Cheng Chengguang, WTF?

Chen Guangcheng Case Lurches Between Triumph, Tragedy, and Fiasco

My recent piece for Asia Times is somewhat more topical than usual, so I’m shooting it out as an e-mail to China Matters readers.

Looking at today’s shenanigans, and Chen’s metamorphosis from brave legal activist to handwringing exile in waiting, I have the distinct impression that people invested in the current freedom fighter vs. tyrant polarity prevailed on Chen to blow this deal up.

Think about it.  If the deal went through and Chen was studying law in Tianjin under the ostentatiously solicitous care of the PRC, what happens to other dissidents who might want asylum?

US Embassy picks up the phone, confirms that Chen is hitting the books and putting on weight, and tells the dissident, no asylum but how about a deal like Chen’s?

I find Chen’s explanation of why he reneged on the deal somewhat unconvincing.

As to his rather belated concern over his wife’s well-being, Chen had already revealed in his video address to Wen Jiabao that local goons in Shandong had rolled his wife in a quilt and used her as a piñata for hours, just for revealing the details of his house arrest to foreign media.  What did he expect they would do when he actually escaped?

The escape itself, is of course a riddle wrapped inside an enigma.  Part of the Chen legend was the intense, up-close surveillance he had to endure.  How did he really evade it?  Was there a deal?  Did that deal blow up too?

Anyway, Chen and his minders have burned their bridges to the Obama administration.  They are already reaching out to the Congress as an alternative to the State Department.  Maybe his brain trust has decided to throw its lot in with the Republican anti-Communists instead of Democratic human rights neo-liberalists.  That might make for some less-than-convivial times if Chen gets that ride on Hillary Clinton’s plane that he’s abjectly begging for.

Here’s the text of my Asia Times piece, which appeared under the title:

Chen’s Switch Spoils Daring US Dance 

If With news reports that legal activist Chen Guangcheng has agreed to be resettled inside China with his family away from his tormenters in Shandong, to an as yet undisclosed university where he can pursue his legal studies, the United States and China probably both breathed sighs of relief.

The United States does not have to scupper its strategic dialogue with China in order to live up to its role as human rights champion and scourge of communist authoritarianism by granting asylum to Chen.

The People’s Republic of China can, however belatedly and grudgingly, have an opportunity for its Judge Bao moment: acting as the benevolent protector of deserving innocents suffering at the hands of brutal and corrupt local authorities (as that venerable jurist has done in countless books and TV serials).

But not so fast.

The sheen went off the deal with alarming speed as reporters and skeptical activists communicated with an increasingly agitated Chen in Chaoyang Hospital in Beijing.  Reunited with his family, he learned from his wife of her harsh treatment in Shandong after his flight, and her desire not to stay in China.   Chen is now saying he wants to come to the United States with his family, in a switch certain to embarrass and irritate the Obama administration.

Chen is receiving a sympathetic hearing, if not encouragement, from Bob Fu of China Aid.  China Aid is a non-profit in Midland, Texas that lobbies for religious freedom and on behalf of Christian house churches in China.  Fu has spoken proudly of his organization’s close relationship with Chen during his difficult years in China.  Fu was perhaps the first person overseas that Chen contacted after his escape.

Mr. Fu would prefer that Chen Guangcheng come to the United States “for some peaceful time” instead of remaining in China, as he told the Texas Tribune well before the deal began to unravel.

Even though Chen declined the offer to come to the United States after his escape, Fu said Chen should reconsider.

“I cannot feel there is a viable option for him to continue in China given the current environment,” Fu said. “My hope is, if Chen is able to get permission from China to have his family members come to the U.S. for some time, some peaceful time, and receive some medical treatment, the U.S. can facilitate that effort.”

One hears echoes of Mr. Fu’s argument in Chen’s statement after he entered Chaoyang Hospital:

The British television program Channel 4 News also interviewed Mr. Chen, who reportedly said: “My biggest wish is to leave the country with my family and rest for a while. I haven’t had a rest day in seven years.”

The US State Department, however, is pushing back across the board at the implication that they slighted Chen’s desires and dumped him back into Chinese hands.  

What started out as a muted triumph for US diplomacy may turn into an episode of unexpected and unwelcome estrangement between the US government and the human rights and democracy activists it wishes to champion, and a win for China if Chen slides uncertainly into exile and irrelevance, his heroic legacy tarnished by an embarrassing fiasco, 

Meanwhile, the Chinese government is allowing Chen to have free access to the press to make a spectacle of his handwringing.   Most recently, CNN:

"I would like to say to President Obama — please do everything you can to get our family out," Chen told CNN, according to a translation of his quote. He also accused U.S. embassy officials of pushing him hard to leave on Wednesday.

"The embassy kept lobbying me to leave and promised to have people stay with me in the hospital, but this afternoon as soon as I checked into the hospital room, I noticed they were all gone."
CNN correspondent Stan Grant said he had interviewed Chen in his Beijing hospital bed at around 3:00 am Thursday (1900 GMT Wednesday) with his wife sitting by his bedside.

 While events sort themselves out in Beijing, conspiracy theorists can start their engines and explore the interesting question of how a blind man, allegedly under video surveillance and with local blocking of cell phones, was able to escape house arrest, evade dozens of goons charged with keeping him bottled up, and rendezvous with a sympathizer to drive away from the town…and have his departure not detected for several days.

Local security was pretty extensive, as Chen himself stated in his video addressed to Premier Wen Jiabao, which he recorded in Beijing after his escape.  As translated by Steven Jiang of CNN:

From what I learned, other than various officials, each team guarding me has more than 20 people. They have three teams with a total of 70 to 80 people. When more netizens tried to visit me recently, they had several hundred people at one time and completely sealed off my village.

Starting with my home, they station a team inside the house and another one outside guarding the four corners. Further out, they block every road leading to my house, all the way to the village entrance. They even have 7 to 8 people guarding bridges in neighboring villages. These corrupt officials draw people from neighboring villages into this and they have cars patrolling areas within a 5-kilometer radius of my village or even further.

Besides all these layers of security around my house -- I think there are 7 to 8 layers -- they have also numbered all the roads leading to my village, going up to 28 with guards assigned to them daily. The whole situation is just so over the top. I understand the number of officials and policemen who participate in my persecution adds up to some 100 people.

Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, an NGO dedicated to ending forced sterilization and abortions, told Asia Times that Chen’s escape was “a miracle”.  That was a characterization that China Aid was happy to echo.

Artist, dissident, and gadfly Ai Weiwei puckishly declared that Chen’s blindness was an advantage in his nighttime escape: “It’s all the same to him.”  But clearly it wasn’t, at least in the matter of physical impediments like ponds and rivers.

Littlejohn told Asia Times that she learned via a Skype session with He Peirong, driver of the vehicle that spirited Chen to Beijing, just prior to her detention by public security personnel, that Chen had taken a spill in some water on his way and showed up soaking wet; news reports in Beijing reported he had also hurt his leg climbing over a wall.

These circumstances beg the question of why he did not bring his (sighted) wife and child along on the escape, especially since an activist claimed that Chen’s subsequent decision to remain inside China was dictated by the threat that his wife would be beaten to death if he tried to leave.

In a video statement Chen made before entering the embassy, he called on Premier Wen Jiabao to order an investigation of his case and the brutal circumstances of his detention, and to assure the safety of his family.

For want of more facts and a better explanation, some news outlets speculate that perhaps Chen’s escape was orchestrated or enabled by the relatively liberal faction of the CCP that is now in ascendancy with the fall of Chongqing kingpin Bo Xilai.  The theory is that Chen’s escape would make security chief and one-time Bo ally Zhou Yongkang look like an idiot, thereby further weakening the hardline faction.

Perry Link, the well-known scholar of China’s democracy movement who assisted Fang Lizhi’s refuge in the US Embassy in 1989, commented to Asia Times on the questions surrounding Chen’s escape:

It's impossible, obviously, that he did it alone.  And clear that some idealistic rights-advocates helped him.  The open question is whether people "inside the system" helped, and if so at what level.  It seems to me plausible, as some have said, that hirelings in Shandong helped; it seems to me less plausible, but still possible--as others have speculated--that people at the top let it happen, as part of the mafia back-stabbing at that level.

The situation was apparently resolved in Beijing after four days of intense negotiations under the aegis of US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Kurt Campbell and input from noted China lawyer and Harvard professor Jerome Cohen.  The deal, by which Chen would, at his insistence, remain in China with guarantees from the Chinese and US governments for the proper and humane treatment of himself and his family, lacked the triumphalist celebration of freedom, Western values, and the human spirit that might have energized Chinese dissidents…and failed to put the United States squarely on “the right side of history,” the Chinese march to democracy that the US considers inevitable.

