Coup Of Compassion

As per usual, the coup in Thailand is about restoring democracy. That's what the army claims at any rate: Thaksin Shinawatra is accused of making incursions into the country's democratic structures and so the army, with their long and distinguished concern for the people, have overthrown a government that won two landslide election victories, the first time in 2001 in the most open, corruption free election in Thai history.

That election was fought under the 1997 People's Constitution, the result of massive public uprisings against the provisional constitution imposed by a military coup in 1991, which urged that the Senate would be appointed by the military (the National Peace Keeping Council, they called themselves), who would in turn override the elected Congress, and that non-elected officials could be made cabinet ministers (so that an acting military leader might become Premier). That coup administration was brought down by huge revolts in 1992, and a subsequent prolonged fight between the workers and peasants, and the army and rich opened up. The 1997 constitution was a classically liberal one, with all sorts of human Trights guaranteed, proportional representation introduced, the executive branch strengthened (more in guard against the subventions of political supporters of the military than anything else), and an electoral commission established.

The government pursued a 'populist' programme of redistributing wealth to the poor by providing universal health care, debt relief for farmers, and development funds for villages. Poverty was massively reduced right across the country, and the economy recovered considerably from the 1997 crash thanks to this Keynesian demand-management.

However, let's not go nuts with admiration: it was a pragmatic concession to workers and rural poor. The government also implemented an extremely harsh drugs policy, continued to privatise the energy sector, and continued the nepotistic policies that have marked previous governments.

The repression of the insurgency in the south of Thailand by Malay Muslim groups was every bit as brutal as before, including a notorious massacre at Tai Bak where the army responded to a local protest by shooting at the crowd. However, eventually the government stopped screaming that the insurgency was all Al Qaeda's doing and actually started to try to meet some of the demands through negotiation. The National Reconciliation Commission was set up, and it recommended establishing autonomous 'Islamic' law for the region, allowing Malay-Patani to be the official language, and setting up an unarmed 'peacekeeping' force for the region. The government promised to implement these, but the King's Privy Council opposed the policies vehemently.

This coup has established a military government loyal to the King in advance of the coming elections for the House of Representatives. The 1997 constitution has been quoshed, and reforms such as healthcare, opposed by the medical elite, will likely to be overturned if they can get away with it. The Malays in the Patani province will get no autonomy, and you can look forward to more brutal repression there.

The US no longer needs Thailand as much as it did during the Cold War and was therefore unwilling to bail out the country during and after the 1997 crisis. However, they had been banking on a 'free trade' agreement with the regime, and are now hoping that when the military 'restores democracy', it can be resuscitated. The military indicates that it will return to a democracy 'loyal to the King', but the King happens to be bearer of power that has been revived, supplied and protected by the US government for fifty years. I think that 'free trade' agreement will go ahead in short order.

The big concern on the news this morning is what will happen to Thailand's tourist industry.
-An Excerpt Of A Post At Thoroughly Unsexy L

Dig That Thai Cuisine

Southeast Asia is the new hot vacation spot for the ball-bearing backpack crowd. [T]he war in Southern Thailand is heating up enough to deserve a column. The Southern Thailand death toll just went into four figures -- 1,037 KIA last time I checked.

UPDATE: Whoops, better make that 1,042. Just now the rebels just killed five Thai Rangers in a classic drive-by shooting at a checkpoint on the Thai-Malaysian border.

A four-figure death toll is big-time these days. It's a sad commentary on the way the world is sliding into wimpery when a puny death toll like that rates a mention.

Sixty years ago, they were killing that many men every few seconds on the Eastern Front. These days we kill the way you piss when you've got kidney stones -- a dribble, a lot of moaning and groaning, then another dribble. But hey, what can I do about it? I don't make the wars, I just try to enjoy them.

To enjoy a war like this, you have to lower your expectations. There ain't gonna be any Gettysburgs in this one, it's not about military strategy or hardware, just tribal grudges rubbing against each other like those continental plates, grinding away and flaring up into a massacre now and then.

Southern Thailand is one of those places where ethnic plates are squeezing like the San Andreas Fault. Look at Thailand on a map and you'll see it's like an apple with a worm dangling down from it. The big apple is the Thai heartland, the river valley where the ethnic Thais grow their rice. The worm dangling down from it is the Malay Peninsula. This insurgency is happening at the very bottom, at the Malay border. The insurgents are Malays, not Thais. Different culture, different religion -- Muslims, not Buddhists like the Thais.

To understand SE Asian military history, you have to understand that in this part of the world, the key is controlling the fertile river valleys. That's where you can do intensive rice planting, so you can feed more people, meaning you end up with more soldiers. The losing tribes get pushed away from the river, up into the dry hills

The longer the Thai kings were able to hold onto the river plains, the more armies they accumulated -- just like holding Australia in Risk. They had to spend some of those armies defending Thailand against their traditional enemies, the Burmese, but the rest were used to push the Thai empire outward, into the northern mountains and south down the Malay Peninsula.

Thailand has been gobbling up little bits of borderland for centuries, like the French kings did in the Middle Ages. The Thais love stories about their kings fighting on the borders against those dirty Burmese.

As they pushed their borders south, down the Malay Peninsula, the Thai kings ran up against the Muslim kingdom of Pattani, and they've been trying to hang on against local rebels ever since. That's what we're seeing now: another flare-up of a war that's been going on for centuries.

It's hard not to take sides on this one. I'm a Thai food fan, a Pad Thai hog from way back. I'll just declare my prejudices here: those Malays should take off their headscarves and try to be better Thais. It'd be a step up for them.

Of course that's not how they see it. To the Malays in Pattani, the Thais are "Buddhist Imperialists," trying to make Allah's faithful bow down to fat-man statues. (And what's wrong with that?)

These Southern Muslims were the biggest of all the Thai rebellions in the 1960s. People forget that during the Vietnam era, it seemed likely that Thailand would be one of the first dominoes to fall. If you look at a military map from that period, the only "green zones" (under government control) were the central river valley and the cities.

In Isaan, the dirt-poor northeast province, Communist cadres were working the pissed-off villagers with help from the VC, Chinese and Pathet Lao. Hill tribesmen funded by the drug barons of the Golden Triangle were sitting in ambush on every scraggy mountain in the north.

But the Muslim rebels of the far south were always the toughest, biggest and hardest to crush. By the mid-80s the Thais had killed all the other insurgencies. There were a lot of factors at work here: the Chinese feud with Vietnam left the rebels with no superpower support, the US poured at least a billion dollars into CI work, and the Thai king -- a smart guy, definitely the best king around -- pushed the military to kill the rebellions off with kindness: development projects, counter-propaganda, and a Royal amnesty for anybody who came in from the jungle.

But the biggest reason is the obvious one: money. Suddenly Thailand was the new cool destination for Northern Europeans eager to get out of Social Democratic limbo for a few weeks. Skulking in the jungle swapping malaria parasites with Pol Pot wasn't a good career choice when you could work as a diving instructor in Phuket or Pattaya and make enough to impress the girls with a motor scooter and a knockoff Rolex.

Money killed off the Commie rebels, but didn't do a thing to the Muslims. That's one of the most important lessons we have to remember: the Commies were paper tigers, a few dollars and they vanished.

But the Muslims won't be bribed. When you've got Saudi boys choosing one-way tickets to the WTC over a lifetime lying by the pool with your imported Swedish girlfriend in Riyadh, you've got a serious ideology to deal with.

The Pattani rebels have gone through the same sort of change as the Palestinians. Back in the day, the Southern Thais had a PLO-style, semi-Commie organization called PULO representing them. But as Communism burned out and Islam heated up, the torch got passed to a new generation of Jihadis.

In Palestine, the PLO lost out to Hamas. In Southern Thailand, PULO is as decrepit as the Fresno Rotary Club. The cool new clique is the Pattani Islamic Mujahedeen Movement, or GMIP.

These guys are long on theology but short on tactics. In fact, some of their operations have been just plain comic. In April 2004, Muslims from the village of Su So massed around Thai police stations in the South waving machetes and knives. The cops told them to hold that pose, got the M-16s out of the gun case, did a few stretching exercises on their trigger fingers, and blasted away. At least 100 Malays were killed. No cops were even wounded.

Getting slaughtered in a mismatch like that seems stupid to us Americans, but there's a pattern in insurgent warfare here: the first wave is suicidal, the second homicidal. There are dozens of examples, two of the most famous being the first and second Intifada in Israel.

