America Needs an Enemy in the Arctic

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By James R. Holmes


On these hot days is the mad blood stirring, and beckoning the Naval Diplomat's attention to … the frosty Arctic!

Last May the Obama administration released the nation's first National Strategy for the Arctic Region. It's worth your time. For me, perusing the document confirms that the U.S. Coast Guard is the logical executor of U.S. strategy. The functions delineated in the document conform ideally to the coast guard's "para-naval" — political scientist Ken Booth's term — character as a sea service.

The strategy's framers sketch three main "lines of effort" in polar climes. They direct U.S. agencies to bolster the nation's security interests, developing the strategic wherewithal to monitor events throughout the region, upholding freedom of the seas, and providing for energy security. The document commits Washington to exercise stewardship over the region, conserving its resources, protecting the environment, and conducting scientific research. And it calls for international cooperation through forums such as the Arctic Council and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. These are coast-guard functions par excellence, well suited to a force that exists mainly to manage events off American shores.

Is the National Strategy for the Arctic Region really a strategy, though? Sure, in a generic sense. Admiral Wylie defines strategy as a "plan of action designed in order to achieve some end; a purpose together with a system of measures for its accomplishment." The Arctic strategy is light on specific ways and means for accomplishing its goals, but it gets over Wylie's bar with perhaps a micron to spare.

It's not a strategy in the traditional sense, though. It makes little mention of the potential for international competition in the Arctic basin. It seemingly assumes away the prospect of interaction between competitors determined to get their way. Clausewitz, of course, depicts strategy as a collision of living forces, as a duel on a grand scale, or as two wrestlers constantly striving to throw each other.

Assuming the ocean will remain tranquil also deprives the strategy of a focal point. Whether strategy demands an adversary is a long-running debate in my field. The drift of opinion seems to be: yes. That's certainly your gentle scribe's view. Even Wylie, having advanced his rather anodyne definition, spends the bulk of his book Military Strategy probing the ins and outs of martial strife.

Washington, then, should refuse to let the non-military challenges lurking in the Arctic theater obscure the likelihood of competition driven by the Thucydidean motives of fear, honor, and interest. Maybe the powers fronting on the polar sea can resolve their conflicts of interest amicably, factoring in the interests of stakeholders to the south. Maybe a navigable Arctic will remain free of the elemental passions that have impelled human actions throughout history. But let's not succumb to wishful thinking.

 http://thediplomat.com/the-naval-diplomat/2013/07/12/america-needs-an-enemy-in-the-arctic/

The Snowden Asylum Saga

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by NORMAN POLLACK

The NYT reports on the wholly expected: US application of pressure to prevent Latin American nations from granting asylum to Edward Snowden.  Why not?  First in the techniques of rendition, waterboarding, habeas-corpus suspension, data-mining, overall contempt for civil liberties, and presided over by the  “Assassination” President who authorizes aerial murder at his Tuesday evening soirees with a stellar cast of national-security advisers, all with a supine, bankrupt Left looking idly on.  With a national resume like that, the only surprise is not ordering a Special Ops mission to Moscow to kidnap Snowden.

How dare Snowden spill the beans!  Every hegemon worth its salt declares itself a National-Security State, rests comfortably with its biggest elephant in the room, its nuclear stockpile (Israel, are you also listening?), turns paramilitary operations, regime change, and economic blackmail into the fun-and-games entertainment of its Joint Chiefs, Political Honchoes, and CIA-JSOC debonair warriors, and, ear to the ground, moves in unison with the needs, ambitions, and desires of its upper capitalist stratum, itself an integral—if not paramount—part of the National-Security State.  Shame on you, Snowden: stripping away the political-legal cover for war crimes.  Twicefold shame, Snowden, for stripping away the ideological cover of counterterrorism, not only as America’s biggest growth industry, not only as the surest way of terrorizing the American public and keeping them docile, but also, as the presently most effective way of pursuing the now age-old means for achieving global counterrevolution, counterrevolution enlarged in concept and practice to include more than taking out Left movements and governments, or even Third World efforts at realizing autonomous modernization, for the biggest challenge perceived by US policy makers appears to be China (Obama’s notorious “pivot,” the Pacific-first geostrategic framework to gain predominance in Asia and hem-in Chinese development to prevent its global political-economic influence).  Snowden’s Revelations (deserving capital “R,” as a way of inaugurating a new Bill of Rights for Americans, if we only cared to listen) leaves the Administration with its pants down (cynically mooning a compliant—aka, complicit—populace), exposing the pretentiousness of Exceptionalism and Moral Rectitude by which the US knows itself (talk of false consciousness!!) in seeking exclusive direction, guidance, leadership of a world community safe for the expansion of American capitalism.

