Pan-African Postcard

The new media face of the peace movement

Horace Campbell

2010-08-05, Issue 493

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/66500

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‘Technology is a double edged sword.’ – General George Casey

When army chief of staff General Casey was making his speech about the future of US National Security to the Brookings Institute in 2007, the US military was being retooled for the era of information warfare. General Casey was quite aware of the deep divisions in the US armed forces and that the world was changing before his eyes. In the same period, there was a book about the Fiasco in Iraq. The peace movement had seized the moral high ground and the rhetoric about war on terrorism was exposed as a front for military aggression against innocent civilians in all parts of the world. With the hollowness of the rhetoric unveiled, the US rulers needed to reformulate the psychological warfare and mind control over the US citizens.

But decline followed decline as the horrors of the Abu Ghraib prison, Faluja and other graphic and disturbing images were beamed by information platforms to billions around the world. Hackers joined the peace and justice forces and discredited the US intelligence/military and information systems. Citizens were now opposed to military spending when there was the most severe capitalist crisis since 1929. The US intelligence/military information apparatus have been known to have the most sophisticated networks of hackers in the world. Hackers, including those trained by the US intelligence service, cannot be considered good for our freedom and security. The irony about the belief that the US intelligence/military apparatus, including the CIA, has a monopoly of sophisticated hackers has been exposed by Wikileaks, which have beaten the US intelligence in their own game. I do not support hackers, but want to highlight the game-changing effects of WikiLeaks.

In previous depressions, nationalism, jingoism, militarism and military aggression were the favourite techniques to mobilise poor people against their own interests. The intelligence, drugs and financial services industry worked together to regain their footing and moved to reshape the Obama administration in their image, with full time warriors in strategic positions around new government in January 2009.

With this new strategy, the forces of war and death hoped to continue, but they were unaware that the election of Obama only served to heighten the understanding of the need for the democratisation of information. Information warfare had inspired its opposite, the appearance of hackers for peace who were in the business of exposing warfare. The peace and justice forces were forced to acquire new tactics and strategies in light of the limits of representative politics and elections.

One of the faces was the online service called WikiLeaks. This was a platform that exposed the video of the July 2007 attack in Baghdad where US forces, firing from helicopter gunships, wounded two children and killed more than a dozen Iraqis, including two Reuters employees. This revelation exposed the brutality of the new kind of terror that was carried using the tax dollars of the poor.

The existence of WikiLeaks exposed the fact that it was not only the US government that could gather information and circulate information. The premises of the Patriot Act and the legislations around Homeland Security in the aftermath of the September 2001 events required total control over information. WikiLeaks and the networks of hackers and computer wonks weakened the power of the militarists and strengthened one of the arms of the peace movement.

PEACE MOVEMENT AS THE GLOBAL SUPER POWER

When the peace movement brought out millions in the streets of the world before the Iraq war in February 2003, the New York Times called this massive organisation one of the new super powers. This is how the paper captured the mobilisation for peace:

‘[T]he huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.’

Faced with this power of public opinion, the US war-makers moved aggressively to disperse and disorganise the traditional forms of the protests, demonstrations and petitions of peace movement. Militarist fronts such as the US Institute for Peace went into full time operation to turn centres of peace into areas for the study of counter-terrorism.

The fabrication of terrorism frightened many in the traditional peace movement so that it was only the most tenacious groups such as Grannies for Peace, Mothers for Peace, Pastors for Peace, Code Pink and local Peace and Justice groups at the local levels (groups with a long term view) that kept opposing the military industrial complex. One of the institutions that suffered the most from this counter penetration was the university system. Unlike in Israel or parts of Europe and Africa where there was a vibrant peace movement within the academy, in the USA, the universities became complicit in covering up war crimes as the corporatisation of the intellectual life was corrupted by the billions handed out by the Pentagon.

