Marc Estrin : Who Needs Tear Gas?

"Port-A-Potty." Art by Ali Spagnola / alispagnola.com.
Who needs tear gas?

The switch from blameworthy military attack to invisible counterinsurgency is a smart one for cities and towns strapped for budget.

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / November 29, 2011

BURLINGTON, Vermont -- Nonchalantly pepper-spraying sitting students, or charging with batons swinging into nonviolent crowds, or middle-of-the-night attacks with gas canisters flying in the streetlights' glare don’t seem to be increasing the popularity of protectors and servers throughout the land.

Some mayors and police chiefs, like our own in Burlington, understand that they can expect to clear Occupy sites with three much more subtle, non-YouTube-able, plausibly deniable techniques, one transient, two permanent.

The first is simply to wait for winter, a time when most outdoor beasts, warm-blooded and cold-, migrate or hibernate, or somehow dig in, and abandon their normal playing fields. Landscapes of all kinds thin out naturally until the burgeoning of spring. In Vermont, that’s at least four months with very unlikely encampment. Things may be different in Florida.

But the second and third tactics are not so iffy, so geographically determined. They are easy, and cheap:

2. Provide no porta-potties. This has been a longstanding tactic. Permits have long been granted for potentially large, one-day demonstrations, extra police are hired, traffic plans are made, barriers and watchtowers are imported, Free Speech Zones demarcated (!), etc. And in spite of all this planning and expense, guess what is absent?

And then consider the decision-making process of potential demonstrators with prostate problems, menstrual issues, nervous bladders, bowel disorders, of any who may not be able to hold it -- whatever "it" is -- for more than a few hours. Discourages going to the demo, doesn't it? Cuts down on the numbers. And with no propaganda, no expense. It also puts pressure on local businesses to guard their facilities, and detest the 99%. A twofer. Here, there are possible technical solutions used by pillheads and astronauts.

3. But the best, and most effective approach of all, potentially lethal to every Occupy site, and for the authorities, killing three big birds with one stone, is simply to rely on the openness, kindness, and communitarian ideologies common to the Occupiers. In Burlington, it was the suicide of a homeless man at the encampment which was the game-changer, and brought down all the tents.

In larger cities, with far larger homeless populations, the situation is far more difficult, and is counted on as such by authorities. The homeless rightfully seek out non-judgmental soup kitchens, and communities in which they are not likely to be awakened in the middle of the night by nightsticks or racist gangs. And if they pay attention at all to the rhetoric of those around them, they know that they are not only part of the 99%, but perhaps the poster children of same.

They belong there. They recognize communities that strive to make them welcome without proselytizing or judgment, that try to cross socio-economic boundaries and learn from their hard experience of life ever more common in America. The homeless wind up in Occupy sites, and they should, and they always will -- for good reason.

Not to mention that Occupy often moves into places and parks that belonged to the homeless in the first place, until they became "contested public spaces." The street people who spent their days in Burlington's City Hall Park during the hours homeless shelters are closed were quite literally overrun by the marchers that "claimed" the park.

The occupation began more like the occupation of Palestine than of Burlington. But with much work, caring, and growth of tolerance, the problems were largely overcome, and the occupiers cohabited with the homeless behind our City Hall. They allowed us to occupy their space. Then came the suicide.

The fact is, and for obvious reasons, the homeless bring many problems with them that become a great burden to any intentional participatory community. There have been a lot of words about everyone being able to have their say during the remarkable people's mic, about rules being formed democratically, etc.

But the fact is that some people are just not into announcing a mic check, and laying out their ideas in short, repeatable phrases. Some people are not into obeying rules at all, whatever they are, whoever made them. Some people are habitually drunk, or drugged, and wildly disinhibited around sexual behavior.

These are the people, and this the sociology, that sophisticated police departments count on to do their work for them, invisibly creating stressors in Occupy situations, and picking up the tab for feeding, housing, and caring for the city's poorest.

A three-fer this time, a win-win for law 'n order: break up the encampments, save money on tear-gas and overtime, and until that is achieved, relieve the strain on food shelves and homeless shelters. There were reports of police picking up drunks in other parts of the city, and chauffering them down to Zucotti Park in the days before Kristallnacht.

