Janesdiggo's List: War

• After his speech, Appelbaum had to use a doppelgänger to escape the rush of federal agents onstage, and at a later unrelated talk was harassed by two FBI agents who asked to have a talk with him so that they could flesh things out.
• The FBI and the U.S. government joined forces, declaring its $9-million “Going Dark” program combined with an Obama-backed bill that would outlaw all encryption that the government can’t obtain backdoor access to, thus outlawing all encryption WikiLeaks depends on to provide security for its sources. The U.S. Government aimed to garner an “Eye of Sauron” of the Internet.
• In late September, the U.S. government furthered its war against WikiLeaks with a new bill—the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act—which seems like an anti-piracy bill, if one doesn’t bother to closely examine the fine print.
• “The list is for domains ‘dedicated to infringing activity’, which is defined very broadly,” said Aaron Swartz on his anti-web-censorship site DemandProgress.org. “Any site where counterfeit goods or copyrighted material are ‘central to the activity of the Internet site’ would be blocked.”
• “Websites such as WikiLeaks.org have trust as their most important centre of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insider, leaker, or whistleblower,” the report stated. “Successful identification, prosecution, termination of employment, and exposure of persons leaking the information by the governments and businesses affected by information posted to WikiLeaks.org would damage and potentially destroy this centre of gravity and deter others from taking similar actions.”

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• In one paragraph, the so-called “anarchists” have regurgitated wholesale the exact same rhetoric that the corporate-owned media, their supposed adversaries, have been spewing ceaselessly for months on end – that anyone who opposes big government (which is what “anarchists” are supposed to do), is a racist and an extremist, while also lying about the origins of the Tea Party which in fact was started by Ron Paul supporters as early as 2007.
• They make for perfect puppets through which the establishment can manipulate to demonize its real political adversaries.
• the Infoshop strain of anarchist has deviated from the original definition — they now appear to be indistinguishable from state-loving “progressives” who also consider Libertarian Tea Party activists “anti-Semites, fascists, libertarians, racists, constitutionalists, militia men, gun freaks, homophobes, Ron Paul supporters, Alex Jones conspiracy types and American flag wavers.”
• Protesters walking behind what are obviously badly disguised cops claim they broke cameras and acted aggressively towards genuine protesters, as well as carrying gas canisters. During a peaceful demonstration on the same night, riot cops savagely attacked protesters with batons and rubber bullets while also assaulting and arresting students who weren’t even part of the demonstration.
• Following the SPP protests in Canada three years ago, Quebec provincial authorities were forced to admit that three rock-wielding black mask-wearing “anarchists” were in fact police infiltrators used to gather information on protesters.
• Alex Jones’ film Police State 2: The Takeover exposed how the black bloc anarchists were completely infiltrated and provocateured by the authorities during the violent 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.
• Police allowed the black bloc to run riot in downtown Seattle while they concentrated on preventing the movement of peaceful protestors
• The film presents clear evidence that the black bloc anarchist group was actually controlled by the state and used to demonize peaceful protesters.

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• In 2008, according to an authoritative report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), $55.2 billion in weapons deals were concluded worldwide. Of that total, the United States was responsible for $37.8 billion in weapons sales agreements, or 68.4% of the total “trade.”
• “Tinkering with our antiquated, bureaucratic, overly cumbersome system is not enough to maintain our competitiveness in the global economy and also help our friends and allies buy the equipment they need to contribute to global security,” he continued, “[Gates] strongly supports the administration’s efforts to completely reform our export control regime, starting ideally with a blank sheet of paper.”
• In addition to revising these export controls, the administration is looking at the issue of “dual-use” technologies. These are not weapons. They do not shoot or explode. Included are high-speed computer processors, surveillance and detection networks, and a host of other complex and evolving technologies that could have military as well as civilian applications. This category might also include intangible items like cyber-entities or access to controlled web environments.
• Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and other major weapons manufacturers have invested billions of dollars from the Pentagon’s research and development budgets in exploring and perfecting such technologies, and now they are eager to sell them to foreign buyers along with the usual fighter planes, combat ships, and guided missiles. But the rules as they stand make this something less than a slam dunk.
• As Wieranga went on to write, the Obama administration’s new 2010/2011 budget allocates $6 billion in weaponry for Afghan Security Forces. The Afghans will actually get those weapons for free, but U.S. weapons makers will make real money delivering them at taxpayers’ expense and, as the Vice Admiral pointed out, that “means there is a staggering amount of acquisition work to do.”
• Wieranga’s Agency announced that the Obama administration had decided to sell a nifty $6 billion in weapons to Taiwan.
• Brazil wants new fighter planes and Boeing is battling a French company for the contract in a deal that could be worth a whopping $7 billion.
• Boeing and Lockheed Martin vying to equip its air force with new fighter planes in deals that Boeing estimates may reach $11 billion.

