[A-List] Fwd: New story Added to SRA Website

[Stanley Goff <sherrynstan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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> From: <esavage@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: May 19, 2005 8:36:44 AM EDT
> To: "esavage@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <esavage@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: New story Added to SRA Website
>
> www.sandersresearch.com
> Inside Track
>
> Continent of Vulnerability
>
> Stan Goff
>
> May 19, 2005
>
> The FBI confirmed Tuesday the accuracy of a New York Times report that 
> software on routers, computers that control the Internet, were 
> compromised last year by a hacker who claimed that he had infiltrated 
> systems serving U.S. military installations, research laboratories, 
> and NASA… The Times reported, and the FBI confirmed, that the focus of 
> the investigation is a youth in Uppsala, Sweden, who has been charged 
> as a juvenile. -CNN, Tuesday, May 11, 2005

>

> Civilian Disasters
>
> Bhopal
>
> On December 3, 1984, a few minutes after midnight as people lay abed, 
> a leak appeared on a plant producing methyl isocyanate (MIC) – and 
> intermediary chemical in the production of pesticides – at a Union 
> Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. The MIC generated a cloud that was 
> carried over a densely populated area.
>
> Half a million human beings, uncounted animals, homes, soil, surface 
> and ground water were exposed to this lethal toxin. Almost 4,000 died 
> outright and in horrible pain. Over 20,000 have died as a result, and 
> conservative estimates are that another 120,000 have suffered 
> permanent and often terrible disabilities. Women’s breast milk still 
> carries 1, 3 & 5 trichlorobenzene, dichloromethane, chloroform, lead 
> and mercury. Mercury in local water sources is still between 20,000 
> and 6 million times the ‘expected’ levels.[1]< /a>

>

> Chernobyl
>
> Less than two years later, at a Ukrainian town called Chernobyl, the 
> technicians at a nuclear power plant were testing the Unit 4 
> emergency-shutdown cooling system, when that system failed and the 
> reactor caught fire. Prevailing northwesterly winds carried the 
> aerosolized radioisotopes across Ukraine, then Belarus, and finally 
> dispersed them over hundreds of thousands of square miles in Eastern 
> Europe, for ten days before the radiation release was controlled. The 
> release equals more radioactive fallout than that produced by the two 
> bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II.
>
> In the 125,000 and 146,000 km2 of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine with 
> gamma-emitting Cesium-137 levels exceeding 1 curie per square 
> kilometer, there were over 7 million people, 3 million of them 
> children. While around 350,000 residents of the contaminated areas 
> were resettled, 5.5 million people continue to live in these areas. 
> The radioactive iodine from the reactor is responsible for thyroid 
> cancers rising from 127 cases in 1980 to 816 cases by 2000. Estimates 
> of total deaths directly attributable to Chernobyl exceed 100,000. 
> Milk, meat, animal fodder, game, fish, berries, and water are all 
> still contaminated. In Belarus alone, 22% of the soil is contaminated 
> as deep as 5 inches, where the majority of plant roots are 
> concentrated. Cesium levels in that soil are still at 90% of their 
> original levels.[2]
>
> If either of these industrial accidents had been caused intentionally 
> as a political-military action, they would far exceed the damages 
> inflicted by the asymmetric military operation against the United 
> States’ financial, political, and military centers on September 11, 
> 2001.
>
> The Revolution in Military Affairs
>
> Asymmetric warfare is a term that has gained currency with this 
> administration even before 9-11. The Estimate, a security and 
> intelligence journal focusing on Southwest Asia and North Africa 
> defines asymmetric warfare, using the attack on the USS Cole and the 
> second Intifada, as follows:
>
> The new intifada and the attack on the Cole both serve, in different 
> ways, as object lessons of what military theorists call “asymmetric 
> warfare”, the use of unconventional tactics to counter the 
> overwhelming conventional military superiority of an adversary. The 
> concept has mostly been refined by US strategists, working within the 
> debate on the “revolution in military affairs” (RMA): the US has an 
> overwhelming technological superiority over the conventional military 
> forces of virtually any conceivable adversary, but remains vulnerable 
> to certain types of unconventional response: terrorist attacks, 
> weapons of mass destruction, or unpredictable actions in unpredictable 
> places, like the attack on the Cole in Aden. Depending on one’s 
> definition, asymm etric warfare includes conventional terrorism, 
> classic guerrilla war and the use of weapons of mass destruction, but 
> also such innovative approaches as cyber-attacks and information 
> warfare.
>
> This reference to Rumsfeld’s and the Defense Advanced Research 
> Projects Agency (DARPA) (the Hitlerian R&D bridge between defense 
> contractors and the military) Grand Vision – the Revolution in 
> Military Affairs (RMA) – needs to be explained.

