Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Syrian Regime Change and the Kurdish Problem
If Assad loses control of his armed forces and the regime
loses its legitimacy as the expression of Syrian nationalism, the ingredients
don’t seem there for a Lebanon-style civil war with local proxies armed by
regional or global actors.
That’s because I don’t think that Russia, China, or even
Iran see any upside in arming some Ba’ath regime generals of primarily Alawite
backgrounds trying to beat back an insurrection powered largely by Syria’s
dominant Sunni majority.
Alawites are estimated at 12% of Syria’s largely Sunni
population and don’t look to do well if the Syrian uprising transforms into an
explicitly sectarian confrontation.
Lebanon, on the other hand, is split between Christians,
Sunnis, and Shi’ites with no one group holding a clear demographic advantage
(especially since there hasn’t been an official census in Lebanon for decades),
providing multiple opportunities for regional and global patrons to make
mischief through their durable local proxies.
If regime collapse occurs in Syria, a disorganized triumph
by various armed Sunni Arab groups, some with a significant Islamist tinge, and
a messy clean-up operation by the West, Turkey, and the Gulf States appears to
be in the offing.
I don’t think anybody is terribly interested in that kind of
outcome.
The whole Sunni-Shi’a/spillover into Lebanon scenario is
bandied about a lot, but I think the ghost at the regime change banquet, as it
were, is not another round of misery for little Lebanon; it is the prospect of more
Kurd-related heartburn for rising regional power Turkey.
A sign of Turkish sensitivities is this banned map showing
the distribution of ethnic Kurdish populations across northeastern Syria,
eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and parts of Iran.
As a disgruntled content screener/whistleblower revealed
, this map is banned on Facebook in Turkey (together with “blatant (obvious) depiction
of camel toes and moose knuckles”):
As the Syrian conflict has militarized and the armed
opposition has acquired a Sunni sectarian tinge accentuated by its Gulf backing,
Syrian Kurds (who make up perhaps 9% of the population) have for the most part
sat on the fence.
The Syrian National Council, a bastion of Arab chauvinism
thanks to its domination by the Muslim Brotherhood (Kurds are of Iranian, not
Arab ethnicity) has put down its marker:
Samir Nashar, now a
member of the seven person General Secretariat of the SNC was even more
explicit, in August 2011 saying “We accuse the Kurdish parties of not
effectively participating in the Syrian revolution. It seems that these parties continue to bet
on a dialogue with the regime. This stance will certainly have consequences
after the fall of the regime.”
As the struggle has militarized, Kurds probably find even
less reasons for reassurance. The anti-government
armed groups competing for Gulf emirate support have displayed a certain Arab
Islamist fervor admixed with the anti-Iranian xenophobia that is de rigeur
these days.
If a Sunni majority regime takes power in Damascus, it will
probably find itself wrangling with its Kurdish population, with the
possibility that the struggles of energized and/or threatened Syrian Kurds will
find an echo in eastern Turkey.
It would appear that Turkey’s reluctance to push forward
with overthrowing the Assad regime and midwifing the creation of a friendly new
Syrian government reflects its concern that a pickup in Damascus will be offset
by headaches in Kurdistan.
Sorting Out the Houla Massacre
Juan Cole jumped the gun a bit by attributing the hundred+ deaths in the Syrian town of Houla to a Syrian Army
artillery assault.
In a perverse way, a massacre by the Syrian military would
have been almost a stabilizing phenomenon.
It would have placed the bad-guy hat firmly and irrevocably
on the heads of the Syrian armed forces.
It would also have served as an affirmation that the Assad
regime is in complete command of the security forces and responsible for the
atrocities committed against Syrian civilians.
And it would have given Dr. Cole added ammunition to argue for a new humanitarian intervention in Syria against the convenient
and vulnerable target of the Assad regime, one that might banish the embarrassing
memory of the last intervention he promoted: the fiasco in Libya.
Instead, the Syrian conflict appears to be spiraling
out of control, with Syrian army military commanders either turning a blind eye
to, condoning, or supporting the activities of local death squads.
The picture, murky as it is, of the atrocity at Houla is of
a fierce battle between government and insurrectionary forces in Houla,
followed perhaps by a tactical withdrawal by the rebels. Then some combination of soldiers and pro-government
irregulars moved in for a massacre that might have been local score-settling
for the assassination of a pro-government informer in a nearby village, a horrific
warning to Syrian soldiers who defect (Houla was reportedly a refuge for many defectors
and their families), or a brutal escalation in COIN-style terror.
In any case, the people who perpetrated the atrocity
apparently knew who they were looking for, if a persuasive account in the
Guardian is accurate:
"They came in
armoured vehicles and there were some tanks," said the boy. "They
shot five bullets through the door of our house. They said they wanted Aref and
Shawki, my father and my brother. They then asked about my uncle, Abu Haidar. They
also knew his name."
From the point of view of the Assad regime, credible
accusations that its military, security personnel, and irregulars are operating
death squads shred its rather threadbare claim to the role of protector of
Syria’s citizens against terrorists.
As Patrick Cockburn points out in a lengthy piece in Counterpunch,
the Annan peace process was something of a lifeline for Assad. The regime has
demonstrated considerably more forbearance than the rebels, who would prefer to
see the peace process collapse, and had little to gain and much to lose from
the carnival of massacre in Houla.
From the point of view of Assad’s patrons in Russia and
China, Houla hints that Assad is losing control of the military and security
apparatus, casting severe doubts on his abilities to manage a political
transition for Syria.
Reporting from Damascus, Cockburn wrote:
The government in Damascus yesterday
appeared to be somewhat leaderless and seemed slow to take on board the impact
of an outrage in which people across the world are blaming the Syrian
authorities for the murder and mutilation of children. “I get the impression
that there is nobody in firm control of Syrian policy and the Syrian armed
forces,” said a diplomat yesterday.
Therefore, Russia and China have both been prompt to call for an investigation of the massacre at
Houla.
Possible but unlikely outcomes are that Houla turns out to have
been some hideous false flag operation, or some local freelance murder spree.
If, on the other hand, evidence shows that the official
security and military apparatus, presumably at a local or regional level,
orchestrated the operation, I expect that Beijing and Moscow will be very interested to see
if Assad can enforce accountability and demonstrate, to the satisfaction of
Russia and the PRC if not the international community, that he can punish and
reassign the commanders and security chiefs responsible for dealing the Annan
plan so conspicuous a setback.
If Assad can’t do it, it is possible that Russia, which is reportedly
impatient for a change at the top in Syria, will probably find somebody who
can.
It does not appear that Russia or China (or, for that
matter, Iran) are interested in backing proxies in a sectarian civil war in
Syria. They will support the Annan plan
and the political process as long as they see a chance for a successor regime
to claim, even in some diminished way, the mantle of Syrian national legitimacy.
If the government becomes irrevocably identified with death
squads as well as the well-known brutality of its military and security
apparatus, Beijing and Moscow will probably throw in their losing hand.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Syria: Is this country headed straight to hell or what?
Back in February I wrote for Asia Times about the Chinese diplomatic
initiative on Syria, which is now largely represented by the Annan peace
plan. At the time, I wrote China’s plan
had a chance, albeit slim, because, for all the brave talk emanating from the
Gulf, Turkey, the EU, and the West nobody seemed particularly eager to step up
and destroy the Assad regime.
Simply imploding the Assad regime to spite Iran would appear to be easy, but has not happened.
Turkey is already providing safe havens for the Free Syrian Army, but apparently has not unleashed it. Western Iraq is aboil with doctrinaire Sunni militants happy to stick it to the Alawite regime, and Qatar has allegedly already laid the groundwork for underemployed Libyan militants to find profitable occupation fighting alongside the opposition in Syria, but utter bloody chaos has yet to erupt.
The fact that Aleppo and Damascus have only been ravaged by two car bombs is perhaps a sign of Wahabbist restraint, and may have been taken by the PRC as a sign that the Gulf Cooperation Council's commitment to overthrowing Assad is not absolute.
Of course, recently Damascus was ravaged by two 1000 kg car
bombs and a similar attack in Aleppo was averted by Syrian government security.
And today there was this in the Washington Post:
Syrian rebels battling the regime of President Bashar al-Assad have begun receiving significantly more and better weapons in recent weeks, an effort paid for by Persian Gulf nations and coordinated in part by the United States, according to opposition activists and U.S. and foreign officials.…Material is being stockpiled in Damascus, in Idlib near the Turkish border and in Zabadani on the Lebanese border. Opposition activists who two months ago said the rebels were running out of ammunition said this week that the flow of weapons — most still bought on the black market in neighboring countries or from elements of the Syrian military — has significantly increased after a decision by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other gulf states to provide millions of dollars in funding each month.Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood also said it has opened its own supply channel to the rebels, using resources from wealthy private individuals and money from gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, said Mulham al-Drobi, a member of the Brotherhood’s executive committee.The new supplies reversed months of setbacks for the rebels that forced them to withdraw from their stronghold in the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs and many other areas in Idlib and elsewhere.“Large shipments have got through,” another opposition figure said. “Some areas are loaded with weapons.”The effect of the new arms appeared evident in Monday’s clash between opposition and government forces over control of the rebel-held city of Rastan, near Homs. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said rebel forces who overran a government base had killed 23 Syrian soldiers
Helluva way to run a cease-fire.
The simplest explanation is that the United States and the Gulf
nations have decided to drive a stake into the heart of the shaky ceasefire and
let ‘er rip in Syria, consequences be damned.
This would fit in with the near-universal desire to get rid of
Assad, while having the collateral benefit of administering a ostentatious
public rebuke to China’s efforts to drive the Middle Eastern political process
in ways that don’t suit the United States and Saudi Arabia.
That’s the most likely explanation.
However, the Obama administration’s queasiness concerning
uncontrolled regime collapse in Syria driven by hardened Islamist fighters and
the Muslim Brotherhood instead of cuddly, pro-Western liberal intellectuals
seems to have become more overt since the car bombings in Damascus.
So I wonder if this article is something in the nature of a push
by Saudi Arabia to reinforce the narrative of inevitable Syrian Armageddon fueled
by aid from the Gulf, and thereby encourage the Obama administration to give up
on the peace process, indeed any ideas of a managed process, and let the
insurrection take its course…and of course, take on the responsibility for
dealing with Syria, or what’s left of it, once Assad is gone.
To me, the takeaway paragraphs were:
Officials in the region said that Turkey’s main concern is where the United States stands, and whether it and others will support armed protection for a safe zone along the border or back other options that have been discussed.…The Sunni-led gulf states, which would see the fall of Assad as a blow against Shiite Iran, would welcome such assistance, but they would like a more formal approach. One gulf official described the Obama administration’s gradual evolution from an initial refusal to consider any action outside the political realm to a current position falling “between ‘here’s what we need to do’ and ‘we’re doing it.’”
“Various people are hoping that the U.S. will step up its efforts to undermine or confront the Syrian regime,” the gulf official said. “We want them to get rid” of Assad.
Not exactly a profile in courage by the counter-revolutionary
kings, sheiks, and emirs of the Arabian peninsula.
I’m pretty sure that the Gulf states could bring down Assad by
themselves, albeit through proxies, at the cost of a few million dollars.
So the issue here is mainly of GCC gutlessness and an attempt to
get America on the hook for dealing with the Syria mess once Assad is in exile
in Russia, hanging from a lamp post or whatever.
The bottom line is, the future of Syria—at least
how its political process and insurrection play out over the next few months—is
in the hands of President Obama.
Thursday, May 03, 2012
Cheng Chengguang, WTF?
Chen Guangcheng Case Lurches Between Triumph, Tragedy, and
Fiasco
My recent piece for Asia Times is somewhat more topical than usual, so I’m
shooting it out as an e-mail to China Matters readers.
Looking at today’s shenanigans, and Chen’s metamorphosis
from brave legal activist to handwringing exile in waiting, I have the distinct
impression that people invested in the current freedom fighter vs. tyrant
polarity prevailed on Chen to blow this deal up.
Think about it. If
the deal went through and Chen was studying law in Tianjin under the
ostentatiously solicitous care of the PRC, what happens to other dissidents who
might want asylum?
US Embassy picks up the phone, confirms that Chen is hitting
the books and putting on weight, and tells the dissident, no asylum but how
about a deal like Chen’s?
I find Chen’s explanation of why he reneged on the deal somewhat
unconvincing.
As to his rather belated concern over his wife’s well-being,
Chen had already revealed in his video address to Wen Jiabao that local goons
in Shandong had rolled his wife in a quilt and used her as a piñata for hours,
just for revealing the details of his house arrest to foreign media. What did he expect they would do when he
actually escaped?
The escape itself, is of course a riddle wrapped inside an
enigma. Part of the Chen legend was the intense,
up-close surveillance he had to endure.
How did he really evade it? Was
there a deal? Did that deal blow up too?
Anyway, Chen and his minders have burned their bridges to
the Obama administration. They are
already reaching out to the Congress as an alternative to the State
Department. Maybe his brain trust has
decided to throw its lot in with the Republican anti-Communists instead of
Democratic human rights neo-liberalists.
That might make for some less-than-convivial times if Chen gets that
ride on Hillary Clinton’s plane that he’s abjectly begging for.
Here’s the text of my Asia Times piece, which appeared under
the title:
If With news reports that legal activist Chen Guangcheng has
agreed to be resettled inside China with his family away from his tormenters in
Shandong, to an as yet undisclosed university where he can pursue his legal
studies, the United States and China probably both breathed sighs of relief.
The United States does not have to scupper its strategic
dialogue with China in order to live up to its role as human rights champion
and scourge of communist authoritarianism by granting asylum to Chen.
The People’s Republic of China can, however belatedly and
grudgingly, have an opportunity for its Judge Bao moment: acting as the
benevolent protector of deserving innocents suffering at the hands of brutal
and corrupt local authorities (as that venerable jurist has done in countless
books and TV serials).
But not so fast.
The sheen went off the deal with alarming speed as reporters
and skeptical activists communicated with an increasingly agitated Chen in Chaoyang
Hospital in Beijing. Reunited with his
family, he learned from his wife of her harsh treatment in Shandong after his
flight, and her desire not to stay in China.
Chen is now saying he wants to
come to the United States with his family, in a switch certain to embarrass and
irritate the Obama administration.
Chen is receiving a sympathetic hearing, if not
encouragement, from Bob Fu of China Aid.
China Aid is a non-profit in Midland, Texas that lobbies for religious
freedom and on behalf of Christian house churches in China. Fu has spoken proudly of his organization’s close
relationship with Chen during his difficult years in China. Fu was perhaps the first person overseas that
Chen contacted after his escape.
Mr. Fu would prefer that Chen Guangcheng come to the United
States “for some peaceful time” instead of remaining in China, as he told the
Texas Tribune well before the deal began to unravel.
“I cannot feel there is a viable option for him to continue in China given the current environment,” Fu said. “My hope is, if Chen is able to get permission from China to have his family members come to the U.S. for some time, some peaceful time, and receive some medical treatment, the U.S. can facilitate that effort.”
One hears echoes of Mr. Fu’s argument in Chen’s statement
after he entered Chaoyang Hospital:
The British television
program Channel 4 News also interviewed Mr. Chen, who reportedly said: “My
biggest wish is to leave the country with my family and rest for a while. I
haven’t had a rest day in seven years.”
The US State Department, however, is pushing back across the
board at the implication that they slighted Chen’s desires and dumped him back
into Chinese hands.
What started out as a muted triumph for US diplomacy may
turn into an episode of unexpected and unwelcome estrangement between the US
government and the human rights and democracy activists it wishes to champion,
and a win for China if Chen slides uncertainly into exile and irrelevance, his
heroic legacy tarnished by an embarrassing fiasco,
Meanwhile, the Chinese government is allowing Chen to have
free access to the press to make a spectacle of his handwringing. Most recently, CNN:
"The embassy kept lobbying me to leave and promised to have people stay with me in the hospital, but this afternoon as soon as I checked into the hospital room, I noticed they were all gone."
CNN correspondent Stan Grant said he had interviewed Chen in his Beijing hospital bed at around 3:00 am Thursday (1900 GMT Wednesday) with his wife sitting by his bedside.
While events sort
themselves out in Beijing, conspiracy theorists can start their engines and
explore the interesting question of how a blind man, allegedly under video
surveillance and with local blocking of cell phones, was able to escape house
arrest, evade dozens of goons charged with keeping him bottled up, and
rendezvous with a sympathizer to drive away from the town…and have his departure
not detected for several days.
Local security was pretty extensive, as Chen himself stated
in his video addressed to Premier Wen Jiabao, which he recorded in Beijing
after his escape. As translated by
Steven Jiang of CNN:
From what I learned,
other than various officials, each team guarding me has more than 20 people.
They have three teams with a total of 70 to 80 people. When more netizens tried
to visit me recently, they had several hundred people at one time and
completely sealed off my village.
Starting with my home, they station a team inside the house and another one outside guarding the four corners. Further out, they block every road leading to my house, all the way to the village entrance. They even have 7 to 8 people guarding bridges in neighboring villages. These corrupt officials draw people from neighboring villages into this and they have cars patrolling areas within a 5-kilometer radius of my village or even further.
Besides all these layers of security around my house -- I think there are 7 to 8 layers -- they have also numbered all the roads leading to my village, going up to 28 with guards assigned to them daily. The whole situation is just so over the top. I understand the number of officials and policemen who participate in my persecution adds up to some 100 people.
Starting with my home, they station a team inside the house and another one outside guarding the four corners. Further out, they block every road leading to my house, all the way to the village entrance. They even have 7 to 8 people guarding bridges in neighboring villages. These corrupt officials draw people from neighboring villages into this and they have cars patrolling areas within a 5-kilometer radius of my village or even further.
Besides all these layers of security around my house -- I think there are 7 to 8 layers -- they have also numbered all the roads leading to my village, going up to 28 with guards assigned to them daily. The whole situation is just so over the top. I understand the number of officials and policemen who participate in my persecution adds up to some 100 people.
Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers,
an NGO dedicated to ending forced sterilization and abortions, told Asia Times
that Chen’s escape was “a miracle”. That
was a characterization that China Aid was happy to echo.
Artist, dissident, and gadfly Ai Weiwei puckishly declared
that Chen’s blindness was an advantage in his nighttime escape: “It’s all the
same to him.” But clearly it wasn’t, at
least in the matter of physical impediments like ponds and rivers.
Littlejohn told Asia Times that she learned via a Skype
session with He Peirong, driver of the vehicle that spirited Chen to Beijing, just
prior to her detention by public security personnel, that Chen had taken a
spill in some water on his way and showed up soaking wet; news reports in
Beijing reported he had also hurt his leg climbing over a wall.
These circumstances beg the question of why he did not bring
his (sighted) wife and child along on the escape, especially since an activist
claimed that Chen’s subsequent decision to remain inside China was dictated by
the threat that his wife would be beaten to death if he tried to leave.
In a video statement Chen made before entering the embassy,
he called on Premier Wen Jiabao to order an investigation of his case and the
brutal circumstances of his detention, and to assure the safety of his family.
For want of more facts and a better explanation, some news
outlets speculate that perhaps Chen’s escape was orchestrated or enabled by the
relatively liberal faction of the CCP that is now in ascendancy with the fall
of Chongqing kingpin Bo Xilai. The
theory is that Chen’s escape would make security chief and one-time Bo ally
Zhou Yongkang look like an idiot, thereby further weakening the hardline
faction.
Perry Link, the well-known scholar of China’s democracy
movement who assisted Fang Lizhi’s refuge in the US Embassy in 1989, commented
to Asia Times on the questions surrounding Chen’s escape:
It's impossible,
obviously, that he did it alone. And clear that some idealistic
rights-advocates helped him. The open question is whether people
"inside the system" helped, and if so at what level. It seems
to me plausible, as some have said, that hirelings in Shandong helped; it seems
to me less plausible, but still possible--as others have speculated--that
people at the top let it happen, as part of the mafia back-stabbing at that
level.
The situation was apparently resolved in Beijing after four
days of intense negotiations under the aegis of US Assistant Secretary of State
for East Asia Kurt Campbell and input from noted China lawyer and Harvard
professor Jerome Cohen. The deal, by
which Chen would, at his insistence, remain in China with guarantees from the
Chinese and US governments for the proper and humane treatment of himself and
his family, lacked the triumphalist celebration of freedom, Western values, and
the human spirit that might have energized Chinese dissidents…and failed to put
the United States squarely on “the right side of history,” the Chinese march to
democracy that the US considers inevitable.
Jerome Cohen described it as a “middle path,” “a kind of
path we are trying hard to create, a space between prison and total freedom” of
the kind that Ai Weiwei currently occupies.
If the deal capsizes on Chen’s anxieties, and becomes an
embarrassment for the US government and political windfall for President
Obama’s Republican critics in an election year, it may be called something
else: appeasement.
For its part, the Chinese government, after a complete
lockdown of Internet keywords involving Chen, “blind man”, “The Shawshank
Redemption” (a prison-escape drama) and “Flight 898” (the number for the United
Airlines Beijing to New York flight that Chen might take into exile), handled
the affair quickly and discretely.
The first official acknowledgement of Chen Guangcheng’s
escape and refuge in the US Embassy came in an op-ed titled US Embassy in quandary over Chen, which was posted just after midnight on May 2
in Global Times, Xinhua’s nationalist
news outlet. The op-ed was carried on
its English language edition available in China, but not the Chinese-language
edition.
Global Times, which had previously expressed exasperation
with the prolonged and extrajudicial detention of Chen and the unfavorable
international attention it provoked, deliberately shied away from any
confrontation with the US government, State Department, or their human rights
policies, and instead focused on a very narrow and easily finessed issue: the
potential negative consequences for the United States of providing Chen—and, in
the future, other dissidents—with a haven:
If petitioners'
requests are not met by domestic authorities and turn to the US embassy, this
is not only embarrassing to China but also puts the US in an awkward position.
The US embassy would have no interest in turning itself into a petition office receiving Chinese complaints. It is easier just preaching universal values to the Chinese public, and occasionally, helping a few exemplary cases that best illustrate US intentions. It is never willing to involve itself in too many detailed disputes in Chinese society.
The US embassy would have no interest in turning itself into a petition office receiving Chinese complaints. It is easier just preaching universal values to the Chinese public, and occasionally, helping a few exemplary cases that best illustrate US intentions. It is never willing to involve itself in too many detailed disputes in Chinese society.
China, of course, has an ample supply of “petitioners” whose
“requests are not met by domestic authorities.”
The implication is that the United States has a choice: it can either
repurpose its embassy as an overbooked hostel for persecuted activists, or it
can engage with the Chinese government on the vital economic, diplomatic, and
security issues of the day.
The next morning the Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted a
statement in the form of a press conference Q&A “On the Matter of ChenGuangcheng Entering the US Embassy”, declaring that the US embassy had engaged
in “activities incompatible with its function” by hosting Chen. The Chinese government demanded an apology
(which US sources promptly declared was not going to happen) and the statement
declared:
The Chinese side notes that the US side
declares it will give weight to the Chinese side’s demands and concerns, and
guarantee to take appropriate measures so that these sorts of incidents shall
not be repeated again.
After the news of Chen’s departure from the embassy emerged,
Global Times rubbed it in with its usual subtlety in an op-ed titled Chen and Embassy should not deludethemselves.
It is hoped that the
US embassy in China can distance itself from activities that do not match its
functions. It should gain the favorable impression of China's public rather
than being an escape route for more extreme elements.
Whatever happens, the Chinese government will apparently
achieve its desired objective: crestfallen activists will get the message that
the US is not a single-minded supporter of principled dissent, and its embassy
is not a reliable safe haven.
If the deal collapses, and the “middle path” endorsed by
Cohen and Campbell evaporates, it will also represent a return to the familiar
if not particularly productive polarities of human rights vs. authoritarianism
that usually characterize US-China relations.
A relatively amicable resolution of Chen Guangcheng’s case could
have been taken as an indicator of a Chinese pivot away from brutal repression
that has characterized the PRC’s “weiwen” or stability maintenance regime over
the last few years—and an indication of tacit US support as the CCP navigates
through its leadership transition and, perhaps toward a more liberal, law-based
polity.
In the early 2000s, the CCP and the PRC experimented with a migration
from Party-led, purely authoritarian social control to a regime that would
achieve its policy goals less directly through nominally democratic legislation
applied and enforced by local governments and courts, and some monetary and
administrative incentives.
Instead of a party cadre telling you what to do, in other
words, you would do it yourself, having accepted and internalized the relevant
laws and rules and weighed the costs and benefits.
A prime field for application of this approach was in the
delicate field of family planning, the most intrusive and personal element of
government control. Family planning, in
the context of China’s perceived need to control its population, traditionally
involved taking a number of unpopular steps from birth scheduling to sterilization
and abortion that were, depending on the whim of the official involved and the
eye of the beholder, either encouraged, mandatory, coerced, or forced.
Instead, new laws, applied in concert with flexible,
responsible, and higher-quality reproductive services and some financial incentives,
would lessen the coercive character of the system.
The new system relied on effective access to the legal
system by the people from the bottom up, instead of only supervision by the
Party from the top down, to detect, remedy, and deter abuses.
In Shandong, in the municipality of Linyi at least, this
attempt at subtle social engineering did not go well, and that is where Chen
Guangcheng came in.
Chen Guangcheng educated himself as a lawyer to help people
in his community in the rural environs of Linyi obtain legal redress for local
government abuses. In Linyi, abuses in
the family planning system appear to have been medieval in their callous
brutality.
Activist lawyer Teng Biao assisted Chen Guangcheng with his
interviews and investigations in 2005. His case notes, translated and circulated by
Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, provide a chilling picture of gangsterized
local rule.
One case involved a 59-year old man who was taken hostage
because they couldn’t find his daughter, who was targeted for sterilization:
At about six o’ clock in the afternoon
[of the 19th] he was found lying by the side of
Yuncai bridge when his relatives went
to the Family Planning office again to look for
him. After he regained consciousness,
his relatives knew the story: “The Family Planning Officials tortured and
starved him for a whole day. Then they asked him to go back to look for his
daughter. He asked for food but was refused. At about four o’clock in the afternoon,
a female town official (Tingju Zhang) went back with a strong smell of wine. After
beating another two elderly persons (seventy years old), she took him to thecourtyard and beat his head with
brooms. Three brooms were broken. Then she slapped him in the face. At about
five o’ clock she pushed him into a small room. She asked him to sit on the
cold cement floor and unbend his legs. She took the lead to stamp on his legs.
Other officials followed her and some also slapped on his face and poured cold water
on his head. He said: “I will sue you!” She shouted: “Sue me in the court if
you want. It costs only ten thousand Yuan [approximately $1500] to take your
life! You are the biggest trash of all the forty thousand people in Shuanghou!”
He said: “I have been a Party member for over thirty years. I’m not trash!” She
said: “I joined the party in 1998,but I can beat an old Party member like you!”
Sordid profit (the Family Planning Bureau was allowed, even
expected to generate revenue to cover its expenses) led to the establishment of
euphemistically named “Family Planning Learning Centers” where relatives of
people who sought to evade sterilization or abortion were detained under miserable
conditions and subjected to brutal beatings in the name of re-education
reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution—and at their own expense.
Chen
and Teng ran the rough numbers, and they are astounding.
On earth how many people were illegally
detained in the Learning Class? According to
Chen Guangcheng’s rough statistics,
Linyi city has a population of 10,800,000 and
130,000 people (12‰ of the population)
were forced to have ligation. Three to 30 of each victim’s relatives or
neighbors were implicated. This amounts to 520,000 people if we count 4 for
each victim. Everyone was detained 1 to 40 days and in total it was 1,560,000 days
(about 4,300 years) if we count 3 days for each person. Each person was charged
100 Yuan each day (some places didn’t charge while some other places charged
several times. But most places charged this amount of money). It amounts to
more than 93,000,000 Yuan if we count 60 for each person per day. This is just
a conservative estimate. But what the farmers’ hard-earned money bought was
outrage, humiliation and horror.
Despite nonstop harassment and intimidation of their
potential witnesses by the local authorities, Chen Guangcheng and his legal
allies collected enough evidence for the National Family Planning and
Population Commission to post a rebuke of abuses in Linyi on their website in August
2005, and for a handful of local officials to be disciplined.
This uplifting story of legal redress did not have a happy
second act, however.
Vengeful local officials pursued Chen with trumped-up
accusations of damaging property and blocking traffic, and a kangaroo court
sentenced him to three and a half years in prison.
The central government did not intervene, possibly because
Chen’s image had evolved beyond local barefoot lawyer to internationally
recognized human rights activist. In
2006, he made the Time 100 list of most influential people in the world, making
it possible for his enemies to paint him as a tool of anti-Chinese forces.
During his legal struggles, Chen had also become associated
with the network of lawyers in the “weiquan” or rights-protection movement, a
number of whom are evangelical Christians using the legal system to challenge
the communist state’s authority and legitimacy by handling awkward, hot button
cases like defense of Falungong practitioners.
In 2008, the US government-funded democracy promotion NGO,
the National Endowment for Democracy, perhaps did Chen no favors by announcinghe was co-winner of the 2008 Democracy Award.
The Democracy Award statuette is modeled on the Goddess of
Democracy, the Statue of Liberty-inspired figure which protesting students
erected in Tiananmen Square just before June 4, 1989, facing the massive
portrait of Chairman Mao and brandishing its freedom torch under his nose. It is therefore a red flag (of the
unfavorable, slap-in-the-face kind) to the current Chinese government,
redolent, at least to the CCP leadership, of sedition, subversion, and regime
change.
When Chen served his full term and emerged from prison in
2010, the local government, in what looks like a pointed repudiation of the
law-based regime the central government had been attempting to promote, placed
Chen under house arrest using the ancient Maoist revolutionary formulation that
his relation to the polity was one of “a contradiction between the people and
the enemy” (calling for the harshest measures, as opposed to “contradictions
within the people,” which are to be resolved through exhaustive and uplifting
jawboning).
Again, the central government did nothing, probably because
it was still very much in the thrall of its Beijing Olympics-related crackdown
mentality and an obsession with “social order.”
Beijing outsourced repression, showering “wei wen” grants on the
provinces, apparently in a no-questions-asked spirit. In Linyi, whatever monies didn’t end up in
the pockets of local officials as graft funded the gargantuan security cordon
of minimum-wage goons surrounding Chen’s residence.
Meanwhile, the local authorities went to town on Chen
Guangcheng after he made a video detailing conditions of his house arrest, as
he described in his post-escape appeal addressed to Wen Jiabao:
They broke into my
house and more than a dozen men assaulted my wife. They pinned her down and
wrapped her in a blanket, beating and kicking her for hours. They also
violently assaulted me. …
When they came to my house to assault us, Zhang Jian, the deputy Party secretary in charge of law enforcement in Shuanghou township, said to me unequivocally: "We don't care about the law and we are ignoring the law -- what can you do about it?" He repeated led people to my home to attack and rob us.
Li Xianli, who heads Team 1 that illegally confined me in my house, repeatedly beat my wife -- once even pulling her off the bike to assault her. He also beat my mother. Simply monstrous. Li Xianqiang, an official with the township's judicial authority, beat my wife last year, gravely injuring her left arm.
When they came to my house to assault us, Zhang Jian, the deputy Party secretary in charge of law enforcement in Shuanghou township, said to me unequivocally: "We don't care about the law and we are ignoring the law -- what can you do about it?" He repeated led people to my home to attack and rob us.
Li Xianli, who heads Team 1 that illegally confined me in my house, repeatedly beat my wife -- once even pulling her off the bike to assault her. He also beat my mother. Simply monstrous. Li Xianqiang, an official with the township's judicial authority, beat my wife last year, gravely injuring her left arm.
News of the over-the-top supervision, harassment, and
beatings spread throughout the world and Chen’s situation evolved into a public
relations nightmare. Affairs reached
their ludicrous apotheosis when actor Christian Bale and a CNN crew drove eight
hours to Linyi to visit Chen in December 2011, only to be driven off a pack of
local goons.
Then came the great escape.
If the deal holds—indeed if the PRC does not gleefully usher
Chen out of China over his well-advertised flip-flopping in order to highlight
American humiliation--a low-key resolution of the Chen Guangcheng affair could
bring a temporary relaxation of the tensions between the United States and
China.
However, even if Chen Guangcheng remains in China, resolutely
maintains his appointed role as “legal activist” and steers clear of
“anti-government dissident”, the CCP may find its enthusiasm for legal
accountability limited—and the impulse to harass and intimidate his associates
and sympathizers irresistible.
The Obama administration has shown a tendency to publicly
extend the hand of conciliation—in this case, probably quite welcome to the new
generation of Chinese leaders looking for political and diplomatic breathing
space as they grind through their transition—but quickly switch to a resentful
shove when affairs don’t evolve as it thinks they should.
With US-China relations hardening into a zero sum
configuration, the United States will probably discover ample cause and
opportunity to challenge the PRC on human rights in the future.
A bigger risk for China, however, is perhaps the problem
Chen Guangcheng is already working on: family planning.
Despite the leveling-off of Chinese population growth and
calls to relax the one-child policy, China’s demographic boffins have decided
to retain family planning at least through 2020.
The policy appears to have a certain eugenic tinge to
it. Urban families are reproducing at
below the replacement rate of 1.5 (Shanghai is at a rock-bottom 0.7 ratio);
meanwhile, rural families are pressing to have more children, especially sons,
and are also feeding the migrant population—which accounts for 25% of women of
childbearing age and remains largely beyond the reach of the family planning
system. Rural families are
disproportionate targets of family planning policies, and are
disproportionately likely to suffer abuse at the hands of undertrained,
underpaid, callous, and unaccountable local officials.
If the horrors of Linyi are repeated and multiplied
nationwide and China’s peasants acquire a unifying sense of grievance and
demand for redress, the PRC may have more to worry about than the legal
activism of Chen Guangcheng.
Labels: Cheng Guangcheng
Friday, April 13, 2012
China Cyberwar and Real War
My Asia Times piece discusses the recent hack of China Electronics Import and Export Corporation by "Hardcore Charlie."
The CEIEC incident is only the most visible of a blizzard of hacks against Chinese sites conducted under the aegis of "Anonymous China." I speculate that these hacks are, if not organized, encouraged or incentivized by the US government as a shot across the bow against China for the PRC's sizable industrial espionage program targeting American corporations such as President Obama's high-tech BFF, Google.
I would advise casual readers not to satisfy their curiosity by searching for the CEIEC files and downloading them. At least one of the documents contains a nasty exploit buried in the bloated header of a Word document; it apparently enables remote operation of the infected computer as a spam-bot or worse.
Anti-virus software identifies the nasty as 2010-3333, which is the target of an elderly Microsoft patch. However, this seems to be something new and improved. Microsoft's security software misses it completely; Sophos software locates it but can't remove it. This is especially galling/ironic because a Sophos guy did a podcast noting the rise in incidence of 2010-3333 but blamed it on lazy users not installing the patch.
Au contraire, my British friend. It looks like Sophos is getting pwned here, not just Mr. Irresponsible Enduser.
So stay away from those CEIEC files.
Something worth looking at and, I'm assuming, safe as milk, is a Youtube video that Hardcore Charlie recommends as accompaniment to viewing the CEIEC dump (whether he is also aware that "2010-3333" from the files is simultaneously burrowing into the vulnerable innards of one's computer is an open question).
The clip is a montage from Coppola's Apocalypse Now illustrating a song by German thrash metal giants Sodom. It's pretty effective.
Hardcore Charlie also likes to quote lyrics from German industrial rockers KMFDM. Here's an official band video from a song of theirs that breaks the Godwin Rule by equating George Bush with Hitler, also rather effective.
"Hardcore Charlie" by the way, derives his web alias from a "death card" apparently distributed by members of the 101st Airborne during the first Iraq War. We know this because he quotes the card's motto:
Compliments of Hardcore Charlie - 3rd BN 502 Infantry - When you care enough to send the very best - AIR ASSAULT.
Military historian Herb Friedman posted a picture of the card about ten years ago, in a fascinating discussion of death cards.
Did you know U.S.Playing Card Co. provided all Ace of Spade packs of Bicycle cards to US military personnel in Vietnam for the purposes of corpse decoration/psyops? Friedman quotes the manufacturer as saying:
The Death Card or Ace of Spades was considered bad luck by the Viet Cong. This is the story that I got first-hand from one of the lieutenants who originated the idea. He had read an article in the Stars & Stripes indicating that the Vietnamese were a very superstitious people and that the men were afraid of the Ace of Spades. The French previously had occupied Indo-China, and in French fortune telling cards, the Spades predicted death and suffering. It also seems that a statue of a woman foretold a "bad day" and there was some belief that the Viet Cong even regarded lady liberty as a goddess of death.
Anyways, this guy, along with three of his fellow-lieutenants were playing cards with one of our Bicycle decks, which fortunately they liked to use, and they noticed that the Bicycle Ace of Spades had a statue of a woman in the middle of it, so they figured that this was a potentially good psychological operations weapon. So they contacted the United States Playing Card Company and we sent them thousands of the requested decks gratis to our troops in Vietnam. These decks were housed in plain white tuck cases, inscribed "Bicycle Secret Weapon: Ace of Spades."
The troops started using them, basically as calling cards. And then all their friends wanted some. And eventually, the military asked us to produce a deck that had fifty-two Bicycle Aces of Spades. The cards were deliberately scattered in the jungle and in hostile villages during raids. The very sight the "Bicycle" Ace was said to cause many Viet Cong to flee.
In another anecdote, Friedman makes it clear that the psychological trauma was a two-way street:
Katherine Keane was a Red Cross “Donut Dolly” in Viet Nam from 1967 to 1968. She was assigned to the Red Cross Recreation Center in Nha Trang. She told me that many of the soldiers coming into the center appeared to have some form of PTSD. She believed they were being treated locally in an Army medical center. One sat down next to her and she expected a pleasant talk about home and what it was like to be in Vietnam. Instead, he pulled out a handful of photographs to show her. She said:
“Here” he said. ‘Look here.” He pulled a stack of Polaroid pictures out of his cargo pocket. He laid the pictures down in front of me one by one. The first showed a dead Vietnamese with an Ace of Spades stuck in his mouth. I was completely unprepared to see this. He continued laying them down, one next to another. The next showed a group of dead Vietnamese with the Ace of Spades stuck in their mouths. The next showed the Ace of Spades apparently stuck into the man’s chest with some kind of stick. The last showed the Ace of Spades nailed into a man’s forehead. He seemed to have the pictures in some sort of order of brutality. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He offered to let me pick and keep one picture but I declined. He seemed relieved. I would have broken up his collection. Then he handed me a sewn patch depicting an Ace of Spades that I did accept.
That's what real war looks like.
Here's the text of my Asia Times piece on US-China cyberwar (go to the AT piece for the links):
Counterattack on China in cyber-space By Peter Lee
The high-profile intrusion into the e-mail server of China Electronics Import & Export Corporation by "Hardcore Charlie" may mark the coming out party for America's own band of patriotic hackers.
Documents obtained through the hack were posted on file-sharing sites. For the most part, they are a bewildering grab bag of seemingly inconsequential documents. One folder contains regulations concerning the privatization of public universities in Vietnam; another reveals the monthly salary of an English teacher working for Ivanhoe Copper in Myanmar.
Then there are the somewhat more disturbing documents: pages and pages of spreadsheets and US military Acrobat files detailing the recent movements of the quaintly-named "jingle trucks" operated by local companies delivering supplies to the network of US facilities inside Afghanistan. The documents are not marked secret, and the US government has apparently still not taken steps to remove them from the file-sharing services a week after they were posted.
In a web statement, Hardcore Charlie justified his hack with the assertion that China was passing sensitive information to America's enemies, including the Taliban. In a pastiche of English, Spanish, obscenities and racist references, he stated:
The Chinese version is somewhat less incoherent, but only slightly. It appears that CEIEC may be trying to say that it is taking issue with the allegations - for instance, that CEIEC is passing on the information to bad guys in Ukraine, Syria, Russia and the Taliban - while skating past the question of whether it was actually hacked. [2]
CEIEC is described as a "defense contractor" in foreign coverage. However, this may be overstating the case somewhat. CEIEC is one of the ancient import/export corporations set up under the Ministry of Foreign Trade 30 years ago. It did a booming business when international trade was a monopoly of the government import/export corporations, and still benefits from its government ties in handling foreign aid projects and administering international tenders.
At the same time, it has successfully reinvented itself as a prime contractor on overseas projects and, in terms of gross revenue, is one of China's bigger companies.
CEIEC is not an industrial enterprise with its own manufacturing capability. It has targeted the defense electronics sector, as an integrator and prime contractor, apparently hoping to supply systems to China's allies overseas. Whatever it has on its servers, it is probably not the crown jewels of China's defense establishment.
But the question of how the minutiae of US military truck transport in Afghanistan ended up on CEIEC's servers remains a mystery. The CEIEC case does highlight a remarkable trend in international hacking - the appearance of non-government auxiliaries in cyber-war battles.
China is notorious for its interest in cyber-war as an asymmetric counter to the conventional military superiority of the United States ... and for its apparent willingness to farm out, encourage, or benefit from private hacker initiatives.
On 2010, Mara Hvistendahl wrote in Foreign Policy:
Their patriotic cyber-duties included destroying the online presence of South Korean boy band Super Junior after an unruly and undignified crowd of Chinese fans clamored to hear the band at the Shanghai World Expo and embarrassed Chinese nationalists. [4]
They also weigh in on foreign issues of greater moment, mixing it up with their Japanese counterparts when Sino-Japanese passions are inflamed by visits to the Yasukuni Shrine or the collision between a Chinese fishing boat and Japanese coast guard vessel off Diaoyutai/Senkaku in 2011.
But their major utility to the Chinese government may be their ability to generate chaff - a barrage of cyber-attacks to distract and overwhelm US security specialists trying to cope with China's pervasive, professional program of industrial and military espionage - and give the People's Republic of China (PRC) government deniability when hacking is traced to a Chinese source.
Chinese industrial cyber-espionage has emerged as a dominant near-term security concern of the United States.
The Barack Obama administration went public with its case against China in November 2011, with a report on industrial espionage titled Foreign Economic Collection. It described China rather generously as a "Persistent Collector" given the PRC's implication in several high-profile industrial espionage cases and soft-pedaled the issue of official Chinese government involvement. The report stated:
Business Week's report, while admitting the woolliness of its methodology, stated that losses to American companies from international cyber-espionage amounted to US$500 billion in a single year.
Scott Borg, director of a non-profit outfit called the US Cyber Consequences Unit told Business Week:
Connect the dots, and it is clear that the Obama administration, in its usual meticulous way, is escalating the rhetoric and preparing the public and the behind-the-scenes groundwork for major pushback against China in the cyber-arena.
Beyond moves in the legal arena such as the aggressive prosecution of the DuPont industrial espionage case - alleging that China orchestrated a program to steal DuPont's titanium dioxide technology - it is interesting to speculate what other moves the Obama administration might make.
The United States is undoubtedly already doing its best to penetrate China's government, military and scientific networks.
How could the US escalate, especially in the industrial and commercial sphere, where the US mindset is that everything worthwhile the Chinese have was stolen from us, so what's worth stealing back?
Maybe the answer is cyber-harassment, turning a blind eye - or actively egging on - non-government hackers to embarrass, inconvenience, humiliate and perhaps even destabilize the Chinese regime.
Consider this April 4 report by Emil Prodalinski at ZDNet on an explosion in hacking against China since a Twitter account was launched on March 30:
The current Anonymous hacks have been of remarkably unimpressive and uninteresting Chinese sites - like the Taoyuan Bureau of Land and Resources. One can wonder if escalation to more tempting, juicier and more sensational targets is in the future. [10]
My speculation is that the campaign of cyber-attacks against Chinese targets was seeded by the US government, but has gathered its own momentum and is drawing in freelance foreign and some Chinese hackers searching for lulz - the hacker term for giggles or detached/callous amusement.
Let us now return to the perpetrator of the most spectacular hack to date - Hardcore Charlie - and if his postings reveal anything about his motivations.
Hardcore Charlie's web persona displays a military bent. His web alias derives from a death card (a specially printed playing card with an intimidating message sometimes placed on an enemy corpse by US servicemen) associated with the US Army's 101st Airborne Division: "Compliments of Hardcore Charlie - 3rd BN 502 Infantry - When you care enough to send the very best - AIR ASSAULT." [11]
Hardcore Charlie's postings also quote lyrics on a military theme, from "Marines" by the German thrash metal band Sodom. He recommends reading the files to the accompaniment of a Youtube videomontage of Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam epic film Apocalypse Now, using Sodom's "Napalm in the Morning" as the soundtrack.
But perhaps there's something more going on here than pro-military pro-freedom enthusiasm. Sodom is an avowedly anti-war band that toured Vietnam, even though it was denied permission to play there, so it could learn more about the war and its aftermath.
Two more bumpers in the postings quote KMFDM, German industrial rockers (and, unfortunately sometimes a favorite band of alienated and murderous high-schoolers such as Eric Harris, the Columbine shooter) with what one could characterize as a vigorous anti-American government stance.
From KMFDM's anti-George W Bush anthem "Stars and Stripes" (whose video includes a Bush/Hitler juxtaposition) , Hardcore Charlie pulled the quote: ... Cut back civil rights / Make no mistake / Tell 'em homeland security is now at stake / Whip up a frenzy / keep 'em suspended / Don't let 'em know that their liberty's ended ... [12]
From another KMFDM song, New American Century, another quote: ... LOVE THY NEIGHBOR TURN HIM IN.. its called PATRIOTISM ...
Interesting, especially when one considers how Hardcore Charlie, in apparently his only media availability, with Reuters, was described: The hacker, who uses the name Hardcore Charlie and said he was a friend of Hector Xavier Monsegur, the leader-turned- informant of the activist hacking group, LulzSec ... [13]
Rewind to March 2012: Key members of the hacking collective known as LulzSec were arrested Tuesday morning, a move authorities are calling "devastating to the organization". According to an exclusive report by Foxnews.com LulzSec's alleged ringleader, Hector Xavier Monsegur of New York City, helped authorities with the arrest. [14]
As for LulzSec, it was an ad hoc hacker collective spun off from Anonymous (the same grouping bedeviling China under the Anonymous China hashtag) by Monsegur. Its sensational 50-day career in 2011 was described by PC Magazine:
Careful readers may find their interest piqued by the fact that Fox News, which got the exclusive on the arrests in 2012, were the first hacked in 2011.
Pattern-oriented readers might consider whether the sudden eruption of Lulzsec resembles the cyber flashmob that is currently swarming Chinese sites.
Contrarian readers might find it interesting that the focus of hacking seems to have done a 180-degree turn away from American government, security and corporate targets to tormenting their Chinese equivalents (despite the limited lulz obtainable when hacking a site whose language one does not understand).
Curious readers might also wonder if information from Monsegur has helped the authorities get "Hardcore Charlie" in their sights and he is hacking into Chinese websites either at their behest to help get the Anonymous China ball rolling or is pre-emptively demonstrating his utility and eagerness to please.
In any case, the cat's out of the bag.
The order of battle in the cyber-armies of China and the United States has been completed by the arrival of the volunteer militias to serve next to the professionals.
The CEIEC incident is only the most visible of a blizzard of hacks against Chinese sites conducted under the aegis of "Anonymous China." I speculate that these hacks are, if not organized, encouraged or incentivized by the US government as a shot across the bow against China for the PRC's sizable industrial espionage program targeting American corporations such as President Obama's high-tech BFF, Google.
I would advise casual readers not to satisfy their curiosity by searching for the CEIEC files and downloading them. At least one of the documents contains a nasty exploit buried in the bloated header of a Word document; it apparently enables remote operation of the infected computer as a spam-bot or worse.
Anti-virus software identifies the nasty as 2010-3333, which is the target of an elderly Microsoft patch. However, this seems to be something new and improved. Microsoft's security software misses it completely; Sophos software locates it but can't remove it. This is especially galling/ironic because a Sophos guy did a podcast noting the rise in incidence of 2010-3333 but blamed it on lazy users not installing the patch.
Au contraire, my British friend. It looks like Sophos is getting pwned here, not just Mr. Irresponsible Enduser.
So stay away from those CEIEC files.
Something worth looking at and, I'm assuming, safe as milk, is a Youtube video that Hardcore Charlie recommends as accompaniment to viewing the CEIEC dump (whether he is also aware that "2010-3333" from the files is simultaneously burrowing into the vulnerable innards of one's computer is an open question).
The clip is a montage from Coppola's Apocalypse Now illustrating a song by German thrash metal giants Sodom. It's pretty effective.
Hardcore Charlie also likes to quote lyrics from German industrial rockers KMFDM. Here's an official band video from a song of theirs that breaks the Godwin Rule by equating George Bush with Hitler, also rather effective.
"Hardcore Charlie" by the way, derives his web alias from a "death card" apparently distributed by members of the 101st Airborne during the first Iraq War. We know this because he quotes the card's motto:Compliments of Hardcore Charlie - 3rd BN 502 Infantry - When you care enough to send the very best - AIR ASSAULT.
Military historian Herb Friedman posted a picture of the card about ten years ago, in a fascinating discussion of death cards.
Did you know U.S.Playing Card Co. provided all Ace of Spade packs of Bicycle cards to US military personnel in Vietnam for the purposes of corpse decoration/psyops? Friedman quotes the manufacturer as saying:
The Death Card or Ace of Spades was considered bad luck by the Viet Cong. This is the story that I got first-hand from one of the lieutenants who originated the idea. He had read an article in the Stars & Stripes indicating that the Vietnamese were a very superstitious people and that the men were afraid of the Ace of Spades. The French previously had occupied Indo-China, and in French fortune telling cards, the Spades predicted death and suffering. It also seems that a statue of a woman foretold a "bad day" and there was some belief that the Viet Cong even regarded lady liberty as a goddess of death.
Anyways, this guy, along with three of his fellow-lieutenants were playing cards with one of our Bicycle decks, which fortunately they liked to use, and they noticed that the Bicycle Ace of Spades had a statue of a woman in the middle of it, so they figured that this was a potentially good psychological operations weapon. So they contacted the United States Playing Card Company and we sent them thousands of the requested decks gratis to our troops in Vietnam. These decks were housed in plain white tuck cases, inscribed "Bicycle Secret Weapon: Ace of Spades."
The troops started using them, basically as calling cards. And then all their friends wanted some. And eventually, the military asked us to produce a deck that had fifty-two Bicycle Aces of Spades. The cards were deliberately scattered in the jungle and in hostile villages during raids. The very sight the "Bicycle" Ace was said to cause many Viet Cong to flee.
In another anecdote, Friedman makes it clear that the psychological trauma was a two-way street:
Katherine Keane was a Red Cross “Donut Dolly” in Viet Nam from 1967 to 1968. She was assigned to the Red Cross Recreation Center in Nha Trang. She told me that many of the soldiers coming into the center appeared to have some form of PTSD. She believed they were being treated locally in an Army medical center. One sat down next to her and she expected a pleasant talk about home and what it was like to be in Vietnam. Instead, he pulled out a handful of photographs to show her. She said:
“Here” he said. ‘Look here.” He pulled a stack of Polaroid pictures out of his cargo pocket. He laid the pictures down in front of me one by one. The first showed a dead Vietnamese with an Ace of Spades stuck in his mouth. I was completely unprepared to see this. He continued laying them down, one next to another. The next showed a group of dead Vietnamese with the Ace of Spades stuck in their mouths. The next showed the Ace of Spades apparently stuck into the man’s chest with some kind of stick. The last showed the Ace of Spades nailed into a man’s forehead. He seemed to have the pictures in some sort of order of brutality. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He offered to let me pick and keep one picture but I declined. He seemed relieved. I would have broken up his collection. Then he handed me a sewn patch depicting an Ace of Spades that I did accept.
That's what real war looks like.
Here's the text of my Asia Times piece on US-China cyberwar (go to the AT piece for the links):
Counterattack on China in cyber-space By Peter Lee
The high-profile intrusion into the e-mail server of China Electronics Import & Export Corporation by "Hardcore Charlie" may mark the coming out party for America's own band of patriotic hackers.
Documents obtained through the hack were posted on file-sharing sites. For the most part, they are a bewildering grab bag of seemingly inconsequential documents. One folder contains regulations concerning the privatization of public universities in Vietnam; another reveals the monthly salary of an English teacher working for Ivanhoe Copper in Myanmar.
Then there are the somewhat more disturbing documents: pages and pages of spreadsheets and US military Acrobat files detailing the recent movements of the quaintly-named "jingle trucks" operated by local companies delivering supplies to the network of US facilities inside Afghanistan. The documents are not marked secret, and the US government has apparently still not taken steps to remove them from the file-sharing services a week after they were posted.
In a web statement, Hardcore Charlie justified his hack with the assertion that China was passing sensitive information to America's enemies, including the Taliban. In a pastiche of English, Spanish, obscenities and racist references, he stated:
Hola comradezz, Today us prezenta recently owneed chino military kontraktor CEIEC Us be shoked porque their shiiit was packed with goodiez cummin froma USA Military brigadezz in Afghanistan, them lulz hablando mucho puneta sam slit eyed dudz in Vietnam and Philiez doing bizness in Ukraine and Russia selling goodiez to Taliban terrorists.CEIEC, for its part, issued a denial equally deficient in grammatical polish, stating:
CEIEC solemnly declares as below:Observers noted the apparent incongruity of CEIEC asserting it had not been hacked ... but reserving the right to take legal action.
The information reported is totally groundless, highly subjective and defamatory. It is believed that rumors stop at wiser.
CEIEC reserves the right to take legal action against the relevant responsible individuals and institutions. [1]
The Chinese version is somewhat less incoherent, but only slightly. It appears that CEIEC may be trying to say that it is taking issue with the allegations - for instance, that CEIEC is passing on the information to bad guys in Ukraine, Syria, Russia and the Taliban - while skating past the question of whether it was actually hacked. [2]
CEIEC is described as a "defense contractor" in foreign coverage. However, this may be overstating the case somewhat. CEIEC is one of the ancient import/export corporations set up under the Ministry of Foreign Trade 30 years ago. It did a booming business when international trade was a monopoly of the government import/export corporations, and still benefits from its government ties in handling foreign aid projects and administering international tenders.
At the same time, it has successfully reinvented itself as a prime contractor on overseas projects and, in terms of gross revenue, is one of China's bigger companies.
CEIEC is not an industrial enterprise with its own manufacturing capability. It has targeted the defense electronics sector, as an integrator and prime contractor, apparently hoping to supply systems to China's allies overseas. Whatever it has on its servers, it is probably not the crown jewels of China's defense establishment.
But the question of how the minutiae of US military truck transport in Afghanistan ended up on CEIEC's servers remains a mystery. The CEIEC case does highlight a remarkable trend in international hacking - the appearance of non-government auxiliaries in cyber-war battles.
China is notorious for its interest in cyber-war as an asymmetric counter to the conventional military superiority of the United States ... and for its apparent willingness to farm out, encourage, or benefit from private hacker initiatives.
On 2010, Mara Hvistendahl wrote in Foreign Policy:
[T]he hacking scene in China probably looks more like a few intelligence officers overseeing a jumble of talented - and sometimes unruly - patriotic hackers. Since the 1990s, China has had an intelligence program targeting foreign technology, says James A Lewis, senior fellow for cyber-security and Internet policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Beyond that, however, things get complicated. "The hacking scene can be chaotic," he says. "There are many actors, some directed by the government and others tolerated by it. These actors can include civilian agencies, companies, and individuals." [3]Patriotic hackers in China are called "hong ke" or "red guest", a pun on the phonetic rendering "hei ke" or "black guest" for hacker.
Their patriotic cyber-duties included destroying the online presence of South Korean boy band Super Junior after an unruly and undignified crowd of Chinese fans clamored to hear the band at the Shanghai World Expo and embarrassed Chinese nationalists. [4]
They also weigh in on foreign issues of greater moment, mixing it up with their Japanese counterparts when Sino-Japanese passions are inflamed by visits to the Yasukuni Shrine or the collision between a Chinese fishing boat and Japanese coast guard vessel off Diaoyutai/Senkaku in 2011.
But their major utility to the Chinese government may be their ability to generate chaff - a barrage of cyber-attacks to distract and overwhelm US security specialists trying to cope with China's pervasive, professional program of industrial and military espionage - and give the People's Republic of China (PRC) government deniability when hacking is traced to a Chinese source.
Chinese industrial cyber-espionage has emerged as a dominant near-term security concern of the United States.
The Barack Obama administration went public with its case against China in November 2011, with a report on industrial espionage titled Foreign Economic Collection. It described China rather generously as a "Persistent Collector" given the PRC's implication in several high-profile industrial espionage cases and soft-pedaled the issue of official Chinese government involvement. The report stated:
US corporations and cyber-security specialists also have reported an onslaught of computer network intrusions originating from Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in China, which private sector specialists call "advanced persistent threats." Some of these reports have alleged a Chinese corporate or government sponsor of the activity, but the IC [intelligence community] has not been able to attribute many of these private sector data breaches to a state sponsor. Attribution is especially difficult when the event occurs weeks or months before the victims request IC or law enforcement help. [5]A month later, in December 2011, US criticism of China became a lot more pointed. Business Week published an exhaustive report on Chinese cyber-espionage, clearly prepared with the cooperation of federal law enforcement authorities as it named and described several investigations:
The hackers are part of a massive espionage ring codenamed Byzantine Foothold by US investigators, according to a person familiar with efforts to track the group. They specialize in infiltrating networks using phishing e-mails laden with spyware, often passing on the task of exfiltrating data to others.United States security boffin Richard Clarke had this to say about Chinese cyber-espionage in an interview with Smithsonian magazine:
Segmented tasking among various groups and sophisticated support infrastructure are among the tactics intelligence officials have revealed to Congress to show the hacking is centrally coordinated, the person said. US investigators estimate Byzantine Foothold is made up of anywhere from several dozen hackers to more than one hundred, said the person, who declined to be identified because the matter is secret. [6]
"I'm about to say something that people think is an exaggeration, but I think the evidence is pretty strong," he tells me. "Every major company in the United States has already been penetrated by China."Some big numbers are being thrown around to publicize the Chinese threat.
"What?"
"The British government actually said [something similar] about their own country."
Clarke claims, for instance, that the manufacturer of the F-35, our next-generation fighter bomber, has been penetrated and F-35 details stolen. And don't get him started on our supply chain of chips, routers and hardware we import from Chinese and other foreign suppliers and what may be implanted in them-"logic bombs," trapdoors and "Trojan horses," all ready to be activated on command so we won't know what hit us. Or what's already hitting us. [7]
Business Week's report, while admitting the woolliness of its methodology, stated that losses to American companies from international cyber-espionage amounted to US$500 billion in a single year.
Scott Borg, director of a non-profit outfit called the US Cyber Consequences Unit told Business Week:
"We're talking about stealing entire industries ... This may be the biggest transfer of wealth in a short period of time that the world has ever seen."Beyond these apocalyptic economic and military scenarios, we might also descend to the personal and political and point out that Google, a favorite target of Chinese cyber-attacks, is Obama's friend, indispensable ally, brain trust and source of personnel in the high-tech sector.
Connect the dots, and it is clear that the Obama administration, in its usual meticulous way, is escalating the rhetoric and preparing the public and the behind-the-scenes groundwork for major pushback against China in the cyber-arena.
Beyond moves in the legal arena such as the aggressive prosecution of the DuPont industrial espionage case - alleging that China orchestrated a program to steal DuPont's titanium dioxide technology - it is interesting to speculate what other moves the Obama administration might make.
The United States is undoubtedly already doing its best to penetrate China's government, military and scientific networks.
How could the US escalate, especially in the industrial and commercial sphere, where the US mindset is that everything worthwhile the Chinese have was stolen from us, so what's worth stealing back?
Maybe the answer is cyber-harassment, turning a blind eye - or actively egging on - non-government hackers to embarrass, inconvenience, humiliate and perhaps even destabilize the Chinese regime.
Consider this April 4 report by Emil Prodalinski at ZDNet on an explosion in hacking against China since a Twitter account was launched on March 30:
The hacktivist group Anonymous now has a Chinese branch. An Anonymous China Twitter account was created late last month ... Boy have they been busy. Hundreds of Chinese government, company, and other general websites have been hacked and defaced in the span of a few days. A couple have also had their administrator accounts, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses posted publicly. On the hacked sites, the group even posted tips for how to circumvent the Great Firewall of China.Prodalinski subsequently wrote that the attacks had not abated and China, in an interesting case of public relations jiu jitsu, was using the campaign as evidence that it was one of the world's many victims of cyber-misbehavior (and, by implication, not a major perpetrator):
A long Pastebin post lists all the websites that were targeted. It contains 327 websites in total, but an updated list, also on Pastebin, brings that number to 485. Most of these websites are operational once again, but many have been defaced a second time after they were brought back. Not all of them were hacked and defaced; some were treated with more viciousness than others. [8]
While Anonymous was not specifically mentioned, it's obvious what China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs was referring to during a briefing on Thursday, given the events during the last week. "First of all, China's Internet is open to all, users enjoy total freedom online. China has gained 500 million netizens and 300 million bloggers in a very short period of time, which shows the attraction and openness of China's Internet," spokesman Hong Lei said in a statement, according to CNN. "Secondly, the Chinese government manages the Internet according to law and regulations. Thirdly, certain reports prove again that China is a victim of Internet hacker attacks." [9]It will be interesting to see how sympathetic the Obama administration will be if the Chinese government begins squealing to it about this outbreak of anti-PRC hacking.
The current Anonymous hacks have been of remarkably unimpressive and uninteresting Chinese sites - like the Taoyuan Bureau of Land and Resources. One can wonder if escalation to more tempting, juicier and more sensational targets is in the future. [10]
My speculation is that the campaign of cyber-attacks against Chinese targets was seeded by the US government, but has gathered its own momentum and is drawing in freelance foreign and some Chinese hackers searching for lulz - the hacker term for giggles or detached/callous amusement.
Let us now return to the perpetrator of the most spectacular hack to date - Hardcore Charlie - and if his postings reveal anything about his motivations.
Hardcore Charlie's web persona displays a military bent. His web alias derives from a death card (a specially printed playing card with an intimidating message sometimes placed on an enemy corpse by US servicemen) associated with the US Army's 101st Airborne Division: "Compliments of Hardcore Charlie - 3rd BN 502 Infantry - When you care enough to send the very best - AIR ASSAULT." [11]
Hardcore Charlie's postings also quote lyrics on a military theme, from "Marines" by the German thrash metal band Sodom. He recommends reading the files to the accompaniment of a Youtube videomontage of Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam epic film Apocalypse Now, using Sodom's "Napalm in the Morning" as the soundtrack.
But perhaps there's something more going on here than pro-military pro-freedom enthusiasm. Sodom is an avowedly anti-war band that toured Vietnam, even though it was denied permission to play there, so it could learn more about the war and its aftermath.
Two more bumpers in the postings quote KMFDM, German industrial rockers (and, unfortunately sometimes a favorite band of alienated and murderous high-schoolers such as Eric Harris, the Columbine shooter) with what one could characterize as a vigorous anti-American government stance.
From KMFDM's anti-George W Bush anthem "Stars and Stripes" (whose video includes a Bush/Hitler juxtaposition) , Hardcore Charlie pulled the quote: ... Cut back civil rights / Make no mistake / Tell 'em homeland security is now at stake / Whip up a frenzy / keep 'em suspended / Don't let 'em know that their liberty's ended ... [12]
From another KMFDM song, New American Century, another quote: ... LOVE THY NEIGHBOR TURN HIM IN.. its called PATRIOTISM ...
Interesting, especially when one considers how Hardcore Charlie, in apparently his only media availability, with Reuters, was described: The hacker, who uses the name Hardcore Charlie and said he was a friend of Hector Xavier Monsegur, the leader-turned- informant of the activist hacking group, LulzSec ... [13]
Rewind to March 2012: Key members of the hacking collective known as LulzSec were arrested Tuesday morning, a move authorities are calling "devastating to the organization". According to an exclusive report by Foxnews.com LulzSec's alleged ringleader, Hector Xavier Monsegur of New York City, helped authorities with the arrest. [14]
As for LulzSec, it was an ad hoc hacker collective spun off from Anonymous (the same grouping bedeviling China under the Anonymous China hashtag) by Monsegur. Its sensational 50-day career in 2011 was described by PC Magazine:
May 7 - Lulz Security [claims] to have gotten ahold of a database of contestants from the Fox TV show X Factor. Lulzsec follows up a few days later with more sales and internal data gleaned from Fox.com.Lulzsec closed shop at the end of June 2011, when an asset in England was arrested. It appears that was not enough to elude the bloodhounds of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or forestall Monsegur's betrayal of his associates.
May 30 - After hacks of Sony in Japan and a British ATM database, Lulzsec scores its first big publicity coup by posting a fake story on the PBS website, which claimed that Tupac Shakur was alive and well in New Zealand.
June 2 - Lulzsec posts personal data for more than a million users from a handful of Sony websites, …
June 3 - The "Lulz Boat" sets a course for the government, targeting security organizations that work with the FBI and other agencies …
June 13-20 - Lulzsec appears to be hitting its stride, with a busy week hacking into the US. Senate's website, stealing the account information of more than 200,000 users from video game maker Bethesda, claiming to have temporarily brought down the CIA's website, and going after more security agencies in the US. and UK.
June 23 - In protest of Arizona's controversial anti-immigration law, Lulzsec posts internal documents and information from the state's Department of Public Security. [15]
Careful readers may find their interest piqued by the fact that Fox News, which got the exclusive on the arrests in 2012, were the first hacked in 2011.
Pattern-oriented readers might consider whether the sudden eruption of Lulzsec resembles the cyber flashmob that is currently swarming Chinese sites.
Contrarian readers might find it interesting that the focus of hacking seems to have done a 180-degree turn away from American government, security and corporate targets to tormenting their Chinese equivalents (despite the limited lulz obtainable when hacking a site whose language one does not understand).
Curious readers might also wonder if information from Monsegur has helped the authorities get "Hardcore Charlie" in their sights and he is hacking into Chinese websites either at their behest to help get the Anonymous China ball rolling or is pre-emptively demonstrating his utility and eagerness to please.
In any case, the cat's out of the bag.
The order of battle in the cyber-armies of China and the United States has been completed by the arrival of the volunteer militias to serve next to the professionals.
Labels: China, cyberwar, Hardcore Charlie
