Egypt in the Throes of Another Revolution

To defeat cruel leaders and a country with a tiny elite is very hard. You can kill the monster who officially runs things, but quickly a new monster grabs the reins of power and re-imposes the cruel regime. That is exactly what is happening in Egypt.

Here is a bit from an excellent article by Ahdaf Soueif in the UK's Guardian newspaper:

Since Friday the military has openly engaged with civilian protesters in the heart of the capital. The protesters have been peacefully conducting a sit-in in Ministries' Street to signal their rejection of the military's appointment of Kamal Ganzouri as prime minister.

Ganzouri announced that no violence would be used to break up the Cabinet Office sit-in. Moments later the military took on the protesters. For a week Military Police and paratroopers had kidnapped activists from the streets, driven them off in unmarked vehicles, interrogated them and beaten them. On Friday they kidnapped Aboudi – one of the "Ultras" of the Ahli Football Club. They gave him back with his face so beaten and burned that you couldn't see features – and started the street war that's been raging round Ministries' Street for the last three days.

The protesters have thrown rocks at the military. The military has shot protesters, and thrown rocks, Molotov cocktails, china embossed with official parliament insignia, chairs, cupboards, filing-cabinets, glass panes and fireworks. They've dragged people into parliament and into the Cabinet Office and beaten and electrocuted them – my two nieces were beaten like this.

They beat up a newly elected young member of parliament, jeering: "Let parliament protect you, you son of … ". They took a distinguished older lady who's become known for giving food to the protesters and slapped her repeatedly about the face till she had to beg and apologise. They killed 10 people, injured more than 200, and they dragged the unconscious young woman in the blue jeans – with her upper half stripped – through the streets.

The message is: everything you rose up against is here, is worse. Don't put your hopes in the revolution or parliament. We are the regime and we're back.

Ultimate Evil: Stealing a Person's Soul

The "dirty war" by the right wing military reached depths only touched on by the vile regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. But they did it with a unique twist. They stole the children of the freedom fighters that they killed and raised them as their own. They not only stole the lives of those they "repressed" but they stole the very identity of the children and taught them there were something other than what they were. That is as ugly a crime as I can imagine. You literally steal a person's soul by hiding their real origin and pretending they are one with you (and your murderous ways).

Here's a bit from an article in the NY Times:

Victoria Montenegro recalls a childhood filled with chilling dinnertime discussions. Lt. Col. Hernán Tetzlaff, the head of the family, would recount military operations he had taken part in where “subversives” had been tortured or killed. The discussions often ended with his “slamming his gun on the table,” she said.

It took an incessant search by a human rights group, a DNA match and almost a decade of overcoming denial for Ms. Montenegro, 35, to realize that Colonel Tetzlaff was, in fact, not her father — nor the hero he portrayed himself to be.

Instead, he was the man responsible for murdering her real parents and illegally taking her as his own child, she said.

He confessed to her what he had done in 2000, Ms. Montenegro said. But it was not until she testified at a trial here last spring that she finally came to grips with her past, shedding once and for all the name that Colonel Tetzlaff and his wife had given her — María Sol — after falsifying her birth records.

The trial, in the final phase of hearing testimony, could prove for the first time that the nation’s top military leaders engaged in a systematic plan to steal babies from perceived enemies of the government.

Jorge Rafael Videla, who led the military during Argentina’s dictatorship, stands accused of leading the effort to take babies from mothers in clandestine detention centers and give them to military or security officials, or even to third parties, on the condition that the new parents hide the true identities. Mr. Videla is one of 11 officials on trial for 35 acts of illegal appropriation of minors.

The trial is also revealing the complicity of civilians, including judges and officials of the Roman Catholic Church.

Notice the crimes of the Catholic Church. Not only is the Church into sheltering pederasts and a long history of using Church doctrine to shield tyrants and the rich from the just social demands of the poor, the Church worked with these ghouls who stole babies from victims they killed to let right wing crazies raise them "as their own".

Here is the crime in which the Catholic Church freely collaborated:

In Latin America, the baby thefts were largely unique to Argentina’s dictatorship, Mr. Vivanco said. There was no such effort in neighboring Chile’s 17-year dictatorship.

One notable difference was the role of the Catholic Church. In Argentina the church largely supported the military government, while in Chile it confronted the government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and sought to expose its human rights crimes, Mr. Vivanco said.

Priests and bishops in Argentina justified their support of the government on national security concerns, and defended the taking of children as a way to ensure they were not “contaminated” by leftist enemies of the military, said Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a Nobel Prize-winning human rights advocate who has investigated dozens of disappearances and testified at the trial last month.

...

Church officials in Argentina and at the Vatican declined to answer questions about their knowledge of or involvement in the covert adoptions.

For many years, the search for the missing children was largely futile. But that has changed in the past decade thanks to more government support, advanced forensic technology and a growing genetic data bank from years of testing. The latest adoptee to recover her real identity, Laura Reinhold Siver, brought the total number of recoveries to 105 in August.

