The CIA’s machine war in Pakistan (and implications)
Despite protests from other countries, the United States is expanding a top-secret effort to kill suspected terrorists with drone-fired missiles as it pursues an increasingly decentralized Al Qaeda, U.S. officials say.
For a systems development account of this, see Manuel De Landa’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines.
For an apologetic account, listen to the silence. This is not the armed forces. It is the CIA, an agency without the strict constitutional accountability of the armed forces to Congress (as if Congress had exercised its prerogative any time lately against the military).
Warfare by drone is the latest leap in two directions: eliminating “friendly” exposure to the perils of the battlefield, and acceptance of the inevitability of civilian casualties in operations that amount to assassinations. Note the latter, because it’s very important. These are not really military operations. They are not conducted by the military; and they involve no engagement between opposing forces.
We are becoming more and more like the Israelis. Drone assassinations of political targets is a mechanized Phoenix Program; and killing a target that might be at a given location with a projectile that has a bursting radius big enough to blow up a building is the same as the Israelis exploding car bombs (as they have done) to hit one target with full knowledge that the bomb is detonating in a crowded street.
I think this rasies an ethical question that I’d like to see debated and discussed more, as one who sits with Yoder’s question and challenge: At what point(s) are we willing to trump our moral decisions with efficacy? This is a question that confronts activists, too. If you want to see what happened to communism, for example, in the context of hostile encirclement and the forced march to industrialization, find the points at which efficacy trumped morality (and was then called “necessity,” while opposition on moral grounds was characterized as “bourgeois sentimentality”). It’s a big question, because efficacy and morality are not the same, and can often come into conflict.
The short-term acceptance of these “compromises” is a slippery slope for sure; and I have to wonder if short-term efficacy doesn’t in some way undermine a longer-term moral stability the way termites silently gnaw out the load-supporting structures of a building. Fanon made note of how the oppressed becomes the oppressor, given the chance. So have others.
Oppressed people are frequently very oppressive when first liberated. And why wouldn’t they be? They know best two
positions. Somebody’s foot on their neck or their foot on somebody’s neck.
- Florynce R. Kennedy (1916-2000)
This drone warfare (by a “civilian” agency shrouded with official secrets) is a phase-transition in the interplay between people and technology in warfare, a signpost along a new — even more morally fraught — path, that will transfer not only justificatory technique from the Israeli application of hit teams (it was illegal until recently to use the CIA for assassinations, even though they did it), but one that will entrain American society with further habituation to nationalist efficacy at the expense of anything like a collective morality.
Bush brought us a long way foward in this trend already in motion (with the whole post-WWII security state). Obama has become the new, improved, hi-tech Lyndon Baines Johnson, with his very own secret CIA war.
Obama – change you can believe in!
I would ask those who share an interest to pass along articles and analyses of interest on this secret CIA war of flying robots.
And I would ask us all to think about where and how we might be tempted to abandon our moral principles on behalf of efficacy. The left, in particular, and I use myself as an example in my past apologetics for armed struggles, eg, needs to take a serious account of this moral threshold, and I would say (naturally) that gender needs to be examined in that account. (Proudly teling somone that you feel nothing in the face of the suffering of another sentient being is a masculine pose (that under the pressure of probative masculinity in male groups becomes an arms race of cruelties); as is calling “sissy” when people demonstrate a reluctance to physically attack and kill others.)
In a culture based on male domination and in which most things feminine tend to be devalued, even if they are secretly envied, the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman. This powerful adult male imperative to be unlike females and to repudiate anything that smacks of maternal caretaking [EMPATHY, SG] is played out just as powerfully in politics as it is in personal life.
Keith:
“…the success rate of the drone bombing campaign is extremely low: just 2 percent of bombs dropped have hit targeted militants. The other 98 percent? Those killed noncombatant Pakistani civilians…”
http://www.dodbuzz.com/2009/05/11/drones-hardly-ever-kill-bad-guys/
19 June 2009, 5:20 amMark:
I was just reading this New Republic piece on the drone attacks yesterday.
LINK
Most of the article reads like an apologia, but there is some useful information.
19 June 2009, 2:19 pmStan:
Holy Correlation Doesn’t Mean Causation, Batman!
