To commemorate Stuart Levey’s resignation from Treasury, I send him off into the sunset with an affectionate slap on the rump in the Asia Times article, Good-bye Mr Insubordination.
I’ve been an interested observer of Mr. Levey’s activities as Assistant Secretary of State for the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence ever since the OTFI’s designation of Macau’s Banco Delta Asia as an institution “of money laundering concern” froze $25 million in North Korean deposits in 2005.
After the North Koreans detonated their atomic bomb in October 2006, the U.S. State Department said it would “resolve” the issue so the denuclearization talks could resume.
After Secretary of State Rice and Under Secretary Christopher Hill announced the agreement in February 2007, there was a concerted effort to sabotage the unfreezing of the BDA funds by John Bolton and hard-liners in the House of Representatives.
Amazingly, the effort was abetted by Stuart Levey’s office, which found myriad reasons not to “git ‘er done”. It took four months (instead of the promised thirty days) and a Rube Goldberg arrangement involving the Fed, the Russian central bank, and a Russian commercial bank to return North Korea’s ill-gotten gains to Pyongyang.
Literally, ill-gotten. Something I don’t get to in the article is the fact that half of the money were deposits of irreproachable provenance belonging to North Korean joint ventures of British American Tobacco and a European banking operation that had nothing to do with Kim Jung Il and his alleged forex shenanigans and shouldn’t have ended up in the DPRK’s coffers.
Unless you read China Matters at the time, you were probably unaware of this, since the general reporting on the issue was pretty craptacular.
The Asia Times piece provides a neat and persuasive summary of the whole fiasco.
One thing that always puzzled me was that there was no reckoning for Stuart Levey. Nobody called him out for defying the State Department; he not only kept his job under Bush, he continued to do the same job under Obama.
Which leads me to believe that there was more going on in sabotaging the BDA transaction than a last ditch effort to torpedo engagement with North Korea by unrepentant hardliners (many of whom had left the Bush administration by 2007) acting under the aegis of Vice President Cheney as part of his war against the Condoleezza Rice’s State Department.
(Dick Cheney, it is probably forgotten, was at the time trolling through Asia at the time trying undercut State Department diplomacy by cobbling together an anti-China united front out of Australia, India, and Japan; I reproduce a post on the issue below as a matter of historical interest.)
However, for the BDA travesty to drag on as long as it did, thereby revealing President Bush’s favorite cabinet officer, Secretary Rice, as a powerless cipher, I would have to think that President Bush acquiesced to Vice President Cheney’s insistence that the humiliating BDA agreement wither and, if possible, die, taking the restart of the Six Party Talks with it.
There would be persuasive geopolitical reasons for doing so.
The left-leaning regime of President Roh was an unwilling partner to American diplomacy, especially of the confrontational type traditionally espoused by the Bush administration.
It was very likely that the conservative and actively pro-US Grand National Party would be in the saddle come December 2007.
So killing or at the very least slowwalking the BDA affair pending a re-set in 2008 might have enjoyed the tacit approval and back channel encouragement of a broad range of executive and national security opinion in the Bush administration.
And Stuart Levey, instead of being Mr Insubordination was actually Mr Virtuous Conspirator, working with the informal network of Bush era foreign policy enthusiasts that trampled over the chain of command and institutional checks and balances to execute policies whose success they considered to be of paramount importance—at least more important than the niceties of fact-based decision-making or consideration of the possibly catastrophic consequences of reckless adventurism.
As to why President Obama decided to keep Mr. Levey on, he had ample reasons starting with the Obama administration’s fondness for smart power and the strong support Mr. Levey enjoyed in hardline constituencies on North Korea and Iran.
Perhaps it was also thought that Mr. Levey’s demonstrated independence of State Department diplomacy contributed to the intimidating aura of OTFI’s activities.
I am rather skeptical of Mr. Levey’s achievements.
It seems to me that the sanctions campaign against North Korea, beyond denying Western energy and fuel aid to North Korea that might be exploited by its army (or possibly find its way to North Korea’s citizens), and driving Pyongyong into Beijing’s arms, has little to show after five years of effort.
As Lee Myung-bak enters the last years of his term, it appears that China, North Korea, and factions within South Korea itself are positioning themselves for a shift to a policy with a bigger dose of engagement and less emphasis on sanctions.
So, as I say in the article, this might be the best time for Mr. Levey to depart with his legend intact.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Circular Gratification: Vice President Cheney’s Most Recent Effort to Contain China
Vice President Cheney recently visited Asia to lend his prestige and power—two increasingly devalued commodities--to two faithful and embattled allies in his global campaign of confrontation and containment, Japan and Australia.
Japan, in particular, needed bucking up, since the Abe regime is reeling from the perfunctory US abandonment of the abductee issue in the rush to conclude the Six Party Agreement on North Korea.
The abductee issue was at the core of Abe’s North Korea policy and, indeed, Abe’s entire political identity as a principled and valued core member of the US effort to assert its interests and agendas in North Asia through confrontation-based diplomacy.
With realists in ascendance at the State Department and negotiation, conciliation, and compromise at the heart of U.S. Asia policy, Vice President Cheney brought with him a rather contrarian and dubious gift—an effort to singlehandedly will into existence another coalition of the willing, centered on Japan, Australia, and India, to take on the unenviable and almost impossible task of presenting an effective, united front against China.
The Marmot’s Hole looks at a proposal for an anti-Chinese alliance midwifed by Dick Cheney and sees an iron ring of democracies containing China.
I look at the vision of an American, Japanese, Australian, and Indian security quadrilateral and see a regional circle j**k characterized by shared press conferences, private fantasies, and shamefacedly selfish gratification.
Australia is blundering through its self-made neocolonial quagmires in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Fiji. It can’t even handle its back yard (where China is cautiously but productively fishing), let alone contribute effectively to the Ant-Chinese Superhero League that’s supposed to take the fight to the Yellow Peril.
All India wants is to play off the United States, China, and Russia against each other and reap concessions and aid from each while it concentrates on its economic development and energy security.
Indeed, Mr. Cheney's hasty initiatives in ad hoc coalition building are probably a direct response to a conspicuous piece of footsie between New Delhi and America's strategic competitors: the Russian/Chinese/Indian mini-summit in Delhi in February.
Which leaves the United States and Japan...well, maybe just Japan.
The money grafs in the story in the Australian:
The Japanese Government and US Vice-President Dick Cheney are keen to include the growing economic and military power of India in the already enhanced "trilateral" security arrangements, locking together the three most powerful democracies of the Asia-Pacific region.
Mr Cheney gave the Japanese proposal new life on his recent visit to Japan and Australia after sections of the Bush administration rebuffed the plan.
Ah, yes...emphasis added.
With the neocons in retreat on Washington and on the North Korean issue, it seems that Japan provides the vital function to Dick Cheney of providing political cover and scope for strategic initiatives that are foreclosed at home.
In this context, I am tempted to describe Japan as our “Israel in the Pacific”, exploiting relationships inside the US government to develop foreign and domestic policitical synergies that go beyond US official policy, in a manner similar to Tel Aviv's.
Now more than ever, Israel is openly and unapologetically working with elements in the Bush administration to advance a particular policy toward the Middle East—and elements within the US national security establishment are utilizing allies within the Israeli government to assist them in promoting their preferred agenda in the policy battles inside the U.S. government.
The estimable Laura Rozen, in profiling Secretary Condileezza Rice’s yearlong struggle to gain control over the Bush administration’s Iran policy, related a similar kind of back-channel initiative that, if it didn’t involve the politically sacrosanct state of Israel, might be unkindly regarded as colluding with a foreign power against the policy of the United States:
Rice knows how the system works. In February, she traveled to Jerusalem to attempt to restart the Middle East peace process. But while she was en route the neoconservative NSC adviser Elliott Abrams was, according to news reports, using contacts in the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to arrange a phone call between Olmert and Bush. After the call, Olmert announced that Israel would not recognize the Palestinian unity government as a legitimate negotiating partner—an essential precondition for productive talks—and that Bush supported Israel’s stance. Her position fatally undercut, Rice returned to Washington empty-handed.
It’s one thing for a small-time erstwhile felon like Elliott Abrams to use a foreign government to promote his virtuous conspiracy against the Palestinian peace process.
