The Secret Coup

In a secret coup, US security agencies have apparently taken over the United States Government.  With key members of Congress, the Executive has given itself secret powers, authorized by secret laws, interpreted by secret courts.  There is no accountability at all.

To facilitate this takeover, the President, his Administration, its agencies and House and Senate leaders have conspired to conceal the nature and scope of these activities from Congressional and Judicial oversight.  They have subverted the Constitution and broken both the law and their oaths of office, an impeachable offense.

These are crimes under US law.  You can argue all you want, but from Obama on down, the defense of these programs amounts to "If the President does it, its not illegal", to quote Richard Nixon.  He was wrong about that.  And what we are talking about here is 10x worse than anything Nixon did.  Watergate was a personal scandal.  Here, the Administration has declared a permanent state of war, and is permanently suppressing Constitutional rights.

This is not an abstract issue.  Reuters has uncovered that the DEA was getting information from these illegal programs and concealed the source of their evidence from Federal Judges in criminal cases.  That is a major crime and people should go to jail.  Another impeachable offense.

Note I am not just specifically accusing Democrats.  The Republicans are in this up to their necks as well.

Its all going to lead to a political crisis.  At least it better. 

UPDATE Aug. 8
Reuters is reporting that the IRS also participated in concealing the source of evidence gained from NSA intercepts.

A Note To Vic

     Photograph by: Reuters , Postmedia News via the Vancouver Sun

To the Hon Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews
Somewhere in the back woods of Alberta

Hey Vic.  Hope you are having a nice summer vacation.  You must be quite busy with the dock or something, so this Omar Khadr thing is going to have to wait.  Anyway, the Americans have him all locked up safe and sound until you get around to it.  Maybe after Labour Day.  Or Thanksgiving.  You are the Minister for Public Fucking Safety, after all.  Its your decision.

So this Khadr guy's lawyers claim Canada had a deal to take him and put him in a Canadian prison.  But it wasn't real for keeps deal.  It was more like a suggestion.  A proposal.  A trial balloon.  Not in any way a commitment.  The Americans don't really want him to leave, they just have to say that. They love him.  He's the only jihadi in Guantanamo who's ever up for a party.  The rest just lay around whining.

Besides, the guy is a fucking terrorist!  The Minister of Public Fucking Safety doesn't let terrorists into Canada.  The Minister if Public Fucking Safety keeps terrorists OUT of Canada.  He's not really a Canadian anyway.  His parents were fake Canadians.  That makes him a fake Canadian too.  So he was a child soldier.  So he was tortured.  So the evidence against him is full of holes.  So fucking what?  He must be guilty of something.  The Americans say so.  You don't end up in Guantanamo for skipping Sunday School.

So, its your decision.  But you have to be careful.  You can't risk Khadr escaping from a Canadian prison, or getting sprung by some idiot judge.   In 10 minutes, he'll be massacring American Combat Medics all over the Eaton's Center.  We all know he's got hand grenades.  Harper would ream your ass so hard you'd have shit come out your nose.

No Vic.  Stick to your guns and keep at that dock, or whatever.  There's no hurry.  Its not like Khadr is going anywhere.  To tell the truth, we don't want him back anyway.  So many problems.  So many complications.  Can't anything ever be simple?  But you know, there's all that information you need to study before making a decision.  Years and years of transcripts to go over!  Trials, and interrogations, and intelligence and background and lots of other stuff too!  It could take a long time.  A very long time.

Cheers
Squidhammer

Pakistan

This is a happening map, if I do say so myself.  Via Google Maps mashups, you can see not only the borders and main cities of Pakistan, but also the population density and, outlined in blue, the Pashtun areas.

The Americans seem to have gone nutty about Pakistan in the last few weeks.  The New York Times, in particular, has been fear mongering like its 2003 again.  There have been articles as full of paranoia, guilt by association, speculation and unrealistic worst case scenarios as anything they printed in the run-up to Iraq.  This article is a good example. Here is another.  

The first thing is that the Taliban are an expression of Pashtun nationalism.  They have no traction whatsoever outside Pashtun areas.  Where they do have a presence, like Karachi, its based on the city`s Pashtun community.  They operate there like a crime gang, not an ideological force.  Even if most Pakistanis wanted an Islamist government, they wouldn't stand for one run by the Taliban.  Punjabis are not going to be ruled by Pashtun.  Despite the Times' assertions, there is no public evidence of a connection between the Taliban and other creatures of the ISI like Lashkar-e-Taiba.  The only things they appear to have in common are radical interpretations of Islam, a love of violence and their paymaster.  In addition, the city that the Times identifies as an outpost of the Taliban in Punjab is Dera Ghazi Khan.  A look at the map above shows this city is on the border of Pashtun territory.  It would be more surprising if they didn't have a presence there.  Tell me when they are taking over Lahore.  

