4 posts tagged “security”
At the Munich (Germany) transatlantic security conference, an alumni-style get together of NATO state representatives and guests, Western politicians bring in their harvest of all but failed security policies. Their last resort: mimick naive innocence.
On Saturday, Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, had some harsh rethorics in store for the hosts of the annual Munich Transatlantic conference on security. The conference unites high ranking government members from NATO states with important personalities from the vanity fair of think tanks, both European and American.
When Russia's president delivered his address on Saturday to a different tune, these representatives uttered astonishment and saw the dawning of a new era of cold war. Top of the list of the media, choosing an unduly innocent pose was the online edition of German newsweekly DER SPIEGEL. The magazine, seeing itself in one league with TIME and Newsweek quoted one participant of the conference asking "why is he [Putin] doing it?"
Putin had criticized American unilatralism as seen by Russia in frank words, and left no doubt about the aims of his address right from the start:
"This conference’s structure allows me to avoid excessive politeness and the need to speak in roundabout, pleasant but empty diplomatic terms."
While the cold-war-rethorics have only slightly lost in impetus on Sunday and a number of the German media attributed Putin's posture as a reflex of Russia's indignation about losing its status as a superpower, none so far documented Putin's speech in full text, which was made available earlier on Sunday through the official homepage of the Kremlin.
Loking at the speech in more detail, it is fair to say that the Russian President's speech amounts to what can be considered a stern warning to the US-led NATO to stop short of unilateralist mesaures.
However, being emotional in tone, Putin's speech in no way fails to objectively outline Russia's new concerns:
Unwillingness to accept moral lessons about democracy from the Western alliance
Mr. Putin made it clear that Russia was unwilling to accept what could be paraphrased as what its considers to be false good advice form the Western alliance about its pace on human rights issues. Mr. Putin compared state internal democracy to a "democratical" world order and tried to redefine the issue, concluding that:
"It is [a] world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.
And this certainly has nothing in common with democracy. Because, as you know, democracy is the power of the majority in light of the interests and opinions of the minority.
Incidentally, Russia – we – are constantly being taught about democracy. But for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn themselves."
Indeed, with EU-investigations on US-sponsored secret service camps to detain suspects in the states of "New Europe" and with allegedly numerous CIA-sponsored prisoner flights, trying to claim moral authority can be perilous and would eventually have backfired on its originators, as demonstrated by Mr. Putin.
Reciprocity of investment activities
The Russian government has of late seen itself exposed to harsh criticism from the West and its corporate stakeholders about preventing foreign investment through repressive means. In his speech, Putin remarked that:
"We are open to cooperation. Foreign companies participate in all our major energy projects. According to different estimates, up to 26 percent of the oil extraction in Russia – and please think about this figure – up to 26 percent of the oil extraction in Russia is done by foreign capital. Try, try to find me a similar example where Russian business participates extensively in key economic sectors in western countries. Such examples do not exist! There are no such examples.
I would also recall the parity of foreign investments in Russia and those Russia makes abroad. The parity is about fifteen to one. And here you have an obvious example of the openness and stability of the Russian economy."
The debate had heated in late 2006, as Russian investors were rumored to try to buy themselves into German telco incumbent Deutsche Telekom, spurring fears about possible industrial espionage. Also, it is unclear, on which basis the cooperation between European aviation consortium EADS and Russia is to be intensified, as the wish to draw upon traditional Russian strengths in aviation engineering and the wish to stop the efflux of Russian engineering talent to undesirable sponsors is counter-balanced by a deep rooting fear about possible technology and knowledge transfer to Russia.