In the first Intifada, the Pals threw rocks at Merkava tanks and got slaughtered. In the second, they went on the offensive. Same pattern in Ireland in the early 20th century: in the "Easter Rising" in 1916, a bunch of rebels in uniform occupied buildings in downtown Dublin, declared themselves a target and got blown to bits by artillery fire. In 1919, the second wave started, with ambushes and pioneering efforts in urban guerrilla warfare that succeeded in driving the Brits out of Southern Ireland, their first big defeat.

How does it work? Like all guerrilla warfare, it's about winning by losing. The first wave takes one for the team. By marching out and getting themselves killed, they get the people angry, set the pattern of thinking of the rebels as heroic martyrs, and their corpses are like fertilizer for the second wave, which consists of cooler heads, guys who are out to kill, not just die.

The grosser the mismatch, the better the propaganda. So in the first Intifada, you saw Pal kids with rocks fighting tanks. In Ireland 1916 you had rifles versus heavy artillery. That sort of things stays in people's heads for centuries, especially when the government troops' retaliation gets out of hand and wreaks havoc.

So it was actually pretty smart for the Irish rebels to occupy central Dublin, because heavy artillery isn't exactly "surgical" and ended up destroying most of the city.

So far it looks like the Thai government is doing the heavy-handed response, laying waste any Muslim village that gets uppity. A year ago, the Army jumped a crowd of Muslim demonstrators, arrested and hogtied 1,300 men and threw them into trucks like sacks of flour for the long drive to their new prison-camp home. By the time they got there, 78 men had been crushed to death.

That's not smart killing. It might be smart to kill all 1,300 -- and all their male kin, while you're at it -- but it's not smart to kill a few and make the rest into your enemies for life. The Thais are just getting frustrated, the way regular armies always do dealing with guerrillas. And from the Thai perspective, there's never been a better time to get rough with Muslims than now, while the Americans are already pissed off at the Jihadis. So they want to clean up the problem before we go soft again. And if you're a Southeast Asian American ally, you can't help fearing that the Americans will go soft again soon. We've done it before, and they're right to fear we'll do it again.

The really smart move for the Thais would be to set up a puppet Muslim autonomous regime in the South, consolidate its power, then push it into a civil war with the extremists. That's what the Israelis are doing in Gaza at the moment: leaving suddenly, creating a power vacuum in the hope that Fatah and Hamas will get too busy fighting each other to keep Intifada #2 going.

It worked for the Brits in Ireland. After losing an urban guerrilla war to the IRA in 1919-21, they signed a treaty with the moderate faction, handed over heavy weapons, and let the moderate and extremist wings duke it out until they were both exhausted. They got 50 years of quiet on the Western (Island) front out of it.

My guess is that there is no happy solution. The Muslim rebels are doing all the right things to keep the people pissed off and angry. The Thais are doing the only thing they can by killing anybody they think is in on the insurgency, because frankly, you can't kill off these Muslim rebels with kindness (and money) the way they did the other rebellions, the Commie-inspired rebellions in the North.

We're going to see a long, slow grind of the ethnic plates in Southern Thailand. Your grandkids will be reading the same headlines from there, a hundred years from now
-Excerpt From An Article By Gary War Nerd Brecher in Exile.

Heavenly Gentrification - Future Shock

[M]ilitary operations in urban settings will become more likely, including disaster relief efforts, as was experienced in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Although urban terrain hinders all types of forces during conventional military operations, high-density population areas and urban canyons are commonly believed to restrict air and space power's role in the urban fight. On the contrary, air and space power's ability to see over the next hill — its inherent capability to offer unobstructed vertical access — is a critical contributor to the joint force.

The Vertical Dimension

Air Force capabilities in the urban arena mirror those in other arenas and support the joint force to accomplish tactical, operational and strategic objectives. Urban is an environment much like any other. The crucial difference in urban environments is the presence of a large number of noncombatants and their properties. Hence, force application and discrimination of targets is one of many obstacles that air and space power must contend with. But this factor is a restraint on all the joint forces.

Beyond its independent capabilities, the Air Force also supports the joint force in the urban fight by providing valuable airspace control; command and control; communications and psychological operations support; close-air support; terminal attack control; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; and combat search and rescue. These are familiar missions for the Air Force. The urban landscape of dense concrete jungles and large numbers of noncombatants are variables that require close attention but of themselves do not render air and space power irrelevant. In fact, the three core strategic capabilities of the Air Force — rapid strike, persistent C4ISR and global mobility — maximize the joint force's effectiveness in the urban arena. In a sense, the Air Force's urban fight is analogous to a joint force prizefighter — the Air Force is the right hook able to strike from afar while keeping the enemy at a distance, and is also the fighter's eyes, giving him the vision to deliver a precise blow at the exact time and place it's required.

"In the development of air power," Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell said, "one has to look forward and not backward to figure out what is going to happen." For urban operations, Mitchell's admonition to look forward and not backward is prescient as the history of effective air and space power in urban operations has been limited largely by the lack of knowledge and precision. From the Spanish Civil War to Operation Desert Storm, airpower has created mountains of urban rubble. However, with improvements in ISR and weapons accuracy, as well as time-sensitive targeting, air and space power have assumed greater roles in urban operations. Rebecca Grant, a contributing editor to Air Force Magazine, assessed the second battle for Fallujah, Iraq, as a "benchmark for airpower in urban joint force warfare." She noted: "Fallujah marked the unveiling of an urban-warfare model based on persistent air surveillance, precision air strikes and swift airlift support. Together, these factors took urban operations to a new and higher level."

In April 2004, coalition forces halted Fallujah ground operations after political pressure from the Iraqi governing council. Despite ceasing active operations on the ground, air and space power continued to provide persistent presence over contested urban areas. Beyond the critical ISR presence, air power assets repeatedly struck targets in Fallujah without putting ground forces at risk. In November 2004, coalition forces again sought to sweep Fallujah of its insurgent activity, and air and space power were involved in the planning from the start. This joint planning resulted in the synergistic use of coalition forces with devastating effect. Persistent ISR and the Global Positioning System (GPS) enabled precision strikes against key targets in September and October 2004.

Surgical blitzkreig

"We put a Hellfire over the wall [of the house] and under the carport with no damage to the house," an Air Force ISR tactician said. Air and space power provided 161 surveillance sorties and 379 kinetic attacks to help secure the city in eight days and continued support for the remaining mop-up operations. The joint planning effort resulted in a blitzkrieg of coordinated attacks with surgical effect. Former Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper noted, "We had a significant number of airplanes in there, working against individual buildings. There are many accounts of our GPS-guided weapons plucking buildings out of the middle of very populated areas."

Although Fallujah showed the important joint effects that are possible with coordination, it also highlighted continuing challenges that airmen face in discriminating insurgents from the local populace and avoiding unnecessary collateral damage. Better technologies must help minimize these obstacles to make air and space power more relevant in future urban operations. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is pursuing a multitude of new technologies to improve ISR capabilities in the dense urban environment.

One promising initiative is development of the Gotcha sensor, which has the ability to provide persistent staring ISR over a large area and note changes in the environment, allowing for rapid diagnosis. Although still early in development, this capability, along with many other sensor initiatives, has the potential to be a powerful force multiplier to address the discrimination challenges we face today.

Similarly, space-based GPS location and time determination and satellite reconnaissance capabilities continue to provide a tremendous advantage to the joint force. In the future, the U.S. may deploy space-based moving target indicator radars that can detect movement, much as Joint Surveillance Attack Radar System does today, reducing the need to deploy aircraft and personnel. The Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle already helps in this way. And the Air Force continues to improve the fusion of sensors with existing intelligence to complete the battle space picture that contributes to information superiority, even within a cluttered city.

The Air Force is also pursuing new technologies to improve urban precision-strike capabilities. The 250-pound Small Diameter Bomb (GBU-39) — ready for use by the fourth quarter of fiscal 2006 — is half the size of the GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), the current urban weapon of choice. The GBU-39's significant reduction in blast effect will decrease collateral damage while achieving intended effects. Another AFRL program under development is the Hardened Surface Target Ordnance Package, which offers the potential of a low collateral damage warhead for use against multistory structures with minimal explosives. Likewise, AFRL's low-collateral-damage project, perhaps ready in five years, includes a munition built with a carbon fiber composite case that concentrates lethal effects while reducing collateral damage by eliminating steel fragments. AFRL is also developing small loitering unmanned strike platforms that can detect and strike targets with significantly smaller precision munitions.

