Nearly two years ago, Antifascist Calling revealed that when DNDO awarded contracts totaling some $1.2 billion over five years to defense and security giants Raytheon, Canberra Industries (a subsidiary of the French nuclear manufacturing titan, the Areva Group) and Thermo Scientific for Advanced Spectroscopic Portal (ASP) radiation monitors in 2006, it should have been "reality-check time."

For the moment at least, it apparently is.

As late as January 2010, despite revelations that the program widely missed the mark, DNDO officials claimed that the ASP "will enhance current detection capabilities by more clearly identifying the source of detected radiation through spectroscopic isotope identification."

Notwithstanding persistent flaws and cost overruns dogging the program, the Department of Homeland Security asked for $41M in its 2011 budget request "for the procurement and deployment of radiological and nuclear detection systems and equipment to support efforts across the Department."

Why would they do that? For answers, we'd better consult defense and security powerhouse Raytheon, the project's prime contractor.

A Homeland "Security Blanket" for the Defense Industry

Clocking-in at No. 5 on Washington Technology's 2009 "Top 100 List" of Federal Prime Contractors, the company pulled-down some $5,942,575,316 in defense and security-related contracts from the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, NASA, the armed forces and Department of Homeland Security.

According to Raytheon, "ASP detectors address the threat of radiological dispersal devices, improvised nuclear devices or a nuclear weapon being used by terrorists inside the United States," therefore "a more discriminating primary screening system--the ASP--is needed."

Touted as a next-gen "homeland security tool" that would provide Customs and Border Protection inspectors with the capability to detect illicit nuclear or radiological materials inside containers entering American ports, "with low false alarm rates" to boot, despite hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the program, the ASP performs no better than devices in place today.

As with existent monitors, the ASP was unable to distinguish between components required to manufacture a radiological dirty bomb from natural radiation emitters such as--wait!-- kitty litter, ceramics or bananas!

You would think the state would have considered another of the firm's more dubious highlights before awarding them with a lucrative contract for something as critical as preventing nuclear terrorism. You'd be wrong however!

According to the Project on Government Oversight's (POGO) Federal Contractor Misconduct Database, Raytheon has the distinction of another No. 5 listing, though I doubt the company will tout this on their web site.

Identified by the government watchdogs as a firm with a history of "misconduct such as contract fraud and environmental, ethics, and labor violations," since 1995, Raytheon has been cited for some $479.2M in 20 instances of what POGO has identified as "misconduct." These include: aircraft maintenance overcharges; contractor kickbacks; defective pricing; False Claims Act violations; improper classification of costs; the violation of SEC rules; TCE contamination at Kansas Airport; an EEOC racial discrimination lawsuit; contamination of Tucson, Arizona's water supply with TCE and dioxane, "chemical solvents believed to be human carcinogens," on and on.

Come to think of it, why wouldn't they be a perfect fit for DHS! As the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) has documented in a series of critical reports, the state's massive reorganization of the security apparatus under the DHS brand "involved new money--stacks of it."

According to CIR, "systematic federal efforts to measure the effectiveness of various homeland security programs and grants have been less than a complete success." And likely to stay that way in this writer's opinion, judging by DNDO's busted ASP program.

Revolving Doors, Greased Wheels

Citing a pressing need for the new gizmos, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert Bonner testified before a Senate panel in 2005, and setting the stage for the ASP fiasco, that detection machines first installed in 2000 "had picked up over 10,000 radiation hits in vehicles or cargo shipments entering the country. All proved harmless."

As security analyst Bruce Schneier wrote at the time, "It amazes me that 10,000 false alarms--instances where the security system failed--are being touted as proof that the system is working."

But as a former airline executive famously told investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker during his probe into the 9/11 attacks: "Sometimes when things don't make business sense, its because they do make sense...just in some other way."

Since completing government "service," Bonner became a partner in the white shoe law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, specializing in "crisis management" for corporate clients.

Amongst the firm's more dubious legal "accomplishments" was their representation of the soon-to-be-installed Bush regime during the 2000 Florida recount. On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court staged a judicial coup d'état and stopped the Florida vote count, thus handing the presidency to the Bush crime family and setting the stage for the most corrupt, and lawless, period in the nation's history.

Confirming suspicions that not much has changed since the Obama administration blew into town last year, the president's Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, appointed Bonner to the Homeland Security Advisory Council's Southwest Border Task Force.

Corroborating the notion that the top political echelons of the secret state are mere jump-off points for a lucrative "post-government" career, and that "homeland security" is a highly-profitable game the whole family can play, CBP's former head honcho is now a principal partner with The Sentinel HS Group, LLC, a Washington lobby shop.

According to a blurb on Sentinel's web site, the firm is "committed to assisting government entities in organizing effectively to carry out their homeland security responsibilities, and in designing and implementing effective homeland security strategies, policies, and programs."

The firm served as the "principal advisor" to the "Boeing Team" that speared the SBInet contract from DHS. Federal Computer Week reported in January however, that Napolitano "has ordered a reassessment of the $8 billion SBInet virtual border fence program in Arizona after another round of delays in the program, an official confirmed today."

The only thing that has changed in the years since the ASP boondoggle was launched, is that millions in taxpayer dollars have greased the palms of well-connected defense contractors. In turn, defense behemoth Raytheon has repaid the favor, showering some $2.2 million dollars on federal candidates in 2008, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, with 55% of the lucre going to "progressive" Democrats.

And 2010 promises to be a banner year for the "best democracy money can buy." OpenSecrets.org reveals that as of January 31, the firm has already raised some $1.5 million, spending 59% of PAC dollars on congressional Democrats.

"I Cheated on the Test? Whaddaya Mean, the Government Gave Me the Answers!"

When DNDO announced the initiative back in 2006, it was trumpeted as one of the cornerstones of the Bush regime's corporate-friendly homeland security apparatus, to wit, it was sold to Congress as a front-line weapon that would prevent the smuggling of illicit nuclear materials into the heimat.

When the $1.2 billion contract was awarded, officials claimed each device would cost "only" $377,000 and would "dramatically" improve vehicle and cargo container screening.

Since those initial cost estimates, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) discovered that securocrats had deceived Congress and that each contraption would probably cost upwards of $822,000 each, with no demonstrable improvement over machines in use today.

Dialing-down the program, DNDO's acting chief William K. Hagan wrote neocon Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, that the Office will "possibly use the machines only for secondary screening, at no more than about a third of the cost originally planned," Post journalist Robert O'Harrow disclosed.

Hagan wrote that DNDO's decision makes "sense, given the available performance and cost data." In other words, although the ASP has proven to be a colossal failure, let's fund a scaled-down version of the program. Is this a great country, or what!

As I previously reported, GAO investigators revealed in a September 2008 report, that DHS massaged test results and painted a rosy picture of what, for all practical purposes, was a lead balloon.

GAO watchdogs discovered that DNDO "used biased test methods that enhanced the apparent performance" of the machines. Congressional investigators found that dodgy methodology designed to manipulate the results, allowed contractors to adjust the devices after preliminary runs, giving the appearance that ASP's performed better than they actually did. In other words, DNDO project managers handed out virtual Cliff Notes to the contractors during testing. Talk about a rigged game!

In 2009 testimony before the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, Committee on Science and Technology, House of Representatives, Gene Aloise, GAO Director of Natural Resources and Environment testified that "DNDO resumed the field testing of ASPs that it initiated in January 2009 but suspended because of serious performance problems. However, the July tests also revealed critical performance deficiencies."

Aloise disclosed that ASPs, like current monitors, "had a high number of false positive alarms for the detection of certain nuclear materials."

Auditors were told by Customs and Border Protection officials that "these false alarms are very disruptive in a port environment because any alarm for this type of nuclear material causes CBP to take enhanced security precautions."

However, despite earlier claims that the machines would "enhance" border security by weeding out nuclear or radiological materials that could be fashioned into IEDs, GAO revealed that DNDO planned "to address these false alarms" by modifying the devices "to make these monitors less sensitive to these nuclear materials and thereby diminishing the ASPs' capability."

Aloise told The Washington Post that "DHS's decision to abandon full-scale deployment of the ASP's is a victory for the U.S taxpayer--a savings of at least $1.5 billion--and our national security."

"As recent testing has revealed" Aloise said, "the consequences of these machines being deployed nationwide in 2007, as DNDO intended, could have been disastrous."

Fear not dear readers, in Washington's accountability-free zone failure is always generously rewarded.

Washington Technology reported on Friday, that Raytheon "has won an initial contract from the Air Force worth $886 million to develop a new element of the Global Positioning System that will improve the accuracy of information from GPS satellites."

If the firm's work for DNDO is any indication of "improved accuracy" we can expect from next-gen GPS, better dust off your compass and learn to navigate by starlight!


Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press , Uncommon Thought Journal, CJO's Avenger212, and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.
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Unnamed sources who spoke to Newsweek magazine said the Obama Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has concluded that John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who penned the infamous memos, used "poor judgment" but will not be subject to disciplinary action. Yoo and Bybee worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, along with Steven Bradbury, who is also named in the report.

The conclusions of the OPR report provide yet another demonstration of President Barack Obama's defense of the anti-democratic and criminal practices of the Bush administration in the "war on terror," and the current administration's resolve that no one--especially those at the highest levels of government--will be held to account.

An earlier version of the OPR report completed in December 2008 concluded that Yoo, presently a University of California at Berkeley law professor, and Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge on the 9th Circuit, violated professional standards when they drafted an August 2002 legal opinion authorizing brutal methods by the CIA in the interrogation of suspected terrorist detainees.

The OPR recommended referral of their cases to state bar associations, which could have revoked their law licenses. Bybee also could have faced an impeachment inquiry before Congress. However, under a new review of the OPR report ordered by Attorney General Eric Holder shortly after he took charge of the Justice Department, the two will not face even these weak sanctions.

In early 2009, the Obama Justice Department began to water down the conclusions of the OPR probe, which was initiated in mid-2004 during the Bush administration following disagreements between the Office of Legal Counsel and White House lawyers over the Bush administration's defense of "enhanced interrogation" techniques justified by the Yoo-Bybee opinions.

David Margolis, a 34-year career prosecutor at the Justice Department, was eventually tasked by Holder with reviewing the final version of the OPR report. It was reportedly Margolis who downgraded the report's initial findings against Yoo and Bybee from "professional misconduct" to "poor judgment."

As recently as December, Obama administration lawyers under the direction of Holder supported the dismissal of a case brought against Yoo by Jose Padilla, the US citizen held incommunicado and tortured for more than two years after his arrest at Chicago's O'Hare Airport.

Earlier last year, Obama administration attorneys supported the dismissal of suits brought by a wide range of victims, including those subject to "extraordinary rendition," targets of government eavesdropping, and detainees transported from the Middle East to US military bases in Afghanistan.

The Justice Department's defense of Yoo and Bybee testifies to the Obama administration's continuation of the police-state structures developed under Bush. The memos drafted by Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury were solicited by the Bush White House to provide pseudo-legal justification for systematic torture that was already being carried out by CIA interrogators.

The memos made the gruesome and legally absurd argument that "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding, threats of death, sleep deprivation, extreme variations of temperature, and the use of psychotropic drugs do not rise to the level of torture unless they inflict pain equivalent to "major organ failure" or death.

Since authoring the memos, Yoo has gone on to write three books in which he defends his doctrine that the president as the "commander in chief" in wartime possesses unlimited powers, including the right to authorize torture and other illegal acts. In one of his August 2002 memos, he asserted that CIA agents accused of torturing Al Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in "self-defense" to prevent future terror attacks.

Newsweek notes that the OPR report is "sharply critical" of the "legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding"' and other torture methods used by CIA interrogators after September 11, and that it will provide "many new details about how waterboarding was adopted and the role that top White House officials played in the process."

This is, however, merely window dressing for a cover-up of war crimes and crimes against the democratic rights of the American people and tacit sanction for the continuation of such practices. Obama has frequently touted his "ban" on torture, but this remains an empty and cynical gesture under conditions where the government protects former government officials who authorized these crimes.

There are two major reasons why the Obama administration continues to block any prosecution of those responsible for authorizing torture. First, the Democratic Party is complicit in the crimes of the Bush administration. Democratic congressional leaders were briefed by Bush officials on the torture practices and violations of democratic rights and international law, and supported them.

Second, such policies continue under the current administration.

One year after assuming office, Obama has broken his pledge to close the Guantanamo detention camp and blocked suits by Guantanamo detainees challenging their detention. He has explicitly defended the Bush administration policies of indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, and military tribunals. The US military prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan continues to hold hundreds of prisoners, without charge or trial, under barbaric conditions.

Obama is going one step further than Bush by seeking to establish a military prison in Illinois where prisoners will be held indefinitely without charge or trial and subjected to treatment defined by international and US law as torture. He is thereby institutionalizing on US soil the illegal, police-state methods improvised by Bush.

Obama has moreover upheld the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, with Yemen becoming the latest target of US threats, along with Iran.

The administration's de facto support for John Yoo and his torture memo accomplices is of a piece with these policies, which are supported by both big business parties. Under conditions of expanding militarism abroad and deepening social inequality at home, there is no section of the political establishment committed to the defense of democratic rights.

Democratic rights can be defended only through the independent mobilization of the working class against the Obama administration, the Democrats and Republicans, and the capitalist system which is the source of war and repression.

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It helps to know that three current constitutional amendments resulted because of Supreme Court decisions that needed remedial action: the Eleventh Amendment (shoring up states' legal immunity), the Sixteenth Amendment (authorizing a federal income tax), and the Twenty-sixth Amendment (assuring eighteen-year-olds the right to vote).

Among the current efforts MoveToAmend.org has already received nearly 50,000 signatories to support is plan, particularly: Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.

Another active group is ReclaimDemocracy.org advocating: Corporations and other for-profit institutions are prohibited from attempting to influence the outcome of elections, legislation or government policy through the use of aggregate resources or by rewarding or repaying employees or directors to exert such influence.

Ultimate Civics, a project of Earth Island Institute, wants this: This amendment affirms that constitutional rights extend only to human persons. Corporations, partnerships, and other organization entities are not human persons and, therefore, are not entitled to constitutional protections.

Largely missing from all this attention to the need for a new constitutional amendment, however, is the recognition that Congress, already corrupted by corporate and other special interest money, is very unlikely - no, make that will surely never propose any such amendment. Nor will any congressional attempts at fixing the Supreme Court problem with legislation do what is needed. In fact, there has been an older movement to take all private money out of federal elections and go to total public financing, which would offer the benefit of opening up the US political system to competitive third party candidates. But this too has never received strong support.

What merits far more attention and support is the use of the alternative path to amending the US Constitution offered in Article V. However, the convention of state delegates option has never been used because Congress has stubbornly refused to obey this part of the Constitution, as if they have a right to pick and choose what to obey, despite the one and only requirement for an Article V convention being satisfied. Indeed, there have been some 750 applications for a convention from all 50 states, more than the two-thirds requirement. A major reason Congress has gotten away with this illegal behavior is that nearly all organized political interests on the left and right have opposed a convention. Why? Because they like their current ability to corrupt Congress through lobbying and other forms of spending and fear true reforms of our political and government system through amendments proposed by a convention, which still must be ratified by three-quarters of the states. Both ratification and the exact words in Article V prevent any wholesale rewriting of the entire Constitution.

If Americans want to fix the recent, awful Supreme Court decision, then they should rally behind the effort of the nonpartisan Friends of the Article V Convention at foavc.org. They only advocate for making Congress obey the Constitution and call the first convention, but not specific amendments.

All those campaigning for a new constitutional amendment to accomplish any type of reform to improve the US should recognize that voting in new members of Congress or a President has proven to be totally ineffective in achieving necessary reforms to make government work better. The two-party plutocracy is far too corrupted by business and other special interests. The Founders gave us the Article V convention option because they anticipated the failure of the federal government to honestly serve public interests. Now, more than ever, is the time to use what they gave us. Now is the time for Americans to stop being constitutional hypocrites, saying they love and honor the US Constitution but refusing to make Congress obey every part of it, especially Article V.

How about President Obama who used to teach constitutional law getting behind this, especially because he reacted to the recent Supreme Court decision this way: "a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans." Wouldn't it be logical for the president to demand that Congress obey the Constitution?

Finally, when corporations are given more freedoms as if they are persons the inevitable result is that citizens lose freedoms and liberties, something that conservatives and libertarians in particular should recognize.

[Joel S. Hirschhorn is a co-founder of Friends of the Article V Convention; contact him through delusionaldemocracy.com]

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Following is a concise list of LOP(PPP);

First law of Politicianary Motion

The orbit of every politician is an ellipse with the power centre i.e. the king, the ruler or the president at its focus.

Law of Conservation of Political Corruption

It states that the total amount of corruption in a political system remains constant over time. A consequence of this law is that corruption can neither be created nor destroyed. It is always present in exploitable forms in any political system. The only thing that can happen to corruption in a political system is that it can change form, for instance power hunger can become nepotism that can in turn change into a buying and selling activity, a la the stock exchange, over a period of time.

Law of Buoyancy

Any politician, wholly or partially immersed in four letter gooey substances, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the four letter gooey substance displaced by the politician. In other words, the more voluminous an immersed politician is, the larger will be the mass of four letter gooey substance displaced by him.

Law of Heat Conduction

The law of Heat Conduction states that the time rate of heat transfer through a politician is proportional to the thickness of his skin, its temperature and to the nature of the organ the skin is covering and through which the heat is flowing.

The Uncertainty Principle

The Uncertainty Principle states that certain pairs of character virtues in a politician, like honesty and honor, cannot both be known to random exactness. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known. In other words, an accurate measure of a politician's honesty cannot guarantee an honorable stand on important national issues and vice versa.

Law of Pressure

In a politician of given volume at constant temperature, pressure and volume are inversely proportional (while one increases, the other decreases). Or in other words, in politicians of ever expanding volumes, pressure points on their bodies continue to reduce.

Law of Political Entropy

Entropy, a measure of disorder, continues to increase in a political system. Or, alternately, the more improvements that are promised to have been delivered by the politicians, the higher the rate of breakdown in other subsystems they oversee.

Physical Laws of Political Motion

Then are the three physical laws of political motion that form the basis for classical politics. These are:

1. In the absence of a proper stimulus, a politician at rest continues to remain at rest and one in motion continues to remain in motion with constant speed.

2. A politician experiencing a stimulus S experiences an acceleration a related to S by S = ma, where m is the mass of the politician. In other words, for a politician of given mass, the larger the stimulus S, the larger will be the acceleration a.

3. Whenever one politician exerts a force F on a second politician, the second politician exerts a force −F on the first politician. F and −F are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. The equilibrium continues till the introduction of a stimulus S at which time the −F becomes +F and the 2Fs continue in the same direction with combined force.

The scribe ends this piece with two quotes;

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy. ~Ernest Benn

Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel. ~John Quinton

The reader may contribute a quote or add to LOP(PPP) if he/she so wishes.

X-X-X-X

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These are among the findings of two 18 January reports on the dynamics of recent defense spending from the Project on Defense Alternatives, a small think tank with offices in the Washington area and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

According to the reports, the boost in spending after 1998 is unmatched over a nearly 60-year period, edging out both the Reagan and the Kennedy-Johnson spending hikes. And the Obama administration, in a move likely to confound critics and supporters alike, plans to spend more on the Pentagon than any administration since 1948.

