TBR News April 5, 2012

Apr 05 2012

 

Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C., April 4, 2012: “The country is being flooded by an enormous number of spam phone calls. If you have caller ID, these usually say ‘Brattleboro, NH” or “San Diego, CA” or “NH127789zhhye” Whenever I have nothing better to do I will occasionally answer these and find out they were for someone who had my phone number ten years ago or are conducting “Informational Polls” for one of the nut Republican candidates or are offering a “Special on Automated  Dildos” or trips to some Third World pest house. Most of these are in violation of federal law but the perps figure that if they get shut down, after 3,000,000 complaints, they will just change their name and keep right on going. There are a number of ways to deal with these vermin. The best one is not to answer but sometimes you can have fun with them. One way is to pick up the phone and then immediately hang it up again. Another is to pretend to be Chinese and babble in fake Chinese until they hang up. Another method is to start to carry on a conversation without reference to the caller. They get furious and hang up. If this is an 800 number, you can call them back thirty of forty times a day. This costs them money. The Federal ‘No Call List’ means nothing to these scumbags and if you try to call them back on their listed number, it is reported as no longer being in service. Or you can answer the call by saying “ XXXXX City Police Department.” Another approach is to answer the call and then press down a number key, making a shrill tone on the other end. Of you can use bad language. Most of these phoning creeps are immune to everything but a bullet in the stomach but I once reduced some pathetic slut to screams and tears by graphically discussing her mother’s sexual problems with animals. A friend in the trade is searching out the unlisted personal phone numbers of the creeps who own the services and then robo calling them from one AM to five. I have tried this and believe me, it works. And if they change their numbers, as they always do, get the new one and repeat the process. After six weeks, they are a raddled mess. And if you can get a street address for them, send in 400 magazine subscriptions using the cards available in any magazine rack at your local supermarket or book store. The best part of these creeps ran down someone’s leg.

 

Eluding a Barrage of Spam Text Messages

April 4, 2012

by Eric A. Taub 

New York Times

“Do you need up to $1,300 today?” I was recently asked. Except for perhaps Mark Zuckerberg, who doesn’t?

Unfortunately this question wasn’t asked by a friend; rather, it came to me in a spam text on my cellphone.

The offer was for a “payday loan,” a type of high-interest cash advance that many states have banned. And that wasn’t the only thing about the message that was questionable from a legal perspective.

Spam text messages, like spam e-mails, are illegal to send to consumers who haven’t actually asked for them. Under the federal Can-Spam Act, companies must follow certain guidelines when sending bulk commercial electronic messages, whether they’re e-mails or texts.

Spam texts often promote the same types of schemes seen in junk e-mails. In January, CTIA, the wireless industry’s trade association, wrote to the Federal Communications Commission complaining about a recent onslaught of political spam texts, from both major parties. And following the links in some spam texts can ensnare you in scam subscriptions that show up on your phone bill, or even infect your phone with malicious software.

Spam text messages are easy for businesses and charlatans to generate. They’re not tapped out by individuals using mobile phones, but often come from computers, using programs that send out text messages to every conceivable telephone number, automatically.

To do so, they send an e-mail using a phone number and the mobile service’s texting address. For example, to send a text message from a computer to a Verizon mobile subscriber, you would take the phone number and append @vtxt.com. AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and others have their own similar text message addresses.

If you are signed up to receive texts from a legitimate company and decide you no longer want them, you can typically unsubscribe by texting “stop” back to the sender. But to spammers, this is often just a signal that your number is valid. And if you’re not on an unlimited texting plan, you’ve now paid for two texts: the one received and the request you sent to cancel.

“You can always filter out e-mails,” said Jason Devitt, chief executive of Mr. Number, a company in Palo Alto, Calif., that markets a mobile app to stop spam texts. “The problem is that anyone in the world can make your phone ring or display a text, if they have your phone number.”

 

Use Your Carrier’s Tools

To stop spam texts, there are several basic steps to take, regardless of which mobile carrier you use.

First, you can report the spam to the carrier. If you’re an AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon subscriber, copy the text and send it to SPAM (7726). You’ll then receive another text asking for the sender’s phone number. Neither message will incur a charge.

A spate of apps are available for Android phones that offer enhanced spam-text blocking features; a few are mentioned below. (Because of Apple’s restrictions on developers, similar apps are not available for the iPhone.)

For those who don’t want to download an app or are using an iPhone, the carriers offer various spam-blocking services.

 

AT&T Unlike its competitors, AT&T charges customers who want to selectively control text messages. For $4.99 a month, customers can subscribe to its Smart Limits for Wireless service, which is primarily intended to control your children’s use of text messaging.

With Smart Limits you can designate up to 30 numbers to block, and designate how many texts can be sent. If you’re not using an iPhone, you can also set times of day during which texts can be received.

 

SPRINT To stop texts, Sprint customers can text various commands to 9999. The range of options is wide. For example, customers can block all messages from one Internet domain, like example.com, by texting “block @example.com.” Specific e-mail addresses can be blocked by texting “block” followed by the address, while text senders who use numeric short codes can be stopped by texting “block” and then the code.

Similarly, customers can create a list of e-mail addresses from which they’d like to receive messages by substituting “allow” for “block.”

A complete list of Sprint commands can be found at bit.ly/xL1USV.

 

T-MOBILE T-Mobile subscribers can block all text messages at no charge, but cannot selectively block texts from specific senders — with one exception.

If spammers are using PCs to send text messages, users can block specific ones based on content. To do so, you use the E-mail and Text Tools tab on the T-Mobile Web site to set up filters that look for specific words in the “from,” “to,” and “subject” fields.

For example, any spam texts that ask you to “lose weight fast, let me show you how” could be blocked by designating the word “weight” as a red flag.

 

VERIZON The nation’s largest carrier offers perhaps the most extensive palette of spam-blocking tools, and does so at no charge.

Verizon customers can block unwanted messages from individual cellphone numbers as well as e-mail addresses by using the company’s Spam Controls tools, found in the Verizon Safeguards area of its Web site (see bit.ly/y0aBLV for more information).

Up to 15 e-mail addresses and Internet domains, plus five phone numbers, can be blocked from sending text, picture or video messages.

All blocks expire 90 days after they are set, but they can be reinstituted by revisiting the Spam Controls page.

Use a Nickname

Both AT&T and Verizon allow customers to create an account nickname; users can then give this nickname to friends and block all text messages sent to their regular mobile number.

For example, if you’re an AT&T customer and you create the nickname “hatespam,” your friends would text you at hatespam@txt.att.net. A Verizon customer who created that name would have friends text her at hatespam@vtxt.com.

The idea is that spammers who spam every possible combination of mobile numbers won’t be able to spam every combination of letters used as nicknames.

The downside: your texting friends will need to know both your mobile nickname and your mobile carrier.

 

On Android, Use an App

Scores of spam-stopping apps are available in Google’s app store, both free and for a price. They include Anti-SMS Spam, Call Blocker, Handcent SMS, smsBlocker and SMS Filter.

Mr. Number is one of the most popular, with four million users. It allows customers to block calls and texts from a particular area code or a user-created block list, and also blocks senders in its database of spammers.

But some spam texts will always get through, and spammers will do their best to foil antispam technology.

As with unwanted telemarketing calls that continue despite the advent of the federal government’s Do Not Call list, spammers have learned how to spoof the origin of their messages.

Which is why when I recently tried to call back the phone number that sent the payday loan offer, a recording stated that “the number you dialed is not a working number.”

 

 

 

The Control of America’s Print Media

April 4, 2012

by Germar Rudolf

 

The control of the opinion-molding media is nearly monolithic. All of the controlled media — television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, motion pictures — speak with a single voice, each reinforcing the other. Despite the appearance of variety, there is no real dissent, no alternative source of facts or ideas accessible to the great mass of people that might allow them to form opinions at odds with those of the media masters. They are presented with a single view of the world — a world in which every voice proclaims the equality of the races, the inerrant nature of the Jewish “Holocaust” tale, the wickedness of attempting to halt the flood of non-White aliens pouring across our borders, the danger of permitting citizens to keep and bear arms, the moral equivalence of all sexual orientations, and the desirability of a “pluralistic,” cosmopolitan society rather than a homogeneous, White one. It is a view of the world designed by the media masters to suit their own ends — and the pressure to conform to that view is overwhelming. People adapt their opinions to it, vote in accord with it, and shape their lives to fit it.