The sense of encirclement
Given its sheer size, which is about double that of the United States (including Alaska) and its east-west stretch across eleven timezones (or about half of the Northern hemisphere), it is difficult for Russia not to feel encircled. During the early 1990s the problem had temporarily faded somewhat, as the West had not regrouped its interest after the fall of the Iron Curtain. However, with US-lead forces operating in its former backyard Afghanistan, an allegedly strong support by the US to centrifugal, anti Russian, political forces in Caucasus and the fact that NATO has advanced towards the Western Russian borders with little or no buffers (Ukraine's pro-Russian government fell in 2006, Georgia to the south is controlled by a pro Western government), Russia does nowadays struggle to keep the advance of US interests at bay. It seems to be impardonable naive to hear NATO's Secretary General, de Hoop Scheffer quoted as saying "I cannot conceal that I am disappointed (...)" if Russia was worried when "democracy and the rule of law moved closer (...)" to its borders. Given the United States' recent track record of moving democracy closer to third-party borders or beyond, a certain Russian concern could be unterstandable when Putin concludes:
"I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”. Where are these guarantees?"
In a more global perspective, Putin's remarks might very well be ushering in a new Russian posture in its security policies, which could ultimately result in the revival of closer strategic ties with China, signs of which are unmistakable according to a number of essays by former high ranking member of the Philippine military, Victor Corpus and published by the Asia Times in 2006.
German online IT newspage Heise.de reports in its Tuesday edition that the German legislator drafts a law that would forbid the dissemination of precise geodata. Some remark, it is a shift into full gear, back into communist era censorship.
According to the report, the German government has submitted a draft law to the upper chamber of German parliament titled: "Law for the protection against imperilment of the security of Germany by means of distribution of high quality reconnaissance data".
The law puts all earth reconnaissance and geo-data systems operated from Germany or by Germans under the potential threat of prohibition, and leaves large leeway for interpretation to the authorities to define what "high quality" actually is.
All operators of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) would, according to the draft law, need a written permission by the German authorities to distribute data, which would potentially confront the development of satellite based navigation systems and map material with unacceptable bureaucratic hurdles. The now introduced legislation, according to Heise, would also concern terrain elevation data models, as they could be used to operate unmanned aviation vehicles in terrorist contexts. It is interesting to observe that the law draws its constitutional justification from Article 26 of the German Grundgesetz (constitution):
"Article 26 [Ban on preparations for war of aggression]
(1) Acts tending to and undertaken with intent to disturb the peaceful relations between nations, especially to prepare for a war of aggression, shall be unconstitutional. They shall be made a criminal offense.
(2) Weapons designed for warfare may be manufactured, transported, or marketed only with the permission of the Federal Government. Details shall be regulated by a federal law."
[Non authoritative translation FYI, source: http://www.iuscomp.org/gla/statutes/GG.htm#26]
Commentators in the blogosphere argue that services like Google Earth would either be beaurocratized to the degree of standstill by the now introduced legislation, or be put in peril considered the potential risk of law violation, making it easy for GIS-companies to decide in turn to divert investment away from Germany.
The law provides for a maximum penalty of five years imprisonment or fines of up to EUR 500.000, putting the politically undesired distribution of geo data in one league with the sale of deadly weapons to rogue states, to which article 26 of the Grundgesetz did pertain in its original intention. It is noteworthy that the law, very obviously being a mishapped attempt to curb terrorist dangers, puts terrorist act at one level with "wars of aggression", completely blurring the border between individual criminal acts and state-sponsored wars of aggression.
Some members of the blogosphere also observed in comments about the article that the now introduced law marks an important step back towards communist-era handling of geodata, quoting a report from Berliner Zeitung about intentionally distorted maps in communist Eastern Germany before 1990.
Alternative media sources have been rife with reports of U.S.-plans for an intervention in South America, using Paraguay's Chaco region as an operational basis against neighboring countries in the so called Tri Border Region (Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina) as well as neighboring Bolivia.
In late 2005, Argentine news daily Clarin reported about a remote military base in the North of Praguay in the settlement of Marriscal Estigarribia. The settlement is in the far North of the small country, located strategically at the heart of the continent. What is interesting about the base is its location, and its size: Far remote from the Southern centers, Marriscal Estigarribia has little or no significance for Paraguay's domestic affairs. What's more, if one approaches the site from air, the massive tarmac of a 3.8 Kilometre long runway stretches in the middle of, basically, the jungle. While the Paraguayan air force only uses very light aircraft, the question remains over what such an overdimensioned tarmac could be used for.
