Month: October 2013

The Russian Space Forces, an actual real branch of the Russian military (with on-again, off-again independence historically) is not in very good shape if war breaks out with some other planet.

“We are unfortunately not ready to fight extraterrestrial civilizations,” conceded Sergey Berezhnoy, the deputy chief of the Titov Main Test and Space Systems Control Centre, who was asked about the forces’ readiness for defending against extraterrestial incursions.

The Titov Centre has been around since 1957, and was eventually just part of the Soviet space program, before its attention turned primarily toward orbital defense, preparation that included not just the prospect of exchanges with other Earth factions in orbit (and missile exchanges), but also at least some preliminary examination of what will happen if and when things get real on a galactic scale.

Of course it’s hard to imagine how anyone could really prepare to fight a whole different species that hasn’t been discovered yet with entirely unknown capabilities, and agendas, but Russian officials don’t seem optimistic about their Space Forces getting “ready” any time soon, noting that there are an awful lot of problems on the planet that are actually taking precedent over the entirely theoretical one.

The U.S. has just announced a deal with Japan that will allow basing rights for surveillance drones. Oh and the Pentagon swears their purpose is to surveil North Korea. Really, they promise. China? What’s a China?

“The primary mission for the Global Hawks will be to fly near North Korea, where U.S. officials hope they will greatly enhance the current spying capabilities,” reports the Washington Post. Maybe – perhaps – an unintended side benefit to the drone missions will be to coordinate with Japan on ” the movements of Chinese ships in the vicinity.”

You can bet Beijing won’t see North Korea as the primary target for the U.S. spy drones. In recent weeks, the Japanese Defense Ministry has indicated a strong interest in obtaining drones for themselves in order to spy on and respond to Chinese military movements in and around the disputed maritime territory of the Senkaku/Diayou islands, currently the most intense point of tension between Japan and China.

Immediately following these indications, Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel visit with their Japanese counterparts and secure a deal to allow the U.S. to base its own drones on Japanese territory and take care Japanese defense for them. It’s a win for the U.S. in that it mitigates the Japanese desire to obtain its own drones, a privileged capability that gives the U.S. an edge, and it maintains U.S. military autonomy in Japan at a time when tensions with China have influenced Tokyo towards beefing up its long-dormant national security state.

But it’s not exactly a win for regional security. The U.S. has been antagonizing China by militarily encircling the rising Asian power and reaffirming defense agreements with all of China’s neighboring rivals, Japan foremost among them. A new scheme to increase spying on Chinese military movements in its own backyard is not going to go over well with Beijing.

“The presence of Global Hawks in East Asia is sure to irritate China, which has become increasingly vocal in pushing back against the U.S. military presence in the region,” the  Washington Post reports. “Officials in Beijing had criticized Tokyo in recent days for reports that the Japanese military was considering acquiring its own Global Hawks, saying the introduction of the drones could escalate tensions.”

U.S. policy could easily exacerbate Sino-Japanese tensions and prompt a very dangerous escalation. “My biggest fear is that a small mishap is going to blow up into something much bigger,” says Elizabeth C. Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations.

“If there is a use of force between Japan and China,” warns Sheila A. Smith, also of CFR, “this could be all-out conflict between these two Asian giants. And as a treaty ally of Japan, it will automatically involve the United States.”

And for what? To contain China’s increasing global power? The U.S. can’t stop that train, which is fueled by their growing economy and increased defense budgets, short of all-out war.

Really, the U.S. should just mind its own business instead of trying to dictate China’s behavior in a desperate attempt to hold on to world hegemony.

Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, provides the following anecdote to sum up the hypcritical U.S. position on China:

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel declared at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore earlier this year, “The United States stands firmly against any coercive attempts to alter the status quo.” Similarly, Hagel’s deputy, Ashton Carter, noted in reference to the Asia-Pacific, “We oppose provocation. We oppose coercion. We oppose the use of force,” adding a U.S. preference for “peaceful resolution of disputes in a manner consistent with international law.” Of course, resorting to coercion and the use of force to change the status quo are defining characteristics of U.S. foreign policy, and — as the reactions to Syria demonstrate — they are widely embraced among pundits and officials. The defining questions of East Asian relations in the coming decades is whether China emulates the U.S. military by embracing coercion, or follows U.S. guidelines as to how local disputes should be resolved.