Go read the whole article. It is very sad. It takes these victims years to shed their old identity and come to understand the horror of the crime committed against them and their birth parents. Read the article to become acquainted with just a couple of the hundreds of victims.

Dominic Streatfeild's "A History of the World Since 9/11"

This is an excellent history of our times. I expected a typical history of events, leaders, and themes. But instead this author presents 8 chapters which introduce a policy stance then burrows down to look at a small handful of "ordinary" people affected by the policy. The author's intent is to lay bare just how badly wrong the "war on terror" has gone. Here is a nice summary of the author's view from the Epilogue:

Outspoken liberals like to display their hatred of the lead players behind the War on Terror. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair: the villains of the piece. The truth is that, with a few notable exceptions, nobody covered themselves with glory. Opposition political parties failed to intervene; the military failed to stand behind its beliefs that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan required better resourcing, manpower and planning; the intelligence community failed to insist that caveats in the products were there for a reason. The media failed to inform the public there were serious problems. Perhaps the blame should be shared? There's enough to go round.

Doubtless there is a case to be made that the world changed as a result of 9/11. But how it changed was not up to Bin Laden, al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It was up to us. We could have reacted differently. We didn't.

As a result, the situation in which we currently find ourselves is not one that has been thrust upon us. It's one that we have chosen. Al-Qaeda doesn't threaten our existence. It never did. Our reaction to it just might.

The book has some wonderfuly graphic stories of individuals and the very real effects of 9/11 on them:

• Chapter 1 looks at Bush's dictum that "the rules have changed" and that "we must take the war to them" and that pre-emptive war was necessary. It ties this with a crazy criminal character in Texas who goes unhinged after seeing the towers fall on 9/11 and decides to go after "the enemy". For him this is anybody ethnically Middle Easternish and he ends up killing an innocent immigrant from India, a Hindu. Streatfeild lays out these characters in great detail. The hard struggle by the Hindu to build a life in America and provide a business built on serving his customers. A very nice guy who worked hard but ended up killed by a madman lashing out at "enemies" to pre-empt their attack on his beloved America. A madman with a criminal past and a mind twisted by drug abuse and violence. Tragic.


• Chapter 2 looks at the "gloves are off" and "the rules have changed. It focuses on a family fleeing Iraq prior to 9/11 but who get caught at sea in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and harshly interned by Australia. The Australians tried to turn away the boat but the desperate immigrants tried everything to prevent being turned away. The brutal treatment left many deeply injured, some insane, from the years spent in limbo under vicious treatment by an anti-refugee policy by Australia. Tragic.


• Chapter 3 looks at the idea that the "war on terror" had to be fought viciously and that all deaths were the fault of al Qaeda and not of those in the West responding to having been attacked. This chapter looks at the excited and joyous planning of a wedding in Afghanistan. Unfortunately this was in the home province of Mullah Omar and the Americans with their "too little boots on the ground" incompetent intelligence decide that Mullah Omar will show up at the wedding. So they unleash the hell fire of US weapons on innocent people 48 were killed and 117 wounded. This disturbing story is only one of many, many in Afghanistan over a decade of "mistakes" by Americans in their war against a nearly invisible enemy.


• Chapter 8 looks at the "unintended consequences" of a war. In this case, it focuses on the world-wide program to eradicate polio. This program was within a year or two or three of success when 9/11 happened. Sadly, it now appears the world has utterly failed to eradicate polio and since there is now billions with no experience with the disease and many hundreds of millions of children with no immunity, the disease is poised to strike back worse than it was during the height of the great polio epidemics of the mid-20th century. This chapter focuses on the tale of a very dedicated, wonderful doctor who struggles to complete the fight against polio in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Sadly, the Muslims come to believe that the vaccine is a Western plot to sterilize them and that the drugs given to them are adulterated with female hormones and pig fat, they refuse the vaccine. Worse, they blow up the car in which the vaccine team is traveling and kill several including this doctor. Another tragic "consequence" of the war.

The other chapters focus on big policy themes and make them real by looking at the level of individual lives. It is all very tragic. But it makes this book especially powerful and poignant. Wars have consequences. How you fight them is very important. Sadly, the Bush administration was cavalier (cowboyish?) in its conduct of a war that has now killed hundreds and soon thousands more than were ever killed on 9/11.

One final quote from the book to hammer home the obscenities that have come out of "the war on terrorism":

Meanwhile, most of these nations seized on the exceptional nature of the post-9/11 threat, then used it as a justification for enacting domestic legislation that aped US policy regarding human rights: restrictions of rights for foreigners and asylum seekers; indefinite incarceration of suspects without trial; withdrawal of the right to an attorney; suspension of habeas corpus; enhanced surveillance techniques. The list went on and on.

'I do not underestimate the ability of fanatical groups to kill and destroy,' conceded Lord Hoffmann in a famous judgement on the incarceration of terror suspects without trial in the United Kingdom in December 2004. 'But they do not threaten the life of the nation.' The real threat to the United Kingdom, he warned, 'comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these.'