Second is that the Times details some pretty tenuous associations to say that Punjabi groups are linked to Al-Qaida.  They insinuate that elements of the Pakistani government share these links.  The last operation unambiguously carried out by Al-Qaida was 9/11.  They are more of a bogyman than a real threat these days. The survivors would all be dead if it weren't for the Pashtun code (see Pashtunwalli).  This is the kind of thing you'd expect The New York Times to know about.

Forth, the Taliban are not going to take over Pakistan.  They do not have the capability.  Besides the ethnic issues noted above, there is the Pakistani Army.  They are a well trained and well armed conventional military.  The Army may not have much enthusiasm fighting the Pashtun in the tribal areas, but would feel a lot different if the Taliban came out of the mountains and tried to take Punjabi cities by force.  That`s not their only problem, India, Iran, China and Russia would be very unhappy with a Taliban takeover and might intervene to prevent it.  

Last, there's much crazy talk by the Times and many others about terrorists getting their hands on some or all of Pakistan's nuclear weapons.  The Taliban have no more chance of getting Pakistani nukes than I do.  The Americans seem to have forgotten everything from the Cold War.  One of the key things is that the most dangerous nuclear weapons are you own.  Anyone with a credible second strike capability doesn't need to worry about being attacked.  The worst thing that can happen is one of your own people sets one off either locally or against another country.  That was the main story in Doctor Strangelove.  No matter what their religious or ideological leanings, the Pakistani Armed Forces are going to retain 100% control over those weapons at all time.  The Pakistani Air Force has especially close relations with the US on nuclear weapons control.  Believe it, even if the Taliban were able to take over Pakistan, the last thing they`d want is to lose control of the nukes.  That would be, at the least, a career limiting move. 

What this looks like is a preparation by the Americans to move into the Pakistani border areas.  This would be an effective military move, but fraught with so much political downside that it would seem to be impossible.  Don`t think for even a second that countries like Qatar (home of the US 7th fleet), Saudi Arabia and even Iraq would support a US invasion of another Muslim country.  The only ones who would cheer would be Iran and India.  In all, this looks like a worse idea than invading Iraq, and that was one of the worst ideas a US President ever had. 

Free Omar Khadr

Omar Khadr in early 2002.

The Khadr family is notorious in Canada.  They lived here on  and off through the 1980's and 1990's.  Several of the children, including Omar, were born here.  Though Arabs, the family moved to Afghanistan permanently in 1999.  Ahmed Said Khadr, the father, was a key offshore fund raiser for Osama bin Laden.  Bin Laden even attended the wedding of one of the Khadr daughters in Kabul.  To the extent that al Quaida actually existed, the Khadrs were core members.

Things fell apart after the US invasion.  Ahmed went on the run and was killed in a shootout with Pakistani soldiers in 2003.  His son Abdulkareem, 14 at the time, was paralyzed in the firefight.  He, his mother and two sisters came back to Canada in 2004.  There was a lot of opposition to their return, but fortunately both the Federal and Provincial governments refused to bow to pressure and the Khadrs were dealt with by the same rules as everyone else.  Abdulkareem, now 19 will be wheelchair bound for life.

Another son, Abdurahman (now 26) was the only one not interested in the family business.  He was a teenager when they moved to Afghanistan and found life in Kabul stunningly primitive after growing up in Toronto.  Nevertheless, Abdurahman got swept up in the net after the invasion.  It took the Americans quite a while to figure out he was unimportant, if not innocent.  Abdurahman was hauled through several facilities, including Guantanamo, between his arrest in 2001 and his release in 2003.  He is currently in Canada, estranged from his family and twice denied a passport for fuzzy reasons.  The obvious guess is that keeping him in Canada and probably under surveillance was the price demanded by the Americans for his release.

Another son, Abdullah (now 27), escaped the dragnet and moved around the Pashtun tribal areas on the Afghan border until his arrest in Pakistan in 2004.  This came after an American "intelligence agency" offered a bounty of $500,000 for his capture.  He was accused of illegal weapons trading in the border areas and specifically purchasing Soviet Stinger missiles for the Taliban.  After a great deal of squabbling, he was transferred by the Pakistanis to Canada in 2005.  For political reasons, the Pakistanis refused to hand him over to the Americans, although they were given full access for questioning.  Anticipating his transfer to Canada, the US started extradition proceedings.  He was re-arrested on the extradition warrant in early 2006 and remains in custody in Toronto.

