Author Archives: News Sources

Don’t break the internet

At Stanford Law Review, Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post, write: Two bills now pending in Congress—the PROTECT IP Act of 2011 (Protect IP) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House—represent the latest legislative attempts to address a serious global problem: large-scale online copyright and trademark infringement. Although the bills differ in certain respects, they share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression.

To begin with, the bills represent an unprecedented, legally sanctioned assault on the Internet’s critical technical infrastructure. Based upon nothing more than an application by a federal prosecutor (or, in certain circumstances, an intellectual property rights holder) alleging that a foreign website is “dedicated to infringing activities,” Protect IP authorizes courts to order all U.S. Internet service providers, domain name registries, domain name registrars, and operators of domain name servers—a category that includes hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, and the like—to take steps to prevent the offending site’s domain name from translating to the correct Internet protocol address. These orders can be issued even when the domains in question are located outside of the United States and registered in top-level domains (e.g., .fr, .de, or .jp) whose operators are themselves located outside the United States; indeed, some of the bills’ remedial provisions are directed solely at such domains.

Directing the remedial power of the courts towards the Internet’s core technical infrastructure in this sledgehammer fashion has impact far beyond intellectual property rights enforcement—it threatens the fundamental principle of interconnectivity that is at the very heart of the Internet. The Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) is a foundational block upon which the Internet has been built and upon which its continued functioning critically depends; it is among a handful of protocols upon which almost every other protocol, and countless Internet applications, rely to operate smoothly. Court-ordered removal or replacement of entries from the series of interlocking databases that reside in domain name servers and domain name registries around the globe undermines the principle of domain name universality—the principle that all domain name servers, wherever they may be located across the network, will return the same answer when queried with respect to the Internet address of any specific domain name. Much Internet communication, and many of the thousands of protocols and applications that together provide the platform for that communication, are premised on this principle.

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Saudi prince invests $300 million in Twitter

Owning three percent of Twitter might not amount to a controlling stake, but when the Saudis start investing in social media you can bet that making money is not their only interest.

The New York Times reports: Prince Walid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia announced a $300 million stake in the social media site Twitter, as the billionaire expands his holdings in the United States.

The investment by Prince Walid and his investment company, Kingdom Holding, represents roughly 3 percent of the company. Prince Walid, who owns 95 percent of Kingdom Holding, said in a statement that the purchase was part of a strategy “to invest in promising, high-growth businesses with a global impact.”

With Twitter, Prince Walid — who also own stakes in American blue chip companies including Citigroup, General Motors and Apple — gains a foothold in the fast-growing social networking space. The microblogging service, which has more than 100 million active users, is part of an elite group of Internet companies that have rapidly attracted users in recent years and that have garnered multi-billion dollar valuations.

Twitter has been increasingly popular in the Arab world, where it was credited with playing a role in the recent uprisings across North Africa and the Gulf. Arabic is now the fastest growing language used on Twitter, according to the data intelligence company Semiocast. The volume of Arabic messages increased by 2,146 percent in the 12 months ending in October.

“We believe that social media will fundamentally change the media industry landscape in the coming years. Twitter will capture and monetize this positive trend,” Ahmed Reda Halawani, Kingdom Holding’s executive director of private equity and international investments, said in a statement.

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Egyptian army targets women protesters

Egyptian army soldiers beat a woman protester

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports: Local human rights watchdogs on Sunday accused the Egyptian military of systematically targeting female political activists, and demanded that Egypt’s military rulers admit to violations committed against demonstrators.

In a joint statement, five human rights organizations accused military rulers of exercising “unprecedented violence against protesters, with the targeting of female activists being a distinctive feature of the proceedings to disperse sit-ins, as depicted in pictures and video clips showing protesters being arrested, beaten, dragged and stripped of their clothes.”

In this video, army soldiers are seen beating an older female activist named Khadiga al-Hennawy.

While this video shows army soldiers dragging, beating and striping a female protester in the street.

The statement was signed by Nazra for Feminist Studies, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, the Hisham Mubarak Law Center and the Women and Memory Association.

They also called for the establishment of an independent judicial committee to investigate crimes against peaceful protestors.