And who are these all-powerful masters of the media? As we shall see, they are, to a very large extent, Jewish. It isn’t simply a matter of the media being controlled by profit-hungry capitalists, some of whom happen to be Jews. If that were the case, the ethnicity of the media masters would reflect, at least approximately, the ratio of rich gentiles to rich Jews. Despite a few prominent exceptions, the preponderance of Jews in the media is so overwhelming that we are obliged to assume that it is due to more than mere happenstance.

            After television news, daily newspapers are the most influential information medium in America. Sixty million of them are sold (and presumably read) each day. These millions are divided among some 1483 different publications (this figure is for February 2000). One might conclude that the sheer number of different newspapers across America would provide a safeguard against minority control and distortion. Alas, such is not the case. There is less independence, less competition, and much less representation of majority interests than a casual observer would think.

In 1945, four out of five American newspapers were independently owned and published by local people with close ties to their communities. Those days, however, are gone. Most of the independent newspapers were bought out or driven out of business by the mid-1970s. Today most “local” newspapers are owned by a rather small number of large companies controlled by executives who live and work hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Today less than 20 percent of the country’s 1483 papers are independently owned; the rest belong to multi-newspaper chains. Only 104 of the total number have circulations of more than 100,000. Only a handful are large enough to maintain independent reporting staffs outside their own communities; the rest must depend on these few for all of their national and international news.

The Associated Press, which sells content to newspapers, is currently under the control of its Jewish managing editor, Michael Silverman, who directs the day-to-day news reporting and supervises the editorial departments. Silverman had directed the AP’s national news as assistant managing editor since 1992. He was promoted to his current job in 2000. Silverman reports to Jonathan Wolman, also a Jew, who is executive editor for the AP.

In only 47 cities in America are there more than one daily newspaper, and competition is frequently nominal even among them, as between morning and afternoon editions under the same ownership. Examples of this are the Mobile, Alabama, morning Register and afternoon Press-Register; and the Syracuse, New York, morning Post-Standard and afternoon Herald-Journal — all owned by the Jewish Newhouse brothers through their holding company, Advance Publications.

The Newhouse media empire provides an example of more than the lack of real competition among America’s daily newspapers: it also illustrates the insatiable appetite Jews have shown for all the organs of opinion control on which they could fasten their grip. The Newhouses own 30 daily newspapers, including several large and important ones, such as the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Newark Star-Ledger, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune; Newhouse Broadcasting, consisting of 12 television broadcasting stations and 87 cable-TV systems, including some of the country’s largest cable networks; the Sunday supplement Parade, with a circulation of more than 22 million copies per week; some two dozen major magazines, including the New Yorker, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Bride’s, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, Self, House & Garden, and all the other magazines of the wholly owned Conde Nast group.

This Jewish media empire was founded by the late Samuel Newhouse, an immigrant from Russia. When he died in 1979 at the age of 84, he bequeathed media holdings worth an estimated $1.3 billion to his two sons, Samuel and Donald. With a number of further acquisitions, the net worth of Advance Publications has grown to more than $8 billion today.

The gobbling up of so many newspapers by the Newhouse family was in large degree made possible by the fact that newspapers are not supported by their subscribers, but by their advertisers. It is advertising revenue — not the small change collected from a newspaper’s readers — that largely pays the editor’s salary and yields the owner’s profit.

Whenever the large advertisers in a city choose to favor one newspaper over another with their business, the favored newspaper will flourish while its competitor dies. Since the beginning of the last century, when Jewish mercantile power in America became a dominant economic force, there has been a steady rise in the number of American newspapers in Jewish hands, accompanied by a steady decline in the number of competing gentile newspapers — primarily as a result of selective advertising policies by Jewish merchants.

Furthermore, even those newspapers still under gentile ownership and management are so thoroughly dependent upon Jewish advertising revenue that their editorial and news reporting policies are largely constrained by Jewish likes and dislikes. It holds true in the newspaper business as elsewhere that he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Three Jewish Newspapers

The suppression of competition and the establishment of local monopolies on the dissemination of news and opinion have characterized the rise of Jewish control over America’s newspapers. The resulting ability of the Jews to use the press as an unopposed instrument of Jewish policy could hardly be better illustrated than by the examples of the nation’s three most prestigious and influential newspapers: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. These three, dominating America’s financial and political capitals, are the newspapers that set the trends and the guidelines for nearly all the others. They are the ones that decide what is news and what isn’t, at the national and international levels. They originate the news; the others merely copy it. And all three newspapers are in Jewish hands.

The New York Times, with a September 1999 circulation of 1,086,000, is the unofficial social, fashion, entertainment, political, and cultural guide of the nation. It tells America’s “smart set” which books to buy and which films to see; which opinions are in style at the moment; which politicians, educators, spiritual leaders, artists, and businessmen are the real comers. And for a few decades in the 19th century it was a genuinely American newspaper.

The New York Times was founded in 1851 by two gentiles, Henry J. Raymond and George Jones. After their deaths, it was purchased in 1896 from Jones’s estate by a wealthy Jewish publisher, Adolph Ochs. His great-great-grandson, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., is the paper’s current publisher and the chairman of the New York Times Co. The executive editor is Joseph Lelyveld, also a Jew (he is a rabbi’s son).

The Sulzberger family also owns, through the New York Times Co., 33 other newspapers, including the Boston Globe, purchased in June 1993 for $1.1 billion; twelve magazines, including McCall’s and Family Circle with circulations of more than 5 million each; seven radio and TV broadcasting stations; a cable-TV system; and three book publishing companies. The New York Times News Service transmits news stories, features, and photographs from the New York Times by wire to 506 other newspapers, news agencies, and magazines.

Of similar national importance is the Washington Post, which, by establishing its “leaks” throughout government agencies in Washington, has an inside track on news involving the Federal government.

The Washington Post, like the New York Times, had a non-Jewish origin. It was established in 1877 by Stilson Hutchins, purchased from him in 1905 by John R. McLean, and later inherited by Edward B. McLean. In June 1933, however, at the height of the Great Depression, the newspaper was forced into bankruptcy. It was purchased at a bankruptcy auction by Eugene Meyer, a Jewish financier and former partner of the infamous Bernard Baruch, industry czar in America during the First World War. The Washington Post was run by Katherine Meyer Graham, Eugene Meyer’s daughter, until her death in 2001. She was the principal stockholder and the board chairman of the Washington Post Co. and appointed her son, Donald Graham, publisher of the paper in 1979. Donald became Washington Post Company CEO in 1991 and its board chairman in 1993, and the chain of Jewish control at the Washington Post remains unbroken. The newspaper has a daily circulation of 763,000, and its Sunday edition sells 1.1 million copies.

The Washington Post Co. has a number of other media holdings in newspapers (the Gazette Newspapers, including 11 military publications); in television (WDIV in Detroit, KPRC in Houston, WPLG in Miami, WKMG in Orlando, KSAT in San Antonio, WJXT in Jacksonville); and in magazines, most notably the nation’s number-two weekly newsmagazine, Newsweek. The Washington Post Company’s various television ventures reach a total of about 7 million homes, and its cable TV service, Cable One, has 635,000 subscribers.

In a joint venture with the New York Times, the Post publishes the International Herald Tribune, the most widely distributed English-language daily in the world.

The Wall Street Journal, which sells 1.8 million copies each weekday, is the nation’s largest-circulation daily newspaper. It is owned by Dow Jones & Company, Inc., a New York corporation that also publishes 24 other daily newspapers and the weekly financial tabloid Barron’s, among other things. The chairman and CEO of Dow Jones is Peter R. Kann, who is a Jew. Kann also holds the posts of chairman and publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

Most of New York’s other major newspapers are in no better hands than the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. In January 1993 the New York Daily News was bought from the estate of the late Jewish media mogul Robert Maxwell (born Ludvik Hoch) by Jewish real-estate developer Mortimer B. Zuckerman. The Village Voice is the personal property of Leonard Stern, the billionaire Jewish owner of the Hartz Mountain pet supply firm. And, as mentioned above, the New York Post is owned by News Corporation under the Jew Peter Chernin.

News Magazines

The story is pretty much the same for other media as it is for television, radio, films, music, and newspapers. Consider, for example, newsmagazines. There are only three of any importance published in the United States: Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report.

