October 21, 2011
MI5 References Emerge in Phone Hacking Lawsuit
By JO BECKER and RAVI SOMAIYA
A British private detective at the center of the phone hacking scandal that has shaken Rupert Murdoch’s media empire cited the MI5 file of a close friend of Princes William and Harry in notes he kept on his work for the tabloid The News of the World, according to a suit filed in London.
But the court papers, released to The New York Times, do not clearly indicate whether the detective, Glenn Mulcaire, accessed the highly classified intelligence file directly, was told of its contents or was simply noting its existence.
The documents, dated Sept. 23, accuse Mr. Mulcaire and the now-closed News of the World of invading the privacy of Guy Pelly, a London nightclub owner and a confidant of the princes. The defendants, the suit says, hacked Mr. Pelly’s cellphone, set up an e-mail address in his name and flew him to Las Vegas on false pretenses to trick him into revealing details about his royal friends.
But the most intriguing accusation relates to at least two references to Mr. Pelly’s MI5 profile in Mr. Mulcaire’s detailed records. He kept copious notes covering his conversations with his employers at the tabloid, his sources, his methods and the information he gleaned.
One reference, the suit said, was in an electronic file titled “Project Guy W. Pelly,” which “included his mobile number, his parents’ landline number, his parents’ address and a further reference to the MI5 profile.”
Somewhat ambiguously, the suit states: “It is to be inferred that individuals close to members of the Royal Family have MI5 profiles and that this information was obtained unlawfully by the Defendants.”
Daisy Dunlop, a spokeswoman for News International, the British arm of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, said that the company’s interpretation of the evidence is that Mr. Mulcaire found out about the MI5 profile from an intercepted voice mail message. There is no basis, she said, “to conclude that Mulcaire or NOTW had access to MI5 files.”
A lawyer for Mr. Pelly, Mark Thomson, who is seeking further information on Mr. Mulcaire’s activities through the courts, declined to comment. Sarah Webb, a lawyer for Mr. Mulcaire, said he was unable to respond, citing a continuing criminal investigation and civil proceedings.
The suit is one of dozens to emerge from a scandal that has revealed disturbingly close ties among elements of Britain’s news media, political leaders and law enforcement officials. It has led to the resignations of two top Scotland Yard officers and the arrests of 16 of The News of the World’s former employees, including its former editor Andy Coulson, who served as Prime Minister David Cameron’s chief spokesman until he was forced to resign this year.
MI5 and its foreign intelligence counterpart MI6 are highly respected and have sweeping powers to collect information in pursuit of national security. Their legendary emphasis on secrecy is enshrined in British law. It is a criminal offense for their agents to leak “any information, document or other article relating to security or intelligence.”
Tom Watson, a British lawmaker who has been prominent in Parliament’s investigation into phone hacking, said the mere existence of notes citing MI5 material raised serious questions.
Parliament will “urgently” want to know, he said, whether the police, who hold Mr. Mulcaire’s notes, told MI5 that there was a potential breach in its security — and if so, whether MI5 acted to inform a judicial inquiry into the tabloid’s wrongdoing.
Further, Mr. Watson said, “If operatives working for a tabloid newspaper have been accessing the files of MI5 illicitly, then that is a very, very serious, massive breach of security.”
A spokesman for the department that oversees MI5, the Home Office, cited a policy to decline to comment on issues pertaining to the agency. Scotland Yard also declined to comment.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Europeans Seek Bold Debt Deal, Despite Differences
October 21, 2011
By STEVEN ERLANGER
PARIS — European leaders were struggling on Friday to craft a bolder solution to the region’s financial crisis, despite clear signals from French and German officials that they have sharp differences heading into an important weekend summit meeting in Brussels.
As ever, the focus is on Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who have made a habit of cobbling together deals to present to their European Union colleagues. But forging an agreement now is harder than before, as Paris and Berlin face core differences over how to maximize the euro zone’s financial rescue fund and how far the European Central Bank should intervene in the bond markets, either on its own or through the bailout fund.
Already the two leaders have announced that Sunday’s summit meeting, which had already been delayed to allow more time for negotiations, would be followed by another summit meeting as early as Wednesday. That announcement, paradoxically, seemed to buoy stock and bond markets, apparently because the Europeans at least appeared to be focusing intensely on resolving the crisis.
But the delay may have been because Mr. Sarkozy needs pressure from other nations to bring Mrs. Merkel around to a more flexible position on how to use the bailout fund, called the European Financial Stability Facility, and the central bank.
Mr. Sarkozy has now rushed twice to Germany for talks with Mrs. Merkel, the last time on Wednesday, as his wife was giving birth, to press for a deal. The meeting was testy, said German officials, who have complained that France is “not budging an inch.” Mr. Sarkozy, clearly the supplicant in the relationship, speaks openly of a “European rendezvous with history,” while Mrs. Merkel keeps repeating that “there is no magic wand” and that a long-term solution will take time.
Jean-Claude Juncker, who also leads the meetings of euro zone finance ministers, said that Thursday’s move to delay final decisions until the second summit meeting Wednesday looked “disastrous” to the outside world. He canceled a news conference scheduled for after Friday’s meeting of the finance ministers of the 17 countries that use the euro, suggesting that no breakthrough was imminent.
The “Franco-German couple” has been vital to each of the agreements reached by the European Union during this two-year crisis. But so far none of the deals have been sufficient to solve even the problem of Greek indebtedness, which is growing worse in an austerity-driven recession, let alone the problem of contagion spreading now to Italy and Spain. Nor has there been an agreement yet on how much capital needs to be injected into European banks so that they can reassure investors that they will remain solvent even as the sovereign debt of Greece, Italy, Spain and other hard-hit countries loses value.
These are the main issues on the agenda.
On Greece, Germany appears willing for a deal to restructure Greek debt to no more than half of its face value, to try to bring Greece’s debt burden to a sustainable level. But Germany wants private investors and banks to accept such losses voluntarily to avoid a formal default, which would be a first for the euro zone.
Big European banks had already agreed to what was billed as a 21 percent reduction in the value of their Greek debt in July, a deal not yet implemented, and they are reluctant to reopen the matter. Nor are they confident that enough private bondholders would agree to such a large cut.
France and the European Central Bank do not want to restructure Greek debt further, fearing market contagion and, for Paris, additional pressure on French banks that hold significant amounts of Greek, Spanish and Italian debt. A major recapitalization of French banks would put more strain on France’s budget and require new cuts elsewhere to meet deficit targets, and could thus jeopardize France’s coveted AAA credit rating. That would be bad politics with elections six months away and Mr. Sarkozy already unpopular.
There is also a fear that banks would cut back on lending rather than try to raise more capital while their stock prices are down, which could lead to a new credit crunch at a time when the entire euro zone is on the brink of a new recession.
France wants Europe to collaborate on recapitalizing banks, ideally by turning the bailout fund into a bank, which could then draw on loans from the European Central Bank, which has the authority to print euros as needed.
But Germany and the central bank itself have resisted that option. “The path is closed for using the E.C.B. to ease liquidity problems,” Mrs. Merkel told her parliamentary caucus in Berlin on Friday, Reuters reported.
Mrs. Merkel wants each country to be responsible for injecting funds into its own banks, and only then turn to the regional bailout fund in an emergency. Politically, it is easier for her to explain to Germans that German money is being used to recapitalize German banks than to concede that it is going to everybody’s banks. Mrs. Merkel is also compelled by German law to seek a mandate from Parliament’s budget committee before committing new funds. Mr. Sarkozy does not face such restrictions.
Still, some progress has been made on the amount of new funds needed to shore up banks. Partly that is because the Europeans have decided that the amount required is half of what the International Monetary Fund and some other experts have suggested. And partly because European officials have used new ways of valuing sovereign debt that offset markdowns on the bonds of weaker countries with paper gains on sovereign holdings of less indebted countries.
Even so, France is asking for a period of nine months for banks to meet recapitalization targets.
France and Germany also disagree on how to leverage or maximize the $590 billion bailout fund to create a “wall of money” to discourage the markets from speculating further on Spain and Italy. The fund has already committed about $200 billion to Greece, Portugal and Ireland, and the German government has promised taxpayers that its own share, as the largest contributor, will not be more than $305 billion.
There are a variety of ideas on how to leverage the fund, but so far they have run into problems with existing treaties, and the European Central Bank has opposed the idea that it should guarantee loans made by the fund. Germany has discussed using the fund as “insurance” to guarantee a portion of any potential losses on future bond auctions for Italy and Spain, but France would still prefer that the bailout fund be allowed to borrow from the central bank. France might agree to the German idea if the insurance ratio is higher.
And there are reports that the International Monetary Fund might also provide some cheaper credit to European countries facing severe market pressure on their bonds.
The Europeans will also be discussing longer-term measures to provide more “economic governance” to the euro zone nations, but those changes are also likely to require treaty changes.
While the markets are focused on Brussels on Sunday and Wednesday, a firmer deadline is probably Nov. 3-4, when Mr. Sarkozy presides over the meeting of the Group of 20 leading economies in Cannes. President Obama, who has been in regular contact by telephone with Mr. Sarkozy and Mrs. Merkel, wants a solution by then, at least, to stop the drag the crisis is having on global markets, economic growth and his own prospects for re-election.
By STEVEN ERLANGER
PARIS — European leaders were struggling on Friday to craft a bolder solution to the region’s financial crisis, despite clear signals from French and German officials that they have sharp differences heading into an important weekend summit meeting in Brussels.
As ever, the focus is on Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who have made a habit of cobbling together deals to present to their European Union colleagues. But forging an agreement now is harder than before, as Paris and Berlin face core differences over how to maximize the euro zone’s financial rescue fund and how far the European Central Bank should intervene in the bond markets, either on its own or through the bailout fund.
Already the two leaders have announced that Sunday’s summit meeting, which had already been delayed to allow more time for negotiations, would be followed by another summit meeting as early as Wednesday. That announcement, paradoxically, seemed to buoy stock and bond markets, apparently because the Europeans at least appeared to be focusing intensely on resolving the crisis.
But the delay may have been because Mr. Sarkozy needs pressure from other nations to bring Mrs. Merkel around to a more flexible position on how to use the bailout fund, called the European Financial Stability Facility, and the central bank.
Mr. Sarkozy has now rushed twice to Germany for talks with Mrs. Merkel, the last time on Wednesday, as his wife was giving birth, to press for a deal. The meeting was testy, said German officials, who have complained that France is “not budging an inch.” Mr. Sarkozy, clearly the supplicant in the relationship, speaks openly of a “European rendezvous with history,” while Mrs. Merkel keeps repeating that “there is no magic wand” and that a long-term solution will take time.
Jean-Claude Juncker, who also leads the meetings of euro zone finance ministers, said that Thursday’s move to delay final decisions until the second summit meeting Wednesday looked “disastrous” to the outside world. He canceled a news conference scheduled for after Friday’s meeting of the finance ministers of the 17 countries that use the euro, suggesting that no breakthrough was imminent.
The “Franco-German couple” has been vital to each of the agreements reached by the European Union during this two-year crisis. But so far none of the deals have been sufficient to solve even the problem of Greek indebtedness, which is growing worse in an austerity-driven recession, let alone the problem of contagion spreading now to Italy and Spain. Nor has there been an agreement yet on how much capital needs to be injected into European banks so that they can reassure investors that they will remain solvent even as the sovereign debt of Greece, Italy, Spain and other hard-hit countries loses value.
These are the main issues on the agenda.
On Greece, Germany appears willing for a deal to restructure Greek debt to no more than half of its face value, to try to bring Greece’s debt burden to a sustainable level. But Germany wants private investors and banks to accept such losses voluntarily to avoid a formal default, which would be a first for the euro zone.
Big European banks had already agreed to what was billed as a 21 percent reduction in the value of their Greek debt in July, a deal not yet implemented, and they are reluctant to reopen the matter. Nor are they confident that enough private bondholders would agree to such a large cut.
France and the European Central Bank do not want to restructure Greek debt further, fearing market contagion and, for Paris, additional pressure on French banks that hold significant amounts of Greek, Spanish and Italian debt. A major recapitalization of French banks would put more strain on France’s budget and require new cuts elsewhere to meet deficit targets, and could thus jeopardize France’s coveted AAA credit rating. That would be bad politics with elections six months away and Mr. Sarkozy already unpopular.
There is also a fear that banks would cut back on lending rather than try to raise more capital while their stock prices are down, which could lead to a new credit crunch at a time when the entire euro zone is on the brink of a new recession.
France wants Europe to collaborate on recapitalizing banks, ideally by turning the bailout fund into a bank, which could then draw on loans from the European Central Bank, which has the authority to print euros as needed.
But Germany and the central bank itself have resisted that option. “The path is closed for using the E.C.B. to ease liquidity problems,” Mrs. Merkel told her parliamentary caucus in Berlin on Friday, Reuters reported.
Mrs. Merkel wants each country to be responsible for injecting funds into its own banks, and only then turn to the regional bailout fund in an emergency. Politically, it is easier for her to explain to Germans that German money is being used to recapitalize German banks than to concede that it is going to everybody’s banks. Mrs. Merkel is also compelled by German law to seek a mandate from Parliament’s budget committee before committing new funds. Mr. Sarkozy does not face such restrictions.
Still, some progress has been made on the amount of new funds needed to shore up banks. Partly that is because the Europeans have decided that the amount required is half of what the International Monetary Fund and some other experts have suggested. And partly because European officials have used new ways of valuing sovereign debt that offset markdowns on the bonds of weaker countries with paper gains on sovereign holdings of less indebted countries.
Even so, France is asking for a period of nine months for banks to meet recapitalization targets.
France and Germany also disagree on how to leverage or maximize the $590 billion bailout fund to create a “wall of money” to discourage the markets from speculating further on Spain and Italy. The fund has already committed about $200 billion to Greece, Portugal and Ireland, and the German government has promised taxpayers that its own share, as the largest contributor, will not be more than $305 billion.
There are a variety of ideas on how to leverage the fund, but so far they have run into problems with existing treaties, and the European Central Bank has opposed the idea that it should guarantee loans made by the fund. Germany has discussed using the fund as “insurance” to guarantee a portion of any potential losses on future bond auctions for Italy and Spain, but France would still prefer that the bailout fund be allowed to borrow from the central bank. France might agree to the German idea if the insurance ratio is higher.
And there are reports that the International Monetary Fund might also provide some cheaper credit to European countries facing severe market pressure on their bonds.
The Europeans will also be discussing longer-term measures to provide more “economic governance” to the euro zone nations, but those changes are also likely to require treaty changes.
While the markets are focused on Brussels on Sunday and Wednesday, a firmer deadline is probably Nov. 3-4, when Mr. Sarkozy presides over the meeting of the Group of 20 leading economies in Cannes. President Obama, who has been in regular contact by telephone with Mr. Sarkozy and Mrs. Merkel, wants a solution by then, at least, to stop the drag the crisis is having on global markets, economic growth and his own prospects for re-election.
NYT tells German Prime Minister What's What - Better listen, bitch!
October 21, 2011
Will Mrs. Merkel Wake Up in Time?
Helmut Schmidt, Germany’s 92-year-old former chancellor, sent a pointed message to his present-day successor, Angela Merkel, this week. Shortchanging Europe damages Germany, he warned in a speech in Frankfurt. “Of course the strong should help the weak,” he said, just as Germany was helped by America after World War II.
We hope Mrs. Merkel heeds his advice. As of Friday, she was still blocking the European Union from bolstering its inadequate bailout fund. She does favor bigger write-downs of Greek debt (German banks have shed their exposure), which must be part of any solution. But other countries cannot afford to go along without the European-financed bank recapitalization that she opposes.
Europe’s leaders have now decided to defer crucial decisions to midweek — not much time to do what they have failed to do for a year and a half: create a realistic recovery program for Greece, keep the debt crisis from engulfing Italy and Spain and recapitalize European banks so they can survive the write-downs ahead.
Here is what Mrs. Merkel isn’t telling her citizens: A Europe in a downward spiral of austerity and recession will buy fewer German exports. A disorderly Greek default and downgrade for Spain, Italy and France could split apart the euro, leaving Germany with a much less competitive exchange rate than it enjoys today. The damage to the European Union, which has smoothed Germany’s postwar reintegration, would be enormous.
