The War Nerd: The French are not cowards—deal with it.

The War Nerd, The EXile, October 2, 2003

Napoleon I, leader of the French. A present and constant threat to the courts of Europe.

Napoleon I, leader of the French. The object of nightmares in just about every court in Europe.

Editor’s Note: Remember the chauvinist idiocy wave that took over the country when Bush/Cheney and the rest of the filthy neocons, supported by the supine media, were busily driving the nation to a supremely unjustified war on false pretenses? When the Yahoos were tripping over each other to proclaim their hatred of all things French? The ridiculous time when even the humble French fries (pommes frites) were quickly rechristened “Patriot fries” in the Congressional cafeteria at the behest of the resident jingoes? Yea, let’s deny the French even the honor of inventing those damn ubiquitous potatoes!

The fury had its origins in a minor slap between fellow imperialists. While the Brits, who have already apparently accepted second-banana status in global criminality had quickly become eager partners in American foreign adventures, France, contrarian France, balked. Not out of sainthood, get that, as recent events in Libya and Syria have shown the French (leadership) remain as corrupt and ruthless as any old dog colonialist power. It’s just that they have a tendency to think for themselves. No shoving, please.

This Gallic show of independence was too much for the Washington bullies, accustomed to getting their way, a rage compounded by the longstanding hatreds and prejudices and contempt the snotty British had transmitted to their former colonies, a massive character deformation born out of centuries old competition with the French and fear of possible revolutionary contamination.

[pullquote]There are two things I hate more than I hate the French: ignorant fake war buffs, and people who are ungrateful. And when an American mouths off about French military history, he’s not just being ignorant, he’s being ungrateful. I was raised to think ungrateful people were trash.[/pullquote]

Eventually, the disfigurations, the relentless venom, the snide remarks and malicious ignorance stuck, and by the time Hollywood perpetuated it, the damage was done. Not for nothing has England been called perfidious Albion. Indirectness combined with ruthlessness is often England’s way, bolstered by heavy infusions of subtle propaganda. It was inevitable then that such warped notions of France and French culture and history would pre-empt the truth in most American minds. It’s an animosity that remains alive. Perhaps they should start looking at the truth for a change. Well, the War Nerd puts things right in this essay, and as usual he takes no prisoners. Too bad that he did not mention that a lot of the British contempt for the French is also rooted in racism. Hmm, we’ll leave that part of the story for another day. I guess we can’t have it all.

—Patrice Greanville

The War Nerd

The French
By Gary Brecher

www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/france.html

Well, I’m going to tell you guys something you probably don’t want to hear: these sites are total bullshit, the notion that the French are cowards is total bullshit, and anybody who knows anything about European military history knows damn well that over the past thousand years, the French have the most glorious military history in Europe, maybe the world.

Before you send me more of those death threats, let me finish. I hate Chirac too, and his disco foreign minister with the blow-dry ‘do and the snotty smile. But there are two things I hate more than I hate the French: ignorant fake war buffs, and people who are ungrateful. And when an American mouths off about French military history, he’s not just being ignorant, he’s being ungrateful. I was raised to think ungrateful people were trash.

When I say ungrateful, I’m talking about the American Revolution. If you’re a true American patriot, then this is the war that matters. Hell, most of you probably couldn’t name three major battles from it, but try going back to when you read Johnny Tremaine in fourth grade and you might recall a little place called Yorktown, Virginia, where we bottled up Cornwallis’s army, forced the Brits’ surrender and pretty much won the war.

French troops awaiting fate, buried in Verdun. (August 1917)

French troops, awaiting fate, half-buried in the rubble of Verdun. (August 1916)

Well, news flash: “we” didn’t win that battle, any more than the Northern Alliance conquered the Taliban. The French army and navy won Yorktown for us. Americans didn’t have the materiel or the training to mount a combined operation like that, with naval blockade and land siege. It was the French artillery forces and military engineers who ran the siege, and at sea it was a French admiral, de Grasse, who kicked the shit out of the British navy when they tried to break the siege.

Long before that, in fact as soon as we showed the Brits at Saratoga that we could win once in a while, they started pouring in huge shipments of everything from cannon to uniforms. We’d never have got near Yorktown if it wasn’t for massive French aid.

So how come you bastards don’t mention Yorktown in your cheap webpages? I’ll tell you why: because you’re too ignorant to know about it and too dishonest to mention it if you did.

