Espionage/"Intelligence"

FILE PHOTO White Helmets in Syria © Omar Haj Kadour / AFP
“Foreign specialists” have arrived in Syria and may stage a chemical attack using chlorine in “the next two days,” the Russian Defense Ministry said. This will be filmed for international media to frame Damascus forces.

Western media has described the unrest and violence in Nicaragua as a “campaign of terror” by government police and paramilitary. This has also been asserted by large non governmental organizations (NGOs). In May, for example, Amnesty International issued a report titled “Shoot to Kill: Nicaragua’s Strategy to Repress Protest”.

Raids by U.S. commandos in Afghanistan. (I could be talking about 2001 or 2018.)
A U.S. drone strike in Yemen. (I could be talking about 2002 or 2018.)
Missions by Green Berets in Iraq. (I could be talking about 2003 or 2018.)
— Nick Turse, Chronicles Magazine, July 2018
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967

We can do it the easy way or we can do it the hard way. Romania did it the hard way. Moarte criminalului, death to criminals: armed revolution, then a series of epic Mineriads, with a mild-mannered IMF gent on hand to suck them dry. I was there after the revolution, in the long hiatus between the fourth and fifth Mineriads, and I was starving until someone told us where the soccer stars dine out.

What is it with Australia’s law enforcement authorities?  Their uncontrollable appetite for encrypted data – primarily the data of private users – is so voracious it has become a parody of itself.  There seems to be little that will restrain such politicians as Cybersecurity minister Angus Taylor, who insists that the technology giants cough up data with ease and cooperative generosity.

People protest war at the Democratic National Convention 2016 (Photo by Brendan Smialowski for AFP-Getty Images)

The question is finally being asked, by the president himself: what’s wrong with collusion? Or at least his lawyer asks the question, while Trumps tweets:

Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn’t matter because there was No Collusion.

Ahab is forever Ahab, man.  This whole act’s immutably decreed.  ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me billion years before this ocean rolled.  Fool!  I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.
— Herman Melville, Moby Dick
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint…But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.

The world of the terrifying hypothetical is programmatically standard in the Trump White House.  Periods of tense calm are followed by careless flights of fury, digs and remonstrations.  Mortal enemies become amenable comrades; reliable allies turn into irresponsible skinflints who ought to fork out more for their defence.

Hey, ol’ pal. Yeah, it’s me. We’re alone here. Nobody reads anything here. Google and Facebook bury it so nobody sees it but unpersons like me and a couple paranoiac deviants like you. This is the next best thing to high-latency messaging over the invisible internet. Virtually tête-à-tête.