Majority of US warships moving to Asia

Defense secretary provides first details of new strategy

MSNBC | Jun 2, 2012

By David Alexander

SINGAPORE — The United States will move the majority of its warships to the Asia-Pacific in coming years and keep six aircraft carriers in the region, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Saturday, giving the first details of a new U.S. military strategy.

Speaking at an annual security forum in Singapore, Panetta sought to dispel the notion that the shift in U.S. focus to Asia was designed to contain China’s emergence as a global power.

He acknowledged differences between the world’s two largest economies on a range of issues, including the South China Sea.

“We’re not naive about the relationship and neither is China,” Panetta told the Shangri-La Dialogue attended by senior civilian and military leaders from about 30 Asia-Pacific nations.

“We also both understand that there really is no other alternative but for both of us to engage and to improve our communications and to improve our (military-to-military) relationships,” he said. “That’s the kind of mature relationship that we ultimately have to have with China.”

Some Chinese officials have been critical of the U.S. shift of military emphasis to Asia, seeing it as an attempt to fence in the country and frustrate Beijing’s territorial claims.

Panetta’s comments came at the start of a seven-day visit to the region to explain to allies and partners the practical meaning of the U.S. military strategy unveiled in January that calls for rebalancing American forces to focus on the Pacific.

The trip, which includes stops in Vietnam and India, comes at a time of renewed tensions over competing sovereignty claims in the South China Sea, with the Philippines, a major U.S. ally, and China in a standoff over the Scarborough Shoal near the Philippine coast.

The South China Sea is a flashpoint but, with about 90 percent of global trade moving by sea, protecting the teeming shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean and the Strait of Malacca is equally vital.

“Maritime freedoms cannot be the exclusive prerogative of a few,” Indian Defence Minister A.K. Antony told the forum. “We must find the balance between the rights of nations and the freedoms of the world community.”

Overlapping maritime claims – often fuelled by hunger for oil, gas, fish and other resources – are compounded by threats from pirates and militants, delegates said.

China’s ‘critical role’

China has downgraded its representation to the Shangri-La Dialogue from last year, when Defence Minister Liang Guanglie attended and met then-U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. This year the Chinese military was represented by the vice president of Academy of Military Sciences.

Panetta, by contrast, was accompanied by General Martin Dempsey, the military’s top officer as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Admiral Samuel Locklear, the head of the U.S. Pacific Command.

Panetta said he was committed to a “healthy, stable, reliable and continuous” military-to-military relationship with China but underscored the need for Beijing to support a system to clarify rights in the region and help to resolve disputes.

“China has a critical role to play in advancing security and prosperity by respecting the rules-based order that has served the region for six decades,” he said.

Fleshing out details of the shift to Asia, Panetta said the United States would reposition its Navy fleet so that 60 percent of its warships would be assigned to the region by 2020, compared to about 50 percent now.

The Navy would maintain six aircraft carriers assigned to the Pacific. Six of its 11 carriers are now assigned to the Pacific but that number will fall to five when the USS Enterprise retires this year.

The number will return to six when the new carrier USS Gerald R. Ford is completed in 2015.

The U.S. Navy had a fleet of 282 ships, including support vessels, as of March. That is expected to slip to about 276 over the next two years before beginning to rise toward the goal of a 300-ship fleet, according to a 30-year Navy shipbuilding projection released in March.

But officials warned that fiscal constraints and problems with cost overruns could make it difficult to attain the goal.

Regional partnerships

Panetta underscored the breadth of the U.S. commitment to the Asia-Pacific, noting treaty alliances with Japan, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines and Australia as well as partnerships with India, Singapore, Indonesia and others.

He said the United States would attempt to build on those partnerships with cooperative arrangements like the rotational deployment agreement it has with Australia and is working on with the Philippines.

Panetta said Washington also would work to increase the number and size of bilateral and multilateral military training exercises it conducts in the region. Officials said last year the United States carried out 172 such exercises in the region.

Pentagon wants to fast-track genetic engineering

nextgov.com | Jun 1, 2012

By Dawn Lim

The Pentagon’s venture capital arm awarded $17.8 million to seven research institutions in May to develop basic genetic building blocks and other easy-to-deploy biological tools to make it easier for scientists to create new medicines and materials.

The funding was through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s research and development program Living Foundries. The project enlists scientists to develop ways to accelerate the process of designing and testing biological materials “by at least 10x in both time and cost” in a field where “the state of the art development cycle for engineering a new biologically manufactured product often takes 7+ years and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to a request for proposals.

DARPA wants to bring efficiency and standardization to a laborious process of genetic engineering that has been largely individualized and dependent on the practices of different labs. It is funding ways to develop an “engineering framework to biology” that can “introduce new architectures and tools” for genetic engineering. For instance, if basic synthetic protein structures could be devised that scientist could play with immediately, they wouldn’t have to mine and harvest naturally occurring genes, speeding up the rate at which new vaccines and materials can be genetically created.

“The outcome should be an open technology platform that integrates these tools and capabilities, allowing new designs to rapidly move from conception to execution,” the solicitation states.

The largest recipients of funding so far are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which got about $5.9 million, the J. Craig Venter Institute, which received $4 million in funding, and Stanford University, which was awarded $3.2 million, contracting databases show. Other recipients include Harvard College, the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, the California Institute of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin.

