war

Illegality practices by the US in the “War on Terror”

history, law, politics / /

From Tony Judt’s “The New World Order” (The New York Review of Books: 14 July 2005):

The unrepublican veneration of our presidential “leader” has made it uniquely difficult for Americans to see their country’s behavior as others see it. The latest report from Amnesty International – which says nothing that the rest of the world doesn’t already know or believe but which has been denied and ridiculed by President Bush – is a case in point. The United States “renders” (i.e., kidnaps and hands over) targeted suspects to third-party states for interrogation and torture beyond the reach of US law and the press. The countries to whom we outsource this task include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria (!), Pakistan – and Uzbekistan. Where outsourcing is impractical, we import qualified interrogators from abroad: in September 2002 a visiting Chinese “delegation” was invited to participate in the “interrogation” of ethnic Uighur detainees held at Guantánamo.

At the US’s own interrogation centers and prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, at least twenty-seven “suspects” have been killed in custody. This number does not include extrajudicial, extraterritorial “targeted assassinations”: a practice inaugurated by Benito Mussolini with the murder of the Rosselli brothers in Normandy in 1937, pursued with vigor by Israel, and now adopted by the Bush administration. The Amnesty report lists sixty alleged incarceration and interrogation practices routinely employed at US detention centers, Guantánamo in particular. These include immersion in cold water to simulate drowning, forced shaving of facial and body hair, electric shocks to body parts, humiliation (e.g., being urinated upon), sex-ual taunting, the mocking of religious belief, suspension from shackles, physical exertion to the point of exhaus-tion (e.g., rock-carrying), and mock execution.

Any and all of these practices will be familiar to students of Eastern Europe in the Fifties or Latin America in the Seventies and Eighties – including the reported presence of “medical personnel.” But American interrogators have also innovated. One technique has been forcibly to wrap suspects – and their Korans – in Israeli flags: a generous gesture to our only unconditional ally, but calculated to ensure that a new generation of Muslims worldwide will identify the two countries as one and hate them equally.

All of these practices – and many, many others routinely employed at Guantánamo, at Kandahar and Bagram in Afghanistan, at al-Qaim, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere in Iraq – are in breach of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention against Torture, to both of which the US is a signatory

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America, a militarized society

history, law, politics / /

From Tony Judt’s “The New World Order” (The New York Review of Books: 14 July 2005):

[Andrew] Bacevich is a graduate of West Point, a Vietnam veteran, and a conservative Catholic who now directs the study of international relations at Boston University. He has thus earned the right to a hearing even in circles typically immune to criticism. What he writes should give them pause. His argument is complex, resting on a close account of changes in the US military since Vietnam, on the militarization of strategic political thinking, and on the role of the military in American culture. But his conclusion is clear. The United States, he writes, is becoming not just a militarized state but a military society: a country where armed power is the measure of national greatness, and war, or planning for war, is the exemplary (and only) common project.

Why does the US Department of Defense currently maintain 725 official US military bases outside the country and 969 at home (not to mention numerous secret bases)? Why does the US spend more on “defense” than all the rest of the world put together? After all, it has no present or likely enemies of the kind who could be intimidated or defeated by “star wars” missile defense or bunker-busting “nukes.” And yet this country is obsessed with war: rumors of war, images of war, “preemptive” war, “preventive” war, “surgical” war, “prophylactic” war, “permanent” war. As President Bush explained at a news conference on April 13, 2004, “This country must go on the offense and stay on the offense.”

Among democracies, only in America do soldiers and other uniformed servicemen figure ubiquitously in political photo ops and popular movies. Only in America do civilians eagerly buy expensive military service vehicles for suburban shopping runs. In a country no longer supreme in most other fields of human endeavor, war and warriors have become the last, enduring symbols of American dominance and the American way of life. “In war, it seemed,” writes Bacevich, “lay America’s true comparative advantage.” …

For Bacevich’s deepest concern lies closer to home. In a militarized society the range of acceptable opinion inevitably shrinks. Opposition to the “commander in chief” is swiftly characterized as lèse-majesté; criticism becomes betrayal. No nation, as Madison wrote in 1795 and Bacevich recalls approvingly, can “preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”[12] “Full-spectrum dominance” begins as a Pentagon cliché and ends as an executive project.