Jerome Cohen described it as a “middle path,” “a kind of path we are trying hard to create, a space between prison and total freedom” of the kind that Ai Weiwei currently occupies.

If the deal capsizes on Chen’s anxieties, and becomes an embarrassment for the US government and political windfall for President Obama’s Republican critics in an election year, it may be called something else: appeasement.

For its part, the Chinese government, after a complete lockdown of Internet keywords involving Chen, “blind man”, “The Shawshank Redemption” (a prison-escape drama) and “Flight 898” (the number for the United Airlines Beijing to New York flight that Chen might take into exile), handled the affair  quickly and discretely.

The first official acknowledgement of Chen Guangcheng’s escape and refuge in the US Embassy came in an op-ed titled US Embassy in quandary over Chen, which was posted just after midnight on May 2 in Global Times,  Xinhua’s nationalist news outlet.  The op-ed was carried on its English language edition available in China, but not the Chinese-language edition.

Global Times, which had previously expressed exasperation with the prolonged and extrajudicial detention of Chen and the unfavorable international attention it provoked, deliberately shied away from any confrontation with the US government, State Department, or their human rights policies, and instead focused on a very narrow and easily finessed issue: the potential negative consequences for the United States of providing Chen—and, in the future, other dissidents—with a haven:

If petitioners' requests are not met by domestic authorities and turn to the US embassy, this is not only embarrassing to China but also puts the US in an awkward position.

The US embassy would have no interest in turning itself into a petition office receiving Chinese complaints. It is easier just preaching universal values to the Chinese public, and occasionally, helping a few exemplary cases that best illustrate US intentions. It is never willing to involve itself in too many detailed disputes in Chinese society.

China, of course, has an ample supply of “petitioners” whose “requests are not met by domestic authorities.”  The implication is that the United States has a choice: it can either repurpose its embassy as an overbooked hostel for persecuted activists, or it can engage with the Chinese government on the vital economic, diplomatic, and security issues of the day.

The next morning the Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted a statement in the form of a press conference Q&A “On the Matter of ChenGuangcheng Entering the US Embassy”, declaring that the US embassy had engaged in “activities incompatible with its function” by hosting Chen.  The Chinese government demanded an apology (which US sources promptly declared was not going to happen) and the statement declared:

The Chinese side notes that the US side declares it will give weight to the Chinese side’s demands and concerns, and guarantee to take appropriate measures so that these sorts of incidents shall not be repeated again.

After the news of Chen’s departure from the embassy emerged, Global Times rubbed it in with its usual subtlety in an op-ed titled Chen and Embassy should not deludethemselves.

It is hoped that the US embassy in China can distance itself from activities that do not match its functions. It should gain the favorable impression of China's public rather than being an escape route for more extreme elements.

Whatever happens, the Chinese government will apparently achieve its desired objective: crestfallen activists will get the message that the US is not a single-minded supporter of principled dissent, and its embassy is not a reliable safe haven.

If the deal collapses, and the “middle path” endorsed by Cohen and Campbell evaporates, it will also represent a return to the familiar if not particularly productive polarities of human rights vs. authoritarianism that usually characterize US-China relations.

A relatively amicable resolution of Chen Guangcheng’s case could have been taken as an indicator of a Chinese pivot away from brutal repression that has characterized the PRC’s “weiwen” or stability maintenance regime over the last few years—and an indication of tacit US support as the CCP navigates through its leadership transition and, perhaps toward a more liberal, law-based polity.

In the early 2000s, the CCP and the PRC experimented with a migration from Party-led, purely authoritarian social control to a regime that would achieve its policy goals less directly through nominally democratic legislation applied and enforced by local governments and courts, and some monetary and administrative incentives.

Instead of a party cadre telling you what to do, in other words, you would do it yourself, having accepted and internalized the relevant laws and rules and weighed the costs and benefits.

A prime field for application of this approach was in the delicate field of family planning, the most intrusive and personal element of government control.  Family planning, in the context of China’s perceived need to control its population, traditionally involved taking a number of unpopular steps from birth scheduling to sterilization and abortion that were, depending on the whim of the official involved and the eye of the beholder, either encouraged, mandatory, coerced, or forced.

Instead, new laws, applied in concert with flexible, responsible, and higher-quality reproductive services and some financial incentives, would lessen the coercive character of the system.

The new system relied on effective access to the legal system by the people from the bottom up, instead of only supervision by the Party from the top down, to detect, remedy, and deter abuses.

In Shandong, in the municipality of Linyi at least, this attempt at subtle social engineering did not go well, and that is where Chen Guangcheng came in.

Chen Guangcheng educated himself as a lawyer to help people in his community in the rural environs of Linyi obtain legal redress for local government abuses.  In Linyi, abuses in the family planning system appear to have been medieval in their callous brutality.

Activist lawyer Teng Biao assisted Chen Guangcheng with his interviews and investigations in 2005.  His case notes, translated and circulated by Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, provide a chilling picture of gangsterized local rule.

One case involved a 59-year old man who was taken hostage because they couldn’t find his daughter, who was targeted for sterilization:

At about six o’ clock in the afternoon [of the 19th] he was found lying by the side of

Yuncai bridge when his relatives went to the Family Planning office again to look for

him. After he regained consciousness, his relatives knew the story: “The Family Planning Officials tortured and starved him for a whole day. Then they asked him to go back to look for his daughter. He asked for food but was refused. At about four o’clock in the afternoon, a female town official (Tingju Zhang) went back with a strong smell of wine. After beating another two elderly persons (seventy years old), she took him to thecourtyard and beat his head with brooms. Three brooms were broken. Then she slapped him in the face. At about five o’ clock she pushed him into a small room. She asked him to sit on the cold cement floor and unbend his legs. She took the lead to stamp on his legs. Other officials followed her and some also slapped on his face and poured cold water on his head. He said: “I will sue you!” She shouted: “Sue me in the court if you want. It costs only ten thousand Yuan [approximately $1500] to take your life! You are the biggest trash of all the forty thousand people in Shuanghou!” He said: “I have been a Party member for over thirty years. I’m not trash!” She said: “I joined the party in 1998,but I can beat an old Party member like you!”

Sordid profit (the Family Planning Bureau was allowed, even expected to generate revenue to cover its expenses) led to the establishment of euphemistically named “Family Planning Learning Centers” where relatives of people who sought to evade sterilization or abortion were detained under miserable conditions and subjected to brutal beatings in the name of re-education reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution—and at their own expense.

Chen and Teng ran the rough numbers, and they are astounding.

On earth how many people were illegally detained in the Learning Class? According to

Chen Guangcheng’s rough statistics, Linyi city has a population of 10,800,000 and

130,000 people (12‰ of the population) were forced to have ligation. Three to 30 of each victim’s relatives or neighbors were implicated. This amounts to 520,000 people if we count 4 for each victim. Everyone was detained 1 to 40 days and in total it was 1,560,000 days (about 4,300 years) if we count 3 days for each person. Each person was charged 100 Yuan each day (some places didn’t charge while some other places charged several times. But most places charged this amount of money). It amounts to more than 93,000,000 Yuan if we count 60 for each person per day. This is just a conservative estimate. But what the farmers’ hard-earned money bought was outrage, humiliation and horror.

Despite nonstop harassment and intimidation of their potential witnesses by the local authorities, Chen Guangcheng and his legal allies collected enough evidence for the National Family Planning and Population Commission to post a rebuke of abuses in Linyi on their website in August 2005, and for a handful of local officials to be disciplined.

This uplifting story of legal redress did not have a happy second act, however.

Vengeful local officials pursued Chen with trumped-up accusations of damaging property and blocking traffic, and a kangaroo court sentenced him to three and a half years in prison.

The central government did not intervene, possibly because Chen’s image had evolved beyond local barefoot lawyer to internationally recognized human rights activist.  In 2006, he made the Time 100 list of most influential people in the world, making it possible for his enemies to paint him as a tool of anti-Chinese forces.

During his legal struggles, Chen had also become associated with the network of lawyers in the “weiquan” or rights-protection movement, a number of whom are evangelical Christians using the legal system to challenge the communist state’s authority and legitimacy by handling awkward, hot button cases like defense of Falungong practitioners.  

In 2008, the US government-funded democracy promotion NGO, the National Endowment for Democracy, perhaps did Chen no favors by announcinghe was co-winner of the 2008 Democracy Award.  

The Democracy Award statuette is modeled on the Goddess of Democracy, the Statue of Liberty-inspired figure which protesting students erected in Tiananmen Square just before June 4, 1989, facing the massive portrait of Chairman Mao and brandishing its freedom torch under his nose.  It is therefore a red flag (of the unfavorable, slap-in-the-face kind) to the current Chinese government, redolent, at least to the CCP leadership, of sedition, subversion, and regime change.

