Bales, Manning, Afghanistan

Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, the man blamed for an infamous massacre in the Kandahar province of Afghanistan (the 16 victims include men, women and children), is facing sentencing. His lawyer has asked for leniency.

Then survivors took the stand. The Army flew in nine of them. Yesterday, it was the turn of two men who'd been away from the village at the time of the massacre. They told the court what it was like to come home and find their families' partially-burned bodies stacked up like cordwood.

Forty-one-year-old Khamal Adin recalled seeing the corpse of an infant with a shoe print on her face. Then his cousin, Haji Muhammed Wazir, took the stand. He lost his mother, his wife, his brother and six of his seven children. Through an interpreter, Wazir said that even now, more than a year later, it feels to him as if the massacre is still happening.

After the prosecutor's last question, Wazir asked to make a further statement. The judge didn't allow it. That frustrated Wazir, who clearly had something more he'd planned say.

Too bad, because there is evidence that Bales was not the sole perpetrator of this atrocity:

The earliest news reports said that more than one party committed the crimes (in two separate locations, miles apart), and foreign press accounts continued to take that possibility seriously even after the military fingered Bales. Locals reported multiple killers who communicated via walkie-talkie. Survivors reported that the assassins were brought in by military helicopters.

The bodies were wrapped in blankets, stacked like logs, and set afire. I find it hard to believe that one man could move so many corpses, and wrap them in blankets -- while simultaneously holding his weapon. Think about it: If Bales had no helper covering him, he would have to keep the rifle in his hand and his finger near the trigger at all times.

Why would a lone killer even bother to burn the bodies (and thereby eradicate forensic evidence)?

Perhaps the reports of multiple assailants are in error, but so far, I've not seen anyone mount a detailed argument to that effect. I outlined the case for conspiracy in this earlier post:

How did he [Bales] get out of the base at 3 am unchallenged and without anyone’s knowledge? How did he manage to do so much damage alone?

We are told that, after killing a number of people in one village, Bales went back to his base to restock his ammo. I presume that the base has a guard. I also presume that a Staff Sergeant would need to give the guard a reason to be out and about at that time of night. Unfortunately, Bales' guilty plea means that we may never learn the details of how he (supposedly) got in and out.

Odd, isn't it, that the court decided to "edit" the eyewitness testimony so tightly?

I suspect that what Wazir wanted to tell the court had to do with a story reported in the Australian press but not our own: Days before the massacre, a bomb took out an American tank, and an officer told the villagers that there would be a retaliatory strike against the entire community.

‘After that, they came back to the village nearby the explosion site. The soldiers called all the people to come out of their houses and from the mosque,’ he said. ‘The Americans told the villagers ‘A bomb exploded on our vehicle. … We will get revenge for this incident by killing at least 20 of your people,’ Mr Rasool said.

Even after the massacre, the hell did not cease:

One Mokhoyan resident, Ahmad Shah Khan, told The Associated Press that after the bombing, U.S. soldiers and their Afghan army counterparts arrived in his village and made many of the male villagers stand against a wall.

"It looked like they were going to shoot us, and I was very afraid," Khan said. "Then a NATO soldier said through his translator that even our children will pay for this. Now they have done it and taken their revenge."

From Wikipedia:

Soldiers from the base have been linked to other atrocities and crimes. The 2010 Maywand District murders involved JBLM-based soldiers.[15] Also in 2010, a recently discharged AWOL soldier from JBLM shot a police officer in Salt Lake City.[18] In April 2011, a JBLM soldier killed his wife and 5-year-old son before killing himself.[16] In January 2012, a JBLM soldier murdered a Mount Rainier National Park ranger.[15] In two separate incidents, unrelated JBLM soldiers have been charged with waterboarding their children.[16]

Jorge Gonzalez, executive director of a veterans resource center near Fort Lewis, said that the Kandahar killings offer more proof that the base is dysfunctional: "This was not a rogue soldier. JBLM is a rogue base, with a severe leadership problem", he said in a statement.

