Stasi Meets Steve Jobs

Published by Eric Margolis       Common Dreams             October 27, 2013

“Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail” sniffed US Secretary of State Henry Stimson in 1929 when told that American cryptographers had broken Japan’s naval and diplomatic codes. Alas, there are not any old-school gentlemen left in Washington these days. Revelations of US electronic spying by whistleblower Edward Snowden have ignited a furor across Latin America and now Europe.

This week’s uproar was intensified by claims that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had tapped into the cell phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe’s most important and influential leader. Further outrage erupted in France after reports that its leaders and diplomats had been tapped by NSA’s big ears.

Back in the day, French Interior Ministers – notably Nicholas Sarkozy – used to stay up late poring over wire taps of fellow officials’ peccadillos. That was good fun. Today, by contrast, the NSA and CIA are sweeping up all communications of supposed allies as part of the runaway US national security state. Call it the Stasi meets Apple’s late Steve Jobs.

Last month alone, NSA reportedly sifted through 70 million French phone calls, text and email under the lame pretext of fighting terrorism. What NSA was really finding were the phone numbers of prominent Frenchmen’s mistresses or boyfriends – very useful for CIA blackmail ops – and important commercial information. Terrorism is a red herring. NSA’s run amok spying, allegedly to combat “terrorism,” is making a lot of Americans wonder again about the events of 9/11 that triggered the explosion of America’s spy state, restrictive laws, and foreign wars.

America’s mammoth, ever-growing spy state built by President George W. Bush costs over $80 billion per annum. Some 4.8 million Americans now have secret security clearance and work for the octopod national security state.

US Elint (electronic spying) has humiliated European and Latin leaders and made them and NATO look like American vassals to be dismissed or disdained. How can Europe’s leaders face their own voters after this shameful episode? Revelations by Snowdon and Army private Bradley Manning show that Washington treats its NATO allies in the same imperious manner the old Soviet Union bossed around the Warsaw Pact.

Europe’s leaders are under mounting pressure to demonstrate their independence of Uncle Sam by taking some stern retaliatory action against US interests.   starting point would be building a brand-new electronic communications architecture for Western Europe that resists US penetration, and creating a truly independent Europe military capability. Time for Europe to stop being foot soldiers to America’s nuclear knights.

US reputation in Europe and Latin America is now at an all-time low. The next NSA spying scandals will likely come from the Mideast, India and Pakistan, Canada, South Korea and Japan. Obama may be remembered as having gotten the world even angrier at the US than predecessor George W. Bush – quite an accomplishment.

Washington claims “everyone does spying.” True enough, but no one is anywhere close to NSA’s giant vacuum cleaner and all-hearing bugs. What the US has been doing is far more than information gathering against a handful of anti-American militants. It’s heavy-duty intimidation. A reminder that Big Brother is watching and listening.  The deeply corrupt US Congress won’t do much to curtail NSA’s information theft. Too many of its members profit from market trades made on the basis of NSA snooping.          [Abridged]     http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/27-2

© 2013 Eric S. Margolis

The European Drone War

by Chris Cole       Common  Dreams        Oct. 26, 2013

While there is rightly much media attention on the US drone war in Pakistan and Yemen, there is a very different but over-looked “drone war” taking place in Europe right now. In parliamentary committee rooms, in company boardrooms, and in packed public meetings, arguments rage about whether Europe should embrace or reject the use of armed drones.

Many European armed forces already have unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, in their armories for reconnaissance, intelligence and surveillance purposes. Increasingly, however, European countries are under pressure to follow in the footsteps of the US and embrace the use of armed drones.

The UK has been a long-time partner with the US in using armed drones, with British military forces using US Predator drones in Iraq starting in 2004 before acquiring their own Reaper drones for use in Afghanistan in 2007. Since then, the UK has launched more than 400 missiles and bombs from its drones in Afghanistan and this is likely to increase as the UK doubles its armed drone fleet over the next year while also now directly operating drones from UK as well as US soil.

So far no other European country has used armed drones. French forces have used unarmed Harfang drones (based on Israel’s Heron) in Afghanistan, Libya and Mali; German forces in Afghanistan have been using unarmed Luna and Israeli Heron drones, and Italy has been operating unarmed drones alongside the US in Libya and Afghanistan from a joint Italian-US ground control station at Amendola airbase in southeast Italy.  But despite widespread public opposition, growing pressure from the pro-drone lobby and military companies is pushing European countries to acquire armed drone capability.

