Iran deploys its war machine

/ the difference a letter makes /
Iason Athanasiadis is a freelance journalist and photographer residing in Tehran - probably one of the most knowledgable and perceptive western correspondents in the Middle East. In this article in the Asia Times, he describes Iranian preperations for a possible US/Israeli attack, the mentality of the Iranian military and their plans he notes:

...a fundamental transition that Iran's Revolutionary Guard (RG) is undergoing as it moves away from focusing on waging its defense of the country on the borders - unrealistic in view of the vast territory that requires securing and the gulf separating Iranian and US military capabilities - and toward drawing the enemy into the heartland and defeating it with asymmetrical tactics.

At the same time, the RG is moving away from a joint command with the ordinary army and taking a more prominent role in controlling Iran's often porous borders, even as it makes each of Iran's border provinces autonomous in the event of war. Iranian military planners know that the first step taken by an invading force would be to occupy oil-rich Khuzestan province, secure the sensitive Strait of Hormuz and cut off the Iranian military's oil supply, forcing it to depend on its limited stocks.

Foreign diplomats who monitor Iran's army make it clear that Iran's leadership has acknowledged it stands little chance of defeating the US Army with conventional military doctrine. The shift in focus to guerrilla warfare against an occupying army in the aftermath of a successful invasion mirrors developments in Iraq, where a triumphant US campaign has been followed by three years of slow hemorrhaging at the hands of insurgents...

Athanasiadis mentions in passing the fact that Iran is probably in possesion of these nasty little anti-ship missiles, state of the art and currently "unbeatable", which promise to make the Straits of Hormuz a rather dangerous playground - with all that this implies for the worlds energy supply (considering that 40% of it passes through these Straits daily).

Speaking of Athanasiadis and countries that start with Ira: he recently published in Greekworks a very interesting letter from Iraq, offering an unsanitized version of his experiences in the "most terrifying city on earth"... Well worth the read.

ESF demo Athens, May 6 2006

/ We're ready for the Champions League /
Thomas, of Anatomy of Melancholy, has posted in flickr some photos from the ESF demonstration.

I note that we've put up quite a team. An American striker (move over Eto'o):



And a French french midfielder:



Anyway the March last week was quite impressive, all things considered, especially since the police and the media were preparing for and announcing this as if it were the arrival of Attila's hordes. The number of participants was around 40.000 I'd figure, possibly more, because the march seemed to diffuse around the whole area. Included in the march, but ignored by the corporate media, were representatives of the Stray Dog Liberation Front of Athens:


[from nkdx's collection]

Greek wiretaps: calling home

/ wiretap dancing /
Following up the huge wiretap scandal I've posted about previously (1, 2, 3), there are many developments most of which seem not to be widely reported outside Greece.

So lets start with what has been reported. The Guardian, on April 10, wrote, recapping the situation as it stood then, that:

Vodafone faces harsh criticism this week from Greece's independent telephone watchdog for its role in an espionage scandal that has rocked the country.

In a report into the affair, the watchdog, known as ADAE, is expected to deliver a withering verdict on the mobile phone giant following the discovery of more eavesdropping devices lurking in the central system of its Greek subsidiary...

...The watchdog's findings follow what is widely considered to be an inadequate judicial inquiry, ordered by the ruling conservative New Democracy party a year ago when the illegal software was discovered after a barrage of customer complaints.

The scandal has reached the highest echelons, with the prime minister's chief of staff and executives of both Vodafone and its software supplier, Ericsson, being called to testify last week before a parliamentary committee investigating the taps.

The firms gave conflicting accounts of how a rogue bugging program came to be installed in the network. Ericsson's regional chief, Bill Zikou, said the Swedish-based company had openly provided Vodafone with software permitting legally sanctioned surveillance - a claim fiercely denied by the mobile operator, which insisted it was not informed of its existence...

...There were claims last week that while the Americans dismantled the devices after the Games, The Greek EYP intelligence service ordered the eavesdropping operation to be continued through Vodafone.

The death of Vodafone Greece's top technician, Costas Tsalikides, found hanged in his bathroom a day after the bugs were first detected last year, has fuelled charges of a cover-up. A colleague at the company has claimed that the 39-year-old unwittingly discovered the wiretaps and was about to go public. Solving the riddle over the apparent suicide is now seen as key to the whole spy mystery...