Do as we say, not as we do. Follow our orders, or prepare for aggression.

Not exactly a constructive approach.

Update: In a piece entitled “New U.S. Drone Base is America’s Latest Move to Contain China,” John Reed at Foreign Policy says “the bottom line is that the U.S. is prepositioning forces around China.” He also details some of the other military assets, in addition to the drones, that America is encircling China with:

The Global Hawks will be joined in Japan by two squadrons of U.S. Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey tiltrotors. An MV-22 can haul a couple dozen Marines over long distances at airplane speeds with the ability to take off and land vertically like a helicopter. Needless to say, these craft could be very useful in responding to emergencies in the Pacific, where American defense officials often lament “the tyranny of distance.”

The Marines will also station F-35B Joint Strike Fighters in Japan starting in 2017, officials announced. The Marines are following the U.S. Air Force’s lead by positioning the stealth fighters in Japan. The air service announced last year that the first overseas bases for its fleet of F-35As will be in Japan. In addition to the American F-35 squadrons, the Japanese, Australian and possibly Singaporean air forces will all fly the Joint Strike Fighter, ringing China’s southeast flank with the stealth jets.

It’s worth pointing out that the U.S. Navy will base some of its brand new P-8 Poseidon submarine and ship hunting jets in Japan starting in December. The P-8 is navalized version of Boeing’s 737 airliner equipped with sonar gear, powerful radars, torpedos and even Harpoon anti-ship missiles.

There is plenty more here. Reed also offers this map of “the sites the U.S. is considering rotating its forces in-and-out of in the Pacific.”

The Iranian commander of the Cyber War Headquarters has been assassinated by two unidentified assailants on motorbikes, in a mysterious killing that bears the hallmarks of previous assassinations of Iranian officials that most experts suspect Israel of carrying out.

The Telegraph:

Mojtaba Ahmadi, who served as commander of the Cyber War Headquarters, was found dead in a wooded area near the town of Karaj, north-west of the capital, Tehran. Five Iranian nuclear scientists and the head of the country’s ballistic missile programme have been killed since 2007. The regime has accused Israel’s external intelligence agency, the Mossad, of carrying out these assassinations.

The last assassination occurred in January of last year, when one of Iran’s top chemists “who worked in the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz” was blown up with an explosive device attached to his car. The incident was met with rising criticism and suspicion of both Israel and the United States. Some even accused the U.S. of being complicit in the killings, which is presumably what prompted U.S. officials to anonymously disclose to NBC News that Israel’s Mossad ordered the assassinations to be carried out by a proxy group, the Iranian dissident group MEK.

Alternatively, CBS reporter Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, a former intelligence correspondent for Haaretz, write in their book “Spies Against Armageddon” that Mossad agents themselves are the ones carrying out the assassinations.

This latest killing, which, keep in mind, is nothing short of international terrorism, comes at an interesting time. Newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has made historic diplomatic overtures to the United States and the Obama administration has been somewhat receptive to it, culminating in the unprecedented direct phone call between Rouhani and Obama last week.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vehemently opposes U.S.-Iranian détente, as made clear in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in which he all but vowed to bomb Iran with or without the U.S.

“Netanyahu will likely dedicate himself to derailing any prospect for a diplomatic breakthrough,” writes Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation.

Is this how he has chosen to do it?

Absent somebody blowing the whistle with some hard evidence, we won’t get confirmation of Israeli involvement. Israeli officials will issue their boilerplate, deliberately ambiguous public statements and everybody will just nod, with perhaps some hardline commentators suggesting such actions are legitimate. He was the commander of the Cyber War Headquarters, they’ll emphasize.