The thing that gets to me is why Americans hate the French so much when they only did us good and never did us any harm. Like, why not hate the Brits? They’re the ones who killed thousands of Americans in the Revolution, and thirty years later they came back and attacked us again. That time around they managed to burn Washington DC to the ground while they were at it. How come you web jerks never mention that?

Sure, the easy answer is because the Brits are with us now, and the French aren’t. But being a war buff means knowing your history and respecting it.

Well, so much for ungrateful. Now let’s talk about ignorant. And that’s what you are if you think the French can’t fight: just plain ignorant. Appreciation of the French martial spirit is just about the most basic way you can distinguish real war nerds from fake little teachers’pets.

Let’s take the toughest case first: the German invasion, 1940, when the French Army supposedly disgraced itself against the Wehrmacht. This is the only real evidence you’ll find to call the French cowards, and the more you know about it, the less it proves. Yeah, the French were scared of Hitler. Who wasn’t? Chamberlain, the British prime minister, all but licked the Fuhrer’s goosesteppers, basically let him have all of Central Europe, because Britain was terrified of war with Germany. Hell, Stalin signed a sweetheart deal with Hitler out of sheer terror, and Stalin wasn’t a man who scared easy.

The French were scared, all right. But they had reason to be. For starters, they’d barely begun to recover from their last little scrap with the Germans: a little squabble you might’ve heard of, called WW I.

WW I was the worst war in history to be a soldier in. WW II was worse if you were a civilian, but the trenches of WW I were five years of Hell like General Sherman never dreamed of. At the end of it a big chunk of northern France looked like the surface of the moon, only bloodier, nothing but craters and rats and entrails.

Verdun. Just that name was enough to make Frenchmen and Germans, the few who survived it, wake up yelling for years afterward. The French lost 1.5 million men out of a total population of 40 million fighting the Germans from 1914-1918. A lot of those guys died charging German machine-gun nests with bayonets. I’d really like to see one of you office smartasses joke about “surrender monkeys” with a French soldier, 1914 vintage. You’d piss your dockers.

Shit, we strut around like we’re so tough and we can’t even handle a few uppity Iraqi villages. These guys faced the Germans head on for five years, and we call them cowards? And at the end, it was the Germans, not the French, who said “calf rope.”

When the sequel war came, the French relied on their frontier fortifications and used their tanks (which were better than the Germans’, one on one) defensively. The Germans had a newer, better offensive st

rategy. So they won. And the French surrendered. Which was damn sensible of them.

This was the WEHRMACHT. In two years, they conquered all of Western Europe and lost only 30,000 troops in the process. That’s less than the casualties of Gettysburg. You get the picture? Nobody, no army on earth, could’ve held off the Germans under the conditions that the French faced them. The French lost because they had a long land border with Germany. The English survived because they had the English Channel between them and the Wehrmacht. When the English Army faced the Wermacht at Dunkirk, well, thanks to spin the tuck-tail-and-flee result got turned into some heroic tale of a brilliant British retreat. The fact is, even the Brits behaved like cowards in the face of the Wermacht, abandoning the French. It’s that simple.

Here’s a quick sampler of some of my favorite French victories, like an antidote to those ignorant websites. We’ll start way back and move up to the 20th century.

Tours, 732 AD: The Muslims had already taken Spain and were well on their way to taking the rest of Europe. The only power with a chance of stopping them was the French army under Charles “the Hammer” Martel, King of the Franks (French), who answered to the really cool nickname “the Hammer of God.” It was the French who saved the continent’s ass. All the smart money was on the Muslims: there were 60,000 of them, crazy Jihadis whose cavalry was faster and deadlier than any in Europe. The French army was heavily outnumbered and had no cavalry. Fighting in phalanxes, they held against dozens of cavalry charges and after at least two days of hand-to-hand combat, finally managed to hack their way to the Muslim center and kill their commander. The Muslims retreated to Spain, and Europe developed as an independent civilization.

Orleans, May 1429: Joan of Arc: is she the most insanely cool military commander in history or what? This French peasant girl gets instructions from her favorite saints to help out the French against the English invaders. She goes to the King (well, the Dauphin, but close enough) and tells him to give her the army and she’ll take it from there. And somehow she convinces him. She takes the army, which has lost every battle it’s been in lately, to Orleans, which is under English siege. Now Joan is a nice girl, so she tries to settle things peaceably. She explains in a letter to the enemy commanders that everything can still be cool, “…provided you give up France…and go back to your own countries, for God’s sake. And if you do not, wait for the Maid, who will visit you briefly to your great sorrow.” The next day she put on armor, mounted a charger, and prepared to lead the attack on the besiegers’ fortifications. She ordered the gates opened, but the Mayor refused until Joan explained that she, personally, would cut off his head. The gates went up, the French sallied out, and Joan led the first successful attack they’d made in years. The English strongpoints were taken, the siege was broken, and Joan’s career in the cow-milking trade was over.

