08.21.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 2:48 pm by George Smith
This, from a comment rescue, on the American way of establishing order.
For as long as the blog has been around, as long as you have, for the last 20 years the national security strategy has been about only one thing: Using overwhelming technology in weaponry and money to beat the poverty stricken, around the globe, into place.
The Department of Defense and our military theorists came up for a laughable justification, a buzz term, really, to describe it 20 or so years back.
The asymmetric threat. The asymmetric threat is a nation, or a trans-national group, a handful of “bad guys,” or even a single person who could theoretically come up with a way to take down the country, or at least create great disasters, by attacking the national security structure at any number of imaging, easily smashed, weak points.
The asymmetric threat was one where its operators knew they couldn’t rival the US military in direct spending or equipment, nobody can. So something needed to be invented to explain how those much poorer, read everyone else in the world we’re after, could strike at the security of everyone in this country.
So with that explanation done with, let’s call it what it is: Bombing Paupers. And everything comes out of that from the development of weird torturing non-lethal weapons to opening the development of mine resistant ambush protected vehicles to the western global private sector for the accumulation of a mix armored force bigger than any other nation’s which is then passed off, in part, to the interior. It’s Keith Alexander’s National Security Agency explaining, without even a hint of self-consciousness or shame, about its technological skill in intercepting the telephone calls of piss poor Somali pirates, in the name of protecting us.
You’ll have noticed another common feature. Bombing Paupers is only used on people who aren’t white. The last time the American military actually did carry out an action against a white-skinned group was way back in the Clinton administration, in the bombing campaign against Serbia.
Which is why you won’t see any direct confrontation with Russia over the Ukraine. The national security megaplex won’t bomb the property of a country armed with thermonuclear weapons, one with a military that could cause some pain in retaliation.
That’s the way it has worked in all the time I’ve been here. You could write a book on it.
Take a look at the MRAP program. Thousands were orders, from multiple vendors. It was free money for gargantuan vehicles with names like the Navstar MaxxPro, the BAE Caiman and the Cougar. (Look them up at images.google.com and add the word “police.” You see the amazing result.)
The Pentagon brought many of them home at great expense. It doesn’t want to leave any to the Afghan military, making the excuse they wouldn’t be able to operate and maintain them. The real reason is the Pentagon expects Afghanistan to disintegrate and doesn’t want them in the hands of various warlords and the Taliban. Maybe Pakistan could be persuaded to buy a few, but that’s not certain.
What has been proved certain is that a plan to lease them for free to American police departments of any size, as long as those police departments picked up the tab for maintenance and upkeep, works.
The MRAP, depending on what was bought, cost anywhere between $350 – 650,000 dollars, taxpayer money. That was money that were never spent on any kind of economic stimulus or building of opportunity in this country. And now it’s a really bad deal because police department use more taxpayers to keep them going, for no apparent social benefit.
There’s a clear villain here. It’s whatever group, or individual, that came up with the plan for it. And was rewarded with success.
Some people come to their senses eventually. From Saginaw County, Michigan, I read this week:
I made the decision about a month ago to decommission that [MRAP] vehicle,??? [the sheriff of Saginaw County] said, noting he did it based on financial concerns due to unforeseen maintenance costs.
While the military was to provide any needed parts, Federspiel said he still had to pay for a specialized mechanic to install the parts, along with insurance and fuel for the vehicle.
When Saginaw County Commissioners asked him to look for cost-saving measures before setting the budget in July, the MRAP was the first thing to go …
Go out to the link. The rationale on how to support the vehicle, as it has been explained by other police departments, was to use money from drug forfeiture cases.
But with something like MRAP vehicles and a bad economy, that money just isn’t enough.
The ACLU, throughout the crisis in Ferguson, pointed out that military tactics used in drug cases have fallen predominantly on the black and brown poor, despite the fact that my tribe uses drugs at equivalent rates of incidence.
You can’t get blood from stones. One doubts taking the valuables of the poor swept up in drug busts in an area and boiling it down to cash furnishes even close to enough to maintain vehicles that originally cost from something over a quarter million to 650,000 dollars a piece.
