The Roots of Neoconservatism are 100% Imperialistic, Colonialist, Supremacist, and Blatantly Evil

strategic-culture |  Neoconservatism started in 1953 with Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the Democratic Party US Senator from the state of Washington (1953-1983), who became known as a ‘defense’ hawk, and as “the Senator from Boeing,” because Boeing practically owned him. The UK’s Henry Jackson Society was founded in 2005 in order to carry forward Senator Jackson’s unwavering and passionate endorsement of growing the American empire so that the US-UK alliance will control the entire world (and US weapons-makers will dominate in every market).

Later, during the 1990s, neoconservatism became taken over by the Mossad and the lobbyists for Israel and came to be publicly identified as a ‘Jewish’ ideology, despite its having — and having long had — many champions who were ‘anti-communist’ or ‘pro-democracy’ or simply even anti-Russian, but who were neither Jewish nor even focused at all on the Middle East. Republicans Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and John McCain; and the Democrat, CIA Director James Woolsey — the latter of whom was one of the patrons of Britain’s Henry Jackson Society — were especially prominent neoconservatives, who came to prominence even before neocons became called “neoconservatives.” What all neocons have always shared in common has been a visceral hatred of Russians. That comes above anything else — and even above NATO (the main neocon organization).

During recent decades, neocons have been hating Iranians and more generally Shiites — such as in Syria and in Lebanon, and now also in Yemen — and not only hating Russians.

When the Israel lobby during the 1990s and after, pumped massive resources into getting the US Government to invade first Iraq and then Iran, neoconservatism got its name, but the ideology itself did not change. However, there are a few neoconservatives today who are too ignorant to know, in any coherent way, what their own underlying beliefs are, or why, and so who are anti-Russians (that’s basic for any neocon) who either don’t know or else don’t particularly care that Iran and Shia Muslims generally, are allied with Russia. Neoconservatives such as this, are simply confused neocons, people whose underlying ideology is self-contradictory, because they’ve not carefully thought things through.

What's Missing From the DC-NYC War Profiteer Consensus?

theamericanconservative |  1) It’s clear now that Europeans will increase their contributions to NATO. But Big Media totally ignored the trillion dollar gorilla in room: Why does anyone have to spend so much on NATO in the first place?

Are we planning a ground attack on Russia because we really think the former Soviet Empire will invade Poland or the Baltic nations? Are we planning for a land war in Europe to intervene in the Ukraine? What for is the money? The Trump administration and Big Media, for all their noise, mainly argue that more spending is good. There is no debate about the reasons why. Meanwhile Russia is cutting its military spending.

Washington is so dominated by our military-industrial-congressional complex that spending money is a major intent. Remember when Washington first insisted that putting up an anti-missile system in Poland and Romania was supposed to protect Europe from an Iranian attack? Of course, it was really directed against Russia. Washington was so eager to spend the money that it didn’t even ask the Europeans to pay the cost even though it was supposedly for their defense. As of 2016 Washington had spent $800 million on the site in Romania. Now it appears that Poland and Romania will pay billions to the Raytheon Corporation for the shield to comply with their commitment to increase military spending to 2 percent of gross national product.

2) There was no focus on the real, growing threat of nuclear war, intentional or accidental. No one, including journalists at the joint press conference, spoke about the collapsing missile treaties (the only one who reportedly seemed keen to discuss it was ejected beforehand). Scott Ritter details these alarming risks here on TAC.

The U.S. is now funding new cruise missiles with nukes which allow for a surprise attack on Russia with only a few minutes of warning, unlike the ICBMs which launch gives a half an hour or more. This was the reason Russia opposed the anti-missile system in Eastern Europe, because they could have little warning if cruise missiles were fired from the new bases. Americans may think that we don’t start wars, but the Russians don’t. The old shill argument that democracies don’t start wars is belied by American attacks on Serbia, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen.

3) For all the Democratic and Big Media attacks on Trump for supposedly caving in to Putin, he gave Putin nothing. His administration is still maintaining an increasingly stringent economic attack on Russian trade and banking, announcing (just days after his meeting) $200 million of new aid to Ukraine’s military and threatening Europeans with sanctions if they go ahead with a new Baltic pipeline to import Russian natural gas. Consequently, some analysts believe that Putin has given up on wanting better relations with the U.S. and instead is just trying to weaken and discredit America’s overwhelming power in the world. In a similar vein Rand Paul writes how we never think about other nations’ interests.

4) The release of intelligence agency findings about Russians’ intervention in the last election just a day before the conference precisely shows the strength of the “Deep State” in dominating American foreign policy. An article by Bruce Fein in TAC argues we should “Forget Trump: The Military-Industrial Complex is Still Running the Show With Russia,” showing how Washington wants to keep Russia as an enemy because it’s good for business.

A Good Start and a Success

theduran |  The result was an agreement between Putin and Trump to reopen channels of communication between their governments and to meet regularly with each other as they feel their way towards a rapprochement.

To be clear, that rapprochement will not mean and is not intended to mean that the US and Russia will cease to be adversaries and will become friends.

Instead what is being discussed are steps to bring to a stop the downward spiral in their relations, with each side obtaining a better understanding of the other side’s moves and red lines, so that hopefully geopolitical disasters like the 2014 Maidan coup can be avoided in future.

That would be a major advance over what has existed previously given that since the USSR collapsed in 1991 the US has refused to acknowledge that Russia has any right to any opinions at all, let alone to act independently or set out red lines.

Needless to say the more often Putin and Trump meet the more ‘normalised’ relations between the US and Russia become, with each meeting provoking less controversy than the previous one, with the whole process beyond a certain point becoming routine so that it attracts ever less attention and (hopefully) eventually becomes uncontroversial.

It is because the powerful forces in the US who scorn the idea of a ‘geopolitical ceasefire’ and want ever greater confrontation between the US and Russia do not want to see relations ‘normalised’ in this way that their reaction to the summit has been so hysterical.

As of the time of writing it is these people who in the media and on twitter are making the running.  However it may be a mistake to see in the volume of the noise they are making a true reflection of their influence.