Bales himself is known to have psychological difficulties. From the beginning, he has claimed to have no memory of what actually happened on that night. Nevertheless he has pleaded guilty (to avoid the death penalty) and has offered an apology. If he receives life with the possibility of parole, he could be out in 20 years.

So my questions are simple:

1. Will Bales receive more lenient treatment than Bradley Manning did?

2. Was Bales made the scapegoat for others? (In which case, shouldn't he receive leniency?)

3. Aren't the true villains the men who made policy in Afghanistan?

Before you answer the third question, let me reprint this segment from my previous post. This report comes from the former Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan:.

The method employed is simple: Identify those who provide financial support or protection to the militants. And those who even have sympathies with them. Constitute teams which would go to the houses so identified, knock at the door and as soon as the wanted man appears, shoot him dead. At times a substitute is killed who may be a guest in the house but was unlucky to greet the intruders at the door. On an average about 50 night raids take place daily. And every night about 25 people are killed in cold blood in different parts of the country.

The abominable practice of night raids was introduced by that much trumpeted and widely acclaimed head of the US forces Gen Stanley McChrystal. The idea was to save US ammunition and soldiers on the one hand and to eliminate all those who show any inclination to support the resistance. The assassination of targeted persons in cold blood is an insidious innovation in counterinsurgency. McChrystal’s successor Gen David Petraeus continued this cowardly programme that has become an entrenched tool of policy in counter-terrorism.

And yet the one we are supposed to despise is poor Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning -- whose only real sin was releasing video proof of a similar atrocity.

Read More

The prom

I'm still too frazzled to put together a proper post, but I wanted to jot down a thought. What follows is fluff. This blog usually reserves non-political trivia for the weekend -- but this week, the weekend starts early.

I've been catching up with a series called The Big Bang Theory, which is new to me even though many of you have followed it for years. Many episodes are laugh-out-loud funny, and the ladies are adorable. But the nerds on this show don't really resemble the nerds that I've known.

Sorry, but I don't think that science geeks spend all that much time thinking about boinking. At least, the nerds I've met don't continually express their thoughts about boinking. They don't act as if there were no other permissible topics of discussion, the way lumpenprole slobs might do.

Many years ago, I was talking to one of my college professors about (of all people) Gordon of Khartoum. I noted that some writers have suspected that Gordon might be gay because he never married. My prof's response: "It's easy to say that. A lot of people don't understand that the great men of history get to be the great men of history because they don't spend as much time as normal people do worrying about who takes whom to the prom."

At the time, I didn't agree. I saw myself as a potential Great Man of History yet I thought about girls all the freakin' time.

Maybe it's a function of age, but I find it easier now than then to understand what my professor was getting at. I also think that if I had spent more time doing stuff and less time thinking about girls, I might have gotten somewhere. Maybe I wouldn't have attained Gordon-of-Khartoumhood. But...somewhere.

My point is this: Our popular culture treats Da Boink as the sole worthwhile activity in all of human existence. In doing so, our culture misrepresents our experience and misleads young people.

As Malcolm Muggeridge (and just because I quote him here doesn't make him my favorite person) famously said: "The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment." We need not go back to the Cross. (And I'm not sure many people truly longed for it.) But if you're shopping for a raison d'etre, then orgasm -- howevermuch fun -- doesn't suffice.

Believe me, kids: After the first ten or twenty minutes of The Sole Worthwhile Activity In All Of Human Existence, a certain familiarity sets in, a certain repetitiveness, a certain is-that-all-there-is. This state of mind can be pleasantly spacey. But this is also the time when I tend to hear distant voices offering a droning rendition of Verdi's Anvil Chorus. Maybe that's why some people get into BDSM -- it gives 'em something to do aside from humming along with the Verdi.

For a young man, the best thing about orgasm is that, afterward, you finally have at least thirty minutes of not thinking about sex. At last, you can focus on writing your novel! Must get to work -- now! Alas, that's precisely the moment when she wants to cuddle.

