TBR News January 11, 2017

Jan 11 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. January 11, 2017: “ “President Barack Obama, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, is no longer a “lawyer”. He surrendered his license back in 2008 in order to escape charges he lied on his bar application.

Michelle Obama “voluntarily surrendered” her law license in 1993. after a   Federal Judge gave her the choice between surrendering her license or standing trial for Insurance fraud!

Source: http://jdlong.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/pres-barack-obama-editor-of-the-Harvard-law-review-has-no-law-license/

https://www.iardc.org (Stands for Illinois Attorney Registration And Disciplinary Committee).

Barack Obama was NOT a Constitutional Law Professor at the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago released a statement in March 2008 saying Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) “served as a professor” in the law school-but that is a title Obama, who taught courses there part-time, never held the title of Professor of Law,” said Marsha Ferziger Nagorsky, an Assistant Dean for Communications and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago School of Law

The Illinois Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission lists President Obama’s registration status as “voluntarily retired.”

It lists Michelle Obama’s status as “voluntarily inactive.”

It’s true that although both President Obama and the University of Chicago have stated at various times that he was a “professor of law” or “professor of constitutional law” at the U.C. Law School, he never officially held that title. He was first a Lecturer (1992-1996) and then a Senior Lecturer (1996-2004) until elected to the Senate in 2004.

It’s also true that neither the president nor the first lady holds an active license to practice law. A search on the website of the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois shows that Barack Obama is listed as “voluntarily retired and not authorized to practice law,” and Michelle Obama is listed as “voluntarily inactive and not authorized to practice law.”

President Obama graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991 and was admitted as a lawyer by the Supreme Court of Illinois on Dec. 17, 1991. Prior to being elected to the Illinois state Senate in 1996, he worked as a civil rights lawyer at the firm formerly known as Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. Four days after Obama announced that he would run for president in February 2007, he voluntarily elected to have his law license placed on “inactive” status, according to Grogan. Then, after becoming president, he elected to change his status to “retired” in February 2009.

Michelle Obama graduated from Harvard Law School in 1988, and was admitted as a lawyer by the Supreme Court of Illinois on May 12, 1989. Following graduation, she joined Sidley Austin, a corporate law firm in Chicago. But a few years later, in 1994, while working for the Public Allies project in Chicago, Obama voluntarily had her license placed on “inactive” status.”

Table of Contents

  • U.S. companies have new business risk – being labeled ‘anti-American’ by Trump
  • Turkey opposition fears ‘dictatorship’
  • Browser autofill used to steal personal details in new phishing attack
  • Mein Kampf’: Murphy translation: Part 7
  • Watch How Casually False Claims are Published: New York Times and Nicholas Lemann Edition
  • The Most Important US Air Force Base You’ve Never Heard Of
  • 902nd Military Intelligence Group. (‘The Duce”)

 U.S. companies have new business risk – being labeled ‘anti-American’ by Trump

January 10, 2017

by Lauren Hirsch and Mike Stone

Reuters

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON-Some U.S. companies are reviewing potential mergers while others are rethinking job cuts or looking at their manufacturing operations in China for fear of being cast as “anti-American” by President-elect Donald Trump, according to Wall Street bankers, company executives and crisis management consultants.

Having seen some of America’s largest companies, including General Motors Co (GM.N), Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) and United Technologies Corp (UTX.N), bluntly and publicly rebuked by Trump on Twitter, many others are worried they may be his next target – especially if they have significant overseas manufacturing, have had U.S. job cuts or price increases for consumers.

“Any business that leaves our country for another country, fires its employees, builds a new factory or plant in the other country, and then thinks it will sell its product back into the U.S. without retribution or consequence is WRONG!” Trump, who assumes office on Jan. 20, tweeted in December.

Trump campaigned on an “America First” anti-globalization platform that promised the return of thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs to economically depressed areas.

That nationalist rhetoric and Trump’s willingness to use his Twitter account as a cudgel has so rattled some companies that they are putting on hold mergers and acquisitions that may involve significant job cuts or moving production or tax domicile abroad, out of fear that such deals could be seen as “unpatriotic”, several top Wall Street bankers said.

Bermuda-based White Mountains Insurance Group Ltd (WTM.N) had been in talks to sell itself in a transaction that would have been structured as an inversion – where a U.S.-based buyer would move its tax domicile overseas.

However, the deal fell apart after the November election partly because potential buyers worried that leaving the U.S. tax home would be seen as “anti-American,” three people with knowledge of the matter said. Potential buyers also found the target less attractive because of the likelihood of lower U.S. corporate taxes under the Trump administration, the people said.

Representatives of the $3.8 billion company declined to comment.

At least two other insurance deals have also fallen apart since the election for similar reasons, said the people, who declined to elaborate and asked not to be named because the matter is not public.

Trump’s aggressive anti-China rhetoric has also given some companies pause.

James Park, chief executive of wearable fitness device maker Fitbit Inc FIT.O, said he expects all companies that have significant manufacturing operations in China, including his own firm, to prepare contingency plans.

Trump has threatened to hit China and Mexico with high tariffs and named vocal China critic Peter Navarro to lead a new White House office overseeing U.S. trade policy.

“Whether it’s taking higher costs into account or operationally preparing for moving manufacturing (out of China), companies are thinking about what to do,” Park said in an interview.

WATCHING TRUMP’S TWEETS

Companies are also beefing up their Twitter monitoring for any Trump tweets that could affect them and engaging public relations firms for advice on potential lines of attack and how to respond if they were to come, several U.S. chief executives as well as half a dozen corporate advisers told Reuters.

“Back in December the board was already asking questions: ‘What’s the plan in terms of what happens if he comes after us, are we ready? The board is asking us if we have a PR firm at the ready, if we have a person monitoring his Twitter,” said a top executive at a large U.S. defense contractor.

“Our plan is to not get into a fight, and concede immediately. The reality is that we’re trying to stay below the radar,” the executive said, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Since his election in November, Trump has ramped up criticism of companies from Ford Motor Co (F.N), Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) and GM, to United Tech and Rexnord Corp (RXN.N) over manufacturing in Mexico for U.S. consumers or moving U.S. jobs abroad.

Trump also slammed Lockheed Martin and Boeing Co (BA.N) for what he called “out of control” costs on their weapons programs.

Both Lockheed and Boeing have said they will work to drive down costs of the programs, while Ford scrapped plans to build a $1.6 billion plant in Mexico, and United Tech’s Carrier unit is keeping half of the 2,100 U.S. jobs it was to shift to Mexico.

Government relations and public relations advisers say they have received a number of calls from companies wanting help in assessing if they have any red flags that could draw Trump’s ire.

Advisers say these potentially include outsourcing of manufacturing, consumer price increases and lower tax rates than peer companies.

“We have literally had about a dozen clients ask us how they should be thinking about this in the last few weeks,” said George Sard, chairman and CEO of strategic communications firm Sard Verbinnen & Co, adding that he is seeing concern from companies in a wide range of industries.

“The week after the election it was non-stop meetings and conference calls and analysis,” said Kent Jarrell, crisis and litigation communication expert at APCO Worldwide. “It’s almost like a whole new Trump practice is developing.”

Corporate leaders, say the advisers, can no longer focus only on maximizing shareholder value; they must now also weigh national interest.

“CEOs are talking to their boards saying we’ve got to be viewed pro-America. If something is more on the margin – like layoffs, or moving manufacturing, then they are not going to do it,” said one Fortune 500 CEO, who said he had spoken with other U.S. companies.

TAKING A PAGE FROM TRUMP PLAYBOOK

Sard, of Sard Verbinnen & Co, said that while companies are well advised not to get into a Twitter war with Trump, his firm is advising clients to “learn from his playbook” and be prepared to communicate directly with shareholders, employees, and customers through blogs and social media.

There is already evidence that companies are quickly adjusting to the new Trump era. Firms have been more vocal in publicizing job creation and they have sometimes let Trump claim credit.

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCHA.MI) (FCAU.N), the No. 3 automaker in the United States, announced plans on Sunday to create 2,000 U.S. jobs. The timing was partly influenced by CEO Sergio Marchionne’s desire to get the news out ahead of any possible criticism from Trump for the automaker’s overseas manufacturing, a person familiar with the company’s thinking said.

Trump has in the past few weeks attacked FCA’s two Detroit rivals, as well as Japan-based Toyota, for their manufacturing operations in Mexico and threatened to impose stiff border taxes on any imports.

In December, SoftBank Group Corp (9984.T), majority owner of Sprint Corp (S.N), unveiled a $50 billion U.S. investment at the Trump Tower in Manhattan. Trump and SoftBank head Masayoshi Son made the announcement together, and Trump later tweeted: “He would never do this had we (Trump) not won the election!”

“You never want to be against the president – especially not one as vocal as (Trump),” the Fortune 500 CEO said.

