military

Military Hotels

Right now I am in Stockholm for a project together with the Swedish military academy. They booked me into a hotel called Tapto so I was expecting a slightly military slant to the hotel and I was not disappointed. Outside the hotel was a military man in uniform waiting for a taxi, or a tank but I doubt that… since I think he was navy.

In the hallways there were military prints – still not surprising. I was a bit surprised by the glass cases with dummies dressed in military uniforms (old and new). A bit unusual for a hotel.

The best bit was when I got into the room. Instead of the traditional bible on the bedside table what do you think I found? It was Alistair Maclean’s “Puppet on a String”…

Obviously the new testament is not action-packed enough.

Posted on by mklang

Art of War (free audiobook)

Sun Tzu’s classic the Art of War is this month’s free audiobook download from Learn Out Loud.

The Art of War is one of the oldest and most famous studies of strategy and has had a huge influence on military planning, business tactics, and beyond. First translated into a European language in 1782 by French Jesuit Jean Joseph Marie Amiot, it had been credited with influencing Napoleon, the German General Staff, and even the planning of Operation Desert Storm. Leaders as diverse as Mao Zedong, Vo Nguyen Giap, and General Douglas MacArthur have claimed to have drawn inspiration from the work. (Wikipedia)

The narrator is Christy Lynn.

This is only free to download during the month of November so do it now or miss the opportunity…

(via The Stingy Scholar)

Posted on by mklang

The Diplomatic Blog?

Not many politicians blog seriously. Some have grasped the blog as more than a party political advertisment and actually blog â?? but most do not. Eventually we will see the politician blog mature into a real form of communication. But will the diplomat blog be established and mature.

Diplomats are almost synonymous with the closed mouth. Their actions and words are weighed on a golden scale not to offend or be misconstrued. During the cold war legions of analysts were kept busy interpreting the words and movements of diplomats and the inner party circle of the Soviet Union. During the middle ages diplomats could not always speak the language of the court they visited and therefore the interpretation of dress and manners were of utmost importance.

So with a group such as this â?? should they blog? Naturally they can. But what will the consequences be?

The blog of Mr Pronk, the UN’s top official in Sudan, was a source of embarrassment when he reported two military defeats for the government and other embarrassing details in the largely invisible war in the western region of Darfur. So he was expelled from the country. (The Guardian)

Is the diplomatic blog a paradox?

(via MyMarkup)

Posted on by mklang

Bush Signs Torture Law

Yesterday President Bush signed the infamous Military Commissions Act of 2006 (fulltext pdf).

In case you have missed this one it is the law that grants the CIA legal right to continue operating torture facilities in undisclosed, foreign countries. It also allows individuals designated as â??enemy combatantsâ?? to be held without habeas corpus.

Habeas Corpus is basically the right that guarantees that the courts should decide whether a person is lawfully imprisoned. By removing this right the CIA now can legally detain people indefinitely without having to seek court permission.

The law also â??establishes military tribunals that would allow some use of evidence obtained by coercionâ?? â??  In the legal systems of most sane countries evidence obtained by torture is not considered good evidence. This is because the point of law is justice. Torture a person long enough and they will admit to anything just to make the torture stop. Only weak-minded incompetent fools can think that the use of torture is a good idea to obtain the truth.

So now the US has reached an all time low. It joins the company terror dictatorships like Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia where anyone deemed an enemy of the state can be picked up, hidden in a foreign jail, tortured until they admit to anything and then sentenced.

The point is, of course, that this move also removes any legitimate moral standpoint the US might have had. While the bill was being signed, protesters outside the White House shouted, â??Bush is the terroristâ?? and â??Torture is a crimeâ??. Those who refused to move were arrested by police. (Times).

To add a bit of the surreal to the event: the table where the president signed the bill had a notice with the words â??Protecting Americaâ?? written on it. If that were true then you wouldnâ??t need the sign would you?

Land of the free, home of the brave? Not likely. Nice one Georgeâ?¦

Posted on by mklang

Road to Gauntanamo

Have you seen the film Road to Guantanamo yet? If not then go see it. I have put it off for some time but now that I have – it absolutly terrified me. The story is about four young men who travel to Pakistan. One is about to be married and the others are there to attend.

Through a mix of youthful carelessness, bad luck and the chaos of war they are detained and considered to be members of Al-Qaeda. The brutal treatment and torture they face at the hands of the US military is absolutly barbaric. They are abused and tortured to obtain confessions – something which the military fail to obtain despite their treatment.

Even if they had obtained forced confessions from the men – what are these results worth? They are not the truth. And the treatment makes those carrying it out less human. The US cannot claim to be the “good-guy” anymore. Their brutality does not make them better than any other “evil” torturer which we would condemn elsewhere.

Despite the torture being carried out at Guantanamo and the number of detainees and the number of years they have been held it is important to remember that the US has not achieved one single conviction. It is only brutality without law. To those who want to claim the honour of fighting for their beliefs and country – the actions of the men at Guantanamo put your actions, your country and your armed forces to shame.

See this movie!! It is an important movie about the horror of war, the madness of belief over reason, against the evils of torture and the strength of those who are subjected to evil treatment.

What terrifies me the most is the ability of countries to commit crimes while being able to maintain a rhetoric of peace and humanity…

The movie website contains both the trailer and information about the infamous prison. Amnesty International has a broschure to accompany the film: The Road to Guantanamo Action Guide.
About the detainees at Guantanamo Amnesty International writes:

None of the detainees have been granted prisoner of war status or brought before a â??competent tribunalâ?? to determine his statusâ?¦The US government refuses to clarify their legal status, despite calls from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to do so. Instead, the US government labels them â??enemy combatantsâ?? or â??terroristsâ??, flouting their right to be presumed innocent and illegally presuming justification for the denial of many of their most basic human rights.

Posted on by mklang

Walls of design, imagination and segregation

For most of their history walls have been used as a cheap method of control. Their popularity increased in the middle ages with the development of castle architecture in the Crusader kingdoms. The reason for the developments at that particular time and place were that the architecture allowed for the defence of large tracts of land with relatively low numbers of military.

Castles and walls began a period of decline with the development of efficient artillery. As a form of true defence the end of the large-scale fortification came with the vast defence system of the Maginot Line. Its uselessness was demonstrated when the invading army simply moved around the defences.

The wall that symbolises my generation is the Berlin wall. A structure designed to prevent attacks but in reality was there to prevent citizens of the east from defecting to the west. This east-west mentality was the hegemonic worldview until a whole world watched in utter amazement when the citizens of Berlin lost their fear of the wall and began to ignore it as a barrier, hit it with hammers and slowly wear it down. As it turned out the wall was an illusion â?? only powerful as long as everyone agreed it was an impenetrable barrier. When the illusion was lost the wall fell.

With the loss of this wall an odd idea took form. We are a world without such walls. Since the symbol of division was lost we began to think that there were no more divisions. But this is wrong. The wall has never been destroyed. Even though some concrete in Germany was removed.

Spain
Three lines of defensive fences have been built around the Spanish enclaves in Africa (Ceuta & Melilla). the purpose of these fences is not to defend these contested pieces of Spanish rule on the African continent but more to prevent immigrants from attempting to enter Spain (and the EU).

Morocco
The Moroccan Wall is a 2,720 km-long system of defensive walls/berms, running mainly through Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara. It is dubbed The Wall of shame by the Polisario Front and other Sahrawi independence-seekers. It consists of sand and stone walls about three meters in height, with bunkers, fences and landmines throughout.

Israel & West Bank
The Israeli West Bank barrier is arguably the most publicised wall at present. It consists of a network of fences with vehicle-barrier trenches surrounded by an on average 60 meters wide exclusion area (90%) and up to 8 meters high concrete walls (10%). It is located partly within the West Bank, partly along the border between the West Bank and Israel proper.