Instead, Mrs. Merkel has gone along with conventional German wisdom that the earnings of frugal, hard-working German taxpayers should remain at home. (We'd say the same for the earnings of frugal, hard-working American taxpayers, but, in a 22.5% unemployment environment, business can be very miserly in what it pays its employees, many of whom realize they are god-damned lucky to have a job in the first place: besides, ANYBODY in the lower 99% can be out-sourced!" She has bowed to anti-Europe conservatives in her coalition, agreeing that all further German contributions to European rescue efforts will be submitted to Parliament in advance. That means that any hope for a breakthrough now depends on Europe convincing Mrs. Merkel of what’s needed and her then convincing Germany’s Parliament.
To be credible, any solution must be generously financed and tackle more than just the financial symptoms.
Without bigger write-downs and more scope for growth, Greece will sooner or later default. If Europe keeps insisting on growth-killing austerity — rather than structural and labor market reforms — Greece will never be able to recover and pay back its debt. Without a bigger bailout fund, Italy and Spain could soon be unable to pay their bills. If countries cannot draw on European funds for bank recapitalization, more countries, including France, will be dragged deeper into debt.
In July, European leaders agreed to increase the bailout fund to $600 billion. It is already inadequate. To meet the new challenges of Italy, Spain and bank recapitalization effectively, somewhere between $2 trillion to $3 trillion will be needed. Some of that may have to come from the European Central Bank.
At the same July summit meeting, Europe’s leaders acknowledged that some Greek debt was unpayable and proposed voluntary bond swaps that would write down Greek obligations by roughly 21 cents on the dollar. Markets now price those obligations at less than 50 cents on the dollar. Compelling creditors to acknowledge that reality would give Greece breathing room to promote growth.
If Europe’s leaders do not come up with a more robust plan, the judgment of global stock and credit markets is likely to be harsh and swift. Germany will be one of the biggest losers. It is time for Mrs. Merkel to acknowledge that truth — and do what is best for Germany and all of Europe.
GERMANY will be one of the biggest losers? How about US investment banks?
Will Mrs. Merkel Wake Up in Time?
Helmut Schmidt, Germany’s 92-year-old former chancellor, sent a pointed message to his present-day successor, Angela Merkel, this week. Shortchanging Europe damages Germany, he warned in a speech in Frankfurt. “Of course the strong should help the weak,” he said, just as Germany was helped by America after World War II.
Does this mean that Germany will get to occupy the countries she helps with her military force and write their constitutions also?
We hope Mrs. Merkel heeds his advice. As of Friday, she was still blocking the European Union from bolstering its inadequate bailout fund. She does favor bigger write-downs of Greek debt (German banks have shed their exposure), which must be part of any solution. But other countries cannot afford to go along without the European-financed bank recapitalization that she opposes.
IF it's so god damned important to the NYT editor that "other countries cannot afford to go along without the European-financed bank recapitalization that she opposes" then why not have the U.S. finance the other countries?
Europe’s leaders have now decided to defer crucial decisions to midweek — not much time to do what they have failed to do for a year and a half: create a realistic recovery program for Greece, keep the debt crisis from engulfing Italy and Spain and recapitalize European banks so they can survive the write-downs ahead.
How pompous of the Times to tell European leaders what they must do!
Here is what Mrs. Merkel isn’t telling her citizens: A Europe in a downward spiral of austerity and recession will buy fewer German exports. A disorderly Greek default and downgrade for Spain, Italy and France could split apart the euro, leaving Germany with a much less competitive exchange rate than it enjoys today. The damage to the European Union, which has smoothed Germany’s postwar reintegration, would be enormous.
Can't wait one day until I read in the NYT, the Trib, WaPo, etc something like this sentence: "Here is what Preznit OBUMMAH isn’t telling his citizens: A world in a downward spiral of austerity and recession {because of the manipulation of the stock markets, the housing markets, the commodities markets, will buy fewer American exports. And besides we don't make anything for export any more save for pornography, pot, weapons systems, and firearms (U.S. bullet manufacturing has been outsourced to China). This is all a natural and predictable outcome of the international corporate welfare state, where ginormous international corporations, answerable (in theory) only to their shareholders (in practice, only to their boards of directors, and there is so much corporate inbreeding in who sits on such boards that you are basically looking at an atrophying bloated system that requires very mindless populations, content merely to shop for cheap shit, and never EVER struggle to overthrow the so-called 'international order.' Once the flames of revolution hit the fan, the old order will be very rapidly fading."
Instead, Mrs. Merkel has gone along with conventional German wisdom that the earnings of frugal, hard-working German taxpayers should remain at home. (We'd say the same for the earnings of frugal, hard-working American taxpayers, but, in a 22.5% unemployment environment, business can be very miserly in what it pays its employees, many of whom realize they are god-damned lucky to have a job in the first place: besides, ANYBODY in the lower 99% can be out-sourced!" She has bowed to anti-Europe conservatives in her coalition, agreeing that all further German contributions to European rescue efforts will be submitted to Parliament in advance. That means that any hope for a breakthrough now depends on Europe convincing Mrs. Merkel of what’s needed and her then convincing Germany’s Parliament.
And this is as it should be - what is a European country's first loyalty? To itself, or to the European Union? It is not as if it is the United States of Europe, and nowhere was it e'er write that the EU must last forever, and BESIDES, why did they let in some of those fucked up countries that are more Mediteranian the You're-A-Peein?"
To be credible, any solution must be generously financed and tackle more than just the financial symptoms.
So the Times is advocating the Germany bail out the other fucked up countreis who fucked them own selves up by speculating in the housing bubble? FORBID IT ALMIGHTY GOD!
Without bigger write-downs and more scope for growth, Greece will sooner or later default. If Europe keeps insisting on growth-killing austerity — rather than structural and labor market reforms — Greece will never be able to recover and pay back its debt. Without a bigger bailout fund, Italy and Spain could soon be unable to pay their bills. If countries cannot draw on European funds for bank recapitalization, more countries, including France, will be dragged deeper into debt.
Unless they grow a set of balls and resist! Why should a well-run conservative country shoulder the burden of bailing out the other countries? And what the fuck is so wrong with defaulting on one's debt? Isn't that why the invented bankruptcy in the first place? And the idiot US investment banks that GAVE these fucked up countries the money - LET THEM TASTE THE SHIT THEY HAVE COOKED UP!
In July, European leaders agreed to increase the bailout fund to $600 billion. It is already inadequate. To meet the new challenges of Italy, Spain and bank recapitalization effectively, somewhere between $2 trillion to $3 trillion will be needed. Some of that may have to come from the European Central Bank.
Can remember no calls by the Times that the US bailout fund was inadequate (although it was).
At the same July summit meeting, Europe’s leaders acknowledged that some Greek debt was unpayable and proposed voluntary bond swaps that would write down Greek obligations by roughly 21 cents on the dollar. Markets now price those obligations at less than 50 cents on the dollar. Compelling creditors to acknowledge that reality would give Greece breathing room to promote growth.
If Europe’s leaders do not come up with a more robust plan, the judgment of global stock and credit markets is likely to be harsh and swift. Germany will be one of the biggest losers. It is time for Mrs. Merkel to acknowledge that truth — and do what is best for Germany and all of Europe.
GERMANY will be one of the biggest losers? How about US investment banks?
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Resist! No Imperialist Discourse on Defense! Represent Our Resistance By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
As I look around the world in 2002, I am even more aware today that behind the deceptive words designed to entice people into supporting violence - words like democracy, freedom, self-defense, national security - there is the reality of enormous wealth in the hands of a few, while billions of people in the world are hungry, sick, homeless. President Eisenhower, himself a warrior, in one of his better moments, called the billions spent on preparations for war ‘a theft’ from those who are without food, without shelter.
-Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train
‘I will believe corporations are people when Texas executes one if them.’
-Posters, Occupy Wall Street Movement
It is your home, so you believe.
A visitor stops at your door and knocks. You go to the door and, before you can say, Hello, he or she enters, looks around.
This is wonderful, beautiful. We can use it!
The visitor is talking, but not to you - you who wait, standing in wonder, think this is unreal. You start to speak but you hear the voice of the visitor. Is the visitor calculating? What is going on, you think.
The visitor walks back to the door, steps out, closes the door, and while you think about moving to the door or moving to the window, move one foot in front of another, step out of the space where you have remained, a spectator to your own submission… the door opens again. The Imperialist Machine does not wait! It always thinks in terms of MOVEments, for the visitor re-enters the house followed by others. Hundreds, thousands, millions of others replicate the visitor, make themselves at home, set up businesses in various rooms, set up a sanctuary, and a prison encampment area in case the former owner becomes disgruntled, angered.
You and yours can work for us!
And you are not asked how you feel, what you think, what are your goals and aspirations. The spokesperson among the visitors says, Mine! Ours! All the voices behind him or her in chorus, say, Ours!
Houses become villages, urban communities, and “sovereign” nations. The villages, urban communities, and “sovereign” nations become “mine” and “ours” because the Greek thinkers, physicians, mathematicians had said “mine” and “ours.”
“Mine” and “ours,” matter-of-factly, normally, universally raised the Roman Empire, enslavement and genocide, Napoleon’s army, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s fascist regimes.
The oppressed and development of the discourse on war accompanies each delusional idea of Ming-like conquest of lands, resources, and people. People frozen at the point of occupation begin to hear talk from the occupiers about defense. We are being shot at. We are being attacked!
The occupiers forget, conveniently, that they invaded the house, the village, community, and nation. The occupiers develop discourse around defending new-found territory, goals, and the flag. Troops, tanks, missiles, bombs, drones, and hundreds of thousands of troops arrive. Convoys of private contractors pull up, equipped to shoot-to-kill. Surveillance agencies set up surveillance equipment and whisper in the ears of your friends and neighbors, and co-workers. Money passes from one hand to the others.
Discourse on the enemy circulates with your picture, and lists of similar folk who similar to the enemy are exchanged and cross referenced at secret locations among personnel who are hidden in behind gates and armed guards. Targets similar to the occupied home, village, community, nation are circled on maps.
The occupiers forget the original scene that led to the war. Occupiers forget that the insurgency is responding to the occupation of home, village, community, and nation. The power to formulate and disseminate a discourse on defense, security, murders first the truth of the original crime. Out of sight, out of mind! Citizens learn the history of defense. All the new comers to the narrative of defense believe with all their hearts that they are defending their homeland.
Yesterday’s cross, diplomatic advisors, and military attaché are today’s troops, F-16s, drones, and the corporations.
This land is your land; this land is my land…
The rise of corporate capitalism’s global domination is as old a revolution as the crime of deceit by the few securing “peace” while spreading poverty among the many.
They want what’s “mine” and “ours”!
Reform is not resistance. To seek integration by requesting the return of a corner or even a room of the house, to request time at the dining room table, time in the kitchen, at the stove to cook a meal that is not for the occupier’s family, to crowd into a corner or room in the house, and then accept gratefully, permission to attend a school intended to educate the occupier’s children with a curriculum giving primacy to the occupier’s history of defense, is not resistance. It is insanity!
To resist is to take back the home or remain forever a second-class citizen, an “other,” always subject to the economic and legal apparatus of the occupier, economic and legal apparatuses established to secure more and more and protect and extend the gap between the occupier and the oppressed.
To fight the wars on behalf of the occupier, wasting valuable time and energy for the occupier’s electoral process, voting for the occupier’s appointed “peoples’” candidates is to engage in mindless battles intended to further enrich the occupiers while assuring the oppressed forget its own right to exist outside this insane paradigm.
The U.S. spends more on defense in the 21st Century than the “next 17 top-spending countries combined,” writes Dan Fromkin, (“Second to None,” Huffington Post, September 2011). Nick Turse writes, “whatever tactical successes have been achieved by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan have paled in comparison to strategic failures that have resulted in wheel-spinning occupations that continues to this day” (Alter Net, September 13, 2011). The wars have their “success stories,” he continues. “Companies behind the Aerospace Industries Association and its corporate chiefs…have seen the most success over the last 10 years of foreign conflict.”
Occupation is big business. Profitable business!
“Tens of trillions of dollars are consolidated within the hands of the economic top one-tenth of one percent of the population…U.S. millionaire households now have over $46 trillion in wealth, yet only one tenth of one percent of the population makes over #1 million per year” while over “50 million” Americans rely on food stamps and “62 million have zero or negative net worth and 64% of Americans have less than $1000 saved” (“The Richest 0.1% Have Launched A War On Us,” Ampedstatus.org, September 8, 2011).
In the meantime, at the President’s discretion, Presidential Directive 51 could put 400.000 NorthCom’s troops “on the streets of the United States in times of an emergency” (Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, September 10, 2011). What is an “emergency”?
National Security Presidential Directive 51 defines a ‘catastrophic emergency’ as ‘any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function (Rothschild).
That definition of a “catastrophic emergency” aptly describes the U.S.’s imperialism around the world: mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function…
We create this discourse on acceptable violence! Do not fight back! Accept the coup!
We must remember the late historian and activist, Dr. Howard Zinn, when he explained that his love was for the country, for the people, “not for whatever government happened to be in power” (You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times). The government, he continues, “is an artificial creation, established by the people to defend the equal right of everyone to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To defend the equal right of everyone…
When a government betrays those democratic principles, it is being unpatriotic. A love of democracy would then require opposing your government. It would require being ‘out of order.’
…Being out of order!
A disruption of this insanity is the only option! Young Americans have to come to see the insanity in reform or in the electoral process. Young Americans are saying NO! Young Americans have forged sites of resistance in cities throughout the U.S. They are organizing and educating themselves. They are linking their courage and commitment to the millions of people globally who have said No!
Say NO! You want your home back! You want democracy, freedom, and justice! You want an end to the Empire’s discourse on defense!
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.
The 2011 Occupy/Decolonize Moment By Dr. John Hayakawa Torok, JD, PhD
BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator
Occupy Wall Street (“OWS”) is a social movement begun September 17, 2011 by a handful of protestors who encamped at “Liberty Square” in lower Manhattan. In a month it has spread to over a thousand actions across the United States.
It is also denominated as the 99% as against the 1% of the wealthiest and highest earning Americans who, along with finance capital, are perceived as having excess power over U.S. and global governance. This 1% is identified as the source of the misery of the global majority.
Since its inception I have followed the uprising through social media and also in what she who shall not be named calls the lamestream media.
I have observed a general meeting or two at the Oakland and San Francisco, California, Occupy/Decolonize encampments. I have also visited the Berkeley encampment. This writing is solely my own reading based on these observations and others’ writings.
AdBusters and author/activist David Graeber are credited with providing the spark for the uprising.
The movement draws inspiration from other recent people’s rebellions like those of the Arab Spring particularly in Tunisia and Egypt, against austerity in Greece and France and the U.K., and Chile and Spain’s Indignados. Connections are also made to the global justice protests at Seattle, Toronto and elsewhere in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Solidarity statements and actions for OWS have already come from players in U.S. organized labor and the broader U.S. left.
Demonstrations of solidarity with OWS also occurred on October 15-16 in Lahore, Seoul, Madrid, London, Hong Kong, Rome, and elsewhere. Another global day of action is apparently being planned for October 29 to precede the next G20 summit scheduled at Cannes.
The ethos at the encampments I have visited and have seen described is radically egalitarian, participatory, and cooperative. They are open, evolving communities committed to non-violence because they are quite aware of the state’s repressive power. They are also sites for deep conversation, “free schools,” cultural performance and production, and even for dancing in the streets.
The carnival aspect does not derogate from these encampments’ projects of self-rule based on consensus, or at least an aspiration to that process of decision-making. To varying degrees
Occupy/Decolonize encampments assert autonomy from the state and thus eschew police presence and protection. In the U.S., the violence that has occurred has come from police repression.
Communications, like the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City, September 29, 2011, are also adopted through the consensus process. They receive wide distribution through social media networks nationally and globally. What other communiqués will emerge, and from where, remains open.
The decolonization critique of OWS has two components. The first is stated in the slogan, “Take Back Wall Street: Occupied Since 1625.” The major premise is that the economic and social development of the present U.S. order originates in white settler colonization. A minor premise is that the invention of racism served as ideological justification for both conquest and enslavement and that racism still prevails in Occupied America.
The second component is based on experiences, and criticism based on those experiences, by people of color participants in the Occupy general assemblies. This part of the critique centers how male, heterosexual, class, and especially white racial privilege exclude the histories and experiences of women and queer people of color in articulating the uprising’s politics.
