PoliticalWarfare.org

Tanker war heats up

Interests relating to an enterprise partly owned by Russia is heating up a propaganda campaign aimed at the American public, and it's highly misleading.

The French-German-Russian aerospace consortium EADS has spent millions marketing an Airbus in the US as a next-generation aerial tanker for the US military.

It's a phony campaign. The propaganda effort tries to obscure the fact that the proposed KC-45 tanker is indeed a European aircraft, designed and manufactured by EADS of France, a company allegedly built on French industrial espionage against American aircraft manufacturers and subsidized by the French and German governments, and partly owned by the Russian government.

The North American subsidiary of EADS has teamed with a brand-name US partner, Northrop Grumman, and erased the Airbus name from the modified A330 airliner to make it look American. The plane will be assembled in Alabama of French, German and Spanish components.

Northrop Grumman's own online info page about the KC-45 admits the A330 part, but conveniently omits any reference to Airbus or EADS.

A domestic propaganda campaign has transformed the Airbus A330 tanker into the "Northrop Grumman KC-45." Northrop Grumman has been flooding Washington airwaves with ads touting the American-sounding aircraft. New, scrappy ads that trash Boeing are now being run in the name of a front group claiming to represent workers in Alabama (where the KC-45 would be assembled).

I'm no apologist for Boeing, but only note that the US aircraft giant has passively sat while a French-German-Russian conglomerate has horned in on its business with a grotesquely misleading campaign that can only be called deception and fraud.

(The "I am EADS" illustration, by the way, is a parody of part of the EADS propaganda campaign that sought to portray the company as an American firm.)

Questions in Obamastan

Why does Senator Obama say he wants the US to "win" the war in Afghanistan, but he doesn't want us to "win" the war in Iraq?

Why has he sanitized his quickie visit to Afghanistan, giving the press no access to him, and relying on the US military - not news organizations - to video his meeting with President Hamid Karzai? Why haven't the TV networks not identified the video as a product of the US military and not of the press pool? Why haven't news organizations, with a rare exception here and there, complained about their correspondents' non-access to the presidential candidate?

NBC's chief foreign correspondent Andrea Mitchell came close to answering the question when she commented before the trip that, given Obama's inexperience in foreign affairs, there was a lot at risk. She is one of the only ones now who have openly criticized the Obama campaign for limiting media access. (The above video is from Media Matters, which complains about Mitchell's comments.)

The Obama trip to Afghanistan and Iraq is something we should expect from, say, the Chinese government, where only approved questions are welcome and where the press sheepishly transmit video shot by the authorities without identifying it as such. Most of the journalists covering the event are acting like timid cub reporters who are afraid to do their jobs. 

The biggest question for the candidate right now should be, "Senator Obama, why do you support winning the war in Afghanistan, yet you oppose winning the war in Iraq?"

Three cheers for the Maryland State Police!

The ACLU, the Washington Post and the Washington Times are whining about the fact that the Maryland State Police infiltrated radical protest groups that oppose fighting the terrorists who would destroy us all.

Good for the police!

Throughout our nation's history foreign spies, agents, terrorists and saboteurs, as well as domestic troublemakers bent on undermining our military during wartime, have used political protest groups to cover their destructive activity. Crowds of protesters are the perfect cover for surveillance, scouting operations, operational planning, and even execution of attacks.

So the Maryland State Police were doing the right thing when they launched short investigations of radical groups whose activities could be used as cover for the bad guys, then promtly closed them.

Especially because those groups want our military to lose the war in Iraq and are undermining our nation's ability to fight terrorism. And because some of the protesters have long histories of providing aid and comfort to our country's enemies.

Maryland has a long tradition of needing to be watchful. The plot to assassinate President-Elect Abraham Lincoln in 1861 took place in Baltimore among political protesters. Anti-war demonstrators, some working for the Confederacy, actively undermined the U.S. Army during Civil War-era Baltimore riots. Plotters of the successful assassination of President Lincoln in 1865 were based in southern Maryland and well-connected with political activists for the Confederate cause.