Braddock’s Defeat (aka Battle of Monongahela) July 1755: Next time you’re driving through the Ohio Valley, remember you’re passing near the site of a great French victory over an Anglo-American force twice its size. General Edward Braddock marched west from Virginia with 1,500 men — a very large army in 18th-c. America. His orders were to seize French land and forts in the Valley — your basic undeclared land-grab invasion. The French joined the local tribes to resist, and then set up a classic ambush. It was a slaughter. More than half of Braddock’s force — 880 men — were killed or wounded. The only Anglo officer to escape unhurt was this guy called George Washington, and even he had two horses shot out from under him. After a few minutes of non-stop fire from French and Indians hidden in the woods, Braddock’s command came apart like something out of Nam, post-Tet. Braddock was hit and wounded, but none of his troops would risk getting shot to rescue him.

Austerlitz, Dec. 1805: You always hear about Austerlitz as “Napoleon’s Greatest Victory,” like the little guy personally went out and wiped out the combined Russian and Austrian armies. The fact is, ever since the Revolution in 1789, French armies had been kicking ass against everybody. They were free citizens fighting against scared peasant and degenerate mercenaries, and it was no contest. At Austerlitz, 65,000 French troops took on 90,000 Russians and Austrians and destroyed them. Absolutely annihilated them. The French lost only 8,000, compared to 29,000 of the enemy. The tactics Bonaparte used were very risky, and would only have worked with superb troops: he encouraged the enemy to attack a weak line, then brought up reinforcements who’d been held out of sight. That kind of tactical plan takes iron discipline and perfect timing — and the French had it.

Jena, Oct. 1806: just a quick reminder for anybody who thinks the Germans always beat the French. Napoleon takes on the Prussian army and destroys it. 27,000 Prussian casualties vs. 5,000 French. Prussian army routed, pursued for miles by French cavalry.

You eXile guys might want to remember that the French under Napoleon are still the only army ever to have taken all of continental Europe, from Moscow to Madrid. I could keep listing French victories till I had a book. In fact, it’s not a bad idea. A nice big hardback, so you could take it to the assholes running all the anti-French-military sites and bash their heads in with it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gary Brecher (true name John Dolan?) is the author of The War Nerd, a twice-monthly column discussing current wars and other military conflicts, published in the eXile and now NSFWCorp. A collection of his columns was published by Soft Skull Press in June 2008.

How Libya Fell Off the Media Map

Lessons From the Kidnapping of Ali Zeidan

by PATRICK COCKBURN

Ali Zeidan—ex opponent of Gaddafi. Buffeted by fanatics on all sides.

Seldom has the failure of a state been so openly and humiliatingly confirmed as happened in Libya last week with the brief kidnapping the Prime Minister Ali Zeidan from his hotel in Tripoli by a militia allied to the government and without a shot being fired. Despite his swift release, the message is very clear: Libya is imploding two years after the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was dragged from a drainage tunnel under a road and summarily shot.

The immediate cause for his abduction was US Secretary of State John Kerry’s assertion that the Libyan government had prior information about the seizure of the al-Qa’ida suspect Abu Anas al-Libi at the weekend. Mr Zeidan has now paid a price for his own compliance with the US and for Mr Kerry’s self-regarding boasts. A government that allows a foreign power to kidnap its own citizens on the streets of its capital is advertising to its own people and the world that it can no longer fulfil the most basic function of any state which is to protect its own citizens.

Dramatic though the seizure of Mr Zeidan by 150 gunmen from the Operations Room of Libya’s Revolutionaries – which had been hired by the government to provide security in Tripoli – undoubtedly is, it is in keeping with the course of events in Libya over the last two-and-a-half years. This culminated over the summer with militiamen linked to separatists in Cyrenaica, the eastern part of Libya, closing down Libya’s oil export terminals so for a time Libya ceased to export oil at all. At the same time, there have been shortages of electricity and water in the capital and a general breakdown of order. Militias act independently and run their own private prisons in which torture is common. Two tribes have been fighting their own private civil war some 25 miles from the international airport. A military prosecutor looking into assassinations was killed when a bomb blew up his vehicle.