Five years later, the Human Rights Council's Eminent Panel of Jurists on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights agreed. After an exhaustive three-year study of the effects of the War on Terror on human rights globally, the Panel concluded that human rights protections, assembled over the last sixty years, had been corroded to the point where the international legal order was in jeopardy. Especially worrying was that the nations that had previously argued for the primacy of human rights were the very same nations now busily opting out of them. The result was 'perhaps one of the most serious challenges ever posed to the integrity of a system carefully constructed after the Second World War.'

Everybody should read this book. It will make them sit up and pay attention to the "war" that has been conducted "on their behalf". It will change their way of viewing the world.

Barking Up the Wrong Tree

That big political food fight last month in the US Congress is a sensational bit of theatre, but it misses the real problem with the US economy.

From the Washington's Blog:

Harvard’s Linda Bilmes co-authored a paper with Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz estimating the long-term costs of current US wars at now $3 to $5 trillion ... with total debt increase since 2001 of over $10 trillion.

If the US wants to cut the deficit & debt, it needs to stop fighting wasteful, useless wars.

Instead of focusing on where their belly has been slit and the intestines are falling out, the US lawmakers made a huge racket over a paper cut on a finger. They bawled, they wailed. They shrieked enough to scare the world into a month-long plunge in the financial markets. But they were fighting over small potatoes. If the politicians were serious, they would look at the US military budget and at the insane amount of money they have spent doing "wars of choice" and "nation building" and other fruitless, stupid activities.

And while they had this shouting match over deficits and debts, the lawmakers have done nothing serious about the corruption and crime on Wall Street:

He concludes fraud is the heart of Wall Street. Under the poignant title, Goldman Sachs: Too Big to Obey the Law: “The behavior and de facto immunity of the biggest banks is out of control.” He cites the financial crisis was engineered by the largest banks to consolidate power: in 1995 the leading six banks had assets of 17% of US GDP; today they have 63%.

Wow! Who says crime doesn't pay? The Wall Street bankers sure know how to make crime pay and pay and pay. They have literally bilked the taxpayer out of billions and left the economy in a $10 trillion recession and yet nobody has been arrested and nobody is even under investigation!

America's Lost Trillions

Here's an interesting interview with an author of a book looking at the US military budget. Many issues are covered, but at 2:00 minutes into the video this bit comes up:

The Pentagon has very little accountability when it comes to its books. Since first submitting financial accounts in 1991, the Pentagon "has been unable to account for trillions of dollars, well over almost $10 trillion by my own account," says Glain. Conspiracy theorists suggest this is CIA money being laundered through the Pentagon, a claim Glain has some sympathy for.

Incredible...

More in this Yahoo! finance article.

The above is just the incompetence and deceit on military spending. The US is a crony capitalist country where many trillions have recently been lost because Wall Street has the Washington politicians in its pocket and have been allowed to trash the economy with the 2008 financial panic with the hundreds of billions in explicit "bailout" money given to it and the implicit and very quietly delivered billions given to the banks by the Federal Reserve's policies to keep interest rates low to move money from the savings accounts of ordinary Americans to the big banks.

A trillion here, a trillion there, soon you will be talking about serious money...

US Air Force is Buying Training Aircraft from China

This sure surprised me.

From an article in the Washington Times:

The Air Force Academy recently purchased 25 advanced trainers from Cirrus Aircraft for its powered-flight program, an integral part of the cadets pilot training.

After Cessna, the Minnesota-based Cirrus Aircraft is the worlds second- largest manufacturer of single-engine general aviation aircraft. The new planes, known as T-53A trainers, come with sophisticated avionics and the most advanced flight safety and recovery design and systems. They are custom-designed for the Air Force based on Cirrus SR20 model.

The deal is worth $6.1 million. Delivery is already under way and is expected to be completed by 2012.

One problem is that Cirrus Industries Inc., the aircraft maker’s parent company, is 100 percent owned by the Chinese communist government. It was purchased by the Chinese in March 2011 for a reported $210 million.

The sale was not blocked for national security concerns by Congress or the Obama administration, even with opposition from Rep. Chip Cravaack, Minnesota Republican, who stated in a letter to the Treasury Department in March that the sale could compromise U.S. national security. Despite alarms coming from several sides, the sale was finalized by the end of June.

Only days after the purchase was completed, the new Chinese owners received the aircraft order from the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece newspaper Peoples Daily on Tuesday called the transaction “revolutionary” because it marked the first time the U.S. Air Force ordered an entire set of aircraft from China for military training equipment.

This is what happens when you have a cronic balance of payments problem and gradually sell off your industrial heartland. Foreigners own everything so you military has to buy from the foreigners.

You would think this would be a "wake up call" for Americans. But most won't even notice and their politicians don't seem to care. But the US better pray that it never goes to war against China. It will be awfully hard to get parts and new equipment from your enemy.

Tim Harford Talks About His New Book

Here is an interview by the Economist magazine with Tim Harford about his new book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure:



The part of the interview about H. R. McMaster is fascinating. Sadly I'm not familiar with his book Dereliction of Duty but it sounds like it might be worth tracking down and reading.