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• Unmanned American drone aircraft gather information about militants and have occasionally fired missiles at them, although neither Washington nor Sanaa is keen to admit this.

• South Korea's navy fired warning shots to drive away a North Korean fishing boat at a maritime border on Wednesday, the second incident in six days, jangling nerves in Seoul ahead of next week's G20 summit.

• On Friday an exchange of fire occurred across the Demilitarized Zone, the first such incident in years, but officials have played down the incident, saying it was likely an accident. The United Nations is investigating the skirmish.

• The Harper government’s shifting Afghan position moves it much closer to the opposition Liberals, who have urged the Harper government to commit to training and other non-combat roles as the 2011 pullout deadline nears.
• Ottawa has repeatedly insisted that Afghanistan would become a purely civilian operation after the pullout of combat troops next year.
• Canada has 3,000 troops in the country now. And roughly 400 of those are already involved in training of some kind.
• NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar accused Mr. Harper and Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff of a “backroom deal” to extend the military mission in Afghanistan. “The NDP is clear: End the military mission as was promised.” Mr. Dewar said.
• The government is firm on that: the combat mission ends in 2011,”
• He called a Canadian Press report that the trainers would remain until 2014 as “speculative.”
• Instead, the official confirmed Canada is weighing several options for 2012 and beyond in Afghanistan, including development aid, diplomacy and military training.
• It’s an indication Ottawa is bowing to pressure “in every way, shape and form” from the U.S. and other NATO allies – and that the ruling Conservative party has the opposition Liberals on board, said David Bercuson, historian and director of the University of Calgary's Centre for Military and Strategic Studies.

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• Liberal MP Bob Rae played a key role in setting the stage for the Harper Conservatives to send a new military training mission to Afghanistan next year, serving behind the scenes as a sounding board as the government faced pressure to flip-flop

• North Korea launched a massive artillery barrage on a South Korean island Tuesday
• North Korea launched a massive artillery barrage on a South Korean island Tuesday
• South Korea immediately responded with its own artillery barrage and put its fighter jets on high alert
• The attack began just after 2:30 p.m.
• The U.S. keeps tens of thousands of troops in South Korea to aid in its defense, and Gibbs said "the United States is firmly committed to the defense of our ally, the Republic of Korea, and to the maintenance of regional peace and stability."
• China is concerned, among other things, about a possible breakdown of the North Korean regime, which might lead to a flood of refugees across the border into China.
• "It is my understanding that North Korea is creating some incidents to make the international world have contact with it," said Chu Shulong, a professor from Tsinghua University. "And then it can bargain with international world to get benefits. The six-party talks have been halted for a long time."
• Tuesday's attack began just as tens of thousands of South Korean troops were beginning an annual military drill called Safeguarding the Nation. The Pyongyang regime had denounced the exercise as a provocation.

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• Chalmers Johnson, in his article "We have the money." Chalmers explains to Real News Network's Senior Editor Paul Jay how the military-industrial complex is a driving force behind the current financial crisis and a determinant of much of what happens in Washington. He also criticizes the omission of the military-industrial complex from the political discourse determined by the two major parties and the media.
• President Eisenhower, in leaving office, warned us against the dangers of the military-industrial complex, that as we now look back on it, probably the greatest single crime of the military-industrial complex has been to totally corrupt Congress, in the sense that the Congress simply is incapable and doesn't want to do oversight on the military.
• Our media has just totally failed on that. It's become complicit as part of the military-industrial complex

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• the meltdown of Wall Street means simply that the era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is certainly over
• nobody seems to be the least bit interested in what happened to American global leadership, that it was already in very serious trouble thanks to law violations of the current administration and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay, one thing after another.
• the nations that have maintained some elementary control over their financial markets, had fairly effective supervision of them with a strong governmental guidance within the economy, Japan, for example, will come out of this just fine.
• the money is there; we have to stop wasting it on rockets in outer space on the missile defense that we know scientifically doesn't work.
• papers from a group of very senior Pentagon officers, uniformed military officers, talking about the horrible situation that our military is in right now. We're spending more money in inflation-adjusted dollars right now than at any time since the end of World War II, and we have fewer fighter planes, we have fewer fighting ships, we have fewer army brigades in the field.
• We have over 700 military bases around the world. They do not contribute one iota to our security. We can get along with 30 of them and still be a new Rome
• we end up with a truly professional military today, unimaginably expensive, almost worthless for our real purposes
• Gates, gave a speech to the Pentagon bureaucracy on "What's wrong with you fools? You keep buying this stuff that doesn't work and that we don't need, whereas what I can't get you to buy would be weapons that might save—armored personnel carriers that would protect our troops from roadside bombs."

