Swiss Prepare Army For Euro Zone Fallout

Switzerland launched the military exercise “Stabilo Due” in September to respond to the current instability in Europe and to test the speed at which its army can be dispatched. The country is not a member of the union or among the 17 countries that share the euro.

Swiss newspaper Der Sonntag reported recently that the exercise centered around a risk map created in 2010, where army staff detailed the threat of internal unrest between warring factions as well as the possibility of refugees from Greece, Spain, Italy, France, and Portugal.

The Swiss defense ministry told CNBC that it doesn’t not rule out having to deploy troops in the coming years.

“It's not excluded that the consequences of the financial crisis in Switzerland can lead to protests and violence,” a spokesperson told CNBC.com. “The army must be ready when the police in such cases requests for subsidiary help.”

Some 2,000 troops were part of the drill exercise in eight different towns across the country. 

Infantry soldiers were used as well as the Air Force and special forces personnel in an assignment that took years to organize.

Quoted in a Schweizer Soldat magazine, Defense Minister Ueli Maurer warned of an escalation of violence in Europe.

"I can’t exclude that in the coming years we may need the army," he said.

According to the minister, under pressure to save, some European countries didn’t renew their armies as they could no longer afford the upkeep of modern systems.

He said that the situation could amplify dramatically, with countries that couldn’t defend themselves facing the possibility of “blackmail.” In the paper, he also asked how long the crisis could be calmed with money alone.

Der Sonntag newspaper also reported that army chief André Blattmann is set to submit a proposal in December to utilize four battalions of military police. This will consist of 1,600 soldiers guarding strategic points in the country including the airport, industrial plants, and the international organizations in Geneva.

Via: "CNBC"

The Ultimate No-Fly List

By Peter Van Buren and Tom Engelhardt,
June 13, 2012
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

Last week, touching down in India on his way to Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta described reality as you seldom hear it in the confines of Washington and, while he was at it, put his stamp of approval on a new global doctrine for the United States. Panetta is, of course, the man who, as director of the CIA, once calledits drone air campaign in the Pakistani borderlands “the only game in town.” (At the time, as now, it was a classified, “covert” set of airstrikes that were a secret to no one in Washington, Islamabad, or anywhere else on Earth.)

In India, expressing his frustration over U.S. relations with Pakistan, he spoke the “W-word” aloud for the first time. “We are,” he told his Indian hosts, “fighting a war in the FATA [the Pakistani tribal areas].” How true. Washington has indeed long been involved in a complex, confusing, escalating, and undoubtedly self-defeating partial war with Pakistan, never until now officially called by that name, even as the intensity of the drone air campaign in that country’s borderlands continues to ratchet up. So give Panetta credit for rare bluntness.

In India, he said something else previously unspoken, acknowledging a breathtaking new reality: “We have made it very clear that we are going to continue to defend ourselves. This is about our sovereignty as well.” In other words, he claimed that, while the sovereignty of other countries might be eternally violable, U.S. sovereignty extends inviolably over Pakistani territory. This is, in fact, the concept that underpinsthe use of drones there and elsewhere. When it comes to its presidential version of war-making, only the U.S. has a claim to global sovereignty, against which the more traditional concept of national sovereignty doesn’t stand a chance.

In Washington, a controversy has now broken out over what are clearly administration leaks about our drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and ournew cyberwar against Iran. It’s clear enough that, in its urge to run a Republican-proof election campaign on the image of a tough-guy president, those in the Oval Office, themselves fierce anti-leakers in other circumstances, didn’t know when to stop leaking information they considered advantageous to the president and so badly overplayed their hand. Now, as prosecutors from the Justice Department (one with apedigree that should leave the administration shaking in its combat boots) are being appointed to look into the leaks, all bets should be off in the capital. Hold onto your hats, tell your journalist friends that, as the investigations begin, they are the ones likely to find themselves in the hottest water, and expect almost anything in the coming months.

One thing won’t happen, though. You’re not going to get tons more Panetta-style realism. It’s clear that all of Washington’s players, however intensely they might argue with one another, will be pulling together to shut down those leaks and any others heading our way. We at TomDispatch are convinced, on the other hand, that its time to open the faucets, turn those drips into a steady stream, and let the American people know just what is being done, what wars (even when not called wars) are being fought in their name, what new weapons are being released into the world with their imprimatur (if not their knowledge).

It’s with some pride, then, that TomDispatch turns to its whistleblower-in-residence, State Department official Peter Van Buren, author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, to offer his take on what this controversy really means for us all and just how it looks to someone who has been on the other end of the Obama administration’s fierce crackdown on governmental truth-tellers, rather than image-padders. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Van Buren discusses how Washington has changed when it comes to both leaking and stifling information, click here or download it to your iPodhere.) Tom

How Obama’s Targeted Killings, Leaks, and The Everything-Is-Classified State Have Fused 

by Peter Van Buren

White is black and down is up. Leaks that favor the president are shoveled out regardless of national security, while national security is twisted to pummel leaks that do not favor him. Watching their boss, bureaucrats act on their own, freelancing the punishment of whistleblowers, knowing their retaliatory actions will be condoned. The United States rains Hellfire missiles down on its enemies, with the president alone sitting in judgment of who will live and who will die by his hand.

The issue of whether the White House leaked information to support the president’s reelection while crushing whistleblower leaks it disfavors shouldn’t be seen as just another O’Reilly vs. Maddow sporting event. What lies at the nexus of Obama’s targeted drone killings, his self-serving leaks, and his aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers is a president who believes himself above the law, and seems convinced that he alone has a preternatural ability to determine right from wrong.

