China Snatches U.S. Navy Spy Apparatus; U.S. Demands Its Return

An underwater, unmanned "drone" operated by the U.S. Navy was seized by the Chinese Navy. China claims it was in Chinese waters, the U.S. claims it was in international waters. [It was in the South China Sea, which China now claims as a virtual Chinese lake. Hence the disagreement.] The U.S. has demanded that China give its drone back, and China said okay, it'll give it back- (when it's good and ready, no doubt). (A curve ball was thrown into the play by president-to-be Donald Trump, who said China should keep the drone. Don't ask me why. I suppose he just always has to grab the spotlight, and that often requires saying something outlandish, in order to stand out. He is a narcissist, an exhibitionist, and an egomaniac, remember. In fact, I'm sure he won't let you forget that for the coming four years, at least.)

The U.S. government domestic radio propaganda network, NPR, absurdly claimed that this spy device was engaged in "scientific" research- as if the U.S. Navy is a scientific research organization.

The Pentagon propaganda office issued a statement under the name of its chief mouthpiece Peter Cook asserting that the underwater spy vehicle was gathering "military oceanographic data...." [My emphasis.] I guess the propagandists at the Pentagon and at NPR didn't get their stories straight. But NPR regards it as one of its missions to always protect the U.S. government, so that could account for the misrepresentation of the drone's mission.  [1]
 
China will doubtless disassemble and study and copy their booty. They did this sort of thing before, when a U.S. spy plane was forced to land on Chinese territory after a Chinese fighter jet clipped and damaged it in flight. (The hot-dogging Chinese pilot was killed in his reckless act, which infuriated the Chinese towards the U.S. But since the U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, after the CIA gave its location to NATO, supposedly in ignorance that it was the Chinese embassy, the Chinese are I think predisposed to blame the U.S. for their losses in confrontations with the U.S. By the way, that embassy bombing is NEVER mentioned in the U.S. Amnesia handicaps ones ability to deal realistically with the world and its other inhabitants.)

This incident is another small step in China's nibbling away at the edge of U.S. power in the Pacific. A much bigger milestone is Philippines death squad president Rodrigo Duterte telling the U.S. to kiss-off, and openly embracing China. The Obama regime has responded like a deer in the headlights, seemingly frozen. When Duterte called Obama a "son of a whore" and publicly cursed him, the U.S. barely reacted to this effrontery. Then the Philippines won a court case against China for China appropriating islands in the South China Sea. The U.S. reacted to that by talking like a mediator, instead of clearly siding with the winner, the Philippines. This signaled weakness. Obviously the U.S. wishes to avoid confrontation with China- but that means the U.S. must retreat in the face of growing Chinese power and "assertiveness."

The Philippines then abandoned its claim and started cozying up to China, under Duterte.

Duterte brags of personally murdering "criminals." No doubt the mild verbal remonstrances the U.S. has to make over his "human rights record," in order to maintain its image as the beacon of freedom and democracy and human rights, irked Duterte, even though the criticisms were strictly pro forma. Duterte is a crude thug, unsophisticated to play the game with winks and nods and understand that some things are just political theater, not to be taken seriously. (The U.S. "objecting" to relentless Israeli colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is a long-running, very tired political play.) A murderous goon like Duterte is temperamentally more comfortable with the tyrants of Beijing than with the two-stepping hypocrites of Washington.

A bit of background: The Philippines was a U.S. colony until after World War II, when it became a neocolony and client dictatorship. It was a Spanish colony until the U.S. seized it as war booty during the Spanish-American war of 1898, when the U.S. also gained control of Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and carved Panama out of Colombia for its own uses. The Filipinos had the crazy idea that they should be independent, so several hundred thousand of them had to be killed to convince them to stop resisting U.S. conquest. President Theodore Roosevelt, an iconic figure in U.S. pseudo-history (quasi-mythology) sent hearty congratulations to the U.S. military commander of the invasion and occupation force for his fine work in suppressing Filipino resistance.

During World War II, the Japanese occupied the Philippines. Their brutality alienated the Filipinos, just as Japanese barbarism alienated the other victims in their "Co-Prosperity Sphere," such as the Koreans and Chinese. In this, they made exactly the same strategic blunder as the Nazis. Their ideology of racial "superiority," hyper-militarism and fascism proved too much for the colonized to bear, unlike other imperialisms which are tolerated by the conquered for longer time-spans.

Two giant U.S. military bases, the Subic Bay naval base and Clark airfield, were long occupied by the U.S. Some years after U.S.-backed dictator Marcos was overthrown, the U.S. was asked to vacate those bases. The U.S. has been angling to get those or other bases in the Philippines back ever since.

