Mini-Me: Thousands call on Turkey’s leader to quit — US Swath of Destruction Absorbs Its Gladio B Ally?
07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace IntelligenceHuh?
Thousands call on Turkey’s leader to quit
Protests swept Turkey on Friday and deep into Saturday morning as thousands of protesters called on prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to resign.
What began as a demonstration against a shopping mall project turned into one of the biggest challenges in recent years to Mr Erdogan’s rule, as whole districts of Istanbul resounded to the banging of pots and pans into the early hours of the morning. Drivers hit car horns in support of the demonstrators.
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However, the size of the protests, and the speed with which they grew, appeared to be a reaction not just to the police crackdown on the initial demonstration in Gezi Park but to Mr Erdogan’s general approach to government.
“Gezi park is the new Tahrir of the region,” said Koray Caliskan, a Turkish columnist, in reference to the epicentre of Egypt’s 2011 revolution.
Berto Jongman: DARPA Weaponizes (Sort Of) the Internet — Has the Time Come to Close DARPA?
04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Corruption, DoD, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, MilitaryThe article is long and certainly worth reading, with many links. Below are two comments that capture the hacker view of this initiative.
This Pentagon Project Makes Cyberwar as Easy as Angry Birds
WIRED Magazine, 28 May 2014
EXTRACT (Comments):
BillStewart2012 ErikasBulbasaur • 3 days ago
Yes, it's the camo-colored-hat skript k1dd13 tool. And is it going to check whether it has the required warrants or legal authorization before launching an attack on a target, or just fire away? I've got some guesses..
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Syria: Assad on Top – With Russian & Christian Support
08 Wild Cards, Ethics, IO Deeds of War, Peace IntelligenceSyria: Fighting. Press service reports indicate that the combined Syrian army and Hizballah forces have control of most, or all, of the town of al-Qusayr. Government claims of success were matched by opposition pleas for assistance from other areas.
Comment: Control of Qusayr means control of Homs Governate and city, which had been in opposition control for months. Opposition groups remain in control of the northern border with Turkey and parts of eastern Syria bordering Iraq, mainly because the government decided to abandon areas too difficult to hold with limited resources.
Peace talks. The various opposition groups are so fractious that they have been unable to agree on representation at the US-Russian sponsored peace talks in Geneva next month. As a result, the main opposition political group announced it would boycott the talks, ostensibly because the Syrian government would not comply with its condition that Asad step down first. This condition is an attempt to put the best face on the failure to craft a united position and presence for talks.
Asad's interview. President Bashar al-Asad announced that the Syrian Army has accomplished major achievements in facing militants on the ground. In an interview broadcast on the Al-Manar television channel on 30 May, he confirmed that the military scales have completely turned in favor of the army. Al-Asad said that “Syria and Hizballah are a single axis,” adding that there are “groups of Hizballah fighters in border areas of Lebanon, but the Syrian Army is doing the fighting, running the battle in the face of the armed groups, and will continue this battle until they vanquish those that he described as terrorists.
Al-Asad denounced the roles of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar in supporting and funding armed groups and he spoke of the presence of nearly 100,000 militants with different Arab and foreign nationalities that entered with the support of these countries.
Continue reading “Syria: Assad on Top – With Russian & Christian Support”
David Swanson: “Dirty Wars” An Anti-War Blockbuster
Cultural Intelligence, IO Deeds of War, Peace IntelligenceThere's no end to the pro-war movies we're subjected to: countless celebrations of bombs, guns, and torture. They come in the form of cartoons, science-fiction, historical fiction, dramas, and reenactments pre-censored by the CIA. Movies show us the excitement without the suffering. War in our theaters resembles almost anything else more than it resembles war.
Journalists appear in our movies too, usually as comic figures, talking-head air-heads, numskulls, and sycophants. In this case, the depiction is much more accurate, at least of much of what passes for journalism.
But, starting in June, a remarkable anti-war / pro-journalism film will be showing — even more remarkably — in big mainstream movie theaters. Dirty Wars (I've read the bookand seen the movie and highly recommend both) may be one of the best educational outreach opportunities the peace movement has had in a long time. The film, starring Jeremy Scahill, is about secretive aspects of U.S. wars: imprisonment, torture, night raids, drone kills.
Dirty Wars won the Cinematography Award for U.S. Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival 2013 and, recently, the Grand Jury Prize at the Boston Independent Film Festival. Variety calls it “jaw-dropping … [with] the power to pry open government lockboxes.” The Sundance jury said it is “one of the most stunning looking documentaries [we've] ever seen.” I agree.
Typically, information that does not support our government's war agenda appears only on the printed page, or perhaps in a power-point presented to the usual heroic crowd of aging white activists gathered outside the range of corporate radar. But stroll through an airport and you'll see hardcopies of Dirty Wars displayed at the front of the bookstores. Check out the movie listings in June and July, and you're likely to see Dirty Wars listed right alongside the latest super-hero, murderfest, sequel of a sequel of some predictable Hollywood hackery.
I wrote a review of the book some time back, after which I picked up a job helping to promote the film. But I'm promoting the film because it's a great film, which is different from calling it a great film because I'm paid to promote it. And my interest remains less in selling the film tickets than in recruiting those who see the film into an active movement to change the reality on which the film reports.
This is not Zero Dark Thirty. You can't walk into Dirty Wars supporting drone strikes, night raids, and cluster bombs and walk out with your beliefs reinforced. Most viewers of Dirty Wars will leave the theater believing that U.S. wars make the United States less safe. In that moment, when people who are usually otherwise engaged have come to realize that the Department of So-Called Defense endangers us (on top of impoverishing us) is when we should sign those people up to take part in activities the following week and month and year.
The film opens by contrasting embedded war journalism — the regurgitation of spoon-fed propaganda — with what the viewer is about to see. And what we see is investigative journalism. The film begins by providing us with an understanding of night raids, including from the point of view of family members who have survived them. We see the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff tell Scahill that night raids that kills civilians should not be investigated. And then we see Scahill investigate them, his search leading him to secretive branches of the U.S. military involved in a variety of dirty tactics in various countries.
The film does have a failing. It doesn't tell people anything they can do about the horrors they're exposed to. But, of course, activism is possible and far more effective than any journalism — good or bad — will tell you.
Continue reading “David Swanson: “Dirty Wars” An Anti-War Blockbuster”
Bill Lind: 4th Generation Warfare is Alive and Well — And Washington is Still Deaf, Dumb, and Blined
02 Diplomacy, 10 Security, 11 Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Officers CallWilliam S. Lind
25 May 2013
So “the world simply didn’t develop along the lines it (4GW) proposed”? How do you say that in Syriac?
The basic error in Chet Richards’ piece of April 19, “Is 4GW dead?” is confusing the external and internal worlds. Internally, in the U.S. military and the larger defense and foreign policy establishment, 4GW is dead, as is maneuver warfare and increasingly any connection to the external world. The foreign policy types can only perceive a world of states, in which their job is to promote the Wilsonian nee Jacobin, follies of “democracy” and “universal human rights.” They are in fact, 4GW’s allies, in that their demand for “democracy” undermines states, opening the door for more 4GW.
In most of the world, democracy is not an option. The only real options are tyranny or anarchy, and when you work against tyranny, you are working for anarchy. The ghost of bin Laden sends his heartfelt thanks.
Third Generation doctrine has been abandoned, de facto, if not de jure, by the one service that embraced it, the U.S. Marine Corps. The others never gave it a glance. The U.S. military remains and will remain second generation until it disappears from sheer irrelevance coupled with high cost. That is coming much sooner than any of them think.
In the external world, meanwhile, fourth generation war is triumphing on almost all fronts. Somalia appears at the moment to be a setback. But elsewhere, the forces of stateless disorder (and there are many, not just AQ) have much to celebrate. The bottom line that defines victory or defeat for both states and non-states forces is one question: Is there a real state? A quick tour d’horizon shows spreading state failure. Libya is now effectively stateless, thanks to the “democracy” crowd in Europe and Washington. Fourth generation war is spreading from Libya into west Africa, where states are already largely fictions, Syria is now stateless. The Iraq created by the American invasion was always a Potemkin state, and 4GW there is growing fast, in part fueled from Syria. Fourth generation war is again kicking NATO’s and the U.S.’s butt in Afghanistan, and entirely predictable outcome of invading the Graveyard of Empires. Far more dangerously, 4GW elements grow ever stronger in Pakistan, where the state is failing. Even in Egypt, which has been at least a proto-state for 5,000 years, the state is shaky.
In many of these cases, including Egypt and Pakistan, the only element strong enough to hold the state together is the army. But the “democracy” crowd in Washington immediately threatens aid cut-offs, sanctions, etc., if the army acts. Again, the children now running America’s foreign policy are 4GW’s best allies.
Complete post below the line.
NIGHTWATCH: Syria-Lebanon Tribal Sunni vs Shi’Ite War Widens
Government, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, MilitarySyria-Lebanon: According to a Beirut newspaper, the Syrian opposition group affiliated with al Qaida, the Al-Nusrah Front, has distributed a statement announcing that it will commence military operations in Lebanon.
The statement said, “If Hizballah is not deterred from killing our mujahideen brethren in Syria, and if its members do not withdraw from the Syrian areas of Al-Qusayr in three days, we will harshly respond in the different Lebanese territories, particularly in the border areas, Al-Biqa, and Beirut's Southern Suburb, where the rejectionist members of Hizballah are spreading. We will target markets, schools, public institutions, and parks.”
Comment: The term rejectionist is a derogatory description of the Shiites, Hizballah. Syrian opposition sources claim fierce fighting is occurring in al Qusayr, Syria, which is close to the northeastern Lebanon border. Hizballah is fighting in support of the Syrian army forces.
The significance of the statement is that it means al Qaida could have a franchise operating in Lebanon by next week. The Al-Nusrah Front has the capability to carry out this threat and spread the Syrian fighting deeper into Lebanon.
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