Future Air Force UAV development will include the Predator B with increased payload (3,000-pound external stores) and the capability to carry the Paveway II guided bomb, JDAM, Hellfire air-to-ground missile and Small Diameter Bomb. In addition to improved optical imaging, the Predator B's capability to laser designate from above the urban sprawl will be of great benefit.

AFRL is also making significant strides in nonlethal and directed-energy capabilities, many with urban applications that are less likely to harm noncombatants. Numerous directed-energy concepts applicable to urban operations missions are being developed by AFRL, including:

• The Active Denial System, which uses millimeter-wave electromagnetic wave energy to stop, deter and turn back an advancing adversary from greater than small-arms range. Its potential uses include crowd dispersal and protection of critical areas. It is being tested in the continental U.S., awaiting further direction from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the ground version could be ready in the near term, if funded. An airborne version could be tested in the mid-term if prioritized for development.

• The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL), which is based on a chemical oxygen-iodine laser (COIL) device. The ATL is scheduled to demonstrate precision strike capabilities against selected ground targets in fiscal 2007. Advanced solid-state laser and beam control technologies are being developed that, in the longer term, could address some of the limitations of the COIL device (limited magazine, logistics support requirements) and increase performance and reduce laser system size and weight in a future gunship application. These technologies, once developed, would enable an AC-130-mounted weapon that could provide a surgical-strike capability against urban targets with essentially no collateral damage.

• The Tactical Relay Mirror System (TRMS) will enable energy beams from the ATL or a ground laser source to be precisely directed onto ground targets. Because the optical telescopes in the TRMS employ both wide and narrow field-of-view optics, the TRMS will enable enhanced surveillance as well as precision strike applications — initial full-up testing in the near term.

Better technologies and processes will enable Air Force contributions to be more significant in the joint urban fight. Yet presently, the urban fight is considered principally a ground-centric problem, and air and space capabilities are too often not at the forefront of the minds of ground commanders. Joint planning and training is perhaps the antidote to this problem and would reaffirm the inherent capabilities that each service brings to this fight.

Air Warrior I, conducted at the National Training Center (NTC) in Fort Irwin, Calif., trains aircrew, airborne forward air controllers (FACs), tactical air control parties (TACPs), joint terminal attack controllers (JTACs) and brigade combat teams. NTC has built seven urban and cave sites with numerous connecting tunnels over the past 24 months. The Air Force has also constructed a live-fire site in the northern section of the NTC so JTACs and airborne FACs can control aircrews dropping or firing munitions in an urban setting. Annually, more than 1,100 joint Air Warrior I sorties have been flown in support of NTC rotations with more than 300 tons of live and inert munitions delivered. Yet, although the capability to practice the joint urban fight exists, not many Air Warrior I scenarios incorporate urban operations because of a lack of exercise joint fires integration and differing Army exercise priorities.

Air Warrior II at Fort Polk, La., endures similar constraints. The Army directs the scenarios and determines whether to incorporate urban training with the Air Force. Air Warrior II has generally been a fighter venue but now includes other types of aircraft. Many challenges remain to achieve comprehensive urban training, but Air Warrior I and II have at least provided venues to begin joint urban training.

Furthermore, increased emphasis on close-air support training has resulted in better joint integration of urban ops. These efforts have been spearheaded by the Air Force's 6th Combat Training Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. All these efforts improve Air Force precision-strike capabilities and give more options to the urban joint commander.

If improved training is the first step, improved command and control is the final step to linking the ground warriors with capabilities from above. This step is arguably the most challenging, as beyond-line-of-sight communications are extremely difficult to maintain for ground forces in urban areas. However, Air Force airborne relay capabilities were recently demonstrated during Joint Expeditionary Force Experiment 2006 that are worthy of further joint investigation. These UHF/VHF/cell phone communication relay capabilities could be expanded to overcome the line-of-sight issues that plague ground forces in urban canyons. Assuming the soldier better understands the Air Force capabilities available through improved planning and training, effective communication is the critical link to bring those capabilities to bear.

The increasing urbanization of the world, coupled with the use of urban areas as sanctuary by U.S. enemies, dictates that the Air Force should place more emphasis on urban operations. While urban air, space and information support is consistent with normal Air Force mission sets, joint commanders are perhaps reticent to request these effects because of fratricide and collateral damage concerns. Much of the future fight will be in urban areas, and the Air Force must get more involved so the joint force can fully exploit the vertical dimension.

Education of the joint force is the starting point for shaping and improving urban awareness, but there are also training opportunities that can and should be leveraged in the near term that can have the greatest immediate effect. These efforts, coupled with a commitment to S&T relevant to the urban fight, will help us prepare for a future of increased urban operations.

-Excerpt From An Article At AFJ By Lt. Col. Brian Newberry. Lt. Col. Brian Newberry is the chief of safety for the 62nd Airlift Wing. He most recently was chief of joint operations in the Concepts, Strategy and Wargaming Division on the Air Staff, where he helped shape the future role of the Air Force in urban operations.

Doкtrinsкi Draftsкi - Jacк Is Bacк

The Russian government is to consider the draft of the new military doctrine prepared by the Defense Ministry expert group. If the document is approved, Russia will be able to interfere in border conflicts, turn a blind eye on the proliferation of nuclear weapons and fight with potential enemies (the USA and NATO) and international terrorism.

Russia adopted the current military doctrine in 1993. President Putin introduced several amendments to it in April of 2000. The doctrine of 2006 has a whole new meaning. The previous doctrine was a temporal document used during the establishment of democracy in Russia. The new document will be the permanent military doctrine of a democratic state.

The document particularly entitles Russia to “defend its citizens’ rights abroad in case of danger posed to their lives.” There was no such wording in the current doctrine.

Furthermore, Russia will be able to participate in armed conflicts on its borders where “principles of international rights are violated and thus can be classified as aggression against citizens.”

The main thesis of the section titled “Defense Security Guarantee” says that Russia stands against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and its delivery means.”

As for Russia’s enemies, the authors of the new military doctrine suggest the following list: the USA, NATO and international terrorism.

“The fact that we can see NATO and the USA as Russia's potential enemies is a vestige of the Soviet military doctrine. In my opinion, this is an inadequate way of thinking. Russia definitely needs to stand against any enemy, but we also need to develop our Armed Forces in local conflicts too,” the Director of the Institute of Political Research, Sergei Markov said.

The basic threat of Russia’s national security is still connected with foreign countries’ interference into Russia’s internal affairs. This process can be conducted either directly or through certain political structures to undermine constitutional regimes in post-Soviet countries.
-Excerpt From Pravda

Powells Of A Feather - The Go Fetch Gene

A 2004 Federal Communications Commission study that showed locally owned television stations provide more local news than others was ordered destroyed by FCC officials, and only came to light this week when a copy was leaked to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D.-Calif.).

Three years ago, then-FCC chair Michael Powell [son of former Secretary of State Colin Powell] launched a proceeding on the effects of local ownership on television news as part of his drive to further deregulate media and allow for even greater consolidation. But the report commissioned under Powell turned out to undermine his argument that consolidation has no ill effects on local news, and, according to former FCC lawyer Adam Candeub, senior managers ordered "every last piece" of the study destroyed (AP, 9/14/06). On September 12, Senator Boxer, armed with the leaked report, questioned current FCC Chair Kevin Martin about it at his renomination hearing.

According to the report, locally owned stations in fact deliver nearly six minutes more of total news and almost five-and-a-half more minutes of local news in a 30-minute newscast than stations with non-local owners. This adds up to 33 more hours of local news a year--a remarkable figure, and a damning one for big media's allies in the FCC, who are required to protect the public interest and to promote localism.

As the Prometheus Radio Project noted (9/15/06):

Former FCC Chairman Michael Powell...made many high-sounding pronouncements about the need for media policy to be rooted in empirical evidence. Powell also attempted to separate out the issue of media consolidation from localism, claiming that most of the millions of comments to the Commission stemmed from a concern about local content, not a concern about concentration of ownership into fewer hands.

Martin, who succeeded Powell in 2005 as chair, voted in 2003 for ownership rules that would have dramatically raised ownership caps. The rules were sharply contested by media activists and others, and a federal appeals court struck them down in 2004. Martin told Boxer he hadn't been aware of the report and has promised to keep "an open mind" on media consolidation as the FCC embarks once again on a review of its media ownership rules (Daily Variety, 9/13/06). The FCC has since posted the full report on its website.

Powell likewise denied any knowledge of the report or responsibility for its suppression (AP, 9/15/06).
Excerpt Of An Alert At FAIR

Freedom From Fate

Israel's war on Lebanon is an integral part of a US sponsored "military roadmap". The war on Lebanon is "a stage" in a sequence of carefully planned military operations.