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International Law in the modern world

history, law, politics / /

From Tony Judt’s “The New World Order” (The New York Review of Books: 14 July 2005):

Things go wrong, and not just in Iraq. International law – like the UN itself – was conceived in a world of sovereign states, a world where wars broke out between countries, peace was duly brokered among states, and a major concern of the post–World War II settlement was to guarantee the inviolability of borders and sovereignty. Today’s wars typically happen within states. The distinctions between peace-making and peacekeeping – between intervention, assistance, and coercion – are unclear, as are the rights of the conflicting parties and the circumstances under which foreign agencies may resort to force. In this confusing new world, well-meaning Western diplomats and observers have sometimes proven unable to distinguish between warring states – operating under conventional diplomatic norms – and locally powerful criminal tyrants, such as the leaders of Sudan. Negotiation with the latter all too often amounts to collaboration and even complicity.

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Napoleon’s losses in the invasion of Russia

history / /

From Wikipedia’s “Napoleon I of France” (5 July 2006):

The French suffered greatly in the course of a ruinous retreat; the Army had begun as over 650,000 frontline troops, but in the end fewer than 40,000 crossed the Berezina River (November 1812) to escape. In total French losses in the campaign were 570,000 against about 400,000 Russian casualties and several hundred thousand civilian deaths.

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Soviet-style society & the US

politics / /

From Jim Marcinkowski’s “National Security: The Attack on the Constitution“:

Over the past 30 years, I have served this country in a variety of positions from the FBI to the CIA, and as a lawyer and a prosecutor …

We fought the Soviets and I fought the Soviets because they had a fatally flawed, intolerable system of government where (and think about this):

The government was always right and never apologized;

Any dissent was suppressed, ridiculed, banned or worse;

Secret prisons were denied and never acknowledged or spoken about;

The torture of captives (in Lubyanka) was condoned;

State incarceration was not subject to the checks and balances of a legal system;

Economic plans, like for oil, were established/determined in closed sessions between politicos, commissars and production managers, far outside public view, and where government claimed privilege in so doing;

Wages were set at the lowest common denominator, no matter what Bloc country you were in;

Government agents had access to your medical records, your library records, your telephone, and your e-mail.

A place where judicial power and judicial review were proclaimed concepts, but simply ignored in application;

Where criminal records of young adults were closed to all but the military;

Where a Constitution was a mere facade and ignored by state actors.

Any dissent, debate and protest were deemed unpatriotic;

The public media was bought, paid for, and provided by the state;

The military clandestinely and shamelessly influenced the national media and public opinion;

A place where wrong was declared right;

Where tapping a phone was like tapping a pencil;

Where lying was considered a patriotic skill;

The extraction of natural resources was paramount to any concern for the environment and the impact on the health of its people;

Where the use of “state secrets,” (those things embarrassing to the government) were confused with legitimate issues of “national security”;

A place where “secrecy” and “national security” were used to control debate;

Where legitimate secrecy, was subject to political use and abuse;

Where “legislators” were mere mouthpieces for and rubberstamps of whoever was in power;

Where you lived and died with the permission of the government;

A place where foreign policy was more important than domestic concerns;

Where fear was used as a political weapon and an acceptable means of control;

Where the best medical care was reserved for the influential;

Where wealth was concentrated in the top 5%;

A place where there was no middle class – just a small economic and political elite, and the working poor.

… Since 1995 the Republican Party and its friends in the American corporate structures that so vigorously contribute to and support them have – in the space of a decade – created in this country more than the beginnings of a system that this country spent 50 years trying to dismantle.

