Drone attacks undermine national security

Drone blowback is real. Over the past five years, terrorists have attempted serious attacks on American soil that were motivated in part by U.S. drone strikes abroad. We know this because the apprehended terrorists have been loud and clear about their motives.

As Pakistani-born Faisal Shahzad, whose car bomb failed to explode in Times Square in May 2010, said at his arraignment:

Until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan and stops the occupation of Muslim lands … we will be attacking U.S. The drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children … They kill women, children — they kill everybody.

A foiled plot to blow up the New York subway, led by Afghan-born, Queens-raised Najibullah Zazi, also speaks to the growing anger over drone warfare.According to courtroom testimony from the would-be perpetrators, they conceived their effort as revenge for the drone attacks in northwestern Pakistan, where U.S. strikes have killed some 2,800 people. Just how many of those killed were Al-Qaeda fighters and how many civilians is not precisely known. But the connection between drones abroad and danger at home is not hypothetical: It’s a demonstrable fact. And yet our national security experts tend to treat these attempted terrorist attacks as if they were of no relevance to Washington’s increasing use of lethal unmanned aircraft.

Pure fanaticism

Last month the Stimson Center, a defense-industry-funded think tank issued what is only the latest report to take a remarkably blasé attitude toward the homeland security liabilities of drone strikes abroad. In fact, the report, “Recommendations and Report of the Drone Policy Task Force” makes no mention of Shahzad or Zazi. It is baffling that the task force, co-led by retired U.S. Army Gen. John Abizaid and Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks, chose to ignore the attempts on Times Square and the New York subway. Do they perhaps think that what motivated a couple of near-miss terrorist attacks is of no importance?

The U.S. national security establishment hypes and magnifies anything remotely resembling a terrorist plot when it’s time to justify security agency budgets and surveillance programs. But when assessing the security costs of U.S. military violence, these terrorist plots suddenly become invisible. This is in part because the acknowledgment of any motive for terrorism stemming from U.S. foreign policy — any motive other than pure evil or pure fanaticism, of course — is huffily condemned by the natsec establishment as excuse-making and perhaps even sympathy: Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. This is, of course, obtuse; knowing why John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln won’t turn you into a neo-Confederate.

Making connections between U.S. violence abroad and retaliatory violence at home should not be controversial, especially when it is a matter of national security. And yet touching these two wires together is, for today’s security pundits, a deeply internalized taboo. The liberal Brennan Center’s 2011 reporton Muslim radicalization, for instance, mentions in passing Shahzad’s attempted bombing but is careful to say nothing about his plainly stated (and widely reported) motive — a bizarre omission in a report dedicated to understanding what turns people into terrorists.

For its part, a 2010 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on homegrown extremism floats a connection between Muslim discontent and U.S. foreign policy, only to torpedo it as a “misperception.” To credit the motivating force of U.S. violence overseas, the report argues, is to buy into “the Al-Qaeda-driven narrative” of an American war with all of Islam.

The CSIS authors are of course correct that the U.S. is not waging a war against the Muslim faith in general — no matter what some American generals, clergyand law enforcement officials like to say. But is also true that Washington has, in the past 10 years, waged war or semiwar in such majority-Muslim lands as Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia, all the while lavishly arming Egypt’s authoritarian dictatorships, the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and the Sunni overlords of Bahrain. A war on Islam is indeed a misperception, but it would be foolish to think that so much military violence will not beget a violent reaction.

If drone strikes are a security liability for the United States, then all other arguments in their favor are moot.

Given the well-documented blowback attacks, one might expect plenty of forthright opposition to drone strikes on strategic grounds. But American liberals don’t have a lot to say about these security consequences. They’d rather talk about more high-minded matters, such as how to regulate drones. When prestigious media outlets such as The New York Review of Books writes about drones, the criticism sticks largely to questions of legal procedure. (Most of the magazine’s “13 Questions for John O. Brennan,” director of CIA, were about the legal aspects of drone assassinations.)

Such commentary leaves the impression that had the strikes been carried out with more due diligence and transparency, there would be nothing wrong with them. By confining dissent mainly to procedural grounds, liberals tacitly affirm the assumption that drone strikes are an unalloyed benefit for homeland security — an assumption that is not grounded in data, even if the Stimson Center report optimistically conjectures that drone assassinations “may have helped keep the homeland free of major terrorist attacks.”

