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May, 2013. Photo by: joanneleon
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You have to read this whole article to believe it. It's from Foreign Policy, written by Philip Mudd . It is a defense of the CIA's signature strikes. And you have to wonder how many times a group that had "unique characteristics that identify a group" turned out to be a town meeting (a jirga) in Pakistan, a group of allied Pakistani soldiers, perhaps a 16-year old American eating at an outdoor restaurant with his cousins, perhaps kids gathering fuel for the home fire, and other civilians who have been blown to bits by signature strikes.
He also talks about how signature strikes are used to kill "militant groups" before they actually form into a cohesive group. Given that it's normal for men to carry weapons in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, perhaps also in Yemen (I'm not sure but think it's likely), I don't know how people looking at video from a half world away can determine if those groups are a future threat to America and I don't know when we gave ourselves the permission to go around the world looking for pre-crime, people who might decide to attack us at some point in the future if they become more organized. I didn't know that our technology had evolved to the point where surveillance drones could read minds and intentions.
He makes another argument about how signature strikes keep the terrorists busy in fear for their lives, and on the run, and they therefore have less time to plot against us. I don't if or how anyone could prove this theory and what I don't hear from this defender is any analysis about how this supposed prevention compares with the well known fact that people become radicalized against us, because of these signature strikes. Signature strikes lead to the radicalization of people who would otherwise never join Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda doesn't even need to recruit anymore, according to accounts from Yemenis, and in some cases the new "terrorists" were former supporters and even admirers of America.
We know that at least once, the group supposedly presenting a threat to America was a jirga, a tribal meeting, two groups meeting to work out some land rights and we blew dozens of them to bits. Is this what we call "intelligence" and couterterrorism? Or is this murderous paranoia enabled by wildly lopsided power equation and the absence of risk and consequences for the anonymous profilers deciding what video figures look like they might someday be a threat, and the "pilots" who create "bug splat" on command from a comfortable leather chair in an air conditioned room in the U.S., and then drive home in their SUV to have dinner with their families?
Fear Factor
In defense of Obama's deadly signature strikes.
So-called signature strikes -- in which target selection is based not on identification of an individual but instead on patterns of behavior or unique characteristics that identify a group -- accelerated this decline for simple reasons. Targeting leadership degrades a small percentage of a diffuse terror group, but developing the tactical intelligence required to locate an individual precisely enough to stage a pinpoint strike, in a no-man's land half a world away, is time-consuming and difficult. And it's not a perfect science; the leaders of groups learn over time how to operate more securely. Furthermore, these leaders represent only a fraction of the threat: Osama bin Laden might have been the public face of al Qaeda, but he was supported by a web of document-forgers, bombmakers, couriers, trainers, ideologues, and others. They made up the bulk of al Qaeda and propelled the apparatus that planned the murder of innocents. Bin Laden was the revolutionary leader, but it was the troops who executed his vision.
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Before the pendulum swings too far in the other direction, though, away from the unquestionably aggressive use of drones by two consecutive presidents and toward a model that imposes tight limits, we are going to have to answer a simple question or two: When the president receives information that a new group -- maybe not a terror organization, but an evolving militant group -- is plotting to strike America at home or abroad, what do we do? If we strike too soon, we risk alienating a local population and increasing its motivation to target New York. If we strike too late, a nascent group of violent extremists will become operational, a lesson we learned too well 12 years ago. So take off the table the 20th-century notion that drones will become part of a more conventional military structure; they won't. The question for the 21st century is easy to state but hard to answer: Given the lessons of 9/11 and Iraq, when should a president choose preemption? And where? What are the rules for this new war?