Last February’s Nuclear Posture Review suggests that there is a very powerful constituency within the US and specifically within the Pentagon which might potentially support the sort of ‘geopolitical ceasefire’ with Russia that Donald Trump appears to be gradually working towards.

The Nuclear Posture Review shows that some sections of the US military understand how dangerously overstretched the US has become as it responds simultaneously to challenges from Russia in Europe and from China in the Pacific.  Both Putin and Trump mentioned during their news conference the extent to which their respective militaries are already in contact with each other and are working well together

Donald Trump: Well, our militaries do get along. In fact, our militaries actually have gotten along probably better than our political leaders for years, but our militaries do get along very well and they do coordinate in Syria and other places. Ok? Thank you.
Vladimir Putin:……..On the whole, I really agree with the President. Our military cooperation is going quite well. I hope that they will continue to be able to come to agreements just as they have been…..

That may be a sign that there is more understanding of what Donald Trump is trying to do – at least within the US defence establishment – than the hysteria the Helsinki summit has provoked might suggest.

Overall, provided it is clearly understood that what Putin and Trump are working towards is a detente style ‘geopolitical ceasefire’ and not ‘friendship’ – and certainly not an alliance –  it can be said that their summit in Helsinki was a good start and a success.

What happens next depends on whether the forces of realism and sanity in the US can prevail over those of megalomania and hysteria.  Given how entrenched the latter have become unfortunately no one can count on this.

However some sort of process which may in time lead to detente and an easing of tensions between the nuclear superpowers has begun.  Given the circumstances in which it has been launched that is more than might have been expected even a short time ago, and for that one should be grateful.

Lost White Military Supremacy: The Real Reason The U.S. Must Talk With Russia

atimes |  It’s crystal clear that President Trump is applying Kissingerian divide-and-rule tactics, trying to reduce Russian political/economic connectivity with the two other Eurasian integration poles, China and Iran.

Still, the swamp cannot possibly contemplate The Big Picture – as this must-watch conversation between two of the very few Americans who actually know Russia in-depth attests. Professor Stephen Cohen and Professor John Mearsheimer go to the jugular: Nothing can be done when Russophobia is the law of the land.

Over and over again, we must go back to Putin’s March 1 speech, which presented the US with what can only be described, writes Martyanov, as “a military-technological Pearl Harbor-meets-Stalingrad.”

Martyanov goes all the way to explain how the latest Russian weapons systems present immense strategic – and historical – ramifications. The missile gap between the US and Russia is now “a technological abyss,” with ballistic missiles “capable of trajectories which render any kind of anti-ballistic defense useless.” Star Wars and its derivatives are now – to use a Trumpism – “obsolete.”

The Kinzhal, as described by Martyanov, is “a complete game-changer geopolitically, strategically, operationally, tactically and psychologically.” In a nutshell, “no modern or prospective air-defense system deployed today by NATO can intercept even a single missile with such characteristics.”

This means, among other things – and stressing it is never enough – that the whole Eastern Mediterranean can be closed off, not to mention the whole Persian Gulf. And all this goes way beyond asymmetry; it’s about “the final arrival of a completely new paradigm” in warfare and military technology.

Martyanov’s must-read book is the ultimate Weapon of Myth Destruction (WMD). And unlike the Saddam Hussein version, this one actually exists. As Putin warned (at 7:10 in the video), “They did not listen to us then.” Are they listening now?

Greasy Supremely Arrogant Replacement Negroe Smugly Assumes Russia Was "Ours" To Loot

WaPo |  President Trump’s news conference Monday in Helsinki was the most embarrassing performance by an American president I can think of. And his preposterous efforts to talk his way out of his troubles made him seem even more absurd. But what has been obscured by this disastrous and humiliating display is the other strain in Trump’s Russia narrative. As he recently tweeted, “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity.” This notion is now firmly lodged in Trump’s mind and informs his view of Russia and Putin. And it is an issue worth taking seriously.

The idea that Washington “lost” Russia has been around since the mid-1990s. I know because I was one of the people who made that case. In a New York Times Magazine article in 1998, I argued that “central to any transformation of the post-Cold-War world was the transformation of Russia. As with Germany and Japan in 1945, an enduring peace required that Moscow be integrated into the Western world. Otherwise a politically and economically troubled great power . . . would remain bitter and resentful about the post-Cold-War order.”

This never happened, I argued, because Washington was not ambitious enough in the aid it offered. Nor was it understanding enough of Russia’s security concerns — in the Balkans, for example, where the United States launched military interventions that ran roughshod over Russian sensibilities.

Perhaps most crucially, by the mid-2000s, steadily rising oil prices had resulted in a doubling of Russia’s per capita gross domestic product, and cash was flowing into the Kremlin’s coffers. A newly enriched Russia looked at its region with a much more assertive and ambitious gaze. And Putin, sitting atop the “vertical of power” he had created, began a serious effort to restore Russian influence and undermine the West and its democratic values. What has followed — the interventions in Georgia and Ukraine, the alliance with President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the cyberattacks against Western countries — has all been in service of that strategy.

So yes, the West might have missed an opportunity to transform Russia in the early ’90s. We will never know whether it would have been successful. But what we do know is that there were darker forces growing in Russia from the beginning, that those forces took over the country almost two decades ago and that Russia has chosen to become the principal foe of America and the American-created world order.

Peace With Russia? Hollywood Made A Blueprint For That Azz....,

wikipedia |  President Kennedy had read Seven Days in May shortly after its publication and believed the scenario as described could actually occur in the United States. According to Frankenheimer in his director's commentary, production of the film received encouragement and assistance from Kennedy through White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, who conveyed to Frankenheimer Kennedy's wish that the film be produced and that, although the Pentagon did not want the film made, the President would arrange to be visiting Hyannis Port for a weekend when the film needed to shoot outside the White House.^[7]

The story is set in the early 1970s, ten years in the future at the time of the film's 1964 release, and the Cold War is still a problem (in the 1962 book, the setting was May 1974 after a stalemated war in Iran). U.S. President Jordan Lyman has recently signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, and the subsequent ratification by the U.S. Senate has produced a wave of dissatisfaction, especially among Lyman's opposition and the military, who believe the Soviets cannot be trusted.