US Crimes at Guantanamo

In twenty or thirty years, Americans will be aghast at the crimes of the Bush and Obama administrations. They have allowed innocent people to be imprisoned for years. Here is the latest one. This info was leaked via UK newspapers via a blog that monitors the press in the UK:

The Daily Telegraph has published 759 of the leaked Guantánamo files it obtained from WikiLeaks, despite the files not having been redacted to remove sensitive information.

One of the documents published by the Telegraph today includes the full name of a boy detained at Guantánamo who, according to the file, was raped at the age of 15, just prior to being transferred to the camp.

...

No charges were brought against the detainee, who was captured by US forces in Afghanistan and transferred to Guantánamo Bay "because of his possible knowledge of Taliban resistance efforts and local leaders". He was released a little more than a year after being transferred to the camp.

Go read the original post to get the full article and the embedded links.

Like the vicious internment of innocent Japanese during WWII, this Guantanamo camp with so many innocent people swept up in Afghanistan and Pakistan forced to endure years of mistreatment by brutal American torture techniques and years of imprisonment with no charges, no evidence, and no guilt.

My personal concern is the vicious treatment of Omar Khadr, a child soldier pushed into al Qaeda by his fanatical father. The kid was 15 when captured. Under international law you can't treat children as "soldiers" but the US has ignored international law. It held him for 8 years before they finally wore him down to sign a "guilty" plea. For that, the US gave him a 16 year sentence. His crime? The US claims he threw a grenade that killed a US soldier, but that is really, really hard to prove. But even if he did, you don't put 15 year olds into prison for 16 years for that. And you certainly don't torture them for years and years. Oh wait... I need to qualify that. Civilized countries don't do that, but the US does and is doing it to Omar Khadr.

Guantanamo is a very black mark on America and it will only fester. Obama promised to close it in 2008 and have trials, but it is now two years later and still nothing! Twenty or thirty years from now Americans will have to hang their heads in shame for these crimes. To my mind it is a crime on the same scale at uprooting 110,000 innocent people, forcing them to sell their homes and businesses "for a song", and shipping them off to godawful desolate places to live behind wire, watched closely by soldiers with machine guns, and having their lives run by prison administration... for no crime!

There are a few guilty terrorists at Guantanamo, but they make up less than a third of the internees. The whole "secret prisons" and "extra legal" treatment of post-9/11 suspects is a horrible black mark on America.

Republicans Get Out Their Ouija Boards

It is amazing how Republicans can "know" what the public wants, but when Democrats claims to know what their constituency wants, the Republicans jump all over them as uninformed ignoramuses. Just shows how "smart" those Republicans are...

Here's an example from Maureen Dowd writing an op-ed for the NY Times:

Republicans hate social engineering, unless they’re doing it.

Wishing they had the power to repeal the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and get back to the repressed “Mad Men” world they crave, some conservative lawmakers grumpily quizzed upbeat military brass on Friday.

“We’re starting to try to conform the military to a behavior, and I remember going through the military, we took behaviors and we formed it to the military,” said Representative Allen West of Florida, warning ominously (and weirdly) that “this could be the camel getting his nose under the tent.”

The House Armed Services subcommittee hearing was led by Joe Wilson, the oh-so-subtle Republican congressman from South Carolina famous for yelling “You lie!” at President Obama. Wilson started off the hearing by saying that the legislation to let gays stop lying while they risk dying was rushed through in an “undemocratic” lame-duck session.

Two top Pentagon officials testified that the transition was going swimmingly, yet Republicans scoffed. Representative Austin Scott of Georgia demanded the price tag. Clifford Stanley, an under secretary of defense, replied that the training materials cost only $10,000.

Scott harrumphed, “If something was done at D.O.D. for $10,000, I would like to know what it was.” He said that hundreds of thousands had been spent training a soldier in his district to disarm I.E.D.’s, but the soldier wouldn’t re-enlist because of the “social policy.”

I'm surprised that the Republicans don't insist that the Penatgon fire all the generals and let the Republican run the military remotely from the halls of Congress. You know, just like Hitler, that military genius, took charge of the German military and made sure that Germany was turned into a smoldering ruins.

Modern Day Safari "Hunters"

It is hard if you love your gun and want to go after the really "collectible" specimens, you know, elephant, lion, tiger, grizzly, Afghani civilian, rhino, big horn sheep, ... Wait a second. Afghan civilians?

If you read this Rolling Stone article you will see how some rogue US soldiers decided to play the role of "Great White Hunters" and go after innocent, unarmed civilians:

Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji.

Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging "savages" and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger.

What is especially sickening about this story is two-fold:

1. Just like Abu Gharaib, no officers are charged, just "grunts". Funny how you can have rogue soldiers but the "officers" never notice. Must be the wonderful new organization skills of the military that let the little guys come up with their own policies, their own strategies, and fight their own self-defined wars without bothering the big brass. Wonderful concept!


