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Sunday 3 June 2012

American drone wars and state secrecy!

How Barack Obama became a hardliner?

He was once a liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war. Now, according to revelations last week, the US president personally oversees a 'kill list' for drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan. Then there's the CIA renditions, increased surveillance and a crackdown on whistleblowers. No wonder Washington insiders are likening him to 'George W Bush on steroids'

Barack Obama
The revelation that Barack Obama keeps a 'kill list' of people to be targeted by drones has led to criticism from former supporters. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP



Amos Guiora knows all about the pitfalls of targeted assassinations, both in terms of legal process and the risk of killing the wrong people or causing civilian casualties. The University of Utah law professor spent many years in the Israel Defence Forces, including time as a legal adviser in the Gaza Strip where such killing strikes are common. He knows what it feels like when people weigh life-and-death decisions.

Yet Guiora – no dove on such matters – confessed he was "deeply concerned" about President Barack Obama's own "kill list" of terrorists and the way they are eliminated by missiles fired from robot drones around the world. He believes US policy has not tightly defined how people get on the list, leaving it open to legal and moral problems when the order to kill leaves Obama's desk. "He is making a decision largely devoid of external review," Guiroa told the Observer, saying the US's apparent methodology for deciding who is a terrorist is "loosey goosey".

Indeed, newspaper revelations last week about the "kill list" showed the Obama administration defines a militant as any military-age male in the strike zone when its drone attacks. That has raised the hackles of many who saw Obama as somehow more sophisticated on terrorism issues than his predecessor, George W Bush. But Guiora does not view it that way. He sees Obama as the same as Bush, just much more enthusiastic when it comes to waging drone war. "If Bush did what Obama has been doing, then journalists would have been all over it," he said.

But the "kill list" and rapidly expanded drone programme are just two of many aspects of Obama's national security policy that seem at odds with the expectations of many supporters in 2008. Having come to office on a powerful message of breaking with Bush, Obama has in fact built on his predecessor's national security tactics.

Obama has presided over a massive expansion of secret surveillance of American citizens by the National Security Agency. He has launched a ferocious and unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. He has made more government documents classified than any previous president. He has broken his promise to close down the controversial Guantánamo Bay prison and pressed on with prosecutions via secretive military tribunals, rather than civilian courts. He has preserved CIA renditions. He has tried to grab broad new powers on what defines a terrorist or a terrorist supporter and what can be done with them, often without recourse to legal process.

The sheer scope and breadth of Obama's national security policy has stunned even fervent Bush supporters and members of the Washington DC establishment. In last week's New York Times article that detailed the "kill list", Bush's last CIA director, Michael Hayden, said Obama should open the process to more public scrutiny. "Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a [Department of Justice] safe," he told the newspaper.

Even more pertinently, Aaron David Miller, a long-term Middle East policy adviser to both Republican and Democratic administrations, delivered a damning verdict in a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine. He wrote bluntly: "Barack Obama has become George W Bush on steroids."

Many disillusioned supporters would agree. Jesselyn Radack was a justice department ethics adviser under Bush who became a whistleblower over violations of the legal rights of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh. Now Radack works for the Government Accountability Project, defending fellow whistleblowers. She campaigned for Obama, donated money and voted for him. Now she has watched his administration – which promised transparency and whistleblower protection – crack down on national security whistleblowers.

It has used the Espionage Act – an obscure first world war anti-spy law – six times. That is more such uses in three years than all previous presidents combined. Cases include John Kiriakou, a CIA agent who leaked details of waterboarding, and Thomas Drake, who revealed the inflated costs of an NSA data collection project that had been contracted out. "We did not see this coming. Obama has led the most brutal crackdown on whistleblowers ever," Radack said.

Yet the development fits in with a growing level of secrecy in government under Obama. Last week a report by the Information Security Oversight Office revealed 2011 had seen US officials create more than 92m classified documents: the most ever and 16m more than the year before. Officials insist much of the growth is due to simple administrative procedure, but anti-secrecy activists are not convinced. Some estimates put the number of documents wrongly classified as secret at 90%.