"The recent wars are only half the story," says author Carl Conetta, "And their high price tag raises as many questions as it answers." The report finds the recent wars to have cost $792,000 per deployed person per year, while the Vietnam war cost only $256,000 per person per year in today's dollars.

Part of the reason for the relatively higher cost of current wars is that the United States today relies on an expensive professional military, rather than a conscript one. The cost-structure of today's military is not well-suited to protracted, labor-intensive wars, concludes the report. Related to this, the proportion of private contractors used in today's wars is five times higher than during the Vietnam war. Also adding to costs, DoD equipment purchases in the decade before the wars focused too heavily on the legacy systems favored by the services and on long-range strike weapons. So a new round of buying was needed to support counter-insurgency operations.

The reports find that DoD has been generally lax in setting priorities among contending acquisition programs. But the most serious problem cited in the studies was the adoption of ambitious new roles, missions, and strategies for a reduced military after the Cold War ended. A variety of reform and transformation efforts were supposed to make it possible for a smaller military to do more. But these efforts fell short of their promise. So costs rose with ambitions.

Since the mid-1990s, the Pentagon has turned increasingly to private contractors to help fill the gap between ambitious strategies and the available number of military personnel. The report finds that the Pentagon's contractor workforce has probably grown by 40% since 1989, while the numbers of military personnel and civilian DoD employees have declined by more than 30%.

To avoid today's exceptionally high budgets the reports suggest that national authorities would have to be more realistic in setting military missions and goals, more judicious in decisions about going to war, more forceful in pushing for Pentagon reform, and stricter in setting and enforcing budget priorities. There is a deeper political problem, warns Conetta: "At present, civilian leaders are politically disinclined to push the Pentagon hard or enact tighter budget constraints, and this stance undercuts reform." In reviewing the economic landscape, however, the reports do conclude that fiscal realities may soon prompt a change in attitudes.

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With the White House in crisis mode since the attempted bombing, President Obama met for two hours January 5 with top security and intelligence officials. Obama said that secret state agencies "had sufficient information to uncover the terror plot ... but that intelligence officials had 'failed to connect those dots'," The New York Times reports.

The latest iteration of the "dot theory" floated by the President, aided and abetted by a compliant media, claims "this was not a failure to collect intelligence" but rather, "a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had."

"Mr. Obama's stark assessment that the government failed to properly analyze and integrate intelligence served as a sharp rebuke of the country's intelligence agencies," declared the Times uncritically.

While the President's remarks may have offered a "sharp [rhetorical] rebuke," Obama's statement suggests that no one will be held accountable. Indeed, the President "was standing by his top national security advisers, including those whose agencies failed to communicate with one another."

While the President may be "standing by" his national security advisers, the question is, are the denizens of America's secret state standing by him? One well-connected Washington insider, MSNBC pundit Richard Wolffe, isn't so sure.

Wolffe, the author of a flattering portrait of Obama, Renegade: The Making of a President, when asked on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann January 4 what is the White House "focus here right now?" Wolffe's startling reply: "Is this conspiracy or cock up? It seems that the president is leaning very much towards thinking this was a systemic failure by individuals who maybe had an alternative agenda." (emphasis added)

"I will accept that intelligence by its nature is imperfect" the President said, "but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged."

The question is why? And more pertinently from a parapolitical perspective, what "alternative agenda" is playing out here that would put the lives of nearly 300 air passengers at risk?

British Evidence: Down the Memory Hole

As Antifascist Calling reported last week, The Sunday Times and The Observer newspapers disclosed that MI5 had built a dossier on Abdulmutallab which showed "his repeated contacts with MI5 targets who were subject to phone taps, email intercepts and other forms of surveillance."

It has since emerged, the Associated Press reported January 4, that British authorities began assembling a security file on Abdulmutallab shortly after his arrival the UK in 2005 when officials claimed he was in contact with "known radicals."

Prime Minister Gordon Brown's spokesperson Simon Lewis said on Monday, "Clearly there was security information about this individual's activities, and that was information that was shared with the U.S. authorities. That is the key point."

In an climb-down from Lewis's admission, The Wall Street Journal reported that Home Secretary Alan Johnson, whose brief includes MI5, said in an appearance before Parliament Tuesday, "Whilst we did provide information to the U.S., according to standard operational practices, linked to the wider aspect of this case, none of the information we held or shared indicated that Abdulmutallab was about to attempt a terrorist attack against the U.S."

The Brown government has steadfastly refused to say just when the file on Abdulmutallab was passed to the U.S., letting stand the implication it was sent before the aborted Christmas Day attack.

The cover story being floated by MI5 now mendaciously claims the agency did not send Abdulmutallab's security dossier on to American officials "because of concerns about breaching his human rights and privacy," The Sunday Times reported January 10.

"MI5 has privately conceded that as early as 2006 its surveillance operations had picked up 'multiple communications' between the 23-year-old Nigerian student and suspected terrorists in Britain," The Sunday Times disclosed.

Despite these concessions, we're now to accept at face value the absurd claim that information on a terrorist suspect wasn't passed along by British spooks to their closest ally "because of guidance from [MI5's] legal department."

Trying selling that fairy tale to Republican victims of the secret state's "human rights and privacy" campaign in Northern Ireland as The Sunday Herald revealed during their multiyear investigation into Britain's dirty war!

Under intense pressure by the United States about these disclosures, the Brown government has gone to great lengths to stress "the importance to Britain of close intelligence cooperation with the United States."

Still reeling however, from U.S. threats to cut-off intelligence sharing last summer if torture evidence was disclosed to the public by the British High Court, the government is moving to avoid a similar controversy over the Abdulmutallab affair.

In late July, The Guardian revealed that "Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, personally intervened to suppress evidence of CIA collusion in the torture of a British resident, the high court heard today." The Guardian also reported that MI5 chief Jonathan Evans said in a speech in October that the "Security Service had been 'slow to detect the emerging pattern of US practice in the period after 9/11'."

While the torture files were eventually released in late October by a High Court order, it is certainly reasonable to ask: what other "U.S. practice(s)" are being suppressed today by the Brown government?

The Independent confirms this and states, "The Downing Street comments were reported to have angered the US government, but after talks with the White House, Mr Brown's spokesman tried to lower the diplomatic temperature. He said relations remained 'excellent' between the two countries."

As part of a new and improved sanitized narrative, the Home Office now claims that Abdulmutallab's transformation into an erstwhile suicide bomber began only after he left Britain. This, despite revelations by The Sunday Times last week, that he stoked MI5's interest precisely because of his repeated contacts with individuals "who were subject to phone taps, email intercepts and other forms of surveillance."

In a further development that can't please the British state, The Guardian reported January 7, that Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister for Defense and Security, Rashad al-Alimi, told a news conference that "information provided to us is that Umar Farouk joined al-Qaida in London."

The Wall Street Journal reports that al-Alimi said Thursday, that Abdulmutallab had "no links" to al-Qaeda "when he first came to Yemen in 2004 and 2005 to study Arabic" and that he "was radicalized during his time in the U.K., where he had studied between his two stints in Yemen," charges that "senior British counterterrorism officials" dismiss, claiming "there was no evidence to back them up."

Why then, would Abdulmutallab's web browsing habits, cell phone conversations as well as "other forms of surveillance" on "targets of interest" to British spooks indicate a "lack of evidence"? It would seem to suggest just the opposite.

Indeed, Abdulmutallab had been in "close contact" with "a key suspect in an Al-Qaeda plot to murder British citizens," according to MP Patrick Mercer, the chairman of the parliamentary counter-terrorism committee. Mercer told The Sunday Times January 10, that the alleged airline bomber "had been in touch" with the suspect, currently a resident in a high-security British prison awaiting trial, "while both men were students in London."

Feeling the heat, Lewis has backtracked from his initial statement and now claims that information revealed Monday was simply a "routine exchange of information," and not specific warnings that "Abdulmutallab posed a terrorist threat."

This beggars belief. Indeed, the Brown government's climb-down is clearly intended to "disappear" inconvenient evidence from the official record, thus suppressing the actual content of MI5's security dossier on Abdulmutallab, and will only heighten suspicions that a transatlantic cover-up of the affair is in full-swing.

A Failure to "Integrate and Understand," or a Thin Tissue of Lies

Making the rounds of the Sunday talk shows last week, John O. Brennan, President Obama's top counterterrorism advisor, claimed that U.S. intelligence officials "had snippets of information" about the suspected bomber but "we didn't have any type of information that really allowed us to identify Mr. Abdulmutallab."

The Washington Post reported January 4 that Brennan mendaciously claimed, "We may have had a partial name. We might have had an indication of a Nigerian. But there was nothing that brought it all together."

Indeed, the 25-year CIA veteran and former CEO of The Analysis Corporation, the firm which built and maintained bloated watchlists for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's National Counterterrorist Center, went so far as to cheekily proclaim "there is no smoking gun piece of intelligence out there that said he was a terrorist, he was going to carry out this attack against this aircraft," or that America's multibillion counterterrorist apparatus only had "bits and pieces of information."

Let's take a look at those informational "snippets" and summarize what is quickly emerging as growing evidence of U.S. foreknowledge of an imminent attack on an American passenger plane:

* May: the British government withdrew its student visa for Abdulmutallab, a graduate of the prestigious University College London and placed him on a watchlist, barring his entry into the UK. MI5, and presumably their MI6 military intelligence colleagues in Yemen, compiled a dossier on the would-be bomber, citing his "political involvement" with "extremist networks" that have enjoyed on-again, off-again ties with NATO military intelligence organizations across the decades. This information, as Brown government spokesperson Simon Lewis, who let the cat out of the proverbial bag, was shared with their American counterparts.

* August: U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and NSA, intercepted cell- and satellite phone traffic which revealed that a Yemeni affiliate of the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets, also known as al-Qaeda, were finalizing preparations for an operation that would utilize a "Nigerian."

* October: Newsweek revealed in their January 11 issue, that the dodgy cleric, the American-born Anwar al-Awlaki, who communicated extensively with the disturbed Ft. Hood shooter, Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan, posted "a provocative message on his English-language Web site: 'COULD YEMEN BE THE NEXT SURPRISE OF THE SEASON?'" According to Newsweek, "Al-Awlaki seemed to hint at an upcoming attack that would make Yemen 'the single most important front of jihad in the world'." The Washington Post reported in 2008 that al-Awlaki had extensive contacts with 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar, and Hani Hanjour and was suspected of having assisted the 9/11 plot. According to the Post, "three of the hijackers had spent time at his mosques in California and Falls Church." Despite, or possibly because, of these dubious connections "he was allowed to leave the country in 2002." According to the History Commons, it is only in 2008 that the U.S. government concludes that the shady imam "is linked to al-Qaeda attacks." However, Al-Awlaki's provenance as a new "terrorist mastermind" should be viewed with suspicion, given well-documented links known to have existed amongst the 9/11 hijackers and American, Saudi and Pakistani secret state agencies.

* October: the same month Al-Awlaki was hinting at a "surprise," Newsweek revealed that John O. Brennan "received an alarming briefing at the White House from Muhammad bin Nayef, Brennan's Saudi counterpart. Nayef had just survived an assassination attempt by a Qaeda operative using a novel method: the operative had flown in from the Saudi-Yemeni border region with a bomb hidden in his underwear. The Saudi was concerned because he 'didn't think [U.S. officials] were paying enough attention' to the growing threat." A familiar trope we've heard in the aftermath of other terrorist strikes.

* Early November: Newsweek published an exclusive report January 4, that two U.S. "intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security circulated a paper within the government last fall that examined in some detail the threats that bombs secreted in clothing--or inside someone's body cavities--might pose to aviation security." According to information leaked to the newsmagazine by anonymous "national-security officials," the report "was prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center in conjunction with Homeland Security and the CIA," and that "one principal point of discussion in the document was whether the detonation of a bomb hidden in clothing on an airliner would have a different explosive effect than the detonation of a bomb secreted in a body cavity under similar circumstances." (emphasis added) This chilling report, prepared in the wake of intelligence information provided U.S. security agencies by Saudi Arabia's counterterrorism czar, should raise provocative questions. No other media outlet however, has followed the trail.

* November 19: Abdulmutallab's father, a prominent Nigerian banker and former high state official, visits the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, telling State Department and CIA officials he believes his son is a threat. A cousin tells The New York Times that the father told U.S. officials, "Look at the texts he's sending. He's a security threat." Although Embassy personnel promise "to look into it," the cousin told the Times that "they didn't take him seriously."

* November 20: the CIA prepares and files a report on Abdulmutallab that is sent to agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia "but not disseminated to other intelligence agencies," unnamed "officials" tell the Times. Embassy staff also wrote and sent a cable known as a "Visa Viper," to the State Department and National Counterterrorism Center and a security file is opened on the suspect.

* December 9-24: Abdulmutallab travels to Ghana from Ethiopia and pays cash, $2,831 to be precise, for a ticket on a Northwest Airlines flight from Lagos through Amsterdam to Detroit, landing on Christmas Day. "It is now known" The Independent on Sunday reported January 10, "that the Ghanaian hotel he listed on his immigration form was not the one where he was actually staying." According to IoS, although the FBI "has officers on the ground in Ghana and believe it is likely the terrorist may well have had his final al-Qa'ida briefing, and supplied with equipment and explosives, there," no steps are taken to apprehend the suspect. "All this" IoS comments, "was more than a month after his father, a wealthy Nigerian banker, had met officials at the US embassy in Abuja to share concerns about his son."

* December 22: during a White House Situation Room briefing Newsweek reports that "a document presented to the president titled 'Key Homeland Threats' did not mention Yemen, according to a senior administration official."

* December 25: Abdulmutallab boards Flight 253 in Amsterdam with only a carry-on bag for his international flight; the would-be lap bomber holds a 2-year entry visa into the United States. As is standard procedure, the Department of Homeland Security is notified an hour prior to departure that he is a passenger on the plane.

* December 25: the Los Angeles Times disclosed January 7 that "U.S. border security officials learned of the alleged extremist links of the suspect in the Christmas Day jetliner bombing attempt as he was airborne from Amsterdam to Detroit and had decided to question him when he landed." Homeland Security officials "declined to discuss what information reached the U.S. border officials in Amsterdam on Christmas Day." Despite suspicions by Customs and Border Protection agents, who had accessed NCTC's TIDE database, the flight crew is not notified of Abdulmutallab's presence aboard the airliner and additional security precautions therefore, are not made.

Preliminary White House Review: Crafting the Cover-Up

In remarks January 7 announcing the White House's preliminary review of alleged "intelligence failures" responsible for the near detonation of a bomb aboard Flight 253, President Obama said that "America's first line of defense is timely, accurate intelligence that is shared, integrated, analyzed, and acted upon quickly and effectively."

Echoing remarks made Tuesday, Obama reiterated the trope that the secret state "failed to connect the dots in a way that would have prevented a known terrorist from boarding a plane for America."

In a maneuver to deflect public attention from the glaring similarities between the 9/11 provocation and the near-tragedy Christmas Day over Detroit, Obama claimed that "intelligence reforms" instituted under the previous regime had "largely achieved" the goal of generating said "timely intelligence."

Leaving aside overwhelming evidence that secret state agencies and a Pentagon data mining program had amassed terabytes of data on the 9/11 hijack team, including detailed profiles and intelligence dossiers, and that the Bush administration had been repeatedly warned by elements within their own counterterrorism agencies as well as their foreign counterparts in Britain, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Morocco and Russia, in other words possessed "timely intelligence" that an attack was imminent, the "connect the dot" meme, as with 9/11, is handmaiden to today's transparent cover-up.

The President then alleged that despite knowledge of the "al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen," and that secret state agencies had amassed considerable information on Abdulmutallab's ostensible Yemeni confederates, and that "we knew they sought to strike the United States and that they were recruiting operatives to do so," as with 9/11, "the intelligence community did not aggressively follow up on and prioritize particular streams of intelligence related to a possible attack against the homeland."

The preliminary review released by the White House presents an even more damning indictment of these purported "intelligence failures."

According to the declassified version of the report, "The U.S. Government had sufficient information prior to the attempted December 25 attack to have potentially disrupted the AQAP [Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] plot--i.e., by identifying Mr. Abdulmutallab as a likely operative of AQAP and potentially preventing him from boarding flight 253."

The document further charges that "the Intelligence Community leadership did not increase analytic resources working on the full AQAP threat."

Despite evidence to the contrary, the administration claims that "the fundamental problems ... are different from those identified in the wake of the 9/11 attacks" and that "firmly entrenched patterns of bureaucratic behavior as well as the absence of a single component that fuses expertise, information technology (IT) networks, and datasets ... have now, 8 years later, largely been overcome."

However, as I documented last week in "The Strange Case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab," as with 9/11, a similar pattern of concealing information from relevant counterterrorism officials who might have intervened and rescinded the suspect's U.S. visa, and thus preventing him from boarding Flight 253, were replicated.

Indeed, the CIA's Nigerian station had prepared a dossier on Abdulmutallab that included biographical details and texts handed over by the family, an analysis of NSA electronic intercepts, reports from their own on-the-ground operatives in Yemen that were sent to the agency's Langley headquarters "but not disseminated to other intelligence agencies," as The New York Times revealed December 31.

The CIA says it is now taking steps to "improve" its handling of "terrorist-threat" information. Agency spokesperson, George Little told the media that CIA Director Leon Panetta specifically ordered the Company to implement several "new measures," including "formally disseminating information on suspected extremists and terrorists within 48 hours," expanding "name traces" and "reviewing information" on individuals from "countries of concern" to determine whether the Agency should recommend "changes in status on U.S. government watch lists."

One would have thought these were precisely the policies already implemented after the September 11, 2001 attacks! And yet, here we are eight years later and the CIA, perhaps more concerned with protecting their intelligence assets--a motley crew of killers and sociopathic riff-raff that include neofascists, mafia kingpins, drug traffickers and terrorists--from scrutiny by law enforcement officials, have to be ordered by the reputed head of their Agency to protect something as trivial as the lives of airline passengers, is stark commentary on the state of affairs in an allegedly democratic republic!

It cannot be ruled out that the CIA was interested in recruiting Abdulmutallab as an asset. After all, the Nigerian youth came from a prominent family, was a graduate of an up-scale British university and was well-versed in the close relationships amongst British and Yemeni Islamist networks. Indeed Abdulmutallab, like MI6's man during the Yugoslav destabilization campaign of the 1990s, the reputed 9/11 bag man, ISI asset and al-Qaeda leader, Omar Saeed Sheik, a graduate of the London School of Economics, would seem to fit the bill quite nicely.

On the face of it, however you care to slice it, the "connect the dots" conspiracy theory floated by the White House doesn't pass muster.

Two separate agencies, the CIA and NCTC, had all the information required to identify the would-be bomber and yet both, if we are to believe the official narrative, failed to do so. This despite the inconvenient fact that NCTC was stood up precisely as a central repository to collate, fuse and "connect" each seemingly minute piece of intelligence, the "dots," flowing into the U.S. security apparatus.

The White House cover story, accepted uncritically by the media, suggest that a mass of disparate data points--raw intelligence--when taken separately, is not incriminating in and of itself. However, after each fragment is subjected to the massive data mining and analytic capabilities of the U.S. Government which "fuse" these datasets into a coherent whole, only then will a dodgy pattern emerge.