(Additional reporting by Olivia Oran in New York, Liana Baker in San Francisco and David Shepardson in Detroit, Editing by Soyoung Kim and Ross Colvin)

 Turkey opposition fears ‘dictatorship’

At President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s behest, the ruling AKP party wants to introduce a presidential system in Turkey. The country’s political opposition is up in arms.

January 10, 2017

DW

Kemal Kilicdaroglu doesn’t mince his words. The head of the biggest Turkish opposition party, the CHP, believes that the introduction of a presidential system in the country would be tantamount to establishing a “dictatorship.”

One thing seems clear: If Turkey were transformed from a parliamentary democracy to a presidential system under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it would mean the strongman at the head of the country would become even more powerful.

A state of emergency has been in place in Turkey since the attempted coup last July, meaning that President Erdogan is able to rule by decree. At present, parliament has to approve these decrees retrospectively. Under the proposed presidential system, this parliamentary control would be dropped.

Added to this, the head of state would also be the head of government. In this position, Erdogan would be responsible for naming and removing all of his deputies and ministers. He would no longer be represented by the head of parliament but by his vice-presidents, and could decide for himself how many of these there would be.

Strong support from the AKP

The formal independence of the president, which has until now been a fixed element in the country’s political system, would be abolished. Erdogan is not formally a member of the AKP, but he makes no bones about his support for his former party.

Approval for the reform within the AKP is correspondingly high. Mehmet Simsek, an AKP politician and deputy prime minister of Turkey, is not at all alarmed by the prospect of the concentration of so much power in one person’s hands. On the contrary. Simsek sees only positives in the introduction of a presidential system. “The executive would be strengthened, for one thing, as the president of the country would be able to rule for five years completely independent of parliamentary fragmentation,” he says. “Furthermore, we could abolish the 10 percent hurdle for entry into parliament, thereby achieving a fair representation of all population groups.”

High barriers to reform

However, enthusiasm in the ranks of the AKP will not be enough to get the reform passed. The party doesn’t have enough seats to push it through parliament on its own. Neither the pro-Kurdish HDP nor the Kemalist CHP share Simsek’s optimism; they’re strictly opposed to the introduction of a presidential system.

Turkey expert Christoph Ramm from the University of Bern is skeptical, too. He says that in order to pass the reform, the AKP would need “to form an alliance, at least unofficially, with the right-wing nationalist MHP. Both parties pursue an isolationist, right-wing nationalist line. There’s a lot of negotiation right now behind the scenes. The introduction of the death penalty is one of the subjects on the table.”

This coalition won’t give the AKP the necessary two-thirds majority, either – but with the MHP’s votes it could schedule a referendum and let the people vote on the reform.

CHP leader Kilicdaroglu is dreading the next few weeks. For him, the fact that these suggestions are being at all made signifies the beginning of the end of “the 140-year-old parliamentary tradition” in Turkey.

Browser autofill used to steal personal details in new phishing attack

Chrome, Safari, Opera and extensions such as LastPass can be tricked into leaking private information using hidden text boxes, developer finds

January 10, 2017

by Samuel Gibbs

The Guardian

Your browser or password manager’s autofill might be inadvertently giving away your information to unscrupulous phishers using hidden text boxes on sites.

Finnish web developer and hacker Viljami Kuosmanen discovered that several web browsers, including Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Opera, as well as some plugins and utilities such as LastPass, can be tricked into giving away a user’s personal information through their profile-based autofill systems.

The phising attack is brutally simple. Kuosmanen discovered that when a user attempts to fill in information in some simple text boxes, such as name and email address, the autofill system, which is intended to avoid tedious repetition of standard information such as your address, will input other profile-based information into any other text boxes – even when those boxes are not visible on the page.

It means that when a user inputs seemingly innocent, basic information into a site, the autofill system could be giving away much more sensitive information at the same time should the user confirm the autofill. Chrome’s autofill system, which is switched on by default, stores data on email addresses, phone numbers, mailing addresses, organisations, credit card information and various other bits and pieces.

Kuosmanen set up a site to demonstrate the issue, showing a text box for a user’s name and email address, with text boxes for address and phone number hidden from view, autofilled by Chrome.

Mozilla’s Firefox is immune to the problem, as it does not yet have a multi-box autofill system and cannot be tricked into filling text boxes by programatic means, according to Mozilla principle security engineer Daniel Veditz. A more complete autofill system is currently in development for Firefox, however.

The phishing attack still relies on users being tricked into entering at least some information into an online form, but unsuspecting users could be tricked into entering more than they bargained for relatively easily.

Users can protect themselves from this kind of phishing attack by disabling the autofill system within their browser or extension settings.

Airline passenger details easy prey for hackers, say researchers

‘Mein Kampf’: Murphy translation: Part 7

January 10, 2017

There have been a number of translations of Hitler’s seminal book. Most have been heavily editited so as to promulgate disinformation about Hitler’s views and remove passages that might offend the sensitive.

The Murphy translation is considered to be the most accurate and is being reprinted in toto here.

Our next publication of this work will be the unexpurgated original German edition. The Germans have recently released a highly doctored edition of ‘Mein Kampf’ that is selling well in Germany.

Perhaps a free copy of the original would do better. ed

 VOLUME I: A RETROSPECT

             CHAPTER VIII: THE BEGINNING OF MY POLITICAL ACTIVITIES

Towards the end of November I returned to Munich. I went to the depot of my regiment, which was now in the hands of the ‘Soldiers’ Councils’. As the whole administration was quite repulsive to me, I decided to leave it as soon as I possibly could. With my faithful war-comrade, Ernst-Schmidt, I came to Traunstein and remained there until the camp was broken up. In March 1919 we were back again in Munich.

The situation there could not last as it was. It tended irresistibly to a further extension of the Revolution. Eisner’s death served only to hasten this development and finally led to the dictatorship of the Councils–or, to put it more correctly, to a Jewish hegemony, which turned out to be transitory but which was the original aim of those who had contrived the Revolution.

At that juncture innumerable plans took shape in my mind. I spent whole days pondering on the problem of what could be done, but unfortunately every project had to give way before the hard fact that I was quite unknown and therefore did not have even the first pre-requisite necessary for effective action. Later on I shall explain the reasons why

I could not decide to join any of the parties then in existence.

As the new Soviet Revolution began to run its course in Munich my first activities drew upon me the ill-will of the Central Council. In the early morning of April 27th, 1919, I was to have been arrested; but the three fellows who came to arrest me did not have the courage to face my rifle and withdrew just as they had arrived.

A few days after the liberation of Munich I was ordered to appear before the Inquiry Commission which had been set up in the 2nd Infantry Regiment for the purpose of watching revolutionary activities. That was my first incursion into the more or less political field.

After another few weeks I received orders to attend a course of lectures which were being given to members of the army. This course was meant to inculcate certain fundamental principles on which the soldier could base his political ideas. For me the advantage of this organization was that it gave me a chance of meeting fellow soldiers who were of the same way of thinking and with whom I could discuss the actual situation. We were all more or less firmly convinced that Germany could not be saved from imminent disaster by those who had participated in the November treachery–that is to say, the Centre and the Social-Democrats; and also that the so-called Bourgeois-National group could not make good the damage that had been done, even if they had the best intentions. They lacked a number of requisites without which such a task could never be successfully undertaken. The years that followed have justified the opinions which we held at that time.

In our small circle we discussed the project of forming a new party. The leading ideas which we then proposed were the same as those which were carried into effect afterwards, when the German Labour Party was founded. The name of the new movement which was to be founded should be such that of itself, it would appeal to the mass of the people; for all our efforts would turn out vain and useless if this condition were lacking. And that was the reason why we chose the name ‘Social-Revolutionary Party’, particularly because the social principles of our new organization were indeed revolutionary.

But there was also a more fundamental reason. The attention which I had given to economic problems during my earlier years was more or less confined to considerations arising directly out of the social problem.

Subsequently this outlook broadened as I came to study the German policy of the Triple Alliance. This policy was very largely the result of an erroneous valuation of the economic situation, together with a confused notion as to the basis on which the future subsistence of the German people could be guaranteed. All these ideas were based on the principle that capital is exclusively the product of labour and that, just like labour, it was subject to all the factors which can hinder or promote human activity. Hence, from the national standpoint, the significance of capital depended on the greatness and freedom and power of the State, that is to say, of the nation, and that it is this dependence alone which leads capital to promote the interests of the State and the nation, from the instinct of self-preservation and for the sake of its own development.

On such principles the attitude of the State towards capital would be comparatively simple and clear. Its only object would be to make sure that capital remained subservient to the State and did not allocate to itself the right to dominate national interests. Thus it could confine its activities within the two following limits: on the one side, to assure a vital and independent system of national economy and, on the other, to safeguard the social rights of the workers.