"We are seeing the reversal of the proper flow of information between the government and the governed. It is probably the fundamental civil liberties issue of our time," said Elizabeth Goitein, a national security expert at the Brennan Centre for Justice. "The national security establishment is getting bigger and bigger."

One astonishing example of this lies high in the mountain deserts of Utah. This is the innocuously named Utah Data Centre being built for the NSA near a tiny town called Bluffdale. When completed next year, the heavily fortified $2bn building, which is self-sufficient with its own power plant, will be five times the size of the US Capitol in Washington DC. It will house gigantic servers that will store vast amounts of data from ordinary Americans that will be sifted and mined for intelligence clues. It will cover everything from phone calls to emails to credit card receipts.

Yet the UDC is just the most obvious sign of how the operations and scope of the NSA has grown since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Under Bush, a key part was a secret "warrantless wiretapping" programme that was scrapped when it was exposed. However, in 2008 Congress passed a bill that effectively allowed the programme to continue by simply legalising key components. Under Obama, that work has intensified and earlier this year a Senate intelligence committee extended the law until 2017, which would make it last until the end of any Obama second term.

"Obama did not reverse what Bush did, he went beyond it. Obama is just able to wrap it up in a better looking package. He is more liberal, more eloquent. He does not look like a cowboy," said James Bamford, journalist and author of numerous books about the NSA including 2008's The Shadow Factory.

That might explain the lack of media coverage of Obama's planned changes to a military funding law called the National Defence Authorisation Act. A clause was added to the NDAA that had such a vague definition of support of terrorism that journalists and political activists went to court claiming it threatened them with indefinite detention for things like interviewing members of Hamas or WikiLeaks. Few expected the group to win, but when lawyers for Obama refused to definitively rebut their claims, a New York judge ruled in their favour. Yet, far from seeking to adjust the NDAA's wording, the White House is now appealing against the decision.

That hard line should perhaps surprise only the naive. "He's expanded the secrecy regime in general," said Radack. Yet it is the drone programme and "kill list" that have emerged as most central to Obama's hardline national security policy. In January 2009, when Obama came to power, the drone programme existed only for Pakistan and had seen 44 strikes in five years. With Obama in office it expanded to Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia with more than 250 strikes. Since April there have been 14 strikes in Yemen alone.

Civilian casualties are common. Obama's first strike in Yemen killed two families who were neighbours of the target. One in Pakistan missed and blew up a respected tribal leader and a peace delegation. He has deliberately killed American citizens, including the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in September last year, and accidentally killed others, such as Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdul-Rahman.

The drone operation now operates out of two main bases in the US, dozens of smaller installations and at least six foreign countries. There are "terror Tuesday" meetings to discuss targets which Obama's campaign manager, David Axelrod, sometimes attends, lending credence to those who see naked political calculation involved.

Yet for some, politics seems moot. Obama has shown himself to be a ruthless projector of national security powers at home and abroad, but the alternative in the coming election is Republican Mitt Romney.

"Whoever gets elected, whether it's Obama or Romney, they are going to continue this very dangerous path," said Radack. "It creates a constitutional crisis for our country. A crisis of who we are as Americans. You can't be a free society when all this happens in secret."

Death from the sky

• Popularly called drones, the flying robots used by Obama are referred to as unmanned aerial vehicles by the defence industry that makes them. The air force, however, calls them RPAs, or remotely piloted aircraft, as they are flown by human pilots, just at a great distance from where they are operating.

• The US air force alone has up to 70,000 people processing the surveillance information collected from drones. This includes examining footage of people and vehicles on the ground in target countries and trying to observe patterns in their movements.

• Drones are not just used by the military and intelligence community. US Customs and Border Protection has drones patrolling land and sea borders. They are used in drug busts and to prevent illegal cross-border traffic.

• It is assumed the Pentagon alone has 7,000 or so drones at work. Ten years ago there were fewer than 50. Their origins go back to the Vietnam war and beyond that to the use of reconnaissance balloons on the battlefield.

• Last year a diplomatic crisis with Iran broke out after a sophisticated US drone, the RQ-170 Sentinel, crash-landed on Iranian soil. Iranian forces claimed it had been downed by sophisticated jamming technology.