But when Big Time, America’s shadow president, has to outsource his anti-China agenda to Japan and two weak and/or unenthusiastic partners in South Asia and rely on them to whipsaw the State Department, that’s a sure sign that it’s going nowhere.
Or better yet, in circles.
Thursday, February 03, 2011
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
Al-Jazeera: It's Not Just for Arabs Anymore
James Wolcott points out with some amusement that Fox News has deigned to take note of Al-Jazeera's fearless coverage of the Egyptian mass movement:
Via the China media and politics site ESWN I came across a link to an interesting interview the Columbia Journalism Review did with Dave Marash.
Marash is the U.S. reporter who left Al Jazeera International because of what’s described in journalistic shorthand as emerging “anti-American bias” at the network.
Marash’s explanation is somewhat more complicated and interesting--and revealing, in an inadvertent way.
Marash was offended when the Al Jazeera’s Doha desk (the network’s mother ship, in Qatar) sent a film crew into America without his knowledge to gather material for what he saw as a crude and clueless piece of agitprop about American poverty:
Then they went to South Carolina and found a town that—I know this is going to shock you, Brent—had very rich people and, on the other side of the railroad tracks, very poor people. And the wretchedness of the poor people’s living conditions was enumerated. In fact this memorable question and answer exchange occurred: Q: What’s it like to live with rats in your home? A: Bad. [laughs]
It’s rather amusing in a sad way how easily Marash slips into pompous anchorspeak to inform us that, even if people are dirt poor and there are rats in their houses in America, it's only must-see-teevee if the proper journalistic rules of detachment, objectivity, and even-handedness are followed.
The economic divide is a story and the reasons why, over a long period of time in this South Carolina town there should be very little transmigration across the line between rich and poor, is a story. The sources of wealth of the rich may be a story. The lack of opportunities for the poor may be a story. But again, you gotta report all these things.
Yeah, and how do the rats feel about being forced to live with all those poor people? Where's their side of the story?
I won’t cheap-shot Marash any more on this issue.
He’s an intelligent, experienced, quintessentially American newsman with the objective, both sides of the story outlook who recognizes that a top team would have come up with a more illuminating coverage.
You know, like Rat: It’s What’s for Dinner; South Carolina Families Employ Determination, Ingenuity—and Barbeque Sauce--in their Struggle With Adversity.
OK, now really no more cheap-shotting.
The poverty piece was apparently well below Al Jazeera’s normal standards of professionalism.
Marash speaks quite highly of Al Jazeera’s standards, quality, and pre-eminent position outside of the United States, particularly in the southern hemisphere.
...in Africa, in Latin America, in the Middle East, in Asia, on Al Jazeera [you] see state-of-the-art, world-class reporting, and south of the equator I don’t think anyone will give you much of an argument that Al Jazeera has become the most authoritative news channel on earth.
He attributes the decline in US coverage to a conscious decision by the headquarters in Qatar in 2007 to draw closer to Saudi Arabia as part of a trend toward regional independence from the United States in foreign affairs especially vis a vis Iran.
I’m suggesting that around that time, a decision was made at the highest levels of [Al Jazeera] that simply following the American political leadership and the American political ideal of global, universalist values carried out in an absolutely pure, multipolar, First Amendment global conversation, was no longer the safest or smartest course, and that it was time, in fact, to get right with the region. And I think part of getting right with the region was slightly changing the editorial ambition of Al Jazeera English, and I think it has subsequently become a more narrowly focused, more univocal channel than was originally conceived.
... BC: This doesn’t bode well for AJE as a credible journalistic operation.
DM: If the goal is to be true to the idea of multipolar transparency, then this is very bad news. And I admit that I find that to be a higher goal than being a thoroughly respectable, thoroughly professional, but somewhat regional or region-specific voice.
The phrase “American political ideal of global, universalist values carried out in an absolutely pure, multipolar, First Amendment global conversation” caught my eye.
It’s interesting that nowhere in the interview is it mentioned that Al Jazeera International is virtually unavailable in the United States.
It’s carried on two satellites and four other platforms: Globecast (French satellite provider) Fision (95000 viewers; going out of business) , JumpTV (internet TV), VDC (small , maybe even non-existent provider of video to desktop services). And you can watch it on Youtube.
The right-wing media watchdog site, Accuracy in Media, in a press release hailing Marash’s departure as vindication of its anti-Al Jazeera stance, stated:
AIM’s campaign had prevented Al-Jazeera from finding a major U.S. cable or satellite company willing to carry it. “We tried from the beginning to expose Al-Jazeera English for what it is – an anti-American, Arab government-financed propaganda operation,” Kincaid said. “Now, hopefully, more people will take note.”
In 2006, Variety reported that US cable companies and DirectTV weren’t interested in allowing Al Jazeera English on the big show, and were only interested in offering the English-language service either on the Arab language slate or in regions with significant Arab-American viewership:
The Associated Press last week reported Comcast had pulled out of talks but, in fact, negotiations continued, with Comcast offering to roll out the channel regionally. Comcast is the dominant operator in the Detroit area, which has one of the nation's largest Arab-American populations. But AJI execs were holding out for a full rollout across all of Comcast's 12.1 million digital subscribers (Comcast has 24 million digital and analog subs), and they believed a deal was imminent.
"We thought we were just awaiting signatures. We feel like we've been led down the garden path. It's a setback for us in the States, but I don't want this to overshadow the fact we've had phenomenal figures in the rest of the world," said one AJI employee who insisted on anonymity.
Sources within AJI speculated the reasons for the pullout had to do with U.S. uncertainty about Al-Jazeera's editorial agenda. Negative portrayals of the situation in Iraq are widely thought to have contributed to the Democratic sweep of the midterm elections.
But Comcast denied the decision had anything to do with politics. "It comes down to a capacity question. We're not adding a lot of new channels," said Comcast spokeswoman Jenni Moyer.
Bear in mind, in Marash’s chronology, in 2006, when this article was written, Al Jazeera International was still committed to the whole high quality, global conversation thing—and running the North American operations from the Washington desk with Marash happily ensconced in the anchor slot.
But remember, the story isn’t about the rat—the political pressure to keep Al Jazeera out of American homes.
It’s about the economic divide, those reasons over a long period of time, the sources of wealth/lack of opportunity transmigration stuff. There were no channels! You gotta report all those things!
OK, this time the cheap-shotting’s really over.
The “American political ideal of global, universalist values carried out in an absolutely pure, multipolar, First Amendment global conversation” is clearly pretty much a one-way street as far as the U.S. market is concerned. Arabic media companies need not apply.
On one level, it could be said that Dave Marash didn’t leave Al Jazeera; Al Jazeera left us.
It made the decision that the effort to become part of the U.S. elite political discourse by hiring our anchors, playing by our rules, and adhering to our standards of journalism and our definition of who and what was important and worth reporting was simply futile.
And, in the iron law of the media business, the least important market gets the fewest resources, the shallowest coverage, and the shoddiest product.
I noticed a change in media tone yesterday that made me blink thrice at the screen to make sure I was watching the channel I thought I was.Here's a piece I wrote back in 2008 on Al Jazeera's struggle to go mano-a-mano against the mighty anchors of Fox and the other media barons in North America:
And I was. On Fox News yesterday afternoon, words of praise were being heaped on Al-Jazeera for its coverage of the demonstrations in Egypt.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Al Jazeera International in America
Don’t Think Twice It’s All RatVia the China media and politics site ESWN I came across a link to an interesting interview the Columbia Journalism Review did with Dave Marash.
Marash is the U.S. reporter who left Al Jazeera International because of what’s described in journalistic shorthand as emerging “anti-American bias” at the network.
Marash’s explanation is somewhat more complicated and interesting--and revealing, in an inadvertent way.
Marash was offended when the Al Jazeera’s Doha desk (the network’s mother ship, in Qatar) sent a film crew into America without his knowledge to gather material for what he saw as a crude and clueless piece of agitprop about American poverty:
Then they went to South Carolina and found a town that—I know this is going to shock you, Brent—had very rich people and, on the other side of the railroad tracks, very poor people. And the wretchedness of the poor people’s living conditions was enumerated. In fact this memorable question and answer exchange occurred: Q: What’s it like to live with rats in your home? A: Bad. [laughs]
It’s rather amusing in a sad way how easily Marash slips into pompous anchorspeak to inform us that, even if people are dirt poor and there are rats in their houses in America, it's only must-see-teevee if the proper journalistic rules of detachment, objectivity, and even-handedness are followed.