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The battle for Upper Egypt

Lauren E. Bohn writes: Assiut feels far away from the famed epicenter of Tahrir Square. The oft-neglected peripheral region of Upper Egypt (the cultivated valley of the Nile from Cairo in the north to Aswan, 535 miles south) has been plagued by institutional apathy for years, long dismissed as a dead-end, from where one travels to the capital for work and never returns. When Egypt’s contentious de-facto leaders, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), speak of a silent but loyal majority, or “liberals,” fret about the backward religious and violence-prone rural areas, they have cities like Assiut in mind. But the reality is far more complicated. Assiut and Tahrir are bound together by personal connections and shared concerns — inextricable ties that suggest a far more nuanced emerging Egypt than is generally felt from the central nerve of Cairo.

The new Assiut, which prides itself on being the capital of Upper Egypt, features a distinct pastiche of Salafis, felool, or remnants (a word used to describe holdovers from the Mubarak era), the popular Muslim Brotherhood, a smattering of activists, and a vaguely Egyptian brand of tribalism. Officials from the Mubarak era still cling to power, while Tahrir’s activists find few points of entry into a skeptical environment. Outside the city’s few main streets, Assiut’s mustard-hazed landscape is home to 3.5 million people spread throughout some 1,000 villages. With 24 parliamentary seats, it was a major target, and now bellwether, in the new electoral competition reshaping Egyptian politics.

Though some activists will tell you they had their own “Tahrir Square” in Assiut, by and large, the countryside remained marginally engaged with the uprisings that took Cairo by hold. Protestors continue to call for a prompt end to military rule, blaming SCAF for their inept, and even malevolent, handling of Egypt’s transition to democracy. But, it is easy to find indifference or even hostility to ongoing protests in places where most people get their news from a largely pro-SCAF state television and almost nobody has access to follow revolutionaries on Twitter. Ayad Hamza, 46, a barber in the small village of Ezbet El Geish dismisses Tahrir as a farce. “These kids are stupid. They have nothing else to do but cause trouble,” he said, mopping his cracked floor. “It’s not a revolution they’re making, but a nightmare.” This is the kind of sentiment SCAF has been banking on — one they say resonates in Egypt. But it misses important linkages between the periphery and the political battles waged in Cairo, and naively exaggerates their indifference.

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Bleak future for returning U.S. veterans

The Economist reports: Brett Quinzon did two tours in Iraq before leaving active duty in May. Originally from Minnesota, Mr Quinzon now lives in Thomaston, a small town around 65 miles south of Atlanta. A grey December morning found him filling out forms in Atlanta’s large veterans’ hospital, seeking treatment for depression. Since returning from Iraq, he says he has “more anger issues”, and finds himself “more watchful and on-guard in public situations” than he was before he deployed. That is not unusual: many soldiers return from the battlefield with psychological scars. Between January and May, as he prepared to leave active duty, Mr Quinzon applied for hundreds of jobs. The search proved difficult: like many veterans, he enlisted right after high-school, and lacks a college degree. But persistence paid off. He is now an apprentice at a heating and air-conditioning company, and is being trained as a heavy-equipment operator.

Not all recent veterans are so lucky. Around 800,000 veterans are jobless, 1.4m live below the poverty line, and one in every three homeless adult men in America is a veteran. Though the overall unemployment rate among America’s 21m veterans in November (7.4%) was lower than the national rate (8.6%), for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan it was 11.1%. And for veterans between the ages of 18 and 24, it was a staggering 37.9%, up from 30.4% just a month earlier.

If demography is indeed destiny, perhaps this figure should not be surprising. More soldiers are male than female, and the male jobless rate exceeds women’s. Since so many soldiers lack a college degree, the fact that the recession has been particularly hard on the less educated hits veterans disproportionately. Large numbers of young veterans work—or worked—in stricken industries such as manufacturing and construction. Whatever the cause, this bleak trend is occurring as the last American troops leave Iraq at the end of this year, and as more than 1m new veterans are expected to join the civilian labour force over the next four years.

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How to halt the expansion of inequality in the U.S.

Former Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis once said, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

Professors Ian Ayres and Aaron S. Edlin say we have reached the Brandeis tipping point. Yet even while acknowledging this level of inequality undermines democracy, rather than try to reverse the trend, they propose a mechanism that would simply cap it. I guess this falls under the category, better than nothing.