When Chen served his full term and emerged from prison in 2010, the local government, in what looks like a pointed repudiation of the law-based regime the central government had been attempting to promote, placed Chen under house arrest using the ancient Maoist revolutionary formulation that his relation to the polity was one of “a contradiction between the people and the enemy” (calling for the harshest measures, as opposed to “contradictions within the people,” which are to be resolved through exhaustive and uplifting jawboning).

Again, the central government did nothing, probably because it was still very much in the thrall of its Beijing Olympics-related crackdown mentality and an obsession with “social order.”  Beijing outsourced repression, showering “wei wen” grants on the provinces, apparently in a no-questions-asked spirit.  In Linyi, whatever monies didn’t end up in the pockets of local officials as graft funded the gargantuan security cordon of minimum-wage goons surrounding Chen’s residence.

Meanwhile, the local authorities went to town on Chen Guangcheng after he made a video detailing conditions of his house arrest, as he described in his post-escape appeal addressed to Wen Jiabao:

They broke into my house and more than a dozen men assaulted my wife. They pinned her down and wrapped her in a blanket, beating and kicking her for hours. They also violently assaulted me. …
When they came to my house to assault us, Zhang Jian, the deputy Party secretary in charge of law enforcement in Shuanghou township, said to me unequivocally: "We don't care about the law and we are ignoring the law -- what can you do about it?" He repeated led people to my home to attack and rob us.

Li Xianli, who heads Team 1 that illegally confined me in my house, repeatedly beat my wife -- once even pulling her off the bike to assault her. He also beat my mother. Simply monstrous. Li Xianqiang, an official with the township's judicial authority, beat my wife last year, gravely injuring her left arm.

News of the over-the-top supervision, harassment, and beatings spread throughout the world and Chen’s situation evolved into a public relations nightmare.  Affairs reached their ludicrous apotheosis when actor Christian Bale and a CNN crew drove eight hours to Linyi to visit Chen in December 2011, only to be driven off a pack of local goons.

Then came the great escape.

If the deal holds—indeed if the PRC does not gleefully usher Chen out of China over his well-advertised flip-flopping in order to highlight American humiliation--a low-key resolution of the Chen Guangcheng affair could bring a temporary relaxation of the tensions between the United States and China.

However, even if Chen Guangcheng remains in China, resolutely maintains his appointed role as “legal activist” and steers clear of “anti-government dissident”, the CCP may find its enthusiasm for legal accountability limited—and the impulse to harass and intimidate his associates and sympathizers irresistible.

The Obama administration has shown a tendency to publicly extend the hand of conciliation—in this case, probably quite welcome to the new generation of Chinese leaders looking for political and diplomatic breathing space as they grind through their transition—but quickly switch to a resentful shove when affairs don’t evolve as it thinks they should.

With US-China relations hardening into a zero sum configuration, the United States will probably discover ample cause and opportunity to challenge the PRC on human rights in the future.

A bigger risk for China, however, is perhaps the problem Chen Guangcheng is already working on: family planning.

Despite the leveling-off of Chinese population growth and calls to relax the one-child policy, China’s demographic boffins have decided to retain family planning at least through 2020.

The policy appears to have a certain eugenic tinge to it.  Urban families are reproducing at below the replacement rate of 1.5 (Shanghai is at a rock-bottom 0.7 ratio); meanwhile, rural families are pressing to have more children, especially sons, and are also feeding the migrant population—which accounts for 25% of women of childbearing age and remains largely beyond the reach of the family planning system.  Rural families are disproportionate targets of family planning policies, and are disproportionately likely to suffer abuse at the hands of undertrained, underpaid, callous, and unaccountable local officials.

If the horrors of Linyi are repeated and multiplied nationwide and China’s peasants acquire a unifying sense of grievance and demand for redress, the PRC may have more to worry about than the legal activism of Chen Guangcheng.

China Cyberwar and Real War

My Asia Times piece discusses the recent hack of China Electronics Import and Export Corporation by "Hardcore Charlie."

The CEIEC incident is only the most visible of a blizzard of hacks against Chinese sites conducted under the aegis of "Anonymous China."  I speculate that these hacks are, if not organized, encouraged or incentivized by the US government as a shot across the bow against China for the PRC's sizable industrial espionage program targeting American corporations such as President Obama's high-tech BFF, Google.

I would advise casual readers not to satisfy their curiosity by searching for the CEIEC files and downloading them.  At least one of the documents contains a nasty exploit buried in the bloated header of a Word document; it apparently enables remote operation of the infected computer as a spam-bot or worse.

Anti-virus software identifies the nasty as 2010-3333, which is the target of an elderly Microsoft patch.  However, this seems to be something new and improved.  Microsoft's security software misses it completely; Sophos software locates it but can't remove it.  This is especially galling/ironic because a Sophos guy did a podcast noting the rise in incidence of 2010-3333 but blamed it on lazy users not installing the patch.

Au contraire, my British friend.  It looks like Sophos is getting pwned here, not just Mr. Irresponsible Enduser.

So stay away from those CEIEC files.

Something worth looking at and, I'm assuming, safe as milk, is a Youtube video that Hardcore Charlie recommends as accompaniment to viewing the CEIEC dump (whether he is also aware that "2010-3333" from the files is simultaneously burrowing into the vulnerable innards of one's computer is an open question).

The clip is a montage from Coppola's Apocalypse Now illustrating a song by German thrash metal giants Sodom. It's pretty effective.



Hardcore Charlie also likes to quote lyrics from German industrial rockers KMFDM. Here's an official band video from a song of theirs that breaks the Godwin Rule by equating George Bush with Hitler, also rather effective.



"Hardcore Charlie" by the way, derives his web alias from a "death card" apparently distributed by members of the 101st Airborne during the first Iraq War.  We know this because he quotes the card's motto:

Compliments of Hardcore Charlie - 3rd BN 502 Infantry - When you care enough to send the very best - AIR ASSAULT.

Military historian Herb Friedman posted a picture of the card about ten years ago, in a fascinating discussion of death cards.

Did you know U.S.Playing Card Co. provided all Ace of Spade packs of Bicycle cards to US military personnel in Vietnam for the purposes of corpse decoration/psyops?  Friedman quotes the manufacturer as saying:

    The Death Card or Ace of Spades was considered bad luck by the Viet Cong. This is the story that I got first-hand from one of the lieutenants who originated the idea. He had read an article in the Stars & Stripes indicating that the Vietnamese were a very superstitious people and that the men were afraid of the Ace of Spades. The French previously had occupied Indo-China, and in French fortune telling cards, the Spades predicted death and suffering. It also seems that a statue of a woman foretold a "bad day" and there was some belief that the Viet Cong even regarded lady liberty as a goddess of death.

    Anyways, this guy, along with three of his fellow-lieutenants were playing cards with one of our Bicycle decks, which fortunately they liked to use, and they noticed that the Bicycle Ace of Spades had a statue of a woman in the middle of it, so they figured that this was a potentially good psychological operations weapon. So they contacted the United States Playing Card Company and we sent them thousands of the requested decks gratis to our troops in Vietnam. These decks were housed in plain white tuck cases, inscribed "Bicycle Secret Weapon: Ace of Spades."

    The troops started using them, basically as calling cards. And then all their friends wanted some. And eventually, the military asked us to produce a deck that had fifty-two Bicycle Aces of Spades. The cards were deliberately scattered in the jungle and in hostile villages during raids. The very sight the "Bicycle" Ace was said to cause many Viet Cong to flee.

In another anecdote, Friedman makes it clear that the psychological trauma was a two-way street:

Katherine Keane was a Red Cross “Donut Dolly” in Viet Nam from 1967 to 1968. She was assigned to the Red Cross Recreation Center in Nha Trang. She told me that many of the soldiers coming into the center appeared to have some form of PTSD. She believed they were being treated locally in an Army medical center. One sat down next to her and she expected a pleasant talk about home and what it was like to be in Vietnam. Instead, he pulled out a handful of photographs to show her. She said:

    “Here” he said. ‘Look here.” He pulled a stack of Polaroid pictures out of his cargo pocket. He laid the pictures down in front of me one by one. The first showed a dead Vietnamese with an Ace of Spades stuck in his mouth. I was completely unprepared to see this. He continued laying them down, one next to another. The next showed a group of dead Vietnamese with the Ace of Spades stuck in their mouths. The next showed the Ace of Spades apparently stuck into the man’s chest with some kind of stick. The last showed the Ace of Spades nailed into a man’s forehead. He seemed to have the pictures in some sort of order of brutality. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He offered to let me pick and keep one picture but I declined. He seemed relieved. I would have broken up his collection. Then he handed me a sewn patch depicting an Ace of Spades that I did accept.