Italy
Serenissima is a suburb to the Italian city of Padua. It sounds idyllic. Translated it means something like the most serene. Padua is known for its great art and the university, where Galileo was once a professor of mathematics. But this romanticised image is far from the truth. Serenissima is a place filled to the brim with social problems, illegal immigrants, drugs & prostitution. Last month riots, described as pitched battes, broke out between the residents of Serenissima and the police.

An attempt to resolve this has been taken. Not a large scale attempt to deal with the social and economic problems in the area. The solution is a barrier.

A large and ugly barrier has been erected to help protect local residents from the run-down apartment blocks, largely filled with immigrants. Stretching for 84 metres, three metres high and made of thick steel panels, there is a police checkpoint at the entrance as well as CCTV camerasâ?¦The barricade has already been dubbed Paduaâ??s Berlin wall and has reignited a debate about how to treat foreign migrants. (The Guardian).

These examples are not intended to provide a full list. We create walls and barriers of segregation all around ourselves. From gated communities to national defence systems we create and implement technological systems (not always particularly high-tech) to efficiently segregate and control populations.

Posted on by mklang

Ending the cold war

Hey â?? remember the cold war? Itâ??s over right? When a war ends it would be nice if the warring factions could pick up all their stuff and move it back to were it belongs. Despite this (obvious?) point the US maintains 480 nuclear weapons in Europe (Germany, UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, and Turkey). Formally these are NATO but they are owned and controlled by the US. It would be really nice if the US would take them back home.

The weapons are placed on European soil and if anything goes wrong the damage will be carried by Europeans. They were designed as a deterrent â?? at least that was what we where told the arms race was for. So now that there is no major power to deter (if there ever was a need for nuclear deterrent) please take the crap off our front lawn.

Why not do something really wild and make Europe a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone?

Greenpeace has more information and also a fun video â??Nato Big Brotherâ?? â?? after the video you are asked to vote whom should leave.

The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC) released its report entitled Weapons of Terror: Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms read about the report launch here.

Commission Chairman Dr. Hans Blix presented it [the report] to the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the UN Headquarters in New York, and thereafter to the President of the United Nations General Assembly, the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Sweden, Mr. Jan Eliasson, to whom Dr. Blix expressed his and the Commissionâ??s gratitude to the Swedish Government for having established and assumed the main financial responsibility of the WMDC.

The report calls for (amongst other things) the removal of nuclear arms in Europe.

The report clearly states that the nuclear weapon states are in breach of their Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) commitment to disarm and “no longer seem to take their commitment to nuclear disarmament seriously – even though this was an essential part of the NPT bargain, both at the treaty’s birth in 1968 and when it was extended indefinitely in 1995.”

That’s the kind of thing we have been saying for decades – but which rarely features in the UN Security Council, dominated as it is by the five permanent members, all of whom possess nuclear weapons.  Far from disarming, they’re actually upgrading their arsenals.

The report also observes:

While the reaction of most states to the treaty violations was to strengthen and develop the existing treaties and institutions, the US, the sole superpower, has looked more to its own military power for remedies. The US National Security Strategy of 2002 made it clear that the US would feel free to use armed force without authorization of the United Nations Security Council to counter not only an actual or imminent attack involving WMD but also a WMD threat that might be uncertain as to time and place.

Download and read the full report here.

(via Real Peter Forsberg)

Posted on by mklang

Island Summer

Its time for the annual summer move – We have rented a small cottage on the local island of Asperö (population 450 people) where we shall be for the next four weeks. The island is small (only about 1 square kilometre) but still manages to have a varied nature â?? including a nature trail through a leafy area, lots of swimming places and a small sweet-water lake.

Asperö (the scale is 500m)

The best thing about the island is that there are no cars only mopeds built for transport rather than speed.


the moped

this type of moped is called â??Flakmoppeâ?? in Swedish which literally translated means loading platform moped â?? sounds much better in Swedish. As you can imagine the pace is much more relaxed on the island. So I am looking forward to a long relaxing summer on the islandâ?¦ even if I do have some short trips (Barcelona & Amsterdam) and some writing (Military Violence, Free Software) planned the main idea is to have a relaxing holiday-time.

Posted on by mklang

Breeding Brutality

What happens when you train young people to kill and then pump them full of rhetoric and send them off to occupy a foreign country? The answer is tragedies like Haditha.

The strange thing is that there have not been many more tragedies and that the people who send their armies to war seem to be â??shockedâ?? and â??surprisedâ?? by these events. What were they expecting?

In the wake of the massacre at Haditha where US marines have allegedly killed 24 innocent civilians the discussions about battlefield and occupation conduct has taken off. On the one hand there have been â??damage controlâ?? actions such as the news that following Haditha servicemen are to be given ethics training, or as it was termed in a military statement â??core warrior valuesâ?? (BBC Online 1 June).

On the other hand there is sad news in relation to how abuses by servicemen are being treated. In the UK the Court Marshal cases lead to acquittals: â??The acquittals call into question the future of Britainâ??s court martial system for dealing with serviceman accused of committing abuses while on duty.â?? (The Times June 7)

None of this should be surprising â?? its just tragic. Monbiot writes about the brutalising effect of occupations and closes his article with the words:

Why should we be surprised by these events? This is what happens when one country occupies another. When troops are far from home, exercising power over people they donâ??t understand, knowing that the population harbours those who would kill them if they could, their anger and fear and frustration turns into a hatred of all â??micksâ?? or â??gooksâ?? or â??hajjisâ??. Occupations brutalise both the occupiers and the occupied. It is our refusal to learn that lesson which allows new colonial adventures to take place. (Originally published in The Guardian 6 June 2006).

Why is this interesting for me? Well in part becuase the horrors of war have a tendency to be forgotten since they are uncomfortable and a colleague of mine has asked me to participate in an exciting project on the legal use of lethal force in the military. This will be as part of a larger project on Military Violence and Killing. My part is to look at the Swedish militaries legal framework for use of lethal force and then, if time permits, attempt to ascertain whether this legal framework is reflected in the training and understanding of the men and women who will be forced into situations where lethal violence may occur.

This is particularly interesting since the Swedish military is gradually moving towards a position of more active participation in overseas peacekeeping/peacemaking action.

Posted on by mklang

War and Peace

In an article entitled You and the Atom Bomb, George Orwell wrote about the relationship between military technology and democratic development. National self-determination is, according to Orwell’s technologically deterministic argument, a product of the ability to develop efficient arms.

The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle…Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccansâ??even Tibetansâ??could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favoured the State as against the individual, and the industrialised country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale, and now there are only threeâ??ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weaponâ??or, to put it more broadly, of a method of fightingâ??not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant. (full article here)

The concept of war and peace has changed since Orwell published this article in Tribune (19 October 1945). Those old enough to have experienced the world wars (either as participants or spectators) claim that we have had peace. This is strange to as I cannot remember a single period in my life when we were not at war with some nation (echoes of Orwell’s 1984?)

This peace is therefore an illusion, a consensual hallucination, if the interpretation of reality claims that we are at war then we are at war. If the claim is that we are at peace then we are at peace. Naturally this does not effect the fact that people are being killed, or that military forces are attacking each other. It just does not mean that we are not living in peacetime.

The atom bomb nicknamed Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki exploded at 11:02 A.M on August 9.
It left an estimated 70,000 dead by the end of 1945.

While living in this myth of peace the threat of all out war remains a threat but in reality war remains based in the use of the rifle or rifle-like weaponry. Since there is no real war in (or with) Afganistan, Iraq, India/Pakistan (Kashmir) or Indonesia (For lists of ongoing conflicts look here and here) but only ‘conflicts’ the struggle remains focused around the rifle.

This is not, as Orwell thought, the technical ability to mass-produce this relatively simple technology but rather the ability to obtain cash or credits to be able to buy small arms (estimated black market trade in small arms range from US$2-10 billion a year). In conflicts such as these it is not the posession of advanced technology that resolves the conflict but rather the money and determination to accept heavy losses.

Posted on by mklang