This is all quite accurate. But ADAE and the ongoing investigation has released new evidence: We now know for a fact that Tsalikidis phone had been used one hour after his estimated time of death and before the family found his hanging body. This makes, I figure, the "suicide" scenario even more unlikely. The phone had been used the night before his death, at a time when the investigation has shown Tsalikidis was not in his house. For more information on Costas Tsalikidis, you might want to visit the site that his family and their lawyer have created, titled Why Costas? as a tribute to the man and as a vehicle for information they want to make public regarding the case and the murder, quite probably, of their loved one.

If this whole case sounds to you like a spy thriller, you're not alone. According to the Observer:

...After buffeting Athens for nearly four months, the seamy story of intrigue and espionage that has implicated the Greek government and portable phone operator Vodafone has been pinpointed by Hollywood for the big screen.

A leading US film company has dispatched scouts to the capital to see whether the film can be made in situ and whether any of the cast of characters are willing to be involved. These, so far, include Greece's Prime Minister, Costas Karamanlis, most of his cabinet, the heads of the armed forces, human rights groups, journalists and a host of Arab businessmen.

All share the same fate of having had their mobile phones monitored, by 'persons unknown', both before and after the 2004 Olympic Games. The unnamed film company believes the scandal has all the ingredients of a big spy thriller. The discovery of the illegal wiretaps, and the ruling conservatives' decision to go public, has provided a snapshot of the underhand methods of intelligence services rarely seen in the real world. 'They're calling it "Watergate, made in Greece",' says one insider.

If made, the movie would capture a period of extraordinary dealings for mobile giant Vodafone, whose Greek CEO, George Koronia, has been approached to participate. Greece's independent telecoms watchdog, ADAE, recently issued a withering verdict on Vodafone's role in the imbroglio, claiming the company not only concealed information but erased evidence of its own involvement by destroying the logs of staff visitors to at least one of its four bugged communication centres.

The article goes on to mention some of the new facts that ADAE's investigation has uncovered such as:

"...that the Vodafone mobile phones that intercepted the calls had received text messages from the UK, the USA, Australia and Sweden - an oblique reference to 'foreign secret services'."

But that's not all. What the article does not mention is that we now know where some of the calls from the "shadow phones" used in the wiretap were made to: There were 11 logged phone calls to Laurel Maryland, USA. Now take a look at the map below: Laurel is literally next door to Fort Meade, and that is a "startling" coincidence: Guess which US government agency is headquartered in Fort Mead... Yep, it's them: the most active warrantless wiretappers in the world...

When they found out about it the ADAE people, pretty much peed their pants after which they decided that the best course of action was doing absolutely nothing. I translate from the Greek business daily Imerisia, reporting on ADAE's testimony before a Greek Parliament Committee:

"Answering the insistent questions of the MPs E. Venizelos [Socialist] and L. Kanelli [Communist], about whether ADAE made any attempts to discover who the US phone numbers belong to and whether they called these phone numbers, Mr. Lambrinopoulos [president of ADAE] was blunt:

"We thought about it, but we were afraid about where these phone numbers might lead us. The capabilities from over there are quite extensive. It's one thing if the phone numbers belonged to a private residence, but if they belonged to someone else, like a company or a service?" he asked, causing unease among the MPs.

"What scared you so much that you wouldn't even call 411 over there?" L. Kanelli insisted.

"Don't you understand that we can't compromise ourselves? It could be someone that shouldn't see the number calling. We can't risk it. It's not personal fear. Any action could have turned out undermining the investigation. What if there was somebody "difficult" on the other end?" Lambrinopoulos noted characteristically.

In a related point E. Venizelos claimed that "either [the Greek Secret Service] EYP didn't understand / didn't want to follow this up or it understood perfectly what was happening and was ordered to tamper with the evidence", ADAE's president "left EYP on a limb, stating that they should have had found the card phones and the calls to the US."

Later, Mr. Lambrinopoulos would disavow the obvious, after being careful not to "undermine the investigation" by trivially comfirming it:

In a statement yesterday, ADAE said that the calls to those four countries needed further investigation but added that there was no evidence to suggest foreign agencies had been involved in tapping some 100 phones.

The watchdog also said that it had no evidence to support claims that the calls made to the USA were actually made to the National Security Agency in Maryland.