>

> The Revolution in Military Affairs
>
> RMA is the fixed name for a shifting concept for completely retooling 
> the United States armed forces’ equipment and doctrine, and a 
> re-disposition of U.S. armed forces around the world. It is a reaction 
> to the obsolescence of Cold War organization, disposition, and 
> doctrinal vestiges. It is based on three main pillars: the 
> introduction of very high-technology systems to every level and 
> dimension of military activity, from the battle-space to the general 
> staff; the abrogation of existing international agreements about the 
> conduct of warfare; and the redeployment of U.S. military forces from 
> old positions designed to contain the now-defunct Soviet Union to new 
> positions designed to simultaneously exert control over strategic 
> Southwest Asia and contain emergent China.

>

> RMA vaguely recognizes the danger inherent in disrupting the viability 
> of existing states, and this accounts on the insistence that the US be 
> exempted from the legal strictures of international treaties governing 
> martial conduct. But it is also based on the radical technological 
> optimism displayed by the emphasis – reinforced by the collateral 
> benefits accruing from fat R&D contracts from the Department of 
> Defense – on technological “solutions” to all military “problems.” 
> This reflects the two-dimensional, linear thought process apparent for 
> people like Donald “Mr. Metrics” Rumsfeld, and DARPA’s RMA Svengali, 
> Richard H. Van Atta. Their arithmetic universe contains little but 
> deep space when it comes to the fundamentally political nature of 
> warfare, and an absolute void where human agency and unpredictability 
> should be.
>
> Asymmetric warfare is a direct response to the increasing 
> conventional/technological power of the United States. As U.S. forces 
> gain the capacity to deepen and extend control over battlefields – 
> where direct engagement takes place – they force asymmetry of response 
> further away from direct contact, and ultimately into the host-society 
> itself.
>
> What they are apparently constitutionally incapable of grasping is 
> that asymmetric warfare takes advantage of latent catastrophic 
> cascades inhering in technologically complex systems. Asymmetric 
> warfare, as the quote above indicates, is a direct response to the 
> increasing conventional/technological power of the United States. As 
> U.S. forces gain the capacity to deepen and extend control over 
> battlefields – where direct engagement takes place – they force 
> asymmetry of response further away from direct contact, and ultimately 
> into the host-society itself.
>
> Continent of Vulnerability
>
> And advanced, late-capitalist, American society is now a continent of 
> vulnerability, an enormous concentration of rapidly-evolving, 
> technology-dependent and critical systems designed to speed up 
> metropolitan capital circuits, impelled by both competition and the 
> deepening crisis of a world system tumbling into protracted crisis.
>
> An example of that vulnerability:

>

> "In November 2001, a man at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International 
> Airport, the biggest air travel hub in the southeastern United States, 
> left his camera bag in the terminal just before boarding his flight. 
> He rushed back to the terminal to retrieve his bag. When he ran back 
> to catch his plane, fearing he would miss the flight and seeing long 
> lines at the security checkpoint, he impulsively ran up the down 
> escalator to bypass those checkpoints. It was stupid. And it was 
> illegal. But it was, on its own, trivial. Individuals forget things. 
> Individuals take shortcuts. Individuals follow impulses that 
> constitute bad judgment. This impulsive act, however, at untold cost 
> shut down air traffic into and out of the major air traffic hub for 
> over four hours, forced the evacua tion of around ten thousand people, 
> and had immeasurable and cascading consequences for each and all of 
> those people. It forced the rerouting of aircraft, rescheduling, 
> cancellations, and re-ticketing for days afterward. It was the weekend 
> before Thanksgiving. AirTran alone evacuated eighteen flights that 
> were awaiting takeoff on the ground at Atlanta. This is the 
> actualization of entropic potential based directly on system 
> complexity. That disorder can be released by an up-the-down-staircase 
> shortcut, or by flying an airplane into a building."[3]
>
> Asymmetric warfare: a case study 
>
> Since 9-11, the United States has been drawn into a losing war in 
> Southwest Asia that could cost the House of Saud its power, has almost 
> certainly balkanized Iraq, has engendered the hatred of around a 
> billion Muslims, and has brought sundry inter-imperial rivalries to 
> the surface of international relations. Asymmetric warfare 
> practitioners understand the latent disorder in technologically 
> complex, generalized systems; therefore they understand how any 
> properly focused decisive action can put a catastrophic cascade of 
> events into motion. They also understand the inhering advantage to the 
> asymmetric force that exists apart from any state.
>
> Non-state actors cannot be geographically fixed, and therefore cannot 
> be easily struck. Moreover, the attacks of a non-state actor do not 
> risk retaliation against critical institutional infrastructure, and 
> the effort and cost of retaliating – both monetary and political (from 
> collateral damage) – is enormous. I have argued in these pages (The 
> War for Saudi Arabia, August 2004) that the September 11 attacks were 
> designed to provoke the US into an invasion and occupation of 
> Southwest Asia in order to polarize the region against it in order to 
> further isolate corrupt local leaders from their own increasingly 
> restive populations. Asymmetric warfare (AW) can be described as 
> politico-military judo.
>
> The limitation of asymmetric warfare is that it does not, on its own, 
> create the conditions to defeat a technologically superior 
> conventional enemy. It can only prevent that enemy from winning, as we 
> are seeing in Iraq now, where we have witnessed the utter destruction 
> of RMA as a doctrine (though one could never tell it from the media). 
> But then AW does not necessarily aim at inflicting a military defeat… 
> of undergoing the transformation of guerrilla warfare to conventional 
> warfare, as the Vietnamese effected. AW can and is being employed to 
> catalyze institutional processes of degradation in the technologically 
> superior host-society. This is extremely apparent now with the 
> debasement of the United States armed forces through personnel 
> attrition manifested most directly as a recruitment and retention 
> crisis.

>

> Technology's not all it's cracked up to be
>
> This reality has forced the United States to rely increasingly on 
> bluffing. Bluffing has always been part of foreign policy, 
> particularly with regard to military capacity. All militaries seek to 
> create a mystique as a mechanism of deterrence. It is extremely common 
> for the U.S. military to advertise various capabilities for its forces 
> that can only be demonstrated with advance planning and rehearsal. 
> Much of the conspiracy theorizing around 9-11 noted the failure of the 
> Air Force to scramble interceptors quickly enough stop the attacks, 
> the assumption being that they failed to do what they could do. That 
> is not a good assumption. Like many of the units I was in, the 
> advertised response capability is published with as much an eye to 
> deterrence as anything else, and when put to the test on any given day 
> with out warning simply doesn’t work.
>
> On May 11, the same day the 16-year-old hacker was discovered who had 
> broken into U.S. military computer systems, a Cessna 152 had 
> penetrated the three-mile inner circle of Washington DC’s protected 
> airspace… the most restricted airspace in the country. The wayward 
> pilot turn out to be a man with a student on board, en route from 
> Southern Pennsylvania to an air show in Lumberton, NC. Fighter planes 
> and helicopters surrounded this hapless plane almost directly over the 
> capital and escorted to the two terrified travelers to a nearby 
> airfield.
>
> The government’s line is that the security system worked “flawlessly.” 
> In the army, we called this pissing on your leg and telling you it’s 
> raining.
>
> This plane did not hug the earth as any interloper who’d stolen or 
> rented a general aviation aircraft might – evading radar to approach a 
> target. No, it flew into this restricted airspace and got within 90 
> seconds of the capital at a designated altitude, nakedly exposed to 
> radar the whole way.

> The Vulnerable Continent
>
> Here is an excerpt from a studyI did two years ago on the 
> vulnerability of nuclear power plants:
>
> "What the Department of Homeland Security apparently has not figured 
> out is that it is likewise not necessary for attackers to hijack 
> airplanes outside the country to activate the huge 'dirty 
> bombs.'[nuclear power plants] The US General Accounting Office (GAO) 
> released a report in September 2003 that showed 70 general aviation 
> aircraft had been stolen inside the United States within the last five 
> years. That is an average of 14 aircraft a year. These are small 
> planes at short-takeoff-and-landing (STOL) airfields.
>
> "Cursory research shows that the most common light aircraft in the 
> United States is the Cessna Skyhawk.
>
> "A Tomahawk Cruise Missile is a precision weapon that can hug the 
> earth, evade radar, travel to a range of 600 miles, and deliver up to 
> 1,000 pounds of high explosive onto a target. A Cessna Skyhawk has a 
> range of 687 miles, can carry a payload up to 675 pounds, and likewise 
> can hug the contours of the earth to evade radar and deliver its 
> payload with pinpoint accuracy.
>
> "These general aviation aircraft then, with the simple addition of a 
> committed pilot prepared to die and 500 pounds of high explosive, 
> could be employed as a “poor person’s Cruise missile."[4]
>
> The so-called security measures that put interceptors up just in time 
> to shoot down a disoriented private plane almost directly over the 
> White House is deterrent eye-wash. Everyone who watches this with the 
> least idea what they are seeing now knows that everything in the US is 
> penetrable.
>
> The United States, in the exercise of its current form of imperial 
> power – currency-hegemony combined with an overwhelming conventional 
> military force – is pursuing policies to retain that power that are 
> releasing (and motivating) enemies from the inhering caution of a 
> geographically-fixed state that paradoxically constitute a threat to 
> that power for which the United States can have no coherent reply.[5]
>
> Threshold of an historical step-change
>
> We are standing at the threshold of an historical step-change in which 
> US power can be quickly transformed into its opposite… and we may be 
> seeing the first stages of that change right now.