To its credit, that report does fret about the long-term strategic effects of increased use of drones — notably, that unmanned aerial vehicles are fast becoming a first resort to any crisis. When U.S. drones were first put to use 10 years ago in Pakistan, it was for the narrowly defined purpose of killing the leadership of Al-Qaeda. But the U.S. government has since quickly rushed drones into serving a much wider array of other goals and aims, as Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations and others have documented, including assassinating low-level Al-Qaeda soldiers and helping the Pakistani government kill armed insurgents that threaten its rule. Lately the White House has announced a number of vague missions for drones in Iraq and Syria, from force protection to guarding infrastructure.

No strategy

Drones have killed some Al-Qaeda leaders and plenty of low-level insurgents along with the civilians of several nations. But if drones are actively harmful to the Unites States’ reputation abroad and its security at home, what are these assassinations worth? Strategy is not trumped by tactical operations, no matter how technologically sophisticated they may be. But then “strategy” is perhaps too dignified a term for Washington’s undisciplined and spasmodic efforts at global, open-ended counterinsurgency — unless their aim is to spread and foment terrorism, not curb it. As James A. Russell of the Naval Postgraduate School has written, drones are a clear example of tactics in aimless search of a strategy.

To be sure, the strategic balance sheet of risk and security is not the sole criterion for judging drone strikes or any other military tactic. But it is the threshold question. If drone strikes are, on the whole, a security liability for the United States, if they increase the risk of terrorist attack rather than diminish it, then all other arguments — moral, legal, procedural — are moot, however toothsome they may be to pundits, jurists and think tankers for hire.

The Stimson report, like others before it, concludes by calling for a “rigorous strategic review.” What else were they going to say? But given the well-documented reality of drone blowback attempts on the homeland, it is already clear enough that this tactic is harmful to U.S. security. And the real purpose of drone strikes has always been to protect the United States — right? More

Chase Madar is an attorney in New York and the author of “The Passion of [Chelsea] Manning: The Story Behind the WikiLeaks Whistleblower” (Verso, 2013).

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.

 

 

© 2014

Five Myths About Hamas

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks about Israel’s ground offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, he says that “without action, the price that we would pay would be much greater.”

But predicting how Hamas is likely to act and react requires probing what the organization can do, what it wants and how it sees itself. From Hamas’s angle, the current fighting offers just as many opportunities as threats. Let’s examine five myths about the militant Islamist organization.

1. Hamas poses no meaningful threat to Israel.

As a movement, Hamas offers resistance — attacking civilians, launching rockets and ransoming captives — but it cannot field a military force that could face Israel on the battlefield. Indeed, all the ground combat is happening in Gaza; Israeli territory remains relatively unscathed. As of Saturday, at least four Israelis had been killed in the latest round of fighting, while Israel’s actions had led to more than 330 Palestinian deaths. So it is absolutely true that Hamas does not pose an existential threat to Israel.

However, more than Israel’s existence is being threatened. The abduction and murder of three Israeli teens last month may or may not have been a Hamas operation — but the event captured the attention of the Israeli public, and the Israeli government reacted as if Hamas were responsible. While the effectiveness of Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile system is debated — officials boast that itintercepts 90 percent of Hamas’s missiles — large parts of the Israeli population now feel within Hamas’s reach as the range of its rockets creeps higher. Some have relocated farther away from Gaza, and those who remain show signs of stress. Israel’s political, military and security leaders are focused on deterring the rocket attacks.

Hamas may never come close to vanquishing Israel on the battlefield, but changes in its capabilities — tunnels, abductions, missiles and even a drone — continue to make Israelis nervous and force them to react.

2. Hamas’s popularity stems from the social services it provides.

Outsiders sometimes see Hamas as something like an American big-city machine that trades jobs and welfare benefits in return for political loyalty and votes — though a machine with an armed wing.

Hamas does have an armed wing, and other parts of the organization attempt to provide some social services, but the number of Palestinians who benefit from those services is small. And it’s dwarfed by those who get assistance from the Palestinian government, international aid bodies and nongovernmental organizations. This fact is missed by outsiders who often mistake anything Islamic for Hamas.

