1. I hope they all stop showing up for work:
“The war room: Daily transition between battle, home takes a toll on drone operators
The daily work duties are arduous, involving close tracking of insurgents, patiently watching them dart in and out of shelters and, if the opportunity presents itself, occasionally raining missiles down on their heads.
But at the end of each day, the Air Force crews who control the Predator and Reaper drones circling high above the battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq stand up from their Naugahyde chairs, emerge from their cramped trailers on this remote Nevada air base and climb into their cars for the drive home, arriving in time to tuck their kids into bed.
Call it combat as shift work, a new paradigm of commuter warfare that is blurring the historical understanding of what it means to go off to battle. And the strain of the daily whiplash transition between bombs and bedtime stories, coupled with the fast-increasing workload to meet relentlessly expanding demand, is leading to fatigue and burnout for the ground-based controllers who drive the drones.
“We have 5,000 years of one type of warfare and only a couple of years of this new kind,” said P.W. Singer, author of “Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.” “These guys are simultaneously at home and at war. It may be that human psychology isn’t designed for that. We don’t know yet.”
…
“The family pressures don’t go away, they heighten,” Singer said. “You’ve just been on a combat mission and half an hour later your spouse is mad at you because you’re late to soccer practice.”
Friction at home can stem from just that simple question upon walking through the door: “How was your day?”
“Combat is a very personal event,” Gersten said. Getting questions at home at the end of each shift means “that compartment is being breached to a degree.” Even for those willing to share that aspect of their lives with their spouse, they feel limited by the secret nature of their job.
“It’s more frustrating than anything else. Your family doesn’t have a security clearance, so it makes for really boring dinner conversation,” said Lt. Col. David Kent, an F-15E pilot who was recently stationed at Creech and now teaches at the Air Force Academy. “You feel really good about something you did that day, but you can’t say anything. Your family can’t share the triumphs and trials with you.”
The mission also requires hyper vigilance, an increased level of tension that doesn’t go over so well at home, Kent said.”
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=65658
2. Unfortunately, this will give the US an excuse to intervene in Ecuador:
“The Ecuadorian officials plan to sign the contract, which was initialed last week, for the delivery of two Mi-17 Hip multirole helicopters for its Defense Ministry’s civilian purposes, said a representative of the Russian state arms exporter, Rosoboronexport.
However, Moscow also expects Ecuador to sign other contracts. A source at Russian Technology said Russia could supply six Su-30MK2 Flanker multirole fighters, several helicopters, and air defense systems to Ecuador, which would increase the value of their military cooperation to over $200 million.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15857
3. “Reform or Revolution? Why the Left failed so miserably
It occurs to me that the left is trapped in its own history, a history that views the industrial working class as the natural ‘partner’ in the revolutionary project but without recognizing that it is now a shadow of its former self. Compounding this paradox is the lack of debate over who is is to take their place, or join the struggle?
As I stated in the previous essay I contend that the road to ruin started when organized labour handed over the reins of power to the ‘party of labour’, a decision that had two related consequences: it disconnected the grassroots from its leadership which in turn, led to the loss of all democratic control, for within a few short years of the founding of the Labour Party it was incorporated into the ruling political class thus ending its potential as a party of revolution.
In other words, power must flow upward, without it we are at the mercy of the ‘leadership’ (which reminds me of a pal of mine in Johannesburg who started up a bar in Yeoville where we all used to hang out called ‘The Politburo’, sub-titled, ‘Don’t tell the leadership’ or as another comrade used to say in the heat of debate, ‘Caution comrade’).
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15811
4. “Diego Garcia Military Base: Islanders Forcibly Deported
In order to convert the sleepy, Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia into a dominating military base, the U.S. forcibly transported its 2,000 Chagossian inhabitants into exile and gassed their dogs.
By banning journalists from the area, the U.S. Navy was able to perpetrate this with virtually no press coverage, says David Vine, an assistant professor of anthropology at American University and author of “Island of Shame: the Secret History of the U.S. Military on Diego Garcia(Princeton University Press).”
