Why is the Lockerbie bomber still alive? This week Senator Robert Menendez, Chair of the Congressional Inquiry into why someone (or indeed everyone) isn’t dead yet announced plans to send a team of yankee investigators to Scotland. This we can understand as it clear that protocol has been breached on this matter. When someone in Scotland commits a crime like say theft or in the case of the accused, Bertybasset al-Megrahi being spotted buying a jumper (or another one the same colour) which was found on a plane, they are tried by a group of vote hungry senators in the run up to mid-term elections. The only hope of clemency for those found guilty comes in the form of a Christmas pardon from our Lord and Saviour, Obama H. Christ.
Kenny McAskill chose to bypass the time honoured tradition of doing exactly what America wanted and instead exercised a strange form of indigenous justice. Under this crazed system us savage Scots occasionally demonstrate that we have different values to those who seek to destroy us…or America…or is that the same thing?
Anyways understandably pissed off Menendez is sending a crack team to Scotland to investigate what’s wrong with this crazy country and what we can learn from our American brethren. SSY meets the men who hope to save us.
Leading the group will be Frank “Freaky Sheik” McDeak (Dem.) Frank will investigate the disgraceful link between oil and political power in Scotland. “This all came as a shock for me, I had to cut short my Saudi holiday…I was watching 50 virgins spray oil out their whatnots while I threw dollars at them…and now I hear these Scotch have been cutting deals in exchange for oil…America would never cut deals with those who tried to blow us up in exchange for oil and money. The Sheik just wouldn’t have it.”
Perry: If you can't hang 'em - Shoot 'em!
Controversial Texas Governor Rick Perry (Rep.) is to investigate the woefully inhumane Scottish Justice system. “Sure I’ve killed a few people….well a few hundred…and I’ve fired all those in the justice system who questioned my decision to execute a man who according to all my closest advisors and scientists was asleep at the time he is supposed to have murdered his kids…but these Scotch! I tell you…letting someone go who allegedly bought a jumper, a strand of which was allegedly found on a plane that Iran Libya blew up…monsters I say…the lotta them!”
The final senator will be Hawky Pearson (Rep) well known international peace activist. He is concerned by what he sees as a continuation of a trend. “We should have seen the warning signs in Darien. For centuries Scots have been dragging their junior partners in the US around on a series of imperial adventures. They dragged us into their conflict with Libya then just like we sent our young men to die for Scottish oil companies in Iraq and Afghanistan. I say no more American blood should be spilled for Scottish interests!”
We also understand that the Senators are to be accompanied by other progressive Americans concerned that Scotland is slipping into an authoritarian nightmare.
Pat “McGroin” Robertson, gay rights activist, is looking into allegations that crazy, Christian homophobes are funded the very same SNP government who freed the terrorist plotter. “We believe some rightwing bus bandit may have influenced the Scottish regime with his insane ranting about the gays. I’ve never been to Scotland but as I’ve always said there are definitely lots of homos there. We can’t allow these people to influence the government.”
SSY preparing for the American Heroes
The group will be rounded off by asylum campaigner and renowned anti-racist Pat Buchanan. He is expected to directly challenge the racism of the Scottish regime by visiting the controversial “Border Wall” constructed all the way along the border to prevent the flow of poor southerners crossing the border to Scotland to access free personal care for the elderly and lower tuition fees. “I intend to deliver a message to the racists in Scotland. I will invoke the spirit of Reagan and say ‘Mr Hadrien! Tear down this wall!’”
In the US Mr al-Megrahi, convicted on, quite literally, a shred of evidence would have been taken out and shot thus saving the need for all these pesky investigations and all this pish chat about “the truth” “justice” and “closure.” The SSY is ecstatic that these Americans want to visit our depraved nation and show us the light.
We shall greet them on the tarmac waving our Saltires and asking…Why isn’t Scotland more like America?
Yesterday marked the celebration of 50 years of independence for the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In 1960, Congo was finally able to free itself from one of the most brutal regimes in all of colonial Africa: Belgian control. Of all the European colonial powers, the Belgians were notorious as the worst for their ruthless exploitation of the Congo’s resources, and their horrendous violence against its people.
Since independence, there’s not been much for people to celebrate, with a 32 year brutal dictatorship followed by a state of total civil war which is the second worst war in the history of humanity, and has claimed for more victims than world war one.