Lebanon constitutes a strategic corridor between Israel and North-western Syria. The underlying objective of this war was the militarization of Lebanon, including the stationing of foreign troops, as a precondition for carrying out the next phase of a broader military agenda.

Formally under a UN mandate, the foreign troops to be stationed on Lebanese soil on the immediate border with Syria, will be largely although not exclusively from NATO countries. This military force mandated by the UN Security Council is by no means neutral. It responds directly to US and Israeli interests.

Moreover, the timely withdrawal of Syrian troops, following the February 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has contributed to opening up a "new space". The withdrawal of Syrian troops served Israeli interests. The timely pullout was of strategic significance: it was a major factor in the timing and planning of the July 2006 IDF attacks on Lebanon.

In the aftermath of the Israeli bombings and the "ceasefire", UN Security Council Resolution 1701, drafted by France and the US in close consultation with the Israeli government, has paved the way for the militarization of Lebanon, under a bogus UN mandate.

The Next Phase of the Middle East War

Confirmed by official statements and military documents, the US in close coordination with Britain (and in consultation with its NATO partners), is planning to launch a war directed against Iran and Syria. US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton has already initiated the draft of a UN Security Council resolution with a view to imposing sanctions on Tehran for its alleged (nonexistent) nuclear weapons program. Whether this resolution is adopted is not the main issue. The US may decide to proceed in defiance of the Security Council, following a veto by Russia and/or China. The vote of France and Britain, among the permanent members has already been secured.

US military sources have confirmed that an aerial attack, pursuant to a sanctions regime on Iran, with or without UN approval, would involve a large scale deployment comparable to the US "shock and awe" bombing raids on Iraq in March 2003:

American air strikes on Iran would vastly exceed the scope of the 1981 Israeli attack on the Osiraq nuclear center in Iraq, and would more resemble the opening days of the 2003 air campaign against Iraq. Using the full force of operational B-2 stealth bombers, staging from Diego Garcia or flying direct from the United States, possibly supplemented by F-117 stealth fighters staging from al Udeid in Qatar or some other location in theater, the two-dozen suspect nuclear sites would be targeted.

Military planners could tailor their target list to reflect the preferences of the Administration by having limited air strikes that would target only the most crucial facilities ... or the United States could opt for a far more comprehensive set of strikes against a comprehensive range of WMD related targets, as well as conventional and unconventional forces that might be used to counterattack against US forces in Iraq

The aerial bombing plans have been fully operational ("in an advanced state of readiness") since June 2005. The various components of the military operation are firmly under US Command, coordinated by the Pentagon and US Strategic Command Headquarters (USSTRATCOM) at the Offutt Air Force base in Nebraska.

In November 2004, US Strategic Command conducted a major exercise of a "global strike plan" entitled "Global Lightening". The latter involved a simulated attack using both conventional and nuclear weapons against a "fictitious enemy" [Iran]. Following the "Global Lightening" exercise, US Strategic Command declared "an advanced state of readiness".

The operational implementation of the Global Strike is called CONCEPT PLAN (CONPLAN) 8022. The latter is described as "an actual plan that the Navy and the Air Force translate into strike package for their submarines and bombers,'

The command structure of the operation is centralized and ultimately The Pentagon will decide on the sequence; " if and when" to launch military operations against Iran and Syria. Israeli military actions and those of other coalition partners including Turkey, would be carried out in close coordination with the Pentagon.

Ground War

While the threat of punitive aerial bombardments of Iran's nuclear facilities have been announced repeatedly by the Bush administration, recent developments suggest that an all out ground war is also under preparation.

CONPLAN constitutes only one component of the Middle East military agenda. CONPLAN 8022 does not contemplate a ground war. It posits "no boots on the ground", which was the initial assumption envisaged in relation to the proposed aerial attacks on Iran.

US and Israeli military planners are fully aware that the aerial "punitive bombings" will almost inevitably lead coalition forces into a ground war scenario in which they will have to confront Iranian and Syrian forces in the battlefield.

Tehran has confirmed that it will retaliate if attacked, in the form of ballistic missile strikes directed against Israel as well as against US military facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, which would immediately lead us into a scenario of military escalation and all out war.

Iranian troops could cross the Iran-Iraq border and confront coalition forces inside Iraq. Israeli troops and/or Special Forces could enter into Syria.

The foreign troops stationed in Lebanon under UN mandate would respond to the diktats of the US led coalition and the prior commitments reached with Washington and Tel Aviv in the context of the various military alliances (NATO-Israel, Turkey-Israel, GUUAM, etc).

War Games

These military preparations have also been marked, quite recently, by the conduct of war games.

In late August, Iran was involved in the conduct of war games in major regions of the country, including border areas with Turkey, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Iran's Defense Minister General Mostafa Mohammad Najjar has confirmed the deployment of enhanced military capabilities including weapons systems and troops on the Iranian border: "[Iranian] forces are supervising all movements by trans-regional troops and their agents around the Iranian borders" (FARS news, 2 September 2006)

Iran War Games August 2006.

Barely acknowledged by the Western media, military exercises organized by Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan under the Collective Security Treaty Organization, (CSTO) were also launched in late August. These war games, officially tagged as part of a counter terrorism program, were conducted in response to US-Israeli military threats in the region including the planned attacks against Iran. In turn, China an Kazakhstan held concurrent war games under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Azerbaijan and neighboring Georgia have close military ties to Washington. Both countries are part of GUUAM, a military alliance with the US and NATO.

Turkey is a close ally of Israel. Since 2005, Israel has deployed Special Forces in the mountainous areas of Turkey bordering Iran and Syria with the collaboration of the Ankara government: Pakistan is also a close ally of the US and Britain. Georgia also has a military cooperation agreement with Israel.

Meanwhile, the USS Enterprise, America's largest aircraft carrier is en route to the Persian Gulf.

US Troop Build-up

US troops in Iraq have been increased to 140,000 as confirmed by recent Pentagon statements (Reuters, 2 September 2006) These plans have been coupled with a the compulsory recall of "inactive servicemen" as well as the expansion of mercenary forces.

The Pentagon justifies the troop build-up as part of a "routine" process of replacement and rotation, required in its ongoing war against "terrorists" in Iraq. The speeding up of military recruitment is also occurring in the core countries of the Anglo-American coalition including Great Britain. Australia and Canada (see also Recruiting Canada). Canada and Australia are aligned with the US. Australian Prime Minister John Howard as well as Canada's Steven Harper have confirmed their commitment to the US-Israeli war and have promised an expansion of the armed forces in their respective countries.

Meanwhile British troops stationed in Iraq have been redeployed to the Iranian border in southern Iraq. This redeployment has been casually presented by Britain's Ambassador to Iraq as part of a "crack down on smuggling and the entrance of weapons into Iraq from Iran".

While British officials are maintaining no desire or preparations for a conflict with Iran, more British troops are being mobilized and deployed to Iraq at the same time. The Light Infantry of the 2nd Battalion, another unit with rapid deployment capabilities, is deploying to the southern Iraqi border with Iran. The 2nd Battalion is being sent to Iraq under the pretext of working in the Rear Operations Battle Group which will provide escorts for military convoys and security for British forces and bases in Basra.

The Role of Israel

In the wake of the war on Lebanon. Israel's military plans and pronouncements are increasingly explicit. Tel Aviv has announced plans to wage a pre-emptive "full-scale war" against Iran and Syria, implying the deployment of both air and ground force. These war plans are now said to at the top of the defense agenda:

"Israel is preparing for a possible war with both Iran and Syria, according to Israeli political and military sources."
(...)
“The challenge from Iran and Syria is now top of the Israeli defense agenda, higher than the Palestinian one,” said an Israeli defense source. Shortly before the war in Lebanon Major-General Eliezer Shkedi, the commander of the air force, was placed in charge of the “Iranian front”, a new position in the Israeli Defense Forces. His job will be to command any future strikes on Iran and Syria."
(...)
In the past we prepared for a possible military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities,” said one insider, “but Iran’s growing confidence after the war in Lebanon means we have to prepare for a full-scale war, in which Syria will be an important player.”
(...)
As a result of the change in the defense priorities, the budget for the Israeli forces in the West Bank and Gaza is to be reduced." (Sunday Times, 3 September 2006)

Media Disinformation

The Western media is beating the drums of war.

The Sunday Times views Israel's war plans as legitimate acts of self defense, to prevent Tehran from launching an all out nuclear attack on Israel: "Iran and Syria have ballistic missiles that can cover most of Israel, including Tel Aviv. An emergency budget has now been assigned to building modern shelters."