That's what real war looks like.

Here's the text of my Asia Times piece on US-China cyberwar (go to the AT piece for the links):

Counterattack on China in cyber-space By Peter Lee

The high-profile intrusion into the e-mail server of China Electronics Import & Export Corporation by "Hardcore Charlie" may mark the coming out party for America's own band of patriotic hackers.

Documents obtained through the hack were posted on file-sharing sites. For the most part, they are a bewildering grab bag of seemingly inconsequential documents. One folder contains regulations concerning the privatization of public universities in Vietnam; another reveals the monthly salary of an English teacher working for Ivanhoe Copper in Myanmar.

Then there are the somewhat more disturbing documents: pages and pages of spreadsheets and US military Acrobat files detailing the recent movements of the quaintly-named "jingle trucks" operated by local companies delivering supplies to the network of US facilities inside Afghanistan. The documents are not marked secret, and the US government has apparently still not taken steps to remove them from the file-sharing services a week after they were posted.

In a web statement, Hardcore Charlie justified his hack with the assertion that China was passing sensitive information to America's enemies, including the Taliban. In a pastiche of English, Spanish, obscenities and racist references, he stated:

Hola comradezz, Today us prezenta recently owneed chino military kontraktor CEIEC Us be shoked porque their shiiit was packed with goodiez cummin froma USA Military brigadezz in Afghanistan, them lulz hablando mucho puneta sam slit eyed dudz in Vietnam and Philiez doing bizness in Ukraine and Russia selling goodiez to Taliban terrorists.

CEIEC, for its part, issued a denial equally deficient in grammatical polish, stating:

CEIEC solemnly declares as below:
The information reported is totally groundless, highly subjective and defamatory. It is believed that rumors stop at wiser.

CEIEC reserves the right to take legal action against the relevant responsible individuals and institutions. [1]

Observers noted the apparent incongruity of CEIEC asserting it had not been hacked ... but reserving the right to take legal action.

The Chinese version is somewhat less incoherent, but only slightly. It appears that CEIEC may be trying to say that it is taking issue with the allegations - for instance, that CEIEC is passing on the information to bad guys in Ukraine, Syria, Russia and the Taliban - while skating past the question of whether it was actually hacked. [2]

CEIEC is described as a "defense contractor" in foreign coverage. However, this may be overstating the case somewhat. CEIEC is one of the ancient import/export corporations set up under the Ministry of Foreign Trade 30 years ago. It did a booming business when international trade was a monopoly of the government import/export corporations, and still benefits from its government ties in handling foreign aid projects and administering international tenders.

At the same time, it has successfully reinvented itself as a prime contractor on overseas projects and, in terms of gross revenue, is one of China's bigger companies.

CEIEC is not an industrial enterprise with its own manufacturing capability. It has targeted the defense electronics sector, as an integrator and prime contractor, apparently hoping to supply systems to China's allies overseas. Whatever it has on its servers, it is probably not the crown jewels of China's defense establishment.

But the question of how the minutiae of US military truck transport in Afghanistan ended up on CEIEC's servers remains a mystery. The CEIEC case does highlight a remarkable trend in international hacking - the appearance of non-government auxiliaries in cyber-war battles.

China is notorious for its interest in cyber-war as an asymmetric counter to the conventional military superiority of the United States ... and for its apparent willingness to farm out, encourage, or benefit from private hacker initiatives.

On 2010, Mara Hvistendahl wrote in Foreign Policy:

[T]he hacking scene in China probably looks more like a few intelligence officers overseeing a jumble of talented - and sometimes unruly - patriotic hackers. Since the 1990s, China has had an intelligence program targeting foreign technology, says James A Lewis, senior fellow for cyber-security and Internet policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Beyond that, however, things get complicated. "The hacking scene can be chaotic," he says. "There are many actors, some directed by the government and others tolerated by it. These actors can include civilian agencies, companies, and individuals." [3]

Patriotic hackers in China are called "hong ke" or "red guest", a pun on the phonetic rendering "hei ke" or "black guest" for hacker.

Their patriotic cyber-duties included destroying the online presence of South Korean boy band Super Junior after an unruly and undignified crowd of Chinese fans clamored to hear the band at the Shanghai World Expo and embarrassed Chinese nationalists. [4]

They also weigh in on foreign issues of greater moment, mixing it up with their Japanese counterparts when Sino-Japanese passions are inflamed by visits to the Yasukuni Shrine or the collision between a Chinese fishing boat and Japanese coast guard vessel off Diaoyutai/Senkaku in 2011.

But their major utility to the Chinese government may be their ability to generate chaff - a barrage of cyber-attacks to distract and overwhelm US security specialists trying to cope with China's pervasive, professional program of industrial and military espionage - and give the People's Republic of China (PRC) government deniability when hacking is traced to a Chinese source.

Chinese industrial cyber-espionage has emerged as a dominant near-term security concern of the United States.

The Barack Obama administration went public with its case against China in November 2011, with a report on industrial espionage titled Foreign Economic Collection. It described China rather generously as a "Persistent Collector" given the PRC's implication in several high-profile industrial espionage cases and soft-pedaled the issue of official Chinese government involvement. The report stated:

US corporations and cyber-security specialists also have reported an onslaught of computer network intrusions originating from Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in China, which private sector specialists call "advanced persistent threats." Some of these reports have alleged a Chinese corporate or government sponsor of the activity, but the IC [intelligence community] has not been able to attribute many of these private sector data breaches to a state sponsor. Attribution is especially difficult when the event occurs weeks or months before the victims request IC or law enforcement help. [5]

A month later, in December 2011, US criticism of China became a lot more pointed. Business Week published an exhaustive report on Chinese cyber-espionage, clearly prepared with the cooperation of federal law enforcement authorities as it named and described several investigations:

The hackers are part of a massive espionage ring codenamed Byzantine Foothold by US investigators, according to a person familiar with efforts to track the group. They specialize in infiltrating networks using phishing e-mails laden with spyware, often passing on the task of exfiltrating data to others.

Segmented tasking among various groups and sophisticated support infrastructure are among the tactics intelligence officials have revealed to Congress to show the hacking is centrally coordinated, the person said. US investigators estimate Byzantine Foothold is made up of anywhere from several dozen hackers to more than one hundred, said the person, who declined to be identified because the matter is secret. [6]

United States security boffin Richard Clarke had this to say about Chinese cyber-espionage in an interview with Smithsonian magazine:

"I'm about to say something that people think is an exaggeration, but I think the evidence is pretty strong," he tells me. "Every major company in the United States has already been penetrated by China."

"What?"

"The British government actually said [something similar] about their own country."

Clarke claims, for instance, that the manufacturer of the F-35, our next-generation fighter bomber, has been penetrated and F-35 details stolen. And don't get him started on our supply chain of chips, routers and hardware we import from Chinese and other foreign suppliers and what may be implanted in them-"logic bombs," trapdoors and "Trojan horses," all ready to be activated on command so we won't know what hit us. Or what's already hitting us. [7]

Some big numbers are being thrown around to publicize the Chinese threat.

Business Week's report, while admitting the woolliness of its methodology, stated that losses to American companies from international cyber-espionage amounted to US$500 billion in a single year.

Scott Borg, director of a non-profit outfit called the US Cyber Consequences Unit told Business Week:

"We're talking about stealing entire industries ... This may be the biggest transfer of wealth in a short period of time that the world has ever seen."

Beyond these apocalyptic economic and military scenarios, we might also descend to the personal and political and point out that Google, a favorite target of Chinese cyber-attacks, is Obama's friend, indispensable ally, brain trust and source of personnel in the high-tech sector.

Connect the dots, and it is clear that the Obama administration, in its usual meticulous way, is escalating the rhetoric and preparing the public and the behind-the-scenes groundwork for major pushback against China in the cyber-arena.

Beyond moves in the legal arena such as the aggressive prosecution of the DuPont industrial espionage case - alleging that China orchestrated a program to steal DuPont's titanium dioxide technology - it is interesting to speculate what other moves the Obama administration might make.

The United States is undoubtedly already doing its best to penetrate China's government, military and scientific networks.

How could the US escalate, especially in the industrial and commercial sphere, where the US mindset is that everything worthwhile the Chinese have was stolen from us, so what's worth stealing back?

Maybe the answer is cyber-harassment, turning a blind eye - or actively egging on - non-government hackers to embarrass, inconvenience, humiliate and perhaps even destabilize the Chinese regime.