The economic divide is a story and the reasons why, over a long period of time in this South Carolina town there should be very little transmigration across the line between rich and poor, is a story. The sources of wealth of the rich may be a story. The lack of opportunities for the poor may be a story. But again, you gotta report all these things.
Yeah, and how do the rats feel about being forced to live with all those poor people? Where's their side of the story?
I won’t cheap-shot Marash any more on this issue.
He’s an intelligent, experienced, quintessentially American newsman with the objective, both sides of the story outlook who recognizes that a top team would have come up with a more illuminating coverage.
You know, like Rat: It’s What’s for Dinner; South Carolina Families Employ Determination, Ingenuity—and Barbeque Sauce--in their Struggle With Adversity.
OK, now really no more cheap-shotting.
The poverty piece was apparently well below Al Jazeera’s normal standards of professionalism.
Marash speaks quite highly of Al Jazeera’s standards, quality, and pre-eminent position outside of the United States, particularly in the southern hemisphere.
...in Africa, in Latin America, in the Middle East, in Asia, on Al Jazeera [you] see state-of-the-art, world-class reporting, and south of the equator I don’t think anyone will give you much of an argument that Al Jazeera has become the most authoritative news channel on earth.
He attributes the decline in US coverage to a conscious decision by the headquarters in Qatar in 2007 to draw closer to Saudi Arabia as part of a trend toward regional independence from the United States in foreign affairs especially vis a vis Iran.
I’m suggesting that around that time, a decision was made at the highest levels of [Al Jazeera] that simply following the American political leadership and the American political ideal of global, universalist values carried out in an absolutely pure, multipolar, First Amendment global conversation, was no longer the safest or smartest course, and that it was time, in fact, to get right with the region. And I think part of getting right with the region was slightly changing the editorial ambition of Al Jazeera English, and I think it has subsequently become a more narrowly focused, more univocal channel than was originally conceived.
... BC: This doesn’t bode well for AJE as a credible journalistic operation.
DM: If the goal is to be true to the idea of multipolar transparency, then this is very bad news. And I admit that I find that to be a higher goal than being a thoroughly respectable, thoroughly professional, but somewhat regional or region-specific voice.
The phrase “American political ideal of global, universalist values carried out in an absolutely pure, multipolar, First Amendment global conversation” caught my eye.
It’s interesting that nowhere in the interview is it mentioned that Al Jazeera International is virtually unavailable in the United States.
It’s carried on two satellites and four other platforms: Globecast (French satellite provider) Fision (95000 viewers; going out of business) , JumpTV (internet TV), VDC (small , maybe even non-existent provider of video to desktop services). And you can watch it on Youtube.
The right-wing media watchdog site, Accuracy in Media, in a press release hailing Marash’s departure as vindication of its anti-Al Jazeera stance, stated:
AIM’s campaign had prevented Al-Jazeera from finding a major U.S. cable or satellite company willing to carry it. “We tried from the beginning to expose Al-Jazeera English for what it is – an anti-American, Arab government-financed propaganda operation,” Kincaid said. “Now, hopefully, more people will take note.”
In 2006, Variety reported that US cable companies and DirectTV weren’t interested in allowing Al Jazeera English on the big show, and were only interested in offering the English-language service either on the Arab language slate or in regions with significant Arab-American viewership:
The Associated Press last week reported Comcast had pulled out of talks but, in fact, negotiations continued, with Comcast offering to roll out the channel regionally. Comcast is the dominant operator in the Detroit area, which has one of the nation's largest Arab-American populations. But AJI execs were holding out for a full rollout across all of Comcast's 12.1 million digital subscribers (Comcast has 24 million digital and analog subs), and they believed a deal was imminent.
"We thought we were just awaiting signatures. We feel like we've been led down the garden path. It's a setback for us in the States, but I don't want this to overshadow the fact we've had phenomenal figures in the rest of the world," said one AJI employee who insisted on anonymity.
Sources within AJI speculated the reasons for the pullout had to do with U.S. uncertainty about Al-Jazeera's editorial agenda. Negative portrayals of the situation in Iraq are widely thought to have contributed to the Democratic sweep of the midterm elections.
But Comcast denied the decision had anything to do with politics. "It comes down to a capacity question. We're not adding a lot of new channels," said Comcast spokeswoman Jenni Moyer.
Bear in mind, in Marash’s chronology, in 2006, when this article was written, Al Jazeera International was still committed to the whole high quality, global conversation thing—and running the North American operations from the Washington desk with Marash happily ensconced in the anchor slot.
But remember, the story isn’t about the rat—the political pressure to keep Al Jazeera out of American homes.
It’s about the economic divide, those reasons over a long period of time, the sources of wealth/lack of opportunity transmigration stuff. There were no channels! You gotta report all those things!
OK, this time the cheap-shotting’s really over.
The “American political ideal of global, universalist values carried out in an absolutely pure, multipolar, First Amendment global conversation” is clearly pretty much a one-way street as far as the U.S. market is concerned. Arabic media companies need not apply.
On one level, it could be said that Dave Marash didn’t leave Al Jazeera; Al Jazeera left us.
It made the decision that the effort to become part of the U.S. elite political discourse by hiring our anchors, playing by our rules, and adhering to our standards of journalism and our definition of who and what was important and worth reporting was simply futile.
And, in the iron law of the media business, the least important market gets the fewest resources, the shallowest coverage, and the shoddiest product.
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
Twittering America’s Allies to Death...While Iran and China Take Notes
Or...
A Useful—if Inadvertent—Demonstration of the Power of the Information-Freedom Death Star
[Counterpunch kindly ran this piece on its website. However, the formatting gremlins attacked them and some of the quotes I made from Mr. Rogin's article weren't displayed properly, making them look like my words instead of his. This was completely inadvertent and I've asked Counterpunch to correct the error. If necessary, please refer to this post and the e-mail notification for the proper formatting of the piece. CH 2/2/11]
Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin has an interesting post on how the U.S. State Department has been working energetically with Twitter, Facebook, Google et. al. to keep the information pipelines open in Tunisia and Egypt.
The Tunisian government responded by hacking massive amounts of Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail accounts and targeted other sites where protestors were convening or communicating.
Facebook contacted the State Department soon thereafter, another State Department official told The Cable, asking for assistance and to help coordinate the response. Facebook then created an encrypted option for accessing the site from Tunisia...
In addition to encouraging technical workarounds, the State Department effort includes jawboning Ben Ali and Mubarak to back off on information control:
Rogin writes:
... the State Department convoked the Tunisian ambassador in Washington to complain about the government's tactics.
In the case of Tunisia, the State Department mixed a strategy of working with companies and third party groups with a series of private and public communications between the Obama administration and the government of now-ousted president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
...
State Department officials told The Cable that their efforts paid off, given that Ben Ali -- before stepping down -- said that he "heard the Tunisian people" and removed the blocks on the Internet and social media sites, although he had never cut off the entire country from communication.
I’m sure that Ben Ali, with the wreckage of his regime crashing down around his head, appreciated taking the time out to discuss his social media policy with the United States.
At least he could jet to exile with the consolation that he would not be remembered as the despot who was too mean to Twitter and Facebook.
Mubarak, on the other hand, will have to deal with the shame of having presided over “the worst shutdown in Internet history”.
The situation is rather awkward for the State Department.
After all, Ben Ali and Mubarak were U.S. allies. Helping their opponents evade information controls in order to overthrow their governments is a rather un-allied thing to do.
In Rogin’s article, the State Department makes two rather unconvincing arguments:
1. Hey, Twitter, Facebook, and Google are American companies whose business should not be disrupted!
As Rogin’s source put it, "These tactics were used against American companies, so we have equities on multiple fronts.”
It’s not particularly persuasive to say that the U.S. State Department needed to work actively to abrogate the sovereignty of these two countries in order maintain the usual volume of tweets, eyeballs, and clickthroughs from Tunisia and Egypt on behalf of American corporate entities
2. Hey, these networking services didn’t overthrow the government by themselves!
The State Department official said that while technology was an accelerant for the protests and a way for the protesters to get unvarnished information, it did not spur the movement.
With all due respect, that’s bullsh*t.
It happens that I believe that dissent will find a way to communicate and organize: pancakes at the fall of the Yuan dynasty, pamphlets during the American revolution, chapatis in India during the Sepoy Rebellion, cassette tapes in Iran at the fall of the Shah.
