July 2013
Vol 13, No.07
PRISM PLANET: OBAMA’S GLOBAL CAT & MOUSE GAME WITH SNOWDEN The unfolding situation around whistleblower Edward Snowden is perhaps the Obama administration’s most notable embarrassment, but how far will Washington go to get even with the countries offering safe haven to the man they view as a fugitive? The Snowden saga has it all: a stealthy CIA employee turned principled whistleblower, passionate journalists bringing disclosures to light, and all the diplomatic twists and turns of a big government that hates losing face pressuring other countries to turnover their man. So, what does an Empire look like after its been poked in the eye? It would resemble that of Washington today, which is privately fuming and gritting teeth in-between White House press conferences, where the US is meting out strong statements slamming Beijing, and pressuring Russia to detain Snowden and send him back to the US for trial. White House spokesmen Jay Carney held steadfast to antagonistic rhetoric, supposing that if Snowden were really an advocate for transparency, freedom of the press and protection of individual rights and democracy, he would not run into the embrace of countries like China, Russia, and
Ecuador. The executive branch has made its opinion clear, but what other rich and substantive views dominate the US media landscape in the coverage of the unfolding Snowden drama?
Fox News analyst Ralph Peters called for subjecting Snowden and other treasonous figures to the death penalty, while prominent media figures have called for The Guardian’s journalist Glenn Greenwald to be charged with “aiding and abetting” the fugitive Snowden. It’s not easy keeping a
straight face when watching Dick Cheney being interviewed on television railing against the “crimes” of Edward Snowden, and its practically impossible to fight the urgent need to facepalm when hearing US Secretary of State John Kerry play on scare tactics that the US would be “attacked because terrorists may now know how to protect themselves” from the sweeping NSA surveillance apparatus brought to light by the now infamous whistleblower on the lam. PRISM is about fighting terrorism, but little stands in the way of the White House putting ‘activists’ or dissidents’ into the same basket as ‘terrorists’; in other words, the purpose of this mass surveillance is primarily for gathering intelligence on individuals that are troublesome to the establishment. The CIA, being as hyperactive as it is, wants a file on everybody – and with zero public accountability, nothing stops Turn to next page
ARTICLES .BRAZIL BURNING: THE STORY OF AN ILLUSION GONE SOUR
BY PEPE ESCOBAR..................................................P 3 .TURKISH PROTESTERS REJECT NEO-LIBERALISM NOT
ISLAMISM: OZAN TEKIN BY NADEEN SHAKER...............................................P 5 .ADVICE FROM AN AFGHAN MOTHER AND ACTIVIST: “RESIST THESE DARK TIMES” BY KATHY KELLY...................................................P 6
.SECTARIANISM AND THE IRRATIONAL NEW DISCOURSE: WHY ARABS MUST WORRY BY RAMZY BAROUD..............................................P 7 .SPACE WARFARE AND THE FUTURE OF U.S. GLOBAL
POWER (PART II) BY ALFRED W. MCCOY........................................P 9
.INTERNATIONAL BUDDHIST- MUSLIM JOINT STATEMENT:
SHARED COMMITMENT OF ACTION...............................P 11
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them from monitoring Occupiers or Libertarians just as they would actual terrorists. As the situation develops and the US postures itself as a freer nation than those which Snowden has made his stopovers in, the hypocrisy of that narrative has become all the more glaring. Is the US waging war on whistleblowers & journalists? When the US isn’t waging a war on drugs, or waging cyber war, or waging drone wars, or waging actual war, it’s recently taken to waging war on leakers and hard-hitting reporters. Let’s be clear – even during the early days of the Patriot Act, which drastically lowered the bar on the legal requirements for suspicious individuals to be spied on, nobody thought that the NSA and the authorities concerned could ever enact such a sweeping program like PRISM, which gives the government unprecedented and intimate access into private email exchanges, phone calls, video chats, and numerous other areas. Regardless of whether or not this program has been abused by authorities isn’t the question – the very existence of such a program represents the administration’s grave misinterpretation of its own mandate, and an enormous betrayal of public trust. Whether dealing with revelations of mass surveillance, the leaking of US diplomatic cables, or bringing video evidence of US war crimes to the forefront, there is a growing tendency in the US establishment to portray sources of controversial information as being treasonous and anti-patriotic in nature. Political personalities and pundits often fan the flames of these reactionary opinions when journalists publish information that may blur the line between activism and journalism. Obama has charged more whistleblowers than any other previous presidential administration, invoking
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the WWI-era Espionage Act to criminalize figures like Snowden and others with aiding the enemy. If Snowden really intended to do harm to the United States, he could have compromised the safety of intelligence officials by revealing the identities of undercover CIA agents embedded in various parts of the world, and other things that could harm more than just Washington’s diplomatic standing in the world. Snowden claims to have released only the information that would benefit the public good, and if he comes forward to release more information that suggests that Washington has acted outside of national and international law in its cyber security programs or foreign adventures, many countries would sympathize with Snowden and view his actions as morally justifiable. The China Equation Behind the handshakes and smiles of Obama’s meet up with Chinese President Xi Jinping