Kalashnikovs are getting dearer

Kalashnikovs are getting dearer

Photo: Valerio Pandolfo

Darra Adam Khel, a small town in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, 'consists of one main street lined with shops, with some alleys and sidestreets containing workshops'. Almost all the shops and the workshops are involved in the business of small, and not-so-small, arms. Officially, you need a permit to get there. Officially, you will not be issued with one.

Well, the news from Darra is that Kalashnikov prices are going up.

read the rest! »

On Killing Terrorist Leaders

This is a frequent topic of discussion, so I thought I'd log this for future reference. Daniel Byman in the LA Times. Byman is Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University:

"In addition to killing several perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics attack, Israel has killed leaders of the PLO, the Lebanese Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

After the second intifada broke out in September 2000, Israel dramatically stepped up its targeting of Palestinian terrorists, killing more than 200 of them. This campaign worked. Targeted killings - combined with the border security barrier, military operations and improved intelligence - reduced Israeli deaths from a high of 172 in 2002 to less than 40 in 2005.

Even more telling, this decline in deaths occurred during periods when the number of attempted attacks by Hamas increased, suggesting that the organization became less capable even though its hatred did not diminish."

I've noted in the past that any organization's scarcest resource is competent leaders, and that terrorist and Netwar organizations are especially vulnerable if their leadership is churned. Indeed, one can observe a similar decline in the American Mafia.¹ Byman adds:

read the rest! »

French Slavery

Recently I read a piece by an American living in Europe, recounting how he had found himself in heated argument with a Frenchman who hammered him with America's rap sheet of historical faults and crimes -- it looked like the usual list, if you're familiar with that dreary experience.

Among them, of course, was slavery. The American wrote that he largely conceded the point of slavery to his foe, remarking only that it was not really an American institution, just a Southern one.

This seemed lame to me, not only because it was, in fact, a national institution, as I have been at pains to tell people for some years now, but because the American could have turned the tables nicely on the Frenchman, if he'd known a little more about French history.

So, in case this ever happens to you, be prepared. Here's a primer. Really, the essential numbers can be summed up like this:

• Slaver voyages: France, 4,200; British North America/United States, 1,500.
• Slaves transported: France 1,250,000, British North America/United States, 300,000.
• Slaves delivered to: French West Indies: 1,600,000, British North America/United States, 500,000.*

read the rest! »

Gangs & Guerillas vs. The State

One of Winds' ongoing themes over the years has been the growing confluence of terrorism and crime, a theme explored in special depth via my Terror, Inc. series.

William S. Lind of Defense and the National Interest writes:

"Meanwhile, drug smugglers and guerrilla forces like the FARC work together more easily than states do. The state system is old, creaky, formalistic and slow. Drug dealing and guerrilla warfare represent a free market, where deals happen fast. Several years ago, a Marine friend went down to Bolivia as part of the U.S. counter-drug effort. He observed that the drug traffickers went through Boyd Cycle or OODA Loop six times in the time it took us to go through it once. When I relayed that to Colonel Boyd, he said, "Then we're not even in the game"

Then he follows up with something I've been wondering, too:

read the rest! »

One Canadian's Thoughts on AdScam

by "DoubleZero"

I just finished reading the book 'Hot Money' by R.T. Naylor. This highly informative and detailed book explains how tax revenues are systematically looted by government officials, their business cronies, and banks in Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, the United States, and Africa. Canada is barely mentioned in the book, but perhaps in the next edition, it should be. What I read on the Captain's Quarters blog was shocking. You expect this sort of thing from municipal politicians and corporate executives, but not from the federal government.

read the rest! »

The New Anarchy: Crime and War

Phil Carter has a blog post up about The Convergence of Crime and War, with a lot of excellent links to professional papers et. al. It's a subject we've been harping about for a while here at Winds of Change.NET, though our focus is more on the fusion of crime, nation-states and terrorism than the "bottom up" evolution Carter is covering. As this LA Times article reminds us, however, we're already facing the stuff that Carter is talking about on the battlefield. Winds of Change.NET's look at this phenomenon includes this recommended set:

• Terror, Inc., Part 1
• Terror, Inc., Part 2
• The S.P.E.C.T.R.E. of Terror, Inc.

See also:

read the rest! »

Children of the Stoplights: Part 6

This is the featured weekly post from Discarded Lies at Winds of Change.NET. This concludes the Children of the Stoplights series, about child trafficking in Europe. Here are parts one, two, three, four and five of Children of the Stoplights. Next week, the Terra Nostra series returns. It's about the Jewish Holocaust in Greece and righteous gentiles .

"I am not able to work because I have never worked in my whole life. I have experience in this business (children trafficking). In Greece, the only way for an idler like me to survive, is to make children work, either mine or others. I made children beg in Thessaloniki and in Athens. I always choose children from families I know well.." Interview of an Albanian children trafficker with a Terre des hommes member in August 2001.

read the rest! »

Strangling Syria's Regime

Tom Holsinger originally left this as a comment in Dan's article about the PFLP's activities in Iraq. I thought to was interesting enough to deserve its own post.

We have a simple and effective, but slow, means of terminating Syria's Baathist regime if we want to. The time required might make it costly in terms of Syrian countermeasures.

We can close Syrian and Lebanese ports with naval mines, i.e. blockade the Syrian economy, including its criminal one. The Turks like the Syrians less than we do so they'd deny use of their ports and rail lines to make up for the closure of Syrian-controlled ports. Syria's rail connections with Jordan and Saudi Arabia lack sufficient capacity to carry the tonnage necessary to keep the Syrian economy going. Ditto for all possible truck and air traffic. Even Syria's feeble economy relies on railroads from ports to carry most of the goods it requires.

The major problem with this, besides the fact that governments don't think that way these days, is the political & diplomatic problems from blockading Lebanon, which happens to be Syria's wholly controlled subsidiary.

Few understand, though, how important sea traffic through Lebanon is for the drug trade carried on by the gangster confederacy called the Syrian government aka its Baathist regime.

read the rest! »

Children of the Stoplights: Part 5

This is the featured weekly post from Discarded Lies at Winds of Change.NET. The Children of the Stoplights series is about child trafficking in Europe. Here are parts one, two, three and four of Children of the Stoplights.

While boys and girls are used to earn money through begging and selling small items, teenage girls from Eastern Europe are exploited in prostitution. From the 20,000 prostitutes who were trafficked in Greece in the last few years, 10% were minors. Out of these minors, 75% are Albanian. Girls who were originally trafficked for economic exploitation are passed to sexual exploitation by the age of 12.

When a new law on trafficking in human beings was under discussion in Greece during 2002, there was a proposal that men paying for sex with trafficked women should be penalised. The proposal was rejected, reportedly on the grounds that too many men in the country engaged in commercial sex and would potentially be penalised. The law eventually adopted makes it an offence (punishable by six months’ imprisonment) to knowingly accept the services of a trafficked person. It was also made an offence to pay for sex with a child of any age, with the offence being considered more serious if the child concerned was under 15, and most serious if under 10. Terre des Hommes: Study on Child Trafficking (PDF)

Gina was 15 years old and Camelia was 16 when they came to Greece from Romania with promises of a job....

read the rest! »

Children of the Stoplights: Part 4

This is the featured weekly post from Discarded Lies at Winds of Change.NET. The Children of the Stoplights series is about child trafficking in Europe. Here are parts one, two and three of Children of the Stoplights.

While some of these children are exploited by being forced to work or beg, others are in even worse situations. And if no one is addressing the subject of nine-year-olds begging in the streets, who's looking out for these other children?

A study in Greece from 1995-97 identified almost 2,900 minors in prostitution. More than 200 of them were under 12 years old. Currently more than 40% of the minors in prostitution are from neighbouring or regional countries including Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Albania and Iraq.

Law enforcement agencies: the role of the police

The Ministry of Public Order created a self-monitoring unit in response to corruption in local authorities and the active participation of elements of the police in trafficking women.

In the 1990s, there were reports in the media about police officers who were on the payroll of organised crime syndicates involved in trafficking. Between 1995 and 1997, in return for large sums of money, police officers in Athens protected trafficking networks and brothels. This was such a common phenomenon that it finally led to the dismissal of high ranking representatives at the ministry of public order, including the head and deputy head, who were found guilty of participating and offering protection to traffickers.

The daily newspaper ‘Eleftherotypia’ reported that in 2000 and 2001 a committee investigated 103 reports of police involvement in trafficking. Many observers still doubt the willingness of all police officers to crack down trafficking rings.

The continuing complicity and involvement of members of the Greek police is also confirmed by the Panhellenic Confederation of Police Officers and the Ministry of Public Order.

The newly established internal unit is intended to penalise police involvement and catch the “untouchables”. There have been no recent convictions of police officers or other officials in connection with THB. As OKEA member Lazos said in the interview, “the police continued working with a smirk on their faces”.

Prevention and Fight Against Trafficking:Greece

Children of the Stoplights: Part 3

This is the featured weekly post from Discarded Lies at Winds of Change.NET. The Children of the Stoplights series is about child trafficking in Europe. Here are parts one and two of Children of the Stoplights.

There are so many of them, and they were closer to home than I imagined. My neighbourhood has changed over the years. Albanian people have moved in the apartment buildings; walking down our narrow streets I hear other languages, I see faces that are not Greek. This is all fairly new, there were no Albanians in Greece before the mid-90s. Hanging out with the guys in the neighbourhood "taverna" I hear the familiar immigrant story: the longing for home, the struggle to find work in an unfamiliar and often inhospitable country not used to immigrants, the discrimination, the lack of papers. I think the reason they felt free to tell me their stories is because I'm an immigrant too.

But the truth I learned from the children. My then seven-year-old neighbour Maria confided to me that her cousins were selling little paper icons every night along with other children. Alexandra was six and her brother was five. An uncle would pick them up every evening and bring them home in the early morning. "They're very poor," she said. "They need the money."

A few weeks later Maria started disappearing in the evenings too. I wondered if the same "uncle" was picking her up.

read the rest! »

Children of the Stoplights: Part 2

This is the featured weekly post from Discarded Lies at Winds of Change.NET. The Children of the Stoplights series is about child trafficking in Europe. Here is Part 1 of Children of the Stoplights.

Salonica, Aristotelous square: Fashionable shops, bookstores, art galleries, people enjoying the sunshine at sidewalk cafés and restaurants, the meeting place for the whole city. People barely glance at the children as they hover at each table for a moment or two, offering flowers for sale, pocket tissues, small paper icons. They seldom speak, they just hold out their merchandise. Some people ignore them completely. Others shake their head "no." Some people feel sorry for them and give the 50 cents.

read the rest! »

Children Of The Stoplights, Part 1

Note: This marks the start of a recurring featured weekly post from Discarded Lies at Winds of Change.NET. To kick the party off right, we're running a double feature this Friday: a post from the Children Of The Stoplights series (simulcast at Discarded Lies) and one from the longer Terra Nostra series, above. The Children Of The Stoplights (a shorter series) is about child trafficking in Europe, and the cold shoulder that European society and authorities turn to the victims of this ghastly trade in human lives. We'd like to thank Joe Katzman for offering us a platform to tell these stories.

When evariste wrote about sexual slavery in Europe, he mentioned Salonica, my home town, the destination for many of these women. That subject led to another one: the trafficking of children. In Greece they're called "children of the stoplights" because they hang out at traffic lights selling small packets of tissues or washing windshields for small change.

They're not Greek, these children...

read the rest! »

New Energy Currents: 2004-10-27

The world faces an onslaught of news stories beginning with "With the price of oil currently at $50 a barrel..." Get used to the hurt - with surging oil consumption in China, dwindling supplies of easily recoverable oil and gas, and widespread instability in many of the key energy producing regions of the world, the energy market isn't going to become significantly less painful any time soon. Beyond our woes in the industrialized world, billions of people in the developing world will also need to increase their energy consumption dramatically in the years to come, as they work to meet their basic needs and increase their standard of living.

Despite what we might hear from the US presidential candidates (and energy lobbyists), there are no easy and no ready solutions to our energy problems. Fortunately, there's a lot of hard work being done by scientists, engineers, and (sometimes) policymakers around the world to come up with a wide variety of potential approaches that will compete with as well as compliment each other as we slowly transform our energy systems. To help you keep track of these developments as they happen, 'New Energy Currents' is a broad but by no means comprehensive compilation of noteworthy news in energy technology and policy from the past month. By John Atkinson of Chiasm.

• Wind
• Water
• Solar
• Nuclear
• Hydrogen
• Fossil Fuels
• Biofuels
• Alternative Alteratives
• Efficiency Improvements
• Related Policy Issues

read the rest! »

Narcocainia, South America

Back in September of 2002, I wrote the Terror, Inc. series of articles here on Winds of Change.NET. Part 2 took an especially close look at Colombia's FARC narco-guerillas as a likely model for future terrorist organizations, and other posts and comments have bandied about the idea that there is effectively an unrecognized narco-state in South America.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, to find this thesis strongly confirmed in the pages of... National Geographic magazine. Cocaine Country in the July 2004 issue describes a land with its own economy and institutions, where raw coca is the main unit of everyday currency. Predictably, FARC's professsed Marxism doesn't stop them from selling the farmers' raw product at a 1,000x markup.

The online version is only a 1-page excerpt (plus photos and field notes), and the entire article is worth reading in your local library.

The U.N. Oil-For-Food Bribery Scandal

Ryan over at Tasty Manatees methodically details the corruption, payoffs, and coverups surrounding the U.N.'s supposed administration of Saddam's "oil-for-food" program under the U.N. sanctions regime. He also includes links to a now-verified list of the political parties and individuals around the world that Saddam bribed using program proceeds, using accounting tactics that look a lot like Enron's.

Pay special attention to the long lists of French & Russian recipients. Not to mention the presence of British MP George Galloway, Indonesia's President Megawati, and so many others.

I'm sure the fact that this money was not actually going to feed the people of Iraq will come as a shock to everyone familiar with Saddam, and with the U.N. Naturally, the organization issued a weasel-worded non-denial in Wednesday's Wall St. Journal. Fortunately, Ryan's article also includes a thorough deconstruction of their evasions. He concludes that the U.N. has refused to investigate the corruption in its own ranks, and will now turn a blind eye to the allegations. That's my bet, too.

A real fine organization the U.S. Democratic Party has decided to beg permission from in order to protect America. Yessirreee.

Iraq Raids: The Genius of Starting Small

MSNBC.com has a great article that sheds considerable new light on both the Special Ops Soldier's Letter From Iraq we published Monday, and our stories yesterday about the op that killed Saddam's sons (yay!!!). Both involve a recent shift in tactics by U.S. forces, and that shift made a big difference.

The MSNBC / Washington Post piece is called "Little targets led to the top", and is proof that there are still some real journalists in theater. The template it offers is worth remembering next time someone talks about combatting terrorism, organized crime with global reach, or other kinds of "4th generation warfare" threats.

UPDATE: Blaster of Overpressure.com makes a very good point about adopting the same approach in official public communications.

The Crime Money Bubble

We've touched on organized crime issues before here at Winds of Change.NET. My own research via authors like Guilhem Fabre, Claire Sterling, James Mills et. al. has convinced me that the organized crime sector is indeed big enough to affect major economies. Japan's "Yakuza recession" may offer one example already. The points I made in "Terror, Inc." [Part 1 | Part 2 | The SPECTRE of Terror Inc.] are a different kind of data point.

Is M. Simon correct? That's not clear - but I think it's possible. What's very clear to me, is that we can no longer treat organized crime as invisible when we analyze either the global economy or geopolitical security.

Why We Must Not End Prohibition
by M. Simon

"The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It's possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government."
   - William Colby, former CIA Director, 1995

I know that enforcing prohibition sounds just like the opposite of what I have been preaching for years in my personal life, and for the last year in my blog posts and writings. There is a very sound reason for this new attitude. It is a very old reason: money. If we end the drug war, a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on it will get hurt. You might even be one of them...

read the rest! »

Rooking Saddam

Stephen Den Beste has an essay up (I can't bring myself to call them posts...) on Saddam's WMD efforts that reinforces my point about WMD and bad management.

SDB: "I just stumbled on a report that offers an interesting point which might help explain just what happened with the apparently-missing Iraqi WMDs: the ones they did have were actually mostly destroyed, and in their frantic attempts to acquire the materials necessary to produce new ones, they ended up tossing money around like a drunken sailor, and got ripped off."

Check out the rest. It goes a long way to answering my two questions on the subject:

SDB: "I think that it isn't that they voluntarily disarmed; it's that they tried to acquire the stuff they needed to rebuild their stockpiles and got rooked, again and again."

That pretty neatly answers:

AL: "...two things (both of which get trumped if they actually find the Secret Underground WMD Factories) - why Saddam would risk war to hide weapons he knew he didn't have, and why Bush would risk lying about something so crucial, when it would be impossible for the lie not to get caught."

Russia's Rising Darkness

Today's must-read article comes via Winds of Change.NET fan Brian Reilly: Russia's Rising Darkness.

The rise of the Russian kleptoklatura has received less attention than it should what with 9/11 and all, but Russia's vast stocks of poorly-secured WMDs (and serious problems with efforts to fix this) means this has to be on our long-term radar as a Class 2 strategic threat at the very least. Nor are these the only reasons Western countries should be concerned.

Books like David Satter's Darkness At Dawn, Claire Sterling's Thieves' World, and James Mills' Underground Empire do us all a service by detailing the true breadth of this issue. The astonishing reach of international criminal syndicates, their willingness to cooperate, their growing preparedness to act on the world stage, and the use of the criminal syndicate model by terrorist organizations are all trends worth serious attention. There are already several regimes and regions that are, in effect, criminal states; aside from the obvious implications for 4th Generation Warfare, the destabilizing and corrupting effect these developments have on outside polities beyond their borders should not be underestimated.

Imagine Al Capone's Chicago, operating under his rulership as a sovereign city-state within America. What would the likely consequences have been beyond Chicago's borders? More and more, that is exactly what we face today.

As presently envisoned, the EU will be a nearly-perfect playground for such entities. The Americans have enough to do elsewhere, and given Europe's proximity and its problems with organized crime Russia's kleptoklatura is exactly the kind of issue they're well-suited and well-advised to tackle. They won't, of course, which is why this threat will grow. The Islamofascists may be the first group we engage seriously in global 4th Generation Warfare; they will not be the last.

The Drug Wars: Interview with a Police Officer

M. Simon writes:

I have been discussing the ramifications of the War On Drugs (WOD) with a Canadian police officer, John A. Gayder. He has started a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). Its most prominent American member is Sheriff Bill Masters of San Miguel County, Colorado, who has been an elected Libertarian Sheriff since 1980.

MS: John, tell me a little about your police career?

JG: I am a currently serving Constable with the Niagara Parks Police Service in Niagara Falls, Canada. Having said that, I need to tell you right off that the opinions I express regarding drug policy reform are strictly my own! They may or may not reflect the official position of my employer.

The policing profession has always been a central part of my life. My late father was a career police officer who rose through the ranks to eventually become a Chief of Police. My sister was a police matron for a time. I grew up in a policing household. I was hired in June of 1989 and have almost exclusively worked uniform patrol, which I consider to be the best job in the whole field of policing. I am also a certified health and safety worker representative and am the services rope rescue team instructor and coordinator. A partial c.v. is viewable on the web.

MS: What is your opinion on the war on drugs? What made you come to that conclusion?

JG: The war on drugs is classic proof that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is a noble idea to not want people to ruin their lives through drug abuse. Unfortunately, the way society continues to go about achieving that aim via the WOD is not working. In fact it is making things worse. Almost everything we hate about drugs is a result of them being illegal. CONTINUED...

read the rest! »

Surveillance Society

I heartily endorse Jeffrey Harrow's "Harrow Technology Report." It's an excellent source of thought-provoking items about the advances technology is making on many fronts - and on the societal changes these advances bring in their wake.

In light of yesterday's bit about Privacy International's Stupid Security Competition, I thought this item from Harrow's reports was rather timely. Calpundit asked if we should laugh or cry, a valid question in light of his excellent January 21, 2003 post. Well...

"Today a company or agency with a $10 million hardware budget can buy processing power equivalent to 2,000 workstations, two petabytes of hard drive space (two million gigabytes, or 50,000 standard 40-gigabyte hard drives like those found on today's PCs), and a two-gigabit Internet connection (more than 2,000 times the capacity of a typical home broadband connection).

If current trends continue, simple arithmetic predicts that in 20 years the same purchasing power will buy the processing capability of 10 million of today's workstations, 200 exabytes (200 million gigabytes) of storage capacity, and 200 exabits (200 million megabits) of bandwidth.

Another way of saying this is that by 2023 large organizations will be able to devote the equivalent of a contemporary PC to monitoring every single one of the 330 million people who will then be living in the United States."

"Surveillance Nation"
MIT Technology Review: April, 2003
(May require a registration on the site.)

Bottom line, says Harrow? "We will get the type of society that we allow ourselves to create. We have been warned..."

Not entirely. To be fully warned, consider this: international organized crime will also have access to this level of computing power. What if the government wasn't the worst of your worries?

North Korea's Tony Sopranos

North Korea is not a serious military threat to anyone. The most its corrupt, decrepit, so-called army can do is commit suicide with a week long artillery bombardment of the Seoul area in South Korea. That would be horror show, but it would end quickly for a variety of reasons included running out of ready ammunition in its border forts and American precision guided munition (PGM) decapitation. But it won't happen due to the phenomenal corruption of the North Korean Army.

What got me here started about 10 years ago when I noticed the spontaneous criminal entrepreneurial activity by the Chinese Navy (PLAN), commonly referred to as piracy. While I was puzzling over that one, I started reading of North Korean support of terrorism ceasing in favor of drug smuggling after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Two recent articles toggled me over to the conclusion in my first paragraph. The first was in the Asian Wall Street Journal titled "China Props Up An Evil Regime" By Danny Gittings (and clipped over in the FreeRepublic.com web site).

The key section from the ASWJ article:

"Mr. Lim, who served for more than a decade in the North Korean military before fleeing to the South in the early 1990s, says he knows what he's talking about. He claims to have participated in a 1991 attempt by disgruntled army officers to kill Kim's father, Kim Il Sung. The assassination attempt, known in South Korea as the Sept. 24 incident, reportedly collapsed when Kim didn't turn up as scheduled at the site of the proposed shooting.

It's one of five coup attempts against the North Korean regime reported in Seoul over the past decade. But none have been confirmed, and Mr. Lim's account contained some inconsistencies. Even the best known of these attempts -- the U.S. embassy reported evidence of a revolt by the army's sixth corps in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong in 1995 -- may have been more complicated than it appears at first sight. A veteran foreign analyst in Seoul told me it was more of a "squabble among thieves," after the sixth corps refused to turn over to a greedy leadership in Pyongyang the hard currency it had made through illicit activities such as opium smuggling.

Whatever the true circumstances behind the reported coup attempts, they shatter the pervasive myth that North Korea is a hermit kingdom of docile slaves, who know nothing of the outside world and still swallow Pyongyang's propaganda about the two Kims being living Gods.

That myth suits the regime's evil purposes. After all, those who know no better are unlikely to revolt, even against a leadership that is starving them to death. But it has long since ceased to be any more than a myth. According to Mr. Lim, more than a decade ago army officers were already grumbling in private about the regime. By the mid-1990s, officers in the northeast, if not actively plotting to bring down the regime, were at the very least more interested in lining their own pockets than defending Kim Jong Il."

This made me sit up and take notice. Corruption that endemic in a military is only a symptom of wider corruption in the state and society. The only model I had for similar corruption was Syria. Whose only hard currency earning exports are colonists to Lebanon and heroin to Europe. And whose political parties were made up of, according to Jim Dunnigan, the Syrian Army's I through V Corps.

Then this US News & World Report article "The Far East Sopranos " by David E. Kaplan filled in the pieces of the puzzle and gave me my title. From the last paragraph:

While the younger Kim gambles away funny money, some 2 million of his countrymen have died of hunger since the mid-1990s. Still, North Korea's racketeering could damage Kim Jong Il's regime. Its official crime wave is helping fuel growing corruption there and prompting independent crooks to get into the game. Smugglers now find they can more easily bribe border cops and other officials. Some U.S. officials welcome the development. "The key here is lack of government control," says one. "Criminal activity may bring about the disintegration of this regime."

Bingo!

In communist states, supreme power has always rested in the hands of the Party with the Army and Secret Police being near co-equals. These two institutions were always set against one another by the Party so the Party could maintain control.

The various communist nation's cultures also played a role. For example, East Germany was never allowed by the Russians to have a large army because Russians were afraid of a large German Army. Various "Peoples'/Workers' militias" were created to fill the role of militarizing and regimenting larger society for East German communists that the Red Army did for the Soviet Union (and let more East Germans wear spiffy uniforms).

In North Korea, a much larger standing army was required earlier in the history of the communist state. This resulted in the the Army filling many of the "ecological niches" in regime politics that in other communist states were held by the Party and the secret police/forced labor camps. The end result was corrupt regional power groupings centered on the various Army Corps. These military leaders are North Korea's "Tony Sopranos" and like their TV name sake, they chose a weak leader they could dominate, Kim Jong Il.

Once these North Korean "Tony Sopranos" got in the habit of disobedience for the sake of corruption to line their pockets, they became "a little bit pregnant" in the disobedience department regarding other things, hopefully including suicidal orders to bombard Seoul. This is why I feel there is little chance of that.

And it is good news for us and bad news for China. North Korea is a failed state doomed to fall because of its corruption no matter what anyone does. It is only a question of when and what the body count will be, despite China's providing the Kim regime 40% of its food and 88% of its oil. All America has to do is nothing, and it will win in North Korea, something Steven Den Beste pointed out recently. And no matter what else happens, China will be faced with a free, unified, Korea with lots of ethnic Koreans on China's side of their common border.

Of course, America isn't going to do "nothing." As I have said on Winds before, the Bush Administration is filled with senior people who are expert in bringing WMD armed totalitarian regimes to soft landing via psychological warfare. The corruption in North Korea has reached the point that the CIA can bribe North Korean border guards to let in radios for American psychological warfare broadcasts. And there is circumstantial evidence the CIA has already started to do so. Again from the ASWJ article:

"As Radio Free Asia President Richard Richter said earlier this week, while announcing a doubling in broadcasts aimed at citizens of the giant gulag, North Korean listeners "have demonstrated extraordinary ingenuity to secretly hear our broadcasts." Although foreign visitors still return with tales of a highly regimented nation, where everyone wears Kim Il Sung badges and does what he is told, the increasingly numerous refugees paint a very different picture. They describe a society where corruption of all kinds, including prostitution, is now rife. In short, they depict a regime in decline and more vulnerable than ever to being overthrown from within."

Mark this well ladies and gentlemen, I had thought that the Bush Administration was just going for a "Bloodless Victory" in Iraq with a pick up of the Iranian Mullahocracy as a opportunistic benefit. Now I think we will not only get a bloodless victory trifecta over all of the names states in the "Axis of Evil", but we may get them all before the end of the year and almost certainly before the 2004 Presidential elections.

UPDATE: Hat tip to David Adesnik of Oxblog for spotting this NY Times article titled "Russia Helped U.S. on Nuclear Spying Inside North Korea." The CIA has been working with Russian intelligence to emplace sensors to detect nuclear weapons manufacturing.

From the article:

"Traditionally, uranium enrichment facilities have required large amounts of electricity and water, making it possible to identify them by spy satellite photographs of power grids and other industrial infrastructure.

Plutonium reprocessing, on the other hand, is a chemical process requiring less power and water, and so such plants can be situated in more remote locations, like Yongbyon, which is about 60 miles north of Pyongyang.

But plutonium reprocessing gives off distinctive emissions that can be tracked and measured, even in very small amounts. Experts familiar with the joint operation between the C.I.A. and Russian intelligence said plutonium reprocessing emits an isotope of krypton in gaseous form that is relatively easy to detect. The Russians were apparently given American sensing equipment to help analysts determine whether reprocessing was under way at Yongbyon, which after 1994 would have been a violation of the agreement reached under the Clinton administration, known as the Agreed Framework. The equipment could also help the C.I.A. determine whether plutonium reprocessing had secretly been moved to another site in North Korea.

"Krypton is a very good technical indicator that is hard to hide," said one person familiar with the intelligence efforts. "If you are able to situate the sniffers in the right places, then you could have confidence that you can find out whether plutonium reprocessing is going on or not."

Now, if the Russian and American intelligence services were cooperative to this extent, how hard would it be to conspire to bribe North Korean border guards to let smugglers get in American radios for psychological warfare broadcasts?

The S.P.E.C.T.R.E. of Terror, Inc.

"Terror, Inc." (Part One | Part Two) drew an interesting reader comment over the weekend, one worth expanding on. "Code Slinger" writes:

"Have you considered how "Bond" this vision of the future of terror organizations is? In five years, will the IRA/FARC be distinguishable from SPECTRE?"

No... and yes. In order to make sense of that reply, let's look at 2 trends I covered - and 2 that I didn't.

read the rest! »

Terror, Inc. (Part 2/2)

The following article is part of a blog burst - a simultaneous and cross-linked posting of many blogs on the same theme. This blog burst commemorates the 30th anniversary of the Munich Olympics Massacre, which began in the dawn hour of September 5th, 1972. Go to The Index of the Munich Massacre Blogburst to find links to all the other articles.

The Munich Massacre in 1972 remains one of terrorism's most durable images from the 1970s. But it was not the first. Or the most extensive (terrorism in Turkey had already pushed that country into full martial law by 1971). Or the most significant.

Indeed, the most significant development for terrorism in the 1970s may be the most unremarked: despite their leftist origins, the terrorist groups that survived and prospered often did so because they became self-sustaining businesses.

Yesterday's post looked at the genesis of this trend, and surveyed the PLO as one if its enduring exemplars. Today we cast our eyes elsewhere. We'll look at what other terrorist organizations are doing to adapt this model to their own needs, and some of the possible implications.

read the rest! »

Other Cyber-Attacks: The Spamdemic Map

Want to know where all your spam is coming from? It's a surprisingly interconnected group, as the Spamdemic Map points out.

And if you want to do something about spam, try this Winds of Change post. If you're a non-Outlook user like me, note the links to "Blackhole lists" et. al. and either program your own filter (UNIX guru approach), or bug your ISP to use one (all others).