What we call the Brandeis Ratio — the ratio of the average income of the nation’s richest 1 percent to the median household income — has skyrocketed since Ronald Reagan took office. In 1980 the average 1-percenter made 12.5 times the median income, but in 2006 (the latest year for which data is available) the average income of our richest 1 percent was a whopping 36 times greater than that of the median household.

Brandeis understood that at some point the concentration of economic power could undermine the democratic requisite of dispersed political power. This concern looms large in today’s America, where billionaires are allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money on their own campaigns or expressly advocating the election of others.

We believe that we have reached the Brandeis tipping point. It would be bad for our democracy if 1-percenters started making 40 or 50 times as much as the median American.

Enough is enough. Congress should reform our tax law to put the brakes on further inequality. Specifically, we propose an automatic extra tax on the income of the top 1 percent of earners — a tax that would limit the after-tax incomes of this club to 36 times the median household income.

Importantly, our Brandeis tax does not target excessive income per se; it only caps inequality. Billionaires could double their current income without the tax kicking in — as long as the median income also doubles. The sky is the limit for the rich as long as the “rising tide lifts all boats.” Indeed, the tax gives job creators an extra reason to make sure that corporate wealth does in fact trickle down.

The New York Times reports on the property market for those with ‘infinite money’: Pierre Buljan guided his black Mercedes S.U.V. around the winding roads of the Hillsborough hills and into Atherton, where the mansions of Silicon Valley technology barons hide behind thick stone walls, wrought-iron gates and tall, manicured hedges.

“These people have essentially infinite money,” said Mr. Buljan, who has been a Realtor on the Peninsula for more than 30 years. He pointed at a sloping four-acre property that included a large redwood grove with a private creek.

“If someone falls in love with a property like this,” he said, “the price doesn’t matter.”

Everywhere Mr. Buljan turned, a historic transition was under way. A generation ago, many of these properties were second homes for San Francisco’s elite families. These days, most are being bought, for cash, by international tycoons or the youthful leaders of local technology companies.

While the wider Bay Area has suffered, along with the rest of the country, with falling property values and rising foreclosures, the luxury housing market has remained robust, analysts said. That is especially true in Silicon Valley, where an arms race for talent among emerging social networking companies has raised salaries for executives and engineers, and a resurgent market for initial public stock offerings is creating hundreds of new millionaires.

Some of the sales are eye-popping. In March, the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, an investor in Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, bought a French-style chateau in Los Altos Hills for a reported $100 million. Some buyers have hidden their identities behind companies.

In September, an Atherton estate formerly owned by the great-grandniece of Levi Strauss sold for $53 million, while the home of Sue Burns, a major investor in the San Francisco Giants, was sold for $20 million by her estate.

“It’s going to take a while for the wider economy to recover, but there are enough people to make a difference at the high end of the housing market,” keeping demand high, said Steve Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, a think tank in Palo Alto, where the median single-family home price last week was $1,838,750.

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Secret U.S., Taliban talks reach turning point

Reuters reports: After 10 months of secret dialogue with Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, senior U.S. officials say the talks have reached a critical juncture and they will soon know whether a breakthrough is possible, leading to peace talks whose ultimate goal is to end the Afghan war.

As part of the accelerating, high-stakes diplomacy, Reuters has learned, the United States is considering the transfer of an unspecified number of Taliban prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay military prison into Afghan government custody.

It has asked representatives of the Taliban to match that confidence-building measure with some of their own. Those could include a denunciation of international terrorism and a public willingness to enter formal political talks with the government headed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The officials acknowledged that the Afghanistan diplomacy, which has reached a delicate stage in recent weeks, remains a long shot. Among the complications: U.S. troops are drawing down and will be mostly gone by the end of 2014, potentially reducing the incentive for the Taliban to negotiate.

Still, the senior officials, all of whom insisted on anonymity to share new details of the mostly secret effort, suggested it has been a much larger piece of President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan policy than is publicly known.

U.S. officials have held about half a dozen meetings with their insurgent contacts, mostly in Germany and Doha with representatives of Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban’s Quetta Shura, the officials said.

The stakes in the diplomatic effort could not be higher. Failure would likely condemn Afghanistan to continued conflict, perhaps even civil war, after NATO troops finish turning security over to Karzai’s weak government by the end of 2014.

Success would mean a political end to the war and the possibility that parts of the Taliban – some hardliners seem likely to reject the talks – could be reconciled.

The effort is now at a pivot point.

“We imagine that we’re on the edge of passing into the next phase. Which is actually deciding that we’ve got a viable channel and being in a position to deliver” on mutual confidence-building measures, said a senior U.S. official.

While some U.S.-Taliban contacts have been previously reported, the extent of the underlying diplomacy and the possible prisoner transfer have not been made public until now.

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Hamas moves away from violence in deal with Palestinian Authority

The Guardian reports: Hamas has confirmed that it will shift tactics away from violent attacks on Israel as part of a rapprochement with the Palestinian Authority.

A spokesman for the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniya, told the Guardian that the Islamic party, which has controlled Gaza for the past five years, was shifting its emphasis from armed struggle to non-violent resistance.

“Violence is no longer the primary option but if Israel pushes us, we reserve the right to defend ourselves with force,” said the spokesman, Taher al-Nounu. On this understanding, he said, all Palestinian factions operating in the Gaza Strip have agreed to halt the firing of rockets and mortars into Israel.

The announcement on Sunday does not qualify as a full repudiation of violence, but marks a step away from violent extremism by the Hamas leadership towards the more progressive Islamism espoused by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.

The Associated Press reports: Bans on women smoking water pipes in public and male coiffeurs styling women’s hair are no longer being strictly enforced in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, apparent signs of greater tolerance as the Islamic militant group acknowledges mistakes in seeking to impose a religious lifestyle.

In explaining the change, several senior members said Hamas has matured in five years in power and learned lessons from the Arab Spring. Islamic groups that have scored election victories in the wake of pro-democracy uprisings in the region now find themselves trying to allay fears they seek Islamic rule.

Since seizing Gaza, Hamas had largely silenced opponents and tried to impose stricter religious rules on an already conservative society. Modesty squads asked young couples seen in public to show proof of marriage, told beachgoers to put on more clothes and ordered shopowners to cover up mannequins. High school girls came under pressure from teachers to wear headscarves.

In recent months, there’s been a change in atmosphere, say rights activists and even political rivals of Hamas.

“Things are freer than before,” said Nasser Radwan, whose family restaurant is one of the places where women again come to smoke water pipes.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said “some mistakes were made” under Hamas rule, though he blamed individual security commanders and overzealous activists, not the government, for heavy-handed tactics.

“They don’t represent the ideology and policy of the Hamas movement,” Barhoum said. “Our policy is that we are not going to dictate anything to anyone.”

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The U.S. is blind to the price of war that is still being borne by the Iraqi people

Gary Younge writes: According to Christopher Gelpi, a political science professor at Duke University who specialises in public attitudes to foreign policy, the most important single factor shaping Americans’ opinions about any war is whether they think America will win. This solipsistic worldview is hardly conducive to the kind of introspection that might translate remorse into redemption.

It’s a mindset that understands the war in Vietnam as being wrong not because an independent country was invaded, flattened, millions murdered and thousands tortured. It was wrong because the US lost.

And it pervades the political spectrum. Even when the war’s critics slam the blood and treasure squandered, they usually refer only to American lives and American money. This is also the way pollsters frame it. A recent CBS poll asked: “Do you think removing Saddam Hussein from power was worth the loss of American life and other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?” (50% no, 41% yes), and “Do you think the result of the war with Iraq was worth the loss of American lives and other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?” (67% no, 24% yes). The cost to Iraqis simply does not feature.

“It is the end for the Americans only,” wrote Emad Risn, argued an Iraqi columnist in a government-funded newspaper. “Nobody knows if the war will end for Iraqis too.” And few Americans seem to care. It’s been some time since Iraq featured at all on the nation’s priorities, let alone high. Rightly Americans fret about the fate of veterans returning to a depressed economy with a range of both physical and mental disabilities. But Iraqi civilians barely get a look-in.

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How the U.S. is helping crush Bahrain’s pro-democracy movement

Nicholas Kristof writes: When President Obama decides soon whether to approve a $53 million arms sale to our close but despotic ally Bahrain, he must weigh the fact that America has a major naval base here and that Bahrain is a moderate, modernizing bulwark against Iran.

Yet he should also understand the systematic, violent repression here, the kind that apparently killed a 14-year-old boy, Ali al-Sheikh, and continues to torment his family.

Ali grew up here in Sitra, a collection of poor villages far from the gleaming bank towers of Bahrain’s skyline. Almost every day pro-democracy protests still bubble up in Sitra, and even when they are completely peaceful they are crushed with a barrage of American-made tear gas.

People here admire much about America and welcomed me into their homes, but there is also anger that the tear gas shells that they sweep off the streets each morning are made by a Pennsylvania company, NonLethal Technologies. It is a private company that declined to comment, but the American government grants it a license for these exports — and every shell fired undermines our image.

In August, Ali joined one of the protests. A policeman fired a shell at Ali from less than 15 feet away, according to the account of the family and human-rights groups. The shell apparently hit the boy in the back of the neck, and he died almost immediately, a couple of minutes’ walk from his home.


NonLethal Technologies, Inc., Homer City, Pennsylvania

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Political crisis in Iraq as U.S. withdraws

Al Jazeera reports: The last US troops withdrew from Iraq this morning, but the story has barely merited a mention on Iraqi television; local media are instead focused on a deepening political crisis, which includes – among other issues – an arrest warrant for the vice-president.

The latest development came on Saturday night, when Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, called for a no-confidence vote on his deputy, Salah al-Mutlaq, state media reported.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi interior ministry has reportedly issued an arrest warrant for Vice-President Tariq al-Hashimi. Several of his security guards have been under investigation over a bombing last month in the green zone, the heavily-fortified district in central Baghdad that houses senior politicians and foreign embassies.

The bomb was assembled inside the green zone, according to Iraqi security officials, but went off prematurely. Both Maliki and Osama al-Nujaifi, the parliament speaker, have claimed to be the intended target.

The interior ministry was supposed to release details of its investigation in a press conference on Saturday night; the ministry said it would announce that Iraqi politicians, presumably referring to Hashimi, were linked to the bombing.

But officials from the ministry announced late on Saturday that they were postponing the press conference because of a request from the judiciary.

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Egyptian soldiers shoot, chase, and beat unarmed protesters in Cairo

The New York Times reports: Egypt’s military rulers escalated a bloody crackdown on street protesters on Saturday, chasing down and beating unarmed civilians, even while the prime minister was denying in a televised news conference that security forces were using any force.

In one of the most incendiary developments, video cameras captured soldiers stripping the clothes off women they were beating on the pavement of Tahrir Square.

The contradiction in the military-led government’s statements and actions appeared to represent a shift in strategy by the military council. After trying for months to preserve some credibility and collaboration with the Egyptian political elite, the ruling generals on Saturday scarcely acknowledged the demands made by their newly appointed civilian advisory council the night before that the military cease its violence and apologize to demonstrators.

Instead, as the crackdown entered its second day, the military council appeared to be playing to those Egyptians impatient with the continuing protests and eager for a return to stability. Crowds of supporters turned out downtown on Saturday morning to cheer on the military police, hand them drinks of water and help them close off Tahrir Square from demonstrators massing to get in.

Protesters, for their part, charged that the military rulers were provoking the clashes to derail or discredit the continuing election of a new Parliament that could challenge their power. “The military council is responsible for everything that happens,” Ziad el-Elaimy, a newly elected member of Parliament who was beaten Friday by the military police, said in a television interview.

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Israel has never been so ugly

Ari Shavit writes: We have never been so ugly. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu seeks to silence the call to prayer over the loudspeakers of the country’s mosques, and to shut down Channel 10 television. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman expresses support for the Russian “democtator” who has just rigged elections. Defense Minister Ehud Barak stands by while Jewish settlers victimize Palestinians and ultra-Orthodox religious nationalists victimize female soldiers.

Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman is trying to turn the Supreme Court into other one of his subsidiaries. Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein is working to prevent the media from reporting on investigations against public figures. Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman excludes women from participation in an official award ceremony.

Coalition chairman Zeev Elkin undermines and neuters civil society. Religious fanatics exclude women, tyrannize secular citizens and spit at priests. Jewish terrorists burn Muslim houses of worship, invade Israel Defense Force bases and attack soldiers.

We see what we would never believe with our own eyes. Darkness at noon, a dark Israel snuffing out an enlightened Israel. There have been dark moments in the past. The 1956 killing of Israeli Arabs at Kafr Qasem, the 1982 massacres by Israeli allies in Lebanon at Sabra and Chatila, the 1994 Hebron massacre by Baruch Goldstein. There have also been prior attempts at silencing the press, publications such as Kol Ha’am, Haolam Hazeh and Hadashot.

There have been assaults on the judicial system. Former Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann, and Daniel Friedmann and Daniel Friedmann. Time after time there have been assaults by the secular right and the religious right on the principles of liberalism and on liberal institutions, but there has never been an all-out, multi-pronged and multi-dimensional attack on the core values of the Jewish democratic state.

There has never been such a comprehensive attempt to remake the face of Israel and to replace it with something else. Under Netanyahu and Lieberman’s leadership, Israel been turned into a country with the values of Newt Gingrich and the look of Vladimir Putin. What’s happening here? And why now exactly? Why are anti-democratic forces at work now to run roughshod over human rights and human dignity and freedom? Why are the Jewish nationalists and ultra-Orthodox fanatics, along with Russian statism, bursting forth now all at the same time?

The answer is Netanyahu. In the past he was conservative, cautious and democratic. With American Jewish leader Ron Lauder at his side and popular historian Paul Johnson in his hand, Netanyahu sought to turn Israel into a strong free-market country sharing the values of Republican America.

As a result, the first time around as prime minister he governed like a democrat and lost like a democrat. And when the left wing tripped him up and got him out of office, he was subdued and a gentleman about it. Just as the Republican Party has changed over the past decade, so too has Netanyahu. The follower of Ronald Reagan has become a Tea Partier. With Sheldon Adelson at his side and Avigdor Lieberman tying his hands, the second iteration of Netanyahu is an aggressive ruler.

He is not guided by the rules of the game, but by the desire to gain a position of strength. It is not protecting democracy that is uppermost in his mind but retaining power. He is therefore not interested or capable of demonstrating moral leadership. Netanyahu is letting his Rottweilers devour liberal democracy while he himself stands by watching. He is not fulfilling his role as the guardian of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

Netanyahu’s weak leadership and moral laxity are what unleashed this frenzy. The fact that he has not put a stop to the dark forces that have always oozed from our depths is what brought us to this situation, but it is not yet too late. Netanyahu can put a stop to this insanity in an instant. All he has to do is halt the totalitarian legislation and to deliver one major address extolling enlightened democracy and human rights.

He must make it clear that violence will not be tolerated, that women are equal. Arabs are equal and every human being is created in God’s image. If the super-leader of the right wing would order the lunatic fringe on the right to stop, they would. If the leader of the State of Israel would say that liberty and equality and law and freedom of expression are the beating heart of the state, so it would be.

Not a single party would quit the government coalition. Not a single minister would quit the cabinet. But the young people who are called upon to defend this place would know what they are protecting. And the older generation who built this place would know what they built. The face in the mirror would again be our face.

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Scores of unintended civilian casualties in NATO bombing of Libya

The New York Times reports: NATO’s seven-month air campaign in Libya, hailed by the alliance and many Libyans for blunting a lethal crackdown by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and helping to push him from power, came with an unrecognized toll: scores of civilian casualties the alliance has long refused to acknowledge or investigate.

By NATO’s telling during the war, and in statements since sorties ended on Oct. 31, the alliance-led operation was nearly flawless — a model air war that used high technology, meticulous planning and restraint to protect civilians from Colonel Qaddafi’s troops, which was the alliance’s mandate.

“We have carried out this operation very carefully, without confirmed civilian casualties,” the secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said in November.

But an on-the-ground examination by The New York Times of airstrike sites across Libya — including interviews with survivors, doctors and witnesses, and the collection of munitions remnants, medical reports, death certificates and photographs — found credible accounts of dozens of civilians killed by NATO in many distinct attacks. The victims, including at least 29 women or children, often had been asleep in homes when the ordnance hit.

In all, at least 40 civilians, and perhaps more than 70, were killed by NATO at these sites, available evidence suggests. While that total is not high compared with other conflicts in which Western powers have relied heavily on air power, and less than the exaggerated accounts circulated by the Qaddafi government, it is also not a complete accounting. Survivors and doctors working for the anti-Qaddafi interim authorities point to dozens more civilians wounded in these and other strikes, and they referred reporters to other sites where civilian casualties were suspected.

Two weeks after being provided a 27-page memorandum from The Times containing extensive details of nine separate attacks in which evidence indicated that allied planes had killed or wounded unintended victims, NATO modified its stance.

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