehicle from pickups to 300-ton haul trucks, Yake said many of his friends who began working in the mines during the 1970s are also considering retirement.
"There's a lot of people that started back when I did that aren't in the Social Security range," he said. "Most of the guys I've seen around, they've had enough."
When they leave, they will take with them a wealth of knowledge.
Meet Dave McElhiney. The 46-year-old former sheriff's deputy has been working as a mechanic for Powder River Coal's Caballo mine for the past four years. That's long enough to know that more than one of his co-workers is eying retirement.
"I got one that's retiring in March, one that's retiring at the end of the year and a bunch that are retiring in three to five years," he said.
He worries that when people like Yake begin to clock out for the last time, they will take with them critical knowledge. For example, not many new hires can modify older machinery and bring it up to code.
Also On NewWest.net, a blog-style site about the western US, notes Peter's contribution to ongoing discussions of the western coal industry:
Black Butte Coal Co. estimates the extra 1,400 acres would bring production up to 1.5 million to 3 million tons of coal over about 20 years. But, as Peter Gartrell from the Gillette News Record reports, the question remains: With many of the old-time coal miners nearing retirement, is there a new generation willing to take over?
Yea Peter, you go man!!! (file photo)
The flight went from MSP > Las Vegas > Tucson, so i had 35 minutes to kill in Babel. Look ma, i found the key to the Bush economy:
I lost $10 in the slots right away and decided I had mastered Vegas.
This is an avenue nearby Nick and Abby's. It rained the night I got there for the first time in weeks. Note the embedded trolley rail.
There is a pending bill in the state Legislature that would make it illegal for anyone to aid illegal immigrants. Many people in the area had signs that said "humanitarian aid is never a crime / no more deaths / no mas muertes".
Quality Nick Moments. He works at the Medicine Man Gallery and can be seen here forging an authenticity certificate.
Expensive developments in the foothills / nice cars around the neighborhoods. Old cars are much easier to preserve in the warmer climate than here in Minnesnowta.
Military presence: planes and helicopters buzzed constantly. This photo is upside down right now but it shows A-10 Warthogs cruising around above the University stadium. I will clean both these up and post properly later.
Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum outside of town: The mountain lion exhibit honors Barry Goldwater, naturally. Note the hummingbird.
More photos from the student protest. These guys are from Telemundo Arizona (Telemundo is owned by NBC Universal, I didn't know that). Actually that one on the right is a very funny video which I will put up soon.
Well that is enough for now. I have to go to bed and get up early to do the Morning Reports. More to come, including video...
My mom was nice enough to get me at 4:15 AM from the airport. I just walked in. We got breakfast at Mickey's Diner on W. 7th. I am going to sleep now. That is all. I will post lots of goodies later today!
I was wandering around downtown Tucson when I came across a protest in front of the federal building. Hundreds of area students walked out of classes and came down there to protest the immigrant situation and action in Washington...
Telemundo Arizona and the local Fox affiliate were there. I got some video clips too that I will put up later. More coverage of protest actions in Arizona can be found on Arizona Indymedia.
I might put more before I get back but likely not.
arizona daily star: Student throngs here walk out for 2nd day
Nearly 1,200 join demonstrations By Daniel Scarpinato and Jeff Commings
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 03.31.2006At least 1,150 students from across the city walked out of class Thursday and marched through the streets, the second straight day of protests against a national effort to strengthen border security and crack down on illegal immigration.
School officials and police officers rushed to manage the situation, delivering water, clearing streets and brainstorming ways to prevent the walkouts from continuing as classwork took a back seat to activism.
Those who walked out came from at least 18 schools. Groups of 100 or more students came from Catalina, Flowing Wells, Palo Verde and Tucson high schools. Elementary- and middle-schoolers also joined in the protests, with the largest group from Pistor Middle School.
The actions followed similar efforts in Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Diego as a divided Congress embarks on possibly changing immigration policy.
