Image via WikipediaEmpire of Bases 2.0: Does the Pentagon Really Have 1,180 Foreign Bases?
In a world of statistics and precision, a world in which “accountability” is now a Washington buzzword, a world where all information is available at the click of a mouse, there’s one number no American knows. Not the president. Not the Pentagon. Not the experts. No one.
The man who wrote the definitive book on it didn’t know for sure. The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist didn’t even come close. Yours truly has written numerous articles on U.S. military bases and even part of a book on the subject, but failed like the rest.
There are more than 1,000 U.S. military bases dotting the globe. To be specific, the most accurate count is 1,077. Unless it’s 1,088. Or, if you count differently, 1,169. Or even 1,180. Actually, the number might even be higher. Nobody knows for sure.
In Afghanistan
When I contacted the military to sort out discrepancies and listed the numbers I had been given -- from Shanks’ 400 base tally to the count of around 250 by Younger -- I was handed off again and again until I landed with Sergeant First Class Eric Brown at ISAF Joint Command’s Public Affairs. “The number of bases in Afghanistan is roughly 411,” Brown wrote in a November email, “which is a figure comprised of large base[s], all the way down to the Combat Out Post-level.” Even this, he cautioned, wasn’t actually a full list, because “temporary positions occupied by platoon-sized elements or less” were not counted.
After months of exchanging emails and seeing the numbers swing wildly, ending up with roughly the same count in November as I began with in January suggests that the U.S. command isn’t keeping careful track of the number of bases in Afghanistan. Apparently, the military simply does not know how many bases it has in its primary theater of operations.
Scan the Department of Defense’s 2010 Base Structure Report for sites in Afghanistan. Go ahead, read through all 206 pages. You won’t find a mention of them, not a citation, not a single reference, not an inkling that the United States has even one base in Afghanistan, let alone more than 400. This is hardly an insignificant omission. Add those 411 missing bases to Kristof’s total and you get 971 sites around the world. Add it to the Pentagon’s official tally and you’re left with 1,073 bases and sites overseas, around 770 more than Walter Trohan uncovered for his 1955 article. That number even tops the 1967 count of 1,014 U.S. bases abroad, which Chalmers Johnson considered “the Cold War peak.”
There are, however, other ways to tally the total.As it happens, though, Afghanistan isn’t the only country with a baseworld black-out. Search the Pentagon’s tally for sites in Iraq and you won’t find a single entry. (That was true even when the U.S. reportedly had more than 400 bases in that country.)
In addition to the unknown number of micro-bases that the Pentagon doesn’t even bother to count and Middle Eastern and Afghan bases that fly under the radar, there are even darker areas in the empire of bases: installations belonging to other countries that are used but not acknowledged by the United States or avowed by the host-nation need to be counted, too. For example, it is now well known that U.S. drone aircraft, operating under the auspices of both the CIA and the Air Force and conducting a not-so-secret war in Pakistan, take off from one or more bases in that country.
Image via WikipediaGovernment-created climate of fear
When I first wrote about WikiLeaks and the war the Pentagon was waging on it few had heard of the group
( The ads were in odd places : I wondered at the time if it wasn't being kept a better secret from the people who would be interested in what it did than from those who might harbour malice towards it )There were numerous people who had a fear of supporting it because donating money to a group so disliked by the government would cause them to be placed on various lists or, worse, incur criminal liability for materially supporting a Terrorist organization.
( One of the thoughts that went through my head when opit.wordpress.com was archived was a wonder if links to foreign blogs hadn't triggered a suppression response - not so crazy if you realize I had really strange problems with my computer at times. And it wouldn't have had to be any open action to give me problems. Paranoid ? Um.
There are places I deliberately did not list online at their request...and several have 'closed shop' for fear of retaliation.Nor am I talking about many I know not to be U.S. citizens...though I generally followed a policy of ' If it's interesting and not part of the echo chamber' I may well follow developments.
Besides : there was a broad feeling that those who wanted to 'know what was going on' should reasonably have been expected to have found out already. Where from ? Well, I've listed Alternative News sites for years...but unless you hopped around
Third World Traveler, third world, United States foreign policy ...
THIRD WORLD TRAVELER is an archive of articles and book excerpts that seek to tell the truth about the state of American democracy, media, and foreign ...www.thirdworldtraveler.com/
the blogroll there, and Library sites ..you may well have missed what has been going on for years.)