In Abdulmutallab's case however, each seemingly innocuous piece of information on its own should have set alarm bells ringing. That this didn't happen Christmas Day cannot be explained away as either incompetence or "firmly entrenched patterns of bureaucratic behavior" but rather, by conscious action, or if you prefer, sinister inaction by factions within America's secret state.

Conclusion

As of this writing, it is not yet possible to provide a comprehensive answer as to why these events unfolded as they did. I am however, certain of one thing: the Obama administration, the security agencies presumably under its control and the corporate media, johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to covering-up imperialism's multitude of crimes, are lying to the American people.

There are however, several preliminary hypotheses which can be advanced, all of which raise further troubling questions worthy of additional investigation.

Were the Christmas Day events a pretext to expand the "War on Terror" into yet another strategic petroleum chokepoint as analyst F. William Engdahl suggests in an excellent piece published by Global Research?

Nor can we dismiss out of hand the analysis offered by the World Socialist Web Site that the failed Christmas Day airline plot was a maneuver by extreme right-wing elements deeply embedded in the U.S. National Security State "to destabilize and undermine the Obama administration." To this can be added Richard Wolffe's provocative statement that factions within the secret state may have had their own "alternative agenda," and thus failed to act.

Add to the mix, the systematic outsourcing of intelligence and security functions to a host of giant defense firms, outside of democratic control; in other words, rightist grifters who answer to shareholders and not the American people, and suddenly another piece of Wolffe's "alternative agenda" comes into sharp focus.

Chock-a-block with ex-CIA officers, NSA analysts, FBI agents and U.S. Special Forces veterans of America's dirty wars who now staff the privatized U.S. security complex, in other words well-paid mercenaries who know a thing or two on how to run a clandestine operation, and we just might have another plausible theory why a "dot" or two was ignored Christmas Day.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press , Uncommon Thought Journal, CJO's Avenger212, and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.
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After all, there's nothing quite like exposing an exchange of cold, hard cash from one greedy fist to another to focus one's attention on the business at hand.

And when that dirty business is the subversion of the American people's right to privacy, there's also nothing quite like economic self-interest for ensuring that a cone of silence descends over matters best left to the experts; a veritable army of specialists squeezing singular advantage out of any circumstance, regardless of how dire the implications for our democracy.

In light of this recommendation researcher Christopher Soghoian, deploying the tools of statistical analysis and a keen sense of outrage, reaffirmed that "Internet service providers and telecommunications companies play a significant, yet little known role in law enforcement and intelligence gathering."

That the American people have been kept in the dark when it comes to this and other affairs of state, remain among the most closely-guarded open secrets of what has euphemistically been called the "NSA spying scandal."

And when the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) posted thousands of pages of documents "detailing behind-the-scenes negotiations between government agencies and Congress about providing immunity for telecoms involved in illegal government surveillance" last month, they lifted the lid on what should be a major scandal, not that corporate media paid the least attention.

A lid that Obama's "change" regime hopes to slam back down as expeditiously as possible.

Hoping to forestall public suspicions of how things actually work in Washington, the administration has declared that "it will continue to block the release of additional documents, including communications within the Executive Branch and records reflecting the identities of telecoms involved in lobbying for immunity," according to EFF's Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl.

No small matter, considering that should a court ever find avaricious telecoms and ISPs liable for violating the rights of their customers, fines could mount into the billions. Even in today's climate of corporate bailouts and "too big to fail" cash gifts to executive suite fraudsters, damages, both in monetary terms and adverse publicity, would hardly be chump change.

Hence, last year's mad scramble for the retroactive immunity avidly sought by these grifters and granted by congressional con men on both sides of the aisle when they passed the despicable FISA Amendments Act, hastily signed into law by our former "war president."

Without belaboring the point that corporate media largely failed to expose the extent of the dirty deals struck amongst these scofflaws, Soghoian, a graduate student no less, stepped into the breech and filled some necessary gaps in the surveillance story.

Believing, naïvely perhaps, that numbers don't lie and that laying out the facts might just wake us from our deadly slumber, Soghoian writes: "If you were to believe the public surveillance statistics, you might come away with the idea that government surveillance is exceedingly rare in the United States."

Indeed, "the vast majority of ... [court] intercept orders are for phone wiretaps. Thus, for example, of the 1891 intercept orders granted in 2008, all but 134 of them were issued for phone taps."

Which begs the question: "How often are Internet communications being monitored, and what kind of orders are required in order to do so."

Unsurprisingly, the threshold for obtaining personal records is exceedingly low and "very few of these methods require an intercept order."

All the government need do to obtain a pen register or trap and trace order, which examine to/from/subject lines of email messages, URLs of viewed web pages, search terms, telephone numbers dialed and the like, is to unilaterally declare that information obtained via this backdoor route is "relevant" to an ongoing criminal or counterterrorist investigation.

In other words, give us everything we want and move along!

The nation's telecoms and ISPs have been very accommodating in this regard. And, as with other recent historical examples that come to mind such as the rush by U.S. firms to "rebuild" Iraq, Afghanistan and other benighted nations "liberated" by that "shining city upon a hill" that bombs, maims and generally does what it pleases because it can, servicing the secret state's limitless appetite for "actionable intelligence" has proven to be a very lucrative cash cow indeed.

Open a Can of Worms and Blood-Sucking Night Crawlers Slither Out

Deciding to "follow the money," Soghoian hoped "to determine how often Internet firms were disclosing their customers' private information to the government." As often as possible as it turns out. Describing the nexus between Sprint Nextel and the secret state, Soghoian discloses:

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint's Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.

It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies' extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics--since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004. (Christopher Soghoian, "8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight," Slight Paranoia, December 1, 2009)

A web portal I might add, equipped with a built-in price list ready-made for charging securocrats who spy on our blog posts, emails, web searches, mobile phone pings; indeed, any data the government might deem worthy of an "investigation." Call it a PayPal for spooks; now how's that for convenience!

How did Soghoian dig up the facts on the firm's lucrative arrangement with the government? In October, he attended the ISS World 2009 conference, Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception, Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Gathering (ISS), described by Wired as "a surveillance industry gathering for law enforcement and intelligence agencies and the companies that provide them with the technologies and capabilities to conduct surveillance."

Closed to the media and the public, the enterprising researcher obtained entry as a graduate student and recorded several sessions, since taken down at the insistence of ISS's corporate master TeleStrategies, who hosted the conference.

Describing itself as "the leading producer of telecommunications conference events in the United States," the firm claimed that Soghoian's recordings "violated copyright law." But not having deep pockets to weather a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown fight, he removed the files from his blog.

Inquiring minds can't help but wonder what was so threatening to the corporatist apple cart that they threatened to bring their thumb down, on a student no less? Let's take a look!

Among the sponsors of this year's ISS confab, one finds the usual low-key suspects manning the exhibits, hawking their wares and delivering learned presentations to their "partners" in the intelligence and security "community."

Leading the pack is ETI Group, self-described as "a leading management consulting firm specializing in Process Management and Improvement." As a "leading provider" of so-called "lawful interception solutions" for security agencies, telecoms and ISPs, ETI Group provide "future proof and scalable platforms" for the acquisition of information from "multiple sources."

NICE Systems, another "leading provider" of what it calls "Insight from Interactions solutions" derived from the "the convergence of advanced analytics of unstructured multimedia content and transactional data--from telephony, web, email, radio, video and other data sources." Partners in the "Security Sector" include, among others, Raytheon, Honeywell, Siemens, Lockheed Martin, HP, Tyco and Motorola, all of whom are heavy-hitters in the Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex and niche players in the burgeoning electronic surveillance industry in their own right.

Next up is SAP, a firm whose Government Support & Services division provide "a comprehensive range" of "enterprise software applications" to "help the analysts of the Intelligence Community" obtain "timely, accurate, objective and relevant intelligence." One can only wonder whether Doug Feith's shop over at the Pentagon deployed SAP "solutions" to find Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction" during the run-up to the Iraq invasion!

Taking their turn on the dais is Spectronic Systems, a Danish firm that is "100% privately owned." Little however, could be gleaned from a perusal of their web site since the company kindly informs us that it "is strictly for the benefit of Government Agencies, Law Enforcement Agencies, Intelligence Agencies and Government Approved companies." However, ISS World was good enough to disclose that Spectronic activities include "the development and manufacturing of monitoring systems and monitoring centres" for telephone, internet, fax and modem traffic. Their systems are designed to "handle--i.e. retrieve, collect, decode, store and present--bulk data," that can double as "data retention systems" for "bulk monitoring of SMS, MMS, e-mails or other means of data communication." But how beneficial is it to the bottom line? Alas, a diligent search of the business press by this writer hit a veritable blank wall.

SS8 on the other hand is more forthcoming, claiming that their "products" allow intelligence agencies to "visualize and analyze a target's internet session" and to "recognize, monitor, investigate and prevent criminal activity." Proud that they have a "global reach," SS8 broadcasts that their "electronic surveillance solutions" are "deployed in over 25 countries" and that their data installations "can intercept more than 100 million subscribers." The firm's platform for internet, WiFi, broadband and satellite interception claims to be capable of ferreting out "hidden relationships" while identifying "trends" (code for data mining and social network analysis) that "meet the functional needs" of the secret state.

Telesoft Technologies, produce "monitoring probes" that "allow data extraction" from "cellular and fixed networks." This can be done for "fixed, 2/3G mobile and packet networks." According to the firm, their "universal passive probes extract call content, signalling [sic] and location information for use by monitoring applications," ensuring a seamless connection" of applications to "real world systems."

True Position; this firm's national security brief involves the identification and tracking of any mobile device in "real time" and offer "insightful intelligence" while "delivering powerful solutions" that "enable private enterprises and government agencies" the capability "to protect people, combat crime, and save lives like never before." According to the company's web site, the firm deploys data mining technologies that "monitor activity and behavior over time in order to build detailed profiles and identify others that they associate with."

Last, but certainly not least, is the ultra-spooky Israeli firm, Verint (formerly Comverse Infosys). Billing itself as the world leader in "actionable intelligence," readers are well-advised to peruse the documents on Verint products such as Reliant and Star Gate generously posted by our good friends over at the whistleblowing web site Quintessenz. And while your at it, why not check out AFC's piece, "Thick as Thieves: The Private (and very profitable) World of Corporate Spying," where information on the shady activities of the firm's founder, Kobi Alexander, can be found. Currently holed-up in Windhoek, Namibia after becoming the recipient of a 2006 thirty-two count indictment by the Justice Department that charged the ex-Israeli intelligence officer and entrepreneur with backdating millions of stock options worth $138 million, Alexander is a sterling representative of an industry dedicated to "lawful interception" of our electronic communications to "prevent criminal activity."

Amongst the exhibitors at ISS World, one finds (yet another) spooky Israeli firm Narus, whose hardware was a permanent "guest" in ATT/NSA "secret rooms" scattered around the country for surveillance of the entire Internet. First disclosed by ATT whistleblower Mark Klein in his sworn affidavit on behalf of EFF's lawsuit, Hepting v. ATT, the firm's STA 6400 traffic analyzer can monitor traffic equal to 39,000 DSL lines at 10 Gbit/s, or in practical terms, a single Narus machine can surveil several million broadband users at any given time. In 2004, the former Deputy Director of NSA, William Crowell joined the firm's board of directors. As a result of FAA's retroactive immunity provision, Hepting v. ATT was dismissed in 2009.

Which brings us full-circle to Sprint Nextel's spiffy new web portal that enables the secret state to "ping" their customers' GPS locations eight million times in the space of a year.

Tip of the Proverbial Iceberg

Hoping to learn more, Soghoian filed multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the Department of Justice, seeking relevant details on just how much these corporate grifters charge our silent guardians for their electronic spying.

It was at that point that Soghoian ran into a brick wall. When he uncovered evidence that the illicit surveillance compact amongst federal security agencies, telecoms and ISPs was a limitless gold mine enriching shareholders at the expense of our constitutional rights, the firms struck back.

"Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public," Wired reported December 1.

What do these firms have to hide? Apparently, quite a lot.

Yahoo and Verizon weren't about to release the data and filed a 12-page objection letter with the Justice Department, claiming that if their pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian he would use it for nefarious ends "to 'shame' Yahoo and other companies--and to 'shock' their customers."

Cryptome Delivers the Goods, Again

Despite their whining, the indefatigable John Young, webmaster of the intelligence and security whistleblowing web site Cryptome, has published the Yahoo! Compliance Guide for Law Enforcement.

The 17-page handy guide for spooks and cops provides information on what the firm can and will provide the secret state (everything) and what it will cost.

Cryptome, never a site to run from a fight, has also posted the compliance guides of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Voicestream, Cox, Cingular, SBC, and Pacific Telesis.

As Antifascist Calling has averred many times, since the business of America's security is, after all, business, let's just say the "service" Yahoo provides our nation's spooks doesn't come cheap.

For his sterling efforts to inform the public, Young has been threatened by Yahoo attorneys with the tony Washington law firm Steptoe & Johnson. Collapse

Washington has been pressuring its NATO allies to pour in more fighters even though Europeans don't want any part of it. The New York Times reported Nov. 25th the U.S. is asking NATO for 10,000 more troops above the 45,000 already in place. That could bring total Allied forces to about 150,000. Toss in 70,000 private contractors and the total force soars to over 200,000. Yes, Afghanistan is shaping up as another Viet Nam.

Obama apparently never seriously considered ending the war diplomatically. Recall his blustering campaign rhetoric about defeating the Taliban; recall the public commitment last December of Defense Secretary Robert Gates to strengthen military bases in Afghanistan. Gates was the Bush official Obama continued in office.

Even as polls show a majority of Americans want U.S. forces out of Afghanistan and that Americans do not believe the war is worth fighting, President Obama---a former editor at the CIA front Business International Corporation in 1983-84---embraces a position in line with the long-held CIA view the U.S. must control the Middle East's energy resources. It was the CIA that overthrew Iran in 1953 after Tehran nationalized its oil production, depriving British Petroleum of its lucrative swindle. Afghanistan is valued today for the oil and gas pipelines the U.S. wants built there, no matter what other reasons Obama gives.

"In the late 1990s," writes Washington reporter Bill Blum in his "Anti-Empire Report," "the American oil company, Unocal, met with Taliban officials in Texas to discuss the pipelines... Unocal's talks with the Taliban, conducted with the full knowledge of the Clinton administration...continued as late as 2000 or 2001." Adds Paul Craig Roberts writing in the December Rock Creek Free Press of Washington, D.C., the U.S./U.K. military aggression in Afghanistan "had to do with the natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan." Roberts explains:

"The Americans wanted a pipeline that bypassed Russia and Iran and went through Afghanistan. To insure this, an invasion was necessary. The idiot American public could be told that the invasion was necessary because of 9/11 and to save them from 'terrorism,' and the utter fools would believe the lie." The war, Roberts continued, is to guard the pipeline route. "It's about money, it's about energy, it's not about democracy."

According to an AP dispatch of November 26th, "The president promised this week to 'finish the job' begun eight years ago...but liberal Democrats already are lining up against it (escalation), in part because of the also-surging cost---up to $75 billion a year." Describing the war in workplace terminology makes it sound as if Obama is running a personnel agency that was dispatching workers to build some public works, not as though he is continuing President George Bush's illegal war.

Apparently, only escalation in Afghanistan was considered by Obama. As The Washington Post reported last December, "standing at Kandahar Air Field in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the United States is making a 'sustained commitment' to that country, one that will last 'some protracted period of time.'" The story goes on to discuss $300 million in new construction at just one base, including a new power plant, electrical and water distribution systems, and housing for 1,500 personnel. Gates hardly would have made a "sustained commitment" if Obama planned to withdraw. And every day the war goes on while Obama mulls his options is a day of victory for the hawks.

In January, a Defense Department report stated "building a fully competent and independent Afghan government will be a lengthy process that will last, at a minimum, decades," The Nation magazine's Jonathan Schell reports (Nov. 30). So far from defeating the Taliban are Allied forces that US military contractors "are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes," Aram Roston writes in the same issue. "It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting." In fact, an American executive there told Roston, "The Army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them. It is Department of Defense money."

Nevertheless, the slick orator from Illinois continues U.S. aggression in the energy-rich Middle East. Obama clearly is no liberal, much less a progressive. He is a reactionary. He is advancing the militarist policies of the Bush-Cheney regime. He is defending the CIA. He is increasing the total Pentagon budget. He is expanding an illegal war into Pakistan. Once this is understood, the other pieces of Obama policy fall into place. Obama is continuing the illegal "extraordinary rendition" kidnappings authorized by President Bush. Obama rejects prosecuting CIA torture goons who broke the law and refuses to release photos of their grisly handiwork. Obama balks at signing a treaty to ban land mines that has been affirmed by 150 nations. Obama expands the Predator assassination attacks claiming hundreds of civilian lives. And so on, ad nauseam.

The military-industrial complex will support Obama's escalation of these wars in order to cash in on those lucrative defense contracts valued at $700 billion a year while good jobs in other sectors of the U.S. economy, starved for investment capital, continue to shrink; while cities continue to decline; while handgun massacres become commonplace in our schools and offices; while homeowners are forced into the streets; while start-ups can't get loans; and while Wall Street loots the Treasury. In short, Obama is propelling the once great USA toward Third World status.

What's more, in all the recent debate in Washington, who has heard a word of concern for the impact of escalation on the suffering civilian populations of Afghanistan and Pakistan?

"Our military demands ever more troops," Veterans Speaker Alliance's founder Paul Cox said at an Oakland, Calif., rally, last week with Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against the initial Afghan aggression. "Meanwhile, our economy is in the toilet, health care costs are out of control, and we can't afford to educate our children. But somehow, there's always money for war." Rep. Lee called for putting "this stage of American history--a stage characterized by open-ended war--to a close."

Europeans---who are supporting a NATO organization that has no real purpose since the end of the Cold War---would agree with Lee. As the New York Times reported Nov. 25th: "America's European allies have remained noncommittal about sending additional troops to Afghanistan. France and Germany in particular have continued to limit their combat role, with both countries refusing to deploy troops in the south of the country, where Taliban forces are strongest."

If the majority Democrats won't end it, Americans could embrace the Green Party, which has consistently called for pulling U.S. forces out of the Middle East, sharply reducing the Pentagon budget, and shifting spending to respond to true public needs. Right now, voting Green appears to be the way to let the peace dove out of its cage.

(Reach the author, a former reporter for the Chicago Daily News, at sherwoodross10@gmail.com)

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While congressional Democrats and Republicans diverted the public's attention with claims and counterclaims whether or not the Company had "misled" Congress by not disclosing the program's existence, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported months earlier that former Vice President Richard Cheney had stood up an "executive assassination ring."

According to Hersh, that fully-operational program was run, not by the CIA, but by the Pentagon's secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a subunit attached to United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). During a "Great Conversations" event last March at the University of Minnesota, Hersh told the audience:

"Congress has no oversight of it. It's an executive assassination ring essentially, and it's been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That's been going on, in the name of all of us." (Eric Black, "Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh describes 'executive assassination ring'," MinnPost.com, March 11, 2009)

Old news right? Well, not entirely.

Wired investigative reporter Noah Shachtman revealed November 3, that a report published by the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations University (JSOU), the "educational component" of USSOCOM based at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, proposed creating a specialized "manhunting" unit with a global reach.