Previously I did not recognize with adequate clearness the difference between capital which is purely the product of creative labour and the existence and nature of capital which is exclusively the result of financial speculation. Here I needed an impulse to set my mind thinking in this direction; but that impulse had hitherto been lacking.

The requisite impulse now came from one of the men who delivered lectures in the course I have already mentioned. This was Gottfried Feder.

For the first time in my life I heard a discussion which dealt with the principles of stock-exchange capital and capital which was used for loan activities. After hearing the first lecture delivered by Feder, the ide immediately came into my head that I had now found a way to one of the most essential pre-requisites for the founding of a new party.

To my mind, Feder’s merit consisted in the ruthless and trenchant way in which he described the double character of the capital engaged in stock-exchange and loan transaction, laying bare the fact that this capital is ever and always dependent on the payment of interest. In fundamental questions his statements were so full of common sense that those who criticized him did not deny that AU FOND his ideas were sound but they doubted whether it be possible to put these ideas into practice. To me this seemed the strongest point in Feder’s teaching, though others considered it a weak point.

It is not the business of him who lays down a theoretical programme to explain the various ways in which something can be put into practice.

His task is to deal with the problem as such; and, therefore, he has to look to the end rather than the means. The important question is whether an idea is fundamentally right or not. The question of whether or not it may be difficult to carry it out in practice is quite another matter.

When a man whose task it is to lay down the principles of a programme or policy begins to busy himself with the question as to whether it is expedient and practical, instead of confining himself to the statement of the absolute truth, his work will cease to be a guiding star to those who are looking about for light and leading and will become merely a recipe for every-day iife. The man who lays down the programme of a movement must consider only the goal. It is for the political leader to point out the way in which that goal may be reached. The thought of the former will, therefore, be determined by those truths that are everlasting, whereas the activity of the latter must always be guided by taking practical account of the circumstances under which those truths have to be carried into effect.

The greatness of the one will depend on the absolute truth of his idea, considered in the abstract; whereas that of the other will depend on whether or not he correctly judges the given realities and how they may be utilized under the guidance of the truths established by the former.

The test of greatness as applied to a political leader is the success of his plans and his enterprises, which means his ability to reach the goal for which he sets out; whereas the final goal set up by the political philosopher can never be reached; for human thought may grasp truths and picture ends which it sees like clear crystal, though such ends can never be completely fulfilled because human nature is weak and imperfect. The more an idea is correct in the abstract, and, therefore, all the more powerful, the smaller is the possibility of putting it into practice, at least as far as this latter depends on human beings. The significance of a political philosopher does not depend on the practical success of the plans he lays down but rather on their absolute truth and the influence they exert on the progress of mankind. If it were otherwise, the founders of religions could not be considered as the greatest men who have ever lived, because their moral aims will never be completely or even approximately carried out in practice. Even that religion which is called the Religion of Love is really no more than a faint reflex of the will of its sublime Founder. But its significance lies in the orientation which it endeavoured to give to human civilization, and human virtue and morals.

This very wide difference between the functions of a political philosopher and a practical political leader is the reason why the qualifications necessary for both functions are scarcely ever found associated in the same person. This applies especially to the so-called successful politician of the smaller kind, whose activity is indeed hardly more than practising the art of doing the possible, as Bismarck modestly defined the art of politics in general. If such a politician resolutely avoids great ideas his success will be all the easier to attain; it will be attained more expeditely and frequently will be more tangible. By reason of this very fact, however, such success is doomed to futility and sometimes does not even survive the death of its author.

Generally speaking, the work of politicians is without significance for the following generation, because their temporary success was based on the expediency of avoiding all really great decisive problems and ideas which would be valid also for future generations.

To pursue ideals which will still be of value and significance for the future is generally not a very profitable undertaking and he who follows such a course is only very rarely understood by the mass of the people, who find beer and milk a more persuasive index of political values than far-sighted plans for the future, the realization of which can only take place later on and the advantages of which can be reaped only by posterity.

Because of a certain vanity, which is always one of the blood-relations of unintelligence, the general run of politicians will always eschew those schemes for the future which are really difficult to put into practice; and they will practise this avoidance so that they may not lose the immediate favour of the mob. The importance and the success of such politicians belong exclusively to the present and will be of no consequence for the future. But that does not worry small-minded people; they are quite content with momentary results.

The position of the constructive political philosopher is quite different. The importance of his work must always be judged from the standpoint of the future; and he is frequently described by the word WELTFREMD, or dreamer. While the ability of the politician consists in mastering the art of the possible, the founder of a political system belongs to those who are said to please the gods only because they wish for and demand the impossible. They will always have to renounce contemporary fame; but if their ideas be immortal, posterity will grant them its acknowledgment.

Within long spans of human progress it may occasionally happen that the practical politician and political philosopher are one. The more intimate this union is, the greater will be the obstacles which the activity of the politician will have to encounter. Such a man does not labour for the purpose of satisfying demands that are obvious to every philistine, but he reaches out towards ends which can be understood only by the few. His life is torn asunder by hatred and love. The protest of his contemporaries, who do not understand the man, is in conflict with the recognition of posterity, for whom he also works.

For the greater the work which a man does for the future, the less will he be appreciated by his contemporaries. His struggle will accordingly be all the more severe, and his success all the rarer. When, in the course of centuries, such a man appears who is blessed with success then, towards the end of his days, he may have a faint prevision of his future fame. But such great men are only the Marathon runners of history. The laurels of contemporary fame are only for the brow of the dying hero.

The great protagonists are those who fight for their ideas and ideals despite the fact that they receive no recognition at the hands of their contemporaries. They are the men whose memories will be enshrined in the hearts of the future generations. It seems then as if each individual felt it his duty to make retroactive atonement for the wrong which great men have suffered at the hands of their contemporaries. Their lives and their work are then studied with touching and grateful admiration.

Especially in dark days of distress, such men have the power of healing broken hearts and elevating the despairing spirit of a people.

To this group belong not only the genuinely great statesmen but all the great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great we have such men as Martin Luther and Richard Wagner.

When I heard Gottfried Feder’s first lecture on ‘The Abolition of the Interest-Servitude’, I understood immediately that here was a truth of transcendental importance for the future of the German people. The absolute separation of stock-exchange capital from the economic life of the nation would make it possible to oppose the process of internationalization in German business without at the same time attacking capital as such, for to do this would jeopardize the foundations of our national independence. I clearly saw what was developing in Germany and I realized then that the stiffest fight we would have to wage would not be against the enemy nations but against international capital. In Feder’s speech I found an effective rallying-cry for our coming struggle.

Here, again, later events proved how correct was the impression we then had. The fools among our bourgeois politicians do not mock at us on this point any more; for even those politicians now see–if they would speak the truth–that international stock-exchange capital was not only the chief instigating factor in bringing on the War but that now when the

War is over it turns the peace into a hell.

The struggle against international finance capital and loan-capital has become one of the most important points in the programme on which the German nation has based its fight for economic freedom and independence.

Regarding the objections raised by so-called practical people, the following answer must suffice: All apprehensions concerning the fearful economic consequences that would follow the abolition of the servitude that results from interest-capital are ill-timed; for, in the first place, the economic principles hitherto followed have proved quite fatal to the interests of the German people. The attitude adopted when the question of maintaining our national existence arose vividly recalls similar advice once given by experts–the Bavarian Medical College, for example–on the question of introducing railroads. The fears expressed by that august body of experts were not realized. Those who travelled in the coaches of the new ‘Steam-horse’ did not suffer from vertigo. Those who looked on did not become ill and the hoardings which had been erected to conceal the new invention were eventually taken down. Only those blinds which obscure the vision of the would-be ‘experts’, have remained. And that will be always so.

In the second place, the following must be borne in mind: Any idea may be a source of danger if it be looked upon as an end in itself, when really it is only the means to an end. For me and for all genuine National-Socialists there is only one doctrine. PEOPLE AND FATHERLAND.

What we have to fight for is the necessary security for the existence and increase of our race and people, the subsistence of its children and the maintenance of our racial stock unmixed, the freedom and independence of the Fatherland; so that our people may be enabled to fulfil the mission assigned to it by the Creator.

All ideas and ideals, all teaching and all knowledge, must serve these ends. It is from this standpoint that everything must be examined and turned to practical uses or else discarded. Thus a theory can never become a mere dead dogma since everything will have to serve the practical ends of everyday life.

Thus the judgment arrived at by Gottfried Feder determined me to make a fundamental study of a question with which I had hitherto not been very familiar.

I began to study again and thus it was that I first came to understand perfectly what was the substance and purpose of the life-work of the Jew, Karl Marx. His CAPITAL became intelligible to me now for the first time. And in the light of it I now exactly understood the fight of the Social-Democrats against national economics, a fight which was to prepare the ground for the hegemony of a real international and stock-exchange capital.

