Many ominous things lurk while the post-tsunami reconstruction works are going on.
On Sept 1, 1923, a 36-feet high tsunami rose up in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake in Japan. This time the tsunami wasn’t the major killer in a tragedy that took 140,000 lives. Two thirds of Tokyo was reduced to ashes as the temblor upturned stoves and kerosene inside wood and paper homes, built as such to "flex in" earthquakes. Desperation provided both political opportunity and rumor-incited scapegoats. Thousands of Korean and Chinese minorities, and crucially for Japan’s historical trajectory, local leftists as well, perished in the ensuing state-sponsored slaughter. Japan removed yet another obstacle on the road to militarization. With Tokyo in ruins, The house of Morgan and the Tsutsumi clan joined hands to make a killing (Seagrave).
In today’s parlance, like before, this would be called "relief aid" or "major reconstruction efforts."
Like today, nobody could see that the lives and homes they helped reconstruct would burn again within two decades. The House of Morgan had earlier bankrolled the British war efforts in WW1, helped revitalize its military-industrial complex and by default its employment levels. The establishment was founded by J.P. Morgan, who once dodged Civil War bullets for the nobler task of shuffling 5,000 rifles - riddled with defects - from an army arsenal to the field at more than six times the price (Zinn). Many thumbs were lost., to say the least.
Sounds familiar? In Iraq, far too many soldiers from the sole superpower are dying from malfunctioning or inadequate equipment while Vice President Dick’s Halliburton is enjoying profit at a priapic level.
Disasters do tilt the balance of power. After the 1755 earthquake and tsunami, Lisbon ceased to be the richest city in Europe, and it’s trading and imperial prospects became irreparably dented.
The crude human reality is that the deaths of many translate into the salvation of others. Portugal’s imperial decline virtually saved some communities intact. I come from one of them.
The still-growing British Empire profited in another way.
After a natural disaster, the historical power motives are simple - fill in the vacuum, profit, dominate and consolidate. The process used to achieve this is more complex in modern times. It starts off with life-saving aid.
When troops are sent into devastated areas, a few of them will have nothing to do with reconstruction. Vanguard Psyops teams, backed with surveillance and satellite technology, will erect vital communications systems for relief efforts. They save lives. When Hurricane Andrew struck off the coast of Florida on Aug 24 1992, US army Psyops units were rushed in to restore order. That’s supposedly covert; They are not supposed to operate on home soil. But who would care when much good is done?
The problem is a small number of them would be assigned to real covert work that only archives would throw up - if ever - decades from now.
Pressing circumstances provide opportunity. When the Stasi headquarters was sacked by angry East Germans in 1989, they were unaware that the main agent provocateurs were West German agents who were leading them to the "wrong" rooms. Some of the best secrets were earlier removed, and others were being retrieved as Berliners were tearing apart testimonies of familial bonds nurtured by a paranoid
Grosser Bruder.
Power prioritizes human lives during a calamity.
Under a looming disaster, any government would resort to saving its most sensitive assets. The alert sent to Diego Garcia and those emailed to US residents in India and Sri Lanka - at the same time - differed in magnitude. Contacts with foreign governments were minimal.
Diego Garcia is a top secret base hosting B-1 and B-2 bombers, sophisticated naval vessels and some bearded guys we can only speculate about. There are time-honored procedures to follow when such alerts flash on the screen.
Ships would be put out to sea, carrying again sensitive weapons, spying equipment, personnel, and perhaps those equally sensitive beards. The bombers would be flown out. The island is only10-square miles with an average height of four feet above sea level. The tsunami waves that struck it were six-feet high. There would certainly be damage, but reports of minimal damage and no loss of life could be true. The ships and planes were out by then.
The question is, could they return to prosecute war in Iraq and Afghanistan, their two major theatres of operations? On a 10-square mile island, even a debris filled runway, busted generators or salinity in drinking water could cause major problems. Their operational capability would certainly be dented for days. A lot depended on speed.