2. There were a number of attempts to tell higher-ups about these rogue soldiers, but the officers ignored this information. Again, it shows the excellence of the "new & modern US military" that is so confident about the quality of their troops that they really don't need officers. I suggest they simply furlough the whole bunch since they seem to be doing no oversight, no management, no strategy & tactics. Other than wearing gold braid, it isn't clear what their "role" is in the "new" military.

Funny how the US military has learned nothing from Abu Gharaib.

A Riddle, Wrapped in a Mystery, Inside an Enigma

Wired magazine has a fascinating article by Noah Shachtman on the anthrax killer in the autumn of 2001:

On August 18, 2008—after almost seven years, nearly 10,000 interviews, and millions of dollars spent developing a whole new form of microbial forensics—some of the FBI’s top brass filed into a dimly lit, flag-lined room in the bureau’s Washington, DC, headquarters. They were there to lay out the evidence proving who was responsible for the anthrax attacks that had terrified the nation in the fall of 2001.

It had been the most expensive, and arguably the toughest, case in FBI history, the assembled reporters were told. But the facts showed that Army biodefense researcher Bruce Ivins was the person responsible for killing five people and sickening 17 others in those frightening weeks after 9/11. It was Ivins, they were now certain, who had mailed the anthrax-filled letters that exposed as many as 30,000 people to the lethal spores.

It is a fascinating story, and a very unsatisfying story because they really aren't that sure they caught the killer. Read the article. Fascinating stuff.

The US Military is Being Haunted by Pictures Again

Here is a bit from Reuters news agency report about German Der Spiegel article publishing a story with pictures of US soldiers in Afghanistan posing as "trophy hunters" with dead civilians:

Germany's Der Spiegel magazine published photos on Monday of American soldiers posed over the bloodied corpse of an Afghan civilian whose slaying is being prosecuted by the U.S. military as premeditated murder.

...

Morlock and Holmes are among five Stryker Brigade soldiers facing court-martial at Joint Base Lewis McChord near Tacoma, Washington, on charges of premeditated murder stemming from the deaths of three Afghan villagers whose killings were allegedly staged to look like legitimate combat casualties.

It is interesting that one of the killers comes from Wasila, Alaska, the same town as the presidential wannabe and gun-loving Sarah Palin:

One photo shows a soldier identified as Army Specialist Jeremy Morlock, 23, of Wasilla, Alaska, broadly smiling in sunglasses as he crouches beside the bloodied, prone body of a man whose head he is holding up for the camera by the hair.

The pictures can be seen at Der Spiegel's site.

The sad fact is that war brutalizes people. I've always been struck by the fact that going back to America's civil war when records were first kept, something like one-third of the soldiers never fired their weapon at "the enemy" because it was just so repugnant. This despite the fact that they were being fired upon. The training in military "boot camp" is to break you of your inhibitions by desensitizing you and building up your "loyalty" to your buddies so that in a combat situation you will do anything to defend your "buddies" against the dehumanized "enemy".

Taxpayer's Money Hard at Work

I'm naive. I didn't think the US government would sink this low. But they have. They are spending taxpayer money to build fake Facebook and other social media accounts where they can " manipulate online conversations and spreading pro-American, pro-military propaganda".

From a UK Guardian newspaper article:

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.

The project has been likened by web experts to China's attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.

The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as "sock puppets" – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.

The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries".

There is more. Go read the original article.

And how much taxpayer money is involved? Only a dribble at this time:

Centcom confirmed that the $2.76m contract was awarded to Ntrepid, a newly formed corporation registered in Los Angeles.

But that is money that could be spent educating an inner city kid to get a solid middle class job and lift himself and his whole extended family out of poverty. Instead, the Obama administration would rather spend the money on propaganda, the intentional injection of lies into social media. And what is the consequence of that? Kids will get cynical about social media. They won't know whether they have a relationship with a real person or a propaganda machine. Talk about dissolving the social fabric!

Why doesn't the military simply put everybody into isolation cells and reduce everybody to bread and water. Why bother pretending that you live in a free society where you can freely interact with others if your government is busy manipulating you, filling your mind with lies. Bizarre.

Of course the US government will put its hand on its heart and "promise" that this kind of weapon won't be turned onto its own population. Not least because of the legal implications:

Persona management by the US military would face legal challenges if it were turned against citizens of the US, where a number of people engaged in sock puppetry have faced prosecution.

Last year a New York lawyer who impersonated a scholar was sentenced to jail after being convicted of "criminal impersonation" and identity theft.

But do you really believe that the Dr. Strangelove's in the military will resist the temptation to protect the nation's "precious bodily fluids" when it has such an effective tool at his disposal?

Even if American citizens are stupid enough to believe the "cross my heart and hope to die" promises of the Obama administration, will other countries sit back and let their citizens be manipulated by propaganda from the US? At the very least, these countries will retaliate and begin building their own weapons of mass propaganda. We could have escalating weapons system reminiscent of the "good old days" of the Cold War when the military was "truly respected" as guardians of the nation (the infamous SAC slogan was "Peace is Our Profession" when in fact their job was to carry nuclear weapons around to ensure the utter destruction of all life on earth).