Shachtman writes that its author argues that the CIA "didn't go far enough. Instead, it suggests the American government should set up something like a 'National Manhunting Agency' to go after jihadists, drug dealers, pirates and other enemies of the state."

While not an "official" report, the fact that the monograph, Manhunting: Counter-Network Organization for Irregular Warfare, was written by retired Air Force Lt. Colonel George A. Crawford and published by JSOU, lends added weight to arguments by critics that the United States Government has "gone rogue" and is preparing a planet-wide Operation Condor network to capture or kill imperialism's enemies.

Currently a senior director for Archimedes Global, Inc., Crawford boasts a résumé that includes "operational assignments with special operations and special activities, intelligence collection and analysis, information operations and psychological operations."

The shadowy firm, while short on information describing what it actually does, like many newly-minted intelligence and security outfits in Washington, is chock-a-block with retired spooks and special forces operators cashing-in on the tsunami of public funds fueling the "War on Terror."

According to their web site the company offer services such as "Operations and Research" from "experienced, highly trained people" who possess "unmatched expertise across a number of industries and focus areas."

In the realm of Technology, Archimedes specializes in "Cryptanalysis and Applied Cryptography." Hint, hint, this is what the National Security Agency does when it isn't spying on the American people and building an exploitable database on dissidents destined for "special handling" should the need arise.

The firm's "Information and Risk" brief claims they will solve "the most difficult communication and risk problems by seeing over the horizon with a blend of art and science." And with focus areas that include "strategic communications, media analysis and support, crisis communications, and risk and vulnerability assessment and mitigation," it doesn't take a rocket scientist to infer that those well-schooled in the dark art of psychological operations (PSYOPS) would find a friendly home at Archimedes!

With some 25-years experience "as a foreign area officer specializing in Eastern Europe and Central Asia," including a stint "as acting Air and Defense Attaché to Kyrgyzstan," Crawford brings an interesting skill-set to the table.

A trained interrogator "selected by the commander of United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) as an inspector for the Secretary of Defense Interrogation Special Focus Team," one shudders to contemplate what his duties entailed in that capacity.

As the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported in 2004 in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, with Special Operations Forces (SOF) tasked with "greater responsibility for planning and conducting worldwide counterterrorism operations," systematic human rights violations in Afghanistan and Iraq was just another day at the office.

Intimate with the narcotrafficking, al-Qaeda-linked Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), JSOU avers that Crawford "personally authored the intelligence plan for military operations in Kosovo and was the lead strategist for developing USSOCOM's advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities for counterterrorism operations."

A rather ironic claim considering that right-up to the moment of the 9/11 attacks, as former FBI translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds revealed, the United States employed Afghan-Arab veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad for destabilization operations in innumerable global hot spots.

Manhunting: The Return of Operation Condor?

This isn't the first time that America's engagement with "dark actors" involved in "manhunting" as a state-sponsored blood sport led to a devil's pact with torturers, drug dealers and sociopathic fascist killers.

During the 1970s, in the wake of the overthrow of Chile's democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, the intelligence and security services of several Latin American states, notably Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay launched a secretive program, Operation Condor--with a major assist from the CIA and the Pentagon--that tracked down and murdered leftist opponents.

Operating under the radar, Condor operatives included military personnel, European neofascists, CIA-trained Cuban terrorists and international narcotraffickers who did the "wet work" for their political masters, Latin American oligarchs and their North American allies. Thousands were killed and thousands more "disappeared" into clandestine prisons.

Long Island University political science professor, J. Patrice McSherry, revealed, "U.S. military and intelligence forces were well informed of Condor operations, and the United States played a key covert role in modernizing and extending the Condor apparatus. An Argentine military source told a U.S. Embassy contact in 1976 that the CIA had been deeply involved in setting up computerized links among the intelligence and operations units of the six Condor states."

Indeed, so extensive were these links that "U.S. forces also gave the Condor organization access to the U.S. continental communications system based in the Panama Canal Zone." A declassified 1978 cable from U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay Robert White to the Secretary of State, "revealed that Condor operatives made use of a U.S. facility in the Canal Zone for secret communications and intelligence coordination."

The Pentagon, according to White's declassified cable, provided the narco-linked death squad with the sophisticated electronic means to coordinate global operations.

General Alejandro Fretes Dávalos, commander of Paraguay's armed forces told the ambassador, "that intelligence chiefs from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay used 'an encrypted system within the U.S. telecommunications net[work],' which covered all of Latin America, to 'coordinate intelligence information'."

"Essentially," McSherry wrote, "U.S. military and/or intelligence forces put the official U.S. communications channel at the disposal of Operation Condor. It was a collaboration reflecting high-level executive approval of Condor."

This "high-level executive approval" of an international death squad reflected past--and current--Pentagon thinking that when it comes to killing capitalism's opponents, everything is permitted.

The parallels to contemporary American covert intelligence and military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with their documented linkages to the flourishing international drug trade are striking.

That these moves by Washington to seize the geostrategic high ground vis-à-vis their imperialist rivals, as in Latin America decades earlier, have spawned an unholy alliance with far-right political forces, warlords, religious extremists and drug traffickers, exposes the lie that U.S. military intervention has anything to do with democracy and human rights. Thirty years ago Danish journalist Henrik Krüger observed:

International Fascista was a crucial first step toward fulfilling the dream not only of [SS Col. Otto] Skorzeny, but also of his close friends in Madrid exile, José Lopez Rega, Juan Peron's grey eminence, and Prince Justo Valerio Borghese, the Italian Fascist money man who had been rescued from execution at the hands of the World War II Italian resistance by future CIA counterintelligence whiz James J. Angleton. They, and other Nazi and Fascist powers throughout Europe and Latin America, envisioned a new world order built on a Fascist Iron Circle linking Buenos Aires, Santiago, Lima, La Paz, Brasilia and Montevideo. (Henrik Krüger, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence, & International Fascism, Boston: South End Press, 1980, p. 210)

Shaped by French unconventional warfare doctrines, U.S. counterinsurgency tactics employed in Southeast Asia, and their own on the ground expertise crushing dissent, the "new professionalism of internal security" deployed by Condor operatives--code for massive repression and unrestrained violence--was directed against the people of Latin America with predictable results.

Eerily prefiguring America's "War on Terror," counterinsurgency "specialist" Roger Trinquier, the author of Modern Warfare and an architect of France's bloody repression during the Algerian anticolonial struggle (1954-1962), averred that counterguerrillas must employ the full range of psychological warfare techniques against the civilian population if victory is to be achieved. This is a thesis to which Crawford returns time and again, particularly as it relates to the covert decapitation of resistance networks by American manhunters.

Fast forward and it becomes all-too-clear that Krüger's "Fascist Iron Circle" didn't disappear with Pinochet's fall from grace; instead, it has morphed into a high-tech killing machine whose tentacles have fanned-out from the Washington Beltway to encircle the globe. Peter Dale Scott, writing on America's descent into a lawless state presciently remarked:

Mafias and empires have certain elements in common. Both can be seen as the systematic violent imposition of governance in areas of undergovernance. Both use atrocities to achieve their ends; but both tend to be tolerated to the extent that the result of their controlled violence is a diminution of uncontrolled violence. I would tentatively suggest an important difference between mafias and empires: that, with the passage of time, mafias tend to become more and more part of the civil society whose rules they once broke, while empires tend to become more and more irreconcilably at odds with the societies they once controlled. ("Deep Events and the CIA's Global Drug Connection," Global Research, September 6, 2008)

Indeed, the "controlled violence" implicit in Crawford's thesis, provides stark confirmation of Scott's analysis that as the imperialist empire unravels it tends "to become more and more irreconcilably at odds" with popular control in a democratic republic.

The Mechanics of Standing Up a Death Squad

In "Unconventional Warfare in the 21st Century," Antifascist Calling revealed last December that USSOCOM had published its definitive doctrine on the subject. Titled Unconventional Warfare, the 248-page document asserted that Unconventional Warfare or UW establishes a "litmus test," namely warfare conducted "by, with or through surrogates" and that their preferred assets are irregular forces:

Irregulars, or irregular forces, are individuals or groups of individuals who are not members of a regular armed force, police, or other internal security force. They are usually nonstate-sponsored and unconstrained by sovereign nation legalities and boundaries. These forces may include, but are not limited to, specific paramilitary forces, contractors, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistance or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political "undesirables." (Army Special Operations Forces, Unconventional Warfare, Field Manual No. 3-05.130, Headquarters, Department of the Army, Washington, DC, 30 September 2008, p. 1-3)

And with an explicitly stated goal to "gain or maintain control or influence over the population and to support that population through political, psychological, and economic methods," the organization that Crawford proposes in Manhunting clearly exists along this UW warfighting continuum.

Manhunting--the deliberate concentration of national power to find, influence, capture, or when necessary kill an individual to disrupt a human network--has emerged as a key component of operations to counter irregular warfare adversaries in lieu of traditional state-on-state conflict measures. It has arguably become a primary area of emphasis in countering terrorist and insurgent opponents. (George A. Crawford, Manhunting: Counter-Network Organization for Irregular Warfare, JSOU Report 09-7, The JSOU Press, Hurlburt Field, Florida, September 2009, p. 1)

In the author's view, a national manhunting agency of necessity, will be a hybrid organization, combining features of a Special Forces small tactical team with those of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team (HRT), the U.S. Marshals Services' Special Operations Group (USMSSOG) at the federal level, "down to Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams and fugitive or criminal task forces in most U.S. cities."

In addition to American examples, the author cites New Scotland Yard's Antiterrorist Branch (SO13), Germany's Grenzschutzgruppe (GSG-9), and the French Groupe de Sécurité et d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN) as examples of a combined task force built on the "elite unit concept." Moving on, Crawford recommends Israel's Sayaret Mat'kal, "a special reconnaissance unit within Israel's General Headquarters Intelligence Corps.

Lest readers forget, New Scotland Yard's Antiterrorist Branch, SO13, was the "crack" unit that murdered Jean Claude de Menezes in cold blood on a London subway in 2005.

After an investigation that was little more than a cover-up, it was revealed that de Menezes was entirely innocent and had been mistakenly targeted by SO13's armed wing, SO19, as part of "Operation Kratos," the Met's controversial "shoot-to-kill" program meant to take down suspected terrorists and would-be suicide bombers.

De Menezes was neither, but that didn't stop police from pumping seven bullets into his head.

Tellingly, SO13 was stood up after consultations with Israeli "experts," well-known for their fidelity to human rights, the rule of law and the sanctity of life, as Israel's murderous assault last year on Gaza amply demonstrated. Collapse

Hoh's resignation revolves around one basic point. And that is that he had lost the 'understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan.' Three facts clearly manifest themselves by the time one reaches the end of Hoh's resignation letter; the first two by their presence, the last by its absence in his long missive;

1. Matthew Hoh seems to be an honest and courageous officer.

2. He sincerely feels that United States blundered by occupying Afghanistan and continuing to remain tied in there.

3. Matthew Hoh does not feel the same about America's Iraq debacle. He did not complain about America's occupation of Iraq even once in his resignation letter.

The resignation itself, therefore, boggles the mind. What was Hoh thinking when he joined the Foreign Service of a government whose governance is seen more abroad than at home? Did he think that American presence in distant corners of the world was for some missionary purpose; or to distribute equitably the milk of human kindness?

He should have known that America had, even before the deployment of troops for the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, around 750 military installations located in more than 130 countries with actual American military contingents stationed in 65 different foreign countries. And that like all occupying powers, Americans have around 70,000 U.S. troops in Germany, 40,000 in Japan and about 37,000 in South Korea, where they have been since 1951.

As an aspiring Foreign Service officer, Matthew Hoh should have long known that Iraq and Afghanistan are just the latest victims of the colonial behemoth in a continued saga of American imperialism and not any thing else. And that, historically, successive American Administrations have made homeless the Native Americans in their own home, conquered half of Mexico, occupied Hawaii, subjugated the Philippines and bullied a rather large number of smaller nations. He should have known that as far back as 1986, in Nicaragua vs. United States, his became the only country ever condemned for 'international terrorism' by the World Court (a foreign policy venture conducted by Foreign Service officers like himself).

Furthermore, while one salutes the courage of Matthew Hoh for not wanting to be a part of the bloody drama in Afghanistan any more, he only found out what most of the world had long known. That Afghanistan is a burial ground of Empires and was a bad choice for his masters to launch their dream of neo-colonizing of an impoverished yet honorable people. That many an invader lie buried beneath the fiery sands of Afghanistan's desolate stretches. That, in the words of Sir Olaf Caroe, "unlike other wars, Afghan wars become serious only when they are over." But fuddled by majestic fantasies and self-adulation, the Empire seekers, whose representative Hoh was till late, went ahead and did exactly what they should have not.

Let us for a moment grant that Hoh erred by joining the Foreign Service and corrected himself later by resigning over Afghanistan issue when he saw things from up close. But then why not mention the Iraq flop too? He does after all remember with horror America's involvement in South Vietnam and the 'arrogance and ignorance' of the then U.S. Administrations in perpetuating the disaster. Yet he somehow forgets to refer to Iraq's occupation; a country where he served for two years and saw the results of America's invasion first hand.

Iraq posed no danger to the United States, having neither the means nor the intent of waging war against her, never issued any threat to America, and never possessed even a single WMD. Yet while Iraq now lies in tatters at the hands of Hoh's masters, the only mention that blighted country gets in his resignation letter is with rather a sense of pride of Hoh having 'served' his country there.

It is thus safe to assume, by natural corollary from the substance of his resignation letter, that he seems to have an 'understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence' in Iraq. Why else would he not refer to America's occupation of Iraq in his resignation letter?

But that is even more intriguing.

Did Hoh, an aspiring Foreign Service officer, never hear of something called the Downing Street memo that clearly shows that the two leading coalition members, the US and Britain, were fully engaged in "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression" and "fixing" intelligence to suit these aims-prosecutable war crimes in themselves.

Having been personally present in Iraq, Hoh should have known that the Bush administration leaders, and military personnel following orders of these leaders, had committed barefaced violations of the laws and customs of war. They caused, directly or indirectly, the massacre of civilian populations of an occupied territory, murdered and ill-treated prisoners of war, pillaged public and private properties, wantonly destroyed cities, towns, and villages not justified by any military necessity and used depleted uranium weapons taking a ghastly toll in human lives.

Every canon of the United Nations Charter, the 1945 Nuremberg Charter, International humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions was blown to bits by his government in Iraq. As a matter of fact, if he so wanted, Hoh could personally sue and prosecute his masters in a U.S. court of law. So blatant were these crimes that no legal genius is required to indict for war crimes some of his previous masters still strutting about in his great country.

And if he ever thought that 'the strategic purpose of the United States' presence' in Iraq was to contain, or wrestle to the ground, radical Islam, then he needs to think again. It is not hard to see that due to the absurd hubris of his previous masters, Islamic militancy is at present surging in tidal waves across the region. America has given Muslim fundamentalism a momentum so pernicious that it now threatens to devour entire nations. The whole area is currently in turmoil with America's closest ally Pakistan in almost death throes.

And now to 'oho'.

'Oho' is an interjection used to express surprise, comprehension, or mock astonishment as defined by the free online dictionary.

Though the scribe does appreciate the courage of the ex-marine, the comprehension part of 'oho', yet is surprised that it took so long for Foreign Service officer Matthew Hoh to lose 'understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan' while retaining the same for America's occupation of Iraq. The scribe's is for Hoh to finally have 'doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy,' and that his resignation was '...based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.'

Welcome to the club Matthew Hoh, the small club of we the rest of the world, who have been saying the same thing for a rather long time now.

Perhaps someday Hoh will enlighten the world with his 'understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence' in Iraq. The scribe would like to see if it was any thing other than the hydrocarbon buried beneath the smoldering sands of Iraq.

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It should come as no surprise then, that the secret state and the capitalist grifters whom they serve, have zeroed-in on the explosive growth of these technologies. One can be certain however, securocrats aren't tweeting their restaurant preferences or finalizing plans for after work drinks.

No, researchers on both sides of the Atlantic are busy as proverbial bees building a "total information" surveillance system, one that will, so they hope, provide police and security agencies with what they euphemistically call "actionable intelligence."

Build the Perfect Panopticon, Win Fabulous Prizes!

In this context, the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks published a remarkable document October 4 by the INDECT Consortium, the Intelligence Information System Supporting Observation, Searching and Detection for Security of Citizens in Urban Environment.

Hardly a catchy acronym, but simply put INDECT is working to put a human face on the billions of emails, text messages, tweets and blog posts that transit cyberspace every day; perhaps your face.

According to Wikileaks, INDECT's "Work package 4" is designed "to comb web blogs, chat sites, news reports, and social-networking sites in order to build up automatic dossiers on individuals, organizations and their relationships." Ponder that phrase again: "automatic dossiers."

This isn't the first time that European academics have applied their "knowledge skill sets" to keep the public "safe"--from a meaningful exercise of free speech and the right to assemble, that is.

Last year The Guardian reported that Bath University researchers' Cityware project covertly tracked "tens of thousands of Britons" through the installation of Bluetooth scanners that capture "radio signals transmitted from devices such as mobile phones, laptops and digital cameras, and using the data to follow unwitting targets without their permission."

One privacy advocate, Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International, told The Guardian: "This technology could well become the CCTV of the mobile industry. It would not take much adjustment to make this system a ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure over which we have no control."

Which of course, is precisely the point.

As researchers scramble for a windfall of cash from governments eager to fund these dubious projects, European police and security agencies aren't far behind their FBI and NSA colleagues in the spy game.

The online privacy advocates, Quintessenz, published a series of leaked documents in 2008 that described the network monitoring and data mining suites designed by Nokia Siemens, Ericsson and Verint.

The Nokia Siemens Intelligence Platform dubbed "intelligence in a box," integrate tasks generally done by separate security teams and pools the data from sources such as telephone or mobile calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions, insurance records and the like. Call it data mining on steroids.

Ironically enough however, Siemens, the giant German electronics firm was caught up in a global bribery scandal that cost the company some $1.6 billion in fines. Last year, The New York Times described "a web of secret bank accounts and shadowy consultants," and a culture of "entrenched corruption ... at a sprawling, sophisticated corporation that externally embraced the nostrums of a transparent global marketplace built on legitimate transactions."

According to the Times, "at Siemens, bribery was just a line item." Which just goes to show, powering the secret state means never having to say you're sorry!

Social Network Spying, a Growth Industry Fueled by Capitalist Grifters

The trend by security agencies and their corporate partners to spy on their citizens has accelerated greatly in the West since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

This multi-billion industry in general, has been a boon for the largest American and European defense corporations. Among the top ten companies listed by Washington Technology in their annual ranking of the "Top 100" prime government contractors, all ten--from Lockheed Martin to Booz Allen Hamilton--earned a combined total of $68 billion in 2008 from defense and related homeland security work for the secret state.

And like Siemens, all ten corporations figure prominently on the Project on Government Oversight's Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (FCMD), which tracks "contract fraud, environmental, ethics, and labor violations." Talk about a rigged game!

Designing everything from nuclear missile components to eavesdropping equipment for various government agencies in the United States and abroad, including some of the most repressive regimes on the planet, these firms have moved into manufacturing the hardware and related computer software for social networking surveillance in a big way.

