Weapon Proliferation: MANPAD

Obviously when someone goes to war, they need weapons. Humans are tool-creating and tool-using animals, and so when we go to war we think of the tools required to perform the war. Hence, weapons are the tools we use in war.

One type of weapon, man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS), is of particular interest. They are relatively portable, relatively easy to train soldiers in their use, and very successful in bringing down aircraft. They are often called "shoulder-launched missiles".

In Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror Richard Clarke details how the U.S. coordinated shipping Stinger Missiles to the Mujahadeen fighting in Afghanistan against the Russian invasion. The U.S. could not put its own soldiers into Afghanistan, likely Russia would have taken that as a direct agression which would have turned their invasion in Afghanistan into a direct world-wide confrontation between the worlds super-powers. Instead the U.S. was supporting the Mujahadeen, and arranged for weapons shipments and training. The transfer point for this activity was Pakistan, and U.S. forces were working in Pakistan, fully in cooperation with the Pakistan Intelligence services, to safeguard the training and arming of the Mujahadeen.

It turns out that the leader of the Mujahadeen, chosen from the elite of the Saudi families, was one Osama bin Laden, who has since become infamous for other activities. The result of this activity by the U.S. to arm and train the Mujahadeen was to demonstrate to those fighters that they can fight, attack, and repulse a world super-power. The turning point in the Afghanistan invasion was the mid-1980's. As Clarke said, the Russians were winning and consolidating their control over Afghanistan, which alarmed the U.S. planners. This is what caused the U.S. to take the step of arming the Mujahadeen with Stinger missiles. Over the next few years the Mujahadeen were successful in routing the Russians, causing their withdrawal from Afghanistan, and shortly afterward the U.S.S.R. collapsed.

Obviously these are potent weapons indeed.

Fast forward to 2004, and we (the U.S.) finds MANPAD style weapons being used in Iraq against American forces. It just so happens that the Mujahadeen the U.S. had armed and trained morphed in the intervening years into the Taliban and al Qaeda. While the Taliban and al Qaeda had no contact or cooperation with the former Iraq government, they are active in Iraq today for exactly the same reason they were active in Afghanistan in the 1980's. Namely, the Arab/Islamic homeland has been invaded by outsiders (then it was Russia, today it is the U.S.) and they are fighting off that invasion. In addition the toppling of the former Iraqi government by the U.S. created a power vacuum, which al Qaeda no doubt wants to fill.

This is rich in Irony. The people we trained with those weapons, fight off our then enemy, contributing to the then enemy's collapse, and now those same people are using the same type of weapons to fight us off.

On June 3, 2004 the GAO released a report giving recommendations on the "proliferation" of these MANPAD weapons.

The U.S. has been selling the Stinger missiles to foreign governments, and then failing to adequately control what happens to them afterward. Legally the U.S. is to monitor the weapons, inventorying them every year, presumably to prevent those weapons from being resold. Just as obviously the forces in Iraq fighting the U.S. have these weapons, and are getting them from somewhere. The report talks of a black market.

Of concern also is their use against commercial aircraft. In 2002 a MANPAD was fired at a commercial jet leaving Kenya for Israel, but it missed.

MSNBC report, June 4, 2004: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5137264/

GAO Report: Nonproliferation: Improvements Needed in Countering Threat for Man-Portable Air Defense Systems. GAO-04-519, May 13. Highlights

On Going to WAR

This is being written while the U.S. is in the midst of an undeclared war. As I've written elsewhere on this site I believe the U.S. administration has lied in order to call for this war, and deserves to be impeached over the creation of this war. I am speaking of course of the second war in Iraq, which has toppled Saaddam Hussein and his government from power. As I write a year afterward, it is hard to remember the toppling and the imagry, especially of U.S. soldiers pulling down the Saddam statue in the main square in Baghdad. In the year since there has been an unceasing grinding of death, destruction, and more.

Leading up to the launching of this war was a great Debate. The debate was high and mighty sounding, with the U.S. President taking moral stands, the Secretary of State giving a moving delivery of evidence to the World sitting in the main conference room of the United Nations. At the same time various countries were opposing the war, and protest rallies were held around the world. The effect of all that was a global debate on when it is appropriate to go to war, or innapropriate.