Time, with a weekly circulation of 4.1 million, is published by a subsidiary of Time Warner Communications, the new media conglomerate formed by the 1989 merger of Time, Inc., with Warner Communications. Although Gerald Levin has retired, Time Warner Communications is still essentially Jewish in character.

Newsweek, as mentioned above, is published by the Washington Post Company, under the Jew Donald Graham. Its weekly circulation is 3.1 million.

U.S. News & World Report, with a weekly circulation of 2.2 million, is owned and published by the aforementioned Mortimer B. Zuckerman, who also has taken the position of editor-in-chief of the magazine for himself. Zuckerman also owns the Atlantic Monthly and New York’s tabloid newspaper, the Daily News, which is the sixth-largest paper in the country.

Note:

Concerned Americans are invited to send their views, and any information of importance, on this subject to:

Germar Rudolf

P.O. Box 121,

Red Lion, PA, 

17356  

germar.r@btinternet.com

 

Memo shows US official disagreed with Bush administration’s view on torture

Previously-unreleased document shows state department official thought techniques were ‘cruel’ and ‘degrading’ punishment

April 3, 2012

Associated Press

A memo about harsh interrogation techniques shows that a former US state department official strongly dissented from the Bush administration’s secret legal view in 2005 that an international treaty against torture did not apply to CIA interrogations in foreign countries.

Until now, the February 2006 analysis by Philip Zelikow has been a high-level, classified internal critique of the Bush administration’s controversial interrogation policies. At the time he wrote his criticism, Zelikow was secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s representative on terrorism issues to the national security council’s deputies committee.

The state department released Zelikow’s memo Tuesday under the freedom of information act to the National Security Archive, a nonprofit advocacy group for openness in government.

In late 2005, Bush signed an amendment sponsored by John McCain that the Republican senator believed applied international standards of cruel and degrading treatment to US interrogation practices.

However, a May 2005 secret justice department interpretation of the law exempted CIA interrogation practices like waterboarding.

In his five-page memo, Zelikow wrote that the state department earlier had agreed with the justice department’s view. But “that situation has now changed” in light of McCain’s amendment, Zelikow wrote.

It “appears to us that several of these techniques, singly or in combination, should be considered ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’,” Zelikow stated.

“The techniques least likely to be sustained are the techniques described as ‘coercive’, especially viewed cumulatively, such as the waterboard, walling, dousing, stress positions and cramped confinement,” Zelikow’s analysis concluded.

In an interview Tuesday following the document’s release, Zelikow said: “I believe that the department of justice’s opinion was an extreme reading of the law and because the justice department opinion was secret, the only way the president could hear an alternative interpretation was for someone like me to offer it.

“It was bureaucratically and personally awkward for a state department official to challenge the department of justice on the interpretation of American constitutional law, but I had worked on constitutional law years earlier,” said Zelikow, a dean and professor at the University of Virginia.

 

After Car-Tracking Smackdown, Feds Turn to Warrantless Phone Tracking

March 31, 2012 |

by David Kravets

Wired.com

Prosectors are shifting their focus to warrantless cell-tower locational tracking of suspects in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling that law enforcement should acquire probable-cause warrants from judges to affix GPS devices to vehicles and monitor their every move, according to court records.

The change of strategy comes in the case the justices decided in January, when it reversed the life sentence of a District of Columbia area drug dealer, Antoine Jones, who was the subject of 28 days of warrantless GPS surveillance via a device the FBI secretly attached to his vehicle. In the wake of Jones’ decision, the FBI has pulled the plug on 3,000 GPS-tracking devices.

In a Friday filing in pre-trial proceedings of Jones retrial, Jones attorney’ said the government has five months’ worth of a different kind of locational tracking information on his client: So-called cell-site information, obtained without a warrant, chronicling where Jones was when he made and received mobile phone calls in 2005.

“In this case, the government seeks to do with cell site data what it cannot do with the suppressed GPS data,” attorney Eduardo Balarezo wrote (.pdf) U.S. District Judge Ellen Huvelle.

Balarezo added:

The government has produced material obtained through court orders for the relevant cellular telephone numbers. Upon information and belief, now that the illegally obtained GPS data cannot be used as evidence in this case, the government will seek to introduce cell site data in its place in an attempt to demonstrate Mr. Jones’ movements and whereabouts during relevant times. Mr. Jones submits that the government obtained the cell site data in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and therefore it must be suppressed.

Just as the lower courts were mixed on whether the police could secretly affix a GPS device on a suspect’s car without a warrant, the same is now true about whether a probable-cause warrant is required to obtain so-called cell-site data.

A lower court judge in the Jones case had authorized the five months of the cell-site data without probable cause, based on government assertions that the data was “relevant and material” to an investigation.

“Knowing the location of the trafficker when such telephone calls are made will assist law enforcement in discovering the location of the premises in which the trafficker maintains his supply narcotics, paraphernalia used in narcotics trafficking such as cutting and packaging materials, and other evident of illegal narcotics trafficking, including records and financial information,” the government wrote in 2005, when requesting Jones’ cell-site data.

That cell-site information was not introduced at trial, as the authorities used the GPS data for the same function.

The Supreme Court tossed that GPS data, along with Jones’ conviction, on Jan. 23.

The justices agreed to decide Jones’ case in a bid to settle conflicting lower-court decisions — some of which ruled a warrant was necessary, while others found the government had unchecked GPS surveillance powers.

“We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the five-justice majority.

The government has maintained in a different case on appeal that cell-site data is distinguishable from GPS-derived data. District of Columbia prosecutors are expected to lodge their papers on the issue by Apr. 6 in the Jones case.

Among other things, the government maintains Americans have no expectation of privacy of such cell-site records because they are “in the possession of a third party” (.pdf) — the mobile phone companies. What’s more, the authorities maintain that the cell site data is not as precise as GPS tracking and, “there is no trespass or physical intrusion on a customer’s cellphone when the government obtains historical cell-site records from a provider.”

In the Jones case, the Supreme Court agreed with an appeals court that Jones’ rights had been violated by the month-long warrantless attachment of a GPS device underneath his car. Scalia’s majority opinion, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor, said placing the device on the suspect’s car amounted to a search. (.pdf)

David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com.

Chinese Insider Offers Rare Glimpse of U.S.-China Frictions

April 2, 2012
by Jane Perlez
New York Times

 

BO’AO, China — The senior leadership of the Chinese government increasingly views the competition between the United States and China as a zero-sum game, with China the likely long-range winner if the American economy and domestic political system continue to stumble, according to an influential Chinese policy analyst.

China views the United States as a declining power, but at the same time believes that Washington is trying to fight back to undermine, and even disrupt, the economic and military growth that point to China’s becoming the world’s most powerful country, according to the analyst, Wang Jisi, the co-author of “Addressing U.S.-China Strategic Distrust,” a monograph published this week by the Brookings Institution in Washington and the Institute for International and Strategic Studies at Peking University.

Mr. Wang, who has an insider’s view of Chinese foreign policy from his positions on advisory boards of the Chinese Communist Party and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, contributed an assessment of Chinese policy toward the United States. Kenneth Lieberthal, the director of the John L. Thornton Center for China Studies at Brookings, and a former member of the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton, wrote the appraisal of Washington’s attitude toward China.

In a joint conclusion, the authors say the level of strategic distrust between the two countries has become so corrosive that if not corrected the countries risk becoming open antagonists.

The United States is no longer seen as “that awesome, nor is it trustworthy, and its example to the world and admonitions to China should therefore be much discounted,” Mr. Wang writes of the general view of China’s leadership.

In contrast, China has mounting self-confidence in its own economic and military strides, particularly the closing power gap since the start of the Iraq war. In 2003, he argues, America’s gross domestic product was eight times as large as China’s, but today it is less than three times larger.

The candid writing by Mr. Wang is striking because of his influence and access, in Washington as well as in Beijing. Mr. Wang, who is dean of Peking University’s School of International Studies and a guest professor at the National Defense University of the People’s Liberation Army, has wide access to senior American policy makers, making him an unusual repository of information about the thinking in both countries. Mr. Wang said he did not seek approval from the Chinese government to write the study, nor did he consult the government about it.

It is fairly rare for a Chinese analyst who is not part of the strident nationalistic drumbeat to strip away the official talk by both the United States and China about mutual cooperation.