The switch from blameworthy military attack to invisible counterinsurgency is a smart one for cities and towns strapped for budget. "Let the buggers eat each other up" has always been the rationale for divide and conquer. Oh, and don't give them any place to pee.

[Marc Estrin is a writer, activist, and cellist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, The Lamentations of Julius Marantz, and The Good Doctor Guillotin have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky. Read more articles by Marc Estrin on The Rag Blog.]

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Vietnam and Afghanistan : Still Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

American soldiers carry a wounded comrade through a Vietnam Swamp. Photo by Paul Halverson, 1969. Image from The Veterans Hour.

Afghanistan, and the specter of Vietnam:
Waist deep in the big muddy

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / May 27, 2010

But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;
We're waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
-- Pete Seeger

As has been expressed in a variety of ways over the years, the specter of Vietnam weighs as an albatross on the American body politic.

President Truman began supporting French colonialism in Indochina in 1950, funding 80 percent of the French war effort as part of the globalization of Cold War policy. After the French were defeated, the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s created a dictatorial, unpopular, and corrupt South Vietnamese government which was aided by military advisers and massive U.S. financial support.

President Kennedy pursued a policy of building a “non-communist road to economic development,” with the addition of thousands more troops. Lyndon Johnson launched a massive air war and counterinsurgency campaign leading to 540,000 troops in the country by 1968. And the Nixon administration engaged in a brutal bombing campaign hitting targets throughout North and South Vietnam.

Each strategy was to be the last. Victory was near. In the end, millions of Vietnamese people died and thousands of Americans.

And all indicators are that the United States is doing it again in Afghanistan. In the 1980s the U.S. committed more than a billion dollars to support religious fundamentalists fighting to overthrow secular Kabul governments it opposed. In the 1990s, the U.S. briefly negotiated with a Taliban government it found abhorrent, but which it felt might become a potential economic ally in the production of oil pipelines running through Afghanistan.

Finally the George W. Bush administration made war on dubious grounds on the Taliban government in the 21st century. The immediate enemy, Al Qaeda, the alleged perpetrator of the crimes of 9/11, was not delivered to the U.S. by the Afghanistan government as “ordered” by the Bush administration.

Since 9/11 we have been engaged in a nine year quagmire in Afghanistan fighting what is left of a dwindling Al Qaeda and a vast population of people who resent being bombed and occupied by a foreign power.

The White House recently hosted Afghan president Hamid Karzai, by numerous accounts corrupt and unpopular. The most troubling information about the encounter between Obama and Karzai was reported by Helene Cooper in The New York Times. According to her, President Obama promised to Karzai that “...the United States would remain in Afghanistan for the long haul, even as he vowed to stick to his timetable to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011.”

Cooper surmised that the week-long visit constituted an effort “...to reassure Mr. Karzai and his government that the United States will not abandon Afghanistan...”

In another New York Times story by Alissa Rubin, the author warns that the hardest fighting is still ahead even though “the biggest challenge lies not on the battlefield but in the governing of Afghanistan itself.” A near future expansion of the counter-insurgency campaign will confront, the “corrosive distrust” of the Karzai government. In areas such as Marja, the population resents influential power brokers such as Karzai’s brother, local police, and other government officials.

Rubin quotes an aid to General Stanley McChrystal, architect of the new counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan: “People are tired of the Taliban, but they also don’t want cops to shake them down, they don’t want power brokers who are so corrupt they impact their lives and livelihood.”

Gareth Porter in an Inter Press Service article points out that the Obama administration has balked at the Karzai effort to dialogue with sectors of the Taliban despite the obvious possibility that negotiations could lead to the withdrawal of U.S. troops which would advantage the United States and at the same time bring peace to the Pashtun population of Southern Afghanistan.