The Obama administration has been actively drawing up lists of targets to hit in their ongoing cyber warfare program, according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Are the officials carrying out that program fair game for China to covertly assassinate? Of course not. Imagine the U.S. reaction (hint: it wouldn’t be anything like Iran’s non-reaction to these assassinations).

Neither is it legitimate for Israel to continue to murder civilian scientists and government officials in Iran.

If this incident prompts a harsh reaction from Iran’s political hardliners, then it could very well begin to unravel the work that’s been done to thaw the U.S.-Iran relationship. And Netanyahu will get exactly what he wanted (see here for why he wants it).

Update: It’s important to note that officials in Iran have cautioned against speculating on whether this was an actual assassination perpetrated by foreign forces.

The NSA admitted in Congressional testimony this week that they were deliberately “collect[ing] data about ordinary Americans’ cellphone locations,” in a test program that lasted from 2010 to 2011.

Collecting data about the cellphone locations of ordinary Americans. The NSA targeted ordinary Americans. This is quite a departure from what the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has repeatedly insisted, that data about ordinary Americans may get inadvertently swept up in the process of targeting terrorists or foreigners.

In an interview after his testimony, NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander told the Washington Post that they discontinued the program because “we couldn’t find…operational value out of it.”

Did you get that? They didn’t shut down the program because it, say, violated the privacy rights of American citizens. They didn’t do it out of conscience. No, they shut it down because it wasn’t as useful as they thought it would be.

But Alexander wants you to know, as he said in testimony, “This may be something that may be a future requirement for the country, but it is not right now…”

Well, I feel better.

After all that has been revealed since Edward Snowden’s heroic leaks, Americans have little reason to be surprised about each new NSA revelation, no matter how much more egregious it makes the previous one seem. But this confession comes just days after another NSA program, also begun in 2010, was revealed. In this program, which is still ongoing, the NSA “has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information,” as reported by James Risen and Laura Poitras in the New York Times.  

The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.

N.S.A. officials declined to say how many Americans have been caught up in the effort, including people involved in no wrongdoing.

This program still exists, so I suppose it proved “valuable” in spying on Americans.

The proportions of the NSA’s unconstitutional domestic surveillance apparatus are wider and grander than almost anybody conceived prior to these disclosures. And yet, the “real story,” as Sen. Ron Wyden put it, is still being hidden from us.

“After years of stonewalling on whether the government has ever tracked or planned to track the location of law abiding Americans through their cellphones, once again, the intelligence leadership has decided to leave most of the real story secret — even when the truth would not compromise national security,” Wyden said in a statement on Wednesday.

In addition to being able to track the geographic location of any “ordinary American,” the NSA is grabbing 75% of all Internet traffic, the Wall Street Journal reported in August, including in some cases “the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S.” Former NSA analyst Russell Tice put it this way: the NSA is “collecting everything.”

What is the Obama administration’s official line on the NSA scandal as of this date? Just as he said on Jay Leno back in August: “There is no spying on Americans.”

The U.S. has been declaring victory in Colombia for several years now, citing successes in clamping down on the drug trade. But it’s clear the international drug war has failed miserably.

The Clinton administration launched a foreign policy initiative to choke off the export of cocaine from Colombia by encouraging the Colombian government to militarize its policing of the drug trade and giving them all the money, weapons, and training they needed to do so. The support has kept up, with almost $4 billion in aid being sent since 2007.

It wasn’t long before abuses became rampant. Right-wing paramilitary groups with close ties to the U.S.-backed government rampage throughout the country with impunity thanks to an accommodative police force. These para-military groups “regularly commit massacres, killings, forced displacement, rape, and extortion, and create a threatening atmosphere in the communities they control” often targeting “human rights defenders, trade unionists, victims of the paramilitaries who are seeking justice, and community members who do not follow their orders,” according to Human Rights Watch. Tactics of the government also became increasingly abusive with widespread illegal spying practices by Colombia’s intelligence agencies grabbing headlines in recent years.

