Kickstarter of Doom: Hoax Site ‘Funds’ Torture Bus, Death Drones

Kickstarter of Doom: Hoax Site 'Funds' Torture Bus, Death Drones | Danger Room | Wired.com:

Crowdsourcing a next-gen drone or a rolling torture center? Uh, yeah, Kickstriker is a hoax.

Inspired by the Kony 2012 fad, a group of New York University grad students has set up the wartime version of Kickstarter, where random people can bankroll new weapons and new paramilitary missions. Among the offerings: an all-seeing drone armed with “a new kind of explosive” promising to cut down on civilian casualties, or a bus packed with a rolling “enhanced interrogation” center.

Just one thing, and it’s a spoiler alert: The site, Kickstriker, is an obvious hoax — one meant to get you thinking about how a world of crowdfunded warfare might not be so far away.

“Polemically, that’s really interesting,” says Clay Shirky, the NYU professor and internet theorist, out of whose communications tech class the idea was born, “but that’s actually a thing that could happen, given that there are these guns for hire. What would it take to create a crowdsourced hire of [mercenaries]?”

Kickstriker, a site only a few days old, bills itself as a way for average citizens “who care” to support the resolution of intractable wars. “Following the massive success of Invisible Children’s ‘Kony 2012′ campaign, we found ourselves excited about the potential that crowdsourcing held for addressing global conflicts,” reads its About page. “Disappointed” by the backlash to Kony 2012′s messianism, comfort with U.S. military intervention and disquieting racial undertones, the crew of three Shirky students sought to “cut out the middleman in online activism.”

While the site is “in beta,” it’s only got a few projects ready for funding. One of them is the “Panopticopter,” the brainchild of three MIT students, a “prototype drone that has more accurate image-capture and image-processing abilities than the current generation of drones being used by the U.S. military,” plus a special, experimental explosive more advanced than the Hellfire missiles armed drones currently tote.

Another is the “Mobile Black Site,” a transportable torture chamber: “With the click of a button, an operator can alter its temperature, noise level, darkness and/or humidity. The MBS also comes equipped with a 165-decibel sound system, capable of playing music and other sounds at unprecedented levels (for reference, just 158 decibels can cause intense nausea).”

Charming. But also, not real.

Check out the “MIT students” working on the drone project: “The three of us (Brandon McCartney, Natassia Zolot and Radric Davis) can spend the summer focusing on the Panopticopter.” That would be real names of the rappers Lil B, Kreayshawn and Gucci Mane. (While I have no doubt about Gucci’s engineering prowess, I certainly doubt his ability to stay out of jail for an entire summer; and he seems to prefer working with Kreay’s awful co-conspirator V-Nasty.)

And that Mobile Black Site? It’s supposedly pushed by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, with partnership from longtime CIA cutout Tepper Aviation. (#eyeroll) Indeed, when you click through the donation tool, Kickstriker admits the hoax before the gullible open their wallets and its creators end up arrested for fraud.

So what’s the Kickstriker crew’s real goal here?

During one of Shirky’s classes in mid-March, a discussion broke out about Kony 2012. One of the site’s founders, James Borda, mused as a reductio ad absurdum about doing a Kickstarter campaign soBlackwater could get the cash to hunt war criminal Joseph Kony. “This hush fell over the room,” Shirky remembers.

“We laughed about it, but then we said this was an idea that’s just one step removed from reality,” says co-founder Mehan Jayasuriya, who put in the rappers’ government names “as a little Easter Egg” for fans. “It’s just believable enough that people might fall for it, or some percentage of people might actually think it’s a good idea, which would be horrifying.”

After the class was dismissed, Jayasuriya and his friends decided that the way to take the critique all the way would be to build a crowdsourcing platform. A parody site was born. “We thought it was such a ridiculous and dark idea that we couldn’t not build it,” he tells Danger Room. “Kony was our starting point — that kind of focus on what James calls the commodification of altruism. The new activism that puts the reader, the donor, the viewer at the center of the story.”

And by using hot-button issues that interest war nerds (drones, torture) and internet nerds (crowdsourcing! Kickstarter!) they thought they might “get people really excited about it, to the point where maybe they wouldn’t even really think about the really damaging, horrible implications of putting something like this out into the world.”

So far, they haven’t gotten angry emails from Heritage, let alone Gucci Mane’s camp. And some reporters (who I agreed not to name) have contacted Kickstriker, credulously, to discuss the project. It’s gone around on Twitter — particularly after Shirky, who wasn’t involved in the project itself, tweeted it Thursday night — but it’s too new to have reached critical mass.