If only the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan knew this…
What better way to deflect any such ideation than by acting inept, callous and niggardly, when death tolls were crossing the 100,000 mark? When the waves receded, it left behind some flopping red herrings for the media circus. The Jan Egeland vs. the Crawford Cowboy duel was a good show. If the president had promised a fat cheque on Christmas night, media speculation would have began on aid distribution. When, how, and through which channels, including units, from a very stretched US army. Egeland seemed genuinely surprised and outraged by the initially US aid pledge. So were many others.
The propaganda opportunity was being presented on a platter but the White House wasn’t taking it.
Those Iraqis, undergoing their first "democratic elections," must not know anything…
A few days later, when Diego Garcia was operational again, the sums pledged could be raised multiple-fold and more than 10,000 troops could be dispatched. The timing again loosely verifies reports of minimal damage on the island.
After that it is "hero-work", with psyops teams sent to Sri Lanka and Banda Aceh to set up communications infrastructures. Without proper communications, there will be no rescue and more deaths.
While saving lives, a few of them will have had a closer look at the military-insurgent balance in the affected nations. For now, the Indonesian military seems to have a slightly upper hand against the insurgent Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM). Likewise, the Sri Lankan army against the LTTE. But there are more things that can be done. These include arsenal assessment, psychological assessment, rearmament prospects and even reconstruction assessments that could further swell Dickey’s war-for-profit enterprise. These are moments when something really nasty or slick can be done.
For an idea, read the account by ex-Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky on how bombs and beacons were planted into Arab bridges and other vital infrastructures in the eventually of a war.
Americans may be puzzled why these devastated nations want US troops out as soon as possible. They saved thousands and yet are grudgingly welcomed, and only for a short period. India would have none of it from the start, even when its highly strategic Carnic air force base in the Car Nicobar Island was destroyed.
Did India prevent close up snoops of the islands by fanning out its vessels to join the relief effort, keep an eye on other naval vessels and score its own propaganda coup? Indian government readily admitted to its hobbled operational capabilities in that sector and one wonders why the giveaway? Granted, the Indian media is more aggressive than its US counterparts.
The Carnic base monitored arms smuggling to Jaffna, Chinese military installation on Burmese islands, and insurgency-related activities further up in its northeastern states.
If the Chinese military installations at Coco Island, Heingyi Island and the Mergui Archipelago were badly damaged, the Indian admission makes military sense. It can launch its vessels from the mainland, away from the flotsam-littered Andamans Sea, for a closer peek en route to humanitarian missions.
If those Chinese installations were damaged, the Dec 27 announcement of a joint Russo-Chinese naval exercise wasn’t so daft after all. The crude message was: Beijing is still a premier power in Asia, even if it lost the propaganda battle in a tsunami-affected region.
That’s a tentative assumption, and US spy satellites can answer that definitively. Their ground-based chain of command certainly didn’t raise the alert to the regional governments, after seeing for themselves the tsunami’s catastrophic affects on Banda Aceh, Thailand, and as it moved, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
There was no way Diego Garcia could withstand such an elemental force and the Chagos Trench and barrier reef details only popped up after everyone marveled at how the little island was spared.
After the standard orders were issued, someone must have thought it was best to keep the foreign governments ignorant, and later busy with their tragedies.
The choice was either sustain a war at an optimum level or save foreign lives. One inevitably comes to this conclusion after much media harping on relief works that were aided by US satellite prowess. The technical details released - not a secret - can throw up other questions. Why weren’t foreign governments warned?
The National Geo-spatial Intelligence Agency spy satellites have extremely sharp resolution. They can identify "items three to five inches, identify debris on airfield runways, large flotsam off a harbor, penetrate darkness and clouds, and use radar to "paint" targets, and help relief effort. (MSNBC, Dec 30). Somehow, they keep missing the stealth turbans of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Mullah Mohammad Omar.
Together with commercial satellite partners, US army surveillance branches have done a good deal to locate and identify stricken zones. One top commercial partner, Space Imaging, was awarded a multi-year satellite imagery contract by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) on Jan 17, 2003. According to a Space Imaging press release of the same day, the contract has a "minimum value of $120 million with a five-year ceiling of $500 million" to provide "map accurate, high-resolution imagery from the IKONOS satellite" for military and intelligence activities, "damage assessments, public diplomacy and humanitarian assistance."
Note the curious reference to "public diplomacy". It doesn’t refer to a Fullbright or Rhodes.
Bush intends to streamline the process of buying up all commercial satellite imagery during a crisis. Commercial satellites have already been fully integrated into US war efforts, notably in Afghanistan. (The media makes scant mention of Iraq). Now, the White House wants a revamped linkage that is cheaper, faster, and mutually beneficial. Under such arrangements, the availability of commercial satellite imagery to human rights organizations would exist only on a satellite firm’s homepage tag line.
Compared to the hundreds of millions they stand to make, the alternative is "shutter control", a complete shutdown of the commercial imaging. Bush wants this extended to GPS services, placing it on an imminent collision course with Europe’s Galileo system when it is fully up and orbiting. GPS technology is used to move troops, direct bombs and missiles. They are installed on aircraft, shipping vessels, and even bombs. In a future war, Bush wants GPS denied to everyone except the US army and he wants
rival systems disabled as well.
If Operation Enduring Occupation spills over to Iran, imagine what would happen if an earthquake struck Tehran? According to scientists like University of Colorado at Boulder’s Roger Bilham and GeoHazards International president Brian Tucker, the Iranian capital is probably the most earthquake-vulnerable city in the world. (National Geographic, May 2, 2003)
With satellite images bought in advance, and the GPS system selectively cut off, what happens when both war and an earthquake strikes at the same time?
Satellite firms boasts of their humanitarian ability to detect an unfolding genocide or evidences of mass graves. No one can buy their images during a war, except the sorts like CNN, which, shamelessly portrayed the Gulf War-era Al Amiriya carnage as an Iraqi "allegation" for years.
The long running Iranian nuke issue is beginning to reach fission point and nukes give off a seismic-like signature. Earthquake and fission can be packaged as one when satellite imagery is cut off, and re-spun when independent technical details begin to trickle in.
It was another Pentagon client, DigitalGlobe, that "spotted" suspected Iranian nuclear facilities recently. They have all been bought up and tied up.
Tehran can wait a little longer.
USAID is now busy disbursing aid. For all its colossal sums, this organization is nothing more than a slush fund for favored US companies. It can allocate billions to Egypt, and insists on American expertise and equipment instead of cheaper Egyptian alternatives to funnel the money back to the source. Yet, some work will be done.
The bad news is USAID does something more than that. It eagerly distributes something else called "regime change" wherever it goes. Recent examples can be seen in Serbia, Kosovo, Georgia, and now Ukraine, where the ultimate winner Viktor Yushchenko’s party probably indulged in more voting fraud - as reported by the British Helsinki Human Rights Group - than the Moscow-backed Viktor Yanukovych.
Regime change is easy. Humans are creatures of petty, personal survival. There are scaled down versions of the Morgans and Tsutsumis everywhere. There are now profiteers in Banda Aceh charging exorbitant fees for anything from translators to helicopter services to drivers. Rentals here can match New York rates.
In the meantime, US Navy survey vessels are now mapping out seabeds that have changed dramatically as a result of shoaling. The
USS John McDonnell was scheduled to start work at the Strait of Malacca from Jan 14 onwards. Officially it’s there to map out the new seascape and ensure navigational safety for civilian vessels, not to check on functionality of seabed sensors that were once laid down during the cold war to detect Soviet submarines.
Pray that they are not looking for a sunken sub with a disgorged, leaking, radioactive warhead. Remember that famous K-129 and Project Jennifer? Expect more "Glomar responses", spins and perhaps, an unprecedented blackout one day.
Jan 31, Kuala Lumpur
Copyright @ Mathew Maavak 2005
Mathew Maavak is the founder of the Panoptic World journal. He was trained in psychological wafare, crisis management and militay studies at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom.