in California, the Snowden saga had broken and began making international headlines. Snowden’s revelations lent strong credibility to Chinese assertions that they are victims of hacking, not the main perpetrators of it, as Washington maintains. Recent leaks detail how the US government has been hacking Chinese mobile operator networks to intercept millions of text messages, hacking the operator of region’s fibre optic cable network, as well as hacking the servers at Tsinghua University, one of country’s biggest research institutions. If the US was on the receiving end of such far-reaching hacks, it would certainly not be quiet – nor would it honor requests by the aggressor nation to ‘extradite the messenger,’ as it were. Beijing has no illusions, and commentary in China’s official news agencies suggest that. China’s Xinhua news agency says that US government owes the world an explanation, and called Washington “the biggest villain” of cyber attacks, while
S T A T E M E N T claiming to be innocent. In the Globaltimes, a Chinese daily that reflects the views of the establishment in Beijing, an op-ed was published that suggested that the Chinese government attempt to extract useful information from Snowden, noting that “Snowden is a political offender against the US, but what he is doing benefits the world” and that “public opinion will turn against China’s central government and the Hong Kong SAR government if they choose to send him back.” White House spokesman Jay Carney called Snowden’s escape from Hong Kong a “deliberate choice by the [Beijing] government to release a fugitive, despite a valid arrest warrant,” prior to claiming that the move would hurt US-China relations. The forecast here is pretty clear, expect a great deal of chill and enhanced mutual distrust. (And probably a lot more hacking.) Let the Putin-bashing begin… These days, when Kerry isn’t preoccupied trying to arm militants and non-state actors in Syria (a strong case can be made that these figures fit the definition of ‘terrorists’), he’s warning Americans of the dangers posed by terrorists, who now have the upper hand to attack America thanks to the criminality of pesky whistleblowers – or so the US mythology goes. At the time of this article being written, nobody is exactly sure where Snowden is, but its assumed that he’s somewhere in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, arranging his political asylum and onward travel to Quito with Ecuadorian diplomats. If Snowden remains in Russia for an extended period, Kerry will be coming at the Kremlin with huge diplomatic pressure to hand Ed over. If the Russian administration chooses not to honor the extradition request, as the US has done in numerous cases, then expect the White House and their cheerleaders in the US media to come down hard on the Putin administration. continued next page
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The same can be expected if he is allowed to leave Russia, or if Moscow does anything but return Snowden to the US. The recent photograph of Obama and Putin awkwardly sitting side-by-side with hands folded and eyes to the ground perfectly captures the mood of US-Russian relations, and it looks as if that kind of chill is the new
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normal. It is also unwise of the White House to contentiously downplay Russia’s commitment to transparency, democracy, and freedom of the press while asking the Kremlin to hand Snowden over. There is little that the US can do if Russia or Ecuador chooses to protect Snowden, though it may make it harder for citizens of those countries to get US visas, or it could even drag the diplomatic tussle
S T A T E M E N T into the economic sphere by delaying investment deals or making it difficult to import goods to US markets. Two things are for certain at this point: the Snowden saga won’t end quietly, and BigBama’s gonna keep watching you… for your own safety from evil terrorists, of course. Executive Committee, JUST 26 June, 2013
ARTICLES BRAZIL BURNING: THE STORY OF AN ILLUSION GONE SOUR By Pepe Escobar Protests in Brazil indicate what goes way, way beyond a cheap bus fare.
When, in late 2010, Dilma Rousseff was elected President after eight years of the impossibly popular Lula, a national narrative was already ingrained, stressing that Brazil was not the “country of the future” anymore; the future had arrived, and this was a global power in the making. This was a country on overdrive – from securing the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics to a more imposing role as part of the BRICS group of emerging powers. Not unlike China, Brazil was breathlessly exploiting natural resources – from its hinterland to parts of Africa – while betting heavily on large agribusiness mostly supplying, you guess it, China. But above all Brazil fascinated the world by incarnating this political UFO; a
benign, inclusive giant, on top of it benefitting from a lavish accumulation of soft power (music, football, beautiful beaches, beautiful women, endless partying).
with retrograde landowning oligarchies and some of the most rapacious, arrogant and ignorant elites on the planet – inevitable by-products of ghastly Portuguese colonialism.
The country was finally enjoying the benefits of a quarter of a century of participative democracy – and selfsatisfied that for the past ten years Lula’s extensive social inclusion policies had lifted arguably 40 million Brazilians to middle class status. Racial discrimination at least had been tackled, with instances of the Brazilian version of affirmative action.
And then, once again, corruption raised its Hydra-like head. Here’s a first parallel with Turkey. In Brazil as in Turkey, participative democracy was co-opted, ignored or forcefully diluted among an orgy of “mega-projects” generating dubious profits for a select few. In Turkey it revolves around the ruling party AKP’s collusion with business interests in the “redevelopment” of Istanbul; in Brazil around public funds for the hosting of the World Cup and the Olympics.