Zombie apocalypse? CDC says not to worry, despite strange string of incidents

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says we shouldn’t worry about zombies prowling around and gnawing at your flesh, like these characters from the AMC zombie drama “The Walking Dead.” Greg Nicotero/AMC

Star-Ledger | Jun 1, 2012

By Brent Johnson

If the news has you worried lately that a zombie apocalypse may soon be under way, don’t panic.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, you’re not likely to find the dead walking around, gnawing at your flesh.

“CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms),” agency spokesman David Daigle said in an e-mail to The Huffington Post today.

Yes, you read that right: The federal agency aimed to protect the United States from disease outbreaks has officially weighed in on the possibility of actual zombies.

Feds vs. Zombies: CDC officially denies ‘Zombie Apocalypse”

The comment comes after a string of strange incidents involving seemingly non-human behavior over the last week.

• In Miami, a naked man was shot by police after eating the face of another man on the side of a highway.

• In Maryland, a college student told investigators he ate the heart and brain of a dismembered body found in his home.

• In Hackensack, a man stabbed himself and threw pieces of his intestines at police.

• And in Canada, police are searching for a porn actor who allegedly killed a young man with an ice pick, dismembered the body and then raped and ate flesh from the corpse.

Apparently, people feared this might all be connected: The phrase “Zombie apocalypse” trended on both Twitter and Google in recent days.

Zombie Apocalypse Not Caused by Virus, CDC Claims

Rudy Eugene, 31, shot and killed after attacking homeless man and eating his face. (PHOTO:Twitter/Diario DiaaDia ‏)

christianpost.com | Jun 1, 2012

By Christine Thomasos

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) denies that there is any existence of zombies, despite public speculation stemming from various cases of cannibalism this week.

Last Saturday, a Miami man was shot dead by police after he was seen naked, growling and consuming the flesh of a homeless man’s face. On Sunday, a man in New Jersey reportedly stabbed himself 50 times before throwing his flesh and intestines at police officers. On Tuesday, a Maryland man told authorities that he had eaten the heart and brain of his roommates.

While many have been speculating about the events, “Zombie Apocalypse” became a trending term on search engines this week. Still, the CDC denies that zombies exist.

A zombie, by defition in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is: “A person held to resemble the so-called walking dead.”

When reports surfaced that many of the assailants involved in the recent crimes had consumed human flesh, news outlets began to refer to them as zombies.

“The CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms),” CDC spokesman David Daigle told The Huffington Post.

However, Gawker reported about a “mysterious rash” in a Hollywood, Fla., school earlier this month along with an unknown chemical that sent five people to the hospital at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. While the HazMat investigation crew was unable to provide conclusive data concerning the two incidents, some believed they were related to zombie activity.

However, Daigle said there are many factors that could cause a “Zombie Apocalypse” outside of exposure to chemicals and viruses.

“Films have included radiation as well as mutations of existing conditions such as prions, mad-cow disease, measles, and rabies,” the CDC spokesman said.

While authorities have stated that 31-year-old Rudy Eugene, known as the “Miami Zombie,” may have eaten the flesh of a homeless man’s face after ingesting a cocktail of drugs called “bath salt,” his friends do not believe this could have been possible.

“It had to be some sort of drug that somebody must have slipped on him, because Rudy wouldn’t so much as pop a Tylenol pill,” Eugene’s friend Bobby Chery told CBS.

The results of toxicology tests have yet to be determined in the cases of the men engaging in zombie-like behavior. Although the CDC has not acknowledged that any of the cases involved actual zombies, the agency still has available a zombie preparedness section on its website that features books and kits.

The section was launched earlier this year as part of a campaign to educate the public about preparedness for certain hazards.

“If you are generally well equipped to deal with a ‘zombie apocalypse’ you will be prepared for a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake, or terrorist attack,” CDC director director Dr. Ali Khan said in a statement on the website.

Will Your Future Be Full of Robot Assassins and Spy Aircraft?

With Its “Roadmap” in Tatters, The Pentagon Detours to Terminator Planet

A Drone-Eat-Drone World

At the end of World War II, General Henry “Hap” Arnold of the U.S. Army Air Forces praised American pilots for their wartime performance, but suggested their days might be numbered.  “The next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all,” he explained.  The future of combat aviation, he announced, would be “different from anything the world has ever seen.”

alternet.org | Jun 2, 2012

By Nick Turse

Today’s armed drones are actually the weak sisters of the weapons world.  Even the Reaper is slow, clumsy, unarmored, generally unable to perceive threats around it, and — writes defense expert Winslow Wheeler — “fundamentally incapable of defending itself.”  While Reapers have been outfitted with missiles for theoretical air-to-air combat capabilities, those armaments would be functionally useless in a real-world dogfight.

Similarly, in a 2011 report, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board admitted that modern air defense systems “would quickly decimate the current Predator/Reaper fleet and be a serious threat against the high-flying Global Hawk.”  Unlike that MQ-1000 of 2030, today’s top drone would be a sitting duck if any reasonably armed enemy wanted to take it on.  In this sense, as in many others, it compares unfavorably to current manned combat aircraft.

The Navy’s even newer MQ-8B Fire Scout, a much-hyped drone helicopter that has been tested as a weapons platform, has also gone bust.  Not only was one shot down in Libya last year, but repeated crashes have caused the Navy to ground the robo-copter “for the indefinite future.”

Even the highly classified RQ-170 Sentinel couldn’t stay airborne over Iran during a secret mission that suddenly became very public last year.  Whether or not an Iranian attack brought down the drone, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board report makes it clear that there are numerous methods by which remotely piloted aircraft can potentially be thwarted or downed, from the use of lasers and dazzlers to blind or damage sensors to simple jammers to disrupt global positioning systems, not to mention a wide range of cyber-attacks, the jamming of commercial satellite communications, and the spoofing or hijacking of drone data links.

Smaller tactical unmanned aircraft may be even more susceptible to low-tech attacks, not to mention constrained in their abilities and cumbersome to use.  Sergeant Christopher Harris, an Army drone pilot and infantryman, described the limitations of the larger of the two hand-launched drones he’s operated in Afghanistan this way: the 13-pound Puma was best used from an observation post with some elevation; it only had a 12-mile range and, though theoretically possible to take on patrol, was “a beast to carry around” once the weight of extra batteries and equipment was factored in.

Terminators of Tomorrow?

As for the future, the Air Force’s 2011-2036 Roadmap has already hit a major detour.  In 2010, Air Force magazine breathlessly announced, “Early in the next decade, the Air Force will deploy a new, stealthy RPA — currently called the MQ-X — capable of surviving in heavily defended airspace and performing a wide variety of ISR [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance] and strike missions.”

Indeed, the 2011 Roadmap lists the MQ-X as the future of Air Force drones.  In February 2012 however, Lieutenant General Larry James told an Aviation Week-sponsored conference: “At this point… we don’t plan, in the near term, to invest in any sort of MQ-X like program.”  Instead, James said, the Air Force will be content simply to upgrade the Reaper fleet and watch the Navy’s development of its Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike or UCLASS drone to see if it soars or, like so many RPAs, crashes and burns.

The Holy Grail of drone ops is the ability of an aircraft to linger over suspected target areas for long durations.  But ultra-long-term loitering operations still remain in the realm of fantasy.  Admittedly, the Pentagon’s blue skies research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is pursuing an ambitious drone project to provide intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and “communication missions over an area of interest” for five or more years at a time.  The project, dubbed “Vulture,” is meant to provide satellite-like capabilities “in an aircraft package.”

Right now, it sounds downright unlikely.

While the Air Force has had a hush-hush unmanned space plane orbiting the Earth for more than a year, much like a standard satellite, the longest a U.S. military drone has reportedly stayed aloft within the planet’s atmosphere is a little more than336 hours.  Plans for ultra-long duration flights took a major hit last year, according to scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and defense giant Northrop Grumman.

In an effort to “to increase UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] sortie duration from days to months while increasing available electrical power at least two-fold,” according to a 2011 report made public by the Federation of American Scientists’Secrecy News, the Sandia and Northrop Grumman researchers identified a technology that “would have provided system performance unparalleled by other existing technologies.”  In a year in which the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster turned a swath of Japan into an irradiated no-go zone, the use of that mystery technology, never named in the report but assumed to be nuclear power, was deemed untenable due to “current political conditions.”

With the Pentagon now lobbying the Federal Aviation Administration to open U.S. airspace to its robotic aircraft and ever more articles emerging about dronecrashes, don’t bet on nuclear-powered, long-loitering drones appearing anytime soon, nor on many of the other major promised innovations in Drone World to come online in the near term either.

From Dystopian Fiction to Dystopian Reality

Until recently, drones looked like a can’t-miss technology primed for big budgetincreases and revolutionary advances, but all that’s changing fast.  “Realistic expectations are for zero growth in the unmanned systems funding,” Weatherington explained by email.  “Most increases will be in technical innovations improving application of delivered systems on the battlefield, and driving down the cost of ownership.”

Major Jeffrey Poquette of the Army’s Small Unmanned Air Systems Product Office talked about just such an effort.  By the late summer, he said, the Army planned to introduce more sophisticated sensors, including the ability to track targets more easily, in its four-pound Raven surveillance drones.  Put less politely, what this means is no roll-outs of sophisticated new drone systems or revolutionary new drone technology: the Army will simply upgrade a glorified model airplane that first took flight more than a decade ago.

Sci-fi it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean that nothing will change in the world of drone warfare.

The Terminator films weren’t exactly original in predicting a future of unmanned planes dominating the world’s skies.  At the end of World War II, General Henry “Hap” Arnold of the U.S. Army Air Forces praised American pilots for their wartime performance, but suggested their days might be numbered.  “The next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all,” he explained.  The future of combat aviation, he announced, would be “different from anything the world has ever seen.”

The most salient and accurate of Arnold’s predictions was not, however, his forecast about drone warfare.  Pilotless planes had taken flight years before the Wright Brothers launched their manned airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, and drones would not become a signature piece of American weaponry until the 2000s.  Instead, Arnold’s faith in a “next war” — a clear departure from thesentiments of so many Americans after World War I — proved accurate again and again.  Over the following decades, American aircraft would strike in North Korea, South Korea, Indonesia, Guatemala, Cuba, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq (again), Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen (again), Libya (again), and the Philippines.  New technologies came and went, air strikes were the constant.

In Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and the Philippines, the U.S. deployed pilotless planes as per Arnold’s other prediction.  From Afghanistan onward, all of the countries that have experienced American air power have also experienced lethal drone attacks — just how many is unknown because figures on drone strikes are kept secret “for security reasons,” the Air Force’s Spires recently told TomDispatch.  What we do know is that drone attacks have increased radically over the years.  “More” has been the name of the game.

Still, barely a decade after our drone wars began, dreams of Terminator-esque efficiency and technological perfection are all but dead, even if the drone itself is increasingly embedded in our world.  Fantasies of autonomous drones and submarines fighting robot wars off the coast of Africa are already fading for any near-term future.  But drone warfare is here to stay.  Count on drones to be an essential part of the American way of war for a long time to come.

Air Force contracting documents suggest that the estimated five Reaper sorties flown each day in 2012 will jump to 66 per day by 2016.  What that undoubtedly means is more countries with drones flying over them, more drone bases, more crashes, more mistakes.  What we’re unlikely to see is armed drones scoring decisive military victories, offering solutions to complex foreign-policy problems, or even providing an answer to the issue of terrorism, despite the hopes of policymakers and the military brass.

Keep in mind as well that those global skies are going to fill with the hunter-killer drones of other nations in what could soon enough become a drone-eat-drone world.  With that still largely in the future, however, the Pentagon continues to glow with enthusiasm over the advantages drones offer the U.S.

Regarding the importance of military robots, for instance, the Pentagon’s Dyke Weatherington explained, “Combatant commanders and warfighters place value in the inherent features of unmanned systems — especially their persistence, versatility, and reduced risk to human life.”

On that last point, of course, Weatherington is only thinking about American military personnel and American lives.  Tomorrow’s drone warfare will likely mean “more” in one other area: more dead civilians.  We’ve left behind the fiction of Hollywood for a less high-tech but distinctly dystopian reality.  It isn’t quite the movies and it isn’t what the Pentagon mapped out, but it indisputably provides a clear path to a grim and grimy Terminator Planet.

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Mind Wars: How the military wants to control our brains

The routine revelations of military atrocities in Afghanistan might lead one to question whether ethicists can be any different from priests blessing the troops before they go into battle.

Mind Wars by Jonathan D Moreno – review

guardian.co.uk | Jun 1, 2012

by Steven Rose

Science long ago struck its Faustian bargain with the military. From Archimedes and Leonardo to the physicists of the Manhattan project, Vietnam’s electronic battlefield and the computer-controlled drones over Afghanistan, the lineage is well known. Now it is the turn of the neurosciences to be recruited into the asymmetric wars of the 21st century.

The new brain sciences offer methods to enhance the fighting capabilities of one’s own troops (war-fighters, in today’s military jargon) and to degrade those of the enemy. The technologies range from the biochemical to the electro-magnetic. They promise novel methods of surveillance and intelligence gathering – not just in traditional war zones abroad but also in controlling an unruly citizenry at home. A line once drawn between the military and the police is being redrawn as wars abroad return in the form of urban terrorism and riot to haunt the heartlands of the old imperial powers.

Many of these developments are veiled in secrecy. A rare insight into their development came in October 2002, when a group of Chechen rebels invaded the Nord Ost theatre in Moscow, taking the 850 theatre-goers hostage. Two days later, in an abortive rescue attempt, Russian special forces pumped an opioid gas, fentanyl, into the theatre’s ventilation system before storming it. The gas, supposedly non-lethal, killed at least 129 of the hostages; all the Chechens were shot.

What is closed elsewhere, however, is far more open in the US, where the military is happy to reveal much about its thinking. A central player is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which for decades has funded military research projects straddling the borderline between practicability and science fiction. Darpa’s activities have been followed for much of this period by Jonathan Moreno, bioethicist and historian, who has been in the privileged insider/outsider position that gives him both access and freedom to comment. His new book, Mind Wars, updates his earlier accounts of the military’s wars on the mind to bring us chilling news of Darpa’s latest projects. To these, he is an excellent and authoritative guide. However, he is cautious and less than surefooted about the politics, as when he describes Bertrand Russell as a socialist – a label that would have appalled and astonished the late earl in equal measure.

So what’s on offer? One priority is to enhance the efficiency of one’s own troops. US pilots flying bombing missions over Iraq and Afghanistan have already used Modafinil to keep them alert on long flights and Ritalin to enhance attention. Asked to suggest military priorities for brain research, the US National Research Council pressed for the development of improved cognitive enhancers to add to the existing drugs. Might it be possible to enhance intelligence by tapping directly into the brain? Smart soldiers for the age of smart weaponry? How about a helmet incorporating a hairnet of electrodes to read off the brain’s electrical activity? Or a brain-computer interface to “analyse intelligence information, improve motivation and accelerate learning”, as well as a warfighter’s ability to “detect and identify threats rapidly and at a distance”? Similar interfaces might enable soldiers brain-damaged or paralysed after a roadside bomb explosion to recover some function, coupling the brain’s electrical activity to the movement of a prosthetic limb. One Darpa project seeks to restore memory loss in brain-injured soldiers by bypassing the damaged brain regions via computer inputs. And for those traumatised by the horrors of war, the military is exploring “forgetting” drugs to erase painful memories. As is so often the case the spur of war advances medicine, and such brain prostheses and drugs are likely to become available for civilians too.

As for the enemy, although lethal chemicals are already banned under international conventions, the non- or, more accurately, the less-lethals, such as fentanyl, inhabit a grey area waiting to be exploited. During the 1960s the US military hit on a drug they claimed would disorientate and confuse an enemy. Codenamed BZ, it worked a bit like LSD, and a film was produced that showed troops exposed to the substance collapsing in laughter, throwing their rifles down and ignoring military orders. Unfortunately army chiefs seem to have been too cautious to employ it.

Today a whole new generation beckons, euphemistically named calmatives to the outside world (and to the insiders spoken of as “on the floor” or “off the rocker”). To avoid any suggestion that they contravene international conventions, the funding has come from the civil budget as the “calmatives” are claimed to be intended for crowd and riot control. International agreements only cover the use of chemicals in war, not for police use.

In an unusual burst of openness, the British Home Office announced in April that it was expanding its “non-lethal” armoury to include guns firing pellets that cause intense burning sensations – already routinely and sometimes lethally used by the Israeli military against Palestinian demonstrators as part of its “active denial strategy”.

Also under research are various forms of electromagnetic radiation. Could an enemy be disoriented by a microwave beam? Could thoughts and intentions be read at a distance? As Moreno comments, many US citizens already believe that their brains are being read or manipulated by the surveillance state – and judging by my email inbox, a fair number on this side of the Atlantic share the suspicion. For decades Darpa has been interested in microwave radiation devices that could disorient and pacify opponents, or, even better, read their intentions and modify their thoughts.

Communication between nerve cells in the brain is electrochemical, and where there is an electric current, there is a magnetic field at right angles to it. Interfere with the magnetic field and the brain signals are disrupted. At the current stage of the technology, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) requires the magnets to be placed directly around a person’s head and focused on specific brain regions. In clinical trials such stimulation has been used to treat depression, OCD and Parkinson’s disease. But could such devices read minds and predict intentions?

Moreno investigates the companies that claim to use brain imaging techniques to do so. “Brain fingerprinting” records the brain’s electrical activity to decide whether a person has “terrorist thoughts” or has visited “a terrorist training camp”; NolieMRI offers a sophisticated lie detection system. Most neuroscientists regard such prospectuses as snake oil, and Moreno shares this scepticism, even if Darpa doesn’t.

He ends his book with a plea for “a new role for neuroethics” which he hopes might be shared by military and the neurotechnology industry alike, and praises Darpa’s willingness to bring ethicists into its discussions. The routine revelations of military atrocities in Afghanistan might lead one to question whether ethicists can be any different from priests blessing the troops before they go into battle.

Obama embraces disputed definition of ‘civilian’ in drone attacks

Tribesmen hold pieces of a missile at the site of a drone attack in Mir Ali, Pakistan, on Jan. 24, 2009 — just days after President Barack Obama’s inauguration. Reuters, file

MSNBC | May 30, 2012

By Chris Woods

LONDON — Two U.S. reports published Tuesday provide significant insights into President Obama’s personal and controversial role in the escalating covert U.S. drone war in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

In a major extract from Daniel Klaidman’s forthcoming book Kill Or Capture, the author reveals extensive details of how secret U.S. drone strikes have evolved under Obama – and how the president knew of civilian casualties from his earliest days in office.

The New York Times has also published a key investigation exploring how the Obama Administration runs its secret ‘Kill List’ – the names of those chosen for execution by CIA and Pentagon drones outside the conventional battlefield.

The Times’ report also reveals that President Obama “embraced” a broadening of the term “civilian”, helping to limit any public controversy over “non-combatant” deaths.

As the Bureau’s own data on Pakistan makes clear, the very first covert drone strikes of the Obama presidency, just three days after he took office, resulted in civilian deaths in Pakistan. As many as 19 civilians – including four children – died in two error-filled attacks.

Until now it had been thought that Obama was initially unaware of the civilian deaths. Bob Woodward has reported that the president was only told by CIA chief Michael Hayden that the strikes had missed their High Value Target but had killed “five al Qaeda militants.”

Read more stories from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Now Newsweek correspondent Daniel Klaidman reveals that Obama knew about the civilian deaths within hours. He reports an anonymous participant at a subsequent meeting with the president: “You could tell from his body language that he was not a happy man.” Obama is described aggressively questioning the tactics used.

Yet despite the errors, the president ultimately chose to keep in place the CIA’s controversial policy of using “signature strikes” against unknown militants. That tactic has just been extended to Yemen.

‘Covert’ US drone operation is mapped on Twitter

On another notorious occasion, the article reveals that U.S. officials were aware at the earliest stage that civilians – including “dozens of women and children” – had died in Obama’s first ordered strike in Yemen in December 2009. The Bureau recently named all 44 civilians killed in that attack by cruise missiles.

Full Story

Hundreds of words to avoid using online if you don’t want the government spying on you (and they include ‘pork’, ‘cloud’ and ‘Mexico’)

Revealing: A list of keywords used by government analysts to scour the internet for evidence of threats to the U.S. has been released under the Freedom of Information Act

Department of Homeland Security forced to release list following freedom of information request

Agency insists it only looks for evidence of genuine threats to the U.S. and not for signs of general dissent

Daily Mail | May 26, 2012

By Daniel Miller

The Department of Homeland Security has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.

The intriguing the list includes obvious choices such as ‘attack’, ‘Al Qaeda’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘dirty bomb’ alongside dozens of seemingly innocent words like ‘pork’, ‘cloud’, ‘team’ and ‘Mexico’.

Released under a freedom of information request, the information sheds new light on how government analysts are instructed to patrol the internet searching for domestic and external threats.

The words are included in the department’s 2011 ‘Analyst’s Desktop Binder’ used by workers at their National Operations Center which instructs workers to identify ‘media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities’.

Department chiefs were forced to release the manual following a House hearing over documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit which revealed how analysts monitor social networks and media organisations for comments that ‘reflect adversely’ on the government.

However they insisted the practice was aimed not at policing the internet for disparaging remarks about the government and signs of general dissent, but to provide awareness of any potential threats.

As well as terrorism, analysts are instructed to search for evidence of unfolding natural disasters, public health threats and serious crimes such as mall/school shootings, major drug busts, illegal immigrant busts.

The list has been posted online by the Electronic Privacy Information Center – a privacy watchdog group who filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act before suing to obtain the release of the documents.

In a letter to the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counter-terrorism and Intelligence, the centre described the choice of words as ‘broad, vague and ambiguous’.

They point out that it includes ‘vast amounts of First Amendment protected speech that is entirely unrelated to the Department of Homeland Security mission to protect the public against terrorism and disasters.’

A senior Homeland Security official told the Huffington Post that the manual ‘is a starting point, not the endgame’ in maintaining situational awareness of natural and man-made threats and denied that the government was monitoring signs of dissent.

However the agency admitted that the language used was vague and in need of updating.

Spokesman Matthew Chandler told website: ‘To ensure clarity, as part of … routine compliance review, DHS will review the language contained in all materials to clearly and accurately convey the parameters and intention of the program.’

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE: THE LIST OF KEYWORDS IN FULL

Israel steps up military ties with China

In this Aug. 16, 2011 file photo, Gen. Chen Bingde, chief of the General Staff of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, left, Israel’s President Shimon Peres, center, and Israel military chief, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz pose for the media during a meeting at Peres’ residence in Jerusalem. After a prolonged chill, security ties between Israel and China are warming up. With Israel offering much-needed technical expertise and China representing a huge new market and influential voice in the international debate over Iran’s nuclear program, the two nations have stepped up military cooperation as they patch up a rift caused by a pair of failed arms deals scuttled by the U.S. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue, File)

Israel steps up security ties with China

AP | May 24, 2012

By JOSEF FEDERMAN and CHRISTOPHER BODEEN

JERUSALEM (AP) — After a prolonged chill, security ties between Israel and China are warming up.

With Israel offering much-needed technical expertise and China representing a huge new market and influential voice in the international debate over Iran’s nuclear program, the two nations have stepped up military cooperation as they patch up a rift caused by a pair of failed arms deals scuttled by the U.S.

The improved ties have been highlighted by this week’s visit to Beijing by Israel’s military chief and a training mission to Israel by the Chinese paramilitary force that, among other things, polices the restive Tibetan and Muslim Uighur regions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to travel to China in the coming weeks.

After their meeting Monday, both China’s chief of staff, Gen. Chen Bingde, and his Israeli counterpart, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, hailed the growing ties and held out the possibility of even closer military cooperation.

Chen told the official China Daily that China “attaches importance to the ties with the Israeli military and is willing to make concerted efforts with the Israeli side to deepen pragmatic cooperation.”

In a statement released by the Israeli military, Gantz mentioned a commitment to developing the relationship, including “joint courses that are scheduled to take place.” It did not elaborate.

Such comments are a remarkable turnaround from just a few years ago, when ties deteriorated after the failed arms deals.

Israel and China established diplomatic relations in 1992, and the two countries traded military technology for nearly a decade. Some military analysts believe that Israel helped China develop its J-10 fighter plane during the 1990s, a claim that both countries have denied.

These ties suffered a blow in 2000 when the U.S. pressured Israel to cancel the sale of a sophisticated radar system to China, fearing it could alter the balance of power with Taiwan. The cancellation infuriated China, cost Israel hundreds of millions of dollars, and frayed ties.

Then, in 2005, the U.S. persuaded Israel not to service spare parts for unmanned aircraft drones already sold to China, concerned that it would upgrade China’s airborne anti-radar capability. Israel officials say that Israel has since halted weapons sales to China.

But in recent months, relations have begun to improve. In June 2011, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak traveled to China. Chen, the Chinese military chief, visited Israel in August, and in December, Israel’s paramilitary Border Police unit hosted a delegation from the People’s Armed Police.

During the monthlong course, “cadets were taught a variety of information, with an emphasis on fighting terror, dealing with disturbances, self defense, open field combat and more,” according to an Israeli police statement. It was the first such exercise, police said.

This newfound cooperation has raised concerns among human rights advocates. Israel’s Border Police serve on the front lines of anti-Israel demonstrations in the West Bank and have been accused of using excessive force dispersing crowds. It denies the allegations.

The People’s Armed Police, or PAP, has also been accused of using excessive force, particularly in Tibet, a western region where the indigenous Buddhist population has pushed for independence.

Policing Tibet is a small part of a challenging mission. Believed to have as many as 1 million members, the PAP is responsible for asserting government control over a rapidly changing society beset by soaring numbers of protests, strikes and ethnic unrest by Tibetans and Muslim Uighurs on China’s Central Asian frontier.

Set up in the early 1980s to take over domestic security from the armed forces, the PAP has been derided for much of its history as undisciplined. The units proved unfit to handle the Tiananmen Square democracy demonstrations in 1989, forcing the Communist Party to call in the People’s Liberation Army.

In the past decade, the government has launched a full-force upgrade. It now has rapid-response, counterterrorism, anti-hijacking and other specialized units.

Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said PAP units engaged in “widespread abuses” in putting down a mass Tibetan uprising in 2008, using live ammunition against unarmed protesters, disappearances and other acts of disproportionate brutality.

He said the Israeli training “must include a human rights component, such as the principle of proportionate use of force.”

Israeli officials rejected any notion of wrongdoing, saying that all cooperation was “transparent” and done with the full knowledge of the U.S. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a sensitive diplomatic issue.

The Chinese Embassy in Tel Aviv did not respond to a request for comment.

According to Israeli diplomats and analysts, the interests on both sides are clear. Israel has a strong interest in getting closer to a rising world power, while China is interested in Israeli military and technological know-how.

“I’m sure Israel does whatever it can to let the Chinese know that despite limitations on military transfers, Israel still has a strong will to attain good relations,” said Yoram Evron, a China expert at Haifa University and the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv think tank.

He said he believes the warming ties were initiated by the Chinese, who were caught off guard by the Arab Spring protests convulsing the region in the past year and a half.

“Due to the Arab Spring, China may have the impression, a stronger impression than before, that Israel is relatively stable compared with other players in the region,” he said.

An Israeli diplomat involved in Asian affairs said the security ties are part of a larger blossoming of relations. China is now Israel’s third-largest trade partner, after the European Union and United States. Bilateral trade exceeded $8 billion last year, roughly 20 percent higher than the previous year.

While those figures are minuscule for China, the diplomat noted that China is very interested in some key industries in which Israel has expertise. He cited Israeli water technologies in agriculture, desalination and wastewater management.

He said Israel has signed number of trade agreements with China in recent years, including a new scholarship program to bring 250 Chinese university students to Israel annually. It also has expanded its diplomatic presence in China with a new consulate in the city of Guangzhou, and another one set to open in Chengdu next year.

Israeli officials acknowledged their motives go beyond trade. They said they routinely raise concerns about Iran’s nuclear program with China, which is both a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council and which relies on Iran for roughly 10 percent of its oil supply.

Israel, like the West, believes Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb, and has hinted it will attack Iran if it concludes that international diplomatic efforts to stop Iran have failed. An Israeli attack could disrupt the flow of oil and send global energy prices skyrocketing, a nightmare scenario for China.

So far, the Israeli lobbying has yielded mixed results. China has helped pass four sets of economic sanctions against Iran, but has tried to dilute the language.

“We would like to see them taking more concrete steps because they have clout over Iran,” the diplomat said. “We explain that if the issue is not resolved, it might affect stability in the Middle East.”

“The Emergency State” undermining American legal and moral foundations

Security is a rallying cry for patriotism, however much it undermines the country’s legal and moral foundations.

“The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at all Costs” by David Unger and “Permanent Emergency: Inside the TSA and the Fight for the Future of American Security” by Kip Hawley and Nathan Means

washingtonpost.com | May 25, 2012

By Karen J. Greenberg, Published

Last year a Newsweek article made public President Obama’s reading list. Its message was promising: A third of the books focused on former presidencies. Yet according to “The Emergency State,” David C. Unger’s ambitious and valuable overview of 20th-century presidents and national security, Obama has unfortunately picked up the bad habits of his predecessors. They have created what Unger calls emergency state government — policies by which America’s security interests are defined with an ever-increasing expansiveness. Over the past century, Unger argues, America’s presidents have incrementally institutionalized the emergency state and in so doing have weakened the country morally, constitutionally, financially and most of all in terms of security itself.

According to Unger, a longtime foreign affairs editorial writer for the New York Times, the rationale for the emergency state emerged in the early 1900s with Woodrow Wilson’s evangelical promise to make the world safe for democracy. But it took the personality and genius of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the godfather of the emergency state, to put into place its more unsavory elements. In the name of national security, FDR enhanced executive power, crafted foreign policy in secret and devious ways, authorized far-reaching and possibly illegal policies against Japanese Americans, and misled the public about his intentions and behind-the-scenes directives.

After FDR, both Republican and Democratic presidents set the pattern of the emergency state. Harry Truman “locked in [its] policies and politics” by waging an all-encompassing cold war rather than pursuing a more nuanced relationship with Soviet Russia, and overseeing the passage of the 1947 National Security Act, which created the architecture of emergency state government: the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council. Eisenhower authorized the CIA’s policy of toppling governments around the globe. And, in a move that Unger finds unforgiveable, John F. Kennedy made the executive unaccountable for its decisions by creating the position of national security adviser, a post subject to neither congressional confirmation nor oversight.

For Unger, all this undermines the Constitution and violates the intent of the country’s founders and 19th-century presidents to steer clear of foreign entanglements. By the time Lyndon Johnson entered the White House, all the elements of the emergency state were in place, and each successive president chose entanglements and evasion over transparency, legality and independence. Following “his political mentor and presidential model,” FDR, Johnson lied to the public about his intentions to escalate the American presence in Vietnam, bypassing Congress and relying on covert operations — and ultimately deciding not to seek reelection in 1968 as a result. Richard Nixon and, to a lesser extent, Gerald Ford aimed to strengthen the emergency state but, with Watergate and its aftermath, accomplished the opposite, “discredit[ing] three crucial pillars of the emergency state — the White House, the CIA and the FBI.” Then came Jimmy Carter, singular in eschewing the deceitful and destructive ways of the emergency state but politically naive and ultimately unwilling to give up presidential powers. He tried his best to pull the country out of the dark hole into which it had fallen but was too ineffectual to do so.

It was up to Ronald Reagan to find a way to restore the glory days. Under his command, the emergency state reasserted itself with renewed strength, along with the telltale signs of secrecy, deceit and disregard for the law. With Iran-contra, Reagan’s NSC bypassed Congress and the secretaries of state and defense and reclaimed the confrontational stance taken by Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. Once the Soviet empire — America’s premier rationale for military expansion worldwide — crumbled, it was left to George H.W. Bush to face the challenges of a new kind of foreign policy: one that focused on a new enemy, the “rogue state.”

But no one seems to disappoint Unger as much as Bill Clinton, “the first American president born under the emergency state.” Armed with the leadership qualities of FDR, the global vision of Eisenhower and Nixon, and a Carter-like suspicion of the emergency state, Clinton nonetheless preferred “enlargement” to downsizing. He encouraged Americans who, “by 1993 . . . were politically addicted to the role of leader of the free world,” to intervene around the globe in places peripheral to U.S. interests, such as Africa, Haiti and Bosnia.

Unger’s disappointment overlooks the fact that, in his narrative, Clinton, while committed to expanding America’s global dominance, does not invoke the more nefarious mechanisms of the national security state, such as implementing unconstitutional measures or encasing foreign policy in a never-ending web of secrecy. To maintain his position that all recent presidents have furthered excesses in the name of national security, Unger holds Clinton accountable not for constitutional violations or corruption, but largely for damaging America’s economy by ignoring foreign-policy-related economic challenges, refusing to curtail the military budget and failing to protect the domestic economy, which essentially “hollowed out the remaining competitive strengths of American industry.”

Unger gives disappointingly brief treatment to the two most recent presidencies and, in so doing, unfairly conflates them. One might criticize Obama for failing to make good on his promise to close Guantanamo or to restore rights generally in the war on terror. But to link his tactics to those of the Bush administration when it comes to foreign policy decisions obfuscates rather than enlightens. To give the most glaring example, Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, met repeatedly and secretly with intelligence officials to craft a deceitful story of WMDs in order to lead the country into war with Iraq. This seems a far cry from sanctions and diplomacy that the Obama administration is using in Iran. Here as elsewhere, one can only wonder whether Unger sluffs over distinctions that might make all the difference.

In contrast to Unger’s relentless pessimism, Kip Hawley and Nathan Means’s “Permanent Emergency” provides a more upbeat story by focusing on one piece of the national security apparatus. In memoir fashion, Hawley’s narrative traces the story of the the Transportation Security Administration, created in the immediate wake of Sept. 11, 2001, and charged with improving airport security. In matters of transportation, Hawley demonstrates, the trade-off is not security vs. American values and constitutional protections, but security vs. efficiency, effectiveness and public approval.

By 2004, TSA employees, routinely demoralized by passenger resistance, were overcome by “hopelessness.” Meanwhile, the public was fed up, tired of delays and seemingly indiscriminate searches. In 2005, Hawley inherited an agency whose workers were disgruntled and whose work was thankless.

Hawley’s solution was to professionalize the work by making intelligence a central part of the agency’s mission. After his promotion to administrator, the TSA was newly included in the Department of Homeland Security’s morning intelligence telephone call. Armed with insights into the updated plans of al-Qaeda, Hawley used this information in part to update the agency’s policies and practices.

Hawley’s defensive account of the importance of the TSA extols, among other things, the passions of patriotism as a useful counterterrorism tool. Throughout his narrative he brings to life details of incipient threats around the globe in an effort to justify his agency and to motivate its workers. He brings to the fore the way in which the emergency state that Unger describes trickles down to the average man: Security is a rallying cry for patriotism, however much it undermines the country’s legal and moral foundations.

Whether observed from the heights of the executive branch or the grittiness of the airport security line, the security agenda that defines 21st-century America continues to challenge the sense of safety and trust in its institutions that its citizens deserve.