Maryland hosts crucial sites of interest to foreign espionage agents and terrorists. Among them, the U.S. Army laboratory at Fort Dietrich, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, the port facilities of Baltimore, the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, the Defense Intelligence Agency just south of Washington, D.C.; and of course, principal access points to the nation’s capital itself.

Since some of the groups that the police investigated in 2005 and 2006 were overtly anti-military, were conducting activities that arguably could demoralize or undermine the military in wartime, served to undermine US counterterrorism operations, and organized protests near or at sensitive targets like the NSA, it was only proper for the police to see if the groups posed threats to public safety.

 

Some of the groups, like the Pledge of Resistance, have longstanding ties to extremist political movements in other countries, including armed clandestine guerrilla groups that targeted American military personnel for assassination. Cases in point are the ties that Pledge of Resistance leaders had in the 1980s to the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) of Nicaragua, and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) of El Salvador.

The FSLN at the time was a Soviet ally with an East German-built state security and intelligence service, and had operational links with international terrorist groups such as the Basque ETA, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other Arab terrorist organizations, and the FARC of Colombia.

The FSLN operated as a subsidiary of the Cuban regime, which was on the State Department list as a state sponsor of terrorism.

The FMLN received operational support from the FSLN for all its needs to make war against the democratically elected government of El Salvador, and had similar ties to international terrorist groups. It targeted American servicemen – including Navy Lt. Cdr. Albert Schaufelberger – for assassination, murdering him as he sat in his car; gunning down four off-duty Marines at a sidewalk café in the notorious Zona Rosa massacre, capturing and murdering Lt. Col. David Pickett, and singling out others who advised the Salvadoran military.

The FMLN attacked a Salvadoran base in El Paraiso in 1987 for the purpose of killing Sgt. Gregory Fronius of the 7th Special Forces, as a propaganda device with which to rally "peace" groups back in the US to protest America's support for the Salvadoran government. The FMLN mutilated Fronius' body by blowing it up with an explosive charge. Ana Belen Montes, a Cuban spy in the Defense Intelligence Agency (which is headquartered in Maryland), alerted Cuban intelligence to Fronius' presence at the base, and the Cubans alerted the FMLN.

FMLN leaders have never been held into account for the assassinations, and groups like the Pledge of Resistance never sought to distance themselves from the murders or condemn the FMLN.

And that's where certain groups cross the line from loyal opposition to aiding the enemy.

So from that standpoint, Three Cheers for the Maryland State Police!  Let’s not allow the ACLU and rest of the terrorism-first crowd to keep our lawmen from doing their jobs.

US should investigate Congressman McGovern's FARC ties

Has the FARC used a US Congressman as a channel to influence Washington's policy toward Colombia? If so, how? Was the congressman an innocent in all this, or was there something more nefarious? These are important questions that the House Ethics Committee and Justice Department should investigate.

At issue is Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the main figure in Congress behind trying to cut off vital support for Colombia's military, and stopping a free trade arrangement that would help the country's economy. The Wall Street Journal has alleged that McGovern is a FARC sympathizer. McGovern has a long record of sympathy for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and other leftist revolutionaries.

Colombian Senator Piedad Cordoba, pictured with McGovern and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is already under criminal investigation in her country for collaborating with the FARC.

Information contained in the laptop computer of the FARC's then-#2 commander, Raul Reyes, suggests McGovern may have gone over the line in building a liaison with the terrorist organization, and that the FARC may have had a plan to advance its interests through other members of McGovern's political party. The Colombian military killed Reyes and captured his computer on March 1. The Colombian Supreme Court says data from that computer, including 900 emails, are grounds for investigating Cordoba. McGovern says his actions were simply part of an innocent effort to help free FARC hostages.

Cordoba appears in the Reyes computer documents as advising FARC not to release hostage Ingrid Betancourt, the senator and former Colombian presidential candidate who was rescued last week. Cordoba wanted to use the hostage releases not as ends in themselves, but as means of improving the image of Hugo Chavez, according to the documents. In an October 27, 2007 email to Reyes, Cordoba called Chavez "my commander." (Click here for the original report, in Spanish, appearing in Colombia's Semana magazine.)