Yet this breakneck capitalist dream masked serious cracks. Locally there may be euphoria for becoming the sixth or seventh world economy, but still social exclusion was far from gone. Brazil remained one the most (deadly) unequal nations in the world, peppered
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spiral; and that racism – especially in the police – never went away while the demonization of peasant and Native Brazilian leaders was rampant; after all they were obstructing the way of powerful agribusiness interests and the “mega-projects” craze. What can a poor boy do There’s no Turkey Spring – as there’s no Brazilian Spring. This isn’t Tunisia and Egypt. Both Turkey and Brazil are democracies – although Prime Minister Erdogan has clearly embarked on a polarizing strategy and an authoritarian drive. What links Turkey and Brazil is that irreversible pent-up resentment against institutional politics (and corruption) may be catalyzed by a relatively minor event. In Turkey it was the destruction of Gezi park; in Brazil the ten-cent hike in public bus fares was the proverbial straw that broke the (white) elephant’s back. In both cases the institutional response was tear gas and rubber bullets. In Turkey the popular backlash spread to a few cities. In Brazil it went nationwide. This goes way, way beyond a cheap bus ride - although the public transport scene in Brazil’s big cities would star in Dante’s ninth circle of hell. A manual worker, a student, a maid usually spend up to four hours a day back-and-forth in appalling conditions. And these are private transport rackets controlled by a small group of businessmen embedded with local politicians, who they obviously own. Arguably the nationwide, mostly peaceful protests have scored a victory – as nine cities have decided to cancel the bus fare hike. But that’s just the beginning. The mantra is true; Brazilians pay developed world taxes and in return get sub-Saharan Africa quality of service (no offense to Africa). The notion of
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“value for money” is non-existent. It gets even worse as the economic miracle is over. That magical “growth” was less than 1% in 2012, and only 0.6% in the first quarter of 2013. The immensely bloated state bureaucracy, the immensely appalling public infrastructure, virtually no investment in education as teachers barely get paid $300 a month, non-stop political corruption scandals, not to mention as many homicides a year as narcopurgatory Mexico – none of this is going away by magic. Football passion apart – and this is a nation where everyone is either an expert footballer or an experienced coach – the vast majority of the population is very much aware the current Confederations Cup and the 2014 World Cup are monster FIFA rackets. As a columnist for the Brazilian arm of ESPN has coined it, “the Cup is theirs, but we pay the bills.” Public opinion is very much aware the Feds played hardball to get the “megaevents” to Brazil and then promised rivers of “social” benefits in terms of services and urban development. None of that happened. Thus the collective feeling that “we’ve been robbed” – all over again, as anyone with a digital made in China calculator can compare this multi-billion dollar orgy of public funds for FIFA with pathetically little investment in health, education, transportation and social welfare. A banner in the Sao Paulo protests said it all; “Your son is ill? Take him to the arena.” Remember “Standing Man” The neo-liberal gospel preached by the Washington consensus only values economic “growth” measured in GDP numbers. This is immensely misleading; it does not take into account everything from rising expectations for more participative democracy to abysmal inequality levels, as well as the despair of those trying to just survive (as in the orgy of expanded
A R T I C L E S credit in Brazil leaving people to pay annual interest rates of over 200% on their credit cards). So it takes a few uprooted trees in Istanbul and a more expensive shitty bus ride in Sao Paulo to hurl citizens of the “emerging markets” into the streets. No wonder the Brazilian protests left politicians - and “analysts” - perplexed and speechless. After all, once again this was people power – fueled by social media - against the 1%, not that dissimilar from protests in Spain, Portugal and Greece. Unlike Erdogan in Turkey – who branded Twitter “a menace” and wants to criminalize social networking - to her credit Rousseff seems to have listened to the digital (and street) noise, saying on Tuesday that Brazil “woke up stronger” because of the protests. The Brazilian protests are horizontal. Non-partisan; beyond party politics. No clear leaders. It’s a sort of Occupy Brazil – with a cross-section of highschool and college students, poor workers who struggle to pay their bus fare, vast swathes of the tax-swamped middle class who cannot afford private health insurance, even homeless people, who after all already live in the streets. Essentially, they want more democracy, less corruption, and to be respected as citizens, getting at least some value for their money in terms of public services. The die is cast. Once again, it’s people power vs. institutional politics. Remember “Standing Man” in Taksim Square. The time to take a stand is now. 21 June, 2013 Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times/ Hong Kong. an analyst for RT and TomDispatch, and a frequent contributor to website and radio shows ranging from the US to East Asia. Source: Information Clearing House
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TURKISH PROTESTERS REJECT NEO-LIBERALISM NOT ISLAMISM: OZAN TEKIN By Nadeen Shaker
Turkish author and activist Ozan Tekin is editor at Marksist.org – a Turkish leftist news site. Ozan describes to Ahram Online the dynamics of the ongoing anti-government protests in Turkey and similarities and differences between the Turkish process and the Arab Spring Ahram Online (AO): Can you give protests? Who is taking part in imposing sharia law. us a picture of how protests were them? transformed from a four-people stand against park destruction to an OT: Those who started the resistance outpouring of nation-wide anti- at the park were leftists, governmental protests? environmentalist, independent activists, etc. The police’s violence Ozan Tekin (OT): A few dozen against them triggered a reaction in activists rushed into Gezi Park when much wider sections of society. the bulldozers arrived on Tuesday night Thousands of independent young last week to start cutting trees. The activists – many taking part in political bulldozers retreated later that day and activity for the first time – came out a few thousand people occupied the onto the streets in anger. All the parties park. The police started attacking the of the left were there. Some trade Many sections in the AKP’s electoral park in the early hours of the morning unions – though perhaps not on a base want change and support Erdogan to let the bulldozers in again. On third massive scale – joined in as well. The because they believe he will deliver that day, this sparked an explosion of main opposition party (CHP) and other – the army’s exclusion from politics, a protest, and tens of thousands joined right-wing nationalist/pro-army groups peaceful solution to the Kurdish the struggle in Taksim Square to keep also joined the protests. But their question, improvements in social the park safe and protest against police influence was very limited on Friday justice. This puts the AKP in a contradictory position – a neo-liberal violence. and Saturday. right-wing agenda on one hand, and AO: What are the reasons behind AO: What is the so-called ‘Turkish many millions voting for a “hope” of the discontent with Erdogan’s Spring’? What are its broader freedom on the other. Even at the peak of the protests, Taksim Square was policies? implications in the region? nowhere near Tahrir in terms of OT: The government’s plans to OT: Erdogan claims to support the numbers, and its political content was restructure Taksim Square are a part revolutionary movements in the Middle much more like “Tahrir against Morsi” of a broader neo-liberal program. They East . But facing a wave of riots on a than “Tahrir against Mubarak”. want to turn Taksim, the centre of the much smaller scale, his government city, into a place for the upper classes managed to use brutal police violence AO: How is Erdogan’s response to and push ordinary people out. This is for hours against the protesters. This the situation impacting the course a conservative, neo-liberal government is his hypocrisy – it shows that the of the protests? Are more strikes and people were increasingly fed up Turkish government can in no way be reflecting other grievances being not only with the plans for Taksim a “model” for the demands of the planned? Square, imposed with no consultation Egyptian or Syrian masses. OT: An AKP spokesman admitted that at all with citizens, but also with the whole spate of neo-liberal policies, the But 50 percent of Turkish society votes they had “only achieved to bring unchecked proliferation of shopping for AKP [Erdogan’s ruling Justice and together many disparate groups in the centers, last months’s legislation to ban Development Party] because they think streets.” Erdogan’s arrogance and the sale of alcohol after 10pm, and the it is slowly doing what the movements insistence on never stepping back helped frequent heavy-handed use of the police from below in the Middle East are the protests to grow bigger. This was against perfectly democratic protests. achieving. Turkey has a long tradition the real cause of his first serious defeat Prime minister Erdogan’s arrogance of the army intervening in politics by in 11 years – the police retreated from and heavy-handed attitude also stoked bloody military takeovers. The generals Taksim and tens of thousands of people the discontent. also plotted to overthrow the AKP occupied the park to turn it into a government, claiming that it was festival area. Now the movement’s main AO: How large is the scope of the turning Turkey into “ Iran “ by continued next page
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aim is to save the park from being destroyed and to oppose the government’s plans to restructure Taksim as a whole. AO: What about the kind of police brutality used and the fresh demand for the removal of the interior minister? OT: The interior minister has said that 1,730 people were arrested during the protests. Hundreds were injured by police attacks which were truly brutal, not only in Istanbul but across the country. So the resignation of the interior minister, the governor of Istanbul and the chief of police are important demands. AO: What about your own experience of the protests? Did you really call Taksim Square Tahrir?
