Imperial Progress

And Lo! It is only the willing who know, it is not the eagle which should symbolize American progress, but the Snowy Owl! The owl of the genus of bubo, the Knight of the right honorable Order of Strigiformes, Class of Aves, Prince of the Phylum Chordata of the Kingdom Animalia. This civilzed beast of such a noble lineage does not scavenge for its meal atop relics of old and antiquity! No! It does not prey on carrion from the sea who have given up their passion for life! It would not lower itself to such an uncivilized and dishonorable temper as the eagle has left in his wake of 231 years of laying waste to his hunting grounds.

No! The Snowy Owl does, what in glorious splendour any creature of virtue will, by its honour and grace, do. It will keep in waiting, leaving naught of its form visible, naught of its sound audible, yet all of its virtue laudable. It will let its prey run, unless to succumb to the skill of its hunt. It will live in its land unimpeded, yet integrated, no less perfect than the snowflakes of his nightly bedchamber, majestic, passionate, and deserving his rightful throne amongst the creatures of this kingdom of nature.

Progress knows only one creature as the exemplification of all in this world that is purely virtutous, and in accordance with coalition principles, The Snowy Owl would like to bestow, through his blessed patronage, his grace upon this coalition, making plain the desire to be a symbol of coalition forces for what time existence has hitherto placed us....

The Poor Are Doomed

The LOGIKBURRO hereby endorses the above video for all purposes private and public.

en-VY-rone-ment

Progress through Debate

The LOGIKBURRO hereby endorses the above video for all purposes private and public.

BUH-jy-nuh

On Iraq...

And Lo! He spoketh unto the willing...

"The war, that is, the hostile feeling and action of hostile agencies, cannot be considered as at an end as long as the will of the enemy is not subdued also; that is, its Government and its allies forced into signing a peace, or the people into submission; for whilst we are in full occupation of the country the war may break out afresh, either in the interior or through assistance given by allies. No doubt this may also take place after a peace, but that shows nothing more than that every war does not carry in itself the elements for a complete decision and final settlement."

-Karl Von Clausewitz

Perhaps the empire should have listened to the prussian military scholars...

Triumph Of The Grill

The Triumphant ones @ Planet 1516 are up to it again: This time its for real, yo. The Coalition would like to invite participants to participate in 'The Triumph of the Grill' pot luck BBQ on Friday April 20th beginning @ 7pm @ Planet 1516 @ Chicago @ Illinois @ U$A. Please be festive and remind yourselves that the organization needs no special thanks, only your devotion to anarchy and progress. And your meat.





and ummm munchies.

and alcoholic beverages. ummmmm yeah....



APPROVED BY THE LOGIKBURRO

Up All Night

The party on the 31st was indeed a success; a night of frivolity and
debauchery that will not soon be forgotten, A testament to the sublime
virtue or our glorious organization!...

The Haymarket Riot

INTRODUCTION

The events that took place in Chicago on May 4th, 1886 changed the world. Occurring during a summer of unprecedented labor organization, a bomb was thrown into a crowd of police, wounding dozens and killing eight. The public reaction to the event was felt the globe over, leading to the first ‘red scare’ in the United States, and crippling the labor movement’s struggle for the eight-hour workday. The trial that ensued ended in the hanging of four innocent men.

FRAMING THE SITUATION

Beginning well before May 1st 1886 labor in the United States was in turmoil. The Nation was recovering from its Civil War, a war fought over labor and a war that was won in favor of wage labor. Since the Civil War, the United States underwent what has been known as the ‘Second Industrial Revolution’, a period where the rebuilding of the United States in both the north and the south took on unprecedented proportions. Huge waves of immigrants from Europe flooded into America, this driving down labor prices and new technologies led to a lack of need for labor that had been previously skilled.

In Chicago, many of the immigrants had come from various German states, and the philosophies at the time had a great influence on the people who had been imported. Anarchy and communism were concepts (strongly influenced by German writers such as Marx) that were philosophically linked, however they had not yet had states of their own, and were at the time still theories to be proven. Much of the language in periodicals of the time speaks of communism and anarchy equally.

MAYDAY PARADE AND STRIKES

On May 1st 1886 thousands and thousands of people all over the United States took off of work in favor of an unprecedented nationwide strike in favor of many labor reforms but mainly the 8-hour workday. Marches, negotiations and strikes were reported from the following cities in The Chicago Daily Tribune: New York 20,000 rally, Milwaukee 5,000 strike, St. Louis (conflicts settled), Pittsburg 600 strike, Washington D.C. (individuals celebrated their 12-hour schedule in the streets), Rochester, N.Y. (began working 8 hour days), Cincinnati 600 strike, Sandusky 13 strike, Detroit between 250 and 300 strike, Philadelphia (negotiations continue) and Baltimore 2000 threaten strike. In Chicago between April 25th and May 4th workers attended many meetings and thousands walked off their jobs. On May 1st alone some 35,000 workers walked off their jobs to march in the streets, with at least 10,000 more joining them as the march went on.
At the McCormick Reaper Plant a long time strike ended on May 3rd when police opened fire on strikers killing at least two. Anarchists immediately circulated several flyers in response to the event, calling workers to rally for a protest meeting at the West Randolph Street Haymarket. One of these flyers had the title: “Revenge! Workingmen to Arms!”


RALLY AT HAYMARKET SQUARE

Mayor Carter H. Harrison attended the meeting that took place on the evening of May 4th 1886, and instructed the police not to disturb the meeting, and the meeting did remain peaceful until a speaker told the crowd to “Throttle” the law. It was then that 176 uniformed Chicago Police Officers ordered the meeting to disperse. It was at that moment that someone threw a bomb into the wall of police, which exploded, killing one officer instantly. The police reaction was to fire wildly back at the crowd, resulting in 60 officers being injured, eight killed, and an undetermined number of civilian casualties. The event galvanized fears that many in the business and government spheres had suspected, and Mayor Harrison immediately banned meetings and processions. Police were ordered to make picketing and publication of ‘Anarchist Literature’ impossible essentially barring printed or public speech of all but the major papers in the city, and those major papers printed literature matching the anarchists’ calls for revenge towards the anarchists. Most of the strikers had become demoralized, and only a few strikes continued after that.

TRIAL, EXECUTIONS AND PARDONS

In the aftermath of the bombing, the police arrested hundreds of people, but could not pin the thrower of the bomb. The trial that occurred after the arrests was one in the midst of a public seeking revenge. Eight anarchists: August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Michael Schwab, Samuel Fielden and Oscar Neebe: all prominent speakers and writers, and 5 of the 8 German immigrants, were tried for murder. The judge and all 12 jurors on the trial admitted prejudice against the defendants. Having no evidence that the tried were the bomb-throwers, or that they knew the bomb thrower, or that they had in any way planned to throw a bomb, the jury, instructed to adopt a conspiracy theory without any legal precedent, convicted all eight defendants. Seven of the eight were sentenced to death.
While many Americans felt that the decision against the convicted was wrong, legal appeals failed. Two of the death sentences were commuted, and on November 11, 1887, four of the defendants, Spies, Parsons, Fischer, and Engel were hanged together before a public audience in the Cook County Jail. The night before the hanging Louis Lingg committed suicide in his cell supposedly using a smuggled dynamite cap held in his mouth like a cigar (the blast disfigured his face and he lived in agony for several hours). Hundreds of thousands turned out for the funeral procession of the five dead men.

LEGACY

Over the years the legacy of Haymarket has had many consequences, whether they be for labor, industry, police action, anarchy or law, the event has come to be an icon of a profound moment of history where ordinary working men and women as well as captains of industry and everyone in-between can take a long hard look at many major problems in society.

-Since the event, socialists and unionists from around the world have celebrated May 1st as “International Workers Day” or “May Day”, in solidarity with the movement. American observance of the holiday was at its peak in the era before World War I, and due to ‘communist’ overtones lessened during the Cold War. Its popularity has risen since the 1980’s. In 2006, a May Day protest occurred across the United States (much like the protest in 1886) with 400,000 mostly Hispanic immigrants in Chicago alone protesting for immigrant’s rights.

-In 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld (a German-born American) granted the three remaining imprisoned defendants absolute pardon, citing lack of evidence and unfairness of the trial. In circles of law, the trial is considered to be one of the worst miscarriages of justice in American History, lending towards many of the anarchists’ claims about the law.