What is happening in Tripoli is a repeat of what had begun to happen earlier in Benghazi, the original centre of the uprising of 2011 and the capital of Cyrenaica. As in the rest of Libya, the government’s attempt to integrate the militias into its security forces has largely meant it paying armed men with their own agenda whom it does not control. In Benghazi in July an Islamist militia called the Libyan Shield, which was supposedly working for the government, opened fire on demonstrators protesting against its misrule and killed 31 of them.

This should all be causing less surprise than is now being expressed internationally. The Libyan revolution of 2011 was always something of a phoney, not in the sense that Gaddafi was popular, but in the pretence that he had been overthrown by an armed opposition of Libyans and with NATO only playing a subsidiary role. The reality was that the military power that displaced and killed Gaddafi stemmed very largely from the US, Britain and France. Without Nato’s tactical air support in the form of ground attack aircraft and missiles the militiamen, who fought bravely for their own communities and cities, would not have lasted more than a few weeks. The militiamen who now purport to rule the country were in military terms largely a mopping up force.

The foreign media was complicit in encouraging the perception that the militiamen had overcome Gaddafi through their own strength. The frequent pictures of militiamen in their pick-ups firing their heavy machine guns in the general direction of the enemy implied that here there was a genuine revolution with an opposition ready to take over. In fact the dispatch of Gaddafi and his regime by Nato left a vacuum which the rest of the world scarcely noticed, aside from the killing of the US ambassador in Benghazi last year.

The international media, which had once packed the hotels of Tripoli and Benghazi, had moved on to Egypt and Syria. Libya fell off the media map as Libyan politicians have vainly struggled to fill the power vacuum, but the extent of their failure only became explicit with the brazen abduction of Mr Zeidan.

PATRICK COCKBURN is the author of Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq.

Wikileaks Rides East!

A Hard Quest to Deliver Truth to the Unwilling

by ISRAEL SHAMIR

The West’s major media do not fare well in this tale of whistleblowers betrayed. The Guardian used Julian Assange’s stuff, vetted it, censored it to fit their masters’ agenda, and afterwards published all the dirt on him they could find, bringing him as much disrepute as they could. The NY Times was even worse, as they collaborated with the CIA and Pentagon all the way, and fully supported the Assange witch-hunt. Snowden will likely receive the same treatment.

Counterpunch

(A review of Mediastan, A Wikileaks Road Movie. The film was screened for the first time in London Raindance Film Festival October 1, 2013, and in a Moscow Festival a week later.)

A diverse gang of five journalists in their early thirties ride a car through deserts and high mountains of Central Asia. Amidst breathtaking scenery, they cross impassable tunnels, negotiate steep curves and flocks of sheep on country roads, visit the capitals of new republics that came into being since the fall of the USSR, meet interesting people and discuss freedom of speech and its limits. A road movie par excellence, it’s Easy Rider by Wim Wenders, but in a better setting.

Soon we learn that theirs is not a joyride. These young people had been sent on a quest to far-away lands by the maverick genius of Julian Assange, captive of Ellingham Hall in East Anglia. (The events unfold two years ago, before Julian’s escape to the Ecuador Embassy) He has his adventure by proxy, unable to leave the walls of the manor. Assange makes a few appearances in the film, and one of the scenes, a fast night walk in the woods, is an artistic gem, as the director Johannes Wahlstrom (the Swede in the gang) conveys dramatic urgency and Julian’s acute personal involvement by cinematic means. Assange speaks to editors via Skype, and argues with his co-workers about the purpose of the whole exercise. Thus we learn that the young party’s goal is to deliver the State Department cables deftly lifted by Sergeant Manning to remote lands, so the peoples of these countries will know the truth, namely how they are perceived by the imperial power. This truth is to liberate them, but they need a mediator: the media.

Somebody has to select, translate, explain and publish the cables so they will reach the target audience. Assange’s missionaries meet with editors of newspapers, news agencies and radio stations, and offer them their tempting and dangerous load, for free. The majority refuse the offer. They are too tightly connected with the American power structure, with the all-embracing tentacles of the Empire. Some take it, but we do not learn whether they actually use it. (I personally had better luck disseminating these cables in Russia, with its vibrant media and anti-American sentiment). Our travellers easily accept that Central Asian media is far from free, but in a subtly presented turn of events they will later discover that the mighty Western mainstream media is equally suborned.

