A couple of quick stories.

Firstly we need to note that it is a bad week for everyone who breach people's privacy for a living and not just News Corporation employees. MI5, MI6 and GCHQ (the British version of the NSA) are all facing funding cuts and shock horror the Intelligence and Security Committee, a parliamentary committee, wants some oversight over the operational activities of all three services. The article is perhaps most noteworthy however for helping me realise the gulf between myself and the establishment

GCHQ director Iain Lobban also says he is having trouble retaining sufficient numbers of suitably-qualified internet specialists.

"I need some real internet whizzes in order to do cyber," he told the committee.

"They will be working for Microsoft or Google or Amazon or whoever. And I can't compete with their salaries. I can offer them a fantastic mission, but I can't compete with their salaries.

"But I probably have to do better than I am doing at the moment, or else my internet whizzes are not going to stay… and we do have a steady drip, I am afraid .

"Month‑on‑month, we are losing whizzes who'll basically say 'I'm sorry, I am going to take three times the salary and the car and whatever else'."

I didn't think anyone talked like that anymore. Perhaps we can apply to the IMF for a bridge loan so as to damn the tide of Whizz loss?

and Secondly a news bulletin this morning relating to violence at a memorial service for Ahmad Wali Karzai, Afghan president Hamid Karzai's half brother was the straw that broke the camel's back. The article states:

Ahmad Wali Karzai, a controversial but key figure in Nato's battle against the Taliban, was killed by his bodyguard.

Now while it is fair to say that "controversial" has a fairly wide scope in a country as unstable as Afghanistan but it does imply his views prompted disagreement rather than his actions. His actions really should provoke more than controversy given he was a Drug Lord and CIA Asset. But the latter probably explains why anywhere above the fold or the first few paragraphs his nature will and can only be referred to as "controversial".

Aliens tech is now real.

We have long known that monstrous parasitic alien lifeforms with acid for blood exist but now the other half of James Cameron's 1986 classic is starting to be realised. Helmet cams were used by US Special forces so Obama could watch, allegedly only until the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden started, yeah just like you told your mother you'd change the channel if the film got too violent or rude.

To be fair I don't think helmet cams themselves are too new, I'm pretty sure they were proposed for British Police a few years ago but it all went quiet, the coppers are fine with CCTV but something that records their own actions on duty is somehow much less worthy in their view. But the way the system of transmitting via WiFi back to a helicopter (much like the APC in Aliens) and then up to a satellite and command is really close to how the film portrayed it.

Tune in next time for more trenchant examinations of how I think something in real life is similar to a film!

Emmanuel Goldstein is dead Part 2.

Probably to your surprise I am doing a second posting about this today. To start off with I recommend two Alternet articles: This one lays out the more mainstream concerns of the aftermath of Bin Laden's death and this one gives a reasonable assessment of how OBL's death doesn't really improve the lives of most Americans one bit.

Now on to some more speculation.

4)I'm going to couch this in terms of TV but thats because I've been watching a lot of it today. The "death" of Osama Bin Laden, a figure who as aforementioned had been reduced to little more than occasional obscure audio messages of dubious provenance, could've been prompted for another reason. TV shows often have an arc across a season in which the protagonists of the show face a particularly dangerous foe. While some opponents last for longer its general a good idea to cycle through villains. When first introduced a villain has mystery and that leads them to be more scary and unpredictable, so an interesting and engaging character. Over time though a villain will often become well known and, well, familiarity breeds contempt. On top of that if a foe lingers for a long time the show can start to slow down and you have increasing difficulty explaining why your protagonists can't deal with them.

Can you see through my elaborate metaphors? Yes, Osama as a concept of evil, a rallying cry and justification for certain foreign policy decisions had really run its' course and was starting to make the American Empire look weak, with all those trillions of dollars spent on defence they couldn't kill one guy? Plus as has been pointed out Americans now care more about the economy than being afraid of brown bogey men. Obviously the old method of keeping Americans scared has run out and a new one rolled out. Otherwise they might start asking questions the elite don't want asked.


