Going Norwegian instead of Swedish

~ Matt Armstrong

From the Norwegian Press:

The US elite force Navy Seals has shown considerable interest in the Norwegian high speed patrol boats of the "Skjold" class, built with stealth technology. This makes the vessels difficult to detect by radar.

The US Navy had one patrol boat on loan for a year for test purposes, and the Norwegian Umoe Mandal Yard has now entered into a contract with the Navy Seals for a further study and evaluation of the suitability of the new patrol boats for US purposes.

The Swedes also have a stealth ship, but the Norwegian ship is apparently superior to both the Swedish and American stealth projects currently underway. These craft will become increasingly important with looming (and in some cases current and covert) littoral warfare and anti-piracy efforts, Not to mention penetrating the coast lines of potential adversaries.

Once again, heeeeeeeere’s al-Jazeera

~ Matt Armstrong

Eccentric Star has a posting with articles on al-Jazeera’s postive (from our perspective) on Arab (not Islamist) publics. I have heard (and received) arguments that al-Jazeera is a mouthpiece for Islamism and anti-Americanism. Eccentric Star’s article demonstrates the US is not the only target of AJ which I wrote about in the context of public diplomacy, or lack of. Possibly the Bush Administration, in its failure to take Egypt to task on the unfair elections and its continued reliance on an unpopular government that contributes to the perception of a double-standard US, see al-Jazeera attacks on Egypt as attacks on the Administration?

Millions not a couple of dozen Americans “sucked into the vacuum”

~ Matt Armstrong

ABC’s Nightline had an NSA whistleblower alleging illegal spying (the link has the Nightline video) could have eavesdropped on millions of Americans. As the source for the NY Times article blowing the cover of the operation (thoughts and implications here), he is apparently the target of rage by the Administration on the leaking of the program.

The damage to domestic and foreign credibility may be severe,
although not to those who feel "no holds barred" is the name of the
game. "Do as we say, not as we do" is not a good motto for a role model.

Meanwhile, Opinio Juris notes a number of "prominent law scholars and attorneys" rejected the Administration’s claims to have the right to conduct this surveillance in a letter:

The letter critiques the Department of Justice’s legal justifications
for the NSA wiretapping program, in particular, the U.S. government’s
reliance on the Sept. 11 Resolution authorizing military force, to
circumvent or avoid the restrictions created by the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Of course it is well-crafted,
reasonable, and persuasive. It takes a couple of unnecessary shots at
John Yoo, I think, but it is still very sensible in focusing on the
statutory rather than constitutional arguments. But while I am halfway
persuaded, I do wonder if the law prof letter relies too heavily on a
FISA provisions limiting wiretaps to 15 days after the declaration of
war.

The argument against the right to do anything hinges on what the authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) comprises:

[E]ven where Congress has declared war—a more formal step than an
authorization such as the AUMF—the law limits warrantless wiretapping
to the first fifteen days of the conflict. Congress explained that if
the President needed further warrantless surveillance during wartime,
the fifteen days would be sufficient for Congress to consider and enact
further authorization. [footnote omitted] Rather than follow this
course, the President acted unilaterally and secretly in contravention
of FISA’s terms. The DOJ letter remarkably does not even mention FISA’s
fifteen-day war provision, which directly refutes the President’s
asserted "implied" authority.

Did Bush really suggest bombing al-Jazeera?

~ Matt Armstrong

The news of the "al-Jazeera Memo" in the UK is a transcript of a meeting between Prime Minister Blair and President Bush in April 2004. The subject of a Freedom of Information Act request in Britain, the release of the memo (that has been officially acknowledge as existing) is the subject of a case going before the court tomorrow. Two men in the UK are charged with violating the Official Secrets Act.

The memorandum is actually a five-page transcript stamped "Top Secret." It describes a meeting at the White House on April 16, 2004, between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. At that meeting, which took place while desperately hard fighting was in progress in the Iraqi town of Fallujah, Bush mooted the idea of taking out the headquarters of Al Jazeera in Doha, Qatar. The network’s correspondents inside the city had been transmitting lurid footage of extreme violence. The exchange apparently puts Blair in a good light, in that he dissuaded the president from any such course of action and was assisted in this by Colin Powell, who was then secretary of state.