Wired revealed in April that the FBI is routinely monitoring cell phone calls and internet activity during criminal and counterterrorism investigations. The publication posted a series of internal documents that described the Wi-Fi and computer hacking capabilities of the Bureau's Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit (CEAU).

New Scientist reported back in 2006 that the National Security Agency "is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks."

And just this week in an exclusive report published by the British high-tech publication, The Register, it was revealed that "the government has outsourced parts of its biggest ever mass surveillance project to the disaster-prone IT services giant formerly known as EDS."

That work is being conducted under the auspices of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British state's equivalent of America's National Security Agency.

Investigative journalist Chris Williams disclosed that the American computer giant HP, which purchased EDS for some $13.9 billion last year, is "designing and installing the massive computing resources that will be needed to analyse details of who contacts whom, when where and how."

Work at GCHQ in Cheltenham is being carried out under "a secret project called Mastering the Internet." In May, a Home Office document surfaced that "ostensibly sought views on whether ISPs should be forced to gather terabytes of data from their networks on the government's behalf."

The Register reported earlier this year that telecommunications behemoth Detica and U.S. defense giant Lockheed Martin were providing GCHQ with data mining software "which searches bulk data, such as communications records, for patterns ... to identify suspects." (For further details see: Antifascist Calling, "Spying in the UK: GCHQ Awards Lockheed Martin £200m Contract, Promises to 'Master the Internet'," May 7, 2009)

It seems however, that INDECT researchers like their GCHQ/NSA kissin' cousins in Britain and the United States, are burrowing ever-deeper into the nuts-and-bolts of electronic social networking and may be on the verge of an Orwellian surveillance "breakthrough."

As New Scientist sagely predicted, the secret state most certainly plans to "harness advances in internet technology--specifically the forthcoming 'semantic web' championed by the web standards organisation W3C--to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals."

Profiling Internet Dissent

Pretty alarming, but the devil as they say is in the details and INDECT's release of their "Work package 4" file makes for a very interesting read. And with a title, "XML Data Corpus: Report on methodology for collection, cleaning and unified representation of large textual data from various sources: news reports, weblogs, chat," rest assured one must plow through much in the way of geeky gibberish and tech-speak to get to the heartless heart of the matter.

INDECT itself is a rather interesting amalgamation of spooks, cops and academics.

According to their web site, INDECT partners include: the University of Science and Technology, AGH, Poland; Gdansk University of Technology; InnoTech DATA GmbH & Co., Germany; IP Grenoble (Ensimag), France; MSWiA, the General Headquarters of Police, attached to the Ministry of the Interior, Poland; Moviquity, Spain; Products and Systems of Information Technology, PSI, Germany; the Police Service of Northern Ireland, PSNI, United Kingdom (hardly slouches when it comes to stitching-up Republicans and other leftist agitators!); Poznan University of Technology; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria; University of Wuppertal, Germany; University of York, Great Britain; Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Technical University of Kosice, Slovakia; X-Art Pro Division G.m.b.H, Austria; and finally, the Fachhochschule Technikum, also in Austria.

I don't know about you, but I find it rather ironic that the European Union, ostensible guardians of democracy and human rights, have turned for assistance in their surveillance projects to police and spy outfits from the former Soviet bloc, who after all know a thing or two when it comes to monitoring their citizens.

Right up front, York University's Suresh Manadhar, Ionnis Klapaftis and Shailesh Pandey, the principle authors of the INDECT report, make their intentions clear.

Since "security" as the authors argue, "is becoming a weak point of energy and communications infrastructures, commercial stores, conference centers, airports and sites with high person traffic in general," they aver that "access control and rapid response to potential dangers are properties that every security system for such environments should have."

Does INDECT propose building a just and prosperous global society, thus lessening the potential that terrorist killers or other miscreants will exploit a "target rich environment" that may prove deadly for innocent workers who, after all, were the principle victims of the 2004 and 2007 terrorist outrages in Madrid and London? Hardly.

As with their colleagues across the pond, INDECT is hunting for the ever-elusive technological quick-fix, a high-tech magic bullet. One, I might add, that will deliver neither safety nor security but rather, will constrict the democratic space where social justice movements flourish while furthering the reach of unaccountable security agencies.

The document "describes the first deliverable of the work package which gives an overview about the main methodology and description of the XML data corpus schema and describes the methodology for collection, cleaning and unified representation of large textual data from various sources: news reports, weblogs, chat, etc."

The first order of business "is the study and critical review of the annotation schemes employed so far for the development and evaluation of methods for entity resolution, co-reference resolution and entity attributes identification."

In other words, how do present technologic capabilities provide police, security agencies and capitalist grifters with the ability to identify who might be speaking to whom and for what purpose. INDECT proposes to introduce "a new annotation scheme that builds upon the strengths of the current-state-of-the-art," one that "should be extensible and modifiable to the requirements of the project."

Asserting that "an XML data corpus [can be] extracted from forums and social networks related to specific threats (e.g. hooliganism, terrorism, vandalism, etc.)," the authors claim they will provide "different entity types according to the requirements of the project. The grouping of all references to an entity together. The relationships between different entities" and finally, "the events in which entities participate."

Why stop there? Why not list the ubiquitous "other" areas of concern to INDECT's secret state partners? While "hooliganism, terrorism, vandalism, etc.," may be the ostensible purpose of their "entity attributes identification" project, surely INDECT is well aware that such schemes are just as easily applicable to local citizen groups, socialist and anarchist organizations, or to the innumerable environmental, human rights or consumer campaigners who challenge the dominant free market paradigm of their corporate sponsors.

The authors however, couldn't be bothered by the sinister applications that may be spawned by their research; indeed, they seem quite proud of it.

"The main achievements of this work" they aver, "allows the identification of several types of entities, groups the same references into one class, while at the same time allows the identification of relationships and events."

Indeed, the "inclusion of a multi-layered ontology ensures the consistency of the annotation" and will facilitate in the (near) future, "the use of inference mechanisms such as transitivity to allow the development of search engines that go beyond simple keyword search."

Quite an accomplishment! An enterprising security service or capitalist marketing specialist need only sift through veritable mountains of data available from commercial databases, or mobile calls, tweets, blog posts and internet searches to instantaneously identity "key agitators," to borrow the FBI's very 20th century description of political dissidents; individuals who could be detained or "neutralized" should sterner methods be required.

Indeed, a surveillance scheme such as the one INDECT is building could greatly facilitate--and simplify--the already formidable U.S. "Main Core" database that "reportedly collects and stores--without warrants or court orders--the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security," as investigative journalists Tim Shorrock and Christopher Ketchum revealed in two disturbing reports last year.

The scale of "datasets/annotation schemes" exploited by INDECT is truly breathtaking and include: "Automatic Content Extraction" gleaned from "a variety of sources, such as news, broadcast conversations" that identify "relations between entities, and the events in which these participate."

We next discover what is euphemistically called the "Knowledge Base Population (KBP)," an annotation scheme that "focuses on the identification of entity types of Person (PER), Organization (ORG), and Geo-Political Entity (GPE), Location (LOC), Facility (FAC), Geographical/Social/Political (GPE), Vehicle (VEH) and Weapon (WEA)."

How is this accomplished? Why through an exploitation of open source materials of course!

INDECT researchers readily aver that "a snapshot of Wikipedia infoboxes is used as the original knowledge source. The document collection consists of newswire articles on the order of 1 million. The reference knowledge base includes hundreds of thousands of entities based on articles from an October 2008 dump of English Wikipedia. The annotation scheme in KBP focuses on the identification of entity types of Person (PER), Organization (ORG), and Geo-Political Entity (GPE)."

For what purpose? Mum's the word as far as INDECT is concerned.

Nothing escapes this panoptic eye. Even popular culture and leisure activities fall under the glare of security agencies and their academic partners in the latest iteration of this truly monstrous privacy-killing scheme. Using the movie rental firm Netflix as a model, INDECT cites the firm's "100 million ratings from 480 thousand randomly-chosen, anonymous Netflix customers" as "well-suited" to the INDECT surveillance model.

In conclusion, EU surveillance architects propose a "new annotation & knowledge representation scheme" that "is extensible," one that "allows the addition of new entities, relations, and events, while at the same time avoids duplication and ensures integrity."

Deploying an ontological methodology that exploits currently available data from open source, driftnet surveillance of news, broadcasts, blog entries and search results, and linkages obtained through a perusal of mobile phone records, credit card purchases, medical records, travel itineraries, etc., INDECT claims that in the near future their research will allow "a search engine to go beyond simple keyword queries by exploiting the semantic information and relations within the ontology."

And once the scheme is perfected, "the use of expressive logics ... becomes an enabler for detecting entity relations on the web." Or transform it into an "always-on" spy you carry in your pocket or whenever you switch on your computer.

This is how our minders propose to keep us "safe."

CIA Gets In on the Fun

Not to be outdone, the CIA has entered the lucrative market of social networking surveillance in a big way.

In an exclusive published by Wired, we learn that the CIA's investment arm, In-Q-Tel, "want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates--even check out your book reviews on Amazon."

Investigative journalist Noah Shachtman reveals that In-Q-Tel "is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It's part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using "open source intelligence"--information that's publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day." Wired reported:

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn't touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what's being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords. (Noah Shachtman, Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm that Monitors Blogs, Tweets," Wired, October 19, 2009)

Although In-Q-Tel spokesperson Donald Tighe told Wired that it wants Visible to monitor foreign social media and give American spooks an "early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally," Shachtman points out that "such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters."

According to Wired, the firm already keeps tabs on 2.0 web sites "for Dell, AT&T and Verizon." And as an added attraction, "Visible is tracking animal-right activists' online campaigns" against meat processing giant Hormel.

Shachtman reports that "Visible has been trying for nearly a year to break into the government field." And why wouldn't they, considering that the heimat security and even spookier black world of the U.S. "intelligence community," is a veritable cash-cow for enterprising corporations eager to do the state's bidding.

In 2008 Wired reports, Visible "teamed-up" with the Washington, DC-based consulting firm "Concepts & Strategies, which has handled media monitoring and translation services for U.S. Strategic Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others."

According to a blurb on the firm's web site they are in hot-pursuit of "social media engagement specialists" with Defense Department experience and "a high proficiency in Arabic, Farsi, French, Urdu or Russian." Wired reports that Concepts & Strategies "is also looking for an 'information system security engineer' who already has a 'Top Secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmentalized Information] with NSA Full Scope Polygraph' security clearance."

In such an environment, nothing escapes the secret state's lens. Shachtman reveals that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) "maintains an Open Source Center, which combs publicly available information, including web 2.0 sites."

In 2007, the Center's director, Doug Naquin, "told an audience of intelligence professionals" that "'we're looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence.... We have groups looking at what they call 'citizens media': people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the internet. Then there's social media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs'."

But as Steven Aftergood, who maintains the Secrecy News web site for the Federation of American Scientists told Wired, "even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically 'open source'."

But as we have seen across the decades, from COINTELPRO to Operation CHAOS, and from Pentagon media manipulation during the run-up to the Iraq war through driftnet warrantless wiretapping of Americans' electronic communications, the secret state is a law unto itself, a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that thrives on duplicity, fear and cold, hard cash.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.
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After getting their asses handed to them on this issue for months precisely because of the never-ending snipe hunt for a bipartisan healthcare reform bill and then throughout August being publicly bullied, taunted, bitch slapped and manipulated while staring like a deer into the headlights it seems the oh so smart corporate Democrats running the show in DC have learned absolutely nothing. How can this be? What can those people be thinking if the answer they've come up with is essentially more of the same? How can they conclude that what we need is more capitulation, further retreat and finally sacrificing real healthcare reform for an insurance company subsidy program that will fatten those malevolent interests even more than they are, that costs far too much, and returns far too little to the common people? Do they know how weak they are making themselves look in the eyes of the American people as they insist on playing the submissive role to the Republicans' and how it demonstrates anything but leadership as they keep the sworn enemies of any healthcare reform in the driver's seat even though the legislative and executive branches are controlled by Democrats?

It is embarrassing and shocking really to come to grips with just how isolated and out of touch the DC Democrats are on this issue (excepting of course the relative handful of committed progressives who have been vocal in their opposition to further capitulation). From day one the corporate DC Dems have played the obsequious handmaidens of the parasitical special interests on healthcare and to their allies, the congressional Republicans, who openly declare not only that they are against reform but that the President is a foreigner hell bent on imposing Soviet style totalitarianism on America combined with Nazi style euthanasia policies and taking the guns from crazy white people everywhere. They handed control of the message to the Republicans from day one too, making the fundamental question one of cost instead of whether or not healthcare will no longer be a privilege in America but a right that every citizen is entitled to in this country just as citizens are in all the other industrialized countries on earth.

When will it occur, and what will it take at long last, for the DC Dems to understand that they cannot represent the corporate interests and the interests of the common people of this nation on healthcare not to mention most other important issues facing the nation? When, at long last will they understand that the situation has become so acute and out of balance that the Washington game of buying off corporate support with massive giveaways to special interests and throwing a bone or two to the people is no longer acceptable? When will they realize that healthcare for all is not an academic mind tease or a parlor game but a life and death issue for 18,000 Americans annually and that it is the difference between keeping their lives together and bankruptcy for a million families every year now? Establishing a viable healthcare system worth having and that serves every citizen is a moral question, not a question of cost. How the lack of healthcare, skyrocketing costs for premiums and deductibles, the lack of good insurance and the denial of benefits are harming human beings are the fundamental issues at stake when you get right down to it, not the cost of covering everyone for the benefit of the for profit insurance industry. And when oh when will the ever so smart minds of the DC Dems realize that the costliest possible approach is the one they seem to want to foist upon us which is one that does not cover everyone, keeps our grotesque and broken system in tact while enriching the insurance companies yet only tinkering at the margins of reform? Providing massive subsidies for people to pay for rotten insurance policies is not a solution to anything and it isn't acceptable. If that's what we get in the end it's hard to imagine what it is we've won other than a pig in a poke for the common American citizen and his or her family.

The bottom line is that sometimes you simply have to fight for what you really believe in and let the chips fall where they may. Yes, you risk losing but winning isn't the only thing that matters. It matters what you win too. If you fight for what is right, but lose, at least you have done so with some honor and the whole world knows what side you are on. To whimper and whine and capitulate to the greediest and most parasitical special interests only to "win" a bill that is no longer worth having can be worse than losing.

It is long past time for the President to come out in his speech to Congress next week strongly in favor of real healthcare reform: not merely insurance reform. It's time for the President to lead by fighting for what he said he believes in on healthcare reform and not to turn tail and run on the public option and instead hide behind weak euphemisms like "choice" and "competition" which means the score at the end of the game will be 100-0 in favor of the interests of the insurance companies vs the interests of the nation, our people and our businesses. If the President fails to do this but instead tries to sell the nation on a watered down, pale imitation of reform that isn't really worth having then why should the common people waste their time supporting it? If people are rational and act according to their interests there would be no reason for the people, in that case, to waste their time and energy. I hope the reports are wrong and the President is going to really change his strategy. I hope that instead of what is being reported, the President comes out of the gate next week no longer burdened by the bipartisan fantasy of what never was and never will be and instead comes out swinging as he should have been doing all along. If he does that the people will support him. Anything less and the people will turn away with a sour taste in their mouths because the DC Dems once again decided that being weak was smarter than being strong and fighting for the interests of the common people.

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After the presentation a former member of the National Security Council who happened to be seated to my right turned to me and said, "[The QDR] seems like a fraud."

More recently Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI), Chairman of the House Armed Services air and land forces subcommittee, referred to the QDR as a "PR stunt" and a "PR exercise" (as reported by Marjorie Censer, Inside the Pentagon, 18 June 2009.) Rep. Abercrombie then went on to offer a less than precise elaboration, saying, "It's all Thunderbird stuff, booms and all that."

I can not be all that sure what the former National Security Council member or Rep. Abercrombie meant by their characterizations of the QDR. But, having followed all four QDRs fairly closely, I can make an educated guess at what they are getting at.

Congress has intended that through the QDR the Pentagon will make a serious attempt to reconcile the national defense strategy to the defense posture of the services and from that presumed point of congruence reconcile it to the defense budget. Policy analysts frequently complain that strategy, posture and budget are dangerously out of whack. If the QDR process addresses this problem and then does the analytical and policy work required making real advances toward reconciliation then we can judge that it is meeting it stated purpose. If it results in a public document that uses rhetorical flourish in order to mask disjuncture of ends and means and to perpetuate prior posture and budget directions, then it is something like a 'fraud' or 'PR exercise.'

The unfolding 2010 QDR process gives us a good opportunity to look for evidence of either real reconciliation or PR exercise. A few pieces of evidence:

There are dozens of high level policy professionals and planners in the Pentagon who have more than a cursory responsibility for aspects of the QDR. They work with hundreds of others, some inside the military and many civilian consultants and contractors. Models are built and simulations are run. Task forces and issue teams work the results. No doubt many of these people would be indignant if you told them their work was simply serving public relations and had little effect on the direction of policy.

On the other hand, modeling output and even the output of task forces are quite sensitive to starting assumptions and specifications. Senior civilian and military leaders in the Pentagon carefully review input parameters and seek to influence how the particulars of output is summed up and presented to those responsible for the next steps in the process of getting to the final report. "Startling findings" and their policy implications are unlikely to find their way into the document drafts unless senior leadership wants them there.

Consider also that Defense News has reported that the Pentagon is moving ahead with the FY'11 budget process before the budget work on the 2010 QDR is completed. This is at least suggestive of prior budget and posture decisions running the QDR output rather than the other way around.

The complete article may be read here

Charles Knight is the co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives and editor of the Defense Strategy Review page - http://www.comw.org/wordpress/dsr/. The webpage will closely follow the 2010 QDR process and track accumulating evidence of 'sincere effort' or 'PR stunt'.

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I highly recommend watching the entire program at Moyers Journal: Top Secret. The full transcript of the program is available at this link. The discussion addresses most of the major points that I have heard and read about how we should pursue the use of torture by the Bush administration.

Danner and Fein discuss the legal, political, and social implications of various ways of addressing the open acknowledgement that the United States institutionalized torture as an matter of policy.

Danner's focus in the discussion makes several key points. First, that because the country is divided on this issue we need to pursue it in a public way. Second, that there is a precedent that has been regarding the use of torture that opens us to using it in "extreme" situations again. Third, that the issue is not "past" politics, but present (and future) politics. Namely because the argument is being made by Cheney and others, that failure to continuing to use torture creates a vulnerability to the nation.

Fein's argument focuses around the legal and Constitutional issues. Namely that President Bush took it onto himself to override the law and created an illegal situation. It is a situation that continues to decimate the balance of powers and must be addressed. He says that if the law handcuffs the national security apparatus, then the resolution is to change the law - not ignore it. He argues, at length, that the Constitution and rule of law must be righted or that we truly do become a "banana republic." Fein notes that if Obama does not want to prosecute the architects of the torture policy, or those who engaged in it, he can do a pardon in advance of investigations. However, that it is critical to the country to operate under the rule of law.

Addendum
Additional related information and links to the memos, Red Cross report, and other source documents can be found at this link at the Moyers Journal site.

Bruce Fein is a conservative who has served in three Republican administrations, and is associated with the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation - both conservative think tanks. He has started his own American Freedom Agenda organization which is acting restore the Constitutional balance between the three branches of government.