This counter-penetration and confusion in the ranks of the peace movement reached its highest point in the Save Darfur Campaign. This was supposed to be a peace movement that was calling for the deployment of US troops in Africa. Mahmood Mamdani has recorded in his book ‘Saviors and Survivors’ how the so-called forces of peace were calling for the deployment of US troops in the Sudan. After the election of Barack Obama in November 2008, this psychological warfare against lovers of peace continued with the war on terror being changed to the 'Overseas Contingency Operation.' The Obama administration had faced pressures from the peace movement and from the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). Those who had recognised the criminal activities of the US military machine urged the Obama administration to drop the phrase ‘war on terror’. The ICJ had communicated to the Obama administration that the formulation ‘war on terror’ had given the Bush administration ‘spurious justification to a range of human rights and humanitarian law violations,’ including detention practices and interrogation methods that the International Committee of the Red Cross has described as torture.

While dropping the name war on terror, the Obama administration did nothing to dismantle the booming business of military and intelligence contracting that consumed billons in the midst of a depression. Despite the mildness of the formulation, ‘humanitarian law violations’ term, the rebuke by the International Commission of Jurists was a manifestation that the peace front was widening.

While those who were looking for messiahs were bemoaning the fact that there were no longer huge demonstrations similar to the February 2003 manifestations, they were not fully appreciative of the new silent but effective face of peace as it appeared in numerous forms within the social media platforms. Peace could not be separated from health nor from environmental justice so those looking for big demonstrations were unaware of the new networks of networks for reparative justice and peace.

One of the places where the peace movement was growing was inside the armed forces. From time to time there were flashes of what was going on from peace forces called Iraq Veterans Against the War. In July 2010 the new reach of this international peace movement was exposed o the world when the WikiLeaks website posted over 76,000 American military documents on the US-led war against the peoples of Afghanistan. The documents covering the period from January 2004 to December 2009 did not bring out anything new, but highlighted the role of death squads and completely discredited any basis for the continuation of this war against innocent human beings.

As a new global platform, the head of this WikiLeaks hails from Australia and the network of workers stretch all across the world. The international nature of these new faces of peace was underlined when the release was timed to coincide with articles on these revelations in the New York Times, the British Guardian and the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel. These news outlets had been traditional supporters of the War on Terror but the chilling details of the killing of innocent civilians (numbered over 20,000 by Julian Assange, spokesperson and editor in chief for WikiLeaks) had deepened. Inside the United States, the principal TV and Media outlets, connected as they were to the military industrial complex, blamed WikiLeaks for endangering the lives of soldiers. There was not a hint of irony from those in the conservative and liberal media who were making these claims about innocent lives.

So while the old forms of mass protests and demonstrations are not seen, new and emerging forces of peace expose how the US death squads operate at will under a media blackout. Popular blogs and other forms of new media reproduced the information on the war crimes, especially the various special forces that at one time were called Task Force 373.

Africans from the peace and justice sections will immediately recognise the activities of these special forces, since these forms of murder had been practiced in Africa and other parts of the oppressed world since the murder of Partrice Lumumba in the Congo. Today, these forms of kidnapping and murder are being carried out by elite groups of the US military and the private contractors who are basically paid assassination groups. We now know that what is being called war in Afghanistan consist of organised groups for murder.

One website Counterpunch summarised the documents in this way:

- The methodical use of a death squad made up of US Special Forces, known as Task Force 373
- Willful, casual slaughter of civilians by Coalition personnel, with ensuing cover-ups
- The utter failure of ‘counter-insurgency’ and ‘nation building’
- The venality and corruption of the Coalition’s Afghan allies
- The complicity of Pakistan’s Intelligence Services with the Taliban.

ADDICTS OF WAR AND HACKERS FOR PEACE

These details of the clearly criminal actions of the US armed forces were not the first to show how the values of the US Constitution had been undermined by the capitalist class and the military industrial complex. During the wars against the peoples of IndoChina, the Bertrand Russell war crimes tribunal had charged the US military with a long history of racial genocide. In the absence of a new and strong force of international peace activists, WikiLeaks emerged as a game changer on the scene.