Both Mr. Wang and Mr. Lieberthal argue that beneath the surface, both countries see deep dangers and threatening motivations in the policies of the other.

Mr. Wang writes that the Chinese leadership, backed by the domestic news media and the education system, believes that China’s turn in the world has arrived, and that it is the United States that is “on the wrong side of history.” The period of “keeping a low profile,” a dictum coined by the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1989, and continued until now by the departing president, Hu Jintao, is over, Mr. Wang warns.

“It is now a question of how many years, rather than how many decades, before China replaces the United States as the largest economy in the world,” he adds.

China’s financial successes, starting with weathering the 1998 Asian financial crisis and the 2008 global financial crisis, the execution of events like the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the Shanghai Expo in 2010, contrast with America’s “alarming” deficit, sluggish economic recovery and polarized domestic politics, Mr. Wang says.

He does not address head on the far superior strength of the United States in military weaponry. But he notes that Beijing has developed advanced rocketry and space technology and sophisticated weapons systems without the “United States or the U.S.-led world order.”

In the face of China’s strengths, and worries that the United States will be displaced from its premier position in the world, Washington is engaged in activities including stepped-up spying by American planes and ships along China’s borders that anger the Chinese, particularly its military, Mr. Wang writes.

Promotion of human rights in China by American-supported nongovernmental organizations is viewed as an effort to “Westernize” the country and undermine the Communist Party, a stance the party will not stand for, he says.

That China is increasingly confident that it will prevail in the long run against the United States is backed, in part, by Mr. Lieberthal’s appraisal of American policy toward China.

Mr. Lieberthal cites findings from American intelligence based on internal discussions among crucial Chinese officials that these officials assume “very much a zero-sum approach” when discussing issues directly and indirectly related to United States-China relations.

Because these are privileged communications not intended for public consumption, American officials interpret them to be “particularly revealing of China’s ‘real’ objectives,” he writes.

In turn, American law enforcement officials see an alarming increase in Chinese counterespionage and cyberattacks against the United States that they have concluded are directed by the Chinese authorities to gather information of national interest.

At a seminar last week at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where Brookings finances a study center, Mr. Lieberthal said there was an increasing belief on both sides that the two countries would be “antagonistic in 15 years.”

That would mean major military expenditures by both countries to deter each other, and pushing other countries to take sides. “The worst case is that this could lead to actual armed conflict, although that is by no means a necessary consequence of mutual antagonism,” Mr. Lieberthal said in an interview.

 

How China Steals Our Secrets

April 2, 2012

by Richard A. Clarke   

New York Times

For the last two months, senior government officials and private-sector experts have paraded before Congress and described in alarming terms a silent threat: cyberattacks carried out by foreign governments. Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., said cyberattacks would soon replace terrorism as the agency’s No. 1 concern as foreign hackers, particularly from China, penetrate American firms’ computers and steal huge amounts of valuable data and intellectual property.

It’s not hard to imagine what happens when an American company pays for research and a Chinese firm gets the results free; it destroys our competitive edge. Shawn Henry, who retired last Friday as the executive assistant director of the F.B.I. (and its lead agent on cybercrime), told Congress last week of an American company that had all of its data from a 10-year, $1 billion research program copied by hackers in one night. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, head of the military’s Cyber Command, called the continuing, rampant cybertheft “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”

Yet the same Congress that has heard all of this disturbing testimony is mired in disagreements about a proposed cybersecurity bill that does little to address the problem of Chinese cyberespionage. The bill, which would establish noncompulsory industry cybersecurity standards, is bogged down in ideological disputes. Senator John McCain, who dismissed it as a form of unnecessary regulation, has proposed an alternative bill that fails to address the inadequate cyberdefenses of companies running the nation’s critical infrastructure. Since Congress appears unable and unwilling to address the threat, the executive branch must do something to stop it.

In the past, F.B.I. agents parked outside banks they thought were likely to be robbed and then grabbed the robbers and the loot as they left. Catching the robbers in cyberspace is not as easy, but snatching the loot is possible.

General Alexander testified last week that his organization saw an inbound attack that aimed to steal sensitive files from an American arms manufacturer. The Pentagon warned the company, which had to act on its own. The government did not directly intervene to stop the attack because no federal agency believes it currently has the authority or mission to do so.

If given the proper authorization, the United States government could stop files in the process of being stolen from getting to the Chinese hackers. If government agencies were authorized to create a major program to grab stolen data leaving the country, they could drastically reduce today’s wholesale theft of American corporate secrets.

Many companies do not even know when they have been hacked. According to Congressional testimony last week, 94 percent of companies served by the computer-security firm Mandiant were unaware that they had been victimized. And although the Securities and Exchange Commission has urged companies to reveal when they have been victims of cyberespionage, most do not. Some, including Sony, Citibank, Lockheed, Booz Allen, Google, EMC and the Nasdaq have admitted to being victims. The government-owned National Laboratories and federally funded research centers have also been penetrated.

Because it is fearful that government monitoring would be seen as a cover for illegal snooping and a violation of citizens’ privacy, the Obama administration has not even attempted to develop a proposal for spotting and stopping vast industrial espionage. It fears a negative reaction from privacy-rights and Internet-freedom advocates who do not want the government scanning Internet traffic. Others in the administration fear further damaging relations with China. Some officials also fear that standing up to China might trigger disruptive attacks on America’s vulnerable computer-controlled infrastructure.

But by failing to act, Washington is effectively fulfilling China’s research requirements while helping to put Americans out of work. Mr. Obama must confront the cyberthreat, and he does not even need any new authority from Congress to do so.

Under Customs authority, the Department of Homeland Security could inspect what enters and exits the United States in cyberspace. Customs already looks online for child pornography crossing our virtual borders. And under the Intelligence Act, the president could issue a finding that would authorize agencies to scan Internet traffic outside the United States and seize sensitive files stolen from within our borders.

And this does not have to endanger citizens’ privacy rights. Indeed, Mr. Obama could build in protections like appointing an empowered privacy advocate who could stop abuses or any activity that went beyond halting the theft of important files.

If Congress will not act to protect America’s companies from Chinese cyberthreats, President Obama must.

Richard A. Clarke, the special adviser to the president for cybersecurity from 2001 to 2003, is the author of “Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It.”

 

Inside America’s Drone HQ

April 4, 2012

by Alastair Leithead

BBC News,

            New Mexico-Unmanned aircraft are the new cornerstone of modern military operations, and both American and British crews are learning to fly them at a New Mexico Air Force base. There, they must tackle the practical questions of what it means to wage war from afar.

            Col Ken Johnson explains the role of drones in the US military on a tour of Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico

America and its allies are fighting wars around the world from computer screens in the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico.

Drones – officially known as remotely piloted aircraft – have become a major part of modern warfare.

These unmanned aircraft have the ability to fly above contentious areas, taking and relaying surveillance photos. The most controversial drones have the ability to launch an attack via onboard weapons.

America operates thousands of drones, with the bigger, more sophisticated versions controlled from bases in the US.

More pilots are being trained to fly American unmanned aircraft than fighter planes, and most of them are put through their paces at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

It’s the biggest drone pilot training centre in the world, with American and British crews learning to fly them, spy with them and fire missiles from them.

‘Not robot warfare’

The two common armed drones are the Predator and the Reaper, and Colonel Ken Johnson, 49th Operations Group commander at Holloman, showed me around them both.

They have high-tech cameras and weapons mounted under the wings. They’re smaller than you might imagine with a grey hump where the glass cockpit would normally be.

             “There’s always going to be a human crew controlling the aeroplane,” he said, explaining why he preferred the term ‘remotely piloted aircraft’ to ‘drone’.

“So they’re not robots. This is not robot warfare.”

Some took off from the runway, controlled from inside the small, innocuous khaki-coloured shipping containers packed with all the necessary computer power.

In other darkened rooms on the base, pilots ran through training exercises on simulators.

“You can use the shadow patterns and the colours in the picture to identify if the man is carrying a weapon,” a female US trainer explained to one of the British Royal Air Force students.

We were allowed to watch but not give the surname of any pilots or navigators as they learned and practiced.

The bank of screens displayed maps and an aerial view of buildings, roads and computer-generated men walking – some carrying guns.

“It’s a basic intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance trip – a two and a half hour mission,” explained Squadron Leader “Dex”, an instructor, but also commander for UK forces at the base.