Across Europe, the acquisition of armed drones is highly controversial. Many political parties are divided on the issue - or flatly oppose it - and there is much public hostility. A Pew Research Poll conducted in 2012 showed widespread opposition to drone strikes, including 59% of people in Germany, 63% in France, 76% in Spain, 55% in Italy, and a whopping 90% in Greece. Only the UK did not have a majority of its public against the use of armed drones but even so, only 44% were in favor.  In the US, opposition to the drone wars is focused on the use of drones for targeted killing. In Europe however, the focus is much more on whether the so-called “risk free” nature of drone warfare - at least to your own forces - will simply lead to more armed conflict, as well as an expansion of targeted killing and a lowering of global security in general.

. Behind the scenes, the drone lobby is trying to persuade European governments to ignore the public anxiety and commit to armed unmanned systems. Their strategically placed Op-Eds extol the economic virtue of developing armed drones and of not being “left behind”. At the same time, NATO and European Union officials are urging European countries to increase spending on drones. US military companies are actively trying to amend international treaties in order to export armed drone technology to Europe. And senior arms company executives are directly lobbying European governments to commit to developing and building a future European armed drone. Already European military companies are devoting much effort and resources towards future combat drones.

As US and European combat forces withdraw from Afghanistan over the next 12 months , the war over drones in Europe is likely to get more intense. The drone lobby will try to clinch deals citing that a war-weary public is unlikely to support putting “‘boots on the ground”’ anytime soon and will therefore support remotely controlled warfare. Skeptics will be demanding more transparency and information about exactly how drones have been used in Afghanistan - including proper casualty data - in order to assess the professed “pin point” accuracy of armed drone strikes and make informed decisions about future use.               [Abridged]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/26

How the Sunni-Shia Schism is Dividing the World

by Robert Fisk                               Independent/UK                       October 24, 2013

The Muslim world’s historic – and deeply tragic – chasm between Sunni and Shia Islam is having worldwide repercussions. Syria’s civil war, America’s craven alliance with the Sunni Gulf autocracies, and Sunni (as well as Israeli) suspicions of Shia Iran are affecting even the work of the United Nations.  Saudi Arabia’s petulant refusal last week to take its place among non-voting members of the Security Council, an unprecedented step by any UN member, was intended to express the dictatorial monarchy’s displeasure with Washington’s refusal to bomb Syria after the use of chemical weapons in Damascus – but it also represented Saudi fears that Barack Obama might respond to Iranian overtures for better relations with the West.

Hatred of the Shia/Alawite Syrian regime, an unquenchable suspicion of Shia Iran’s nuclear plans and a general fear of Shia expansion is turning the unelected Sunni Arab monarchies into proxy allies of the Israeli state they have often sworn to destroy. Furthermore, America’s latest contribution to Middle East “peace” could be the sale of $10.8bn worth of missiles and arms to Sunni Saudi Arabia and the equally Sunni United Arab Emirates, including GBU-39 bombs – the weapons cutely called “bunker-busters” – which they could use against Shia Iran. Israel, of course, possesses the very same armaments.

On Monday Kerry said that he valued the autocracy’s leadership in the region, shared Riyadh’s desire to de-nuclearise Iran and to bring an end to the Syrian war.  But Kerry’s insistence that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his regime must abandon power means that a Sunni government would take over Syria; and his wish to disarm Shia Iran – however notional its nuclear threat may be – would ensure that Sunni military power would dominate the Middle East from the Afghan border to the Mediterranean.

The minority Sunni monarchy in Bahrain – supported by the Saudis and of course by the compliant governments of the US, Britain, et al – is likewise accusing Shia Iran of colluding with the island’s majority Shias. Oddly, Prince Bandar, in his comments, claimed that Barack Obama had failed to support Saudi policy in Bahrain – which involved sending its own troops into the island to help repress Shia demonstrators in 2011 – when in fact America’s silence over the regime’s paramilitary violence was the nearest Washington could go in offering its backing to the Sunni minority and his Royal Highness the King of Bahrain.