I can envision the resurgence of the MAD doctrine. But this time as the MAP (Mutually Assured Propaganda) doctrine, i.e. I get to convince your citizens that you leader is psychotic and trying to kill them all and you get the right do convince my citizens that our leader is psychotic and trying to kill our citizens!

As an interesting side note... On the one hand the US government is spending money to propagandize people. On the other hand, it has just voted to kill all funding for NPR (National Public Radio). I guess the powers-that-be have decided that NPR was not an effective propaganda tool. Going to social media and creating fake personalities would be cheaper and more effective.

More "Transparency" from the Obama Administration

Yep... if you criticize the policy, then Obama will give you all the transparency you need. You get kicked out and get to wander the lonely political wilderness for your honesty.

Whistleblowers beware! Obama takes letting the truth out very seriously. He will fire you for telling the truth. He won't fire you for incompetence or studpidity or greed or lying, but he will fire you for telling the truth. This is the Obama policy on "transparency".

From BoingBoing:

Report: State Dept.'s Crowley out, days after criticizing Manning treatment as "counterproductive, stupid"

Xeni Jardin at 9:47 AM Sunday, Mar 13, 2011

CNN reports that P.J. Crowley, State Department spokesperson, has left (or been sacked) just days after widely reported comments critical of the Defense Department's treatment of accused Wikileaks source Bradley Manning.

What is Bradley Manning's crime? He was frustrated that the US military refused to respond to Reuters inquiries about the killing of a news team. Why did the miltiary cover up? Because it was the killing of a news team and several civilians, and some young children by a trigger happy Apache attack helicopter in which the pilots exult over their "victory". Watch for yourself!

Seems the US military didn't want the "bad publicity". So Bradley Manning spilled the beans. The military kept the lid on, so Manning opened the whole can of worms. So the military grabbed him and has been torturing him in isolation during pre-trial ever since.

Yep... the US military is a classic case of how not to "control" the news. If you squash it you make it worse. Rather than "man up" and tell the truth and discipline the Apache helicopter crew, the US military has unleashed hellish punishment on Bradley Manning... and of course on the Truth. But everybody knows that the first victim in war is the Truth.

When Obama ran for office he indicated he wanted to stop the senseless Bush military offensives. He was going to close Guantanamo. But he has brought a bigger war effort in the quagmire of Afghanistan and he has not only kept Guantanamo, he has now reinstated the senseless and fruitless military tribunals. Most of the people plucked randomly off the streets and shipped to Guantanamo. No wonder Obama wants no "transparency" about this war he is continuing, this war on anything that moves.

Watch Ethan McCord's witness testimony about the war on anything that moved in Iraq.

Obama Joins Bush as an Evil President

Bush will be infamous in history for ordering US troops to torture and turning the US into a torture nation.

Obama will be infamous for turning a blind eye to the abysmal treatment of an accused, Bradley Manning, in effect torturing an as-yet innocent man because you hate his actions.

Here's the relevant assessment from Mark Kleiman:

Asked about the extraordinary conditions imposed on Bradley Manning and the even more extraordinary remarks of the State Department spokesman dumping on DoD for that mistreatment, Barack Obama sounds completely clueless. Clueless at the Bush level:

I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assured me that they are. I can’t go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety as well.

Surely the President knows as well as anyone else that asking people accused of maltreating a prisoner whether the prisoner is being properly treated is like asking a drunk how much he’s had to drink. Since Barack Obama is not a fool, this can only mean that he’s reluctant to countermand Gates and Gates’s subordinates. (Note that he didn’t say that he’d had the allegations checked out and found that they were false.)

Obama reminds me of those German civilians living next to a Nazi death camp who claimed they "never knew" what was going on in the camp and weren't curious enough to attempt to find anything, not one thing, about what was going on in the camp. That was evil because they weren't that innocent. You can't live by a death camp and literally have "no idea" what is going on. Obama knows that the military is torturing Bradley Manning, an accused man but one who is still innocent until proven guilty. And even if the brain-dead military finds him guilty of treason (because he released material incriminating the US military is war crimes), it would not justify the torture they are putting him through. Obama is a lawyer. He knows that. But he is pulling the "nobody told me" excuse. Well... the Nurenberg trials made the point that you can't use the excuse "I was only following orders". And similarly "I didn't know that my underlings were committing crimes" is not exculpatory. Obama is evil.

Here are the facts according to Wikipedia:

Juan E. Mendez, a United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture submitted a formal inquiry about Manning to the U.S. State Department in or around January 2011.[35] In the same month, Manning's lawyer filed an Article 138 complaint, arguing that under Article 13 of the UCMJ the conditions of the detention amounted to unlawful pre-trial punishment.

And the British are pulling the same lying and fakery as they are with Julian Assange:

Amnesty International asked the British government in early 2011 to intervene on the grounds that Manning is a British national. Citing the Immigration Law Practitioners' Association in London, The Guardian wrote in February 2011 that Manning acquired British nationality by descent through his Welsh mother; under the British Nationality Act 1981 anyone born outside the UK after 1 January 1983 whose mother is a British citizen by birth is British by descent. The British embassy in Washington told The Guardian that it had not received a request to visit Manning.