Image via WikipediaFrom a strictly legal standpoint, those concerns were and are ill-founded: WikiLeaks has never even been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime, nor does it do anything different than what major newspapers around the world routinely do, nor has it been formally designated a Terrorist organization, nor -- I believed at the time -- could it ever be so designated. There is not -- and cannot remotely be -- anything illegal about donating to it. Any efforts to retroactively criminalize such donations would be a classic case of an "ex post facto" law unquestionably barred by the Constitution. But from a political perspective, the crux of the fear was probably more prescient than paranoid: within a matter of months, leading right-wing figures were equating WikiLeaks to Al Qaeda, while the Vice President of the U.S. went on Meet the Press and disgustingly called Julian Assange a "terrorist." ( But for me, of course, the surprise was much less...since I've read most of what I've plugged into the 'Perception Alteration' file. )
But more significant than the legal soundness of this fear was what the fear itself signified. Most of those expressing these concerns were perfectly rational, smart, well-informed American citizens. And yet they were petrified that merely donating money to a non-violent political and journalistic group whose goals they supported would subject them to invasive government scrutiny or, worse, turn them into criminals. A government can guarantee all the political liberties in the world on paper (free speech, free assembly, freedom of association), but if it succeeds in frightening the citizenry out of exercising those rights, they become meaningless.
( And if you think those are not sensible attitudes I suggest you read up on the history of the F.B.I. and of McCarthyism....similar to today's Islamofascism meme in attacking rights and freedoms of the citizenry....if there were really any such ! Or anti Trade Union activity. )
That a large percentage of those brutalized by this system turned out to be innocent -- knowingly innocent -- is a feature, not a bug: that one can end up being subjected to these lawless horrors despite doing nothing wrong only intensifies the fear and makes it more effective.
( So the converse is also true. You can 'do wrong' on what the state might maliciously allege in defiance of its mandate ; reasonably sure that the administration/bureaucracy is incompetent to follow through on logical grounds.
That's why the Patriot Act is a kludge. It is intentionally a dictatorial SNAFU which does not conform to legal norms...and why secret orders and agreements also disable the law.
Appalling ? Sure. New ? Not really.
There was a Canadian detective ( P.I.) program in which the female lead had a quip she tossed at 'immigration officers' on her way through the border when asked her business - and I wish I was sure whether it was "I'm going to the 'Land of the Brave' to see if the 'Free' are at home" or the other way around. And in case Canadian humour is too subtle...it was snark...perhaps set in the era of the Vietnam draft. )
Consider Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the former WikiLeaks volunteer and current elected member of Iceland's Parliament whose Twitter account was also the target of the DOJ's snooping (prompting Iceland's government this morning to summon the U.S. Ambassador for an explanation). She was scheduled to leave on a long-planned trip to Canada for a conference and last night wrote this about her travel plans:
That's an elected member of the Parliament of a NATO country who -- after having the DOJ use the federal courts to snoop through her private online information -- is now afraid to fly through the U.S.
And these fears are well-justified. Anyone connected to WikiLeaks -- even American citizens -- are now routinely detained at the airport and have their property seized, their laptops and cellphones taken and searched and retained without a shred of judicial oversight or due process. And this treatment extends to numerous critics of the government having nothing to do with WikiLeaks.
Yesterday, computer security expert Chris Soghoian documented how little the DOJ can hope to learn from the court-ordered Subpoena issued to Twitter (given how limited is the information stored on Twitter). But that's the point: the goal of that Order isn't to learn anything; it's to signal to anyone who would support WikiLeaks that they will be subject to the most invasive surveillance imaginable.
This is the same reason for keeping Bradley Manning in such inhumane, brutal conditions despite there being no security justification for it: they want to intimidate any future whistleblowers who discover secret American criminality and corruption from exposing it (you'll end up erased like Bradley Manning). And that's also what motivates the other extra-legal actions taken by the Obama administration aimed at WikiLeaks -- from publicly labeling Assange a Terrorist to bullying private companies to cut off ties to chest-beating vows to prosecute them: they know there's nothing illegal about reporting on classified American actions, so they want to thuggishly intimidate anyone from exercising those rights through this climate of repression.
Much of the world, as a result of such actions, sees the U.S. not as "Leaders of the Free World" but one of the greatest threats to privacy and other core liberties. Watching people afraid to fly through the U.S. -- including its own citizens -- is just remarkable.
Image via WikipediaShould everyone cool off the coalfield rhetoric?