Thus, a call to “Occupy America” obscures the histories of colonization and resistance that U.S. indigenous and people of color communities often carry with them. The slogan “Occupy Everywhere” also unfortunately evokes colonialist projects. The phrase “Occupy Together” – used by an unofficial online coordination project –avoids this danger by inviting everyone’s participation.
Participatory democracy and consensus-based decision-making require significant leisure. That leisure can come from wealth, or student status, or unemployment. Most with jobs or families – unless they are homeless and living in poverty - will find it difficult either to follow or to participate in the on-site Occupy/Decolonize conversations. That does not render the conversations unimportant.
By claiming to be the dispossessed and disenfranchised 99% - a claim that hundreds of thousands around the world have found compelling enough to find ways to support the movement and its physical articulation as local encampments including financially – the participants have clearly struck a nerve.
The opportunity that the Occupy/Decolonize encampments provide is for people from diverse racial backgrounds and class positions to learn together and articulate a new democratic politics to transform society. It is this potential unleashed by OWS for the liberatory imagination to work and to transform our world that has captured so many imaginations not only in the U.S. but in other countries as well.
BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator, Dr. John Hayakawa Torok, JD, PhD, is a critical race theorist and card-carrying member of the USA Green Party, who lives in Oakland, California. Click here to contact Dr. Torok.
Manifest Destiny on a Global Scale Sharp n’ Blunt By Desi Cortez
BlackCommentator.com Columnist
Give the people what they want.
America’s streets are, at long-last, being invaded, seized, alas occupied - by, can you believe it... White folks - who’ve just had that 2:37 in the AM wake-your-ass-up call; yes, either we all stand together... or we’ll all swing together. Believe it, this country’s “Everyday people” who sing-a-simple-ass song have been compelled to stand-up and speak-out... finally.
Power to the people...
Butchers, bakers and even college educated computer-chip makers seem to have heard the call, they’re coming to an hard-realization, an era-enlightenment; they too constitute the little people. The 99% of us who get-up and go to work everyday, some from can’t see to can’t see - and all this hard work, its not to thrive, but to merely survive... 1 maybe 2 paychecks from “Hit the road Jack n’ Jackie!”
And as far as Wall Street sees it, 99% of Americans... well, they’re expendable.
And who are the fat-rats who’ve betrayed “we, the people?”
It be the top-tier, the top 1% who’ve apparently little, if any loyalty to a - and this is critical - a darkening America. Nor will they adhere to any common rules of financial decency. Instead, these elitists have manipulated the rules of fair trade and commerce, hand-crafting an economic environment of unbridled, unchecked, cutthroat capitalism.
Greed gone wild.
Who’s to say where this “hi n’ all-so-mighty” mentality stems from? Perhaps from a number of sources; a historical sense-of privilege, a false-sense of overall human superiority, or flip-it, feelings of obvious inferiority. Nevertheless, America’s aristocrats have purchased “for sale” politicians, who’ve in turn done what they were instructed to do - sabotage the US economic system in order to fatten the already fat pockets of Rush Limbaugh obese fat-cats.
He who has the Gold, regardless of how the wealth / power was amassed... makes the rules. Believe it baby - that’s the rich White American man’s Way... all that glitters is Gold.
Yes, even atop the Manhattan skyscraper, on the 187th floor, or behind Piranha-stocked moats and gun-turret topped electrified walls surrounding lily-White communes... it’s all about livin’ a life full of nothin’ but bitchs n’ money.
Now, in-order to understand where this bleached-out Tony Montana “the world is mine” mentality may be rooted, look to no other then aspiring American Aristocrat Mitt Romney - the flexible, bend-over-able “Plastic Man” who’s rightfully catching hell because, yes, he does belong to a... religious “cult,” Mormonism, - even in the eyes his holier-then-thou bible-totin’ religious Rednecks on the “Far-Out Right” - yet that’s neither here nor there.
Here’s where the flip-flop, flim-flam man is on-the-money, as he recently summed-up the American global perspective of his country club comrade’s “rightful place.” "This century must be an American century. In an American century, America has the strongest economy and the strongest military in the world," Romney says. "God did not create this country to be a nation of followers. America is not destined to be one of several equally balanced global powers. America must lead the world, or someone else will.”
There! That mindset is what’s wrong with America - such a burning desire to lead, to dominate... dominate by any manipulative, diabolical means required. The Military / industrial / prison / pharmaceutical / energy / tech / finance complex... run-amok. What we’ve got here is 21st century Imperialism - instead of holding hands with the inhabitants of the world and singing “It’s A Small World.”
Clearly when Mitt and the Mormon Tabernacle choir sing, “He’s got the Whole World in His Hands” they don’t mean the Big “G” up in the sky’s hand... they mean their own mitts.
Mitt is fronting America’s self-proclaimed nobility, the landed-class, well-above gentry, but slightly below royalty - these are the greedy-ass bastards who’ve pulled the rug from beneath “real Americans,” the patriots protesting in America’s streets. Those people pushed there by the unscrupulous businessmen Romney “fronts” - who at the end of the day - seek to exploit economically all the semi-slaves on all-sides of the political spectrum, and who hope to see worker-ants on the Right at the throats of Worker-bees on the Left.
When Romney speaks of “global domination” he means financially first n’ foremost, followed by his version of American cultural being exported to the four-corners of the globe - forcing, via the barrel of a gun, all-the-world to assimilate and accommodate his twisted version of the American way of Life.
“Money is God, and God is money.”
Here, in the ol’ US of A, moo-lah is everything, and you do anything to have more of it. You can never, ever have too much cold-cash. Please note GE, General Electric, pulled every accounting trick in the book - in order to make 14.2 billion in profits last year... and not pay a red-nickle on it in taxes.
Their high class peers applauded them, while the stock-holding citizens could care less if their hard earned monies are invested in traitorous operations like GE, Whirlpool and countless other US business - who’ve moved tens-of-thousands of “build-a-dream-on” head-of-the-household 45 hours-a-week j-o-b-s to China, Mexico... Pluto - in some calculated cutthroat effort to increase their profit margins.
Just make mo’ money baby.
Now here, wait a minute. Can I make it funky? General Electrics’ Chief Executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is one of President Obama’s advisers for U.S. job creation...
And wait; can I get down one-more-time? Tell me, can I?
Herman Cain, yes the House Negro who sings ol’ southern serenades to the Daughters of the Confederacy crowds - who sits on various and numerous multinational corporate boards, as window dressin’, where he’s paid - about $400,000 a year to rubber-stamp the exodus of all those jobs - as he declares that US citizens who don’t have a job, or can’t attain the economic heights they seek, can’t seem to ever achieve the levels of financial security and stability they long for - we’ve no one to blame but ourselves.
Ain’t that a...
As Cain and his wealthy frat-brothers eliminate the societal tools needed to build an American Dream, they arrogantly taunt the masses, tell us to get-up off our lazy asses and work as hard as they do. Yeah right, that’s another one of those “don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s spring showers.”
The people gathering across America recognize who’s vying for the Oval Office and sadly who’s advising this current President - they understand the fox is in the hen-house. As a matter of fact, the Little Red Roster let him in the front door. The game is fixed, rigged, we’re set up to fail, born to lose.
Immelt, while having the ear of Obama - is no friend to the working man n’ woman. He’s wed to the interest of individuals who despise Organized labor and worker solidarity - he’s apart of the base corporate element who’d like to break the backbone of America’s working-class and middle-class, in-order to maximize Wall Street’s profits - and they predominate and dominate the US political scene.
And you can’t spit in this present White House without hitting one just like Immelt.
With allies fighting for the common folk like Immelt... who needs enemies like Eric Cantor, the Republican TEA Party Grand Pooh-Pah who has already displayed his arrogance and disconnection by branding the folks amassing in this country’s major metropolises. “I, for one, am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country,” Cantor said. “Believe it or not, some in this town have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans.”
Next Cantor, who at the whim of his master’s -The Koch brothers - elitists who fly no flag, harbor no loyalty towards this country’s workers - this political prostitute and his fellow congressman will call for the folks in the streets, the “mob” members to be barred from the streets, branded on their foreheads for easy identification, if not the out right extermination.
This is the line in the sand being drawn, right here before our eyes. The riff-raft... the unwashed masses, you n’ I, us - the 95%, or 98% deliberately pitted against America’s self-anointed royalty... the rich, who by mere coincidence, just happen to be white males, who find themselves atop the world.
BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Desi Cortez, was hatched in the heart of Dixie, circa 1961, at the dawning of the age of Aquarius, the by-product of four dynamic individuals, Raised in South-Central LA, the 213, at age 14 transplanted to the base of the Rockies, Denver. Still a Mile-Hi. Sat at the feet of scholars for many, many moons, emerging with a desire and direction… if not a sheep-skin. Meandered thru life; gone a-lot places, done a-lot of things, raised a man-cub into a good, strong man, produced a beautiful baby-girl with my lover/woman/soul-mate… aired my mind on the airwaves and wrote some stuff along the way. Click here to contact Desi.
Is Nuclear Power Really a Trump Card Against Global Warming? by TAKASHI HIROSE
OCTOBER 19, 2011
The Big Con
In recent years there seemed to be a nuclear power renaissance. One reason for this has been the adoption by its promoters of the theme of global warming, and their claim that nuclear power is clean energy because it does not produce carbon emissions. But is nuclear power in fact the clean-energy solution its promoters claim?
Only one third of the heat energy produced in a nuclear reactor is transformed into electricity. In Japan, the remaining two thirds of the energy that remains in the water vapor– that is, twice as much energy as contained in the generated electricity – is disposed of in the sea. In the cooling system, seawater is used to cool the water vapor, which condenses again to water and is circulated through the reactor once again. This heated seawater is called “thermal discharge”. How much heat does this thermal discharge carry into the sea? The amount is startling.
Before the Fukushima accident, that is, at the end of 2010, Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors were producing a total of 49,112,000 kilowatts of electricity. So every day they were throwing away twice that much, approximately 100,000,000 kilowatts of energy, in the form of heat, into the sea.
This means that every day they were pumping into the sea energy equivalent to 100 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. The Hiroshima bomb destroyed the city in an instant and ended the lives of some 140,000 people, but when energy 100 times that great is “dropped” into the sea daily, what effect does that have? That it would not be destructive of the ocean’s ecology is unimaginable. Before saying that “nuclear power plants supply one third of the demand for electricity”, it needs to be said that “twice as much energy as the electricity they produce is used to heat up the sea.”
I want to ask, what kind of global warming debate is it that never discusses this fact? In Japan, the number one global warming agent is the nuclear power plants.
After I left the company I was working for, I spent a long time translating medical books. In the 1970s I was translating books depicting the suffering of people whose health was damaged by environmental pollution, and at the same time through an agent was accepting work from industry. At that time I received a request from
TEPCO to translate a 1970s report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In it was the following passage.
“When thermal discharge from nuclear power plants is released into the sea, the heat does not immediately disperse. Rather it concentrates and remains suspended in what are called “hot spots”. For this reason it has a very large effect on sea life near the shore. In the shallows, even a difference of two or three degrees can kill fish eggs or young fish.”
I translated this English correctly and delivered the manuscript to TEPCO. The report of which it was a part was apparently suppressed within the company. To this day it has never appeared.
Moreover, the claim that nuclear power is a cheap form of energy is also untrue. Nuclear power plants are located far from the users of the electricity, so they require extraordinarily long transmission systems (In 1964 the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) stipulated that “Dangerous nuclear power plants must not be located in heavily populated areas”). The nuclear power plants that deliver electricity to the capital are the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini reactors, Niigata Prefecture’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa reactor, and Ibaragi Prefecture’s Tokai Daini reactor. The 14 nuclear power plants sending electricity to the Kansai (Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe) area are lined up along the faraway shore of the Japan Sea at Wakasa Bay, in Fukui Prefecture. When you take into account the transmission systems connecting the power plants with the metropolitan areas they serve, you cannot call it an inexpensive source of electricity.
Without Nuclear Power, Will There Be Blackouts?
After the Fukushima Daiichi accident, TEPCO carried out planned blackouts, and the Kan Naoto administration, “in order to avoid a major blackout due to electricity shortages in the summer months” is considering enacting measures enforcing limits on electricity consumption for the first time since the oil shock of 1974. This deep-seated “blackout fear” held by so many seems to be grounded in the idea that we must continue gingerly to maintain the nuclear power industry, which advertises itself as providing one-third of the country’s electricity. What I see in the opinion polls is the attitude, I don’t like living with nuclear power plants, but without them there is no way to get the electricity, so there’s nothing to be done because like they say, you can’t exchange your back for your belly.
This is a huge misunderstanding that must be corrected.
A survey by year of the generating capacity of Japan’s main sources of electrical power compared with the total amount of electricity demand tells a different story. In no year has the peak demand for electricity – that is, the demand for electricity in the hours between 2 and 3pm on the hottest days of summer – exceeded what could be provided by the combination of fossil fuel and water powered generators. Moreover, the highest recorded peak demand was in 2001, and has never been surpassed in the ten years since then. Rather, with the economic downturn, demand for electricity fell in 2008 and 2009.
From whence, then, comes the misunderstanding that nuclear power plants supply one third of the country’s electricity, and that without them there would be blackouts?. The answer sounds like a joke, but it is true: it is that while Japan has a very large capability for generating electricity from natural gas, these facilities have been intentionally kept operating at only 50-60 per cent of capacity. Among the major sources of electricity used in the advanced countries, natural gas is the cleanest. Then there are the petroleum powered plants; amazingly they are operating at only 10 to 20 per cent of their capacity. (This figure may sound unbelievable, but since the 1970s Oil Shock, most of the developed countries have a policy of reducing oil consumption as far as possible. Japan’s fossil fuel power plants use mainly coal and natural gas.) The idea that without nuclear power there would be blackouts is nonsense.
The reason TEPCO carried out intentional blackouts after the earthquake is that the fossil fuel reactors in the region also suffered temporary damage. No doubt there was also difficulty delivering fuel. But repairing fossil fuel power plants is nowhere near as difficult at repairing nuclear power plants. It’s just a matter of replacing damaged parts. Once repair work begins, it doesn’t take long before the plant is operating again. And once the fossil fuel plants are back on line, electricity demand is no problem.
After its nuclear plants were so badly damaged, TEPCO should have put its natural gas and petroleum plants into full operation, but it did not. Rather it carried out intentional blackouts, bringing confusion to the metropolitan area and bringing losses both to industry and to private citizens. In this it did not fulfill its responsibility as an electricity provider, and revealed a fundamental problem. And now we hear everywhere language fanning the fear of summertime blackouts, but this is only a false rumor being spread by people who know nothing of electrical power generation. (Translators note: in fact in the summer since this was written, there were no electrical blackouts in Japan.)
A natural gas power plant can be built in a few months. This was made clear in an article appearing the April 6, 2011 edition of Gasu Energii Shinbun (Gas Energy News) by Ishii Akira, head of the Energy and Environment Research Center, titled “After Fukushima, the Age of Natural Gas”. In this article, Ishii explains Japan’s energy situation from the standpoint of a professional. The Fukushima nuclear power plant accident took place on March 11. Why didn’t TEPCO begin immediately to take action to ensure that there would be no electrical shortage? If they couldn’t get it done in time, why did they not immediately ask the world’s largest manufacturer of natural gas power plants, America’s General Electric (GE) to do it for them? An electric company that can’t supply electricity to the public has no right to be called an electric company.
Nuclear power supporters will argue that the supply of natural gas is limited. But this too is the outdated opinion of one who does not know the energy industry. As Ishii Akira pointed out in an article of Feb 2, 2011 in Gas Energy News, new sources of natural gas are being discovered one after another all over the world. In the Mediterranean Sea, offshore from Madagascar, under the sea to the east of India, on the continental shelf in northwestern Australia, in Brazil, in Turkmenistan – in the ten years up to 2009 the world’s known supply of underground deposits has increased by close to 30 per cent. In addition to this natural gas supply, new, so-called non-traditional gases such as coal bed methane, tight sand gas, shale gas, and methane hydrate are being developed one after another. According to Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (which is dedicated to locating natural resources for Japan) the underground reserves of these new forms of natural gas total more than 922 trillion cubic meters, more than five times the reserves of traditional natural gas. No doubt there will be future discoveries one after another, so I would say that we have enough gas reserves alone to last well over 200 years.
The Big Con
In recent years there seemed to be a nuclear power renaissance. One reason for this has been the adoption by its promoters of the theme of global warming, and their claim that nuclear power is clean energy because it does not produce carbon emissions. But is nuclear power in fact the clean-energy solution its promoters claim?
Only one third of the heat energy produced in a nuclear reactor is transformed into electricity. In Japan, the remaining two thirds of the energy that remains in the water vapor– that is, twice as much energy as contained in the generated electricity – is disposed of in the sea. In the cooling system, seawater is used to cool the water vapor, which condenses again to water and is circulated through the reactor once again. This heated seawater is called “thermal discharge”. How much heat does this thermal discharge carry into the sea? The amount is startling.
Before the Fukushima accident, that is, at the end of 2010, Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors were producing a total of 49,112,000 kilowatts of electricity. So every day they were throwing away twice that much, approximately 100,000,000 kilowatts of energy, in the form of heat, into the sea.
This means that every day they were pumping into the sea energy equivalent to 100 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. The Hiroshima bomb destroyed the city in an instant and ended the lives of some 140,000 people, but when energy 100 times that great is “dropped” into the sea daily, what effect does that have? That it would not be destructive of the ocean’s ecology is unimaginable. Before saying that “nuclear power plants supply one third of the demand for electricity”, it needs to be said that “twice as much energy as the electricity they produce is used to heat up the sea.”
I want to ask, what kind of global warming debate is it that never discusses this fact? In Japan, the number one global warming agent is the nuclear power plants.
After I left the company I was working for, I spent a long time translating medical books. In the 1970s I was translating books depicting the suffering of people whose health was damaged by environmental pollution, and at the same time through an agent was accepting work from industry. At that time I received a request from
TEPCO to translate a 1970s report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In it was the following passage.
“When thermal discharge from nuclear power plants is released into the sea, the heat does not immediately disperse. Rather it concentrates and remains suspended in what are called “hot spots”. For this reason it has a very large effect on sea life near the shore. In the shallows, even a difference of two or three degrees can kill fish eggs or young fish.”
I translated this English correctly and delivered the manuscript to TEPCO. The report of which it was a part was apparently suppressed within the company. To this day it has never appeared.
Moreover, the claim that nuclear power is a cheap form of energy is also untrue. Nuclear power plants are located far from the users of the electricity, so they require extraordinarily long transmission systems (In 1964 the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) stipulated that “Dangerous nuclear power plants must not be located in heavily populated areas”). The nuclear power plants that deliver electricity to the capital are the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini reactors, Niigata Prefecture’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa reactor, and Ibaragi Prefecture’s Tokai Daini reactor. The 14 nuclear power plants sending electricity to the Kansai (Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe) area are lined up along the faraway shore of the Japan Sea at Wakasa Bay, in Fukui Prefecture. When you take into account the transmission systems connecting the power plants with the metropolitan areas they serve, you cannot call it an inexpensive source of electricity.
Without Nuclear Power, Will There Be Blackouts?
After the Fukushima Daiichi accident, TEPCO carried out planned blackouts, and the Kan Naoto administration, “in order to avoid a major blackout due to electricity shortages in the summer months” is considering enacting measures enforcing limits on electricity consumption for the first time since the oil shock of 1974. This deep-seated “blackout fear” held by so many seems to be grounded in the idea that we must continue gingerly to maintain the nuclear power industry, which advertises itself as providing one-third of the country’s electricity. What I see in the opinion polls is the attitude, I don’t like living with nuclear power plants, but without them there is no way to get the electricity, so there’s nothing to be done because like they say, you can’t exchange your back for your belly.
This is a huge misunderstanding that must be corrected.
A survey by year of the generating capacity of Japan’s main sources of electrical power compared with the total amount of electricity demand tells a different story. In no year has the peak demand for electricity – that is, the demand for electricity in the hours between 2 and 3pm on the hottest days of summer – exceeded what could be provided by the combination of fossil fuel and water powered generators. Moreover, the highest recorded peak demand was in 2001, and has never been surpassed in the ten years since then. Rather, with the economic downturn, demand for electricity fell in 2008 and 2009.
From whence, then, comes the misunderstanding that nuclear power plants supply one third of the country’s electricity, and that without them there would be blackouts?. The answer sounds like a joke, but it is true: it is that while Japan has a very large capability for generating electricity from natural gas, these facilities have been intentionally kept operating at only 50-60 per cent of capacity. Among the major sources of electricity used in the advanced countries, natural gas is the cleanest. Then there are the petroleum powered plants; amazingly they are operating at only 10 to 20 per cent of their capacity. (This figure may sound unbelievable, but since the 1970s Oil Shock, most of the developed countries have a policy of reducing oil consumption as far as possible. Japan’s fossil fuel power plants use mainly coal and natural gas.) The idea that without nuclear power there would be blackouts is nonsense.
The reason TEPCO carried out intentional blackouts after the earthquake is that the fossil fuel reactors in the region also suffered temporary damage. No doubt there was also difficulty delivering fuel. But repairing fossil fuel power plants is nowhere near as difficult at repairing nuclear power plants. It’s just a matter of replacing damaged parts. Once repair work begins, it doesn’t take long before the plant is operating again. And once the fossil fuel plants are back on line, electricity demand is no problem.
After its nuclear plants were so badly damaged, TEPCO should have put its natural gas and petroleum plants into full operation, but it did not. Rather it carried out intentional blackouts, bringing confusion to the metropolitan area and bringing losses both to industry and to private citizens. In this it did not fulfill its responsibility as an electricity provider, and revealed a fundamental problem. And now we hear everywhere language fanning the fear of summertime blackouts, but this is only a false rumor being spread by people who know nothing of electrical power generation. (Translators note: in fact in the summer since this was written, there were no electrical blackouts in Japan.)
A natural gas power plant can be built in a few months. This was made clear in an article appearing the April 6, 2011 edition of Gasu Energii Shinbun (Gas Energy News) by Ishii Akira, head of the Energy and Environment Research Center, titled “After Fukushima, the Age of Natural Gas”. In this article, Ishii explains Japan’s energy situation from the standpoint of a professional. The Fukushima nuclear power plant accident took place on March 11. Why didn’t TEPCO begin immediately to take action to ensure that there would be no electrical shortage? If they couldn’t get it done in time, why did they not immediately ask the world’s largest manufacturer of natural gas power plants, America’s General Electric (GE) to do it for them? An electric company that can’t supply electricity to the public has no right to be called an electric company.
Nuclear power supporters will argue that the supply of natural gas is limited. But this too is the outdated opinion of one who does not know the energy industry. As Ishii Akira pointed out in an article of Feb 2, 2011 in Gas Energy News, new sources of natural gas are being discovered one after another all over the world. In the Mediterranean Sea, offshore from Madagascar, under the sea to the east of India, on the continental shelf in northwestern Australia, in Brazil, in Turkmenistan – in the ten years up to 2009 the world’s known supply of underground deposits has increased by close to 30 per cent. In addition to this natural gas supply, new, so-called non-traditional gases such as coal bed methane, tight sand gas, shale gas, and methane hydrate are being developed one after another. According to Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (which is dedicated to locating natural resources for Japan) the underground reserves of these new forms of natural gas total more than 922 trillion cubic meters, more than five times the reserves of traditional natural gas. No doubt there will be future discoveries one after another, so I would say that we have enough gas reserves alone to last well over 200 years.
Translated by Douglas Lummis, ideaspeddler@gmail.com
Takashi Hirose can be contacted at takhi@jcom.home.ne.jp
This is excerpted from the concluding chapter of Takashi Hirose
Fukushima Meltdown: The World’s First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster now available in English from Amazon Kindle Books.
The Centegra Diaries: 3 August, 2011 - 13 August, 2011
While house cleaning, I FINALLY found my poetry written from the mental hospital to which I was confined from August 2-August 13 this past summer, during which time a memorial service was held for my mother, and her visitation was also held. She had a stroke, driving through the lovely countryside of Barrington Hills, IL, as we were returning from shopping at ALDI's where we had a most enjoyable time.
At the stop sign, her jaw went slack, her head went back, and her eyes rolled up into their sockets. I put a compress mirror under her nostrils, but she was not breathing. I dialed 9-1-1 on the cell, and they told me to lay her back. This I did, her foot was still firmly attached to the brake pedal, and was heavy to remove. Then they told me to get her to flat ground and administer mouth-to-mouth rescusitation. An angel who lived near by returned from his home to help. I tried, but could not get her to breath. The emergency vehicle arrived within six minutes of my call, and they tried for 25 minutes before driving her off to the hospital. In addition to her stroke, she had pneumonia in both lungs (she had congenitive heart failure), and this made it impossible for any air to enter her lungs. Four days later, they pulled the plug on her in the hospital. She never regained consciousness.
I sent out over 550 e-mails to keep people advised on her status. Our neighbors up the block stayed with her 10 hours a day in the visitors room, they held a constant vigil. But she was, for all practical intents and purposes, dead once she had the stroke, because she could not get any oxygen soon enough.
Fortunately, she and father had made plans for just such an event, and both of them have stipulated that there will be no extraordinary means applied to keep them alive in a vegatative state. So those choices were easy.
While in the hospital (for threatening to kill my parents' pastor, who had kicked me out of church back in February, for singing too high, and for talking to the praise band as they set up for 3rd service - and would not even let me enter the church where I was confirmed, and for 47 years a memmber - and only my mother even once came to my defense, on that Easter Sunday when the Roman Catholics let me be an usher, but the Lutherans would not even let me attend one of their services - so, I thought it inappropriate for the pastor to officiate her memorial service; he disagreed, as did my father and sister, which was very disappointing to me) we had an exercise where we were told to keep a free form writing journal. Until just this afternoon, I had lost track of where I had left it, but, voila! C'est ici!
WRITE ABOUT YOUR HOPES & DREAMS & GOALS
I hope to see my grandchildren (although as of now, I have none).
I dream to sing at the Super Dome
In New Orleans, Lousianna, in front of
40,000 ninth ward residents.
My goal is to stumble the
Fuck out of this nutzoid place
That allows Alchoholic-Bipolar-Weenie
Waggers out in three (working) days
But keeps me in for ever
And ever and evah
AH,
MEN?
****************************
(they would ultimately confine me for nine working days
(although all other patients were discharged within five
(they wanted me to take a $1,000+ injection rather than
(the $13 / month medications that I had taken for more
(than 10 years during which time my mood was stable
(and no one felt as if I had to be controled.
(Clearly, at some point in time, I stopped being a patient
(to be healed, and started to become a profit center
(to be exploited. Ass hole bastards!
**********************************
**********************************
Today, now, finally, it seems as if tomorrow
I shall be released (finally) from this
place of incarceration which is in no way
unpleasant and, in fact, offers me
the one thing (besides intimacy)
that I most crave - companionship.
And in this absolutely delightful circumstance
Fellowship too - the best of all companioships;
With cable TV, sometimes a mere backdrop,
And sometimes a focal point, an interesting
Collection of CDs, DVDx and cassettes, and a
Crowd which, for the most part, would accept
Whatever - no one's in control of the remote
And every one's in control, and snacks and
Drinks (nno booze, no surprise, no coffee regular, dammit
(to hell in a hand basket and back) are available
Virtually 24/7, and you can wander the halls
Even after lights out, and talk, again, even after
Lights out, in hushed tones
So I'm going to miss this place
More than I'll ever miss my mother
albeit only Loopy Audrey (Who is in
No manner Loopy) and pot-headed Sue
afre left, and one of my favorites,
Tree-man-Mike, has displayed enough
Anger issues to have his discharge
Revoked (WHEW - he barely made it out).
So what will I take from this (experience)?
Five friends - four girls and Tom S.
Who will share with me the Magical
Mystery Tour
Just about time
To hop on the bus
FLY AWAY
FLY AWAY
FLY AWAY
(And always - to visit pot-head Sue)
************************************
************************************
LIKE SHEEP TO THE SLAUGHTER
Pot-head Sue (the former care giver) was kind enough
to gently put the crappy socks they dole out
here on my feet. With this particular second
shift crew, I probably could have made it
past 7:00 am without being told to stuff
'em into socks. But, I don't want to cause trouble.
And they have kindly asked, twice already,
"Mark, would you please put your socks on? We
"know not what evil stuff resides 'twixt the tiles."
But, as with most things, I need help to put
on my socks - either a chair to sit in (end
even then, it's a stretch), or a step to step up
on, since my overly fat belly is an
obstacle to socking up. And also to
wiping my ass after I shit. Sad state
of affairs.
But, Angel Pot-Head Sue is here now for me,
and freely offers to have socks with me,
and thus I with her, and, sadly to say,
this as as erotic as anything I have
engaged in (with a woman) since August, 2008,
with my beloved Natalie Jean, in Galesburg.
I need a dog. Amen.
******************************
******************************
******************************
At the stop sign, her jaw went slack, her head went back, and her eyes rolled up into their sockets. I put a compress mirror under her nostrils, but she was not breathing. I dialed 9-1-1 on the cell, and they told me to lay her back. This I did, her foot was still firmly attached to the brake pedal, and was heavy to remove. Then they told me to get her to flat ground and administer mouth-to-mouth rescusitation. An angel who lived near by returned from his home to help. I tried, but could not get her to breath. The emergency vehicle arrived within six minutes of my call, and they tried for 25 minutes before driving her off to the hospital. In addition to her stroke, she had pneumonia in both lungs (she had congenitive heart failure), and this made it impossible for any air to enter her lungs. Four days later, they pulled the plug on her in the hospital. She never regained consciousness.
I sent out over 550 e-mails to keep people advised on her status. Our neighbors up the block stayed with her 10 hours a day in the visitors room, they held a constant vigil. But she was, for all practical intents and purposes, dead once she had the stroke, because she could not get any oxygen soon enough.
Fortunately, she and father had made plans for just such an event, and both of them have stipulated that there will be no extraordinary means applied to keep them alive in a vegatative state. So those choices were easy.
While in the hospital (for threatening to kill my parents' pastor, who had kicked me out of church back in February, for singing too high, and for talking to the praise band as they set up for 3rd service - and would not even let me enter the church where I was confirmed, and for 47 years a memmber - and only my mother even once came to my defense, on that Easter Sunday when the Roman Catholics let me be an usher, but the Lutherans would not even let me attend one of their services - so, I thought it inappropriate for the pastor to officiate her memorial service; he disagreed, as did my father and sister, which was very disappointing to me) we had an exercise where we were told to keep a free form writing journal. Until just this afternoon, I had lost track of where I had left it, but, voila! C'est ici!
WRITE ABOUT YOUR HOPES & DREAMS & GOALS
I hope to see my grandchildren (although as of now, I have none).
I dream to sing at the Super Dome
In New Orleans, Lousianna, in front of
40,000 ninth ward residents.
My goal is to stumble the
Fuck out of this nutzoid place
That allows Alchoholic-Bipolar-Weenie
Waggers out in three (working) days
But keeps me in for ever
And ever and evah
AH,
MEN?
****************************
(they would ultimately confine me for nine working days
(although all other patients were discharged within five
(they wanted me to take a $1,000+ injection rather than
(the $13 / month medications that I had taken for more
(than 10 years during which time my mood was stable
(and no one felt as if I had to be controled.
(Clearly, at some point in time, I stopped being a patient
(to be healed, and started to become a profit center
(to be exploited. Ass hole bastards!
**********************************
**********************************
Today, now, finally, it seems as if tomorrow
I shall be released (finally) from this
place of incarceration which is in no way
unpleasant and, in fact, offers me
the one thing (besides intimacy)
that I most crave - companionship.
And in this absolutely delightful circumstance
Fellowship too - the best of all companioships;
With cable TV, sometimes a mere backdrop,
And sometimes a focal point, an interesting
Collection of CDs, DVDx and cassettes, and a
Crowd which, for the most part, would accept
Whatever - no one's in control of the remote
And every one's in control, and snacks and
Drinks (nno booze, no surprise, no coffee regular, dammit
(to hell in a hand basket and back) are available
Virtually 24/7, and you can wander the halls
Even after lights out, and talk, again, even after
Lights out, in hushed tones
So I'm going to miss this place
More than I'll ever miss my mother
albeit only Loopy Audrey (Who is in
No manner Loopy) and pot-headed Sue
afre left, and one of my favorites,
Tree-man-Mike, has displayed enough
Anger issues to have his discharge
Revoked (WHEW - he barely made it out).
So what will I take from this (experience)?
Five friends - four girls and Tom S.
Who will share with me the Magical
Mystery Tour
Just about time
To hop on the bus
FLY AWAY
FLY AWAY
FLY AWAY
(And always - to visit pot-head Sue)
************************************
************************************
LIKE SHEEP TO THE SLAUGHTER
Pot-head Sue (the former care giver) was kind enough
to gently put the crappy socks they dole out
here on my feet. With this particular second
shift crew, I probably could have made it
past 7:00 am without being told to stuff
'em into socks. But, I don't want to cause trouble.
And they have kindly asked, twice already,
"Mark, would you please put your socks on? We
"know not what evil stuff resides 'twixt the tiles."
But, as with most things, I need help to put
on my socks - either a chair to sit in (end
even then, it's a stretch), or a step to step up
on, since my overly fat belly is an
obstacle to socking up. And also to
wiping my ass after I shit. Sad state
of affairs.
But, Angel Pot-Head Sue is here now for me,
and freely offers to have socks with me,
and thus I with her, and, sadly to say,
this as as erotic as anything I have
engaged in (with a woman) since August, 2008,
with my beloved Natalie Jean, in Galesburg.
I need a dog. Amen.
******************************
******************************
******************************
How to Spin a Plot by GARETH PORTER
OCTOBER 17, 2011
U.S. Officials Peddle False Intel to Support Terror Plot Claims
Officials of the Barack Obama administration have aggressively leaked information supposedly based on classified intelligence in recent days to bolster its allegation that two higher- ranking officials from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were involved in a plot to assassinate Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in Washington, D.C.
The media stories generated by the leaks helped divert press attention from the fact that there is no verifiable evidence of any official Iranian involvement in the alleged assassination plan, contrary to the broad claim being made by the administration.
But the information about the two Iranian officials leaked to NBC News, the Washington Post and Reuters was unambiguously false and misleading, as confirmed by official documents in one case and a former senior intelligence and counterterrorism official in the other.
The main target of the official leaks was Abdul Reza Shahlai, who was identified publicly by the Obama administration as a “deputy commander in the Quds Force” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Shahlai had long been regarded by U.S. officials as a key figure in the Quds Force’s relationship to Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Iraq.
The primary objective of the FBI sting operation involving Iranian- American Manssor Arbabsiar and a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant that was started last June now appears to have been to use Arbabsiar to implicate Shahlai in a terror plot.
U.S. officials had learned from the DEA informant that Arbabsiar claimed that Shahlai was his cousin.
In September 2008, the Treasury Department designated Shahlai as an individual “providing financial, material and technical support for acts of violence that threaten the peace and stability of Iraq” and thus subject to specific financial sanctions. The announcement said Shahlai had provided “material support” to the Mahdi Army in 2006 and that he had “planned the Jan. 20, 2007 attack” by Mahdi Army “Special Groups” on U.S. troops at the Provincial Coordination Center in Karbala, Iraq.
Arbabsiar’s confession claims that Shahlai approached him in early spring 2011 and asked him to find “someone in the narcotics business” to kidnap the Saudi ambassador to the United States, according to the FBI account. Arbabsiar implicates Shahlai in providing him with thousands of dollars for his expenses.
But Arbabsiar’s charge against Shahlai was self-interested. Arbabsiar had become the cornerstone of the administration’s case against Shahlai in order to obtain leniency on charges against him.
There is no indication in the FBI account of the investigation that there is any independent evidence to support Arbabsiar’s claim of Shahlai’s involvement in a plan to kill the ambassador.
The Obama administration planted stories suggesting that Shahlai had a terrorist past, and that it was therefore credible that he could be part of an assassination plot.
Laying the foundation for press stories on the theme, the Treasury Department announced Tuesday that it was sanctioning Shahlai, along with Arbabsiar and three other Quds Force officials, including the head of the organisation, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, for being “connected to” the assassination plot.
But Michael Issikof of NBC News reported the same day that Shahlai “had previously been accused of plotting a highly sophisticated attack that killed five U.S. soldiers in Iraq, according to U.S. government officials and documents made public Tuesday afternoon”.
Isikoff, who is called “National Investigative Correspondent” at NBC News, reported that the Treasury Department had designated Shahlai as a “terrorist” in 2008, despite the fact that the Treasury announcement of the designation had not used the term “terrorist”.
On Saturday, the Washington Post published a report closely paralleling the Issikof story but going even further in claiming documentary proof of Shahlai’s responsibility for the January 2007 attack in Karbala. Post reporter Peter Finn wrote that Shahlai “was known as the guiding hand behind an elite militia of the cleric Moqtada al Sadr”, which had carried out an attack on U.S. troops in Karbala in January 2007.
Finn cited the fact that the Treasury Department named Shahlai as the “final approving and coordinating authority” for training Sadr’s militiamen in Iran. That fact would not in itself be evidence of involvement in a specific attack on U.S. forces. On the contrary, it would suggest that he was not involved in operational aspects of the Mahdi Army in Iraq.
Finn then referred to a “22-page memo that detailed preparations for the operation and tied it to the Quds Force….” But he didn’t refer to any evidence that Shahlai personally had anything to do with the operation.
In fact, U.S. officials acknowledged in the months after the Karbala attack that they had found no evidence of any Iranian involvement in the operation.
Talking with reporters about the memo on Apr. 26, 2007, several weeks after it had been captured, Gen. David Petraeus conceded that it did not show that any Iranian official was linked to the planning of the Karbala operation. When a journalist asked him whether there was evidence of Iranian involvement in the Karbala operation, Petraeus responded, “No. No. No… [W]e do not have a direct link to Iran involvement in that particular case.”
In a news briefing in Baghdad Jul. 2, 2007, Gen. Kevin Bergner confirmed that the attack in Karbala had been authorised by the Iraqi chief of the militia in question, Kais Khazali, not by any Iranian official.
Col. Michael X. Garrett, who had been commander of the U.S. Fourth Brigade combat team in Karbala, confirmed to this writer in December 2008 that the Karbala attack “was definitely an inside job”.
Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, is on the list of those Iranian officials “linked” to the alleged terror plot, because he “oversees the IRGC-QF officers who were involved in this plot” , as the Treasury Department announcement explained. But a Reuters story on Friday reported a claim of U.S. intelligence that two wire transfers totaling 100,000 dollars at the behest of Arbabsiar to a bank account controlled by the FBI implicates Soleimani in the assassination plot.
“While details are still classified,” wrote Mark Hosenball and Caren Bohan, “one official said the wire transfers apparently had some kind of hallmark indicating they were personally approved” by Soleimani.
But the suggestion that forensic examination of the wire transfers could somehow show who had approved them is misleading. The wire transfers were from two separate non-Iranian banks in a foreign country, according to the FBI’s account. It would be impossible to deduce who approved the transfer by looking at the documents.
“I have no idea what such a ‘hallmark’ could be,” said Paul Pillar, a former head of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center who was also National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East until his retirement in 2005.
Pillar told IPS that the “hallmark” notion “pops up frequently in commentary after actual terrorist attacks,”, but the concept is usually invoked “along the lines of ‘the method used in this attack had the hallmark of group such and such’.”
That “hallmark” idea “assumes exclusive ownership of a method of attack which does not really exist,” said Pillar. “I expect the same could be said of methods of transferring money.”
U.S. Officials Peddle False Intel to Support Terror Plot Claims
Officials of the Barack Obama administration have aggressively leaked information supposedly based on classified intelligence in recent days to bolster its allegation that two higher- ranking officials from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were involved in a plot to assassinate Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in Washington, D.C.
The media stories generated by the leaks helped divert press attention from the fact that there is no verifiable evidence of any official Iranian involvement in the alleged assassination plan, contrary to the broad claim being made by the administration.
But the information about the two Iranian officials leaked to NBC News, the Washington Post and Reuters was unambiguously false and misleading, as confirmed by official documents in one case and a former senior intelligence and counterterrorism official in the other.
The main target of the official leaks was Abdul Reza Shahlai, who was identified publicly by the Obama administration as a “deputy commander in the Quds Force” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Shahlai had long been regarded by U.S. officials as a key figure in the Quds Force’s relationship to Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Iraq.
The primary objective of the FBI sting operation involving Iranian- American Manssor Arbabsiar and a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant that was started last June now appears to have been to use Arbabsiar to implicate Shahlai in a terror plot.
U.S. officials had learned from the DEA informant that Arbabsiar claimed that Shahlai was his cousin.
In September 2008, the Treasury Department designated Shahlai as an individual “providing financial, material and technical support for acts of violence that threaten the peace and stability of Iraq” and thus subject to specific financial sanctions. The announcement said Shahlai had provided “material support” to the Mahdi Army in 2006 and that he had “planned the Jan. 20, 2007 attack” by Mahdi Army “Special Groups” on U.S. troops at the Provincial Coordination Center in Karbala, Iraq.
Arbabsiar’s confession claims that Shahlai approached him in early spring 2011 and asked him to find “someone in the narcotics business” to kidnap the Saudi ambassador to the United States, according to the FBI account. Arbabsiar implicates Shahlai in providing him with thousands of dollars for his expenses.
But Arbabsiar’s charge against Shahlai was self-interested. Arbabsiar had become the cornerstone of the administration’s case against Shahlai in order to obtain leniency on charges against him.
There is no indication in the FBI account of the investigation that there is any independent evidence to support Arbabsiar’s claim of Shahlai’s involvement in a plan to kill the ambassador.
The Obama administration planted stories suggesting that Shahlai had a terrorist past, and that it was therefore credible that he could be part of an assassination plot.
Laying the foundation for press stories on the theme, the Treasury Department announced Tuesday that it was sanctioning Shahlai, along with Arbabsiar and three other Quds Force officials, including the head of the organisation, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, for being “connected to” the assassination plot.
But Michael Issikof of NBC News reported the same day that Shahlai “had previously been accused of plotting a highly sophisticated attack that killed five U.S. soldiers in Iraq, according to U.S. government officials and documents made public Tuesday afternoon”.
Isikoff, who is called “National Investigative Correspondent” at NBC News, reported that the Treasury Department had designated Shahlai as a “terrorist” in 2008, despite the fact that the Treasury announcement of the designation had not used the term “terrorist”.
On Saturday, the Washington Post published a report closely paralleling the Issikof story but going even further in claiming documentary proof of Shahlai’s responsibility for the January 2007 attack in Karbala. Post reporter Peter Finn wrote that Shahlai “was known as the guiding hand behind an elite militia of the cleric Moqtada al Sadr”, which had carried out an attack on U.S. troops in Karbala in January 2007.
Finn cited the fact that the Treasury Department named Shahlai as the “final approving and coordinating authority” for training Sadr’s militiamen in Iran. That fact would not in itself be evidence of involvement in a specific attack on U.S. forces. On the contrary, it would suggest that he was not involved in operational aspects of the Mahdi Army in Iraq.
Finn then referred to a “22-page memo that detailed preparations for the operation and tied it to the Quds Force….” But he didn’t refer to any evidence that Shahlai personally had anything to do with the operation.
In fact, U.S. officials acknowledged in the months after the Karbala attack that they had found no evidence of any Iranian involvement in the operation.
Talking with reporters about the memo on Apr. 26, 2007, several weeks after it had been captured, Gen. David Petraeus conceded that it did not show that any Iranian official was linked to the planning of the Karbala operation. When a journalist asked him whether there was evidence of Iranian involvement in the Karbala operation, Petraeus responded, “No. No. No… [W]e do not have a direct link to Iran involvement in that particular case.”
In a news briefing in Baghdad Jul. 2, 2007, Gen. Kevin Bergner confirmed that the attack in Karbala had been authorised by the Iraqi chief of the militia in question, Kais Khazali, not by any Iranian official.
Col. Michael X. Garrett, who had been commander of the U.S. Fourth Brigade combat team in Karbala, confirmed to this writer in December 2008 that the Karbala attack “was definitely an inside job”.
Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, is on the list of those Iranian officials “linked” to the alleged terror plot, because he “oversees the IRGC-QF officers who were involved in this plot” , as the Treasury Department announcement explained. But a Reuters story on Friday reported a claim of U.S. intelligence that two wire transfers totaling 100,000 dollars at the behest of Arbabsiar to a bank account controlled by the FBI implicates Soleimani in the assassination plot.
“While details are still classified,” wrote Mark Hosenball and Caren Bohan, “one official said the wire transfers apparently had some kind of hallmark indicating they were personally approved” by Soleimani.
But the suggestion that forensic examination of the wire transfers could somehow show who had approved them is misleading. The wire transfers were from two separate non-Iranian banks in a foreign country, according to the FBI’s account. It would be impossible to deduce who approved the transfer by looking at the documents.
“I have no idea what such a ‘hallmark’ could be,” said Paul Pillar, a former head of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center who was also National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East until his retirement in 2005.
Pillar told IPS that the “hallmark” notion “pops up frequently in commentary after actual terrorist attacks,”, but the concept is usually invoked “along the lines of ‘the method used in this attack had the hallmark of group such and such’.”
That “hallmark” idea “assumes exclusive ownership of a method of attack which does not really exist,” said Pillar. “I expect the same could be said of methods of transferring money.”
GARETH PORTER is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam“, was published in 2006.
Thoughts on Yom Kippur The Coming Shock by URI AVNERY
OCTOBER 17, 2011
ON YOM KIPPUR eve last week, when real Jews were praying for their lives, I sat on the seashore of Tel Aviv, thinking.
It was my first Yom Kippur without Rachel, and the dark water reflected my mood.
I was thinking about our state, the State of Israel, in which I have, so to speak, a founder’s share.
Will it endure? Will it be here in another 100 years? Or is it a passing episode, a historic fluke?
When asked for his assessment of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai famously replied: “It’s too early to tell.”
The Zionist Revolution – and that’s what it was – started more than a hundred years after the French one. It is certainly much too early to tell.
* * *
ONCE, IN a more cheerful mood, I told my friends: “Perhaps we are all wrong. Perhaps Israel is not really the final shape of the Zionist enterprise. Like the planners of every great project, the Zionists decided first to build a ‘pilot’, a prototype, in order to test their scheme. Actually, we Israelis are only guinea pigs. Sooner or later another Theodor Herzl will come by and, after analyzing the faults and mistakes of this experiment, will draw up the blueprint of the real state, which will be far superior.”
Herzl 2 will start by asking: where did Herzl 1 go wrong?
Herzl 1 visited Palestine only once, and that only for the express purpose of meeting the German emperor, whom he wanted to enlist for his enterprise. The Kaiser insisted on seeing him at the gate of Jerusalem, listened patiently to what he had to say and then purportedly commented to his aides: “It’s a grand idea, but you can’t do it with Jews!”
He meant the Jews he knew – the members of a world-wide religious-ethnic community. Herzl intended to turn these into a modern-style nation, like the other modern nations of Europe.
Herzl was not a profound thinker, he was a journalist and dramatist. He – and his successors – saw the necessary transformation as basically a question of logistics. Get the Jews to Palestine, and everything will fall into place automatically. The Jews will become a normal people, a people (“Volk”) like other peoples. A nation among nations.
* * *
BUT THE Jews of his day were neither a people nor a nation. They were something rather different.
Whilst anomalous in 19th century Europe, the Jewish Diaspora was quite normal 2000 years earlier. The large-scale social structure of that time was a network of Diasporas – autonomous religious-ethnic entities dispersed throughout the “civilized” (Mediterranean) world. The ruling empires – Persian, Alexandrine, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman – recognized them as the natural fabric of society.
Nations in the modern territorial sense were then inconceivable. A Jew in Jerusalem did not belong to the same society as a Hellenist in Caesarea, only a hundred miles away. A Christian man in Alexandria could not marry the Jewish girl next door, but she could marry a Jewish man in far-away Antiochia.
Since then, Europe has changed many times, until the emergence of the modern nations. The Jews did not change. When Herzl looked for a solution to the “Jewish problem”, they were still the same ethnic-religious Diaspora.
No problem, he thought, once I get them to Palestine, they will change.
BUT AN ethnic-religious community, living for millennia as a persecuted minority in a hostile environment, acquires a mentality of its own. It fears the “Goyish” government, the source of unending evil edicts. It sees everyone outside the community as a potential enemy, unless proven otherwise (and even then). It develops an intense sense of solidarity with members of its own community, even a thousand miles away, supporting them through thick and thin, whatever they do. In their helpless situation, the persecuted dream of a day of revenge, when they can do unto others as others have done unto them.
All this pervades their world-view, their religion and their traditions, transmitted from generation to generation. Jews have prayed to God for centuries, year after year, on Pesach eve: “Pour your wrath upon the Goyim…”
When the Zionists started to arrive and founded the new community, called the “Yishuv” (settlement), it seemed that Herzl had been right. They started to behave like the embryo of a real nation. They discarded religion and despised the Diaspora. To be called “exile Jew” was the worst possible insult. They saw themselves as “Hebrew”, rather then Jewish. They started to build a new society and a new culture.
And then the awful thing happened: the Holocaust.
It brought all the old Jewish convictions back with a vengeance. Not only the Germans were the guilty, but all the nations who looked on and did not lift a finger to save the victims. So all the old beliefs were true after all: the whole world is against the Jews, we must defend ourselves whatever it takes, we can only rely on ourselves. The attitude of the Yishuv towards Jewishness and the Diaspora was a terrible mistake, we must repent and embrace everything we despised only yesterday: Jewish religion, Jewish traditions, the Jewish Shtetl.
The late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an observant Jew, maintained that the Jewish religion had died 200 years ago, and that the one thing that linked the Jews all over the world was the Holocaust.
Right from its founding, the State of Israel became the Holocaust-state. But we are not a helpless ghetto anymore – we have powerful armed forces, we can indeed do unto others as others have done unto us.
The old existential fears, mistrusts, suspicions, hatreds, prejudices, stereotypes, sense of victimhood, dreams of revenge, that were born in the Diaspora, have superimposed themselves on the state, creating a very dangerous mixture of power and victimhood, brutality and masochism, militarism and the conviction that the whole world is against us. A ghetto with nuclear weapons.
* * *
CAN SUCH a state survive and flourish in the modern world?
European nation-states have fought many wars. But they never forgot that after a war comes peace, that today’s enemy may well be tomorrow’s ally. Nation-states remain, but they are becoming more and more interdependent, joining regional structures, giving up huge chunks of their sovereignty.
Israel cannot do that. Public opinion polls show that the vast majority of Israelis believe that there will never be peace. Not tomorrow, not in a hundred years. They are convinced that “the Arabs” are out to throw us into the sea. They see mighty Israel as the victim surrounded by enemies, while our “friends” are liable to stick a knife in our back any time. They see the eternal occupation of Palestinian territories and the setting up of belligerent settlements all over Palestine as a result of Arab intransigence, not as its cause. They are supported in blind solidarity by most of the Jews around the world.
Almost all Israeli parties, including the main opposition, insist that Israel be recognized as the “nation-state of the Jewish people”. This means that Israel does not belong to the Israelis (the very concept of an “Israeli nation” is officially rejected by our government) but to the worldwide ethnic-religious Jewish Diaspora, who have never been asked whether they agree to Israel representing them. It is the very negation of a real nation-state that can live in peace with its neighbors and join a regional union.
* * *
I HAVE never labored under any illusions about the magnitude of the task my friends and I set ourselves decades ago. It is not to change this or that aspect of Israel, but to change the fundamental nature of the state Itself.
It is far more than a matter of politics, to substitute one party for another. It is even far more than making peace with the Palestinian people, ending the occupation, evacuating the settlements. It is to effect a basic change of [or “in”] the national consciousness, the consciousness of every Israeli man and woman.
It has been said that “you can get the Jews out of the ghetto, but you can’t get the ghetto out of the Jews.” But that is exactly what needs to be done.
Can it be done? I think so. I certainly hope so.
Perhaps we need a shock – either a positive or a negative one. The appearance here of Anwar Sadat in 1977 can serve as an example of a positive shock: by coming to Jerusalem while a state of war was still in effect, he produced an overnight change in the consciousness of Israelis. So did the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in 1993. So did, in a negative way, the Yom Kippur war, exactly 38 years ago, which shook Israel to the core. But these were minor, brief shocks compared to what is needed.
A Second Herzl could, perhaps, effect such a miracle, against the odds. In the words of the first Herzl: “If you want it, It is not a fairy tale.”
ON YOM KIPPUR eve last week, when real Jews were praying for their lives, I sat on the seashore of Tel Aviv, thinking.
It was my first Yom Kippur without Rachel, and the dark water reflected my mood.
I was thinking about our state, the State of Israel, in which I have, so to speak, a founder’s share.
Will it endure? Will it be here in another 100 years? Or is it a passing episode, a historic fluke?
When asked for his assessment of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai famously replied: “It’s too early to tell.”
The Zionist Revolution – and that’s what it was – started more than a hundred years after the French one. It is certainly much too early to tell.
* * *
ONCE, IN a more cheerful mood, I told my friends: “Perhaps we are all wrong. Perhaps Israel is not really the final shape of the Zionist enterprise. Like the planners of every great project, the Zionists decided first to build a ‘pilot’, a prototype, in order to test their scheme. Actually, we Israelis are only guinea pigs. Sooner or later another Theodor Herzl will come by and, after analyzing the faults and mistakes of this experiment, will draw up the blueprint of the real state, which will be far superior.”
Herzl 2 will start by asking: where did Herzl 1 go wrong?
Herzl 1 visited Palestine only once, and that only for the express purpose of meeting the German emperor, whom he wanted to enlist for his enterprise. The Kaiser insisted on seeing him at the gate of Jerusalem, listened patiently to what he had to say and then purportedly commented to his aides: “It’s a grand idea, but you can’t do it with Jews!”
He meant the Jews he knew – the members of a world-wide religious-ethnic community. Herzl intended to turn these into a modern-style nation, like the other modern nations of Europe.
Herzl was not a profound thinker, he was a journalist and dramatist. He – and his successors – saw the necessary transformation as basically a question of logistics. Get the Jews to Palestine, and everything will fall into place automatically. The Jews will become a normal people, a people (“Volk”) like other peoples. A nation among nations.
* * *
BUT THE Jews of his day were neither a people nor a nation. They were something rather different.
Whilst anomalous in 19th century Europe, the Jewish Diaspora was quite normal 2000 years earlier. The large-scale social structure of that time was a network of Diasporas – autonomous religious-ethnic entities dispersed throughout the “civilized” (Mediterranean) world. The ruling empires – Persian, Alexandrine, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman – recognized them as the natural fabric of society.
Nations in the modern territorial sense were then inconceivable. A Jew in Jerusalem did not belong to the same society as a Hellenist in Caesarea, only a hundred miles away. A Christian man in Alexandria could not marry the Jewish girl next door, but she could marry a Jewish man in far-away Antiochia.
Since then, Europe has changed many times, until the emergence of the modern nations. The Jews did not change. When Herzl looked for a solution to the “Jewish problem”, they were still the same ethnic-religious Diaspora.
No problem, he thought, once I get them to Palestine, they will change.
BUT AN ethnic-religious community, living for millennia as a persecuted minority in a hostile environment, acquires a mentality of its own. It fears the “Goyish” government, the source of unending evil edicts. It sees everyone outside the community as a potential enemy, unless proven otherwise (and even then). It develops an intense sense of solidarity with members of its own community, even a thousand miles away, supporting them through thick and thin, whatever they do. In their helpless situation, the persecuted dream of a day of revenge, when they can do unto others as others have done unto them.
All this pervades their world-view, their religion and their traditions, transmitted from generation to generation. Jews have prayed to God for centuries, year after year, on Pesach eve: “Pour your wrath upon the Goyim…”
When the Zionists started to arrive and founded the new community, called the “Yishuv” (settlement), it seemed that Herzl had been right. They started to behave like the embryo of a real nation. They discarded religion and despised the Diaspora. To be called “exile Jew” was the worst possible insult. They saw themselves as “Hebrew”, rather then Jewish. They started to build a new society and a new culture.
And then the awful thing happened: the Holocaust.
It brought all the old Jewish convictions back with a vengeance. Not only the Germans were the guilty, but all the nations who looked on and did not lift a finger to save the victims. So all the old beliefs were true after all: the whole world is against the Jews, we must defend ourselves whatever it takes, we can only rely on ourselves. The attitude of the Yishuv towards Jewishness and the Diaspora was a terrible mistake, we must repent and embrace everything we despised only yesterday: Jewish religion, Jewish traditions, the Jewish Shtetl.
The late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an observant Jew, maintained that the Jewish religion had died 200 years ago, and that the one thing that linked the Jews all over the world was the Holocaust.
Right from its founding, the State of Israel became the Holocaust-state. But we are not a helpless ghetto anymore – we have powerful armed forces, we can indeed do unto others as others have done unto us.
The old existential fears, mistrusts, suspicions, hatreds, prejudices, stereotypes, sense of victimhood, dreams of revenge, that were born in the Diaspora, have superimposed themselves on the state, creating a very dangerous mixture of power and victimhood, brutality and masochism, militarism and the conviction that the whole world is against us. A ghetto with nuclear weapons.
* * *
CAN SUCH a state survive and flourish in the modern world?
European nation-states have fought many wars. But they never forgot that after a war comes peace, that today’s enemy may well be tomorrow’s ally. Nation-states remain, but they are becoming more and more interdependent, joining regional structures, giving up huge chunks of their sovereignty.
Israel cannot do that. Public opinion polls show that the vast majority of Israelis believe that there will never be peace. Not tomorrow, not in a hundred years. They are convinced that “the Arabs” are out to throw us into the sea. They see mighty Israel as the victim surrounded by enemies, while our “friends” are liable to stick a knife in our back any time. They see the eternal occupation of Palestinian territories and the setting up of belligerent settlements all over Palestine as a result of Arab intransigence, not as its cause. They are supported in blind solidarity by most of the Jews around the world.
Almost all Israeli parties, including the main opposition, insist that Israel be recognized as the “nation-state of the Jewish people”. This means that Israel does not belong to the Israelis (the very concept of an “Israeli nation” is officially rejected by our government) but to the worldwide ethnic-religious Jewish Diaspora, who have never been asked whether they agree to Israel representing them. It is the very negation of a real nation-state that can live in peace with its neighbors and join a regional union.
* * *
I HAVE never labored under any illusions about the magnitude of the task my friends and I set ourselves decades ago. It is not to change this or that aspect of Israel, but to change the fundamental nature of the state Itself.
It is far more than a matter of politics, to substitute one party for another. It is even far more than making peace with the Palestinian people, ending the occupation, evacuating the settlements. It is to effect a basic change of [or “in”] the national consciousness, the consciousness of every Israeli man and woman.
It has been said that “you can get the Jews out of the ghetto, but you can’t get the ghetto out of the Jews.” But that is exactly what needs to be done.
Can it be done? I think so. I certainly hope so.
Perhaps we need a shock – either a positive or a negative one. The appearance here of Anwar Sadat in 1977 can serve as an example of a positive shock: by coming to Jerusalem while a state of war was still in effect, he produced an overnight change in the consciousness of Israelis. So did the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in 1993. So did, in a negative way, the Yom Kippur war, exactly 38 years ago, which shook Israel to the core. But these were minor, brief shocks compared to what is needed.
A Second Herzl could, perhaps, effect such a miracle, against the odds. In the words of the first Herzl: “If you want it, It is not a fairy tale.”
Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch’s book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.
Mapping the Predators America’s Secret Empire of Drone Bases by NICK TURSE
OCTOBER 17, 2011
They increasingly dot the planet. There’s a facility outside Las Vegas where “pilots” work in climate-controlled trailers, another at a dusty camp in Africa formerly used by the French Foreign Legion, a third at a big air base in Afghanistan where Air Force personnel sit in front of multiple computer screens, and a fourth at an air base in the United Arab Emirates that almost no one talks about.
And that leaves at least 56 more such facilities to mention in an expanding American empire of unmanned drone bases being set up worldwide. Despite frequent news reports on the drone assassination campaign launched in support of America’s ever-widening undeclared wars and a spate of stories on drone bases in Africa and the Middle East, most of these facilities have remained unnoted, uncounted, and remarkably anonymous — until now.
Run by the military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and their proxies, these bases — some little more than desolate airstrips, others sophisticated command and control centers filled with computer screens and high-tech electronic equipment — are the backbone of a new American robotic way of war. They are also the latest development in a long-evolving saga of American power projection abroad — in this case, remote-controlled strikes anywhere on the planet with a minimal foreign “footprint” and little accountability.
Using military documents, press accounts, and other open source information, an in-depth analysis by TomDispatch has identified at least 60 bases integral to U.S. military and CIA drone operations. There may, however, be more, since a cloak of secrecy about drone warfare leaves the full size and scope of these bases distinctly in the shadows.
A Galaxy of Bases
Over the last decade, the American use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned aerial systems (UAS) has expanded exponentially, as has media coverage of their use. On September 21st, the Wall Street Journalreported that the military has deployed missile-armed MQ-9 Reaper drones on the “island nation of Seychelles to intensify attacks on al Qaeda affiliates, particularly in Somalia.” A day earlier, a Washington Post piece also mentioned the same base on the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago, as well as one in the African nation of Djibouti, another under construction in Ethiopia, and a secret CIA airstrip being built for drones in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. (Some suspect it’s Saudi Arabia.)
Post journalists Greg Miller and Craig Whitlock reported that the “Obama administration is assembling a constellation of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of a newly aggressive campaign to attack al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen.” Within days, the Post also reported that a drone from the new CIA base in that unidentified Middle Eastern country had carried out the assassination of radical al-Qaeda preacher and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.
With the killing of al-Awlaki, the Obama Administration has expanded its armed drone campaign to no fewer than six countries, though the CIA, which killed al-Awlaki, refuses to officially acknowledge its drone assassination program. The Air Force is less coy about its drone operations, yet there are many aspects of those, too, that remain in the shadows. Air Force spokesman Lieutenant Colonel John Haynes recently told TomDispatch that, “for operational security reasons, we do not discuss worldwide operating locations of Remotely Piloted Aircraft, to include numbers of locations around the world.”
Still, those 60 military and CIA bases worldwide, directly connected to the drone program, tell us much about America’s war-making future. From command and control and piloting to maintenance and arming, these facilities perform key functions that allow drone campaigns to continue expanding, as they have for more than a decade. Other bases are already under construction or in the planning stages. When presented with our list of Air Force sites within America’s galaxy of drone bases, Lieutenant Colonel Haynes responded, “I have nothing further to add to what I’ve already said.”
Even in the face of government secrecy, however, much can be discovered. Here, then, for the record is a TomDispatch accounting of America’s drone bases in the United States and around the world.
The Near Abroad
News reports have frequently focused on Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas as ground zero in America’s military drone campaign. Sitting in darkened, air-conditioned rooms 7,500 miles from Afghanistan, drone pilots dressed in flight suits remotely control MQ-9 Reapers and their progenitors, the less heavily-armed MQ-1 Predators. Beside them, sensor operators manipulate the TV camera, infrared camera, and other high-tech sensors on board the plane. Their faces are lit up by digital displays showing video feeds from the battle zone. By squeezing a trigger on a joystick, one of those Air Force “pilots” can loose a Hellfire missile on a person half a world away.
While Creech gets the lion’s share of media attention — it even has its own drones on site — numerous other bases on U.S. soil have played critical roles in America’s drone wars. The same video-game-style warfare is carried out by U.S and British pilots not far away at Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base, the home of the Air Force’s 2nd Special Operations Squadron (SOS). According to a factsheet provided to TomDispatch by the Air Force, the 2nd SOS and its drone operators are scheduled to be relocated to the Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field in Florida in the coming months.
Reapers or Predators are also being flown from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, March Air Reserve Base in California, Springfield Air National Guard Base in Ohio, Cannon Air Force Base and Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, Ellington Airport in Houston, Texas, the Air National Guard base in Fargo, North Dakota, Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, and Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, New York. Recently, it was announced that Reapers flown by Hancock’s pilots would begin taking off on training missions from the Army’s Fort Drum, also in New York State.
Meanwhile, at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, according to a report by theNew York Times, teams of camouflage-clad Air Force analysts sit in a secret intelligence and surveillance installation monitoring cell-phone intercepts, high-altitude photographs, and most notably, multiple screens of streaming live video from drones in Afghanistan. They call it “Death TV” and are constantlyinstant-messaging with and talking to commanders on the ground in order to supply them with real-time intelligence on enemy troop movements. Air Force analysts also closely monitor the battlefield from Air Force Special Operations Command in Florida and a facility in Terre Haute, Indiana.
CIA drone operators also reportedly pilot their aircraft from the Agency’s nearby Langley, Virginia headquarters. It was from here that analysts apparently watched footage of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, for example, thanks to video sent back by the RQ-170 Sentinel, an advanced drone nicknamed the “Beast of Kandahar.” According to Air Force documents, the Sentinel is flown from both Creech Air Force Base and Tonopah Test Range in Nevada.
Predators, Reapers, and Sentinels are just part of the story. At Beale Air Force Base in California, Air Force personnel pilot the RQ-4 Global Hawk, an unmanned drone used for long-range, high-altitude surveillance missions, some of them originating from Anderson Air Force Base in Guam (a staging ground for drone flights over Asia). Other Global Hawks are stationed at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, while the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio manages the Global Hawk as well as the Predator and Reaper programs for the Air Force.
Other bases have been intimately involved in training drone operators, including Randolph Air Force Base in Texas and New Mexico’s Kirtland Air Force Base, as is the Army’s Fort Huachuca in Arizona, which is home to “the world’s largest UAV training center,” according to a report by National Defense magazine. There, hundreds of employees of defense giant General Dynamics train military personnel to fly smaller tactical drones like the Hunter and the Shadow. The physical testing of drones goes on at adjoining Libby Army Airfield and “two UAV runways located approximately four miles west of Libby,” according to Global Security, an on-line clearinghouse for military information.
Additionally, small drone training for the Army is carried out at Fort Benning in Georgia while at Fort Rucker, Alabama — “the home of Army aviation” — the Unmanned Aircraft Systems program coordinates doctrine, strategy, and concepts pertaining to UAVs. Recently, Fort Benning also saw the early testing of true robotic drones — which fly without human guidance or a hand on any joystick. This, wrote the Washington Post, is considered the next step toward a future in which drones will “hunt, identify, and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans.”
The Army has also carried out UAV training exercises at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah and, earlier this year, the Navy launched its X-47B, a next-generation semi-autonomous stealth drone, on its first flight at Edwards Air Force Base in California. That flying robot — designed to operate from the decks of aircraft carriers — has since been sent on to Maryland’s Naval Air Station Patuxent River for further testing. At nearby Webster Field, the Navy worked out kinks in its Fire Scout pilotless helicopter, which has also been tested at Fort Rucker and Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, as well as Florida’s Mayport Naval Station and Jacksonville Naval Air Station. The latter base was also where the Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) unmanned aerial system was developed. It is now based there and at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington State.
Foreign Jewels in the Crown
The Navy is actively looking for a suitable site in the Western Pacific for a BAMS base, and is currently in talks with several Persian Gulf states about a site in the Middle East. It already has Global Hawks perched at its base in Sigonella, Italy.
The Air Force is now negotiating with Turkey to relocate some of the Predator drones still operating in Iraq to the giant air base at Incirlik next year. Many different UAVs have been based in Iraq since the American invasion of that country, including small tactical models like the Raven-B that troops launched by hand from Kirkuk Regional Air Base, Shadow UAVs that flew from Forward Operating Base Normandy in Baqubah Province, Predators operating out of Balad Airbase, miniature Desert Hawk drones launched from Tallil Air Base, and Scan Eagles based at Al Asad Air Base.
Elsewhere in the Greater Middle East, according to Aviation Week, the military is launching Global Hawks from Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, piloted by personnel stationed at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland, to track “shipping traffic in the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Arabian Sea.” There are unconfirmed reports that the CIA may be operating drones from the Emirates as well. In the past, other UAVs have apparently been flown from Kuwait’s Ali Al Salem Air Base and Al Jaber Air Base, as well as Seeb Air Base in Oman.
At Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the Air Force runs an air operations command and control facility, critical to the drone wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The new secret CIA base on the Arabian peninsula, used to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, may or may not be the airstrip in Saudi Arabia whose existence a senior U.S. military official recently confirmed to Fox News. In the past, the CIA has also operated UAVs out of Tuzel, Uzbekistan.
In neighboring Afghanistan, drones fly from many bases including Jalalabad Air Base, Kandahar Air Field, the air base at Bagram, Camp Leatherneck, Camp Dwyer, Combat Outpost Payne, Forward Operating Base (FOB) Edinburgh and FOB Delaram II, to name a few. Afghan bases are, however, more than just locations where drones take off and land.
It is a common misconception that U.S.-based operators are the only ones who “fly” America’s armed drones. In fact, in and around America’s war zones, UAVs begin and end their flights under the control of local “pilots.” Take Afghanistan’s massive Bagram Air Base. After performing preflight checks alongside a technician who focuses on the drone’s sensors, a local airman sits in front of a Dell computer tower and multiple monitors, two keyboards, a joystick, a throttle, a rollerball, a mouse, and various switches, overseeing the plane’s takeoff before handing it over to a stateside counterpart with a similar electronics set-up. After the mission is complete, the controls are transferred back to the local operators for the landing. Additionally, crews in Afghanistan perform general maintenance and repairs on the drones.
In the wake of a devastating suicide attack by an al-Qaeda double agent that killed CIA officers and contractors at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Khost in 2009, it came to light that the facility was heavily involved in target selection for drone strikes across the border in Pakistan. The drones themselves, as the Washington Post noted at the time, were “flown from separate bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
Both the Air Force and the CIA have conducted operations in Pakistani air space, with some missions originating in Afghanistan and others from inside Pakistan. In 2006, images of what appear to be Predator drones stationed at Shamsi Air Base in Pakistan’s Balochistan province were found on Google Earth and later published. In 2009, the New York Times reported that operatives from Xe Services, the company formerly known as Blackwater, had taken over the task of arming Predator drones at the CIA’s “hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
Following the May Navy SEAL raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, that country’s leaders reportedly ordered the United States to leave Shamsi. The Obama administration evidently refused and word leaked out,according to the Washington Post, that the base was actually owned and sublet to the U.S. by the United Arab Emirates, which had built the airfield “as an arrival point for falconry and other hunting expeditions in Pakistan.”
The U.S. and Pakistani governments have since claimed that Shamsi is no longer being used for drone strikes. True or not, the U.S. evidently also uses other Pakistani bases for its drones, including possibly PAF Base Shahbaz, located near the city of Jacocobad, and another base located near Ghazi.
The New Scramble for Africa
Recently, the headline story, when it comes to the expansion of the empire of drone bases, has been Africa. For the last decade, the U.S. military has been operating out of Camp Lemonier, a former French Foreign Legion base in the tiny African nation of Djibouti. Not long after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it became a base for Predator drones and has since been used to conduct missions over neighboring Somalia.
For some time, rumors have also been circulating about a secret American base in Ethiopia. Recently, a U.S. official revealed to the Washington Post that discussions about a drone base there had been underway for up to four years, “but that plan was delayed because ‘the Ethiopians were not all that jazzed.’” Now construction is evidently underway, if not complete.
Then, of course, there is that base on the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. A small fleet of Navy and Air Force drones began operating openly there in 2009 to track pirates in the region’s waters. Classified diplomatic cables obtained by Wikileaks, however, reveal that those drones have also secretly been used to carry out missions in Somalia. “Based in a hangar located about a quarter-mile from the main passenger terminal at the airport,” the Post reports, the base consists of three or four “Reapers and about 100 U.S. military personnel and contractors, according to the cables.”
The U.S. has also recently sent four smaller tactical drones to the African nations of Uganda and Burundi for use by those countries’ militaries.
New and Old Empires
Even if the Pentagon budget were to begin to shrink, expansion of America’s empire of drone bases is a sure thing in the years to come. Drones are now the bedrock of Washington’s future military planning and — with counterinsurgency out of favor — the preferred way of carrying out wars abroad.
During the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, as the U.S. was building up its drone fleets, the country launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and carried out limited strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, using drones in at least four of those countries. In less than three years under President Obama, the U.S. has launched drone strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. It maintains that it has carte blanche to kill suspected enemies in any nation (or at least any nation in the global south).
According to a report by the Congressional Budget Office published earlier this year, “the Department of Defense plans to purchase about 730 new medium-sized and large unmanned aircraft systems” over the next decade. In practical terms, this means more drones like the Reaper.
Military officials told the Wall Street Journal that the Reaper “can fly 1,150 miles from base, conduct missions, and return home… [T]he time a drone can stay aloft depends on how heavily armed it is.” According to a drone operator training document obtained by TomDispatch, at maximum payload, meaning with 3,750 pounds worth of Hellfire missiles and GBU-12 or GBU-30 bombs on board, the Reaper can remain aloft for 16 to 20 hours.
Even a glance at a world map tells you that, if the U.S. is to carry out ever more drone strikes across the developing world, it will need more bases for its future UAVs. As an unnamed senior military official pointed out to aWashington Post reporter, speaking of all those new drone bases clustered around the Somali and Yemeni war zones, “If you look at it geographically, it makes sense — you get out a ruler and draw the distances [drones] can fly and where they take off from.”
Earlier this year, an analysis by TomDispatch determined that there are more than 1,000 U.S. military bases scattered across the globe — a shadowy base-world providing plenty of existing sites that can, and no doubt will, host drones. But facilities selected for a pre-drone world may not always prove optimal locations for America’s current and future undeclared wars and assassination campaigns. So further expansion in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia is a likelihood.
What are the Air Force’s plans in this regard? Lieutenant Colonel John Haynes was typically circumspect, saying, “We are constantly evaluating potential operating locations based on evolving mission needs.” If the last decade is any indication, those “needs” will only continue to grow.
They increasingly dot the planet. There’s a facility outside Las Vegas where “pilots” work in climate-controlled trailers, another at a dusty camp in Africa formerly used by the French Foreign Legion, a third at a big air base in Afghanistan where Air Force personnel sit in front of multiple computer screens, and a fourth at an air base in the United Arab Emirates that almost no one talks about.
And that leaves at least 56 more such facilities to mention in an expanding American empire of unmanned drone bases being set up worldwide. Despite frequent news reports on the drone assassination campaign launched in support of America’s ever-widening undeclared wars and a spate of stories on drone bases in Africa and the Middle East, most of these facilities have remained unnoted, uncounted, and remarkably anonymous — until now.
Run by the military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and their proxies, these bases — some little more than desolate airstrips, others sophisticated command and control centers filled with computer screens and high-tech electronic equipment — are the backbone of a new American robotic way of war. They are also the latest development in a long-evolving saga of American power projection abroad — in this case, remote-controlled strikes anywhere on the planet with a minimal foreign “footprint” and little accountability.
Using military documents, press accounts, and other open source information, an in-depth analysis by TomDispatch has identified at least 60 bases integral to U.S. military and CIA drone operations. There may, however, be more, since a cloak of secrecy about drone warfare leaves the full size and scope of these bases distinctly in the shadows.
A Galaxy of Bases
Over the last decade, the American use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned aerial systems (UAS) has expanded exponentially, as has media coverage of their use. On September 21st, the Wall Street Journalreported that the military has deployed missile-armed MQ-9 Reaper drones on the “island nation of Seychelles to intensify attacks on al Qaeda affiliates, particularly in Somalia.” A day earlier, a Washington Post piece also mentioned the same base on the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago, as well as one in the African nation of Djibouti, another under construction in Ethiopia, and a secret CIA airstrip being built for drones in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. (Some suspect it’s Saudi Arabia.)
Post journalists Greg Miller and Craig Whitlock reported that the “Obama administration is assembling a constellation of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of a newly aggressive campaign to attack al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen.” Within days, the Post also reported that a drone from the new CIA base in that unidentified Middle Eastern country had carried out the assassination of radical al-Qaeda preacher and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.
With the killing of al-Awlaki, the Obama Administration has expanded its armed drone campaign to no fewer than six countries, though the CIA, which killed al-Awlaki, refuses to officially acknowledge its drone assassination program. The Air Force is less coy about its drone operations, yet there are many aspects of those, too, that remain in the shadows. Air Force spokesman Lieutenant Colonel John Haynes recently told TomDispatch that, “for operational security reasons, we do not discuss worldwide operating locations of Remotely Piloted Aircraft, to include numbers of locations around the world.”
Still, those 60 military and CIA bases worldwide, directly connected to the drone program, tell us much about America’s war-making future. From command and control and piloting to maintenance and arming, these facilities perform key functions that allow drone campaigns to continue expanding, as they have for more than a decade. Other bases are already under construction or in the planning stages. When presented with our list of Air Force sites within America’s galaxy of drone bases, Lieutenant Colonel Haynes responded, “I have nothing further to add to what I’ve already said.”
Even in the face of government secrecy, however, much can be discovered. Here, then, for the record is a TomDispatch accounting of America’s drone bases in the United States and around the world.
The Near Abroad
News reports have frequently focused on Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas as ground zero in America’s military drone campaign. Sitting in darkened, air-conditioned rooms 7,500 miles from Afghanistan, drone pilots dressed in flight suits remotely control MQ-9 Reapers and their progenitors, the less heavily-armed MQ-1 Predators. Beside them, sensor operators manipulate the TV camera, infrared camera, and other high-tech sensors on board the plane. Their faces are lit up by digital displays showing video feeds from the battle zone. By squeezing a trigger on a joystick, one of those Air Force “pilots” can loose a Hellfire missile on a person half a world away.
While Creech gets the lion’s share of media attention — it even has its own drones on site — numerous other bases on U.S. soil have played critical roles in America’s drone wars. The same video-game-style warfare is carried out by U.S and British pilots not far away at Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base, the home of the Air Force’s 2nd Special Operations Squadron (SOS). According to a factsheet provided to TomDispatch by the Air Force, the 2nd SOS and its drone operators are scheduled to be relocated to the Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field in Florida in the coming months.
Reapers or Predators are also being flown from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, March Air Reserve Base in California, Springfield Air National Guard Base in Ohio, Cannon Air Force Base and Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, Ellington Airport in Houston, Texas, the Air National Guard base in Fargo, North Dakota, Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, and Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, New York. Recently, it was announced that Reapers flown by Hancock’s pilots would begin taking off on training missions from the Army’s Fort Drum, also in New York State.
Meanwhile, at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, according to a report by theNew York Times, teams of camouflage-clad Air Force analysts sit in a secret intelligence and surveillance installation monitoring cell-phone intercepts, high-altitude photographs, and most notably, multiple screens of streaming live video from drones in Afghanistan. They call it “Death TV” and are constantlyinstant-messaging with and talking to commanders on the ground in order to supply them with real-time intelligence on enemy troop movements. Air Force analysts also closely monitor the battlefield from Air Force Special Operations Command in Florida and a facility in Terre Haute, Indiana.
CIA drone operators also reportedly pilot their aircraft from the Agency’s nearby Langley, Virginia headquarters. It was from here that analysts apparently watched footage of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, for example, thanks to video sent back by the RQ-170 Sentinel, an advanced drone nicknamed the “Beast of Kandahar.” According to Air Force documents, the Sentinel is flown from both Creech Air Force Base and Tonopah Test Range in Nevada.
Predators, Reapers, and Sentinels are just part of the story. At Beale Air Force Base in California, Air Force personnel pilot the RQ-4 Global Hawk, an unmanned drone used for long-range, high-altitude surveillance missions, some of them originating from Anderson Air Force Base in Guam (a staging ground for drone flights over Asia). Other Global Hawks are stationed at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, while the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio manages the Global Hawk as well as the Predator and Reaper programs for the Air Force.
Other bases have been intimately involved in training drone operators, including Randolph Air Force Base in Texas and New Mexico’s Kirtland Air Force Base, as is the Army’s Fort Huachuca in Arizona, which is home to “the world’s largest UAV training center,” according to a report by National Defense magazine. There, hundreds of employees of defense giant General Dynamics train military personnel to fly smaller tactical drones like the Hunter and the Shadow. The physical testing of drones goes on at adjoining Libby Army Airfield and “two UAV runways located approximately four miles west of Libby,” according to Global Security, an on-line clearinghouse for military information.
Additionally, small drone training for the Army is carried out at Fort Benning in Georgia while at Fort Rucker, Alabama — “the home of Army aviation” — the Unmanned Aircraft Systems program coordinates doctrine, strategy, and concepts pertaining to UAVs. Recently, Fort Benning also saw the early testing of true robotic drones — which fly without human guidance or a hand on any joystick. This, wrote the Washington Post, is considered the next step toward a future in which drones will “hunt, identify, and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans.”
The Army has also carried out UAV training exercises at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah and, earlier this year, the Navy launched its X-47B, a next-generation semi-autonomous stealth drone, on its first flight at Edwards Air Force Base in California. That flying robot — designed to operate from the decks of aircraft carriers — has since been sent on to Maryland’s Naval Air Station Patuxent River for further testing. At nearby Webster Field, the Navy worked out kinks in its Fire Scout pilotless helicopter, which has also been tested at Fort Rucker and Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, as well as Florida’s Mayport Naval Station and Jacksonville Naval Air Station. The latter base was also where the Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) unmanned aerial system was developed. It is now based there and at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington State.
Foreign Jewels in the Crown
The Navy is actively looking for a suitable site in the Western Pacific for a BAMS base, and is currently in talks with several Persian Gulf states about a site in the Middle East. It already has Global Hawks perched at its base in Sigonella, Italy.
The Air Force is now negotiating with Turkey to relocate some of the Predator drones still operating in Iraq to the giant air base at Incirlik next year. Many different UAVs have been based in Iraq since the American invasion of that country, including small tactical models like the Raven-B that troops launched by hand from Kirkuk Regional Air Base, Shadow UAVs that flew from Forward Operating Base Normandy in Baqubah Province, Predators operating out of Balad Airbase, miniature Desert Hawk drones launched from Tallil Air Base, and Scan Eagles based at Al Asad Air Base.
Elsewhere in the Greater Middle East, according to Aviation Week, the military is launching Global Hawks from Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, piloted by personnel stationed at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland, to track “shipping traffic in the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Arabian Sea.” There are unconfirmed reports that the CIA may be operating drones from the Emirates as well. In the past, other UAVs have apparently been flown from Kuwait’s Ali Al Salem Air Base and Al Jaber Air Base, as well as Seeb Air Base in Oman.
At Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the Air Force runs an air operations command and control facility, critical to the drone wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The new secret CIA base on the Arabian peninsula, used to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, may or may not be the airstrip in Saudi Arabia whose existence a senior U.S. military official recently confirmed to Fox News. In the past, the CIA has also operated UAVs out of Tuzel, Uzbekistan.
In neighboring Afghanistan, drones fly from many bases including Jalalabad Air Base, Kandahar Air Field, the air base at Bagram, Camp Leatherneck, Camp Dwyer, Combat Outpost Payne, Forward Operating Base (FOB) Edinburgh and FOB Delaram II, to name a few. Afghan bases are, however, more than just locations where drones take off and land.
It is a common misconception that U.S.-based operators are the only ones who “fly” America’s armed drones. In fact, in and around America’s war zones, UAVs begin and end their flights under the control of local “pilots.” Take Afghanistan’s massive Bagram Air Base. After performing preflight checks alongside a technician who focuses on the drone’s sensors, a local airman sits in front of a Dell computer tower and multiple monitors, two keyboards, a joystick, a throttle, a rollerball, a mouse, and various switches, overseeing the plane’s takeoff before handing it over to a stateside counterpart with a similar electronics set-up. After the mission is complete, the controls are transferred back to the local operators for the landing. Additionally, crews in Afghanistan perform general maintenance and repairs on the drones.
In the wake of a devastating suicide attack by an al-Qaeda double agent that killed CIA officers and contractors at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Khost in 2009, it came to light that the facility was heavily involved in target selection for drone strikes across the border in Pakistan. The drones themselves, as the Washington Post noted at the time, were “flown from separate bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
Both the Air Force and the CIA have conducted operations in Pakistani air space, with some missions originating in Afghanistan and others from inside Pakistan. In 2006, images of what appear to be Predator drones stationed at Shamsi Air Base in Pakistan’s Balochistan province were found on Google Earth and later published. In 2009, the New York Times reported that operatives from Xe Services, the company formerly known as Blackwater, had taken over the task of arming Predator drones at the CIA’s “hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
Following the May Navy SEAL raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, that country’s leaders reportedly ordered the United States to leave Shamsi. The Obama administration evidently refused and word leaked out,according to the Washington Post, that the base was actually owned and sublet to the U.S. by the United Arab Emirates, which had built the airfield “as an arrival point for falconry and other hunting expeditions in Pakistan.”
The U.S. and Pakistani governments have since claimed that Shamsi is no longer being used for drone strikes. True or not, the U.S. evidently also uses other Pakistani bases for its drones, including possibly PAF Base Shahbaz, located near the city of Jacocobad, and another base located near Ghazi.
The New Scramble for Africa
Recently, the headline story, when it comes to the expansion of the empire of drone bases, has been Africa. For the last decade, the U.S. military has been operating out of Camp Lemonier, a former French Foreign Legion base in the tiny African nation of Djibouti. Not long after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it became a base for Predator drones and has since been used to conduct missions over neighboring Somalia.
For some time, rumors have also been circulating about a secret American base in Ethiopia. Recently, a U.S. official revealed to the Washington Post that discussions about a drone base there had been underway for up to four years, “but that plan was delayed because ‘the Ethiopians were not all that jazzed.’” Now construction is evidently underway, if not complete.
Then, of course, there is that base on the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. A small fleet of Navy and Air Force drones began operating openly there in 2009 to track pirates in the region’s waters. Classified diplomatic cables obtained by Wikileaks, however, reveal that those drones have also secretly been used to carry out missions in Somalia. “Based in a hangar located about a quarter-mile from the main passenger terminal at the airport,” the Post reports, the base consists of three or four “Reapers and about 100 U.S. military personnel and contractors, according to the cables.”
The U.S. has also recently sent four smaller tactical drones to the African nations of Uganda and Burundi for use by those countries’ militaries.
New and Old Empires
Even if the Pentagon budget were to begin to shrink, expansion of America’s empire of drone bases is a sure thing in the years to come. Drones are now the bedrock of Washington’s future military planning and — with counterinsurgency out of favor — the preferred way of carrying out wars abroad.
During the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, as the U.S. was building up its drone fleets, the country launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and carried out limited strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, using drones in at least four of those countries. In less than three years under President Obama, the U.S. has launched drone strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. It maintains that it has carte blanche to kill suspected enemies in any nation (or at least any nation in the global south).
According to a report by the Congressional Budget Office published earlier this year, “the Department of Defense plans to purchase about 730 new medium-sized and large unmanned aircraft systems” over the next decade. In practical terms, this means more drones like the Reaper.
Military officials told the Wall Street Journal that the Reaper “can fly 1,150 miles from base, conduct missions, and return home… [T]he time a drone can stay aloft depends on how heavily armed it is.” According to a drone operator training document obtained by TomDispatch, at maximum payload, meaning with 3,750 pounds worth of Hellfire missiles and GBU-12 or GBU-30 bombs on board, the Reaper can remain aloft for 16 to 20 hours.
Even a glance at a world map tells you that, if the U.S. is to carry out ever more drone strikes across the developing world, it will need more bases for its future UAVs. As an unnamed senior military official pointed out to aWashington Post reporter, speaking of all those new drone bases clustered around the Somali and Yemeni war zones, “If you look at it geographically, it makes sense — you get out a ruler and draw the distances [drones] can fly and where they take off from.”
Earlier this year, an analysis by TomDispatch determined that there are more than 1,000 U.S. military bases scattered across the globe — a shadowy base-world providing plenty of existing sites that can, and no doubt will, host drones. But facilities selected for a pre-drone world may not always prove optimal locations for America’s current and future undeclared wars and assassination campaigns. So further expansion in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia is a likelihood.
What are the Air Force’s plans in this regard? Lieutenant Colonel John Haynes was typically circumspect, saying, “We are constantly evaluating potential operating locations based on evolving mission needs.” If the last decade is any indication, those “needs” will only continue to grow.
Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com, where this article originally appeared. His latest book, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books), which brings together leading analysts from across the political spectrum, has just gone into its second printing. Turse is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. His website is NickTurse.com.
An Interview with Fulvio Grimaldi on Libya Bloody Spring by DAN GLAZEBROOK
OCTOBER 17, 2011
Fulvio Grimaldi is the legendary Italian (and former BBC) journalist and filmmaker who shot and smuggled out video footage of the Bloody Sunday massacre from under the noses of the British army almost forty years ago. He champions a style of journalism that is passionate, that does not shy away from the graphic horror of war, and that resists the pretence of neutrality in times of barbarism. As he put it after Bloody Sunday: “…impartiality didn’t even cross our minds… we belonged to the running and screaming and falling and dying”. He has belonged to them ever since.
Now 73, he has just returned from Libya where he was making his latest film, about NATO’s neo-colonial ‘revolution’ in Libya. I caught up with him in Bristol where he was attending the film’s English premiere.
I began by asking Grimaldi how closely his recent trips to Libya matched the impression given in the mainstream media:
“Not in the least. I personally visited areas around Tripoli where Gheddafi had allegedly “bombed his own people”, but not a bomb had fallen before Nato started its attacks. And this was confirmed by Russian spy satellites. Wherever I went – only in the company of other Fact Finding officials, talking freely to people of my choice, and stopping wherever I wished – I came across multitudes of young and old, men and women, who declared themselves committed to Gheddafi. They are the people who withstood a 7 month war by 27 military powers who had promised a two-week victory, those who defended Tripoli for over a week, those who today hold out in Sirte, Bani Walid, Sabha, Kufra and in 75% of the still free national territory – against genocidal bombings, special Nato troops and mercenaries.”
This is clearly not the picture we have come to expect from the media – the play-school image of a ‘people united against a dictator’. To what does Grimaldi attribute such high levels of support for Gheddafi?: “The UN explains it in its 2010 report: Libya was the top country in Africa on their Index of Human Development: for life expectancy, education, health, housing, children, the elderly, women. Free schools and hospitals, free housing, free drinking water for everybody, modern infrastructure, the oil revenue distributed to the people – and independence and dignity.” This was what Gheddafi represented to many – and NATO’s bombing only seemed to harden these attitudes: “thousands of civilians murdered by bombs, missiles, Western terrorists and mercenary throat-cutters. What does one think the wanton destruction of all infrastructure, hospitals, schools, factories, waterpipes, homes, may have produced in the attitude of 6 million Libyans and 2 million well-treated, dignified migrant workers?”
These migrant workers have been consistently demonised as “African mercenaries” – or at best, “alleged African mercenaries” – in the Western press from even before the war started, and this wilful disinformation has continued even after an Amnesty International report comprehensively demolished the claim in July. The lie has served to obscure and justify the racial killings that have characterising the rebellion since its outbreak. I asked Grimaldi about these murders and about their willful misrepresentation: “Racism is one of the most powerful weapons in the imperialist arsenal of genocide and regime-change. The thousands of black Libyans and Africans tortured, executed and dismembered by the “rebels” testify to this. There is abundant visual and testimonial evidence for it, even in my film. As to the main-stream media and their passive followers on the left, the process of monopolisation that has taken place over the past years among publishers and networks, identifies the interests of the warmongers with that of their media. The individual journalist has the choice between complying with the agenda of his employer and its psy-op consultants, and unemployment.” Grimaldi is unsurprised by the recent Wikileaks revelation that the Director-General of Al-Jazeera was involved in what he called the “criminal manipulation of information during the whole Libyan crisis”. After all, “Al Jazeera was the main source for war correspondents who sat with the mixed gang of Al Qaeda-Gheddafi renegades while they proceeded to roast blacks and talk nonsense about Gheddafi and non existent rebel-advances.”
Finally, I asked Grimaldi about NATO’s real aims in this war. He is much clearer than most about the war’s importance to the imperial project: “To rid the planet of one of the countries that rejected globalization and neoliberalism, privatization and multinational robbery. To establish Africom in Africa, for further penetration into the Continent, to establish the Greater Middle East from the Atlantic to the Gulf, to eliminate the Chinese and Russian competition for resources and strangle their oil- lifeline, to get the water of Africa’s richest sweet water reserve, and to teach a lesson to all those masses that genuinely produced the Arabic Spring.” In brief – “to expand capitalist dictatorship”. No wonder he no longer works at the BBC.
Fulvio Grimaldi’s new film “Bloody Spring” is out now.
Fulvio Grimaldi is the legendary Italian (and former BBC) journalist and filmmaker who shot and smuggled out video footage of the Bloody Sunday massacre from under the noses of the British army almost forty years ago. He champions a style of journalism that is passionate, that does not shy away from the graphic horror of war, and that resists the pretence of neutrality in times of barbarism. As he put it after Bloody Sunday: “…impartiality didn’t even cross our minds… we belonged to the running and screaming and falling and dying”. He has belonged to them ever since.
Now 73, he has just returned from Libya where he was making his latest film, about NATO’s neo-colonial ‘revolution’ in Libya. I caught up with him in Bristol where he was attending the film’s English premiere.
I began by asking Grimaldi how closely his recent trips to Libya matched the impression given in the mainstream media:
“Not in the least. I personally visited areas around Tripoli where Gheddafi had allegedly “bombed his own people”, but not a bomb had fallen before Nato started its attacks. And this was confirmed by Russian spy satellites. Wherever I went – only in the company of other Fact Finding officials, talking freely to people of my choice, and stopping wherever I wished – I came across multitudes of young and old, men and women, who declared themselves committed to Gheddafi. They are the people who withstood a 7 month war by 27 military powers who had promised a two-week victory, those who defended Tripoli for over a week, those who today hold out in Sirte, Bani Walid, Sabha, Kufra and in 75% of the still free national territory – against genocidal bombings, special Nato troops and mercenaries.”
This is clearly not the picture we have come to expect from the media – the play-school image of a ‘people united against a dictator’. To what does Grimaldi attribute such high levels of support for Gheddafi?: “The UN explains it in its 2010 report: Libya was the top country in Africa on their Index of Human Development: for life expectancy, education, health, housing, children, the elderly, women. Free schools and hospitals, free housing, free drinking water for everybody, modern infrastructure, the oil revenue distributed to the people – and independence and dignity.” This was what Gheddafi represented to many – and NATO’s bombing only seemed to harden these attitudes: “thousands of civilians murdered by bombs, missiles, Western terrorists and mercenary throat-cutters. What does one think the wanton destruction of all infrastructure, hospitals, schools, factories, waterpipes, homes, may have produced in the attitude of 6 million Libyans and 2 million well-treated, dignified migrant workers?”
These migrant workers have been consistently demonised as “African mercenaries” – or at best, “alleged African mercenaries” – in the Western press from even before the war started, and this wilful disinformation has continued even after an Amnesty International report comprehensively demolished the claim in July. The lie has served to obscure and justify the racial killings that have characterising the rebellion since its outbreak. I asked Grimaldi about these murders and about their willful misrepresentation: “Racism is one of the most powerful weapons in the imperialist arsenal of genocide and regime-change. The thousands of black Libyans and Africans tortured, executed and dismembered by the “rebels” testify to this. There is abundant visual and testimonial evidence for it, even in my film. As to the main-stream media and their passive followers on the left, the process of monopolisation that has taken place over the past years among publishers and networks, identifies the interests of the warmongers with that of their media. The individual journalist has the choice between complying with the agenda of his employer and its psy-op consultants, and unemployment.” Grimaldi is unsurprised by the recent Wikileaks revelation that the Director-General of Al-Jazeera was involved in what he called the “criminal manipulation of information during the whole Libyan crisis”. After all, “Al Jazeera was the main source for war correspondents who sat with the mixed gang of Al Qaeda-Gheddafi renegades while they proceeded to roast blacks and talk nonsense about Gheddafi and non existent rebel-advances.”
Finally, I asked Grimaldi about NATO’s real aims in this war. He is much clearer than most about the war’s importance to the imperial project: “To rid the planet of one of the countries that rejected globalization and neoliberalism, privatization and multinational robbery. To establish Africom in Africa, for further penetration into the Continent, to establish the Greater Middle East from the Atlantic to the Gulf, to eliminate the Chinese and Russian competition for resources and strangle their oil- lifeline, to get the water of Africa’s richest sweet water reserve, and to teach a lesson to all those masses that genuinely produced the Arabic Spring.” In brief – “to expand capitalist dictatorship”. No wonder he no longer works at the BBC.
Fulvio Grimaldi’s new film “Bloody Spring” is out now.
DAN GLAZEBROOK writes for the Morning Star newspaper and is one of the co-ordinators for the British branch of the International Union of Parliamentarians for Palestine. He can be contacted at danglazebrook2000@yahoo.co.uk
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