I guess the British "lost" Amnesty International's request. And I'm willing to bet they will "lose" every one they get from Amnesty International. Yeah, sure Britain loves to tout Amnesty International for the "fine job" it does defending freedoms in countries Britain doesn't like. But if Amnesty International puts its nose into British misdeeds, the British suddenly find they can't understand how requests from Amnesty International get "lost". So much for "justice".

Mark Kleiman is willing to give Obama higher marks than I will:

Our actual choice next November will be between an incumbent who would more or less like to do the right thing about torture but isn’t willing to cash in all his chips to do so, and who also has sane and decent views about poverty, ignorance, and environmental catastrophe, and a Republican candidate who is enthusiastic about torture and also about poverty, ignorance, and environmental capacity.

I think the 2012 choice will be between (a) an evil shill for the ultra-rich eager to torture (the Republican) and (b) an evil hypocrite who claims virtues he is unwilling to practice, in short, a "leader" who doesn't have the courage to lead (the Democrat). Pathetic

US New Industrial Policy

From a Wired magazine article we get a glimpse of the brave new world of US government "industrial" policy:

This spring, the United Arab Emirates is expected to close a deal for $7 billion dollars’ worth of American arms. Nearly half of the cash will be spent on Patriot missiles, which cost as much as $5.9 million apiece.

But what makes those eye-popping sums even more shocking is that some of the workers manufacturing parts for those Patriot missiles are prisoners, earning as little as 23 cents an hour. (Credit Justin Rohrlich with the catch.)

The work is done by Unicor, previously known as Federal Prison Industries. It’s a government-owned corporation, established during the Depression, that employs about 20,000 inmates in 70 prisons to make everything from clothing to office furniture to solar panels to military electronics.

It is funny that the US claims to have no "industrial policy" but with the world's highest incarceration rate, and using those prisoners at a wage that makes China's sweat shops look generous, it sure seems to me that the US has an "industrial policy". It is a policy of squeezing profit out of the underclass through the prison system.

US Taxpayer Pay the US Military to Tell Them Lies

This is an incredible story published in the Washington Times. The US military paid good money for a contractor to "discover" that the 2008 financial meltdown was the result of some mysterious foreign terrorist group. Incredible. Tax dollars are spent by the US military to create fiction:

Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system.

The unclassified 2009 report “Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses” by financial analyst Kevin D. Freeman, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, states that “a three-phased attack was planned and is in the process against the United States economy.”

While economic analysts and a final report from the federal government's Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission blame the crash on such economic factors as high-risk mortgage lending practices and poor federal regulation and supervision, the Pentagon contractor adds a new element: “outside forces,” a factor the commission did not examine.

“There is sufficient justification to question whether outside forces triggered, capitalized upon or magnified the economic difficulties of 2008,” the report says, explaining that those domestic economic factors would have caused a “normal downturn” but not the “near collapse” of the global economic system that took place.

Suspects include financial enemies in Middle Eastern states, Islamic terrorists, hostile members of the Chinese military, or government and organized crime groups in Russia, Venezuela or Iran. Chinese military officials publicly have suggested using economic warfare against the U.S.

With the US federal government groaning under a huge deficit, you would think that the US military would be making sure that every dollar spent was spent very wisely. Nope. Some nutcases in the Pentagon hired other nutcases as "consultants" to write up a fiction to satisfy their urge to find boogymen as "foreign" conspirators who caused the 2008 Great Recession.

As the article points out, if you consult with a sane academic you get this assessment:

Paul Bracken, a Yale University professor who has studied economic warfare, said he saw “no convincing evidence that ‘outside forces’ colluded to bring about the 2008 crisis.”

“There were outside players in the market” for unregulated credit default swaps, Mr. Bracken said in an e-mail. “Foreign banks and hedge funds play the shorts all the time too. But suggestions of an organized targeted attack for strategic reasons don’t seem to me to be plausible.”

But I guess that the Pentagon was so "successful" at capturing Osama Bin Laden and bringing "democracy" to Iraq with the 2003 invasion, that they needed to turn their critical eye to "terrorists" who they are sure must have brought down the US economy in 2008.

If this is the level of "expertise" in the Pentagon, the US should disband its current military and rebuild it from the ground up!

US Military Fights Its Own Soldiers Better than Its Real Enemies

It has now been just over 9 years that the US military was given the instruction to "get Osama Bin Laden dead or alive". It has failed miserably.

But when it comes to protecting women inside the army from rapes by other soldiers the US military, the organization is incompetent. Women face far more hazards from their fellow citizen soldiers than they do from "the enemy".

And to add to the idiocy, here is the US military "piling on" poor Bradly Manning. From an MSNBC news report:

Following an intensive seven-month investigation, the Army on Wednesday filed 22 additional charges against Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of illegally downloading tens of thousands of classified U.S. military and State Department documents that were then publicly released by WikiLeaks, military officials tell NBC News.