A lot of the media coverage has focused on Sarah Palin’s “crosshairs ad,” but I did happen to notice that Tom Brokaw mentioned West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s “Dead Aim” advertisement this morning on MSNBC. And I’m told that David Gregory mentioned it on Meet the Press yesterday.( What seems seldom mentioned is that for subsets of society feeling oppressed, these ideas may seem sensible and urgent. Certainly corporate sponsorship of the Tea Party is not done without any thought being taken to the usual 'message control'....nor do I should have to belabour the obvious. )
It does happen here : 'Can you outrun a nine millimeter...'
In the last election cycle, when I ran for State Representative, I received several threats of gun violence on the campaign trail. .....
Quoting directly from the police report on Nipko's side of the story: "According to him they argued and increased until she asked if he was going to hit her. His reply was, 'No but can you outrun a nine millimeter?'"
To me, this was a threat and I was concerned enough to go to the police. The county prosecutor, Lynn Stoppy, refused to pursue the case, dismissing it as only an implied threat.
After Giffords Shooting, Other Threatened Politicians Decry Arizona's History Of Extremism
Wilcox, a Democrat, had been the target of talk-radio tirades telling Maricopa County residents to "take her out.""I knew at the time that the hate had been caused by a lot of the rhetoric that had gone on," Wilcox told HuffPost. "At the trial, the man actually said, 'I shot her because the radio said I should take her out.'"
When she heard what happened to Giffords, she said, she felt a tinge of familiarity. "That's what we have come to," Wilcox said. "If you disagree with someone in Arizona, you demonize them.
Giffords News Roundup
Exclusive: Loughner Friend Explains Alleged Gunman's Grudge Against Giffords
Environmental Activist Exposed As Undercover Agent and Expresses Remorse- UK
For seven years Mark Stone was an important and serious environmental activist. According to the Guardian, he took part in every major protest in the UK from 2003 onwards and traveled abroad to demo's as well.
In October environmentalists discovered that he was living a double life as an undercover agent for the police. Now, in the midst of a trial of activists, he has expressed remorse and quit the police, telling friends that what he did was wrong.
It turns out that he had been a policeman since 1994, and a secret agent infiltrating protest movements and "monitoring domestic extremists" since 2003.
Gibbs Departure Offers Opportunity To Fix White House Press Relations
Image via Wikipedia
The modern White House press secretary operates in a defensive crouch, fending off questions rather than answering them and revealing as little as possible.
Mason said Gibbs comes out to the podium with the goal of not making news."It's all about control," she said. "It's all about trying to control the press and trying to control the message. And you can't. And the more that they try to control it, the less information we get."
To people who believed Obama's campaign promises about transparency -- and to people who thought the Obama administration had some good stories to tell, and should tell them -- Gibbs was a disappointment from his very first day on the job.
From that first briefing, it was clear that Gibbs's approach would be as defensive and uninformative as his most recent predecessors in the notoriously opaque Bush administration.
That he was doing what his boss wanted became abundantly clear the very next day.
One person who was unsurprised was Helen Thomas, the 90-year-old former wire service reporter who covered the White House from 1961 until being unceremoniously drubbed out of the press corps last June for one highly inflammatory comment.
"It's the same old game," she told HuffPost. "They get their marching orders every morning from the chief of staff and the senior advisers."
Mason said the correspondents' association has repeatedly heard complaints from reporters that they have been berated by members of the press office, and in some cases been cut off in retaliation for pointed questions or unwelcome stories.
There is, however, a bright side of being snubbed by the press office, Mason said: "Their information is so useless that when they cut you off, they're not really harming you in any way."
Image by Getty Images via @daylifeKlout Lands $8.5 Million From Kleiner Perkins And Greycroft To Measure Social Influence
Klout, which markets itself as a “standard for influence” on the web, evaluates Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook users’ behavior with complex ranking algorithms and semantic analysis of content to measure the influence of individuals and topics around the web. On Twitter, Klout’s influence score is based on a user’s ability to drive action through Tweets, ReTweets and more. On Facebook, Klout will examine how conversations and content generate interest and engagement, via likes, comments, and more, from the network’s 500 million-plus users.
How I brought my electricity bill down to $5
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Duke Energy agreed to pay $47.48 a share for Progress Energy on Monday, in a deal valued at $13.7 billion.
The deal would create the country’s largest utility, with $22.7 billion in revenue and more than 7 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio.
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