Snowden’s documents thus far released already demonstrate that the US has a finger in every pie, making it only a matter of time before that selfsame world community, especially the euphonious-sounding “friends and allies,” awakens to the recognition that all are being had, whether as “partners” in military alliances, which liberally finance the military’s status and power in each of the countries, participants in American-led international financial organizations (IMF, World Bank) which have determined domestic austerity policies compatible with US commercial and banking interests, or simply, as carrot-and-stick induced ideological soul mates, cemented in the spiritual bond of market fundamentalism, in which outsourcing clothing manufacturing to the semi-enslaved workers in poor Asian countries is deemed a crowning achievement.  We mustn’t underestimate the significance of the Revelations, which is why the USG will leave no stone unturned in seeking retribution and, more immediately, silencing the messenger.  This will also serve notice on future whistleblowers, your services are not wanted; indeed, you are really domestic al Qadea, and fair game for Obama’s Tuesday soirees off the Situation Room; you, too, may find yourself on the baseball cards dealt around the table.  Feel honored that your Leader cares enough about you to enlist the full apparatus of the National-Security State to squelch your activities, with the full help of AG Holder and DCIA Brennan, Rice leading the cheering section of “humanitarian interventionists.”  My New York Times Comment (July 12) follows, on the article about US full-court pressure applied to Latin American nations concerning asylum for Snowden:

    If I could give my home extraterritoriality I would be honored to take in Edward Snowden as my guest. But of course even then USG would find a way to render him to a third country for torture–or simply shoot him on sight. In the eyes of the world America by its treatment of Snowden–as here blackmailing Latin American countries with sinister threats–stands out as the global terrorist, bully, war criminal.

The more we get tough the more isolated we become, a world pariah. That is the main thing, not the specific revelations about domestic and foreign surveillance, but the larger revelation: that the US believes it can dominate Latin America and the world at large. Thank you, Obama, for revealing your true despotic dimensions–while your fellow liberals and/or progressives look the other way, showing their contempt for civil liberties and privacy (true tests of a democracy). The Left in the US is morally bankrupt, worshiping at the feet of a Democratic Party distinguished only by its interventionist propensities and incipiently fascist opportunism. By all means, Biden, man the phones. You are a laughing stock.


Norman Pollack is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University. His new book, Eichmann on the Potomac, will be published by CounterPunch/AK Press in the fall of 2013.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/12/the-snowden-asylum-saga/

New studies: ‘Conspiracy theorists’ sane; government dupes crazy, hostile

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Dr. Kevin Barrett

Recent studies by psychologists and social scientists in the US and UK suggest that contrary to mainstream media stereotypes, those labeled “conspiracy theorists” appear to be saner than those who accept the official versions of contested events.

The most recent study was published on July 8th by psychologists Michael J. Wood and Karen M. Douglas of the University of Kent (UK). Entitled “What about Building 7? A social psychological study of online discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories,” the study compared “conspiracist” (pro-conspiracy theory) and “conventionalist” (anti-conspiracy) comments at news websites.

The authors were surprised to discover that it is now more conventional to leave so-called conspiracist comments than conventionalist ones: “Of the 2174 comments collected, 1459 were coded as conspiracist and 715 as conventionalist.” In other words, among people who comment on news articles, those who disbelieve government accounts of such events as 9/11 and the JFK assassination outnumber believers by more than two to one. That means it is the pro-conspiracy commenters who are expressing what is now the conventional wisdom, while the anti-conspiracy commenters are becoming a small, beleaguered minority.

Perhaps because their supposedly mainstream views no longer represent the majority, the anti-conspiracy commenters often displayed anger and hostility: “The research… showed that people who favoured the official account of 9/11 were generally more hostile when trying to persuade their rivals.”

Additionally, it turned out that the anti-conspiracy people were not only hostile, but fanatically attached to their own conspiracy theories as well. According to them, their own theory of 9/11 - a conspiracy theory holding that 19 Arabs, none of whom could fly planes with any proficiency, pulled off the crime of the century under the direction of a guy on dialysis in a cave in Afghanistan - was indisputably true. The so-called conspiracists, on the other hand, did not pretend to have a theory that completely explained the events of 9/11: “For people who think 9/11 was a government conspiracy, the focus is not on promoting a specific rival theory, but in trying to debunk the official account.”

In short, the new study by Wood and Douglas suggests that the negative stereotype of the conspiracy theorist - a hostile fanatic wedded to the truth of his own fringe theory - accurately describes the people who defend the official account of 9/11, not those who dispute it.

Additionally, the study found that so-called conspiracists discuss historical context (such as viewing the JFK assassination as a precedent for 9/11) more than anti-conspiracists. It also found that the so-called conspiracists to not like to be called “conspiracists” or “conspiracy theorists.”

Both of these findings are amplified in the new book Conspiracy Theory in America by political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith, published earlier this year by the University of Texas Press. Professor deHaven-Smith explains why people don’t like being called “conspiracy theorists”: The term was invented and put into wide circulation by the CIA to smear and defame people questioning the JFK assassination! “The CIA’s campaign to popularize the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility must be credited, unfortunately, with being one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time.”

In other words, people who use the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” as an insult are doing so as the result of a well-documented, undisputed, historically-real conspiracy by the CIA to cover up the JFK assassination. That campaign, by the way, was completely illegal, and the CIA officers involved were criminals; the CIA is barred from all domestic activities, yet routinely breaks the law to conduct domestic operations ranging from propaganda to assassinations.

DeHaven-Smith also explains why those who doubt official explanations of high crimes are eager to discuss historical context. He points out that a very large number of conspiracy claims have turned out to be true, and that there appear to be strong relationships between many as-yet-unsolved “state crimes against democracy.” An obvious example is the link between the JFK and RFK assassinations, which both paved the way for presidencies that continued the Vietnam War. According to DeHaven-Smith, we should always discuss the “Kennedy assassinations” in the plural, because the two killings appear to have been aspects of the same larger crime.

Psychologist Laurie Manwell of the University of Guelph agrees that the CIA-designed “conspiracy theory” label impedes cognitive function. She points out, in an article published in American Behavioral Scientist (2010), that anti-conspiracy people are unable to think clearly about such apparent state crimes against democracy as 9/11 due to their inability to process information that conflicts with pre-existing belief.

In the same issue of ABS, University of Buffalo professor Steven Hoffman adds that anti-conspiracy people are typically prey to strong “confirmation bias” - that is, they seek out information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs, while using irrational mechanisms (such as the “conspiracy theory” label) to avoid conflicting information.

The extreme irrationality of those who attack “conspiracy theories” has been ably exposed by Communications professors Ginna Husting and Martin Orr of Boise State University. In a 2007 peer-reviewed article entitled “Dangerous Machinery: ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ as a Transpersonal Strategy of Exclusion,” they wrote:

“If I call you a conspiracy theorist, it matters little whether you have actually claimed that a conspiracy exists or whether you have simply raised an issue that I would rather avoid… By labeling you, I strategically exclude you from the sphere where public speech, debate, and conflict occur.”

But now, thanks to the internet, people who doubt official stories are no longer excluded from public conversation; the CIA’s 44-year-old campaign to stifle debate using the “conspiracy theory” smear is nearly worn-out. In academic studies, as in comments on news articles, pro-conspiracy voices are now more numerous - and more rational - than anti-conspiracy ones.

No wonder the anti-conspiracy people are sounding more and more like a bunch of hostile, paranoid cranks.


Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist, is one of America's best-known critics of the War on Terror. Dr. Barrett has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications. Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin, where he ran for Congress in 2008. He is the co-founder of the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance, and author of the books Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie (2007) and Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters (2009). His website is 
www.truthjihad.com
.http://presstv.com/detail/2013/07/12/313399/conspiracy-theorists-vs-govt-dupes/

Snowden a Hero to Americans

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by Justin Raimondo

 In spite of a hate campaign by the "mainstream" media

He’s been portrayed in the mainstream media as a "narcissist," a scheming "traitor," an agent of Russia, a Chinese spy, a clueless high school drop out, an anti-government "extremist," and I’m quite sure I must’ve missed a few of the more exotic epithets. I’m talking about Edward Snowden, of course, the former CIA employee and NSA contractor whose leaking to the Guardian has exposed a vast global spying apparatus secretly constructed by Washington. The weeks-long Hate aimed at Snowden reached its apogee when prominent "journalists" started going after the reporters who broke the Snowden story, principally Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, inferring that it was Greenwald and the Guardian who put Snowden up to penetrating the NSA. These aren’t just wingnut bloggers we’re dealing with here, but two prominent legacy-media reporters: David "Meet the Press" Gregory and Walter Pincus, of the Washington Post. When Gregory demanded to know why Greenwald shouldn’t be prosecuted alongside Snowden, that was the Establishment baring its teeth.

One should never assume their bark is worse than their bite, but clearly this display of anger is born of sheer frustration. Snowden, after all, has thrown our rulers and their court jesters in the media on the defensive. Not since David bopped Goliath on the noggin has a single individual landed such a decisive blow on a giant, unwieldy bully. Washington is reeling from the impact of the Snowden revelations, not just on the international plane but on the home front as well. In spite of battalions of politicians of both parties dutifully denouncing the NSA leaker as a modern day Benedict Arnold, and weeks of media hysteria over the alleged "damage" he has done to our national security, the American people aren’t buying the Official Narrative: a recent Quinnipiac poll reports:

"American voters say 55 – 34 percent that Edward Snowden is a whistle-blower, rather than a traitor, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today. In a massive shift in attitudes, voters say 45 – 40 percent the government’s anti-terrorism efforts go too far restricting civil liberties, a reversal from a January 14, 2010, survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University when voters said 63 – 25 percent that such activities didn’t go far enough to adequately protect the country. Almost every party, gender, income, education, age and income group regards Snowden as a whistle-blower rather than a traitor."

This poll tracks several interesting trends, the most arresting of which is the utter unanimity with which the American people are rejecting the Official Narrative on Snowden – that Snowden is a traitor who committed espionage and deserves to be punished for his "crime." Weeks and weeks of relentless smearing, accusing him of collusion with America’s enemies, and worse, have simply had no effect – other than, perhaps, to increase his approval ratings!

As was the case in the former Soviet Union, where people took the truth to be the opposite of whatever appeared in the newspapers, the American people are simply tuning out the "mainstream" media. In the upside down Bizarro World they find themselves living in, Americans have resorted to the only reliable method of determining truth from falsehood: by simply inverting whatever the Establishment media is "reporting." They’re telling us Snowden’s a "traitor": ergo, he’s a heroic whistle-blower. A crude but very effective methodology, one that – if applied consistently – can have some pretty interesting implications down the road.

The great shift in voter attitudes toward civil liberties is worth going into specifics: the partisan breakdown is particularly interesting. While 49 percent of Republicans support the NSA’s phone dragnet program, the number rises to 58 percent when we’re talking about Democrats. Opposition is centered in Independents, Republicans, and males. 56 percent of Republicans say the dragnet is too much of an intrusion into privacy, while only 40 percent of Democrats agree.

The evolution of American liberalism from a pro-civil liberties stance to one that effectively disappears the Fourth Amendment because Government Is Our Friend is here charted and measured. Yes, you’re right that they might not be telling the pollsters this if a Republican was in the White House, but I would argue this shift was bound to happen anyway. After all, haven’t "progressives" been telling us for years that conservative-libertarian fears of Big Government are just paranoid alarmism? Aren’t Democrats the "Mommy" party, which sees government as the Great Protector – and doesn’t the demographic breakdown, which shows women much more conducive to the Surveillance State than men, tell us where Democratic strategists are placing their bets? Indeed, one is hard put to come up with a reason for liberals to stand with Snowden in an age when "We’re from the government, and we’re here to help" is the leitmotif and motto of American "progressivism."

Old-fashioned American liberals never believed in any such claptrap. The Midwestern "progressives" of yesteryear didn’t cotton to centralization, and saw government regulation as the instrument of corporate control as much as a shield against it. They didn’t trust Washington bureaucrats, and although they initially supported the New Deal they turned against FDR when he started accruing more power in the alphabet soup of government agencies set up during the Depression. They stood up during the McCarthy era, when the threat to our civil liberties was almost as great as it is today, and they fought government repression tooth and nail. Today, that noble tradition persists in the ACLU, and a few other organizations, mostly legal defense groups, but politically the old-fashioned liberals are in decline, as the Quinnipiac poll suggests, with the center of opposition to the Surveillance State shifting to the libertarian-conservative side of the spectrum.

In the short term, this is good news for libertarians, such as myself, who have been campaigning for years to convert conservatives to the cause of constitutional government and a non-interventionist foreign policy. The latter is involved, at least tangentially, because the rationalization for universal surveillance hinges on the need to protect us from the consequences of our dangerously wrong-headed policy of perpetual war. To those of us who lived – and suffered – through the Bush years, that significantly more Republicans than Democrats see Snowden as a whistleblower rather than a "traitor" is an astonishing fact.