The NR article does indeed have useful information, but I remain amazed at the kinds of things that “respectable” journalists will say that defies the most elementary rules of logic and evidence. The NR article also claims that the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths is “impossible” to know. This is not a “meaning of life” question, but an empirically verifiable question about the status of a finite number of real people who were recently killed. What they are really saying is that it’s too strange and dangerous for us to figure out, so we will repeat what local experts report, but only if we also cast apsersions on their credibility (they seem kind of strange and dangerous, too…. just Pakistanis, you understand).
The Grant article that Keith sent along accepts the Pakistani estimate, which does correspond (without reaching outside the evidentiary circle) to Grant’s thesis that these drones are a shotgun being fired through a roomful of people.
I feel pretty comfortable suggesting that this drone war of the CIA (and its ultimate commander, Barack Obama) is an application with a context — Waziristan and Balochistan are remote, thinly populated, and without much modern infrastructure. It is this remoteness (with few witnesses that will be credible to orientalist Westerners) that makes these kinds of attacks “work.” This is also the sancutary region of these networks; so the tactic is highly opportunistic (and likely experimental, as in they are testing these weapons on this “remote” people).
Bringing us back to my original question… one pregnant with a lot of our own rationalizations. In our own political musings, how often do we construct hypothetical (or actual) situations in which we cross the threshold putting efficacy and moral principle at odds; and in which scenarios are we ourselves willing to say that “then end justifies the means.”
Honesty in reply to this question exposes a recurring contradiction. Once we share the claim that the end can justify the means, we have to try and undermine actions like these attacks based solely on whether they are efficacious or not. So we resort to body counts to add degrees of culpability, and those body counts, as opposed to the actions themselves, become the centerpiece of our public debate. We have ceded the moral ground altogether, and elevated efficacy to an ultimate value… modernism’s optimizations, no?
What we end up with — because liberalism has already established its embrace of efficacy as the highest value — are policies based solely on that standard (nested in the axiomatic character of ethnocentrism, nationalism, common good, the dictatorship of the proletariat, whatever) of whether something “works.” Oddly enough, this is one of those things Hornborg notes about machine fetishism (taking a page directly from Marx): we judge whether machines “work,” and surround them with a force-field of “objectivity” that decontextualizes and dehistoricizes them. Cars work. The question of whether we ought to make cars — in this case — has already been answered implicitly, in the axiomatic affirmative.
These epistemic phenomena have common cultural roots.
If global society has been driven into a great material cul-de-sac (which nature will sort out one way or another), then our ways of knowing are as obsolete as the material practices they reflect. Efficacy, optimization, “objectivity”… anachronisms, and dangerous ones at that.
20 June 2009, 4:59 amStan:
It appears that the administration is stepping up recruiting of college students for the CIA, even as Obama’s first secret CIA war picks up steam.
21 June 2009, 7:45 ameoinmonkey:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2402479.stm
Here is a blast from the past, pun intentional. I believe this was the first time a (multiple) assasination by un-manned Predator drone was reported in the mainstream press. It may or may not have been the actual first time, but it made for great propaganda copy- six dead, all “terrorists”; no civilians nearby; expensive new toy to play with. Nice and clean, and futuristic, as if warfare wasnt still mainly about guys with sore feet killing one another with hot bits of metal at between 20 and 200 yards. The article above is from the time, and does not mention something I thought was particularly fascinating about the whole business- this is 2002, remember, when the potential invasion of Iraq was still in the offing, and rabid anti-French sentiment of a rather pathetically masculinist variety was bursting into American Freedom-Fried conciousness. It was glossed over, certainly in the American press, that the CIA officers who controlled this particular Predator to its intended target were based in a French military base in, if memory serves, Djibouti. Make of that what you will.
http://cursor.org/stories/dronesyndrome.htm
22 June 2009, 5:31 amThis is an article about how expensive Predators are and how often they fail, which I think misses the point slightly (although they do mention it)- who cares how much they cost and how often they crash when every wreck is a chance to buy a new one with taxpayers money, and when no servicemen die as a result? the military/CIA certainly wont be giving much of a shit. It does make an interesting and valuable point about new technology and the military, and how it is fanfared and consistently over-valued as “the next big thing” and sometimes (although most people are too cynical to buy this sort of bullshit anymore) as “the weapon that will end war forever!” What is it people say- Big boys are only distinguished from little boys by their bigger toys…?
