The United Nations top human rights official Navi Pillay is obviously (see below) exaggerating numbers of people killed in skirmishes in Syria. At the same time she is calling for the U.N. Security Council to refer the situation to the International Criminal Court. Such blatant political manipulation of the dead should be below the UN's honor.

December 1: Syria now in a civil war with 4,000 dead: United Nations

Syria has entered a state of civil war with more than 4,000 people dead and an increasing number of soldiers defecting from the army to fight President Bashar Assad's regime, the U.N.'s top human rights official said Thursday.

December 13: Syria crackdown has killed 5,000 people, UN says

The death toll from Syria's crackdown on a 9-month-old uprising has exceeded 5,000 people, the top U.N. rights official said Monday, as Syrians closed their businesses and kept children home from school as part of a general strike to pressure President Bashar Assad to end the bloodshed.

So in the eleven days between Thursday the first December and yesterday 1,000 people, over 90 per day, died in Syria through civil war like violence?

Where does that UN official get her numbers from?

On December 6 the New York Times reported on 36 dead bodys, likely killed in sectarian violence, that were found in Homs. It did not report any any killing elsewhere but added:

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in London, called it “one of the deadliest days since the start of the Syrian Revolution.”

That weird "Syrian Observatory for Human Rights", which is clearly on the side of the opposition and certainly doesn't downplay the numbers, calls 36 dead "one of the deadliest days". But the UN comes up with a number that represents more than 90 per day killed on each of the last 11 days.

That can not be right. I have searched through the media reports of the last 12 days and nowhere do I come up with any daily number reported that would be more than those 36 on December 6. The average per day seems to be less than 15.

Navi Pillay and the UN are losing their credibility when they make up such false numbers. The Security Council members should note that and dismiss her and her request.

"We broke your sovereign rights and international law by flying a spy drone deep into your airspace to do surveillance on your scientist and their work and to enable able us to kill them. You fuckers took this drone down. Now could we please have it back!"

That is, according to AP, what the U.S. president just said:

Obama: US Has Asked Iran to Return Downed US Surveillance Drone.

"We were just testing it before giving it to Israel for Hanuka because we didn't wanted them to get a bad drone."

Ahh, "America the beautiful" or whatever plays in the background there.

But isn't illegal to deal with Iran? Ain't there laws and sanctions that do not allow trades with the "terrorist sponsoring" Iran?

Superpositioning these two talk-denials via Al Jazeerah and Reuters we can safely assume that the talks between the Pakistani government and the Pakistani Taliban are indeed going well and are likely to be successful.

Pakistani government denies talks with Taliban

Pakistan's interior minister and prime minister have both denied the government is holding peace talks with its homegrown Taliban, according to media, saying it would do so only if the militants first disarmed and surrendered.

Pakistani Taliban deny talks with government

A spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban has denied earlier claims that the group was in talks with the government in Islamabad.
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"Talks by a handful of people with the government cannot be deemed as the Taliban talking," Ehsan told The Associated Press by telephone from an undisclosed location.

Ehsan said there would be no talks with the government until Islamabad agreed to impose Sharia law.

The phrase "Fog in Channel – Continent Cut Off" was allegedly a newspaper headline in Britain in the 1930s.

Prime Minister Cameron decided not to join measures the European Union is trying to implement to consolidate budgets and to get better control of the banks:

Arguing he had to protect the City of London, Cameron demanded that any transfer of power from national regulators to an EU regulator on financial services be subject to a veto; the UK be free to place higher capital requirements on banks; that the European Banking Authority remain in London; and the European Central Bank be rebuffed in its attempts to rule that euro-denominated transactions take place within the eurozone.He also argued that non-EU institutions operating in the City but not in the eurozone, such as American banks, should be exempt from EU regulation.

The banks who own the City of London, a medieval and unaccountable corporation, are obviously more important to Britain than the project of a united and fiscally sound Europe. (Bagehot at the Economist has a good background piece on the British and European politics behind this.)