The investigation is ongoing, but let me tell you something about this story: If the NSA can be shown to have been heavily involved in these wiretaps, and if Tsalikidis was indeed murdered as part of the cover-up - hypotheticals that are not by any means far-fetched - then a US agency is connected - directly or indirectly - with the murder of a citizen of an allied country, a man whose only crime it seems was his professional diligence, and Vodafone, Ericsson and the Greek government by their inaction or collusion, were accomplices and/or the physical perpetrators. And thus this story will never reach the courts, I wager, because someone most excruciatingly "difficult" is, indeed, on the other end of that line...



[crossposted on the European Tribune]

The EU's Security Research Programme [pdf]

/ brothers / very big /
Statewatch, has published a report on the development of a European Military-Security complex titled "Arming Big Brother - The EU's Security Research Programme". In it, it presents in rather horrifying detail, the uncelebrated and under-reported story of the EU's efforts at "Security Research", the people who will get rich off it and the bloody scary, undemocratic world of European Lobbying. The whole thing presents a clear and present danger to democracy in the EU, as it entails the development of a host of very sensitive technologies as far as civil rights are concerned:

"...Myriad local and global surveillance systems; the introduction of biometric identifiers; RFID, electronic tagging and satellite monitoring; "less-lethal weapons"; paramilitary equipment for public order and crisis management; and the militarization of border controls -– technological advances in law enforcement are often welcomed uncritically but rarely are these technologies neutral, in either application or effect. Military organisations dominate research and development in these areas
under the banner of "“dual-use"” technology, avoiding both the constraints and controversies of the arms trade. Tomorrow'’s technologies of control quickly become today's political imperative; contentious policies appear increasingly irresistible. There are strong arguments for regulating, limiting and resisting the development of the security-industrial complex but as yet there has been precious little debate..."

Apart from the research itself, the whole process is brimming with practically unaccountable and unelected committees deciding on critical issues, heavy lobbying by powerful corporations and a lack of public scrutiny that is becoming par for the EU course. A brief summary:

The militarisation of the EU is a controversial development that should be fiercely contested. EU funding of military research is also very controversial, from both a
constitutional and political perspective. This Statewatch-TNI report examines the development of the EU Security Research Programme (ESRP) and the growing security-industrial complex in Europe it is being set up to support. With the global market for technologies of repression more lucrative than ever in the wake of 11 September 2001, it is on a healthy expansion course. There are strong arguments for regulating, limiting and resisting the development of the security-industrial complex but as yet there has been precious little debate.

The story of the ESRP is one of "“Big Brother"” meets market fundamentalism. It was personified by the establishment in 2003 of a "Group of Personalities"” (GoP) comprised of EU officials and Europe'’s biggest arms and IT companies who argued that European multinationals are losing out to their US competitors because the US government is providing them with a billion dollars a year for security research. The European Commission responded by giving these companies a seat at the EU table, a proposed budget of one billion euros for "“security"” research and all but full control over the development and implementation of the programme. In effect, the EU is funding the diversification of these companies into the more legitimate and highly lucrative "dual use"” sector, allowing them to design future EU security policies and allowing corporate interests to determine the public interest.

The planned Security Research Programme raises important issues about EU policy-making and the future of Europe. Europe faces serious security challenges: not just terrorism, but disease, climate change, poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, resource depletion and other sources of insecurity. Rather than being part of a broader strategy to combat these challenges, the ESRP is part of a broader EU counter-terrorism strategy almost singularly orientated to achieving security based primarily on the use of military force and the demands of law enforcement. Freedom and democracy are being undermined by the very policies adopted in their name.

Related to this other piece of dystopic europlanning, previously reported here.

Not too many posts lately...

But between a heavy work schedule, family, a busy (but almost equally unattended to) Greek blog and Greek Easter, I haven't had that much time to sit down and blog properly.

However I did manage to post a couple of diaries over at the European Tribune, which might be of interest to some of my readers here:

The Appeal of the Resistance Fighters - about how the surviving protagonists of the French resistance are still in a fighting mood.

and

Prodi and the European Constitution - in which Prodi suggests a new European Constitution, exactly like the one the Monde Diplomatique predicted, right before the French referendum, will be proposed sooner or later.

I'm not sure how it will go but I hope to be posting more frequently, at least slightly more frequently, from now on...