The area they travel is comprised of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, and they deal with local media as they go: hence the title, Mediastan. Our travellers learn that the US habitually pays these local media to publish articles favourable to the US; some of those articles are published first in Russia, and afterwards reprinted in local publications, so that they appear to carry more authority. Some chief editors actually reside in the US and control their publications remotely. In timid Turkmenistan they visit a central newspaper office; every issue of the newspaper carries a photo of their president in full colour on the front page, and the editor tells his visitors that he is not looking for trouble. Leaving his office, they drive through a rebuilt-from-scratch Ashgabat, an architectural wonder of marble houses and clean broad avenues. Apparently not all the natural gas revenue has been siphoned abroad, and this seems a positive development. However, our visitors end up being expelled from the republic, just in case.

In Kazakhstan, they encounter the oil workers of Zhanaozen, who have carried a long hunger strike: no media reported on this development, until a month later, after they had been dispersed by bullets. A dozen strikers were killed, many wounded and even more imprisoned. This film footage is remarkable for preserving the sorrows and complaints of the oil workers before the violent repression. Even afterwards, the drama of the oil workers received very little exposure, for they were working for Western oil companies, and the President, Mr Nazarbayev, is considered West-friendly. For the mainstream media, gay pride parades have greater news value than a workers’ hunger strike.

The travellers also meet up with a character from another Wikileaks exploit, a released Guantanamo prisoner. Wikileaks had published his secret CIA file (among others). This big, grim, handsome and bearded man spent five years in that hellish camp; he tells our gang of his life in limbo, and they reveal to him why he was imprisoned – like Edmond Dantes of The Count of Monte Cristo, Gitmo prisoners are never told of the accusations against them. When he learns that he had been locked up for so long simply because American interrogators wanted to learn from him the mood among Tajik refugees in Afghanistan, he became furious: “Couldn’t they just ask me, and let me go?” he exclaims.

[pullquote]

Always putting wedge issues ahead of class, the drama of the oil workers received very little exposure, for they were working for Western oil companies, and the President, Mr Nazarbayev, is considered West-friendly. For the mainstream media, gay pride parades have greater news value than a workers’ hunger strike or their repression by fusillade.

[/pullquote]The Afghan episode stands apart from the rest, but that is the attraction of a road movie: it allows the film-maker to piece together quite disparate items. In semi-occupied Northern Afghanistan our gang visits a Swedish camp, where the Swedish press officer admits that they have no clue why they are there in the first place. The Afghans want them to leave, because the Swedes do not give bribes. We learn that under American pressure, the Swedes do something similar to bribing, in order to stay. Why are they there at all? The US wants to impress the natives with Swedish good will, at no expense for itself.

In a somewhat comic episode, Johannes tries to push his leaked cables to the head of local Radio Liberty, the US-owned and financed propaganda network. He is solemnly informed that Radio Liberty enjoys full freedom of expression, can discuss any subject, and knows no censorship. Johannes might as well have offered the cables to the US embassy!

The realm of Mediastan is not enclosed by the high mountains; it stretches all the way to the Hudson River and the Thames, for there Wahlstrom meets two people thriving at the top of the media food chain: in London, chief editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger and in New York, the then executive editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller. The two are smooth, glib and polished, suave and botoxed, they have their answers at the ready, but they are as subservient to power as a lowly editor of Stan-News.

The Guardian played a tricky part in the Wikileaks story, a part they are likely to repeat now with Snowden. In the case of Snowden, they published his materials, previously vetting them with the NBA, induced him to reveal his identity, beefed up their ‘’progressive’’ reputation, and at the end, commissioned their own hatchet-man, Luke Harding, to write a book, presumably trashing him. They gained a feather in their cap with the intelligence services, with the trusting readers, and are likely to end up destroying the man.