One person flies the drone, the other operates the cameras and sensors.

They clearly give a huge advantage to troops on the ground, but there’s controversy surrounding the American use of drones.

CIA’s black hole

In Pakistan, covert missile strikes are launched on suspected insurgents in a country not at war with the US.

Who is targeted, why and who’s next on the strike list is a secretive process, and there have been reports of civilian casualties in unmanned air attacks.

“For the covert US drone programme there needs to be a lot more transparency and accountability,” said Sarah Holewinski, executive director of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC).

With the military’s drones we know how they are operated – some is confidential, but we know what happens there. When it comes to the CIA’s use of drones it’s a complete black hole.

“For civilians living on the ground they don’t know whether they are going to be targeted the next day, or at the market if they are standing next to somebody who is a target.”

The military dismisses descriptions such as “targeted assassinations” for strikes on suspected fighters in Pakistan or on men not convicted of any crime.

“I think it’s only controversial in terms of the media – they will make it controversial,” said Sqdr Ldr Dex.

“We train to operate a weapon system in exactly the same way we would train in a manned aircraft – and we do the same job.

“So to us there’s nothing controversial about it. Through our training and our smart decisions we avoid collateral damage as best we can. All of our engagements, all of our missions are legitimate and legal.”

And what of the psychological impact on troops fighting a war in Afghanistan during the day and then picking up the children from school on the way home to dinner?

Sqdr Ldr Dex says it’s part of the training – and the long drive home through the desert from the base helps leave his working day behind him.

But fighting and killing from thousands of miles away as if it were a computer game is a very different way of fighting a war.

These are moral, and legal debates, which will intensify the more we depend on unmanned aircraft to fight our wars.

It appears to be the future, as nations around the world invest in the technology, but it’s already very much in the present.

 

 

Scientist reveals how he made bird flu that could spread between people

Researcher created a hybrid of H5N1 bird flu and swine flu viruses then isolated a strain that can infect cells in the throat

April 3, 2012

by Ian Sample, science correspondent

guardian.co.uk,

A scientist whose work was deemed too dangerous to publish by US biosecurity advisers revealed for the first time on Tuesday how he created a hybrid bird flu virus that is spread easily by coughs and sneezes.

In a conference presentation that was webcasted live to the public, he detailed how his team created the deadly virus. Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison described experiments that pinpointed four genetic mutations enabling the virus to spread between ferrets kept in neighbouring cages. The animals are considered the best models of how the infection might spread between people.

In December the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) called for sections of Kawaoka’s work to be deleted from a paper in the British science journal Nature, amid fears that a rogue state might use the information to create a biological weapon.

The NSABB raised similar concerns over a paper by Dr Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam. That study, describing another mutant bird flu strain that can also be spread through the air between ferrets, is under consideration at the US journal Science.

The controversy over the papers triggered a crisis in science. Many researchers argued the work must be made fully public so it is available to other experts in the field, such as surveillance teams looking for emergent pandemic strains in Asia and elsewhere. Others said the work should never have been done, or that sensitive details should be shared only with a list of approved experts.

The advisory board reversed its stance on Friday after considering updated versions of the papers and a fresh risk analysis of the studies at a meeting at the National Institutes of Health in Washington DC. The board unanimously approved Kawaoka’s paper for publication in full, and gave the green light to Fouchier’s work after a vote of 12 to 6 in favour. Neither paper had information removed for the review.

Bird flu is considered particularly threatening to people because more than half of the 600 or so people known to have caught the virus have died from the infection. Many scientists fear the virus could trigger a pandemic if it evolved into a form that spread rapidly.

The experiments by Kawaoka and Fouchier were designed to answer the question of whether the bird flu virus could pick up genetic mutations in the wild that would allow it to adapt to humans and spread rapidly like seasonal flu.

Speaking at a Royal Society conference on bird flu, Kawaoka and Fouchier claimed their work highlighted how easily bird flu could mutate into a form that would potentially be transmissible among humans. But their findings showed the mutant strains did not spread as swiftly as seasonal flu, and were not lethal to animals that caught the infection from a neighbouring animal. Both viruses could be controlled by antiviral drugs, such as Tamiflu, and bird flu vaccines, the researchers added.

Kawaoka created a hybrid flu strain by merging H5N1 bird flu with the “swine flu” virus that caused a pandemic in humans in 2009. Through a series of experiments in ferrets, he isolated a strain with four mutations that helped the virus latch on to and infect cells in the throat. One reason bird flu does not spread well between people is that it cannot bind to cells in the throat and nose, where it can be coughed and sneezed out.

Defending the work, Kawaoka said is was carried out in a high-security laboratory where all of the staff had been vetted by the FBI. The work was “important for pandemic preparedness” and emphasised the need for countries to stockpile vaccines to combat bird flu.

One of the mutations is already common in the wild, Kawaoka said, appearing in all 46 bird flu viruses isolated from people in Egypt between 2009 and 2011. “The risk is out there in nature,” Kawaoka said.

The UK has a stockpile of 16,000 doses of the GSK bird flu vaccine, Pandemrix, which has a shelf life of three to seven years.

Fouchier told the conference he was unable to reveal full details of his own research because the Dutch government has imposed export controls on the information. His team created a mutant strain of H5N1 bird flu by infecting a succession of ferrets until a strain emerged that spread between animals housed in neighbouring cages. Ferrets that had already been exposed to flu viruses were not affected by the mutant strain.

Fouchier was unable to confirm the specific mutations that made the virus more transmissible, but said many had already been spotted in the wild. “Most of the mutations we found we can see in the field, and we are even seeing them in combination,” he said.

“We are looking for strains of mutants that are associated with particular biological traits,” Fouchier added. “Just as we want to predict tsunamis and earthquakes, we want to predict pandemics.”

 

War porn: The new safe sex

April 3, 2012

by Pepe Escobar

Asia Times

            The early 21st century is addicted to war porn, a prime spectator sport consumed by global couch and digital potatoes. War porn took the limelight on the evening of September 11, 2001, when the George W Bush administration launched the “war on terror” – which was interpreted by many of its practitioners as a subtle legitimization of United States state terror against, predominantly, Muslims.
            This was also a war OF terror – as in a manifestation of state terror pitting urban high-tech might against basically rural, low-tech cunning. The US did not exercise this monopoly; Beijing practiced it in Xinjiang, its far west, and Russia practiced it in Chechnya.
            Like porn, war porn cannot exist without being based on a lie – a crude representation. But unlike porn, war porn is the real thing; unlike crude, cheap snuff movies, people in war porn actually die – in droves.
            The lie to finish all lies at the center of this representation was definitely established with the leak of the 2005 Downing Street memo, in which the head of the British MI6 confirmed that the Bush administration wanted to take out Iraq’s Saddam Hussein by linking Islamic terrorism with (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction (WMD). So, as the memo put it, “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
            In the end, George “you’re either with us or against us” Bush did star in his own, larger-than-life snuff movie – that happened to double as the invasion and destruction of the eastern flank of the Arab nation.