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Modern mercenaries

business, history, law, politics, security / /

From Rebecca Ulam Weiner’s “Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing” (Legal Affairs: January/February 2006):

YOU WON’T FIND THE WORD “MERCENARY” on the homepage of the International Peace Operations Association, the trade group for the private military industry. While many of the IPOA’s member companies are staffed by elite former soldiers of the United States military who now make a living hiring themselves out, the so-called “M word” isn’t in the IPOA’s corporate vocabulary. Members are known as private military companies (often called PMCs) or military service providers, who specialize in “private peace operations.” …

In recent years, private contractors have increasingly taken on important military functions, operating in some 50 countries and earning an estimated $100 billion in annual revenue. They provide security to civilian aid workers, other contractors, and even military forces. They train local armies for combat, develop future American soldiers (the firm MPRI helps run ROTC), and interrogate prisoners. At times, they’ve engaged in combat. During the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the U.S. has relied heavily on their support – private contractors make up a workforce of about 20,000, double the British troop presence. …

During the Iraq war, contractors have run the computers that control Predator drones, operated guided missile systems on naval ships, and maintained aerial surveillance and communications systems. In the Persian Gulf war of 1991, the ratio of soldiers to contractors was 50 to 1. In the current Iraqi conflict, it is 10 to 1 and falling.

This proliferation has worried many – in the academy, Congress, the media, and, increasingly, the military – because contractors operate outside the military chain of command and most legal jurisdictions. PMCs have no clear place under the framework of the Geneva Conventions – they aren’t noncombatants, because they carry weapons, but they aren’t lawful combatants, because they don’t wear uniforms. Nor do they fit the anachronistic definitions of mercenaries found in international treaties and resolutions, because those definitions generally require engagement in direct combat.

Soldiers are subject to rules of engagement and can be court-martialed for breaking the law. Contractors are governed most directly by the terms of their contracts – their extraterritorial activities and corporate status make them virtually immune from federal law. …

Worse, critics argue, because the military has no direct control over its contractors, it won’t accept responsibility for their actions. And PMCs allow the Pentagon to evade accountability to Congress, because they circumvent caps on the number of troops approved for deployment and their casualties aren’t counted.

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Henry Wirz, the Demon of Andersonville

history / /

From Carolyn Kleiner’s “The Demon of Andersonville” (Legal Affairs: September/October 2002):

During the last 14 months of the Civil War, nearly 13,000 Union prisoners of war died at the Confederate prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia – more than at Antietam, one of the war’s bloodiest battles, and more than at any of the other hundred or so Civil War prisons. Reports of atrocities at Andersonville and other Southern jails had been widely circulated in the North during the war, along with photos of severely emaciated inmates who to 21st-century eyes bear an unnerving resemblance to prisoners at Nazi concentration camps. Captain Henry Wirz was the commandant of the prison and, by the end of the war, he was one of the most infamous men in America. By a special military commission, he was convicted of conspiracy to intentionally harm Union prisoners and of personally murdering at least ten soldiers. The noose was for him. …

Many captured Union soldiers were kept in and around Richmond, but as the front lines edged south and Dixie jails started to overflow, the Confederate government planned a new facility in the small, out-of-the-way town of Andersonville. The site was chosen for its easy railroad access, an abundance of pine forests, and a clear creek that ran across the property – and because the town’s 20 or so residents didn’t object. The first load of prisoners arrived in February 1864, before construction was complete. From that point on, the trains never stopped.

Built with the official name of Camp Sumter, the Andersonville prison consisted of a sixteen-and-a-half-acre dirt pen (later enlarged to twenty-six and a half acres), surrounded by a stockade made of rough-hewn, 15-foot-tall pine logs placed so close together it was impossible to see outside.

Though conditions were initially a vast improvement over Richmond detention centers, problems grew in proportion to the number of inmates. By late summer 1864, the prison population made Andersonville one of the largest cities in the Confederacy. At its peak in August, the “bullpen,” built to lodge up to 10,000 enlisted men, held 33,000 grimy, gaunt prisoners, each one crammed into a living area the size of a coffin. Their only protections from the sun were “shebangs,” improvised shelters constructed from blankets, rags, and pine boughs, or dug into the hard, red Georgia clay.

As the war dragged on and the Rebel government fell further into disarray, its resources and supplies depleted more each day, Andersonville became increasingly ill-equipped to provide for its wards. Daily prison rations usually consisted of coarse cornmeal with small bits of cob still in it (very rough on Northern stomachs accustomed to wheat bread), around two ounces of beef or pork, often served raw and moldy, and occasionally beans or molasses. (Guards got the same gruel.) Too many inmates meant not enough water to go around, as well as too much human waste, and the once-clear stream that ran through the camp became polluted, covered with a thin layer of green slime. The stench of the place carried as far as the town of Americus, ten miles away. Prisoners suffered from afflictions ranging from diarrhea and dysentery to scurvy and a condition described in death records as “nostalgia,” when men seemed to stop wanting to live.

Between March and June of 1864, the number of casualties per month more than tripled, reaching 2,994 at the end of the summer – or around 100 men a day. …

After arriving in Andersonville, Wirz initiated a record system and reorganized the prisoners into small details of 90 men each. A believer in strict discipline, he preferred forms of punishment like putting a prisoner in stocks or shackling him to a ball and chain. He was concerned about escapes, so he built a “deadline” of posts approximately 15 feet inside the prison walls; if inmates crossed the line, they were to be shot, no questions asked. Hungry dogs were sent after any who managed to break out. …

Andersonville closed for good the day after Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Twelve thousand, nine hundred and twelve of the 45,000 men who did time there as inmates remained behind forever, buried shoulder to shoulder in the prison cemetery. …

The Union government had been loath to recognize the Confederacy as a separate nation during the war, but now that it was over the government made an exception, in order to prosecute Captain Wirz squarely. He was charged as a foreign enemy who had violated the international laws of war. The fact that he was born abroad may have made it easier for Americans to swallow the notion of a fellow citizen being tried for criminal behavior in a military commission. The rules of the commission provided more room to maneuver and allowed for a broader range of admissible evidence.

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The American Revolution: led by elites, sold to the masses

history, politics / /

From James Grimmelmann’s “On the Second Life Tax Revolt“:

The Boston Tea Party was the expression of mercantile anger at taxes: the protesters wanted was a revision of British tax policies to favor colonial merchants at the expense of merchants in England. Economically speaking, the entire American Revolution was a scheme to improve the fortunes of colonial elites. But to convince their future countrymen to go along with their tax revolt, they developed one of the most inspiring ideologies of liberty and justice the world has ever seen. ‘No taxation without representation’ is a slogan that transforms ‘mere’ economics into egalitarianism. There are plenty of thinkers who will tell you societies as a whole can often reap enormous benefits by letting one particular group get rich; these benefits are hardly confined to material wealth.

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A burning quilt brings revenge

history, security / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (287-288):

[At the Battle of Pea Ridge,] they saw the rebels coming, yelling and firing as they came, hundreds of them bearing down to complete the wreckage their artillery had begun. As the Federals fell back from their shattered pieces an Iowa cannoneer paused to toss a smoldering quilt across a caisson, then ran hard to catch up with his friends. Still running, he heard a tremendous explosion and looked back in time to see a column of fire and smoke standing tall above the place where he had fuzed the vanished caisson. Stark against the twilight sky, it silhouetted the lazy-seeming rise and fall of blown-off arms and legs and heads and mangled trunks of men who just now had been whooping victoriously around the captured battery position.