A History of the car bomb: part I, part II

/ vehicles / lethal /
Mike Davis writes about the history of the "poor man's airforce", the car bomb, from its origins at the hands of an Italian-American armed Anarchist, through its use in Palestine, Vietnam, Ireland, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Sri-Lanka all the way to today's Iraq. The cheapest WMD around, equally deadly in the hands of a rightwing kook in Oklahoma city, the Italian Mafia, the Hezbollah, The IRA, or the CIA and Al Qaeda. Excerpt (though it's hard to pick only one):

Twenty-first century hindsight makes it clear that the defeat of the U.S. intervention in Lebanon in 1983-84, followed by the CIA's dirty war in Afghanistan, had wider and more potent geopolitical repercussions than the loss of Saigon in 1975. The Vietnam War was, of course, an epic struggle whose imprint upon domestic American politics remains profound, but it belonged to the era of the Cold War's bipolar superpower rivalry. Hezbollah's war in Beirut and south Lebanon, on the other hand, prefigured (and even inspired) the "asymmetric" conflicts that characterize the millennium. Moreover, unlike peoples' war on the scale sustained by the NLF and the North Vietnamese for more than a generation, car-bombing and suicide terrorism are easily franchised and gruesomely applicable in a variety of scenarios. Although rural guerrillas survive in rugged redoubts like Kashmir, the Khyber Pass, and the Andes, the center of gravity of global insurgency has moved from the countryside back to the cities and their slum peripheries. In this post-Cold-War urban context, the Hezbollah bombing of the Marine barracks has become the gold standard of terrorism; the 9/11 attacks, it can be argued, were only an inevitable scaling-up of the suicide truck bomb to airliners.

The unimaginable, planned

/ scenarios / nightmare /
Do you want to read something really scary? Try Seymour Hersh's latest piece in the New Yorker, on the war plans being prepared regarding Iran. I quote:

A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror expressed a similar view. "This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war," he said. The danger, he said, was that "it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability." A military conflict that destabilized the region could also increase the risk of terror: "Hezbollah comes into play," the adviser said, referring to the terror group that is considered one of the worldÂ’s most successful, and which is now a Lebanese political party with strong ties to Iran. "And here comes Al Qaeda..."

I think at this point, Al Qaeda would not be at the top of one's worries.

The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran - —without success, the former intelligence official said. "The White House said, 'Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.' "

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it "a juggernaut that has to be stopped." He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue. "There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries," the adviser told me. "This goes to high levels." The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. "The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks," the adviser said. "And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen..."

You know things are getting out of hand when the doves are senior Pentagon officers...

Note also this piece of information:

...As of early winter, I was told by the government consultant with close ties to civilians in the Pentagon, the units were also working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Baluchis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast. The troops "are studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds,"” the consultant said. One goal is to get "eyes on the ground"” - —quoting a line from "Othello,"” he said, "“Give me the ocular proof."” The broader aim, the consultant said, is to "“encourage ethnic tensions"” and undermine the regime...

... in light of recent news:

Armed rebels have killed two army officers, and shot a top cleric in troubled Sistan-Baluchistan province in southeastern Iran, a press report said...

...Iranian press reported Thursday that security forces had killed the leader and 11 members of a Sunni militant group, called the Jundallah (soldiers of God) responsible for murdering 26 people last month in Sistan-Baluchistan.

In December, nine Iranian border patrols were kidnapped in the region. The Jundullah (soldiers of God) later claimed the execution of one of the soldiers.

Iran has seen a surge in ethnic violence in the last two years, with unrest in Sistan-Baluchistan, and to the southwest in Khuzistan province, home to a large Sunni Arab population.

In another incident of unrest, three members of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards were killed by Wednesday by a Kurdish rebel group known as Pejak in West Azerbaijan province near the border with Turkey.

Iran says Pejak is linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, which has waged a 15-year insurgency against Ankara for self rule in the Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast.

Iran has pointed the finger at foreign intervention from the United States, Britain for the recent wave of ethnic-related violence.

