The Agonist - thoughtful, global, timely

Told You So

Wed, 16 May 2012 13:59:36 -0400

Not sure exactly when I said it, but I did predict that Greece would exit the Euro. I also said that it should leave the Euro sooner, rather than later and do so on its own terms. Now elite opinion has decided it's okay for Greece to exit. Mostly because the neoliberals have already raped the economy there. You heard it here first.

Why Do Afghan Soldiers Turn Their Guns On Americans?

Wed, 16 May 2012 13:58:16 -0400

Back in summer 2010 I suggested that there was a worrying emerging pattern of "green on blue" attacks in Afghanistan - that far from each being an "isolated incident" from which "it's very difficult to draw a generalisation", a comparison of the frequency of such attacks with those in Iraq might suggest it was going to be a whole lot harder to stand up the Afghan security forces than expected. That idea has taken on more credence within the past two years as the number of "green on blue" attacks has snowballed from a handful to dozens.

Today, the New York Times has a detailed report on just one of those attacks, on March 1 this year, in which two Americans and their two Afghan attackers died - and which destroyed an armored vehicle as well as half the base before a helicopter gunship ended the fighting. A third conspirator was caught and the NYT's Matthew Rosenberg writes:

The coalition and Afghan Army would now have a rare opportunity to interrogate an Afghan soldier who had turned on coalition forces; most are quickly killed in ensuing firefights. Why had three men attacked American soldiers they barely knew? Was it a personal grudge against Americans? Or had they turned to the Taliban?

The detainee has since presumably been asked those questions. But in a reflection of the official reticence to discuss green-on-blue attacks, his answers remain shrouded in secrecy. It is not even clear whose custody he is in.

In 2010, Dr Antonio Maria Costa, former head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, alleged that the Taliban had thoroughly infiltrated Afghan security forces, setting up sleeper cells and planning further attacks on Nato-led troops. He appears to have been correct, but there are still unanswered questions. The biggest of all is why, after ten years and thousands dead, are the Taliban stronger than ever according to the leaders of congressional intelligence committees?

An answer to that, and many other questions, may lie in the first ever recorded "green on blue" attack of the last decade's wars - in Mosul, Iraq in 2008.

On Dec. 26, an Iraqi soldier opened fire on U.S. soldiers accompanying him during a joint military patrol in the northern Iraqi city Mosul. He killed the U.S. captain and another sergeant, and wounded three others, including an Iraqi interpreter.

Conflicting versions of the killing have arisen. Col. Hazim al-Juboory, uncle of the attacker Kaissar Saady al-Juboory, told IPS that his nephew at first watched the U.S. soldiers beat up an Iraqi woman. When he asked them to stop, they refused, so he opened fire.

"Kaissar is a professional soldier who revolted against the Americans when they dragged a woman by her hair in a brutal way," Col. Juboory said. "He is a tribal man, and an Arab with honour who would not accept such behaviour. He killed his captain and sergeant knowing that he would be executed."

Others gave IPS a similar account. "I was there when the American captain and his soldiers raided a neighbourhood and started shouting at women to tell them where some men they wanted were," a resident of Mosul, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS on phone. "The women told them they did not know, and their men did not do anything wrong, and started crying in fear."

The witness said the U.S. captain began to shout at his soldiers and the women, and his men then started to grab the women and pull them by their hair.

"The soldier we knew later to be Kaissar shouted at the Americans, 'No, No,' but the captain shouted back at the Iraqi soldier," the witness told IPS. "Then the Iraqi soldier shouted, 'Let go of the women you sons of bitches,' and started shooting at them." The soldier, he said, then ran off.

There have only been five "green on blue" attacks in Iraq since 2003 and all happened in the Mosul area. Veteran Finnish journalist Jari Lindholm pointed out the simularities between that city and Afghanistan:

The lesson? There are simply too many actors involved in the multilayered conflict in Mosul for classic COIN to work. First of all, the fault lines are not sectarian but ethnic. You can’t protect the population by walling off neighbourhoods, because you wouldn’t know whom to wall in and whom to keep out. Second, you can’t cut off terrorist infiltration because you don’t have enough troops, and a single dirt berm doesn’t do it. Third, you can’t pay off the hardcore militants, because they don’t want your money; and you can’t pay off the gangsters because they don’t need your money. And fourth, you can’t stop the IEDs, because there’s always a jobless IDP willing to dump a pressure plate on a road for ten bucks.

A porous international border, lucrative smuggling routes, a restless refugee population, transnational jihadis mingling with local nationalists, and an explosive ethnic mix — if this rings a bell, it’s because the war in Mosul has more in common with the morass we face in Afghanistan than it has with Baghdad.