5) Following on from that a similar reason for wrapping up the threat of Bin Laden could well be due to extremely pressing foreign policy concerns elsewhere. After all the song and dance made about the danger he posed until he was dead it was really quite hard to shift foreign policy focus. That may well be why Obama was so focused on killing him, he has shown himself to be a traditional US Imperialist and likely wants to move away from the strange neo-con crusades of the W Bush White house.

With OBL dead there is plenty of excuse to shift to other concerns. The most likely new direction is probably South America. In the past decade it has shifted from being a subdued back yard for America, something it has long been, to a largely leftist region that is rapidly gaining regional solidarity and moving away from Washington's roadmap. Still as Honduras's Coup showed countries in the region can be realigned to US interests. I have no idea if other nations will be retaken so easily but I imagine the Obama Whitehouse strongly desires to regain control of the region and its' natural resources and having an excuse to shift focus to South America from the AFPAK region is mighty handy for them.

6)Of course, just because a course of action seems to be the best one from the outside doesn't mean that is the one that'll be pursued, maybe because of info outsiders aren't privy to or maybe because of regime politics. I have absolutely no inside track or real understanding of how Obama's government functions but I would say the appointment of General Petraeus to head the CIA shows Obama maybe doesn't have total control of the direction his regime takes (to be fair there are compelling arguments for why Obama would actively choose to appoint him but thats not what I want to focus on here.) Petraeus has been a booster for invading Iran for instance which in the US Empire's current weakened state would be tantamount to suicide.

Then again, W Bush's legacy is a wide variety of ways for the US Empire to commit suicide. Going back to the issue of Pakistan I raised in Part 1 while I said it gave the US carte blanche I think that should be clarified via the can should gap. Yes you can do a thing but that does not mean you should do a thing. There are broadly justifiable actions the US could in the near future take in Pakistan but they would be exceptionally unwise to do so. As aforementioned the US is not pleased Pakistan has overthrown their client dictator. This can be rectified, as happened in Honduras and many other places, by the CIA and other intelligence agencies in quite subtle ways that really don't place the US Empire under much threat even if they fail.

There are strong hints however that America is taking a much more dangerous path that OBL's death could justify ramping up. The drone bombings and incursions into Pakistan by ground troops are not subtle and are already having considerable blowback, ramping that up in a country with nuclear weapons and a large population that holds pretty fundamentalist views would be bad at any time, let alone in the midst of two ohther wars and maybe a third in Libya. Oh and of course lets not forget in the Kashmir region Pakistan shares a border with India AND China, spillover that brought those two countries into the mix could be absolutely catastrophic.

Lord knows what will actually happen.

Oh and now you've read all this heres a much more concise and better summary: http://www.explosm.net/comics/2409/ Thanks Jonny.

And now; some Propaganda Model news.

A hagiography was originally a biography of a saint listing all their positive virtues and painting them in the best light possible, subsequently it has come to mean a highly positive portrayal of a person, usually in print.

The propaganda model would suggest that if an event that is negative to US interests occurred and it could not safely be ignored then it will be belittled, diminished and "spun" to lessen its' impact on US policy as much as possible.

The Wikileaks document release last week was just such an event and I betcha can't guess what happened. It is consistently fascinating to me (though unsurprising) that the NYT is held up as an example of extremely liberal journalism when it is such an obvious and blatant establishment supporter. The reasons for things being such is simple and twofold: 1)It is to keep the Overton Window (do note the depressing fact right wing uber shill Glenn Beck has tried to co-opt the term just as he has tried to co-opt Martin Luther King's actions) in the very right wing place it is currently, American political discourse will stay right wing as long as people think what the NYT offer is in any way left wing. 2) To people who want to be left wing and suchlike but aren't that well informed (what with how subservient the US media is and all) will read the NYT and unknowingly consume right wing propaganda.

