Nederlands
English
Category: media
Interview on The Keiserreport
On Moday december 2nd 2013 I was a guest on Max Keiser’s programme ‘The Keiser Report‘. Max is a former Wall Street trader who foresaw the current economic crisis a decade ago. On his show he lets rip on the insane financial system and allows his guests to do the same.
O, and a PetaFLOP is 1.000.000.000.000.000 computations per second. I should have known that 😉
Full Keiserreport episode here on RT site and here on Youtube.
Xeroxing the war
In 1969, when the Vietnam War was in full swing, a senior analyst at the U.S. Department of Defense was quietly copying a secret report about the war. This report, which ran to 7000 pages, covered the progress of the Vietnam war in exhaustive detail. The analyst intended to share this highly classified information with influential politicians and scientists, in the hope that it would quickly bring the war to an end.
That analyst was Daniel Ellsberg, a former officer of the Marine Corps who worked for RAND, the Pentagon think tank. As a result of his experiences in Vietnam and his meetings with conscientious objectors in the US, he became convinced that the war was wrong. With his insider’s knowledge, he already knew that it was militarily lost, but that the American government was misleading the people. Every day the Vietnam war took about eight hundred Vietnamese lives, more than two thirds of them civilians, and twenty American soldiers. Many more were seriously injured or maimed for life..
On June 13, 1971 The New York Times tried to publish a number of excerpts from these documents, but was blocked by the Nixon government through legal and political means. Senator Mike Gravel made a breakthrough by reading a large part of the document in the Senate. The reading of 4100 pages took a while, but the rules of the Senate do not allow a senator who is talking to be interrupted (the "filibuster"). Everything the Senator said automatically became part of the proceedings of the Senate and thus on the public record. The publication of this information was the beginning of the end of the Vietnam war and the start the process of withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Fast forward to 2010. The US is once again embroiled in unwinnable wars, launched on dubious grounds, that continue indefinitely without any clear strategy or goal. Every extra day that these wars continue, more civilians and soldiers die.
And now there are new people who leak secret information about the wars, in the hope that the resulting political pressure will bring them to a close. The Xerox technology in 1969 has been replaced by a global computer network that uses encryption to protect the identity of the whistleblowers. Even Wikileaks does not know their identities – this is safer for both the whistleblowers and Wikileaks.
But the media’s response is simply surreal. The bulk of the attention and the debate is about the Xerox machine – or at least the 21st century equivalent of it, the Wikileaks website. Questions such as "is WikiLeaks journalism?" and "should you be allowed to leak classified information?" are discussed in exhaustive detail by apparently intelligent media pundits – who with alarming regularity seem to have little understanding of the very technology they are discussing.
The first ‘big’ coup from Wikileaks, the “Collatoral Murder" video, led to a huge debate about the culpability of the helicopter pilots and whether or not it was reasonable for them to be able to distinguish between a camera and a grenade launcher. The key topic that was not discussed was the simple fact that the Pentagon had knowingly, for three years, lied to both Reuters and the families of the civilian casualties in Baghdad about the circumstances surrounding the shooting by an Apache helicopter, which was one kilometre away and which riddled two children with bullets from its cannon. The Pentagon made a statement in 2007 saying that it knew nothing of any injuries to children, even though it had been in possession of this video from day one and it leaves nothing to the imagination.
The deliberate lying from the start of the Iraq war continues to this day. The Dutch late night talk show, P&W, led the news on TV with "Dutchman involved in leaking attack video": that, after all, is news – apparently far more important than the fact that children were shot and there was a cover-up.
Wikileaks has already been the top story in the news for more than one week, and that’s a problem. The Xerox machine is not important. Illegal wars of aggression launched on the basis of lies are important. The torture of innocent citizens in secret prisons is important. Spying on UN diplomats is important. Messing about in the internal political decisions of other countries is important.
So why is the entire media is so busy with the Xerox machine and the person with his finger on the copy button? Dear journalists, you have been presented with a cornucopia of scoops, many of which make Watergate pale into insignifcance. If African dictators were doing the things Western countries are being accused of, they would be dragged in handcuffs to the International Court in The Hague. Get to work!
Weapons of mass distraction
On July 12, 2007 in Baghdad 12 civilians, including a Reuters photographer and his driver, were shot dead by a U.S. Apache helicopter. Because of the involvement of the Reuters staff, this became minor news and the Pentagon gave a statement on the circumstances surrounding the events: nine ‘rebels’ and two civilians were killed (the Reuters employees). That seemed to be end of the case. Reuters tried to research the circumstances of the shooting but was blocked by the U.S. government. A formal request for access to videos of the Apache helicopter and audio communication between the crew and ground troops was refused. At that time the story was a tiny blip on the news radar, and quickly forgotten. There have been over 100 journalists killed in Iraq since March 2003 and an estimated 700,000 to over 1.3 million civilians (the U.S. military sees no need to keep track of exactly how many – "we do not do body counts").
Nearly three years later the incident is known worldwide because of the online release of 38 minutes of video recorded by the Apache helicopter involved in the incident. The shortened version on Youtube has been viewed over 6 million times. For anyone who thinks the Iraq invasion was a good idea, watch the full 38 minutes. Twice. A wealth of supporting information is available at collateralmurder.com. On Dutch TV, activist and hacker extraordinaire Rop Gonggrijp was invited to give some background to the video. The anchor closed the item with the immortal words "well, it’s a good story." Former Chief of Staff General Hans Couzy had called the actions of the Apache crew a war crime one day earlier.