The most serious of the new charges is "aiding the enemy," a capital offense which carries a potential death sentence.

Not only have they cruelly put him into isolation, they now want to kill him. He didn't "give aid to the enemy". He was pointing out the incompetence and lies and hypocrisy within the military and the supposed goals of the US administration. The first big leak was over a case where the US military murder -- yes outright murdered -- civilians and some Reuters news people in a trigger-happy helicopter attack. The US military refused to release any material. Sure. It shows the incompetence and murderous intent of US soldiers who have no respect for life. But that was a war crime and the US military should have stood up and taken the hit. Instead, they blame Bradley Manning for releasing the material.

Bottom line: I blame Barack Obama for this latest moral outrage!

America as a War Machine

The US spends far more on the military than any other country. And even though the Cold War is long over and the threats are now puny non-state actors, the budget for the military inexorably keeps rising. Here a bit from an article in Slate magazine:

Still, $708.2 billion, the sum requested just for fiscal year 2011, is an extraordinary chunk of change. The Center for a New American Security (hardly a dovish think tank) calculates that, adjusting for inflation, this sum is 13 percent higher than the defense budget at the peak of the Korean War, 33 percent higher than at the peak of the Vietnam War, 23 percent higher than at the peak of the Cold War, and 64 percent higher than the Cold War's average.

That is inconceivable. The Cold War was an existential threat to the US. The war on Al Qaeda is a pin prick. The best they could do was kill 3,000 and that was a fluke and will never happen again. But the US is now spending 64% more on war than it was at the height of the Cold War! Insane.

And there is something extremely "fishy" about the military expenditures:

There has been one constant in the defense budget ever since the mid-1960s: the money has been divided almost exactly evenly—never varying by more than a couple of percentage points—among the Army, Navy, and Air Force. For all of Gates' apparent rationality, the same is true in this budget: 32 percent goes to the Army, 35 percent goes to the Navy, 33 percent goes to the Air Force. (For more on this, click here.) It is extremely unlikely that our national-security needs just so happen to demand a response that gives each of our three services a nearly equal share of the military budget.

Does everybody believe that the Al Qaeda threat requires that 35% of the budget go to the Navy while only 32% goes to the Army? What? Has Al Qaeda launched a flotilla while I wasn't watching? Or why does the Air Force get 33% of the budget? Does Al Qaeda have an air force I haven't heard about?

Here's the reality:

In other words, the Defense Department is a monstrous bureaucracy, and its budget is a political document—a set of weights and balances to keep the natural tensions from erupting out of control. (In the 1950s, when budgets were very tight, and before this tacit pie-splitting deal was worked out, the service chiefs saw one another as, quite literally, enemies. For an example, click here.)

So the real principle behind who much and who gets what is a deal brokered in the 1960s? That's 50 years ago! What does that military have to do with the military of 2011?

And while I'm outraged at the incredible sums being "spent" (read: "wasted") in the military budget, it gets worse:

In fact, according to one senior Pentagon official, the White House has promised the Defense Department an increase of $100 billion over the next five years—and that's just in the baseline budget, not including extra money for fighting wars.

So, one of two things is likely to happen in the next couple years. Either the budget—the overall federal budget—and the deficit will zoom higher than the White House is projecting. Or Obama will order his budgeteers to stop playing with numbers and give Gates the authority to bulldoze through a few more bureaucratic barriers in the Pentagon.

Incredible!

Egypt: The People Win, Now Comes the Hard Part

Mubarak didn't have the courage to say the words, so he got his right hand man to step in and announce that he has given up power. Thankfully only 300 lives were lost and several thousand injured to achieve this great victory for the Egyptian people:



The power now rests with the military. Hopefully they will use it wisely to quickly put in place a civilian transitional government, set about electing a constitutional assembly, and start the rebuilding of Egyptian society. The signs I will be looking for will be announcements where commissions are set up including leading opposition figures and representatives of the demonstrators, the clear definition of timelines, and a process of education throughout the land to prepare the people for elections.

Achieving a successful democracy is hard work. It requires thoughtful leadership, an engaged public willing to bear the burdens of building a new society, and patience for putting in place the changes needed. Sadly there will be fanatics and criminals who will try to steal this victory from the people, so the nation must stay vigilant. It will take many months to build the necessary institutions and prepare the people to make wise choices. It will require the people to be patient but watchful. This is the hard work of laying the foundations for a new society.

This is hopefully the start of a wonderful new era for Egypt, an era of peace and progess, of economic growth, of properity, and the chance for Egypt to take a seat among the leading nations on earth.

Here are some hopeful voices from posts on Al Jazeera:

7:34pm Qatar: We look forward a continuous special relations with Egypt that will benefit both countries.

7:12pm Bahrain's foreign minister Khalid al Khalifa: Egypt takes the Arab world into a new era .. Let's make it a better one

6:54pm ElBaradei speaks to Al Jazeera:

We need to rebuild the Egyptian culture and intellect