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Ed Webb

Our Commando War in 120 Countries: Uncovering the Military's Secret Operations In the O... - 0 views

  • Born of a failed 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran, in which eight U.S. service members died, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) was established in 1987.  Having spent the post-Vietnam years distrusted and starved for money by the regular military, special operations forces suddenly had a single home, a stable budget, and a four-star commander as their advocate.  Since then, SOCOM has grown into a combined force of startling proportions.  Made up of units from all the service branches, including the Army’s “Green Berets” and Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force Air Commandos, and Marine Corps Special Operations teams, in addition to specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, civil affairs personnel, para-rescuemen, and even battlefield air-traffic controllers and special operations weathermen, SOCOM carries out the United States’ most specialized and secret missions.  These include assassinations, counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations.
  • “as a former JSOC commander, I can tell you we were looking very hard at Yemen and at Somalia.”
  • Olson launched "Project Lawrence," an effort to increase cultural proficiencies -- like advanced language training and better knowledge of local history and customs -- for overseas operations.  The program is, of course, named after the British officer, Thomas Edward Lawrence (better known as "Lawrence of Arabia"), who teamed up with Arab fighters to wage a guerrilla war in the Middle East during World War I.  Mentioning Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mali, and Indonesia, Olson added that SOCOM now needed "Lawrences of Wherever."
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  • According to testimony by Olson before the House Armed Services Committee earlier this year, approximately 85% of special operations troops deployed overseas are in 20 countries in the CENTCOM area of operations in the Greater Middle East: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Yemen
  • a well-honed public relations campaign which helps them project a superhuman image at home and abroad
  • Tasked to coordinate all Pentagon planning against global terrorism networks and, as a result, closely connected to other government agencies, foreign militaries, and intelligence services, and armed with a vast inventory of stealthy helicopters, manned fixed-wing aircraft, heavily-armed drones, high-tech guns-a-go-go speedboats, specialized Humvees and Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, as well as other state-of-the-art gear (with more on the way), SOCOM represents something new in the military.  Whereas the late scholar of militarism Chalmers Johnson used to refer to the CIA as "the president's private army," today JSOC performs that role, acting as the chief executive’s private assassination squad, and its parent, SOCOM, functions as a new Pentagon power-elite, a secret military within the military possessing domestic power and global reach.
  • With control over budgeting, training, and equipping its force, powers usually reserved for departments (like the Department of the Army or the Department of the Navy), dedicated dollars in every Defense Department budget, and influential advocates in Congress, SOCOM is by now an exceptionally powerful player at the Pentagon.  With real clout, it can win bureaucratic battles, purchase cutting-edge technology, and pursue fringe research like electronically beaming messages into people’s heads or developing stealth-like cloaking technologies for ground troops. 
  • U.S. Special Operations forces were approximately as large as Canada’s entire active duty military.  In fact, the force is larger than the active duty militaries of many of the nations where America’s elite troops now operate each year, and it’s only set to grow larger
  • When missions are subject to scrutiny like the bin Laden raid, he said, the elite troops object
Ed Webb

The Forgotten Cameroon War - 0 views

  • In 2005, parliament adopted a law requiring history teachers to discuss the “positive aspects” of colonization. Of course, this has always been done: many French colonial atrocities have been erased, and the driving forces of imperialism are rarely, if ever, critically examined. School curricula propagate a sugarcoated version of France’s bloody past.
  • French society as a whole perpetually extols its colonial history. All over the country, innumerable streets and headstones pay homage to the worst colonialists, the scholars who justified a white supremacist racial hierarchy, and the imperial army’s violent feats.
  • A significant majority of French people remain proud of their colonial past, unaware of the barbarous manner in which France conquered Algeria, Indochina, and Madagascar in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ignorant of how it violently suppressed colonial resistance in Morocco, Benin, and Martinique, and having only a basic knowledge of the massacres that punctuated the last phase of the colonial era — from the carnage of the Thiaroye military camp in Senegal on December 1, 1944, to the mass killings in the streets of Paris on October 17, 1961.
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  • Among the omissions of French colonial historiography, the Cameroon war of the 1950s and 1960s is perhaps the most striking. Hardly anyone even realizes it took place. This secret war, which nonetheless claimed tens of thousands of victims, went almost unnoticed at the time, and its victors, the French and their local intermediaries, methodically erased every remaining trace in the following decades: the Gaullist regime installed a ferocious dictator in Yaoundé who hastened to wipe out all memory of the anticolonial struggle.
  • Tens of thousands of letters and petitions were sent to the United Nations to convey the UPC’s watchwords: social justice, an end to racial discrimination, total independence, and reunification — slogans that echoed the promise of the UN charter itself
  • European authorities quickly realized that the trusteeship system weakened the imperial edifice. If the Cameroonians managed to assert the rights the United Nations legally upheld, the wind of decolonization, already blowing in Asia, would arrive in Africa, causing surrounding colonies to crumble by contagion and destroying what remained of empire. For the French, who controlled the major part of the country, it became urgent to halt the growing liberation movement.
  • The Union of the Populations of Cameroon (UPC), founded in April 1948, centered the independence movement, which was gaining in popularity daily. Particularly well-structured and led by some remarkable militants, the UPC rapidly extended its influence and began to undermine the administering authorities, not only in the urban centers of Yaoundé, Douala, Dschang, and Édéa, but also in the countryside. Ever-larger crowds gathered to listen to speeches from UPC secretary general Ruben Um Nyobè, President Félix Moumié, and Vice Presidents Abel Kingue and Ernest Ouandié.
  • In 1972, the French government censored French Cameroonian writer Mongo Beti’s Main basse sur le Cameroun, the first work describing the atrocities of the independence war. The French government immediately banned it and destroyed all available copies.
  • In Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and elsewhere, African politicians cynically accepted French authorities’ assistance in establishing themselves in positions of responsibility that were, in reality, closely supervised. In Cameroon, however, the operation proved more difficult to carry out: UPC leaders refused to betray the political aims and popular aspirations they had upheld for years. As they continued the work of political mobilization within and beyond Cameroon’s borders, Paris decided to employ strong-arm tactics.
  • In Kenya in 1952, the British had bloodily repressed the Land and Freedom Army — which they pejoratively called “Mau Mau”— and seemed determined to maintain their grip on that country. Elsewhere, however, their strategy appeared to diverge. In the Gold Coast (now Ghana), London seemed prepared to negotiate independence with the nationalist movement lead by Kwame Nkrumah. Such weakness scandalized some French observers of colonial affairs. The British were going to give away their empire and abandon the unfinished work of colonialism! And all for the benefit of a handful of radicalized Africans who would inevitably deliver the continent to the communists.
  • The more aware French administrators, however, held a different view. Aware that traditional colonialism was done for, they saw Britain’s apparent laxness in the Gold Coast and elsewhere as a subtle way of controlling their colonies’ inevitable independence. According to this analysis, London was trying to reproduce in Africa what Washington and Moscow had realized in Latin America and Eastern Europe: converting these countries into vassal states by leaning on local elites as their collaborators and intermediaries.
  • A new piece of legislation, prepared as soon as 1954 and adopted two years later under the name of the “Defferre loi cadre,” or framework law, entrusted certain responsibilities to handpicked African elites who would keep the colonies within the French fold. By giving local autonomy and limited power to local leaders, this particularly perverse outsourcing of the state’s domestic administration undermined its full sovereignty.
  • In late trusteeship-era French Cameroon, Messmer’s mission was to keep the UPC underground and groom a local ruling class that could continue to favor French interests after independence. As he explicitly wrote in his memoirs, the idea was to give “independence to those who called for it the least, having eliminated politically and militarily those who had called for it most intransigently.”
  • From the moment independence was proclaimed, France intensified its war effort. The Sanaga-Maritime had been, in large part, purged between 1957 and 1959, and the conflict escalated in Wouri, Mungo, and the Bamileke region, where the Kamerunian National Liberation Army (ALNK) had been established in 1959. The French army repeated its villagization policy, set up militias, and disappeared prisoners. It added a vast campaign of aerial bombardment to its repertoire. The population endured intense psychological campaigns — torture was systematized, public executions proliferated, and the severed heads of alleged rebels were displayed at markets and public squares.
  • the two top French administrators in Cameroon had a shared interest in counterinsurgency. In part inspired by the psychological warfare developed in the United States and by British techniques used in various colonial arenas, a line of French officers during the 1946–1954 Indochina war elaborated the French counterrevolutionary war doctrine
  • aimed to install civilian-military structures capable of leading the masses physically and psychologically
  • The counterrevolutionary doctrine was exported simultaneously to two territories under French rule — Algeria, shaken by the National Liberation Front (FLN) movement, and Cameroon, where French officialdom described the UPC as a sort of African Vietminh. Smarting from Indochina, these officers arrived in Cameroon in 1955 with the firm intention of scouring out “communist subversion.”
  • December 1956 marked a major turning point. Pierre Messmer organized elections in which the outlawed UPC could not participate. This way, the high commissioner could validate the elimination of the main Cameroonian party and appoint “democratically elected” candidates better disposed to France. To prevent this, the nationalists organized resistance fighters through the National Organization Committee (CNO)
  • The French reaction became so violent that tens of thousands of families left their villages to take refuge in the surrounding forests and put themselves under the protection of the CNO maquis. Other armed organizations joined the fight, attempting, with varying degrees of success, to coordinate with the UPC.
  • Like the British in Malaya and Kenya and like the Americans later in Vietnam, the French began a process of so-called villagization. Security forces under French command mercilessly hunted down all those who refused to join military regroupment camps. The French army and its affiliated militias burned illegal villages and summarily executed outlaws extrajudicially. Those who joined the regroupment camps, willingly or not, had to experience the army’s total surveillance apparatus, endure endless screening sessions, and take part in countless psychological rehabilitation schemes.
  • We will probably never know the exact number of people massacred during these “cleansing operations.” We do know that the UPC’s charismatic Um Nyobè — a priority target — was one of the victims. A comrade was tortured until she revealed Um Nyobè’s location, and a military patrol quickly assassinated the nationalist leader.
  • The “troubles,” as the French authorities called them, affected all of southern French Cameroon, in particular the area from the port city of Douala to the coffee-growing Mungo and Bamileke regions. Because these regions bordered British southern Cameroon — where numerous UPC leaders had taken refuge — the French rebuked their British counterparts, accusing them of allowing their territory to be used by the nationalist combatants as a strategic withdrawal zone.
  • Under the French secret services’ watchful eye, UPC president Félix Moumié and a dozen others began a long revolutionary journey, settling successively in Sudan, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Morocco, and later, in Algeria, Congo-Brazzaville and Angola — in any African country that would grant them asylum.
  • From the Cameroonian perspective, the scheme had two obvious defects. For one, it called for independence prior to an election. For another, the Cameroonian leaders whom French authorities co-opted as allies had to sign a series of bilateral accords with Paris, some of them secret, that would legalize French control over the new state’s commercial, monetary, military, cultural, and diplomatic policies. This was, then, an illusory independence — the Cameroonian people were deprived of sovereignty, and their leaders remained under France’s supervision.
  • This controlled independence had numerous advantages for the French. Apart from defusing the real Cameroonian independence movement’s message, it allowed the French authorities to put an end to the international trusteeship system and shed UN oversight. Also, independence would accelerate British Cameroon’s emancipation, and Paris assumed the two parts of the country would quickly reunite. The latter aim was only half achieved — the northern half of British Cameroon joined Nigeria. Surely the most important outcome of Cameroon’s independence was that it freed France to repress movements deemed subversive as it wished.
  • The Soviets, suspected of trying to spread “world revolution,” were often accused of directing African independence movements from afar
  • It was only when Ouandié was arrested in 1970 and publicly executed in January 1971 that the nationalists accepted that armed struggle had definitively failed.
  • Supervised by French advisers, Cameroonian president Ahmadou Ahidjo — installed in 1958 — transformed his regime into a dictatorship. Well aware that he owed his power to France, he suppressed all civil liberties and progressively established a one-party system. Under the pretext of fighting “subversion,” he surrounded the Cameroonian people with a wall of silence. With its omnipresent army, brutal political police, and administrative detention camps, the regime became one of the most repressive in Africa to the benefit of the local apparatchiks and French businesses, who shared in the profits from the country’s economic exploitation.
  • “Françafrique” was born — the French version of neocolonialism, which allowed Paris to maintain its former African colonies not in spite of independence but, in fact, thanks to it.
  • According to the British embassy’s confidential report from the mid 1960s, the war caused from 60,000 to 76,000 civilian deaths between 1956 and 1964. At a 1962 conference, a journalist from Le Monde claimed 120,000 had been killed since 1959 in the Bamileke region alone. “Yet we are almost entirely ignorant of this even in France, the former metropole,” he added. For good reason: neither he nor any of his colleagues informed their readers about it.
  • To admit that repression continued — let alone that it intensified — would have highlighted the artificiality of independence and the illegitimacy of the pro-France regime. As a result, very few journalists were allowed in combat zones. Taken up in French planes to observe the conflict from above, they described it as an incomprehensible “tribal war,” thereby justifying French aid — “at the request of the Cameroonian government” — to end this “anachronistic” conflict. If the journalist from Le Figaro — one of the few French people to fly over the Bamileke region in 1960 — is to be believed, French intervention in Cameroon was a kind of humanitarian charity.
  • France’s military strategy included the deliberate portrayal of the conflict as a tribal or civil war. Heavily committed in Algeria — which was also monopolizing public attention — the French army sent very few of its own troops to Cameroon. As much as possible, they trained and supervised troops either from surrounding French colonies (Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, Gabon) or from local paramilitary groups and self-defense militias within Cameroon
  • by stirring up ethnic rivalries, French instigators could hide behind their African subordinates when carnage ensured, attributing it to “innate African savagery.”
  • The French victory and Ahidjo’s installation as the postcolonial state’s first president not only muzzled all criticism of the regime, but also effaced the memory of the nationalists who fought to achieve real independence.
  • Not until the 1980s could Cameroonians begin to research their country’s violent decolonization, and even then they had to do it abroad.
  • in 2009, François Fillon responded to questions about France’s role in the UPC leaders’ assassinations by describing the accusation as “pure invention.” In fact, this aspect of the war is the best documented. Granted, in a July 2015 visit to Cameroon, François Hollande mentioned these “tragic episodes” for the first time. But his vague sentence barely paid lip service to these “episodes”; indeed, he appeared to not know what he was talking about. There has been no follow-up to these muddled ramblings.
Ed Webb