The new Guernica
            Iraq may indeed be seen as the Star Wars of war porn – an apotheosis of sequels. Take the (second) Fallujah offensive in late 2004. At the time I described it as the new Guernica. I also took the liberty of paraphrasing Jean-Paul Sartre, writing about the Algerian War; after Fallujah no two Americans shall meet without a corpse lying between them. To quote Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, there were bodies, bodies everywhere.
            The Francisco Franco in Fallujah was Iyad Allawi, the US-installed interim premier. It was Allawi who “asked” the Pentagon to bomb Fallujah. In Guernica – as in Fallujah – there was no distinction between civilians and guerrillas: it was the rule of “Viva la muerte!”
            United States Marine Corps commanders said on the record that Fallujah was the house of Satan. Franco denied the massacre in Guernica and blamed the local population – just as Allawi and the Pentagon denied any civilian deaths and insisted “insurgents” were guilty.
            Fallujah was reduced to rubble, at least 200,000 residents became refugees, and thousands of civilians were killed, in order to “save it” (echoes of Vietnam). No one in Western corporate media had the guts to say that in fact Fallujah was the American Halabja.
            Fifteen years before Fallujah, in Halabja, Washington was a very enthusiastic supplier of chemical weapons to Saddam, who used them to gas thousands of Kurds. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at the time said it was not Saddam; it was Khomeinist Iran. Yet Saddam did it, and did it deliberately, just like the US in Fallujah.
            Fallujah doctors identified swollen and yellowish corpses without any injuries, as well as “melted bodies” – victims of napalm, the cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel. Residents who managed to escape told of bombing by “poisonous gases” and “weird bombs that smoke like a mushroom cloud … and then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. The pieces of these strange bombs explode into large fires that burn the skin even when you throw water over them.”
            That’s exactly what happens to people bombed with napalm or white phosphorus. The United Nations banned the bombing of civilians with napalm in 1980. The US is the only country in the world still using napalm.
            Fallujah also provided a mini-snuff movie hit; the summary execution of a wounded, defenseless Iraqi man inside a mosque by a US Marine. The execution, caught on tape, and watched by millions on YouTube, graphically spelled out the “special” rules of engagement. US Marine commanders at the time were telling their soldiers to “shoot everything that moves and everything that doesn’t move”; to fire “two bullets in every body”; in case of seeing any military-aged men in the streets of Fallujah, to “drop ’em”; and to spray every home with machine-gun and tank fire before entering them.
            The rules of engagement in Iraq were codified in a 182-page field manual distributed to each and every soldier and issued in October 2004 by the Pentagon. This counter-insurgency manual stressed five rules; “protect the population; establish local political institutions; reinforce local governments; eliminate insurgent capabilities; and exploit information from local sources.”
            Now back to reality. Fallujah’s population was not protected: it was bombed out of the city and turned into a mass of thousands of refugees. Political institutions were already in place: the Fallujah Shura was running the city. No local government can possibly run a pile of rubble to be recovered by seething citizens, not to mention be “reinforced”. “Insurgent capabilities” were not eliminated; the resistance dispersed around the 22 other cities out of control by the US occupation, and spread up north all the way to Mosul; and the Americans remained without intelligence “from local sources” because they antagonized every possible heart and mind.
             Meanwhile, in the US, most of the population was already immune to war porn. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke out in the spring of 2004, I was driving through Texas, exploring Bushland. Virtually everybody I spoke to either attributed the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to “a few bad apples”, or defended it on patriotic grounds (“we must teach a lesson to “terrorists”).

I love a man in uniform
            In thesis, there is an approved mechanism in the 21st century to defend civilians from war porn. It’s the R2P – “responsibility to protect” doctrine. This was an idea floated already in 2001 – a few weeks after the war on terror was unleashed, in fact – by the Canadian government and a few foundations. The idea was that the concert of nations had a “moral duty” to deploy a humanitarian intervention in cases such as Halabja, not to mention the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the mid-1970s or the genocide in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.
            In 2004, a panel at the UN codified the idea – crucially with the Security Council being able to authorize a “military intervention” only “as a last resort”. Then, in 2005, the UN General Assembly endorsed a resolution supporting R2P, and in 2006 the UN Security Council passed resolution 1674 about “the protection of civilians in armed conflict”; they should be protected against “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”.
            Now fast-forward to the end of 2008, early 2009, when Israel – using American fighter jets to raise hell – unleashed a large-scale attack on the civilian population of the Gaza strip.
            Look at the official US reaction; “Israel has obviously decided to protect herself and her people,” said then-president Bush. The US Congress voted by a staggering 390-to-5 to recognize “Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza”. The incoming Barack Obama administration was thunderously silent. Only future Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We support Israel’s right to self-defense.”
            At least 1,300 civilians – including scores of women and children – were killed by state terror in Gaza. Nobody invoked R2P. Nobody pointed to Israel’s graphic failure in its “responsibility to protect” Palestinians. Nobody called for a “humanitarian intervention” targeting Israel.
            The mere notion that a superpower – and other lesser powers – make their foreign policy decisions based on humanitarian grounds, such as protecting people under siege, is an absolute joke. So already at the time we learned how R2P was to be instrumentalized. It did not apply to the US in Iraq or Afghanistan. It did not apply to Israel in Palestine. It would eventually apply only to frame “rogue” rulers that are not “our bastards” – as in Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011. “Humanitarian” intervention, yes; but only to get rid of “the bad guys.”
            And the beauty of R2P was that it could be turned upside down anytime. Bush pleaded for the “liberation” of suffering Afghans – and especially burqa-clad Afghan women – from the “evil” Taliban, in fact configuring Afghanistan as a humanitarian intervention.
            And when the bogus links between al-Qaeda and the non-existent WMDs were debunked, Washington began to justify the invasion, occupation and destruction of Iraq via … R2P; “responsibility to protect” Iraqis from Saddam, and then to protect Iraqis from themselves.

The killer awoke before dawn
            The most recent installment in serial episodes of war porn is the Kandahar massacre, when, according to the official Pentagon version (or cover up) an American army sergeant, a sniper and Iraqi war veteran – a highly trained assassin – shot 17 Afghan civilians, including nine women and four children, in two villages two miles apart, and burned some of their bodies.
            Like with Abu Ghraib, there was the usual torrent of denials from the Pentagon – as in “this is not us” or “we don’t do things these way”; not to mention a tsunami of stories in US corporate media humanizing the hero-turned-mass killer, as in “he’s such a good guy, a family man”. In contrast, not a single word about The Other – the Afghan victims. They are faceless; and nobody knows their names.
            A – serious – Afghan enquiry established that some 20 soldiers may have been part of the massacre – as in My Lai in Vietnam; and that included the rape of two of the women. It does make sense. War porn is a lethal, group subculture – complete with targeted assassinations, revenge killings, desecration of bodies, harvesting of trophies (severed fingers or ears), burning of Korans and pissing on dead bodies. It’s essentially a collective sport.
            US “kill teams” have deliberately executed random, innocent Afghan civilians, mostly teenagers, for sport, planted weapons on their bodies, and then posed with their corpses as trophies. Not by accident they had been operating out of a base in the same area of the Kandahar massacre.
            And we should not forget former top US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who in April 10, 2010, admitted, bluntly, “We’ve shot an amazing number of people” who were not a threat to the US or Western civilization.
            The Pentagon spins and sells in Afghanistan what it sold in Iraq (and even way back in Vietnam for that matter); the idea that this is a “population-centric counter-insurgency” – or COIN, to “win hearts and minds”, and part of a great nation building project.
            This is a monumental lie. The Obama surge in Afghanistan – based on COIN – was a total failure. What replaced it was hardcore, covert, dark war, led by “kill teams” of Special Forces. That implies an inflation of air strikes and night raids. No to mention drone strikes, both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s tribal areas, whose favorite targets seem to be Pashtun wedding parties.
             Incidentally, the CIA claims that since May 2010, ultra-smart drones have killed more than 600 “carefully selected” human targets – and, miraculously, not a single civilian.
            Expect to see this war porn extravaganza celebrated in an orgy of upcoming, joint Pentagon-Hollywood blockbusters. In real life, this is spun by people such as John Nagl, who was on General David Petraeus’ staff in Iraq and now runs the pro-Pentagon think-tank Center for New American Security.
            The new stellar macho, macho men may be the commandos under the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). But this a Pentagon production, which has created, according to Nagl, an “industrial strength counter-terrorism killing machine”.
            Reality, though, is much more prosaic. COIN techniques, applied by McChrystal, relied on only three components; 24-hour surveillance by drones; monitoring of mobile phones; and pinpointing the physical location of the phones from their signals.
            This implies that anyone in an area under a drone watch using a cell phone was branded as a “terrorist”, or at least “terrorist sympathizer”. And then the focus of the night raids in Afghanistan shifted from “high value targets” – high-level and mid-level al-Qaeda and Taliban – to anyone who was branded as helping the Taliban.
            In May 2009, before McChrystal arrived, US Special Forces were carrying 20 raids a month. By November, they were 90 a month. By the spring of 2010, they were 250 a month.   When McChrystal was fired – because of a story in Rolling Stone (he was competing with Lady Gaga for the cover; Lady Gaga won) – and Obama replaced him with Petraeus in the summer of 2010, there were 600 a month. By April 2011, they were more than 1,000 a month.
            So this is how it works. Don’t even think of using a cell phone in Kandahar and other Afghan provinces. Otherwise, the “eyes in the sky” are going to get you. At the very least you will be sent to jail, along with thousands of other civilians branded as “terrorist sympathizers”; and intelligence analysts will use your data to compile their “kill/capture list” and catch even more civilians in their net.
            As for the civilian “collateral damage” of the night raids, they were always presented by the Pentagon as “terrorists”. Example; in a raid in Gardez on February 12, 2010, two men were killed; a local government prosecutor and an Afghan intelligence official, as well as three women (two of them pregnant). The killers told the US-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) command in Kabul that the two men were “terrorists” and the women had been found tied up and gagged. Then the actual target of the raid turned himself in for questioning a few days later, and was released without any charges.
            That’s just the beginning. Targeted assassination – as practiced in Afghanistan – will be the Pentagon’s tactic of choice in all future US wars.