The FARC leader with the nom de guerre Cesar who led the unit holding Betancourt told Reyes in a December 11, 2007 email that Cordoba had urged the FARC to keep Betancourt as a hostage. The Colombian military captured Cesar when it rescued Betancourt and the others last week.

Cordoba, a leftist well known for her FARC ties, was briefly an official Colombian interlocutor last year to negotiate a FARC hostage release under an arrangement with Chavez. US immigration officers held Cordoba for more than two hours at New York's JFK airport last month, despite the fact that she had a diplomatic passport. (She is shown in the photo conversing with FARC Commander Reyes.)

McGovern is a top congressional opponent of the US-Colombia free trade agreement, and helped persuade Speaker Pelosi to sink the pact last April. McGovern has also tried to cut the US military aid to Colombia that has been decisive in taking down the FARC. These points are important, because nearly everything McGovern has done concerning Colombia has undermined that country's progress against, and arguably aided, the narcoterrorist group. The question is, has McGovern been malicious in intent, or just misguided? More importantly, did a foreign terrorist group use a US congressman as an agent or asset to influence and change US foreign and defense policy?

Anyone who has watched Jim McGovern as I have over the past 20-plus years, back to when he was a congressional staffer helping the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Cuban-backed guerrillas in El Salvador, knows that he has a soft spot, to put it politely, for the Latino extreme Left. The proposal of a McGovern-FARC go-between - an international negotiations setup involving US Members of Congress and pitting them against the Colombian and US governments - is a carbon copy of the same tactics McGovern promoted to save the Sandinistas and El Salvador's FMLN guerrillas from total defeat in the 1980s. That proposal appeared in the captured Reyes computer.

Nothing in the record suggests that McGovern ever publicly criticized the FMLN for killing American military personnel, or tried to use his influence to get the FMLN to stop killing American servicemen back when he had influence with the guerrilla group. McGovern denies he is a FARC sympathizer. He has gone on record of late criticizing the FARC for its brutality - but then, so have Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.

The Wall Street Journal commented on McGovern's FARC flirtation last March, when the contents of Reyes' computer became public. Journal editors ascribe McGovern's opposition to a free trade deal with Colombia to his sympathies toward the other side: "We think the documents reveal something else entirely: Some Democrats oppose the Colombia trade deal because they sympathize more with FARC's terrorists than with a US antiterror ally."

Is Congressman McGovern a witting collaborator or an unwitting dupe? What does he have to say about Senator Cordoba? He should come clean right away - and he should justify how his attempts to cut off the Colombian military would have succeeded in taking down the hemisphere's most notorious terrorist group. The House Ethics Committee should launch a probe immediately. So should the Justice Department. Wittingly or unwittingly, Members of Congress should not be agents of influence for foreign terrorists and regimes.

(Click here for Senator Cordoba's webpage containing Congressman McGovern's letter criticizing the Colombian government for breaking off the "Chavez initiative" to negotiate with the FARC. Another page on Cordoba's website contains a quote by McGovern: "I am very disappointed by the termination of the Chavez facilitation initiative." http://www.piedadcordoba.net/indexprincipal.html. A link to the full text is dead.)

Paranoid FARC executes 26 of its own

So paranoid is the Colombian FARC guerrilla group that it executed 26 of its own combatants - more than a third of an entire unit of 70 fighters.

And that was before last week's hostage rescue. The pace of executions, according to a former hostage, was painfully slow. They took place over a five-month period of internal tribunals, where commanders tried to root out traitors from their ranks.

With hundreds of FARC members deserting or defecting to the government every month, taking with them priceless intelligence about the internal workings of the organization, the command structure is eating itself alive. Defectors helped military intelligence understand the anxieties of individual FARC commanders, allowing the army to build psychological profiles and devise ways to exploit them to save the hostages.

Those defectors, plus broken communications and internal paranoia, have been an important asset to the army. Colombian military intelligence officers who planned the rescue said that the FARC's own disarray and demoralization have been the army's best counterinsurgency weapon.