If the President Does It, It’s Legal?

In May 2011 the Pentagon declared that another country’s cyber-attacks — computer sabotage, against the U.S. — could be considered an “act of war.” Then, one morning in 2012 readers of the New York Times woke up to headlines announcing that the Stuxnet worm had been dispatched into Iran’s nuclear facilities to shut down its computer-controlled centrifuges (essential to nuclear fuel processing) by order of President Obama and executed by the U.S. and Israel. The info had been leaked to the paper by anonymous “high-ranking officials.” In other words, the speculation about Stuxnet was at an end. It was an act of war ordered by the president alone.

Similarly, after years of now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t stories about drone attacks across the Greater Middle East launched “presumably” by the U.S., the Times (again) carried a remarkable story not only confirming the drone killings — a technology that had morphed into a policy — but noting that Obama himself was the Great Bombardier. He had, the newspaper reported, designated himself the final decision-maker on an eyes-only “kill list” of human beings the United States wanted to destroy. It was, in short, the ultimate no-fly list. Clearly, this, too, had previously been classified top-secret material, and yet its disclosure was attributed directly to White House sources.

Now, everyone is upset about the leaks. It’s already a real Red vs. Blue donnybrook in an election year. Senate Democrats blasted the cyberattack-on-Iran leaks and warned that the disclosure of Obama’s order could put the country at risk of a retaliatory strike. Republican Old Man and former presidential candidate Sen. John McCaincharged Obama with violating national security, saying the leaks are “an attempt to further the president’s political ambitions for the sake of his re-election at the expense of our national security.” He called for an investigation. The FBI, no doubt thrilled to be caught in the middle of all this, dutifully opened a leak investigation, and senators on both sides of the aisle are planning an inquiry of their own.

The high-level leaks on Stuxnet and the kill list, which have finally created such a fuss, actually follow no less self-serving leaked details from last year’s bin Laden raid in Pakistan. A flurry of White House officials vied with each other then to expose ever more examples of Obama’s commander-in-chief role in the operation, to the point where Seal Team 6 seemed almost irrelevant in the face of the president’s personal actions. There were also “high five” congratulatory leaks over the latest failed underwear bomber from Yemen.

On the Other Side of the Mirror

The Obama administration has been cruelly and unusually punishing in its use of the 1917 Espionage Act to stomp on governmental leakers, truth-tellers, and whistleblowers whose disclosures do not support the president’s political ambitions. AsThomas Drake, himself a victim of Obama’s crusade against whistleblowers, told me, “This makes a mockery of the entire classification system, where political gain is now incentive for leaking and whistleblowing is incentive for prosecution.”

The Obama administration has charged more people (six) under the Espionage Act for the alleged mishandling of classified information than all past presidencies combined. (Prior to Obama, there were only three such cases in American history, one beingDaniel Ellsberg, of Nixon-era Pentagon Papers fame.) The most recent Espionage Act case is that of former CIA officer John Kiriakou, charged for allegedly disclosing classified information to journalists about the horrors of waterboarding. Meanwhile, his evil twin, former CIA officer Jose Rodriguez, has a best-selling book out bragging about the success of waterboarding and his own hand in the dirty work.

Obama’s zeal in silencing leaks that don’t make him look like a superhero extends beyond the deployment of the Espionage Act into a complex legal tangle of retaliatory practices, life-destroying threats, on-the-job harassment, and firings. Lots of firings.

Upside Down Is Right Side Up

In ever-more polarized Washington, the story of Obama’s self-serving leaks is quickly devolving into a Democratic/Republican, he-said/she-said contest — and it’s only bound to spiral downward from there until the story is reduced to nothing but partisan bickering over who can get the most advantage from those leaks.

But don’t think that’s all that’s at stake in Washington. In the ever-skittish federal bureaucracy, among the millions of men and women who actually are the government, the message has been much more specific, and it’s no political football game. Even more frightened and edgy than usual in the post-9/11 era, bureaucrats take their cues from the top. So expect more leaks that empower the Obama Superman myth and more retaliatory, freelance acts of harassment against genuine whistleblowers. After all, it’s all been sanctioned.

Having once been one of those frightened bureaucrats at the State Department, I now must include myself among the victims of the freelancing attacks on whistleblowers. The Department of State is in the process of firing me, seeking to make me the first person to suffer any sanction over the WikiLeaks disclosures. It’s been a backdoor way of retaliating for my book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, which was an honest account of State’s waste and mismanagement in the “reconstruction” of Iraq.

Unlike Bradley Manning, on trial under the Espionage Act for allegedly dumping a quarter million classified documents onto the Internet, my fireable offense was linking to just one of them at my blog. Just a link, mind you, not a leak. The document, still unconfirmed as authentic by the State Department even as they seek to force me out over it, is on the web and available to anyone with a mouse, from Kabul to Tehran to Des Moines.

That document was discussed in several newspaper articles before — and after — I “disclosed” it with my link. It was a document that admittedly did make the U.S. government look dumb, and that was evidently reason enough for the State Department to suspend my security clearance and seek to fire me, even after the Department of Justice declined to prosecute. Go ahead and click on a link yourself and commit what State now considers a crime.

This is the sort of thing that happens when reality is suspended in Washington, when the drones take flight, the worms turn, and the president decides that he, and he alone, is the man.

What Happens When Everything Is Classified?