Consider this April 4 report by Emil Prodalinski at ZDNet on an explosion in hacking against China since a Twitter account was launched on March 30:

The hacktivist group Anonymous now has a Chinese branch. An Anonymous China Twitter account was created late last month ... Boy have they been busy. Hundreds of Chinese government, company, and other general websites have been hacked and defaced in the span of a few days. A couple have also had their administrator accounts, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses posted publicly. On the hacked sites, the group even posted tips for how to circumvent the Great Firewall of China.

A long Pastebin post lists all the websites that were targeted. It contains 327 websites in total, but an updated list, also on Pastebin, brings that number to 485. Most of these websites are operational once again, but many have been defaced a second time after they were brought back. Not all of them were hacked and defaced; some were treated with more viciousness than others. [8]

Prodalinski subsequently wrote that the attacks had not abated and China, in an interesting case of public relations jiu jitsu, was using the campaign as evidence that it was one of the world's many victims of cyber-misbehavior (and, by implication, not a major perpetrator):

While Anonymous was not specifically mentioned, it's obvious what China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs was referring to during a briefing on Thursday, given the events during the last week. "First of all, China's Internet is open to all, users enjoy total freedom online. China has gained 500 million netizens and 300 million bloggers in a very short period of time, which shows the attraction and openness of China's Internet," spokesman Hong Lei said in a statement, according to CNN. "Secondly, the Chinese government manages the Internet according to law and regulations. Thirdly, certain reports prove again that China is a victim of Internet hacker attacks." [9]

It will be interesting to see how sympathetic the Obama administration will be if the Chinese government begins squealing to it about this outbreak of anti-PRC hacking.

The current Anonymous hacks have been of remarkably unimpressive and uninteresting Chinese sites - like the Taoyuan Bureau of Land and Resources. One can wonder if escalation to more tempting, juicier and more sensational targets is in the future. [10]

My speculation is that the campaign of cyber-attacks against Chinese targets was seeded by the US government, but has gathered its own momentum and is drawing in freelance foreign and some Chinese hackers searching for lulz - the hacker term for giggles or detached/callous amusement.

Let us now return to the perpetrator of the most spectacular hack to date - Hardcore Charlie - and if his postings reveal anything about his motivations.

Hardcore Charlie's web persona displays a military bent. His web alias derives from a death card (a specially printed playing card with an intimidating message sometimes placed on an enemy corpse by US servicemen) associated with the US Army's 101st Airborne Division: "Compliments of Hardcore Charlie - 3rd BN 502 Infantry - When you care enough to send the very best - AIR ASSAULT." [11]

Hardcore Charlie's postings also quote lyrics on a military theme, from "Marines" by the German thrash metal band Sodom. He recommends reading the files to the accompaniment of a Youtube videomontage of Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam epic film Apocalypse Now, using Sodom's "Napalm in the Morning" as the soundtrack.

But perhaps there's something more going on here than pro-military pro-freedom enthusiasm. Sodom is an avowedly anti-war band that toured Vietnam, even though it was denied permission to play there, so it could learn more about the war and its aftermath.

Two more bumpers in the postings quote KMFDM, German industrial rockers (and, unfortunately sometimes a favorite band of alienated and murderous high-schoolers such as Eric Harris, the Columbine shooter) with what one could characterize as a vigorous anti-American government stance.

From KMFDM's anti-George W Bush anthem "Stars and Stripes" (whose video includes a Bush/Hitler juxtaposition) , Hardcore Charlie pulled the quote: ... Cut back civil rights / Make no mistake / Tell 'em homeland security is now at stake / Whip up a frenzy / keep 'em suspended / Don't let 'em know that their liberty's ended ... [12]

From another KMFDM song, New American Century, another quote: ... LOVE THY NEIGHBOR TURN HIM IN.. its called PATRIOTISM ...

Interesting, especially when one considers how Hardcore Charlie, in apparently his only media availability, with Reuters, was described: The hacker, who uses the name Hardcore Charlie and said he was a friend of Hector Xavier Monsegur, the leader-turned- informant of the activist hacking group, LulzSec ... [13]

Rewind to March 2012: Key members of the hacking collective known as LulzSec were arrested Tuesday morning, a move authorities are calling "devastating to the organization". According to an exclusive report by Foxnews.com LulzSec's alleged ringleader, Hector Xavier Monsegur of New York City, helped authorities with the arrest. [14]

As for LulzSec, it was an ad hoc hacker collective spun off from Anonymous (the same grouping bedeviling China under the Anonymous China hashtag) by Monsegur. Its sensational 50-day career in 2011 was described by PC Magazine:

May 7 - Lulz Security [claims] to have gotten ahold of a database of contestants from the Fox TV show X Factor. Lulzsec follows up a few days later with more sales and internal data gleaned from Fox.com.

May 30 - After hacks of Sony in Japan and a British ATM database, Lulzsec scores its first big publicity coup by posting a fake story on the PBS website, which claimed that Tupac Shakur was alive and well in New Zealand.

June 2 - Lulzsec posts personal data for more than a million users from a handful of Sony websites, …

June 3 - The "Lulz Boat" sets a course for the government, targeting security organizations that work with the FBI and other agencies …

June 13-20 - Lulzsec appears to be hitting its stride, with a busy week hacking into the US. Senate's website, stealing the account information of more than 200,000 users from video game maker Bethesda, claiming to have temporarily brought down the CIA's website, and going after more security agencies in the US. and UK.

June 23 - In protest of Arizona's controversial anti-immigration law, Lulzsec posts internal documents and information from the state's Department of Public Security. [15]

Lulzsec closed shop at the end of June 2011, when an asset in England was arrested. It appears that was not enough to elude the bloodhounds of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or forestall Monsegur's betrayal of his associates.

Careful readers may find their interest piqued by the fact that Fox News, which got the exclusive on the arrests in 2012, were the first hacked in 2011.

Pattern-oriented readers might consider whether the sudden eruption of Lulzsec resembles the cyber flashmob that is currently swarming Chinese sites.

Contrarian readers might find it interesting that the focus of hacking seems to have done a 180-degree turn away from American government, security and corporate targets to tormenting their Chinese equivalents (despite the limited lulz obtainable when hacking a site whose language one does not understand).

Curious readers might also wonder if information from Monsegur has helped the authorities get "Hardcore Charlie" in their sights and he is hacking into Chinese websites either at their behest to help get the Anonymous China ball rolling or is pre-emptively demonstrating his utility and eagerness to please.

In any case, the cat's out of the bag.

The order of battle in the cyber-armies of China and the United States has been completed by the arrival of the volunteer militias to serve next to the professionals.

Trains in Vain: California’s HSR and the Hukuang Railway

I have a piece up at Asia Times concerning California’s efforts to entice China’s sovereign wealth fund into an investment in its troubled high speed rail project.

Not gonna happen, is my feeling.  The project’s economics don’t smell very sweet, and CIC has already taken huge heat within China for its disastrous investments in Morgan Stanley and Blackstone.  CIC doesn’t need another high-profile failure.

PRC President-in-waiting Xi Jinping, who was lobbied on the project during his visit to LA, might possibly have considered throwing a few billion at CHSR as a promotional expense, in order to display the benign face of rising China to the US.  

But post-Wenzhou-crash and in the atmosphere of strong partisanship that permeates opposition to the project from Republicans and Tea Partyites (if you want a strong feeling that America is circling the drain, politically, Google “Agenda 21”),  a package of Chinese trains and investment is a PR nightmare, not a PR dream, IMHO.

Too busy or too lazy to Google?  Here’s the relevant excerpt from my Asia Times piece:

In the mainstream, Agenda 21 is a toothless United Nations environmental initiative for sustainable development. For the Tea Party fringe, it is a conspiracy staple: a UN-created, George Soros-funded plan for leftists in the government to destroy freedom and private property by setting up a chain of gulags along passenger rail lines full of bike paths and clean air but no cars or liberty.

Enamored of the energy of the Tea Party, the Republican leadership, especially Newt Gingrich, and Fox News have flirted with legitimizing Agenda 21. Agenda 21 Cassandras figured prominently in the public outcry that doomed the only high-speed rail project in the US other than California's: the Florida HSR.

Attitudes like this should dissuade Xi Jinping that the PRC will be welcomed as the savior of California's high-speed rail system:

Oooh baby ... High-speed rail owned and operated by the Chinese throughout the US. ... Roads, sewer systems, and water systems will be owned by the Chinese. ... I can see it now. We lose our rural roads - pulverized to gravel. Our private vehicle usage is limited, restricted, and taxed. Our bus service will be declared insolvent and not cost effective. High-speed rail will be the only way to travel.

Fully owned and operated by the Chinese. In our country. Airport-style searches. Restricted use tickets. Overcrowding. Limited line service. Why? Because we can't maintain our own infrastructure? Can we maintain our sovereignty? Just wondering.