The dice are rolling? Anyway, the Times report that:

Yesterday the Pentagon attempted to dismiss the report as being filled with “fantastical, wrong and unsubstantiated allegations”. Hersh pointed out that the Pentagon had used similar language initially to describe his revelations about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

Stanislaw Lem 1921-2006... and every vector dreams of matrices

/ obituaries / Lem /
A brilliant author, a sui generis visionary. A sci-fi Borges some say. Stanislaw Lem was a cherished favorite, his memory safely perserved, coded in the orbit of Solaris, implied in Ijon Tichy's unpredictability and programmed into the Electronic Bard's poetry:

Love and Tensor Algebra from the Cyberiad:

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product of four scalars it defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!

French unrest blogged

/ uprisings / blogged /
The French youth along with the unions by their protests and actions have shown that France remains a society of active citizens not easily taken in by the neoliberal hogwash. The linked blog provides english language information and commentary on the events as they unfold.

If your sources for these events are the English language financial press, I would suggest you take a look at the thorough debunking of the myths circulating about the French economy and the recent demonstrations done by Jerome over at the European Tribune (this is the latest - previous).

Welcome to Liberated Iraq

/ liberty as death /
Dr. Entissar Mohammad Ariabi, a pharmacist from Yarmook Hospital went to the US to talk about what's really happening in Iraq, three years after the invasion, from her experience as someone who works in one of the largest hospitals in Iraq. Her testimony is truly horrific and infuriating, as it points to a willful (and murderous) mismanagement for the sake of profiteering, that defies any sort of ethics, apart from the deadly toll of an already immensely murderous campaign:

After our hospitals were bombed and looted, millions of dollars were given to contractors to repair them. We suggested that this money be used to buy things that we urgently need, but the contractors refused and instead bought furniture and flowers and superficial things. Meanwhile, we suffer from a critical shortage of medicines, emergency supplies and anesthesia, and there is no sterilization in the operation rooms. As the director of the pharmacy department in my hospital, I refused to sit on a new chair while there were no sterile operating rooms.

And confirms that the health situation in the country is even worse than it was under the UN sanctions:

Diseases that were under control under the regime of Saddam Hussein, diseases such as cholera, hepatitis, meningitis, polio, have now returned to haunt the population, especially the children. Death due to cancer has increased because treatment programs stopped and medicines are not available. The health of the Iraqi people is also devastated by environmental contamination due to the destruction of our water and sewage systems.

The health of women, particularly pregnant women, has deteriorated. Many pregnant women suffer from malnutrition. When it comes time to give birth, many women prefer to give birth at home because they fear being shot on their way to the hospital and they know the bad conditions in the hospitals. As a result, more women are dying in childbirth, and more babies are dying.

Before the occupation, with all the problems we had under sanctions, Iraq ranked number 80 in the worldwide list of deaths of children under 5. Today, we have jumped up to number 36. UNICEF has said that the rate of severe malnutrition among Iraqi children has almost doubled since the occupation.

So it seems that when the occupation forces are not busy killing six-month-old infants and two-year-old children with their own hands, they are spreading death much more efficiently through institutionalized negligence.

Three years ago, as the US armed forces invaded Iraq, creating what was an easily predictable catastrophe in an already ravaged land, millions of people world wide demonstrated against the intervention, sensing (I suspect) directly or indirectly that this would be the opening act of a much larger campaign of recolonisation and of war. In the process the ethos of the US government was demonstrated in the killing fields of Fallujah, in Abu Ghraib and in the myriads of theatres of the most horrendous violence and repression, already far beyond what Saddam would have been able to inflict on his own country. The net result is a brewing low intensity civil war in Iraq, that threatens at any moment to erupt on a grander scale, coupled with unfathomable destruction and looting by the partners of the Bush regime - a gang of kleptocrats that would put Yeltsin to shame. The mantra that if the occupation forces leave now the situation will only become worse, is tired already and will possibly become a self-fulfilling prophecy if they are not removed now, but are rather left to watch over a civil war whose flames they can only fan. The only reasonable chance that Iraq has of avoiding a total civil war is immediate negotiated withdrawal of occupation forces now.

As we speak it seems possible that the same crew of warmongers is preparing the ground for an attack on Iran which, most rational people would agree, will create an even more deadly and dangerous world. In this event anti-war demonstrations are not enough. Any government which chooses to ride the Bush bandwagon should be brought down by demonstrations, strikes, and every imaginable sort of campaign. This is not only for the sake of the people of Iran (for whom an aerial attack on nuclear facilities will be a disaster of immense scale), but for the sake of our own lives and the lives of our children.