Schtupping ain't everything. In fact, it's hardly anything. Monkeys schtupp. So do dogs and cats and beetles and anteaters and snails. But only human beings can design a Parthenon or sculpt a Pieta or erect the great statue of Gyuanin in Sanya.

There's another teevee show that makes a similar mistake: Da Vinci's Demons. I could stand to watch only one episode of that beautiful-looking irritation. Never mind the anachronisms, never mind the religious bigotry, and never mind the historical question of Lenny's homosexuality, which falls into the likely-but-unproven category. Bottom line: I've read more about Leonardo da Vinci than you (probably) have and -- unlike the writers of that show -- I've concluded that he (probably) wasn't a very sexual being. Even in his secret writings, he rarely addressed the subject of sex. When he did, he seemed to look upon the act with a cold eye, as though coitus were a bizarre biological process involving some alien species.

That attitude is impermissible and unthinkable to our current entertainment-creators. The people who write for television all presume that those of fine and famous mind were as rut-obsessed as is the lowest quasi-humanoid lumpenprole organism in the audience.  When Leonardo da Vinci was twenty, he wasn't like I was, or like you were, or like anyone you know. He didn't think about girls -- or even boys -- all the freakin' time. He had bigger fish to fry. And that's how he got to be Leonardo da Vinci.

Another thing: There's an early episode of Big Bang Theory in which a gifted artist wins a date with Penny by surreptitiously drawing her portrait. In real life, this trick doesn't work. Trust me. In fact, the results can be downright humiliating, because your sketchbook provides an excellent visual record of your failures.

On the other hand, I've heard that Stephen Ward used this very stratagem to assemble his harem (or whatever you want to call it). Bugger all! Why did it work for him and not me?

(Finally! I finally managed to get some politics into this post!)

Read More

You need a vacation

Okay, I admit it. My brain is too frazzled (by some stuff completely unrelated to blogging or politics or anything of that sort) to sort through all of the NSA-related material that happened yesterday. So here's a quick non-spook-related post, one that may not make you very happy. It all comes down to this graphic, which I swiped from The Confluence.

 

 

Told you it wouldn't make you very happy. But the question is: How do we change the picture?

More libertarianism is not the answer.

Read More

An overload of spooky stuff

Where to begin? Let's start here: The British sent some thugs to the Guardian offices to destroy hard drives that might contain Snowden's NSA material.

In an article posted on the British newspaper's website on Monday, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said that a month ago, after the newspaper had published several stories based on Snowden's material, a British official advised him: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back."

After further talks with the government, Rusbridger said, two "security experts" from Government Communications Headquarters, the British equivalent of the ultra-secretive U.S. National Security Agency, visited the Guardian's London offices.

In the building's basement, Rusbridger wrote, government officials watched as computers which contained material provided by Snowden were physically pulverized. "We can call off the black helicopters," Rusbridger says one of the officials joked.

Remember how, a couple of posts back, we defined "Chatty Terrorist Syndrome" (or CTS) which strikes whenever the NSA's snoopery needs justification? Well...

Two years ago, following the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, a number of journalists wrote dramatic accounts of the Al Qaeda leader’s last moments. One such story, co-authored by Eli Lake in the Washington Times, cited Obama administration officials and an unnamed military source, described how bin Laden had “reached for a weapon to try to defend himself” during the intense firefight at his compound, and then “was shot by Navy SEALs after trying to use a woman reputed to be his wife as a human shield.”

It was exciting stuff, but it turned out to have been fictitious propaganda concocted by U.S. authorities to destroy bin Laden’s image in the eyes of his followers. Based on what we know now, the SEALs met virtually no resistance at the compound, there was no firefight, bin Laden didn’t use a woman as a human shield, and he was unarmed.