Slate also reports that Colin Powell may have had some difficulty later on in remembering the meeting, which BlairWatch digs on. Based on Powell’s profile and past soldierly commitment to the Chief, I would suggest that either he honestly did not remember or did not want to remember because anything he could have honestly said would have reflected poorly on his boss. The still diplomatic answers he gave a recent BBC interview continues to confirm this.

A little background on where al-Jazeera is:

The state of Qatar, which though a Wahabbi kingdom has a free press and allows women to run and to vote in elections, has not been the host of just Al Jazeera since the network’s predecessor was kicked out of Saudi Arabia. It has also been the host of United States Central Command, and of many American civilians.

This memo, if it comes out to be a)existant and b)accurate would fit in with a growing opinion of the Bush Administration’s "unitary executive" methodology in all things it does.

Al-Qaeda Manhunt in Kenya

~ Matt Armstrong

From the Jamestown Weekly Journal of News and Analysis on International Terrorism comes news of US CT (counter-terror) / al-Qaeda operations in Kenya. Andrew McGregor writes (text is below) about operations along the Kenya-Somalia border as the Horn region become hotter than before.

Al-Qaeda Manhunt in Kenya
Andrew McGregor

Kenya is widely remembered as the site of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing that killed over 200 people and cast al-Qaeda into international prominence. The attack was followed by a 2002 suicide car bombing that targeted a hotel popular with Israelis near Mombassa and the attempted destruction of an Israeli airliner. In both incidents, the vast majority of victims were Kenyans. There is, however, a great difference in the perception of the ongoing terrorist threat in Nairobi and Washington. Over Kenyan opposition the U.S. has issued a new terrorist warning for Kenya, damaging the important Kenyan tourism industry. Kenyan officials claim their country is largely free from terrorist threat and is unfairly blamed for its unavoidable proximity to lawless Somalia.

The warning cites “continuing terrorist threats and the limited ability of the Kenyan authorities to deter and detect such acts” (U.S. State Department, December 30). One day after the warning was issued Kenyan Internal Security announced they were intensifying their search for suspected al-Qaeda members. Of special interest are two Mombassa-born Kenyans, Ahmad Salim Swedan and Salah Ali Salah Nabhan, both indicted in the U.S. for leading roles in the 1998 bombing and suspected of planning the 2002 attacks. Nabhan is believed to be living in Mogadishu. Kenyan security officials claim that al-Qaeda is active in the country only through infiltrators from Somalia. Muslims constitute about 10 percent of Kenya’s population and are a majority in the port city of Mombassa.

U.S. and Israeli officials are highly displeased with the June 2005 acquittals of seven suspects brought to trial on conspiracy charges in the 2002 hotel bombing. Charges of planning a new attack on the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in 2003 were dropped. The lack of convictions has fostered perceptions the U.S. that the Kenyan government is not serious about terrorism.

Despite the development of well-trained counter-terrorist forces, large areas of the sensitive Somali-Kenyan border remain poorly administered and beyond the operational range of conventional Kenyan police or their anti-terrorist squadrons. The recent seizure of a rocket launcher and ammunition by the poorly equipped Administration Police (AP) was the result of solid police work following a tip that weapons were being brought across the border. Without radios or other communications equipment, an AP constable had to wait two days to hitch a ride from a UN vehicle to the closest regular Kenyan police detachment to report the arrest (The Nation [Nairobi], January 3). With drought and a growing food shortage in the region there are fears of large-scale movement of nomads across the border that may be exploited by members of the al-Qaeda connected al-Ittihad movement. There are also security concerns in Mombassa, where the port security chief was recently murdered when he failed to accept a bribe to stop investigation of a large container-theft syndicate. A Kenyan MP and his family are being investigated in the killing (The Nation, January 4).

The U.S. occupation of Iraq is unpopular in Kenya, and the renewal of the terrorism advisory has been widely condemned by government and the media. The United States maintains a counter-terrorist force in Djibouti (known as the Combined Joint Task Force for the Horn of Africa) that has participated with Kenya in combined military exercises designed to combat regional terrorist activity. Although further security assistance has been offered to Kenya by both the U.S. and the EU, persistent corruption at all levels of government is hindering international cooperation and threatens foreign aid.

Remote Warfare… some comments

~ Matt Armstrong

Remote and/or unattended warfare & monitoring is a field that will grow in importance and visibility over the coming years. Its impact on the composition and format of the US military over the next several decades will be substantial. Advances in technology may already be seen in the current UAV Roadmap of 2005 (PDF on GoogleDocs) that will be further strategized and propagated with the upcoming QDR that will be taking its “final shape” next week.