Stan:
So it seems.
There is something new under the sun here, too, though.
Changes in the machinic phylum is what DeLanda calls them. The internet we are using right now is a military technology.
The automation of weapons systems seems to be taking a big leap here — a paradigm shift… bifurcation. The logics of war may perpetuate and refine this form of war; but other logics may recognize the moral contradictions this form of warfare exposes. Public discussions of this kind of warfare inevitably raise some very deep, structural-philosophical questions. That bugaboo of mine about *morality and efficacy in conflict* is sure on sharp display in this process.
Anyone seen where there is any serious blogging going on? Technorati gives 1,024 hits when I type in “unmanned drones.”
Here’s Bratich on the machinic phylum shift.
22 June 2009, 9:11 ameoinmonkey:
Surely moral contradiction is one of the cornerstones of war, certainly in this po-faced age of rampant smuggery about “our boys” and “the war on terror”? Morality and efficacy in combat has been a concern for some time- the Geneva conventions enshrine the rule of proportionality in response, and yet it is one of those things hardly anyone ever takes seriously anyway, unless they need a legal stick to beat their enemies with.
23 June 2009, 12:08 pmKim Sky:
The only occassional blogging I’m finding about this stuff is on:
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/
Where is seems to be more of a futurist than any kind of moralist.
The whole topic is difficult to grasp. I have read many a rational for developing a counter-insurgency in the NW Frontier modeled after Turkey. That decision is the one that seizes my heart. According to Global Guerillas, the “rebels” in Afghanistan are already using drones, and that within the next ten years some form of drone/artificial intelligence will be practically integrated throughout all societies on this planet. The march of technology coupled with a lack of foresight …
Otherwise:
Unmanned aerial vehicle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_aerial_vehicle
Unmanned Air Systems [conferences]
google.com
number of postings on drones
23 June 2009, 1:38 pmhttp://cryptome.org/
Chris Wardle:
An except from the sections of my facebook page (20090624):
… The idea that morality has been overcome by efficacy and technology is a worry, as are:
* The damning notion that the efficacy of drone attacks is a trifling 2% – i.e. 98% collateral damage on Pakistani non-combatants; and
* The harsh – and to me unacceptable reality – that this is not a military intervention, but a purely political one – i.e. drones under CIA control, not that of the US military.
To give some context, I write as an Aussie working in Pakistan and as someone blessed to be married to a wonderful Baloch woman. While I’d like to say that I enjoyed the article and comments, the reality is that I find myself feeling somewhere between impotent rage and tears!
Many things trouble me in this disquieting blog, but two things stand out:
* The fear of how many people in my beloved’s homeland may needlessly die as guinea-pigs for a foreign power wanting to test technology that goes beyond the bounds of morality or any understanding of our common humanity; and
* The fear that my ability to be a catalyst for change is severely compromised – as an expatriate I have no sense of how I can be effective in this political context, or raise concerns at the appropriate political level.
At home I’d be banging on the door of our elected officials and speaking out at rallies – perhaps an unrealistic expectation here in Islamabad – or is it? So how dear reader to deal with this – how would you guide me on effective expatriate action?
Currently I’m assisting a British INGO to deal with the conflict-driven, mass human migration juggernaut that has forced over 3.5 million out of their homes. In the areas in which we work, 80% of the internally displaced people (IDPs) live with host families and those hosts take in not just one, but an average of twelve additional families. Can you imagine in your own home an additional 104 people sharing your floor space, food and bathroom every day.
Countering the loss and misery caused by the so-called collateral damage from ‘drones’, this generosity of spirit and sharing is the only positive and bright news I see in an ongoing nightmare that seems to have little chance of abating as a counter-insurgency offensive cranks up in the Pakistan’s South Waziristan Agency, bringing with it many more IDPs.
At the end of the day Feral Scholar’s blog brings home to me the haunting echoes of Aboriginal voices silenced forever by the British nuclear testing in the last century in the Australian desert at Maralinga – another remote and sparsely populated region who’s inhabitants had little clue as to their rights and no defense against a morally bankrupt and militarily ‘superior’ empire.
24 June 2009, 12:05 amStan:
Thank you for this, Chris. Unfortuntely, yesterday’s news brought more horror.
