Web of Democracy

Japanese counterinsurgency 'force multiplier' may have been targeted.

Initial reports said [the between one and five] car bomb[s] that tore through Kandahar Tuesday, killing at least 40 and injuring more than 60 civilians, was "against a[n] office of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)."  [North India Times] This was quickly denied by CIDA official Lucas Robinson, who "said CIDA has its headquarters at the Canadian military base in Kandahar...Robinson said the confusion might have arisen because the abbreviation for the Japanese construction company that was hit by the attack was similar to that of CIDA's." [Monsters and Critics]  

Taliban spokesperson Qari Yuosef Ahmady denied and condemned the attack, one of the largest since the 2001 invasion, stating "Whoever carried out the explosion, they are the enemies of the Afghan people, the enemies of the Muslims, and enemies of Islam.”

The New York Times reports that the Japanese construction company is Saita Afghanistan, an affiliate of Japan's Saita Corporation (according to AP, see their video report), whose headquarters were "flattened" by the blast. Even though "the explosion appeared to be from a single truck bomb outside the building used by Saita," Japanese officials denied that their office was targeted. "People related to the Afghan authorities suspect that the target was the facilities of the National Directorate for Security and not the Japanese company," said Foreign Ministry Press Secretary Kazuo…

You will recall that before Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez began to rival Oprah's scale of book sales with his presentation of a copy of Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America to President Obama earlier this year, he helped Chomsky sell out his Hegemony or Survival, after referencing it in his 2006 UN General Assembly address. Today, we learn that Chomsky is visiting Venezuela, where he has been praised by Chavez as "among the intellectuals who have helped most in the fight against the imperial hegemony." [El Universal] [Image: Terra Magazine]

You have two choices - Patrick Cockburn's take on the Afghan demo elections, via the Independent or Counterpunch:

"What foreign reporting of elections in both Afghanistan and Iraq misses is the extent to which ordinary Afghans and Iraqis regard their governments as rackets run by political gangsters for their own ends...One of the many depressing aspects of the American and British campaign in Afghanistan is that so few of the lessons of Iraq have been learned...So little has been learned in Iraq because propaganda is being taken as a guide to what happened there and what should be done in Afghanistan."

Earlier this month, Amnesty International issued a call for jailed Lavalas activist Ronald Dauphin to be released pending trial. He's wallowed in prison for over four years following his detention by the coup regime on what many believe to be "trumped up charges." IPS reports on the growing movement to free Dauphin. (Note: documentation and background information concerning the Canadian International Development Agency's funding of the legal and PR work of Dauphin's partisan accusers can be viewed here; critical background and analysis of the events surrounding Dauphin's imprisonment can be found here and here.)

The Time's Oliver Kamm is at it again. He clearly does not like Chomsky's response to Ian Williams, accusing him of "typical Chomskyism[s]," such that "In the manner of the conspiracy theorist, he snatches at quotations [namely, from Wesley Clark],  that divulge a latent policy agenda." Kamm doesn't seem to understand what "uncontroversial facts" are (ie. As Chomsky wrote, "The worst atrocities began as the [NATO] bombing [of Kosovo] started").

On this matter, let's inject some fresh analysis into the mix by turning to Professor of Public Affairs at the LBJ School at the University of Texas, Alan J. Kuperman. Fittingly enough, Kuperman has presented his cautionary findings at two R2P conferences, one of which featured (Ret.) General Wesley Clark, who is a senior fellow at UCLA's Burkle Center, host of a major R2P conference last April.

Kamm tries to show that Clark is not the 'impeccable source' that Chomsky makes him appear to be, pointing to statement's that Clark made which appear to contradict what he stated in his memoirs (the ones that Chomsky quoted from, p. 171).