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Camera Grenade and Other Thoughts

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 2 Comments

From the unattended & remote warfare department is this tool:

"The HUNTIR Round is a fixed-type
cartridge designed to be fired from 40mm Grenade Launchers M79 and M203
(attached to the M16/M16A1 rifle) or a Milkor MK-1/[MGL-140] Grenade Launcher.
The round consists of a cartridge case assembly, and a metal projectile body
containing a first fire charge, a pyrotechnic delay column, an ejection charge,
a CMOS Camera, and a parachute assembly. Upon firing, the projectile assembly is
propelled to an average height of 700 feet, the first fire charge ignites the
pyrotechnic delay element, which ignites an ejection charge that effectively
ejects the CMOS Camera, which is attached to the parachute. The CMOS Camera
provides up to 5 minutes of real-time streaming video to a handheld device with
a correcsponding transmitter."

See the category Unattended and Remote Warfare for more

The Spivak Conspiracy

~ Matt Armstrong

Hmmm… a public relations campaign that could easily explode. The foreign press, if they picked up on this or will pick on similar cases in the future, will distort and blow up the misguided and foolish attempts to boost an exec’s year-end bonus. In light of the expanding Abramoff scandal today is a story a few months old called the Spivak Conspiracy:

A pharmaceutical consultant secretly commissions a novel about terrorists poisoning Americans with medicine from Canada, then backs out and inadvertently spawns a thriller pillorying his own industry.

This is no pulp-fiction farce. Call it bookgate, an impossible-to-make-up public-relations disaster now dogging the pharmaceutical industry.

Its real-life cast includes a deputy vice president of the country’s drug lobby, a celebrity divorce lawyer, a tell-all book publisher, and even former New York Times fabricator Jayson Blair in a cameo.

"It’s a nightmare beyond nightmares," admitted Mark A. Barondess, the consultant who initiated the book deal and now calls it a mistake.

Media Influence and Misinformation

~ Matt Armstrong

An example of how disinformation becomes reality from the WashingtonPost.

A White House official said last night the administration was confident that press reports changed bin Laden’s behavior. CIA spokesman Tom Crispell declined to comment, saying the question involves intelligence sources and methods.

The article demonstrates how OBL’s use of a cell / satellite phone was in the public domain before 9/11 and before the "press blew the lid".

Leveraging the Internet, part I

~ Matt Armstrong

It is not just pornographers that purchase domain names that are similar to mainstream companies, publications, etc that people may want to visit. I was trying to surf to a German political journal, International Politik. So I naturally typed in: http://www.internationale-politik.de.  However, that link is a redirect to an old Kurdish freedom page, http://kurdistan-solidaritaet.de. This site, btw is out of date some five years…. but it is an example that it is not just non-terrorists that can use the Net. More to come on this.

Kathryn Cramer: Top Cat Marine Security Has an Executive Level

~ Matt Armstrong

In an effort to keep information fresh, from Kathryn Cramer’s blog on TopCat Marine Security:

We had our differences and I’m no longer associated with Peter Casini, TCMS, Cobra Boats, Topcat Design or any other Casini enterprise.

It seems that "Bacehlor #3" in an earlier post by Kathryn is a man who now is making it clear he has nothing to do with TopCat. TCMS is an interesting org, but still more interesting: Did they hope to get in front of the coming action?

Britain: imperial nostalgia

~ Matt Armstrong

Link: Britain: imperial nostalgia.

Britain not only conveniently still forgets the crimes of its imperial past, but it has also again begun to romanticise its colonial achievements and declare them a proper source of pride.

Without spending too much time on various Western — I am thinking of French, German, Belgian, Dutch, and British here — protestors disengaged the present from the past, I would like to remind them of Africa, the ‘Middle East’, and their involvement then and today.

Looking for regulating international private military companies? Maybe we should look at International Maritime Law

~ Matt Armstrong

Should we look toward the Law of the Sea and anti-pirate laws to regulate Private Military Companies? The use of military force is based on international norms and agreements. Through either tacit or implicit permission of organizations and states, an actor, generally a state can use its military. Of course, it used to have freedom to wield its Weberian monopoly of legitimate force within its borders at its leisure, but times have changed.

The latest wave of globalization has reversed border ossification of the last 150 years to allow penetration of domestic policies. With mixed results, states have influenced internal politics of states (Tianamen, Cote d’Ivorie, Congo, FYR, PNG, Sri Leone, etc) to make their constituents ‘feel’ better about the world in which they trade and conduct commerce and communication because much of the time these external regions really had little, if any, direct impact on the outsiders. Today, however, we have military forces outside the direct control of the state and possibly outside the Weberian-defined norms.

The effect of these PMCs have to influence states and peoples, possibly outside the control of states, must be regulated. States and corporations do not not uncertainty by their nature, at least those who operate in the institutionalized with our Disneylands, 401(k), and minimal need for personal protective services.

Mercenary companies were once outlawed as interfering with state business. The Laws of the Seas, with its international cooperative construct that does not require ascension like the WTO, be a fair model for a global agreement on military force? The multi-lateral agreement between all states bordering the seas is functional, should it be extended? What about the growing piracy menace? Is it cover for 4GW ‘warriors’, terrorists, or something else?

UK SAS-SBS poaching

~ Matt Armstrong

This is not about the highly respected UK SAS-SBS soldiers poaching but of the poaching OF THEM by private security companies:

The SAS and SBS have fewer than 600 "shooters" between them and all have already served several times in Iraq and Afghanistan since the war on terror was launched in 2001.
Part-time volunteer reservists from 21 and 23 Territorial regiments of the SAS have also been called up to ease the strain.
Between 40 and 60 experienced regular troopers have abandoned their roles over the last year to earn up to �500 a day – about five or six times their army pay – as mercenaries with private security firms in Iraq.
A joint SAS-SBS detachment is based in Basra with a second contingent operating out of the US base at Balad north of Baghdad. They amount to about a third of the manpower of the UK’s special forces.

General and SecDef rift — civil-military relations dividing

~ Matt Armstrong

Friction between politicians and the military is age old, but in the United States today it is getting hotter. Back in November there was an interesting exchange between the new Joint Chief Gen Pace and SecDef Rumsfeld. In today’s NYT, the "Marine infantry platoon commander currently assigned as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff" (General Peter Pace) gave a belated and rather lame explanation of the month old exchange.

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Japanese Maritime Self-Defense recruiting videos

~ Matt Armstrong

Changes in enlistment motivation from institutional to occupational and back can be found in the advertisements for the military service. Consider the purpose of the Army of One, the Navy’s Accelerate Your Life, and the Air Forces program (which was what again? obviously it didn’t track well with this demographic). The JMSDF has apparently two recruiting videos. One is clearly institutional and the other, well, I’m not sure what the other is. Look for yourself and determine (this link has both videos playing simultaneously). Thank to Glimpse of the World for this. See note: see this English-language Japanese news story on SDF / JMSDF recruiting changes (not quite the Army of One or Be All You Can Be).

Holiday & Offline

~ Matt Armstrong

I will be offline 23 Dec – 2 Jan due to the holidays. Please continue to read this site, post comments, send email directly to me, use it at resource, etc. I will be back after the first of the new year.

Chinese and the Horn of Africa

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

News from the Horn of Africa is diverse and found along many paths. To start, US troops in the Ogaden area rescued two abused and endangered cheetah cubs late last month (Nov 2005) while the Taipei Times is reporting the Chinese navy is "flexing its soft power" as part of an "assertive foreign policy…connecting Chinese seaports with the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. Its strategy: to build up sea power, measured in ships, bases and alliances. Energizing a populace accustomed to thinking of China as a land power is one crucial element of Beijing’s new maritime diplomacy." The sea-based public diplomacy is integral to Chinese expansion in the Middle East region as Iran seeks to seal a deal with China next month (Jan 2006):

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Rove Energy Corporation Limited

~ Matt Armstrong

Somaliland_maplarge_1The blogosphere is increasingly used to incite and investigate and this recent comment is a further example of this growing use of the new pamphleteers to influence events. The region in question has obvious links to other disucssions on this site (see the Somalia category and take your pick of readings).

How does the South African Ophir Corporation has recently announced a 75% stake in the Rova Energy Corporation figure into all of this? The maritime diplomacy of the Chinese, Yemini fields accessed from Somalia, and the general lawlessness of the region certainly makes for some interesting reading. More investigation on this surely to come. Comments, leads?