For a number of years now, U.S. "special forces" have been semi-covertly helping the Filipino military hunt and kill Islamofascist rebels in the Philippines. Duterte now says he wants the U.S. military out, and the U.S. can keep its money too.

 

                       EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT! DUTERTE DUMPS DIRT ON U.S.!


Instead of the U.S. successfully constructing a coalition of nations to contain China, things seem to be going the other way, first with the U.S. gratuitously picking a fight with Russia over the Ukraine, which the U.S. gleefully destabilized, and driving Russia into China's arms (witness a recent multi-billion dollar economic deal and joint naval maneuvers between Russia and China), friendlier ties between India and China, and now the Philippines rushing to embrace China and spurning its long-time dominant political spouse the U.S.

The U.S. is so powerful that it has gotten away with some major blunders (the Indochina War, siding with jihadists against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and fecklessly allowing Pakistan to become a nuclear weapons power, for example), but with China's rise, the stakes may be higher than ever. In the two World Wars, other nations did the heavy fighting and dying, and the U.S. picked up the chips at the end of the games. But all-out war with nuclear-armed China is out of the question, as obviously a land invasion is!

China is ruled by a patient one-party dictatorship that has less pressure from domestic public opinion when it comes to how it conducts foreign affairs than in the U.S. case. It also has a much more unified ruling class, whereas in the U.S. the Republican Party seems determined to destroy the Democratic Party and monopolize political power. No matter what a Democratic president does, even if it is identical with Republican policies, he is attacked by the Republicans. That won't be a problem for the next four to eight years, with a Republican president and Congress, and the Democrats inclined to bark but never bite. But U.S. politicians are still remarkably short-sighted, and this is reflected in its conduct of foreign affairs. Part of this is due to their need to get reelected (every two years in the case of House Representatives). Part is due to Americans' temperamental impatience. And part is a disinterest in history, which to Americans is like intellectual broccoli, something off-putting.

But ironically, it may be the mercurial, notoriously short-attention-spanned Donald Trump who makes some changes. [2]

1]  Here is the Pentagon's statement. The title links to globalsecurity.org, which reproduced the Pentagon statement. If you want to have the Pentagon record you computer ID so they can track you, put you in the NSA database, and maybe plant spyware/malware on your computer, I have also provided the Pentagon's URL for the statement, from global security, below the statement. Note that the type of data the Pentagon admits the drone was collecting is pertinent to anti-sub warfare, especially "sound speed." To destroy subs, one has to track them by listening for them. Sound travels through water at different speeds depending on salinity and temperature, for example. So this drone is not so innocent, to quote a song.

"Statement by Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook on Incident in South China Sea, Release No. NR-448-16," December 16, 2016.

Using appropriate government-to-government channels, the Department of Defense has called upon China to immediately return an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) that China unlawfully seized on Dec. 15 in the South China Sea while it was being recovered by a U.S. Navy oceanographic survey ship. The USNS Bowditch (T-AGS 62) and the UUV -- an unclassified "ocean glider" system used around the world to gather military oceanographic data such as salinity, water temperature, and sound speed - were conducting routine [sic!]operations in accordance with international law about 50 nautical miles northwest of Subic Bay, Philippines, when a Chinese Navy PRC DALANG III-Class ship (ASR-510) launched a small boat and retrieved the UUV. Bowditch made contact with the PRC Navy ship via bridge-to-bridge radio to request the return of the UUV. The radio contact was acknowledged by the PRC Navy ship, but the request was ignored. The UUV is a sovereign immune vessel of the United States. We call upon China to return our UUV immediately, and to comply with all of its obligations under international law.

http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/1032611/

2] See "Is Trump An Unwitting International Relations 'Realist'?," December 16, 2016.

WikiLeaks Invites Obama to Bomb It

In effect, that is. It's certainly not their intent to be subjected to a murderous U.S. attack.

WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization and website founded by Julian Assange, offered a $50,000 reward for military records of the U.S. war crime of bombing the Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on October 2^nd. [1] And they asked for some very specific material that the U.S. no doubt will refuse to release. Here's their ask:

“The AC-130 records its attacks with high resolution gun cameras. According to military procedure, this footage should have been retained along with the cockpit audio. A post-massacre inquiry report referred to as an ‘AR 15-6’ should have also been commissioned. We are raising a U.S. $50,000 bounty to obtain the footage, the cockpit audio, the inquiry report and other relevant materials.” [2] [3]

Wow! Talk about tickling the throat of the tiger. That sure got the attention of the U.S., I'll bet.