In another direction also this course of lectures had important consequences for me.

One day I put my name down as wishing to take part in the discussion.

Another of the participants thought that he would break a lance for the Jews and entered into a lengthy defence of them. This aroused my opposition. An overwhelming number of those who attended the lecture course supported my views. The consequence of it all was that, a few days later, I was assigned to a regiment then stationed at Munich and given a position there as ‘instruction officer’.

At that time the spirit of discipline was rather weak among those troops. It was still suffering from the after-effects of the period when the Soldiers’ Councils were in control. Only gradually and carefully could a new spirit of military discipline and obedience be introduced in place of ‘voluntary obedience’, a term which had been used to express the ideal of military discipline under Kurt Eisner’s higgledy-piggledy regime. The soldiers had to be taught to think and feel in a national and patriotic way. In these two directions lay my future line of action.

I took up my work with the greatest delight and devotion. Here I was presented with an opportunity of speaking before quite a large audience.

I was now able to confirm what I had hitherto merely felt, namely, that

I had a talent for public speaking. My voice had become so much better that I could be well understood, at least in all parts of the small hall where the soldiers assembled.

No task could have been more pleasing to me than this one; for now, before being demobilized, I was in a position to render useful service to an institution which had been infinitely dear to my heart: namely, the army.

I am able to state that my talks were successful. During the course of my lectures I have led back hundreds and even thousands of my fellow countrymen to their people and their fatherland. I ‘nationalized’ these troops and by so doing I helped to restore general discipline.

Here again I made the acquaintance of several comrades whose thought ran along the same lines as my own and who later became members of the first group out of which the new movement developed.

Watch How Casually False Claims are Published: New York Times and Nicholas Lemann Edition

January 10 2017

by Glenn Greenwald

The Intercept

Like most people, I’ve long known that factual falsehoods are routinely published in major media outlets. But as I’ve pointed out before, nothing makes you internalize just how often it really happens, how completely their editorial standards so often fail, like being personally involved in a story that receives substantial media coverage. I cannot count how many times I’ve read or heard claims from major media outlets about the Snowden story that I knew, from first-hand knowledge, were a total fabrication.

We have a perfect example of how this happens from the New York Times today, in a book review by Nicholas Lemann, the Pulitzer-Moore professor of journalism at Columbia University as well as a long-time staff writer for The New Yorker. Lemann is reviewing a new book by Edward J. Epstein – the long-time neocon, right-wing Cold Warrior, WSJ op-ed page writer and Breitbart contributor – which basically claims Snowden is a Russian spy.

The book has been widely discredited even before its release as it is filled with demonstrable lies. The usually rhetorically restrained Bart Gellman, whose work on the Snowden story at the Washington Post won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, called the book “bad faith work” that is filled with “distortions” and “baseless and bizarro claims,” several of of which he documented. I’ve documented some of the other obvious falsehoods in the book.

Suffice to say, so fringe is Epstein’s conspiracy claim that even top NSA and CIA officials – who despise Snowden and have repeatedly attempted to disparage him – have rejected the book’s central conspiracy theory that Snowden has worked with the Kremlin. In 2014, Epstein, citing what he claimed a government official told him “off the record,” wrote my favorite sentence about this whole affair, one which I often quoted in my speeches to great audience laughter: “there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation; or 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation.” He’s apparently now opted for Door #1.

Lemann himself is highly dismissive of the book’s central accusations about Snowden, and does a perfectly fine job of explaining how the book provides no convincing evidence for its key conspiracies:

Epstein proves none of this. “How America Lost Its Secrets” is an impressively fluffy and golden-brown wobbly soufflé of speculation, full of anonymous sourcing and suppositional language like “it seems plausible to believe” or “it doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to conclude.”

Lemann’s review is worth reading to see what a farce this book is, and especially – for all those authoritarian liberal New Cold Warriors tempted to embrace the book because it smears Snowden as a Russian operative – to understand who Epstein is and the ideological agenda to which he’s long been devoted.

Nonetheless, there is one statement in Lemann’s review that is misleading in the extreme, and another that that is so blatantly, factually false that it’s mind-boggling it got approved by a NYT editor and, presumably, a fact-checker. But it is worth looking at because it illustrates how easily this happens. Here’s the first one:

Snowden, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, and their immediate circle of allies come from a radically libertarian hacker culture that, most of the time, doesn’t believe there should be an N.S.A. at all, whether or not it remains within the confines of its legal charter.

Though ambiguous about who exactly it is describing, this passages strongly implies that Snowden “doesn’t believe there should be an N.S.A. at all.” Snowden believes nothing of the kind. In fact, he believes exactly the opposite: that the NSA performs a vital function and many of their programs are legitimate and important. He has said this over and over. That’s why he wanted to work for the agency. It’s why he refused to dump all the documents he took and instead gave them to journalists, demanding that they only publish those which expose information necessary to inform the public debate: precisely because he did not want to destroy NSA programs he believes are justifiable.

It’s unclear who Lemann means by Snowden’s “immediate circle of allies” but I personally have never heard anyone who qualifies as such express the cartoon view Lemann has manufactured here. What I’ve heard from both Snowden and his “immediate circle of allies” has been quite consistent: that – as is true of all countries – it is legitimate for NSA to engage in targeted surveillance (i.e., monitoring specific individuals whom a court, based on evidence, concludes are legitimate targets) but inherently illegitimate to engage in suspicion-less mass surveillance (i.e., subjecting entire populations to monitoring). Everything Snowden has said and done is the antithesis of this absolutist abolish-the-NSA view Lemann concocted (indeed, Snowden has been harshly criticized by actual radicals for being too protective and supportive of NSA’s functions, as have the journalists who worked with him for refusing to dump the whole archive).

But while that passage from Lemann is misleading, his final paragraph is outright false as a clear factual matter:

This time around, [Epstein’s] concern seems to be half with the celebratory closed loop between Snowden and the journalists who covered him, and half with the causes and consequences of a major security breach at the N.S.A. The heart of the matter is the second of these concerns, not the first. In the Snowden affair, the press didn’t decide what stayed secret, and neither did Congress, the White House or the N.S.A. Snowden did.

This is the exact opposite of the truth. It is a fundamentally false description of what happened. Most amazingly, the New York Times knows first-hand that this claim it just published is false because of its direct involvement in reporting the Snowden archive.

Not a single document that saw the light of day was published because Snowden decided it should be: literally not one. Snowden played no decision-making role whatsoever in determining which documents were published and which were withheld. What happened was exactly the opposite of what Lemann told New York Times readers: it was the press, not Snowden, which decided what stayed secret and what was reported.

After giving the journalists with whom he worked the documents and asking them to withhold those which could harm innocent people or destroy legitimate programs, Snowden lost all ability to control what was and was not published. As is true of most leaks – from the routine to the spectacular – those publishing decisions rested solely in the hands of the media outlets and their teams of reporters, editors and lawyers. Every Snowden document ever published was published by a media outlet with teams of professionals, which means that not one Snowden document was ever published without multiple reporters, editors and lawyers jointly deciding that the public interest was served by its publication.

The New York Times knows first hand that Lemann’s claim is false because that paper possessed a large portion of the Snowden archive, and published all of its stories without ever obtaining Snowden’s permission. Indeed, Snowden at times vehemently disagreed with the decisions made by the NYT and other outlets to publish certain material.

As Snowden told Time: “There have of course been some stories where my calculation of what is not public interest differs from that of reporters, but it is for this precise reason that publication decisions were entrusted to journalists and their editors.” As the ACLU’s Ben Wizner, who represents Snowden, explained: “He didn’t want and didn’t think that he should have the responsibility to decide which of these documents should be public.” Anyone who has even casually followed this story knows this was the journalist-driven process that determined which documents got published.

Ironically, the most controversial Snowden stories – the type his critics cite as the ones that should not have been published because they exposed sensitive national security secrets – were often the ones the NYT itself decided to publish, such as its very controversial exposé on how NSA spied on China’s Huawei. It was the NYT’s David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth and their editors – not Snowden – who decided that this program should be exposed. That same dynamic drove every story based on Snowden documents.

Even if one wants to argue that Snowden bears some moral responsibility for exposure of this program by virtue of having made these documents available to news outlets, it is undeniably true – to reverse Lemann’s formulation – that Snowden didn’t decide what stayed secret. The press did. As the ACLU’s Wizner simply put it about Lemann’s review: “the last lines are just false.”

(One great irony highlights this dynamic: in September, Perlroth – after exploiting Snowden’s leaks for her own benefit – argued that her own source should not be pardoned on the ground that he leaked documents “that had nothing to do with privacy violations.” But it was she, Nicole Perlroth – not Snowden – who decided to expose, on the front page of the NYT, the NSA’s spying activities on Huawei.)