Since that high and mighty debate we've had a war, with all the grisly realties included in those activites. Accidental deaths from friendly fire, families killed by accident, people tortured, kidnappings, murder, theft, lootery, and more. War is Hell, and Hell has been unleashed. The idea I have gained is that those who would launch war should consider well before they do so, because they are going to unleash a bit of hell and brimstone. As the world tried to do just before this last war, the launchers of war should think about the causes, purposes, etc. But this war, like many, seems to have been launched for the basest of all possible purposes, megalomaniacal power over the world gained through ruling the center of the place where the worlds power comes from, namely the oil belt.

That's the purpose for this page, to look back over war in general, why, etc.

[2004-06-08] Weapon Proliferation: MANPAD: Shoulder launched missiles are being proliferated to "terrorists", and are seen as a grave threat. The irony is that the U.S. directly proliferated those same weapons to those same "terrorists" in the 1980's to aid their fight against the then-enemy, Russia, and their invasion of Afghanistan.

[2004-05-31] First to Fight Culture: This article illustrates what I am getting at above. It is written by a U.S. Marine, inspired by a discussion with his Marine buddy, about what Marine's are trained for. The author, Chris White, points out that Marines are trained for one thing, to locate enemies, infiltrate them, and destroy them. Their training does not include peace keeping, humanitarian aid, political correctness and all the rest. Their training would have them, when unleashed, go in and destroy a country so that we can achieve our military ends.

[2004-05-17] Torture in the Iraq War: Horrendous acts being perpetrated by U.S. Military. This cannot be fitting American values, but here it is being perpetrated by Americans acting in their official duties as American Soldiers and in the act of committing war in the name of us Americans.

Big Brother is watching YOU (using Total Information Awareness)

How Big Brother Is Watching, Listening and Misusing Information About You (By TERESA HAMPTON & DOUG THOMPSON
Jun 8, 2004, 08:19, Capitol Hill Blue)

You’re on your way to work in the morning and place a call on your wireless phone. As your call is relayed by the wireless tower, it is also relayed by another series of towers to a microwave antenna on top of Mount Weather between Leesburg and Winchester, Virginia and then beamed to another antenna on top of an office building in Arlington where it is recorded on a computer hard drive.

The computer also records you phone digital serial number, which is used to identify you through your wireless company phone bill that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency already has on record as part of your permanent file.

A series of sophisticated computer programs listens to your phone conversation and looks for “keywords

Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq

Bush in Babylon: The Recolinisation of Iraq: The Recolonisation of Iraq

Tariq Ali is a novelist, essayist, and BBC commentator who was among the best-known radical student leaders in late 1960s Britain. One of the ways he distinguishes himself from his anti-war contemporaries is via prodigious and multidisciplinary cultural knowledge; he once collaborated with avant-garde filmmaker Derek Jarman on a film about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance. Bush in Babylon benefits greatly from such knowledge. The book is essentially a harsh critique of the way the Bush administration has dealt with Iraq in the wake of 9-11, referred to as "corporate looting." The most captivating chapter centers on the history of Iraqi resistance as exemplified in poetry made by Iraqis in exile. Ali translates important contemporary works by poets who left during Hussein's regime but are still denied entry back into Iraq by Coalition forces. These are works that have traveled from the Internet to the oral tradition, to become instant spoken-word hits, and they provide a fascinating glimpse into the Iraqi situation that one cannot simply find in a daily newspaper in the West or on CNN. Ali's biggest fault is an undisguised disgust for the "imperialist" United States government. When he lists the casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki alongside those in Vietnam with no discussion of the difference between the two events, he alienates many potential fans of his important work. Bush in Babylon has a lot going for it, despite a polemical tone which invariably grates as one marches through this smart, well-researched book.

NY Times mea culpa for publishing misleading falsehoods about Iraq's WMD

[May 24, 2004] The NY Times has issued a mea culpa saying that some of their reporting leading to the Iraq War was dubious. Uh, duh, they were repeating the lies of the Administration.

However there is a Salon.COM article [salon.com/news/feature/2004/05/27/times/index.html] claiming that the principle NY Times reporter on this beat, Judith Miller, was apparently actively cooperating with the White House to get their lies published. She was working closely with the same liar, Ahmed Chalabi and his cronies, as was the Administration, so when Chalabi or one of his cronies might have told her some lie, he will have already told that lie to sources at the White House or DoD whom she could then call to get the confirmation required to publish.