“It was probably better that we did this as a joke,” Jayasuriya says, “rather than somebody launching something like this for real.”

U.S. Turns Osama Against Al-Qaida With Document Dump

U.S. Turns Osama Against Al-Qaida With Document Dump | Danger Room | Wired.com:

Osama bin Laden (center) in 1998. Photo: AP

In an apparent attempt to sow discord within the ranks of al-Qaida’s remaining sympathizers, the U.S. government declassified personal communications from Osama bin Laden showing the terror leader fretting about the bloodthirsty movement he launched.

If al-Qaida affiliates keep killing Muslim civilians, bin Laden wrote to an aide shortly before the Navy SEAL raid that killed him, “they will spoil [things and] alienate the people, who could be won over by enemy after enemy…. Our brothers are making things worse by opening themselves up to evil and hostility!”

At the behest of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point released a declassified, translated version of 17 documents seized in the raid. SEALs left the Abbottabad compound seizing hundreds of bin Laden’s laptops, hard drives, cellphones and flash drives, a collection of thousands of pieces of data that U.S. intelligence officials have often described asa treasure trove of information about al-Qaida. Accordingly, the surprise declassification presents a selective narrative that the U.S. wants in circulation.

It is not difficult to see why. “The focus of his private letters is Muslims’ suffering at the hands of his jihadi ‘brothers.’ He was at pains advising them to abort domestic attacks that cause Muslim civilian casualties and instead focus on the United States, ‘our desired goal,’” the Center’s summary reads. “Bin Ladin’s frustration with regional jihadi groups and his seeming inability to exercise control over their actions and public statements is the most compelling story to be told on the basis of the 17 declassified documents.”

Seemingly every active al-Qaida offshoot comes in for criticism by bin Laden and his coterie in Pakistan. One of his top lieutenants, the American Adam Gadahn, urged bin Laden to publicly repudiate al-Qaida in Iraq, which targeted Iraqi civilians it considered insufficiently Islamic more than it did U.S. forces. He struggled to focus al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula on striking Americans rather than taking over sections of Yemen. Somalia’s al-Shabab offered “little practical value” in bin Laden’s eyes. The offshoot in north Africa appears to be an afterthought.

It’s worth mentioning that these four groups deeply concerned U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials who briefed reporters on Friday about the current strength of al-Qaida. Those offshoots, the officials said, have eclipsed the remnants of al-Qaida central in the danger they pose to the United States.

“Bin Ladin was burdened by what he viewed as the incompetence of the ‘affiliates,’” the summary reads, “including their lack of political acumen to win public support, their media campaigns and their poorly planned operations which resulted in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of Muslims.”

The terrorist leader may have had a point. Al-Qaida in Iraq’s brutality ended up alienating the very Sunni Iraqis that it relied upon for support, resulting in the “Anbar Awakening” that enabled the U.S. troop surge of 2007 to become a tactical success. Shabab appears to have alienated many Somalis by not allowing the United Nations to provide food relief into its territory during the country’s devastating famine.

But al-Qaida’s decentralized structure became a hindrance to stopping the offshoots from damaging its brand. One Indonesian jihadist quoted in the documents described the relationship with central al-Qaida as “a business affiliate, we can ask them (i.e., al-Qa`ida) for an opinion but they have no authority over us. We are free. We have our own funds, our own men.”

That would seem to undercut U.S. intelligence officials’ frequent declarations in the wake of the raid that bin Laden played a major operational role in ordering the network’s attacks, as most of those attacks over the years have been launched by the regional affiliates, not the core al-Qaida group.

“The documents show that some of the affiliates sought Bin Ladin’s blessing on symbolic matters, such as declaring an Islamic state, and wanted a formal union to acquire the al-Qa’ida brand,” the Center concludes. “On the operational front, however, the affiliates either did not consult with Bin Ladin or were not prepared to follow his directives. Therefore, the framing of an ‘AQC’ [al-Qaida Central] as an organization in control of regional ‘affiliates’ reflects a conceptual construction by outsiders rather than the messy reality of insiders…. Far from being in control of the operational side of regional jihadi groups, the tone in several letters authored by Bin Ladin makes it clear that he was struggling to exercise even a minimal influence over them.”

Ironically, bin Laden’s main concern with the affiliates resembles that of U.S. military commanders waging counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan: preventing the deaths of innocent Muslim civilians.

In 2010, bin Laden proposed making the affiliates sign a “memorandum of understanding” placing them further under the operational control of bin Laden, to ensure “we do not violate our words with some of our practices.” Killing Muslim civilians would lead to unforced errors that the U.S. and its allies could exploit: “the mistakes of the jihadis were exploited by the enemy, [further] distorting the image of the jihadis in the eyes of the umma’ general public and separating them from their popular base,” he wrote to a top aide.

Nor did the Internet extremist forums provide much of an alternative. Gadahn wrote bin Laden that their membership and contents would be “repulsive to most Muslims.” The forums “distor[t] the face of Qa’ida, due to what you know of bigotry, the sharp tone that characterizes most of the participants in these forums.”

We’ll have more from the document dump later in the day as we comb through its contents.

For 10 years, U.S. analysts have debated what kind of information operations would be most effective against al-Qaida, with some lamenting the United States’ lack of facility with the relatively untraditional means of attack. And while it may be a low bar to clear, releasing bin Laden’s own words of discomfort with the movement he created might be the most sophisticated U.S. information operation launched to date.

Pentagon Quit The Avengers Because of Its ‘Unreality’

Pentagon Quit The Avengers Because of Its 'Unreality' | Danger Room | Wired.com:

If Thor and Cap were looking for U.S. military backup, a continuity flaw prevented it from happening. Image: Marvel Studios

The Pentagon halted its cooperation with Marvel Studios’ blockbuster movie The Avengers because the Defense Department didn’t think a movie about superheroes, Norse Gods and intergalactic invasions was sufficiently realistic in its treatment of military bureaucracy.

Moviegoers and comic fans know that S.H.I.E.L.D., led by Samuel L. Jackson’s super-spy Nick Fury, is an international peacekeeping/global surveillance/crisis response/quasi-military organization. But its relationship with the United States is murky. And that basically stopped the U.S. military, which is normally eager to cooperate with the film industry on blockbuster movies, from teaming up with the Avengers.

“We couldn’t reconcile the unreality of this international organization and our place in it,” Phil Strub, the Defense Department’s Hollywood liaison, tells Danger Room. “To whom did S.H.I.E.L.D. answer? Did we work for S.H.I.E.L.D.? We hit that roadblock and decided we couldn’t do anything” with the film.

Well, almost anything. In the movie’s climactic Manhattan fight scene, New York National Guardsmen show up to try to help police and firemen contain — spoiler alert — the damage wrought by a cosmic invasion. The Defense Department allowed Marvel to film Humvees for the scene.

But attentive moviegoers may have noticed the U.S. military’s latest stealth jets, the F-22 Raptors and what looked like F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, aboard S.H.I.E.L.D.’s airborne helicarrier, an awe-inspiring, tilt-rotor aircraft carrier. (One assumes that thing has the runway space necessary for a Raptor take-off — and S.H.I.E.L.D. super-scientists fixed the jet’s oxygen woes.) The fighters were “digitally inserted” by the studio, Strub explains, not actual planes provided by the U.S. military.

Normally, the military loves to help Hollywood make mega-blockbusters. Iron Man got into a dogfight with F-22 Raptors in his first eponymous movie. The Navy provided the producers of the recent Act of Valor with unprecedented access to SEAL training missions and even let its secretive elite warriors act on camera. And the secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, even has a cameo in the forthcoming Battleship. (“I had a great time, although the director would probably recommend that I keep my day job,” Mabus told Politico.)

But the ambiguity around what exactly S.H.I.E.L.D. is provides a vexing complication. If it’s an American governmental agency, what kind of constitutional authority does it exercise over the military? If it’s an international body, as the movie text suggests and Strub determined, are U.S. military personnel and equipment on loan to it through some kind of United Nations Security Council resolution? The questions may seem picayune, but they’re precisely the stuff that can cause an image-conscious military to yank its cooperation from a movie.

The comics have fudged the issue for decades. Marvel now describes it as an “extra-government” body, although many takes on the organization have clearly emphasized its international character. Yet U.S. presidents have fired S.H.I.E.L.D. directors (Fury, Tony Stark/Iron Man) and appointed others (Norman Osborn/The Green Goblin, incumbent Steve Rogers/Captain America) — although that might operate by an informal international understanding, much like the U.S. appoints the director of the World Bank.

Either way, the ambiguity prevented the Avengers from assembling beside the U.S. military. “It just got to the point where it didn’t make any sense,” Strub laments. And now comic nerds have another data point to bring up during continuity debates about what exactly S.H.I.E.L.D. is.

Occupy George

Occupy George:

 

Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide

Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide | | AlterNet:

We’re a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to economic “suicide” Chomsky says. But there are glimmers of possibility.

Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy movement. A veteran of the civil rights, anti-war, and anti-intervention movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, he’s given lectures at Occupy Boston and talked with occupiers across the US.  His new book, Occupy, published in the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series by Zuccotti Park Press brings together several of those lectures, a speech on “occupying foreign policy” and a brief tribute to his friend and co-agitator Howard Zinn.

From his speeches, and in this conversation, it’s clear that the emeritus MIT professor and author is as impressed by the spontaneous, cooperative communities some Occupy encampments created, as he is by the movement’s political impact.

We’re a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to economic “suicide” Chomsky says. But there are glimmers of possibility – in worker co-operatives, and other spaces where people get a taste of a different way of living.

We talked in his office, for Free Speech TV on April 24.

LF: Let’s start with the big picture. How do you describe the situation we’re in, historically?

NC: There is either a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. One view is the norm is stagnation and occasionally you get out of it. The other is that the norm is growth and occasionally you can get into stagnation. You can debate that but it’s a period of close to global stagnation. In the major state capitalists economies, Europe and the US, it’s low growth and stagnation and a very sharp income differentiation a shift — a striking shift — from production to financialization.

The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe it’s austerity in the midst of recession and that’s guaranteed to be a disaster. There’s some resistance to that now. In the US, it’s essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid of superfluous population through incarceration. It’s a subtext of what happened in Cartagena [Colombia] last week with the conflict over the drug war. Latin America wants to decriminalize at least marijuana (maybe more or course;) the US wants to maintain it.  An interesting story.  There seems to me no easy way out of this….

LF: And politically…?

NC: Again there are differences. In Europe there’s an dangerous growth of ultra xenophobia which is pretty threatening to any one who remembers the history of Europe…  and an attack on the remnants of the welfare state. It’s hard to interpret the austerity-in-the-midst-of-recession policy as anything other than attack on the social contract. In fact, some leaders come right out and say it. Mario Draghi the president of the European Central Bank had an interview with the Wall St Journal in which he said the social contract’s dead; we finally got rid of it.

In the US, first of all, the electoral system has been almost totally shredded. For a long time it’s  been pretty much run by private concentrated spending but now it’s over the top. Elections increasingly over the years have been [public relations] extravaganzas. It was understood by the ad industry in 2008 -- they gave Barack Obama their marketing award of the year.  This year it’s barely a pretense.

The Republican Party has pretty much abandoned any pretense of being a traditional political party. It’s in lockstep obedience to the very rich, the super rich and the corporate sector. They can’t get votes that way so they have to mobilize a different constituency. It’s always been there, but it’s rarely been mobilized politically. They call it the religious right, but basically it’s the extreme religious population. The US is off the spectrum in religious commitment. It’s been increasing since 1980 but now it’s a major part of the voting base of the Republican Party so that means committing to anti-abortion positions, opposing women’s rights…  The US is a country [in which] eighty percent of the population thinks the Bible was written by god. About half think every word is literally true. So it’s had to appeal to that – and to the nativist population, the people that are frightened, have always been… It’s a very frightened country and that’s increasing now with the recognition that the white population is going to be a minority pretty soon, “they’ve taken our country from us.” That’s the Republicans. There are no more moderate Republicans. They are now the centrist Democrats. Of course the Democrats are drifting to the Right right after them. The Democrats have pretty much given up on the white working class. That would require a commitment to economic issues and that’s not their concern......

9/11 defendants in court at Guantanamo

9/11 defendants in court at Guantanamo - Americas - Al Jazeera English:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other co-defendants could face the death penalty if convicted [EPA]

Five men accused of planning the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US have appeared before a military judge at the Guantanamo Bay to face charges that could lead to their execution.

The defendants, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is accused of masterminding the attacks, were being arraigned on Saturday under heavy security at the US base in Cuba.

The five face charges that include terrorism and 2,976 counts of murder each for their alleged roles planning and aiding the attacks by hijackers aboard four airliners which destroyed the World Trade Center in New York and damaged the US defence department headquarters at the Pentagon, near Washington DC.

The five men could face the death penalty if convicted.

Saturday's hearing is the first time the five have been in court in nearly three-and-a-half years. US President Barack Obama put their previous tribunal on hold in a failed effort to move the case to civilian court.

Military tribunal mocked

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has mocked the tribunal and said in previous court appearances that he welcomed execution.

"The military commission that is trying Mohammed and his four co-defendants is itself extremely controversial," said Al Jazeera's Rosiland Jordan, reporting from Guantanamo Bay.

"Military commissions have been used in US history, prior to this, but usually they involved people who were actually soldiers from another country's military.

"These men were not acting on behalf of any specific state or nation, so there has been a lot of criticism about them being tried in this setting."

The trial is being broadcast on closed-circuit TV after James Pohl, the lead military judge, ruled that remote viewing locations were necessary because of the significant public interest in the trials.

Pohl's order sets aside five viewing sites for families of September 11 victims, survivors and emergency personnel who responded to the attack.

Those will be at Fort Meade, Fort Hamilton and another site in New York City, Joint Base McGuire Dix in Lakehurst, New Jersey and Fort Devens, Massachusetts.

Dozens of journalists as well as relatives of September 11 victims were expected to attend the hearing.

Closed-circuit broadcast opposed

Lawyers for some defendants opposed the closed-circuit broadcast on the grounds that the proceedings should be open to anyone to see, not just broadcast by closed-circuit TV at certain locations.

"We want it more transparent and more open," said Cheryl Bormann, a lawyer for defendant Waleed bin Attash. "We believe that the world needs to see what's happening."

This is the second time that the US has attempted to prosecute the five prisoners at Guantanamo.

Obama's administration withdrew the charges and sought to move the case to a civilian court in the US as part of an effort to close the prison on the base in Cuba.

But the administration was forced to reverse course because of opposition in Congress and by New York City officials who said the case posed too great of a security threat.

Beastie Boys' Adam "MCA" Yauch, Rapper and Progressive Activist, Dead at 47

Beastie Boys' Adam "MCA" Yauch, Rapper and Progressive Activist, Dead at 47 | AlterNet:

Adam "MCA" Yauch, founding member of pioneering rap trio the Beastie Boys, passed away Friday after battling throat cancer. The Brooklyn-born rapper and producer was 47. The Beastie Boys were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame earlier this year, but Yauch accepted his award in absentia, owing to his illness. The other members, Mike D and Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz, accepted his award for him. The Beasties have released an obituary for MCA at their website, writing that he's survived by his wife, activist Dechen Wangdu, his daughter, and his parents. 

Yauch was a practicing Buddhist, and was largely responsible for the plight of Tibet becoming part of American pop culture in the 1990s. In 1996, along with the other Beastie Boys, Yauch organized the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, which ran until 2003; over that time, Yauch helped raise over $2 million for the cause of Tibetan independence, and sparked the international organization Students for a Free Tibet. Additionally, via the Beastie Boys' website:

In the wake of September 11, 2001, Milarepa organized New Yorkers Against Violence, a benefit headlined by Beastie Boys at New York's Hammerstein Ballroom, with net proceeds disbursed to the New York Women's Foundation Disaster Relief Fund and the New York Association for New Americans (NYANA) September 11th Fund for New Americans–each chosen for their efforts on behalf of 9/11 victims least likely to receive help from other sources.

The Beastie Boys emerged in 1979 as a teenage punk band running around Manhattan and raising hell, but by 1984 they had transitioned into hip-hop. Initially signed to Def Jam Records in its early, legendary stages, the Beasties have released eight full albums since then, including the groundbreaking License to Ill and Paul's Boutique. In recent years, MCA opened Oscilloscope, a recording studio, through which he not only produced albums but distributed films. He directed many of the Beasties' videos, and in 2008 released Gunnin for that #1 Spot, a documentary about high school basketball champs.

In "Sure Shot," one of the Beastie's biggest songs, MCA rapped, "I wanna say a little something that's long overdue/ This disrespect to women has got to be through/ To all the mothers and the sisters and the wives and friends/ I want to offer my love and respect to the end." Back at ya, MCA. Rest in peace.

The United States of Fear

Tom Engelhardt,creator and editorof TomDispatch.com,argues that the U.S. government successfully used the threat of terrorism to scare the public into supporting increased spending on war, the military, and homeland security, leading the country down the same path the Soviet Union took just prior to its collapse. During this event, Mr. Engelhardt is in conversation with journalist and author Jeremy Scahill. Hosted by New York University.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/StatesofF