Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei thus has made sure this time that there will be no trouble before and after the election on June 14.

22 May 2013 @ 7:40 am.

Last update May 22, 2013.

When Gary Sick speculates that Hashemi and/or Mashaei believe that “Khamenei (1) acquiesced in their candidacy; or (2) could not prevent it; or (3) was essentially irrelevant,” he just does not take into account wisdom of an elder statesman. If, as the Guardian Council, which vets the candidacies, announced yesterday may approve up to 40 presidential hopefuls, there is any opportunity to remove unwanted figures on Khamenei’s personal request.

That Mashaie would eventually be allowed to run is highly unlikely. He doesn’t belong to the Islamic Republic’s establishment. None of his nationalistic (rather than Islamistic) ideas including his infamous statement in public in 2008 that the American and Israeli peoples are friends of Iran are supported by either the clerics nor the Revolutionary Guards. They have openly been declared as “deviant”. His closeness to Ahmadinejad is downright a disadvantage.

I do not expect Rafsanjani to run either. Four years ago, another former president, Mohammad Khatami, withdrew briefly  after he had announced his candidacy.  I had written then that “Khatami might even have perceived signals that he certainly won’t receive the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s support” which might be equivalent with blatant threats. Multi-billionaire (dollars, not toman) Rafsanjani, who had given a remarkable and certainly not forgotten Friday sermon on 17 July 2009 putting him close to the so-called Green Movement, as well as his family have to lose a lot, probably too much. Symbol of the corrupt system, he is not popular at all among the poor and even Iran’s struggling middle class in the large cities’ urban slums and the countryside who still represent Iran’s majority. He might be removed from the list by the Guardian Council  just because of his age of 78 years.

Overall, it won’t matter. There won’t be a revolt on June 14 or afterwards. Khamenei’s man will win as expected, whether it will be Saeed Jalili (civilized, smart, presentable) or Tehran’s major Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, or somebody else.

20 May 2013 @ 5:45 pm.

Last modified May 22, 2013.

According to Al Jazeera’s critically acclaimed documentation of 2008, the later Napoleon then had encouraged the “Jews of the world to reclaim their land in league with France.”

“This story [the Nakba] starts in 1799, outside the walls of Acre in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, when an army under Napoleon Bonaparte besieged the city. It was all part of a campaign to defeat the Ottomans and establish a French presence in the region.

In search of allies, Napoleon issued a letter offering Palestine as a homeland to the Jews under French protection. He called on the Jews to ‘rise up’ against what he called their oppressors.

Napoleon’s appeal was widely publicised. But he was ultimately defeated. In Acre today, the only memory of him is a statue atop a hill overlooking the city.

Yet Napoleon’s project for a Jewish homeland in the region under a colonial protectorate did not die, 40  years later, the plan was revived but by the British.”

Whether this was Bonaparte’s real intention, is highly questionable, though. It seems to be one of the numerous myths about the origins of Zionism.

18 May 2013 @ 10:55 am

Last modified May 18, 2013.

Great opportunity. Since I am in Germany, unintentionally and somewhat enervated, I might have a chance to visit once more one of the major Jazz festivals in the world. I was a regular concertgoer there in the late 1970s and most of the 1980s, but had somehow lost interest in New Jazz later.

Just before I moved to the Middle East in 2001 (a couple of weeks before September 11, which then changed the world), The Residents (something which I had in fact predicted in 1982), Fred Frith, and David Thomas performed on one evening, which was dedicated to “Art Rock” (not Jazz at all; pretty unforgettable) in one of the largest circus tents of the world in the rather unlikely city of Moers on the Lower Rhine, except for Pentecost just backwater.

Fred Frith who is among the most frequent artists at Moers will come again this year, as well as John Zorn who got the whole first evening together with his gang. See the full program here.

16 May 2013 @ 2:14 pm.

Last update May 16, 2013.

As Noam Chomsky has described earlier this year President Obama’s drone war on terror in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Yemen and several other countries as just a “global assassination campaign”, designers at Pitch Interactive have now described every known attack by the US since 2004 in a stunning, well shocking, interactive graph and movie using data from the the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Accordingly, a mere 1.5% of high profile targets were killed while 175 casualties were children and 535 civilians.

You may see the video here.

27 March 2013 @ 6:45 pm.

Last modified March 27, 2013.

Further information here.

16 March 2013 @ 9:25.

Last modified March 16, 2013.

Update March 12 below.

While the original 35-page statement by Bradley Manning last week at the pretrial hearing at Fort Meade, Md, has not yet been released, one can read through a rough transcript of it on the Bradley Manning Support Network. It is a testimony of an exemplary young American soldier, highly competent in his work as intelligence analyst, committed to his tasks, reliable and responsible.  Well, and no longer loyal when having experienced war crimes.