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OT: Mass protests on the streets were really very inspiring for two days – Friday and Saturday. The soul of the movement was like that of Tahrir. Many activists were explicitly referring to Tahrir Square . Tens of thousands resisted the police with no fear. When Gezi Park was won, many ordinary people celebrated and then went back to their homes and work. Then came the growing influence of pro-army nationalists, mostly CHP voters, trying to turn the protest into something that pushes the military to take action against the government. These people are hostile to Kurds and Armenians, oppose the peace negotiations with the Kurds (which is a historic turning point for democracy in Turkey ) and call the prime minister “a national traitor”. In 1997, mass protests led by the left
A R T I C L E S against the “deep state” were used by the military to force the Islamist government of the time to resign. There are some groups who are trying to do that now – their presence is a growing threat for the mass movement. It splits and weakens us. But they have not so far succeeded in hijacking the movement. This is a serious ideological struggle we need to win. We are against this government not because it is Islamic, but because it is conservative and neoliberal. It is a legitimate, elected government and therefore we do not want it to be overthrown by unelected armed forces. We want it to be overthrown by the mass movement of the people. 5 June, 2013 Nadeen Shaker is the Middle East reporter at Ahram Online. Source: Ahram Online
ADVICE FROM AN AFGHAN MOTHER AND ACTIVIST: “RESIST THESE DARK TIMES” By Kathy Kelly
before, Fahima decided to make it her task to help alleviate the abysmal conditions faced by ordinary Afghans living at or below the poverty line - by helping to build independent women’s enterprises wherever she could. She trusted in the old adage that if a person is hungry it’s an even greater gift to teach the person how to fish than to only give the person fish. When she was 24 years old, in 1979, Fahima Vorgetts left Afghanistan. By reputation, she had been outspoken, even rebellious, in her opposition to injustice and oppression; and family and friends, concerned for her safety, had urged her to go abroad. Twenty-three years later, returning for the first time to her homeland, she barely recognized war-torn streets in urban areas where she had once lived. She saw and felt the anguish of villagers who couldn’t feed or shelter their families, and no less able to accept such unjust suffering than she’d been half her life
Last week, our small delegation here in Kabul traveled around the city with her to visit several clinics and “shuras,” or women’s councils that she has opened. The first clinic we visited has been here since 2006. Two women, a doctor and a midwife, told us that they are part of a staff who work in three shifts to keep the clinic open “24-7.” Not one of their patients has died while being treated at the clinic. Next we visited two villages, one
Pashtun and the other Tajik, on the outskirts of Kabul. “Why did you pick this village?” asked Jake Donaldson, an M.D. from Ventura, CA who joined us here in Kabul about a week ago. “I didn’t pick them,” Fahima exclaimed. “They picked me.” A year previously, the villagers had asked her to build a clinic and a literacy center. She had told them that if they would agree to organize a women’s cooperative and pool their resources to hire teachers, midwives and nurses, she herself would build the physical building and help with supplies. In each village, we visited a newly constructed building which will house a clinic, a women’s cooperative for jewelry-making, tailoring, and canning, a set of literacy classes for children and adults, and even a public shower continued next page
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which families can sign up to use. A young teacher invited us to step inside his classroom where about fifty children, girls and boys, were learning their alphabet in the first week of a literacy class. Several villagers proudly showed us the well they had dug, powered by a generator. The well will help them irrigate their land as well as supply clean drinking water for the village. Before we left, a male village elder described to Fahima how valuable her work has been for his village. Fahima seemed to blush a bit as she gratefully acknowledged his compliment. Such appreciative words, along with the children’s eager expressions, seem to be the main compensation for her tireless work. “I and the board members of The Afghan Women’s Fund are 100% volunteers,” Fahima assures me. “Our board members are people of tremendous integrity.” On the day before our tour, Fahima had
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come to the Afghan Peace Volunteer home to speak to the seamstresses who run a sewing cooperative here and encourage them to hold on at all costs to their dignity. She urged them never to prefer handouts to hard work in selfsustaining projects. Fahima had helped the seamstresses begin their cooperative effort at the Volunteer house when she purchased sewing machines for them a little over a year ago. “Not all of the projects I’ve tried to start have worked out,” said Fahima. “Sometimes people are hampered by conservative values and some families don’t want to allow women to leave their homes. Most often, it is war or the security situation that prevents success.” She firmly believes that war will never solve problems in her country - or anywhere else, for that matter. Fahima is outspoken, even blunt, as she speaks about warlords and war profiteers. She has good reason to be
A R T I C L E S bitter over the cruelties inflicted on ordinary Afghans by all those interested in filling their own pockets and expanding control of Afghanistan’s resources. She advises the Afghan Peace Volunteers with the voice and love of a mother. “The world is gripped by a class war in which the 1% elite, irrespective of nationality or ethnicity and including the Afghan and U.S./ NATO elite, have been ganging up to control, divide, oppress and profit from us, the ordinary 99%. Resist these ‘dark times’, resist war and weapons, educate yourselves, and work together in friendship.” Fahima’s spirit of youthful rebellion clearly hasn’t been snuffed out by age or experience. Her practical compassion is like a compass for all of us who learn about her work.
28 May, 2013 Kathy Kelly is the co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org). Source: Countercurrents.org
SECTARIANISM AND THE IRRATIONAL NEW DISCOURSE: WHY ARABS MUST WORRY By Ramzy Baroud My friend Hanna is Syrian and also happens to be Christian. The latter fact was rarely of consequence, except whenever he wished to boast about the contributions of Arab Christians to Middle Eastern cultures. Of course, he is right. The modern Arab identity has been formulated through a fascinating mix of religions, sects and races. Christianity, as well as Islam, is deeplyrooted in many aspects of Arab life. Needless to say, the bond between Islam and Christianity is simply unbreakable. “I am Christian, but, in terms of culture, I am equally a Muslim,” he told me by way of introduction to a
daunting realization. “But now, I am very worried.”
savaged Iraq, sparing neither Muslims nor Christians.