Another victory to apply to the fight against Islamist extremists. Does anyone remember how, not so long ago, American and international politicians were denouncing US and Colombian counterterrorism policy as wrong-headed, needlessly tough, and so on? That the FARC was too powerful to defeat? That our Colombian allies didn't have their act together and didn't deserve our support? That our whole approach was misguided? Where are those politicians today, so long after having helped boost the FARC's morale?

Click here for a good Washington Post recap of the rescue planning.  (Photo: Hundreds of thousands march against FARC in Cali, Colombia.)

No war for (Russian and Chinese) oil!

Irony of ironies - with American troops dying almost daily amid "No War for Oil" protests, it's odd that nobody's even saying boo about Iraq's decision to allow the Russians and Chinese bid to drill for the very petroleum that the Americans liberated.

Worse still is the Bush Administration's apparent assent to Baghdad's snub of the sacrifices that the US, Britain and a few other Coalition countries made to free Iraq. It's outrageous to let the Russians, Chinese and others who were not part of the Coalition - and who indeed opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom - to reap the benefits. For some reason the administration doesn't agree.

Nobody who opposed the liberation of Iraq should be allowed to profit from the nation's reconstruction. I have yet to hear a single politician in Washington make that statement.

Congressman Henry Waxman's latest headline grab has been about a Texas oil company's concessions in Kurdistan. He ought to be focusing on who in the State Department or elsewhere let in the Russians and Chinese. But then, maybe that's asking too much. Waxman has never really objected much to anything that Moscow or Beijing has ever done.

While we're at it, the Chinese are buying up Afghanistan right from under our noses. The administration, Congress and some enterprising journalists ought to look at the huge mineral deals the Chinese have been doing there, while the State Department either approves or looks the other way. Beijing is profiteering from America's military sacrifice.

'Brutal psychological hit' against FARC

Audacious thinking, clever use of defectors, three-way electronic intercepts, copycatting precedents set by Hugo Chavez, exploiting broken command and control, and playing on the targets' egoes were among the elements of Colombia's successful hostage rescue this week, what a senior Colombian officer calls a "brutal psychological hit" against the FARC.

Today's Wall Street Journal captures these elements, showing how the skillful use of psychological means can defeat terrorists and other extremists:

• Taking advantage of a leadership crisis within the FARC, to compromise communications and make FARC units think they were transferring the hostages to the group's new leader;
• Infiltrating the FARC leadership and command structure with penetration agents;
• Copying Hugo Chavez's propagandistic recovery of hostages last January and February, by re-enacting a similar scenario with Russian helicopters painted with similar color schemes;
• Using deception to communicate between FARC leaders and the guerrillas' security detail guarding the hostages, disinforming the security detail to move the hostages to a location where they would be transferred by a helicopter under ostensible FARC control;
• Hollywood-style acting classes for undercover Colombian military intelligence officers, taught by American acting coaches and FARC defectors, to make the officers look and act like real FARC men - even mimicking the way the guerrillas walk and talk;
• Coaching to make a Colombian officer look like an Australian leftist;
• Dressing cameramen to look like they were from Chavez's Telesur satellite TV channel, copying Telesur's participation in the previous rescues (see video embed);
• Using "more cunning than firepower."

"The plan had a chance of working because, for months, in an operation one army officer likened to a 'broken telephone,' military intelligence had been able to convince [former senator and presidential candidate Ingrid] Betancourt's captor, Gerardo Aguilar, a guerrilla known as 'Cesar,' that he was communicating with his top bosses in the guerrillas' seven-man secretariat. Army intelligence convinced top guerrilla leaders that they were talking to Cesar. In reality, both were talking to army intelligence," according to the report.

Fruits of the operation include:

• Rescue of high-value hostages whom the FARC never had any intention of releasing;
• Provoking recriminations within the FARC, further splintering the organization and causing more desertions and defections;
• Further demoralizing the FARC and its supporters;
• Humiliating the FARC's strongest supporters, including Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, both of whom praised the rescue and criticized the FARC, with Castro calling the FARC "cruel" and Chavez telling the FARC to free all hostages and to disarm;
• Boosting the standing of Colombian President Uribe and the US strategy to assist Colombia;
• Increasing the domestic and international prestige of the Colombian military, which has made huge strides in its professionalism over the past decade;
• Causing liberal and left-wing groups to concede that their go-soft negotiations approach was wrong, and that Uribe's tough approach was the right thing to do.

The Wall Street Journal carries this precious quote from a top NGO leader who had criticized Uribe's approach and urged a soft line: "I have to recognize that the strong hand has prevailed," said Robert Menard, a liberal human rights activist and founder and secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders. "Our insistence on the need to negotiate with the FARC, hoping they would release their most valuable card, was foolish."

A textbook operation - one for the history books of how to do things exactly right. Notably, the US was closely involved with this Colombian operation. Now, if we can do this type of thing with the Islamists, we'll be doing just fine.

Colombia's amazing rescue operation - and the political death of the FARC

Hugo Chavez helped dig the FARC's grave a little deeper earlier this year when he sent in a white helicopter to ferry out hostages, and video crews to reap propaganda benefits.

I wondered why the Colombians would ever allow Chavez to send in the white Venezuelan helicopter to bring some prisoners held by the FARC to Venezuela. It looked like a big propaganda boost for Chavez at the time, as it certainly was. Apparently the Colombians had something bigger in mind: using Chavez's media stunt as a precedent to camouflage a daring mission of their own.

How else to rescue 15 hostages without anyone getting hurt?

This week the Colombian army sent in its own white helicopters, unmarked Russian Mi-17s supposedly under FARC control, on the gutsy freedom mission. The captives - the most important of an estimated 700 in terrorist hands - included former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, 11 Colombian policemen and three American private military contractors.

News coverage justifiably focuses on the amazing nature of the mission, which took months for the Colombians to prepare. Rescuing the three Americans, who were Defense Department contractors assisting a US-Colombian counternarcotics program, was a top priority of Admiral James Stavridis, head of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM).  Initial news reports say that Colombian agents infiltrated the FARC at its highest levels, penetrated the FARC security detail in charge of the hostages, and mounted a complex deception operation to move the hostages on a 93 mile trek through the sweltering mountains to a point where the Colombian army could extract them.

Undercover Colombian agents wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and posing as FARC terrorists arrived at the extraction point in a unmarked white helicopters, allegedly to move the hostages to visit an unspecified international delegation. Once the 15 hostages were safely aboard and taken from the area, the agents identified themselves as Colombian military and announced that the captives were free.

It was a fantastically successful operation. And there's more mileage to be squeezed from it. Right now, the FARC is discredited, broken and factionalized. Its longtime leader is dead, the Colombians killed other senior commanders, FARC sponsor Chavez has rhetorically become very harsh against the organization, and the rescue has humiliated the group further. Even better, the Colombian military revealed it had infiltrated the FARC's seven-person central secretariat as well as the most sensitive parts of the group's security apparatus.

This means that FARC commanders can no longer trust one another. They must now become especially suspicious of one another: Who among them is a spy for the Colombian or American governments? Who has already betrayed who to whom? Who will sell out next?

Isolated extremist groups like the FARC tend to breed paranoia in their ranks, and this paranoia will only heighten as uncertainties swell about where the organization is headed now that its leadership is dead, compromised or factionalized. About 300 FARC members are defecting monthly, the group has lost its hero status and is widely viewed in Colombia as a mafia, and President Alvaro Uribe, who led the no-compromise fight, is the considered the most popular president in Colombia's history.

This is great news! Over the next few months, Colombia and its friends should play on FARC's divisions, humiliation and fears to goad FARC commanders to turn against one another, do one another in and sell one another out. Helping the FARC self-destruct is a big part of the game.

We can thank Hugo Chavez for the white helicopter idea. And also for the use of video camera crews to provide propaganda support for his "rescues" earlier this year. According to Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos, the Colombian planners deliberately mimicked the precedent he set, and they fooled the FARC completely. Gracias, Hugo!

(Time magazine has a rather good analysis, if late in the game.)

Photo: Venezuelans protest the FARC at a Caracas rally, February 2008. The placards read, "No more FARC."