Around the world, not many people think about the almost unimaginable death toll of the wars in Congo, and when they do it’s only to confirm racist stereotypes about independent Africa. The Congo today is not only the home of a devastating war, but also unbelievably high rates of sexual violence, preventable disease, illiteracy and poverty.
But the blame for the disastrous state of the Congo today shouldn’t be put at the door of the Congolese people. Rather, its European powers, and later the US, that must accept responsibility for turning swathes of Central Africa into a hell on Earth.
An armed forces day message to unarmed civil rights protesters
Today the city I call home didn’t feel like home for me. The city centre of Glasgow, like towns and cities all over Scotland, played host to a massive display of weaponry, Union Jacks, and mass recruitment to the British military.
Today is armed forces day, the second time that an annual “celebration” has been held, allegedly to “Show Your Support for the men and women who make up the Armed Forces community.”
I want to make clear from the outset that I have no problem with charities collecting money to support soldiers and veterans. God knows, the way that people who leave the military are treated by the state, they need it. 20,000 veterans, traumatised and psychologically damaged from their experiences, are in prison, probation or parole. As many as a quarter of those sleeping rough in the UK may have been in the forces, and there are hundreds of veterans on the streets or in hostels. Then there’s the harder to measure damage the wars the British government has engaged in has caused to British troops: the mental health problems, the alcoholism, the divorces, the suicides.
But you wouldn’t have heard much about that today. In Glasgow, although the charities that pick up the pieces of these broken lives were round the fringes of George Square, the heart of the city centre was instead given over to a massive celebration of British imperialism, war and military recruitment.
This week Obama sacked his top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. What the affair proves is that, for US commanders, it doesn’t matter how many innocent civilians you kill, or deaths you cover up; what really matters is slagging off colleagues.
McChrystal had given exclusive access to a reporter from Rolling Stone, who went on to report some of the stuff he said about other top US officials in Afghanistan. Basically, he and his team don’t think very highly of them.
McChrystal and his aides said of Obama that he was “unprepared” and “intimidated”, and of US Vice-President Joe Biden, “Who’s that? Joe Bite Me?” They called a meeting with a French minister about war policy “fucking gay.” They say the President’s national security adviser is “a joke”. They call the President’s special adviser to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, “a wounded animal”, and react to him contacting them with “Not another fucking email from Holbrooke!”
The comments are so extraordinary they have made some people ask if McChrystal was actually trying to get fired to avoid taking the blame for failure in Afghanistan. Obama has made a promise to start pulling out troops next July, but this is of course dependent on the situation being stabilised to the US’ liking, something which looks just as unlikely as it has done for the last few years. Certainly there seems to be a recognition by pretty much everyone interviewed in the article that the US is not going to succeed in getting what it wants from Afghanistan. In a long piece, the words “win” or “victory” are not uttered by the general or his team. One commander who does say win says:
“It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win. This is going to end in an argument.”
But a perhaps more convincing explanation is that McChrystal is a product of a society that now accepts permanent war as a part of reality, and glorifies the soldier above the political “wimps” and “pen pushers” back home. The US is an incredibly militarised society, a process which has accelerated dramatically over the past decade. The idea of unending war for global dominance has become acceptable in a way that it wouldn’t have been not that long ago. McChrystal spoke out as part of a culture that loves “mavericks” who ignore what those above them think, causing maximum destruction in the process.
Movies and popular culture help create the context in which McChrystal felt he could publicly speak his mind so dramatically. His backstory reads a perfect action movie character. As a student he defied authorities and was a hard drinker, before going into the special forces to command black ops on behalf of the US government. This is the kind of character who is constantly glorified to the American public. His team of special advisers, who surely must share some of the blame for his gaffes, was composed of special forces veterans, and called themselves ‘Team America.’
The reporter for Rolling Stone himself was suckered into this atmosphere, gleefully describing how, after the “fucking gay” dinner, Team America found the “least Gucci” (unfancy) Paris bar to get “shit faced”, dance, sing incoherent songs about Afghanistan and declare how they would die for each other.
America's top people in Afghanistan
What the tales of macho heroism ignore however is the truth of what a special forces based, counter insurgency strategy actually means. Sacking McChrystal, Obama declared he was making “a change of personnel not of policy.” That is, the plan that McChrystal fought for in Afghanistan remains in place.