Sooner or later.
Well, Facebook, Twitter, and Google made it sooner.
The events in Egypt and Tunisia illustrated an American strategy: the U.S. State Department views free communication as a strategic weapon against authoritarian adversaries whose governments are vulnerable to organized popular dissent:
Ever since the State Department intervened during protests by the Iranian Green movement in June 2009, convincing Twitter to postpone maintenance so opposition protestors could communicate, the U.S. government has been ramping up its worldwide effort to set up a network of organizations that could circumvent crackdowns on Internet and cell phone technologies by foreign governments. That effort faced its first two major tests over the last few weeks and the State Department has been working with private companies, non-governmental organizations, and academic institutions to activate this network and put it to use in real time.
"Our mission is to provide a lifeline of protection when people get in trouble through a range of support for the activists and the people on the ground," Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) Michael Posner said in an interview on Friday with The Cable. "I think there will be an increase in contacts on several levels in the coming days and weeks."
Even before the unrest in Tunisia and Egypt, the State Department was working to drastically increase its activities with the internet freedom organizations, many of them using State Department funding provided through a grant program administered by DRL. This month, State announced it would spend another $30 million on this project.
For Posner, the drive to create an "open platform" for Internet communications is part of the overall drive to protect the universal rights the administration has been trumpeting in recent days and that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laid out in her speech on Internet Freedom.
Rather ironically, the first successful instances of the policy were classic cases of blowback, taking down two American allies in the Middle East while Iran and China are taking notes on the sidelines.
Rather significantly, the State Department has doubled down.
Ben Ali and Mubarak are history anyway; and their demise can serve a useful demonstration of the power of the information-freedom death star.
The anxieties of the Saudis and King Hussein of Jordan are apparently an acceptable price to pay for declaring to the Iranian and Chinese leaders—and their citizens—that America will continue to apply its ingenuity, energy, and advantages to promote information freedom openly and covertly to apply potentially destabilizing pressure against these regimes.
China is rather anxiously scrubbing the Chinese Internet of stories and comments that emphasize the popular mass-movement character of the risings in Tunisia and Egypt. Published reports focus instead on local chaos and the efforts of the Chinese government to evacuate Chinese nationals.
Global Times took the bit in its teeth and weighed in with a “color revolutions are bad” editorial; the rest of the official media appears to be doing its best to ignore the issue and possible consequences for China.
However, Hu Jintao probably isn’t packing his bags for Switzerland just yet. The Chinese government seems to have enough wealth, time, and legitimacy to apply itself to the serious problems of corruption, income inequality, and the fundamental pig-headedness of one-party states when it comes to managing and channeling dissent.
Also, China has an important advantage.
It has the U.S. as an unmistakable, threatening adversary that serves as a focus for patriotic and nationalistic sentiment.
This probably puts China in a better situation than the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, which have—all information freedom triumphalism aside—found the U.S. as an equivocal, ultimately fatal ally.
Finally, it should be pointed out that the U.S. is all for information freedom—as long as it isn’t Wikileaks.
In other words, The Truth Shall Set You Free......Unless It’s My Truth.
A Useful—if Inadvertent—Demonstration of the Power of the Information-Freedom Death Star
[Counterpunch kindly ran this piece on its website. However, the formatting gremlins attacked them and some of the quotes I made from Mr. Rogin's article weren't displayed properly, making them look like my words instead of his. This was completely inadvertent and I've asked Counterpunch to correct the error. If necessary, please refer to this post and the e-mail notification for the proper formatting of the piece. CH 2/2/11]
Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin has an interesting post on how the U.S. State Department has been working energetically with Twitter, Facebook, Google et. al. to keep the information pipelines open in Tunisia and Egypt.
The Tunisian government responded by hacking massive amounts of Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail accounts and targeted other sites where protestors were convening or communicating.
Facebook contacted the State Department soon thereafter, another State Department official told The Cable, asking for assistance and to help coordinate the response. Facebook then created an encrypted option for accessing the site from Tunisia...
In addition to encouraging technical workarounds, the State Department effort includes jawboning Ben Ali and Mubarak to back off on information control:
Rogin writes:
... the State Department convoked the Tunisian ambassador in Washington to complain about the government's tactics.
In the case of Tunisia, the State Department mixed a strategy of working with companies and third party groups with a series of private and public communications between the Obama administration and the government of now-ousted president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
...
State Department officials told The Cable that their efforts paid off, given that Ben Ali -- before stepping down -- said that he "heard the Tunisian people" and removed the blocks on the Internet and social media sites, although he had never cut off the entire country from communication.
I’m sure that Ben Ali, with the wreckage of his regime crashing down around his head, appreciated taking the time out to discuss his social media policy with the United States.
At least he could jet to exile with the consolation that he would not be remembered as the despot who was too mean to Twitter and Facebook.
Mubarak, on the other hand, will have to deal with the shame of having presided over “the worst shutdown in Internet history”.
The situation is rather awkward for the State Department.
After all, Ben Ali and Mubarak were U.S. allies. Helping their opponents evade information controls in order to overthrow their governments is a rather un-allied thing to do.
In Rogin’s article, the State Department makes two rather unconvincing arguments:
1. Hey, Twitter, Facebook, and Google are American companies whose business should not be disrupted!
As Rogin’s source put it, "These tactics were used against American companies, so we have equities on multiple fronts.”
It’s not particularly persuasive to say that the U.S. State Department needed to work actively to abrogate the sovereignty of these two countries in order maintain the usual volume of tweets, eyeballs, and clickthroughs from Tunisia and Egypt on behalf of American corporate entities
2. Hey, these networking services didn’t overthrow the government by themselves!
The State Department official said that while technology was an accelerant for the protests and a way for the protesters to get unvarnished information, it did not spur the movement.
With all due respect, that’s bullsh*t.
It happens that I believe that dissent will find a way to communicate and organize: pancakes at the fall of the Yuan dynasty, pamphlets during the American revolution, chapatis in India during the Sepoy Rebellion, cassette tapes in Iran at the fall of the Shah.
Sooner or later.
Well, Facebook, Twitter, and Google made it sooner.
The events in Egypt and Tunisia illustrated an American strategy: the U.S. State Department views free communication as a strategic weapon against authoritarian adversaries whose governments are vulnerable to organized popular dissent:
Ever since the State Department intervened during protests by the Iranian Green movement in June 2009, convincing Twitter to postpone maintenance so opposition protestors could communicate, the U.S. government has been ramping up its worldwide effort to set up a network of organizations that could circumvent crackdowns on Internet and cell phone technologies by foreign governments. That effort faced its first two major tests over the last few weeks and the State Department has been working with private companies, non-governmental organizations, and academic institutions to activate this network and put it to use in real time.
"Our mission is to provide a lifeline of protection when people get in trouble through a range of support for the activists and the people on the ground," Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) Michael Posner said in an interview on Friday with The Cable. "I think there will be an increase in contacts on several levels in the coming days and weeks."
Even before the unrest in Tunisia and Egypt, the State Department was working to drastically increase its activities with the internet freedom organizations, many of them using State Department funding provided through a grant program administered by DRL. This month, State announced it would spend another $30 million on this project.
For Posner, the drive to create an "open platform" for Internet communications is part of the overall drive to protect the universal rights the administration has been trumpeting in recent days and that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laid out in her speech on Internet Freedom.
Rather ironically, the first successful instances of the policy were classic cases of blowback, taking down two American allies in the Middle East while Iran and China are taking notes on the sidelines.
Rather significantly, the State Department has doubled down.
Ben Ali and Mubarak are history anyway; and their demise can serve a useful demonstration of the power of the information-freedom death star.
The anxieties of the Saudis and King Hussein of Jordan are apparently an acceptable price to pay for declaring to the Iranian and Chinese leaders—and their citizens—that America will continue to apply its ingenuity, energy, and advantages to promote information freedom openly and covertly to apply potentially destabilizing pressure against these regimes.
China is rather anxiously scrubbing the Chinese Internet of stories and comments that emphasize the popular mass-movement character of the risings in Tunisia and Egypt. Published reports focus instead on local chaos and the efforts of the Chinese government to evacuate Chinese nationals.
Global Times took the bit in its teeth and weighed in with a “color revolutions are bad” editorial; the rest of the official media appears to be doing its best to ignore the issue and possible consequences for China.