Bombing Paupers, if not lethally, is a domestic strategy to curb unrest.
The Department of Homeland Security did not make block grants of over a million dollars to communities during the war on terror under the rationale that an economically successful region with opportunity is one that is safer and more secure.
What if it had? Rhetorical. A silly suggestion. Socialism, no rewarding of takers and leeches!
More later.
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06.19.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle at 8:19 am by George Smith
Wire news now:
A U.S. official says Obama is expected to announce the deployment of about 100 Green Berets to Iraq to help train and advise the Iraqi forces.
The crippled philosophy. Bombing paupers, first with small bits, the only way to go. Have at it.
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06.13.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 2:46 pm by George Smith
As if it isn’t big enough already, you can observe how large elements in the media and sources at the Pentagon wish to relight the American war machine, in at least two places.
The bombing theater of Iraq. And doing something about Russia’s slow re-annexation of the Ukraine.
Today, at TIME (no link):
The U.S. confirmed Friday that Russia sent tanks and military equipment to separatist fighters in Ukraine.
The delivery of military equipment threatens to further escalate tensions between Russia, Ukraine and Ukraine’s Western allies …
Someone at the State Department told the magazine, “We are highly concerned.”
At which point two things should occur to you. First: What you mean by we?
And, second, the State Department has been nothing more than a toady (or appendix) of the national security machine since the Vietnam War.
Getting involved in anything on the old battlefields of The Great Patriotic War in the former Soviet Union is an idea magnitudes worse than the epic fraud and disaster that was the invasion of Iraq.
But Americans don’t know this. Most of us probably think Uncle Sam actually beat the Wehrmacht and so, forever, the world owes us a big thank you.
The Soviet Army destroyed the majority of Nazi Germany’s war machine. Without the meat grinder of the Eastern Front, the Second World War might have been very different for Americans on the landing beaches of North Africa, France and Italy.
Russians have very strong feelings about the Patriotic War.
Want to relight a big war? One where you could be badly hurt here? One where drones and bombing the paupers won’t be jolly good and risk-free?
Go, go ahead, trying antagonizing Russians by picking a fight on what they consider to still be their bloody patriotic battlefields.
And what else can you say about Iraq? Nothing, that’s what. We should have the good grace to admit we pulverized the place for no damn good reason and the result is not surprising.
Again, because, some famous last words from 2002:
“You can see them in the field, in subsequent years, dedicated young men and women, their weapons merged into an information network that enables them to cut out with surgical precision the cancer that threatens us all — heat-packing humanitarians who leave the innocent unscathed, and full of renewed hope. In their wake, democracy, literacy and an Arab world restored to full flower, as it deserves to be, an equal in a burgeoning global culture …???
Heat-packin’ humanitarians, aren’t we all?
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06.12.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 11:52 am by George Smith
From a long time ago.
On the unfolding disaster, extract from the NYT today:
Iraq’s fracturing deepened on Thursday as Kurdish forces poured into the strategic northern oil city of Kirkuk after government troops fled, while emboldened Sunni militants who seized two other important northern cities this week moved closer to Baghdad and issued threats about advancing into the heavily Shiite south and destroying the shrines there, the holiest in Shiism …
Militants aligned with the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria swept across the porous border from Syria on Tuesday to overrun Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. They have been driving toward the capital since then, capturing the town of Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, seizing parts of the oil refinery city of Baiji and threatening Samarra, a city sacred to Shiites just 70 miles north of Baghdad.
I have nothing to say except we did this.
Now unintentionally hilarious and black quote from Salon writer Wagner James Au, at Salon, in 2002:
“You can see them in the field, in subsequent years, dedicated young men and women, their weapons merged into an information network that enables them to cut out with surgical precision the cancer that threatens us all — heat-packing humanitarians who leave the innocent unscathed, and full of renewed hope. In their wake, democracy, literacy and an Arab world restored to full flower, as it deserves to be, an equal in a burgeoning global culture …”
And in honor, you can again download and listen to Iraq N Roll by Uncle Sam & the JDAMs. Here.
The old recommended donation, not obligatory, was three dollars and fifty cents.
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03.19.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 11:13 am by George Smith
Iraqi Freedom commemorative music and art! Read it!
Great stuff. The record, I mean.
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02.10.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle at 3:41 pm by George Smith
From the wire, Iran is allegedly sending two ships toward the US east coast:
Iran’s military doctrine is based on asymmetric warfare, relying on a multilayered strategy the employs many kinds of low-tech weapons and a willingness to accept casualties, says Michael Connell, director of Iranian Studies at the Center for Naval Analyses, which conducts research and analysis for the U.S. government.
In the Persian Gulf, Iran hopes to employ dozens of midget submarines, land-based missile launchers and speedboats, in a strategy meant to confuse and overwhelm an adversary with superior technology and firepower, Connell wrote in an assessment of Iran’s naval doctrine.
Bolton said Iran’s ships may not pose much of a threat now but their mission shows the Islamic Republic is building up its capabilities for the future.
Bad time of year to do it. They could run into some lousy weather.
Previously, I’ve briefly mentioned why the US military invented the buzz-term, asymmetric, to define threats.
Bluntly, it’s a simple fraud that encompasses the fact that every enemy in the world that we might ever face, now and going forward, will always be grossly inferior due to gigantic differences between the US military budget and everyone else’s.
So any enemy that has much less money to spend on ships, jet aircraft, tanks, advanced weapons systems, anything (which is to say, again, everyone) is always said to have developed, or to be developing, an asymmetric strategy.
A strategy that attacks some slightly-real or imagined Achilles heel, turning the enemy into a credible threat, a puny David ready to take down the goliath of American military power.
It’s a sophistry of liars, always consisting of made-up crap, sometimes simple but never particularly complicated, for the rationalization and discussion of how any type of relative weakling, be it a group, a tribe, a handful of hackers, a poorer nation, or maybe even angry bees, allegedly can threaten the existence of the world’s pre-eminent military power.
Over the last twenty years its been embedded in every discussion of potential threats against the US. The enemy, a pauper, will ALWAYS attack asymmetrically.
And so today, and perhaps in the next few, too, we’ll get the infrequent spectacle of some puny detachment from Iran being a harbinger of bad things to come. Never mind the southern side of the Persian Gulf is outfitted with overwhelming US military striking power and that one of our reliable toadies, Bahrain, hosts the Fifth Fleet.
I always get a kick out of showing the threat of Iran’s midget submarines.
I don’t know if I would feel confident submerging in one of them. How about you?
And how about this squadron of “stealth” flying boats!
I think one of them would be pretty popular on a summer weekend afternoon at Lake Hopatcong in New Jersey, don’t you?
And whatever this is, hoax or real, I like it!
Or perhaps they will be sending this and it will have a Scud in it with an atomic warhead and next week I won’t be able to post to the blog because electromagnetic pulse will have wiped out US civilization.
This is the Kharg, an Iranian navy oiler, by the way. If it doesn’t look Iranian built, it isn’t. It was built in the United Kingdom a long time ago.
And I am sure a few dozen of these would do really well against the USN and USAF.
No pictures of a couple of their heavier units, like a Kilo sub. They didn’t build it. These things would be the first to go to the bottom in a shooting war.
Asymmetric or not.
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01.06.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 1:55 pm by George Smith
The US has the biggest national security infrastructure in world history. It’s globe-spanning. And what’s its purpose? To hammer poor people, mostly.
Nothing advertised it more than, once again, 60 Minutes’ lame publicity work for the National Security Agency.
Let’s stop a moment and look again at what the NSA chose to show on television.
From the transcript at Cryptome:
Metadata has become one of the most important tools in the NSA’s arsenal. Metadata is the digital information on the number dialed, the time and date, and the frequency of the calls. We wanted to see how metadata was used at the NSA. Analyst Stephen Benitez showed us a technique known as “call chaining??? used to develop targets for electronic surveillance in a pirate network based in Somalia.
Stephen Benitez: As you see here, I’m only allowed to chain on anything that I’ve been trained on and that I have access to. Add our known pirate. And we chain him out.
John Miller: Chain him out, for the audience, means what?
Stephen Benitez: People he’s been in contact to for those 18 days.
Stephen Benitez: One that stands out to me first would be this one here. He’s communicated with our target 12 times.
Stephen Benitez: Now we’re looking at Target B’s contacts.
John Miller: So he’s talking to three or four known pirates?
Stephen Benitez: Correct. These three here. We have direct connection to both Target A and Target B. So we’ll look at him, too, we’ll chain him out. And you see, he’s in communication with lots of known pirates. He might be the missing link that tells us everything.
The disconnect from our world and theirs is total. They’re using all their massive computing, relationship-mapping software and data sucking power to spy on people who are among the poorest and most desperate in the world. They are “chaining” them out.
Look at the photos on Cryptome.
The NSA is showing the young people bent over their computers. They think they’re defending the country against foreign threats.
What they’re really doing is spying on the pathetic in the worst places of the world using virtually unlimited technological resources. They should be ashamed of themselves. And Edward Snowden has brought them a measure of it.
Somali pirates pose no real threat to Americans. More die, per year, from attacks by angry bees.
Take a look for yourself.
Such bad guys.
Yet this is the example of metadata sifting of the networks of global enemies the NSA chose as an example to show the American people on prime time television.
The NSA workers shown are just more cogs in the big machine, a machine that bears no resemblance to a military that once existed to destroy the Axis powers.
That is all gone.
In its place, a monstrous and growing device that’s been at it for well over a decade, grinding after the paupers and the piss ants even after an original threat has been annihilated, selling it forward by convincing only the gullible that the targets pose serious threats to the country.
Under this mechanism of distortion and unreality, one can justify anything.
The people who make untrustworthy networks:
Many of the cryptologists skipped grades in school, earned masters degrees and PhDs and look more like they belong on a college campus than at the NSA.
Actually, [solving] the Rubik’s cube took [one of them] one minute and 35 seconds.
Recent score card:
Afghanistan: Hammering poor people. Majority of Americans want to leave, feel it’s not worth it, are ignored. Malnutrition worsening.
Libya: Hammered poor people to depose one famous dictator. Created failed state.
Syria: Resisted hammering poor people for the sake of getting at one famous dictator.
Iraq: Hammered poor people for a decade, rendered country into ruins, then left. Country now in bloody civil war.
What Keith Alexander, director of the NSA says:
“Well, my concern on that is specially what’s going on in the Middle East, what you see going on in Syria, what we see going on– Egypt, Libya, Iraq, it’s much more unstable, the probability that a terrorist attack will occur is going up. And this is precisely the time that we should not step back from the tools that we’ve given our analysts to detect these types of attacks.”
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10.06.13
Posted in Bombing Moe, Bombing Paupers, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 12:45 pm by George Smith
The mighty US war on terror machine grinds on. Big news, big news, an allegedly important al Qaeda man, nabbed by US special forces in the failed state formerly known as Libya. Hate to rain on the parade. (Well, no, not really.)
Anas al Libi was a retiree from the Afghan war against the Soviets.
The picture now all over the news is misleading. Anas al Libi most probably does not look like that now.
Reads the New York Times today (no link):
American commandos carried out raids on Saturday in two far-flung African countries in a powerful flex of military muscle aimed at capturing fugitive terrorist suspects
[Anas al Libi’s] brother, Nabih, told The Associated Press that just after dawn prayers, three vehicles full of armed men had approached [his] home and surrounded him as he parked his car. The men smashed his window, seized his gun and sped away with him, the brother said.
Military muscle.
In 2000 al Libi was living in England when the British took the “Manual of Afghan Jihad” off him and gave it to the FBI. Al Libi was not arrested and later faded from sight, apparently leaving the country.
After 9/11, the US government started calling this book the “al Qaeda manual.” It’s what you used to see quoted from when authorities wanted to produce some evidence of the methods of mayhem used by al Qaeda. Photocopies were published, various edits of it have been posted around the web, by the GWB White House and, of course, here.