Pass the condom, darling
            Libya was a major war porn atrocity exhibition – complete with a nifty Roman touch of the defeated “barbarian” chief sodomized in the streets and then executed, straight on YouTube.
            This, by the way, is exactly what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a lightning visit to Tripoli, had announced less than 48 hours before the fact. Gaddafi should be “captured or killed”. When she watched it in the screen of her BlackBerry she could only react with the semantic earthquake “Wow!”
            From the minute a UN resolution imposed a no-fly zone over Libya under the cover of R2P, it became a green card to regime change. Plan A was always to capture and kill Gaddafi – as in an Afghan-style targeted assassination. That was the Obama administration official policy. There was no plan B.
            Obama said the death of Gaddafi meant, “the strength of American leadership across the world”. That was as “We got him” (echoes of Saddam captured by the Bush administration) as one could possibly expect.
            With an extra bonus. Even though Washington paid no less than 80% of the operating costs of those dimwits at NATO (roughly $2 billion), it was still pocket money. Anyway, it was still awkward to say, “We did it”, because the White House always said this was not a war; it was a “kinetic” something. And they were not in charge.
            Only the hopelessly naïve may have swallowed the propaganda of NATO’s “humanitarian” 40,000-plus bombing which devastated Libya’s infrastructure back to the Stone Age as a Shock and Awe in slow motion. This never had anything to do with R2P.
            This was R2P as safe sex – and the “international community” was the condom. The “international community”, as everyone knows, is composed of Washington, a few washed-up NATO members, and the democratic Persian Gulf powerhouses of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), plus the House of Saud in the shade. The EU, which up to extra time was caressing the helm of Gaddafi’s gowns, took no time to fall over themselves in editorials about the 42-year reign of a “buffoon”.
            As for the concept of international law, it was left lying in a drain as filthy as the one Gaddafi was holed up in. Saddam at least got a fake trial in a kangaroo court before meeting the executioner (he ended up on YouTube as well). Osama bin Laden was simply snuffed out, assassination-style, after a territorial invasion of Pakistan (no YouTube – so many don’t believe it). Gaddafi went one up, snuffed out with a mix of air war and assassination. They are The Three Graceful Scalps of War Porn.

Sweet emotion
            Syria is yet another declination of war porn narrative. If you can’t R2P it, fake it.
            And to think that all this was codified such a long time ago. Already in 1997, the US Army War College Quarterly was defining what they called “the future of warfare”. They framed it as “the conflict between information masters and information victims”.
            They were sure “we are already masters of information warfare … Hollywood is ‘preparing the battlefield’ … Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable … Our sophistication in handling it will enable us to outlast and outperform all hierarchical cultures … Societies that fear or otherwise cannot manage the flow of information simply will not be competitive. They might master the technological wherewithal to watch the videos, but we will be writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties. Our creativity is devastating.”
            Post-everything information warfare has nothing to do with geopolitics. Just like the proverbial Hollywood product, it is to be “spawned” out of raw emotions; “hatred, jealousy, and greed – emotions, rather than strategy”.
            In Syria this is exactly how Western corporate media has scripted the whole movie; the War College “information warfare” tactics in practice. The Syrian government never had much of a chance against those “writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties”.
            For example, the armed opposition, the so-called Free Syrian Army (a nasty cocktail of defectors, opportunists, jihadis and foreign mercenaries) brought Western journalists to Homs and then insisted to extract them, in extremely dangerous condition, and with people being killed, via Lebanon, rather than through the Red Crescent. They were nothing else than writing the script for a foreign-imposed “humanitarian corridor” to be opened to Homs. This was pure theater – or war porn packaged as a Hollywood drama.
            The problem is Western public opinion is now hostage to this brand of information warfare. Forget about even the possibility of peaceful negotiations among adult parties. What’s left is a binary good guys versus bad guys plot, where the Big Bad Guy must be destroyed at all costs (and on top of it his wife is a snob bitch who loves shopping!)
            Only the terminally naïve may believe that jihadis – including Libya’s NATO rebels – financed by the Gulf Counter-revolution Club, also know as Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are a bunch of democratic reformists burning with good intentions. Even Human Rights Watch was finally forced to acknowledge that these armed “activists” were responsible for “kidnapping, detention, and torture”, after receiving reports of “executions by armed opposition groups of security force members and civilians”.
            What this (soft and hard) war porn narrative veils, in the end, is the real Syrian tragedy; the impossibility for the much-lauded “Syrian people” to get rid of all these crooks – the Assad system, the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Syrian National Council, and the mercenary-infested Free Syrian Army.

Listen to the sound of chaos
            This – very partial – catalogue of sorrows inevitably brings us to the current supreme war porn blockbuster – the Iran psychodrama.
            2012 is the new 2002; Iran is the new Iraq; and whatever the highway, to evoke the neo-con motto, real men go to Tehran via Damascus, or real men go to Tehran non-stop.
            Perhaps only underwater in the Arctic we would be able to escape the cacophonous cortege of American right-wingers – and their respective European poodles – salivating for blood and deploying the usual festival of fallacies like “Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map”, “diplomacy has run its course”, “the sanctions are too late”, or “Iran is within a year, six months, a week, a day, or a minute of assembling a bomb”. Of course these dogs of war would never bother to follow what the International Atomic Energy Agency is actually doing, not to mention the National Intelligence Estimates released by the 17 US intelligence agencies.
            Because they, to a great extent, are “writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties” in terms of corporate media, they can get away with an astonishingly toxic fusion of arrogance and ignorance – about the Middle East, about Persian culture, about Asian integration, about the nuclear issue, about the oil industry, about the global economy, about “the Rest” as compared to “the West”.
            Just like with Iraq in 2002, Iran is always dehumanized. The relentless, totally hysterical, fear-inducing “narrative” of “should we bomb now or should we bomb later” is always about oh so very smart bunker buster bombs and precision missiles that will accomplish an ultra clean large-scale devastation job without producing a single “collateral damage”. Just like safe sex.
            And even when the voice of the establishment itself – the New York Times – admits that neither US nor Israeli intelligence believe Iran has decided to build a bomb (a 5-year-old could reach the same conclusion), the hysteria remains inter-galactic.
             Meanwhile, while it gets ready – “all options are on the table”, Obama himself keeps repeating – for yet another war in what it used to call “arc of instability”, the Pentagon also found time to repackage war porn. It took only a 60-second video now on YouTube, titled Toward the Sound of Chaos, released only a few days after the Kandahar massacre. Just look at its key target audience: the very large market of poor, unemployed and politically very naïve young Americans.
            Let’s listen to the mini-movie voice over: “Where chaos looms, the Few emerge. Marines move toward the sounds of tyranny, injustice and despair – with the courage and resolve to silence them. By ending conflict, instilling order and helping those who can’t help themselves, Marines face down the threats of our time.”
            Maybe, in this Orwellian universe, we should ask the dead Afghans urinated upon by US Marines, or the thousands of dead in Fallujah, to write a movie review. Well, dead men don’t write. Maybe we could think about the day NATO enforces a no-fly one over Saudi Arabia to protect the Shi’ites in the eastern province, while Pentagon drones launch a carpet of Hellfire missiles over those thousands of arrogant, medieval, corrupt House of Saud princes. No, it’s not going to happen.
            Over a decade after the beginning of the war on terror, this is what the world is coming to; a lazy, virtually worldwide audience, jaded, dazed and distracted from distraction by distraction, helplessly hooked on the shabby atrocity exhibition of war porn.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com 

 