Glenn Greenwald while at no point referring to the propaganda model (Chomsky is Haraam in American mainsteam political discourse) does a very good job of showing how the reaction to this release of information by Wikileaks is a case study of just how the propaganda model works. Greenwald draws some solace from the fact people are questioning just how in the pentagon's pocket the NYT writers were and I suppose to an extent it is. But if nearly of ample evidence of just how blatantly Burns and his ilk lied about Iraq and Afghanistan is only now drawing some criticism rather than hair teared out outrage it would seem that the Propaganda Model is functioning well enough for the elite and US interests.

People in prescence of heavily armed men say nice things about them...

...which is concrete evidence the NATO occupation of Afghanistan is adored by the local populace.

To quote the old joke: "What do you call a Gorilla with a machine gun?

Sir."

Some good news to start off the day.

Turns out that the worthless sacks of shit who willingly committed prisoner abuse and torture are suffering awful PTSD now of course this is nowhere near what their victims are suffering if they even survived and the higher ups who ordered this and bear the true responsibility are sitting pretty but its nice that a little bit of justice has occured.

How the US govt is attempting to hide real controversy.

The Propaganda model requires that if dissenting or controversial opinion is put forward in the media then good tame journalists will throw up "flak" contravening opinions presented as fact, insinuations about the dissenter's motivations and related propaganda about the subject showing that even if the disputed suggestion is true in general what the elite want us to think is true.

However the leak of ninety odd thousand government documents causes two major problems for the propaganda model. Firstly Wikileaks is too secretive and not well known enough to really pin specific blame on, its' leaks have covered a wide range of subjects. Nonetheless attempts are being made to suggest they some kind of malignant, ill defined ideology, as seen in the article I posted yesterday David Finkel, a good little journalist who despite knowing about the events of the helicopter gunship attacking civilians video for well over a year before it was released didn't make a fuss about, suggests that Wikileaks reason for leaking is suspect because "They provided artificial agenda driven context." Afterall, people merrily murdering civilians and laughing about it isn't a big deal unless you put some evil context on it.

Secondly though given the papers are government documents not meant to be released it is very difficult for the press to assert they're suspect or ideologically motivated, the sheer volume as well as the source undermines that. Unless the US military and government is deliberately lying to itself about Afghanistan (something of a controversy in itself) most of the tools of flak simply don't work.

However flak is mainly a tool of second resort, to suppress issues that have gotten past the first line of defence, the media defining what the elite talked about as the entire scope of news. But this is not the media's news, it is the governments so the US government is trying very hard to make out that while EVIL HILTER WIKILEAKS has endangered every brave Troop and destroyed Afghanistan with its' carelessness the actual information contained in those 90k documents is pretty boring and uninteresting. For instance Obama had this to say.

And yet mean old members of the media who are evil enough to point out the leaked documents do point out a range of things previously unknown or at least not acknowledged. Al Jazeera's report summarises most of the major problems but for specifics the leak revealed: a different death squad operation separate from JSOC's death squads called Task Force 373, at least 144 civilian deaths were known about but not reported by the US Military, the US government believes that the ISI (Pakistani intelligence service) is aiding the Taliban oh and we've actually known where Bin Laden was much more recently than claimed but capturing him might end the forever war and the contractor bonanza so it was kept quiet.

But yeah members of the public just trust the President and don't look too closely at what the leak actually contained, theres far more important things to do, like watching The View!

A profile of Julian Assange, founder of wikileaks.

The tone of this seems to be leaning towards being too trusting of the official line for my tastes but still its quite interesting to read about his background and what the guy who leaked the Pentagon Papers thinks about all of this. Plus making WANK appear on the screens of NASA is pretty funny.

Also don't miss the fact Obama's administration is even more secretive than Bush's was. Hope and change folks.

edit: link now works!

Petraeus's new Afghanistan strategy revealed

People easier to kill if they stand close together.

Michael Hastings' Article that toppled McChrystal

I want to let the article spreak for itself but I will quote one part:

After Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters. He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman had been killed by enemy fire. (McChrystal would later claim he didn't read the recommendation closely enough – a strange excuse for a commander known for his laserlike attention to minute details.) A week later, McChrystal sent a memo up the chain of command, specifically warning that President Bush should avoid mentioning the cause of Tillman's death. "If the circumstances of Corporal Tillman's death become public," he wrote, it could cause "public embarrassment" for the president.

"The false narrative, which McChrystal clearly helped construct, diminished Pat's true actions," wrote Tillman's mother, Mary, in her book Boots on the Ground by Dusk. McChrystal got away with it, she added, because he was the "golden boy" of Rumsfeld and Bush, who loved his willingness to get things done, even if it included bending the rules or skipping the chain of command. Nine days after Tillman's death, McChrystal was promoted to major general.

Two years later, in 2006, McChrystal was tainted by a scandal involving detainee abuse and torture at Camp Nama in Iraq. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, prisoners at the camp were subjected to a now-familiar litany of abuse: stress positions, being dragged naked through the mud. McChrystal was not disciplined in the scandal, even though an interrogator at the camp reported seeing him inspect the prison multiple times. But the experience was so unsettling to McChrystal that he tried to prevent detainee operations from being placed under his command in Afghanistan, viewing them as a "political swamp," according to a U.S. official. In May 2009, as McChrystal prepared for his confirmation hearings, his staff prepared him for hard questions about Camp Nama and the Tillman cover-up. But the scandals barely made a ripple in Congress, and McChrystal was soon on his way back to Kabul to run the war in Afghanistan.

McChrystal was a swell guy.

Titanic still on course for Iceberg

So McChrystal got sacked and America came one step closer to a president with hands on deathsquad experience but worry not kids, the Afghanistan Surge strategy is still on course. Sure the Iraq surge didn't really work and the UN says the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating fast but WE'RE STILL ON COURSE.

Thanks to bribes in the right places and daring and skilled investigation I am able to bring you a video of a high level tactical and strategic discussion regarding staying the course:

Ex-CIA man lies about regional strong man!

"Ex"-CIA man Robert Grenier uses his regular AJE editorial column to write about Ahmed Wali Karzai the younger half brother of the puppet that has fallen out of favour Hamed Karazi. In the piece he writes about the unfortunate emergence of Karzai the younger due to unforeseen consequences of US government action. Yet strangely US Government officials seem to think that Wali emerged quite deliberately as a result of CIA policy. Furthermore the US military seems to think this CIA asset is following in the agency's long tradition of also being heavily involved in the international drug trade.

It is thus troubling but also mildly funny that the "ex"-CIA man comes to the conclusion that we must "grudgingly" accept this CIA backed drug lord as a necessary evil in securing the support of Afghanistan's population now he has inadvertently risen to prominance. A wonderful post facto justification of an installed strongman. That supporting him is apparently necessary to combat the Taliban, another agency created group, just adds to the Irony.

If you ever want to know what the CIA's spin on a paticular issue is Grenier's editorials are well worth a read.

Bang goes the presidential bid

General Petraeus faints

Ok, so I'm not actually sure Petraeus was going to attempt to run in 2012 but the vague rumours I'd heard were fairly convincing that it was possible and given Obama's liking for comparing himself to Lincoln I had hoped for an inverse 1864 election and Obama losing to the general his continued imperialism elevated to a position of national renown.

That likely wont happen now. I don't imagine the media will give him an especially hard time about it but in a world where hollywood blockbusters define people's perceptions of the military this is a serious blow to his military touch guy image. You see in blockbusters general can die but they die heroically, jaw clenched as the inhuman enemies of humanity America (tautology?) close in. Hell they can be wrong, they're just so tough and stubborn they can't see the truth the hero can but you bet your bottom dollar at just the right climactic moment they'll bring the cavalry and secure the heroes' victory. But the one thing a general never does in a blockbuster is faint. Only women and liberals faint.

In reality his excuses are fairly plausible and heck most people would've snapped completely under the amount of strain he is under long ago. But in terms of perception and the popular imagination this is pretty unforgiveable.