The runway which can receive B 52-sized aircraft without major complications, has been constructed in the mid-1980s under then dictator Alfredo Stroessner. What makes it an ideal location today is its strategic location between Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, with Hugo Chavez's Venezuela well within reach. It might also be noteworthy that Paraguay and its neighbor Brazil sit on one of the world's largest reserves of drinking water, the Aquifero Guaraní, making it an ideal strategic possible foothold for 21st century wars over drinking water.
While the U.S.-government has constantly denied allegations by alternative media that the U.S. presidential family has been active in purchasing land in this region of Paraguay, there are reports in the alternative media that, since 2005, about one dozen exercises have been held with the participation of U.S.- and Paraguayan forces. Some of these are reported to have resulted in violent, at times deadly, clashes between expropriated campesinos and security forces with strong U.S.-participation. Rumors according to which U.S. Marines were granted an immunity statute by the Paraguayan government were also denied in several communiqués sponsored by the U.S. administration. Official claims that there is no military base in Northern Paraguay can be as easily refuted as with a click to Google Maps, giving some very clear indications that the installations rather cater to the standards of an Army sponsored facility for 20.000 personell than to Southern American barrack-standards.
There are however clear signs for a buildup of North American forces in the region, as PR and communications activities apparently already begin levelling the field for a possible intervention. Instead of a, now non-exsistant, communist threat, a concentration of Arabs with a terrorist background is now used as the official pretext for surveillance measures in the region. Using military force instead of having a Gay Old Time with 1970's style coups d'etat would hence seem a rational choice to make for the sitting administration, as the blogosphere and a certain degree of transparency would make it more difficult than cutting some phone lines and occupying some radio stations to take protest off the air. Also, recent development in Latin America have triggered a possible domino scenario which could be considered highly risky from the U.S. governments' perspective. With the nationalizations of natural energy resources by the leftist presidents in Bolivia and Venezuela, policies tilted somewhat to left center in Argentina and a socialist government in Brazil, the continent could nourish and financially support to an extent the flame of the anti-globalization movement.
One question remains: Why would Paraguay put relationships with its neighbors in the Mercosur region at stake? Clarin reports that slim chances of exporting chiefly its produce to the Mercosur region as well as a whopping unemployment of close to 40% in some regions as well as over half of its population below the poverty line could leave Paraguay with little choice than to offer itself as a kind of land based aircraft carrier in exchange for certain economic concessions and lifting of trade barriers by the U.S.
When I sifted through the online version of German newsweekly DER SPIEGEL today, i felt more than slightly uncomfortable. A North American Scientist, it said, wanted to tell evil terrorist intentions from facial expressions.
It seems like an April Fool's that never ends: According to an article in German newsweekly DER SPIEGEL, American psychologist Paul Ekman and the Department for Homeland Security now want to screen passing-by passengers for terrorist or otherwise evil intentions by looking at their faces.
Ekman, the article says, has studied universal facial expressions for over four decades and maintains that there is a universality to facial expressions in every human. Consequently, at 14 US-airports, specially trained officers have been posted to guess possible delinquents from the facial expression with which they pass by.
After rolling my mouse over the task bar calendar, I reassured myself that it was not April, 1st, 2007. As expected, it wasn't.
The now initiated programme seems only the latest step of a global culture shifting into full gear , towards medieval or inquisitory methods of second guessing and superstition as a means of penal (or at least pre-penal) justice. The principle has re-emerged at different historical stages, and maybe was best known during the late 1930's and early 1940's in Germany, when the Nazi-spindocs tried to match facial features such as nose size or the size of the temples to human charactaristics such as intelligence or mental illness.
As early as 1933, the Nazi smut literature was made available to the hobby-racist, titled "Kleine Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes" (little racial almanac for German citizens).
It remains to be seen, whether hobby-denouncers soon will have facial expression files for PDAs, laptop computers, PSPs and iPods at hand on their trip, alongside with publications of the above shown style.