How can the New York Times allow Lemann to make such a blatantly false claim about how this reporting took place and who made the decisions about what should and should not be secret? One of the great benefits of new media – of online reporting – is that one can provide proof of one’s claims in the form of links (as I’ve done here), so that readers can determine if journalistic claims have evidentiary support. That is such a vital exercise because, as Lemann and the NYT just demonstrated, it is so often the case that the most influential media outlets publish factually false statements using the most authoritative tones. This episode illustrates yet again why everyone is well-advised not to believe assertions from any authority or institution that are unaccompanied by evidence you can see and evaluate for yourself.

As is true of many enduring news stories, there are several zombie myths associated with the Snowden story that will never die no matter how often they are debunked. Perhaps the most annoyingly persistent is that Snowden said at the start that he was only exposing privacy violations on Americans, so that one can prove he’s a liar by demonstrating that he also leaked documents pertaining to spying on foreigners.

But Snowden never said anything like that. From the beginning, he always said the exact opposite: that he greatly values the privacy rights of Americans but also values the privacy rights of the 95% of the world’s population called “non-Americans.” As Snowden said in his first online interview with readers that I conducted back in June, 2013: “Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it’s only victimizing 95 percent of the world instead of 100 percent.” That Snowden said he only wanted to expose privacy violations on Americans is just one of those falsehoods that no matter how many times you disprove it, commentators for some reason feel perfectly entitled to keep repeating it.

The Most Important US Air Force Base You’ve Never Heard Of

Ramstein, Germany, is the hub for America’s global drone war, from North Africa to South Asia.

by Norman Solomon

The Nation

The overseas hub for America’s “war on terror” is the massive Ramstein Air Base in southwest Germany. Nearly ignored by US media, Ramstein serves crucial functions for drone warfare and much more. It’s the most important Air Force base abroad, operating as a kind of grand central station for airborne war—whether relaying video images of drone targets in Afghanistan to remote pilots with trigger fingers in Nevada, or airlifting special-ops units on missions to Africa, or transporting munitions for airstrikes in Syria and Iraq. Soaking up billions of taxpayer dollars, Ramstein has scarcely lacked for anything from the home country, other than scrutiny.

Known as “Little America” in this mainly rural corner of Germany, the area now includes 57,000 US citizens clustered around Ramstein and a dozen smaller bases. The Defense Department calls it “the largest American community outside of the United States.” Ramstein serves as the biggest Air Force cargo port beyond US borders, providing “full spectrum airfield operations” along with “world-class airlift and expeditionary combat support.” The base also touts “superior” services and “exceptional quality of life.” To look at Ramstein and environs is to peer into a faraway mirror for the United States; what’s inside the frame is normality for endless war.

Ramstein’s gigantic Exchange store (largest in the US military) is the centerpiece for an oversize shopping mall, just like back home. A greeting from the Holy Family Catholic Community at Ramstein tells newcomers: “We know that being in the military means having to endure frequent moves to different assignments. This is part of the price we pay by serving our country.” Five American colleges have campuses on the base. Ellenmarie Zwank Brown, who identifies herself as “an Air Force wife and a physician,” is reassuring in a cheerful guidebook that she wrote for new arrivals: “If you are scared of giving up your American traditions, don’t worry! The military goes out of its way to give military members an American way of life while living in Germany.”

That way of life is contoured around nonstop war. Ramstein is the headquarters for the US Air Force in Europe, and the base is now pivotal for using air power on other continents. “We touch a good chunk of the world right from Ramstein,” a public-affairs officer, Maj. Tony Wickman, told me during a recent tour of the base. “We think of it as a power-projection platform.” The scope of that projection is vast, with “areas of responsibility” that include Europe, Russia, and Africa—104 countries in all. And Ramstein is well-staffed to meet the challenge, with over 7,500 “active duty Airmen”—more than any other US military base in the world except the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

Serving the transport needs of war efforts in Iraq and Syria (countries hit by 28,675 US bombs and missiles last year) as well as in many other nations, Ramstein is a central pit stop for enormous cargo jets like the C-5 Galaxy and C-17 Globemaster. The Ramstein base currently supports “fifteen different major combat operations,” moving the daily supply chain and conducting urgent airlifts. Last July, when Ankara gave Washington a green light to use Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base for launching airstrikes in Syria, vital equipment quickly flew from Ramstein to Incirlik so F-16s could start bombing.

But these days a lot of Ramstein’s attention is focused southward. The base maintains a fleet of fourteen newest-model C-130 turboprops, now coming in mighty handy for secretive US military moves across much of Africa. With its sleek digital avionics, the cockpit of a C-130J looked impressive. But more notable was the plane’s spacious cargo bay, where a pilot explained that it can carry up to 44,000 pounds of supplies—or as many as 92 Army Airborne “jumpers,” who can each be saddled with enough weapons and gear to weigh in at 400 pounds. From the air, troops or freight—even steamrollers, road graders, and Humvees—leave the plane’s hold with parachutes. Or the agile plane can land on “undeveloped air fields.”

With Ramstein as its home, the C-130J is ideal for flying war matériel and special-operations forces to remote terrain in northern and western Africa. (The Pentagon describes it as “a rugged combat transporter designed to take off and land at austere fields.”) In mid-2014, the itinerary of a single trip got into a fleeting news story when a teenage stowaway was found dead in a wheel well of a C-130J at Ramstein, after the plane returned from a circuit to Tunisia, Mali, Senegal, and Chad. Stealthy intervention has escalated widely in the two years since journalist Nick Turse found that the US military was already averaging “far more than a mission a day on the continent, conducting operations with almost every African military force, in almost every African country.”

The officers I met at Ramstein in early spring often mentioned Africa. But the base mission of “power projection” hardly stops there.

In the American foreign policy lexicon, peace has become implausible, a faded memory, a mythic rationale for excelling at war. An airlift squadron at the Ramstein Air Base, which proudly calls itself the “Fighting Doves,” displays a logo of a muscular bird with dukes up. On lampposts in a town near Ramstein’s gates, I saw campaign posters for Germany’s Left Party (Die Linke) with a picture of a dove and a headline that could hardly have been more out of sync with the base: Wie lange wollt lhr den Frieden noch herbei-bomben? “How much longer do you want to keep achieving peace by bombing?” Such questions lack relevance when war is perceived not as a means to an end, but an end in itself.

More than ever, with relatively few US troops in combat and air war all the rage, the latest military technology is the filter of the American warrior’s experience. When Ramstein’s 60,800-square-foot Air and Space Operations Center opened in October 2011, the Air Force crowed that it “comes with 40 communication systems, 553 workstations, 1,500 computers, 1,700 monitors, 22,000 connections, and enough fiber optics to stretch from here to the Louvre in Paris.” (Mona Lisa not included.) A news release focused on “the critical mission of monitoring the airspace above Europe and Africa” and “controlling the skies from the Arctic Circle to the Cape of Needles.” But the Defense Department didn’t mention that the new hyper-tech center would be vital to the USA’s drone war.

Ramstein receives visual images from drones via satellite, then relays the images to sensor operators and pilots at computer terminals in the United States. “Ramstein is absolutely essential to the US drone program,” says Brandon Bryant, a former Air Force sensor operator who participated in drone attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia for five years while stationed in New Mexico and Nevada. “All information and data go through Ramstein. Everything. For the whole world.”

Bryant and other sensor operators had Ramstein on speed dial: “Before we could establish a link from our ground-control station in the United States to the drone, we literally would have to call Ramstein up and say ‘Hey, can you connect us to this satellite feed?’ We would just pick up the phone and press the button and it automatically dials in to Ramstein.” Bryant concluded that the entire system for drone strikes was set up “to take away responsibility, so that no one has responsibility for what happens.”

The US government’s far-flung system for extrajudicial killing uses Ramstein as a kind of digital switchboard in a process that fogs accountability and often kills bystanders. A former Air Force drone technician, Cian Westmoreland, told me that many of the technical people staffing Ramstein’s Air and Space Operations Center are apt to be “none the wiser; they would just know a signal is going through.”

Westmoreland was stationed in Afghanistan at the Kandahar Air Field, where he helped build a signal relay station that connected to Ramstein. He never moved a joystick to maneuver a drone and never pushed a button to help fire a missile. Yet, in 2016, Westmoreland speaks sadly of the commendations he received for helping to kill more than 200 people with drone strikes. “I did my job,” he said, “and now I have to live with that.”

During his work on the drone program, Westmoreland developed “a new kind of understanding of what modern warfare actually is. We’re moving towards more network-centric warfare. So, orders [are] dealt out over a network, and making systems more autonomous, putting less humans in the chain. And a lot of the positions are going to be maintenance, they’re technician jobs, to keep systems up and running.”