What happens when the very definitions that control life in government become so topsy-turvy that 1984 starts looking more like a handbook than a novel?

I lived in Taiwan when that island was still under martial law. Things that everyone could see, like demonstrations, never appeared in the press. It was illegal to photograph public buildings or bridges, even when you could buy postcards nearby of some of the same structures. And that was a way of life, just not one you’d want.

If that strikes you as familiar in America today, it should. When everything is classified — according to the Information Security Oversight Office, in 2011 American officials classified more than 92,000,000 documents — any attempt to report on anything threatens to become a crime; unless, of course, the White House decides to leak to you in return for a soft story about a heroic war president.

For everyone else working to create Jefferson’s informed citizenry, it works very differently, even at the paper that carried the administration’s happy leaks. Timesreporter Jim Risen is now the subject of subpoenas by the Obama administration demanding he name his sources as part of the Espionage Act case against former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling. Risen was a journalist doing his job, and he raises this perfectly reasonable, but increasingly outmoded question: “Can you have a democracy without aggressive investigative journalism? I don’t believe you can, and that’s why I’m fighting.” Meanwhile, the government calls him the only witness to a leaker’s crime.

One thing at stake in the case is the requirement that journalists aggressively pursue information important to the public, even when that means heading into classified territory. If almost everything of importance (and much that isn’t) is classified, then journalism as we know it may become… well, illegal.

Sometimes in present-day Washington there’s simply too much irony for comfort: the story that got Risen in trouble was about an earlier CIA attempt to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, a plot which failed where Stuxnet sort of succeeded.

The End

James Spione, an Academy Award–nominated director who is currently working on a documentary about whistleblowers in the age of Obama, summed things up to me recently this way: 

Beneath the partisan grandstanding, I think what is most troubling about this situation is the sense that the law is being selectively applied. On the one hand, we have the Justice Department twisting the Espionage Act into knots in an attempt to crack down on leaks from “little guys” like Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou, while at the same time an extraordinarily detailed window into covert drone policy magically appears in the Times.

Here is the simple reality of our moment: the president has definitively declared himself (and his advisers and those who carry out his orders) above the law, both statutory and moral. It is now for him and him alone to decide who will live and who will die under the drones, for him to reward media outlets with inside information or smack journalists who disturb him and his colleagues with subpoenas, and worst of all, to decide all by himself what is right and what is wrong.

The image Obama holds of himself, and the one his people have been aggressively promoting recently is of a righteous killer, ready to bloody his hands to smite “terrorists” and whistleblowers equally. If that sounds Biblical, it should. If it sounds full of unnerving pride, it should as well. If this is where a nation of laws ends up, you should be afraid.

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year veteran Foreign Service Officer at the State Department, spent a year in Iraq as Team Leader for two State Department Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Now in Washington and a TomDispatch regular, he writes about Iraq, the Middle East, and U.S. diplomacy at his blog, We Meant Well. Since his book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books), was published in 2011, the Department of State has begun termination proceedings against him, after reassigning him to a make-work position and stripping him of his security clearance and diplomatic credentials. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Van Buren discusses how Washington has changed when it comes to both leaking and stifling information, click here or download it to your iPod here.

[Disclaimer: The views here are solely those of the author, expressed in his capacity as a private citizen.]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch, join us on Facebook, and check out the latest TD book, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

Copyright 2012 Peter Van Buren

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Game Of Drones

June 11, 2012 -- 8:00 PM
Courtesy Of "The Washington Examiner"

Last week, in its report on the 2013 Defense Authorization bill, the Senate Armed Services Committee called for allowing drones to operate "freely and routinely" in U.S. airspace.

"Large numbers of [UAVs] now deployed overseas may be returned to the United States as the conflict in Afghanistan and operations elsewhere wind down in coming years," the Committee Report read.

Drones "have clearly demonstrated their immense value to DOD military capabilities in the global war on terrorism," and they're increasingly "contributing to missions of agencies and departments within the United States. ... The pace of development must be accelerated," the report concluded.

Technology forged for gathering battlefield intelligence and waging war against terrorists is coming home -- and the powers that be seem pretty blithe about it.

"It's great!" Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell said on WTOP's "Ask the Governor" program last month: "That's why we use [UAVs] on the battlefield .... If you're keeping police officers safe, making it more productive and saving money... it's absolutely the right thing to do."

"Drones are a legitimate form of law enforcement," Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., told CNN's Candy Crowley Sunday: "You don't have an expectation of privacy if you're in the open."

True enough: as Stanford Law's Ryan Calo notes, under current law, "citizens do not enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy in public, nor even on the portions of their property visible from a public vantage."

That's a problem. Drone technology dramatically enhances the government's ability to monitor citizens in public places and on their own property -- and privacy law hasn't kept pace with technological change.

Law enforcement agencies already have access to some 146 commercial drones -- and that may be just the beginning as drones get smaller and more capable.

Defense contractor AeroVironment is perfecting the "Nano Hummingbird," a drone that weighs less than an AA battery and is capable of alighting on a window ledge to record video.

The "Gorgon Stare" system, under development by the Air Force, features a drone-mounted, Argus-eyed camera array designed for full-spectrum surveillance.

"Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything," an Air Force officer bragged to the Washington Post. "The Department of Homeland Security is exploring the technology's potential, an industry official said."

Creepy? Sure. But the dystopian fears these metal sentinels provoke might force us to get serious about new legal protections. Privacy violations in the form of massive data mining and the like "tend to be hard to visualize," Stanford's Professor Calo observes. The specter of domestic drones "could be just the visceral jolt society needs to drag privacy law into the 21st century."