Porter quotes an administrative official:

Obama’s forceful opposition to any political approach to any Taliban leadership until after the counter-insurgency strategy has been tried appears to represent a policy that has been hammered out within the administration at the insistence of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Middle East expert Juan Cole writes that Obama’s master plan for Afghanistan has involved a “massive counter-insurgency effort,” involving tens of thousands of troops and massive combat. Cole estimates that the strategy has about a 10 percent possibility of success.

Forty-six years ago Lyndon Johnson won an enormous presidential electoral victory against conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. LBJ ran as the anti-war candidate. He embarked on a campaign to get Congress to support civil rights legislation that would at last end Jim Crow in the South. He constructed a variety of programs to address poverty in America, activate community participation in the political process, and launched a program to expand access to health care for the elderly. He promised the American people “A Great Society.”

Much of the Great Society agenda was destroyed as the Vietnam War escalated from 120,000 troops in 1965, to over 400,000 by 1967, and 540,000 in January 1968. By 1967 the United States had dropped more bombs on Vietnamese targets than were dropped on enemy targets during World War II. And President Johnson was forced to withdraw from the 1968 campaign for the presidency.

The Obama/McChrystal counter-insurgency strategy may not yield the magnitude of escalation reached in Vietnam. However, the combination of support for a corrupt regime, placing foreign troops among a hostile population, indiscriminate killing of local civilians, and refusal to negotiate with adversaries, as Juan Cole suggests, surely will yield a Vietnam-style failure in Afghanistan.

Along with the pain and suffering of the Afghan people, the counter-insurgency strategy of this administration will dash the hopes and dreams of all the young people who worked so hard in 2008 to get the candidate committed to progressive social change, Barack Obama, elected president. The parallels with the young who worked to elect the “peace candidate” in 1964 are stark.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. His blog is Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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Turning to High-Tech to See Through the Economic Mess

Fighter pilot helmet with x-ray vision -- to see through those marble walls! And that ain't nothin, honey.
Using 21st century anti-insurgency technology to prevent the next stock market meltdown
By Doug Porter / September 23, 2008

The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have both run stories in the past few weeks referring to new super secret technologies being used by the US military that have contributed significantly to the decline in violence in the war in Iraq . Both papers have only made fleeting references to the methodologies involved, citing concerns that foreign governments/terrorists will use any disclosures to development counter-technologies that will negate the advantages that these new super secret technologies give the US military.

To quote the Times,

“American officials requested that details of the new technology not be disclosed out of concern that doing so might enable militants to evade U.S. detection. But officials said the previously unacknowledged devices have become a powerful part of the American arsenal, allowing the tracking of human targets even when they are inside buildings or otherwise hidden from Predator surveillance cameras.”

Whenever the press says something is “super secret”, I utilize my own private technology (aka Google) to gain enlightenment. It’s a good thing that foreign governments/terrorists haven’t figured this out, except that they have. The Chinese government has already stolen the basic drone technology, and there are numerous references around the web to the techniques that have made these weapons so effective.

Without revealing any more secrets than Google provided in three basic searches, let’s look at the some of the basic technology in use:

** The ability to see through walls: Known by its acronym (STTW), a several year old report from the National Defense University cites a system that can “detect the presence of personnel within rooms (stated to be doing well through 12 inches of concrete),” as well as a commercially developed system with a “30-foot standoff capability.” STTW is new application of radar technologies. Intensive R&D has reduced the size of the equipment to about the same size as an automotive battery, although it is apparently very heavy, as its utilization reduces the amount of weaponry that Predator drones can carry.

** By combining the STTW technology with distributed sensors and utilizing marching cubes, a computer graphics algorithm utilized for MIR and CT scan images, it is now possible to create three dimensional images. The effect of these devices, according to a former U.S. military official interviewed by the Times, is that insurgents, even indoors, “are living with a red dot on their head.”

** Last, there have been significant advances in military SIGINT programs. (That’s Signals Intelligence) These breakthroughs are enabling the military to gain intelligence based on the “signatures” of various communication devices. It’s all terribly triple secret, and if I were to explain any more here, I’d have to shoot you.