California’s lethal combination of rail and political and economic peril put me in mind of another gigantic north-south rail project, biggest of its kind, which scrambled for foreign investment, ignited a political firestorm, and brought a great state to its knees—even before it defaulted on its bonds, and almost 30 years before the line got built: the Hukuang railway, which began its tortuous path to completion in the latter days of the Qing dynasty.

“Hukuang” means “Hubei/Guangdong”.  The purpose of the railway was to connect central and south China via a thousand-plus mile rail line between Canton and Hankow across some very nasty, mountainous, and expensive terrain.  Local and national funding wasn’t up to scratch, so it was deemed necessary to tap the power of private capital.

In the old days, of course, railroad investment ran the other way, from West to East.  In the early 20^th century, it was China that needed capital and it was America that sought power and profit through investment in the Chinese railway network.

As an article by Michael Mahler details, Hukuang was the big infrastructure play in China at the time.  It also represented the Qing dynasty’s rather desperate attempt to get its financial and geopolitical house in order with the help of international capital and the foreign powers after the disaster of the Boxer Rebellion.

Originally, the credit would have been issued in 1909 by a consortium of British, German, and French banks.  However, America’s vaunting ambition induced complexity, rancor, and fatal delay that played a significant role in sinking the Qing dynasty.

Getting an American share of the £ 6,000,000 bond issue to finance construction of the Hukuang line was a cornerstone of President William Taft’s “dollar diplomacy”: the use of the good offices of the American government to extend the reach of American investment and trade, thereby projecting US power.  

Placing his faith in greenbacks rather than battleships, Taft mobilized J.P. Morgan, Kuhn Loeb, First National Bank, and National City Bank to promote US diplomatic and financial interests in Asia.
 

Specifically, Taft (and later Woodrow Wilson) hoped that a “China Consortium”, composed of British, French, German, and US banks working in harmony under the direction of their governments on "Open Door"principles, would serve as the exclusive conduit for massive Western public investment in China, thereby swamping Russian and Japanese efforts to carve China, starting with Manchuria, into exclusive national spheres of influence and/or colonies.

In response to the insistent lobbying by Taft’s Secretary of State, Philander Knox (including a threat that the US would cancel its remission of the Boxer indemnity), the US group was granted a quarter share of the Hukuang consortium (even though the Americans at that time did not possess the financial heft to dispose of their share in the US and needed European channels—and the bemused forbearance of their partners--to lay off their holdings).

The Hukuang loan was the largest commercial debt undertaking ever assumed by the Qing dynasty, dwarfed only by the gigantic Boxer and Sino-Japanese war reparations.  Since the revenues of the Maritime Customs (the loan guarantee of first resort for a risk-averse foreign power) were maxed out, the loan was secured by salt, rice, and likin (local transit) taxes.

Unfortunately, the two years of bickering provoked by the US muscling in on the consortium meant that the Qing dynasty was in extremis when it was finally time to issue the loan, and ill equipped to handle the political blowback it provoked.

In order to lock up foreign funding, the Qing dynasty was obliged to effectively nationalize all railway operations in China.  This meant cancelling concessions to local Chinese companies with competing projects, whose stock offerings had been enthusiastically underwritten by patriotic and nationalistic gentry and overseas Chinese determined to create an alternative to foreign control of the critical sector.

The announcement of the Hukuang loan on May 20, 1911, less than three weeks after the cancellation of the domestic concessions, including one to a floundering local outfit unable to make a convincing go of the Hukuang line, infuriated gentry investors in the now-defunct railways. They made common cause with disgruntled students and ardent revolutionaries in a “Protect the Railways” movement.  

It was as if the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and the Chamber of Commerce had all banded together to stick it to the government.

Disgust with the Manchu regime over the railway issue quickly fed into widespread alienation, unrest, demonstrations, and rioting that ate away at the legitimacy of the dynasty.  In October 1911, while two of its regiments were dispatched to deal with railway protection movement unrest, the garrison at Wuchang revolted; within two months the Qing dynasty had, for all effects and purposes, collapsed.

Ironically, the Chinese government had foreseen the political perils and tried to back out of the loan, only to be forced to conclude it by foreign pressure:

The U.S. minister to China, William J. Calhoun, was greatly embarrassed by instructions that he demand that the Chinese conclude the loan negotiations. He argued that it was undignified, "unworthy of civilized powers," to force a loan on an unwilling government. But Calhoun's protests were brushed aside, and the U.S. government joined in the pressures to which the Chinese succumbed in May 1911. As the Peking government anticipated, conclusion of the £6 million loan led to increased violence in the provinces and ultimately to revolution.

So the oblivious mandarins of the Qing empire had a better handle on the problems and the consequences of the loan than the masters of the steam-powered universe.  Imagine that.

Hukuang, therefore, is frequently invoked as the precipitating factor in the fall of the 3000 year-old Chinese empire.  

Needless to say, the China consortium did not have an easy time selling Hukuang bonds. 

According to a history of Morgan by Vincent and Rose Carosso, JP Morgan sold off its roughly 9% share (north of half a million pounds) with the help of its London and Paris offices, and netted a less than princely $50,000 for the New York partners.  This was in the day when JP Morgan was run strictly by and for the partners, and they were not at all happy that two years of time, effort, and aggravation on behalf of President Taft’s “dollar diplomacy” had yielded so paltry a return.  

On the other hand, perhaps the partners were consoled and even heartened by the observation that they had been able to get the bonds off their book-- and book a profit!--while the Qing was in virtual free fall.

Though post-Qing China declared bankruptcy in 1921, Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China government did not repudiate the debt and struggled, sometimes unsuccessfully, to pay interest on the bonds out of salt revenues (since the railway had not yet been completed).  Chiang Kai-shek’s government renegotiated the debt in 1936-7 but eventually defaulted on the bonds in 1938, shortly after the line was completed, when the travails of the Sino-Japanese War made further payments impossible.  The Communist government subsequently repudiated the debt as “odious.”

The Hukuang bonds themselves lived on, and became a significant impediment to normalization of PRC-American relations in the 1980s.  Speculative investors who had purchased the bonds as relations thawed in 1976 filed a claim in US court against the PRC.  When the PRC didn’t appear in court, the judge awarded a summary judgment of $41 million to the claimants, threatening the PRC with attachment of its then meager assets in the United States.  Deng Xiaoping communicated his exasperation to the US government and Jerome Cohen, the doyen of China legal scholars, jumped in. 

It still took three years and the intercession of George Schultz’s State Department for the case to go away.

Today Hukuang bonds are a valued only as a scripophily collectible.  But a £ 100 Hukuang bond sells for $695—more than its face value.

We’ll have to see if California high speed rail bonds will match that performance.

Image of Hukuang bond from scripophily.net

In Syria, al Jazeera’s credibility implodes before the Bashar regime does

Over the last couple days the Syrian army has moved into the Baba Amr district of Homs.

The action is Syria’s Tiananmen.

The Western shorthand for Tiananmen is “authoritarian regime reveals its true monstrous face to the world and its own citizens by trampling on helpless pro-democracy demonstrators.”

Maybe so, but in the Chinese official political lexicon Tianenmen was “a demonstration of state power against a dissident group meant to illustrate the absolute authority of the state and the utter marginalization of the protesters.”

On February 25, I wrote this about the Homs endgame in Asia Times:

Then there is Homs or, more accurately, the Baba Amro district of Homs, which has turned into a symbol of resistance, armed and otherwise, to Assad's rule.

Assad's Western and domestic opponents have put the onus on Russia and China for enabling the Homs assault by their veto of the UN Security Council resolution, a toothless text that would have called for Assad to step down.

However, the significance of the veto was not that it allowed Assad to give free rein to his insatiable blood lust for slaughtering his own citizens, as the West would have it.

The true significance of the veto was the message that Russia and China had endorsed Assad as a viable political actor, primarily within Syria, and his domestic opponents, including those holding out in Baba Amro, should think twice before basing their political strategy on the idea that he would be out of the picture shortly thanks to foreign pressure.

It is difficult to determine exactly what the government's objectives are for Baba Amro. Hopefully, they are not simply wholesale massacre through indiscriminate shelling.

Recent reports indicate that the government, after a prolonged and brutal softening-up, has decided to encircle the district, send in the tanks, and demonstrate to the fragmented opposition that "resistance is futile", at least the armed resistance that seems to depend on the expectation of some combination of foreign support and intervention to stymie Assad and advance its interest.

Whatever the plan is, the Chinese government is probably wishing that the Assad regime would get on with it and remove the humanitarian relief of Homs from the "Friends of Syria" diplomatic agenda.

…

The message that Syria and China hope the domestic opposition will extract from Homs in the next few weeks is that, in the absence of meaningful foreign support, armed resistance has reached a dead end; it is time for moderates to abandon hope in the local militia or the gunmen of the FSA and turn to a political settlement.

To Syria's foreign detractors, the message will be that the genie of armed resistance has been stuffed back into the bottle thanks to "Hama Lite"; and the nations that live in Syria's neighborhood might reconsider their implacable opposition to Assad's continued survival. 

I think this interpretation of events is pretty spot on.  But enough self-congratulatory tummy rubbing.  

And I wish somebody would address the issue of who were the 4000 who stayed to the end in Baba Amr, “a working class district of 100,000”: Was it the core of the resistance? People who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave when the Syrian army tightened the noose?  Any second thoughts on that botched exfiltration of that Sunday Times reporter that got him out a couple days before the Syrian army moved in (and moved the journos out) but apparently got 13 people killed?

Was Homs a) a carnival of slaughter unleashed by a madman against his own citizens? b) a bloody exercise in Fallujah-style collective punishment meant to terrify Syria’s Sunni majority into submission? c) a brutal and effective coordinated military/security/political/diplomatic campaign meant to isolate and marginalize the rebels and convince Syrians that the insurrection has no hope of foreign succor or domestic success?

Inquiring minds want to know.

It looks like they won’t find out from al Jazeera.

The main event, or what should be the main event, for Western observers of Syria is the messy implosion of Al Jazeera’s credibility.  Somebody disgruntled with the diktat of channel management that the Syrian revolution (at least the SNC version of it) “must be televised” leaked some raw footage of Homs coverage and interviews staged for maximum anti-regime effect.

As’ad AbuKhalil, proprietor of the Angry Arab newsblog, hails from the atheist/Marxist/feminist/anarchist quadrant and is no friend of the Bashar regime.  He had this to say about recent trends in programming on Syrian state TV:

It seems that Syrian regime had agents among the rebels; or it seems that the Syrian regime obtained a trove of video footage from Baba Amru.  They have been airing them non-stop.  They are quite damning.  They show the correspondent or witness (for CNN or from Aljazeera) before he is on the air: and the demeanor is drastically different from the demeanor on the air and they even show contrived sounds of explosions timed for broadcast time…

PS This is really scandalous. It shows the footage prior to Aljazeera reports: they show fake bandages applied on a child and then a person is ordered to carry a camera in his hand to make it look like a mobile footage.  It shows a child being fed what to say on Aljazeera.

Later in the day:

This is rather explosive.  You know how low Aljazeera has sunk when Syrian regime TV stations have a field day with the shoddy journalism and fabrication procedures of Aljazeera.  It seems that people inside Aljazeera have leaked raw footage and pre-air reports to someone in Syrian regime TV.  I am not surprised of the leak at all: I am in contact from people inside Aljazeera who are disgusted by the propaganda work of the network in the last few months.  …  I know how those things work and they know that I know.  The footage that are being shown show staging of events of calling a civilian an "officer" in the Syrian army, of faking injuries and feeding statements to people before airtime, etc. Aljazeera seems to be writing its own professional obituary.  I don't know how it can really resurrect itself again.  It is mortally wounded. I know that there are people in the network who are pained about what is happening but royal orders are royal orders in the network and no one dare to disobey.  I am told that orders came down to the effect that no half-position would be tolerated and that categorical adoption of the Qatari foreign policy on Syria is a job requirement.

  

Actually, information about Al Jazeera’s Syria biases had already reached the English language media on February 24 (and Syria watchers when Josh Landis posted it on his Syria Comment blog), when an article in al Akhbar reported on some e-mails hacked off al Jazeera’s servers by the Syrian regime’s “electronic army”:

The major find to be made public was an email exchange between anchorwoman Rula Ibrahim and Beirut-based reporter Ali Hashem. The emails seemed to indicate widespread disaffection within the channel, especially over its coverage of the crisis in Syria.
…
Ibrahim … protested that she had “been utterly humiliated. They wiped the floor with me because I embarrassed Zuheir Salem, spokesperson for Syria’s Muslim Brothers. As a result, I was prevented from doing any Syrian interviews, and threatened with [a] transfer to the night shift on the pretext that I was making the channel imbalanced.” 

Ibrahim also spoke of how Syrian activists invited onto Al Jazeera use terms of sectarian incitement on air, “which Syrians understand very well.”
…
They also confirmed an allegation Ibrahim had reportedly made in one of her emails: That Ahmad Ibrahim, who is in charge of the channel’s Syria coverage, is the brother of Anas al-Abdeh, a leading member of the opposition Syrian National Council. He allegedly stopped using his family name to avoid drawing attention to the connection.

Yes, emphasis added.  The guy who runs al Jazeera’s Syrian coverage is the brother of a SNC bigwig.

The requisite ironic coda (and what should be the obituary for al Jazeera as a serious news outfit, at least as far as its current Syrian coverage is concerned) is contained in this observation:

However, the scoop did not attract the attention that had been hoped for. Like other official Syrian media, the channel is not widely watched and has suffered a loss of viewer confidence.
Thus the report was barely noticed, and Al Jazeera itself completely disregarded it.

Yes, news you can report just by walking into your newsroom; that’s too far for al Jazeera (and, probably CNN).

Middle East: Stupid is the Order of the Day

The stupid Attack Iran meme seems to have infected virtually all discourse on the Middle East.

Marc Lynch said something stupid…then Amnesty International said something stupid…and how about those stupid Islamic terrorist plots?

I have already written about Marc Lynch’s rather terminal and embarrassing misunderstanding of the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in the matter of Syria, a major problem since he presents threatening Assad and his cohorts with prosecution by the ICC as the cornerstone for his vision of coercive diplomacy.

Largely because of the insistence of the United States, the ICC does not enjoy universal jurisdiction. It cannot pursue crimes against humanity regardless of where they occur; it can only act 1) in the case of “state parties” – nations that have both signed and ratified the Rome Statute, thereby binding themselves to submit to the jurisdiction of the ICC or 2) when the UN Security Council decides that the superseding demands of world peace and security dictate that a malefactor, whether or not he or she belongs to a “state party” should be turned over to the court.

As long as Syria—a signatory but not ratifier of the Rome Statute—is shielded in the Security Council by Russia and China, Lynch’s riposte to Syrian recalcitrance, the threat of ICC prosecution, appears ludicrous.

Of course, there is always the possibility that the West will refuse to accept defeat and simply try to change the rules under which non-state-party despots are exposed to ICC jeopardy.

Andrea Bianchi and Stephanie Barbour try to do their best to expand the ICC’s reach, despite a rather sobersided piece of reporting by AP that highlights the limits to ICC jurisdiction in the matter of Syria:

Experts said the list is likely to be more of a deterrent against further abuses than a direct threat to the Assad regime. Syria isn't a member of the ICC so its jurisdiction doesn't apply there, and Russia would likely block any moves in the U.N. Security Council to refer the country to the Hague-based tribunal.

But Andrea Bianchi, a professor of international law at Geneva's Graduate Institute, said anyone on the U.N. list might still be arrested and prosecuted if they traveled from Syria to a country that has signed up to the international court.

"Personally, if I were on that list I would worry," he said.

Human rights group Amnesty International urged that the list be kept secret to prevent suspects from being tipped off.

"If in the future there is to be any potential to issue sealed arrest warrants the list has to remain confidential," said Stephanie Barbour, coordinator of the group's campaign for international justice.

Personally, if I was of the opinion that the ICC was basically an arbitrary tool against dictators that the United States and its allies doesn’t like, I guess I’d worry, too.

And if I was a professor at some Geneva institute of higher education, or a coordinator at AI, I’d be rather ashamed that I wasn’t spending some time highlighting the fact that the United States has gone even further than Syria in removing itself from the ICC’s jurisdiction.

But that’s just me.

Here in Connect-the-Dots-Istan, we were also struck by the parallels between the stupid Muslim assassin in Washington story and the stupid Iranian terrorists in Thailand, Georgia, and India story.

Foreign Policy tells us about the long and winding path to arrest of the Moroccan who tried to assassinate President Obama with a bogus suicide vest thoughtfully provided by the FBI:

An would-be suicide bomber was arrested on Capitol Hill today after accepting what he thought was an explosive vest from undercover agents. Roll Call's Emma Dumain has the details:
…
“The arrest was the culmination of a lengthy and extensive operation,” the statement continued. “At no time was the public or Congressional community in any danger.”[...] 

Local reports by Fox News describe the individual in custody as “a man, in his 30s and of Moroccan descent” who has been a target of a lengthy FBI investigation. Fox News reported that the suspect believed the undercover FBI agents assisting him were al-Qaida operatives.

