Author: alannahpriestley

New Media and ‘the War of Ideas’ – On looking in your own backyard

by Roy Revie

Don’t worry, this isn’t another article about “Social Media and the Arab Spring”. Not that it’s unimportant, but it strikes me that those involved in the revolutions are better placed to examine these questions. In any case, I’m sure the booming industry in Arab Spring conferences, books, and special journal issues will sufficiently suck out any revolutionary joy and furnish us with reports on the minutiae of what they think is important. I’ll leave them to it. Besides, the revolutionary potential of communication technologies which can sometimes allow you to talk to each other and broadcast information that would otherwise be repressed seems kind of self evident. While Western leaders implore foreign autocrats (with a vigour which varies proportionally to some ‘tipping point’ calculus of self-interest) to ‘tear down this firewall!’, and op-ed after op-ed is written about the impact of technology on autocracies I want to reverse the lens: how is social media changing the way liberal Western governments operate? What are the implications of the American embrace of ‘internet freedom’ for US Government foreign policy and military practice?

The key focus of US government communication efforts is influence on publics, both foreign and domestic, as a means to winning legitimacy. This element of state activity is seen as all the more important in the post-9/11 ‘battle of ideas’ in which Robert Gates has said success “will be less a matter of imposing one’s will and more a function of shaping behaviour – of friends, adversaries, and most importantly, the people in between”. Militarily, contemporary conflict has seen, one theorist suggests, a “shift in the classical centres of gravity away from the will of governments and armies to the perceptions of populations”. In these circumstances, it is not difficult to see why the rise of Web 2.0 has forced widespread and serious consideration of communication policy. As Ali Fisher has written, “the internet provides a unique environment for the ideological clashes that have occurred” since 9/11, as new communication platforms produce a situation where “the hegemonic group is unable to use the organs of the State for coercion”. A cursory look at the most memorable events of the Iraq war support this: while early on the system of ‘embedding’ journalists seemed a massive PR coup for the Coalition, providing a largely compliant media with heart-of-the-action footage, what history will remember will be the unofficial ‘emergent’ images from Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and Saddam Hussein’s execution chamber. Influence and communication has had to be re-thought.

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10 Years After: Welcome to the Failed State of Americastan.

by Johnny Barber

Kabul–As we step off the Turkish Air flight and walk across the dusty tarmac to the terminal, we are greeted by a large billboard. In big bold English it proclaims, “Welcome to the Home of the Brave.” It stops me in my tracks. I shake my head, thinking, “damn weird” and continue in to passport control. After waiting in a short line, I present my American passport to the guard in the booth. He doesn’t acknowledge me. He flips through the shiny new pages until he gets to the visa. He stamps it. He turns to the picture. He gives me a precursory glance and hands the passport back to me. I turn and enter Afghanistan.

I have come here with two friends from Voices for Creative Non-Violence, forming a small delegation interested in developing relationships with ordinary Afghans and gathering stories of everyday life since the American invasion in 2001. After collecting our luggage and taking a short bus ride to the parking area, Hakim, Mohammed Jan, and his brother Noor greet us warmly. Hakim and Mohammed Jan are our hosts and the organizing force of the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers.

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The wonderful world of Tony Blair

Britain’s most fearless investigative journalist Peter Oborne follows up his excellent work exposing Britain’s Israel lobby and the Murdoch empire with another devastating documentary about the myriad conflicts of interest of the execrable Tony Blair. (Also see Ali Abunimah’s piece on Blair’s myriad shady dealings).

International viewers can watch the documentary below:

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Just Obstructed at Bagram as at Guantanamo

by Brian Terrell

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Scott T. Sturkol)

Despite ten years of occupation and untold millions of dollars spent on rebuilding Afghanistan’s broken judicial and criminal justice system, the Afghan courts are “still too weak,” the Washington Post reported on August 12, for the United States to relinquish its control over the Parwan Detention Center on Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. On September 21, the same paper reported that the U.S. military is seeking contractors to significantly increase the capacity of the prison there.