Those systems strive to reduce the lag time from target zone to computer screen in Nevada. The delay during satellite transmission (“latency” in tech jargon) can last up to six seconds, depending on weather conditions and other factors, but once the signal gets to Ramstein it reaches Nevada almost instantly via fiber-optic cable. Permission to fire comes from an attack controller who “could be anywhere,” as Bryant put it, “just looking at the same video feeds as us pilots and sensors. He just sits in front of a screen too.” As Andrew Cockburn wrote in his recent book Kill Chain, “there is a recurrent pattern in which people become transfixed by what is on the screen, seeing what they want to see, especially when the screen—with a resolution equal to the legal definition of blindness for drivers—is representing people and events thousands of miles and several continents away.”

For all its ultra-tech importance, the Air and Space Operations Center at Ramstein is just a steely link in a kill chain of command, while a kind of assembly-line Taylorism keeps producing the drone war. “I think that’s part of the strength of the secrecy of the program,” Bryant said. “It’s fragmented.” Meanwhile, “We were supposed to function and never ask questions.”

Worlds away, the carnage is often lethally haphazard. For example, classified documents obtained by The Intercept shed light on a special ops series of airstrikes from January 2012 to February 2013 in northeast Afghanistan, code-named Operation Haymaker. The attacks killed more than 200 people, while only 35 were the intended targets. Such numbers may be disturbing, yet they don’t convey what actually happens in human terms.

Several years ago, Pakistani photographer Noor Behram described the aftermath of a US drone attack: “There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike. You can’t find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.”

Even without a missile strike, there are the traumatic effects of drones hovering overhead. Former New York Times reporter David Rohde recalled the sound during his captivity by the Taliban in 2009 in tribal areas of Pakistan: “The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.”

But such matters are as far removed from Little America in southwest Germany as they are from Big America back home.

The American drone war has long been unpopular in Germany, where polling indicates that two out of three citizens oppose it. So President Obama was eager to offer assurances during a visit to Berlin three years ago, declaring: “We do not use Germany as a launching point for unmanned drones…as part of our counterterrorism activities.” But such statements miss the point, intentionally, and obscure how much the drone war depends on German hospitality.

Attorney Hans-Christian Ströbele, a prominent Green Party member of the Bundestag, told The Nation that “the targeted killings with drones are illegal executions at least in countries which aren’t in war with Germany. These illegal executions offend against human rights, international law and the German Grundgesetz [Constitution]. If German official institutions permit this and do not stop these actions, they become partly responsible.”

With 10 percent of the Bundestag’s seats, the Greens have the same size bloc as the other opposition party, the Left Party. “To kill people with a joystick from a safe position thousands of miles away is a disgusting and inhumane form of terror,” Sahra Wagenknecht, co-chair of the Left Party, told me. “A war is no video game—at least not for those who have not the slightest chance to defend themselves…. These extrajudicial killings are war crimes, and the German government should draw the consequences and close down the air base in Ramstein…. In my view, the drone war is a form of state terrorism, which is going to produce thousands of new terrorists.”

A lawsuit filed last year in Germany focuses on a drone attack in eastern Yemen on August 29, 2012, that killed two members of the Bin Ali Jaber family, which had gathered in the village of Khashamir to celebrate a wedding. “Were it not for the help of Germany and Ramstein, men like my brother-in-law and nephew might still be alive today,” said Faisal bin Ali Jaber, one of the surviving relatives behind the suit. “It is quite simple: Without Germany, US drones would not fly.” But the German judiciary has rebuffed such civil suits—most recently in late April, when a court in Cologne rejected pleas about a drone strike that killed two people in Somalia, including a herdsman who was not targeted.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has played dumb about drone-related operations in her country. “The German government claims to know nothing at all,” Bundestag member Ströbele said. “Either this is a lie, or the government does not want to know.” The general secretary of the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Wolfgang Kaleck, sums up the German government’s strategy as “See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing.” He charges that “Germany is making itself complicit in the deaths of civilians as part of the US drone war.”

After an uproar over US National Security Agency spying in Germany caused the Bundestag to set up a special committee of inquiry two years ago, it became clear that surveillance issues are intertwined with Ramstein’s role in a drone program that relies on cell-phone numbers to find targets. The Green Party’s representative on the eight-member committee, Konstantin von Notz, sounded both pragmatic and idealistic when I interviewed him this spring at a Berlin cafe. “We assume that there is a close connection between surveillance and Ramstein,” he said, “as data collected and shared by German and US intelligence services already led to drone killings coordinated via Ramstein.”

Left Party co-chair Wagenknecht was emphatic about the BND, Germany’s intelligence agency. “The BND delivers phone numbers of possible drone targets to the NSA and other agencies,” she told The Nation. “The BND and our foreign minister bear part of the blame. They do not only tolerate war crimes, they assist them.”

The United States now has 174 military bases operating inside Germany, more than in any other country. (Japan is second, with 113.) The military presence casts a shadow over German democracy, says historian Josef Foschepoth, a professor at the University of Freiburg. “As long as there are Allied troops or military bases and facilities on German soil,” he wrote in a 2014 article, “there will be Allied surveillance measures carried out on and from German soil, which means, in particular, American surveillance.”

For surveillance and an array of other spooky purposes, the US government created what would become the BND at the end of World War II. “We grew it carefully,” a retired senior Defense Intelligence Agency official, W. Patrick Lang, said in an interview. “They’ve always cooperated with us, completely and totally.” Intelligence ties between the two governments remain tightly knotted. “When it comes to the secret services,” Professor Foschepoth told a public forum in Berlin last summer, “there are some old legal foundations where the federal [German] government follows the American interests more than the interests of their own citizens.”

Extending such talk to depict the current US military presence as bad for democracy in Germany is a third rail in German politics. When Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg quoted from Foschepoth’s article at the Berlin forum—and pointedly asked, “Why are American troops here still? Why the bases?”—the panelist from the Green Party, von Notz, vehemently objected to going there. “I wouldn’t open the discussion or have in the background that this is still an occupation problem or something,” he said. “It’s not a problem of troops somewhere—it’s a problem of lacking democracy, state of law, controlling our secret services today.”

Nine months later, talking with him at Café Einstein on Berlin’s Kurfürstenstrasse, I asked von Notz why he’d pushed back so heatedly against the idea that US military bases are constraining German democracy. “Germany needs to take full responsibility of what is going on on its territory,” he responded. “The German government can no longer hide behind a US-German relation allegedly characterized by the post–World War II occupation. Germany strictly has to ensure that the US intelligence services comply with the law without ignoring the illegal actions of its own Federal Intelligence Service [the BND].”

Whatever the state of its democracy, Germany is continuing to enable America’s furtive warfare in Africa. Ramstein’s many roles include serving as home to US Air Forces Africa, where a press officer gave me a handout describing the continent as “key to addressing transnational violent extremist threats.” The military orders come from the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) headquarters in Stuttgart, a two-hour drive from Ramstein.

At first, AFRICOM—which calls itself “a full-spectrum combatant command”—was to be a short-term guest in southwest Germany, some 800 miles from Africa’s closest shores. A State Department cable, marked “Secret” and dated August 1, 2008, said that “no decision has been made on a permanent AFRICOM headquarters location.” Two months later, just as AFRICOM was going into full-fledged operation, a confidential cable from the US Embassy in Berlin reported that “the German government strongly supported the US decision to temporarily base” AFRICOM in Germany.

Yet at the outset, as US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks show, tensions existed with the host country. Germany balked at extending blanket legal immunity under the NATO Status of Forces Agreement to every American civilian employee at the new AFRICOM facility, and the dispute applied to “all US military commands in Germany.” While the two governments negotiated behind the scenes into late 2008 (one confidential cable from the US Embassy in Berlin complained about the German Foreign Office’s “unhelpful positions”), AFRICOM made itself at home in Stuttgart.

Nearly eight years later, the “temporary” headquarters for AFRICOM shows no sign of budging. “AFRICOM will stay permanent in Stuttgart if Germany won’t protest against it,” said the Green Party’s Ströbele, who has been on the Bundestag’s intelligence committee for almost twenty years. He told The Nation: “We do not know enough about the AFRICOM facility. Nevertheless there is the assumption that this facility is used to organize and to lead US combat missions in Africa. Because of this reason no country in Africa wanted to have this facility.” Whatever political hazards might lurk for AFRICOM in Germany, the US government finds those risks preferable to headquartering its Africa Command in Africa. And there are more and more interventions to sweep under rugs.