Since the dawn of the information age, the US military had been entering the video game business and using this medium as a recruiting tool. Youths in the USA are then ensnared into the military in a context where death does not seem real. The Pentagon had joined forces with the information technology behemoths while the intelligence services tapped into the business model of Google to establish firms such as In-Q-Tel. But the surreal nature of the video game wars caught up with the US military as hundreds of real soldiers were committing suicide because of the crimes they were witnessing and millions more were suffering from mental disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder.

With the wave of sickness from the criminal acts increasing, there were young citizens in the armed forces who were opposed to the wars. Hundreds of thousands of these youths had been brought up on video games and were linked to the world of social media and a world of computer wizards known as hackers. These youths were connected to networks of computer programmers who had access to the security clearances that had exploded with the multibillion-dollar intelligence contracting business after the wars escalated.

The world of hackers and the world of soldiers for peace met with the emergence of new actors for peace, and one such person was Bradley Manning.

The reality was that the era of information technology had sharpened the digital divide with the strengthening of those who used the power of information to dominate others. So while the democratic content of information technology is counteracted by the technology divide on a global scale, the US could not contain the explosion of computer knowledge. This was especially because the US wanted to remain a super power without spending on education and health. If in 2003, the NY Times was referring to two superpowers, by the time of the capitalist depression of 2008, the global peace movement was slowly emerging as the potential force in world politics. Casey was beginning to see the reality that information warfare and technology was a double-edged sword because there were others whip could control the technology outside the big capitalists.

The contradictions of the massive investments in the Cold War military industrial complex were coming to haunt the rulers and they were faced with a world where there was the declining power and influence of the USA. This decline was exponential in the information technology branches of industry because the US did not sufficiently invest in the education of the youths and in the expansion of broadband technology. By 2010, the US ranked No. 20 on the scale of countries where the citizens had access to broadband. Thus, the world of hackers was being internationalised with hackers having their own platforms such as the Hackers Quarterly, hoping to make up for the democratic deficit in the information era in a context where the military and intelligence services were in a losing battle to escape accountability and transparency.

The New York Times lists three groups of hackers:

‘“Black hats” break into corporate computer systems for fun and profit, taking credit card numbers and e-mail addresses to sell and trade with other hackers, while the “white hats” help companies stop their disruptive counterparts. But it is the third group, the “gray hats,” that are the most vexing for companies. These hackers play it any number of ways, which can leave a company vulnerable to lost assets as well as a tarnished reputation as security breaches are exposed.’

One group that was not mentioned was the hackers for peace who are wielding the double-edged sword in the era of information warfare.

WIKILEAKS AND THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

WikiLeaks operates within this world of computer technology where there are black hats, white hats and gray hats. The hackers have their own mouthpiece and do not make the same distinctions as the mainstream media. Our interest is in the fact that the interpenetration between hackers for peace and hackers for war are temporarily blurred in the era of disinformation and it is the task of other sections of the reparations, peace and justice movements to bring out the positive aspects of the hackers for peace. This point should be made because peace activists should not be purists. One look at Julian Assange will tell that he has not been fully exposed to the world of reparative justice in Australia. However, the role of WikiLeaks in this new information warfare is pushing the work to new spaces so that the peace movement as a whole is enriched by the operations of hackers for peace that are in the networks of information sharing and sifting that is eventually seen on web sites such as WikiLeaks.

One can see the value of these platforms in the fact that in this era of YouTube graphic images are worth millions of words as pictures are streamed of war crimes. This was certainly the case of the video that is now being called ‘Collateral Murder’.

‘Collateral Murder’ is the name given to the now famous graphic video from Baghdad that had shown the US killing innocent civilians in July 2007. These graphic details fully explain why the US military and their supporters have been the most opposed to the United States signing the Rome Statutes to becoming a member of the International Criminal Court.