However, Hu Jintao probably isn’t packing his bags for Switzerland just yet. The Chinese government seems to have enough wealth, time, and legitimacy to apply itself to the serious problems of corruption, income inequality, and the fundamental pig-headedness of one-party states when it comes to managing and channeling dissent.
Also, China has an important advantage.
It has the U.S. as an unmistakable, threatening adversary that serves as a focus for patriotic and nationalistic sentiment.
This probably puts China in a better situation than the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, which have—all information freedom triumphalism aside—found the U.S. as an equivocal, ultimately fatal ally.
Finally, it should be pointed out that the U.S. is all for information freedom—as long as it isn’t Wikileaks.
In other words, The Truth Shall Set You Free......Unless It’s My Truth.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
China’s J20 Stealth Fighter: Made in America...via Belgrade
I have an article up at Asia Times titled The tearful origins of China's stealth.
It addresses a rumor circulating in China that the U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 in order to destroy wreckage of a F117A stealth fighter shot down during the NATO air war against Yugoslavia.
Regardless of whether or not the stealth wreckage legend is true, it appears highly probable that the embassy was bombed on purpose.
Certainly, a lot of people inside China believe the bombing was intentional.
The bombing of the Belgrade embassy is something of a 9/11 moment for China.
It galvanized the Chinese elite in its determination to upgrade China’s military capabilities.
It also occasioned a sea change in Chinese public opinion.
In 1989, I remember a resident of Beijing plaintively asking why the U.S. couldn’t send some B-52s to help out the pro-democracy demonstrators.
In 1999, when the U.S. bombers did show up—at the Chinese embassy in Belgrade—the reaction inside China wasn’t so favorable.
Warm and fuzzy affection for the United States as a paragon of democratic values were replaced, to a significant extent, by nationalist perceptions of the U.S. as a dangerous and unscrupulous adversary.
To the Chinese government’s satisfaction, the Belgrade bombing complicated the unfavorable post Tian An Men narrative of democracy-loving Chinese populace preferring the USA system over the PRC.
In a couple of posts in 2007, I covered the embassy bombing incident in considerable detail:
The Belgrade Bombing, the F-117 Cake, and the Tears of Premier Zhu Rongji
and
Why China Hates Satellite Guided Munitions, Part 1: The Bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999
They are particularly useful because some interesting information has subsequently vanished from the net, and my posts are a good place to find them.
Here’s a taste, drawing on a 2006 report from a Chinese magazine called Global Views:
It addresses a rumor circulating in China that the U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 in order to destroy wreckage of a F117A stealth fighter shot down during the NATO air war against Yugoslavia.
Regardless of whether or not the stealth wreckage legend is true, it appears highly probable that the embassy was bombed on purpose.
Certainly, a lot of people inside China believe the bombing was intentional.
The bombing of the Belgrade embassy is something of a 9/11 moment for China.
It galvanized the Chinese elite in its determination to upgrade China’s military capabilities.
It also occasioned a sea change in Chinese public opinion.
In 1989, I remember a resident of Beijing plaintively asking why the U.S. couldn’t send some B-52s to help out the pro-democracy demonstrators.
In 1999, when the U.S. bombers did show up—at the Chinese embassy in Belgrade—the reaction inside China wasn’t so favorable.
Warm and fuzzy affection for the United States as a paragon of democratic values were replaced, to a significant extent, by nationalist perceptions of the U.S. as a dangerous and unscrupulous adversary.
To the Chinese government’s satisfaction, the Belgrade bombing complicated the unfavorable post Tian An Men narrative of democracy-loving Chinese populace preferring the USA system over the PRC.
In a couple of posts in 2007, I covered the embassy bombing incident in considerable detail:
The Belgrade Bombing, the F-117 Cake, and the Tears of Premier Zhu Rongji
and
Why China Hates Satellite Guided Munitions, Part 1: The Bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999
They are particularly useful because some interesting information has subsequently vanished from the net, and my posts are a good place to find them.
Here’s a taste, drawing on a 2006 report from a Chinese magazine called Global Views:
1960s tube amplifier enthusiasts will be thrilled to learn that the Yugoslavian air force attributes the shootdown of the F117A to P-12 type vacuum tube-technology Russian radars so old the U.S. considered them obsolete.Happy New Year.
According to their account, the F117A Stealth fighter was detectable by antique radar operating at wavelengths of 2 meters—a detail that had supposedly escaped the Stealth designers, who operated on the assumption that the plane would only have to be invisible to modern centimeter and millimeter wavelength radars.
On the evening of March 27, Yugoslavia’s anti-aircraft defenses detected an aircraft entering Yugoslavian airspace at a distance of 80 km. The radar was immediately shut off, since U.S. planes were armed with radar seeking missiles that would fire automatically within 20 seconds and track the signal to its source and destroy it. The Yugoslavian anti-aircraft crews had been rigorously trained to either acquire and fire on a target or turn off their radio within this 20-second window. The radar was switched on when the target was about 15 km away and a barrage of SA-2 SAM missiles were fired manually. The F117A fell to earth. Witnesses said, “It looked like a sparrow shot from the sky.”
The shootdown raised an important tactical and strategic issue for NATO. Bad weather had limited helicopter operations and the U.S. was relying on high-altitude bombing to advance its war objectives. Therefore, a great deal of attention was paid to identifying and disabling Yugoslavia’s anti-aircraft facilities.
The Global Vision article reports that the headquarters of the 126 Mid-Air Detection and Anti-Aircraft Battalion—which had detected the plane—was attacked 11 times, each time with 5 JDAM bombs. The 250th Battalion—which fired the offending SAMs--was attacked 22 times.
The Yugoslav asserts that the 3rd Brigade of the 250th Battalion, whose missiles actually brought down the plane, suffered no fatalities or casualties during the war, leading them to brag: “We’re the real Stealth”.
The F-117A shootdown provided a psychological boost to the Yugoslavs which lives on to this day.
Every year on March 27 the 250th Battalion, now part of the Serbian Air Force, holds a raucous party. The main event occurs when a large cake bedecked with candles is rolled out. On the top is a rendering of an F-117A Nighthawk in chocolate. At precisely 8:42 pm, the exact time of the shootdown, the first slice is cut—through the port wing, which is the one severed by the SAM barrage.
No word as to whether the cake is inscribed with the taunt “Neener Neener” or the Serbian equivalent.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Hu Jintao's Visit: 2011 is not 2006
I wrote the obligatory Hu Jintao in America article for Asia Times, For Hu, Style Is the Substance.
I was able to make some useful points about how the red carpet treatment for China creates a few fissures in the US/ROK/Japan alliance and points up problems for conventional containment strategy against the PRC.
Also, I provided some interesting perspective that I haven't seen in the gazillion of other articles covering Hu's visit:
Even if the U.S. commentariat doesn't remember the nitty gritty of the 2006 visit, Hu Jintao undoubtedly does--and finds the contrast extremely gratifying.
I was able to make some useful points about how the red carpet treatment for China creates a few fissures in the US/ROK/Japan alliance and points up problems for conventional containment strategy against the PRC.
Also, I provided some interesting perspective that I haven't seen in the gazillion of other articles covering Hu's visit:
2011 is not 2006.
In 2006, the occasion of Hu's previous visit, George W Bush was still riding high in the early years of his second term. The "war on terror", with a few bumps, was rolling along and doing in the surviving members of the "axis of evil" - North Korea and Iran - was at the top of the foreign policy agenda after the third member, Iraq, had already been dealt with. Confronting China - long a preoccupation of vice president Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne Cheney - to moderate its support of North Korea and Iran was an important priority.
In April 2006, when Hu visited, the US campaign to financially isolate and destabilize North Korea - initiated with the Treasury finding that Macau's Banco Delta Asia (BDA) was a "financial institution of money laundering concern" and toppled it into insolvency - was in full swing.
And China was feeling the heat.
As the architect of the effort, David Asher, subsequently testified to the US congress, the objective of the BDA designation was an aggressive effort to "kill the chicken in order to scare the monkey", that is, intimidate China into actively participating in the financial blockade of North Korea by threatening its own institutions such as the People's Bank of China with a BDA-type designation if it continued its dealings with the Pyongyang regime.