>

> The final vulnerability in this system is both social and 
> psychological. The male ethos of “not backing down” that seems to 
> infect American culture – indoctrinated as we are with a ceaseless 
> river of entertainment cum socialization featuring male revenge themes 
> and militaristic Reichian warrior-fathers – has cornered American 
> politicians. With the Manichean worldview of Americans, carefully 
> programmed to fear the threatening dark Other outside the suburbs, 
> every politician facing the challenge of his or her next electoral 
> ritual is also faced with the potential destructive power of an 
> opponent who can bait the candidate with being “soft”; soft on drugs, 
> soft on crime, soft on communism, soft on terrorism.
>
> It is this cultural and psychological machismo that creates the kind 
> of reactionary inertia, nay – momentum, we are seeing with the Bush 
> administration, and sidelines the cooler heads of the empire. It is 
> this same momentum which forecloses any option of ending the most 
> provocative foreign policies and which will accelerate the 
> re-disposition of the “battle-space” into the “homeland.”
>
> We will then see Rosa Luxemburg’s most dire prediction come to pass, 
> an epoch characterized by the advance of barbarism. In many ways, we 
> are seeing it already.


> [1] Data available from the International Campaign for Justice in 
> Bhopal, at http://www.bhopal.net/.
> [2] Data available from the International Chernobyl Research 
> Information Network, at http://www.chernobyl.info/index.php.
> [3] Stan Goff, “Full Spectrum Disorder – The Military in the New 
> American Century” (Soft Skull Press, 2004), p. 66.
> [4] Stan Goff, “Feeling More Secure Yet? Bush, Security, Energy, 
> Money,” Counterpunch, December 3, 2003.
>
> In another article, it was noted:
>
> "There are 3,000 chemical facilities in the US that are within a 
> danger radius of at least 10, 000 people, 700 plants that would 
> endanger 100,000 or more people, and 123 that could hit more than a 
> million residents. There is transportation sabotage, water supply 
> sabotage (imagine 20 gallons of LSD), coal fired power plants, 
> internet disruption,… in many ways, when you think about it, the 
> targets selected for 9/11 were not mad mass destruction targets but 
> targets selected carefully for their strategic and symbolic import – a 
> major global financial center (where Unocal and the CIA had offices), 
> the Pentagon, and (according to some) the Capital. Financial, 
> military, and political decapitation.
>
> "I hate to break it to those who fantasize that OBL, or whomever, was 
> out to create the worst imaginable havoc out of pure antisocial evil, 
> but if that were the case, the target in New York would not have been 
> the WTC; it would have been the Indian Point nuclear reactor.
>
> "Based on the immense wealth the United States has accumulated through 
> its domination and exploitation of the rest of the world – including, 
> by the way, it’s imperial allies – we are now captured in a giant net 
> of potentially lethal and highly vulnerable techno-mass. Anyone that 
> wants the US bad enough, can get it… only all of us are stuck here in 
> “it.” Stan Goff, “Donald Rumsfeld & Porter Goss say we should be very 
> afraid… and we should,” http://stangoff.com/index.php?p=34.
>
> [5] A hundred moderately well-organized and committed Earth-First-ish 
> monkey-wrenchers could conceivably create havoc for weeks throughout 
> the country with the careful employment of tiny devices called 
> “crabs,” (which I will not describe in detail here) that can be made 
> in any welder’s shop with plain rebar, and which can jam up major 
> automobile thoroughfares for untold hours.
Stan
http://stangoff.com