There is undoubtedly more to all this “super secret” stuff than the government has been willing to leak to the press. If Cold War History can be used as a reliable model, most of the world’s intelligence services and a great many insurgent groups will have all the gory details long before the American public gains access to this information. The “SECRET” stamp means that moral, legal, or financial questions about the utilization of this technology can and will be effectively avoided behind the twin shields of National Security and the War on Terrorism.

AND , it also means some technologies that the military has developed for battlefield use in the various middle east/ near east conflicts will likely (if they haven’t already) be allowed to “trickle down” for domestic use. Of course, because the technologies are all secret, there will be no legal, moral, or ethical standards in place governing their use. Our friends from the north (aka Canada ) have been playing with this stuff for years and are pretty honest about its potential for domestic use.

So, let’s get to the point. The government has X-Ray Glasses technology, can leap tall buildings with a single bound (or hover over them for hours, as needed) and can pretty much get to all your vital secrets using your cell phone, Blackberry, automotive GPS and probably even your iPod. Members of both political parties, a gaggle of pundits and even the President agree that we have a “national crisis” going on at present on Wall Street that threatens the very foundations of our Nationhood. It’s a short leap from National Crisis to National Security—if the country’s broke, how are we gonna pay for more wars?

It’s time to bring the technology that’s been so useful in Iraq home and put it to use Saving Our Economy. In the past, these kinds of military programs have been used for spying on domestic dissenters and the occasional criminal conspiracy. Now it’s time to step up to the plate and hit a homer. The government can spare us the details, if they like–just give us the facts. Wouldn’t it be in America ’s best interest to know when Treasury Secretary Paulson and his ilk were selling off all the “assets” for deeply discounted prices that our tax dollars have recently acquired? Wouldn’t this be the ultimate oversight? Wouldn’t it be terrific if all the CEO Blackberries suddenly began spewing out insider info for all to share?

Just a thought.

Source / OB Rag

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U.N. Finds U.S. Airstrike Killed 90 Afghans

An Afghan doctor, left, examines Zinat Gul's wounded hand, who allegedly was wounded by a U.S. air strike in Shindand district, as her mother looks on at a hospital in Herat, east of Kabul, Afghanistan, on Monday. Photo by Fraidoon Pooyaa / AP.
Most fatalities in U.S.-led attack said to be children
By Candace Rondeaux and Karen DeYoung / August 27, 2008

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- United Nations officials in Afghanistan said Tuesday that there was "convincing evidence" at least 90 civilians -- two-thirds of them children -- were killed in a U.S.-led airstrike last week that caused the Afghan government to call for a review of U.S. and NATO military operations in the country.

Kai Eide, the top U.N. official in Afghanistan, said local officials and residents in the western province of Herat corroborated reports that 60 children and 30 adults had been killed in an Aug. 21 military operation led by U.S. Special Operations forces and the Afghan army.

In a statement, Eide called the incident a "matter of grave concern to the United Nations" and said he had "repeatedly made clear that the safety and welfare of civilians must be considered above all else during the planning and conduct of all military operations."

U.S. forces in Afghanistan have increased their reliance on air power since last year, causing a corresponding increase in civilian deaths. The Herat assault appears to have caused the largest civilian loss of life attributed to U.S. forces since the war began in late 2001.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said military commanders in Afghanistan continued to believe that the attack in Herat "was a legitimate strike on a Taliban target."

Whitman promised a detailed investigation. "This has a lot of people's interest, and my sense is they want to be thorough and complete. We're doing it as expeditiously as we can."

The U.N. findings came as the government of President Hamid Karzai demanded more coordination between Afghan and international security forces and called for greater accountability on the part of U.S. and NATO troops operating in the country. Afghanistan's Council of Ministers called Monday for a halt to aerial bombings and to what it called overly aggressive house raids and illegal detentions. The council demanded an agreement with U.S. and NATO forces that would define the parameters of international military operations in Afghanistan.

Afghan officials and independent investigators say more than 165 civilians have been killed in four airstrikes in the past two months. The deaths have angered Afghans, who are pressuring Karzai to seek greater control over foreign troops even as resurgent Taliban fighters increase their attacks on the international presence in Afghanistan.