A Pentagon insider, United States Marine Corps Colonel "Jiggs" Casey (the Director of the Joint Staff), stumbles on evidence that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by the charismatic Air Force General James Mattoon Scott, intend to stage a coup d'etat to remove Lyman and his cabinet in seven days. Under the plan a secret Army unit known as ECOMCON (Emergency COMmunications CONtrol) will seize control of the country's telephone, radio, and television networks, while Congress is prevented from implementing the treaty. Although personally opposed to Lyman's policies, Casey is appalled by the plot and alerts Lyman, who gathers a circle of trusted advisors to investigate: Secret Service White House Detail Chief Art Corwin, Treasury Secretary Christopher Todd, advisor Paul Girard, and Senator Raymond Clark of Georgia.

Casey uses the pretense of a social visit to General Scott's former mistress to ferret out potential secrets that can be used against Scott, in the form of indiscreet letters. Meanwhile, the alcoholic Clark is sent to Fort Bliss near El Paso, Texas, to locate the secret base, and Girard leaves for the Mediterranean to obtain a confession from Vice Admiral Barnswell, who declined to participate in the coup. Girard gets the confession in writing, but is killed when his return flight crashes, while Clark is taken captive when he reaches the secret base. However, Clark convinces the base's deputy commander, Colonel Henderson, a friend of Casey's and not party to the coup, to help him escape. They reach Washington, DC, but Henderson is abducted during a moment apart from Clark.

Lyman calls Scott to the White House to demand that he and the other plotters resign. Scott initially denies the existence of the plot, but then tacitly admits to it while denouncing the treaty. Lyman argues that a coup in America would prompt the Soviets to make a preemptive strike. Scott maintains that the American people are behind him. Lyman is on the verge of confronting Scott with the letters obtained from Scott's mistress when he decides against it and allows Scott to leave.

Scott meets the other three Joint Chiefs, demanding they stay in line and reminding them that Lyman does not seem to have concrete evidence of their plot. Somewhat reassured, the others agree to continue the plan to appear on television and radio simultaneously on the next day to denounce Lyman. However, Lyman first holds a press conference, at which he demands the men's resignations. As he is speaking, Barnswell's hand-written confession, recovered from the plane crash, is handed to him. Copies are given to Scott and the other plotters, who have no choice but to call off the coup. The film ends with an address by Lyman to American people on the country's future.

The Choice America Is Making Now

eand |  Predatory capitalism has long fuelled the American economy — the middle class hollowed out to make the rich richer. But they don’t have any money, savings, or income left to give. And yet the only thing that American economy was built to do was prey. So whom will it prey on now?

Do you see the problem? The machine was built to generate “growth” by taking things from people — their money, their time, their imagination, their courage, their empathy — and in return jacking up the price of the basics of life, healthcare, education, finance, to astronomical prices. Not exactly a fair trade to begin with. But people now have nothing left to give. They have been bled dry. So what happens now? What will the machine consume to keep itself going?

Well, whom can it prey on now? Maybe more camps will have to be built, and more kids put in them, and each one made a profit center. Maybe all those private prisons will have to be filled up with dissidents. Maybe all those tech companies will start reporting you as dangerous. Maybe all those TV shows you watch will be used to make a profile of whether or not you are a good citizen. It’s not a coincidence they built concentration camps in old Walmarts — it’s a perfect metaphor for an implosive economy.

The point is this. Profits have to propped up, by more and more violent and coercive means, because America’s economy isn’t really capable of producing much that is real or valuable anymore. Nobody in the world really wants to buy what America has to sell — guns, Facebook ads, and greed, to put simply. But America’s own broken middle class doesn’t have anything left to give now. So the ways that such a predatory economy can “grow” are few now: by imprisoning people for profit, by abusing them for profit, by expropriating their wealth, or by putting them to work. What are those ways, in particular?

So the third thing “implosion” implies is a violent, spectacular process. When a society is collapsing, it is run by plutocrats. But when a society is imploding, it is run by mafias and warlords. That is basically where America is, though maybe it wouldn’t like to admit it. What other kinds of people smile as kids are shot in schools? Mafias and warlords exact their tribute. It doesn’t matter who pays, or whether payment is made in gold, silver, or bodies — it only matters that the mafias are paid.

That is why predation is now taking on a very different tone now. It is going from the hidden, soft predation of crap jobs and raiding pension funds and shifting debt from bailed out hedge funds onto students — to something harder, something more lethal, whose teeth and claws are finally being revealed. So implosion means, in this second sense, that predatory institutions are ready to use hard force, real violence, to accomplish their means. They are ready to consume everything that is left now, with very real abuse and systematic human rights violations. Hence, the camps.

But the camps are just a beginning. For an economy which has no good way left to grow, which makes mostly nothing the world wants, and whose people are too poor to buy what the world makes, the endgame is clear. Such an economy is going to have start resorting to more and more spectacularly violent means of repression and subjugation, to alleviate fast-spreading poverty. So today’s camps, as terrible as they are, are only a starting point, not an end point.

Pentagon Busy Making Up Excuses To Boost Warsocialist Welfare

tomdispatch |  For almost 20 years, U.S. drone warfare was largely one-sided. Unlike Afghans and Yemenis, Iraqis and Somalis, Americans never had to worry about lethal robots hovering overhead and raining down missiles. Until, that is, one appeared in the skies above Florida.

But that’s a story for later. For now, let’s focus on a 2017 executive order issued by President Trump, part of his second attempt at a travel ban directed primarily at citizens of Muslim-majority nations. It begins: “It is the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks.”