I do not agree with the austerity policies the ECB, Merkel and Sarkozy are pushing onto the smaller European countries in financial troubles. Their debt should be erased and a big Keynesian program should be set up to help them to regain competitiveness.

But I do agree to better control and stronger regulations for the financial sector. It is obvious that it was the fraud and greed of this sector that brought us the second world depression we are now living through. It is also obvious that mostly British and American financial firms are currently causing a lot of trouble and pain by speculating on European bonds.

If Britain does not want stronger regulation of its financial sector it should have no further role in the European project. Unlike some individual leaders Europe as a whole is not into watersports.

This was the second time Cameron snubbed Europe in recent days. After the IAEA released its strongly politicized report, Britain defied common European foreign policy and was the only country to announce and implement a boycott of the Iranian Central Bank. The southern European countries who buy a lot and depend on Iranian oil were not amused.

A third strike and Britain will be out.

It obviously never liked the European project. It never paid its full share and in European conflicts with the United States often sided with its former colony.

So there will be fog in the channel and the continent will be cut off. But the continent, with its hinterlands ranging up the pacific, will survive that much better than the British island.

News & views …

Hats off to Iran and its electronic warfare specialists.

To bring down the most sophisticated U.S. stealth drone known nearly completely intact is something very few other countries would be able to achieve. A real technical feat.

From the way Iran disguised the lower part of the drone it exhibits in that gymnasium we can assume that there is some damage at the bottom of the drone. Maybe they had a little accident while landing the drone after they took control of it. The also seem to have cut off the wings to allow for an easier transport.

Earlier I speculated that the drone was taken over by the line-of-sight control channel after its satellite control channel was severed by some electronic means. I have yet to see any other report mentioning that second control channel at all and as the way to take over the drone. But seeing the bird with so little damage in that video I am even more sure now than before that this was the way it was done.

Press TV:

Iran has announced that it intends to carry out reverse engineering on the captured RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft, which is also known as the Beast of Kandahar, and is similar in design to a US Air Force B-2 stealth bomber.

The most interesting part to reverse engineer is probably not the drone itself but the sensor package and communication equipment it carries. Any decent engineer would love to get her hands on that. Reverse engineering it will save a ton of money one would otherwise have to be spend in research and development costs to achieve that knowledge.

Press TV is by the way wrong when it asserts that this is a similar design as the B-2. The B-2 had its first flight in 1989, the RQ-170 likely in 2006/7. It is a generation younger and its stealth features are more sophisticated than the B-2's.

The U.S. has only ten or so of this sophisticated and likely very expensive type of drones. They are – for now – reportedly grounded to find ways to avert another such loss of a system and prestige.

But let us not forget the real important point here that has come to light with this Iranian drone acquisition. Despite flying such drones over Iran for years the U.S. has found no sign of an Iranian weapons program.

There is none to be found and that is the main point in this whole story.

The officials say the RQ-170 Sentinel drone that went down over Iran was part of a fleet of secret aircraft that enabled the CIA to carry out dozens of high-altitude surveillance flights deep into Iranian territory without being detected.

A former senior Defense Department official said the stealth drone flights had been underway for “at least four years," …
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The CIA is thought to have a dozen or so of the batwing-shaped, radar-evading aircraft, which are capable of being fitted with different “sensor payloads,” meaning they can be equipped to capture a range of intelligence material, including high-resolution images, radiation measurements and air samples.
WaPo, Dec 8 2011

One important point seems to get lost in the reports on the U.S. stealth drone Iran managed to obtain by electronic means.

Despite such espionage by flying sophisticated spy drones over Iran "for at least four years" those flights have not found any hint of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Then National Intelligence director Dennis Blair told Congress in 2009 that Iran had not made the decision restart and alleged nuclear weapons program:

But as for the nuclear weapons program, the current position is the same, that Iran has stopped its nuclear weapons design and weaponization activities in 2003 and did not — has not started them again …

U.S. spy drones had been flying over Iran for some two years when that statement was made.

In February 2011 the current National Intelligence director James Clapper gave a similar testimony (pdf) at a Congress hearing:

We continue to assess Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.

When that statement was made radiation sniffing and air sampling spy drones had been flying over Iran for some three and a half years. Obviously they had not detected anything the intelligence community identified as a nuclear weapons program. Otherwise Clapper's statement would not hold.

That is the real important point to take from this drone brouhaha. Despite using them for years in highly sophisticated espionage on Iran no sign of an Iranian nuclear weapons program has been found.

"Western" organizations and media are alleging irregularities in Sunday's elections in Russia.

Western observers reported Monday that the results of Russia’s parliamentary elections were seriously distorted by ballot stuffing and a lack of transparency, which suggests that the ruling United Russia party did even worse than the official count showed.

The election leading and governing United Russia Party gets accused of manipulating the votes in its favor. These allegations seem to be based based on some dubious youtube videos, anecdotal stories and a small demonstration by some opposition members in Moscow.

There is always a good test when such allegations come up. Do the results of the election fit with the prediction of independent pollsters issued before the election?

Before Sunday's vote the Associated Press wrote:

A poll released Friday predicts that Vladimir Putin’s party will receive 53 percent of the vote in Russia’s parliamentary election, now a little over a week away.

While still a majority, this would be a significant drop for United Russia and deprive it of the two-thirds majority that has allowed it to amend the constitution without seeking the support of the three other parties in parliament.

Russia TV reported:

The All-Russian Public Opinion Centre polls predicts United Russia is set to get between 55-58% of votes, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation 16-19%, the Liberal Democratic Party 11-14% and Fair Russia 6.5-9.5%

AFP added:

Two polls published ahead of the elections showed United Russia is expected to keep its current majority but win no more than 262 seats in the 450-member Duma.

Now let's look at the election results:

According to preliminary results released by the Central Elections Commission on Tuesday, the United Russia Party got almost 50 percent of the vote which translated into 238 of 450 seats in the Duma. The Communist Party came second with about 20 percent of the votes and a total of 92 parliamentary seats. A Just Russia Party is in the third place with more than 13 percent and 64 seats. The Liberal Democratic Party got 56 seats, while three parties – Yabloko, Right Cause and Patriots of Russia – failed to make it to the Duma.

United Russia's share of the vote was less than all the independent polls predicted. If the party or the government it leads really manipulated the election why would that be the case? Did they really give themselves less votes than the pre-election polls have led anyone to expect?

Would someone manipulating an election in the U.S., local or nationwide, organize for less votes to their  cause than independent pre-election polls would suggest? Why?

Russia is a big country. It is likely that there were some irregularities in this or that polling station. Such manipulations happen everywhere and that is why we have laws against them. But given the pre-election polls and the election result it is not plausible that the manipulations in Russia were organized by, or in favor of United Russia.

Stoking up rumors and creating serious unrest in Moscow is still a wet dream for "western" cold-war warriors, neocons and their "liberal" allies in Russia. They wish back the days of Yelzin when they robbed Russia blind. But as the election showed those times are over and Russians will no longer fall for their false promises.

A bomb went off in Kabul today during a Shia Ashura mourning gathering. Some 55 people wwre killed and over 160 were wounded (video, graphic pictures). This happened near the Abdul Fazl shrine in Murad Khani, Kabul's old city, and right in front of the Ministry of Defense and the palace. That area should be secure.

Another bomb went off at a Shiite gathering in Mazar-e-Sharif that killed four and injured 16 others today. Another blast took place in Kandahar city in southern Afghanistan, wounding 6 people, though it is not yet known if that one is related.

One source said the Pakistani militant group Sepah-e-Sahaba (also called Lashkar-e-Jhangvi) claimed responsibility for the Kabul blast. The group is known for sectarian killings in Pakistan but has up to now not been active in Afghanistan.

Indeed during the last years sectarian killings like this have been quite rare in Afghanistan. The attacks today seem intentionally designed to incite sectarian violence.

After the attack mourners chanted anti-US and anti-Pakistan slogans. After the bombing in Mazar-e-Sharif a scuffle between Shia and Sunni students at the Mazar University turned violent. Five people were injured before the police intervened.

In an email to the media Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujaheed strongly condemned the bombing of Shiites in Kabul and Mazar and called them an act of their enemies. He blamed the "invaders" for the bombing and claimed they were designed to are foment insecurity to extend the foreign presence.

These incidents remind me of the bombing of the al-Askari mosque in Samara, Irag, in 2006. That bombing, done by people in Iraqi Special Forces uniforms, ignited a brutal sectarian civil war. Then the officials blamed Al-Qaeda in Iraq for that atrocity but other claimed that the U.S. was behind it.

As always the question that needs to be asked is: "Cui bono?"

Into who's plans does this fit and who might believe to benefit from an additional sectarian aspect in war in Afghanistan? Whoever it is is playing with fire.

It seems that Iran has acquired a U.S. stealth drone which was illegally flying within its airspace.

A secret U.S. surveillance drone that went missing last week in western Afghanistan appears to have crashed in Iran, in what may be the first case of such an aircraft ending up in the hands of an adversary.

Iran’s news agencies asserted that the nation’s defense forces brought down the drone, which the Iranian reports said was an RQ-170 stealth aircraft. It is designed to penetrate enemy air defenses that could see and possibly shoot down less-sophisticated Predator and Reaper drones.
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U.S. officials acknowledged Sunday that a drone had been lost near the Iranian border, but they declined to say what kind of aircraft was missing.
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The first reports of the drone crash came from Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency. “Iran’s army has downed an intruding RQ-170 American drone in eastern Iran,” the Arabic-language al-Alam state television network quoted an unnamed source as saying. “The spy drone, which has been downed with little damage, was seized by the armed forces.”

Reuters wrote that U.S. official says no sign Iran shot down drone. Of course Iran never claimed that it shot down the drone so this is a non-denial. Iran just "downed" the drone by some electronic warfare means.

The question now is "How did they do it?" Here are my speculative ideas on that.

RQ-170 image by Truthdowser/Wikimedia

As this is a stealth drone detecting it is the first problem. A usual monostatic radar where the emitter of the radar beam and the receiver which catches the echo from the airplane are in the same place would not find the drone. The drone's form and its echo reducing coating would scatter the beam too much.

But by using bistatic radar where the emitter is separated from the receiver(s) by a distance that is comparable to the expected target distance even stealthy flying objects can be detected.

Detection by electronic means is also possible if the drone is receiving and sending information via its satellite link and not just silently following a preprogrammed flightpath. While the signal from the drone to the satellite is send in a highly directional beam a plane equipped with the necessary radios flying above the drone and near the line of sight between the satellite and the drone should be able to locate it. If the drone used its own radar to "look around" Iran the recently delivered Russian Avtobaza "anti-stealth" system will likely have detected it.

The Iranians says it did not shoot the drone down but "downed" it with little damage. I think they may have actually landed it.

This RQ-170 drone type became known as the "Beast of Kandahar" when it first observed there four years ago. Flying U.S. stealth drones in Afghanistan is obvioulsy necessary to escape the Taliban's radars (not). The drone is quite big with an estimated wingspan of 65 feet (20m) to 90 feet (27m) and a takeoff weight of some 10,000 lbs.

When the drone is in the air it is controlled via a satellite link from a remote operating station. But during start and landing the drone is piloted via line-of-sight radio by an operator near the start or landing field. This is necessary because the remote satellite link has a delay of several hundred milliseconds which is just too much latency to correct wind sheer and other problems during takeoff and landing.

What the Iranians seem to have done is to take over the drone's line-of-sight control. This after electronically disrupting its satellite link. Disrupting the satellite link alone would not be enough as the drone would then have followed some preprogrammed action like simply flying back to where it came from. With the line-of-sight control active a satellite link disruption would not lead to a preprogrammed abort.

We can reasonably assume that the Iranians have some station near Kandahar Airport that is listening to all military radio traffic there. They had four years to analyze the radio signaling between the ground operator and such drones. Even if that control signal is encrypted pattern recognition during many flights over four years would have given them enough information to break the code.

Iran will take care to hide the drone well as the U.S. would likely try to destroy it if its location would be known. When the Chinese collected parts of a stealth F-117 stealth plane that was downed in Yugoslavia the U.S. bombed their embassy in Belgrade.

Having acquired an only slightly damaged state of the art stealth drone Iran will be able to copy a lot of its technology as well as to find new measures against such drones. There will also bee a lot of interests from other sides into this technology. We can bet that the military attaches from the Russian, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani and other embassies are already queuing up in the Iranian Defense Ministry and ready to make some very lucrative offers.

In the Fast & Furious operation the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives handed thousands of automatic guns to the Mexican drug cartels. This was supposed to "track" where the guns were going. The ATF then lied about the operations.

In another operation, revealed today, agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency laundered cartel money to "track" where it is going:

The agents, primarily with the Drug Enforcement Administration, have handled shipments of hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal cash across borders, those officials said, to identify how criminal organizations move their money, where they keep their assets and, most important, who their leaders are.

They said agents had deposited the drug proceeds in accounts designated by traffickers, or in shell accounts set up by agents.
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One D.E.A. official said it was not unusual for American agents to pick up two or three loads of Mexican drug money each week. A second official said that as Mexican cartels extended their operations from Latin America to Africa, Europe and the Middle East, the reach of the operations had grown as well. When asked how much money had been laundered as a part of the operations, the official would only say, “A lot.”
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And the former officials said that federal law enforcement agencies had to seek Justice Department approval to launder amounts greater than $10 million in any single operation. But they said that the cap was treated more as a guideline than a rule, and that it had been waived on many occasions to attract the interest of high-value targets.

In other operations, to be revealed at some later point, the Department of Agriculture is optimizing South American coca plantations, the Food Safety and Inspection Service is helping the cartels to implement product quality standards for coca procession, the Special Operation Command is training cartel members how to effectively fight against Mexican government forces and the Central Intelligence Agency is providing the top management personal of the Mexican drug cartels.

The immense profits from these operations get washed through too-big-to-fail banks at Wall Street and a part of them is used to by off the politicians who would otherwise ask too many questions.

All this of course is only to "track" what the drug cartels are doing.

Such "tracking" is just what every business owner is doing in his own shop. Tracking what is bought, produced and sold and the money streams involved. The U.S. government is doing just the same. All to keep the customers happy and the profits to flow.

So there is nothing of interest to see here. But look over there, those must be terrorists. And there is that small country on the other side of the planet that is threatening our business. Must. Go. To War. Now.

In mid July it became known that the CIA had used a fake vaccination campaign in Abbottabad in Pakistan in an attempt to get the DNA of Osama Bin Laden's children who were suspected to be there with him. 

I then predicted that these CIA Fake Vaccination Will Kill Children:

[T]his, now public, stunt will jeopardize many legitimate vaccination drives like the ones UNICEF and the WHO are organizing in Afghanistan.
…
So far the Taliban cooperated with such vaccination campaigns. From now on they will not trust these anymore. The abuse of such medical services for spying operations will be deadly for many children.

Today's Wall Street Journal reports:

The United Nations says a reportedly fake vaccination campaign conducted to help hunt down Osama bin Laden has caused a backlash against international health workers in some parts of Pakistan and has impeded efforts to wipe out polio in the country.
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Some 1,700 families living in Mohabatabad, a poor area of 20,000 people on the outskirts of Mardan, a town in Pakistan's northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, have refused vaccinations after local Islamic seminaries launched a countercampaign to discourage vaccinations, health workers say.
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Ghulam Rasool, a laborer from Khyber, found out in March that his 18-month-old son had polio after militants had warned off health workers.
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Pakistan is one of the last significant polio reservoirs in the world, imperiling global eradication efforts, Unicef warns.

Those kids are just some of those uncounted and innocent casualties of the futile war of terror. How many more will have to die before that war ends?

The U.S. Senate yesterday voted on amendments to the defense-authorization bill. As that bill is a “must-do” there are always some contentious and crazy issues attached to it. Three of those voted on yesterday are of interest.

After a passionate debate over a detainee-related provision in a major defense bill, the lawmakers decided not to make clearer the current law about the rights of Americans suspected of being terrorists. Instead, they voted 99 to 1 to say the bill does not affect “existing law” about people arrested inside the United States.
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The uncertainty over the current law added confusion. Some, like Mr. Graham and Mr. Levin, insisted that the Supreme Court had already approved holding Americans as enemy combatants, even people arrested inside the United States. Others, like Senators Feinstein and Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, insisted that it had not done so.

The Senate does not agree on what current law says and it does not want to change that. Does anyone understand why they voted on it at all?

This non-decision keeps the risk open for any U.S. citizen to get accused, without proof, of terrorism and to be then indefinitely detained by the U.S. military. Should one day the rabble decide to protest too much about the ongoing robbery by the 1%, this non-law will be used to shut it up.

The issue where the Senate demonstrated more sense was Afghanistan:

The Senate voted on Wednesday to require President Barack Obama to devise a plan for expediting the pullout of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, signaling growing impatience in Congress.

Unfortunately the House seems likely to turn that amendment down. Still this is a sea-change from earlier votes which went against such an accelerated retreat.

Unfortunately, while voting for winding down one war, the Senate also voted to start another one:

Acting on concerns Iran aims to develop a nuclear weapon, the U.S. Senate Thursday voted to impede that country’s ability to process oil revenue by making it harder for it to access the world financial system.

The 100-0 vote came in spite of warnings from the Obama administration that the sanctions would alienate allies and drive up oil prices. The administration has been trying to use diplomatic avenues to persuade allies to avoid Iranian oil, which provides half of the government’s revenues. But Congress, frustrated by President Barack Obama’s reluctance to apply sanctions to Iran’s central bank, decided to push him in that direction.

The banning of any bank from business with Iran’s central bank would exclude Iran from dealing in any major world market. It would be an act of economic war on top of the already ongoing and increasing secret war. It would likely soon lead to a physical one.

But this vote makes clear that war with Iran is the open intent of the U.S. foreign policy. It has nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear program. The aim is regime change in Iran by all means, including war, and at all costs.

Obama was elected as a democrat and as president foreign policy is his prerogative. Hillary Clinton is seen as a resolute secretary of state who also has some capable ambassadors. One thereby might assume that those two together would have a firm and decisive voice in U.S. foreign policy decisions.

But as this piece on the unwillingness of the U.S. to say sorry for the deadly attack on Pakistani soldiers makes clear, even day to day foreign policy is set by different powers.

The [United States ambassador to Pakistan], speaking by videoconference from Islamabad, said that anger in Pakistan had reached a fever pitch, and that the United States needed to move to defuse it as quickly as possible, the officials recounted.

Defense Department officials balked. While they did not deny some American culpability in the episode, they said expressions of remorse offered by senior department officials and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton were enough, at least until the completion of a United States military investigation establishing what went wrong.

Some administration aides also worried that if Mr. Obama were to overrule the military and apologize to Pakistan, such a step could become fodder for his Republican opponents in the presidential campaign, according to several officials who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

On Wednesday, White House officials said Mr. Obama was unlikely to say anything further on the matter in the coming days.

So instead of the State Department it is the Pentagon that making the foreign policy decision and instead of the elected democrats the republican candidates are the most influential force in the adoption of these foreign policies with regards to Pakistan.

And even when it is in the genuine U.S. interest to regain some good will with Pakistan, as expressed by the ambassador, the man in the Oval Office, hell-bent to get reelected, is unwilling to spend some political capital on the issue and to make the right decision.