Author: Jason Ditz

Everybody the world over knows that drones are the next big thing militarily, so it probably seemed like a safe bet when German Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere signed off on investments in the “Euro Hawk” drone. That’s just the sort of thing a DM, especially one who’s been tapped as the next Chancellor, would do.

Five years and €600 million later, de Maiziere’s ministry, as well as his political future look to be in serious jeopardy because the Euro Hawk is ridiculously unsafe, even by the standards of robotic planes that routinely careen out of the sky. The opposition has called the investment a waste “to an unimaginable degree” after it was revealed that the EU had announced the thing was so unsafe that they couldn’t legally fly it in European airspace.

De Maiziere’s problem goes even deeper, because apparently his reaction to learning about this potential embarrassment was to order all data on the Euro Hawk “classified” and then order the German Army’s testing complex to destroy all the files detailing the failure.

On Friday, Israel attacked Syria. On Sunday, they launched multiple additional attacks, destroying several military targets in the Syrian capital city of Damascus and killing 42 people.

Today (Monday), Israel has filed an official complaint to the United Nations after a pair of Syrian mortar shells, being fired in the ongoing civil war, strayed across the line of control into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights (which the UN recognizes as part of Syria anyhow), doing no damage and causing no injuries.

The path from Monday to today, which has brought the US to believe Syria’s chemical weapons use is unusual. This timeline may help us better get a grip on how (though not why) officials got from A to B.

Monday: Chuck Hagel is in Israel speaking with Israeli Defense Minister Moshe ‘Bogie‘ Ya’alon. According to Hagel, Syrian chemical weapons didn’t come up.

Tuesday: Israeli Brigadier General Itai Brun delivers a speech in Tel Aviv claiming that Syria has “repeatedly” used chemical weapons.

Later Tuesday: Secretary of State John Kerry calls Benjamin Netanyahu to specifically press him on Brun’s claim. Kerry says Netanyahu was unable to confirm the allegation at all, while Netanyahu’s office refuses to make any public comments on the call or Brun’s claim. Kerry follows up with this non-proof by pushing NATO to send more aid to Syria’s rebels.

Wednesday: Hagel points out how weird it is that no one in Israel told him any of this stuff during his visit, in which he (civilian leader of the US military) met with Israeli military officials.

Thursday: The White House says it believes Syria has used chemical weapons on a “small scale.” Hagel says he believes that too.

The holes in the story:

1. Israel’s military claims to have provided the evidence on which Brun makes his statement to the US, even though Hagel has apparently never heard of it.

2. Conversely, Israel’s military suggests that Brun’s assessment is based in large measure on “visual evidence” i.e. photographs from Syria’s rebels of people foaming at the mouth. This “evidence” was certainly familiar to the US before Monday, and they still had repeatedly said over the past weeks that they didn’t believe Syria had actually used chemical weapons.

Other things worth noting:

3. Brun claims Syria used chemical weapons five times. The US “assessment” says twice. Media reports of rebels claiming chemical weapons use are common, but only twice did the reports get major coverage. The more recent of the two saw Syrian troops killed by suffocating gas, leading analysts to believe that the rebels had used a make-shift lachrymatory agent as a weapon, not the “nerve agent” that Syria’s arsenal consists of and is accused of using. The US ended both of the major reports claiming that they didn’t believe chemical weapons were used, but now say they do, based only on “evidence” that they already had and already dismissed.

With interest in American celebrity visits to North Korea on the rise in the wake of Dennis Rodman’s visit earlier this month, retired professional wrestler Nature Boy Ric Flair has given an interview to an NBC affiliate in North Carolina detailing his own visit in 1995.

Flair’s own visit saw him taking part in a multi-day event by New Japan Professional Wrestling (NJPW) surrounding the May Day holiday. He wrestled Japanese legend Antonio Inoki on the main day of the event in front of an audience of 190,000, believed to be the largest indoor attendance for a single event in human history.

Despite Flair’s history of autobiographies and multi-hour interviews on his career, he has rarely discussed his role in the North Korea event in much detail. Today’s comments provide some unique insight into his own decision to go, and he notes that two US Senators at the time, Sens. Jesse Helms (R – NC) and Strom Thurmond (R – SC), the head of the Foreign Relations Committee and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, respectively, advised him against going.

The wrestling match was a relatively straightforward 10 minute event, noteworthy primarily for its participants and its location. Flair reveals new details related to the rest of the trip, however, including that he and the other athletes had their telephones confiscated mid-visit after somebody described human rights conditions there. He likewise talks about North Korea’s government pressing him to make a statement that he believed they were capable of destroying the United States, something which he refused to do.

Flair’s opponent, Inoki, was a member of Japanese Parliament, and trained by North Korean-born wrestler Rikidozan, and was hyped considerably ahead of the visit. Knowledge of professional wrestling was limited in North Korea, of course, but to the extent they were familiar at all it was by way of Japanese wrestling. Flair says he doesn’t believe North Koreans had any idea who he actually was.

Inoki has visited North Korea several times since the match on diplomatic and humanitarian missions. He has been an outspoken supporter of “sports diplomacy,” and has expressed interest in sending another show to North Korea.

In 2008 Wired Magazine did a brief exposé on the Golfinder, a “novelty item” being marketed as an electronic golf ball finder. It turned out the machine was a joke, just an old-fashioned dowsing rod being sold for $49 and later $20.

In 2010, the Iraqi government announced a lawsuit against British company ATSC over $60,000 bomb detectors that turned out to be little more than a “car antenna mounted on a plastic box” and expensive cases with little to no electronics within.

What do these two stories have to do with each other? Everything, as it turns out. ATSC owner Jim McCormick, currently on trial in Britain for creating a company that sold devices that do literally nothing, turns out to have gotten the idea from the Golfinder, and indeed his first model of bomb finders were literally Golfinders themselves.

Incredibly, McCormick’s ADE100 bomb finder was literally a Golfinder with a few modifications and his company’s logo slapped on it. He bought 300, and they were sold to several nations for tens of thousands of dollars each before giving way to the ADE101, a similar device of his own design which similarly did absolutely nothing.

The original models had nothing on his later designs, including the ADE651, the high-end version sold to the Iraqi government in huge numbers during the occupation. The device included color-coded “sensor cards” that could supposedly allow the machine to be programmed to detect almost anything. The cards, as we reported in 2010, were pieces of plastic with a 5 cent RFID tag as their only electronics. The card reader was an empty plastic case with a slot for the card… and no electronics within.

Fascinating as all of this is, perhaps the most impressive aspect of this is that McCormick continues to insist in court that the devices actually do work, based on what he claims is “high school physics” but seems more a claim of magic.

McCormick says he put the “sensor cards” in sealed glass jars with whatever they were supposed to detect for a week, and they would “absorb the vapours” so that they would be able to detect them in the future. Needless to say, scientists say there is no basis for this claim.

US officials did something unprecedented last night, formally denying that they were behind a pair of drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Officials rarely claim credit in the first place, but to officially deny them is unheard of, especially with the administration claiming the power to launch such strikes with no oversight at any rate.

The overriding incident in this case is the ongoing battle to confirm drone enthusiast John Brennan, and since those strikes came during the hearings an unusual amount of attention was brought to them.

What’s the excuse though? The US is the only nation with drones over Pakistan, and so the officials speculated they might’ve been Pakistani war planes, as though tribesmen haven’t been hit with hundreds of drone strikes and weren’t able to tell the difference. Moreover, the Pakistani government has avoided using air power in North and South Waziristan for fear of riling up militant factions they have non-aggression pacts with. Pakistan is also rejecting the accusation.

Which demonstrates the difficulty of launching drone strikes in a nation where the government isn’t 100% on board and where, perhaps even more importantly, there are actual elections coming up. Such an issue never would’ve happened in the other drone zone, Yemen, where the US-backed rulers have long gone out of their way to cover up US attacks that kill civilians. The ruler, Maj. Gen. Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, was “elected” last year in an election in which no other candidate was allowed to run, and in which the “no” option wasn’t even put on the ballot. One nation, one candidate, one checkbox. Is it any wonder the US is presenting the Yemen model of “democracy” as something to be emulated throughout the region?