The number of Afghans detained at Bagram has tripled over the past three years to more than 2,600 and the new construction will raise the capacity to 5,500 prisoners. Capt. Kevin Aandahl, a spokesman for the U.S. task force that oversees detention operations in Afghanistan, told the Post that the expansion was necessary to “accommodate an increase in the number of suspected insurgents being detained as a result of intelligence-based counter- terrorism operations, which we conduct with our Afghan partners.”

Many of those held at Bagram have been there since the U.S. occupied the former Soviet air base in 2001, and some two thirds of prisoners there have not been charged with or convicted of any crime. Corruption is rampant in Afghan courts and among police there as it is in many other places but the major fear of the United States is not that the Afghan courts will not function according to their constitution and accepted norms of law, but that they will. In order for Afghanistan to take sovereignty over its own judiciary and prison system, the Afghans must first fix the “cracks of an undeveloped legal system” and adopt essential “reforms,” including adoption of the U.S. practice of detaining suspected insurgents indefinitely without trial.

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Meltdown: The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse

We recently posted the first part of a superb four-part documentary on the forces behind the financial meltdown. A production of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the series is currently being aired in installments on Al Jazeera but can be viewed on the CBC website in its entirety by clicking here.

The four installments appear in reverse order on the site; start with the video listed fourth from the top (Meltdown: The Men Who Crashed the World), followed by Parts II (A Global Tsunami), III (Paying the Price), and IV (After the Fall).

UPDATE: The CBC website has been rearranged. Click on the following links to watch the film on YouTube:

Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.

Erdogan on Israel, Syria and Iran

Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks to Freed Zakaria on CNN’s GPS. He has some strong words for Israel.

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Meltdown – The men who crashed the world

The first of Al Jazeera’s four-part investigation into a world of greed and recklessness that brought down the financial world.

UPDATE: Our readers Delia and Richard inform us that this excellent series is actually a production of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

Foreshadowing Iraq: The War on “Life Itself”

Residents inspect a damaged church after a bomb attack in central Kirkuk, Iraq (Photo: Reuters -- Ako Rasheed)

American University of Beirut professor Omar Dewachi writes at Al Akhbar English:

Washington’s planned withdrawal of troops from Iraq next December is hailed as a turning point for the country. But the war on Iraq was much more than a military battle under the banner of regime change. It was an attack on the social body of a people that predated the 2003 invasion and will outlast a nominal troop withdrawal. As the world marks the ten years anniversary of 9/11 used as a pretext to invade Iraq, reflecting on the burdens of this war is a reminder that 20 years of violent US intervention will take decades to erase.

George Bush’s declaration of ‘war on terror’ in the wake of 9/11 took place one month after I arrived in the US to embark on my doctoral studies in anthropology. An unending war was unleashed with dramatic consequences on the lives of millions of people in the Middle East and the US. After 2003, members of my own family fell victim to the occupation and the sectarian violence, while others were completely uprooted from the city of Baghdad. The war was being felt in the US, as men and women of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent were subjected to physical, symbolic, and bureaucratic violence through torture, surveillance systems, and the new cultural economy of blame and accusation.

In 2003, I began my research on the effects of years of warfare in Iraq by mainly looking at the exodus of Iraqi doctors and the ‘un-doing’ of the Iraqi health system during the 1990s. I was already familiar with the topic. I had trained and worked as a medical doctor in Iraq during the 1990s, where I lived through the collapse of one of the region’s most developed health systems. As a doctor working under sanctions, I struggled in my everyday with the rapid deterioration of the whole country’s infrastructure, the lack of medical supplies, the migration of the medical staff, the dismantling of the service infrastructure, and the mounting of the regime’s coercive violence. We wrestled daily to stock low supplies of saline solutions, cannulas, disposable gloves, and antibiotics. Hospital structures began failing with the absence of maintenance and supplies, as many were on the UN sanctioned list of ‘dual use.’ This was not merely a war on a rogue political regime; it was a war on the social body in Iraq.

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Ways of Seeing

Booker Prize-winning author and art critic John Berger’s classic 1972 documentary series investigating the ideologies embedded in visual images.

Episode 1

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Ten years too long: What is the True Cost of the Afghanistan War?

Narrated by Tony Benn, with music by Brian Eno. The clip ends with a call to join the Antiwar Mass Assembly in Trafalgar Square on 8 October: http://www.antiwarassembly.org