Mark Danner is a long time journalist who has expertise in covering U.S. international policy and human rights issues. He was a long time writer for The New Yorker, has written a number of books, and is a professor of journalism.

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With the Bush-corrosion of our Constitution and collapse of the economic system after it had been exploited by the rich and corrupt, what better time for revolution? Instead, we got a president with a glib tongue, a terrific smile and a deep commitment to the two-party plutocracy and corporate state. Obama is no populist, not even close. Nor is he a genuine reformer. At best, he is a master exploiter of populism.

Obama was and still is a master of masquerading as just a regular guy. Even now, after making more than $8 million from his books, and even before when his wife made a huge salary and he lived in a million dollar house, and he reaped the many benefits of an elite Harvard Law School ticket to success. Totally consistent with his plutocratic and elitist background he has packed his administration with the same Harvard, elitist and Wall Street crowd that pumped many millions of dollars into his campaign and did nothing to stop the mortgage crisis and economic meltdown.

He has shown absolutely no courage or interest in standing up to the status quo, earmark-driven, and corrupt Democratic leaders in the House and Senate who, in large measure, share blame for the nation's economic crisis, especially its roots in the mortgage insanity and under-regulation of the financial sector that they nurtured. Obama should have rejected the spending bill with tons of pork earmarks. But in reality Obama has shown no taste for standing up for principles. He had no problem with a Treasury Secretary that was a blatant tax dodger. Almost on a daily basis there is news about decisions being made that resemble Bush policies. Rather than shunning signing statements when Congress sends him bills, so abused by Bush, Obama immediately issued his own one.

The spending of the nation's debt-based wealth on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue with no end in sight, despite the painful economic meltdown and mind-boggling deficit spending. When it comes to the wars and domestic problems, he seeks success through massive spending rather than through structural and systemic reforms.

Here is the problem: All the venom aimed at AIG and its bonus-receiving employees served more as a distraction than a viable political strategy to reform our government. True, there has been terrible economic warfare by the rich and corrupt in government and the private sector that has savaged ordinary Americans. Our corrupt and dysfunctional government did not protect us. We need a Second American Revolution. We need deep structural reforms to make our current MISrepresentatives obsolete and return our government to us. For this to happen we must not let ourselves be deceived by lying politicians. We must recognize that voting and elections have NOT worked effectively. We must look to our Constitution for the legal path to revolution.

The Founders anticipated that Americans would eventually lose confidence in the federal government. They created a never-used option in Article V. Never used because Congress has refused to obey the Constitution and gotten away with violating it and their oath of office. That option is an Article V convention of state delegates that has the constitutional power to propose constitutional amendments, only amendments, no wholesale rewriting of the Constitution. The one and only requirement in Article V is that two-thirds of state legislatures must apply to Congress for a convention. In fact, there have been over 700 such state applications from all 50 states.

Why no Article V convention? Because Congress and virtually every politically powerful group on the left and right oppose and fear an Article V convention. Why? Because clearly such a convention which is outside the control of Congress, the President and the Supreme Court has the constitutional authority to discuss and propose amendments that could truly reform our government to remove corruption and make it much more equitable and effective for we the people. Where is the public outrage over Congress disobeying and disrespecting the Constitution? There is far less to fear from a convention than from maintaining the status quo two-party plutocracy.

If you believe in our Constitution, if you liked the change rhetoric of Obama, if you are furious about the economic meltdown, and if you see the need to seriously reform our government, then examine the materials at foavc.org and become a member of the nonpartisan Friends of the Article V Convention. Help make Congress obey the Constitution and give us the convention we have a constitutional right to have. If you see yourself as a patriot, dissident or activist, join our effort.

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through www.delusionaldemocracy.com; he is a co-founder of Friends of the Article V Convention.]

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The new Afghan "democracy" was touted with the "election" of Hamid Karzai - ex-primary UNOCAL consultant- to the presidency of Afghanistan. Many around the world, and in the region, feared the rigging of those elections, and that Karzai was little more than a U.S. pawn. Now we have open news that this may well be the case. Borger and Macaskill write in the Guardian "US Will Appoint Afghan 'Prime Minister' to Bypass Hamid Karzai." Really? The U.S. can appoint a government official in another nation to usurp the powers of the "elected" president? This is followed on 3/24 by Jane Perlez of the New York Times with "U.S. Weighs Sharif as Partner in Pakistan." So the U.S. is meddling in Pakistan's political process as well?

So why are we there? Is it to oust al Qaeda, control "terrorist" groups, "stabilize" the region? Or are we there because of the long simmering oil and natural gas issues with Russia?

As Pepe Escobar succinctly states in his article "Liquid war: Welcome to Pipelineistan:

Forget the mainstream media's obsession with al-Qaeda, Osama "dead or alive" bin Laden, the Taliban - neo, light or classic - or that "war on terror", whatever name it goes by. These are diversions compared to the high-stakes, hardcore geopolitical game that follows what flows along the pipelines of the planet.

This is not new news, but our ongoing "interest" in Afghanistan has virtually nothing to do with either "terrorism" or with good wishes for the people of Afghanistan - anymore than we seem to care about the people of Pakistan or Iraq. The United States is not there for them - it is there because of U.S. "interests." Apparently, both our government, and the people of the United States, are willing to accept a lot of "collateral damage" to protect (or advance) those "interests." All too frequently those interests are energy related, and those interests pass through and advance corporate interests. For example, the consortium of oil companies who were bargaining for the pipeline through Afghanistan.

The Clinton administration had been working with the Taliban from 1994 forward. Why? Because some companies (particularly UNOCAL and Saudi owned Delta) wanted "to build a pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Afghanistan." ... "so that the vast untapped oil and gas reserves in the Central Asian and Caspian region could be transported to markets in South Asia, South-East Asia, Far East and the Pacific" 17. This is supported by Jon Flanders article. While official relations were purportedly broken off in 1998, relations with the Taliban were maintained through the State Department (Ahmad) and through the Pakistan Military Intelligence ISI by the CIA (Chossudovsky).

According to Jon Flanders (2001), U.S. interest in the pipeline restarted in 2000, but was still not moving forward when Bush was elected. With Bush came Cheney (CEO of Halliburton) and Halliburton had investments in Turkmentistan for "integrated drilling services with an estimated value of $30 million for the total package." (Flanders)

It should not be surprising given the oil interests of the President, his kin, and his appointees, that Bush placed Afghanistan on the top of his action list. In July 2001, Colin Powell gave the Taliban $43 million for "humanitarian aid" (Madsen 2002).

According to a BBC report by George Arney (9/18/01), the US was planning military action in Afghanistan prior to 9/11. "Naiz Naik, a former Pakistan Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action would go ahead by the middle of October." (From: Power Play? Wolf, 2001)

All of which of course begs the question of September 11, 2001 and the catastrophic lies and invasions that occurred as a response. However, this article is not focused on 9/11 (though it hauntingly suggests the power of "interests"). Rather, one has to ask whether our new President has any different a world view, or policy initiative, than has been in play in the United States since at least the end of World War II.

Currently, Obama has expanded drone attacks into Pakistan and there is actually very little news of U.S. operations in Afghanistan. Has the "war" shifted? Obama has already stated, and started, the shifting of forces from Iraq (the "bad" war) to Afghanistan (the "good" war). I have to ask if this is because Iraq is seen as safely on a leash, or whether the saber rattling of Russia has raised the priority of protecting the pipeline (and hence "leashing" Russia's energy power)?

Left or right, there is little hard questioning of either why we are there, or what we should be trying to do. The focus has largely been "get out of Iraq" with a general acceptance that we left Afghanistan "undone." "Undone" meaning we still don't have bin Laden. However, the stakes have changed, and it is looking increasingly likely that the Taleban will be back in control of the Afghan government soon - and perhaps Pakistan's as well. While this prospect is murmured as "unfortunate," it is seen as a "realistic" approach. Perhaps, the negotiations with the Taleban have little to do with what is "realistic" and who can provide the muscle to guard the pipeline.

One note of hope is Obama's pledge to take the United States to energy independence. Success in this are - and around the world - would radically reduce the armed conflicts. While oil and gas are not the only conflict issues, they are major ones. Addressing that would start a transformation of international policy - overt and covert.

Related Articles of Interest
Ramzy Baroud. 2/21/2009. A New Afghanistan Nightmare

John Steppling. 8/13/2008. Inventing Your Own History as it Happens

Rowan Wolf. 5/26/2005. "Pipe-istan" Becomes A Reality.

Rowan Wolf. 6/27/04. Afghanistan - not a pipe dream any longer

Rowan Wolf. 5/2002. Power Play?.

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The promise of change echoed the world over as people from all corners anticipated the magic moment Obama could actually change the devastating reality in which we live today. But just weeks before his inauguration, Israel unleashed the most barbaric attacks on defenseless Palestinian civilians since 1948. Civil societies expressed outrage and called for Israeli leaders to be tried for war crimes and genocide. Other nations cut diplomatic ties completely with the Jewish state. But the man of change did absolutely nothing. For weeks he was completely silent. Even in his first days in office, Obama made no mention of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. So, what of this change that he promised? What kind of hold does Israel have to silence the President of the United States?

Authors and professors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, of University of Chicago and Harvard University respectively defined the Israel Lobby in their volume: The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy as a "loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction." What has been revealed in their work is that "The Lobby" is not a unitary organization, of a few, or many paid lobbyists who are pushing for a specific foreign policy agenda. Sure, you have that too, manifested in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) - an organization that boasts of 60,000 active members, and who showers US congressmen with many millions of dollars in campaign contributions, all with one aim in mind, a pro-Israel, right or wrong agenda. But it's much more complex than that.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, less known than AIPAC is a powerful lobby conduit, for it supposedly represents 52 major Jewish organizations. Based in New York, the organization simply represents an uncompromisingly pro-Israel stance, which tends to advocate Israel's suppression of Palestinians (as Israel's right to defend itself), and advocates a pro-war agenda (as was the case before the Iraq war, and later against Syria and Iran.)

These are but mere examples. What Mearsheimer and Walt describe as a "loose coalition of individuals and organizations" is in fact a vast infrastructure that has penetrated every major organization and institution, governmental and otherwise, that could in some way influence, push for or advocate Israel's interests.

When AIPAC holds its annual conferences, countless members of the House and the Senate, the executive branch, top representatives of both parties, as well as hundreds of US ambassadors flock from all over the world in an unprecedented manner to vow their allegiance to Israel.

With the passing of time, the strength of the lobby, and the level of influence of Israel's "friends" in the Congress has grown immensely to the point that US allegiances actually jeopardize the interests of their own citizens. Even from an imperialistic viewpoint, the US has no particular interest in supporting Israel's genocidal policies in Gaza, for example, considering the fact that the US is struggling to find any semblance of 'stability' in the region that is saturated with anti-American sentiment.

Consider what outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in a speech in the Israeli southern town of Ashkelon on Jan 12, regarding how he influenced the US vote in the UN on a resolution pertaining to the Gaza war:

"In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the Secretary of State wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favor," Olmert said.

"I said 'get me President Bush on the phone'. They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn't care. 'I need to talk to him now'. He got off the podium and spoke to me.

"I told him the United States could not vote in favor. It cannot vote in favor of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favor."

"She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favor."

Imagine, Olmert is boasting how he, with one telephone call managed to completely turn around the entire US foreign policy agenda, no questions asked. This tells us that it's not a give-and-take relationship.

One can learn a valuable lesson in all of this. Within the United States there is a great apparatus that has been in motion for generations. It is beyond civil society, beyond individual citizens and citizen groups, it is perhaps even more powerful than 'the man of change' himself. And if we are truly to see some transformation in the way the US now rules the world, then this war-mongering machine must be dismantled.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London).

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The first analysis is Forceful Engagement: Rethinking the Role of Military Power in US Global Policy. In this report, Conetta highlights that while there has been a dramatic increase in military spending over the last ten years, the world is a more dangerous place. Further, the virtual dependence of the US on projecting military force as its primary approach to global situations has stretched that resource beyond any level of efficiency. This means that the US is "paying more and more for less and less security."

Further, the dramatic increase in military spending and the end of the Cold War, was seen by some as an opportunity to extend US dominance. Perhaps in part to justify the growing budget, "worst case" scenarios were increasingly pushed to the fore. With the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive invasion and the use of nuclear weapons, we now are watching an escalation of military development which threatens to place us back on vulnerable footing with both old and new competitors.

There are possibilities for the new administration to transform growing tension into mutual cooperation by focusing on shared concerns. Conetta frames this alternative as follows:

An alternative security policy would emphasize broad multilateral cooperation in containing and resolving regional crises, reducing conflict potentials, and redressing the sources of instability in the international system. And, it would recognize that the sources of instability today are not principally military, political, or ideological in character, but instead economic, demographic, and environmental.

The real measure of a renewed US diplomacy will be efforts to reach across current strategic divides-- especially to Russia, China, and the Muslim world-- and find common ground. Cooperation on water, food, energy, and health security, global warming, economic development, and the management of globalization could serve as a foundation for progress on more divisive issues. A re-emphasis on traditional "quid pro quo" diplomacy will pay higher dividends in resolving divisive issues than will the resort to coercive diplomacy and saber rattling.

The second policy perspective is "Re-Envisioning Defense: An Agenda for US Policy Debate and Transition." Conetta points out twenty-five strategic concerns organized into three core areas - policy vision, role of the armed forces, and the fit between defense and global security.

Policy Vision: the "war on terrorism" places us on a permanent war footing which not only increases costs, but may actually serve to aggravate existing problems - such as stretch and the arms race.

The Role of the Armed Forces: Conetta argues that the use of force has been increasing. This is not only expensive, it makes that force increasingly ineffective and sometimes counter-productive.

Fit Between Defense and Global Security: the increasing reach of the Defense arena is overwriting the diplomatic arena. Not only has the pressure led us to a policy of global coverage, but military usurping of State Department arenas. Development of more peacekeeping and training activities would contribute to a better balance and increase security.

I strongly encourage readers to look carefully at these two documents. They raise issues and present information that is critical to our informed evaluation of the role of the defense system and national and international security. There are many forces that are driving the world towards either solutions or increased conflict (resources, environmental destruction, collapsing global and national economies). The military is currently the biggest and most frequently used tool in the box. This isn't working, won't work, and actually increases risk. We all need to think about these issues.

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What matters most are the lessons that the new administration gleans from the failed efforts of its predecessors. The first among these is perhaps the most difficult to fully grasp and take to heart: The United States has been using its armed forces and military power well beyond the limit of their utility. We are now experiencing not just diminishing returns, but negative ones. Thus, the nation finds itself paying more and more for less and less security.

The military effort expended these past eight years has been, by any measure, prodigious. But, in no area of concern has it produced much in the way of reliable progress. Indeed, the world seems less stable and more polarized today than it did in 2001. And anti-Americanism is at a level not seen since the Vietnam war years.

The Iraq and Afghanistan operations have demonstrated that the world's "sole superpower" cannot -- by its current methods -- reliably stabilize two destitute and dejected nations comprising only one percent of the world's population, despite the investment of nearly 5,000 American lives and more than $850 billion. What General David Petraeus once asked of the Iraq war -- "Tell me how this ends" -- still pertains, despite the reduction in violence there. The same question might be asked of the Afghanistan war and, indeed, of the "war on terror" as a whole, which seems to be on a road to nowhere.

Setting a new course in policy begins with acknowledging that America's recent emphasis on military action and instruments has been, on balance, counter-productive. Looking to the future, the next administration must be more realistic about what can be reliably accomplished by these means. This applies not only to counter-terrorism efforts, but also to efforts to stabilize troubled regions of the world and prevent the emergence of new threats.

It has become something of a mantra among reformers that the United States needs to "re-balance" its security "tool kit". But it is not enough to simply "plus up" the diplomatic side of engagement. Rolling back the current emphasis on military action and instruments is a prerequisite to greater success in diplomatic efforts. This, because what most divides the United States from those it proposes to lead is the issue of when, how, and how much to use force and the armed forces.

More generally, the next Administration needs to lead the nation in reappraising its defense posture and investments. Despite the expenditure of more than $7 trillion since 1992, and more than ten years of talk about "military transformation", America's armed forces are not yet especially well-adapted to the new security environment. Efforts to prepare and defend in all directions have dissipated American power and have left the nation less prepared to deal with what is actually emerging. Presently, the United States is responsible for nearly half of all military spending worldwide. And yet, our present and future Secretary of Defense argues that this is simply not enough -- which should lead all of us to suspect that either our resources are being misspent or our objectives misconceived.

Achieving real change in US security policy will not be easy. Our present posture and preferences are well rooted ideologically, institutionally, and politically. Nonetheless, the experiences of the past eight years (and more) provide a powerful argument for a sea-change in policy. For now, a minimum goal is that the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States should mark the renewal of the national debate on security policy and not its end.

Links to Companion Pieces
Forceful Engagement: Rethinking the Role of Military Power in US Global Policy

Re-Envisioning Defense: An Agenda for US Policy Debate and Transition

Suggestions for a New Defense Strategy for Obama. (Wolf)

Accompanying Charts

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On June 28, 2008, I published the summary of Re-Envisioning Defense Alternatives by Carl Conetta and Charles Knight. On June 7, the report received some positive corporate media attention with an editorial in the NY Times "Where Do We Go From Here?.

In a correspondence from Carl Conetta, I learned that the report has been downloaded more than 10,000 times, and is being circulated to members of Congress with a cover letter by Rep. Jim
McGovern. Carl and Charles have also been invited to debate alternative Iraq policies at the US Institute for Peace. It is great that such worthy work is getting serious attention.

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Recent defense policy evinces a disturbing paradox: it has been delivering less and
less security at ever increasing cost. And, on a world scale, a process of global re-
polarization and re-militarization is underway. If unchecked, this portends a return to
conditions reminiscent of the Cold War, which would add impetus to weapon
proliferation, arms races, and conflicts.

Reviewing current US policy, we have identified 25 concerns or areas of concern that
relate to the problems noted above. These might form an agenda for policy
discussion and reform. From these we have distilled a "short list" of three overarching
topics or concerns that, taken together, capture the fundamental problems in current
policy. Alternatives addressing these three core concerns can provide guidance for
understanding and addressing the rest.

THREE CORE CONCERNS

Core concern 1. Security policy vision: How do we understand and hope to attain
security?

This entails our assessment of the security environment and its dynamics as well as
our security interests, goals, concerns, and strategy. Presently, the "war on
terrorism" provides the principal organizing theme for US security policy, which puts
America on a permanent war footing. Is this the optimal frame for addressing
post-Cold War security challenges?

An alternative approach might emphasize non-military means and broad multilateral
cooperation in mitigating and redressing the sources of stress and instability in the
international system. Such an approach would not turn principally on waging and
winning wars or pursuing strategic advantage in a contest of nation-states. Instead,
it would turn on building broad cooperation and winning the confidence of people in
troubled regions. Focal concerns might include water, food, energy, and health
security, global warming, economic development, and the management of
globalization.

Core concern 2. The role of force and the armed forces in US foreign and security
policy.

Since the Cold War's end, the role of the US military in the world, and the role of force
in US policy, have grown more prominent. The outcome of this increased activity has
not been encouraging, however. It has done more to add to instability than resolve it.
And it has proved fabulously expensive in terms of both lives and treasure. Any
adequate alternative to recent defense policy must provide new guidance on the use
of force and the role of the military.