The plan is basically to flood Afghanistan with US troops, who will carry out special forces missions to assassinate the networks of opposition, gaining intelligence on how people organise against the US presence and eliminating them. In Iraq, McChrystal headed death squads that systematically hunted US opponents. The article refers to this operation as a “killing machine”, and McChrystal as “a terrorist hunter.”
The only problem with this plan is that it’s been shown again and again not to work. Leave aside all your preconceptions of Jack Bauer lone warrior types from movies, and examine the places were these kinds of tactics have been used before. Algeria, where the French were defeated by the national resistance and independence achieved in 1962. Or Vietnam, where year upon year of American actions failed to remove the political support for the National Liberation Front among the people.
The new US commander, veteran of death squads in Iraq General David Petraeus, wrote a manual on counter insurgency that praises Operation Phoenix in Vietnam. This programme used capture, torture, assassinations, terrorism and infiltration to disrupt the civilian population of Vietnam who supported the Communist resistance to the US. It targeted civilian members of the Communist Party, and led to untold deaths and misery. At least 26,000 people were killed. One former US serviceman called it “a sterile depersonalised murder programme.”
Insurgencies, or guerilla wars, fundamentally depend on the support of the people. Mao famously once wrote that “the guerilla must swim in the people as the fish swim in the sea.” Therefore, counter insurgency programmes inevitably end up killing a lot of civilians.
A good example of what the policy means for people in Afghanistan is a night time raid in Khataba earlier this year. US special forces attacked a home, killing a teenage girl, two pregnant women, alongside an Afghan police officer and government prosecutor who were on their fucking side.
On discovering they had made a mistake, the soldiers then carved their bullets out of the bodies with knives, and carved more out of the walls of their home. They washed blood from the scene with alcohol, and went on to tie up the corpses, claiming that was how they had found the scene. McChrystal, as overall commander, supported this cover up. It was only exposed because of journalists who were willing to dig a little deeper. However, McChrystal has suffered no reprimand as a result. If it had turned out that the men in the house had been “enemy combatants,” you can bet they wouldn’t even have bothered with the cover up.
Death covered up: Pat Tillman
McChrystal’s only other major previous brush with trouble was the affair of Pat Tillman. Tillman was a celebrity recruit for the military, a former NFL American Football player, who very publicly joined the special forces after 9/11, in what was a propaganda coup for the military and government. He was later accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan, something which McChrystal helped cover up by signing off on a falsified report aiming to make it look like he had been killed by hostile fire. But even when this was exposed he got away with it, even though this time it was an American celebrity dead rather than a (to the US public) anonymous Afghan girl.
So the conclusion to take away from all this is clear: the US government doesn’t care about civilian deaths, or even that much about the deaths of their own grunts. Deaths are what they send commanders abroad to cause. But when you start fucking with your fellow officials and commanders, well then your job really is on the line.
Hamid Karzai first came to western attention after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, where he was imposed as the President of the divided country. He’s a far cry from scary unshaven one-eyed Taliban head honcho mad bastard Mullah Omar, and other Taliban hardliners – Karzai cuts a dapper figure in sharp suits, possibly designed by Gok Wan. In a piece of largely unreported (can’t imagine why) news however the west’s favourite man in Afghanistan has been rocking the boat a bit, declaring if he gets any more flak for rigging elections he will bugger off and join the Taliban. Karzai is upset at the west for raising mild criticisms of his electoral fraud (which he blames on the US), and says if they keep pressuring him he will join the Taliban and change it into a “National Resistance Movement” – because anyone who is paying you off suddenly becomes much nicer. Unfortunately small irrelevant news like the President of Afghanistan threatening to go flakey and join the people you are currently fighting isn’t important enough for the UK media.
Oh Hamid, you are a tease!
Karzai’s threat isn’t as outlandish as it may seem – he originally joined in the Taliban’s Pashtun based rebellion, after he himself had served as a Government minister in a Jaaamat I-Islamiya (an Islamic fundamentalist group) led Afgan regime. Today Karzai is happy to sit in Government with a raft of brutal Afghan warlords who impose similar Sharia law on their population to the Taliban. Karzai doesn’t have any principles beyond manoeuvring himself into power, whether it’s with Afghan warlords, Taliban or NATO.