But forget about the ugly consequences of U.S. aid and militarization. Even on it’s own terms, Washington’s drug war in Colombia has failed. While coca production has indeed decreased dramatically, the drug production has merely shifted to neighboring countries.

Ted Galen Carpenter at the Cato Institute explains:

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime announced last week that the production of coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine, has shifted away from Colombia toward Peru.  Observers of the war on drugs are not surprised by that development. During the early and mid-1990s, drug warriors hailed the decline of coca production in Peru and neighboring Bolivia, thanks to a crackdown that Washington heavily funded through aid programs to Lima and La Paz, as a great victory in the crusade against illegal drugs.  They ignored the inconvenient fact that cultivation and production had merely moved from Peru and Bolivia into Colombia–and to a lesser extent into nearby countries such as Ecuador, Venezuela, and Brazil.

That phenomenon is known as the “balloon” or “push down, pop up” effect.  Strenuous efforts to dampen the supply of illicit drugs in one locale simply cause traffickers to move their production to other locations where the pressure is weaker for the moment.  When Washington and Bogotá launched Plan Colombia in 2000, the multi-billion-dollar, multi-year program to attack the coca industry in that country, cultivation and production gradually began to shift back to Peru and Bolivia.  The latest UN report confirms that trend.  As Ricardo Soberón, the former heard of Peru’s drug policy office, put it: “The carousel has come full circle.”  Adam Isacson, an expert on Latin American drug issues with the Washington Office on Latin America, noted that the new map of coca production “looks an awful lot like the old” map from the early 1990s.

So, what have we to show for the billions of dollars and countless lives ruined in the drug war in Colombia? Nothing. We’re back to square one, proving yet again that military tactics will not diminish the demand for drugs and that prohibitionist policies – on the domestic front and the international – simply don’t work.

The U.S. continues to militarize the drug war in Latin America, however. Our DEA agents, for example, are running all around Honduras, training security forces and killing people occasionally. U.S. economic and military aid continues to flow to abusive governments in the region, much of it contingent on how much those governments militarize their domestic police functions and crack down on the drug trade. Signs of improvement, unsurprisingly, are not forthcoming.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's words were entered as testimony at the European Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee in Brussels on Monday.

Jesselyn Radack of the US Government Accountability Project (GAP) and a former whistleblower and ethics adviser to the US Department of Justice, read Snowden's statement into the record.

Ms. Radack came to prominence after she revealed that the FBI had committed what she said was a breach of ethics in its interrogation of John Walker Lindh, who was captured during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and dubbed the “American Taliban.”

* * *

I thank the European Parliament and the LIBE Committee for taking up the challenge of mass surveillance. The surveillance of whole populations, rather than individuals, threatens to be the greatest human rights challenge of our time. The success of economies in developed nations relies increasingly on their creative output, and if that success is to continue, we must remember that creativity is the product of curiosity, which in turn is the product of privacy.

A culture of secrecy has denied our societies the opportunity to determine the appropriate balance between the human right of privacy and the governmental interest in investigation. These are not decisions that should be made for a people, but only by the people after full, informed, and fearless debate. Yet public debate is not possible without public knowledge, and in my country, the cost for one in my position of returning public knowledge to public hands has been persecution and exile. If we are to enjoy such debates in the future, we cannot rely upon individual sacrifice. We must create better channels for people of conscience to inform not only trusted agents of government, but independent representatives of the public outside of government.

When I began my work, it was with the sole intention of making possible the debate we see occurring here in this body and in many other bodies around the world. Today we see legislative bodies forming new committees, calling for investigations, and proposing new solutions for modern problems. We see emboldened courts that are no longer afraid to consider critical questions of national security. We see brave executives remembering that if a public is prevented from knowing how they are being governed, the necessary result is that they are no longer self-governing. And we see the public reclaiming an equal seat at the table of government. The work of a generation is beginning here, with your hearings, and you have the full measure of my gratitude and support.

Thanks to Common Dreams for this post.