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Better in command of the enemy than a prisoner

history, language & literature / /

From “Fort Henry and Fort Donelson“:

Shortly after the surrender of Fort Sumter, Confederates built two forts just south of the border of Tennessee and Kentucky. … Fort Henry guarded the Tennessee River while Fort Donelson guarded the Cumberland. … The key to rolling up the Confederate defense of the Mississippi River was the capture of Fort Henry and Donelson. That job fell to General Ulysses S. Grant and Commodore Andrew Foote. …

Fort Henry was easy prey for the Union gunboats … When Fort Henry surrendered, Grant turned his attention to Fort Donalson. … Inside Fort Donelson, General John Floyd commanded, with Gideon Pillow and Simon Bolivar Buckner under him. …

Gideon Pillow launched an assault against the Union right (McClernand), demolished 5 brigades in the federal line, forcing them into full retreat and grabbed a road that led to Nashville. Pillow had a number of good choices he could have made: turn left or right to battle the exposed flanks of Grant’s army, or use the road he had captured to evacuate to Nashville. Pillow, generally regarded as the worst general on either side during the Civil War, decided to withdraw back into the fort because his men seemed exhausted.

… That evening, Floyd, Pillow and Buckner considered surrender. Buckner, lowest ranking of the three generals, was the one left to do the task. Buckner and Pillow slipped out by boat and Nathan Bedford Forrest, his cavalry and a few foot soldiers found a partially flooded land route out minutes before it was closed off by Union infantry.

According to General Grant’s memoirs, one of Grant’s first questions to Buckner was: “Where is Pillow? Why didn’t he stay to surrender his command?”

Buckner: “He thought you were too anxious to capture him personally.”

Grant: “Why if I had captured him I would have turned him loose. I would rather have him in command of you fellows than as a prisoner.”

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Word of the day: cunctative

commonplace book, history, word of the day / /

Cunctative: Cunc’ta*tive, a. Slow; tardy; dilatory; causing delay.
Cunctator: Cunc*ta’tor, n. [L., lit., a delayer; — applied as a surname to Q. Fabius Maximus.] One who delays or lingers.

From Wikipedia’s “Fabius Maximus“:

Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (c. 275 BC-203 BC), called Cunctator (the Delayer), was a Roman politician and soldier, born in Rome around 275 BC and died in Rome in 203 BC. He was consul five times (233 BC, 228 BC, 215 BC, 214 BC and 208 BC) and was twice dictator, 221?–219 BC, and 217 BC. His nickname Cunctator (akin to the English noun cunctation) means “delayer” in Latin, and refers to his tactics in deploying the troops during the Second Punic War. His cognomen Verrucosus means warty, a reference to the wart above his upper lip. …

Fabius was well aware of the military superiority of the Carthaginians, and when Hannibal invaded Italy he refused to meet him in a pitched battle. Instead he kept his troops close to Hannibal, hoping to exhaust him in a long war of attrition. Fabius was able to harass the Carthaginian foraging parties, limiting Hannibal’s ability to wreak destruction while conserving his own military force.

The Romans were unimpressed with this defensive strategy and at first gave Fabius his nickname as an insult. The strategy was in part ruined because of a lack of unity in the command of the Roman army: Fabius’ magister equitum, Minucius, was a political enemy of Fabius. … Minucius had been named a co-commander of the Roman forces by Fabius’ detractors in the Senate. Minucius openly claimed that Fabius was cowardly because he failed to confront the Carthaginian forces. Near the present-day town of Larino in the Molise (then called Larinum), Hannibal had taken up position in a town called Gerione. In the valley between Larino and Gerione, Minucius decided to make a broad frontal attack on Hannibal’s troops. Several thousand men were involved on either side. It appeared that the Roman troops were winning but Hannibal had set a trap. Soon the Roman troops were being slaughtered. Fabius, despite Minucius’ earlier arrogance, rushed to his co-commander’s assistance and Hannibal’s forces immediately retreated. After the battle there was some feeling that there would be conflict between Minucius and Fabius. However, the younger soldier marched his men to Fabius’ encampment and he is reported to have said, “My father gave me life. Today you saved my life. You are my second father. I recognize your superior abilities as a commander.”

At the end of Fabius’ dictatorship, the command was given back to the consuls Gnaeus Servilius Geminus and Marcus Atilius Regulus. In the following year, the new consuls Paullus and Varro were defeated at the battle of Cannae, and the wisdom of Fabius’ tactic was understood. Thus Cunctator became an honorific title. This tactic was followed for the rest of the war, as long as Hannibal remained in Italy.

… Later, he became a legendary figure and the model of a tough, courageous Roman. According to Ennius, unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem – “one man, by delaying, restored the state to us.” While Hannibal is mentioned in the company of history’s greatest generals, military professionals have bestowed Fabius’ name on an entire strategic doctrine known as “Fabian strategy.”

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Russian anti-tank dogs

commonplace book, history, security / /

From Damn Interesting’s “Let Slip the Dogs of War“:

Nary does a modern movie depict the way the Romans used mastiffs with razored collars in battle, nor the fully armored Death Hounds … that the medieval knights would loose on a field to snap at the legs of opponents and dispatch the wounded that littered the ground. In fact, dogs have fought alongside their masters through most of history. At the eve of World War II, the Soviets had a fully operational four-legged fighter division, and a dog with a bomb is a potent foe.

The Soviets were unable to address the looming tank problem with any new technologies right away, thus they were forced to contemplate tackling the issue with the means at hand. Landmines were a viable option, but because one couldn’t count on the Nazis seeking out the mines, they had to figure a way to make the mines seek the tanks.

The answer laid in the dog division. The trainers would starve the dogs, then train them to find food under a tank. The dogs quickly learned that being released from their pens meant to run out to where the training tank was parked and find some vittles. Once trained, the dogs would be fitted with a bomb attached to the back, and loosed into a field of oncoming German Panzers. When the dog climbed underneath the tank – where there was no armor – the bomb would detonate and gut the enemy vehicle.

Realization of that plan was a little less successful. The dogs had been trained to look under a Soviet tank for food, and would sometimes be loosed into a battle just to turn around and find a friendly tank to climb under. Sometimes the dogs would spook at the rumble of a running diesel engine and run away from the battle. Sometimes the dogs just decided they didn’t want to go.

Despite the problems, the Anti-tank dogs were successful at disabling a reported 300 Nazi tanks. It was enough of a problem to the Nazi advance that the Germans were compelled to attempt measures at stopping them. The top mounted machine gun proved ineffective due to the relatively small size of the attackers, the fact that there were low to the ground and hard to spot, and that dogs just don’t want to die when they think they’re close to food. … Eventually the Germans began using flame-throwers on the tanks to ward the dogs away, and they were much more successful at dissuading the attacks – but some dogs would stop for neither fear of the fire nor actually being burned.

However, in 1942 one use of the Anti-tank dogs went seriously awry when a large contingent of anti-tank dogs ran amok, thus endangered everyone in the battle and forced the retreat of the entire Soviet division. Soon afterward the Anti-tank dogs were pulled from service.

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The spirit of the real Texas Rangers

commonplace book, history, overheard, true stories / /

I rather like this, even if it’s probably not true:

The story goes that Captain Jack Hayes and his men, the fabled Texas Rangers, were surrounded and vastly outnumbered during one of the many skirmishes of the Mexican War. He made the following prayer, certainly one of the most colorful ever made before battle: “Oh Lord, we are about to join battle with vastly superior numbers of the enemy, and, Heavenly Father, we would like for you to be on our side and help us; but if you can’t do it, for Christ’s sake don’t go over to the enemy, but just lie low and keep dark, and you’ll see one of the damndest fights you ever saw in all your born days. Amen.”

As I said, probably apocryphal, but a great story nonetheless.

