Jan 30

Today’s News 30th January 2018

  • Pakistan 'Pivots' To Purchase Weapons From China/Russia After Trump Halts Military Aid

    President Trump’s decision to ring the New Year by simultaneously demonizing Pakistan on Twitter has mostly backfired.

    In an interview with the Financial Times, Pakistan’s defense minister Khurram Dastgir Khan said Pakistan is expanding its relationships with Russia and China, as relations with Washington deteriorate following the suspension over $2 billion in military aid to Islamabad.

     

    Khan said is his government is undergoing a “regional recalibration of Pakistan’s foreign and security policy,” which implies Pakistani defense forces will be buying military weapons from Russia and China, rather than the United States.

    “The fact that we have recalibrated our way towards better relations with Russia, deepening our relationship with China, is a response to what the Americans have been doing,” Khan stated.

    Khan’s comments to the Financial Times came three weeks after Beijing announced it would be building its second foreign military base near the Gwadar Port, in the Pakistani province of Balochistan.

    Plans call for the Jiwani base to be a joint naval and air facility for Chinese forces, located a short distance up the coast from the Chinese-built commercial port facility at Gwadar, Pakistan. Both Gwadar and Jiwani are part of Pakistan’s western Baluchistan province.

    …

    The large naval and air base will require the Pakistani government to relocate scores of residents living in the area. Plans call for their relocation to other areas of Jiwani or further inland in Baluchistan province.

    The Chinese also asked the Pakistanis to undertake a major upgrade of Jiwani airport so the facility will be able to handle large Chinese military aircraft.

    Work on the airport improvements is expected to begin in July.

    The naval base and airfield will occupy nearly the entire strategic peninsula.

     

    Khan made it clear that Pakistan started the “recalibration” process three years ago when it began buying Russian helicopters. He indicates this is not a new trend, but the recent actions by President Trump have certainly spurred Pakistan to gravitate towards Russia and China for defense weapons.

    Tensions between the US and Pakistan are the worst point ever in its 70 years of friendship. Khan stressed that Pakistan has many similar goals with Washington, but “lately the focus has been on areas of divergence”.

    “We have already bought some Russian helicopters in the past three years,” he said. “This is what we call a regional recalibration of Pakistan’s foreign and security policy. It is because of the unfortunate choice the United States continues to make.”

    Earlier this month, the U.S. said it would suspend the security assistance program to Pakistan worth $2 billion because the country has failed to combat terrorism within its borders.

    “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than $33 billion in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies and deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools,” President Donald Trump tweeted in earlier January.

    Khan called Trump’s tweets “deeply offensive” and “counterproductive.”

    Khan further added: “It is unfortunate that we are even discussing the numbers [the amount of aid] while Afghanistan slowly spirals out of the American and Afghan control.”

    Khan notes that the backbone of the Pakistan air force is the General Dynamics’ F-16 Fighting Falcon of the U.S., which Khan said Islamabad has been received spare parts from Washington in two years.

    “We are using our own ingenuity and using other sources to keep the fleet up in the air,” he said. “It has been very difficult.”

    Considering Washington’s neglect in sending parts for Pakistan’s F-16s, Khan said he is open for dialogue with Russia on the Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jet.

    About nine days after President Trump’s tweet, Khan declared that military and intelligence cooperation with the United States would be suspended.

    Interestingly enough, both Beijing and Moscow issued strong statements in support of Pakistan after Trump unleashed fire and furry on Twitter.

    “We must value Pakistan’s important role on the Afghanistan issue, and respect Pakistan’s sovereignty and reasonable security concerns,” China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi told Secretary of State Rex Tillerson over the telephone, according to Chinese media.

    And lastly, this might be the bombshell, “The fact that we have recalibrated our way towards better relations with Russia, deepening our relationship with China, is a response to what the Americans have been doing. And they have their own reasons. They want to use India, in our view, to contain China,” Khan said.

  • Army Major: Wrong On 'Nam, Wrong On Terror

    Authored by Major Danny Sjursen via TomDispatch.com,

    Vietnam: it’s always there. Looming in the past, informing American futures.

     

    A 50-year-old war, once labeled the longest in our history, is still alive and well and still being refought by one group of Americans: the military high command.  And almost half a century later, they’re still losing it and blaming others for doing so. 

    Of course, the U.S. military and Washington policymakers lost the war in Vietnam in the previous century and perhaps it’s well that they did.  The United States really had no business intervening in that anti-colonial civil war in the first place, supporting a South Vietnamese government of questionable legitimacy, and stifling promised nationwide elections on both sides of that country’s artificial border.  In doing so, Washington presented an easy villain for a North Vietnamese-backed National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgency, a group known to Americans in those years as the Vietcong. 

    More than two decades of involvement and, at the war’s peak, half a million American troops never altered the basic weakness of the U.S.-backed regime in Saigon.  Despite millions of Asian deaths and 58,000 American ones, South Vietnam’s military could not, in the end, hold the line without American support and finally collapsed under the weight of a conventional North Vietnamese invasion in April 1975.

    There’s just one thing.  Though a majority of historians (known in academia as the “orthodox” school) subscribe to the basic contours of the above narrative, the vast majority of senior American military officers do not.  Instead, they’re still refighting the Vietnam War to a far cheerier outcome through the books they read, the scholarship they publish, and (most disturbingly) the policies they continue to pursue in the Greater Middle East.

    The Big Re-Write

    In 1986, future general, Iraq-Afghan War commander, and CIA director David Petraeus penned an article for the military journal Parameters that summarized his Princeton doctoral dissertation on the Vietnam War.  It was a piece commensurate with then-Major Petraeus’s impressive intellect, except for its disastrous conclusions on the lessons of that war.  Though he did observe that Vietnam had “cost the military dearly” and that “the frustrations of Vietnam are deeply etched in the minds of those who lead the services,” his real fear was that the war had left the military unprepared to wage what were then called “low-intensity conflicts” and are now known as counterinsurgencies.  His takeaway: what the country needed wasn’t less Vietnams but better-fought ones.  The next time, he concluded fatefully, the military should do a far better job of implementing counterinsurgency forces, equipment, tactics, and doctrine to win such wars.