My understanding is that signature strikes are a product of the CIA drone program, which is different from the drone program being run by DoD doing targeted strikes, and that there has been a lot of opposition to signature strikes by our military. When the president and all the president's men talk about surgical, vetted strikes, they are referring to the military drone program, not the CIA paramilitary drone program where signature strikes are common. And then there is the hybrid drone program (JSOC? by order of the White House
National Security Council? almost like a president's personal drone team?), which I don't understand well enough yet. The NSC sounds like a big council but it's really a rather small team and I think they are also referred to as the "principals". NSC is P, VP, Sec State, Sec Treas, Sec Def. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs attends as the military advisor and Dir. of Nat'l Intelligence attends as the intelligence advisor. AG and OMB sometimes attend, along with the WH chief of staff and others as needed. From a lot of things that I've read, Brennan used to attend when he was the president's terrorism advisor. The ebook written by two former special ops guys whose friend (also former special ops working on a security team in Libya) was killed said that the reason why the Libyan militias attacked the consulate was because the National Security Council (they singled out Brennan) was directing raids and drone strikes against targeted Libyan militia members, and they were not using the DoD chain of command, and not notifying any of the people with whom they might have been working at cross purposes. Years ago ~2009, there were stories about how Cheney had his own assassination squad. I don't know if this is the same kind of set up but it sounds just like it. Seymour Hersh talked about it in a speech in Minnesota in 2009 and it was reported
here. Also see
this. When Cheney was doing it, it was called an
"executive assassination ring" and considered to be bad, and scandalous. Anyway, more on that later perhaps.
Heh, I just saw that emptywheel has written a piece about the Mudd "Fear Factor" column. I didn't realize that Mudd was the "former Deputy Director of CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and FBI".
Philip Mudd Makes the Case for Signature Strikes against Banksters
So it seems this defense of signature strikes should be read as one of two things. Either, a case that the best defense against the damage banksters have caused is the fairly indiscriminate killing of their mid-level managers. Or, if that solution seems barbarous at its core, then perhaps this is a good case study in how extreme the idea of signature strikes would seem if it weren’t couched in a sloppy kind of Orientalism advocating it for others but not for our own.
Anyway, McCain went to have a "secret" meeting with the Syrian rebels yesterday and on Saturday he said there is going to be a no-fly zone. What the heck? He went with the supposed Supreme General of the Syrian Free Army, except that when actual members of the FSA were asked about him a month or so ago they said they don't even know him and don't take any orders from him.
Senator McCain met with rebels in Syria: spokesman
(Reuters) - Republican Senator John McCain, a former presidential candidate and an outspoken advocate for U.S. military aid to the Syrian opposition, met with some of the rebels during a surprise visit to the war-torn country on Monday, his spokesman said.
Spokesman Brian Rogers confirmed McCain's meeting with the rebels, but declined to give any details about the visit, which may fuel pressure on Washington to intervene in a conflict that is believed to have claimed 80,000 lives.
The visit came as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pledged to do their utmost to bring Syria's warring parties together, and new allegations surfaced about chemical weapons use in the civil war.
Since the situation in Syria is so funny, Lindsey Graham joked about it on Twitter yesterday. Seriously.
McCain was supposedly there visiting troops from Arizona who are in Turkey.
Glenn's column about the president's big speech is a must read. He nails it. He also seems to see that the speech does not declare an end to the war on terror and if anything, it hints at an expansion of the drone program. Orwell would be proud.
Obama's terrorism speech: seeing what you want to see
Some eager-to-believe progressives heralded the speech as a momentous change, but Obama's actions are often quite different than his rhetoric
What Obama has specialized in from the beginning of his presidency is putting pretty packaging on ugly and discredited policies. The cosmopolitan, intellectualized flavor of his advocacy makes coastal elites and blue state progressives instinctively confident in the Goodness of whatever he's selling, much as George W. Bush's swaggering, evangelical cowboy routine did for red state conservatives. The CIA presciently recognized this as a valuable asset back in 2008 when they correctly predicted that Obama's election would stem the tide of growing antiwar sentiment in western Europe by becoming the new, more attractive face of war, thereby converting hordes of his admirers from war opponents into war supporters. This dynamic has repeated itself over and over in other contexts, and has indeed been of great value to the guardians of the status quo in placating growing public discontent about their economic insecurity and increasingly unequal distribution of power and wealth. However bad things might be, we at least have a benevolent, kind-hearted and very thoughtful leader doing everything he can to fix it.