Indeed, Americans are becoming increasingly unsettled by this sort of military "mission creep." In February, a Rasmussen poll found voters opposed to the use of drones for domestic surveillance, 52 to 30.

Some legislators are taking note. Last week, Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., introduced a bill to restrict domestic use of drones. His "Preserving Freedom From Unwarranted Surveillance Act" leaves space for legitimate public safety uses of UAVs in "exigent circumstances" like hostage situations or missing person hunts. But it provides that "a person or entity acting under the authority of the United States shall not use a drone to gather evidence or other information except to the extent authorized in a warrant."

That's a start -- but we'll need continual vigilance to ensure that technologies developed for foreign wars aren't turned into tools of domestic social control. As James Madison warned at the Constitutional Convention, "The means of defense against foreign danger have always been the instruments of tyranny at home."

Examiner Columnist Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of "The Cult of the Presidency

Mutually Assured Cyber-Destruction

Obama's Virus Wars: By Officially Sanctioned Leaks, The US Brags Of Its Cyber Warfare Alliance With Israel Against Iran. Is This Wise Or Safe Policy?

By Richard Silverstein and Muhammad Sahimi
Friday 8 June 2012 08.30 EDT
Courtesy Of "The Guardian"

Recent revelations about Flame, the most sophisticated cyber-worm ever created, and David Sanger's White House-authorized leak of classified information confirming US-Israeli collaboration in creating the Stuxnet and Duqu viruses, raise the question of how committed the US is to a negotiated resolution of the nuclear impasse with Iran.

A former senior Israeli government minister has told us that, just as Sanger confirmed Stuxnet was created in partnership with the IDF's Unit 8200 cyber warfare unit, Flame was created by similar figures in Israel. Stuxnet's main purpose was to sabotage Iran's uranium enrichment program. A Flame variant appears to have wiped out the hard drives of specific Iranian officials and damaged the National Iranian Oil Company's computer network last month, forcing some oil terminals to go offline.

Flame has even broader goals and capabilities. It targets specific computers and surveils the entire system, takes screenshots of instant messaging (IM) activity, and can turn on a microphone to monitor audio activity as well. Computers in a number of Arab countries deemed hostile to Israel (mostly Iran, but also Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and Russia) have been infected.

Our source also confirms that Flame is the first cyber weapon used by Israeli intelligence to target its own citizens also. For example, Haaretz reports (Hebrew) on the gargantuan power struggle between the former IDF chief of staff Gaby Ashkenazi and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, which involved charges of spying, counter-spying and forged memos investigated by the security services. Our Israeli source tells us that the Shin Bet installed Flame on the computer of Barak's chief of staff after Ashkenazi complained the former was spying on him.

Sanger, meanwhile, writes that the Obama administration saw cyber warfare as an inexpensive, non-lethal method of covert war against Iran that would keep Israel on a leash, preventing it from attacking Iran militarily. The US president judged a military strike as being a worse evil than computer sabotage.

But there are major problems with cyber warfare as a tool of national policy. First, if the US really does want to reduce Iran's perceived nuclear threat through negotiations, covert acts of sabotage only hinder such diplomatic efforts. The fiercely nationalist Iranians will not take kindly to such acts, particularly in light of cyber warfare being part of a broader and sometimes lethal campaign widely attributed to the Mossad of Israeland Iranian dissident forces, which has also included the assassination of key Iranian nuclear scientists. Given that oil is vital to Iran's economy, might not that nation consider the type of strategic sabotage described above as an act of war?

Can we imagine how the US would react if a competing power engaged in such acts of terror against us? In fact, we don't need to: the Wall Street Journal reported a year ago that the Pentagon determined that computer sabotage may constitute an "act of war" against the United States, to which we might respond militarily. So, in effect, we are doing to Iran precisely what we've said we might attack another country for doing to us.

Second, if negotiations fail, as they had until their recent revival, then the US would be left with a bunch of sanctions and computer worms as a substitute for an articulate strategy toward Iran. If war is to be avoided, how do sanctions and cyber-attacks represent a substantive policy? As the Iraq experience taught us, failed sanctions may be merely a prelude to military operations.

There is a great danger of counterterror tactics and strategy, which includes cyber warfare, becoming a policy in and of itself. We've seen the use of drones to attack Islamist militants in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere become so common that there appears to be no other current strategy to engage these countries. Our relations with them are becoming embroiled in the controversy over drone attacks and their invasion of territorial sovereignty, crowding out any other, more constructive form of engagement.

Obama faces the same problem regarding his counterterror strategy and relations with the Arab world as outlined in Scott Shane's New York Times investigative piece, which exposed the terror kill list personally vetted and approved by the president. Instead of having a genuine policy toward the Arab world, Obama seems to have an effective drone counterterror tactic that efficiently kills reputed Islamist terrorists in numerous Arab countries (along with several hundred innocent bystanders).

There's yet another troubling element of the Stuxnet story reported by Sanger. As Gawker pointed out, the White House has not denied that it authorized the leak of classified materials that the New York Times reporter used for his story. This means the Obama administration wantsAmericans and Israelis to hear about its cyber warfare successes. Barack Obama clearly wants to burnish his national security credentials and Stuxnet allows him to do that.