-The complicated nature of the conflict is exemplified by how the Haymarket Square itself has been memorialized over the years. In 1893 the Haymarket Martyrs Monument was constructed at Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park Illinois, where the four executed prisoners were buried. In 1997 it was dedicated a National Historic Landmark with a plaque. Also in 1889, a nine-foot bronze statue of a Chicago policeman was constructed in the Haymarket Square itself. On the 41st anniversary of the riot (May 4, 1927) a streetcar jumped tracks and hit the monument. It is unclear if this was deliberate by the driver. Then, in October 1969 an anti-United States terrorist organization called The Weather Underground bombed the statue, and within a year it had been rebuilt and bombed again supposedly by the same organization. A 24-hour police guard remained around the statue until 1972, when it was moved from the pedestal on which it stood to the grounds of the Chicago Police Academy. The pedestal remained for three decades known as ‘the Anarchist Landmark’. On March 25, 1992 a plaque was dedicated on the spot of the rally, and in 2004, a sculpture was placed on the spot where the original speakers wagon stood, it remains there to this day.

Bibliography:

Green, James. Death in the Haymarket. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006.
Ashbaugh, Carolyn. Lucy Parsons American Revolutionary. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1976.
Wade, Louise Carroll. Chicago’s Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown, and the Environs in the Nineteenth Century. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Sifakis, Carl. “John P. Altgeld and the Haymarket Riot.” The Encyclopedia of American Crime, Second Edition. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2001. Facts On File, Inc. American History Online. HYPERLINK "http://www.fofweb.com" www.fofweb.com.
Unknown Author. “For An Eight-Hour Day.” Chicago Daily Tribune (1872-1963); May 2, 1886: ProQuest Historical Newspapers Chicago Tribune (1849 – 1985) pg. 11.
Thale, Christopher. “Haymarket and May Day.” The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Ed. James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, Janice L Reiff. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
“Haymarket Riot.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Thursday March 8th, 2007, 10:53 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation. 8 March 2006 HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_Riot" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_Riot.