Core concern 3. The "fit" between America's defense posture and the global security
environment.

America's military posture is not well-adapted to today's security challenges. And
this contributes to its problem of sustainability. Adjusting the nation's defense
posture to more closely fit the security environment would simultaneously render that
posture more "sustainable". And this might turn the defense policy paradox "on its
head" yielding greater security at lower cost.

TOPICS FOR POLICY DEBATE AND REFORM

The 25 areas of concern that we have identified in US policy are listed below. They
can be divided into eight categories:

* Policy on strategic warfare
* Counter-proliferation, counter-terrorism, and homeland security
* Policy on major military operations, conventional and irregular
* Peacetime military engagement
* The US stance on international law and arms control
* Civil-military relations: The growing influence of the Pentagon
* Defense budget, acquisition, and management issues
* Country-specific controversies

>> POLICY ON STRATEGIC WARFARE

1. Nuclear weapons modernization, missile defense, and the "new (offensive)
deterrence"
2. Prompt global strike: The advent of conventional strategic warfare
3. Seizing the "new high ground": the weaponization of space

>> COUNTER-PROLIFERATION, COUNTER-TERRORISM, AND HOMELAND
SECURITY

4. Offensive counter-proliferation (OCP): Arms control by bombardment?
5. Counter-terrorism & homeland security: Search for a sensible strategy

>> MAJOR REGIONAL MILITARY OPERATIONS, CONVENTIONAL AND
IRREGULAR

6. Preparations for major wars reflect unnecessarily ambitious goals
7. "Shock and awe" strategy and attacks on civilian-military targets
8. Counter-insurgency, peace and stability operations, nation-building: renewed
enthusiasm despite Iraq experience.

>> PEACETIME MILITARY ENGAGEMENT

9. Global military presence & base posture: cover the earth?
10. Military cooperation, assistance, and arms transfers programs: uncertain effects.

>> US STANCE ON INTERNATIONAL LAW AND ARMS CONTROL

11. Adherence to international law and legal institutions
12. The role of negotiated arms control in US security policy

>> CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS: THE GROWING INFLUENCE OF THE
PENTAGON

13. DOD's domestic "perception management" efforts
14. DOD's drive for expanded "authorities" and greater freedom of action

>> DEFENSE BUDGET AND ACQUISITION ISSUES

15. DOD's broken financial and inventory accounting system.
16. Pork-barrel spending: the Pentagon budget as "gravy train"
17. DOD's broken weapon procurement system
18. Military transformation: To what end? How much of what is enough?
19. Setting the defense budget forever more than $600 billion?

>> COUNTRY-SPECIFIC ISSUES

20. Iraq withdrawal: soon or never?
21. Resolving the Iran and North Korea nuclear issues
22. Afghanistan war & Pakistan instability
23. Israel-Palestine and Lebanon conflict
24. Relations with China and Russia.
25. Increased military activity in sub-Saharan Africa and South America

Go to Full Text of the report

For a related discussion see Out from the House of War: A Litmus for New Leadership in Security Policy, also by Carl Connetta and pertinent in the presidential election year.

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Also, the OSC went on to state this same pumping equipment had previously malfunctioned under favorable contractor testing conditions and was subsequently shown to be defective, yet was knowingly installed by the Corps of Engineers.

In addition, the OSC went on further to state the whistleblower, a veteran Corps engineer who was the Team Leader of Pumping Systems Installation for New Orleans, alleged USACE employees and MWI (the pump manufacturer) circumvented contract requirements in an effort to complete the task, all at the expense of public safety. It was reported that key safeguards were circumvented and "there is an erroneous assumption that...hydraulic pumps are fully operational, and hence, the risk to the public remains high," in the words of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.

We should have seen something reported on the status of this investigation over six months ago. Hurricane season started this weekend and we still don't have any answers?! There doesn't seem to be much urgency attached to this investigation. Maybe the Secretary of Defense is too busy handling other matters?

Failure of this pumping equipment to function properly during a time of flooding is yet another catastrophic event in waiting for New Orleans, a city still recovering from Hurricane Katrina.

If true, given the hardships suffered by the People of New Orleans, the United States Government can ill afford to take unnecessary risks with public safety due to faulty pumping equipment and lack of proper government oversight; a situation that indeed raises serious issues of public safety and government oversight.

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For details on correspondences related to this position reversal see today's Disaster Accountability Project Blog posting below and at this link

"Failure to promptly communicate information about disaster conditions to people in the field led to the unnecessary deaths of firefighters at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and is a common problem in other disasters. It is vital that FEMA and other federal agencies move swiftly to create a national alerting system before another catastrophic disaster occurs," says former Federal emergency management whistle-blower and Disaster Accountability Project's volunteer Policy Analyst, Linda Lewis. "With the CMAS program, FEMA has further undermined public trust and, moreover, has undermined its relationship with federal partners in preparedness. One wonders how much longer this dark play will last before the President finally gives stage manager Michael Chertoff his walking papers."

"A tropical storm has already formed, FEMA leadership is touting the Federal Government's level of readiness-- but really, in the end, FEMA is playing the same stalling games played since Katrina," says Ben Smilowitz, Executive Director of the Disaster Accountability Project. "The public must advocate for action to save the Emergency Alert System from the same fate as the Agency's disaster housing plans, currently moving at a snail's pace, leaving thousands unnecessarily in formaldehyde trailers."

With Hurricane Season beginning June 1, 2008, the Disaster Accountability Project is profiling six areas of concern in the U.S. disaster management system to expose gaps in preparedness -- and compare rhetoric to reality. Despite recent assurances from leadership at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FEMA that the Federal government is prepared for a major disaster, significant areas of concern remain that must be resolved before the U.S. disaster management system can honestly represent itself as sufficiently prepared to respond to a disaster requiring federal resources.

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These "public affairs" efforts present an inherent conflict of interest for organizations simultaneously fulfilling a role tasked by the federal government and raising billions of dollars in private donations. The public should know exactly what limitations exist for organizations providing such critical services.The Role of Volunteers: The mostly volunteer force serving along the Gulf Coast after Katrina consisted of a number of highly-skilled volunteers that took unpaid time from work, individuals in-between jobs, many retirees, religious groups, first-time volunteers, and many others that simply wanted to get away for three weeks. America must decide if key Mass Care functions should be managed by a volunteer force. For example, see the following position description for a volunteer ESF-6 Mass Care Team Chief with responsibilities that include:

Prepare, submit and track all Action Request Forms with FEMA; report status daily to the ESF #6 Mass Care lead in the Disaster Operations Center.

Identify gaps and shortfalls in Mass Care.

While there were many highly skilled volunteers, many could not apply their skills because (we were told) ARC insurance policies capped the level of care Client Service Centers could provide at basic first aid. A large population of survivors that had not received any care for weeks after the storm could not receive tetanus shots, IVs, and other basics. Such necessities could only be provided by those carrying a sufficient insurance policy: National Guard Medics, lone doctors, and ambulances (some of the ambulances we regularly called to our Site had been driven down from Connecticut).While organizations like the ARC have allegedly made many changes to their response capacity, few changes have been publicly disclosed.... and the public is largely in the dark about the capacity of these multi-billion dollar organizations to respond to a major disaster.Ice: FEMA announced last month that ice would no longer be distributed after disasters... or, rather, ice would only be available to those that need it for medical emergencies. How would this work? FEMA typically gets called when States need help -- during emergencies. How will every mother with baby formula, every diabetic with insulin, and every other prescription drug user requiring refrigeration for their medications, and others- prove that they are deserving of ice- to FEMA's temp workers that get hired by the hundreds, after a disaster? I'm not convinced that the reasoning here is sound.The Durable Medical Equipment (DME) Crisis: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) conducted a bidding process for durable medical equipment reimbused by Medicare in 10 Metropolitan Service Areas (MSAs). Somehow, the bidding process somehow "forgot" to include any considerations of disaster preparedness and post-disaster response capacities. For example, in South Florida, there are 501 suppliers of oxygen. Through the new bidding process, only 44 suppliers were chosen to continue their Medicare contracts.While DAP is not passing judgment on the need to reduce the number of suppliers of oxygen, deeply troubling is the result of having only 44 suppliers of oxygen and other important life-sustaining DMEs in areas so disaster prone. According to current DME suppliers, after previous FL hurricanes, fewer than half of the suppliers were functional in the immediate aftermath. An oxygen shortage could lead to even larger emergency room surges after a disaster-- something that could overwhelm hospitals already potentially overwhelmed by a hurricane or other disaster. Surprisingly, CMS requires emergency and evacuation planning for hospitals and nursing homes. From GAO Report GAO-08-544R:

At the federal level, HHS's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has requirements related to hospital and nursing home evacuation planning as a condition of participation in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. (page 6)

How did an agency so "disaster conscious" forget to include similar considerations in its DME bidding process? The public deserves an answer.... before Hurricane Season begins.With Hurricane Season around the corner, the public remains vulnerable because the organizations and agencies responsible for providing Mass Care lack transparency. As a result, it is hard for the public to know what has improved to prevent the same bungled Katrina disaster response in 2005 from happening again in 2008.

Note: Ben Smilowitz is Founder and Executive Director of the Disaster Accountability Project. After Katrina, he served as the site manager of a Red Cross Client Service Center in Gulfport, MS.

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Following the 2005 Gulf Coast hurricanes, FEMA was bombarded with criticism of its handling of post-disaster assistance grants. In a 2006 CNN interview, Secretary Chertoff tried to deflect the criticism by suggesting that FEMA should be responsible only for response and short-term recovery, and there should be a "handoff when you get to long-term recovery." (Inside Cable News). Meanwhile, fraud, incompetence and political profit-taking continue.

The State of Mississippi received over $3 billion dollars appropriated by Congress for housing - half of that slated for low-income families. But, Governor Haley Barbour, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, asked for and received a waiver of the rules.

Where did the money go? The Steps Coalition says the governor "either excluded poor families from his recovery plans, or put them to the very back of the line," taking only eight months to issue a billion dollars to mostly affluent families, but taking more than a year to begin a program aiding lower income families, many of whom still haven't received grants (William Brangham, Bill Moyers Journal). As Coalition member Melinda Harthcock described it, "The people who have the least amount of backup, the least cushion in their budget, have been asked to wait two years before they got any help.

Delays turned out to be just part of the problem. State officials later announced that they were going to redirect $600 million of the housing funds to repairing and improving a port, to the potential benefit of cruise ships and casinos (Brangham).

"One of the most profound shifts that's happening down here is that people, even solidly middle class people who thought that they were respected members of society, who thought they'd done the right thing to protect their assets, who thought their voices counted for something - are finding that they don't" (Melinda Harthcoc, Bill Moyers Journal)

Louisiana, too, is suffering through a slow recovery. And, while the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina deserves condemnation, the slow trickle of aid to replace low and middle income communities is nothing new.

The reluctance to rebuilt low-rent housing commonly encountered after disasters (Phillips 1993a) has also occurred in South Florida (Hartman 1993a). The official explanations for the slow rate of rebuilding of public projects and private Section 8 (subsidized) rental units, include problems with asbestos, funding, and contractors (Tanfani 1993). Whatever the reasons, few deny the reluctance to rebuild low-income multifamily housing (Morrow 2000).

Many of the emergency plans that I reviewed over the years included only a page or two of recovery phase planning and said little or nothing about how the public would be involved in decision making. Federal emergency exercises, also, devoted little time to the recovery phase and some ignored it entirely.

Federal, state, local and tribal officials need to do more to plan in advance how resources will be used to rebuild communities and citizens need to demand a seat at the table before disaster strikes again. Over the years, I frequently heard government planners say there would be plenty of time to plan after a disaster. But, there never is enough time to attend to the millions of details fast enough to prevent the secondary tragedies that await families and small businesses due to slow recovery aid.

Perhaps, if responsible government officials were forced to work in FEMA trailers for the duration, the pace of recovery would pick up a bit. They might then give more than superficial attention to pre-disaster recovery planning. Until problems of bias, corruption and neglect are swept away by a competent nation recovery plan, government's claim to be prepared for hurricane season is little more than whistling in the dark.

Citations:

Morrow, B.H. (2000) Stretching the Bonds: the families of Andrew, in: W.G. Peacock, B.H. Morrow and H. Gladwin (eds) Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, Gender, and the Sociology of Disasters (Miami, International Hurricane Center).

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In recognition of Hurricane Preparedness Week, the Disaster Accountability Project will be highlighting an issue that is important to hurricane/disaster response and recovery on each of the following days: Wednesday 5/28 - Disaster Housing, Formaldehyde Levels in Cabins; Thursday 5/29 - Recovery; Friday 5/30 - Mass Care/Medical/Healthcare; Saturday 5/31 - Evacuations; Monday 6/2 - Emergency Alerts/Notifications; Tuesday 6/3 - Levees. Each day, the Disaster Accountability Blog (http://blog.disasteraccountability.org) will post a story on a different area of concern.

Please Publicize: The Disaster Accountability Project is recruiting a network of Disaster Accountability Monitors across the U.S. In the event of a disaster, Monitors will help publicize the Disaster Accountability Hotline (866-9-TIP-DAP) and report and/or verify reported gaps in disaster relief/response services.

Please Publicize: The public is encouraged to call the Disaster Accountability Hotline (866-9-TIP-DAP) with any tips on gaps in federal, state, and/or local preparedness, response, relief, or recovery systems. Individuals with special needs that 1) do not know the details of their local evacuation plans or 2) believe their local plans are insufficient, are encouraged to tip DAP by calling the DAP Hotline (866-9-TIP-DAP) or sending an email to Tips@DisasterAccountability.org. Tips must include the city or township and state in which any confusion or incomplete plans exist (this is critical information for DAP to evaluate where weaknesses lie).

---

The nonpartisan Disaster Accountability Project provides accountability and oversight to the nation's disaster prevention, response, relief, and recovery systems through monitoring and policy research.

A toll-free hotline (866-9-TIP-DAP) is available as a public service for disaster survivors, workers and volunteers to report critical gaps in disaster prevention, response, relief, and recovery services or planning. The group is recruiting a national network of Disaster Accountability Monitors and Bloggers to help report, verify, and publicize gaps in disaster services or planning.

The Disaster Accountability Project's website is http://www.DisasterAccountability.org

Disaster Accountability Project is a 2008 Echoing Green Finalist.
For more information: http://www.echoinggreen.org/fellows/2008-fellowship-finalists

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From the report:

Of the 72 programs GAO assessed this year, none of them had proceeded through system development meeting the best practices standards for mature technologies, stable design, or mature production processes by critical junctures of the program, each of which are essential for achieving planned cost, schedule, and performance outcomes.

The GAO started this monitoring in 2000. At that point development cost overruns were 6 %. In 2007 that had increased to 26%. In other words, it is getting worse every year. Further, since 200, the DOD has more than doubled it "investments" in planned systems from "$790 billion to $1.6 trillion." Please excuse me while I choke on those figures.

In 2000, the actual figures averaged in at 27% over estimates. By 2005 that had increased to 33%. By 2007 the DoD was 40% over estimates (page 2). The average schedule delay has increased from 16 months in 2007 to 21 months in 2007.

You have to shake your head at the wag your finger tone of the GAO introduction:

The current DOD leadership has recently established initiatives designed to change the strategic environment at the weapon acquisition portfolio level. These initiatives reflect sound business concepts and could lead to better outcomes if implemented fully and correctly. However, policy without practice is not uncommon within the Department and the upcoming change in administration presents challenges in advancing progress through sustained implementation of best practices, as well as addressing new issues that may emerge.

The DOD is supposed to be following a "knowledge point" system. Point 1 - "Resources and needs match.." Point 2 - "Product design is stable." Point 3 - "Production processes are mature. This point is achieved when it has been demonstrated that the company can manufacture the product within cost, schedule, and quality targets." Of the systems that responded (since obviously at least 23 programs couldn't be bothered with responding to oversight requirements), 12% met point 1; 4% met point 2; and ... 0% met point 3.

If the costs of these issues were not so huge, then the situation would be laughable. However, weapons systems development comes out of the discretionary budget. It is in direct competition with infrastructure, health, education, environment, the Centers for Disease Control (etc.) budgets. That $295 BILLION (plus) cost overrun is money that did not go to other critical needs. This cost also does not reflect the over $150 billion for the Iraq occupation. Nor is it part of standard military costs (troop pay and support). Even without the mortgage/credit crisis, these types of costs would drive any economy into the ground.

This makes me angry. Every year, the DOD is over budget - not just by a little bit, but by hundreds of billions of dollars. They essentially have no internal accounting system as far as anyone can tell. They operate as if they had a blank check. This is not acceptable. Yet year after year they cruise along spending money as if it drops like manna from heaven. Congress needs to shut this down - now.

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Just out of curiosity, you might wonder what they are looking for in program managers:

Are you a scientist or engineer with a radical idea (or ideas) that you believe could provide disruptive change for the United States military? Would you like to lead the country's most capable academic and industrial experts to make that idea become reality in a period of just a few years? If so, you should consider joining the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a Program Manager.

Twisted geniuses please apply.

Whether because the vision of the future of "war fighting" is for a much smaller military, or whether it is easier to centralize control operations, DARPA's "big challenge" is a contest to produce an "autonomous vehicle" that can navigate in moving traffic. The contest is called the "Urban Challenge."

From what I can gather, they want a vehicle that can be remotely operated for supply transport operations. However, this vehicle is operating in urban environments. In other words - doing supply runs in cities. It would seem to me that if this is for use in a high conflict zone, that such a vehicle would be very vulnerable to hijacking. It also seems like a very expensive way to do delivery runs. However, maybe the commercial operations - like pizza delivery - will bring down the overall cost.

Well back at the DARPA conference, it looks like a combination show and tell and job fair.

Maybe I can get an invite for next year.

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I couldn't stop my jaw from dropping when I read the headline Seeking Iran Intelligence, U.S. Tries Google.

Yes comrades - GOOGLE!

Why, pray tell, is the U.S. State Department using google to determine who should go in the UN draft of sanctions on Iraq by doing google searches? Well, because they requested a list of Iranians connected with Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program from the CIA, but the CIA refused to give them a list. The CIA was too busy, and didn't want to share their sources with the folks at State.

Throwing up their hands, the task of coming up with a list of names was turned over to a "junior Foreign Service officer." Whether the officer was told to go search google, or whether that was his/her own creative solution, or whether such a procedure is common, is up for grabs. Regardless, searching under terms like "Iran and nuclear," he or she winnowed out a list of individuals and companies to put on the list. The consequences of the list are significant - bans on international travel and business.

Of course, the CIA scoffs at the list, and says that none of the listed are credible. You can see them thumbing their noses and making donkey ears with their hands as they issue their proclamation.

A senior administration official acknowledged that the back-and-forth with the CIA had been difficult, especially given the administration's desire to isolate Iran and avoid a repeat of flawed intelligence that preceded the Iraq war.

"In this instance, we were the requesters and the CIA was the clearer," the official said. "It's the process we go through on a lot of these things. Both sides don't know a lot of reasons for why either side is requesting or denying things. Sources and methods became their stated rationale and that is what they do. But for policymaking, it can be quite frustrating."