Hamas’s support from Palestinian civilians, when it comes, stems from other things. For example, the movement poses as uncompromising on Palestinian rights and uncorrupted by money and power. The political and diplomatic solutions, such as the Oslo peace process, offered by other factions such as Fatah seem meaningless to most Palestinians, who have grown cynical about their leaders’ ability to deliver.

The image of Hamas as an uncorrupt movement unconcerned with the trappings of power grew outdated once the group stepped into power after its 2006 election victory. But earlier this year, Hamas resigned all its cabinet positions and agreed to surrender political leadership of the Gaza Strip. With the decision to stop being a government as well as a movement, Hamas’s reputation may begin to recover. And some of its leaders may be saying now: What better way to start the effort than to return to the movement’s roots in armed resistance?

3. Hamas has lost popularity.

In all kinds of ways, recent opinion polling shows that the majority of Palestinians back positions that Hamas rejects regarding diplomacy and resistance. Hamas remains more hard-line than the public it seeks to lead, and surveys also show that the group would have tremendous trouble repeating its 2006 election win.

But right now, Hamas’s leaders aren’t concerned about whether they could obtain a majority of the vote. Elections are unlikely any time soon. And the despair among Palestinians is so deep, the numbers do not look much better for any leader or faction; at this point Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is seen as isolated, aloof and having spent all his political capital on a failed peace process.

What concerns Hamas’s leaders is their relevance, their ability to articulate the deep senses of frustration and injustice that most Palestinians feel — and whether their rhetoric will resonate with the public. The current path of the conflict, and its fiery rhetoric, offer Hamas opportunities to present itself as more in line with the times.

Yes, Hamas surrendered its cabinet positions to people appointed by Abbas. And yes, Hamas is taking a beating and its activists are being driven underground. But its credentials as the movement that does not bend and dares to take on Israel are being burnished among much of the audience it cares about.

4. Hamas’s loss of regional allies has tied its hands.

Hamas’s base in Syria was shut down two years ago. Its Iranian allies have greatly reduced their support. Its big brothers in Egypt, Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, can do little for the movement now that they are out of power. In the last round of fighting, in 2012, Egypt helped broker a cease-fire; now its position seems as hard-line on Hamas as Israel’s. Internationally isolated and strapped for cash, Hamas is in crisis. More

 

© 2014

Studies by Once Top Secret Government Entity Portrayed Terrible Costs of Nuclear War

Studies by Once Top Secret Government Entity Portrayed Terrible Costs of Nuclear War

After Briefing on Likely Death Tolls, JFK Remarked: "And We Call Ourselves the Human Race"

Net Evaluation Subcommittee Nevertheless Initially Projected U.S. Prevailing in Global Nuclear Conflict -- Although Final Report Described a "Nuclear Stalemate"

Some Studies Depicted U.S. as Launching First, Preemptively

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 480

Posted - July 22, 2014

For more information contact:
William Burr - 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu

Washington, D.C., July 22, 2014 -- On the morning of 20 July 1961, while the Berlin Crisis was simmering, President John F. Kennedy and the members of the National Security Council heard a briefing on the consequences of nuclear war by the NSC's highly secret Net Evaluation Subcommittee. The report, published in excerpts today for the first time by the National Security Archive, depicted a Soviet surprise attack on the United States in the fall of 1963 that began with submarine-launched missile strikes against Strategic Air Command bases. An estimated 48 to 71 million Americans were "killed outright," while at its maximum casualty-producing radioactive fallout blanketed from 45 to 71 percent of the nation's residences. In the USSR and China, at the end of one month 67 and 76 million people, respectively, had been killed.

This was President Kennedy's first exposure to a NESC report, but the secret studies of nuclear war scenarios had been initiated by his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. It may have been after this briefing, described by Secretary of State Dean Rusk as "an awesome experience," that a dismayed Kennedy turned to Rusk, and said: "And we call ourselves the human race."

The NESC reports on nuclear war were multi-volume, highly classified studies and none has ever been declassified in their entirety. (Indeed, for years the very existence of the NESC was a well-kept secret.) The summaries published here today -- for the annual reports from 1957 to 1963 -- provide a glimpse of the full reports, although important elements remain classified. Besides the summaries and fuller reports for 1962 and 1963, today's posting includes a number of special studies prepared by the NESC, including an especially secret report requested by President Eisenhower that led to the production of the comprehensive U.S. nuclear war plan in 1960, the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP).


