War FOR Information

Source: Infowar

Department of Defense definition of terrorism:

"Terrorism is carried out purposefully, in a cold-blooded, calculated fashion. The men and women who plan and execute these precision operations are neither crazy nor mad. They are very resourceful and competent criminals, systematically and intelligently attacking legally constituted nations that, for the most part, believe in the protection of individual rights and respect for the law. Nations that use terror to maintain the government are terrorists themselves." (p.5-3, DoD, quoted Postmodern War p.181)

Gee, sounds like the US Government, doesn't it?
Many times in ATS I've referred to the US Government as the real terrorists...

What happened in Oklahoma City is far removed from the kind of "terrorism" of the urban guerrilla of the 70's: After the end of the Cold War the external and internal Security Enforcement Agencies find themselves at a loss of an enemy and under pressure to justify their incredibly huge budgets. This is a serious situation since there are problems in the world that could be solved with the hundreds of billions of dollars of "defense" budgets. Suddenly so-called Rogue States (like Lybia, Iran) and a new form of the Mad Bomber - this time it's nuclear! - had to fill the gap left open by the "socialist" camp. But there was very little evidence for this theory...The "proof" for the actuality of the Terrorist Threat was missing. Until the bomb went off in Oklahoma City...

...Despite Timothy McVeigh getting the death penalty for it there remain a large number of open questions that suggest that maybe a whole different scenario is at work than is brought forward by the mass media. Of course people who wonder about the veracity of the official version are called conspiracy nuts, but let me just quote a fraction of the open questions from Adam Parfrey's "Finding our Way out of Oklahoma (Cult Rapture, Feral House)

* If the bombing of the Murrah building was a terrorist reprisal for Waco, why weren't ATF or FBI agents injured? How many ATF personnel took the day off? Why were judge Alley and others warned by special agents about impending violence on April 19. Who were these special agents.

* By definition a terrorist must take credit for his violence, or else there is no compelling reason to commit a crime. The specific purpose of terrorism is gaining leverage on a specific political objective through the ability of threatening future terrorist acts. No one has claimed credit for the Oklahoma City bombing. Militia groups produced particularly vehement public statements condemning the crime.

* Did the Murrah building warehouse documents regarding the Branch Davidians? Are these documents missing? Will the missing papers affect Ramsey Clark's suit against ATF and FBI on behalf of the remaining Branch Davidian survivors.

* Why did the director of University of Oklahoma's Geological survey, Dr. Charles Mankin, say that according to two different seismographic records, there were two blasts. Dr. Mankin reports "that the news media even reported two blasts initially but later changed their story."

* A pre-Oklahoma City bombing issue of Soldier of Fortune featured a James Pate article on Waco with a photograph of three BATF agents. One of these agents, the only agent unidentified, looks like the spitting image of Timothy McVeigh. Is this merely coincidental? Or was there a second "Timothy McVeigh" roaming the country, appearing at militia meetings?

I'm stopping here, but the picture that starts emerging is disturbing. Asking the cui bono - who profits? - we have to acknowledge that it is the proponents of the New World Order that are the only winners, not just that: They were the only ones trying to win from the beginning....

...With the disappearance of the other superpower as the main enemy, and the emergence of Rogue States and Super Hackers the difference between hot war and cold war are disappearing as well. And paranoia is emerging: I quote from a paper titled 'Political Aspects of Class III Information Warfare: Global Conflict and Terrorism' by Matthew G.Devost held at a conference called InfoWarCon II in Montreal January 18-19, 1995:

"There is no early warning system for information warfare. You don't know it is coming, so you must always expect it which creates a high level of paranoia."

It's a maxim that's been true throughout the history of human civilization that the most tyrannical/fascist government are those most paranoid against their own people...And actively seek to spread the same to make the people even more afraid of the government.

Keep this in mind when we look at the concepts brought forward by RAND researchers John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt. In their text 'Cyberwar is Coming' available on the web and more recently as a part of the book/anthology 'In Athena's Camp - Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age' along with a collection of essays by various authors.

The two main concepts they formulate are 'Cyberwar' and 'Netwar'.

Cyberwar is explained as referring to "conducting, and preparing to conduct, military operations according to information-related principles. It means disrupting, if not destroying, information and communications systems, broadly defined to include even military culture, on which an adversary relies in order to know itself: who it is, where it is, what it can do and when, why it is fighting, which threats to counter first, and so forth. It means trying to know everything about an adversary while keeping the adversary from knowing much about oneself."

What is interesting is that they don't pretend this to be fundamentally new form of war, in fact as the primary example for Cyberwar they mention the Mongols with their hugely successful army that was partly based on their fast information system that kept commanders in close contact over thousands of miles, although they do go so far as to claim: "As an innovation of warfare, we anticipate that cyberwar may be to the 21st century what Blitzkrieg was to the 20th."

Netwar however is the kind of civilian, or civil war side of cyberwar. While cyberwar is concerned with traditionally military aspects like Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence, also called C3I, intelligence collection, processing and distribution, tactical communications, positioning, identifications friend-or-foe (IFF) and socalled 'smart' weapons systems, netwar "refers to information-related conflict at a grand level between nations and societies. It means trying to disrupt, damage, or modify what a target population knows or thinks it knows about itself and the world around it. A netwar may focus on public or elite opinion, or both. It may involve public diplomacy measures, propaganda and psychological campaigns, political and cultural subversion, deception of or interference with local media, infiltration of computer networks and databases, and efforts to promote dissident or opposition movements across computer networks."

More at Source-link.

This is one of the reasons why I likened the struggle between We the People vs. the Unconstitutional Government as already conducting a "War FOR Information" way back in 2002, near the end of my OP in Future Shock. Save the Internet, anyone?