The fact that Iran does not possess nuclear weapons capabilities as confirmed by the IAEA report does not seem to be an issue for debate.

Media disinformation has contributed to creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. The announcement on August 10 by the British Home Office of a foiled large scale terror attack to simultaneously blow up as many as ten airplanes, conveys the impression that it is the Western World rather than the Middle East which is under attack.

Realities are twisted upside down. The disinformation campaign has gone into full gear. The British and US media are increasingly pointing towards "preemptive war" as an act of "self defense" against Al Qaeda and the State sponsors of terrorism, who are allegedly preparing a Second 911.

The underlying objective, through fear and intimidation, is ultimately to build public acceptance for the next stage of the Middle East "war on terrorism" which is directed against Syria and Iran.

The threat of an Al Qaeda "Attack on America" is being used profusely by the Bush administration and its indefectible British ally to galvanize public opinion in support of a global military agenda.

Nuclear Weapons against Iran

The use of tactical nuclear weapons by the US and Israel against Iran, is contemplated, ironically in retaliation for Iran's nonexistent nuclear weapons program.

The Bush administration's new nuclear doctrine contains specific "guidelines" which allow for "preemptive" nuclear strikes against "rogue enemies" which "possess" or are "developing" weapons of mass destruction (WMD). (2001 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations (DJNO)).

CONPLAN 8022, referred to above, is 'the overall umbrella plan for sort of the pre-planned strategic scenarios involving nuclear weapons.'

'It's specifically focused on these new types of threats -- Iran, North Korea -- proliferation and potentially terrorists too,' he said. 'There's nothing that says that they can't use CONPLAN 8022 in limited scenarios against Russian and Chinese targets.'(According to Hans Kristensen, of the Nuclear Information Project, quoted in Japanese economic News Wire, op cit)

The mission of JFCCSGS is to implement CONPLAN 8022, in other words to trigger a nuclear war with Iran.

The Commander in Chief, namely George W. Bush would instruct the Secretary of Defense, who would then instruct the Joint Chiefs of staff to activate CONPLAN 8022.

The use of nuclear weapons against Iran would be coordinated with Israel, which possesses a sophisticated nuclear arsenal.

The use of nuclear weapons by Israel or the US cannot be excluded, particularly in view of the fact that tactical nuclear weapons have now been reclassified as a variant of the conventional bunker buster bombs and are authorized for use in conventional war theaters. ("they are harmless to civilians because the explosion is underground").

In this regard, Israel and the US rather than Iran constitute a nuclear threat.

The World is at a Critical Crossroads

If aerial bombardments were to be launched against Iran, they would trigger a ground war and the escalation of the conflict to a much broader region. Even in the case of aerial and missile attacks using conventional warheads, the bombings would unleash a "Chernobyl type" nuclear nightmare resulting from the spread of nuclear radiation following the destruction of Iran's nuclear energy facilities.

Throughout history, the structure of military alliances has played a crucial role in triggering major military conflicts. In contrast to the situation prevailing prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, America's ongoing military adventure is now firmly supported by the Franco-German alliance. Moreover, Israel is slated to play a direct role in this military operation.

NATO is broadly supportive of the US led military agenda and is firmly aligned with the Anglo-American-Israeli military axis, which also includes Australia and Canada. In February 2005, NATO signed a military cooperation agreement with Israel, and Israel has a longstanding bilateral military agreement with Turkey.

Iran has observer status in The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and is slated to become a full member of SCO. China and Russia have far-reaching military cooperation agreements with Iran.

China and Russia are firmly opposed to a US-led military operation in the diplomatic arena. While the US sponsored military plan threatens Russian and Chinese interests in Central Asia and the Caspian sea basin, it is unlikely that they would intervene militarily on the side of Iran or Syria.

While China and Russia will oppose the US led war at the diplomatic level as well as at the UN Security Council, Washington has secured the support of France and Germany. While Russia and China have military cooperation agreements with Iran, they would most probably not intervene militarily in favor of Iran.

The planned attack on Iran must be understood in relation to the existing active war theaters in the Middle East, namely Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon-Palestine.

The conflict could easily spread from the Middle East to the Caspian sea basin. It could also involve the participation of Azerbaijan and Georgia, where US troops are stationed.

Military action against Iran and Syria would directly involve Israel's participation, which in turn would trigger a broader war throughout the Middle East, not to mention the further implosion in the Palestinian occupied territories. Turkey is closely associated with the proposed aerial attacks.

If the US-UK-Israeli war plans were to proceed, the broader Middle East- Central Asian region would flare up, from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Afghan-Chinese border. At present, there are three distinct war theaters: Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine-Lebanon. An attack directed against Iran would serve to integrate these war theaters transforming the broader Middle East Central Asian region into an integrated war zone. (see map above)

In turn the US sponsored aerial bombardments directed against Iran could contribute to triggering a ground war characterized by Iranian attacks directed against coalition troops in Iraq. In turn, Israeli forces would enter into Syria.

An attack on Iran would have a direct impact on the resistance movement inside Iraq. It would also put pressure on America's overstretched military capabilities and resources in both the Iraqi and Afghan war theaters.

In other words, the shaky geopolitics of the Central Asia- Middle East region, the three existing war theaters in which America is currently, involved, the direct participation of Israel and Turkey, the structure of US sponsored military alliances, etc. raises the specter of a broader conflict.

The war against Iran is part of a longer term US military agenda which seeks to militarize the entire Caspian sea basin, eventually leading to the destabilization and conquest of the Russian Federation.

Eggs

The issues raised here do not imply that the war will take place. What the analysis of official statments and military documents confirms is that:

a) the war is part of a political agenda;

b) military plans to launch an attack on Iran and Syria are "in an advanced stage of readiness".

War is not an inevitable process.

Secure Computing - Turning Tricks For Iran's Ahmadinejad

Iran has adopted one of the world’s most substantial Internet censorship regimes. Iran, along with China, is among a small group of states with the most sophisticated state-mandated filtering systems in the world.

Iran has adopted this extensive filtering regime at a time of extraordinary growth in Internet usage among its citizens and a burst of growth in writing online in the Farsi language. Iran’s sophisticated Internet censorship regime is part of a trend that the OpenNet Initiative’s research has uncovered toward states focusing on blocking expression in local languages, such as Farsi, and with a particular view toward clamping down on what can be published through inexpensive and popular applications, such as weblogs.

Iran is also one of a growing number of countries, particularly in the Middle East region, that rely upon commercial software developed by for-profit United States companies to carry out the core of its filtering regime.

Iran has recently acknowledged that it uses the commercial filtering package SmartFilter – made by the US-based company, Secure Computing – as the primary technical engine of its filtering system.

This commercial software product is configured as part of the Iranian filtering system to block both internationally-hosted sites in English and sites in local languages.

SmartFilter, as with all commercial filtering software packages, is prone to over-blocking, errors, and a near-total lack of transparency. In effect, Iran outsources many of the decisions for what its citizens can access on the Internet to a United States company, which in turn profits from its complicity in such a regime.

War Against Iraq - Beyond The Sales Pitch

In The War on Iraq, filmmaker Robert Greenwald chronicles the Bush Administration's determined quest to invade Iraq on the heels of the events of September 11, 2001. The film attempts to deconstruct the administration's case for war through interviews with U.S intelligence and defense officials, foreign service experts, and U.N. weapons inspectors -- including a former CIA director, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and even President Bush's Secretary of the Army.

Dan Rather: Media Down

A lecture featuring Dan Rather, who was anchor and managing editor for the CBS Evening News for 24 years, and now hosts and produces long form programming examining major global topics and events for the Discovery Channel, will be in conversation with Orville Schelll, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism. Sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley and the Graduate School of Journalism.

Top 25 Censored News Stories

Project Censored has compiled a list of 25 news stories of social significance that have been overlooked, underreported or self-censored by the major national news media in the U.S.

