Gareth Porter has an excellent piece up on Inter Press Service, “Fiction of Marja as City Was U.S. Information War,” in which he breaks down the media disinformation campaign on the size of Marja:
Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers’ homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley.
“It’s not urban at all,” an official of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who asked not to be identified, admitted to IPS Sunday. He called Marja a “rural community”.
“It’s a collection of village farms, with typical family compounds,” said the official, adding that the homes are reasonably prosperous by Afghan standards.
Porter is right on, and you should read the whole thing for an idea on exactly how these disinformation campaigns are spread, but I’m afraid in the case of Marja, we might be missing the point. We’re complaining that Marja is only an excuse for a propaganda victory while at the same time complaining that the victory won’t be worth anything because it’s not a city.
As Woody Allen said on a much different topic, “This food is terrible, and such small portions!”
UPDATE 1945 GMT: Take this for what it’s worth from former CIA operative Robert Baer: “I’ve been told that the Bush Administration at one point considered Jundallah as a piece in a covert-action campaign against Iran, but the idea was quickly dropped because Jundallah was judged uncontrollable and too close to al-Qaeda. There was no way to be certain that Jundallah would not throw the bombs we paid for back at us.”
– We followed up Sunday’s bombing in southeastern Iran with a discussion between EA’s Mr Smith and Chris Emery on the likely attackers, the Baluch insurgent group Jundallah. Meanwhile, the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps and Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani were claiming that Jundallah was supported by foreign intelligence services, including US operatives.
EA correspondent Josh Mull dissects the Jundallah-US narrative to put some questions not about the claim but about the significance of the bombing. — WSL
My immediate question is why the blaming of Jundallah head Abdolmalek Rigi automatically makes Tehran’s anti-Western rhetoric more credible. Who else could they have named that would NOT lend credibility to their anti-Western rhetoric? The Kurdish PKK? The Baluchistan Liberation Army? The Mujahedin-e-Khalq? The US is said to have supported all of them against the Tehran regime at one point or another, so what makes Jundallah an extra-credible outlet for US activities? Read the rest of this entry »
Last week the New York Timespublished an article detailing the Pentagon’s plan to shift focus away from international terrorism, known under the previous administration as the Global War on Terror, towards larger strategic threats to the United States such as destabilized governments and mass refugee crises provoked by climate change. Most in the defense establishment welcome this shift in strategy, but the threat from terrorism still remains.
This time, however, there is a difference. The terror threat comes largely not from foreign nationals but from Americans.
In 2009 almost 70 Americans, including police officers and medical personnel, have been killed by domestic terror attacks. This is a breathtakingly sharp rise from 2008, when only two people lost their lives, both of whom died at the hands of anti-Liberal terrorist Jim D. Adkisson in Tennessee. The first attack in 2009 was in Samson, Alabama, when Michael McLendon went on a cross-county shooting rampage that killed 11 people including himself. The most recent was on June 10, when James von Brunn opened fire inside the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, killing one guard and wounding several others.
While each of these attacks is unique, they can be roughly broken down into a handful of categories. In this piece, we will explore these terrorist archetypes, the ecosystem that produced them, as well as common tactics, both harmful and helpful, used to counter them. The intention is to provide students, analysts and researchers, with a sound and coherent image of the domestic terror threat facing the United States.
At the annual meeting of the powerful pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference in Washington, DC, Vice President Joe Biden was on hand to deliver the concluding address to an estimated 6,500 people in attendance. His speech was filled with the same set of platitudes given by every high-ranking American official: the US would support Israel, protect Israel, and fight for Israel at all cost. Biden even reprised Obama’s 2008 AIPAC narrative of the “Zionist idea,” a homeland for all people (like the United States) or, more appropriate to Israel, a homeland for a tiny sectarian movement.
No surprises there, but Biden also used the speech to drop hints about, though he did not directly address, future US policy towards Israel and Syria.
There is a very lively debate in the mainstream media on what should be done to fight piracy in the Gulf of Aden. However, all of the solutions seem to focus on violence and military might. Are there any other options that have yet to be debated?
President Obama has introduced his $85 billion Supplemental Budget for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tucked away in those billions, however, is $815 million for the Palestinian Authority. How is this money being spent?
A disturbing picture is emerging of one of the countries at the center of the Global War on Terror, a terrifying confluence of events which constitutes a “perfect storm” of instability. This country, which President Bush formerly praised as a “leader” in the fight against militant Islamism in Central Asia, now appears to be increasingly ungovernable, what we in the West commonly refer to as a “Failed State.”
A porous border facilitates the funneling of arms and resources to a booming narco-insurgency next-door, an insurgency which takes the lives of innocent civilians, militants, soldiers and police on a daily basis. In the halls of power and government, corrupt western-educated oligarchs continue to, in the midst of catastrophic economic collapse, wildly pillage the state treasuries while their rural fundamentalist constituencies, and the militant industries they patronize, fuel money and weapons to the neighboring insurgency, often with the explicit help of state intelligence services. And yet even though the citizens have recently achieved some modest democratic gains, the central government seems oblivious to their cries for justice against members of the criminal ex-regime. Meanwhile, a brutal domestic terrorist outbreak, flush with recently unemployed recruits, continues without mercy, killing over 50 civilians and security services in a series of suicide attacks over the last month.
Gareth Porter has an excellent piece up on Inter Press Service, “Fiction of Marja as City Was U.S. Information War,” in which he breaks down the media disinformation campaign on the size of Marja:
UPDATE 1945 GMT: Take this for what it’s worth 
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