But the addicts of war could not hide, despite the absence from any international body that could bring the perpetrators of the crimes to justice. Hackers for peace within the military itself had constituted a new face for peace and exposed to the world that there were hundreds of thousands of ordinary soldiers in the US military who wanted to bring the US military before the court of international public opinion. Bradley Manning epitomised one of the hundreds of soldiers who are now the new faces of the peace movement. These are sailors on ships, soldiers in faraway places, marines and some sections of the air force who are quietly compiling information. These new faces of the peace and justice forces within the traditional military are making distinctions between the addicts of war and the psychopaths of the military contract ring business on one side and poor youths of the working classes who have been forced into the military because of the depression.

The double-edged sword is cutting both ways. The corporate media and those sections of the information technology industry that are now collaborating with the intelligence services are most afraid of the hackers for peace. These hackers respect no borders visible and invisible and have now created panic in the ranks of the top military brass of the USA. The vitriolic responses of Defense Secretary Gates of the USA and the Chairperson of the Joint Chief of Staff reflect the realisation that the information communicated by WikiLeaks represented the tip of the iceberg. The shrill and panic reached the point where the Secretary of Defense used the word ‘moral’ to describe the transgression of WikiLeaks.

EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED

The arrest of Bradley Manning and the fallout of the entrapment of this young soldier exposed a new layer of warfare in the United States. As the full story of the relationship between Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and the differing layers of the US intelligence/corporate structures are revealed, there will be further education on the ways in which the Central Intelligence Agency is fully integrated into Wall Street.

More significantly, the case of Adrian Lamo as reported on the website of Glen Greenwald, the strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks serves to remind the uninitiated of the world that was inhabited by James Jesus Angleton. Readers should get the book, ‘JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters’ to understand the double and triple dealings that were orchestrated to kill a president and to send the USA into war.

There is a similar move afoot in the USA to pitch the USA into war. The leaked documents are part of the information and disinformation process.

The war in Afghanistan was already unpopular. The US rulers wanted a drawdown and a new front for war in Iran. In the middle of this planned transition to a new round of destruction and diversion in order to save capitalism, the released documents unleashed a cascading release of information that exposed the full integration of Wall Street, the Intelligence Agencies, Google and the army of private contractors.

For the first time citizens heard of In-Q-Tel comprising of billionaires, venture capitalists, academics, intelligence wonks and militarists. The information on Bradley Manning only served to expand the base for mobilising the active duty soldiers and sailors who represent the new faces of the peace movement. Every attempt to press charges against Manning by the Obama administration will intensify the networks of new hackers linked to the military who will intensify their efforts to develop a project beyond capitalism so that the mainstream media will have to reformulate their black, white and gray hats.

Names such as Project Vigilant and the nested loop of investors, financiers and militarists who wanted war strengthened the peace and justice forces as the military sought to threaten Julian Assange. Even with the threats, the full exposure of the death squads and special forces meant that the faces of peace were spreading and that a new stage had been reached. The challenge was for the international faces of the peace movement to become such a force that will bring down the death squads and military contractors along with the investment firms and banks that want capitalism to continue regardless of the costs for humans everywhere.

The capitalist classes in the USA are desperate. The mind control of the war against terror has failed. Millions are unemployed. At a time when the conditions of the working people all over the world have deteriorated, the profits of the capitalist classes are at an all time high. New wars are necessary to confuse the ordinary citizens. But these wars will only serve to intensify the contradictions to strengthen the forces of peace and justice. A military strike against Iran in the midst of this tussle at the international level could unleash untold consequences for the USA and for the world. Barack Obama should heed the warnings of the veteran Intelligence professionals on the consequences of an attack on Iran.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Horace Campbell is a teacher and writer. His latest book is 'Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA', published by Pluto Press
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

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