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Feral cities of the future

commonplace book, history, politics, security / /

From Richard J. Norton’s “Feral cities – The New Strategic Environment” (Naval War College Review: Autumn, 2003):

Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power. Such cities have been routinely imagined in apocalyptic movies and in certain science-fiction genres, where they are often portrayed as gigantic versions of T. S. Eliot’s Rat’s Alley. Yet this city would still be globally connected. It would possess at least a modicum of commercial linkages, and some of its inhabitants would have access to the world’s most modern communication and computing technologies. It would, in effect, be a feral city.

…

The putative “feral city” is (or would be) a metropolis with a population of more than a million people in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city’s boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system.

In a feral city social services are all but nonexistent, and the vast majority of the city’s occupants have no access to even the most basic health or security assistance. There is no social safety net. Human security is for the most part a matter of individual initiative. Yet a feral city does not descend into complete, random chaos. Some elements, be they criminals, armed resistance groups, clans, tribes, or neighborhood associations, exert various degrees of control over portions of the city. Intercity, city-state, and even international commercial transactions occur, but corruption, avarice, and violence are their hallmarks. A feral city experiences massive levels of disease and creates enough pollution to qualify as an international environmental disaster zone. Most feral cities would suffer from massive urban hypertrophy, covering vast expanses of land. The city’s structures range from once-great buildings symbolic of state power to the meanest shantytowns and slums. Yet even under these conditions, these cities continue to grow, and the majority of occupants do not voluntarily leave.

Feral cities would exert an almost magnetic influence on terrorist organizations. Such megalopolises will provide exceptionally safe havens for armed resistance groups, especially those having cultural affinity with at least one sizable segment of the city’s population. The efficacy and portability of the most modern computing and communication systems allow the activities of a worldwide terrorist, criminal, or predatory and corrupt commercial network to be coordinated and directed with equipment easily obtained on the open market and packed into a minivan. The vast size of a feral city, with its buildings, other structures, and subterranean spaces, would offer nearly perfect protection from overhead sensors, whether satellites or unmanned aerial vehicles. The city’s population represents for such entities a ready source of recruits and a built-in intelligence network. Collecting human intelligence against them in this environment is likely to be a daunting task. Should the city contain airport or seaport facilities, such an organization would be able to import and export a variety of items. The feral city environment will actually make it easier for an armed resistance group that does not already have connections with criminal organizations to make them. The linkage between such groups, once thought to be rather unlikely, is now so commonplace as to elicit no comment.

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Haber’s dead wife

commonplace book, history / /

From “The Invention of Modern Gas Warfare“, at Ockham’s Razor:

[Dr. Fritz] Haber [inventor of modern gas warfare] was a very patriotic German and so when the war began he looked for ways to assist the military effort. His first major critic was his childhood sweetheart and wife, Clara. She was a talented chemist herself. She was appalled at the use of science to kill people. A few days after the first use of gas, she used his army pistol to commit suicide.

This did not deter Haber. He went off to supervise the use of gas warfare on the Eastern front and he left others to handle her funeral arrangements.

When the war ended in 1918, Haber donned a disguise and fled temporarily into Switzerland. The use of gas warfare had been so controversial that he was afraid that he would be tried by the Allies as a war criminal. About 1.3 million people had been wounded by gas, with 91,000 being killed.

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Walking dead man

commonplace book, history / /

From “The Invention of Modern Gas Warfare“, at Ockham’s Razor:

One of Haber’s [Dr. Fritz Haber, inventor of gas warfare] victims was a British soldier named Fred Cayley. He was gassed in 1917. He had poor health for the rest of his life and he had to visit a doctor every week until his death in 1981. The coroner recorded that Cayley had been ‘killed by the King’s enemies’. This is the statement that would have appeared on his death certificate if he had been killed outright 64 years earlier. As far as the coroner was concerned, Cayley was as good as dead back in 1917, it was simply that he did not get buried until 1981.

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