I have no doubt the allegations of arms dealings are true.  Unless you are a farmer or a doctor or a schoolteacher, there aren't a lot of legal ways to make a living in Wasiristan.  But most of the arms he his alleged to have handled went to his father and were captured by the Pakistanis in 2003.  If neither Pakistan nor Canada wants to try him, its unclear to me how the Americans have jurisdiction.

The last son was Omar.  He was 14 when the US invaded Afghanistan and took to the hills.  He was captured after being seriously wounded in a firefight in July 2002 at the age of 15.  After being held some months at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, he was transferred to Guantanamo where he remains.  He is accused of, among other crimes, throwing a grenade that killed a US medic.  The trial has stuttered for some months, but not actually started.  Last week, it was postponed until January 27, 2009.  The judge may be hoping Obama solves the Omar Khadr problem without a trial.  So far, the only heroes of Guantanamo have been the conscientious military lawyers and judges who have fought enormous efforts to turn the proceedings into show trials.

Despite the general unpopularity of the Khadr family in Canada, there is strong support for bringing Omar home.  This rests on four points.  First, he was the legal resident of a country that was invaded.  He resisted.  That's not by definition criminal and he should not be considered an illegal combatant.  Second, he was 15 at the time.  A UN treaty that the US signed designates child soldiers as ineligible for punishment, viewing them as victims of war rather than perpetrators.  Third, taking a 15 year old seriously wounded boy, torturing him for years and failing to provide an opportunity for him to challenge his confinement is outrageous.  It shouldn't be able to happen to a Canadian citizen, especially at the hands of our closest ally.  Fourth, now that the trial has started to move forward, it turns out the evidence Khadr killed the medic is not exactly watertight.  It may have been friendly fire.  However, the Guantanamo trial process is so wrecked that at this point no objective observer believes he can get a fair trial.

In any case, Khadr has been locked up for six years.  Heroic labors by his military and civilian lawyers have kept the case bubbling and on the public radar.  Now that his trial has been delayed again, due to procedural malfeasance by the prosecution, the time has come to end this farce.  Canada should demand Omar Khadr be freed and sent home.  As long as he obeys the laws of this country, he should remain a free man.

Conspiracy Theories

People love conspiracy theories.  They make up and passionately defend theories about events that have patently obvious explanations.  Like the moon landings.  The obvious explanation being that they happened exactly as they appeared.  Like 9/11.  What more explanation does one need than the evidence provided on live TV at the time?  Was there a cover-up?  I'm sure there was.  But like the cover-ups surrounding JFK's assassination, they were designed to hide incompetence beforehand, panic at the time, and rash actions afterwards.  The granddaddy of all conspiracy theories is creationism.  How can something  so important as me come about by chance?

Conspiracy theories are the modern, socially acceptable form of superstition.  Studies have shown that the less control people have over their environment, the more prone they are to superstition.  This should not be a surprise because superstition is a positive (though undesirable) behavior.  The human mind making sense of the world and seeking patterns creates artifacts.  Superstitions are the artifacts.  Their presence has nothing to do with intelligence.  They are due to lack of information, societal conformity and economy of effort.  Most people don't spend time learning about or understanding things they don't need to.  Most of the exceptions only learn or understand extra stuff that they are interested in.

Scratch the surface of anyone's understanding of the world and you will find lots of magical thinking.  How does your TV work?  How about the Internet you are using to access this post?  They just work, and we don't need to understand the details if we don't want to.  But importantly, we have a kind of story at the back of our minds about how these things work.  That's the societal narrative.  A shared set of short-hand explanations.  When these explanations are grounded in evidence we call it science.  When grounded in belief, we call it faith.  When grounded in prejudice or ignorance, or nothing at all, we call it superstition.  What all these share is a desire to discern cause and effect.  A need to describe the structure of the world and the individual's place in it.

When the explanation for extraordinary events is inconsistent with people's life experience, they look for a new pattern that is more consistent.  Not a bad thing on the face of it.  But a lot of events are random or chaotic.  Despite their importance, they were unanticipated because nobody thought they could ever happen.  For example, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.  There are people who look at the evidence available before the event and conclude that the powers that be must have known.  The evidence of impending attack went from suggestive a few weeks beforehand to persuasive a few days before to conclusive within an hour of the attack.  Yet it was a total surprise.   The idea that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbour on that sunny Sunday morning never entered the heads of those in Hawaii until the funny looking planes dropped bombs that really went off.  Since a Japanese attack was an idea that never formed, all the evidence that is so obvious in retrospect was dismissed or misinterpreted.