“A network of American drone outposts” now “stretches across east and west Africa,” reports the Center for the Study of the Drone, which is based at Bard College. One of the new locations is northern Cameroon, where a base for Gray Eagle drones (capable of dropping bombs and launching Hellfire missiles) recently went into full operation, accompanied by 300 US troops, including special-operations forces. In late winter The New York Times reported that the United States “is about to break ground on a new $50 million drone base in Agadez, Niger, that will allow Reaper surveillance aircraft to fly hundreds of miles closer to southern Libya.” In March the Pentagon triumphantly announced that drones teamed up with manned jets to kill “more than 150 terrorist fighters” at an al-Shabab training camp in Somalia.

As drone attacks have widened, they’ve become a growing provocation to a vocal minority of German lawmakers. “We deeply regret Germany’s loss of sovereignty, but the government keeps on acting cowardly,” said Sevim Dagdelen, the Left Party’s leader on foreign affairs. Another member of the party in the Bundestag, Andrej Hunko, told me that “AFRICOM in Stuttgart and the Air Operation Center in Ramstein are very important hubs for drone strikes led by the US military”—but “it is very difficult for German lawmakers to control this issue.”

Hunko and colleagues filed more than a dozen requests for explanation of drone-related policy from the German government, but he says “the answers were always dodgy.” The Merkel government deflects formal queries about Ramstein and AFRICOM by claiming to have no reliable information—a stance abetted by the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), now in its third year of serving as a big junior partner to Merkel’s right-leaning Christian Democratic Union. While Left Party legislators and some in the Green Party denounce the stonewalling, they have scant leverage; the two parties combined are just one-fifth of the Bundestag.

Merkel’s stone wall is strengthened by the fact that some Green Party leaders have no problem with US bases. (Citing the very left-wing pasts of several key figures in today’s party, one peace activist near Ramstein tartly remarked that “the Green Party changed from red to green to olive green.”) In the affluent state of Baden-Württemberg, home to AFRICOM headquarters, the state’s Green minister-president Winfried Kretschmann is a military booster. Likewise, the drone program has nothing to fear from Fritz Kuhn, mayor of Stuttgart, the largest city in Germany with a Green mayor. Kuhn declined to answer any of the questions that I submitted in writing about his views on AFRICOM and its operations in his city. “Mayor Kuhn wants to waive the interview,” a spokesman said.

More than publicly acknowledged, the economic benefits of hosting AFRICOM’s headquarters were major factors in the German government’s decision to allow it to open in the first place, a member of the Bundestag told me. With the US military footprint shrinking in the country, Germany’s political establishment saw the chance to welcome AFRICOM as very good news. Today, AFRICOM says that 1,500 US military and civilian personnel are stationed at its Kelley Barracks command center in Stuttgart.

“Ramstein is a preparation center for the next world war,” Wolfgang Jung said as we neared the base. War has overshadowed his entire life. Jung was born in 1938, and his childhood memories are vivid with fear and the destruction that came with bombs (from both sides). He lost two schoolmates. His father ended up on the Russian front and died in a POW camp just after the war’s end. As a teenager, Jung saw Ramstein open, and in the decades since then he has become a dogged researcher. The base is not just about drones, he stressed. Far from it.

The entire region is brandishing huge arsenals. Ten miles from Ramstein, the Miesau Army Depot is the US military’s biggest storage area for ammunition outside the United States. In late February the depot received what Stars and Stripes reported as “the largest Europe-bound ammo shipment in 10 years”—more than 5,000 tons of US Army ammunition that arrived while the Pentagon was “ramping up missions on the Continent, particularly along NATO’s eastern flank, in response to concerns about a more aggressive Russia.”

In many ways, this heavily militarized stretch of Germany is now a ground-zero powder keg. The consolidated Allied Air Command, “responsible for all Air and Space matters within NATO,” has been at the Ramstein base since 2013. The command includes a center for missile defense, the nexus of the latest US scenario for a missile shield—which the Kremlin views as a threatening system that would make a first strike against Russia more tempting and more likely. Interviewed by the German newspaper Bild in January, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he saw “striving for an absolute triumph in the American missile defense plans.”

Such matters preoccupy Jung and his wife Felicitas Strieffler, also a lifelong resident of the area. She spoke of Ramstein as a grave menace to the world and a blight on the region. Locals dread sunny days, she said, because roaring warplanes take to cloudless skies for training maneuvers. On a hillside, after climbing a 60-foot tower—a red sandstone monument built in 1900 to honor Bismarck—we looked out over a panorama dominated by Ramstein’s runways, hangars, and aircraft. Strieffler talked about a dream she keeps having: The base will be closed and, after the chemical pollutants are removed, it will become a lake where people can go boating and enjoy the beauties of nature.

Such hopes might seem unrealistic, but a growing number of activists in Germany are working to end Ramstein’s drone role and eventually close the base. On June 11, several thousand protesters gathered in the rain to form a “human chain” that stretched for more than five miles near the Ramstein perimeter. At the Stopp Ramstein Kampagne office in Berlin, a 37-year-old former history student, Pascal Luig, exuded commitment and calm as he told me that “the goal should be the closing of the whole air base.” He added, “Without Ramstein, no [US] war in the Middle East would be possible.” With no hope of persuading the US government to shut down Ramstein and its other bases in his country, Luig wants a movement strong enough to compel the German government to evict them.

The Pentagon top brass can’t be happy about the publicity in Germany connecting Ramstein to the drone war. “They like to keep these things low key, just because there are points of vulnerability,” former drone technician Cian Westmoreland said, noting that “the military is all about redundancies.” In fact, even while Ramstein’s Air and Space Operations Center was going into action nearly five years ago, a similar facility was on the drawing boards for the Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily.

According to some sources, the ultimate goal is to replace Ramstein with Sigonella as the main site for relay of drone signals. (Replying to my inquiry, an Air Force spokesman at Ramstein, Maj. Frank Hartnett, wrote in an e-mail: “There are currently no plans to relocate the center’s activities.” He did not respond to follow-up questions.) An investigative journalist working for the Italian newsmagazine L’Espresso, Stefania Maurizi, told me in mid-spring that progress toward such a center at Sigonella remained at a snail’s pace. But on June 21, she reported that an Italian engineering firm had just won a contract for a building similar to Ramstein’s relay center. Construction at Sigonella could be completed by 2018.

As part of the militarization process in Italy—“the Pentagon has turned the Italian peninsula into a launching pad for future wars in Africa, the Middle East and beyond,” author David Vine observes—Sigonella already has some infrastructure for satellite communication. Another asset is that Italy is even more deferential to the American military than Germany is. “Italy has become the launching pad for the US wars, and in particular for the drone wars, without any public debate,” Maurizi says. “Our responsibilities are huge and the Italian public is kept in the dark.” And when the Pentagon decides to build big in Italy, it doesn’t hurt the momentum that—as Vine documents in his 2015 book Base Nation—the lucrative contracts are routinely signed with Italian construction firms controlled by the Mafia.

In any event, no one can doubt that the Defense Department has become utterly enthralled with drones, officially dubbed Remotely Piloted Aircraft. “Our RPA enterprise” is now “flying combat missions around the globe,” the general running the Air Combat Command, Herbert Carlisle, testified to a Senate subcommittee in March. There was no mistaking his zeal to further expand drone missions, mangled syntax notwithstanding: “They are arming decision makers with intelligence, our warfighters with targets, and our enemies with fear, anxiety and ultimately their timely end.”

General Carlisle said the US military is now flying five times as many drone sorties as a decade ago—a boost that “exemplifies the furious pace at which we have expanded our operations and enterprise.” But he warned that “an insatiable demand for RPA forces has stretched the community thin, especially our Airmen performing the mission.” Today, almost 8,000 Air Force personnel are “solely dedicated” to Predator and Reaper drone missions. “Of the 15 bases with RPA units,” Carlisle said, “13 of them have a combat mission. This mission is of such value that we plan on consistent increases in aircraft, personnel and results.” Several weeks after his testimony, Reuters—citing “previously unreported US Air Force data”—revealed that “drones fired more weapons than conventional warplanes for the first time in Afghanistan last year and the ratio is rising.”

Some in-house government appraisals have concluded that the drone war fails because it creates more enemies than it kills. But the “war on terror” is anything but a failure for many corporations or the individuals who spin through the revolving doors of the military-industrial complex. As a critical node in the Pentagon’s global “intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” (ISR) system, Ramstein is integral to ongoing boondoggles for contractors like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, and General Dynamics. The bottomless pit for taxpayers is a bottomless well for firms catering to the Air Force, with its jargon-larded pursuit of “a distributed ISR operation capable of providing world-wide, near-real-time simultaneous intelligence to multiple theaters of operation through…robust reachback communications architectures.”

Looking back at the milieu of his work in the drone program, Westmoreland has concluded that “it’s more or less a for-profit venture. When you get out of the military, you expect to get a job in the defense sector, an executive position. And really it’s about racking up as many awards and decorations as you possibly can.”