The fact that the President of a country, the leader of it’s fictional “Afghan National Army” openly talks about defecting to the Taliban like a career move shows there is no stable, democratic or principled Afghan Government worth defending. It’s a collection of cut-throat careerists who are in power off the back of NATO firepower, and not one more Afghan, British or American Soldier should die to prop up Karzai’s corruption any longer.
One bit you might have missed in the leaders’ debate the other night: David Cameron’s justification for why he thinks the UK should retain the capacity to destroy life as we know it by replacing Trident:
Quite what scenario that brings China and the UK into a nuclear war is I’m not sure. Maybe Dave’s got another war to force them to take opium planned again. Or maybe the Tories are committed to a policy of “If we can’t have Hong Kong no one will!!!!”
At least when Labour take us to war the enemy doesn’t really have any WMD they can hit back at the UK with. If you think war with China would be a laugh, maybe you need to check this out Mr. Cameron. While China can easily match the UK when it comes to nukes, they are however the only country to have given a pledge not to use nukes against states that don’t have any (meaning we’d be SAFER if we scrapped Trident) and also have a “no first use” rule when it comes to using nuclear weapons.
We can’t be certain what the future holds for China, but I can be pretty certain there will be ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING, not even the kidnapping of Jack Bauer, that would ever justify nuking the most populous nation on Earth. Come on people, are we really going to let the end of the world be a vote winner?
A while ago I did an article about violent videogames, where I jokingly made reference to accidentally shooting civilians in a helicopter gunship. Watching this footage thats been leaked on the internet of insurgents and civilians (including a reuters cameraman) being slaughtered makes you wonder how far war is from a videogame today. The gunship attacking the crowd doesn’t appear to be at threat, with the pilots chatting casually -- and then laughing when they make the kill.
This isn’t the first time journalists have been killed by the US Army -- the Al Jazeera offices were bombed not just in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan as well. This slaughter of journalists might have been a mistake, but the attack on Al Jazeera offices twice in two wars must be a deliberate attack on a tv station that is critical of the war on terror.
The footage of this attack must have been extremely hard to obtain, and leak without risk of discovery and or court martial from the US military -- it’s very likely there are many more cases like this across Iraq, that we will never see footage of. The mainstream media has ignored research done by institutions like ORB predicting over a million Iraqi casualties, with Iraq Body Count research showing the single largest cause of death was from US/UK forces attacking from the air.
The SSP is standing across Scotland in 10 constituencies, and alongside opposition to cuts in public services we’ll be making the case for the withdrawal of all British troops from Afghanistan. We’ve had new branches and dozens of new members on the back of our campaign for withdrawal, and were also standing SSY and SSP member James Nesbitt in Glasgow Central. Listen to him below speak out against the occupation of Afghanistan.
I found the above map via boingboing. It shows attacks by unmanned robotic drones committed by the US within Pakistan. The analysts who produced it write:
“Our study shows that the 114 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan, including 18 in 2010, from 2004 to the present have killed approximately between 834 and 1,216 individuals, of whom around 549 to 849 were described as militants in reliable press accounts, about 2/3 of total on average. Thus, the true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 32%.”
Of course, what defines a militant in this kind of situation could be pretty elastic. But what this seems to be showing us is that at least a third of the people we are sending robots to kill are completely innocent Pakistani civilians.
Earlier this year The Guardian reported how a group of police forces and government agencies are working with BAE systems to adapt military drone robots for use in spying on UK citizens.
The flying robots are currently used in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world to monitor and mount attacks by remote.
When the US invaded Iraq in 2003 it had no military robots on the ground, and only a few unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air. Today, just in Iraq, the US military is using 7000 drones and around 12, 000 ground robots. Although the US military is driving the development of military robots, the UK and other major arms manufacturing countries aren’t far behind. The Ministry of Defence has hosted robotics competitions to design new surveillance bots, and recently bought 100 Dragon Runner robots. Canada, South Korea, South Africa, Singapore and Israel. China, Russia and India all have military robotics programmes of their own.
Without any real public scrutiny or comment, the way our governments conduct war, and indeed carry out police operations at home, is becoming increasingly robotocised. What’s wrong with this? On the face of it surely less human casualties for our soldiers is a good thing?