And, just like in Mosul's un-friendly fire tragedies, there's no shortage of provocation for Afghan soldiers and police to join the Taliban, to form sleeper cells or simply to decide they've had enough of seeing their people abused. They've seen children killed in airstrike after airstrike, pregnant woman who were shot and then had the bullets dug out of their bodies, kill teams and "lone renegades" have murdered even whole families, corpses have been urinated upon - and that's just the tip of an iceberg of daily, wanton and unheeding lesser abuses.

Whether members of Taliban sleeper cells or acting alone, it seems clear that "green on blue" attackers are part of the horrid price the West has to pay for overstaying its lukewarm welcome in Afghanistan.

Ignoring The Tornado In The Room

Wed, 16 May 2012 13:22:57 -0400

Chuck Hagel pens an oped on "The Challenge Of Change" for the US:

The great challenges facing the world today are the responsibility of all peoples of the world. They include cyber warfare, terrorism, preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regional conflicts, prosperity and stability, and global poverty, disease and environmental degradation."

I'm assuming that "environmental degradation" doesn't just mean pollution but is code for global warming/climate change in case Republicans reading get upset by the actual words*.

It's one thing to ignore an elephant, it's entirely another to avoid a tornado.

* At least I hope so, because the alternative - that the Chair of the Atlantic Council and co-Chair of Obama's Intelligence Advisory Board has written such a piece without mentioning climate change at all - is just too horrible a possibility to contemplate.

C-R-A-Z-Y Lady Is Crazy. No. Really.

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:08:34 -0400

We all had a pretty good laugh at the woman who got up in front of the Lincoln, Nebraska city council and railed on about homosexuality in response to the proposed "Fairness Ordinance" extending anti-bias protections to the LGBT community.

Select quotes:
1. "A huge percent of gay men in school grounds molest boys, partly because they don't have AIDS yet."

2. "Whitney Houston was found without clothes in a bathtub. Every corpse found without clothes has a partner who did away with them."

3. "P-E-N-I-S goes into the anus to rupture intestines. The more a man does this, the more likely he'll be a fatality or a homicider."

You get the drift. We all had a good laugh. We all might want to rethink that laugh:

[Jane] Svoboda lives at an assisted-living facility in Lincoln and is listed as a protected person, according to court documents. Her brother, Patrick Svoboda of Ogallala, is her conservator because she is incompetent, the documents say.

He was unaware of the video's popularity, but wasn't surprised -- he knew it would be a matter of time before she got in trouble somewhere.

He said he's disappointed the video garnered such attention and jokes without the whole story.

"To me, it shows how little society really cares about people with mental health issues," Patrick Svoboda said. "She does have a very tender heart ... but anything she says is certifiably schizophrenic ... she's not some crazy conservative."

Apparently, she speaks in front of the council regularly at their open mic sessions, which allow anyone of the general public to speak for up to five minutes on any topic. And believe it or not, this might not be the most outlandish speech she's ever given. She's talked about "Chinese subliminals," radio signals sent through our cell phones, brought a large stick figure and said it was the ghost of her mom and regularly hands out fliers on the U Nebraska campus.

I empathize with her brother and his comments, to be sure, and see his point. I have a mentally challenged brother and my mom was, well, possibly less than stable. And I've spent tens of thousands of dollars in therapy to come to grips with my own....shall we say, unique?...mental and emotional challenges. I don't think I'm normal in the way most people would define that term, but then I don't think there is a normal anymore.

But here's the thing: in her speech, she sounds perfect rational and reasonable for a right-wing conservative. She may not honestly believe what she's saying...indeed, it's possible she picked up these thoughts along the way and is merely echoing what she's learned and not what she believes, as a parrot would...but it's such a convincing performance that we all took her as being not unusual for that sector of society.

That says a lot more about that sector than it does about this woman. Still, we probably all should take a look in the mirror tonight.

John Boehner Puts On The Full Crazy Suit

Wed, 16 May 2012 09:54:49 -0400

Remember last summer's suspenseful adventures of the New Republican Tea Party? When they threatened to do something that even Greece hasn't quite done yet - default on the country's debt? When American bonds were downgraded?

Well, they love the country so much that they want to do it again. John Boehner said so yesterday.

It seems to me that deliberately sabotaging the country's financial standing verges on (is?) treason. It's like when a couple divorces and one of them manages to pull all the money from their joint bank accounts.

Except we're not so lucky to have the Republicans getting out of our lives with their addictions to racism and failed economics.

It looks like Ezra Klein will be following this. That's good, because it makes me sick.