The campaign, led by Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence Stuart Levey, was global in reach and reportedly successful enough to force some Chinese banks into cutting banking ties with North Korea. However, the US did not succeed in getting the Chinese government to change its North Korea policy or even abandon its support for BDA.
China's role as an impediment to Bush administration policies did not make for a particularly hospitable environment for Hu's visit.
As Dana Milbank reported at the time:
The protocol-obsessed Chinese leader suffered a day full of indignities - some intentional, others just careless. The visit began with a slight when the official announcer said the band would play the "national anthem of the Republic of China" - the official name of Taiwan. It continued when Vice President Cheney donned sunglasses for the ceremony, and again when Hu, attempting to leave the stage via the wrong staircase, was yanked back by his jacket. Hu looked down at his sleeve to see the president of the United States tugging at it as if redirecting an errant child.
Then there were the intentional slights. China wanted a formal state visit such as Jiang [Zemin] got, but the administration refused, calling it instead an "official" visit. Bush acquiesced to the 21-gun salute but insisted on a luncheon instead of a formal dinner, in the East Room instead of the State Dining Room. Even the visiting country's flags were missing from the lampposts near the White House.
In addition to his sunglass-donning transgression, Cheney also had to deny he had marked Hu's Oval Office briefing by taking a nap in his chair (thereby, perhaps inadvertently, leaving the impression that he had actually chosen to feign sleep in order to show his contempt for the red supremo).
The capper to the disastrous visit was the outburst of Dr Wang Wenyi, Falungong's point person on the issue of vivisection and organ harvesting allegedly inflicted on Falungong practitioners by the Chinese government.
Despite having been denied press credentials by Maltese security during a previous overseas trip of Hu's, somehow Wang was able to evade the scrutiny of the White House press office and acquire a one-day credential for Hu's visit as the press rep of Falungong's Epoch Times.
It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that somebody in the press office thought it might be a fun prank to throw Hu together with a Falungong activist.
In 2006, the Secret Service did not cover itself in glory, either, as Milbank described:
90 seconds into Hu's speech on the South Lawn, the woman started shrieking, "President Hu, your days are numbered!" and "President Bush, stop him from killing!"
Bush and Hu looked up, stunned. It took so long to silence her - a full three minutes - that Bush aides began to wonder if the Secret Service's strategy was to let her scream herself hoarse. The rattled Chinese president haltingly attempted to continue his speech and television coverage went to split screen.
Even if the U.S. commentariat doesn't remember the nitty gritty of the 2006 visit, Hu Jintao undoubtedly does--and finds the contrast extremely gratifying.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Eyesight to the Blind on North Korea
I have an article up at Asia Times on North Korea as the pivot point for competing U.S. and Chinese ideas of the North Asian security order.
Asia Times’ crack editors titled it Eyesight to the Blind .
Not sure what that’s about, unless they are referring to the fact that I haven’t seen other commentators making my point: that the U.S., ROK, and Japan are trying to assert a apply Free World vs. Communists template to guide relations with China and North Korea, while China wants to break this system down as a Cold War relic, and replace it with a series of bilateral relations.
North Korea is China’s wedge against the alliance: by asserting the continued viability of North Korea (with Chinese support, natch), it is declaring that a US/ROK/Japan tie-up can’t solve the Nork problem and is not an effective paradigm for North Asian security as a whole.
There is some anxiety that the U.S. is going to go all wobbly and make a separate peace with China, as Stephen Walt observed during his current trip to Vietnam:
I given several lectures since my arrival here, and met with a number of Vietnamese officials. One theme that has come up repeatedly is the fear that the United States and China will reach some sort of great power condominium. at the expense of the weaker powers in the region. There is clearly considerable concern that the United States will "do a deal" with China, in effect granting it a free hand in its neighborhood in exchange for concessions elsewhere.
I agree with Walt that the U.S. is unlikely to throw Vietnam (and the ROK and Japan) under the bus for the sake of the China relationship—even though there are signs that the Obama administration sees the current Korea policy as a cul-de-sac and wouldn’t mind extricating itself.
[It occurs to me that the Vietnam issue neatly illustrates the US conundrum. We want to frame Asia policy as a good guys vs. bad guys issue, but it turns out that the bad guys are all China and its allies--North Korea and Burma--but Vietnam, another single-party mixed-market autocracy, gets a free pass because it's at loggerheads with the Chinese. So it's hard to get away from the contain-China core of the policy, with all the risks and divided loyalties for the U.S. and its allies that the policy entails. Ironically, Vietnam, which is closest to the PRC in polity and economic strategy, is probably also the closest to serving as China's purest zero-sum adversary in Asia. CH 1/18/11]
The Lee Myung-bak government in Seoul and the DPJ regime in Japan are entirely vested in the pro-US/anti-North Korea security setup. There isn’t enough evident China upside to justify betraying two committed U.S. allies.
Also, national security theater has its own, supremely powerful constituency. Confronting a Chinese threat means fat defense budgets for US, ROK, and Japanese military and industrial establishments for at least half a century.
Andrew Cockburn titled his look at the J-20 Pentagon Ecstatic Over New Chinese "Threat" and wrote:
For much of the 1990s, luck deserted our military industrial complex. Its formerly reliable Soviet partners ceased to play their part, leaving the Pentagon to scour the world for a “peer or near peer competitor.” There were hopes, always futile, for a reconstituted USSR, or perhaps an emergent China (always popular on the right in those days) which was followed by the putative menace of regional competitors, (Iran, Iraq, North Korea) combining against America.
...
Now... the Chinese have stepped up to the plate.
Our Asian friends have suddenly offered a titillating peek from an airfield in Chengdu at their newest warplane, described as a radar-evading "stealth" fighter like our own F-22.
The reaction from some quarters has been predictably enthusiastic. "From what we can see, I conclude that this aircraft does have great potential to be superior in some respects to the American F-22, and could be decisively superior to the F-35," claims Richard Fisher, a senior fellow on Asian military affairs at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, a Washington-based security think tank.
Other denizens of the military-industrial complex have pushed hyperbole further, with predictions that the plane — though it looks enormous in the photographs — may be pretty much invisible to radar.
"You can tell it has some serious stealth technology," proclaims one former Navy pilot now in the defense investment business quoted by Fox News. "My F-18 looks like an 18-wheeler on radar. That thing might not even show up."
...
We should not have to wait too long before some obliging member of Congress calls for the reopening of the F-22 production line, cut off by Gates in 2009 after a mere 187 planes had been built.
My personal feeling: the best play for the United States might be to decouple from ROK’s hardline policy, engage in some reverse wedging i.e. rapprochement with a (very willing) North Korea to distance it from China, and, at least for the purpose of geopolitics, take the much-touted threat of “instability on the Korean peninsula” as the Chinese put it, off the table.
With China’s self-declared role as problem-solver for the DPRK headache diminished, negotiations with Chinese could focus directly on the things that China is doing itself that disturb its neighbors: military buildup, island and atoll shenanigans, and so on.
What we’re doing right now is exactly the opposite: feeding into the Chinese narrative by touting North Korea as an existential threat that, unfortunately, we don’t seem to be able to do anything about without Chinese assistance.
Re Eyesight to the Blind, most people know it as a song off the Who’s Tommy rock opera. The Who were actually covering a tune by bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson.
Sonny Boy Williamson was a member of the great 1950s Chess blues triumvirate including Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf that fueled the rise of the Chicago record label in the pre-Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley days.
He was a master of the blues harp and a sly, underplayed style that contrasted with the more assertive stance of Muddy Waters and Howlin’Wolf. He recorded Eyesight to the Blind as a 78 for Trumpet Records in Mississippi in the early 1950s. Arhoolie has issued his Trumpet (pre-Chess recordings) as Sonny Boy Williamson: King Biscuit Time (since it includes a 15-minute recording of a radio show—sponsored by a flour company—that he hosted in the mid-1960s).
Here’s Eyesight to the Blind and a link to get the Arhoolie CD.
Youtube uploaded by randomandrare
Asia Times’ crack editors titled it Eyesight to the Blind .
Not sure what that’s about, unless they are referring to the fact that I haven’t seen other commentators making my point: that the U.S., ROK, and Japan are trying to assert a apply Free World vs. Communists template to guide relations with China and North Korea, while China wants to break this system down as a Cold War relic, and replace it with a series of bilateral relations.
North Korea is China’s wedge against the alliance: by asserting the continued viability of North Korea (with Chinese support, natch), it is declaring that a US/ROK/Japan tie-up can’t solve the Nork problem and is not an effective paradigm for North Asian security as a whole.
There is some anxiety that the U.S. is going to go all wobbly and make a separate peace with China, as Stephen Walt observed during his current trip to Vietnam:
I given several lectures since my arrival here, and met with a number of Vietnamese officials. One theme that has come up repeatedly is the fear that the United States and China will reach some sort of great power condominium. at the expense of the weaker powers in the region. There is clearly considerable concern that the United States will "do a deal" with China, in effect granting it a free hand in its neighborhood in exchange for concessions elsewhere.
I agree with Walt that the U.S. is unlikely to throw Vietnam (and the ROK and Japan) under the bus for the sake of the China relationship—even though there are signs that the Obama administration sees the current Korea policy as a cul-de-sac and wouldn’t mind extricating itself.
[It occurs to me that the Vietnam issue neatly illustrates the US conundrum. We want to frame Asia policy as a good guys vs. bad guys issue, but it turns out that the bad guys are all China and its allies--North Korea and Burma--but Vietnam, another single-party mixed-market autocracy, gets a free pass because it's at loggerheads with the Chinese. So it's hard to get away from the contain-China core of the policy, with all the risks and divided loyalties for the U.S. and its allies that the policy entails. Ironically, Vietnam, which is closest to the PRC in polity and economic strategy, is probably also the closest to serving as China's purest zero-sum adversary in Asia. CH 1/18/11]
The Lee Myung-bak government in Seoul and the DPJ regime in Japan are entirely vested in the pro-US/anti-North Korea security setup. There isn’t enough evident China upside to justify betraying two committed U.S. allies.
Also, national security theater has its own, supremely powerful constituency. Confronting a Chinese threat means fat defense budgets for US, ROK, and Japanese military and industrial establishments for at least half a century.
Andrew Cockburn titled his look at the J-20 Pentagon Ecstatic Over New Chinese "Threat" and wrote:
For much of the 1990s, luck deserted our military industrial complex. Its formerly reliable Soviet partners ceased to play their part, leaving the Pentagon to scour the world for a “peer or near peer competitor.” There were hopes, always futile, for a reconstituted USSR, or perhaps an emergent China (always popular on the right in those days) which was followed by the putative menace of regional competitors, (Iran, Iraq, North Korea) combining against America.
...
Now... the Chinese have stepped up to the plate.
Our Asian friends have suddenly offered a titillating peek from an airfield in Chengdu at their newest warplane, described as a radar-evading "stealth" fighter like our own F-22.
The reaction from some quarters has been predictably enthusiastic. "From what we can see, I conclude that this aircraft does have great potential to be superior in some respects to the American F-22, and could be decisively superior to the F-35," claims Richard Fisher, a senior fellow on Asian military affairs at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, a Washington-based security think tank.
Other denizens of the military-industrial complex have pushed hyperbole further, with predictions that the plane — though it looks enormous in the photographs — may be pretty much invisible to radar.
"You can tell it has some serious stealth technology," proclaims one former Navy pilot now in the defense investment business quoted by Fox News. "My F-18 looks like an 18-wheeler on radar. That thing might not even show up."
...
We should not have to wait too long before some obliging member of Congress calls for the reopening of the F-22 production line, cut off by Gates in 2009 after a mere 187 planes had been built.
My personal feeling: the best play for the United States might be to decouple from ROK’s hardline policy, engage in some reverse wedging i.e. rapprochement with a (very willing) North Korea to distance it from China, and, at least for the purpose of geopolitics, take the much-touted threat of “instability on the Korean peninsula” as the Chinese put it, off the table.
With China’s self-declared role as problem-solver for the DPRK headache diminished, negotiations with Chinese could focus directly on the things that China is doing itself that disturb its neighbors: military buildup, island and atoll shenanigans, and so on.
What we’re doing right now is exactly the opposite: feeding into the Chinese narrative by touting North Korea as an existential threat that, unfortunately, we don’t seem to be able to do anything about without Chinese assistance.
Re Eyesight to the Blind, most people know it as a song off the Who’s Tommy rock opera. The Who were actually covering a tune by bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson.
Sonny Boy Williamson was a member of the great 1950s Chess blues triumvirate including Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf that fueled the rise of the Chicago record label in the pre-Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley days.
He was a master of the blues harp and a sly, underplayed style that contrasted with the more assertive stance of Muddy Waters and Howlin’Wolf. He recorded Eyesight to the Blind as a 78 for Trumpet Records in Mississippi in the early 1950s. Arhoolie has issued his Trumpet (pre-Chess recordings) as Sonny Boy Williamson: King Biscuit Time (since it includes a 15-minute recording of a radio show—sponsored by a flour company—that he hosted in the mid-1960s).
Here’s Eyesight to the Blind and a link to get the Arhoolie CD.
Youtube uploaded by randomandrare
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
What Julian Assange Is Doing Is Not So Terrible...
...But What We're Doing to Bradley Manning Is Terrible
There seems to be an increasingly bright line in the foreign affairs realms of the blogosphere separating those who are concerned about the public relations and legal jihad against Julian Assange and the affliction of Bradley Manning, and those who mock, snort, and maintain the proper air of sniggering condescension and ostentatious outrage to please their bespoke sources at the State Department.
On the left, there's an interesting recapitulation of the split between the opponents of the Iraq war and the liberal hawk supporters of the get-Saddam crusade.
Today, in my opinion, Glenn Greenwald, Counterpunch, and Antiwar.com are on the side of the good guys.
From his prosperous perch at Salon, I imagine Glenn Greenwald needs little more than moral support.
But I think Counterpunch and Antiwar.com wouldn't mind some more tangible, financial indication of appreciation.
Please visit their sites to subscribe (in the case of Counterpunch) or make a donation (in the case of Antiwar.com).
Here's an excerpt from a recent interview Daniel Ellsberg gave to Antiwar.com's radio arm:
An article by Jean Casella and James Ridgway from their site Solitary Watch, via Counterpunch, puts Manning's treatment in a sobering perspective:
There seems to be an increasingly bright line in the foreign affairs realms of the blogosphere separating those who are concerned about the public relations and legal jihad against Julian Assange and the affliction of Bradley Manning, and those who mock, snort, and maintain the proper air of sniggering condescension and ostentatious outrage to please their bespoke sources at the State Department.
On the left, there's an interesting recapitulation of the split between the opponents of the Iraq war and the liberal hawk supporters of the get-Saddam crusade.
Today, in my opinion, Glenn Greenwald, Counterpunch, and Antiwar.com are on the side of the good guys.
From his prosperous perch at Salon, I imagine Glenn Greenwald needs little more than moral support.
But I think Counterpunch and Antiwar.com wouldn't mind some more tangible, financial indication of appreciation.
Please visit their sites to subscribe (in the case of Counterpunch) or make a donation (in the case of Antiwar.com).
Here's an excerpt from a recent interview Daniel Ellsberg gave to Antiwar.com's radio arm:
Horton: Okay, good. So, welcome to the show. Tell me, there’s a lot of talk in the media saying that, “Yeah, well, we all give Dan Ellsberg respect for leaking the Pentagon Papers” – now at least there’s somewhat of a consensus that maybe that was the right thing to do – “but WikiLeaks is a totally different thing. This guy Assange has a terrible agenda to hurt America,” not help it like you wanted to do, and I think that’s at least part of it. What do you think about that?
Ellsberg: Well, Floyd Abrams, who defended the New York Times in front of the Supreme Court in the Pentagon Papers case, where the question was injunction, prior restraint against the New York Times, just had a Wall Street Journal article in which he quoted me, critically I could say, and he says, “Daniel Ellsberg says that there is a myth that Pentagon Papers good, WikiLeaks bad.” And that’s true, I did say that and I do say that and it is a myth.
And then he went on to say, “But the real myth is not that one, but the real myth is that they’re the same.” Well, nobody said they’re the same. Obviously there are all kinds of differences which certainly I can identify as well as anybody. But there are some fundamental similarities, both in the motive and the kind of war there and the need for the revelations that they’re presenting.
And in terms of the charges that are made against them, including by Abrams, but especially by others, again there’s a very great similarity in the situation. People are implying that everyone could see that the Pentagon Papers – which was a history of a single conflict over a period of time; it was focused on one thing and it revealed deception by a succession of administrations – everybody could see that that was a worthy thing to do, or at least, you know, conscientious, and my motives were good, etc. etc. etc. Not everybody saw that at the time. Not the administration, the White House, which called it treason, with a little [laughs] a little more basis – how to say this: I am a citizen. I do owe allegiance to the United States. To say that Julian Assange is guilty of treason has some problems since he’s an Australian citizen.
But anyway, I was called a traitor, which was no more true of me than it is to say Bradley Manning, who is accused now of leaking, sitting in a jail in Quantico – he’s no more a traitor than I am, and I’m not. Neither of them are terrorists any more than I am, and I’m not.
So I did get these comments. I didn’t get the “terrorist” at the time, because that wasn’t in vogue as a demonizing label then 40 years ago, but I would be called a terrorist now. I have no doubt at all, if I put out the same documents now, they would call me a terrorist, because that’s the bad thing now.
Now, more than that, of course, I was – they’re searching now for a law with which to indict Assange for what he did, and of course Assange’s role is that essentially of the New York Times in the case of the Pentagon Papers or of WikiLeaks. There really is no basis in law that they’re going to find that can nail or can entrap or indict Assange that doesn’t apply to the New York Times exactly as well, since they have put out these clearly classified documents to the public.
In fact, they’ve made the choice, along with the other four newspapers, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and El Pais in Spain – they made the choice so far which documents in this Cablegate series to put out. Assange has put out on his own website essentially only those, with a few exceptions, but almost entirely those that have been chosen to be referred to or put out by these mainstream newspapers.
So there is no judicial basis, no legal basis, for charging Assange with anything that doesn’t apply equally well to the New York Times, and it’s clear that the administration is not anxious to get in a legal fight with the New York Times. So they’re trying to distinguish Assange not only from me and the Pentagon Papers, but from the New York Times, and that’s really pretty impossible to do.
But finally, to get back to the initial point that I was making, in fact all the charges that were made against Assange now – he’s interfering with diplomatic relationships, he’s disrupting diplomacy, he’s producing embarrassing things that make our relations with other countries harder, and he’s endangering the lives of troops – all of those were said about the Pentagon Papers, and that was the basis, after all, for the attempt at prior restraint, which they didn’t do in this occasion, presumably because they just couldn’t. You know, with the electronic means, there was no way of stopping it. But they could have tried to restrain the Times very well from putting out any more, but in the clear recognition that the information would get out anyway from other newspapers and from the Internet.
So, they said at the time, for instance, that the Pentagon Papers were disrupting our relations with Australia because it embarrassed the measures we took to encourage or coerce Australians into sending troops to Vietnam. Actually that’s something they certainly deserved to embarrassed about. They actually started the draft in order to send Australians to Vietnam, which is a scandal, really.
So, as I say, these accusations were made. They were all found to be unfounded in the end, although it was indeed embarrassing to relations. The idea that in these documents there are criticisms by American diplomats of their counterparts [laughs] – and that was not true of the Pentagon Papers? Almost any – most pages at random would find extreme criticisms of the government of Saigon, our puppets in Saigon, for example, and in complaints about our allies, whether they were doing enough in their relationship, one way or the other.
So I come to the point: Condemn this, and you do condemn the Pentagon Papers, and the question is then, was it a good thing or not for the Pentagon Papers to come out? Was it legitimate in a democracy? Did we need it or not? And there were plenty of people who said not, at the time, that it shouldn’t have happened. And those have basically the same point of view that is condemning Assange now.
An article by Jean Casella and James Ridgway from their site Solitary Watch, via Counterpunch, puts Manning's treatment in a sobering perspective:
For the past few weeks, progressive online media sources have been alive with outrage against the conditions in which accused Wikileaker Bradley Manning is being held. Manning is in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement at a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, denied sunlight, exercise, possessions, and all but the most limited contact with family and friends. He has now been in isolation for more than seven months. The cruel and inhuman conditions of his detention, first widely publicized by Glenn Greenwald on Salon and expanded upon by others, are now being discussed, lamented, and protested throughout the progressive blogosphere (ourselves included). Few of those taking part in the conversation hesitate to describe Manning's situation as torture.
Meanwhile, here at Solitary Watch, we've been receiving calls and emails from our modest band of readers, all of them saying more or less the same thing: We're glad Bradley Manning's treatment is getting some attention, but what about the tens of thousands of others who are languishing in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails? According to available data, there are some 25,000 inmates in long-term isolation in the nation's supermax prisons, and as many as 80,000 more in solitary in other prisons and jails. Where is the outrage–even among progressives–for these forgotten souls? Where, even, is some acknowledgment of their existence?
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Frequently, writers and readers make the point that Manning is being subjected to these condition while he is merely accused , rather than convicted, of a crime. Perhaps they need to be introduced to the 15-year-old boy who, along with several dozen other juveniles, is being held is solitary in a jail in Harris County, Texas, while he awaits trial on a robbery charge. He is one of hundreds–if not thousands–of prisoners being held in pre-trial solitary confinement, for one reason or another, on any given day in America. Most of them lack decent legal representation, or are simply too poor to make bail.
We have also seen articles suggesting that the treatment Manning is receiving is worse than the standard for solitary confinement, since he is deprived even of a pillow or sheets for his bed. Their authors should review the case of the prisoners held in the St. Tammany Parish Jail in rural Louisiana. According to a brief by the Louisiana ACLU, "After the jail determines a prisoner is suicidal, the prisoner is stripped half-naked and placed in a 3′ x 3′ metal cage with no shoes, bed, blanket or toilet…Prisoners report they must curl up on the floor to sleep because the cages are too small to let them lie down. Guards frequently ignore repeated requests to use the bathroom, forcing some desperate people to urinate in discarded containers…People have been reportedly held in these cages for days, weeks, and months." The cells are one-fourth the size mandated by local law for caged dogs.
There is, rightly, concern over the damage being done to Manning's mental health by seven months in solitary. Seldom mentioned is the fact that an estimated one-third to one-half of the residents of America's isolation units suffer from mental illness, and solitary confinement cells have, in effect, become our new asylums. Witness the ACLU of Montana's brief on a 17-year-old mentally ill inmate who "was so traumatized by his deplorable treatment in the Montana State Prison that he twice attempted to kill himself by biting through the skin on his wrist to puncture a vein." During his ten months in solitary confinement, he was tasered, pepper sprayed, and stripped naked in view of other inmates, and "his mental health treatment consists of a prison staff member knocking on his door once a week and asking if he has any concerns."
Finally, many have argued that the nature of Manning's alleged crimes renders him a heroic political prisoner, rather than a "common" criminal. Those who take this line might want to look into the "Communications Management Units" at two federal prisons, where, according to a lawsuit filed last year by the Center for Constitutional Rights, prisoners are placed in extreme isolation "for their constitutionally protected religious beliefs, unpopular political views, or in retaliation for challenging poor treatment or other rights violations in the federal prison system." Or they might investigate the aftermath of the recent prison strike in Georgia, in which several inmates have reportedly been thrown into solitary for leading a nonviolent protest against prison conditions.
All of these cases are "exceptional," but only in that they earned the attention of some journalist or advocate. Most prisoners held solitary confinement are, by design, silent and silenced. Most of their stories–tens of thousands of them–are never told at all. And solitary confinement is now used as a disciplinary measure of first resort in prisons and jails across the country, so its use is anything but exceptional.
All across America, inmates are placed in isolation for weeks or months not only for fighting with other inmates or guards, but for being "disruptive" or disobeying orders; for being identified as a gang member (often by a prison snitch or the wrong kind of tattoo); or for having contraband, which can include not only a weapon but a joint, a cell phone, or too many postage stamps. In Virginia, a dozen Rastafarians were in solitary for more than a decade because they refused to cut their dreadlocks, in violation of the prison code. In many prisons, juveniles and rape victims are isolated "for their own protection" in conditions identical to those used for punishment. And for more serious crimes, the isolation simply becomes more extreme, and more permanent: In Louisiana, two men convicted of killing a prison guard have been in solitary confinement for 38 years.
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The treatment of Bradley Manning, which has introduced many on the left to the torment of solitary confinement, may present an opportunity for them to measure their own humanity. They might begin by asking themselves whether prison torture is wrong, and worthy of their attention and outrage, only when it is committed against people whose actions they admire.
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