In Vietnam 58, 000 US soldiers died, compared to a few thousand in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. A lot of this has to do with advancing technology, better medical techniques etc. However, over the past century civilian casualties in war have rocketed. In World War 1 civilians were only 10% of those that died. Today they make up as much as 90% of war casaulties. For example, it’s been reported that 1 million Pakistanis have fled their homes because of threat of US drone attacks on the border with Afghanistan. The people of the North-West Frontier Province must be wondering where their John Connor is.
Predator drone
Military chiefs have recognised since Vietnam that it’s often difficult to make ordinary people pull the trigger and kill a fellow human being. Even unconsciously, many will aim their guns high rather than shoot someone. It’s one of the reasons that the US moved away from using conscription to recruiting their army. They wanted a professional force of highly motivated trained killers.
Since Vietnam, the US military has becoming increasingly dependent on air power, and satellite monitoring from space. Now the sudden upsurge in the use of robots continues the trend-increasingly US soldiers in other countries are able to kill at a distance, probably with a video screen in between. This makes it much easier to indiscriminately destroy any suspected threats, meaning more civilians get killed in the process. For a generation of military robot operators who have grown up doing similar tasks in computer games again and again, it’s easy to see how they get desensitised to the misery they’re causing from afar.
Anti-war campaigners are currently able to get a lot of support because many people in Britain and the US are angry about the numbers of our troops dying in imperial wars. One of the main drives behind developing new robots is a hope by the government that this means they can reduce the numbers dying significantly. While nobody wants to see working class kids sent to die, we also don’t want to see the government feeling free to intervene anywhere it feels like it using robot troops.
The boom in military robots is also making a lot of money for arms manufacturers, like the privatised UK government agency turned international evil megacorp QinetiQ.
And now, with the news that the police in the UK are going to have access to surveillance drones, we’re about to see a dramatic increase in the ability of the state to spy on us wherever we go. The people of the UK already have more CCTV watching them than anywhere else on Earth. There’s about 1 CCTV camera for every 14 people in Britain.
But with the use of drones the police will be able to cheaply monitor anywhere they want from above, which obviously has implications for political activists that get up to things the government don’t like.
Some companies, like iRobot, make both civilian and military robots. iRobot manufactures both the PackBot and the Roomba home cleaning bot. Such companies are potentially worried about public pressure, and should be targeted.
Just in case you think I’m making this up, or exaggerating the threat, here’s a look at some of the latest developments in robotics.
This is the SWORDS robot, that is armed and able to kill:
Here’s some footage of the truly terrifying (but still cool to look at, I know) BigDog robot, designed with funding from the military to be an artificial pack mule carrying gear over difficult terrain:
BigDog has got a little friend, the LittleDog.
This is a group of swimming robots based on a fish, with obvious potential naval applications.
Something that is especially creepy is the potential now to remotely control insects and intercept what they see for the use of surveillance. Check out this cyborg moth:
Perhaps the most crazy idea of all though is the EATR. This stands for Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot. The basic idea is that it would be able to operate alone out in the field for a long period without going back to base to refuel. Hence EATR-it can take organic matter from the environment and turn it into fuel. This has, unsurprisingly, got a lot of people worried. The idea of a potentially flesh eating killer robot on the loose is something that does not appeal to anyone who is even half way sane.
Artists' impression of the future EATR robot
The manufacturers and government agencies working on this technology have strictly denied that the EATR would ever start using the “organic matter” contained in the corpses of those it kills as fuel. They claim it is strictly vegetarian. Yet their own documents talk about chicken fat as a potential fuel, so the possibility that it could use fuel derived from animals, including humans, is clearly there.
Although many of these robots are developing the capacity for autonomous action, that is to take decisions on their own without the need for a human operator, we’re still quite a few years away from something with the intelligence of a Terminator or a Cylon.
And we shouldn’t be against the advances in robotics technology going on per se. It’s just that no technology is neutral-people design things with a goal in mind. And in our society one of the main goals is to make sure that the world’s most powerful countries are able to dominate the planet and exploit its peoples at the minimum cost to themselves.
But even with the prospect of robots becoming self-aware and nuking humanity isn’t quite on the horizon yet, some experts are already calling for serious thinking about military robots. Many have demanded that governments start thinking now about the implications of taking the decision of whether or not to kill someone out of human hands and putting it on an autonomous robot.
But SSY has a slightly more radical idea: how about we just don’t build KillBots. Doesn’t sound so crazy really, does it? Here’s a couple of documentaries that might win you round if you don’t agree:
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