Roll Call notes that the story is similar to that of Rezwan Ferdaus, who was arrested last September in the midst of a plot to attack the Capitol with a remote-controlled aircraft. Ferdaus was also in communication with FBI agents posing as al Qaeda members. 

The case is also similar to that Farooque Ahmed, who thought he was going to blow up the DC Metro system in 2010, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who thought he was going to blow up a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland Oregon in 2010, David Williams, who thought he was going to blow up a Bronx synagogue in 2009, and the "Fort Dix Five," who thought they were going to attack a New Jersey military base in 2006. 

In each case, undercover FBI agents spent months communicating and providing fake resources to the suspects before springing the trap. …

The increasing frequency of these operations is bound to raise some questions about whether law enforcement agencies are pushing along the development of plots that the individuals involved might never have acted on without the longterm encouragement of their "al Qaeda contacts." 

Now, I don’t have any special insights into the concurrent anti-Israeli bomb plots with Iranian principals that were simultaneously busted in Georgia, India, and Thailand, but Arshin Adib-Moghaddam wrote in Counterpunch to offer a perspective on the conspiracies:

Let’s assume that sections of the military and security apparatus in Iran are responsible for the string of bombings in Georgia, Thailand and India. What would be the motive? The argument that Iran is retaliating for the murder of five civilian nuclear scientists in Iran is not plausible. If Iran wanted to target Israeli interests, it has other means at its disposal. It is hard to imagine that the Iranian government would send Iranian operatives to friendly countries, completely equipped with Iranian money and passports – making the case against them as obvious as possible.

If the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are as professional, highly trained and politically savvy as we have been told repeatedly by Israeli politicians themselves, if they have successfully trained and equipped the cadres of Hezbollah and other movements with paramilitary wings in the region, then why would they launch such a clumsy and self-defeating operation?

And why India, Georgia and Thailand, three countries that Iran has had cordial relations with during a period when Iran is facing increasing sanctions spearheaded by the United States? A few days ago, India agreed a rupee-based oil and gas deal with Iran and resisted US pressures to join the western boycott of the Iranian energy sector. As a net importer of 12% of Iranian oil, India’s total trade with Iran amounted to $13.67bn in 2010-2011. What would be the motive for damaging relations with one of Iran’s major trading partners and regional heavyweights?

For Iran it doesn’t make sense to risk alienating India by launching an assassination attempt in the capital of the country. Similarly, Iran has good economic and political relations with Georgia and Thailand. Why would the leadership in Tehran risk a major crisis with these countries during this sensitive period when IAEA inspectors are moving in and out of Iran to investigate the country’s nuclear programme?

Good, good questions. Especially when it was recently revealed that the Israeli intelligence agencies were mounting false flag operations, convincing Balochistan militants that their attacks against Iranian targets were being orchestrated by the CIA, not Mossad.

I would also not hesitate to draw the conclusion that US and Israeli security services have a sizable roster of extremist dingdongs on tap, available to incite and detain as the needs of public safety and anti-Muslim/anti-Iran diplomacy require.

Marc Lynch Apparently Said Something Really Stupid…

Laura Rozen reported on a piece of Syria-related chinstroking by Marc Lynch at the Center for a New American Security titled Pressure Not War: A Pragmatic and Principled Policy Towards Syria.

The CNAS page promoting the study tells us:

Dr. Lynch recommends specific actions for policymakers grappling with the crisis, including:
•    Present Asad with an ultimatum: resign, or be referred to the International Criminal Court for War Crimes.

(plus a variety of other sanction/diplomacy squeeze tactics).

In the report, the ICC option is presented as follows:

The time has come to demand a clear choice from Syrian regime officials. They should be clearly warned that their names are about to be referred to the ICC on charges of war crimes. It should be made clear that failure to participate in the political transition process will lead to an institutionalized legal straightjacket that would make it impossible for them to return to the international community.This should be feasible, even without Security Council agreement. Top regime officials should be left with no doubt that the window is rapidly closing on their ability to defect from the regime and avoid international prosecution. To date, Syrian officials have not been referred to the ICC, in order to keep alive the prospect of a negotiated transition. Asad must have an exit strategy, by this thinking, or else he will fight to the death. However, Asad has shown no signs of being willing to take a political deal, and in any case, his crimes are now so extensive that he cannot have a place in the new Syrian political order. He should be forced to make a clear choice: He can step down and agree to a political transition now, and still have an opportunity for exile, or he can face international justice…


Unfortunately for Dr. Lynch, Syria signed but did not ratify the Rome Statute setting up the International Criminal Court.

Therefore, Syria is not a “state party” under the statute; it cannot make referrals to the court for crimes by other states, but the treaty is also not binding upon it, except in a rather vague way under international law: to abstain from “acts which would defeat the object and purpose” of the treaty.

In other words, it is in the same situation as Libya was; and a referral from the UN Security Council trumping the ordinary procedures and jurisdiction of the Rome Treaty on the basis of an overriding threat to world peace and security was needed in order to enable the ICC indictment of Gaddafi and two other Libyans that quickly followed.

We can, perhaps, forgive Dr. Lynch for his ignorance concerning the statutory functions of the ICC.

After all, the United States signed, then declined to ratify, then “unsigned” the Treaty of Rome setting up the International Criminal Court, so that busy US government officials can engage in their various escapades beyond ICC jurisdiction…unless the UNSC (on which the US itself holds a veto) decides to make a referral.

Absent a UNSC resolution on Syria (certainly not forthcoming for the time being as Russia and China are both pushing for negotiation between the opposition and Assad on a non-coercive basis), the ICC is not going to get the UNSC referral it needs to pursue the Syrian government and Assad.


For the sake of argument, let’s say that somebody comes up with a new legal justification for subjecting non-state party signatories like Syria to indictment by the ICC that doesn’t require a UNSC referral (and also doesn’t accidentally subject the United States--a non-ratifier and now also a non-signatory--to unwelcome legal jeopardy).

Is an ICC war crimes prosecution something that can be turned on or off like a tap in order to serve the diplomatic/strategic objectives of a certain coalition of states?

I think not, Dr. Lynch.

The ICC prosecutor is required to launch an investigation if he receives a referral from a “state party” or the UNSC.

But that’s not all.

The prosecutor must also open an investigation if the “Pre-Trial Chamber”, a panel of ICC poobahs, decides that a complaint by victims justifies a case.

Per Wikipedia, which I think can be leaned on as a reliable source on this subject:

The Office of the Prosecutor is responsible for conducting investigations and prosecutions. It is headed by the Chief Prosecutor, who is assisted by one or more Deputy Prosecutors. The Prosecutor may open an investigation under three circumstances:
•    when a situation is referred to him by a state party [i.e. a signatory to the Treaty of Rome setting up the ICC];
•    when a situation is referred to him by the United Nations Security Council, acting to address a threat to international peace and security; or
•    when the Pre-Trial Chamber authorises him to open an investigation on the basis of information received from other sources, such as individuals or non-governmental organisations.

When one considers that Navi Pillay, head of the UN Human Rights Commission, has declared that “it appears likely that war crimes have been committed” in Syria, it would be, to say the least, interesting if the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber and the Prosecutor decided that, based on the merits, an investigation was not called for:

The Fact-Finding Mission, the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, and I myself have all concluded that crimes against humanity are likely to have been committed in Syria. I have encouraged the Security Council to refer the situation to the International Criminal Court.

Under these circumstances, it would appear that an ICC investigation of Assad, if demanded by his victims inside Syria, is not an option; it’s an obligation.

Not something that Assad’s antagonists in the West and Arab world can instigate at their discretion…or squelch if negotiating Assad’s exit demands it.

Recalling Dr. Lynch's confidence that an ICC indictment can be ordered up like a pizza with a choice of prosecutorial toppings at the discretion of the great powers, I particularly enjoyed this declaration:

The Rome Statute provides that the Office of the Prosecutor shall act independently; as such, no member of the Office may seek or act on instructions from any external source, such as states, international organisations, non-governmental organisations or individuals.

Noble pronouncements aside, could it be that the ICC really is a compliant tool of Western interests?

Fortunately, a quick review of ICC indictments gives a clear picture of even-handed global justice:

Five guys from the DR Congo; five more from Uganda; one guy from the Central African Republic; six from Sudan, including Bashir; seven from Kenya; three from Libya, including Gaddafi; and one from Cote d’Ivoire.

To be fair, several of these luminaries were referred by successor governments of their own states.

Even so, if Assad is indicted, he will be the first defendant in the court’s history that didn't hail from the continent of Africa (if you, like I, wondered where Milosevic was tried, he was tried in an ad hoc court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia).