On Thursday, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden made an appearance at Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington. He said:
I just got back from five days in the Middle East. I love to travel, but it’s great to be back to a place where a boom in housing construction is actually a good thing.
UPDATE 18 March: The New York Times has discovered the story, “Pentagon Sees a Threat From Online Muckrakers”.
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For those of us looking for the story behind the story, Wikileaks has been a valuable source since 2007. Its revelations are not limited to one Government or case; rather, in the name of openness, it has been a site for exposure of the misdeeds and manipulations of those in power from China to the US to the United Nations.
In its latest scoop, Wikileaks reveals how the US Government tried to cripple the activities of….Wikileaks. The website summarises a 32-page classified (Secret/No Foreign Dissemination) report from the US Army:
The report recommends, “The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site.”….As an odd justificaton for the plan, the report claims that “several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the Wikileaks.org website”.
The opening of the report:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
(S//NF) Wikileaks.org, a publicly accessible Internet Web site, represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the US Army.
I’m not a big fan of General David Petraeus’ interference in US foreign policymaking, given his challenge to (and potential undermining) of his President on an issue such as Afghanistan, but Mark Perry in Foreign Policy offered a tale where Petraeus’ manoeuvres may lead to a significant — and, I think, productive — re-alignment in US foreign policy.
To be blunt, if you take a charitable interpretation of Petraeus’ move (he was telling the US diplomats to get out of their dead end of caving to Israeli steps such as settlement expansion) rather than the cynical one (he was again seeking to expand his authority), this may open up a prospect — limited but visible — of the US staking out a position where it can challenge Israel’s unilateral obstacles to the peace process.
On Jan. 16, two days after a killer earthquake hit Haiti, a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command (responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East), arrived at the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On 4 June 2009, President Barack Obama announced in Egypt that he had come to “Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world”. Fulfilling his Inauguration promise to extend a hand to the Muslim world, Obama stated his administration planned to seek a new way forward “based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”
With Obama proposing this progressive policy, Americans, as most of the Muslim world, were confident a broad strategy would follow. Instead, a piecemeal approach to engaging the Muslim world has taken place.
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!”
The head of US Central Command, General David Petraeus, appeared on NBC Television’s Meet the Press, first to walk viewers through the US interventions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq and then to take a tour around other issues from Iran to Guantanamo Bay to the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays and lesbians in the military.
In contrast to previous appearances, when Petraeus was fighting his own President to get his version of US foreign and military policy, this was a stay-the-course interview behind agreed approaches. The message on Afghanistan was long-haul effort to win. On Pakistan, it was supporting Pakistani forces to vanquish the Taliban. He spoke in generalities about maintaining pressure on Iran, and beyond his main agenda, on the tricky issues like Guantanamo Bay and “enhanced interrogation” (torture), he evaded any definitive statements.
MR. DAVID GREGORY: General David Petraeus joins us live from U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida.
General, welcome to MEET THE PRESS.
GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS: Thanks, David. Good to be with you.
Iran: More posturing today over the nuclear issue, as well as slurs and counter-claims between the US and Iran on which country is the “dictatorship”.Human rights continues to dominate internal news, and labour activism appears to be gathering speed, although there no firm signs of a nationwide general strike yet. We have live-blogging from Ahmadinejad’s press conference, and as always, all news and links will be updated throughout the day on our live weblog.
Late-breaking news is of a rising challenge from the Karroubi family, with both Mehdi Karroubi’s wife and son making pointed challenges to the regime. That bears out the importance of the analysis by EA’s Mr Verdeof the beating of Medhi Karroubi’s son Ali: “Imagine for a moment that the son or daughter of a Presidential or Prime Ministerial candidate in the US or Britain had been taken away by plainclothes security forces and kept in an unknown locations for days. Imagine that he or she had been beaten and threatened with rape….”
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