The most critical long-term danger posed by cyber warfare, however, is "as ye sow so shall ye reap". In other words, now we've done it to the Iranians. But they are quick learners and shrewd. After containing the sophisticated computer worms, they will modify them for use in their own cyber warfare. What will stop Iran from doing it to us? Our cyber security experts have told us that no matter how "hard" a target we are, this country is so dependent on computer technology that there will be millions of weaknesses to exploit. A determined enemy will find a way to exploit them. If the enemy is skilled enough, the damage could be catastrophic.

What defense can we then mount as we face such a tragedy, when it is we who, in effect, have unleashed this weapon upon the world? If a building, bridge, power plant or airliner fails through such sabotage, can we truly say we are innocent victims?

Sanger's Mutually Assured Cyberdestruction makes it quite clear that the Obama administration has not plumbed the profound moral and strategic implications of the US embrace of cyber warfare against Iran and other enemies:

"'They approached the Iran issue very, very pragmatically,' one official involved in the discussions over Olympic Games [US cyber warfare program] told me. No one, he said, 'wanted to engage, at least not yet, in the much deeper, broader debate about the criteria for when we use these kinds of weapons and what message it sends to the rest of the world'."

When will we be ready to pursue this debate? After hundreds have been killed by a US nuclear plant explosion, or after one of our viruses runs rampant and poisons the water supply of a major Iranian city (to use but two of many possible examples)?

Again, once we've used this weapon on our enemies, we've opened a Pandora's Box – which others will seek to exploit also. Are we so certain that our use of the cyber weapons has been and will continue to be just, pure and morally defensible, compared to those who follow us who may or may not have our compunctions?

We should ask another question: how much benefit has the use of cyber sabotage brought us? A thousand centrifuges in Natanz (20% of Iran's inventory) destroyed. A nuclear program delayed by a few months, possibly a year. Is the potential short and long-term impact on the world worth such limited gains? Personally, we believe the national security considerations that approved the use of these cyber weapons were exceedingly short-term. We planted seeds and could reap the whirlwind.

Fallout From Egypt Being Felt In Region

Yemenis chant slogans and hold posters of Egypt's late President Gamal Abdel Nasser during a demonstration in support of Egyptian anti-government protesters, in Sanaa, Yemen, Friday, Feb. 11, 2011. (AP Photo/Sami Mohammed) (Sami Mohammed - AP)

By BRIAN MURPHY
The Associated Press
Friday, February 11, 2011; 12:09 PM
Courtesy Of "The Washington Post"

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Less than a month after the world watched Tunisia celebrate the collapse of the country's strong-arm ruler, the scenes in central Cairo on Friday offered an even more potent display of the newfound power of the Arab street: fist-pumping crowds cheering the end of President Hosni Mubarak.

The downfall of Mubarak - one of the mainstays of Middle East politics and Western policies in the region for nearly three decades - marks another history-shaping moment for the Arab world from a country seen by many as its political and cultural crucible.

What began as a tentative cry against an entrenched regime in late January grew into a popular mutiny that forced Mubarak to flee Cairo and then step down in just a few dizzying hours.

But the revolution on the Nile - which reached its climax 32 years to the day after the fall of the government of the U.S.-backed shah of Iran - raises deep questions about the long-term stability of other Western-allied regimes across the region and could significantly recalibrate America's policy playbook from the Mediterranean to the Gulf.


There is no guarantee that the reform wave will wash over another country soon. An attempt to stir Egypt-inspired protests in Syria earlier this month was snuffed out by security forces.

The reverberations, however, are already being felt in smaller but significant ways.

In Saudi Arabia - the other traditional cornerstone of U.S. interests in the Mideast - a group of opposition activists said Thursday they asked the nation's king for the right to form a political party in a rare challenge to the absolute power of the ruling dynasty.

"You know well that big political developments and attention to freedom and human rights is currently happening in the Islamic world," the activist said in a letter to King Abdullah, who was one of Mubarak's staunchest supporters up until the end.

Jordan's new prime minister, Marouf Bakhit, promised Wednesday to continue political reforms demanded by protesters who forced King Abdullah II to reshuffle the cabinet. Last week, Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh - a key U.S. ally in office for more than three decades - bowed to pressure from protesters and announced he would not seek re-election in 2013 and would not try to pass power to his son.

"Egypt is going to have a big, big impact around the region," said Salman Sheik, director of The Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. "It is - as it always has been - a bellwether for what happens elsewhere. It's wrong, though, to get into a count about what country could be next. The real impact is already being seen in reforms that are coming from countries feeling the pressure."

It could hit next in the strategic Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, where opposition groups are calling for street rallies Monday.

Bahrain is home to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet and the most politically divided in the Gulf. Majority Shiites have long alleged they face second-class status under the Sunni rulers. Last summer, the tiny nation was torn by clashes and riots after a wave of arrests against perceived Shiite dissidents.


On Friday - just hours before Mubarak stepped down - Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa granted each Bahraini family the equivalent of nearly $2,700 in an apparent bid to calm tensions.

In Kuwait, the other Gulf nation with serious political opposition, outlawed any "gatherings, rallies or marches" after Friday prayers, said a report on the state news agency KUNA.

"Everybody should put the interests of the homeland above all considerations," said the statement by Kuwait, which has key U.S. military bases and is an important way station for the U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq.

It also showed how close any unrest in the region comes to U.S. military and political bulwarks - seen as a critical front-line alignment against Iran.

But even Iran's main Mideast ally, Syria, has been showing some concessions to the reformist fervor. This week, Facebook and YouTube were available for the first time in three years amid signs Damascus may be lifting its ban on the popular social networking websites that have helped energize and organize protests.