Check out today's posting at the National Security Archive's Nuclear Vault -http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb480/

Find us on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/NSArchive

Unredacted, the Archive blog - http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/

________________________________________________________
THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals.

 

© 2014

Life after a nuclear war revealed: Computer models reveal Earth would suffer a 20-year-long winter and worldwide famine

The terrible fate of Earth after a nuclear war has been mapped out using computer models for the first time.

Worldwide famine, deadly frosts, global ozone losses of up to 50 per cent and more would greet any inhabitants of the planet still remaining after a nuclear conflict.

And the researchers hope their study of what they call a relatively 'small' nuclear war will serve as a deterrent against such weapons being used by any nation in the future.

THE AFTERMATH OF NUCLEAR WAR ACCORDING TO THE STUDY

Year 0

Five megatons of black carbon released into the atmosphere, which absorbs sunlight and begins to cool the planet. Black carbon rain also kills millions.

Year 1

Average surface temperature drops by 1°C (2°F).

Year 2

Crop growing season is shortened by 10 to 40 days.

Year 5

Earth is an average of 1.5°C (3°F) colder than the present day, colder than it has been in 1,000 years. There is also nine per cent less rainfall. The ozone is also up to 25 per cent thinner, increasing UV rays on Earth.

Year 10

Ozone recovers slightly to just 8 per cent less than modern day.

Year 20

Planet warms slightly to 0.5°C (1°F) lower than the present day.

Year 26

Rainfall increases to about 4.5 per cent less than today.

In it the researchers looked at the outcome of a ‘limited, regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan in which each side detonates 50 15-kiloton weapons.’

They then used computer models to examine the impact on the planet and its environment - and it makes for grim reading.

The immediate result of 100 nuclear weapons roughly the size of those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki being detonated would be the release of five megatons of black carbon into the atmosphere.

Black carbon, not too dissimilar to soot, would block out the sun and can also be fatal to humans.

Following a spell of black carbon rain, a deadly weather front that would devastate what remained of humanity following the nuclear war, the temperature of Earth would begin to drop.

After a year the temperature would fall by 1°C (2°F), while after five it would be 1.5°C (3°F) cooler than it is now.

About 20 years after the conflict it would warm again to just 0.5°C (1°F) below today’s temperature.

Accompanying what the researchers call ‘the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1,000 years’ would be a huge loss in ozone levels. They say that global ozone losses of 20 to 50 per cent would occur over populated areas, ‘levels unprecedented in human history

The drop in temperature would produce ‘killing frosts’ that reduce the world’s growing season by 10 to 40 days.

Meanwhile the eradication of up to half of the ozone would increase UV rays in some locations by as much as 80 per cent, raising the chance of developing skin cancer for large swathes of humanity.

Combined with the global cooling, this ‘would put significant pressures on global food supplies and could trigger a global nuclear famine.’

The planet’s falling temperature would also decrease the amount of rainfall.

Five years after the conflict Earth would see 9 per cent less rain, while 26 years after the war there would still be 4.5 per cent less rain.

The result of all this would be devastation and ultimately death for hundreds of millions, and perhaps billions.

But the researchers hope that their example of a relatively small nuclear war between two modestly armed nuclear nations, India and Pakistan, will encourage superpowers such as the U.S. and Russia to discuss nuclear disarmament.

‘Knowledge of the impacts of 100 small nuclear weapons should motivate the elimination of more than 17,000 nuclear weapons that exist today,’ they write. More

Above: US Missile Control Centre

© 2014

Sifting through the wreckage of MH17, searching for sense amid the horror

Any journalist should hesitate before saying this, but news can be bad for you. You don’t have to agree with the analyst who reckons “news is to the mind what sugar is to the body” to see that reading of horror and foreboding hour by hour, day after day, can sap the soul.

This week ended with a double dose, administered within the space of a few hours: Israel’s ground incursion into Gaza and, more shocking because entirely unexpected, the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine, killing all 298 on board.

So in Gaza we look at the wildly lopsided death tolls – nearly 300 Palestinians and two Israelis killed these past nine days.

The different responses these events stir in those of us who are distant, and the strategies we devise to cope with them, say much about our behaviour as consumers of news. But they also go some way to determining our reaction as citizens, as constituent members of the amorphous body we call public, or even world, opinion.

As I write, 18 of the 20 most-read articles on the Guardian website are about MH17. The entry into Gaza by Israeli forces stands at number 21. It’s not hard to fathom why the Malaysian jet strikes the louder chord. As the preacher might put it, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Stated baldly, most of us will never live in Gaza, but we know it could have been us boarding that plane in Amsterdam.

Which is why there is a morbid fascination with tales of the passenger who changed flights at the last minute, thereby cheating death, or with the crew member who made the opposite move, hastily switching to MH17 at the final moment, taking a decision that would have seemed so trivial at the time but which cost him his life. When we read about the debris – the holiday guidebooks strewn over the Ukrainian countryside, the man found next to an iPhone, the boy with his seatbelt still on – our imaginations put us on that flight. Of course we have sympathy for the victims and their families. But our fear is for ourselves.

It’s quite true that if the US truly decided that Israel’s 47-year occupation of Palestinian territory was no longer acceptable, that would bring change.

The reports from Gaza stir a different feeling. When we read the Guardian’s Peter Beaumont describe the sights he saw driving around the strip on Friday morning – three Palestinian siblings killed by an Israeli artillery shell that crashed into their bedroom, a father putting the remains of his two-year-old son into a plastic shopping bag – we are shaken by a different kind of horror. It is compassion for another human being, someone in a situation utterly different to ours. We don’t worry that this might happen to us, as we now might when we contemplate an international flight over a war zone. Our reaction is directed not inward, but outward. More

There is an interesting article by Chris Hedges entitled It's NOT going to be OK on the current economic disparity which, he believes could lead to a drastic decline in democracy as states respond to social protests. The question I ask is what can be done to slow or erradicate this process? Editor

 

© 2014

CIA Station Chief Ordered out of Berlin

Berlin has ordered the CIA chief of station to leave Germany by the end of the week amid a growing espionage scandal, according to German newspapers.

The German Foreign Office did not verify a timeline for departure, but did reiterate the German government’s expectation that the intelligence representative leave “promptly.” Chancellor Angela Merkel demanded the station chief’s departure last week after a year-long spying dispute, triggered by revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) monitored Merkel’s cell phone, culminated with reports that a German intelligence official was spying for the CIA.

Maj. James Weirick, the Marine Corps whistleblower who accused a senior general and his staff of wrongdoing during the trial of Marines implicated in a video depicting US personnel urinating on dead Afghani insurgents, has been transferred. Weirick, who previously served as a staff judge advocate at Quantico with Marine Corps Combat Development Command, filed an inspector general complaint in March of last year accusing Marine Commandant Gen. James F. Amos and some of his senior staff of exerting undue influence and seeking “to manipulate the military justice system to ensure tough punishments against the snipers shown in the video,” namely by removing the three-star general assigned to oversee the cases after learning that the general intended to impose administrative nonjudicial punishment rather than a more serious court-martial.

The Department of Justice declined to investigate the CIA’s allegations that Senate Intelligence Committee staff somehow hacked the agency’s computers while working on a report highly critical of the agency’s detention and interrogation program. The DOJ’s refusal to investigate the CIA allegations seems to affirm Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) earlier comments that accusations “that Senate committee staff who have no technical training somehow hacked into the CIA’s highly secure classified networks…appears on its face to be patently absurd.”

A Navy nurse at Guantanamo is refusing to continue force-feeding inmates on hunger strikes and has been reassigned to “alternative duties.” The Department of Defense recently admitted it has video recordings of force-feeding detainees at the same time detainees are accusing the US of manipulating data on inmates’ hunger strikes to keep strike numbers artificially low. A lawyer for one of the striking detainees, Abi Wa’el Dhiab, submitted court filings to preserve the force-feeding tapes. Dhiab is also one of the six-low level detainees being transferred to Uruguay, and the transfer would likely render his lawsuit moot.

House Democrats are asking the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general to investigate McClatchy’s allegations that “Motorola’s contracting tactics have led state and local governments to squander millions of dollars on the company’s pricey two-way emergency radio systems.” Motorola’s public safety division, Motorola Solutions, has controlled an estimated 80 per cent or more of the market for emergency communications equipment for years, and its radios contain proprietary software that prevents Motorola equipment from interacting with other systems.