[pullquote]Mediastan is a lesson in tenacity for anticapitalist activists. While The Fifth Estate, richly funded by the empire to the tune of 40MM, attempts to character assassinate Assange (and his mission), the people behind Mediastan did the work out of principle and a thirst for truth. Despite all odds, they succeeded in producing a powerful and haunting thriller for the thinking man – an epic quest to deliver vital truth to the unwilling. They did the same with Julian: they used his stuff, vetted it, censored it to fit their masters’ agenda, and afterwards published all the dirt on him they could find, bringing him as much disrepute as they could. The NY Times was even worse, as they collaborated with the CIA and Pentagon all the way, and fully supported the Assange witch-hunt.[/pullquote]

The CP readers were able to follow this unique saga in real time, from its very inception, probably better than anybody in mainstream or blogs. They could learn how cables were published, and how the Guardian maligned Assange (they received confidential Swedish police records and distorted its contents). When, some months later, the records were made public, a Swedish site wrote: “The sleaze printed …above all [by] the toxic Nick Davies of The Guardian, can stand no more… Nick Davies’ account of the protocols was maliciously skewed”. The Guardian tendentiously headlined the cables obtained by Manning and delivered by Assange. Ordinary people rarely read beyond headlines. So the Guardian habitually ascribed to Wikileaks certain remarks of the US officials, as you can see here, most often in order to undermine Russia and delegitimise its president. Only now can we understand the reason for these relentless attacks on Putin – only he was strong-willed enough to bridle the impending US attack on Syria, and thus signal the end of American hegemony.

The Central Asian cables were more interesting, than somewhat, for the US ambassadors in the region were incautious, even brutally frank, in their communications with the State Department. “The Guardian has deliberately excised portions of published cables to hide evidence of corruption [by Western companies in Central Asia]”, as CP readers were told in this piece, which is difficult to locate via Google (surprise, surprise!). Wahlstrom asks Alan Rusbridger why he excised the names of the grafters and receives a true-to-(Mediastan)form response: these are very rich people and they could take us to court.

The film appears just in time to coincide with first screening of The Fifth Estate, the Hollywood film on the same subject. It’s not a coincidence: Assange was very unhappy with the Hollywood project and he said so openly to its producer, its director and to the actor who played his part. He wisely decided to keep his hands off Mediastan: he refused to get involved so the film maker would be independent. This is definitely not a groupie movie about their guru: the central figure is not Julian, but media.

The films are vastly different. The Fifth Estate is based on a story by Assange’s co-worker turned enemy and wannabe rival, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and was produced on an above-the-average budget of $40 million, while Mediastan was done by the young director Johannes Wahlstrom, a friend of Assange, on a shoestring budget out of his own slim pocket; the DP (Director of Photography) and other dedicated, but lacking in resources, crew members worked for free. Despite all odds, they succeeded in producing a powerful and haunting thriller for the thinking man – an epic quest to deliver vital truth to the unwilling.

The film occupies a very special niche of a documentary that uses all the tools of a feature film: it’s dynamic, tightly wound, rich with nuances,a pleasure for the eyes and food for thought, beautifully photographed by Russian virtuoso of the camera, Feodor (Theo to his friends) Lyass, the DP for the recent top success of Russian cinema, Dukhless. Director Johannes Wahlstrom – (I do not dare to say how wonderful he is, because, after all, he is my son) – was brought up in Israel, and moved to Sweden with his Swedish mother when he was 12. This is his first full feature film; he previously worked in Swedish TV and edited a magazine. He is one of these brave young men who want to fix the world instead of giving it a fix.

I suggest you see this film, for the sheer pleasure of watching these keen young faces, wild landscapes and far-away lands, if not also to learn more about how Wikileaks has changed the world.

[Language editing by Ken Freeland]

Israel Shamir lives in Moscow.

NSA “harvesting” electronic address books and contact lists

By Thomas Gaist, wsws.org

The president that implicitly promised transparency and a strengthening of citizens’ rights, has instead decimated them.

The Washington Post on Tuesday published new revelations stemming from PowerPoint slides and documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. In an article headlined “NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally,” the Post wrote that “the National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans.”

The new information reported by the Washington Post further confirms what has become apparent since the first Snowden leaks emerged last June: the NSA data collection programs are virtually unlimited. The NSA and other state agencies are in possession of a wealth of private and personal information on every individual who uses the Internet or a telephone, both in the US and around the world. All of this is carried out in violation of the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights.

According to the Post, “The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and ‘buddy lists’ from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.”

The PowerPoint slides outline the sprawling dimensions of the NSA’s contact list collection efforts. As reported in the Post, the slides show that the NSA’s Special Source Operations acquired “444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers” in the course of a single day in 2012.

The slides describe intrusive and aggressive practices by the agency. One slide, with the heading “Data is stored multiple times,” cites three different programs—MARINA, MAINWAY and PINWALE—that sort through Internet metadata, telephone metadata and contact chaining, and written content, respectively.