#1 Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media

#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran

#3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger

#4 Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US

#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo

#6 Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy

# 7 US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq

#8 Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act

#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall

#10 Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians

#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed

#12 Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines

#13 New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup

#14 Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US

#15 Chemical Industry is EPA’s Primary Research Partner

#16 Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court

#17 Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda

#18 Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story

#19 Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever

#20 Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem

#21 Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers

#22 $Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed

#23 US Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe

#24 Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year

#25 US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region

Perception, Persuasion, and Communications

John Davies is one of the nation’s most respected communications strategists. He is the CEO of Southern California’s third largest public relations firm. He applies the study of human behavior and proven communications strategies to gain influence in the complex information-saturated decision-making process today. As a political consultant, John Davies enjoyed a nearly 90% win ratio with more than 150 campaigns. This is a lecture by John Davies held at the University of California, Santa Barbara (January 6, '06)

Mainstream Media, Retards, Tiger Woods, And Hezbollah

It's not easy being right all the time. Way back on July 23, when all the suckers in the Mainstream Media were passing on the bullshit about Israel expelling Hezbollah from Southern Lebanon, I said Hezbollah was going to win every round of the fight. I took a lot of heat for that, but now, when you look through the smoking ruins of Northern Israel and Southern Lebanon, you see two things: the yellow Hezzie flag flying high, and the fat face of your favorite War Nerd sticking his tongue out at all the better-paid pundits who got it wrong as usual.

You know what "Mainstreaming" is, don't you? That's when they put retards in schools for normal people. And that's what the Mainstream Media is: a bunch of retards who don't know a damn thing about contemporary war, don't even want to know. It's Affirmative Action for fools, not just giving them jobs but shoving them in front of a camera to tell all the suckers back home how the good guys are gonna win, sleep tight, don't worry.

The funniest bit is the way desperate suckers are trying to spin total defeat of the IDF into some kind of victory. What's impressed me is that no Israelis are saying that. All the Israeli commentators I've read have faced up to the fact that they got hosed. It's the Americans, totally out of touch with reality and desperate to stay that way, who are finding lame excuses for the IDF, like "Hezbollah didn't really WIN, since they didn't wipe out Israel."

The best answer to that comes from an Israeli columnist I read, who said, "If a lightweight boxer fights a heavyweight and gets a draw, the lightweight won." Except I'm not sure it was even a draw. I think Hezbollah flat-out won, not just in PR/Propaganda terms but by anybody's standards. They're in total control of the field of battle, Southern Lebanon -- I hope none of you are dumb enough to think that this "International Peacekeeping Force" is going to actually try to disarm Hezbollah after the Israelis couldn't do it by force of arms. And I'll throw y'all a little curve by arguing that Hezbollah may even have had a smaller casualty count than the IDF. I can't prove it, and I'm not sure, but because Hezbollah fought smart and played defense most of the time, they may actually have had fewer KIA than the 118 the IDF is admitting.

The IDF isn't even claiming to have killed more than about 500 Hezzies, and that in itself is shocking. It means that the kill ratio, conventional army to guerrillas, is less than five to one. It should be ten to one at least. The Israeli Air Force tried to fudge those stats by blasting a lot of Lebanese civvies, about 900 or so, but that was just dumb, and it's probably going to cost the IDF C-in-C, Dan Halutz, his job.

Halutz is exactly the kind of idiot who'd feel at home with guys like Cheney: he's all tough talk and no performance. Halutz was a fighter pilot who got famous for sound bytes about how he loved dropping 1,000-lb bombs on the Pals, and he tried to run the war against Hezbollah the same way: by "shock and awe," blowing up apartment buildings and bridges, scaring the grandmas. Didn't work. The Shi'ites are way, way tougher than the Pals, always have been.

I remember back when the IDF first occupied Southern Lebanon, a teenage Shi'ite girl rammed a car full of HE into an IDF M113, killed a couple of soldiers, and one smart IDF Colonel said, "This is going to be bad. In 30 years of fighting the Palestinians, nobody ever did that to us." He sure was right about that. In fact, the Shia ran the IDF out of Southern Lebanon in 2000, and when they lured the IDF back in this summer, it took just one month to send the Israelis running south all over again, pretending that they're delighted to accept a UN peacekeeping force full of Muslim nationals whose countries don't even recognize Israel's existence, even though back at the start of this war, when they still thought they'd kick some Hezzie ass, the IDF was actually shelling UN outposts.

But back here in the US, we're supposed to think Hezbollah's victory is a disaster. But why, exactly? First of all, why are Americans are supposed to love Israel when there's never been much sign that Israel loves America? We give them three billion a year, and they give us little more than grief. Ask the crew of the USS Liberty -- no, wait, they're all dead, killed by an Israeli airstrike and followup machinegunning by Israeli gunboats, on a USN vessel flying the American flag. Ask the USAF generals who begged the Israeli Air Force to pass on crucial info on Syrian air defenses after the IDF's campaign against the Syrians in. The Israelis take any classified info they want from American intelligence, but when it was their turn to cough up some secrets, they stonewalled us. Fast-forward to Reagan's disastrous Lebanon invasion, when we lose two Navy jets against the same Syrian air defenses the Israelis had figured out years earlier. What did these guys ever do for us?

The worst thing a world power can do is pick sides in a non-stop tribal war for sentimental reasons. You know why we're speaking English and not French, thank God? Because way back in 1609, the French explorer Champlain hooked up with a Huron war party and headed south into New York. He liked the Huron, they liked him (the French had much more respect for the Injuns than the Brits, generally got along well with them) and when the Huron went into battle against a tribe they told the Frenchman was their hereditary enemy, he couldn't resist a chance to help his allies and show off his hi-tech military equipment. This being 1609, the hi-tech gadget was a huge arqebuse, more like a shoulder-fired cannon than a modern rifle -- but when Champlain lit the fuse, pointed the barrel at an enemy chief and fired, he made an even bigger impression than he meant to. Sure, he killed the enemy chief and probably got to strut like a 17 th -c. Pimp all the way back to Tribal HQ, and no doubt got a warm reception from all those Huron girls who wanted his Superbowl QB genes...but he also doomed the French in North America.

By the way, if you ask me what's really wrong with the French militarily, I'd say it's not cowardice at all, it's sheer impulsiveness, the kind Champlain showed that day -- too worried about looking good, not cold-blooded enough, no long-term plan.

See, the Hurons' hereditary enemy happened to be the Iroquois, who were not just the tribe next door. They were a six-tribe confederation, one of the few big, stable alliances among the North American Native tribes, with a reputation for holding a grudge forever. From the moment Champlain fired his hand-cannon, the Iroquois were the sworn enemy of the French and the allies of the English. It wasn't that the Iroquois actually liked the Brits -- I mean, who could like those snotty, slow-witted Redcoats?--but the Iroquois felt like Churchill in WW II: they'd have made a deal with Satan to get rid of those Froggy bastards who'd embarrassed them.

So even though the French knew how to make friends with the natives and the Brits didn't, the Brits had the biggest and most powerful tribe in the Northeast on their side. From then on, the Brits had the advantage. It took them another 150 years to take Quebec, but once the Iroquois swore vengeance, that area was as doomed as Constantinople.

We did a Champlain in the Middle East when we made Israel sentimental favorites back in 1948. But at least we had good reason -- giving the Jews a safe haven after Hitler tried to wipe them out. And at least Israel really was the underdog back then, before Congress handed them everything but their own aircraft carrier.

The IDF hasn't been a real underdog for a long time. Amateurs look at the map of the Middle East, see poor li'l Israel in the middle of all that Arab real estate and think the IDF is still the underdog. Nope--Israel was set up by a bunch of smart, educated Europeans, and when you match an army of those guys, backed by billions in US military aid, against peasant conscripts, only a fool bets on the peasants. Doesn't matter how much real estate they have, peasants in uniform are useless in conventional warfare against smart, motivated Western troops.

Till now -- till Hezbollah. Hezbollah chose when and where and how they were going to fight Israel. Here are the lessons they learned. Read'em and weep, because they work just as good against US armed forces and tactics as they do against the IDF:

First, most important lesson: take the defense tactically, the offense strategically. This ought to be a familiar doctrine to any American war buff because it was the policy behind most of our great victories, like Bunker Hill, New Orleans, and it's what kept Lee's Army of Northern Virginia on top against bigger and better-equipped Federal forces until Gettysburg -- and the only reason Lee lost there was because he abandoned the policy like a fool. Hezbollah took the offensive strategically by prepping the ground, Southern Lebanon, with a network of underground bunkers, then picking its moment to attack Israel while the IDF was busy kicking ass down in Gaza. The IDF, already under pressure for not rescuing that soldier kidnapped by Hamas in Gaza, charged over the border right into the trap.