“The Chagossians were put on a boat and taken to Mauritius and the Seychelles, 1,200 miles away, where they were left on the docks, with no money and no housing, to fend for themselves,” Vine said on the interview show “Books Of Our Time,” sponsored by the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.
…
“They were moved because they were few in number and not white,” Vine added. The U.S. government circulated the fiction the Chagossians were transient contract workers that had taken up residence only recently but, in fact, they had been living on Diego Garcia since about the time of the American Revolution. Merchants had imported them to work on the coconut and copra plantations. Vine said the U.S. government induced The Washington Post not to break a story spelling out events on the island.
…
Long off limits to reporters, the Red Cross, and all other international observers and far more secretive than Guantánamo Bay, many long suspected the island was a clandestine CIA “black site” for high-profile detainees, Vine wrote in a related article. Journalist Stephen Grey’s 2006 book “Ghost Plane” documented the presence on the island of a CIA-chartered plane used for rendition flights. On two occasions former U.S. Army General Barry McCaffrey publicly named Diego Garcia as a detention facility. And a Council of Europe report named the atoll, along with those in Poland and Romania, as a secret prison.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15840
5. “AFRICOM and America’s Global Military Agenda: Taking The Helm Of The Entire World
Later in 2007, even before AFRICOM was formally announced, Defense News reported that the Pentagon had already decided to divide the continent into five regions: North, south, central, east and west.
“One team will have responsibility for a northern strip from Mauritania to Libya; another will operate in a block of east African nations – Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Kenya, Madagascar and Tanzania; and a third will carry out activities in a large southern block that includes South Africa, Zimbabwe and Angola….A fourth team would concentrate on a group of central African countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad and Congo [Brazzaville]; the fifth regional team would focus on a western block that would cover Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Niger and Western Sahara….” [35]
Before the official inauguration of AFRICOM, analysts around the world sounded the alarm that beneath the innocuous-sounding claims by Washington that it was solely interested in becoming a “security partner” to African nations lurked something more geostrategically significant. And more sinister.
…
The campaign to subjugate an entire continent with its more than one billion inhabitants to Western military and economic demands is an integral and milestone component of broader designs around the world. Starting with the Balkans and Eastern Europe as a whole after the breakup of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. and its NATO allies have relentlessly pursued plans to penetrate and dominate the former Eastern bloc, former Soviet space, the Broader Middle East, the Arctic Circle and Greater Antarctica and to reclaim and solidify control of Latin America and Oceania.
AFRICOM and complementary NATO initiatives are an exponential advancement of the campaign by the West to reassert and expand global supremacy by targeting a continent at the crossroads of north and south, west and east, and the industrial and the developing worlds. As an earlier citation mentioned, it is also the meeting place of three continents and the Middle East with coasts on two of the world’s oceans and three of its seas.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15788
6. “Mind Your Tweets: The CIA Social Networking Surveillance System
Not to be outdone, the CIA has entered the lucrative market of social networking surveillance in a big way.
In an exclusive published by Wired, we learn that the CIA’s investment arm, In-Q-Tel, “want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates–even check out your book reviews on Amazon.”
Investigative journalist Noah Shachtman reveals that In-Q-Tel “is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using “open source intelligence”–information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.” Wired reported:
Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords. (Noah Shachtman, Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm that Monitors Blogs, Tweets,” Wired, October 19, 2009)
Although In-Q-Tel spokesperson Donald Tighe told Wired that it wants Visible to monitor foreign social media and give American spooks an “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” Shachtman points out that “such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters.”
According to Wired, the firm already keeps tabs on 2.0 web sites “for Dell, AT&T and Verizon.” And as an added attraction, “Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns” against meat processing giant Hormel.
…
But as Steven Aftergood, who maintains the Secrecy News web site for the Federation of American Scientists told Wired, “even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically ‘open source’.”
But as we have seen across the decades, from COINTELPRO to Operation CHAOS, and from Pentagon media manipulation during the run-up to the Iraq war through driftnet warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ electronic communications, the secret state is a law unto itself, a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that thrives on duplicity, fear and cold, hard cash.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15827