Is Google Doomed?

Wed, 16 May 2012 09:39:53 -0400

One might begin to see the seeds of its decline here:

iMore reports that Google may make four times the ad revenue off of their use in iOS than they do from their own Android platform. Apple wants to change that. Apple has already begun intermediating search queries though Siri, effectively cutting Google out of the valuable identity information associated with those searches. Next up is that other large data components on iOS, maps.

Google's revenue stream is based on advertising coupled with its unique monopoly on data-farming. In layman's terms, Google's software can extract information from you and sell that information to advertisers. Worse, it can do this on a micromanaged level: every click-thru you make from a Google page is one more data point, and eventually, the blizzard of data you provide presents a frighteningly accurate profile of who you are.

Most people come across a Google page at least once a day (I'd bet it's a lot more often than that) whether it's the search engine or a Gmail account or Google+. The only website that could possibly rival it for data-farming would be Facebook, but Facebook has all those stupid games and apps that really don't tell that much of a story (apart from the fact there are a frighteningly large number of would-be farmers out there.)

Most people don't opt out of this data dump by signing out of their Gmail or other Google accounts. It's plain laziness coupled with a "who cares?" attitude. Not unreasonably, I guess I should add. After all, for the most part, it's pretty benign tracking and the convenience of being presented with targeted advertisements is in some respects a plus: imagine if you turned on your television and instead of seeing reverse mortgage or penis pill commercials, you saw commercials about things you care about, like raising your kids or your favorite hobby?

So Google's livelihood is wholly dependent on being able to quickly amass data and quickly provide that data to its advertisers. The question becomes, then, what happens when its data becomes fuzzy or inaccurate?

The advertising becomes less effective. Click-thru wane. Views per sale spikes precipitously as the inverse, sales per views plummets. The personalization and tailoring of advertisements becomes more generic and less targeted.

In other words, if you thought Google's mad scramble to get into mobile telephones was silly and ridiculous, guess again. They saw the writing on the wall: computing had to become less and less about the computer and more and more about on-the-go data access-- mobile computing.

I suppose the writing on the wall for Google parallels that of MicroSoft's: brand extension into areas in which it had no expertise (the X-box, pen-tablet software, BOB) because it saw the demise of its core business as a real threat. Think about the last time anyone got excited about the next Windows software. System 7? Oh wait, that was Apple. Windows 95? Ever since, MicroSoft has wasted billions of dollars on software development (Steve Ballmer estimates that the development of Vista cost 200 man-years more than it should have).

The parallels are pretty remarkable, and seem to fit how American businesses operate over the past century: a spectacular rise to market dominance followed by a plateau where innovation is hard to come by and market forces begin to intrude on the business itself, and then a meteoric plummet to at least mediocrity if not outright obsolescence.

There's a lesson there for any business in this nation: you don't want to become so big that you can't be nimble.

Officials: Nearly $2 million in guns, combat gear sold to gangs

Wed, 16 May 2012 03:36:05 -0400

Lindell Kay & Mike Mchugh | Camp Lejeune, NC | May 15

The (Jacksonville) Daily News - A wide-reaching investigation by military and civilian authorities has uncovered a criminal conspiracy within the Armed Forces to steal and sell nearly $2 million in guns and combat gear to gangs in the U.S. and foreign countries including China, military officials have confirmed.

The probe began more than a year and a half ago when agents with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service began to conduct undercover operations to disrupt and reduce the theft, transfer, sale and possession of stolen U.S. Government property. With the aid of Marine and Naval authorities, NCIS has recovered $1.8 million in stolen guns and combat gear to include assault rifles, night-vision goggles, flashlights and other items, military officials said.

Those involved are accused of stealing, over-ordering or otherwise obtaining equipment and selling guns locally and other gear over the Internet to people in foreign countries including China and Russia, officials said.

Those involved in the criminal enterprise did so for a multitude of reasons including but not exclusive to human greed and the ease by which the material could be pilfered, according to a government official familiar with the operation.

“We’re talking about sophisticated, hi-tech flashlights that cost the government up to $800 per unit. The temptation and ease with which to steal and sell them, for some, is irresistible,” the official said.

[...]

The ever-widening probe now includes the FBI; Homeland Security; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Defense Logistics Agency; Defense Criminal Investigative Service, N.C. State Bureau of Investigations, and several local agencies including the Onslow County Sheriff’s Office and the Jacksonville Police Department.