All in all, then, a mighty Western love affair with Sunni Islam – a love that very definitely cannot speak its name in an Arab Gulf world in which “democracy”, “moderation”, “partnership” and outright dictatorship are interchangeable – which neither Washington nor London nor Paris (nor indeed Moscow or Beijing) will acknowledge. But, needless to say, there are a few irritating – and incongruous – ripples in this mutual passion.

The Saudis, for example, blame Obama for allowing Egypt’s decadent Hosni Mubarak to be overthrown. They blame the Americans for supporting the elected Muslim Brother Mohamed Morsi as president – elections not being terribly popular in the Gulf – and the Saudis are now throwing cash at Egypt’s new military regime. Assad in Damascus also offered his congratulations to the Egyptian military. Was the Egyptian army not, after all – like Assad himself – trying to prevent religious extremists from taking power?  Fair enough – providing we remember that the Saudis are really supporting the Egyptian Salafists who cynically gave their loyalty to the Egyptian military, and that Saudi-financed Salafists are among the fiercest opponents of Assad.

Thankfully for Kerry and his European mates, the absence of any institutional memory in the State Department, Foreign Office or Quai d’Orsay means that no one need remember that 15 of the 19 mass-killers of 9/11 were also Salafists and – let us above all, please God, forget this – were all Sunni citizens of Saudi Arabia.   

© 2013 The Independent           [Abridged]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/24-2

Drone Warfare: America is still killing civilians from the sky

Our Amnesty Report released today reveals the extent of unlawful killings

Kate  Allen                          Independent/UK                     22 October 2013

In a major new report published today, the most comprehensive study of the US drones programme conducted from a human rights perspective, Amnesty has reviewed the use of drones in Pakistan’s north-western tribal areas where most drone strikes have taken place. The report condemns the almost complete absence of transparency around the US drone programme and concludes that the USA has carried out unlawful killings, some of which could amount to war crimes.  Amnesty reviewed all 45 known drone strikes that took place in North Waziristan in north-western Pakistan between January 2012 and August this year. Contrary to official claims that those killed were “terrorists”, Amnesty’s research indicates that in a number of cases the victims were not involved in armed activity and posed no threat to life.

Cases like that of Mamana Bibi, a 68-year-old grandmother who, last October, was picking vegetables in the family field outside her home, with her grandchildren. No men of “fighting age” were anywhere near her. She was horrifically killed in a double strike, apparently by a Hellfire missile. A second volley of missiles was fired a few minutes later, gravely injuring some of the children who ran to the place where their grandmother had been. It is hard to know how a grandmother and her grandchildren could have posed an imminent threat to life.  Hard to imagine also, how anyone could claim that in the immediate aftermath of an initial strike, a pilot thousands of miles away could determine who the people who ran to the scene of the incident were, and whether they were legitimate targets. In this instance, they were children who were maimed. These so called “rescuer attacks” are a grim signature feature of the drone attacks documented in the report.

The USA continues to rely on a “global war” doctrine to attempt to justify a borderless war with al-Qa’ida, the Taliban or other “enemies” of the USA. It also claims that its drone strikes are extremely accurate based on vetted intelligence and that the vast majority of those killed have been linked to al-Qa’ida and its allies. The world has to take this on faith, since the US administration refuses to disclose key facts, such as details of who is targeted and on what basis. Certainly the findings of Amnesty’s research today put a significant dent in that faith.

The first rule about the drones programme is, apparently, that you don’t talk about the drones programme. Although that rule has not been universally adhered to, almost every element of the operation is surrounded in a veil of secrecy. The USA’s promise to increase transparency around drone strikes, underscored by a major policy speech by President Barack Obama in May, has yet to become a reality and the USA still refuses to divulge even basic factual and legal information.  This secrecy has enabled the USA to act with impunity and block victims from receiving justice or compensation. As far as Amnesty is aware, no US official has ever been held to account for unlawful killings by drones in Pakistan. The secrecy surrounding the drones programme essentially gives the US administration a license to kill beyond the reach of the courts or basic standards of international law.

The use of drones is rapidly becoming one of the big moral challenges of our time, and if we are not careful, their use will continue under the radar, and beyond the scope of public scrutiny. There are debates to be had about how technological advances are deployed and there needs to be accountability without exceptions. For now, we are dealing in the dark, without access to the quantitative data that experts need access to and reliant on compiling testimony from bereaved families like the Bibis who lost a wife, mother and grandmother when she was blown to bits from a pilotless aircraft in the skies. How common is that tale of woe? The truth is at the moment we really don’t know. It’s time for the US to drone up.         [Abridged]

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/drone-warfare-obama-promised-transparency

12 Years a Slave tells an American story

Jasmin Alibhai Brown                        Independent/UK                20 October 2013

But when will Britain confront its own history?

Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen is now one of Britain’s most independent, unsettling film-makers, an outsider whose cameras go looking into the Stygian nooks of the human psyche and secreted collective perversions. His new film, 12 Years a Slave, examines both. It is based on a true tale of a free black man, Solomon Northup, living quietly near New York in 1841, when he was duped, captured and taken off to a southern plantation.

Critics seem shaken by its unsparing detail and authenticity.  McQueen, known as “an English film-maker” is a Londoner of Grenadian descent: “I’m here because my family went through slavery. Fact.” That fact and others have been buried away in unknown graves in the country which now claims him and in the other UK nations too.

Our national narrative goes like this: slavery occurred in America and the untamed Caribbean isles, with the co-operation of the “dark continent” and it took heroic Britons to end the evil. Lies told so often and so assiduously eventually transmute into impenetrable, solid veracities. This film will not shift those steadfast beliefs because the story is well, again, an American one. When will we get such a film made about, say, one of the small boys sold in a London coffee house, his life as a slave on these shores, his attempts to escape, the terrible punishments, mutilations and degradation? It happened, even after Lord Mansfield decreed in 1772, that no men or women could be sent forth from these isles to be slaves.

Oh the arguments I have had with people, including friends, about Britain’s slave history. They do not want to know. Last summer we went on holiday to Trinidad and Tobago. In museums, seeing shackles, testimonies, torture instruments, etchings of whippings and hangings, my daughter wept. Although she has been educated in Britain, she was never taught about what really went on, the grotesque truths.

To calm those readers who will be getting very angry, I must acknowledge some facts, which do, up to a point, mitigate the culpability of this nation. Arabs and Africans had been enslavers for many centuries and continued after abolition. Long before the British came into the business, the Spanish, Dutch, French and Portuguese were catching and transporting Africans across the Atlantic and selling them. Britain then transformed the trade into a massive, profitable industry. The country, however, had vocal women and men of conscience who, with ex-slaves, finally stopped the commodification of humans. It was a moral crusade. Ships patrolled the coasts of Africa to stop slave ships. It is right that we always remember what they did. But we must also remember the horrors of enslavement that created revulsion among those great and good, women and Quakers in particular.

Sir John Hawkins, second cousin of Sir Francis Drake, started it all in 1555, with a cargo of 301 slaves. After the Restoration, the trade was controlled by monopoly companies backed by the King. Jamaica was seized by the British in 1655. Fifty years later, there were 42,000 slaves there. Half a century after that the number rose to 200,000. Death rates were high so many more must have landed. Read the books by James Walvin to get the stark details. Almost every institution and class in this country profited. The Tate Gallery, Oxbridge colleges, the Church, politicians, the aristocracy, middle classes, banks, manufacturers and traders. In the recent past, to their credit, cities like Bristol and Liverpool have broken the silence and found ways to permanently remember the stolen people.

It’s not enough but at least England tries. Scotland, in contrast, has completely excised its part and the whitewash continues. It joined the Union so it could get into the lucrative game. Glasgow was built on slave money and later the empire. Many great lairds owned massive Caribbean slave plantations. Robert Burns planned to go out to the Caribbean to become a slave driver. The vast number of Scottish surnames of black people in the US, Caribbean and UK show just how deeply involved the Scots were in this enterprise.

African-American writers and artists will not let their nation forget. Here the descendants of slaves remain reticent. Some even feel shame and don’t want to be reminded of those dark centuries. Though we have compelling black writers, thus far none has given us the potent slave narratives of, say, Alex Haley or Toni Morrison. McQueen sees the consequences of the trade in black-skinned men, women and children: “Look at the prison population, mental health issues, poverty.” Actual enslavement still goes on too –  trafficked farm workers, young, forced prostitutes, undocumented domestics and cleaners.

This groundbreaking film, whilst very important, will not get audiences to make connections between America and Britain, then and now. And so British slavery remains the greatest story never told.        [Abbrev.]

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/12-years-a-slave-tells-an-american-story-but-when-will-britai