    Two decades later, when the next Vietnam-like quagmire did indeed present itself in Iraq, he and a whole generation of COINdinistas (like-minded officers devoted to his favored counterinsurgency approach to modern warfare) embraced those very conclusions to win the war on terror.  The names of some of them — H.R. McMaster and James Mattis, for instance — should ring a bell or two these days. In Iraq and later in Afghanistan, Petraeus and his acolytes would get their chance to translate theory into practice.  Americans — and much of the rest of the planet — still live with the results.

    Like Petraeus, an entire generation of senior military leaders, commissioned in the years after the Vietnam War and now atop the defense behemoth, remain fixated on that ancient conflict.  After all these decades, such “thinking” generals and “soldier-scholars” continue to draw all the wrong lessons from what, thanks in part to them, has now become America’s second longest war. 

    Rival Schools

    Historian Gary Hess identifies two main schools of revisionist thinking. 

    There are the “Clausewitzians” (named after the nineteenth century Prussian military theorist) who insist that Washington never sufficiently attacked the enemy’s true center of gravity in North Vietnam.  Beneath the academic language, they essentially agree on one key thing: the U.S. military should have bombed the North into a parking lot.

    The second school, including Petraeus, Hess labeled the “hearts-and-minders.”  As COINdinistas, they felt the war effort never focused clearly enough on isolating the Vietcong, protecting local villages in the South, building schools, and handing out candy — everything, in short, that might have won (in the phrase of that era) Vietnamese hearts and minds.

    Both schools, however, agreed on something basic: that the U.S. military should have won in Vietnam. 

    The danger presented by either school is clear enough in the twenty-first century.  Senior commanders, some now serving in key national security positions, fixated on Vietnam, have translated that conflict’s supposed lessons into what now passes for military strategy in Washington.  The result has been an ever-expanding war on terror campaign waged ceaselessly from South Asia to West Africa, which has essentially turned out to be perpetual war based on the can-do belief that counterinsurgency and advise-and-assist missions should have worked in Vietnam and can work now. 

    The Go-Big Option

    The leading voice of the Clausewitzian school was U.S. Army Colonel and Korean War/Vietnam War vet Harry Summers, whose 1982 book, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, became an instant classic within the military.  It’s easy enough to understand why.  Summers argued that civilian policymakers — not the military rank-and-file — had lost the war by focusing hopelessly on the insurgency in South Vietnam rather than on the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi.  More troops, more aggressiveness, even full-scale invasions of communist safe havens in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, would have led to victory.

    Summers had a deep emotional investment in his topic.  Later, he would argue that the source of post-war pessimistic analyses of the conflict lay in “draft dodgers and war evaders still [struggling] with their consciences.”  In his own work, Summers marginalized all Vietnamese actors (as would so many later military historians), failed to adequately deal with the potential consequences, nuclear or otherwise, of the sorts of escalation he advocated, and didn’t even bother to ask whether Vietnam was a core national security interest of the United States. 

    Perhaps he would have done well to reconsider a famous post-war encounter he had with a North Vietnamese officer, a Colonel Tu, whom he assured that “you know you never beat us on the battlefield.”

    “That may be so,” replied his former enemy, “but it is also irrelevant.”

    Whatever its limitations, his work remains influential in military circles to this day. (I was assigned the book as a West Point cadet!) 

    A more sophisticated Clausewitzian analysis came from current National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in a highly acclaimed 1997 book, Dereliction of Duty.  He argued that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were derelict in failing to give President Lyndon Johnson an honest appraisal of what it would take to win, which meant that “the nation went to war without the benefit of effective military advice.”  He concluded that the war was lost not in the field or by the media or even on antiwar college campuses, but in Washington, D.C., through a failure of nerve by the Pentagon’s generals, which led civilian officials to opt for a deficient strategy. 

    McMaster is a genuine scholar and a gifted writer, but he still suggested that the Joint Chiefs should have advocated for a more aggressive offensive strategy — a full ground invasion of the North or unrelenting carpet-bombing of that country.  In this sense, he was just another “go-big” Clausewitzian who, as historian Ronald Spector pointed out recently, ignored Vietnamese views and failed to acknowledge — an observation of historian Edward Miller — that “the Vietnam War was a Vietnamese war.”

    COIN: A Small (Forever) War

    Another Vietnam veteran, retired Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Krepinevich, fired the opening salvo for the hearts-and-minders.  In The Army and Vietnam, published in 1986, he argued that the NLF, not the North Vietnamese Army, was the enemy’s chief center of gravity and that the American military’s failure to emphasize counterinsurgency principles over conventional concepts of war sealed its fate.  While such arguments were, in reality, no more impressive than those of the Clausewitzians, they have remained popular with military audiences, as historian Dale Andrade points out, because they offer a “simple explanation for the defeat in Vietnam.” 

    Krepinevich would write an influential 2005 Foreign Affairs piece, “How to Win in Iraq,” in which he applied his Vietnam conclusions to a new strategy of prolonged counterinsurgency in the Middle East, quickly winning over the New York Times’s resident conservative columnist, David Brooks, and generating “discussion in the Pentagon, CIA, American Embassy in Baghdad, and the office of the vice president.” 

    In 1999, retired army officer and Vietnam veteran Lewis Sorley penned the definitive hearts-and-minds tract, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam.  Sorley boldly asserted that, by the spring of 1970, “the fighting wasn’t over, but the war was won.”  According to his comforting tale, the real explanation for failure lay with the “big-war” strategy of U.S. commander General William Westmoreland. The counterinsurgency strategy of his successor, General Creighton Abrams — Sorley’s knight in shining armor — was (or at least should have been) a war winner. 

    Critics noted that Sorley overemphasized the marginal differences between the two generals’ strategies and produced a remarkably counterfactual work.  It didn’t matter, however.  By 2005, just as the situation in Iraq, a country then locked in a sectarian civil war amid an American occupation, went from bad to worse, Sorley’s book found its way into the hands of the head of U.S. Central Command, General John Abizaid, and State Department counselor Philip Zelikow.  By then, according to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, it could also “be found on the bookshelves of senior military officers in Baghdad.”

    Another influential hearts-and-minds devotee was Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl.  (He even made it onto The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.) His Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam followed Krepinevich in claiming that “if [Creighton] Abrams had gotten the call to lead the American effort at the start of the war, America might very well have won it.”  In 2006, the Wall Street Journal reported that Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker “so liked [Nagl’s] book that he made it required reading for all four-star generals,” while the Iraq War commander of that moment, General George Casey, gave Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a copy during a visit to Baghdad.

    David Petraeus and current Secretary of Defense James Mattis, co-authors in 2006 of FM 3-24, the first (New York Times-reviewed) military field manual for counterinsurgency since Vietnam, must also be considered among the pantheon of hearts-and-minders.  Nagl wrote a foreword for their manual, while Krepinevich provided a glowing back-cover endorsement.

    Such revisionist interpretations would prove tragic in Iraq and Afghanistan, once they had filtered down to the entire officer corps. 

    Reading All the Wrong Books 

    In 2009, when former West Point history professor Colonel Gregory Daddis was deployed to Iraq as the command historian for the Multinational Corps — the military’s primary tactical headquarters — he noted that corps commander Lieutenant General Charles Jacoby had assigned a professional reading list to his principal subordinates.  To his disappointment, Daddis also discovered that the only Vietnam War book included was Sorley’s A Better War.  This should have surprised no one, since his argument — that American soldiers in Vietnam were denied an impending victory by civilian policymakers, a liberal media, and antiwar protestors — was still resonant among the officer corps in year six of the Iraq quagmire.  It wasn’t the military’s fault!

    Officers have long distributed professional reading lists for subordinates, intellectual guideposts to the complex challenges ahead.  Indeed, there’s much to be admired in the concept, but also potential dangers in such lists as they inevitably influence the thinking of an entire generation of future leaders.  In the case of Vietnam, the perils are obvious.  The generals have been assigning and reading problematic books for years, works that were essentially meant to reinforce professional pride in the midst of a series of unsuccessful and unending wars.

    Just after 9/11, for instance, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers — who spoke at my West Point graduation — included Summers’s On Strategy on his list.  A few years later, then-Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker added McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty.  The trend continues today.  Marine Corps Commandant Robert Neller has kept McMaster and added Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger (he of the illegal bombing of both Laos and Cambodia and war criminal fame).  Current Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley kept Kissinger and added good old Lewis Sorley.  To top it all off, Secretary of Defense Mattis has included yet another Kissinger book and, in a different list, Krepinevich’s The Army and Vietnam.

    Just as important as which books made the lists is what’s missing from them: none of these senior commanders include newer scholarship, novels, or journalistic accounts which might raise thorny, uncomfortable questions about whether the Vietnam War was winnable, necessary, or advisable, or incorporate local voices that might highlight the limits of American influence and power. 

    Serving in the Shadow of Vietnam 

    Most of the generals leading the war on terror just missed service in the Vietnam War.  They graduated from various colleges or West Point in the years immediately following the withdrawal of most U.S. ground troops or thereafter: Petraeus in 1974, future Afghan War commander Stanley McChrystal in 1976, and present National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in 1984.  Secretary of Defense Mattis finished ROTC and graduated from Central Washington University in 1971, while Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly enlisted at the tail end of the Vietnam War, receiving his commission in 1976.

    In other words, the generation of officers now overseeing the still-spreading war on terror entered military service at the end of or after the tragic war in Southeast Asia.  That meant they narrowly escaped combat duty in the bloodiest American conflict since World War II and so the professional credibility that went with it.  They were mentored and taught by academy tactical officers, ROTC instructors, and commanders who had cut their teeth on that conflict.  Vietnam literally dominated the discourse of their era — and it’s never ended.

    Petraeus, Mattis, McMaster, and the others entered service when military prestige had reached a nadir or was just rebounding.  And those reading lists taught the young officers where to lay the blame for that — on civilians in Washington (or in the nation’s streets) or on a military high command too weak to assert its authority effectively. They would serve in Vietnam’s shadow, the shadow of defeat, and the conclusions they would draw from it would only lead to twenty-first-century disasters.   

    From Vietnam to the War on Terror to Generational War

    All of this misremembering, all of those Vietnam “lessons” inform the U.S. military’s ongoing “surges” and “advise-and-assist” approaches to its wars in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Representatives of both Vietnam revisionist schools now guide the development of the Trump administration’s version of global strategy. President Trump’s in-house Clausewitzians clamor for — and receive — ever more delegated authority to do their damnedest and what retired General (and Vietnam vet) Edward Meyer called for back in 1983: “a freer hand in waging war than they had in Vietnam.” In other words, more bombs, more troops, and carte blanche to escalate such conflicts to their hearts’ content.

    Meanwhile, President Trump’s hearts-and-minds faction consists of officers who have spent three administrations expanding COIN-influenced missions to approximately 70% of the world’s nations.  Furthermore, they’ve recently fought for and been granted a new “mini-surge” in Afghanistan intended to — in disturbingly Vietnam-esque language — “break the deadlock,” “reverse the decline,” and “end the stalemate” there.  Never mind that neither 100,000 U.S. troops (when I was there in 2011) nor 16 full years of combat could, in the term of the trade, “stabilize” Afghanistan.  The can-do, revisionist believers atop the national security state have convinced Trump that — despite his original instincts — 4,000 or 5,000 (or 6,000 or 7,000) more troops (and yet more drones, planes, and other equipment) will do the trick.  This represents tragedy bordering on farce. 

    The hearts and minders and Clausewitzians atop the military establishment since 9/11 are never likely to stop citing their versions of the Vietnam War as the key to victory today; that is, they will never stop focusing on a war that was always unwinnable and never worth fighting.  None of today’s acclaimed military personalities seems willing to consider that Washington couldn’t have won in Vietnam because, as former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak (who flew 269 combat missions over that country) noted in the recent Ken Burns documentary series, “we were fighting on the wrong side.”

    Today’s leaders don’t even pretend that the post-9/11 wars will ever end.  In an interview last June, Petraeus — still considered a sagacious guru of the Defense establishment — disturbingly described the Afghan conflict as “generational.”  Eerily enough, to cite a Vietnam-era precedent, General Creighton Abrams predicted something similar. speaking to the White House as the war in Southeast Asia was winding down.  Even as President Richard Nixon slowly withdrew U.S. forces, handing over their duties to the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) — a process known then as “Vietnamization” — the general warned that, despite ARVN improvements, continued U.S. support “would be required indefinitely to maintain an effective force.”  Vietnam, too, had its “generational” side (until, of course, it didn’t). 

    That war and its ill-fated lessons will undoubtedly continue to influence U.S. commanders until a new set of myths, explaining away a new set of failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, take over, possibly thanks to books by veterans of these conflicts about how Washington could have won the war on terror.  

    It’s not that our generals don’t read. They do. They just doggedly continue to read the wrong books.

    In 1986, General Petraeus ended his influential Parameters article with a quote from historian George Herring: “Each historical situation is unique and the use of analogy is at best misleading, at worst, dangerous.”  When it comes to Vietnam and a cohort of officers shaped in its shadow (and even now convinced it could have been won), “dangerous” hardly describes the results. They’ve helped bring us generational war and, for today’s young soldiers, ceaseless tragedy.

  • Visualizing History's Biggest Crypto-Heists

    The Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck had to admit having been targeted by hackers who got away with NEM coins worth half a billion dollars on Friday.

    As Statista’s infographic based on data by news agency Bloomberg shows, this wasn’t the first such heist.

    Infographic: The Biggest Crypto Heists | Statista

    You will find more statistics at Statista

    In 2014, the crypto exchange Mt. Gox lost digital currency worth some 480 million dollars. The company based in Tokyo said it had probably been stolen and had to file for bankruptcy in the United States and Japan shortly after. It had been one of the leading bitcoin exchanges.

    Coincheck for its part has assuaged its customers that any losses would be refunded, and further reassuring investors – sending the price of the hacked NEM surging higher – developers behind NEM created an automated tagging system to track down the funds stolen by hackers.

    As CoinTelegraph reports, the NEM development team created an automated tagging system to ensure that all funds stolen from Coincheck are traced. By tagging stolen funds as tainted funds, cryptocurrency exchanges can now easily verify if stolen NEM funds are withdrawn or deposited to regulated trading platforms.

     

    Image Courtesy of CoinTelegraph

    “Hack update: NEM is creating an automated tagging system that will be ready in 24-48 hours. This automated system will follow the money and tag any account that receives tainted money. NEM has already shown exchanges how to check if an account has been tagged. So the good news is that the money that was hacked via exchanges can’t leave,” said a NEM spokesperson.

    During an interview, NEM Foundation vice president Jeff McDonald confirmed the development of the tagging system and the work NEM Foundation will lead in the next few weeks to prevent stolen funds from being cashed out or converted to other cryptocurrencies through trading platforms.

    As of now, the hackers behind the Coincheck NEM security breach are out of options. It is not possible for the hackers to convert the stolen NEM to other major cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Ethereum because the automated tagging system will immediately alert exchanges about the tainted funds.

    Due to the sheer size of the stolen funds, it is also not likely that the hackers will go through small-scale cryptocurrency exchanges to convert or launder the stolen funds.

    At this stage, the only safe option for the hackers is to hold onto the stolen NEM. Because of the technology NEM has developed in light of the recent Coincheck hack, it has become significantly difficult for the hackers to do anything with the funds. It is not possible to cash out the stolen NEM to fiat currencies like the US dollar and it is also not possible to convert the stolen funds to other cryptocurrencies.

    NEM, its open-source development community, and the NEM Foundation did not have to develop the tagging system for the benefit of Coincheck, specifically because stolen funds on the NEM blockchain network would still have circulated around the network even if they are not recovered. But, NEM developers have done Coincheck and investors that lost millions of dollars in the hacking attack a tremendous favor by voluntarily creating a solution to a serious problem.

  • "History Isn't All About Us" – Nationalism Means Peace On The Korean Peninsula

    Authored by Justin Raimondo via AntiWar.com,

    Korea, the Winter Olympics, and the Spirit of Queen Min

    Nationalism means peace on the Korean peninsula

    We are told by practically everyone that nationalism is an archaic, aggressive, and downright evil sentiment, one that causes wars, racism, bigotry, and probably the common cold as well. And we get this from both the right and the left. Nationalism of any kind, we are told, is a dangerous atavism, a throwback to primitive “tribalism” and an insult to sacred “modernity.”

    While this nonsensical view is pretty widespread throughout the Western world, it is especially dominant – at least among the political class – here in the United States, where it is routinely alleged that America isn’t a place, it isn’t the American people: America, they solemnly intone, is an Idea. What sort of idea, or, rather, whose idea, seems to be a matter of some dispute: but, in any case, we aren’t really an actual country, according to the wise and wondrous elites who let us know what to think, so much as we’re an abstraction, floating in the ether, like a cloud in the sky imprinted with the image of a giant welcome mat.

     

    Things are quite different on the Korean peninsula.

     

    They called it the Hermit Kingdom before its forcible opening by the Western powers, and for a very good reason: unlike Japan and, later, China, the Koreans stubbornly resisted trade – or, indeed, any sort of contact with the West, which was strictly forbidden. While Western writers routinely attribute this to the supposedly tyrannical rule of Yi Ha-ung, the Regent (1864-97), Koreans then and now revere him as the defender of the nation from European encroachment and domination, which was China’s sad fate.

    An American crew in service to a British company made the first serious attempt to “open” Korea: in 1866 the General Sherman tried to sail up the Taedong river to reach Pyongyang, but were ordered back by the Korean authorities. The Westerners ignored this edict and continued on their way, but were soon beached when the river waters ran low. They were then set upon by the Koreans, who rescued the Korean officials who had been taken hostage by the crew and killed everyone on board. An inauspicious beginning to a relationship rife with conflict: today there is a monument on the spot where the General Sherman was burned which informs visitors that the leader of the attackers was the great-grandfather of Kim Il-Sung!

    Several more attempts were made by the Europeans, and all were repulsed: the French sent Catholic missionaries, who were ruthlessly persecuted along with their few converts. It was the Japanese who, finally, succeeded where the Western barbarians had failed: a Japanese force invaded in 1876 and succeeded in imposing a “treaty” according to which they acquired a complete trade monopoly, locking out the Chinese, their major rivals. This was endorsed by the king, who was considered a weak ruler, but opposed by Queen Min, who resisted the Japanese westernizing influence.

    As tensions rose, the Japanese demanded that the Koreans pay them tribute: Queen Min mocked the Japanese emissaries for wearing Western clothes and had them summarily deported. Shortly afterward a gang of Japanese thugs murdered her in her palace: she is today considered a symbol of patriotism and is honored in both the North and the South. During the subsequent Sino-Japanese war, the Japanese annexed the Korean peninsula, where they exercised dominion as part of their empire until the end of World War II.

    Korea’s history is one of implacable and fairly constant conflict with the violent and aggressive West, as well as resistance to both Japanese and Chinese domination: it is, in short, the history of a fiercely nationalistic people determined to shape their own destiny in the face of avaricious imperialism.

    The division of the Korean peninsula as the victorious Allied powers devoured the spoils of war did not erase the spirit of the courageous Queen Min, who sought an independent road for her country, or the Regent who resisted “modernization,” i.e. the integration of Korea into one or another mercantilist arrangement.

    While the communist North and the Western-occupied South certainly developed along far different lines, beneath the thin veneer of official ideology the country retained its nationalistic character. Both fragments of the split apart nation set up ministries devoted to “unification,” and, despite efforts by the Bush II administration to stop it, the “Sunshine Policy” of economic cooperation and closer ties nearly succeeded in bringing the two regimes to the point where unity was at least a possibility. However, the Bushites were determined to torpedo that effort and they finally succeeded, naming the North as part of the “axis of evil,” and threatening to invade by regularly conducting military “exercises” that limn a full-scale frontal attack. This is a yearly ritual.

    Despite all this, Queen Min is still looking out for her subjects: her unabashedly nationalist spirit pervades the new sense of optimism that is preceding the Winter Olympics, to be held in South Korea, with the full participation of the North. In a move that surprised – and horrified – the warmongers in the West (both inside and outside the Trump administration) North and South Korean athletes will march together under a special “unification flag”: the two countries will unite their hockey teams, and the North’s two champion figure skaters, Ryom Tai-Ok and Kim Ju-Sik, described by their South Korean counterparts as “friendly and kind and a little bit shy,” will be the stars of the show. The North Korean state orchestra is scheduled to perform.

    What is saving the Korean peninsula from a war so horrific that it is unthinkable is nothing less than nationalism, i.e. love of country and a fierce desire to preserve it against the depredations of foreign powers. As I wrote last year:

    “No, China is not the key to ending the impending North Korean crisis: with the installation of an antimissile system in South Korea, which the Chinese think is aimed at them, they aren’t likely to cooperate in any meaningful way. And, in any case, their influence is very limited, since their relations with Pyongyang have never been worse.

    “The initiative is going to have to come from Seoul, which has the most to lose if war breaks out. And when this initiative does come, Washington must welcome it, and do everything to foster it. When Trump was campaigning for President, he questioned the US presence in the South and wondered aloud why we had to risk war and bankruptcy providing for Seoul’s defense. His instincts were right: now perhaps we’ll get to see if his policies match his campaign rhetoric.”

    The initiative did come from Seoul. Trump’s bellicose rhetoric since taking the White House has caused many of the more hysterical NeverTrumpers to squeal that he’s about to launch a first strike at Pyongyang. Folks, it ain’t happening. His rhetoric no doubt helped motivate South Korean President Moon Jae-in to take the initiative in fulfilling his campaign promise to revive the “Sunshine Policy” and pursue better relations with the North in a serious way.

    History isn’t all about us. Sometimes – and, in the future, I believe this will increasingly be the case in a multi-polar world – it’s about people independently determining their own destiny and pursuing the path of peace.

  • Corrupt Baltimore Cops Admit Planting Guns, Using GPS-Locators To Rob Drug Dealers

    Over the past year, the Baltimore Police Department has undoubtedly gained national attention in a corruption scandal involving the Gun Trace Task Force, running wild on the streets of Baltimore.

    Members of this elite group were charged with “racketeering and other corruption, accused of robbing citizens, making illegal arrests and filing for thousands of dollars in overtime they never worked,” said the Baltimore Sun.

    Maurice Ward, one of the Gun Trace Task Force detectives, took the stand Tuesday in the case of officers Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor who were charged with robbery, extortion, fraud and firearm charges.

    Ward’s testimony provided a somewhat shocking account of how detectives used GPS locators to follow drug dealers, and then, eventually rob them of their cash and drugs.

    According to the Baltimore Sun, here are some notable and shocking moments from the testimony during Tuesday’s proceedings:

    Ward testified that his squad would prowl the streets for guns and drugs, with his supervisor, Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, driving fast at groups of people and slamming on the brakes. The officers would pop their doors open to see who ran, then give chase and detain and search them. Ward said this occurred 10 to 20 times on slow nights, and more than 50 times, “easy,” on busier nights.

    The officers had no reason to target the crowds other than to provoke someone who might have drugs or a gun into running. “A lot of times” guns and drugs were recovered in this way, Ward said.

    Ward said Jenkins liked to profile certain vehicles for traffic stops. Honda Accords, Acura TLs, Honda Odysseys were among the “dope boy cars” that they would pull over, claiming the drivers weren’t wearing seat belts or their windows were too heavily tinted.

    Ward said Jenkins also believed males over the age of 18 carrying bookbags were suspicious and attempted to stop them.

    Jenkins would portray himself as a federal agent, telling drug dealers that he was taking their money and drugs but would let them go because they weren’t his ultimate target.

    Ward said the officers used illegal GPS trackers to follow the movements of some targets.

    Jenkins would ask suspected drug dealers, “If you could put together a crew of guys and rob the biggest drug dealer in town, who would it be?” The officers would use the answers to determine who to target, Ward said

     

     

    In Ward’s testimony, he described some detectives carried around fake guns to plant on suspects in case they got into a jam. He further detailed an incident where detectives stole $100,000 from an illegal search of a home. The testimony shows detectives were in the game of robbing drug dealers, but on a positive note, the task force removed plenty of guns from the war-torn streets.

    Ward said the officers kept BB guns in their vehicles “in case we accidentally hit somebody or got into a shootout, so we could plant them.” He did not say whether the officers ever planted a BB gun on anyone.

    In one incident, police took a man’s house keys, ran his name through databases to find his address, went into the home without a warrant and found drugs and a safe. The officers cracked open the safe, which had about $200,000 inside. They took $100,000 out, closed the safe back up, then filmed themselves pretending to open it for the first time. “Nobody touch anything,” Jenkins can be heard saying on the video, which was played for jurors.

    After the man’s arrest, Jenkins listened to the man’s calls made from jail. He was discussing the officers taking his money, and said he wanted to hire a good lawyer to go after them. Ward said Jenkins determined the man’s wife was arranging his legal matters, and wanted to cut her out. They wrote a note purporting to be from another woman, saying the man had gotten her pregnant, and left it in the man’s door, Ward said.

    Later, Ward said Jenkins contacted him about wanting to rob the man again. They met at an apartment, where Jenkins and Detective Daniel Hersl sipped Twisted Teas and discussed a robbery. Another time, he proposed a different robbery, and showed the officers a large black bag that was full of balaclava ski masks, black clothing and shoes. Another bag contained tools such as a crow bar, battering ram, and a rope with a grappling hook. “I didn’t understand that part,” Ward said of the grappling hook. Both bags were emptied out for jurors in the courtroom.

    A federal prosecutor described the elite team of Baltimore detectives as a “perfect storm” of corruption in the opening arguments at the Gun Trace Task Force trial on Tuesday.

    Justin Fenton, a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun provides more updates on the ongoing trial:

  • Mike Krieger's Four Pillars For A Better Future: Part 3 – Action Matters

    Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

    There’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason it will never ever ever be fixed. It’s never going to get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you’ve got… because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now… the real owners. The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.

    Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. 

    – George Carlin on The American Dream

    Part 2 of this series dived into the importance of technology and innovation to the evolution of the human species. Indeed, innovation is one of the most important pieces to the puzzle, with the caveat that such advancements must be rooted in higher consciousness. An unconscious people will create and embrace technology that will enslave, while a conscious and thoughtful people will manifest innovation that can propel humans forward toward a vastly superior paradigm. Consciousness + innovation are the two most crucial variables when it comes to realizing our higher potential in the decades and centuries to come.

    That said, not everyone has the capacity or desire to work on the next groundbreaking technology. That’s perfectly fine. What we all possess is the capacity to become more conscious,thoughtful and loving, and it’s from this foundation that every individual can contribute to the creation of a better world. Whether you’re a lawyer, a banker, a painter or a chef, the most important thing you can do is ensure your work stems from a higher state of consciousness.

    An unfortunate aspect of life here on earth is we often neglect the power we have as individuals to affect the world around us. We overlook the fact we’re presented with various opportunities on a daily basis to do some good via small interactions with others and the environment. Don’t discount the importance of all the little things you do every day simply because you aren’t in a corporate suite making billion dollar decisions, or voting on legislation in Congress. You have tremendous power to influence the world around you each and every day. Don’t let the seemingly little, but consequential, daily opportunities pass you by unconsciously. Everything we do matters.

    Once you recognize your true power, you start to realize the current world is designed to prevent you from figuring it out. In fact, much of our media and culture is designed to make us feel small, inferior, weak, scared and insecure. We’re endlessly encouraged to obsess about the bread and circus spectacles that are Presidential elections, with the implication that voting for some new fraud every four years is the highest manifestation of our duties as citizens. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

    No billionaire or political “rising star” is going to sweep down and save you, the country, or the planet. It’s up to us to do that, and until we stop being lazy and admit this, we’ll continue to fall for conmen and women who offer fairytales visions of imminent salvation via a centralized and monumentally corrupt Washington D.C.

    The point is we need to first work on ourselves and then take it from there. A conscious people will not just bring forth liberating innovation, a conscious people will also understand that political change comes from the ground up, not from the top of the pyramid. Thinking otherwise is actually insane. Paradigm level change will never come from a place as deranged and corrupt as Washington D.C. Forget getting the “right people” in office and instead get to work at the local level.

    I like to highlight the issue of cannabis because it’s extremely instructive. Thanks solely to the will of the people, 9 states have now made cannabis fully legal, and it’s been decriminalized in another 13 states.

    This represents a historical achievement that would’ve appeared inconceivable 20 years ago. Most importantly, it was led by the people themselves in Colorado and Washington, where citizens directly voted to legalize it via public referendum in 2012. Significantly, the federal government played no role whatsoever. If anything, that centralized, corrupt bureaucracy has been actively holding things back, as we saw in 2016, when the DEA denied two petitions to reschedule marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

    Bottom line, Washington D.C. won’t be the wellspring of anything decent or beneficial, so stop indulging in such fantasies. Rather, we need to change as individuals and then drive meaningful improvement at the local level. Cannabis is just one high profile example of how much power the people can exert if we get organized and demand change. In fact, legalization has been such a success 65% of the U.S. population (including a majority of Republicans) now think cannabis should be legal. It’s become such a clear cut issue at this point even a federal fossil like Jeff Session is essentially powerless to stop it. Take the lessons learned from the huge success of the cannabis legalization movement and apply them everywhere.

    The point of this piece is to emphasize that we the people actually possess a lot of power. We relinquish that power by indulging in these silly games of looking for a decent politician to vote for. Even if we got one, D.C. is so entirely corrupt and entrenched with nefarious interests, a well-meaning person doesn’t stand a chance. The solutions to our problems will never come from the top, so please let that fairytale go.

    In reality, the true power resides in each and every one of us. Let’s start using it.

    In case you missed them:

    Four Pillars for a Better Future: Knowledge, Consciousness, Innovation, Local Action – Part 1

    Four Pillars for a Better Future: Knowledge, Consciousness, Innovation, Local Action – Part 2

    *  *  *

    If you liked this article and enjoy my work, consider becoming a monthly Patron, or visit our Support Page to show your appreciation for independent content creators.

  • Trump Refuses To Impose New Sanctions On Russia

    Following an expected Monday release of a list of “corrupt Russian oligarchs” by the US Treasury Department, the Trump administration notified Congress that legislation passed last year authorizing new Russia-related sanctions was sufficiently “serving as a deterrent,” and no action would be taken against those on the list, nor those doing business with the blacklisted entities according to a State Department spokesperson. 

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    “Given the long timeframes generally associated with major defense deals, the results of this effort are only beginning to become apparent. From that perspective, if the law is working, sanctions on specific entities or individuals will not need to be imposed because the legislation is, in fact, serving as a deterrent,” the spokesperson said.

    That said, the State Department also said that foreign governments and private sector entities are “on notice … that significant transactions with listed Russian entities will result in sanctions.”

      The list was created pursuant to an August 2017 law requiring the Treasury and State Departments identify officials and oligarchs as determined by “their closeness to the Russian regime and their net worth” in order to penalize the Kremlin for its alleged meddling in the 2016 election. The law allows President Trump to postpone sanctions on people or entities if he determines they are in the process of reducing or ending their involvement with Russia’s defense or intelligence industries – as long as Congressional committees are notified every six months that that progress has been made. 

      Trump’s decision has already drawn criticism from opponents and Russia hawks, as the move could be determined as a handout to the country which helped Trump win the election – as that narrative goes.

      “I’m fed up waiting for this administration to protect our country and our elections,” said Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, adding “They’ve now shown us they won’t act, so it’s time for Congress to do more.”

      “The Trump administration had a decision to make whether they would follow the law and crack down on those responsible for attacking American democracy in 2016 … They chose instead to let Russia off the hook yet again. The State Department claims that the mere threat of sanctions will deter Russia’s aggressive behavior. How do you deter an attack that happened two years ago, and another that’s already underway? It just doesn’t make sense.” –Eliot Engel

      Trump was reluctant to sign the August 17 legislation which called for the creation of the “corrupt oligarchs” list, as the new laws limit the President’s ability to undo sanctions imposed by the previous administration. 

      The president, who sought to change CAATSA while it was being written, sharply criticized the law while signing it in August.

      “By limiting the executive’s flexibility, this bill makes it harder for the United States to strike good deals for the American people, and will drive China, Russia, and North Korea much closer together,” Trump said in a statement at the time.

      The State spokesperson said Monday that some of the senior most State Department officials and other U.S. authorities have privately and publicly dangled the threat of sanctions over both foreign governments and other entities for their dealings with listed Russian entities. –The Hill

      “Since the enactment of the CAATSA legislation, we estimate that foreign governments have abandoned planned or announced purchases of several billion dollars in Russian defense acquisitions,” said State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert.

      Trump’s decision on sanctions was being watched closely by Moscow on Monday, according to Eurasia Group director Alex Brideau. “Wealthy Russians are reported to be lobbying heavily in Washington, seeking legal advice regarding their foreign investments,” said Brideau, adding that they were “trying to distance themselves from the Kremlin.”

      Amusingly, the Kremlin has pointed the the sanctions as a “direct and obvious attempt” by the United States to interfere with Russia’s upcoming presidential vote in March. 

      “We do think that this is a direct and obvious attempt to time some sort of action to coincide with our elections in order to influence them,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on a Monday teleconference. “We disagree with this, and we are sure this will have no influence.”

      We’re sure the Kremlin isn’t too worried about election influence, however – after the Kremlin disqualified one of Putin’s top rivals, Alexei Navalny, for a fraud conviction December, who was just arrested at a Moscow anti-corruption demonstration on Sunday.

    • NSA Deletes "Honesty" And "Openness" From Core Values

      Authored by Jean Marc Manach via The Intercept,

      The National Security Agency maintains a page on its website that outlines its mission statement. But earlier this month, the agency made a discreet change: It removed “honesty” as its top priority.

      Since at least May 2016, the surveillance agency had featured honesty as the first of four “core values” listed on NSA.gov, alongside “respect for the law,” “integrity,” and “transparency.” The agency vowed on the site to “be truthful with each other.”

      On January 12, however, the NSA removed the mission statement page – which can still be viewed through the Internet Archive…

       

      And replaced it with a new version…

       

      Now, the parts about honesty and the pledge to be truthful have been deleted. The agency’s new top value is “commitment to service,” which it says means “excellence in the pursuit of our critical mission.”

      Those are not the only striking alterations.

      In its old core values, the NSA explained that it would strive to be deserving of the “great trust” placed in it by national leaders and American citizens. It said that it would “honor the public’s need for openness.” But those phrases are now gone; all references to “trust,” “honor,” and “openness” have disappeared.

      The agency previously stated on its website that it embraced transparency and claimed that all of its activities were aimed at “ensuring the safety, security, and liberty of our fellow citizens.” That has also been discarded.

      The agency still says it is committed to transparency on the updated website, but the transparency is now described as being for the benefit of “those who authorize and oversee NSA’s work on behalf of the American people.”

      The definition of “integrity” has been edited, too. The agency formerly said its commitment to integrity meant it would “behave honorably and apply good judgment.” The phrase “behave honorably” has now been dropped in favor of “communicating honestly and directly, acting ethically and fairly and carrying out our mission efficiently and effectively.”

      The new list of values includes the additions “respect for people” and “accountability.” But the section on respecting people is a reference to diversity within the NSA workforce, not a general commitment to members of the public. Accountability is defined as taking “responsibility for our decisions.”

      The one core value that remains essentially unchanged is “respect for the law,” which the agency says means it is “grounded in our adherence to the U.S. Constitution and compliance with the U.S. laws, regulations and policies that govern our activities.”

       

      In response to questions from The Intercept on Tuesday, the NSA played down the alterations. Thomas Groves, a spokesperson for the agency, said: “It’s nothing more than a website update, that’s all it is.”

    • Information Blackout Follows Putin-Netanyahu Meeting

      What was today’s most important diplomatic meeting, was also the least publicly discussed. And judging by the information blackout in its aftermath, that’s just what the organizers intended.

      Very few details have emerged from the lengthy Moscow talks between Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, the duo’s seventh face to face meeting in two years, in which the two leaders who are currently reshaping the middle east in the power vacuum left by the US, were expected to discuss military cooperation on Syria and Iran’s influence in the region.

      The information fog after the meeting was so dense there wasn’t even a brief blurb on either Bloomberg or Reuters what the two spoke about in private; alternatively – and may this be a lesson for Trump – this is the intended outcome when there are no leaks.

      The meeting came less than a week after Netanyahu met US President Donald Trump in Davos, and he said that he spoke with the Russian leader about the same issues concerning Syria and Iran that he spoke about with Trump. Both men, he said, “understand” Israel’s positions.

      Netanyahu was also accompanied by the head of Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Herzi Halevi, and Putin brought Russia’s Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu to the talks.

      With the Russian army just across the border in Syria, Netanyahu said that these meetings with Putin – and the type of cooperation that has developed between the defense establishments of both countries – is critical “so we don’t clash.” In addition, he said these meetings are also important because they allow the two sides to frankly tell the other about their positions.  “In light of the changing situation, our policies also change,” Netanyahu said, adding that he relays to Putin Israel’s positions as “clearly and truthfully” as possible.

      Netanyahu and Putin met for some 90 minutes privately, and also held talks on bilateral issues with their wider staffs. Netanyahu said the discussions were “concrete,” not “theoretical.”

      Netanyahu said he and Putin talked about various “scenarios of escalation” in the region, and how they can be dealt with. Netanyahu said that with the Mideast at a crossroads, there is an opportunity to stabilize Syria and Lebanon, but that there is one actor – Iran – which is trying to do the opposite.

      The prime minister said he raised the issue of the Iranian nuclear deal, and he told Putin that if changes were not made to the deal, then it was likely that the US would walk away from it.

      * * *

      Russia’s president and the Israeli prime minister met at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, where the two leaders took part in the opening of an exhibit to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day call called “Sobibor: Victorious over Death,” which is dedicated to the 1943 uprising in the Nazi extermination camp. The exhibit tells the story of Alexander Pechersky, a Red Army officer who led a successful breakout from the camp.

      Putin said that memory of the Holocaust is “a warning against any attempt to jump on the idea of global domination, to announce, build or assert one’s grandeur based on racism, ethnic or any other supremacy. Russia categorically rejects any such attempt.”

      Commenting on the meeting, the Russian president’s aide Yuri Ushakov vaguely told reporters that Putin and Netanyahu discussed a number of bilateral and regional issues, as well as the process of reconciliation in Syria. The Syrian National Dialogue Congress, currently taking place in Sochi, was also among the topics discussed, the Russian official said, without providing any details.

      Senior Israeli official Ze’ev Elkin, who came to Moscow alongside Netanyahu, said the meeting between the two leaders was “very fruitful and lasted longer than it was planned” adding that meetings between Putin and Netanyahu have “contributed greatly to the security of our country.”

      * * *

      There was some additional coverage in the Israeli local press, with Jerusalem Post  which quoted Netanyahu saying that “if Iran is not stopped from entrenching itself militarily in Syria or turning Lebanon into a factory for precision missiles aimed at Israel, then Israel will stop it.” Speaking with Israeli reporters via a conference call after the meeting, Netanyahu said the discussions took place at a “watershed” moment.

      “Will Iran entrench itself in Syria, or will this process be stopped?” Netanyahu said. “I made clear to Putin that we will stop it if it doesn’t stop by itself. We are already acting to stop it.”

      The prime minister said he also spoke with Putin about the threat of Iran manufacturing precision weapons in Lebanon, something Jerusalem views as “a grave threat.” Netanyahu said he told Putin that “also here, if we need to act, we will act.”

      The Israeli prime minister revealed some of the topics he discussed with Putin in a recorded statement posted on Twitter.

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      Netanyahu said he told the Russian president about his concerns of “Iranian attempts to create military bases in Syria,” and of Tehran’s alleged attempts to place “high-precision weapons” in Lebanon to target Israel. Tel Aviv firmly opposes such actions and will act on its own if the international community won’t handle the issue, he warned Putin. The reaction of the Russian president to these statements, however, remained a mystery.

      In parting, Putin gave Netanyahu as a gift a letter the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who save some 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust, sent to his wife.

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