Immediately after the appearance of the video, heated debates erupted on a number of online forums. Was it reasonable or unreasonable to shoot? Or was just the first shooting reasonable and the second at the-bus-with-the-kids was not? The New York Times found it necessary for military experts to “explain”, and to suggest with detailed analysis that really nothing was wrong. The ‘rules of engagement” were followed and that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Similar discussion took place in a multitude of other places. Many arm-chair generals who anonymously claimed military expertise stated that the behaviour of the Apache pilots were quite normal. How a badly injured person without any visible weapons can be a threat to an armored Apache helicopter flying at least one kilometre away remains unclear to me (take the time difference between the Apache firing its gun and the impacting of the shells and multiply this by 800 meters per seconds). Luckily there are many veterans who honestly reveal that the Wikileaks video is unfortunately not exceptional.
But what was missing from virtually all discussion was the simple point that the original statement of the U.S. Army from 2007 was incorrect and that they must have known that. On the day of the attack itself, the Pentagon had the video that we have access to only now. So how come they said for years they did not know how the two children were injured, as the crystal-clear video images show that the Apache helicopter shot them and their father for no reason?
Apart from the specific tragedy of 12 dead civilians and two seriously injured children, it seems to me the main lesson of the WikiLeaks video is that we are still consistently being lied to. The case for war in Iraq was based on deliberate lies back in 2003 and it seems nothing has changed since then. To retain support in Europe for continuing the war in Afghanistan, the CIA has developed a great propaganda plan in which the fears and principles of certain demographics in each country will be manipulated.
In The Netherlands, the Davids Committee report on the Dutch support for the invasion of Iraq expertly avoided the most important question, "did we participate militarily?" by claiming that it found no evidence. It is unclear how hard they searched for that evidence, because more than enough has emerged in recent years. The easiest way to avoid annoying answers is still not to ask the question.
Soon on Wikileaks there will be a new video of a bombing in Granai, Afghanistan. Hopefully, the discussion will not be about what type of bombs we can better use next time.
What the iPad is good for
I have in recent months, with some surprise, seen how the drone armies of the Steve Jobs Cult of Mac have hyped a 15 year old concept into sainthood. From the moment the technical specifications of the iPad became known, it was clear to me that I would not be buying. The iPad is an iPhone + + and that is unfortunately the level of control that Apple will take over all aspects of the use of it. Apple determines which applications you can run, which media sources are acceptable and in what formats those media sources are stored. The iPad is comparable with the AOL Internet experience of over 12 years ago. A walled garden where customers are ‘protected’ from the chaotic freedom that is the open Internet and are made to pay for the privilege.
Critics of the iPad have in recent months rightly explained in detail how the iPad is in many respects a step backwards compared to the rich read/write Internet. Steve’s tablet is primarily a media consumption device, much like a DVD player. You read, watch and listen to something that someone else has created for you and are passive, like a TV couch-potato (TV, you know, from the past …). Determining what things you are viewing is also done by Apple. Having people simply choose their own content and using formats of their choice is obviously not the way things are done on the iPad. The Apple Politburo also chooses what "dirty" words you can and cannot read on the e-book reader.
Like the AppleTV, the device is a direct pipeline to the iTunes and App store. For Apple is it a direct pipeline to your credit card. For the AppleTV there is now a good alternative: XBMC gives the choice over media source and format selection back to the owner of the hardware. Probably there will be something like this for the iPad, a jailbreak or something, so .mkv files can be played and fans can install their own apps without first having to ask permission from Steve.
There is another way. On the Archos Internet tablet, the possibility of installing a completely different OS is even explicitly allowed. If I have a ‘third’ device (in addition to laptop and phone) I want to buy that kind of freedom and I’m willing to pay for it. Buying an iPad in its current form is not for me. Perhaps the device will be more open in the future and then I will reconsider, but not now.
In spite of all this I’m glad that Apple makes these things and hypes them. Apple forces other suppliers of these products to innovate where otherwise they would not, at least for a while. There are now more than ten other parties involved in the release of tablet-like devices and existing devices suddenly get extra attention and software upgrades. More importantly, Apple sets a bar for high usability. This gives the open source community something to strive for. Usability is traditionally not the strongest aspect of open source software. Security, stability and portability were always the focus. For the Linux desktop, Windows is no longer the benchmark, as this has been largely achieved (including CPU-hungry eye-candy with bouncy windows). MacOSX is the standard being pursued (and imitated) by the Ubuntu team and others and that is fine. As Steve himself once quoted Picasso: "Good artists copy, great artists steal", and he would know.
IPod MP3 players were poorly used and uninteresting for the majority of people. The iPhone has motivated Nokia, Samsung, HTC and Google to develop great new phones. So although I will never buy another iPod/Phone/Pad, I enjoy its effect indirectly because of the new concepts that these products have made mainstream. In the same vein I am now, after two MacBook Pros, again enjoying a Thinkpad (X301, Lenovo’s answer to the MacBook Air) with Ubuntu. Thanks Apple!
A 5-7 "tablet with 32Gig fixed memory and an open architecture sounds very nice to me, stick some HSDPA capability on it and I am happy to shell out 600 euros or so.