"Anonymous" activist: We're fighting for the 99%

Tue, 15 May 2012 19:03:00 -0400

Via Ian Welsh, a must-read interview with Christopher Doyon, a.k.a. Commander X. If the Anonymous hacker group says it doesn't have real leaders, then Doyon is one of the major leader's they haven't got. "There’s a really good argument at this point that we might well be the most powerful organization on Earth" he says of Anonymous' 50,000 strong collective, who Ian calls "the only enforcer class the left has". Doyon refuses to accept the term "terrorist" applies.

Basically I decline the semantic argument. If you want to call me a terrorist, I have no problem with that. But I would ask you, “Who is it that’s terrified?” If it’s the bad guys who are terrified, I’m really super OK with that. If it’s the average person, the people out in the world we are trying to help who are scared of us, I’d ask them to educate themselves, to do some research on what it is we do and lose that fear. We’re fighting for the people, we are fighting, as Occupy likes to say, for the 99%. It’s the 1% people who are wrecking our planet who should be quite terrified. If to them we are terrorists, then they probably got that right.

“Information terrorist” – what a funny concept. That you could terrorize someone with information. But who’s terrorized? Is it the common people reading the newspaper and learning what their government is doing in their name? They’re not terrorized – they’re perfectly satisfied with that situation. It’s the people trying to hide these secrets, who are trying to hide these crimes. The funny thing is every email database that I’ve ever been a part of stealing, from Pres. Assad to Stratfor security, every email database, every single one has had crimes in it. Not one time that I’ve broken into a corporation or a government, and found their emails and thought, “Oh my God, these people are perfectly innocent people, I made a mistake.”

And if what Doyen says about the group's reach is true, "most powerful group on earth" may be justified:

Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems. The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defence who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don’t run anything anymore. It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the U.S. State Department in half. The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the U.S. Department of Defence in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody.

Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they’re not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they’re coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they’re giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over. … The world needs to be concerned.

On the question of whether that's true or not, ironically, all we are likely to hear from officials are rote denials and "that's classified".

No wonder the suicide rate among vets is so high

Tue, 15 May 2012 18:30:20 -0400

This is just beyond tears.

I've been reading the rare posts on this blog for a while - and they should all be read - but I seldom comment simply because words are insufficient.

I'm sure there are many more women and probably gays in similar circumstances.

All I can do is agitate for better VA funding and programs and speak up for tighter controls in the military.

And weep.

Pro-Life Means Doing Nothing While a Woman Bleeds to Death

Tue, 15 May 2012 16:53:45 -0400

Under Kansas law, it is perfectly legal for a pharmacist, a doctor, a nurse, a hospital, or just about anyone, to allow a woman to bleed to death if you think the woman's bleeding is caused by an attempted abortion:

With the signing of a new expanded conscience clause bill in Kansas, Republican Governor Sam Brownback has now legally blessed a virtually open-ended number of situations in which "religious" workers can refuse to assist women under the guise that they believe they "may be" terminating a pregnancy.

Advocates of the law argue that it "updates existing law." But by changing the law to include refusal to administer any drug that they believe may terminate a pregnancy, it opens the door to refusal of birth control and emergency contraception -- both of which many anti-choice medical workers and pharmacists erroneously charge end very early pregnancies rather than preventing conception. The law could also allow refusal of even more medically-necessary drugs simply because they may relate to abortions.

Idaho already had a case of a pharmacist who refused to fill a [prescription] for a woman who needed drugs to stop bleeding, believing that the woman may have had an abortion which caused her blood loss, and the pharmacist received no punishment for the action. How long will it take for that to become the rule, rather than the exception, as the Kansas law goes into effect?

"Assisting in terminating a pregnancy" has already become an overly expansive phrase that many anti-choice activists are applying to even more unrelated situations -- from the nurses who refuse to do intake of women in the hospital for a termination to the bus driver who won't drive a route to Planned Parenthood.

F-15s Over Yemen

Tue, 15 May 2012 13:29:35 -0400

Go read David Axe on how Italian aviation blogger David Cenciotti joined the dots to throw some new light on America's shadow wars along Africa's Indian Ocean coastline. F-15s based in Djibouti carrying out airstrikes in Yemen, spyplanes at the same airbase, Reaper drones with bases in the Seychelles Yemen and Ethiopia. Axe himself adds the possibility of a floating headquarters for special forces ops sitting somewhere of the coast.

America is waging more wars, with a bigger involvement, than it wants to admit.

Insiders Say MeK To Be Delisted As Terror Group

Tue, 15 May 2012 12:53:38 -0400

After the EU delisted the MeK on the back of a well-funded lobbying campaign by the MeK and it's neocon allies, there was always going to be huge political pressure for the U.S. to follow suit. The MeK has poured large sums, millions of dollars, into paying for lobbyists and former government officials to speak up on its behalf. Now it seems their efforts are to pay off. The WSJ is reporting insiders who say the delisting is likely to happen.