That sentence would be repeated in a January report from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” Meant to strengthen the president’s case for the travel ban, it was panned for its methodological flaws, pilloried for its inaccuracies, and would even spur a lawsuit by the civil rights organization, Muslim Advocates, and the watchdog group, Democracy Forward Foundation. In their complaint, those groups contend that the report was “biased, misleading, and incomplete” and “manipulates information to support its anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim conclusions.”

To bolster the president’s arguments for restricting the entry of foreigners into the United States, the DOJ/DHS analysis contained a collection of case summaries. Examples included: the Sudanese national who, in 2016, “pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to ISIS”; the Uzbek who “posted a threat on an Uzbek-language website to kill President Obama in an act of martyrdom on behalf of ISIS”; the Syrian who, in a plea agreement, “admitted that he knew a member of ISIS and that while in Syria he participated in a battle against the Syrian regime, including shooting at others, in coordination with Al Nusrah,” an al-Qaeda offshoot.

Such cases cited in the report, hardly spectacular terror incidents, were evidently calculated to sow fears by offering a list of convicted suspects with Muslim-sounding names. But the authors of the report simply looked in the wrong places. They could have found startling summaries of truly audacious attacks against the homeland in a collection of U.S. military documents from 2016 obtained by TomDispatch via the Freedom of Information Act. Those files detail a plethora of shocking acts of terrorism across the United States including mass poisonings, the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and that “People’s Armed Liberation (PAL) attack on U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) headquarters in Tampa, Florida, [by] a drone-launched missile.”

That’s right! A drone-launched missile attack! On CENTCOM’s Florida headquarters! By a terrorist group known as PAL!

Wondering how you missed the resulting 24/7 media bonanza, the screaming front page headlines in the New York Times, the hysterics on Fox & Friends, the president’s hurricane of tweets?

Well, there’s a simple explanation. That attack doesn’t actually happen until May 2020. Or so says the summary of the 33rd annual Joint Land, Air, and Sea Strategic Special Program (JLASS-SP), an elaborate war game carried out in 2016 by students and faculty from the U.S. military’s war colleges, the training grounds for its future generals and admirals.

It's Mueller's War and the Evil of It is Near at Hand...,

davidstockmanscontracorner |  America First is an existential threat to the Deep State.

 

It turns the clock back to April 2, 1917---the date when the Woodrow Wilson foolishly declared war on Germany and led America into a bloody cauldron on the Western Front that had absolutely no bearing on its national security; and thereafter into a destructive "peace" at Versailles that guaranteed perpetual war.

America First, when followed to its logical and correct conclusion, would put the War Capital of the world out of business; it would result in a massive slashing of the hideously bloated national security budget; it would ash-can the endless complex of think-tanks, NGOs, intelligence contractors and lobbyists for foreign interests.

We refer, of course, to the likes of the Podesta brothers, Paul Manafort and 20,000 more like and similar operators and racketeers. Indeed, having it way with the Warfare State, America First would bring a hair-curling recession to the Imperial City which would make Youngstown Ohio look like a model of prosperity.

To be sure, we seriously doubt that the Donald had any idea of where American First was leading him when he stumbled upon the slogan; and we are afraid that his xenophobic fear-mongering about the Mexican border would have distracted him, anyway.

But the Deep State was taking no chances. That's why the partisan shills who ran the CIA and FBI under Obama were able to launch their insidious anti-Trump witchunt as an "insurance policy" in July 2016; and it's also why the Obama Administration pulled out all the stops in its waning days in office to insure that the verdict of November 8 would be re-litigated on the back of the Russian Meddling story.

In Part 3 we intend to summarize the ludicrously threadbare nature of the whole Mueller investigation, but suffice it here to note the Smoking Bunker Buster that puts the lie to the whole scam.

To wit, it is absolutely the fact that neither Donald Trump, nor his sons, nor his daughter and son-in-law went to Russia at any time after the Donald's unlikely campaign was launched in June 2015. At that time no one including Vlad Putin gave him a snowball's chance of ending up in the Oval Office; and since then Trump has proven that no one matters in his comings and goings except the Donald and his family.

So if there was any collusion after the announcement, it had to be by email or phone between the Trumps and high state officials in the Kremlin. That is to say, every word of such conversations would be stored in the vast NSA (national security agency) server farms where everything which crosses the worldwide web gets snatched and stored.

Needless to say, if Robert Mueller were truly doing god's work in behalf of the rule of law and American democracy, he would have ordered-up the NSA taps on day one, and resolved the matter of "collusion" with the Russians within one week's time.

That he didn't do because no such taps exist and no such conversations between the Trumps and the Russian state ever happened. Period. Full stop.

To the contrary, the entire prolonged, ballyhooed, ever-expanding, leak-ridden, media-fueling Mueller investigation is designed to mortally wound Donald Trump and drive him from office. That is, to crush America First in its infancy and to obliterate even the crude and half-baked form in which its emerged from the modest gray matter nested under the Orange Comb-Over.  The Deep State Closes In On The Donald Part 1

 

Who Are America's Enemies In Africa?

strategic-culture |  Although AFRICOM is mandated to conduct “stability operations,” there is evidence that the command has engaged in fomenting military coups in Africa. In 2009, a group of Guinean army officers who attempted to assassinate Guinea's President, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, were operating under orders of US Special Forces assigned to the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) and French military intelligence personnel. Camara, himself, seized power in a December 2008 coup in following the death of Guinea's President Lansana Conte.

Camara had apparently signed a deal with China for that nation to take over bauxite mining contracts from US and French companies with the promise that China would refine bauxite into aluminum by building a factory in Guinea. The Americans and French previously exported raw bauxite to smelters abroad. The offer of the Chinese to smelter bauxite in Guinea, with the promise of well-paying jobs for the impoverished nation, was too much for France and the United States and a "hit" was ordered on Camara, using assets in the Guinean military trained by AFRICOM in Guinea, Germany, and the United States.

The National Security Agency, America’s top signals intelligence (SIGINT)-gathering agency, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in training intercept operators in a number of languages, including those spoken in Africa. AFRICOM has operated a redundant and dual linguist training program, mirroring the NSA program. AFRICOM has spent millions needlessly duplicating the NSA in training speakers and to be fluent in Bemba, Bete, Ebira, Fon, Gogo, Kalenjin, Kamba, Luba-Katanga, Mbundu/Umbundu, Nyanja, Sango, Sukuma, Tsonga/Tonga, Amharic, Dinka, Somali, Tigrinya, and Swahili. This is just one of many examples by which AFRICOM has served as a complete waste of money in duplicative efforts undertaken by other government agencies and elements.

The June 4, 2017 strangling death in Bamako, Mali of US Army Green Beret Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar by two US Navy SEALs, all deployed under AFRICOM’s direction, was linked to Melgar’s discovery that the two Navy personnel were pocketing official funds used by AFRICOM to pay off informants in the West African country. The fraud was yet another example of the culture of malfeasance present among AFRICOM’s ranks.

Counterinsurgency Governance vs Heavily Armed Citizens

thenation |  Governing through the counterinsurgency warfare paradigm has, since 9/11, been distilled into three core strategies. 

First, bulk collect everything about everyone in the population. This is the model of NSA’s TREASURE MAP program: “every single end device that is connected to the Internet somewhere in the world—every smartphone, tablet and computer” must be known. The data of everyone, especially the neutral or passive majority, is crucial because that is the only way to identify accurately the active minority. This has been turned on the American population since 9/11. 

Second, identify and eradicate the revolutionary minority. Total information about the entire population is what makes it possible to discriminate between friend and foe. Once suspicion attaches, individuals must be treated severely to extract all possible intelligence, with enhanced interrogation techniques if necessary; and if they are revealed to belong to the active minority, they must be disposed of through detention, rendition, deportation, or targeted assassination. Unlike conventional soldiers, these minorities are dangerous not because of their physical presence on a battlefield, but because of their ideology and allegiances. 

Third, the passive majority must be assuaged. Remember, in this new way of seeing, the population is the battlefield. Its hearts and minds must be assured. In the digital age, this can be achieved, first, by offering distractions and entertainment: a rich new environment of YouTubes and NetFlix, Facebook posts and Tweets, Amazon Prime, Second, by targeting enhanced content (such as sermons by moderate imams) to deradicalize susceptible persons—in other words, by deploying new digital techniques of psychological warfare and propaganda. Third, now, with a reality-TV presidential style that turns every new day into, in Donald Trump’s words, “a new episode of a television show.” 

These three maxims have been deployed aggressively in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in a historical development that can only be described, tragically, as poetic justice, this counterinsurgency paradigm has been domesticated. Gradually—and increasingly—these strategies have come to shape the way that we, in the United States, govern ourselves domestically. It is Americans who have become the target of their own counterinsurgency strategies: total-information awareness, targeted extraction of minority suspects, and the continuous effort to prevent majority citizens from sympathizing in any way with any minorities.

Lotta Restless Unemployed Killers Out'Chere Yo!

theintercept  |  The White House press secretary did not directly dispute the revelation that Blackwater founder Erik Prince and former Iran-Contra figure Oliver North pitched a plan to develop a private spy network to members of the Trump administration.

The plan, detailed in a story broken by The Intercept on Monday, is to develop a private intelligence network to counter perceived “deep state” enemies within the ranks of government. Prince denied the report, and North did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

“I’m not aware of any plans for something of that definition or anything similar to that at this time,” said White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, in response to a question from CBS News’s Major Garrett about the story.

Garrett followed up to ask if President Donald Trump “would be opposed” to an outside spy network operating on his behalf. Sanders said she was unaware.

Garrett asked to Sanders to confirm whether any administration official had been briefed on such a network.

“I’m not going to answer some random hypothetical. Did some random person off the street come in and say something? I don’t know,” Sanders said.

And finally, Garrett asked if it was an idea Trump would consider.

“Again, I haven’t asked him, but its not something that’s currently in the works,” Sanders replied.

A White House official later told New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman that the proposal was indeed pitched to the Trump administration, but that there is no sign the president himself was briefed.

CIA False-Flagging and Impersonating Kaspersky

wikileaks |  Hive solves a critical problem for the malware operators at the CIA. Even the most sophisticated malware implant on a target computer is useless if there is no way for it to communicate with its operators in a secure manner that does not draw attention. Using Hive even if an implant is discovered on a target computer, attributing it to the CIA is difficult by just looking at the communication of the malware with other servers on the internet. Hive provides a covert communications platform for a whole range of CIA malware to send exfiltrated information to CIA servers and to receive new instructions from operators at the CIA.

Hive can serve multiple operations using multiple implants on target computers. Each operation anonymously registers at least one cover domain (e.g. "perfectly-boring-looking-domain.com") for its own use. The server running the domain website is rented from commercial hosting providers as a VPS (virtual private server) and its software is customized according to CIA specifications. These servers are the public-facing side of the CIA back-end infrastructure and act as a relay for HTTP(S) traffic over a VPN connection to a "hidden" CIA server called 'Blot'.

The cover domain delivers 'innocent' content if somebody browses it by chance. A visitor will not suspect that it is anything else but a normal website. The only peculiarity is not visible to non-technical users - a HTTPS server option that is not widely used: Optional Client Authentication. But Hive uses the uncommon Optional Client Authentication so that the user browsing the website is not required to authenticate - it is optional. But implants talking to Hive do authenticate themselves and can therefore be detected by the Blot server. Traffic from implants is sent to an implant operator management gateway called Honeycomb(see graphic above) while all other traffic go to a cover server that delivers the insuspicious content for all other users.

Digital certificates for the authentication of implants are generated by the CIA impersonating existing entities. The three examples included in the source code build a fake certificate for the anti-virus company Kaspersky Laboratory, Moscow pretending to be signed by Thawte Premium Server CA, Cape Town. In this way, if the target organization looks at the network traffic coming out of its network, it is likely to misattribute the CIA exfiltration of data to uninvolved entities whose identities have been impersonated.

The documentation for Hive is available from the WikiLeaks Vault7 series.

Managing The Dangerous Classes - Our Aggressive Domestic War On The Poor

truthdig  |  None of the reforms, increased training, diversity programs, community outreach and gimmicks such as body cameras have blunted America’s deadly police assault, especially against poor people of color. Police forces in the United States - which, according to The Washington Post, have fatally shot 782 people this year - are unaccountable, militarized monstrosities that spread fear and terror in poor communities.

By comparison, police in England and Wales killed 62 people in the 27 years between the start of 1990 and the end of 2016.

Police officers have become rogue predators in impoverished communities. Under U.S. forfeiture laws, police indiscriminately seize money, real estate, automobiles and other assets. In many cities, traffic, parking and other fines are little more than legalized extortion that funds local government and turns jails into debtor prisons.

Because of a failed court system, millions of young men and women are railroaded into prison, many for nonviolent offenses. SWAT teams with military weapons burst into homes often under warrants for nonviolent offenses, sometimes shooting those inside. Trigger-happy cops pump multiple rounds into the backs of unarmed men and women and are rarely charged with murder. And for poor Americans, basic constitutional rights, including due process, were effectively abolished decades ago.

Jonathan Simon’s “Governing Through Crime” and Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” point out that what is defined and targeted as criminal activity by the police and the courts is largely determined by racial inequality and class, and most importantly by the potential of targeted groups to cause social and political unrest. Criminal policy, as sociologist Alex S. Vitale writes in his new book, “The End of Policing,” “is structured around the use of punishment to manage the ‘dangerous classes,’ masquerading as a system of justice.”

The criminal justice system, at the same time, refuses to hold Wall Street banks, corporations and oligarchs accountable for crimes that have caused incalculable damage to the global economy and the ecosystem. None of the bankers who committed massive acts of fraud and were responsible for the financial collapse in 2008 have gone to prison even though their crimes resulted in widespread unemployment, millions of evictions and foreclosures, homelessness, bankruptcies and the looting of the U.S. Treasury to bail out financial speculators at taxpayer expense. We live in a two-tiered legal system, one in which poor people are harassed, arrested and jailed for absurd infractions, such as selling loose cigarettes—which led to Eric Garner being choked to death by a New York City policeman in 2014—while crimes of appalling magnitude that wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth are dealt with through tepid administrative controls, symbolic fines and civil enforcement.

The grotesque distortions of the judicial system and the aggressive war on the poor by the police will get worse under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. There has been a rollback of President Barack Obama’s 2015 restrictions on the 1033 Program, a 1989 congressional action that allows the transfer of military weaponry, including grenade launchers, armored personnel carriers and .50-caliber machine guns, from the federal government to local police forces. Since 1997, the Department of Defense has turned over a staggering $5.1 billion in military hardware to police departments.

The Trump administration also is resurrecting private prisons in the federal prison system, accelerating the so-called war on drugs, stacking the courts with right-wing “law and order” judges and preaching the divisive politics of punishment and retribution. Police unions enthusiastically embrace these actions, seeing in them a return to the Wild West mentality that characterized the brutality of police departments in the 1960s and 1970s, when radicals, especially black radicals, were murdered with impunity at the hands of law enforcement. The Praetorian Guard of the elites, as in all totalitarian systems, will soon be beyond the reach of the law. As Vitale writes in his book, “Our entire criminal justice system has become a gigantic revenge factory.”

The arguments—including the racist one about “superpredators“—used to justify the expansion of police power have no credibility, as the gun violence in south Chicago, abject failure of the war on drugs and vast expansion of the prison system over the last 40 years illustrate. The problem is not ultimately in policing techniques and procedures; it is in the increasing reliance on the police as a form of social control to buttress a system of corporate capitalism that has turned the working poor into modern-day serfs and abandoned whole segments of the society. Government no longer makes any attempt to ameliorate racial and economic inequality. Instead, it criminalizes poverty. It has turned the poor into one more cash crop for the rich.

What's That Africom Cover Story Again? (REDUX Originally Posted 1/26/13)

antiwar | But Patrick Meehan, chairman of the US Congressional committee that drew up the report, said “While I recognize there is little evidence at this moment to suggest Boko Haram is planning attacks against the [US] homeland, lack of evidence does not mean it cannot happen.”

Washington’s interest in Africa goes back at least to 2007, when the Pentagon’s AFRICOM was formed, long before rebels in Libya or militants in Mali were a threats to exaggerate.

The dominant way of thinking in Washington is that the US should be involved in every corner of the planet, and the pressure to always “do something” is intense.

But as Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations recently commented with regards to the intervention in Mali, “Some things that happen on the other 94% of the earth that isn’t the US, has nothing to do with the US, nor requires a US response.”

When You Can No Longer Pretend Soldiering is Heroic, Send In The Clowns...,

Counterpunch |  Predictably, the news media spent most of the week examining words Donald Trump may or may not have spoken to the widow of an American Ranger killed in Niger, in northwest Africa, in early October. Not only was this coverage tedious, it was largely pointless. We know Trump is a clumsy boor, and we also know that lots of people are ready to pounce on him for any sort of gaffe, real or imagined. Who cares? It’s not news. But it was useful to those who wish to distract Americans from what really needs attention: the U.S. government’s perpetual war.

The media’s efforts should have been devoted to exploring — really exploring — why Rangers (and drones) are in Niger at all. (This is typical of the establishment media’s explanation.)

That subject is apparently of little interest to media companies that see themselves merely as cheerleaders for the American Empire. For them, it’s all so simple: a U.S president (even one they despise) has put or left military forces in a foreign country — no justification required; therefore, those forces are serving their country; and that in turn means that if they die, they die as heroes who were protecting our way of life. End of story.

Thus the establishment media see no need to present a dissenting view, say, from an analyst who would question the dogma that inserting American warriors into faraway conflicts whenever a warlord proclaims his allegiance to ISIS is in the “national interest.” Patriotic media companies have no wish to expose their audiences to the idea that jihadists would be no threat to Americans who were left to mind their own business.

Apparently the American people also must be shielded from anyone who might point out that the jihadist activity in Niger and neighboring Mali is directly related to the U.S. and NATO bombing of Libya, which enabled al-Qaeda and other Muslim militants to overthrow the secular regime of Col. Muammar Qaddafi. That Obama-Clinton operation in 2011, besides producing Qaddafi’s grisly murder and turning Libya into a nightmare, facilitated the transfer of weapons and fanatical guerrillas from Libya to nearby countries in the Sahel — as well as Syria. Since then the U.S. government has been helping the French to “stabilize” its former colony Mali with surveillance drones and Rangers based in Niger. Nice work, Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. (Citizen Trump was an early advocate of U.S. intervention in Libya.) Need I remind you that the U.S./NATO regime-change operation in Libya was based on a lie? Obama later said his failure to foresee the consequences of the Libya intervention was the biggest mistake of his presidency. (For more on the unintended consequences for the Sahel, see articles here, here, and here.)

Pit of Despair Because of Africans or Because of White Imperialism Bee Dee?

local10  |  President Donald Trump told U.S. Army Sgt. La David Johnson's widow Tuesday that "he knew what he signed up for ... but when it happens, it hurts anyway," when he died serving in northwestern Africa, according to U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Florida.  

"Yeah, he said that," Wilson said. "So insensitive. He should have not have said that. He shouldn't have said it."  

The president called about 4:45 p.m. and spoke to Johnson's pregnant widow, Myeshia Johnson, for about five minutes. She is a mother to Johnson's surviving 2-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter. The conversation happened before Johnson's remains arrived at Miami International Airport on a commercial Delta Airlines flight.  

"The president's conversations with the families of American heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice are private," a top advisor later told Local 10 News.  

Wilson watched as the widow, who is expecting their third baby in January, leaned over the U.S. flag that was draping Johnson's casket. Her pregnant belly was shaking against the casket as she sobbed uncontrollably. Their daughter stood next to her stoically. Their toddler waited in the arms of a relative. 

There was silence. 

Local politicians, police officers and firefighters lined up to honor Johnson for his service and for the efforts and discipline that got the former Walmart employee to defy all odds and become a 25-year-old member of the 3rd Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. 

Johnson, who participated in a mentorship program Wilson founded in 1993, died during a mission fighting alongside Green Berets. Islamic militants ambushed them on Oct. 4 with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns. The team reportedly didn't have overhead armed air cover and was in unarmored pickup trucks. Reuters reported the lack of planning upset the French.  

Trump didn't discuss any of the details of the ambush or say that the Pentagon was conducting an investigation. Instead, he focused on questions about whether or not he had offered his condolences to the families of the fallen. 

You Holding Up the Mirror The Only Thing Worse Than Babylon Seeing Itself...,

TomDispatch |  As in Baghdad, so in Baltimore. It’s connected, you see. Scholars, pundits, politicians, most of us in fact like our worlds to remain discretely and comfortably separated. That’s why so few articles, reports, or op-ed columns even think to link police violence at home to our imperial pursuits abroad or the militarization of the policing of urban America to our wars across the Greater Middle East and Africa. I mean, how many profiles of the Black Lives Matter movement even mention America’s 16-year war on terror across huge swaths of the planet? Conversely, can you remember a foreign policy piece that cited Ferguson? I doubt it.

Nonetheless, take a moment to consider the ways in which counterinsurgency abroad and urban policing at home might, in these years, have come to resemble each other and might actually be connected phenomena:

*The degradations involved: So often, both counterinsurgency and urban policing involve countless routine humiliations of a mostly innocent populace.  No matter how we’ve cloaked the terms -- “partnering,” “advising,” “assisting,” and so on -- the American military has acted like an occupier of Iraq and Afghanistan in these years.  Those thousands of ubiquitous post-invasion U.S. Army foot and vehicle patrols in both countries tended to highlight the lack of sovereignty of their peoples.  Similarly, as long ago as 1966, author James Baldwin recognized that New York City’s ghettoes resembled, in his phrase, “occupied territory.”  In that regard, matters have only worsened since.  Just ask the black community in Baltimore or for that matter Ferguson, Missouri.  It’s hard to deny America’s police are becoming progressively more defiant; just last month St. Louis cops taunted protestors by chanting “whose streets? Our streets,” at a gathering crowd.  Pardon me, but since when has it been okay for police to rule America’s streets?  Aren’t they there to protect and serve us?  Something tells me the exceedingly libertarian Founding Fathers would be appalled by such arrogance.

*The racial and ethnic stereotyping.  In Baghdad, many U.S. troops called the locals hajis, ragheads, or worse still, sandniggers.  There should be no surprise in that.  The frustrations involved in occupation duty and the fear of death inherent in counterinsurgency campaigns lead soldiers to stereotype, and sometimes even hate, the populations they’re (doctrinally) supposed to protect.  Ordinary Iraqis or Afghans became the enemy, an “other,” worthy only of racial pejoratives and (sometimes) petty cruelties.  Sound familiar?  Listen to the private conversations of America’s exasperated urban police, or the occasionally public insults they throw at the population they’re paid to “protect.”  I, for one, can’t forget the video of an infuriated white officer taunting Ferguson protestors: “Bring it on, you f**king animals!”  Or how about a white Staten Island cop caught on the phone bragging to his girlfriend about how he’d framed a young black man or, in his words, “fried another nigger.”  Dehumanization of the enemy, either at home or abroad, is as old as empire itself.