Independently arriving at the same "uncontroversial" conclusion as Chomsky, Kuperman's research doesn't rely on testimony from Clark, just typical scholarly rigor and extensive interview with former KLA rebels. Speaking at the Cardozo School of Law's R2P conference in March 2008, Kuperman said, "In 1998, prior to NATO bombing, the Serb forces were killing about a hundred per month. After NATO bombing,…

- Bolstering the argument made by Mahmood Mamdani in his important Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror, CSM's Marc Gustafson unmasks the destructive role of the "Save Darfur" lobby, "the activist campaigns [that] mischaracterized and sensationalized [the war in Darfur] in order to grow the movement. Such distortion helped the PR effort, but it arguably hurt the very people who needed help." [Christian Science Monitor] 

"CIA Hired Private Military Firm Blackwater for Secret Assassination Program." [via Democracy Now!, and NYT's original]

- Malalai Joya: "Like millions of Afghans, I have no hope in the results of this week’s election. In a country ruled by warlords, occupation forces, Taliban insurgency, drug money and guns, no one can expect a legitimate or fair vote." [Common Dreams]

- Scahill: 'No Interference in Afghan Elecs - Except James Carville and the US occupation.' [RebelReports] [Note: Carville is advising presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani. As Stephen Colbert put it, "How could Carville campaign against our puppet leader [Karzai]?" How, indeed.

- Porter: 'Karzai and Warlords Mount Massive Vote Fraud Scheme.' [IPS]

- RAWA's Miriam Rawi and Sonali Kolhatkar lash out at the [humanitarian imperialist] Feminist Majority Foundation's "advoca[cy] for further troop escalation and war." [h/t: VoltaireNet]

- Also see, 'Electoral fraud and intimidation of the press.' [StopWar]

- Further to the quickly retracted headline last week ("Taliban Now Winning"), and following the three-plus year trajectory that has seen the Taliban's resurgence, the AP reports:

"Southern Afghanistan is the focus of the U.S. deployment of an additional 21,000 troops this year, and the region where many say the legitimacy of Thursday's presidential and provincial elections will rest, depending on voter turnout...But it's also the region where the Taliban have their strongest infrastructure - one that goes beyond warriors to a shadow government that includes a justice system and militant-appointed governors." [Associated Press]

…

There have been a number of interesting developments on the R2P Lobby front since the July 23rd informal debate in the UN General Assembly involving R2P critics Noam Chomsky, Jean Bricmont, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, and prime R2P lobbyist, Gareth Evans. More on this later.

For now, a look at a particular exchange between Ian Williams and [aka 'Deadline Pundit'], and Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky recently wrote a response to Williams, who published a bizarre defense of R2P - assailing Chomsky in the process, earlier this month in a commentary for Foreign Policy in Focus. (FPIF, you may recall, had a somewhat watery 'Strategic Dialogue' on R2P last March; a version of Williams' article also appeared in the British Labour party's magazine, Tribune)

In his only direct attack on Chomsky (elsewhere he implicitly refers to him as among those "ideological allies" uttering "cynical accusations," as de facto "apologists for authoritarian sovereignty"), Williams writes:

"Noam Chomsky...claims the Nato air raids on Serbia actually precipitated the worst atrocities. This latter claim is not only untrue, but also morally unpalatable in its spurious causality."

FPIF graciously permitted Chomsky the right of reply to this and other claims. Exposing Williams' charge as amounting to "apologetics for NATO," Chomsky cites (Ret.) General "mad bomber" Clark who affirmed in his memoirs "that on March 6, 1999, he had informed Secretary of State Madeline Albright that if NATO proceeded to bomb Serbia, "almost…

Noam Chomsky is creating a buzz in Belfast, where he will be delivering the Amnesty International Annual Lecture, titled 'Hope and Prospects' on October 30th.

"Festival Director Graeme Farrow said he thought Mr Chomsky's speech "may turn out to be the fastest-selling speaker event in the [Belfast] Festival's history, such is the interest which Noam Chomsky attracts wherever he goes in the world." [BBC]

Catching up with the podcasts....Here's a good interview with Jeff Klein, recently returned from a brief visit to Gaza, via Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

"Jeff Klein’s excellent adventure this summer was a mission to Gaza, the Palestinian beachhead between Egypt and Israel, to witness resilience, as he says, amidst horrific destruction..." [Listen here]

Last week it was 'Red Reads,' this week the New Statesman brings an in-depth, moderately critical look at the ongoing war/occupation of Afghanistan. [10 articles here]

- Jean Saint-Vil,  'A Giant Step for Mankind - Made in Haiti: The Bwa Kay Iman uprising against slavery.' (GodisNotWhite.com)

- Chris Scott, 'Death Watch in Haiti's Jails.' (The Dominion) (Note: the ATIP documents that Scott references are (warning, big file) now online in 'Declassified.')