Hanna’s list of worries is long. Lead amongst them is the fact that Christian Arabs in some Arab societies are increasingly viewed as ‘foreigners’ or ‘guests’ in their own countries. At times, as was the case in Iraq, they are punished by one extremist group or another for embracing the same religion that US-western zealots claim to represent. Churches were blown up in brutal retribution for a savage war that President George W. Bush and many of his ilk maintained to be between good and evil, using the most brazen religious references as they
During the early years of the war, many Arab intellectuals seemed wary of the sinister divide that the US was erecting between religions, sects and communities. Many in Arab media referenced past historical experiences when other imperial powers – namely Britain and France – resorted to the ‘divide and conquer’ stratagem. Those attempts in the first half of the 20th century resulted in much bloodshed and lasting scars in many communities. Lebanon is the obvious example with Iraq prevailing. continued next page
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In response to the colonial attempts at busying the Arabs with internal conflicts, Arab nationalists had then wrangled with a discourse that proved of immense value to modern Arab identity. To escape the pitfalls of religious and sectarian divides, and to unleash the untapped energies of Arab societies, there was an urgent need to articulate a new language expressing a unifying pan-Arab political discourse. In post-World War II, the rise of Arab nationalism was the force to be contended with, from Egypt, to Iraq and to Syria. It was a battle of wills involving imperialist powers, later joined by the United States. It was also local, tribal elites fighting for their own survival. The nationalists’ discourse was meant to inspire, from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s thundering speeches in Egypt, to Michel Aflaq’s eloquent thoughts in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. At least then, it seemed to matter little that Nasser was an Egyptian Sunni Muslim, and that Aflaq was a Greek Orthodox Christian. Aflaq was profound, and his insistence on the vitality of the Muslim character to Arabs was a testament to a generation of nationalists that since then, has all but completely faded. He spoke of Arab unity, not as a distant dream, but a practical mechanism to snatch liberty from many sinister hands. “What liberty could be wider and greater than binding oneself to the renaissance of one’s nation and its revolution?” he said during a speech. “It is a new and strict liberty which stands against pressure and confusion. Dictatorship is a precarious, unsuitable and self-contradictory system which does not allow the consciousness of the people to grow.” Many voices echoed that sentiment in Arab nations near and far. Poets recited the will of freedom fighters and artists rendered the language of philosophers. While Arab nationalist movements eventually fragmented, were weakened
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or defeated, an Arab identity survived. Long after Nasser died, and even Anwar Saddat signed the Camp David accords, thus breaking with Arab consensus, school children continued to sing “Arab homelands are my home, from the Levant to Baghdad, from Najd to Yemen and from Egypt to Morocco.” The war over Arab identify however never ceased, as it continued to manifest itself in actual and figurative ways. Israel and western powers, vying for military dominance, regional influence and ultimately resources, did the best they could to shatter the few semblances that sustained a sense of unity among Arab nations that survived despite numerous and perhaps insurmountable odds. The Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) left deep wounds that continue to fester. The Iraq war was particularly painful. While Lebanon civil strife involved welldemarcated sects, the alliances were in constant influx. But Iraq’s civil war, encouraged and sustained with direct American involvement to weaken Iraqi resistance to US-British occupation, was well-defined and brutal. Muslim Shia and Sunni engaged in a bitter struggle as US troops wreaked havoc in Baghdad. Members of all sects paid a heavy price for the fighting, which also damaged the national identity of Iraq and made a mockery of its flag and national anthem. The sociopolitical impact of that war was so severe, it resuscitated a reactionary discourse that forced many communities to see themselves as members of one group or another, each fighting for its own being. Soon after the Egyptian revolution, I walked the streets of Cairo, reminiscing, with much giddiness - about the past and the encouraging future. A ‘new Egypt’ was being born, one with ample room for all of its children. An Egypt where the poor are giving their fair share, and where Muslims and
A R T I C L E S Christians and the rest would march forward, hand in hand, as equals, compelled by the vision of a new generation and the hopes and dreams of many more. It was not a romantic idea, but thoughts inspired by millions of Egyptians, by bearded Muslim men protecting churches in Cairo against government plots to stir religious tensions, by Christian youth guarding the Tahrir square as Muslim youth prayed, before they all resumed their fight for freedom. Despite my insistence on optimism, I find the current political discourse hateful, polarizing and unprecedentedly defeatist. While Muslim political elites are sharply divided between Shia and Sunni, assigning layers of meaning to the fact that one is born this way or that, this wrangling has been weaved into a power play that has destroyed Syria, awakened past animosities in Lebanon and revitalized existing conflict in Iraq, further devastating the very Arab identity. Iraq’s historical dilemma, exploited by the US for immediate gains, has now become a pan-Arab dilemma. Arab and Middle Eastern media is fomenting that conflict using terminology loaded with sectarianism and obsessed with erecting the kind of divides that will bring nothing but mistrust, misery and war. Resurrecting Nasser’s and Aflaq’s Arab nationalism might no longer be possible, but there is a compelling need for an alternative discourse to the type of intellectual extremism that justifies with disturbing lucidity the butchering of the inhabitants of an entire village in Syria because of their sect or religion. My friend Hanna has every reason to worry, as all Arabs should. 13 June, 2013 Ramzy Baroud is an internationallysyndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. Source: Countercurrents.org
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SPACE WARFARE AND THE FUTURE OF U.S. GLOBAL POWER (PART II) By Alfred W. McCoy
The first part of this article appeared in the April 2013 issue of the JUST Commentary. We apologize for inadvertently missing the second part of this article which was supposed to be published in the May 2013 issue. -editor
A Robotic Information Regime As with the Philippine Insurrection and the Vietnam War, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have served as the catalyst for a new information regime, fusing aerospace, cyberspace, biometrics, and robotics into an apparatus of potentially unprecedented power. In 2012, after years of ground warfare in both countries and the continuous expansion of the Pentagon budget, the Obama administration announced a leaner future defense strategy. It included a 14% cut in future infantry strength to be compensated for by an increased emphasis on investments in the dominions of outer space and cyberspace, particularly in what the administration calls “critical space-based capabilities.” By 2020, this new defense architecture should theoretically be able to integrate space, cyberspace, and terrestrial combat through robotics for — so the claims go — the delivery of seamless information for lethal action. Significantly, both space and cyberspace are new, unregulated domains of military conflict, largely beyond international law. And Washington hopes to use both, without limitation, as Archimedean levers to exercise new forms of global dominion far into the twenty-first century, just as the British Empire once ruled from the seas and the Cold War American imperium exercised its global reach via airpower. As Washington seeks to surveil the globe from space, the world might well ask: Just how high is national sovereignty? Absent any international agreement about the vertical extent of
sovereign airspace (since a conference on international air law, convened in Paris in 1910, failed), some puckish Pentagon lawyer might reply: only as high as you can enforce it. And Washington has filled this legal void with a secret executive matrix — operated by the CIA and the clandestine Special Operations Command — that assigns names arbitrarily, without any judicial oversight, to a classified “kill list” that means silent, sudden death from the sky for terror suspects across the Muslim world. Although U.S. plans for space warfare remain highly classified, it is possible to assemble the pieces of this aerospace puzzle by trolling the Pentagon’s websites, and finding many of the key components in technical descriptions at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). As early as 2020, the Pentagon hopes to patrol the entire globe ceaselessly, relentlessly via a triple canopy space shield reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, driven by drones armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, monitored through a telescopic panopticon, and operated by robotic controls. At the lowest tier of this emerging U.S. aerospace shield, within striking
distance of Earth in the lower stratosphere, the Pentagon is building an armada of 99 Global Hawk drones equipped with high-resolution cameras capable of surveilling all terrain within a 100-mile radius, electronic sensors to intercept communications, efficient engines for continuous 24-hour flights, and eventually Triple Terminator missiles to destroy targets below. By late 2011, the Air Force and the CIA had already ringed the Eurasian land mass with a network of 60 bases for drones armed with Hellfire missiles and GBU-30 bombs, allowing air strikes against targets just about anywhere in Europe, Africa, or Asia. The sophistication of the technology at this level was exposed in December 2011 when one of the CIA’s RQ-170 Sentinels came down in Iran. Revealed was a bat-winged drone equipped with radar-evading stealth capacity, active electronically scanned array radar, and advanced optics “that allow operators to positively identify terror suspects from tens of thousands of feet in the air.” If things go according to plan, in this same lower tier at altitudes up to 12 miles unmanned aircraft such as the “Vulture,” with solar panels covering its massive 400-foot wingspan, will be patrolling the globe ceaselessly for up to five years at a time with sensors for “unblinking” surveillance, and possibly missiles for lethal strikes. Establishing the viability of this new technology, NASA’s solar-powered aircraft Pathfinder, with a 100-foot wingspan, reached an altitude of 71,500 feet altitude in 1997, and its fourthgeneration successor the “Helios” flew continued next page
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at 97,000 feet with a 247-foot wingspan in 2001, two miles higher than any previous aircraft. For the next tier above the Earth, in the upper stratosphere, DARPA and the Air Force are collaborating in the development of the Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle. Flying at an altitude of 20 miles, it is expected to “deliver 12,000 pounds of payload at a distance of 9,000 nautical miles from the continental United States in less than two hours.” Although the first test launches in April 2010 and August 2011 crashed midflight, they did reach an amazing 13,000 miles per hour, 22 times the speed of sound, and sent back “unique data” that should help resolve remaining aerodynamic problems. At the outer level of this triple-tier aerospace canopy, the age of space warfare dawned in April 2010 when the Pentagon quietly launched the X37B space drone, an unmanned craft just 29 feet long, into an orbit 250 miles above the Earth. By the time its second prototype landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in June 2012 after a 15month flight, this classified mission represented a successful test of “robotically controlled reusable spacecraft” and established the viability of unmanned space drones in the exosphere. At this apex of the triple canopy, 200 miles above Earth where the space drones will soon roam, orbital satellites are the prime targets, a vulnerability that became obvious in 2007 when China used a ground-to-air missile to shoot down one of its own satellites. In response, the Pentagon is now developing the F-6 satellite system that will “decompose a large monolithic spacecraft into a group of wirelessly linked elements, or nodes [that increases] resistance to... a bad part breaking or an adversary attacking.”
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And keep in mind that the X-37B has a capacious cargo bay to carry missiles or future laser weaponry to knock out enemy satellites — in other words, the potential capability to cripple the communications of a future military rival like China, which will have its own global satellite system operational by 2020. Ultimately, the impact of this third information regime will be shaped by the ability of the U.S. military to integrate its array of global aerospace weaponry into a robotic command structure that would be capable of coordinating operations across all combat domains: space, cyberspace, sky, sea, and land. To manage the surging torrent of information within this delicately balanced triple canopy, the system would, in the end, have to become self-maintaining through “robotic manipulator technologies,” such as the Pentagon’s FREND system that someday could potentially deliver fuel, provide repairs, or reposition satellites. For a new global optic, DARPA is building the wide-angle Space Surveillance Telescope (SST), which could be sited at bases ringing the globe for a quantum leap in “space surveillance.” The system would allow future space warriors to see the whole sky wrapped around the entire planet while seated before a single screen, making it possible to track every object in Earth orbit. Operation of this complex worldwide apparatus will require, as one DARPA official explained in 2007, “an integrated collection of space surveillance systems — an architecture — that is leak-proof.” Thus, by 2010, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had 16,000 employees, a $5 billion budget, and a massive $2 billion headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, with 8,500 staffers wrapped in
A R T I C L E S electronic security — all aimed at coordinating the flood of surveillance data pouring in from Predators, Reapers, U-2 spy planes, Global Hawks, X-37B space drones, Google Earth, Space Surveillance Telescopes, and orbiting satellites. By 2020 or thereafter — such a complex technosystem is unlikely to respect schedules — this triple canopy should be able to atomize a single “terrorist” with a missile strike after tracking his eyeball, facial image, or heat signature for hundreds of miles through field and favela, or blind an entire army by knocking out all ground communications, avionics, and naval navigation. Technological Dominion or TechnoDisaster? Peering into the future, a still uncertain balance of forces offers two competing scenarios for the continuation of U.S. global power. If all or much goes according to plan, sometime in the third decade of this century the Pentagon will complete a comprehensive global surveillance system for Earth, sky, and space using robotics to coordinate a veritable flood of data from biometric street-level monitoring, cyber-data mining, a worldwide network of Space Surveillance Telescopes, and triple canopy aeronautic patrols. Through agile data management of exceptional power, this system might allow the United States a veto of global lethality, an equalizer for any further loss of economic strength. However, as in Vietnam, history offers some pessimistic parallels when it comes to the U.S. preserving its global hegemony by militarized technology alone. Even if this robotic information regime could somehow check China’s growing military power, the U.S. might still have the same chance of controlling wider geopolitical forces continued next page
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continued from page 10 with aerospace technology as the Third Reich had of winning World War II with its “super weapons” — V-2 rockets that rained death on London and Messerschmitt Me-262 jets that blasted allied bombers from Europe’s skies. Complicating the future further, the illusion of information omniscience might incline Washington to more
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military misadventures akin to Vietnam or Iraq, creating the possibility of yet more expensive, draining conflicts, from Iran to the South China Sea. If the future of America’s world power is shaped by actual events rather than long-term economic trends, then its fate might well be determined by which comes first in this century-long cycle:
military debacle from the illusion of technological mastery, or a new technological regime powerful enough to perpetuate U.S. global dominion. 8 November, 2013 End of Part II Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. A TomDispatch Regular.
International Buddhist-Muslim Joint Statement Shared Commitment of Action Bangkok, Thailand | 16 June 2013 ============================= Buddhist and Muslim leaders from South and South East Asian countries including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, have gathered in Bangkok, Thailand to address escalating tensions between two communities and potential spread of hatred across the region. The consultation was co-organized by the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB), the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), and Religions for Peace (RfP). We recognize these challenges facing the two communities in the region: 1) Rise of extremism, hate speeches and campaigns and instigation of religious discrimination and violence; 2) Prejudice, fear and hatred caused by ignorance, misperception, stereotyping, negative impact of traditional and social media, simplification and generalization, and communal pressure; 3) Misuse of religion by certain religious, political and other interest groups and individuals; 4) Socio economic dimensions of conflict; and 5) Spillover effects across the region. We are also deeply aware that if Buddhist and Muslim communities can overcome the challenges that confront them, there is tremendous potential for the growth and development of ideas and values that may help to transform the region. For Buddhist and Muslim philosophies embody gems of wisdom about the purpose of life, the position and role of the human being and her relationship with all other sentient beings and nature which could well liberate contemporary civilization from its multiple crises. The young in these two communities in particular should be imbued with these profound ideas and values about life and its meaning. We endorse the Dusit Declaration of 28 June 2006 and commit ourselves to implementing its shared action across the region. Our actions will include intra-religious and inter-religious initiatives in education, advocacy, rapid reaction/ solidarity visits/early warning/conflict prevention, constructive engagement with the government, strategic common action, and the effective use of media for positive messages. We will also engage in multi-stakeholder partnerships with governments, inter-governmental bodies such as the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), and the United Nations.
* The full version of the Dusit Declaration appeared in the July 2006 issue of the JUST Commentary and is now available online at JUST’s Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/just.international.
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