*The searches: Searches, searches, and yet more searches. Back in the day in Iraq -- I’m speaking of 2006 and 2007 -- we didn’t exactly need a search warrant to look anywhere we pleased. The Iraqi courts, police, and judicial system were then barely operational.  We searched houses, shacks, apartments, and high rises for weapons, explosives, or other “contraband.”  No family -- guilty or innocent (and they were nearly all innocent) -- was safe from the small, daily indignities of a military search.  Back here in the U.S., a similar phenomenon rules, as it has since the “war on drugs” era of the 1980s.  It’s now routine for police SWAT teams to execute rubber-stamped or “no knock” search warrants on suspected drug dealers’ homes (often only for marijuana stashes) with an aggressiveness most soldiers from our distant wars would applaud.  Then there are the millions of random, warrantless, body searches on America’s urban, often minority-laden streets.  Take New York, for example, where a discriminatory regime of “stop-and-frisk” tactics terrorized blacks and Hispanics for decades.  Millions of (mostly) minority youths were halted and searched by New York police officers who had to cite only such opaque explanations as “furtive movements,” or “fits relevant description” -- hardly explicit probable cause -- to execute such daily indignities.  As numerous studies have shown (and a judicial ruling found), such “stop-and-frisk” procedures were discriminatory and likely unconstitutional.

WarSocialism Overcame Trump's Insurgency

moonofalabama |  It is indisputable that the generals are now ruling in Washington DC. They came to power over decades by shaping culture through their sponsorship of Hollywood, by manipulating the media through "embedded" reporting and by forming and maintaining the countries infrastructure through the Army Corps of Engineers. The military, through the NSA as well as through its purchasing power, controls the information flow on the internet. Until recently the military establishment only ruled from behind the scene. The other parts of the power triangle, the corporation executives and the political establishment, were more visible and significant. But during the 2016 election the military bet on Trump and is now, after he unexpectedly won, collecting its price.

Trump's success as the "Not-Hillary" candidate was based on an anti-establishment insurgency. Representatives of that insurgency, Flynn, Bannon and the MAGA voters, drove him through his first months in office. An intense media campaign was launched to counter them and the military took control of the White House. The anti-establishment insurgents were fired. Trump is now reduced to public figure head of a stratocracy - a military junta which nominally follows the rule of law.

Stephen Kinzer describes this as America’s slow-motion military coup:

Ultimate power to shape American foreign and security policy has fallen into the hands of three military men [...]
...
Being ruled by generals seems preferable to the alternative. It isn’t.
...
[It] leads toward a distorted set of national priorities, with military “needs” always rated more important than domestic ones. 
...
It is no great surprise that Trump has been drawn into the foreign policy mainstream; the same happened to President Obama early in his presidency. More ominous is that Trump has turned much of his power over to generals. Worst of all, many Americans find this reassuring. They are so disgusted by the corruption and shortsightedness of our political class that they turn to soldiers as an alternative. It is a dangerous temptation.

The country has fallen to that temptation even on social-economic issues:

In the wake of the deadly racial violence in Charlottesville this month, five of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were hailed as moral authorities for condemning hate in less equivocal terms than the commander in chief did.
...
On social policy, military leaders have been voices for moderation.

The Endgame is a US with the Military Effectively in Charge

tomdispatch |  By Michael T. Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of 14 books including, most recently, The Race for What’s Left. He is currently completing work on a new book, All Hell Breaking Loose, on climate change and American national security. Originally published at TomDispatch

Deployed to the Houston area to assist in Hurricane Harvey relief efforts, U.S. military forces hadn’t even completed their assignments when they were hurriedly dispatched to Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to face Irma, the fiercest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. Florida Governor Rick Scott, who had sent members of the state National Guard to devastated Houston, anxiously recalled them while putting in place emergency measures for his own state. A small flotilla of naval vessels, originally sent to waters off Texas, was similarly redirected to the Caribbean, while specialized combat units drawn from as far afield as Colorado, Illinois, and Rhode Island were rushed to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Meanwhile, members of the California National Guard were being mobilized to fight wildfires raging across that state (as across much of the West) during its hottest summer on record.

Think of this as the new face of homeland security: containing the damage to America’s seacoasts, forests, and other vulnerable areas caused by extreme weather events made all the more frequent and destructive thanks to climate change. This is a “war” that won’t have a name — not yet, not in the Trump era, but it will be no less real for that. “The firepower of the federal government” was being trained on Harvey, as William Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), put it in a blunt expression of this warlike approach. But don’t expect any of the military officials involved in such efforts to identify climate change as the source of their new strategic orientation, not while Commander in Chief Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office refusing to acknowledge the reality of global warming or its role in heightening the intensity of major storms; not while he continues to stock his administration, top to bottom, with climate-change deniers.

Until Trump moved into the White House, however, senior military officers in the Pentagon were speaking openly of the threats posed to American security by climate change and how that phenomenon might alter the very nature of their work.  Though mum’s the word today, since the early years of this century military officials have regularly focused on and discussed such matters, issuing striking warnings about an impending increase in extreme weather events — hurricanes, incessant rainfalls, protracted heat waves, and droughts — and ways in which that would mean an ever-expanding domestic role for the military in both disaster response and planning for an extreme future.

That future, of course, is now.  Like other well-informed people, senior military officials are perfectly aware that it’s difficult to attribute any given storm, Harvey and Irma included, to human-caused climate change with 100% confidence. But they also know that hurricanes draw their fierce energy from the heat of tropical waters, and that global warming is raising the temperatures of those waters. It’s making storms like Harvey and Irma, when they do occur, ever more powerful and destructive.  “As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global temperatures increasing, and severe weather patterns are accelerating,” the Department of Defense (DoD) bluntly explained in the Quadrennial Defense Review, a 2014 synopsis of defense policy. This, it added, “may increase the frequency, scale, and complexity of future missions, including defense support to civil authorities” — just the sort of crisis we’ve been witnessing over these last weeks.

As this statement suggests, any increase in climate-related extreme events striking U.S. territory will inevitably lead to a commensurate rise in American military support for civilian agencies, diverting key assets — troops and equipment — from elsewhere. While the Pentagon can certainly devote substantial capabilities to a small number of short-term emergencies, the multiplication and prolongation of such events, now clearly beginning to occur, will require a substantial commitment of forces, which, in time, will mean a major reorientation of U.S. security policy for the climate change era.  This may not be something the White House is prepared to do today, but it may soon find itself with little choice, especially since it seems so intent on crippling all civilian governmental efforts related to climate change.