The U.S. has already taken extreme measures to destroy WikiLeaks. It arranged for credit card companies and Paypal to bar donations to WikiLeaks. It has launched numerous computer attacks against the organization and unleashed the whole panoply of secret police repressive and close surveillance against the group. Most notoriously, it arranged a long-running criminal “investigation” of Assange by Sweden, and now has him trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Ecuador has granted Assange political asylum, a decision Britain refuses to respect. It has a police cordon around the Embassy, and planted a listening device inside, violating diplomatic sovereignty. And the U.S. has a secret indictment of Assange. It is licking its chops waiting for an opportunity to seize him and imprison him for decades, if not life. There is an ongoing grand jury “investigation” of WikiLeaks, a standard political repression weapon the U.S. uses.

WikiLeaks incited the enduring hatred of the U.S. government and some U.S. elites (a number of whom publicly called for Assange's murder) by exposing, among other things, one of the most blood chilling U.S. war crimes, the murder of Reuters journalists in Iraq by a murderous U.S. helicopter crew, who also fired on a van full of children whose father had stopped to aid the journalists after they had been gunned down in the street.

WikiLeaks was given the helicopter's video and audio recording of the murders anonymously by U.S. Army private Chelsea Manning, who was turned in by FBI secret police informer Adrian Lamo, in whom Manning unwisely confided in online. Manning was then kept naked for a year in a Marine brig (despite being an Army private), court-martialed, and sentenced to 35 years in prison. The murderers of course suffered no consequences at all. [See the collateral murder video.]

The U.S. is used to getting its way and will break any law to get it.

It took the extreme measure of forcing down the presidential plane of Bolivian president Evo Morales and had it searched when it suspected that Edward Snowden was onboard. Snowden is the man who exposed some of the massive NSA global surveillance programs.

To show their displeasure with al-Jazeera, the Qatari news outfit, they bombed its offices four times in Kabul and Baghdad, and kidnapped one of its employees, who they imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, where they tried to force him to be a spy inside al-Jazeera for them.

Considering the U.S.' willingness to commit any crime, I have an idea! Why not a drone strike on the Ecuadorean embassy in London? It's the next logical step after bombing a hospital run by an internationally renowned organization. What do you think, Barack? It's not like you'd be technically bombing London. The embassy is Ecuadorean national territory by law. You could always say it was a “mistake,” issue an “apology,” and announce an “investigation” afterwards if the squawking got too loud.
Ecuador does have a left-wing government now, after all. And the president is (falsely) accused of attacking press “freedom.” You could say bombing their embassy strikes a blow for freedom. That's no more far-fetched than a lot of U.S. propaganda, such as support for fascist death squad terror states is “defending freedom and democracy.”

But Obama did “apologize” to Médecins Sans Frontières....five days after the war crime, and a few hours after MSF publicly called for an independent of the crime under the Geneva Convention. Guess he thought he could dissuade them with a “sorry.”

1] “Afghanistan: MSF staff killed and hospital partially destroyed in Kunduz,” and “Kunduz Hospital Airstrike,” Médecins Sans Frontières.

2] “Wikileaks Offers to Pay $50,000 for Kunduz Bombing Footage,” Time magazine, October 8, 2015. You could go to the WikiLeaks website, but the U.S. government will trap your IP address and plant spyware and maybe worse on your computer. You could try using the Tor browser and a vpn, but there's no guarantee that would provide absolute protection. I suppose you could use a computer in an Internet cafe or library, so it won't be your computer- but if you use your actual name to use it, they might find out your name, depending on how fanatical they are. (Pretty fanatical, generally speaking.) Living in a global police state gets to be a real pain in the ass....

Interestingly, Time referred to WikiLeaks as “Transparency activist group Wikileaks” I was surprised by that non-derogatory, accurate description from a U.S. establishment media organ.

3] The AC-130 is the murderous flying gunship the U.S. unleashed on the hospital- it has also been used in El Salvador, Vietnam, and other poor countries victimized by the U.S., generally against people who have no defense against it. It is a cargo plane reconfigured with rapid-fire cannons to blow people on the ground to bits. It also carries air-to-ground missiles. There are plans to add a laser weapon. It also helped murder 4,000 Panamanians when the U.S. invaded that country on the orders of Bush the Elder.
There's an amoral description of the plane and its history at Wikipedia.

Standard weapons are two 20mm cannons, a 25mm Gatling gun that fires 1,800 rounds per minute, a 40mm cannon that fires 100 rounds a minute, and a large 105mm cannon that can fire 10 shells a minute. It is also packed with various surveillance and electronic equipment. See Federation of American Scientists for specs.

My, what Big Bullets you Butchers have! 40mm munitions on the flying abattoir.

AC-130 gunship with air to ground 
missiles on wingpod.

Lockheed Martin manufactures the killer aircraft. Note cannons protruding from fuselage.

Black Americans can enjoy the benefits of 

slaughtering people too.

You've come a long way, Baby- 

you've got your own gun now.

  That's what I call progress!

 After awhile one does gets blase about butchery.

 Blast away, Boys!

Obama won't unleash this on ISIS or on Assad's forces- but a hospital makes a perfect target. Hospitals can't shoot back!

[Scroll down to earlier essays for details on the hospital bombing and its aftermath, and the ever-changing series of smarmy U.S. lies.]

Bush Created "Enemy Combatants." Now Obama Has Invented "Unprivileged Belligerents," Formerly Known as Journalists

Amazingly, the U.S. has openly declared its intent to murder journalists.

As I wrote about yesterday, ["Obama Regime Codifies Policy of Murdering Journalists U.S. Doesn't Like"] under Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Barack Obama, the Department of "Defense" has issued a new manual giving its killers carte blanche to deal with journalists whose work it considers a "threat" in the same manner that "enemy combatants" and "terrorists" are dealt with. These journalists are now to be considered "unprivileged belligerents." A belligerent is an enemy soldier. "Unprivileged" means the normal laws of war do not apply. In short, the Obama regime's Pentagon has declared its intent to murder journalists who displease it too much. (One such journalist, Michael Hastings, was murdered by the government last year, apparently at the instigation of  CIA boss John Brennan. Hastings was reviled by the military for "causing" the firing of general Stanley McCrystal, and held in contempt by establishment pseudo-journalists.) [1]

These categories were specifically created to dehumanize the intended targets of violence to legitimize, morally and pseudo-legally, torture, murder, and indefinite imprisonment in secret locations under barbaric conditions without having to bother with courts, lawyers, or trials. They create the psychological and political conditions to activate these crimes against basic human rights. Thus does Obama take the U.S. further into barbarism, continuing the evil project of his predecessors.
The fact that the U.S. is now openly declaring its "right" to treat journalists it finds annoying as subhuman scum to be eliminated at will moved the New York Times to publish a worried editorial on the matter. (Referenced and linked to in my previous essay noted above.)

The Pentagon document is a declaration of war against journalists who don't toe the U.S. line. Al-Jazeera journalists were targets of lethal U.S. violence from the very start of the "War On Terrorism" in 2001. In the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the target list of journalists was expanded to include "unembedded" journalists, that is, those who would not be stooges of the U.S. military.
What had been unofficial policy, a practice of selective murder thinly veiled under cynical claims of "accidents," is now openly proclaimed as stated U.S. military policy. As usual, the U.S. government does its Alice-In-Wonderland game of calling whatever they proclaim as "lawful." "Law is whatever the U.S. Killer State says it is."

U.S. involvement in or directly murdering journalists goes back at least to 1948, when CBS correspondent George Polk was murdered by Greek fascists and the Truman regime arranged to frame up communists for the crime. Polk had exposed corruption in the the fascist regime of former Nazi collaborations the Truman regime installed in Greece after World War Two. No less a personage than the notorious William "Wild Bill" Donovan, head of the wartime OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, was detailed to arrange the coverup and frameup. (A communist journalist was tortured into "confessing," among other, ahem, irregularities in the "trial." Make that show trial, a term the self-proclaimed "Free World" was fond of throwing at its Bolshevik adversaries. Or as they say in Wonderland, first the verdict, then then trial.)

The U.S. media and "educational" system has done an assiduous job of erasing the story of George Polk from general knowledge, while cynically recognizing the journalism award named after him. Very little has been written about this tawdry crime of U.S. Imperialism and its fascist underlings. I first learned of it years ago when a now-defunct magazine named More published a cover story about it, telling the true story. Then Kati Marton, a former wife of ABC chief "news" reader Peter Jennings and U.S. State Department tough guy Richard Holbrooke (both now deceased) wrote a book that also endeavored to reveal the truth.

Over the decades, the U.S. has been involved in the murders of hundreds of journalists by the various neo-fascist regimes it has installed in its various satrapies around the world, especially in Latin America. It has directly killed a smaller number, some in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, some inside the U.S. (See my essay referenced above for examples.) The particulars of each case leave no doubt that none were accidents or "suicides," and all were deliberate murders.

The U.S. used to put up a facade of denial. Now they have announced they will no longer even bother with that.

1] For a discussion of the hatred and contempt U.S. corporate propagandists had for the genuine journalist Michael Hastings, see "Michael Hastings: my friend and his enemies," the Guardian, (UK), June 19, 2013.