Russia will regain control of Lourdes Intelligence Center outside of Havana after giving it up in 2001 to satisfy a request from the US. Russia began negotiating with Cuba to regain control of the facility, which was the USSR’s largest electronic intelligence facility and controlled radio and telephone connections over a large territory of the “potential enemy,” several years ago. Russian President Vladimir Putin also signed a law writing off 90 per cent of Cuba’s $32 billion Soviet-era debt to Russia during his visit to Havana last week.

Newly declassified documents obtained by Ryan Shapiro show the FBI monitored Nelson Mandela during the 1990s over a perceived communist threat. The documents show the bureau monitored Mandela’s communications with the African National Congress “and kept a close eye on the anti-apartheid activities of the Communist Party USA.” Mandela remained on the US’ terror watch list, and the ANC remained designated as a US’ terrorist organization, until 2008. Shapiro has FOIA lawsuits against the NSA, FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency for their records on any participation in Mandela’s 1962 capture, and a separate case against the CIA for records on Mandela’s arrest.

FOIA work from the folks at MuckRock revealed some interesting cafeteria complaints at the CIA, including suspicion that the Pepsi dispenser was in fact dispensing Diet Pepsi, anger with Russian-themed menu items (“Beef stroganoff is more American than Russian”), and frustration with the grumpy demeanor of fast food workers who have “attitude every day.” In other culinary news, the international food service company Sodexo is seeking a master chef for a secure US government facility in Northern Virginia who holds or can obtain a Top Secret security clearance. As Steve Aftergood points out, this is a prime example of the bloated security clearance system, which the Office of Management and Budget reportedearlier this year as being too large and needing to be reduced. As Aftergood notes, “Eliminating the TS/SCI clearance requirement for access to the kitchens and dining rooms of government facilities might be a sensible place to start.”

The KGB Archives of Soviet defector Vasiliy Mitrokhin’s are in the process of opening to the public for the first time. While not available online yet, the FBI called these documents, which Mitrokhin initially smuggled out of KGB facilities daily on small scraps of paper hidden in his shoes, “the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source,” and are bound to be a boon to researchers when they become available.

Finally, this week’s #tbt document pick is a great reminder on the need for reformto the b(5) “deliberative process” exemption. The document is a May 18, 1994, State Department memo expressing doubts about the size of the Rwandan death toll and was cited in Samantha Power’s 2003 groundbreaking history A Problem from Hell, based largely on FOIA requests she and other Archive staff filed while at the National Security Archive. Apparently, the Department of State failed to realize in 2007 that the memo had been released years earlier in its entirety and cited in Power’s book, and chose to use the b(5) exemption to withhold the information in the memo from the public, citing the specious claim of the deliberative process. It’s worth noting that Power’s book also cites the intransigence of US agencies at the time, noting the need for “congressional inquiries with the power to subpoena documents and to summon US officials of all ranks in the executive and legislative branches,” as it was nearly impossible to obtain “meaningful disclosure” about the Rwandan genocide through the FOIA process. More

 

© 2014

The Peak Oil Crisis: Better Than Fire

In addition to following the twists and turn of the world’s energy situation, I have been tracking the reporting on developments concerning several “exotic” and therefore controversial energy sources whose proponents say would be far more cost-effective than current alternatives to fossil fuels such as wind, solar and nuclear.

The reason for this interest is that if one believes global warming is caused by carbon emissions, then it certainly looks like there will not be much left of human civilization in a century or so. While the use of “conventional” alternatives is growing, the demand for energy to fuel economic growth is so great that it seems likely that, unless some outside force intervenes, mankind is going to burn fossil fuels until it is no longer economically possible to do so.

What is clearly necessary is some source of energy that is so cheap and easy to produce and so environmentally clean that everyone on earth will want to use the new energy source as soon as possible.

Fortunately, there are a handful of people out there who really are a few steps ahead of academia, government officials, and the mainstream media in the effort to save mankind from what is shaping up to be a many millennia-long disaster. In the past I have written about cold fusion or in the current jargon, low energy nuclear reactions (LENR). This technology is still alive, well, and seems destined to produce some commercially viable prototypes in the near future.

However, last week a company up in New Jersey call BlackLight Power and its founder announced a breakthrough which could be just what the world sorely needs in addition to touching off a new era in the history of mankind. I stress could for all the evidence is not in yet and useful prototypes have yet to be built, but BlackLight’s founder and inventor of the technology, Randall Mills, seems unusually forthright in his claims that there has indeed been a breakthrough on the exotic energy front. For those of the “its too good to be true” bent, keep in mind that discoveries do happen from time to time – electricity, internal combustion, and smart phones to name a few.

About 20 years ago Randall Mills announced that a more compact form of the hydrogen atom existed in the universe which he termed a hydrino. This form of hydrogen had its electron circling its proton at about 1/4th the distance from the nucleus as in a conventional hydrogen atom and therefore had much less energy. Mills went on to say he believed that the dark matter which makes up the bulk of the universe was composed of these compact hydrogen atoms which neither absorb nor emit light making them very difficult to detect. At the cosmological scale dark matter is only known to exist because of its gravitational pull on other mass. As most of the visible universe is composed of hydrogen, it seems to make sense that the invisible part is hydrogen too.

When Mills announced his hypothesis in 1991, it was, of course, denounced by the scientific establishment as ridiculous for if another form of hydrogen existed, we surely would have discovered it decades ago. To make the ensuing controversy still worse, Mills claimed that the accepted version of quantum mechanics had it wrong in its description of just what an electron is and that the classical physics of Newton and Maxwell works at the atomic as well as the cosmic scale. Such a claim is heresy of the first order in the land of the scientists so Mills and his hydrinos were quickly forgotten.

From mankind’s perspective, however, the interesting feature about the existence of two forms of hydrogen is that in converting the conventional hydrogen atom to a hydrino a spectacular amount of energy is released – on the order of 200 times as much as when hydrogen is joined with oxygen to form H2O. Thus began the 20-year search for the Holy Grail of our civilization – a way to transform hydrogen into hydrinos and release lots of energy.

As with the Wright brothers, all Mills had to do was to build a machine that took in water and send commerical amounts of energy out, then his thesis would have to be accepted. It took 20+ years to develop the theoretical basis for such a machine, but for the last six months Mills has been demonstrating crude prototypes to selected audiences. Fortunately for the rest of us, these demonstrations and considerable information on what is taking place have been appearing regularly on the internet. Although some remain skeptical, the length of time Mills has been working on this project, the size of his organization, the scale of his financial backing and the verification of his science by external laboratories strongly suggests that his claims are valid.

Mills’ machines are remarkably simple. After 20 years of research he has developed a metallic powder that will also absorb moisture (hydrogen) from the humidity in the air. A tiny amount of this damp powder is subjected to a low voltage, high amperage current and the hydrogen in the powder is zapped, for want of a better word, into hydrinos with a blinding flash of light. The hydrogen-depleted powder can then absorb more moisture from the atmosphere and be reused indefinitely.

While the mini-explosions that take place in Mills’ device are spectacular, they certainly were a long ways from a technology that might save the world until two weeks ago when he announced that the energy emitted from these “explosions” is mostly white light. The white light emitted is at least 50,000 times brighter than that of sunlight as it reaches the earth’s surface and given the latest in solar cell technology, can easily be converted into prodigious amounts of electricity using only the humidity in the air as the fuel. One design is anticipating that a one-foot cubic device will be able to produce 10 million watts of electric power.

To quote Mills, “nature has just given us the best gift that we have ever had, this is better than fire.” More

 

© 2014

Spreadsheets list prices paid for an Afghan life, a cow and a car

The description in a single box of a spreadsheet is brief and to the point: “We shot into a crowd and killed a lady’s son.”

Next to it stands an amount: $1,000.

The entry from October 2007 detailing an incident in Kabul covers one of hundreds of “condolence payments” paid to Afghans by U.S.-led forces for deaths, injuries and property damage, described in leaked military spreadsheets.

The sheets document some $4 billion in spending on a military-backed scheme, the Commander’s Emergency Response Program, intended to win over ordinary Afghans with reconstruction projects that improve local communities and provide jobs.

The bulk of the money goes on transport and building projects, although the sheets include entries as diverse as $91,000 for riot batons and almost $6,000 for scout uniforms. But commanders also use the fund to pay for harm done by U.S. troops or their allies – from deaths in botched air strikes to crops damaged by military vehicles.

Thomson Reuters Foundation has analysed these condolence payments, which offer a rare, detailed line-by-line insight into a key period of the war, as part of a project to explore how nations and organisations try to put a monetary value on life and limb.

Covering some 19,000 rows of data, the sheets appear complete for the years 2008 to 2010, when the United States was ramping up its war against the Taliban with thousands of extra troops. Leaked to the website publicintelligence.info, the files also include some entries going back through 2003 and as recent as 2011.

The Department of Defense did not respond to requests by time of publication to comment on the documents, although a special advisor in its freedom of information office said by email the spreadsheets appeared to be leaked.

They list some $1 million paid to Afghans for deaths, injuries and property damage during the period. Additional amounts were paid from $10 million in funds withdrawn in bulk and used for multiple purposes including condolence payments, but no breakdown of these payments was shown.

The average sum for an Afghan life was $2,500 while the most frequent was $2,000, according to the Foundation’s analysis.

But the data present some jarring contrasts. Sometimes Afghans received as much for a dead animal or the destruction of a vehicle as they got for the loss of a loved one.

A man in Kunar province received $2,500 in 2008 for a cow “that got caught in crossfire and razor wire”. Another got $800 for the loss of a camel. A farmer in the eastern province of Laghman received $2,640 after a stray missile killed two cows and 10 chickens.

In 2010 in Kabul, a payment of $2,500 was made to the owner of a Toyota Hiace van after it was fired upon by an armoured military vehicle “driven by U.S. or Coalition Forces”.

ENOUGH COMPENSATION?

The payout of $2,500 represented roughly three times the average annual income for an Afghan in the 2008 to 2010 period, based on International Monetary Fund estimates of GDP per capita figures adjusted for cost of living and inflation. The U.S. military continues to use $2,500 as a guideline for a civilian death, although the increase in salaries and rising cost of living mean that its value today has slipped to represent about twice the average Afghan income.

Michael Semple, an Afghanistan expert who has served as the European Union’s deputy special representative in the country, said this money would not go far even in a rural area. In Afghan culture, a brother would be obliged to support the widow and children of a dead family member who was head of household.

“I know lots of families where the main economically active person is having to support 15 people because he has brought in one or two widows and their children,” said Semple, a visiting professor at Queen’s University in Belfast.

“So in that context, if you get a few thousand dollars from the DoD (U.S. Department of Defense), then frankly it helps you pay for the funeral expenses and maybe sees you through the first month. But for the rest of their lives, the people who are left behind depend on brothers and uncles and fathers.”

The leaked data show the highest payment for a civilian death was $4,700 to the family of an interpreter killed on a military base in Khost province in September 2008. The lowest was $1,000 to a woman in Kabul in September 2007 for the killing of her son.

In one case U.S. forces paid $4,500 to two men after seven relatives were killed in an air strike in Helmand in August 2010.

NO OBLIGATION TO PAY

The United States is in the process of withdrawing most of its troops from Afghanistan after 12 years of fighting Taliban insurgents, although it will keep a force of 9,800 there next year and will remain the country's biggest foreign donor.

In the three years covered by the leaked data, more than 7,300 civilians were killed in Afghanistan. Around two thirds of the deaths were caused by insurgents, one quarter by pro-government Afghan security forces and international troops and the remainder were unexplained, according to the United Nations mission in the country.

Military forces are under no legal obligation to pay civilians for any harm caused by combat operations, according to experts in international law. But they sometimes make payments, even while not admitting legal liability, in recognition of local customs. The U.S. military initially ruled there was no such practise but reversed course in face of anger from the families of civilians killed in botched air raids, crossfire and at border checkpoints.

The payments are not classed as compensation but are meant to recognise the grief of a family, wounds of a civilian or damage to property.

The Pentagon says U.S. and other contingents in the NATO-led force in Afghanistan take local circumstances into account when deciding how much to pay out.

“Commanders consider the severity of injury or type of damage, cost of living in the local community, and any other applicable cultural considerations,” said U.S. Navy Commander Elissa Smith, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

“We have found that working through community elders or local contacts to determine fair damage amounts defuses community tensions, reinforces the authority and legitimacy of local elders, and establishes a stronger relationship between the Troop Contributing Nation and local government officials,” she said via email. More

 

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