Sultan Ahmed Baheen, spokesman for the Afghan Foreign Ministry, said his office and the Afghan Defense Ministry have been working to draft a document that would require more coordination between Afghan security forces and international troops to minimize civilian deaths and damage from military operations. About 60,000 troops from 40 nations are in Afghanistan, including 32,000 from the United States.

At the United Nations on Tuesday, Russia introduced a sharply worded draft statement expressing concern about reports that U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan had caused "numerous civilian casualties, including women and children."

U.N. diplomats said the Russian text stood little chance of being adopted in the Security Council, where the United States wields veto power. They interpreted the Russian action as a signal that it would pursue a more confrontational approach with the United States in response to Washington's criticism of the Russian intervention in Georgia.

U.S. officials in Washington said they have been anticipating that Karzai will demand a formal status-of-forces agreement with the United States; the Bush administration is finalizing a similar accord with Iraq after protracted negotiations. Although U.S. troops participate in the NATO-led force in Afghanistan under a U.N. mandate, the bulk of U.S. forces fall under Operation Enduring Freedom, a U.S.-only force governed by an exchange of diplomatic notes signed with the Afghan government in May 2003.

At least 90 percent of all aircraft being used in the Afghan war belong to U.S. forces operating under their own command structure. "Civilian deaths are not a NATO problem," said Marc Garlasco, a military analyst at New York-based Human Rights Watch. "Civilian casualties are primarily being caused in airstrikes in support of the counterterrorism mission that the United States is running completely separate from the NATO-run counterinsurgency conflict," said Garlasco, who has compiled a report on civilian deaths from airstrikes to be published next month.

Last year, as Taliban attacks increased, the number of civilian deaths caused by airstrikes spiked sharply, from 116 killed in 2006 to 321 in 2007, according to figures issued by the U.S. Air Forces Central Command. The number of sorties increased by about one-third in 2007, and the amount of munitions that were dropped more than doubled, according to the data.

Garlasco said the amount of bombs dropped by U.S. airstrikes in June (317,000 pounds) and July (270,000 pounds) is equivalent to the total tonnage dropped in 2006. The vast majority of the strikes, Garlasco said, are unplanned missions called in by U.S. Special Operations ground forces fighting Taliban units or because a "target of opportunity" is located through on-the-ground intelligence.

Unlike in Iraq, where U.S. forces frequently use 250-pound bombs to make attacks more precise, Garlasco said American troops in Afghanistan "are still using a lot of" 2,000-pound bombs.

The Herat bombing occurred around midnight after U.S. Special Operations forces and Afghan troops led a raid on a compound in the town of Azizabad where they said they thought a Taliban commander was holding a meeting with supporters. U.S. military officials said at least 30 insurgents were killed, including the commander, who is known as Mullah Siddiq.

Afghan officials in Herat said the bombing occurred as dozens of villagers gathered for a memorial ceremony for a villager who was killed last year. Ahmed Dehzad, one of the province's parliamentary representatives, said that local officials had received reports of Taliban activity in the vicinity several days before the ceremony but that coalition forces did not issue a warning before the attack on a compound near where the ceremony was held.

A spokesman for the Afghan army's western command said Saturday that an army investigation into the incident confirmed that about 60 children and 19 women had been killed in the airstrike. The spokesman, Raouf Ahmedi, said there was no evidence that any of those killed had ties to the Taliban.

The U.N. investigators found that at least 15 people were injured in the operation.

A little more than a day after the raid, a U.S. military spokeswoman dismissed as "outrageous" the Afghan government's assertions that scores of civilians had been killed in the attack. Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green said U.S. forces who inspected the site afterward found that five civilians had been killed.

A U.S. official in Washington, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the Taliban has become adept at spreading false intelligence to draw U.S. strikes on civilians. "The fact is that the Taliban now has pretty good insight into where we're picking up information and how we're developing it into actionable intelligence," the official said. "They've figured out a way to misguide us."

[DeYoung reported from Washington. Staff writer Colum Lynch at the United Nations and special correspondent Javed Hamdard in Kabul contributed to this report.]

Source / Washington Post

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