Saturday 2 June 2012

Good strategy statement towards successful business

When a statement is more than just words


IT has been a good morning. After a nice walk through the Bukit Kiara Forest Reserve with my wife, we drove over to our favourite noodle soup stall in Taman Tun for breakfast.

I have been strategically rehabilitating my taste buds since I came back. From the home cooked chicken rendang upon arrival to the fried tenggiri at Raju's the next morning, recovery has been slow but fruitful. I am relearning how to enjoy my food once again, a bite at a time. Forever an optimist, I believe I just need another 10 meals before I attain full recovery.

After a nasi padang lunch of multiple dishes with my colleagues, I was drawn back to a lecture on strategy by Prof Cynthia Montgomery when she asked us whether we know the difference between Mission Statement, Company Values, Vision Statement and Strategy Statement.

The corporate boys from the big organisations were ecstatic. Like national anthems, they memorised each and every line of each and every kind of corporate statement and they sounded like they truly understood what they all mean. Meanwhile, I was lost and confused.

To a small entrepreneur like me, all the statements and visions can be combined into one. Like eating nasi campur without the curry. No clear idea, no understanding and no taste.

Without confusing you to death, I suggest you keep your life simple by just focusing on developing a Strategy Statement for your business and making sure it is a good one. Your statement should cover objective, scope and advantage.

Objective is the definition of the ends that the strategy is trying to achieve.

Scope is the domain of the business: the part of the landscape where the business will operate.

Advantage is your competitive advantage: what sets your business apart and what you will do differently from other competitors to achieve your objective.

As an exercise, let us try to define a Strategy Statement for National Feedlot Corporation (NFC) in not more than 35 words.

“We aim to replace 40% of beef imports into Malaysia through an integrated supply chain of local breeders and centralised meat processing to ensure consistent supply of fresh quality beef (at a lower price) to the rakyat.”

Since we need to squeeze the sentence into not more than 35 words, you can take out “(at a lower price).”

Anyway, on the strength of that Strategic Statement alone, any government in the world will gladly grant a RM250mil loan at 2% interest rate. And if the NFC had put those words into action, it would have benefited the company and the rakyat of the nation. Fresher less frozen beef and possibly at a lower price.

What if the NFC had to come up with a Mission Statement (Why we exist), Company Values (What we believe in and how we will behave), and Vision Statement (What we want to be)?

The existence of NFC must have originated from a brilliant analysis on beef supply. Notwithstanding the fact that cows bred in Malaysia tend to sweat in our tropical weather thus being less meaty compared with colder climate cows.

No comments on Company Values and Vision Statement as condominium ownership do not exactly fit into any of the statements.

Oh! I forgot to mention that the Hierarchy of Company Statements also include a Balanced Scorecard (How we will monitor and implement that plan). You be the judge.

For those of you who want to read more into the Hierarchy of Company Statements, the recommended reading is Can you say what your strategy is? by David J Collis and Michael G Rukstad, Harvard Business Review April 2008. It is a great article which if you understand will help you craft a great business plan with clear strategies that will serve as a guiding light throughout your corporation's journey.

But if you have a simple mind like me, then a well worded Strategic Statement will suffice. With just a 35 word statement, you would have clarity as to the end point you want to achieve within a certain timeframe. You will also define the landscape in which you want your business to operate. Lastly, you will know what competitive advantage your business will have to help you achieve your objectives.

So, if you are starting a new business, try to put up a 35 word Strategy Statement on what your new business is all about. Words that will lead to action. But do spend more time to develop these few words that truly capture your strategy. Words that will energise and empower your people who will raise the long term financial performance of your organisation.

Writing so many words have made me hungry again. Should I have fresh Malaysian beef rendang or against my doctor's advice, a full banana leaf meal? Suffering from jet lag and blurred vision, my food mission will have to be abandoned. I will head home for a simple meal of porridge with ikan bilis and salted eggs.

The writer is an entrepreneur who hopes to share his experience and insights with readers who want to take that giant leap into business but are not sure if they should. Email him at thtan@alliancecosmetics.com

Japan's Politics Favoring a Regional FTA over TPP?

It is easy to misapprehend Japanese politics.  It is hard—to put it mildly—to correctly apprehend them.   I say misapprehend, rather than misunderstand, Japan’s politics because the problem is not so much interpretation of information as of one of limited and biased sources of information.

Sad to say, if you don’t have Japanese and aren’t listening to and reading the Japanese media, you can simply give up thinking that any judgment you make is based on meaningfully representative information.  But even if you do follow matters in Japanese, it is hard to avoid finding one’s judgment biased by the fact that only Japan’s big business community—whose organ is the Nihon Keizai Shimbun—seems to speak on any issue clearly and with one voice.  The trap is allowing oneself to think that the Nikkei’s advocacy—because clear and forceful—holds more sway in the political process than that of a host of other interest groups, or that Japan’s political process is particularly responsive to big business.

I say this by way of apology and no doubt excuse for what I have suggested in the past is the “slam dunk” logic of Japan’s entering the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations, or of meeting any ostensible deadlines for doing so, or of TTP being one of the highest priorities of the Noda government, and that accession to an agreement is critical to Japan’s future.

During the past month, and for at least the next few weeks, the Noda government—and Prime Minister Noda personally—have been engaged in a raucous and exhausting debate with dissident members of its own ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) as well as the opposition parties, led by the Liberal Democrats (LDP), over legislation to raise Japan’s consumption tax from 5% to 10%.  Noda has said many times that he is staking his political life on passage of the consumption tax rise, so vital does he believe it is to putting Japan back on a path to fiscal soundness and avoiding a Greece-like crisis.

Noda’s policy stance on the consumption tax is exactly that of Japan’s big business establishment, and the editorial pages of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun.   What about TPP—along with the consumption tax hike, a cause celebre of the Nikkei?  In fact, the trade agreement seems to have slipped completely off the agenda, at least for the time being.  Why—if it is so critical—might this be the case?

In answering this question I am indebted to an exceptionally insightful analysis by Professor Aurelia George Mulgan of the University of New South Wales in Australia recently posted in the East Asian Forum (website: eastasiaforum.org).  Apart from the obvious point that presently Noda has no spare political capital to invest in TPP, Professor Mulgan notes that “Japan’s record on signing Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) is not promising.  As a general rule, Japan prefers signing FTAs with non-agricultural exporting powers, rather than with powerhouses like Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S….  Japan has not signed trade agreements with its major trading partners or with developed countries (except for Switzerland in 2009); and it has preferred developing countries instead because it asks them to accept a lower trade liberalization rate with exceptions for some agricultural product.”

Professor Mulgan elaborates on why TPP is stalled, and may be doomed, in Japan.  I want to relate his many insights in a future post.  Now I will focus on one more; he writes:

“PM Noda has argued that by joining the TPP Japan ‘can absorb the Asia Pacific’s growth power’, but this argument is flawed because…China, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines, are not in it.”

While TPP may be going nowhere, Professor Mulgan believes that Japan will “continue to push the Japan-China-South Korea FTA proposal, which was boosted by Noda’s recent trip to Beijing.”  In fact, at the tripartite meeting in Beijing Noda suffered another humiliating snub as Hu Jintao refused to meet one-on-one with him.  Speculation was briefly rife in the Japanese press as to why this happened.  But the buzz quickly passed, as snubs from Beijing seem recently to be the rule rather than the exception.

As readers of this blog know, I believe that the China-centric Asian regional economic and trade integration is an overriding mega-trend shaping and redefining Japan’s future.

Despite the Nikkei’s advocacy, movement toward TPP has stalled.    Very likely, where Japan’s varied political interests are aligning is toward a Japan-China-Korea FTA.

Stephen Harner
Stephen Harner, Forbes Contributor


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You are guilty until you prove yourself innocent in cyberspace, right?

Write or not, you can be wrong!

It is absolutely right that we be held responsible for what we post and say in cyberspace. But only if we indeed are the ones who wrote and posted it. 

SOME years ago, a nephew – a freshie in college then – walked over to me with his phone and pointed out an app he had. It was all in Russian, so it was pretty much Greek to me.

“Watch this,” he said, and fiddled with the keys. Seconds later, my phone rang. It was my wife.

But the wife was sitting across the table, all innocent-like and with her handphone safely ensconced in one of those tie-string cloth bags – inside her handbag (why they do that with handphones, I will never understand).

So, I stared at the nephew. He grinned. It was an app, he said, that could tap into any phone nearby and make a call out, using that number. You got to chat and someone else got the bill.

Cyber fun: This file picture shows a group of people patronising a cybercafe in Petaling Jaya. Someone could very easily walk into a place like this, hack into a person’s account and do something nasty.
 
“Do you want it? I can bluetooth it over to your phone,” he asked, oh so generously.

No thanks, I said, I can pay my bills without having to land someone else with the burden.

That was years ago and with a phone that’s nowhere as canggih as the ones to be found these days. These days, I am told, kids can do just about anything with their phones and computers or tablets.

Which is why the story of the new Evidence Act is quite scary for people like me. You see, anything posted on, say, your Facebook account is now your responsibility (as it should be, if you really did post it) and the real scary part is: you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent.

I’m no wonderkid and I am still trying to figure out what all this means but the doctrine of being guilty until proven innocent just doesn’t sit right.

Sure, some friends tell me that IP addresses are infallible and unique but these days, tech guys can do just about anything.

And what if some guy goes into a cybercafé, hacks into my computer and does some nasty stuff. Do I take the fall?

I mean, I’m the guy who grew up with stuff like The Net, where Sandra Bullock’s character has her identity stolen and loses just about everything. Of course, in the movie, she’s this IT-savvy girl-genius who manages to outdo the bad guys. But this is the real world. The bad guys often win!

And even Datin Paduka Marina Mahathir (she needs no introduction) had to make clear a few days ago that some imposter (im-poster, how apt) was posting stuff in her name.

Sure, there’s a need to regulate what’s being said in social media these days. I tell you, it’s a real rancorous country out there these days.

We’ve had a yellow rally, a red rally, big guys with beef burgers, bigger guys going bottoms up (with warm water please, no isotonic drinks. Someone should tell them that bottoms up is best done with the hard stuff), even punch-ups and egg-throwing fests.

And all that rancour is turning into a lot of venom and seditious, defamatory stuff that’s being spewed anonymously on the Net.

It doesn’t have to be all politics, either.

There was this model who was rubbed the wrong way, quite literally, by some guy in a cybercafe. And a few other guys had heckled her and made catcalls in Tamil.

If she is expecting catcalls in Hindi, Urdu, Telegu or Malayalam from Indian-looking guys in Malaysia, she has a long wait coming.

Most Indian-looking guys here speak Tamil and many do make cat-calls at pretty, young Indian-looking woman.

I don’t know where this woman’s ancestors came from in India but since the guys spoke in Tamil, she decided she hated the Tamils and went on a hate-spree on Facebook.

Of course, that angered other Tamils, whose only crime was trolling the Net. And they went after her with a real vengeance.

The poor woman had to apologise in a newspaper, saying she meant to scold only those guys who had hurt her.

That is the problem with the social media. It’s one thing to grumble to friends about others, but another altogether to go about hate-mongering on the Net.

This model is not alone. Some years ago, another woman – a snatch theft victim, I think – also went on a racist rant after her ordeal.

She, too, received several angry retorts before being forced to apologise.

So, it is important that we stop to think about what we want to write in cyberspace.

And I believe it is absolutely right that we be held responsible for what we post and say. But only if we indeed are the ones who wrote and posted it. But guilty until proven innocent? I’ll definitely take a rain check on that.

> The law comes into effect June 1, 2012 but the writer hopes that lawmakers will take another look at it, although he has no solutions to offer. It’s over to the techies, really.


Why Not? By D. RAJ

Related post:

Bridging the rich-poor gap in Singapore

The recent pay increases are seen by some Singaporeans as a step forward, but critics view them as tweaking, rather than resolving, a fundamental problem.

WHEN Cabinet ministers took turns to rebuff a proposal to push up salaries of lowly-paid workers, most Singaporeans viewed it as good as buried.

Given the strict way the government is run, the revolutionary idea raised by former state economic adviser Professor Lim Chong Yah might well have faced the death sentence.

His think-out-of-the-box way of narrowing the economic gap called for the salaries of low-level workers to be raised by 50% over three years, and those at the top-end be frozen for a similar period.

The widening gap between rich and poor is becoming one of the most pressing problems here today. It threatens Singapore’s social fabric despite its strong GDP growth.

To the PAP, Prof Lim’s suggestion probably smacks too much of socialism.

But according to the professor, this land of record millionaires needs such a solution because it has for years been significantly under-paying its poorer workers.

The rich are becoming richer, and the poor poorer, not the best way to win votes.

The Boston Consulting Group said that 15.5% of Singapore households have at least S$1mil (RM2.4mil) in liquid assets, the highest percentage in the world.

But the earnings of the city’s 20% lowest paid had declined during the past 10 years.

The unequal growth was not due to globalisation or technological change, but the mass influx of foreign workers in the past 10 years, said prominent diplomat Prof Tommy Koh.

He said Singapore had a per capita income similar to Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, yet cleaners in these countries were paid some seven times more than those in Singapore.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s response to Prof Lim was a firm “no” and said such pay increases must be matched by a rise in productivity.

That is virtually impossible as this growth slowed to an average 1% a year in the past decade.

However, I’m glad no one said “never” to Prof Lim. Due to the seriousness of the problem, it is unlikely any leader can swear that the concept will not be relooked at one day.

In fact, since Prof Lim’s controversial suggestion, a series of steep pay increases resembling — and even exceeding — his suggestion has been announced — although only for a duration of one year.

Prof Lim’s proposal was for an average of 16%-17% a year for a consecutive three years.

The recent ones included the following:

> SMRT announced that it was raising bus drivers’ salaries by 35%, but for a six- instead of five-day week.

> Public health workers, including nurses, will have had increases of up to 17% from last month.

> Social workers can expect pay rises of up to 15% this year.

> NTUC, the large union movement, announced that non-executive staff will get up to 15.8% in wage increment and adjustment.

> Several thousand junior and mid-level civil servants will get pay increases of between 5% and 15% this year.

The increases are, of course, unconnected to Prof Lim’s proposal but some observers believe the government is worried over, and may be responding to, the growing public unhappiness about stagnant salaries.

In its way, the job market seems to be lending support to Prof Lim’s proposed measures. The economic imbalance is the second worse in the world, next only to Hong Kong.

But Premier Lee disagreed.

“Although we want our workers to earn more, we cannot simply push up Singaporean wages as we would like,” he wrote on his Facebook page.

“The only way for our workers to do better is to compete on knowledge and innovation, upgrade our skills, and stay ahead of the pack.”

Critics, however, say this is near crisis time and it is not sufficient for the premier to stick to a conventional approach.

Meanwhile, the national wages advisory council, of which Prof Lim is former chairman, has for the first time since 1984 recommended a minimum quantum of pay raise.

It suggested S$50 (RM120) plus an unspecified percentage for workers earning less than S$1,000 (RM2,400) a month.

Although critics say it is a far cry from what is needed, it is apparently aimed at drawing a minimum line.
The authorities have always rejected calls for a minimum wage in Singapore.

Ryan Ong of Yahoo Moneysmart commented: “No offence and all, but that’s about as helpful as a pair of blunt scissors.

“I guarantee a whole bunch of companies are already reading ‘unspecified percentage’ as ‘nothing’.”

Some Singaporeans welcome the recent pay increases as a step forward but critics view them as tweaking, rather than resolving, a fundamental problem.

But as the debate flows, a dark shadow is appearing on the horizon that can worsen the situation and threaten any prospect of strong pay increases.

The global economy appears to be slowing down as it faces woes from Europe, which Singapore has strongly invested in, and an economic slowdown in China.

More employers are likely to become more concerned about avoiding being pulled down rather than how much to raise staff salaries.

A local daily reported that some industries, including shipping, are already feeling the pinch from the slowing Western markets.

Some are planning measures to reduce costs or retrench workers as a short term solution, TODAY reported.

This puts the squeeze on the government’s social compact of promising jobs and a reasonable living standard to Singaporeans in return for their political support.

The grounds at home and abroad are becoming tougher for everyone.

INSIGHT: DOWN SOUTH By SEAH CHIANG NEE
cnseah05@hotmail.com 


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Mar 17, 2012