Speaking in Michigan on Thursday, U.S. President Barack Obama said the world is "witnessing history unfold" in Egypt. But he also was quick to extend a hand of friendship to the "new generation" who led the uprising, which includes the well-organized Muslim Brotherhood group that could steer the new leadership in Egypt away from its tight bonds with Washington.

"The U.S. is being forced to rewrite its Middle East diplomatic strategy on the fly," said Sami Alfaraj, director of the Kuwait Center for Strategic Studies. "But everyone is in the same position to some extent. The events have been so unexpected and so fast."

Tunisia offers a cautionary tale for what could be ahead in Egypt or elsewhere.

Tunisia's interim President Fouad Mebazaa was given decree-making powers this week to speed reforms and try to quell lingering unrest following the ouster of former dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on Jan. 14.

But a prominent Tunisian dissident told The Associated Press in Paris that he worries the "people's revolution" is at risk of collapsing into chaos and possibly leading to calls for the return of the deposed president.

"All this is extremely dangerous for the country," said Moncef Marzouki.

Just seconds after Mubarak's departure, the new tools of political activism - Facebook and Twitter - were buzzing with encouragement to maintain the momentum for change across the Middle East.

A Twitter message from Egypt played on the digital lingo: "Uninstalling dictator, 99 percent complete."

Another - perhaps inadvertently - appeared to carry a message for the rest of the region as he joined the avalanche of posts about Mubarak.

"Dude, Egyptians invented writing on the wall," it said. "You really should learn to read it."

Murphy, the AP's bureau chief in Dubai, has covered Middle East affairs for more than a decade.

Pearl Harbour As Japanese BlowBack

The United States, its abandonment of law and worse

Christopher King says that the United States has gone beyond lawlessness and inhumanity into pathologically vicious means of waging warfare. It has experienced blowback from its past actions and can expect more from its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pearl Harbour attack was blowback and current Japanese objections to US base arrangements might be the commencement of blowback from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

By Christopher King
Source: "Redress"
December 8, 2009
Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"

We have entered a period of government lawlessness, led by the United States, with inevitably serious consequences for everyone. Nuclear war is a possibility. With climate change threatening the planet itself, we do not need this as well. Europe must cease supporting this berserk state. It needs to recover the vision, the spirit of goodwill and humanity that laid the foundations of the European Union. In following America, Europe has lost its way.

American behaviour extends beyond inhumanity into viciousness. The character of Barack Obama, which in dealing with non-Americans is no different from that of George W. Bush, also shows the American characteristic of cruelty without limits.

It is said that the Afghan surge is Obama’s defining action, which is probably true politically. He revealed himself much earlier however, in April, at the time the Maersk Alabama’s captain was held by three teenaged pirates. The pirates were in a boat tied to a US warship and were attempting to negotiate for their lives. The captain was in no more danger than he had been for days but Obama approved killing the men who held him. It was not a firefight. It was cold-blooded murder by trained snipers – hailed in the American media as heroism. That defined Obama as I said at the time. His approval of the Afghanistan surge was inevitable.

Beyond inhumanity in Afghanistan

Speaking of Afghanistan, it is not that invading other countries, massacring their inhabitants and stealing their resources is unusual. Men have been doing it for millennia. Nor is it that trampling international law by kidnapping, torture, failure to prosecute torturers and dispensing with the oldest, most critical guarantee of freedom – habeas corpus – is particularly unusual, although we had hoped that these practices were past. What is unusual in Afghanistan is the detached murder of individuals, families and gatherings by drone aircraft whose pilots are hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away. This “murder on suspicion” has by other means, hitherto only been practised by the secret police forces of despotic regimes. America has made it an army procedure in which anyone’s behaviour, as viewed from the air or on the word of informers, can make one liable to instant assassination. Even the Nazi Gestapo, Iranian Savak under America’s puppet Shah and Soviet KGB had the good grace to torture confessions from their victims. Drone assassinations on suspicion are America’s unique contribution to terror.

The 9/11 World Trade Centre attack that triggered the invasion was, of course, nothing to do with Afghanistan. It was blowback from America’s theft of Saudi wealth, its use of that country as a base for attacking other Muslim countries and its support of Israeli injustice against the Palestinians. Osama bin Laden said so.

Beyond inhumanity in Iraq

Perhaps the Afghans are fortunate, however. Although in Iraq US-sponsored sanctions killed half a million children, its invasion killed over a million persons and made four or five million homeless, one might say that the Nazis did worse and the worst is hopefully over. America has surpassed the Nazis, however, in its use of depleted uranium munitions which have spread radioactivity that will last hundreds of thousands of years over wide areas of Iraq. Cancers and birth defects directly attributable to this are now being seen in Iraq and will continue indefinitely, so it is likely that over time the Iraqi civilian death toll will exceed that of the Nazis. Americans say that this material is harmless; however, if depleted uranium were to be dispersed on American territory as in Iraq, it would be considered to be outrageous. If others were to do it, it would be called a “dirty bomb” attack. American use of depleted uranium goes beyond lawlessness to become an attack on life itself.

Beyond inhumanity in Vietnam

A similar case is America’s use of the dioxin-containing “agent orange” defoliant. Not content with using explosives and napalm on civilians, millions of gallons of agent orange were sprayed on Vietnam’s forests during America’s war on the Vietnamese. This environmental and humanitarian disaster killed about 400,000 persons and caused about 500,000 birth defects. Dioxin is persistent and its direct effects continue to the present time. Dioxin also damages human DNA so that its effects will persist in the Vietnamese population indefinitely.