On the other hand, this is very bad news for the country in the long term. A healthy American liberalism – that is, a movement dedicated to the preservation of our civil liberties against a government ever-eager to infringe on them – is absolutely necessary if the Constitution is to be successfully defended. In the absence of such a movement, it becomes politically impossible to fight off attempts by both the Obama cult and the neocons to impose a universal surveillance regime in the US. Unless old-fashioned liberalism undergoes a revival on account of the Snowden revelations, civil liberties in this country are doomed. Neither the left nor the right alone can save the Constitution: a united effort is needed if we are going to defeat the new authoritarians.

 http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/07/11/snowden-a-hero-to-americans/

Where Orwell got it wrong

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by John O'Farrell

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

In his novel 1984, George Orwell forecasted a dystopian society 36 years in the future, in which an all-powerful state uses advanced technology to exert totalitarian control over the thoughts, words and actions of its citizens. Ubiquitous two-way “telescreens” watch the individual’s every move and emit an endless stream of sinister propaganda. Big Brother is watching you. The Ministry of Truth is the only source of information. The Thought Police control what you think. As citizen Winston Smith learns to his cost, resistance is futile.

The allegations that the NSA has apparently been collecting the cellphone and Internet records of everyone in the United States (if not the world) has catalyzed fears that Orwell’s terrifying future may finally be materializing twenty-nine years late. Sales of 1984 are up 9,500%. Was Orwell right? Is technology in the hands of the state enabling our subjugation as he predicted?

In one key aspect, Orwell was absolutely right. Like Orwell’s telescreens, security cameras increasingly monitor us from every street-corner, but we also carry smartphones that log our every physical movement, and meanwhile a host of tracking technologies record our virtual movements across the Web. As a recent WSJ OpEd by Sen. Rand Paul proclaims, “Big Brother Really Is Watching Us” – and he’s using technologies far more powerful than Orwell could have imagined back in 1948. The implications of this surveillance are profoundly disturbing. While we may trust the current administration’s assertions that they’re only watching us in order to protect us, who can be confident that future administrations or less benign overseas governments will not use these tools to track and persecute whomever they deem to be an enemy of the state?

In another fundamental aspect, however, Orwell was dead wrong. In a paradox worthy of 1984 itself, the same technologies that enable Big Brother to watch us are rendering it ever more impossible for him to control what we know and think. Far from ending up in control of all knowledge through the Ministry of Truth, today’s governments have effectively lost the ability to control our access to information. In Orwell’s time, the state only needed to censor a few newspapers and a handful of broadcasters to effect total information control. Today, we carry access to hundreds of global news sources and tens of thousands of bloggers around in our pockets, most of them beyond our national government’s reach. If the New York Times won’t publish it due to a secret FISA court order, the Guardian will. If we don’t trust the Turkish government’s account of events in the streets of Istanbul, we can turn for the truth to thousands of cellphone videos or tweets from the people themselves. SMS, Twitter and Facebook have become the means for citizens to organize resistance to abusive government power, and for the rest of the world to witness it. No wonder Prime Minister Erdogan recently declared Twitter and its ilk “the worst menace to society.”

Moreover, technology is exposing the state itself to scrutiny in ways that Orwell never foresaw. Even in China, these days it only seems to take a flurry of critical comments on Sina Weibo for the government to change its policy on luxury cars for officials or to give in to villagers demanding the removal of a corrupt mayor. In what’s become a recurring nightmare for Western governments, leaks spread instantly and uncontrollably in the world of smartphones and Twitter. Whether you agree or disagree with their tactics, it only takes one “whistleblower” to shine the blinding spotlight of the global Internet on controversial top-secret government programs. And just as our personal use of technology lays a trail the government can follow, so too does government’s use of technology create a record that can be used to scrutinize the actions of the officials involved and hold them to account. If there is a “smoking gun” associated with the IRS Tea Party affair, it’s likely to be found somewhere in a trove of internal email. Like Nixon with his tapes, the day will inevitably come when a national government is brought down by its emails.

So, Orwell was partly right. The state uses ever more advanced surveillance technology to watch us, and our own ever-greater use of personal technology makes it possible. On the other hand, technology has fundamentally destroyed the state’s ability to control our access to information, and exposed its bureaucracy to unprecedented scrutiny. This may be the death of privacy, but perhaps it’s also the death of secrecy and impunity. In that respect, fortunately, Orwell was wrong. Thanks to technology, Big Brother may be watching us, but we’re watching him too.

https://medium.com/surveillance-state/a3f8a99880d6