British authorities tried to use it in a famous ricin trial to establish that an “al Qaeda poison cell” was linked to al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The US government also used the alleged “al Qaeda poison cell” as evidence in Colin Powell’s discredited UN Security Council exposition on the Saddam Hussein regime’s WMD programs and its connection with al Qaeda.
The British jury for the London ricin trial did not agree there was a poison cell (and the defense proved a ricin recipe seized in an anti-terror raid in England was not the same as that in al Libi’s “Manual of Afghan Jihad”) and found all of the Muslims rounded up as part of the alleged plot not guilty, except for one man.
Every regular knows I wrote about it extensively years ago.
Excerpted, from GlobalSecurity.Org:
It was the British prosecution’s aim to link the “UK poison cell” to al Qaida by associating its ricin and poisons recipes with documents of Afghan — read al Qaida — origin. It cited three documents of interest: the “Manual of Afghan Jihad” seized in an information gathering raid in Manchester in 2000, notes found in English and Russian in Kabul in 2001 and notes found in Kabul, written in Arabic, also in 2001.
In a mini-trial within the trial, the prosecution’s claims became unconvincing for a number of reasons. The “Manual of Afghan Jihad” was obtained in Manchester in April 2000 by British anti-terrorism agents and subsequently turned over to the FBI’s Nanette Schumaker later that month and contains sections on poisons. Its ricin recipe is clearly taken from Hutchkinson and Saxon and although it is of similar nature to the recipe in the Bourgas trial, it is not identical.
In the manner of details, the “Manual of Afghan Jihad” calls for the use of lye in the treatment of castor seeds. The use of lye was subsequently dropped for many methods found in terrorist literature and it also does not appear in the Bourgass recipe. Other portions of the “Jihad” recipe straighforwardly descend from Hutchkinson, including the reference to DMSO. And still other fine details separate it from the Kamel Bourgass formulation.
A further knock on the “Manual of Afghan Jihad” as an al Qaida source comes from its apparent origin in the first jihad against the Communist occupation of Afghanistan, prior to al Qaida. The “Manual of Afghan Jihad” was the property of Nazib al Raghie, also known as Anas Al Liby to the US government. At the time the manual was taken off al Raghie in Britain, UK authorities were not interested in him. Neither, apparently, was the FBI and he was not arrested. These days, al Raghie, as Al Liby, is on the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists.
The “Manual of Afghan Jihad’s” ricin recipe was fairly obviously not the same as the one presented as evidence in the trial and a representative of the defense added that its appellation as an “al Qaida manual” was and is an invention of the United States government. More to the point, it was the work of the Department of Justice because nowhere in the manual is the word “al Qaida” mentioned although one could find it entitled as such on the DoJ website copy.
Summary: Anas al Libi (or Anas al Liby) was once, perhaps accurately, described privately by an expert for the defense in the London ricin trial as a pensioner from the Afghan wars.
He owned the copy of the so-called “al Qaeda manual” that used to be famous.
Anas al Libi has probably not been doing much of anything for years. He finally returned home, his capture partly the result of the turning of Libya into a failed state.
Go team. We expect nothing less than the description of great victories and legerdemain in the removal of poverty-stricken fly dirt.
The capture of Anas al Libi illustrates the working policy of the US government in open-ended military operations.
American special forces can roam the world, easily finding permission to snatch or kill any relative nobody as long as they are deemed problematical, in any failed or failing state, almost always those with warring tribes of Muslims.
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08.30.13
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle at 3:18 pm by George Smith
You would be right if you think Americans lack character, empathy and the ability to think things through.
From the BBC, citing a Quinnipiac Poll, it is determined that Half of Americans don’t want war with Syria but half said they’re “open” to it if it means pushing a button and shoving 200 remote-controlled guided bombs into a barrel willy-nilly:
This option is more palatable to the US public than the deployment of ground troops … Indeed, remotely controlled attacks such as air strikes have been called ‘the American way of war’ by the authors of an article in Foreign Affairs magazine.
More palatable, yes, if you can be cooking hot dogs over the weekend and getting revved up for college football.
Foreign Affairs?
“Foreign affairs” implies a foreign policy and a state department.
The state department hasn’t done anything for decades except say “OK!” when someone suggests unleashing the bombers.
Here’s the American way of war, from over a decade ago.
If you recall, the opening round of the Iraq War involved much publicity surrounding a midnight strike on “Dora Farms,” a place where Saddam Hussein was said to have a command hideout.
The hope was, in flattening it, that he could be buried in the rubble, bringing a quick end to things.
Dora Farms turned out to be another American technological gaffe. The missiles and bombers hit an empty field.
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08.29.13
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle at 3:56 pm by George Smith
All the nausea-provoking cliches of American war junk journalism have returned: “What would a military strike on [fill in the blank] look like?” [1]
Followed by numbing, intelligence-insulting descriptions of weapons platforms, maps with potential targets and quote from “experts” at US think tanks, all career dependent on continuous war. Tried to counter it with a column lampooning it, “Weapon of the Week,” at the Voice a decade ago. (Google.)
That did a damn fucking lot for my reputation.
There was also a big piece in the Post with said “experts” — alleged thinking of wise men — on whether or not a good bombing of Syria would be a “just war.” At this juncture it would not have occurred to me that any discussion of a remote-controlled strategic bombing campaign against any puny country, no matter how bad and which can barely defend itself, belongs on the same page as the word “just.”
No link, mostly because there’s nothing in it you can’t imagine.
Andrew Bacevich, the official retired military man voice-for-the- left, says it’s a bad idea, the same thing he said a decade ago about Iraq.
A Brookings flunky takes the opposite side of the coin, predictably.
A handful of religious men are nervous about the subject. They don’t much like talking about the US and the concept of “just war.”
One of them admits the US is not the sword of God, something that’s probably occurred to quite a lot of people. This is the only bit unusual as anything like it would usually be edited out.
And it’s mildly startling to see some people actually getting fidgety in print over discussions on the the US and prosecution of “just war.” Since they believe in a deity and an afterlife they are perhaps starting to think that eventually they’ll have to do some explaining and that “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” was always a pretty sickening tune.
You can say “God bless America” in the knee-jerk way of politicians and citizens but does he when you’re pushing the launch-cruise-missiles button? Or are you just feeling like you’re pushing your luck? Such teleological questions are real brain-twisters.
And, finally, at the end of the day, the Britishes showed some sense, many — a majority — thinking that dumping 200 cruise missiles and stealth bomber strikes into Syria at midnight will not likely make it a better place.
From the NYT:
“Prime Minister David Cameron said that Britain would not participate militarily in any strike against Syria after he lost a parliamentary vote by 13 … It was a stunning defeat for a government that had seemed days away from joining the United States and France in a short, punitive cruise-missile attack on the Syrian government …”
Which raises the question: “Why can’t we have nice things like ‘stunning defeats’ every now and then?”
[1.] War junk journalism, example provided by the Christian Science Monitor, a website that should not exist at all as its entire purpose is to furnish, as fast as possible, three or four paragraph blog posts on whatever is trending in search nationally:
[What] would a US attack look like?
First, it will probably start at night. US night-fighting capability is unsurpassed, and night attacks reduce the risk of civilian casualties, given that any civilian workers at Syrian military installations are likely to be home in bed. This could occur within days, perhaps as early as Thursday.
Second, the weapon of choice will almost certainly be precision-guided munitions. The US Navy has four destroyers within range of Syrian targets. Each Arleigh Burke-class destroyer has 90 vertical launchers for Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles and defensive missiles, according to a Syria attack plan produced by Christopher Harmer, senior naval analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. Depending on the mix of munitions loaded in these launchers, four ships should easily be able to hit Syrian targets with 180 Tomahawks.
US cruise missiles have a 1,000-mile range, meaning they can be launched hundreds of miles at sea. If they operate as intended, their accuracy carries them to within a few meters of their intended targets.
No link. That place sucks and so do those who work there.
The Bombing Paupers tab is, once again, officially open.
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