At the top ranks, Westmoreland sees a conflict of interest: “They have an incentive to keep wars going.” For the military’s leadership, the available dividends are quite large. For instance, former NSA and CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden—an outspoken advocate of the drone program—received $240,125 last year as a member of the board at Motorola Solutions. That company has an investment in CyPhy Works, a major developer of drones.

Endless war propels an endless gravy train.

Like the other drone whistleblowers interviewed for this article, former tech sergeant Lisa Ling was careful not to reveal any classified information. But when we met at a coffee shop in California, what she said at the outset could be heard as subversive of the US drone program: “I would like to see humanity brought into the political discourse.” Her two decades in the military included several years of work on assimilating Air National Guard personnel into the drone program. Now she expresses remorse for taking part in a program where “no one person has responsibility.”

The new documentary film National Bird includes these words from Ling: “We are in the United States of America and we are participating in an overseas war, a war overseas, and we have no connection to it other than wires and keyboards. Now, if that doesn’t scare the crap out of you, it does out of me. Because if that’s the only connection, why stop?”

After leaving the Air Force, Ling went on a humanitarian mission to Afghanistan, planting trees and distributing seeds to people she’d previously seen only as indistinct pixels. The drone war haunts her. Ling asks how we would feel if armed drones kept hovering in the sky above our own communities, positioned to kill at any moment.

In the Little America where the Ramstein Air Base is the crown military jewel, such questions go unasked. For that matter, we rarely hear them in Big America. Yet those questions must be asked, or the forever war will be.

902nd Military Intelligence Group. (‘The Duce”)

January 11, 2017

by Harry von Johnston, PhD

 

Nathan Hale Hall, 4554 Llewellyn Ave. Fort George G. Meade, MD

No of employees, 1097

Infiltrates any domestic American group deemed to be “potentially hostile” to U.S. “geo-political aims and goals.”

902nd Military Intelligence Group

308th Military Intelligence Battalion

Alpha Company

Fort Monroe Resident Office

Bldg 217, 146 Bernard Road

Ft Monroe, Virginia

: The 902nd Military Intelligence Group conducts counterintelligence activities to protect the U.S. Army, selected Department of Defense forces and agencies, classified information and technologies by detecting, identifying, neutralizing and exploiting foreign intelligence services and transnational terrorist threats.

The 902nd MI Group headquarters and subordinate battalion activity headquarters are located at Fort George G. Meade, Md. The 902nd MI Group has company headquarters detachments and resident or field offices in more than 50 locations inside and outside the continental U.S.

The 902nd MI Group consists of the Headquarters and Headquarters Detachment, 308 th MI Battalion, 310th MI Battalion and the U.S. Army Foreign Counterintelligence Activity.

The HHD provides personnel administration, training, and logistical support to the 02nd MI Group’s headquarters, as well as to subordinate units located at Fort George G. Meade.

In addition, the HHD Special Security Office serves not only the 902nd MI Group, but the entire installation. Without deviating from its core mission, the detachment prepares its Soldiers and civilians to execute their duties in an ever-changing military intelligence environment.

The 308 th MI Battalion conducts counterintelligence operations throughout the continental United States to detect, identify, neutralize and defeat the foreign intelligence services and international terrorism threats to U.S. Army and selected Defense Department forces, technologies, information and infrastructure.

The 310th MI Battalion conducts worldwide counterespionage and counter-intelligence investigations, counterintelligence operations and multidiscipline counterintelligence technical operations in support of the Army and defense agencies in peace and war.

FCA is a multi-function, strategic counterintelligence activity that supports U. S. Army and national counterintelligence and counterterrorist objectives by detecting, identifying and providing a unique operational “window” into foreign intelligence organizations worldwide.

. 902d Military Intelligence Group

Building 4554 Llewellyn Avenue

Fort George G. Meade, MD  20755-5910

Ft Meade DSN:     622-XXXX

COMM: 301-677-XXXX

 

902d MI Group Operations  4665/2049

 

308th MI BN Operations                7885/7887

(General CI Support)

 

310th MI BN Operations                6717/2445

(Technical CI Support)

308th MI BN

Geographic Offices

 

DSN / COMM

A CO Aberdeen, MD  298-7799 / 410-278-7799

APG, MD              298-2913 / 410-278-2913

Detroit, MI           786-7842 / 586-574-7842

Ft Monmouth, NJ             992-4173 / 732-532-4173

Ft Monroe, VA                 680-2030 / 757-788-2030

National Capital Region    655-3008 / 703-805-3008

New England                  256-3735 / 978-796-3735

Rock Island, IL                793-5042 / 309-782-5042

 

B CO Redstone, AL              788-7618 / 256-876-7746

Ft Benning, GA               835-2828 / 706-545-2828

Ft Bragg, NC                             236-4809 / 910-396-4809

Ft Campbell, KY              635-0952 / 270-798-0952

Ft Gordon, GA                780-9409 / 706-791-9409

Ft Knox, KY                               464-7647 / 502-624-7647

Miami, FL                        567-1286 / 305-437-1286

Orlando, FL                               791-4088 / 407-646-4088

Redstone MID, AL           897-5186 / 256-313-5186

 

C CO Leavenworth, KS                   552-7869 / 913-684-7869

Ft Bliss, TX                     978-2697 / 915-568-2697

Ft Carson, CO                 691-4815 / 719-526-4815

Ft Hood, TX                              737-2507 / 254-287-2507

Ft Huachuca, AZ             821-2214 / 520-533-2214

Ft Leavenworth, KS                   552-7876 / 913-684-7876

Ft Leonard Wood, MO      581-0598 / 573-596-0598

Ft Lewis, WA                   357-2501 / 253-967-2501

Ft Sill, OK                       639-2720 / 580-442-2720

Los Alamitos, CA             972-1316 / 562-795-1316

White Sands, NM            258-5022 / 505-678-5022

 

310 Bn

MISSION.  TO CONDUCT SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE (SIGINT) OPERATIONS IN SUPPORT OF NATIONAL, JOINT, COMBINED,  ALLIED, AND U.S. ARMY REQUIREMENTS AS PART OF A REGIONAL SIGINT OPERATIONS CENTER (RSOC).

(1)  Functions.  Provides command, control, and staff planning for Signals Intelligence operations.

Assists Commander in formulation and implementation of security policies and procedures for BN.

Assists Commander in formulation of intelligence plans and management of operations.

The 310th Military Intelligence Battalion, a subordinate unit of the  902nd Military Intelligence Group, celebrated the grand opening of the Cyber Counterintelligence Activity(, the CCA was known as the Information Warfare Branch of the 310th MI Battalion located at Fort George G. Meade.

The CCA is comprised of a combination of U.S. Army Counterintelligence (CI) Special Agents, both military and civilian, and technical support personnel who offer a wide range of technical expertise.They conduct computer forensic media analysis in support ofCI investigations.

The CCA also conducts investigations of network intrusion into Army InformationSystems; they support CI surveys by providing technical advice and assistance to the command concerning computer security posture. The CCA can also conduct mobile training at customer sites regarding network intrusion and seizing computer evidence for forensic analysis

310th MI Battalion, conducts counterintelligence scope polygraph screening examinations in support of Department of Defense Special Access Programs, the Department of the Army Cryptographic Access Program and the National Security Agency on a routine basis. In addition, operational examinations are conducted in support of Offensive Counterintelligence Operations, Counterintelligence/ Counterespionage Investigations and Counterintelligence Force Protection Source Operations.

With the current Global War on Terrorism and other significant events occurring throughout the world, the mission continues to increase. During the last fiscal year, the branch conducted 1137 counterintelligence scope polygraph screening examinations and 68 operational examinations. These numbers are expected to increase dramatically in the near future.

The Department of Defense continues to expand the use of polygraph because of its proven benefit. The 902ndMI  Group polygraph examiner strength may increase from the current ten examiners to twenty-five over the next five to ten years. This includes adding various programs and requiring even more polygraphs in those areas where intelligence is susceptible. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence recently concluded that the polygraph was one of the best tools available to safeguard intelligence information. It is another tool which commanders can use to safeguard information. This has many looking to expand its uses to other jobs where leaks can occur.

Counter Intelligence Units

66th MIG (CI) EAC Europe, Augsburg (German)

902nd MIG (CI) CONUS DoD, HQ US Army, Fort Meade, MD

Units Intelligence Signal / Listening Region (SIGINT)

116th MIG, Fort Gordon, GA

115th MIB, Schofield, HI

704th MIB, Fort Meade, MD Collaboration NSA

109th MIG, Menwith Hill (GB) Collaboration NSA

108th MIB EAC, Bad Aibling (German) in Collaboration with NSA

Units of Support of Unified Command

500th MIB EAC, Camp Zama (Tokyo, Japan ) Support Forces US Japan and CONUS

501st MIB EAC, Yongsan ( Séoul, Korea ) Support Forces US Koréa

 

 

 

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