The White House blamed the misleading early reports on the “fog of war,” but as Will Saletan pointed out in Slate, “A fog of war creates confusion, not a consistent story like the one about the human shield. The reason U.S. officials bought and sold this story is that it fit their larger indictment of Bin Laden. It reinforced the shameful picture of him hiding in a mansion while sending others to fight and die. It made him look like a coward.”

Harpers goes on to say what I've been saying all along: That the major CTS tales we've been recently told are probably just...yarns.

The sources for the story were three U.S. officials “familiar with the intelligence.” “This was like a meeting of the Legion of Doom,” one told Lake and Rogin. “All you need to do is look at that list of places we shut down to get a sense of who was on the phone call.”

The piece also cited Republican senator John McCain, who drew a predictably grim conclusion from the news. “This may punch a sizable hole in the theory that Al Qaeda is on the run,” he said. “There was a gross underestimation by this administration of Al Qaeda’s overall ability to replenish itself.” The story was picked up widely, especially on the right. On his show, Rush Limbaugh charged that the Obama “regime” had leaked the story for political gain.

For once, Rush may have been on to something. But Limbaugh can't bring himself to examine the possibility that the intelligence community (not simply a Democratic administration) may be concocting whoppers.

Limbaugh can't make that admission, because doing so requires looking at the history of Washington Times writer Eli Lake, known for spreading lies that helped pave the way for the Iraq war. Lake is now spreading the latest CTS "conference call" tales.

In a follow-up story published the day after the original article, Lake wrote that at the request of its sources, the Daily Beast was “withholding details about the technology al Qaeda used to conduct the conference call.” The suggestion was that the story had omitted information to keep terrorists from knowing too much about U.S. intelligence operations. But as Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor noted, “If a conference call of some sort took place, then the participants know full well how they did it. And the moment they see a news report that says the United States was listening in to the call, they’re going to shut that means of communication down.” Others wondered why, given the worldwide uproar about National Security Agency spying, Al Qaeda would risk gathering all of its top operatives for any form of simultaneous multiparty communication.

This business of intelligence concoctions brings us to this Salon story, which revisits the 2001-2002 myth of Bin Laden's underground lair. Remember that one? A widely reproduced graphic gave the world the impression that Bin Laden was a James Bond supervillain.

The myth of bin Laden’s subterranean fortress began with a story in the London Independent newspaper on November 27, 2001, which described a mountain honeycombed with tunnels, behind iron everything is a clue 301 doors, with “its own ventilation system and its own power, created by a hydroelectric generator,” capable of housing 2,000 people “like a hotel.” This story was quickly picked up and embellished by American media. The result was that on November 29th the Times (London) published a cutaway drawing titled “Bin Laden’s Mountain fortress,” showing thermal sensing equipment and tunnels wide enough for a car to drive through. … When “Meet the Press” was broadcast on December 2nd, Tim Russert showed the drawing to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who suggested there might be many such sophisticated redoubts, and not only in Afghanistan.

When American forces arrived at Osama’s actual lair, they found something somewhat simpler. They found some caves.

The Salon story is one of those by-the-numbers pieces that criticizes America's affection for conspiracy stories. But the example chosen here works against the writer's intent. Those fake stories about Bin Laden's "Dr. No" compound didn't make themselves. Such things don't just happen. No, those stories were concoctions promulgated by the intelligence community.

You can affix any label you choose to such concoctions. But if you want to be accurate, you're going to have to reconcile yourself, at some point, to use of the dreaded C word. The only proper way to describe the graphic reproduced above is to admit that it was the result of a conspiracy to mislead the public.

(Oddly enough, a good discussion of the Bin Laden "fortress" myth comes to us by way of Edward Epstein, who is responsible for spreading quite a few myths of his own.  Epstein was the creature of the CIA's ultra-paranoid James J. Angleton. Under JJA's tutelage, Epstein wrote Legend, an outrageous attempt to pin the JFK assassination on the Russians.)

Let's bring our discussion back to the present day. Marcy Wheeler notes that the NSA has been telling some obvious lies about its capabilities lately...

Today, as part of a story describing that NSA still doesn’t know what Edward Snowden took from NSA, MSNBC quotes a source saying NSA has stinky audit capabilities.

Another said that the NSA has a poor audit capability, which is frustrating efforts to complete a damage assessment.

(We’ve long known this about NSA’s financial auditing function, and there have long been signs they couldn’t audit data either, but apparently MSNBC’s source agree.)

For the past several months, various Intelligence officials have assured Congress and the public that it keeps US person data very carefully guarded, so only authorized people can access it.

Today, MSNBC reports NSA had (has?) poor data compartmentalization.

NSA had poor data compartmentalization, said the sources, allowing Snowden, who was a system administrator, to roam freely across wide areas.

Again, there have long been signs that non-analysts had untracked access to very sensitive data. Multiple sources agree — and possibly not just non-analysts.

All of these stories lead us to one big question: Why should we believe anything the spooks tell us?

Read More

Cellphone privacy

If you're arrested, do the cops have the right to go through your cellphone without a warrant? The Obama administration says yes.

In a petition filed earlier this month asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, the government argues that the First Circuit’s ruling conflicts with the rulings of several other appeals courts, as well as with earlier Supreme Court cases. Those earlier cases have given the police broad discretion to search possessions on the person of an arrested suspect, including notebooks, calendars and pagers. The government contends that a cellphone is no different than any other object a suspect might be carrying.

But as the storage capacity of cellphones rises, that position could become harder to defend. Our smart phones increasingly contain everything about our digital lives: our e-mails, text messages, photographs, browser histories and more. It would be troubling if the police had the power to get all that information with no warrant merely by arresting a suspect.

Arrest is not conviction, and an arrested suspect is, by definition, an innocent. Since anyone may be arrested -- during, for example, a political protest -- it should be obvious that the mere fact of arrest should not abrogate our rights to privacy.

The only reasons to bypass the warrant process have to do with time-critical situations. But if the suspect is already in custody, time is (in almost all cases) not a factor. Besides, the laws governing the use of warrants take emergencies into account.

Police work is easy only in a police state. Why is the Obama administration trying to establish one?

Let's give this post a bit of edginess. How can the black community continue to support Obama blindly when this policy will make oppression of black people easier? I've asked this question before and I'll ask it again: Can you name a single black person not named Obama whom Obama has helped?

Read More

I can't wait...

I can't wait to write a defense of the People's Revolutionary Court that tries supercilious-yet-sycophantic media toadies like Michael Grunwald and condemns the whole lot of 'em to spend the rest of their lives doing grueling labor in the hot sun and in freezing cold, eating burned beans and sleeping in blankets infested with fire ants.

And I speak as one who recently became extremely ticked off at Assange for his pro-Libertarian statements.

By the way: Greenwald has vowed to make the UK pay for what it did. Go for it, GG!

Read More

Intimidation, surveillance and "CTS"

Glenn Greenwald's live-in (we're supposed to use the word "partner," even though that word conjures up images of law firms and movies about mismatched cops) was stopped, questioned and harassed at Heathrow airport, for no good reason. The ordeal lasted more than nine hours.

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

As you know, strained rationalization is my favorite form of humor. That's why I'd like to hear the Brits explain why they considered Miranda a terrorist.

The "no fly" list seems to exist mostly for the purposes of political intimidation. As you may recall, during the Bush years, Anwar al-Awlaki was allowed to zoom in and out of the country even though, at the same time, any left-wing professor who had denounced the Iraq war could expect to find himself detained.

As Digby notes, right-wing pundits are very quick to denounce Chinese and Iranian authorities who have detained journalists and friends of journalists under exactly similar circumstances. The thing I find most appalling about right-wingers is their lack of absolute standards. Even though they often denounce the concept of situational ethics, they love to put the idea into practice.

Consider, for example, the vile Janet Shan at the mis-named "Moderate Voice." She applauds the use of Stalin-esque intimidation tactics against anyone she doesn't like:

What did Greenwald think would happen? That he and his lover could run around the world and not be subjected to scrutiny in light of the security leaks?

Yes, Janet. That's the point. Greenwald and his lover have exactly that right. Everyone has a right to expect not to be detained as a "terrorist" when there is no evidence to that effect.

Here's a detail you won't find in many articles about this incident:

“David is smart and strong,” Greenwald told Firedoglake. “But still, it was scary: Guardian lawyers were speculating all day that given how much time he was held – which is very rare – he’d possibly be arrested under a terrorism statute.”

“It’s speculation, but I think the only reason that didn’t happen was because Brazilian government at high levels intervened so aggressively and angrily,” Greenwald added.

The story of his partner being held in detention has become the biggest story in Brazil, according to Greenwald.

Well, I don't see the story on the front page of the English-language Rio Times, but Correio Braziliense is indeed giving the incident big play.

Incidentally, the same newspaper also carries a story originating in the German Bild about an alleged Al Qaeda plan to derail high-speed trains in Europe. Here's a translation of the key sentence:

The source of information is the National Security Agency (NSA, its acronym in English), U.S., who intercepted a phone conversation between members of the command of Al-Qaeda, a few weeks ago.

Once again, we see an example of Chatty Terrorist Syndrome. Very odd. In the past -- even before 9/11 -- many news accounts established that actual members of Al Qaeda are fully cognizant of the fact that Uncle overhears their phone conversations. That's why the Al Qaeda plotters referred to the World Trade Center attack as a "big wedding."

In a striking coincidence, Chatty Terrorist Syndrome (CTS) set in only after the Snowden revelations put heat on the NSA. Way I see it, only two scenarios can explain this sudden upsurge in cases of CTS:

Possibility 1: Terrorists are just screwing with the NSA.

Possibility 2. The NSA is screwing us.

The second possibility brings us to Juan Cole, whom I've not quoted (or read) in ages. But his latest (which references the harassment of Greenwald via his partner) is surprisingly hard-hitting:

How to turn a democracy into a STASI authoritarian state in 10 easy steps:

1. Misuse the concept of a Top Secret government document (say, the date of D-Day) and extend classification to trillions of mundane documents a year.

2. Classify all government crimes and violations of the Constitution as secret

3. Create a class of 4.5 million privileged individuals, many of them corporate employees, with access to classified documents but allege it is illegal for public to see leaked classified documents

4. Spy on the public in violation of the Constitution

5. Classify environmental activists as terrorists while allowing Big Coal and Big Oil to pollute and destroy the planet

6. Share info gained from NSA spying on public with DEA, FBI, local law enforcement to protect pharmaceuticals & liquor industry from competition from pot, or to protect polluters from activists

7. Falsify to judges and defense attorneys how allegedly incriminating info was discovered

8. Lie and deny to Congress you are spying on the public.

9. Criminalize the revelation of government crimes and spying as Espionage

10. Further criminalize whistleblowing as “Terrorism”, have compradors arrest innocent people, detain them, and confiscate personal effects with no cause or warrant (i.e. David Miranda, partner of Glenn Greenwald)

Presto, what looks like a democracy is really an authoritarian state ruling on its own behalf and that of 2000 corporations, databasing the activities of 312 million innocent citizens and actively helping destroy the planet while forestalling climate activism.

Take special note of that "2000 corporations" comment. Despite what we've heard from libertarian fools like Julian Assange and Jeff Bezos, the surveillance state exists to serve the corporate state. That's why the presidents who talked the libertarian talk before attaining office -- Reagan, Dubya -- presided over a national security apparat which became ever more Orwellian.

Added note: For some reason, Wikileaks chose this moment to release 46 gigs (!!!) of "insurance files." That's a huge number. I'd be downloading the torrent right now, but for one problem: I don't have enough disc space on my C drive!

Read More