The clear purpose of Obama's speech was to comfort progressives who are growing progressively more uncomfortable with his extreme secrecy, wars on press freedom, seemingly endless militarism and the like. For the most part, their discomfort is far more about the image being created of the politician they believed was unique and even transcendent than it is any substantive opposition to his policies. No progressive wants to believe that they placed such great trust and adoration in a political figure who is now being depicted as some sort of warped progeny of Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney. That creates internal discomfort and even shame. This speech was designed to allow progressives once again to see Barack Obama as they have always wanted to see him, his policies notwithstanding: as a deeply thoughtful, moral, complex leader who is doing his level best, despite often insurmountable obstacles, to bring about all those Good Things that progressives thought they would be getting when they empowered him.
[...]
In contrast to the NYT's instant swooning, serious journalists and commentators - who weren't given special pre-speech access to a marketing pitch by the White House - began analyzing the speech's content and reached a much different conclusion. McClatchy's Leslie Clark and Jonathan Landay astutely noted that Obama's formulation for when drone strikes should be used was broader than past government statements, which meant he "appeared to be laying groundwork for an expansion of the controversial targeted killings".
The End of the Beginning of the End
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
- Frederick Douglass
[...]
A report released early this year by the organization Oxfam International revealed that the combined income of the richest 100 people in the world is enough to end global poverty four times over, and that the gap between rich and poor has exploded by some 60% in the last 20 years. Rather than hinder this division, the recent global economic crisis has exacerbated it. Money does not disappear, you see, but tends to be translated up the income ladder in times of financial distress.
[...]
The incomes of 100 people out of the seven billion on the planet could fix that, and then fix it again, and then fix it again, and then fix it again. The exact total of the wealth of these individuals is actually something of a mystery, thanks to the tax havens they use to hide their fortunes. There are trillions of dollars squirrelled away in those havens - no one knows quite how much - and the subtraction of that money from the global economy has a direct and debilitating effect on the people not fortunate enough to be part of that elite 100.
[...]
Occupy was only the beginning, but may very well have been the last manifestation of peaceful resistance against the ever-widening chasm of inequality and desolation. The noose is tightening around the necks of average people, and more become radicalized with each passing day. The wealthy would do well to take note of this, and voluntarily move to square the savage imbalance that drives billions around the world into furious despair. It does not have to be this way, and if it continues in this way, eventually the dam is going to break. When that happens, woe be unto those who believe their wealth keeps them safe and cozy. On that day, the rock will not hide them, and the dead tree will give no shelter.
Time to move. Long past time for Internet 2.0.
This Pentagon Project Makes Cyberwar as Easy as Angry Birds
The target computer is picked. The order to strike has been given. All it takes is a finger swipe and a few taps of the touchscreen, and the cyberattack is prepped to begin.
For the last year, the Pentagon’s top technologists have been working on a program that will make cyberwarfare relatively easy. It’s called Plan X. And if this demo looks like a videogame or sci-fi movie or a sleek Silicon Valley production, that’s no accident. It was built by the designers behind some of Apple’s most famous computers — with assistance from the illustrators who helped bring Transformers to the silver screen.
Today, destructive cyberattacks — ones that cause servers to fry, radars to go dark, or centrifuges to spin out of control — have been assembled by relatively small teams of hackers. They’re ordered at the highest levels of government. They take months to plan. Their effects can be uncertain, despite all the preparation. (Insiders believe, for example, that the biggest network intrusion in the Pentagon’s history may have been an accidental infection, not a deliberate hack.)
With Plan X, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking to change all that. It wants munitions made of 1s and 0s to be as simple to launch as ones made of metal and explosives. It wants cyberattack stratagems to be as predictable as any war plan can be. It wants to move past the artisanal era of hacking, and turn cyberwarfare into an industrial effort. Across the U.S. government, there are all kinds of projects to develop America’s network offense. None are quite like this.
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