“An airstrike believed to be carried out by a U.S. drone killed at least 60 people at a funeral in South Waziristan on Tuesday, residents and local news reports said.” LINK to story.
24 June 2009, 4:34 amMichael Anderson:
A new (old) base to launch drones?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/23/kyrgyzstan-us-manas-airbase-open-afghanistan
Kyrgystan is geographically close(er) to Pak….and Russia, too.
The system keeps doing what is important for the survival of the system, not humanity…and more of it, as collapse comes nearer.
24 June 2009, 7:57 amSean:
@ Chris Wardle –
Nice to know I’m not the only one using Facebook to spread word of global and domestic political thuggery. Some of my friends give me grief for not using it as a “friendly, positive space” but I can’t be bothered with the hopes and wants of their country-club view of life and their slight at the mention of some of the uglier things done by the USA or in its name. I’m not keen on ignoring, or sweeping under a rug, the things I wish weren’t true. I don’t know how things can improve if we ignore what’s bad, immoral, illegal, unconscionable, etc.
24 June 2009, 11:39 amMichael Anderson:
Another related link—-efficacy in the classroom, too. Our universities are job factories for the system, and at this stage in a student’s life they are getting into more abstract reasoning and starting to find their hole in the system pegboard. It seems now that with an all-volunteer military and CIA trainees in the classroom that the circle may well be closing.
http://www.alternet.org/story/140872/spies_in_the_classroom%3A_the_government_is_running_a_secretive_intelligence_recruitment_program_in_schools/?page=entire
25 June 2009, 4:46 pmStan:
FULL
25 June 2009, 4:57 pmHoward:
T.E. Lawrence: “The ideal weapon is the knife, the worst is the airplane.”
25 June 2009, 11:39 pmMike Craig:
The sad fact is that regardless of the technology at hand, As long as there are religous factions that know whats best for the rest of the world, there will death to the inocent. Followed by the ever popular dollar. It is my Humble opinion that more people have been killed for “God” than for any other reason. A quick review of our own prevailing religion’s history is more than most want to contemplate. Why is it prevalent to Human nature to want to destroy anything that is different from the popular belief, As creatures of the same planet, facing the same future, We spend more time creating new ways to hate and kill than in solving our planets problems. There seems no end in site, except for a true world war. why Did The United States rather than Canada get attacked on 9-11? Oh Yea, thats right, Canada didn’t play in the 21st Century Crusades, sorry Guys, I forgot.
13 July 2009, 9:24 pmHenry:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6862
The “Great Game” Enters the Mediterranean: Gas, Oil, War, and Geo-Politics
http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20090511_eu_turkey_challenges_nabucco_pipeline
EU, Turkey: The Challenges of the Nabucco Pipeline
http://www.stratfor.com/hungary_change_heart_nabucco
Hungary: A Change of Heart on Nabucco
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14412
US Strategy of Total Energy Control over the European Union and Eurasia
Nabucco Turkey EU and Obama Geopolitics
by F. William Engdahl
Where Is Oil Production Headed?: An Adverse Scenario
17 July 2009, 7:52 pmhttp://www.theoildrum.com/node/5160
Henry:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KG15Ak01.html
Pipeline deal is sweet music for Iran
18 July 2009, 4:58 pmBy M K Bhadrakumar
Henry:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KG22Df01.html
Clinton delivers unwanted tidings to New Delhi
20 July 2009, 2:45 pmBy M K Bhadrakumar
Robert Reed (cabdriver):
On a somewhat related topic: I’ve had speculative premonitions about the potential for space weapons technology for at least 10 years and counting. High Frontiers Full Spectrum Dominance.
It’s been apparent to me for quite some time that there are no theoretical barriers to the development of a space based laser weapons array with the capability of identifying targets from person-carried data devices like cellphones- or, perhaps, VLSI chip implants, already a common technology for identifying house pets and currently being mainstreamed as a technology in humans, using the rationale of such microchip implants providing a ready database for medical providers- and blasting them with a Death Ray bolt from the blue with a linear accuracy of terrifying precision and power.