No other country has ever before done such things to another.

Beyond inhumanity in Japan

Indeed, America is the only country to have used nuclear weapons on another. The American narrative of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour is of a treacherous, unprovoked attack by that country. We will recall, however, that in 1852 the American Commodore Matthew Perry used armed force to obtain a trade agreement with Japan. Having had America force itself, its economic philosophy and its technology on them, the Japanese industrialized, only to find Western markets closed to their “cheap” goods. Japanese attempts to found an oriental empire and their attack on Pearl harbour were blowback from their humiliation by Perry and the American and European tariff barriers against them. We might notice that the Japanese are currently unhappy both with American bases, particularly on Okinawa, and a secret treaty under which the US has brought nuclear weapons into Japan. America considers that the Japanese should do whatever it wants. We have yet to see blowback in Japan from Hiroshima and Nagasaki but this might be its beginning. There is always blowback from inhumanity and injustice.

Blowback in Iran

This reaction was evident in the case of Iran following the CIA overthrow of the democratic Mossadeq government in 1953 and installation of the puppet Shah. Bush dismissed it as “ancient history” even though the blowback from that event gave rise to the Islamic revolution and the current regime. The viciousness that America currently shows toward Iran is not due to anything that the Iranians have done. To the contrary. It is a case of the attacker blaming the attacked, the thief blaming the person from whom he stole.

Blowback from Hitler and Europe’s reaction

Europe acknowledged that the harshness of the Versailles treaty following World War I gave rise to blowback in the form of Hitler’s rise and World War II, with Italy and Japan joining him as the Axis powers. By recognizing the reality of those events and the simple fact that wars create problems rather than solve them, it has been possible for the European Union to be developed. Unfortunately, the EU is now seen by its newer entrants and applicants for entry in terms of economic benefits rather than the primary objective envisaged by the six founder states.

The original objective of the original coal and steel community was to make warfare impossible by means of economic integration. That spirit and objective needs to be recovered if the EU is to survive. Under the influence of the US, law is slipping away from the EU. Europe has been led by America beyond lawlessness in Iraq and Afghanistan, setting precedents for European behaviour that we had hoped the formation of the EU had extinguished. Other countries will also adopt US and EU behaviour as precedents. We have lost the moral high ground. Neither the US nor Europe is now able to criticize any other country for the awful crime of torture or for “pre-emptive war” on a non-threatening country. America has done it and Europe has been complicit.

President Obama believes that it is legitimate for him to interfere in EU business by pressing for the EU entry of other countries as American presidents have done before him. America controls NATO directly and is selecting and training European officers who are willing to place American interests before those of Europe. This follows the model of the School of the Americas at Fort Benning that in the past has trained most of the coup and subversion leaders of South America.

Blowback in Europe from the Iraq war

European cities, notably Madrid and London, have experienced terrorist attacks as blowback from supporting the US in its Middle Eastern atrocities. Association with the US is as toxic as its fraudulent financial derivatives, not because of harm that might occur to our soldiers or cities but because US foreign policy is aggressive, unjust and illegal. The vicious element in US behaviour makes the US a fit partner for Saddam Hussein to whom it sold the chemical weapons that he used against Iran. Iran had never harmed the US. US lies about Iran’s nuclear programme, its fabricated evidence, sanctions, subversion programme, the chemical weapons used by Saddam as a US proxy, the overthrow of the Mossadeq government are now typical US behaviour. Leaving aside what the US has done to other countries, if an individual were to exhibit behaviour of this nature he would be declared criminally insane and locked away for life. US behaviour is pathological. It is criminally insane.

Europeans must examine carefully the US bases on their soil and the US’s NATO First Act, now before Congress, that has the intention of making them permanent. It is incomprehensible that Europe’s leaders, particularly those of the UK, should collude with the US in its crimes. The only explanation can be that our political class has the same motivations as Anthony Blair – that immediate personal gain is more important than the good of the country. The UK and Europe are giving legitimacy to American lawlessness and worse – not merely inhumanitarian behaviour but behaviour of inhuman viciousness.

The UK has never understood the European Union nor committed itself to it. It might as well leave and be done with it. Europe will not miss it and its leaders can concentrate on enriching themselves by pimping for the US and transferring its population’s cash to its banks.

The British military’s role

The UK military establishment is in full accord with its corrupt politicians and has now committed itself to supporting the politicians in selling the Afghanistan/Pakistan disaster to the British public. We may now recognize them as mercenaries and nothing more. It is, in fact, in the interests of the UK and European military establishment to withdraw from Afghanistan as a war of aggression, get rid of American bases on their soil and develop a European fighting force independent of NATO as the French, before America’s sycophant Sarkozy, always advocated. Their precious careers, pensions and status would be safe and probably enhanced.

The message from the UK’s military establishment is now that UK opposition to the Iraq war encourages Afghan insurgents to kill UK soldiers. UK soldiers are in fact being killed in Afghanistan because of the cowardice of their commanders who will not take the political risk of complying with international and UK law by abandoning this war of aggression.

Anthony Blair, who enriched himself by selling British soldiers lives to the Americans, out-bluffed the other UK political parties at the time of the last election by claiming that failure to support the Iraq war was failure to support our soldiers. It was a disgusting lie but the Liberal Democratic Party, which to its credit voted against the Iraq war, did not credit the British public with the ability to distinguish between supporting our forces by bringing them back from an illegal war and Blair’s mendacity. It is a disgrace to the British army that it is now preaching the same message prior to the coming election in six months time. The British army is playing politics – another destructive trait learned from America.