Once they'd provoked the massive attack they hoped for, Hezbollah assumed the defensive, sticking to their bunkers and launching an incredible number of guided and unguided missiles against the Israelis. The most devastating weapon they have is the RPG 29, the newest Russian version of our old friend the RPG 7. The RPG 29 seems to be able to knock out the IDF's MBT, the Merkava 4. That's a big, big blow to the IDF, because the newer Merkavas are supposed to be invulnerable to anything but huge shaped charges laid as mines. They're equipped with all the latest tricks in anti-missile defenses, like reactive armor and screens that are supposed to make the warhead detonate prematurely -- kind of like premature ejaculation for RPGs. ("Oh jeez, sorry honey, I guess I just got too excited, your turret's so damn sexy....") The RPG 29 has a simple but effective counter for all this last-ditch defensive stuff: a tandem warhead, where the first warhead blasts the reactive armor or screen and the second, the really deadly shaped-charge one, has a free path right into the tank. By sticking to their bunkers, where they could fire from safety at the Merkavas, the Hezbollah antitank teams destroyed the Merkava 4's rep in a few weeks.

At sea Hezbollah used the same strategy: use guided missiles against high-value targets. Israel has been used to having control of the Mediterranean, and using its navy as low-cost, mobile artillery to blast enemy positions (and picnics). Hezbollah served notice that them days are over by hitting an Israeli gunboat with a guided weapon of some kind. It's not clear what they used, either an Iranian antiship missile or something homemade, some kind of model aircraft carrying a few pounds of C-4. Personally I'm hoping it turns out to be the Ace Hardware version, some dweeb's model Cessna, the kind you see sad Asian kids flying around your local high-school parking lot on weekends, modified by the Bill Murray character in Caddyshack -- you know where he makes models of the gopher's little friends, "the harmless bunny rabbit" and so on? I'm not sure what a Hezbollah model-airplane dweeb would make out of plastic explosive -- in fact, I'm not sure what a Hezbollah dweeb would look like if one even exists -- but it'd have to be something resembling IDF naval vessels' little friends, like a claymation US congressman with a sack of money in his teeth, maybe. Whatever it was, the contraption worked: killed four IDF crew, set the gunboat on fire, and taught the Israeli Navy a little respect.

Second Lesson: When you're fighting a force that depends on firepower and air power, DIG IN. Hezbollah has been tunneling out Southern Lebanon like those Caddyshack gophers from the first day the IDF vacated the area. They built reinforced bunkers, some with AC, designed to withstand air strikes and be used as firing positions for those new-generation anti-tank weapons. Just think for a second and you'll see that if you don't need to move, and stay underground like the Cong in Cu Chi, airpower can't touch you. The IDF kept waiting for Hezbollah to move aboveground but got nowhere, because the Hezzies had what the Germans call "fire discipline," the special kind of guts you need to stay still and not fire till the enemy's real close. The hotheads in Hamas have the more obvious kind of guts, attacking the IDF with small arms and old RPGs from the back of a pickup, but that kind of courage don't cut it no more.

Remember, in military terms, courage changes with the technology. When the Greeks fought one-on-one, courage was Achilles strutting up and saying, "I'll take the best guy you punks got." When the phalanx came into its own, courage meant NOT jumping out of formation on your lonesome but keeping rank, with your shield protecting your neighbor (or your bayonet, if you're talking the Redcoats' squares at Culloden in 1745). To fight and win the way Hezbollah did, courage is waiting...waiting...waiting for that Merkava to roll into the kill zone, not jumping up and firing your AK at Chobham armor.

And speaking of AKs, another lesson of this war is that the era of the automatic rifle as basic small arm may be ending. We may be heading back to some kind of shoulder-fired cannon (just like Champlain's!). Most of the IDF casualties in this war were inflicted by RPGs, just like most of our casualties in Iraq. The Chechen guerrillas have gone to a new formation, with three-man teams consisting of two RPG gunners with one AK man whose only job is to protect the RPGers. That may be the wave of the future.

Of course all these moves would've been wasted if the Israelis had caught on to what Hezbollah was up to, which leads to another lesson, one I'm always preaching: in asymmetrical warfare, Intelligence is everything. Or in this case, counterintelligence. Israeli intel, Shin Bet and Mossad, has been the real strength of the IDF for a long time. They're the best and most ruthless intelligence agencies since the USSR went bankrupt. But they had no idea what was waiting for them over the border. That's incredible, the most shocking news of all.

Remember, the IDF has instant access to all US military satellite intel, so this means that our tech intel was just as ineffective as Mossad's more traditional infiltration methods. That means Hezbollah, a huge organization with branches in every street in South Beirut and South Lebanon, has a scary effective counterintelligence branch. We all know the CIA is useless, but when Mossad and Shin Beth can't even penetrate the lower levels of a mass movement like Hezbollah, then the world has turned upside down.

And it has, folks. That's why this is such a huge, huge war. No matter what the waterheads on CNN try to tell you, the IDF lost totally, and every force configured like it -- such as, oh, the US Army or Air Force -- lost too. The Gophers are beating the shit out of the gardeners on this course. The gophers just kicked the shit out of Tiger Woods.

It's hard to say who gains in the long run. Short term, sure, Hezbollah wins big. But in the long run, maybe what's happened is that the day when genocide replaces the farce called "CI Warfare" just got a lot closer.
-An Article By Gary War Nerd Brecher In The Exile

The Myth Of The Omnipresent Enemy

Despite all the ominous warnings of wily terrorists and imminent attacks, there has been neither a successful strike nor a close call in the United States since 9/11. The reasonable -- but rarely heard -- explanation is that there are no terrorists within the United States, and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad.

For the past five years, Americans have been regularly regaled with dire predictions of another major al Qaeda attack in the United States. In 2003, a group of 200 senior government officials and business executives, many of them specialists in security and terrorism, pronounced it likely that a terrorist strike more devastating than 9/11 -- possibly involving weapons of mass destruction -- would occur before the end of 2004. In May 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft warned that al Qaeda could "hit hard" in the next few months and said that 90 percent of the arrangements for an attack on U.S. soil were complete. That fall, Newsweek reported that it was "practically an article of faith among counterterrorism officials" that al Qaeda would strike in the run-up to the November 2004 election. When that "October surprise" failed to materialize, the focus shifted: a taped encyclical from Osama bin Laden, it was said, demonstrated that he was too weak to attack before the election but was marshalling his resources to do so months after it.

On the first page of its founding manifesto, the massively funded Department of Homeland Security intones, "Today's terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon."

But if it is so easy to pull off an attack and if terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it? Why have they not been sniping at people in shopping centers, collapsing tunnels, poisoning the food supply, cutting electrical lines, derailing trains, blowing up oil pipelines, causing massive traffic jams, or exploiting the countless other vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could so easily be exploited?

One reasonable explanation is that almost no terrorists exist in the United States and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad. But this explanation is rarely offered.

HUFFING AND PUFFING

Instead, Americans are told -- often by the same people who had once predicted imminent attacks -- that the absence of international terrorist strikes in the United States is owed to the protective measures so hastily and expensively put in place after 9/11. But there is a problem with this argument. True, there have been no terrorist incidents in the United States in the last five years. But nor were there any in the five years before the 9/11 attacks, at a time when the United States was doing much less to protect itself. It would take only one or two guys with a gun or an explosive to terrorize vast numbers of people, as the sniper attacks around Washington, D.C., demonstrated in 2002. Accordingly, the government's protective measures would have to be nearly perfect to thwart all such plans. Given the monumental imperfection of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, and the debacle of FBI and National Security Agency programs to upgrade their computers to better coordinate intelligence information, that explanation seems far-fetched. Moreover, Israel still experiences terrorism even with a far more extensive security apparatus.

TERRORISTS UNDER THE BED

A fully credible explanation for the fact that the United States has suffered no terrorist attacks since 9/11 is that the threat posed by homegrown or imported terrorists -- like that presented by Japanese Americans during World War II or by American Communists after it -- has been massively exaggerated. Is it possible that the haystack is essentially free of needles?

The FBI embraces a spooky I-think-therefore-they-are line of reasoning when assessing the purported terrorist menace. In 2003, its director, Robert Mueller, proclaimed, "The greatest threat is from al Qaeda cells in the U.S. that we have not yet identified." He rather mysteriously deemed the threat from those unidentified entities to be "increasing in part because of the heightened publicity" surrounding such episodes as the 2002 Washington sniper shootings and the 2001 anthrax attacks (which had nothing to do with al Qaeda). But in 2001, the 9/11 hijackers received no aid from U.S.-based al Qaeda operatives for the simple reason that no such operatives appear to have existed. It is not at all clear that that condition has changed.