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• It's simply a travesty that we pretend outrage over Russia's suppression of the use of military force by Georgia.
• it's just amazing that we've gone this far pushing the Russians around, when they're the only people on earth who could literally destroy us. They have a weapon against which there is no known defense, the Topol M. It's a ICBM that is so advanced, so modern, so fast, things of this sort, there is no form of defense.
• The putting of bases in Czechoslovakia and Poland, allegedly to deter a missile threat from Iran, which Iran doesn't have that kind of missiles, and it probably won't have a nuclear warhead for at least another two to three years,
• do you see any difference in the Eastern European strategy between the Republicans and the Democrats?
• Well, unfortunately, no
• Obama makes statements about Afghanistan that seem to be totally without history or knowledge. He doesn't seem to understand that of course we're going to lose in Afghanistan; of course we're going to be forced to withdraw.
• And it's a place from which we should be withdrawing right now, just as we should get out of Iraq, and it'll probably improve just as a result of our leaving.

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• the political system failed us in getting us into this trap, in getting us totally owned by the military-industrial complex and 16 secret intelligence agencies that are the personal praetorian guards of the president
• the political system failed us in getting us into this trap, in getting us totally owned by the military-industrial complex and 16 secret intelligence agencies that are the personal praetorian guards of the president.
• "All I can say about Obama is that he is extremely intelligent." I believe that is about all you can ask for right now
• We are being thrown out of the base in Manta in Ecuador. The president of Ecuador said, "You can keep your base if you'll give me a base in New Jersey."
• McCain he looks like a standard GI-issue of a neocon, of people who have not been following what's been going on in the world, who do not understand the way world politics works, who have delusions of Roman grandeur, who sound like the air force, with the full-spectrum dominance and this kind of tone they like to intone these days, which are largely nonsense.
• When you think about how pitiful Tony Blair has turned out to be in terms of the influence that Britain might have had in the world compared with the actual influence it has now, it's been a disaster
• They began to understand, no matter how you [inaudible], how many clever characters you hire at the American Enterprise Institute to talk it up, empire is a pure form of tyranny. It never rules through consent, and least of all does an empire that basically grows out of the barrel of a gun as ours does.
• There's a lot of nations out there now that are on the move, that are beginning to think of ways to frustrate, to check and even checkmate the United States.
• Well, it's an old classic of history to use war to cover up these hopeless domestic failures precisely is what is scary about the United States right now.
• It's going to require the mobilization of the public to understand what they're about to lose, and once they lose it they'll never get it back.

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• This follows the Iraq pattern where 50,000 American troops remain after the departure of U.S. “combat” forces to great media fanfare. 
• He also claimed that, post-2014, the U.S. would be maintaining a “counterterrorism capability” in Afghanistan -- and Iraq -- for which “platforms to... execute... counterterrorism operations,” assumedly bases, would be needed
• Mark Sedwill, NATO’s civilian counterpart to U.S. commander General David Petraeus, insisted that 2014 was nothing more than “an inflection point” in an ever more drawn-out drawdown process.  That process, he insisted, would likely extend to “2015 and beyond,” which, of course, put 2016 officially into play. 
• And new British Chief of the Defense Staff General Sir David Richards suggested that, given the difficulty of ever defeating the Taliban (or al-Qaeda) militarily, NATO should be preparing plans to maintain a role for its troops for the next 30 to 40 years.
• Since June 2009, Petraeus and various helpers have stretched the schedule to 2014 for (most) American combat troops and at least 2015 or 2016 for the rest.  If you were to start counting from the president’s December surge address, that’s potentially seven more years.  In other words, we’re now talking about either a
• 15-year war or an on-and-off again quarter-century one. 
• Europeans generally want out and their governments know it, but (as has been true since 1945) the continent’s leaders have no idea how to say “no” to Washington.
• No more is the byword “protect the people,” or “clear, hold, build”; now, it’s smash, kill, destroy.  The war commander has loosed American firepower in a major way in the Taliban strongholds of southern Afghanistan.
• In October, U.S. planes launched missiles or bombs on 1,000 separate Afghan missions, numbers seldom seen since the 2001 invasion.  The Army has similarly loosed its massively powerful High Mobility Artillery Rocket System in the area around the southern city of Kandahar.  Civilian deaths are rising rapidly.  Dreaded Special Operations night raids on Afghan homes by “capture/kill” teams have tripled with 1,572 such operations over the last three months.
• “…368 insurgent leaders killed or captured, and 968 lower-level insurgents killed and 2,477 captured, according to NATO statistics”
• In the districts around Kandahar, a newly reported American tactic is simply to raze individual houses or even whole villages believed to be booby-trapped by the Taliban, as well as tree lines “where insurgents could hide.”  American troops have also been “blow[ing] up outbuildings, flatten[ing] agricultural walls, and carv[ing] new ‘military roads,’ because existing ones are so heavily mined… right through farms and compounds.” 

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