In fact, as far as I can tell, the biggest obstacle to achieving such a weapon would be transmitting and storing sufficient energy to the laser/maser/particle beam/directed energy weaponry in order to allow quick reload capability, to dispatch a large number of targets. Hopefully, that’s a problem that will elude practical solution by the budding Dr. Strangeloves out there. But the logistics underpinning the matter of precision targeting capability are pretty much already in place. A fait accomplit.
All of this sounds very sci-fi paranoid, I realize that. Rest assured that I’ve never been one to obsess over my being at the top of any list of potential targets, in the event of the employment of such weaponry.
But it nonetheless strikes me that any regime or militaristic elite that might manage to achieve such a capability would possess a power over the human population that would verge on the omniscient and omnipotent. There would be no way to shoot back or disable such a space-based weapon. There would be multiple ways to search out targets with unprecedented accuracy. Depending on the nature of the beam weapon, it might conceivably even be impossible to come to a sure conclusion about the cause of death, much less tracing the trajectory or origin point of a weapon employed in such a remote-control assassination, deployed somewhere in low-earth orbit.
What would have sounded like lunacy in 1993 is now accepted as commonplace, as far as landsat mapping, precision GPS location, personal digital electronics, and microchipping. And I have no assurance that moral or ethical considerations will prevent the research, development, or deployment of such a weapons array.
In fact, from reading documents on space weaponry produced by the USAF or its enthusiastic private contractor associates, it often seems as if such ethical considerations have already been dispensed with, because We’re So Good. And since We’re So Good, the horrific, totalitarian implications of a space-based Panopticon Remotely Controlled Garrison are never mentioned. Instead, the achievement of that goal is typically taken for granted as inevitable, necessary, and even as an Ultimate Solution. Unchallengable Power as the Key to World Peace.
I have issues with that worldview.
8 August 2009, 12:23 pm(Boer) Tom:
To Mr Reed:
There are many problems with such a system.
First off, it requires huge amounts of energy. To illustrate, at what frequencies do these tracking devices operate? According to one supplier, it is around 100-200KHz, i.e. with wavelengths of 500m – 1km – these wavelengths reflect off the lower levels of the atmosphere back to earth, when they leave the earth at all: The earth is a conductor, and these signals tend to travel along the earth’s signal (listen to an AM station some time – you might be able to pick out a slight distortion like a very short echo (1/7 of a second) or a beating sound, which arises because at those low frequencies, the signal can take the short and long route along the earth to you. FM commercial frequencies (88-108MHz) go in straight lines (wavelength on the order of 3m) – they have some chance of exiting the atmosphere (rather than being reflected) and being absorbed by a satellite’s receiver. Moreover, many of these devices are ‘passive’ in the sense that they need an external power source, e.g. a varying magnetic field, for power. Add scattering in urban environments, and mere satellites won’t be able to triangulate you; local ground-based (and closely spaced) receivers would be necessary, and they are expensive (energy-wise) to manufacture, much less to deploy, or to develop necessary algorithms for (especially for signals that can go around the earth with not too much attenuation). It pays to study for and obtain the advanced radio amateur examination – the material is not too complicated for a grade eight student – go take it. As for GPS, it relies on signals coming from satellites, and cannot put out enough power to communicate back to the satellite (the complexity required to have such back-communication would make the system very haphazard). Likewise, land-based addenda to GPS (for precision location), simply send out pulses coordinated in time with the satellite signals, to allow for greater precision in location – the GPS device triangulates your device’s position based on the time stamps of the various signals. A GPS device would have to send out your position, i.e. be an explicit tracking device – being a GPS receiver is not sufficient in and of itself. The energy expenditure of including such functionality within each GPS unit would be huge, even if its operation could be controlled to save power. The above does not mean that you shouldn’t take precautions, only that the limits of the technology’s use against you are sufficient that it can be employed efficiently.
Second, huge amounts of energy are necessary for any laser – efficiencies for semiconductor lasers are typically ~1% (this patent makes noises of reaching 10% – but high efficiency lasers usually put out less power). Efficiencies for gas lasers are usually ~0.1%, although CO2 lasers can reach 30% – although much of that energy would be pumped into moisture and ice-crystals, or simply be scattered by them, as the wavelength of that laser is 0.01mm, the same as the mean for cloud water-droplet and ice crystal diameter. High purity plutonium would be needed for any such a satellite system, as the solar panels would probably make the satellite obvious in the night sky, if not day sky, and impurities in the plutonium (e.g. the wrong isotope) tends to cause components to fail due to chemical interactions with daughter elements.
Third, high-power semiconductor lasers tend to wear with time, and need occasional replacement – this is especially a problem with fibre-optic communications systems. The difference is greater mass and/or repeated replacement of satellites – the more people or structures they attack, the sooner they have to replace. CO2 lasers typically last a few thousand hours at 200W – assuming a power-lifetime product behavior, even with great feats of engineering, will mean frequent replacement, which militates toward ground-based systems, which are vulnerable.
The advantage of this system is fear, not ability – once they anger enough people, the system’s continuous operation becomes prohibitively costly. Remember peak oil – it takes huge amounts of energy to prepare high purity chemicals (whether for power generation or the control circuitry). Peak water brings similar considerations. And there are at least three super-states who would consider this, which makes the proposition even more costly (inflation – much of the advances in military and other high-computation electronics in the last two decades came from using off-the-shelf consumer electronics to cut costs – dogwaggery?).
9 August 2009, 2:46 pm(Boer) Tom:
Oops – that should be surface of earth, not signal…
9 August 2009, 5:11 pm(Boer) Tom:
Correction: You shouldn’t hear beats – the frequencies would be the same – but distortions arising from variations in the path taken should be audible; the variations are somewhat dependent on atmospheric conditions; according to this site, at the AM frequencies (see 160m), the signal does leave the surface and bounce off the ionosphere at night (even lower frequencies are needed to follow the earth’s surface), so listen at night (better: at dawn or dusk – you might even hear some foreign stations) to a lower-frequency (~650KHz, e.g.) station a few nights in a row, and the distortions should vary on a given night. DX in the link means long distance…
9 August 2009, 6:21 pm(Boer) Tom:
One other thing: In order to focus to the small spot size implied (cause of death unclear) – you’d need a lens with a focal length of 160km – and the lens must be completely free of defects, for the minimum spot size (10 micron). A 1mm spot size from a 1mm diameter (i.e. narrow hence low power) laser would only half the focal length requirement (which declines with laser width). More over, some means of controlling the beam would be necessary, and that means that the satellite (or some ground system) would have to track the movement of the beam, especially before full power is applied. The lens would have to be very thin, have a highly controlled refractive index, and have a huge (yet consistent) radius of curvature on both sides.
Without a lens, at the wavelength of a CO2 laser (the most efficient choice) beam dispersion would give a minimum width of 71cm for a satellite at 160km, and the width increases as the square root of the height of the satellite – the laser would need a diameter of 71cm, as narrower lasers will undergo wider dispersion – see any decent optoelectronics text for the beam dispersion equation 2\theta = \frac{4\lambda}{2\pi w_0} (in LaTeX notation). 2\theta is the dispersion angle in radians, \lambda is the wavelength, and w_0 is the beam width at the source (laser). The beam width roughly is the maximum of w_0 and L tan \theta (where L is the height of the satellite). Set them equal, and use the small angle approximation on tan (tan \theta = \theta when in radians), solve for w_0 and get ~71cm beam width.
10 August 2009, 2:13 pmRobert Reed (cabdriver):
Tom, thanks for the information. Good to hear a response the topic I brought up by someone who possesses more than my minimal background in regard to technology and engineering.
I always get a sense of relief whenever I learn of practical limitations imposed by laws of physics that obviate my most paranoid nightmares of technological dystopia. Thanks heavens for the inverse square law, for instance.
I’ve read of the possibility of satellites obtaining and storing large amounts of power transmitted via microwaves from power plants on earth, in connection with me looking doing a brief and inconclusive survey of the maze of rumors and allegations associated with the somewhat infamous HAARP project.
But since I know of no evidence for a working model of such a technology at present, I’m inclined to discount the possibility- especially as far as its ability to store and utilize the huge amounts of power required for earth targeting laser weaponry.
(In preference to leading this thread astray into a tangent of doubtful value, curious readers are directed to the official site of HAARP, http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/ ; for the views of those who are suspicious or dubious about the project, http://www.haarp.net/ . I don’t mean to derail the commentary from a more grounded general discussion of the original topic.)
10 August 2009, 4:09 pm