Language school

The Royal Jordanian Air Academy or RJAA was established in 1966 with its main campus in Amman, the capital city of Jordan with a satellite campus in Aqaba. The Academy is considered to be one of the leading aviation training centres in the Middle East and it trains both private and commercial pilots as well as maintenance technicians. RJAA is privately owned ...

RJAA's major shareholder and Chairman, Mohammed Abu Ghazaleh, originally from Palestine, now lives in San Francisco. Arabian Business magazine considers him to be one of the world's most influential Arabs. His net worth in 2011 was $2.4 billion and, rather surprisingly, he is the Chairman and CEO of Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc., purveyors of bananas and pineapples among many other things.

Now you ask, what does this have to do with anything?

Well, it seems that American taxpayers will be forking over hundreds of millions of dollars to one of Mr. Abu Ghazaleh's enterprises, the aforementioned Royal Jordanian Air Academy. According to a release posted here on the U.S. Department of Defense website, the U.S. Air Force has awarded RJAA a firm, fixed-price contract to provide Type 1 Special English language and technical aviation training for Iraqi Air Force technical personnel between now and August 8, 2013. The total amount of the contract - $370,779,589 for the year, which works out to $1.02 million per day. Note that this contract is not for pilot training, just for English language and technical learning.

Acknowledgements to Viable Opposition

And, for more on bananas, see:

http://richlist.arabianbusiness.com/profile/1338/

http://badbananas.wordpress.com/tag/mohammad-abu-ghazaleh/

http://www.phillyrecord.com/2011/01/fresh-del-monte-a-tough-competitor-in-a-cut-throat-trade/

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3336.htm

http://www.sptimes.com/2003/01/03/news_pf/Columns/Another_suspect_deal_.shtml

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/04/28/341728/index.htm

http://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1418036.htm

Weather at war

'Few in the civil sector fully understand that geoengineering is primarily a military science and has nothing to do with either cooling the planet or lowering carbon emissions (Report, 6 February). While seemingly fantastical, weather has been weaponised. At least four countries – the US, Russia, China and Israel – possess the technology and organisation to regularly alter weather and geologic events for various military and black operations, which are tied to secondary objectives, including demographic, energy and agricultural resource management.

'Indeed, warfare now includes the technological ability to induce, enhance or direct cyclonic events, earthquakes, draught and flooding, including the use of polymerised aerosol viral agents and radioactive particulates carried through global weather systems. Various themes in public debate, including global warming, have unfortunately been subsumed into much larger military and commercial objectives that have nothing to do with broad public environmental concerns. These include the gradual warming of polar regions to facilitate naval navigation and resource extraction.'

Matt Andersson
Former executive adviser, aerospace & defence, Booz Allen Hamilton, Chicago

The Guardian 10 February 2012

Greece and Germany

And this:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,769703,00.html

and this:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,797584,00.html

UAV



The heat of battle

 He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.



A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

Many Reapers and Predators don’t encrypt the video they transmit to American troops on the ground. In the summer of 2009, U.S. forces discovered “days and days and hours and hours” of the drone footage on the laptops of Iraqi insurgents. A $26 piece of software allowed the militants to capture the video.

Software is being developed to move the decision on whether to launch a strike against a particular target from human operators to computer programs. That probably costs more than $26.



Cry havoc



Heart of Darkness

In a recent post, No subject, I reflected upon our inability to empathise fully with the greater suffering of, to take but one example, the people of central Africa, because we do not know them, because they are not ours. We assume, I suggested, that they have somehow brought their sufferings upon themselves.

We assume that, I think, partly because the horrific brutality they sometimes inflict upon each other seems so alien and incomprehensible: people do not, with just a few isolated exceptions, do that sort of thing with machetes in West Kensington or North Virginia.

I should have reflected that it was, quite likely, western practice that established such horrors in the minds and experience of the people of central Africa. In the Congo Free State the Force Publique made the practice of cutting off the limbs of the natives as a means of enforcing rubber quotas a matter of policy; the practice was widespread. In this country we tend to regard such things as an aberration attributable to the infamous King Leopold II of Belgium, who made the Congo his personal possession and who was thought to have reduced the native population by half in his process of expropriating its wealth. It was indeed international pressure lead by the British, and Mark Twain, that forced the Belgium government to take over responsibility for the territory and turn the Free State into a government administered colony, although it was not, by all accounts, exactly well endowed with infrastructure and social stability when it was granted independence in 1960.

British responsibility for the establishment of the free state is, however, not negligible, in that is was the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, Welsh born but British be-knighted, who was instrumental in establishing Leopold's domain.

That, however, is history, but the present apparently finds western societies still bringing an overwhelming and malign influence onto the lives of the peoples of the Congo. A recent talk by the journalist Johann Hari at the Royal Society of Arts in London (how different a caché 'royal' bestows in this context from that of King Leopold II) shows us how intimately our personal lives connect with the sufferings of the people of central Africa.

In whose hearts is the darkness now?

War is the health of the state

'It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a function of States and not of nations, indeed that it is the chief function of States. War is a very artificial thing. It is not the naïve spontaneous outburst of herd pugnacity; it is no more primary than is formal religion. War cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military establishment cannot exist without a State organization. War has an immemorial tradition and heredity only because the State has a long tradition and heredity. But they are inseparably and functionally joined. We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State. And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure, that this war is a war to end war, unless at the same time we take measures to end the State in its traditional form. The State is not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated. If the State’s chief function is war, then the State must suck out of the nation a large part of its energy for its purely sterile purposes of defense and aggression.
...
'What is the State essentially? The more closely we examine it, the more mystical and personal it becomes. On the Nation we can put our hand as a definite social group, with attitudes and qualities exact enough to mean something. On the Government we can put our hand as a certain organization of ruling functions, the machinery of lawmaking and law-enforcing. The Administration is a recognizable group of political functionaries, temporarily in charge of the government. But the State stands as an idea behind them all, eternal, sanctified, and from it Government and Administration conceive themselves to have the breath of life. Even the nation, especially in times of war — or at least, its significant classes — considers that it derives its authority and its purpose from the idea of the State.
...
'Nothing is more obvious, however, than that every one of us comes into society as into something in whose creation we had not the slightest hand. We have not even the advantage, like those little unborn souls in The Blue Bird, of consciousness before we take up our careers on earth. By the time we find ourselves here we are caught in a network of customs and attitudes, the major directions of our desires and interests have been stamped on our minds, and by the time we have emerged from tutelage and reached the years of discretion when we might conceivably throw our influence to the reshaping of social institutions, most of us have been so molded into the society and class we live in that we are scarcely aware of any distinction between ourselves as judging, desiring individuals and our social environment. We have been kneaded so successfully that we approve of what our society approves, desire what our society desires, and add to the group our own passionate inertia against change, against the effort of reason, and the adventure of beauty.

'Every one of us, without exception, is born into a society that is given, just as the fauna and flora of our environment are given. Society and its institutions are, to the individual who enters it, as much naturalistic phenomena as is the weather itself. There is, therefore, no natural sanctity in the State any more than there is in the weather. We may bow down before it, just as our ancestors bowed before the sun and moon, but it is only because something in us unregenerate finds satisfaction in such an attitude, not because there is anything inherently reverential in the institution worshiped. Once the State has begun to function, and a large class finds its interest and its expression of power in maintaining the State, this ruling class may compel obedience from any uninterested minority. The State thus becomes an instrument by which the power of the whole herd is wielded for the benefit of a class. The rulers soon learn to capitalize the reverence which the State produces in the majority, and turn it into a general resistance toward a lessening of their privileges. The sanctity of the State becomes identified with the sanctity of the ruling class, and the latter are permitted to remain in power under the impression that in obeying and serving them, we are obeying and serving society, the nation, the great collectivity of all of us. . . . '

War is the health of the state

RANDOLPH BOURNE 1918

No subject

The justification for and satisfaction at the killing of the most prominent international terrorist of our time rests upon some debatable claims: that he was ‘uniquely’ evil, that the quantity he killed was ‘exceptional’.

Despite the overwhelming welcome and relief in the west at the news, behind it all there are strange notes of unease. Was it right to shoot him dead without any attempt to capture him, bring him back and put him on trial for his actions, when he was, apparently, once the ‘fog of war’ cleared, not fighting back, not armed and when, as most commentators assumed (perhaps mistakenly or perhaps not), he had not for some time had the ability to direct active terrorist campaigns?

The thought that ultimately put these qualms to rest was that he had ‘declared war on western civilisation’. The term is applied here in a way that is both hideously real and also metaphorical. However, wars between states are (or were) started with a declaration and ended with a treaty: the ‘war against terrorism’, like the ‘war against drugs’, is a war without beginning or end. The US officially regarded him as 'an emeny conbattant in war', though that had not prevented them from also indicting him in a criminal court in Manhattan in 1998.

Yet, in his own terms, declare war on us he certainly did, though the idea that he had any chance of destroying our civilisation, devastating its economy or overthrowing its cultural life and social organisation seems fanciful. Elements within our societies have done more to achieve all of those ends, and in very recent years, than he could ever aspire to.

There are plenty of places in the world where in recent and current times more innocent lives have been lost, more hideous suffering imposed, more human trust betrayed, more gruesome methods of inflicting pain been devised (and where much of the responsibility can be plausibly laid at the doors of individuals) than is the case here with terrorist outrages in western and other cities. Think of central Africa, the Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, to name only those that are not contentious to western political assumptions.

But somehow, I think, we in the west have the lazy and self-indulgent feeling all that was somehow their own fault; they brought it on themselves; the suffering and bloodshed were within and part of their own lives and societies. Ultimately, this implies, they were not as innocent as those who fell from the twin towers – perhaps not even the baby hacked to death by machete in its sleep in Rwanda.

Those people in central Africa were not ours; we did not know them; we will not on the tenth anniversary of their deaths be interviewing their surviving relatives on our news programmes. That, in itself, is a natural limitation on the expression of human empathy, but, as we interfere in far distant parts of the world, we need to keep under constant and deliberate review what restraints human empathy ought to place on our actions. In northern Pakistan it seems we have far abandoned that humane review. 'Predator drone' has entered the western joke lexicon, even, it seems, that of the President and Commander in Chief.

In our apprehensions, he was an ogre from beyond (he even looked the part – tall, straggly bearded, staring eyes, threatening mouth), who declared war on us and brought death and suffering from a realm outside our control or responsibility. He struggled hard to impose himself on Muslim and eastern minds, and for a while and in part, succeeded, as the fount, figurehead and active, gun-toting leader and mastermind of a ruthless armed struggle against assumed western and Christian oppression of and disrespect for his peoples and his religion. And he would not have succeeded as he did if there were not things for which we should reproach ourselves in our historic and present treatment of the peoples of the east. But beyond the actual spectacular and murderous outrages, his success was even greater in cultural than in practical terms, and perhaps greater amongst us, his victims and enemies, than among his own, whom he also did not scruple to kill and maim.