Mueller also claimed to know that "al Qaeda maintains the ability and the intent to inflict significant casualties in the U.S. with little warning." If this was true -- if the terrorists had both the ability and the intent in 2003, and if the threat they presented was somehow increasing -- they had remained remarkably quiet by the time the unflappable Mueller repeated his alarmist mantra in 2005: "I remain very concerned about what we are not seeing."

Intelligence estimates in 2002 held that there were as many as 5,000 al Qaeda terrorists and supporters in the United States. However, a secret FBI report in 2005 wistfully noted that although the bureau had managed to arrest a few bad guys here and there after more than three years of intense and well-funded hunting, it had been unable to identify a single true al Qaeda sleeper cell anywhere in the country. Thousands of people in the United States have had their overseas communications monitored under a controversial warrantless surveillance program. Of these, fewer than ten U.S. citizens or residents per year have aroused enough suspicion to impel the agencies spying on them to seek warrants authorizing surveillance of their domestic communications as well; none of this activity, it appears, has led to an indictment on any charge whatever.

In addition to massive eavesdropping and detention programs, every year some 30,000 "national security letters" are issued without judicial review, forcing businesses and other institutions to disclose confidential information about their customers without telling anyone they have done so. That process has generated thousands of leads that, when pursued, have led nowhere. Some 80,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants have been subjected to fingerprinting and registration, another 8,000 have been called in for interviews with the FBI, and over 5,000 foreign nationals have been imprisoned in initiatives designed to prevent terrorism. This activity, notes the Georgetown University law professor David Cole, has not resulted in a single conviction for a terrorist crime. In fact, only a small number of people picked up on terrorism charges -- always to great official fanfare -- have been convicted at all, and almost all of these convictions have been for other infractions, particularly immigration violations. Some of those convicted have clearly been mental cases or simply flaunting jihadist bravado -- rattling on about taking down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch, blowing up the Sears Tower if only they could get to Chicago, beheading the prime minister of Canada, or flooding lower Manhattan by somehow doing something terrible to one of those tunnels.

THREAT PERCEPTIONS

The results of policing activity overseas suggest that the absence of results in the United States has less to do with terrorists' cleverness or with investigative incompetence than with the possibility that few, if any, terrorists exist in the country. It also suggests that al Qaeda's ubiquity and capacity to do damage may have, as with so many perceived threats, been exaggerated. Just because some terrorists may wish to do great harm does not mean that they are able to.

Gerges argues that mainstream Islamists -- who make up the vast majority of the Islamist political movement -- gave up on the use of force before 9/11, except perhaps against Israel, and that the jihadists still committed to violence constitute a tiny minority. Even this small group primarily focuses on various "infidel" Muslim regimes and considers jihadists who carry out violence against the "far enemy" -- mainly Europe and the United States -- to be irresponsible, reckless adventurers who endanger the survival of the whole movement. In this view, 9/11 was a sign of al Qaeda's desperation, isolation, fragmentation, and decline, not of its strength.

Those attacks demonstrated, of course, that al Qaeda -- or at least 19 of its members -- still possessed some fight. And none of this is to deny that more terrorist attacks on the United States are still possible. Nor is it to suggest that al Qaeda is anything other than a murderous movement. Moreover, after the ill-considered U.S. venture in Iraq is over, freelance jihadists trained there may seek to continue their operations elsewhere -- although they are more likely to focus on places such as Chechnya than on the United States. A unilateral American military attack against Iran could cause that country to retaliate, probably with very wide support within the Muslim world, by aiding anti-American insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq and inflicting damage on Israel and on American interests worldwide.

But while keeping such potential dangers in mind, it is worth remembering that the total number of people killed since 9/11 by al Qaeda or al Qaeda­like operatives outside of Afghanistan and Iraq is not much higher than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States in a single year, and that the lifetime chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 80,000 -- about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor. Even if there were a 9/11-scale attack every three months for the next five years, the likelihood that an individual American would number among the dead would be two hundredths of a percent (or one in 5,000).

Although it remains heretical to say so, the evidence so far suggests that fears of the omnipotent terrorist -- reminiscent of those inspired by images of the 20-foot-tall Japanese after Pearl Harbor or the 20-foot-tall Communists at various points in the Cold War (particularly after Sputnik) -- may have been overblown, the threat presented within the United States by al Qaeda greatly exaggerated. The massive and expensive homeland security apparatus erected since 9/11 may be persecuting some, spying on many, inconveniencing most, and taxing all to defend the United States against an enemy that scarcely exists.
-An Excerpt Of An Article By John Mueller In the Council Of Foreign Relations' Foreign Affairs

The High Art Of Keeping A Straight Face

I know we said the Jesse McBeth video was a must see - and it was. But this one takes the cake though it has little to do with psyops other than demonstrating the contextualizing power of a straight face. It's apparently (it seems a bit too Jesse McBethish to be for real. Notice how the audience members keep perfectly straight faces) a video of a dutch interviewer on a LIVE TV show (Dutch version of 60 Minutes) about surgeries gone wrong. He's interviewing a man who's surgical team inadvertently removed his testicles. No translation is needed to understand what is happening...

The New Yorker: The World After 9-11

The New Yorker Magazine, in their 9-11 anniversary issue, has a roundtable discussion (posted online this morning) on the aftereffects of the Bush administration's reaction to the attacks five years ago.

(SEYMOUR) HERSH: In the fall of 2001, I was learning a lot about a great debate inside the Administration about what to do in Afghanistan. There were a lot of people who argued very bitterly against the air war -- I'm talking about people on the inside, tough guys -- arguing against what we all assumed to be the one just aspect of this whole post-9/11 process, which was the invasion and bombing of Afghanistan and the Special Forces operation. That was the beginning of the whole torture issue with Guantanamo, and the buying of prisoners.

All of that stuff was debated before late October, when the President authorized the bombing. There was a huge debate about even whom to support in Afghanistan -- whether or not we should do more real counterinsurgency, and take up the Taliban and consider them more seriously as people you could actually talk to, and the decision was that we ought to go with the warlords.

Like a lot of people, I accepted the premise of the Afghan war; I accepted the premise that it wasn't that irrational, that we had to do something. I didn't accept it the second time, in Iraq. If the Administration wants a role model for how to respond to grave abuses in terms of international terrorism, look at the Indian government and Mumbai, the train bombing there. The government treated it like a criminal activity. By going to war, instead of criminalizing what Osama bin Laden and his minions did -- there's no question that, in terms of military operations, this is the worst government in the history of America.

(AMY) DAVIDSON: George, this is something you've written about. Do you think that we've learned something since 9/11 about the limits of what military action can accomplish?

(GEORGE) PACKER: Some of us have, including some people in the government and in the military, but they're not in the key positions. Sy's most recent article, on the Lebanon war, suggests that the people who are in the key positions continue to learn the wrong lessons, which is that air power can destroy deeply entrenched groups that are as much political as they are military.

Which is very worrying, because it shows that what one hears -- that no unwelcome information reaches the President, that it is generally stopped at his door by people from the Vice-President's office or by his immediate staff -- is true. It's something I hear over and over again. So I don't think anyone in a position to make decisions has learned.

I think what those people have done is protected themselves from learning by counterpunching every time anyone lands a blow and turning what should be very difficult strategic policy questions into, essentially, part of a permanent campaign at home to win a political argument. I think they've taken that more seriously, they've given it more energy, and they consider it more important, in a way, than they do the actual conflict outside of our borders.

But I also want to say, there's a huge ideological battle that is not of our making, but which is now the world we live in. That's where I think the real key questions are. I think Sy's absolutely right that war is far too blunt an instrument, that crime and intelligence work are where we -- and the Brits, and other countries -- have had our few successes. But, beyond that, there is this ideological problem, which anyone who travels in that part of the world gets a heavy dose of. And we don't know what to do about it. And that is a failure of leadership.

This Is How We (Should) Do It

Strategic PsyOps against foreign enemies - forget it. This is how conversion is to be effectuated if it is to be effectuated at all.







Save the PsyOps for the domestic population. That's the only mentality we seem to be able to understand, and understanding is of course nine tenths of what is required to manipulate people into convenient place. If you don't believe me, just take a peek at our psyopy track record.

Narrative Warfare - Outfoxed: A Case Study

"Outfoxed" takes a peek into Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the dissemination and moulding of information vital to the American voter's ability to understand and safeguard her own interests. Media experts, including Jeff Cohen (FAIR) Bob McChesney (Free Press), Chellie Pingree (Common Cause), Jeff Chester (Center for Digital Democracy) and David Brock (Media Matters) provide context and guidance for the story of Fox News and its effect on society. Official Site: http://www.outfoxed.org/