- Paul Farmer (who's also discussed in Saint-Vil's piece), author of The Uses of Haiti, founder of Partners in Health, Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) board member, was passed over as a potential director of USAID , but has just been appointed as the UN's Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti under Bill Clinton. Farmer has moved 'mountains beyond mountains,' now we'll see how he handles the slippery slope[s]...(tip: take a page from Richard Falk's playbook).

Two years ago today, one of Haiti's most tireless and well-known political and human rights activists, Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, was kidnapped. He has not been seen since and has presumably been killed; for now, he remains 'disappeared,' both literally and figuratively - his body has yet to surface, and the media and the self described 'friends of Haiti' (Canada, France, the U.S.) refuse to report on or press for an investigation into his abduction.

Chomsky and Herman defined the dynamic of 'worthy and unworthy victims' in their still-relevant, standard-bearing tome, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media:

"A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy."

As one of the most vocal opponents of the 2004 coup d'etat that ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide, Lovinsky's enemies were many. Virtually anyone who had a stake in preserving the status quo of foreign military occupation, repression against the once-ruling and still-dominant Lavalas political party and movement, and the shifting back of political power firmly into the hands of Haiti's notoriously brutal ruling elites, would like to see Lovinsky kept quiet.

Others have noted how the media, and the Canadian government in particular, have largely ignored the Lovinsky disappearance. Why has Lovinsky been deemed 'unworthy' of official attention?…

"We'll have a live report from Honduras on the continuing repression from the coup leaders there...Plus, Flashpoints' special correspondent Jon Elmer reports from the West Bank, and talks about the neo-liberal “model city” structure, entrenching apartheid and economic repression; and the Knight Report." [Listen here]

An update on the Ward Churchill case via DV, and today's interview with him (listen live or follow instructions to the archive/podcast, here)

By way of an interview, get up to speed with University of California at Santa Barbara professor William I. Robinson's victory over the pro-Israel lobby after they tried to make him a "test case" by having him reprimanded for criticizing Israeli policies earlier this year. Fortunately, due to the facts and a serious mobilization that effectively countered the Lobby, they failed. Yousef Baker from the Committee to Defend Academic Freedom at UCSB and Robinson were recently interviewed by Ottawa radio CHUO's 5 O'clock Train. (Listen here)

[Update: also see Ben Terrall's review of Robinson's latest book, Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective.]

- Anyone for Another [McChrystal-led,-perhaps-with-a-little-Colombian-help] Assassination Ring? 'U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Drug Lords Tied to Taliban' [NY Times]

- PSYOPS alert: 'At least two Afghan villages have been blanketed with leaflets warning that if an American soldier kidnapped by the Taliban two weeks ago isn't freed, "you will be targeted." [Original via CBS, and h/t]

- Baitullah Mehsud: Now [the drone strike] killed him, now it didn't.

- Long-time imperial brain trust member Anthony Cordesman (of RAND) calls for upwards of 45,000 more U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan;

- Lots of musings about how long foreigners are going to occupy Afghanistan for - from "many years to come" to "decades to come."

- Most people, of course, want troops out of Afghanistan, now. [Disclaimer: as professor Randall Marlin notes, “Knowing the mind of an audience comes in modern times largely through opinion polls. Money gives great advantage to a modern propagandist, since polls are not cheap.”]

The Pilger post reminded me to link to this important study from the good people at Project Censored.

"Based on the evidence presented we conclude that media concentration, PR consolidation, and post-9/11 sensitivities have all contributed to the continuation of strong support for the propaganda model theory as a significant way to understand corporate media in the US. We understand also that this theory may contribute to the news story selection process inside the left liberal media as well. Further investigation of this evidence will likely continue to develop over the next decade of media research." [h/t]

[Update]: see, related, Bob Feldman's "Report from the Field: Left Media and Left Think Tanks Foundation-Managed Protest?" (Apologies for mediocre, yet readable, quality)

'The radical works which can make sense of these extraordinary times':

- Malalai Joya's recently launched Raising My Voice: The extraordinary story of the Afghan woman who dares to speak out;

- Chomsky & Herman's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.

- Edwards and Cromwell's forthcoming Newspeak in the 21st Century;

- Miller and Dinan's A Century of Spin;

- Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics by Street

[among others at New Statesman]

Remember the controversial Ottawa Initiative on Haiti meeting? Here are the few, heavily censored documents that I obtained about the meeting via ATIP back in '04. There, you'll also find some memo's from then-Canadian ambassador to Haiti Kenneth Cook from around the time of the coup. 

Important details and analysis of the coup's backers in Washington continues to emerge. BoRev reminds us to keep an eye on Machetera, as she looks into 'Otto Reich and the Honduran Coup D’Etat: The Provocateur, his Protege, and the Toppling of a President.' (Part 1, Part 2). Along similar lines, In These Times digs into the Honduran Connection. Another detailed-if-disturbing development finds that perennial coup-supporter Roger Noriega was hired by fellow anti-Cuban Jonathan B. Slade's Cormac Group to help lobby on behalf of Honduran business elites shortly after the coup. Noriega already has experience with both fomenting and consolidating the '21st century coup,'  as those who followed the lead-up to and aftermath of the events of February 29, 2004 in Haiti will be aware.

'Will Progressives Respond To The Attempt to Overthrow The President?' A fair question posed by the news dissector. 

The latest installment of William Blum's Anti-Empire Report.

You might recall that a previous, Draft version of the Canadian Army's Counterinsurgency Operations Manual was leaked by Ceasefire.ca in 2007. (Reported on here and here.)

Now you can compare the two. The final version (reported on earlier this year here, here, here , here , here, and here is now available via Wikileaks. [Update, as of April 2010, the Wikileaks page is unavailable. Fortunately, Public Intelligence has also released a copy of the COIN manual, and for good measure, I've uploaded their copy to the WOD's 'Declassified' section, which you can download directly here (.pdf).]

Canadian independent journo Eva Bartlett, who braved the Israeli-led assault on Gaza earlier this year, reports on the plight of local taxi drivers. 

"Rami Dawoud confirms that no cars, new or used, have been allowed into Gaza in the last three years. Gaza currently has around 45,000 cars, of which many are worn-down, damaged, in need of parts unavailable in Gaza, or on their last legs. According to the Ministry of Transport, 1,197 cars were damaged during the war, another 565 were completely destroyed." [IPS]

Nine more NATO soldiers were killed over the weekend in separate incidents (mostly by the ever-evolving IED -  six U.S., two Canadian, and in direct clashes with insurgents -  one French: "U.S. troops say militants are now using bombs with little or no metal in them, making them even harder to detect"[Link]), along with ten civilians and two Afghan police, courtesy of a bomb blast in Herat.

"At least 71 foreign troops were killed in July. This included 41 U.S. troops, well above the previous monthly high of 26 in September 2008, and 22 British soldiers." [Link]

The increase in violence comes amidst reports of increasing popular opposition to the war and occupation in Britain and Canada, two of the U.S.'s key allies [read: lacking 'caveats' that would prevent them from 'taking it' to the insurgents] in the South. Canada is slated to change its contribution to the counterinsurgency effort by the end of 2011, although the extent of a post-2011 mission is still undetermined despite increasing speculation. The British, meanwhile, have announced that they will be deploying "up to 2,000 more troops to Afghanistan as part of an effort by General Stanley McChrystal, the American commander, to train more Afghan soldiers and police."

The violence also coincides with the upcoming elections and the recent, massive influx of U.S. soldiers - "a record 62,00." Despite the huge increase in the U.S. presence (the process for which began in the final months of the Bush administration), a…

The Canadian 'Minister of State of Foreign Affairs (Americas)' (a new title created just for him following his election last October), Peter Kent (reportedly a member of the neo-conservative, Orwellian-named 'Canadian Coalition for Democracies') appeared on CBC radio's The Current along with  Rights Action's Grahame Russell. Consistent with the Conservatives tyrannical communications policies, Kent refused to debate Russell directly. Russell later replied, in print, to Kent's Honduran distortions. 

Adjectives Russell uses to describe Kent: "misleading," "inappropriate and disturbing," "parroting the highly questionable position of the coup planners and perpetrators," "openly partisan," "seemingly washing clean the hands of the coup supporters," "biased," among others...