For example, the issue of the Aluminum Tubes supposedly to be used to build centrifuges.

If the double-agent spy business had a trophy to hold up and show neophyte spooks what happens when their craft is perfectly executed, it would be a story by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on a Sunday morning in September 2002. The front-page frightener was titled "Threats and Responses: The Iraqis; US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts." Miller and Gordon wrote that an intercepted shipment of aluminum tubes, to be used as centrifuges, was evidence Hussein was building a uranium gas separator to develop nuclear material. The story quoted national security advisor Condoleezza Rice invoking the image of "mushroom clouds over America."...The story had an enormous impact, one amplified when Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney all did appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows, citing the first-rate journalism of the liberal New York Times. No single story did more to advance the political cause of the neoconservatives driving the Bush administration to invade Iraq....But Miller's story was wrong. ...It turned out that the aluminum tubes were covered with an anodized coating, which would have been machined off to make them usable in a centrifuge. But that change in the thickness of the tube wall would have rendered the tubes useless for a centrifuge, according to a number of nuclear scientists who spoke publicly after Miller's story. Aluminum, which has not been used in uranium gas separators since the 1950s, has been replaced by steel. The tubes, in fact, were almost certainly intended for use as rocket bodies. Hussein's multiple-launch rocket systems had rusted on their pads and he had ordered the tubes from Italy. "Medusa 81," the Italian rocket model name, was stamped on the sides of the tubes, and in a factory north of Baghdad, American intelligence officers later discovered boxes of rocket fins and motors awaiting the arrival of the tubes of terror.

War justifications relied on informants that the CIA had already dismissed as liars.

[May 19, 2004] War justifications relied on informants that the CIA had already dismissed as liars.

See [http://www.freep.com/news/nw/snitch18_20040518.htm; Detroit Free Press; May 18, 2004] The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, claimed he had worked at illegal chemical, biological and nuclear facilities around Baghdad. But when members of the CIA-operated Iraq Survey Group, charged with tracing any illegal weapons held by ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, took Saeed back to Iraq earlier this year, he pointed out facilities known to be associated with the conventional Iraqi military. He couldn't identify a single site associated with illegal weapons, U.S. officials said....

The informant in question gets prime billing in "A Decade of Deception and Defiance", a report issued on September 12, 2002 in support of President Bush's highly defiant and inflamatory speech to the United Nations on that day (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/iraqdecade.pdf).

The report in turn refers to another report, Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Net Assessment, by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. (http://www.iiss.org/news-more.php?itemID=88) This second report is an independant review of Iraq's capabilities, and some portions of the report were used in the justifications that ultimately led to the war. Note that the phrases were apparently cherry-picked from the report, since the report for example says things about the nuclear capability (e.g. that they had none) which the Administration did not say (e.g. their claim was to point at Iraq's imminent nuclear capability).

The war has gone from bad to worse, to even worser.

[May 19, 2004] And it went from worser to even worserer. Namely, U.S. soldiers are now known to have been torturing, yes, torturing, both Iraqi and Afghani prisoners. This is the U.S., we don't do that kind of thing do we?

[April 29, 2004] The war has gone from bad to worse, to even worser. At the breaking point [Salon.com; by Robert Schlesinger] Under the rubric of the war on terrorism, the U.S. armed forces are now conducting operations in more countries around the world than at any time since World War II, though in sheer numbers the current force of 10 active divisions is dwarfed by the 90 divisions of the earlier force. The Bush administration's policies have created unsustainable and dangerous conditions in the U.S. Army, according to military experts, retired officers and a growing number of elected officials from both parties. The administration's insistence on doing more with less has left the military unable to secure Iraq, triggering a ripple effect that threatens the morale of active and reserve members of the Army, retention, training schedules and, not incidentally, American lives. While some of the underlying issues predate this administration, they have been exacerbated by the decision to wage a war of choice in Iraq and critically bad judgments on how that war's aftermath would play out. ... Rumsfeld prevailed in the planning for the war and its aftermath. And it was his belief that more from less would work as well with the occupation as it did with the military conquest. His faith was bolstered by neoconservatives' insistence that the U.S. forces would be greeted as liberators; that once Saddam was toppled a democratic Iraq would immediately take its place; and that the allied troops and newly minted Iraqi security forces would bear their share of the burden.