Pre-9/11 intelligence Policy On Terrorism

Intelligence is defined as "...the process and the result of gathering information and analyzing it to answer questions or obtain advance warnings needed to plan for the future." In the wake of the attacks on the 11th of September 2001, many questions were raised. How prepared was the US to handle this threat? Did the US intelligence community have enough information to act on this threat? Was the US intelligence policy on terrorism designed well enough before 9/11, and was it simply a matter of existing organizations communicating with each other? The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on these questions, as well to prove that : The US did have enough information to prevent the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but not the organizational or political initiative to act on these potential threats.
Terrorism is an ambiguous term usually used to describe a particular form of political violence. A terrorist or a terrorist action attempts to achieve a particular political or social goal through violence. A common way to identify a terrorist action is by six characteristics: Violence, Target, Objective, Motive, Perpetrator and Legitimacy. This definition excludes governments, organized crime, war crimes, and requires that any action labeled 'terrorist' be unlawful. Also Terrorism is divided into two groups: lone-wolf terrorists such as the Unibomber and Timothy McVeigh, and state sponsored terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and the Irish Republican Army.
The United States has been familiar with the threat of international terrorism before the 9/11 attacks. Throughout the 1970's and 1980's there were several airplane hijackings, and more specifically to the topic at hand, in three separate instances the US had direct encounters with Al-Qaeda. In 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed, in 1998 two embassies in Africa were bombed simultaneously, and in 1999 so was the USS Cole. In all three cases dealing with Al-Qaeda in the 1990's up until 9/11 there was never a paradigm shift in how the US dealt with international terrorism. It is important to point this out as policy is often determined by past conflict.
Policy determines what kind of intelligence is to be collected. Modern US intelligence is gathered in six steps. The steps are: planning and direction, collection, processing, analysis, dissemination and feedback. It is this very first step that determines what defines a policy problem and then all the other steps are logical ways to gather and present information on that problem. This means that policy makers are the ones in charge of what information is gathered in the first place because they have set the precedent for what is deemed a worthy issue. War, for example has precedent, and a long standing methodology as to how to go about engaging in war. Therefore the collection, processing, analysis, dissemination and feedback of information about foreign powers and foreign governments all comes to be because of a desire from the top leadership policy team to get information on foreign countries in order to prepare for / prevent war. Terrorism too, has precedent, however, the threats of terrorism before 9/11 were not met with the same tenacity as a leader would have gone about going to war.
Some facts stand out. In early 2001, the newly elected Bush administration did not have counter-terrorism high on its list of priorities. The intelligence community had known of Al-Qaeda itself as a terrorist organization since 1999, and even up until 1997 had considered Osama Bin Laden to be simply a financier of terrorism. This (in hindsight) may seem absurdly inadequate. To better understand how urgent threats are dealt with in the intelligence community, we need only look back to the year 1999.
The biggest terror threat immediately prior to 9/11 was the millennium new years festivities, known as the 'Millennium Crisis'. A slew of intelligence began to surface. On December 4th, a sleeper cell in Jordan was caught by Jordanian authorities, revealing detailed information on how Al-Qaeda operates. As a direct result of this, on December 8th the Counter-terrorism Security Group (CSG) set out to make plans to deter Al-Qaeda plots. By accident on December 14th a Jihadist was caught smuggling explosives into the US. This confirmed to the CSG that sleeper cells in the US and Canada were receiving instruction from Al-Qaeda members abroad (It was noted that while this plot was foiled, it probably did not create any significant dent in the operational ability of Al-Qaeda). As a result, the members of the CSG met daily, and higher members were meeting constantly. The sense of heightened urgency was felt all through the intelligence community. The new year went off without a hitch, but it was noted that the foiled attack was probably just the first of a planned string of attacks. All throughout the summer of 2000 and 2001 there were similar threats and intelligence acquisitions. Most notably, the Taliban government in Afghanistan was threatened to be eliminated if any Al-Qaeda attack occurred. In effect, while these were all warning signals to policy makers, no significant intelligence policy shift occurred.
A major source of failure to prevent 9/11 came on the part of how to deal with the foreign versus the domestic threat of terrorism. The attacks fell into the gap perceived to be a line between domestic and international terrorism. The foreign agencies were prepared and informing for an attack (like what had happened before in Yemen and Africa), and the domestic agencies were watching for sleeper cells within the US borders, but each bureau responsible for gathering information on their respective threats were not sharing information in a collective way with each other. The attacks that occurred were an intermestic affair, meaning that it was eventually foreigners who had infiltrated into the US who had committed these attacks.
In this way, the bureaucratic politics model of government explains the gap - policy has not been formulated with respect to any underlying conception of US national interest. Other forces interrupted the need to prevent terrorism. Competing smaller organizations and individuals did do their jobs, but in the end they did not have a singular unified plan.
The whole intelligence community could have been helped by external guidance and initiative from the president and other higher ranking individuals as to how to proceed in combating terrorism. One stated problem with intelligence gathering is how the information gathered is eventually used. Some have said that intelligence is often not used as a means for directing policy, but vice versa. This would assume a political agenda purported by politicians outside the realm of the intelligence community, that would guide the fundamental first step in intelligence gathering. It could certainly be argued that evidence of this concept is notable in the summer of 2001, and the failure to act on information coming in from various agencies. It could also be conceded that without major precedent (like the events of 9/11) that few policy makers could perceive the threat of intermestic terror to be that real. However, this might have been prevented (in the case of 9/11) by a centralization of communication, and a single strong unified message brought to the president and other policy makers.
Altogether, while the information gathered by various agencies had completed their own goals of information gathering, in terms of combating terrorism it was fragmented and did not complete a whole. Our policy was shaped by the bureaucratic politics model of policy - making. The US intelligence community had not received enough go-ahead style initiative from higher authority to act in a manner needed to prevent the attacks on 9/11.





Bibliography:
1.) Source:
Egendorf, Laura K. Terrorism : Opposing Viewpoints. Greenhaven Press, Inc. 2000.
ISBN 0-7377-0136-6
2.) Source:
Strasser, Steven. The 9/11 Investigations. PublicAffairs LLC 2004.
ISBN 1-58648-279-3
3.) Source:
Nadelmann, Ethan A. Cops Across Borders. The Pennsylvania State University Press 1993.
ISBN 0-271-01095-9
4.) Source:
US Government Publication. The 9/11 Commission Report. W.W. Norton & Company Inc. 2004.
ISBN 0-393-32671-3
5.) Source:
Hastedt, Glenn P. American Foreign Policy: Past, Present, Future. 6th ed. Pearson Prentice Hall 2006.
ISBN 0-13-193069-9
6.) Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_%28information_gathering%29, 2005.