The Pulitzer Problem | Rafia Zakaria - 0 views

  • Taub’s article was published in 2019, slightly more than four years after Salahi himself published his best-selling Guantánamo Diary, which notably did not win a Pulitzer Prize. Large parts of “Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret”—awarded a Pulitzer this week in the Feature Writing category—particularly those that deal with Salahi, rehash with the customary “he wrote” what had already been written. Yet while the content may be mostly the same, the purpose is different. Taub, unlike Salahi, is out to deliver absolution to his American reader: casting Steve Wood as an integral player is one part of this; leaving the still-constrained reality of Salahi’s present (he cannot leave tiny Mauritania) to the very end of the piece is another.
  • Credibility and journalistic heroism, as each year’s prizes show, reside in the pages of prestige publications; the New York Times and the Washington Post are mainstays, and since the prizes were first opened up to include magazines in 2015, The New Yorker is as well. No truth is really a truth, particularly a courageous truth, until it appears in their pages. The brown man, the accused terrorist, the actual torture survivor Mohamedou Ould Salahi may have written a great book. But the definitive story about “Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret” is the one penned by Taub.
  • Such hefty institutional backing has a relationship to truth-telling and to truth creation. It doesn’t matter that Taub, per his own admission, did not speak Arabic, that he seems to have rehashed a large chunk of his Pulitzer-winning article from an already published book, or even that he spent only a week in Mauritania where Salahi now lives. His article legitimizes a process through which the Western liberal frame is conflated with the lack of any frame at all and applied to foreign places or people through the roving foreign correspondent. Ben Taub is not the problem, of course. It’s just that the edifices of elite journalism consistently elevate the voices of those like him. In a story about how a system of silencing allowed the most shameful cruelties to happen, considering the architecture of truth and silence seems important.
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  • Salahi and countless non-Western others have long known and written about torture at Guantánamo or Bagram or any of the many places where it occurred. But it only becomes a literary, notable, and prize-worthy truth when it flows from the pen of a foreign correspondent at a prestige publication like The New Yorker.
  • “If you say that you are angry,” Salahi tells the two white men, “it is understood as an emotion. If I say that I am angry, it is seen as a threat to national security.”
  • Salahi’s words underscore the truth Taub has not told: that writing an article about torture that does nothing to disrupt a worldview that has left brown men forever suspect is not getting anywhere at all.
Ed Webb

Slaughter in Indonesia: Britain's secret propaganda war | Indonesia | The Guardian - 0 views

  • what would later be claimed, by those who led it, as one of the most successful propaganda operations in postwar British history. A top secret operation that helped overthrow the leader of the fourth most populous country in the world and contributed to the mass murder of more than half a million of its citizens.
  • Recently released in Britain’s National Archives are pamphlets purporting to be written by Indonesian patriots, but in fact written by British propagandists, calling on Indonesians to eliminate the PKI, then the biggest communist party in the non-communist world.
  • The outcome of the turmoil was a brutal and corrupt 32-year military dictatorship whose legacy shapes Indonesia to this day
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  • Sukarno, like many Indonesians, including the PKI, believed the creation of a Malaysian federation was unwarranted regional interference by the British to maintain their colonial dominance.
  • Like its US and Australian allies, Britain feared a communist Indonesia. The PKI had three million members and was close to Mao’s China. In Washington the fall of the Indonesia “domino” into the communist camp was seen as a greater threat than the potential loss of Vietnam.
  • Suharto, appointed supreme army commander on 14 October, used the rebellion to undermine and eventually overthrow Sukarno, and as what historian John Roosa has called a “pretext for mass murder”: the elimination of the PKI in a series of massacres across Indonesia that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
  • British intelligence agencies and propaganda specialists were complicit, carrying out covert operations to undermine Sukarno’s regime and eliminate the PKI by blaming them for the Untung coup.
  • What Gilchrist wanted and what became the unit’s mission was the production of black propaganda, apparently produced by patriotic Indonesian émigrés abroad, to stir Indonesian anti-communists into action.The influential targets of a propaganda newsletter, according to a declassified report by Wynne, would eventually include “as many personages in the hierarchy of government, army and civil service as we can find”.To disguise the British origin of the newsletter it was sent into Indonesia via Asian cities including Hong Kong, Tokyo and Manila.
  • “No, we do not cry out for violence,” the IRD propagandists wrote, “but we demand in the name of all patriotic people that this communist cancer be cut out of the body of the state.” The PKI “is now a wounded snake”, they wrote: “Now is the time to kill it before it has a chance to recover.”
  • Detailed historical research has established that the mass killings of PKI party members and alleged supporters appear to have been triggered by local army commanders or the arrival of army special forces, about three weeks after the botched coup had been put down by Suharto.During that period the media in Indonesia was full of black propaganda against the PKI and its alleged atrocities, as the army whipped up popular anger against communists and legitimised what Roosa has described as its “already-planned moves against the PKI and President Sukarno”.
  • The newsletters were approved by IRD in London before dispatch. Copies sent to senior Foreign Office officials were destroyed after reading at IRD’s request.
  • “Anyone who was leftist was picked up. They were very systematic. They targeted all the leftist groups and not just PKI. People kept themselves to themselves and only talked in whispers.”
  • As the massacres progressed in the autumn of 1965, IRD’s unit in Singapore reassured their readers as to the necessity of the slaughter.In Newsletter 21 they wrote: “Unless we maintain a vigorous campaign to eradicate communism … the red menace will envelop us again.”The stakes were life and death. “We are fighting for our lives and the very existence of Indonesia and we must never forget that. THE CATS ARE WAITING TO POUNCE!”In Newsletter 23 Winchester Road’s propagandists praised “the fighting services and the police” for “doing an excellent job”. Sukarno, then trying to restrain the generals, was wrong: “Communism must be abolished in all its forms. The work started by the army must be carried on and intensified.” The authors finished by equating the PKI to Hitler and Genghis Khan.
  • Reddaway had served in the army during the second world war before joining the Foreign Office and playing a key role in the establishment of IRD. After the failed Untung coup he arrived to take charge of the British operation. His brief was simple. In an interview in 1996 with two of the authors, he said he’d been given a budget of £100,000 by the Foreign Office and was told “to do anything I could do to get rid of Sukarno”. Only now do we know what “anything” fully meant.
  • In the 1996 interviews Reddaway boasted of manipulating the British and other global media to take an anti- Sukarno and PKI line but insisted IRD only passed on true facts and did not use black propaganda.As ever with IRD, Reddaway told us a partial truth. According to a memo he had written: “The bludgeon was surprisingly effective because we were able … to supply publicists with information which they could not find from other sources because of Sukarno’s censorship.”
  • “GCHQ could break and read Indonesian codes without difficulty. The government was among many third world countries using equipment supplied by Swiss-based company Crypto AG. For over 50 years, Crypto AG supplied secretly sabotaged cypher machines, with built-in back doors to which the CIA and GCHQ had keys.”
  • The newsletters remained the core work of Ed Wynne and his colleagues in Winchester Road. A key theme was to encourage their influential readers to support the army’s campaign against the communists. They urged Indonesian patriots: “The PKI and all it stands for must be eliminated for all time.”We now know that to do that they included sensationalised lies. On 5 November the pro-military Jakarta Daily Mail claimed that on the day of the Untung coup 100 women from PKI’s Gerwani women’s organisation had tortured one of the generals using razor blades and knives to slash his genitals before he was shot.The story of the torture and mutilation of the generals by the Gerwani women became part of the founding myth of Suharto’s regime, used to justify the destruction of the PKI. It was also, according to Roosa, a pretext for murder. A lie propagated by the Indonesian army, regurgitated and repurposed to incite IRD’s influential readers.
  • The IRD was deliberately silent on the massacres. One document from December 1965 says they should “do nothing to embarrass the generals” and the newsletter carefully itemises accounts of isolated incidents of PKI brutality but makes no explicit mention of the army’s killings.
  • By early 1966 the mass murders in Indonesia, if not their scale, were well known.In January Robert F Kennedy compared the massacres to “inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the communists” and asked when people would “speak out … against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged communists have not been perpetrators, but victims?”
  • Wynne regarded the operation as a success. In his 1966 annual report he proudly says his operation was “fairly successful” because all his enemies (Konfrontasi, Sukarno, Subandrio and the PKI) were “destroyed”.
  • According to Prof Scott Lucas of the University of Birmingham, the declassified documents show that: “Britain was prepared to engage in dirty deeds which ran contrary to its purported values.” They reveal, he says, “how important black propaganda was to give the illusion that Britain could wield global power – even if many people might be killed for that illusion”.
Ed Webb

Pentagon Knew About Civilian Casualties in Somalia - 0 views

  • AFRICOM contends that hundreds of airstrikes and commando missions in the past 10 years have killed or injured only two civilians in Somalia. This flies in the face of scores of local accounts as well as investigations by international journalists and human rights organizations, including a recent report by Amnesty International. And The Intercept has obtained an AFRICOM document, through the Freedom of Information Act, that shows the command itself has long been aware of multiple attacks that left civilians dead or wounded following operations by U.S. or allied forces
  • The document, along with remarks from a former commander of U.S. Special Operations forces in Africa who spoke with The Intercept, suggests that AFRICOM may be classifying all military-aged males killed in airstrikes, including civilians, as combatants. (This has long been standard operating procedure in Afghanistan, suggesting that targeting protocols employed by U.S. Central Command have migrated to AFRICOM.)
  • Some witnesses interviewed by Amnesty suggested that a lone member of al-Shabab, identified by two people as “Malable,” was the fourth individual killed and the likely target of the strike. A senior local official also confirmed to Amnesty that three civilians were killed in the attack. “I don’t know why they were hit, but maybe it was a mistake,” the local official said. “The U.S. are making a lot of mistakes in this region.”
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  • “AFRICOM says it conducted 110 air strikes that killed 800 terrorists,” said Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security with Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA. “It’s just not plausible that all of the people killed were actually enemy armed forces, and that none were civilians.”
  • “As far as we can tell, AFRICOM doesn’t do any on the ground investigations, and none of the 150 people we interviewed had ever spoken to a government official, Somali or American, about these attacks,” Brian Castner, Amnesty International’s senior crisis adviser on arms and military operations, previously told The Intercept
  • In March 2017, President Donald Trump reportedly designated parts of Somalia as “areas of active hostilities,” meaning the lifting of Obama-era rules requiring that there be near certainty that noncombatants will not be injured or killed. “The burden of proof as to who could be targeted and for what reason changed dramatically,” said retired Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who headed Special Operations Command Africa, or SOCAFRICA, from April 2015 to June 2017. Bolduc added that the change led AFRICOM to conduct airstrikes that previously would not have been carried out
  • the number of U.S. airstrikes in Somalia have risen markedly under the Trump administration, jumping from 14 under President Barack Obama in 2016 to 47 last year. The U.S. is on track to conduct at least 140 airstrikes in Somalia in 2019 if it maintains its current pace, according to Amnesty International.
  • “You just can’t go in there and kill everything that moves,” said the former SOCAFRICA commander. “I don’t have anything against HVT [high-value target] hunting, but we can’t continue to destroy everything in our path in the process of trying to secure U.S. national objectives. Because, at the end of the day, we’ve done nothing to change the fundamental security and stability of the environment.”
  • “That’s just not how war works, especially not air wars,” counters Eviatar. “We know that al Shabaab members are integrated into communities in Somalia, they don’t just occupy isolated military bases, so it strains credulity to suggest that US drones and manned aircraft dropping bombs in areas where civilians live and farm and congregate only killed al Shabaab fighters.”
  • “They’re just saying ‘trust us,’ and we can’t trust them because they’ve already made outlandish claims, like ‘Of the 800 people who were killed in 110 air strikes, none were civilians,’” she said. “There’s just no reason for human rights groups or anyone else to believe them. They don’t have to demonstrate that what they’re doing is lawful, and yet they can go out and kill people. It’s infuriating because what they’re really saying, effectively, is that they’re above the law.”
Ed Webb

Fortress Europe: the millions spent on military-grade tech to deter refugees | European... - 0 views

  • The EU is central to the push towards using technology on its borders, whether it has been bought by the EU’s border force, Frontex, or financed for member states through EU sources, such as its internal security fund or Horizon 2020, a project to drive innovation.In 2018, the EU predicted that the European security market would grow to €128bn (£108bn) by 2020. Beneficiaries are arms and tech companies who heavily courted the EU, raising the concerns of campaigners and MEPs.
  • “In effect, none of this stops people from crossing; having drones or helicopters doesn’t stop people from crossing, you just see people taking more risky ways,” says Jack Sapoch, formerly with Border Violence Monitoring Network. “This is a history that’s so long, as security increases on one section of the border, movement continues in another section.”
  • The most expensive tool is the long-endurance Heron drone operating over the Mediterranean.Frontex awarded a €100m (£91m) contract last year for the Heron and Hermes drones made by two Israeli arms companies, both of which had been used by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip. Capable of flying for more than 30 hours and at heights of 10,000 metres (30,000 feet), the drones beam almost real-time feeds back to Frontex’s HQ in Warsaw.Missions mostly start from Malta, focusing on the Libyan search and rescue zone – where the Libyan coastguard will perform “pull backs” when informed by EU forces of boats trying to cross the Mediterranean.
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  • In September, Greece opened a refugee camp on the island of Samos that has been described as prison-like. The €38m (£32m) facility for 3,000 asylum seekers has military-grade fencing and CCTV to track people’s movements. Access is controlled by fingerprint, turnstiles and X-rays. A private security company and 50 uniformed officers monitor the camp. It is the first of five that Greece has planned; two more opened in November.
  • Poland is hoping to emulate Greece in response to the crisis on its border with Belarus. In October, its parliament approved a €350m wall that will stretch along half the border and reach up to 5.5 metres (18 feet), equipped with motion detectors and thermal cameras.
  • German MEP Özlem Demirel is campaigning against the EU’s use of drones and links to arms companies, which she says has turned migration into a security issue.“The arms industries are saying: ‘This is a security problem, so buy my weapons, buy my drones, buy my surveillance system,’” says Demirel.“The EU is always talking about values like human rights, [speaking out] against violations but … week-by-week we see more people dying and we have to question if the EU is breaking its values,” she says.
  • The EU spent €4.5m (£3.8m) on a three-year trial of artificial intelligence-powered lie detectors in Greece, Hungary and Latvia. A machine scans refugees and migrants’ facial expressions as they answer questions it poses, deciding whether they have lied and passing the information on to a border officer.The last trial finished in late 2019 and was hailed as a success by the EU but academics have called it pseudoscience, arguing that the “micro-expressions” the software analyses cannot be reliably used to judge whether someone is lying. The software is the subject of a court case taken by MEP Patrick Breyer to the European court of justice in Luxembourg, arguing that there should be more public scrutiny of such technology. A decision is expected on 15 December.
Ed Webb

DNA Reveals the Hidden Jewish Ancestry of Latin Americans - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The stories have always persisted—of people across Latin America who didn’t eat pork, of candles lit on Friday nights, of mirrors covered for mourning. A new study examining the DNA of thousands of Latin Americans reveals the extent of their likely Sephardic Jewish ancestry, more widespread than previously thought and more pronounced than in people in Spain and Portugal today.
  • The team also found a mix of indigenous American, European, sub-Saharan African, and East Asian ancestry in many people they sampled—a legacy of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and more recent pulses of immigration from Asia
  • Spain did not allow converts or their recent descendants to go to its colonies, so they traveled secretly under falsified documents. “For obvious reasons, conversos were not eager to identify as conversos,” says David Graizbord, a professor of Judaic studies at the University of Arizona. The designation applied not just to converts but also to their descendants who were always Catholic. It came with more than a whiff of a stigma. “It was to say you come from Jews and you may not be a genuine Christian,” says Graizbord. Conversos who aspired to high offices in the Church or military often tried to fake their ancestry.
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  • conversos—or people who shared ancestry with them—came to the Americas in disproportionate numbers
  • the Spanish Inquisition reached into the colonies, too. Those found guilty of observing Jewish practices in Mexico, for example, were burned at the stake.
  • Nearly a quarter of the Latin Americans shared 5 percent or more of their ancestry with people living in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, including self-identified Sephardic Jews. DNA alone cannot prove that conversos were the source of this ancestry, but it fits with the historical record. This pattern of widespread but low North African and eastern Mediterranean ancestry in the population suggests that its source is centuries old, putting the date around the early days of New Spain. In contrast, more recent immigration to Latin America from Italy and Germany in the late 19th century show up concentrated in relatively few people in a few geographic areas.
  • By the 17th century, Graizbord says, most conversos had assimilated and lost any connection to Jewish customs. Today, some of their descendants are reclaiming their Jewish identity. They can join Jewish genealogy groups. Some have even converted to Judaism. DNA tests are fanning interest, too. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York politician whose family comes from Puerto Rico, recently revealed during a Hanukkah event that she has Sephardic Jewish ancestry.
Ed Webb

New Mexico's Sad Bet on Space Exploration - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • New Mexico spaceport is only the latest entry in a triumphant time line of military and aerospace innovation in this southwestern state. Our video narrator speeds through Spanish colonialism and westward expansion to highlight the Manhattan Project’s work in Los Alamos, to the north, and Operation Paperclip, a secret program that recruited German scientists to the United States after World War II. Among them was Wernher von Braun, who brought his V-2 rockets to the state.White Sands Missile Range, a 3,200-square-mile military-testing site in South Central New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin, hosted much of this work. It’s home to the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, and von Braun’s rocket testing site, too. Spaceport America is positioned adjacent to the Army property, in a tightly protected airspace. That makes rocket-ship testing a lot easier.
  • “It feels exciting, it’s like the future is now,”
  • For now, the spaceport is a futurist tourist attraction, not an operational harbor to the cosmos. The tour buses depart from a former T or C community center twice a day every Saturday. They pass thrift stores, RV parks, and bland but durable-looking structures, defiant underdogs against the mountains. We pass the Elephant Butte Dam, a stunning example of early-20th-century Bureau of Reclamation engineering that made it possible for agriculture to thrive in southern New Mexico; even so, a fellow spaceport tourist notes that the water levels seem far lower than what he recalls from childhood
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  • The complex and its buildings vaguely recall a Southwest landmark frequently mistaken for the city of the future: Arcosanti, the architect Paolo Soleri’s 1970 “urban laboratory” nestled in the mountains north of Phoenix. It’s oddly fitting: Soleri imagined a sustainable desert utopia, as well as speculative space “arcologies”—self-sustaining architectural ecologies, delicately rendered as hypothetical asteroid-belt cities or prototype ships
  • The only spacecraft we see on the tour is a model of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, glimpsed from a distance in an otherwise empty hangar. Even the spacecraft isn’t real.
  • the name Spaceport America suggests theatrics. There are several commercial spaceports throughout the United States, some of which sport more activity and tenants. Most of Virgin Galactic’s testing has happened at the Mojave Air and Space Port; Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport recently signed on the SpaceX competitor Vector as a customer.Others, like Oklahoma’s Air and Space Port, seem to be even more like ghost towns than this one. But New Mexico’s gambit suggests we are at the spaceport of the nation. It doesn’t feel like the frontier of private space travel so much as a movie set.
  • Many promises for technologies of future urbanism start as desert prototypes
  • New Mexico examples tend to include slightly more dystopian rehearsals: Much of the state’s existing science and defense industries emerged from bringing Manhattan Project scientists to what, at the time, was the middle of nowhere to test nuclear weapons—essentially, to practice ending the world.
  • most of my fellow tourists take the premise of ubiquitous space travel to colonies on Mars as a fait accompli. I’m not sure why people in a desert would fantasize about going somewhere even harder to inhabit
  • Humanity dreams of going to space for many of the same reasons some people went to the desert: because it is there, because they hope to get rich extracting natural resources they find there, and because they suspect mysterious, new terrains can’t be any worse than the irredeemable wreckage of the landscape they’re leaving behind
  • believing in the inevitability of Mars colonies is maybe no less idealistic than believing in the Southwest itself
  • The romance and promise of the American West was built, in part, on federal land grants to private corporations that promised to bring boomtowns to places previously otherwise deemed uninhabitable wastelands. Cities rose and fell with the rerouting of railroads
  • To manifest destiny’s proponents, to doubt the inevitability of technological and social progress via the railroad was tantamount to doubting the will of God. Today, questioning the value of (mostly) privately funded space development likewise feels like doubting human progress
  • I wonder if the future always feels like rehearsal until it arrives, or if it is always rehearsal, only seeming like it has arrived when the run-through loses its novelty. Maybe all of the impatient skeptics will be proven wrong this year, and the future will finally arrive at Spaceport America. Here in the desert, a better future always seems to be right around the corner
Ed Webb

The Century-Long Scientific Journey of the Affordable Grocery Store Orchid - Atlas Obscura - 0 views

  • Humans have become adept at shaping plants and animals to our needs and desires, but orchids have been more resistant to our interventions than most of the wild things we covet. Collectors and gardeners devoted their whole lives to cultivating orchids, and still struggled to get seedlings to emerge, to make the plants comfortable in our homes, and to encourage them to reproduce. Corralling orchids—coaxing out the secrets that let us germinate, replicate, and commodify them—took a century of dedicated floriculture. Now there is a multinational apparatus of orchid science, sales, and shipping. An orchid might travel across the globe, from Taiwan to California to New Jersey, before it lands in a bathroom in Brooklyn.
  • From roots to flowers, there are orchids smaller than an inch. The largest can weigh a ton. Vanilla is an orchid, the only one used in industrial food production. Some orchids grow on trees, others in bogs. Some have petals fringed like a leaf of frisée. Some have petals that look like the face of a monkey. But the ones we see available everywhere are all the same, derived from one tiny branch of the orchid family—phalaenopsis.
  • Europe has hundreds of orchid species of its own, but the orchids that drove plant people to madness and obsession came from across the ocean. In the early 1800s, naturalists started shipping flouncy, bright cattleya orchids from tropical Brazil back to England. These flowers grow larger than a person’s palm, and they drip with color and ripple along their petal edges. But no one could figure out how to create more of them. A single pod can contain millions of seeds, and all of them might fail to grow, whether they’re sown on pieces of fern, strips of cork, patches of moss—at one time growers tried anything that seemed like it might work. Demand for these tropical orchids kept rising, but no one in Europe could reliably produce them. Orchid fever ran so hot that the wealthiest orchid lovers hired professional collectors to travel to faraway jungles and send plants back home.
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  • Owning orchids meant being able to afford a plant that a man might have risked his life to collect, that might die at any time, and that couldn’t be made to reproduce.
  • Once exotic, rare, and delicate, these orchids have been transformed into a commodity—inexpensive, widely available, and completely familiar. Of all the many orchids in the world, though, we’ve only manage to tame and package a few.
Ed Webb

The American Empire Is the Sick Man of the 21st Century - Foreign Policy - 0 views

  • classic Foundation series, Isaac Asimov imagines a Galactic Empire, governed from the city-world of Trantor, that has maintained peace and prosperity for thousands of years but that is teetering on the brink of decline. The only person who sees this clearly is the psychohistorian Hari Seldon, who has mathematically determined that the core conditions for the Empire are unsustainable and will crumble over the course of centuries. As Trantor “becomes more and more the administrative center of Empire, it becomes a greater prize,” a disciple says as he absorbs Seldon’s calculations. “As the Imperial succession becomes more and more uncertain, and the feuds among the great families more rampant, social responsibility disappears.” Asimov published these words in 1951, at the peak of U.S. global power. But they might as well be describing Washington in 2019, an imperial capital whose elite have transformed it into a great prize to be feuded over as surely as Asimov’s future empire did—and as other empires have done in the past.
  • much of the United States has experienced a steady decline while a handful of major cities, including Washington, have become hyperwealthy and almost unaffordable through the concentration of financial, tech, and media monopolies and their affiliated lobbyists. By now, many Americans know this story—but few think about what it means for their place in the world
  • Although Foundation drew its direct inspiration from Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, history is replete with examples of seemingly powerful empires run by weak, divided elites and picked apart by outside powers
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  • The near-universal understanding of the United States as a powerful, unified global actor is flawed and in need of revision. The United States is less a great power exerting its will and more an open-air market for global corruption, in which outside powers can purchase influence, shape political outcomes, and play factions against each other in the service of their own competing agendas.
  • Trump’s administration is openly bought by foreign governments via his international network of hotels and resorts, including the one located directly between the White House and the U.S. Capitol, where a Saudi-funded lobbyist rented 500 rooms in the month after the 2016 election. His political party, which still controls the Senate and increasingly dominates the judiciary, has no interest in holding him accountable for any of this. And of course there’s the small matter of Russian interference in the 2016 election; as the limited information known so far from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report confirms, Trump and the Republicans were at the very least the passive and willing beneficiaries of efforts by a foreign power to influence the election outcome.
  • the influence of outside money in Washington has become routine over the past generation. From the pervasive influence of the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf monarchies over think tanks and media organizations to virtually the entire U.S. government kowtowing before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to China’s warm relationship with the Chamber of Commerce and with the heads of some of the most powerful U.S. companies to the funneling of foreign money through the real estate industries of the country’s largest and wealthiest cities—the U.S. government is for sale.
  • The complete deregulation of campaign finance and the subsequent legalization of corruption in Washington, on a scale unheard of in other developed countries, have resulted in a capital where the distinction between foreign and domestic monied interests is harder and harder to parse. The U.S. government, in other words, does not exist to serve the interests of Americans through either its foreign or its domestic policies; rather, it exists to perpetuate the interests of the globalized oligarchy.
  • While Rhodes and Obama also faced pressure from within the Washington establishment, they found their agenda for the Middle East repeatedly hijacked by foreign allies—the same governments that also lobbied, with varying success, for U.S. military operations from Syria to Yemen. American power, however mighty, means nothing if it’s being used for the ends of the highest bidders
  • what we’re seeing is neither a considered, responsible withdrawal from empire in order to invest in urgent needs at home nor a revolt against empire by the world’s wretched. Rather, it’s a drawn-out, decadent collapse recognizable to any student of Rome or Constantinople. America is the sick man of the 21st century, and anyone who has watched its president bumble through a gathering of bemused, pitying world leaders knows it.
Ed Webb

Government admits 'losing' thousands of papers from National Archives | UK news | The G... - 0 views

  • Thousands of government papers detailing some of the most controversial episodes in 20th-century British history have vanished after civil servants removed them from the country’s National Archives and then reported them as lost. Documents concerning the Falklands war, Northern Ireland’s Troubles and the infamous Zinoviev letter – in which MI6 officers plotted to bring about the downfall of the first Labour government - are all said to have been misplaced.
  • British colonial administration in Palestine
  • Other files the National Archives has listed as “misplaced while on loan to government department” include one concerning the activities of the Communist party of Great Britain at the height of the cold war; another detailing the way in which the British government took possession of Russian government funds held in British banks after the 1917 revolution; an assessment for government ministers on the security situation in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s; and three files about defence agreements between the UK and newly independent Malaya in the late 1950s, shortly before the two countries went to war with Indonesia.
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  • Some historians have been particularly distrustful of the Foreign Office since 2013, when the Guardian disclosed that the department had been unlawfully hoarding 1.2m historical files at a high-security compound near Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire. The hoard came to light during high court proceedings brought by a group of elderly Kenyans who were detained and abused during the Mau Mau insurgency in 1950s Kenya, when the Foreign Office admitted it had withheld thousands of colonial-era files.
Ed Webb

America's Forever Wars Have Come Back Home - 0 views

  • there are several obvious ways in which America’s recent conduct abroad has led to greater insecurity, paranoia, loss of trust, and division within the United States
  • Whatever Americans’ intentions may have been, U.S. actions have sometimes caused enormous suffering in other countries—through sanctions, covert action, support for thuggish dictators, and a remarkable ability to turn a blind eye to the brutal conduct of close allies—not to mention America’s own far-flung military activities. Given the countries the United States has invaded, the bombs it’s dropped, and the drone strikes it’s conducted, it is any wonder that some people in other places wish Americans ill?
  • there is a mountain of evidence—including the official 9/11 Commission Report—showing that what drove anti-American extremism was opposition to U.S. policy
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  • the vast sums Americans have spent trying to nation-build, spread democracy, or defeat all “terrorists of global reach” inevitably left fewer resources available to help Americans at home (including the veterans of the country’s protracted wars)
  • the over $6 trillion spent on what Bush dubbed the “war on terror”—including the money spent on unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—could surely have been spent helping Americans live more comfortable and secure lives at home (or merely left in taxpayers’ pockets). Add to the list the decisions to promote rapid globalization and financial deregulation, which did significant harm to some sectors of the economy and led to the 2008 financial crisis, and you begin to see why confidence in the elite has taken a hit.
  • running an ambitious and highly interventionist foreign policy—and, in particular, one that tries to manipulate, manage, and ultimately shape the internal politics of foreign countries—requires a lot of deception. To sustain public support for it, elites have to spend a lot of time inflating threats, exaggerating benefits, acting in secret, and manipulating what the public is told
  • the architects of failure are rarely, if ever, held accountable
  • Once back in office, they are free to repeat their previous mistakes, backed by a chorus of pundits whose recommendations never change no matter how often they’ve failed.
  • The United States set out to remake the world in its image, and when some parts of that world pushed back, it reacted the way that most societies do when they are attacked. Americans got scared, lashed out even more, stopped thinking clearly and strategically, and looked around for someone to blame
  • the Republican Party’s decision to pin its political future on gerrymandering, voter suppression, and mobilizing a shrinking base and not on trying to appeal to the median voter is surely part of the problem, too, along with the twisted soul of Trump himself
  • Endless campaigns abroad unleash a host of political forces—militarism, secrecy, enhanced executive authority, xenophobia, faux patriotism, demagoguery, etc.—all of them contrary to the civic virtues on which a healthy democracy depends
Ed Webb

US Military Bases Are Key Pieces of the Global War Machine - 0 views

  • “bases frequently beget wars, which can beget more bases, which can beget more wars, and so on.”
  • While the idea that the global expansion of military bases corresponds with the rise of US empire may seem obvious, this book convincingly shows that it is both consequence and cause. Vine brilliantly documents the way widespread global military positions — which are always sold to the public as defensive — are, by their very nature, offensive and become their own, self-fulfilling ecosystems of conquest.
  • Over “almost 115 consecutive years of U.S. wars against indigenous nations,” as Vine puts it, US military forts played a consistent role in protecting white settler pillaging and conquest.
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  • Just as the “induced demand” principle shows why building more lanes on highways actually increases traffic, United States of War makes the argument that military bases themselves incentivize and perpetuate military aggression, coups, and meddling.
  • Organized labor, immigrants, recently freed slaves, indigenous peoples at home and abroad: They were all subdued by the same military and police forces making way for white settlement and capital expansion.
  • a “permanent war system,” as Vine puts it, was established. During the post–World War II era of decolonization, the United States used its military base network and economic influence, buttressed by new institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to protect its preeminence.
  • While giving the illusion of increased safety, these bases actually made foreign wars more likely, argues Vine, because they made it easier to wage such wars. In turn, conflict increased construction of US bases.
  • “To this day,” Vine notes, “Chagossians and many others among the displaced are struggling to return home, to win some justice and recompense for what they have suffered.” This is where Vine’s book is at its best: showing the moral stakes of US empire. Shrouded in the sanitized and sterile think tank–ese of “forward positions,” “kinetic action,” and “open door policy,” the average media consumer would be hard-pressed to know the human costs of these bases. Vine documents the stakes from the vantage point of the displaced and disenfranchised.
  • While the Bush-Cheney administration closed some bases in Europe, overall spending on bases “reached record highs” during their time in office
  • Since September 11, 2001, the United States has also expanded its presence in Africa, building “lily pads” across the continent — smaller profile, somewhat secretive installations, suggesting “a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad toward its prey,” writes Vine. US bases have been central  to waging the 2011 NATO war in Libya, drone strikes in Yemen, military intervention in Somalia and Cameroon. “The military has been conducting a variety of operations regularly in at least 49 African countries,” writes Vine. “It may be operating in every single one.”
  • The War on Terror ethos, in which the whole world is considered a US battlefield and the United States grants itself broad latitude to wage preemptive war, has come to define US foreign policy.
  • Engaging Vine’s book is less like reading a tidy cause-and-effect theory of the relationship between US military bases and wars, and more an exploration of the symbiotic relationship between capital, US empire and racism, and their primary mode of interaction: the military base.
Ed Webb

Max Hastings: Brexit's Predictable Crises in Gibraltar, the Channel, Ireland - Bloomberg - 0 views

  • All that is certain about this dispute, concerning a territory with but 34,000 residents, is that it needlessly amplifies aggravation between Britain and Spain. Logic suggests that the U.K. should cede the territory, which no longer has any possible strategic value. I urged this on Douglas Hurd, foreign secretary in the 1990s, when he bemoaned to me the hair-raising secret service reports detailing criminal activity bankrolled through Gibraltar.But I am not a politician. The view of successive British governments about such things — including the refusal to surrender the Falkland Islands to Argentina — is that to quit Gibraltar would enrage jingoistic opinion at home for no political benefit. 
  • The more neurotic a nation becomes about its place in the world, the more likely it is to cling to micro-symbols. 
  • Going back to the 2016 Brexit referendum, Johnson and his colleagues have dismissed the obvious impossibility of reconciling Brexit with the terms of the Irish Good Friday peace agreement, as a mere technicality. 
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  • “Trust in this British government’s good faith, never high, is now minimal … on all sides in Northern Ireland.” 
  • Johnson declared recently that Northern Ireland is a part of the U.K. in exactly the same fashion as are its other constituent parts: England, Scotland and Wales. This is simply untrue. No U.K. prime minister since Irish Partition in 1921 has sought to pretend such a thing. Modern British governments have acknowledged that Northern Ireland remains a part of the U.K. — as long as that is the wish of its own people. And polls have shown a majority in the north now favors holding a referendum on exactly that proposition.
  • Unless Britain treads very carefully indeed, which recent events suggest that this government is not good at, militant Irish Republicanism could revive, the killing on the streets resume.
  • In the grand scheme of things — compared with U.S. confrontation with China, Afghanistan threatened with anarchy, Russian disruption of the democratic West — none of the friction points between Britain and the EU threatens an immediate or severe crisis. It was always inevitable that Brexit would generate issues and disputes. But the tensions involving Gibraltar, migration and Northern Ireland highlight the perils facing Johnson’s nation as a consequence of having made the historic choice to go it alone. The standard-bearers for Brexit made grandiose claims that it would “set Britain free” to develop its full potential. But freedom can also bring loneliness. Johnson is accumulating foreign adversaries — not quite enemies, but people who do not wish him well — much faster than he is winning allies and admirers.
Ed Webb

Behind the UK government's false flag 'free speech' campaign | Education | Al Jazeera - 0 views

  • Instead of addressing a very real crisis in teaching and learning conditions that threatens to seriously degrade British universities, Boris Johnson’s ministers have thrown their energies into manufacturing a campus “free speech crisis”. Having deliberately excluded higher education from COVID-19 support, they have spent the pandemic making nonsensical claims about campus “cancel culture” and crafting legislation to protect exactly the kind of hateful speech Durham University students exercised their right not to listen to. The point is less to enshrine freedom of thought than it is to force discredited ideas upon young people.
  • The Higher Education Freedom of Speech Bill now progressing through Parliament seeks to prevent invitations to speakers from being rescinded if they are discovered to have peddled discredited or hateful ideas. The legislation targets the tactic of “no-platforming” which was adopted by the National Union of Students in 1974 to stop fascist organisations, like the National Front, from using universities to disseminate their views.
  • A 2018 Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights investigation found that there was “no wholesale censorship” at universities
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  • It is obviously easier to decimate the higher education sector after painting it as intolerant and partisan
  • what is at stake for the political right here is the opposite of freedom of expression. As draconian laws effectively criminalise political protest, the goal of the fake crisis is to foist retrograde and discredited ideologies like race science and climate denial upon universities which are among the few remaining spheres where knowledge is valued
  • Since universities also have a statutory obligation, alongside academic freedom, to uphold academic standards, repudiating specious thought is a scholarly duty, not cancel culture.
  • Education Secretary Gavin Williamson warned English universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism in its entirety or face sanctions despite widespread concerns. My own university has adopted the IHRA document wholesale even as scores of its academics have warned that some of the examples it gives conflate criticism of the policies, constitutional doctrines and laws of the State of Israel with anti-Semitism, and will silence those who work or speak on the topic of Israel and Palestine
  • The sharpest end of governmental cancellation is reserved for those who assess Britain’s imperial past critically. Attempts to undo silences and amnesia around empire and slavery, or question mindless glorification are frequently met with enraged denunciations of “town hall militants”, “woke worthies” and “baying mobs”, to use Communities Minister Robert Jenrick’s epithets.
  • Heritage organisation National Trust has also come under attack. Its “Colonial Countryside” project which sought to modestly illuminate some colonial and slavery connections for properties in its care was met with political fury from Conservatives. A particular red rag was Winston Churchill’s family home, Chartwell, in relation to which his imperial connections, hardly a state secret, were mentioned.
  • Dowden’s warnings to heritage bodies to act in line with government policy or face funding cuts have rightly worried museum staff about political interference in the sector.
  • the extent to which the concocted free speech crisis is influenced by far-right forces in the United States and their culture war agenda. An exposé by Open Democracy last year found that the freedom of speech White Paper, not only cited Policy Exchange (complete with false claims) liberally but also the US-based Alliance for Democratic Freedom International (ADF), a Christian anti-equality organisation which has been classified as a “hate group”. This organisation has spent £410,000 ($542,000) on lobbying in the UK since 2017, also getting involved in campus disputes.
  • Behind the fabricated cultural battles and false flag “free speech” campaigns, a real battle is now unfolding, a fight to defend critical thought, robust scholarship, and the right to challenge the line that wealth and power would have us all acquiesce to.
Ed Webb

Survivors of Kissinger's Secret War in Cambodia Reveal Unreported Mass Killings - The I... - 0 views

  • Survivors from 13 Cambodian villages along the Vietnamese border told The Intercept about attacks that killed hundreds of their relatives and neighbors during Kissinger’s tenure in President Richard Nixon’s White House. The interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors, published here for the first time, reveal in new detail the long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war. These attacks were far more intimate and perhaps even more horrific than the violence already attributed to Kissinger’s policies, because the villages were not just bombed, but also strafed by helicopter gunships and burned and looted by U.S. and allied troops.
  • U.S. troops implicated in killing and maiming civilians received no meaningful punishments
  • Experts say Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11.
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  • “You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Greg Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow.” “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”
  • Grandin estimated that, overall, Kissinger — who also helped to prolong the Vietnam War and facilitate genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America — has the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands
  • In his 2003 book, “Ending the Vietnam War,” Kissinger offered an estimate of 50,000 Cambodian civilian deaths from U.S. attacks during his involvement in the conflict — a number given to him by a Pentagon historian. But documents obtained by The Intercept show that number was conjured almost out of thin air. In reality, the U.S. bombardment of Cambodia ranks among the most intense air campaigns in history. More than 231,000 U.S. bombing sorties were flown over Cambodia from 1965 to 1973. Between 1969 and 1973, while Kissinger was national security adviser, U.S. aircraft dropped 500,000 or more tons of munitions. (During all of World War II, including the atomic bombings, the United States dropped around 160,000 tons of munitions on Japan.)
  • Ray Sitton, a colonel serving the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would bring a list of targets to the White House for approval. “Strike here in this area,” Kissinger would tell him, and Sitton would backchannel the coordinates into the field, circumventing the military chain of command. Authentic documents associated with the strikes were burned, and phony target coordinates and other forged data were provided to the Pentagon and Congress.
  • Kissinger was the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia, achieving almost co-president status in such matters. Kissinger and Nixon were also uniquely responsible for attacks that killed, wounded, or displaced hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and laid the groundwork for the Khmer Rouge genocide.
  • For decades, the U.S. government has shown little interest in examining allegations of civilian harm caused by its military operations around the world. A 2020 study of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents found that most have gone completely uninvestigated, and in those cases that have come under official scrutiny, U.S. investigators regularly interview American military witnesses but almost totally ignore civilians — victims, survivors, family members, and bystanders — “severely compromising the effectiveness of investigations,” according to researchers from the Center for Civilians in Conflict and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute. The U.S. military rarely conducted investigations of civilian harm allegations in Cambodia and almost never interviewed Cambodian victims. In all 13 Cambodian villages I visited in 2010, I was the first person to ever interview victims of wartime attacks initiated 9,000 miles away in Washington, D.C.
  • The Defense Department has been clear that it isn’t interested in looking back. “At this point we don’t have an intent to re-litigate cases,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., when she asked last year whether the Pentagon was planning to revisit past civilian harm allegations from the forever wars. The possibility that the Defense Department will investigate civilian harm in Cambodia 50 years later is nil.
  • trauma can have intergenerational effects; it can be passed on, whether genetically or otherwise. Even at this late date, the pain of America’s war in Cambodia lives on
  • survivors believed that more than half of all the villagers living in Doun Rath during the late 1960s and early 1970s were either killed or wounded by American attacks
  • Both Vuth and her sister, 72-year-old Vuth Thang, broke down as soon as I explained the purpose of my reporting. They were away from their home in the village of Por when a B-52 strike wiped out 17 members of their family. “I lost my mother, father, sisters, brothers, everyone,”
  • Villagers said that when they first saw American aircraft overhead, they were awestruck. Having never seen anything like the giant machines, people came out to stare at them. Soon, however, residents of Mroan learned to fear them. Cooking rice became dangerous as Americans flying above would see the smoke and launch attacks. Helicopters, survivors said, routinely strafed both the nearby fields and the village itself, then comprised of about 100 homes. “This one was the most vicious,” said Sheang, pointing at a photograph of a Cobra gunship among pictures of other aircraft I provided. When the “coconut shell” helicopter, a U.S. Army OH-6 or “Loach,” marked an area with smoke, villagers recalled, the Cobra would attack, firing rockets that set homes ablaze. “During the American War, almost all houses in the village were burned,” said Sheang.
  • in May 1971, U.S. helicopter gunships shot up a Cambodian village, wounding a young girl who couldn’t be taken for treatment because a U.S. officer overloaded his helicopter with a looted motorcycle that was later gifted to a superior, according to an Army investigation and exclusive follow-up reporting by The Intercept. The Cambodian girl almost certainly died from her wounds, along with seven other civilians, according to previously unreported documents produced by a Pentagon war crimes task force in 1972.
  • As Cambodians lay wounded and dying, the ARVN Rangers looted the village, grabbing ducks, chickens, wallets, clothing, cigarettes, tobacco, civilian radios, and other nonmilitary items, according to numerous American witnesses. “They were stealing everything they could get their hands on,” Capt. Thomas Agness, the pilot of the helicopter that carried Brooks and some of the ARVN, told me. Brooks, however, had the biggest score of all. With the help of South Vietnamese troops, he hauled a blue Suzuki motorcycle onto a helicopter, according to Army documents.
  • While court martial charges were filed against Brooks, his commanding general dismissed them in 1972, instead giving him a letter of reprimand. Records indicate that no other troops were charged, let alone punished, in connection with the massacre, the looting, or the failure to render aid to wounded Cambodian civilians.
  • In late 1978, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge from power, driving Pol Pot’s forces to the Thai border. The U.S., however, threw its support behind Pol Pot, encouraging other nations to back his forces, funneling aid to his allies, helping him keep Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations, and opposing efforts to investigate or try Khmer Rouge leaders for genocide.
  • Kissinger’s mammoth memoir, “White House Years” was published. As journalist William Shawcross pointed out, Kissinger failed to even mention the carnage in Cambodia because “for Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow, its people expendable in the great game of large nations.”
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