“After sending this [the compressed data files of CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigActs which became the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs when WikiLeaks published them], I left the SD card in a camera case at my aunt’s house in the event I needed it again in the future. I returned from mid-tour leave on 11 February 2010. Although the information had not yet been published by the WLO (WikiLeaks Organization), I felt this sense of relief by them having it. I felt I had accomplished something that allowed me to have a clear conscience based upon what I had seen and what I had read about and knew were happening in both Iraq and Afghanistan everyday.” (Emphasis added.)

True, after having sent the Iran and Afghanistan War Logs in February 2010 from his aunt’s home in Maryland, he became a repeater when later sending to WikiLeaks the 10 Reykjavik 13 cable, and outright “war porn” as what has become known as the Collateral Murder video of the 12 July 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad. It’s amazing to read Manning’s words here.

“The aerial weapons team crew members sound like they lack sympathy for the [killed in the attack] children or the parents. Later, in a particularly disturbing manner, the aerial weapons team crew vocalizes enjoyment at the sight of one of the ground vehicles driving over one of the bodies.

As I continued my research [on the Apache helicopter attack], I found an article discussing a book, The Good Soldiers, written by Washington Post writer David Finkel.

In Mr. Finkel['s] book, he writes about the aerial weapons team attack. As I read an online excerpt in Google Books, I followed Mr. Finkel’s account of the event belonging to the video. I quickly realize[d] that Mr. Finkel was quoting, I feel verbatim, the audio communications of the aerial weapons team crew.

It is clear to me Mr. Finkel obtained access and a copy of the video during his tenure as an embedded journalist. I was aghast at Mr. Finkel’s portrayal of the incident. Reading his account, one would believe the engagement was somehow justified as payback for an earlier attack that lead to the death of a soldier. Mr. Finkel ends his account of the engagement by discussing how a soldier finds an individual still alive from the attack. He writes the soldier finds him and sees him gesture with his two forefingers together—a common method in the Middle East to communicate that they are friendly. However, instead of assisting him, the soldier makes an obscene gesture with his middle finger.

The individual apparently dies shortly thereafter.

“I saved a copy of the video on my workstation. I searched for and found the rules of engagement, the rules of engagement annexes, and a flow chart from the 2007 time period, as well as an unclassified Rules of Engagement smart card from 2006. On 15 February 2010 I burned these documents onto a CD-RW at the same time I burned the 10 Reykjavik 13 cable onto a CD-RW. At the time, I placed the video and rules for engagement information onto my personal laptop in my CHU [Containerized Housing Unit]. I planned to keep this information there until I re-deployed in Summer 2010. I planned on providing this to the Reuters office in London to assist them in preventing events such as this in the future.

“After the release, I was concern[ed] about the impact of the video and how it would be[..] received by the general public. I hoped that the public would be as alarmed as me about the conduct of the aerial weapons team crew members. I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare. After the release I was encouraged by the response in the media and general public who observed the aerial weapons team video. As I hoped, others were just as troubled—if not more troubled—tha[n] me by what they saw.

At this time, I began seeing reports claiming that the Department of Defense an CENTCOM could not confirm the authenticity of the video. Additionally, one of my supervisors, Captain Casey Fulton, stated her belief that the video was not authentic. In [my] response, I decided to ensure that the authenticity of the video would not be questioned in the future. On 25 February 2010, I emailed Captain Fulton a link to the video that was on our T-drive, and a copy of the video published by WLO that was collected by the open source center so she could compare them herself.“

Manning describes that several attempts to inform superiors about what he had to analyze on a daily basis were unavailing. He sent, to WikiLeaks, the Guantanamo files; then, between 28 March and 3 May 2010, he downloaded the diplomatic cables. He also saved on his computer the video of the Granai air strike of May 2009 in Afghanistan when probably more than 100 civilians, mainly women and children, had “accidentally” been killed.

Shortly after that, Manning had been betrayed by a former hacker with whom he had chatted by email and was then arrested by the FBI. During his 28 February 2013 pretrial hearing, he pleaded guilty to 10 of 22 lesser charges but anyway has to expect to be held in prison between 20 years or lifelong.

9 March 2013 @ 2:54 pm.

Last modified March 9, 2013.

Update March 12. The audio recording of Bradley Manning when reading his manuscript on February 28 in his pretrial hearing in Fort Meade has been leaked by Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF). You can hear it after having clicked here. See more information by Glenn Greenwald here. He concludes,

“It [the leak by FPF] is a cause for celebration that the US government’s efforts to silence his voice, literally, have now been thwarted. Now, people can and should hear directly from Manning himself and make their own assessment. Whoever made this illicit recording (as well as the FPF in publishing it) acted in the best spirit of Manning himself: defying corrupt, unjust and self-protecting government secrecy rules in order to inform the world about vital matters.”

Manning denied that he was compromising national security although he conceded that many of the diplomatic cables would be embarrassing. He pleaded guilty to ten of 22 charges, among them “to improperly storing classified information; having unauthorized possession of such information; willfully communicating it to an unauthorized person.” He pleaded not-guilty to 12 more charges , including “aiding the enemy and disseminating any information that he believed could harm U.S. national security.”