Well, it may be "frustrating" for them, but it burns me. We - the tax payers - are spending BILLIONS of dollars on "intelligence," purportedly aimed at ensuring the safety of the United States (us folks). We have watched the shredding of the Constitution and our protections from government abuse for the elusive claim of "safety."

On the other hand, we have those individuals who variously get identified as "threats" to national security which then subjects those so identified to a panoply of harm. Based on what? A GOOGLE search?

While State and the CIA apparently won't work cooperatively, the "diplomats" at the UN are much more agreeable: "The real scope of debate will be on the number of sanctions," one diplomat said. "Companies and individuals could go off the list or go on."

Maybe their google search was different. Or maybe they used a different search engine.

[Note: Nothing against google in any of this. I think it is an excellent search engine and use it all the time. However, I would think that our government had a more sophisticated and targeted "tool"]

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On social issues, the report is more mixed. South Dakotans voted down the proposed abortion ban, and Oregonians voted down an expansion of parental notification; however, four states (SC, TN, VA, WI) supported bans on gay marriage. Four other states (AZ, CO, ID, SD) have marriage bans on the ballot, but those results are not in yet. Michigan voters decided that race and gender could not be used to consider college entrance requirements -a blow for equity groups. In short a mixed bag for social justice.

Many states - including Oregon - rejected the Supreme Court's ruling on eminent domain by voting for private property protection.

While the Congress has consistently voted against raising the minimum wages, states that had minimum wage increases on the ballot (MO, MT, OH, NV, AZ, CO) seem to be leaning towards passing them. Results are still pending in Arizona and Colorado.

Last, but not least, THANK YOU OREGON for voting down the TABOR measure (48) that Colorado is trying desperately to rid itself of.

It seems that in most states across the nation voter turn out was strong. In fact, in some places very strong for a midterm election. It is clear that voters were aware, concerned and motivated. That seems a positive sign for our democracy at a point where it seems to have become history. People are realizing that the ultimate check in our system of checks and balances is us.

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Jane Mayer wrote Can the C.I.A. legally kill a prisoner?. The answer is "Yes we can and do." Mayer's article discusses the case of a civilian contractor, hired by the CIA, who participated in an interrogation that ended in the murder of a "detainee." There are no criminal charges for the contractor, and he is still contracted to the CIA. Meanwhile Cheney has lobbied and bullied the Congress to allow the CIA to continue its policies of using torture as a legal interrogation method.

"Senior Administration officials have led a fierce, and increasingly visible, fight to protect the C.I.A.'s classified interrogation protocol. Late last month, Cheney and Porter Goss, the C.I.A. director, had an unusual forty-five-minute private meeting on Capitol Hill with Senator McCain, who was tortured as a P.O.W. during the Vietnam War. They argued that the C.I.A. sometimes needs the "flexibility" to treat detainees in the war on terrorism in "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" ways. Cheney sought to add an exemption to McCain's bill, permitting brutal methods when "such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack." A Washington Post editorial decried Cheney's visit, calling him the "Vice-President for Torture." In the coming weeks, a conference committee of the House and the Senate will decide whether McCain's proposal becomes law; three of the nine senators who voted against the measure are on the committee."

Brian Ross and Richard Esposito of ABC News report that these interrogation methods lead to poor intelligence information:

Harsh interrogation techniques authorized by top officials of the CIA have led to questionable confessions and the death of a detainee since the techniques were first authorized in mid-March 2002, ABC News has been told by former and current intelligence officers and supervisors.

They say they are revealing specific details of the techniques, and their impact on confessions, because the public needs to know the direction their agency has chosen. All gave their accounts on the condition that their names and identities not be revealed. Portions of their accounts are corroborated by public statements of former CIA officers and by reports recently published that cite a classified CIA Inspector General's report."

We are told that the techniques used are 1) not torture, 2) necessary to "quickly" extract crucial intelligence, 3) not as "bad" as what the "enemy" is doing, and 4) that only "insurgents" and "terrorists" are being treated in this manner. Each and every one of these is not true. Groups that are taking hostages and murdering them in front of the cameras are not interrogating those hostages. They are making a political statement. Further, their participation in atrocity is no justification for the U.S. to participate in atrocity.

The cloak of secrecy only makes torture much more likely. The Iraqi torturers, like the CIA, hid their prisoners away while starving and beating them. Now it is highly likely that these Iraqi torture practices could be more widespread. Certainly they are likely widespread, and it is also highly likely that the U.S. is turning prisoners over to these groups knowing full well they will be tortured.

"Speaking from Amman, Mr Sadoun, a 38-year-old engineer, said: "They kicked down our door and asked about a neighbour. When I said I did not know where the man was, they started kicking me and beating me. The soldiers had paint on their faces and did not have same uniforms as other troops. The Americans did not take part, but they saw what was happening.

"But this was nothing. When they took me to their base I was blindfolded and beaten very, very badly with metal rods. They then hung me up on hooks by my wrists until I thought they would tear off. I think that stopped because one of the Americans said something. I could hear English spoken in an angry voice. But this happened again later." From the Independent (11/20/05) The Dirty War: Torture and mutilation used on Iraqi insurgents

Everyone who the U.S. chooses to "detainee" or attack, or kill, is an "insurgent." None are innocent bystanders. There are no civilians in this "war." It is critical to understand this because those who are aroused against the United States (and its allies) also define a conflict where there are no "civilians;" no "innocents." That is the justification for random bombings in Iraq, Spain, and London. It is the purported justification for the events of September 11, 2001. It is the justification for the targeting of journalists and aid workers. In sharing that definition of the scope of the "battlefield," we only legitimate its use by militants (and others). By practicing and legitimating secrecy, torture, and denying any legitimate international standards or laws, we legitimate them for others. This "policy" does not make anyone safer.

The United States is neither setting an example of democracy, nor are setting up a democracy in Iraq. Voting does not a democracy make. Heck, there were elections under Saddam Hussein, and no one quibbles that was a "democratic" government. Democracy requires openness and information. It requires protection of citizens by the laws of the land from the abuses of government. It should occur in an environment of standards recognized as humane in the international environment, and under international laws and agreements. None of that is true in the case of the actions of the United States in the "war on terrorism" wither inside or outside the U.S. What we are doing, and what we are creating in Iraq and Afghanistan are models of repressive rogue regimes. What has been created in the United States is also a repressive rogue regime - with barely present velvet gloves.

What is happening on the world stage cannot be hidden or legitimated by cute turns of phrase. Certainly the consequences of these actions, under whatever name, will haunt us for generations.

Side Note
I highly recommend reading the article by Kim Sengupta " The Dirty War: Torture and mutilation used on Iraqi 'insurgents'" in the Independent. You can access it at The Independent, or at this link

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"Well, gentlemen," he said to me and another journalist who had just been blasted out of our hotel rooms by suicide bombers, "this is what happens when terrorists carry out terrorism - a lot of people dead, a lot of people hurt. Now you can see what we are up against."

The general was savouring his moment. His special forces have been accused by the media and others of carrying out the worst human rights abuses against "suspected insurgents" in what is becoming an ever more savage and dirty war.

Behind the daily reports of suicide bombings and attacks on coalition forces is a far more shadowy struggle, one that involves tortured prisoners huddled in dungeons, death-squad victims with their hands tied behind their backs, often mutilated with knives and electric drills, and distraught families searching for relations who have been "disappeared".

This hidden struggle surfaced last week when US forces and Iraqi police raided an Interior Ministry bunker only a couple of hundred yards from where we were standing. They found 169 tortured and starving captives, who looked like Holocaust victims. The "disappeared" prisoners were being held, it is claimed, by the Shia Muslim Badr militia, which controls part of the ministry. Bayan Jabr, the Minister of the Interior, is himself a former Badr commander, but the ministry's involvement does not end there: General Adnan's commandos come under its control. So does the Wolf Brigade, which vies with the commandos for the title of most feared.

Baghdad is now a city in the shadow of gunmen. As I left the Hamra to replace what was lost in my bombed room, I had to negotiate checkpoints of the Badr militia, their Shia enemies, the Mehdi Army of the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Kurdish peshmerga. The Iraqi police and the government paramilitaries have their own roadblocks.

And there are others: the Shia Defenders of Khadamiya - set up under Hussein al-Sadr, a cousin of Muqtada, who is an ally of the former prime minister Iyad Allawi - and the government-backed Tiger and Scorpion brigades. They all have similar looks: balaclavas or wraparound sunglasses and headbands, black leather gloves with fingers cut off, and a variety of weapons. When not manning checkpoints, they hurtle through the streets in four-wheel drives, scattering the traffic by firing in the air. Out of sight they are accused of arbitrary arrests, intimidation and extrajudicial killings.

The US and Britain, which trained many of the forces involved, and which still have ultimate responsibility for them, are implicated. But the pattern of illegality is also the continuation of a process that began with the questionable justification for the invasion. American and British forces have played their own part, from the abuses of Abu Ghraib to deaths in British military custody, from the deployment of white phosphorus as a chemical weapon in the assault on Fallujah to the wild use of overwhelming American firepower, which some have called almost as indiscriminate as the killings caused by Sunni insurgents' car bombings.

But more than two years after President George Bush officially declared a victorious conclusion to the war in Iraq, the body count continues to rise. Faced with an insurgency that shows no signs of abating, the US and Iraqi government rely more and more on the paramilitaries. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, has said units such as General Adnan's commandos are among "forces that are going to have the greatest leverage on suppressing and eliminating the insurgency".

Those on the receiving end of some of this "leverage", however, describe terrifying experiences. Ahmed Sadoun (not his full name) was arrested in the middle of the night at his home in Mosul by government paramilitaries accompanied by American soldiers. He was held for seven months before being released without charge and left Iraq as soon as he could.

Speaking from Amman, Mr Sadoun, a 38-year-old engineer, said: "They kicked down our door and asked about a neighbour. When I said I did not know where the man was, they started kicking me and beating me. The soldiers had paint on their faces and did not have same uniforms as other troops. The Americans did not take part, but they saw what was happening.

"But this was nothing. When they took me to their base I was blindfolded and beaten very, very badly with metal rods. They then hung me up on hooks by my wrists until I thought they would tear off. I think that stopped because one of the Americans said something. I could hear English spoken in an angry voice. But this happened again later.

"I was in a room which was so small that not all the prisoners could even lie down properly. All night we could hear people screaming, people being hit. One day they said I could go, but after what happened to me I know they could do this to me again. So I left."

At one roadblock I met the Wolf Brigade, which was widely involved in suppressing disturbances in Mosul around the time Mr Sadoun was being held, though he does not know which paramilitaries seized him. One of them took off his balaclava and turned out to be in his late teens, belying the ferocity of the snarling wolf badges on his arms.

The young man shook his head about what happened at the Hamra. "That is bad, very bad," he said. "But you are alive, that is good - too many dead people in Baghdad." He was keen to make the point that "the people like us because we kill the people who try to kill them. Listen, mister, we are fighting bad people, you cannot treat them like normal persons."

But what about the innocent who get caught and end up being abused in detention centres? "Mister, those are just lies, you must not believe them. These people are terrorists. We are here because the police cannot do the job by themselves."

The paramilitary influence on the police is particularly overt in the British-controlled south of Iraq, where the British invited the militias to join the security forces, and then saw them take over. Nothing was done by the British authorities when police in plain clothes, along with their militia colleagues, killed Christians, claiming they sold alcohol, or Sunnis for being supposedly Baathists.

Action was only belatedly taken when a particularly menacing faction, a "force within a force" based at the Jamiat police station on the outskirts of Basra, captured two SAS soldiers who were gathering information on their mistreatment of prisoners.

British troops smashed into a police station to rescue the two soldiers and later arrested more than a dozen others. But now they more or less stay out of Basra, leaving Iraq's second city at the mercy of a police force that even its commanders say they barely control. There have been dozens of assassinations, including that of at least one foreign journalist.

Even families of fellow policemen are not exempt. Ammar Muthar, a member of the border police, knew his father, Muthar Abadi, was on the Shia militia hit list, because he had acted as a missile engineer in the war against Shia Iran. Ammar brought his father from Al-Amarah to Basra for safety. But while he was out one day, six policemen, in uniform but wearing black masks, dragged Abadi away. His body was later found, shot five times, three in the face.

"The neighbours could do nothing because it was the police who took him away," said Ammar. "They wanted to kill him, and no one could stop them."

One British officer said: "You hear about the militias infiltrating the police. But they did not have to. We invited them to join."

THE CHARGE SHEET

Endemic torture of prisoners

The discovery last week of starved and tortured prisoners in an Interior Ministry bunker emphasised that detention without due process remains endemic in Iraq, echoing the Saddam era. In Basra, militia elements in the police used cells to imprison and torture their enemies. When the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal broke, it emerged that among the prisoners being maltreated by US soldiers were "undocumented" detainees who had been kept hidden from the Red Cross. And Britain was shamed by the death of Baha Mousa, a Basra hotel clerk, in British military custody.

Use of napalm and phosphorus

Last week the Pentagon admitted using white phosporus as an offensive weapon in last year's assault on Fallujah. Its official use is to create smokescreens to shield troop movements, but if fired into trenches or foxholes it can burn victims to the bone. The legality of this use is debatable. Last year the US also admitted, after previous denials, that it had used napalm - which Britain has banned - against Iraqi forces during the invasion. There is also controversy over the deployment of cluster munitions, which Britain has said should not be used in or near civilian areas.

Extra-judicial killings

Early in the insurgency, it appeared that Sunnis loyal to Saddam were attacking defenceless Shias - an impression the coalition authorities sought to reinforce. Extra-judicial killings by Shias in the paramilitary groups operated by the Interior Ministry, or in party militias, have become increasingly open. Victims are rounded up in house-to-house raids at night and their bodies, frequently handcuffed, are found dumped later. Sunni civilians are the main target, but Shias seen as collaborators under Saddam, or connected with rival militias, have also "disappeared".

Indiscriminate 'spray and slay'

Heavy-handed tactics against the insurgency, dubbed "spray and slay", have attracted much criticism. The current American offensive in the west and north-west appears to replicate the methods used in Fallujah: the population is ordered to leave before the town is sealed off and subjected to an air and ground assault. Those killed are invariably described as insurgent fighters, even in incidents where there is strong evidence that groups of civilians, including women and children, have been caught up in airstrikes.

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It seems everyone is scrambling for either vaccines or anti-viral drugs. Taiwan has decided to violate Roche's patent and make its own version of Tamiflu. World wide, orders are over the moon anti-virals, and in the U.S. individuals are hoarding Tamiflu and Relenza. Britain has already promised to buy enough vaccine to cover its entire population - when it is ready.

The broadspread run on antivirals has health professionals concerned. Like the scenario we currently have with antibiotics, if the Avian flu meets Tamiflu and Relenza at every turn, it will simply mutate into an even stronger form of the disease. With a mortality rate of roughly 50% at this point, a more virulent strain is certainly not the news we want to hear.

Let's look at what we know.
The main form of transmission at this point is bird to bird. Migratory birds are now carrying the virus, and infecting domestic poultry stocks.

Most of the known cases of Avian flu have spread from birds (almost universally domestic stocks) to humans.

There is a vaccine for birds. There is not a vaccine for humans.

There are several unconfirmed cases of human to human transmission. The fear is a mutation in the Avian flu virus to a communicable human to human transmission.

The further the bird version of the virus spreads, the more likely it will meet the conditions to make the species jump.

Fighting back
Thus far most of the effort in the fight against Avian Flu has been the quarantining and mass destructions of infected flocks.

While nations try to figure out where it is going and how to deal with it once it arrives, the issue of public health surges to the surface. While many European nations have fairly strong public health access, this has deteriorated in the United States. It is not showing signs of strengthening in the current situation. In fact, some decisions fly in the face of all reason.

One example of this is the Bush brothers. George had given Jeb the " sweeping right to curb Medicaid." Facing a pandemic, does not seem to be an appropriate time to further limit health care access to the population. In Florida, this means increased restrictions on the 2.2 million Medicaid recipients. The "gift" also gives private insurers to right to limit benefits. The one caveat is that children and pregnant mothers are exempt from the limits.

Medicaid is the health care access for the poor. A population that is already under-covered, and at high risk. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, George Bush promised to address the economic divide. What is becoming ever more clear is that his approach id to widen it - not decrease it.

Frighteningly, Michael Leavitt (Secretary of HHS) is quoted as saying: "Today will be remembered as a day of transformation for the Florida Medicaid program. Florida's framework will be helpful to other states." In doing what? Giving more control to private providers and decreasing care to the poor?

Florida's planned changes seem to follow many of the changes that were made to Medicare - extending the questionable pharma "choices" to an even broader population. This means that even those who are able to access health care may not from the confusion of red tape placed to block them from that access.

Such moves take on huge implications in the face of a looming pandemic. While doctors fear antiviral hoarding, a huge portion of the population doesn't have access at all - or only limited access.

Protecting yourself ... and others
The best suggestions for protecting oneself from the Avian (and other) Flu infections come from Al Jazeera's Common sense can help fight bird flu. They include, washing your hands frequently, don't buy Tamiflu, stay home if you are sick.

My Chiropractor, whose advice I respect, suggests taking time released Vitamin C three times a day to keep the immune system up.

Like recent experience with hurricane and quake response displays, you had better prepare for lack of help from officialdom. A pandemic looks to be no different.

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It is instructive to look at the FY 2006 Budget Total Tables from the Office of Management and Budget, and the figures below for the 2006 Budget are taken from that document. The 1999 figures come from the 1999 Budget.

Item	1999 Budget	2006 Budget
Defense Funding	$271.6 (306.9)	$419 (increases to $492 in 2010)a
Homeland Security (New office)	not applicable	$32 (increases to $39 in 2010)a
Non-Defense portion of the Discretionary Budget	$290.7 (328.5)	$497
Total Discretionary Expense	$570.6 (644.8)	$895 (increased to $971 in 2010)a
Total Revenues	$1,742.7 (1942.7)	$2,178

Notes: Dollars are in Billions; Numbers in parentheses are year 2004 equivalents - $1 in 1999 - $1.13 in 2004; a - from Table S-10

Homeland Security is one of the so-called "cross cutting" areas. Effectively, this means they have their hands in a lot of pots (agriculture, commerce, defense, education, energy, health & human services, HUD, DoI, DoJ, DoL, State, Transportation, Treasury, ... Smithonian, Holocaust Museum - see page 50 of the online budget). Anyway, when you add in all the funding for their "cross cutting," their budget jumps from $32 billion to $49,942.9 Billion.

Individual income tax accounted for 46% of revenues in the 199 budget, and corporate income taxes were 11%. Under the Bush 2006 budget, individual income tax has droped to 44% and corporate income tax to 10%.

Now I know that we now have three wars going on - the war on terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq. However, neither Afghanistan or Iraq are included in the budget. THe expenses for those are being submitted separate from the usual budget process. The new Department of Homeland Security is roughly $50 billion of the increase. Much of the remainder is an increase for the Department of Defense - $147.4 billion (plus an addtional $9 billion for Homeland issues). However, the size of the military has not expanded dramatically. Bases are still being closed. The cost of the wars is not in the budget. So where is all that additional money going? Oh yeah, Star Wars and the development of the next generation of nuclear bombs (and other more secret activities).

p.s. Also not included in the Bush budget is the permantizing his tax cuts. That is expected to further reduce revenue by $1.4 trillion over ten years.

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