Lieutenant-General Sir Graeme Lamb, British adviser to General McChrystal, said: “We hear people saying the fight isn't worth it. Does that mean all the sacrifices which have been made, the deaths and the injuries have been for nothing?” Yes, lieutenant-general, that is precisely what it means. Their deaths and injuries have been for nothing. Lives, both British and Afghan, are being thrown away as of no value and for no gain. That is why our troops should come home. The good lieutanant-general said on 2 December: “We are continuing to strike the Taliban ... until their eyballs bleed.” This is surely the unhappy effect of his getting drunk with Americans.

The public must become more politically aware

The matter is worse than current sacrifices of lives being for nothing. If that outcome, tragic though it is, finalized conflict at least damage would be known and limited. Unfortunately, the Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistani wars have introduced malevolence, destructiveness or evil, as G.W. Bush would call it, into the affairs of men that will produce blowback as it always does. Osama bin Laden’s attacks were blowback from American meddling that were amplified by America drawing Europe and other nations into the illegal Afghan and Iraqi wars. This destructive dynamic must be extinguished. The best way is for every person to refuse cooperation with it. We need a better informed and more politically aware public, which can begin by seeking information from more reliable sources than the UK government-controlled BBC.

This week, the BBC gave Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili about 20 minutes of television time to present himself as a peace-lover, friend of the “free world” using Cold-War language, doing wonderful things, whose tiny country is under threat from an aggressive Russia. Saakashvili is perhaps the most dangerous man in Europe who, with American backing, attempted to embroil NATO in a war with Russia when he invaded South Ossetia. He has rushed to offer President Obama one thousand Georgian troops for Afghanistan, which immediately makes him a friend of Gordon Brown and the UK government-appointed BBC governors.

There is no point in our military families protesting to the government after their sons, husbands or womenfolk have been killed or maimed in Afghanistan. This is not a war in defence of Britain. It is in defence of Gordon Brown’s future payoff, our politicians’ company directorships and our military leaders’ careers. Military families and the general public should appraise themselves of the law and the facts of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. These are extremely simple.

The only law necessary is the Nuremberg Principles which are part of UK law and prescribe punishment for war crimes, including wars of aggression. The only facts necessary are: Iraq did not threaten or attack Europe or America and neither Afghanistan nor any Afghan threatened or attacked Europe or America. The only interpretation possible, therefore, is that the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions are wars of aggression and constitute war crimes.

That was not apparent immediately following the 9/11 attack on the World Trade centre when we struggled to understand the attack itself, to find Afghanistan on a map, to distinguish the Taliban from Al-Qaeda, and to understand the aims of Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush and Anthony Blair. It took time to get the truth and when it emerged it was not from our government. Now, eight years on, we know more and it has been evident for much of that time that the Afghanistan invasion was a war of aggression. The American and British governments lied to us.

Gordon Brown, the Joint Chiefs of Defence Staff and government ministers such as Douglas Alexander can give no reason why UK soldiers are fighting and dying there. As Alexander said on television recently: “We’re in Afghanistan defending the UK.” How, exactly, he did not say and nor has anyone else been able to. The London bombers were UK citizens, born in this country and if they had a connection to any other country it was Pakistan, not Afghanistan. None of the Madrid bombers came from Pakistan or Afghanistan either.

Political change in the spring election is needed

The UK needs drastic political change to extract us from the war in Afghanistan as the first stage of detaching from the malign influence of the United States of America. Europe has permitted itself to be occupied by this berserk, vicious state that has 113,337 structures of all types, including 60,086 buildings, in countries external to the United States, according to the US Dept of Defence Base Structure Report. One can see from this that Japan and Germany are still under occupation. The UK is also occupied by half a dozen major bases. The UK’s “special relationship” with America means that our politicians give the US whatever it wants and the US pays off people like Anthony Blair. Watch Gordon Brown’s fortunes improve after he is thrown out of office in the coming elections.

There is no future for Europe or the UK in being parasitized by the USA. The only function of US bases in Europe is to permit political meddling, military provocations and, ultimately, armed force over which Europe has no control. The Japanese are finding that they have no influence whatsoever on what the US does on their territory. We in Europe need to rid ourselves of US bases, form an independent European force and take responsibility for our own security. America is no longer a friend to Europe.

Our current crop of UK politicians and military chiefs are looking after themselves, not the country or the people for whom they are responsible. We now have our own military-industrial complex. The UK’s citizens must find a new type of politician or we can look forward to lives as poverty-stricken serfs of our business, military and political leaders in the service of America. The lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, the behaviour of our politicians and banks as well as the growing underclass in the UK and America itself, demonstrate it.

Never mind the nonsense that our politicians and military chiefs spout about how we endanger our troops by not supporting their wars. Anthony Blair, for whom justice is waiting at the International Criminal Court, kept the Iraq war out of the last election by preaching that. Watch our current politicians fudge the issue with half-truths and hedged promises. In the spring elections we need candidates who will pledge to bring our troops home immediately, take the Iraq war to the International Court of Justice and unlike Barack Obama’s “change”, actually do it. That is the best possible support for our troops and in the best possible long-term interests of our country and the country knows it.

Christopher King is a retired consultant and lecturer in management and marketing. He lives in London, UK.