Jewish Imperialism & The US Military

March 24, 2012

by Brother Nathanael Kapner

Much is being said these days and debated about America’s role in a changing world.
Emerging out of this debate is a global consensus that no longer should one single power wield a tyrannical hold over the rest of the world.
            And why do I say, “tyrannical?”
             Because, behind America’s wars and bullying around the globe, lays a pernicious force that I call, “Jewish Imperialism,” fueled by four components of Zionist tyranny:
            Control of the Press—Control of Capital—Control of the Political Process—and, Control of the Military.
             You see, the military, is in truth, in the hands of Zionist Jewry due to its military’s dependence on the loans the Jewish-owned Federal Reserve Bank makes to the US government – AT INTEREST – by the way.
            But the world is changing…with new powers, new alliances, and new perceptions evolving.
            We are now witnessing an emergent Russia, which under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, is pulling Europe…especially Germany…away from Judaic influence into its own Christian orbit.
            The recent inauguration of the Nord Stream Pipeline and the imminent opening of South Stream, pumping Russian Natural Gas—heating the homes and fueling the industries of an energy-starved Europe—secures a greater tie than any dominance Jewish Imperialism could ever impose.
            And with the awakening of Islamic populations to a new political awareness and activism, America finds itself between a rock and a hard place.
            The rock is Russia, and the hard place, Islam-Rising.
            General Petraeus nailed it in 2010 when he had the ‘audacity’ to warn Jewish Senator Carl Levin and his Senate Armed Services Committee that America’s “favoritism” toward Israel “jeopardizes” American lives and interests in the Islamic-enraged Middle East.
            But someone must have read Petraeus the riot report, for since then, not a peep out of him.
            But it all resurfaced last month when General Dempsey, head of the US Military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a television audience—and bucking, by the way, the powerful Jewish Lobby, a force more formidable than any Belligerent in the history of wars—that a war for Israel against Iran would “not be prudent:”
             Netanyahu, enabled by his American Jewish constituency, actually had the nerve to call General Dempsey, a “servant of Iran.”
            Believe me, my friends, this kind of Zionist posturing does NOT play well with those who rule in the upper echelons of the US military. And they don’t readily forget. They don’t get mad, they get even.
            Two choices now lie before America. And it will determine its demise or revival.
             America can either continue its fool-hardy subservience to Zionist-Jewry’s belligerence around the globe OR serve as a model of peace-making and international co-operation.
            Only by breaking the power of Jewish Imperialism and embracing a Christian-centered morality and compassion, can America take the lead as a peacemaker in a bloodied, chaotic, war-wounded world. 

 

Regicide: The Official Assassination of JFK

by Gregory Douglas

 

The Official Cover Up

 

Soviet Intelligence Study (translation)

           

            62. A very large number of published books about the assassination have appeared since the year 1963. Most of these books are worthless from a historical point of view. They represent the views of obsessed people and twist information only to suit the author’s beliefs.

            63. There are three main ideas written about:

            a. The American gangsters killed the President because his brother, the American  Attorney General, was persecuting them;

            b. Cuban refugees felt that Mr. Kennedy had deserted their cause of ousting Cuban chief of state Castro;

            c. Various American power groups such as the capitalist business owners, fascist political groups, racists, internal and external intelligence organization either  singly or in combination are identified.

            64. American officials have not only made no effort to silence these writers but in many cases have encouraged them. The government feels, as numerous confidential reports indicate, that the more lunatic books appear, the better. This way, the real truth is so concealed as to be impenetrable.

            65. It was initially of great concern to our government that individuals inside the American government were utilizing Oswald’s “Communist/Marxist” appearance to suggest that the assassination was of a Soviet origin.

            66. In order to neutralize this very dangerous theme, immediately after the assassination, the Soviet Union fully cooperated with American investigating bodies and supplied material to them showing very clearly that Oswald was not carrying out any Soviet designs.

            67. Also, false defectors were used to convince the Americans that Oswald was considered a lunatic by the Soviet Union, and had not been connected with the Soviet intelligence apparatus in any way. He was, of course, connected but it was imperative to disassociate the Soviet Union with the theory that Oswald, an American intelligence operative, had been in collusion with them concerning the assassination.

            68. The false defector Nosenko, a provable member of Soviet intelligence, was given a scenario that matched so closely the personal attitudes of Mr. Hoover of the FBI that this scenario was then officially supported by Mr. Hoover and his bureau.

            69. Angleton of the CIA at once suspected Nosenko’s real mission and subjected him to intense interrogation but finally, Nosenko has been accepted as a legitimate defector with valuable information on Oswald.

            70. Because of this business, Angleton was forced to resign his post as chief of counter intelligence. This has been considered a most fortunate byproduct of the controversy.

            71. The FBI has accepted the legitimacy of Nosenko and his material precisely because it suited them to do so. It was also later the official position of the CIA because the issue dealt specifically with the involvement, or non-involvement, between Oswald, a private party, and the organs of Soviet intelligence. Since there was no mention of Oswald’s connection with American intelligence, this was of great importance to both agencies

 

The DIA Analysis

            71. The concern of Soviet intelligence and government agencies about any possible connection between defector Oswald and themselves is entirely understandable. It was never seriously believed by any competent agency in the United States that the Soviet Union had any part in the assassination of Kennedy and also known that Oswald was a government agent, working for various agencies in his lifetime.

            72. Because of the emotional attitudes in official Washington and indeed, throughout the entire nation immediately following the assassination, there was created a potentially dangerous international situation for the Soviets. Oswald was an identified defector with Marxist leanings. He was also believed to be a pro-Castro activist . That both his Marxist attitudes and his sympathies and actions on behalf of the Cuban dictator were simulations was not known to the Warren Commission at the time of their activities.

            73. To bolster their eager efforts to convince the American authorities that their government had nothing to do with the assassination, men like Nosenko were utilized to further support this contention. It is not known whether Nosenko was acting on orders or whether he was permitted access to created documentation and given other deliberate disinformation by the KGB and allowed to defect. A great deal of internal concern was expressed upon the Nosenko’s purported defection by Soviet officials but this is viewed at merely an attempt, and a successful one, to lend substance to his importance.

            74. James Angleton’s attitude towards Nosenko is a commentary on the duality of his nature. On one hand, Angleton was performing as Chief of Counter Intelligence and openly showed his zeal in searching for infiltrators and “moles” inside his agency while on the other hand, Angleton had very specific personal knowledge that the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination

 

 

Author’s Comments

 

The death of President Kennedy was, on the surface at least, a straightforward act. He was shot to death while riding in a motorcade. The shooting itself was photographed (and subsequently, the FBI seized a number of these pictures and none of them have ever been seen again) by a number of bystanders in Dealy Plaza and the famous Zapruder motion picture has been viewed by a large number of people.

The murder of Oswald two days later by a petty criminal in a heavily guarded police facility clearly sowed the seeds of the following cloud of controversy and doubt that has surrounded this act.

The hastily cobbled together Warren Report was of such a nature as to raise far more questions than it answered and the attempts on the part of establishment supporters to validate it merely lend credence to the suspicions of growing legions of doubters.

When the establishment formulates an official version of an important incident, this version is strongly supported by not only the establishment itself, but by the sections of the media and academia that are beholden to them.

Anyone who entertains, or even more important, presents for public consumption, views that are in opposition to the establishment are either ignored or trivialized. In the case of the growing number of those who have brought the Warren Commission Report into question, the usual dismissive phrase is “conspiracy buff.” The implication is that anyone who questions the Warren Report is merely a gadfly amateur, protected under the First Amendment, but, of course, just another eccentric. And, as such, to be ignored.

On the other hand, authors like Gerald Posner who support the Warren Report are given prominent coverage in the establishment papers, and one sees such comments as “Persuasive…brilliantly illuminating…more satisfying than any conspiracy theory.” This is credited to a reviewer for the New York Times,[1] a newspaper that has always been a powerful supporter of the establishment point of view of the Kennedy assassination.

The official version of this event is always given the most positive adjectives in media comment while anything that would negate the official version is always termed “conspiracy theory” and generally dismissed as being the product of a disordered mind and, certainly, not having been proven.

There have been, of course, no other documents available to the public other than the ones under governmental control, and this absence has powerfully strengthened the establishment position.

Should any documents appear that would seriously question that position, the formula for negation is already well in place. Proof would be demanded, and if it were forthcoming, it would be rejected.

The motives of the supporters of the government’s thesis and their methods will be discussed in a separate chapter.


[1]    G. Posner, op. cit. dust jacket comments.

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