Glenn Greenwald explains why this is not just a bad idea but encapsulates everything that's wrong with Washington. It will cheapen the terrorist listing into simply a means to punish those the U.S. sees as its enemies, show that the U.S. is indeed an agressor against Iran, prove that national security decisions are available to the highest bidder and make a mockery of the rule of law by showing that the law is "not even a purported constraint on the conduct of Washington political elites".

As Andrew Exum put it this morning: “I guess Hizballah and LeT just need to buy off more former administration officials.”

Sadly I expected this, but it makes it no less disgusting that yet again the Obama administration doesn't even bother to make a passing nod to legality or ethics.

Rebekah Brooks charged with perverting the course of justice

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:28:53 -0400

Sandra Laville | May 15

The Guardian - Former News International chief executive, her husband and four others charged in phone-hacking inquiry

Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, has been charged over allegations that she tried to conceal evidence from detectives investigating phone hacking and alleged bribes to public officials.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced that Brooks, one of the most high-profile figures in the newspaper industry, would be charged with three counts of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in July last year at the height of the police investigation. Scotland Yard later confirmed she had been charged along with her husband, Charlie Brooks, and four others.

Brooks is accused of conspiring with others, including her husband, a racehorse trainer and friend of the prime minister, and her personal assistant, to conceal material from detectives.

Brooks and her husband were informed of the charging decision – the first since the start of the Operation Weeting phone-hacking investigation last January – when they answered their bail at a police station in London on Tuesday morning.

Fadbook

Tue, 15 May 2012 08:44:51 -0400

The results of this poll sort of reflect my own feelings and experiences with Facebook:

According to a new AP-CNBC poll, 57 percent of Facebook users say they never click ads or other sponsored content when they use the site, with another 26 percent saying they hardly ever engage in such activity.

While the company makes money, in part, simply by displaying sponsored content, user clicks are a critical part of an advertiser’s calculus when gauging how effective those ads are and how much they’re willing to pay for them. In the first quarter, Facebook generated 82 percent of its $1.06 billion in revenue from advertising sales. In the company’s online IPO pitch to retail investors, CFO David Ebersman says the company is working to make ads “more relevant, more social, and more engaging” as it looks to grow.

And while Facebook has been able to decrease its reliance on sponsored content (down from 98 percent of sales in 2009), the hopes of expanding the company’s e-commerce footprint also faces public resistance, the poll shows. A majority of participants (54 percent) said they wouldn’t feel safe using the platform for financial transactions like purchasing goods or services. Only 8 percent said they would feel extremely or very safe in doing so.

This does not bode well for the long-term future of the company as a public entity. For my part, I'll occasionally click ads to investigate a product more, but I can't remember the last time I've actually bought something off that first click-through.

And "liking pages" allows me to enter contests and keep informed on a particular entity or activity, but usually I find those items in my newsfeed as opposed to clicking over.

There may, in fact, be too much stuff in my newsfeed for me to keep tabs on everything I want to. I don't really need to read the latest Farmville news from friend A, yet the ability to opt out is more work sometimes than its worth. It ought to be an opt-in policy (e.g. if I sign up for Farmville, I ought to be asked if I want to see my friends' activity there, rather than have to go back to my settings to opt out.)

What you'll end up with is a fad: a huge, lasting fad, but a fad nonetheless, with little opportunity to expand beyond its current capacities or abilities. People will get bored.

I think Facebook has plateaued, although that plateau could last a long time. There are some 900 million users and seven billion people on the planet. There's room for growth there.

Zuckerberg probably waited a year, maybe two, too long to issue an IPO. He'll make a boatload of money but the funds to invest in some kind of expansion into some new territory were needed last year: Facebook could have, for instance, partnered with Google to develop a true competitor to the iPad and promised an huge user base with its audience. It would also have prevented Google+ from getting underway-- which has been underwhelming anyway-- and given Facebook a genuine e-commerce stream.

As it was, they took forever to come out with an app for the iPad which is basically just the Safari browser with the Facebook logo slapped on and a pretty shoddy app at that (again, you have to opt out of things like location services and chat.)

My suspicion is that Facebook is a one-trick pony, and that the IPO is a recognition that they've done about all they can with it, and it's time to cash in their chips.

Flathead

Tue, 15 May 2012 07:24:15 -0400

I still think Matt Taibbi's takedown was the best on Friedman, but this is still pretty damned hilarious: