The Horrible Libya Hypocrisies - Secret Libya Psyops, Caught by Online Sleuths

by Leslie H. Gelb ..... Neocons and liberal interventionists stampeded Obama into imposing a no-fly zone against Libya—despite the absence of vital U.S. interests there. Leslie H. Gelb on the hypocrisy among world leaders and how the experts abuse historical analogies. There's nothing like a foreign-policy crisis, real or imagined, to ignite the worst among world leaders and foreign-policy experts. Out pop the nuclear weapons of the trade: phony analogies and unabashed hypocrisy. The manufactured crisis in Libya is a prime case in point. No foreign states have vital interests at stake in Libya. Events in this rather odd and isolated land have little bearing on the rest of the tumultuous Mideast region. Also not to be dismissed, there are far, far worse humanitarian horrors elsewhere. Yet, U.S. neoconservatives and liberal humanitarian interventionists have trapped another U.S. president into acting as if the opposite were true.

Once this terrible duo starts tossing out words like "slaughter" and "genocide," the media goes crazy. Then, the chorus begins to sing of heartless inaction by the U.S. president, blaming him for the deaths. White House common sense crumbles into insanity. The reason why neither President Obama nor his coalition partners in Britain and France can state a coherent goal for Libya is that none of them have any central interest in the outcome there. It is only when a nation has a clear vital interest that it can state a clear objective for war. They've all simply been carried away by their own rhetoric.

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The drama usually starts when leaders and thinkers are seduced by the feeling they must do good. Sometimes, they essentially ignore the killings, even as deaths climb into the hundreds of thousands, as in Rwanda and millions as in Congo. Other times, the deaths number in the hundreds or so, as in Libya—and the guy doing the killing is someone they have good reason to dislike, and so they want to do good and stop him. It was just so with the irresistible trio of Senators—John McCain, John Kerry, and Lindsay Graham—and with their counterparts in foreign-policy land.

The kneejerk reaction among interventionists is to see the blood and insist that the United States act right away. There's no time to deliberate, they say. Don't find out about who the rebels are. Don't worry about who else will help. Just do it! In the case of Libya, the call to action took flight as a "no-fly zone." They spoke of it like a pill that could cure cancer. At the time they first proposed it, the rebels in fact were winning the war and Col. Muammar Gaddafi had just begun to retaliate with planes and tanks. There was yet no endorsement to counter him from the Arab League or from the U.N. Security Council, but the interventionists screamed for action anyway. Imagine what the reaction would have been had Western bombs and missiles fell upon Libya without that prior approval.

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No one should have deluded himself into believing that chasing Gaddafi's planes from the air would, by itself, save civilians on the ground. Saving those lives always depended mainly on hitting Gaddafi's ground forces—his tanks, artillery, and combat troops. Thus, imposing only a no-fly zone would have been largely symbolic. When it failed to stop Gaddafi's onslaught, voices would have been raised for escalation, for hitting ground targets—precisely as has happened in the last few days. If the goal was to stop Gaddafi from killing his own people, there never was an alternative to impairing or destroying his ground force capability.

The reason why neither President Obama nor his coalition partners in Britain and France can state a coherent goal for Libya is that none of them have any central interest in the outcome there.

But it becomes increasingly difficult to nail down reality, especially when slogans like "no-fly zones" and "act now" are ennobled by reference to Shakespeare. For example, interventionists whose memories of the Bard have frayed might be tempted to compare themselves to Macbeth, a man of action, and portray Obama as Hamlet, a man of self-doubt and delay. Remember Macbeth's line about killing the king: "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well/ It were done quickly." So, Macbeth grabbed his dagger and killed the king right off. And boy did his quick action produce great results: The kingdom was shaken to its roots, his wife went crazy with guilt, and predictably, he was killed by a more rightful heir to the throne. And just as Macbeth's formidable decision-making process receives perennial praise, so does Hamlet get trashed for his supposed indecision and hesitation. Forget the fact that Hamlet's famous indecision was about killing himself ("To be, or not to be"), and not about whether he would seek vengeance on the king who had killed Hamlet's father and married his mother. But to today's foreign-policy experts, Hamlet committed an unforgivable sin: He waited for evidence that the new king had actually killed his father. Thus, he concocted the idea of a play within a play to draw out the new king's guilt. In other words, he violated the first principle of modern American foreign-policymaking: He sought hard evidence.

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Historical analogies do as much damage to policymaking. Thus, inevitably, erupts the game the current crisis resembles. Foreign-policy experts rush to compare Libya to Bosnia, the Punic Wars, Iraq, Kosovo, Thermopylae, and so forth. Take, for example, the difficulties of imposing a no-fly zone in Libya as opposed to Iraq or Bosnia. Well, it might be noticed that the terrain, cultures, leaders, peoples, and most elements of these situations were quite different from one another. It's not just a matter of sending U.S. aircraft up here and there and expecting the same results. The no-fly zone the U.S. enforced over Kurdistan after the first Gulf war worked just fine. But the one declared for the Shiite southern part of Iraq didn't. That's mainly because the U.S. government said the no-fly dictum applied only to fixed-wing aircraft, not to helicopters. And what Saddam Hussein used to put down the revolt in the south was helicopters, tanks, and ground troops.

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That's precisely what would happen in Libya if the no-fly zone pertained only to fixed-wing aircraft. Because Gaddafi's main power flows from helicopters, tanks and troops, no-fly by itself would have been of very limited value. If the goal is to save civilians, there is no choice other than hitting all military targets.

So now comes the ultimate hypocrisy—the one of intoning that a sin is so mortal and a threat so deadly that only somebody else can do the job. Remember the West's joy after the Arab League's blessing of a no-fly zone? Foreign policy experts reacted as if Arabs were putting aside their Arab-first cloak and actually joining the hated Westerners in humanitarian military action. In reality, however, they were just saying, "You do it." Thus, it is no surprise that those Arabs are nowhere to be found when it comes to translating their heroic rhetoric into action. So far, it appears that their contributions will be limited to Egypt providing some arms to the Libyan "freedom fighters," four Qatari jets flying over Libya (as fast as they can, I assume), some cash payments to the Western devils, and other unspecified considerations. Just in case the self-delusory Westerners didn't get the point, the Arab League head Amr Moussa set them straight on Sunday. He criticized the Western devils for killing Libyan civilians in no-fly zone operations. Apparently, the League thought that an effective no-fly zone was like flying kites—just a beautiful thing to watch with no one being injured. Westerners must have been confused and actually believed that the Arab League desired the no-fly operation to reduce Gaddafi's killing Libyan civilians. Apparently, only some Arabs are permitted to kill certain other Arabs. In which event, the Arabs should have gone and flown their own planes against Gaddafi's in the first place. Which is precisely what I advocated in the first place—and still do.

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President Obama erred initially by saying that Gaddafi "must go." Maybe he meant of his own accord or by being overthrown by his own cohorts, but he didn't specify. Then, properly, he stiff-armed those demanding an immediate no-fly operation. Instead, and properly again, he waited upon Arab League and U.N. resolutions, and upon agreements from America's overeager French and British allies on their assuming major responsibility for military action over Libya in few days. Pray that he sticks to that course and puts America in a strictly supporting role. Pray he is not drawn deeper into the Libyan snake pit by events or the hypocritical oratory of world leaders and foreign policy experts.

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Secret Libya Psyops, Caught by Online Sleuths

The U.S. military has dispatched one of its secret propaganda planes to the skies around Libya. And that “Commando Solo” aircraft is telling Libyan ships to remain in port – or risk NATO retaliation.

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We know this, not because some Pentagon official said so, but because one Dutch radio geek is monitoring the airwaves for information about Operation Odyssey Dawn — and tweeting the surprisingly-detailed results. On Sunday alone, “Huub” has identified the tail numbers, call signs, and movements of dozens of NATO aircraft: Italian fighter jets, American tankers, British aerial spies, U.S. bombers, and the Commando Solo psyops plane (pictured).

“If you attempt to leave port, you will be attacked and destroyed immediately,” the aircraft broadcasted late Sunday night.

It’s the kind of information that the American military typically tries to obscure, at least until a mission is over. But Huub is just a single node in a sprawling online network that trawls the airwaves for clues to military operations.

Huub, also known online as “BlackBox” and @FMCNL, has been monitoring longer than most — more than a quarter-century. A former member of the Dutch military, he says that he’s captured the sounds of everything from Air Force One to CIA rendition flights to the travels of Yugoslavian war criminal Slobodan Mlosevic.

“I just combine the global and free information on the Internet with my local received information from the ether,” Huub e-mails Danger Room. “[My] main goal to listen to this communication is to listen to ‘the truth,’ without any military or political propaganda.”

Military aircraft have to provide basic information about their position over unencrypted, unclassified UHF and VHF radio networks; otherwise, they’d risk slamming into civilian jets in mid-air. That allows savvy listeners like Huub to use radio frequency scanners, amplifiers, and antennas to capture the communications. Some spend thousands of dollars homebrewing their own DIY listening stations. Many others – Huub included – rely on handheld gear, much of which can be ordered through Radio Shack. Huub uses the ICOM R20 receiver and the Uniden UBC-785XLT scanner, both of which retail for a little more than $500.

But the type of gear is almost secondary, Huub writes. “I do not simply listen to ATC [air traffic control] or NATO frequencies,” he says. Instead, he monitors everything from aircraft transponder data to IRC chatrooms to pinpoint his planes. “I use a combination of live listening with local equipment, audio streaming, video streaming, datamining, intelligence, analyzing and the general knowledge of ATC procedures, communication, encryption, call signs, frequencies and a lot of experience on this!”

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Huub, who ordinarily spends his days as a digital forensics manager in the town of Hilversum, has lately spent up to 16 hours a day, scanning for clues about the attack on Libya. Some of his Twitter followers aren’t so sure Huub should be devoting that much time to plucking military data from the sky.

“If you are not delaying your tweets by a WIDE margin, you are putting the pilots in harms way!!!!” tweets @Joe_Taxi. “When the sounds of the #operationoddesydawn aircraft are heard in #Libya it should be a complete surprise.”

Huub is hardly the only one eavesdropping on this operation, however. At least two others recorded the Commando Solo in action on Sunday, for instance.

And that shows just how easily average folks can now gather intelligence in ways once reserved for the best-funded spy agencies. Online sleuths now use Google Earth to find everything from North Korea’s launch facilities to Pakistan’s drone bases. Plane-spotters scoured tail numbers to uncover the CIA’s torture flights. So it’s no wonder that the sounds of this newest air war are being broadcast online — even before the planes return to their airstrips.

What’s in a Name? ‘Odyssey Dawn’ Is Pentagon-Crafted Nonsense

The U.S. military’s nickname for the no-fly zone in Libya sounds like the beginning of a long adventure. But Defense Department officials insist that there’s no hidden meaning behind “Operation Odyssey Dawn.” It’s just the product of the Pentagon’s semi-random name-generating system.

Each command within the vast Defense Department apparatus is given a series of two-letter groupings that they can use for their operations’ two-word sobriquets. Under the system, the U.S. Africa Command, nominally in charge of the Libya strikes, was given three sets of words that it could begin the operation with.

“These words begin between the letters JF-JZ, NS-NZ and OA-OF, and those three groups give about 60 some odd words,” explains Africom spokesman Eric Elliott. “So, the folks who were responsible for naming this went through and they had done recent activities with NS and they went to O.”

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Using the O series of letters, Africom officials picked out “Odyssey” for the first word. The second word is picked “as random as possible because that’s the goal of these operational names,” says Elliot. Africom pulled out “Dawn” for its second word and the resulting combination, “Odyssey Dawn,” is devoid of any intended meaning, Elliott insists.

The modern system for assigning names to operations, exercises and the like came out of bad PR experiences in the Korean and Vietnam wars, according to Lt. Col. Gregory Sieminski’s brief history of “The Art of Naming Operations,” published in Parameters in 1995. Nicknames like “Operation Killer” during the Korean war and Vietnam’s “Operation Masher,” Sieminski wrote, caused controversy when reported in the press. As a result, the Pentagon issued its first guidelines  restricting how nicknames can be formed in 1972 and created the two-letter system in 1975.

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Combatant Commands still have to be careful about what words they pick under the two-letter system. Official guidelines prohibit “well-known commercial trademarks” in operation nicknames, as well as  ”exotic” or “trite” choices. Nicknames can’t be spelled similar to or sound like codewords.

And in a reflection of the negative impact of “Killer” and “Masher,” Pentagon wordsmiths aren’t allowed to use terms that convey “a degree of aggression inconsistent with traditional American ideals or current foreign policy.” They also mustn’t give offense to American allies, “free-world nations” or any “particular group, sect or creed.”

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Mistakes can still happen while following the rules. An Army unit in Honduras once labeled an operation in Honduras “Blazing Trails,” which in Spanish can translate to “Shining Path,” the name of Peruvian terrorist group.

The two-letter system isn’t the exclusive way to pick an operation and exercise names. For larger operations, like the first Gulf War’s operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield, commanders have picked names that sound good to them or influence public opinion — something Sieminski dates to the renaming the invasion of Panama to “Just Cause” from “Blue Spoon.”

Some lesser operations, like a 2004 roundup of insurgents in Kirkuk called “Operation Slim Shady,” also don’t seem like they would have passed through the Defense Department’s official guidelines.

Coalition partners in the no-fly zone have their own operation names. Britain’s Ministry of Defence labeled its participation in the no-fly zone “Operation Ellamy“; Canada’s efforts are called “Operation Mobile.” Ever a patron of the arts, France seems to be the only coalition partner going for the poetic route. It calls its operations in Libya “Harmattan,” referring to a “hot, dry wind that blows from the northeast or east in the western Sahara.”