How it was possible that a 22-yr-old intelligence analyst and, well, outcast at “Forward Operating Base Hammer” in Iraq could access, investigate, spirit away and then leak at least half a million military and diplomatic documents (which, according to Manning, were available to “thousands” of people throughout the U.S. government) and videos has not been publicly assessed so far. The case of Bradley Manning, according to many one of the heroes of our time, is made up solely to make an example of what will happen if that happens again. His own motives for the leak are utterly noble. He “believed, and still believe… [the leaked documents] are some of the most significant documents of our time.” What he wants to reveal is, in his words, “war porn” like the Apache helicopter video.  As so many, he does not feel comfortable with the situation of Guantanamo where “we found ourselves holding an increasing number of individuals indefinitely.”

If he had been the contact person at WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, whose name he apparently mispronounced throughout the hearing, had apparently not revealed his identity. Manning said, that no one at WikiLeaks had ever encouraged him to leak.

Well, whether that will help Assange or whether Manning’s  confession of the lesser charges will ultimately spare him up to 20 years in prison is uncertain after all.

1 March 2013 @ 11:30 am.

Last modified March 1, 2013.

“The Post learned Tuesday night that another news organization was planning to reveal the location of the base, effectively ending an informal arrangement among several news organizations that had been aware of the location for more than a year (emphasis added),”

which is the real scandal. Wired had become quite infamous in the Bradley Manning case when one of its reporters computer hackers who had been contacted by email by Manning in May 2010 had betrayed him to the FBI a couple of days later who had then been arrested immediately. So, the two ex-officers who talked to Shachtman should be on alert. Whistle-blowing is heavily prosecuted under Obama’s administration. Shachtman writes,

“But a pair of former American intelligence officers tell Danger Room that they are reasonably sure that this is the base revealed by the media earlier this week.

‘I believe it’s the facility that the U.S. uses to fly drones into Yemen,’ one officer says. ‘It’s out in eastern Saudi Arabia, near Yemen and where the bad guys are supposed to hang out. It has those clamshell hangars, which we’ve seen before associated with U.S. drones.’

The former officer was also impressed by the base’s remote location. ‘It’s way, way out in the Rub al Khali, otherwise known as Hell, and must have been built, at least initially, with stuff flown into Sharorah and then trucked more than 400 kilometers up the existing highway and newly-built road,’ the ex-officer adds in an e-mail. ‘It’s a really major logistics feat. The way it fits inconspicuously into the terrain is also admirable.’”

Well, not really. The region seems to be replete with air bases, as cryptome.org knows. Besides Um Al Melh (the one revealed by Shachtman), another one just 8 km south to the border to Yemen, apparently Oyba Al Badie according to Cryptome, can easily be identified in Google Earth.

As Cryptome writes,

“Comparison of several Saudi Arabia and Yemen border guard airports with the base identified by Wired as a possible CIA drone base shows that the Wired base is markedly more complex with dual runways — the main one longer — with hangars and extensive support structures lacking in the existing simpler bases.

This suggests that the Saudis may have named the Wired base as a border guard base to camouflage Saudi participation in the drone program with drone launch capabilities inserted into border guard functions.

However, with the US-assisted global spread of drone use, the Saudis may well have added drone capabilities to its border defense in response to the rise in Al Qaeda threats from Yemen.”

The site displays satellite images of numerous air bases in the (Saudi) Arabian desert (most having been taken around 2007, long before the reported (by Wired) late 2010/early 2011 start of construction of the CIA drone base). But drone launch platforms do not need airports.

“Drone launch platforms are likely to increase at airports, air strips, highways, roads, fields, dry lake beds, prairies, flat mountain tops, ice fields, from whereever aircraft have traditionally gone aloft. As drones decrease and increase in size it should be expected that launch sites will proliferate in benign dual-use locations to cloak their operation.”

12 February 2013 @ 8:33 am.

Last modified February 12, 2013.

“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

In the White Paper the DoJ concludes that  “a U.S. operation using lethal force in a foreign country against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qa’ida or an associated force would be lawful” where the following three conditions are met:

“(1) an informed, high level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States; (2) capture is infeasible, and the United States continues to monitor whether capture becomes feasible; and (3) the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.”

Of course, if one reads the Fifth Amendment carefully it presupposes “in time of War or public danger” (which was not the case in the Yemen assassination but that may be disputed).

While cowardly having not touched America’s Constitution’s Second Amendment yet, after the Newtown school shooting in December,

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”

but seriously impeding Freedom of Press when it comes to unwelcome leaks so far granted by the First Amendment,

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,”

law professor President Obama just continues bending America’s Constitution. It may come to one’s mind that an amendment of the above first condition, “an informed, high level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against irreversibly damaging the international reputation the United States,” could apply. No irresponsible drone attacks are needed in that case, just impeachment.

6 February 2013 @ 6: 54 am.

Last modified February 6, 2013.