Unfortunately, if you want to believe that governments are on top of things, that things should work as they are supposed to, such failures are problematic.  The Japanese shouldn't be able to sneak a fleet within striking distance of Hawaii undetected.  A loser like Lee Oswald shouldn't be able to kill JFK with a cheap mail-order rifle.  An avowed enemy of America like Osama bin Laden shouldn't be able to use the US air travel system to stage devastating attacks.  But these events happened.  Conspiracy theory bridges the gap.  Roosevelt knew, but wanted the US in the war.  JFK was killed by Castro, or the Mob, or Lyndon Johnson.  The World Trade Center was blown up, not destroyed by an airplane.  Because little things and little men shouldn't be able to cause big events.  Big events need big causes.  This proportionality is ingrained.  It comes from early life experience and is an essential understanding of how the world works.  So when the world doesn't work the way its supposed to, we fill in the blanks necessary to make it appear as if it does.  But ascribing events to the evil eye, or curses, or black cats is declasse.  The need remains, but the traditional methods are unavailable.  We make up new ones.

Nobody is immune to magical thinking.  We routinely blame cancer on luck or lifestyle.  In fact, virtually every human over the age of 70 either has or will get cancer.  Its almost universal.  No matter how enlightened we imagine ourselves, people in 200 years will wonder at our astounding ignorance.  Its no wonder then, that conspiracy theories proliferate.  They are part of human nature.  They will be around as long as we are.

The Pashtun Wild West

       click image for larger map
The last-minute war of George Bush's regime looks to be against Pakistan rather than Iran.  The US Navy has dispersed the large concentration built up last month in the Persian Gulf area.  They don't seem to be planning an attack on Iran anytime soon.  Instead, Bush's determination to deal with Osama bin Laden before he leaves office and the deteriorating military situation in Afghanistan has led to increased US activity in the Pakistani border area.

The map above shows the main Pashtun border territories in Pakistan.  The orange overlay shows the ethnic Pashtun distribution in the region.  The Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan are not really under Pakistani control.  The Pashtun recognize neither the border nor the government in Islamabad.  They don't recognize the government in Kabul either unless they control it, and not much then.  The swath of mountains running north-east from Quetta to the top of the map is almost entirely under their control.  Only the corridor running from Peshawar through the fabled Khyber Pass to Jalalabad and Kabul is under the firm control of the Pakistani and Afghan governments.  Major NATO deployments in the area are shown by flags.  The Taliban stronghold is Waziristan in the southern section of the Tribal Areas.  Bin Laden has probably been hiding here since the battle of Tora Bora.  There are estimated to be about 60 million Pashtun.  They constitute the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the second largest in Pakistan.  The total population of Afghanistan is probably 32 million (no census in a long time) and of Pakistan 164 million.

The Taliban are a Pashtun faction.  They were created and supported by the Pakistanis during the Soviet occupation.  They continue to enjoy support and funding from elements of the Pakistani government Intelligence and Military.  NATO is thus fighting a proxy war with Pakistan.  Other elements of the Pakistani government are supportive of NATO's operations and want to exert control over the tribal areas.  All the "official" parts of the Pakistani government fall into the latter camp. While Musharraf was in charge, the government was willing to overlook US cross-border actions. Provided there was plausible deniability of Pakistani cooperation in these actions.

Pakistani Army enthusiasm for operations in the tribal areas has always been weak.  A major offensive in 2003 resulted in unacceptable Army casualties.  Musharraf was forced into a cease-fire with tribal leaders and the Pakistani military has alternated operations and cease-fires since.  Musharraf never regained the credibility lost both internally and internationally.

The new government is less tolerant of US cross-border actions.  After a major US special forces operation and at least 4 airstrikes in Waziristan this month, domestic political pressure begun to build.  In reaction, Pakistan has threatened to fire on any NATO soldiers found on the Pakistani side of the border. Realistically, there is nothing the Pakistanis can do to stop NATO encursions, just like there's nothing they can do to prevent Taliban operations on either side of the border.  Pakistani Army presence is mostly limited to border posts.  The tribes are willing, apparently, to tolerate the Pakistani Army patrolling the Afghan border as long as they are patrolling against NATO and ignore the Pashtun.

Fear Is The Best Policy

 

      click on image for legible size. Photo by gruntzooki

This photo was posted on Flickr a few days ago.  I have no reason to believe its not genuine.  Because you can't make this shit up.  Click for larger to read the actual copy.  Better be specific next time someone asks you about your travel plans.  And delete that Al Jazeera bookmark. There is another poster targeting suspicious river traffic.  But that is so outlandish I'm not 100% sure its real. 

What amazes me about all this is that the British went through the whole thing before with the IRA.  There was none of this insanity at that time.  Arguably, the IRA threat was far more material than any posed by jihadis, and the Irish blended in so well you couldn't spot them.  Maybe that's the difference, that the Irish weren't that different.  Muslims, on the other hand can often be spotted because of their skin color, dress, accent, etc.