Another slide presents a case study of a Yahoo account, belonging to a member of the Iranian Quds Force, that was hacked by the NSA in September of 2011. A mass of spam messages subsequently sent from the account led to the accidental collection of huge quantities of data as a result of all the “false connections” generated by the spamming.

[pullquote]As reported in the Washington Post, the slides show that the NSA’s Special Source Operations acquired “444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers” in the course of a single day in 2012.[/pullquote]

Slide four reads: “Buddy Lists, Inboxes: Unlike address books, frequently contain content data—Offline messages, buddy icon updates, other data included—Webmail inboxes increasingly include email content—Most collection is due to the presence of a target on a buddy list where the communication is not to, from, or about that target.”

Slide four further states: “NSA collects, on a representative day, ~500,000 buddy lists and inboxes—More than 90 percent collected because tasked selectors identified only as contacts.”

Collection of the address lists is carried out, the Post reported, on the basis of “secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s main data routes.”

The address lists provide the NSA with enormous amounts of data. The Post described the lists as “far richer sources of data than call records alone,” noting that “Address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses, but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information.”

The address books are reportedly collected overseas, allowing the NSA to skirt nominal restrictions on the collection of data produced by US citizens. As the Post reported, “In practice, data from Americans is collected in large volumes—in part because they live and work overseas, but also because data crosses international boundaries even when its American owners stay at home.”

The newspaper continued: “The NSA has not been authorized by Congress or the special intelligence court that oversees foreign intelligence to collect contact lists in bulk, and senior intelligence officials said it would be illegal to do so from facilities in the United States…

“The agency avoids the restrictions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by intercepting contact lists from access points ‘all over the world,’ one official said.”

Reports of address book collection are only the latest in a torrent of revelations that have emerged over the past four months regarding illegal surveillance programs carried out by the NSA and other state agencies. These include:

* Telephone metadata collection, including historical location data produced by cell phones

* PRISM, a global electronic surveillance and data-mining operation

* The Drug Enforcement Agency’s Hemisphere Project, a partnership involving DEA agents and AT&T employees from 2007, which collects vast quantities of telephone data

* The XKeyscore program, which enables the NSA to monitor practically all internet traffic produced globally through a variety of spying activities, including dragnet surveillance of web data and reading of email content

* Boundless Informant, a data analysis system used by the NSA to summarize the results of global data-mining for surveillance managers

* NSA penetration of the European Union computer network and its bugging of EU headquarters and offices in Washington, DC and New York City

* Extensive collaboration between the NSA and Microsoft, with the latter making available for snooping all documents and messages produced by users

* Treasury Department plans to transfer data on Americans’ financial records to the military and intelligence agencies.

These programs have the full support of the political and media establishment, including the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.

In an opinion piece published in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, defended the unconstitutional NSA programs with the standard claim that they are necessary to protect the US from terrorism.

Ignoring the voluminous evidence that the programs are used to spy on millions of ordinary Americans who are not remotely linked to terrorist groups, as well as foreign governments, organizations and individuals allied with the United States, Feinstein wrote: “The US must remain vigilant against terrorist attacks against the homeland… The NSA call-records program is working and contributing to our safety… If we end this vital program, we only make our nation more vulnerable to another devastating terror attack.”

This is nothing less than a blanket justification for shredding all democratic rights and instituting a police state. Moreover, it ignores the well established fact that the US is supporting groups in Syria, Libya, and other countries that are allied with Al Qaeda, the supposed target of the surveillance programs.

The real target of the surveillance apparatus is not foreign terrorist groups, but the American people. The ruling class is fearful of the emergence of broad social opposition to its reactionary policies and is building up the means for carrying out political repression on a mass scale.

Churchill’s Poison Gas Stockpile

When the Brits Came Close to Using Chemical Weapons in World War II

by PATRICK COCKBURN, Counterpunch

A hundred experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which on Friday won the Nobel Peace Prize, and the United Nations are assembling to dismantle and destroy Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons including 1,000 tons of sarin and mustard gas as well as chemical mixing equipment. All are to be eliminated by 30 June 2014.

It is one of the extraordinary twists and turns of the war in Syria that the alleged use of sarin against civilians in rebel-held districts in Damascus on 21 August should turn out to be to the advantage rather than to the disadvantage of President Bashar al-Assad. The most immediate effect seemed likely to be foreign military intervention against Assad. In the event, the United States and Britain balked at the idea of another war in the Middle East, particularly one that might put in positions of power al-Qa’ida-linked groups such as the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant .

States acquire chemical weapons in order to frighten or kill but, like the man in the fairy story who owns a bottle with a powerful genie inside, they often end up getting the opposite of what they wish for. Saddam Hussein used poison gas with typical ruthlessness against the Iranians and the Kurds, and may have congratulated himself on its effectiveness. But in the long term he found that possession of weapons of mass destruction, and his inability to prove that he had destroyed them, provided justification for ruinous UN sanctions against Iraq and the US-led invasion of 2003.

Chemical weapons are often described as “weapons of last resort”, but a country that is already losing a war cannot use them without inviting calamitous retaliation by those about to win. This appears to be why Hitler did not use Germany’s massive arsenal of chemical weapons when his armies were going down to defeat in 1943-45. The Germans also wrongly believed that the Western allies had developed nerve gases such as sarin and tabun, discovered in Germany in the late 1930s.

In fact, it was Britain that came closest to using poison gas on a mass scale during the Second World War. Had Germany launched an invasion in 1940, the British plan was to spray German troops with mustard gas from aircraft while they were still crowded together on the beaches. The idea was proposed first on 15 June 1940, just two days after Dunkirk, by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir John Dill according to A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare by Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman. General Dill wrote with gusto that German troop concentrations “would present a splendid target. Gas spray by aircraft under such conditions would be likely to have a more widespread and wholesale effect than high explosives.”

The plan was lethally dangerous, not least because Germany had 20 times as much mustard gas as Britain. The British would be breaching a secret agreement made with Hitler in the first hours of the war in 1939 that Britain and France would not use poison gas or germ warfare so long as Germany also refrained. The appalled Director of Home Defence rejected the plan to spray enemy troops: “We should be throwing away the incalculable moral advantage of keeping our pledges and for a minor tactical surprise; and the ultimate effects of retaliation by the enemy would be very serious in this overcrowded little island.”

General Dill withdrew his memorandum in the face of fierce criticism, but it was then supported by Churchill who gave his full backing for the use of gas. A fleet of bombers fitted with spray tanks holding between 250lb and 1,000lb of mustard gas each was scraped together but Britain had only 450 tons of mustard gas. Stocks would have been exhausted after one or two days of RAF attacks.

Even in the desperate situation after Dunkirk, the plan seemed foolhardy. Spraying troops from a low level in the face of hostile air attack would have been very difficult, and regular troops with gas masks and other anti-gas equipment would not necessarily have been incapacitated. The English coast where the German army intended to land was between Folkestone and Newhaven on the south coast, a parachute division dropping near Folkestone. The main beachheads would have been the wide pebble shores on either side of Dungeness and the flat land of Romney Marsh.

Would Churchill really have ordered the use of poison gas when supplies of it were so meagre and German retaliation against London likely to be massive and immediate?

Churchill’s determination to use it in the case of German invasion did not ebb, even as the chances of an attack receded. Because of his efforts, Britain had 20,000 tons of poison gas ready to use by 1942. Conventional wisdom and military war games suggest that a German invasion force could have got ashore but would have been cut off by the Royal Navy and, ultimately, wiped out. The Navy, in turn, could not have been eliminated without total German air superiority, which it failed to win in the Battle of Britain. This was most likely the case, but German defeat was not quite so certain in 1940.

I have always been fascinated by the non-use of poison gas in the Second World War, because it showed restraint even in a time of total war. Most probably its use against London and other British cities would have provoked mass flight. In 2003, the Kurds in northern Iraq, who had seen what poison gas could do, were convinced that Saddam still had stocks of it. I remember shops selling flimsy plastic sheeting for people to put over windows, which only advertised citizens’ vulnerability. Most Kurds fled their cities.

Exotic terror weapons such as gas inspire revulsion in a way conventional weapons do not, though high explosive shells and bombs are as lethal. People from Eastern Ghouta in Damascus complain that nobody has objected strongly to the fact that they have been shelled and bombed. In considering what happened in Fallujah, Iraq in 2004, people are obsessed with the possible use of depleted uranium, but take it as a matter of course that the US Marines’ artillery pumped a daily average of 379 155mm shells for two weeks into this not very large city. One evil effect of chemical weapons is making conventional weapons that kill people in their hundreds of thousands seem acceptable by comparison.

PATRICK COCKBURN is the author of “Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq.