Author Archives: News Sources

No scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs

Sustainable Pulse reports: There is no scientific consensus on the safety of genetically modified foods and crops, according to a statement released today by an international group of more than 90 scientists, academics and physicians.

The statement comes in response to recent claims from the GM industry and some scientists, journalists, and commentators that there is a “scientific consensus” that GM foods and crops were generally found safe for human and animal health and the environment. The statement calls these claims “misleading”, adding, “This claimed consensus on GMO safety does not exist.”

“Such claims may place human and environmental health at undue risk and create an atmosphere of complacency,” states Dr. Angelika Hilbeck, chairperson of the European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility (ENSSER) and one of the signatories. “The statement draws attention to the diversity of opinion over GMOs in the scientific community and the often contradictory or inconclusive findings of studies on GMO safety. These include toxic effects on laboratory animals fed GM foods, increased pesticide use from GM crop cultivation, and the unexpected impacts of Bt insecticidal crops on beneficial and non-target organisms,” Dr Hilbeck continues.

In spite of this nuanced and complex picture, a group of like-minded people makes sweeping claims that GM crops and foods are safe. In reality, many unanswered questions remain and in some cases there is serious cause for concern.

Prof C. Vyvyan Howard, a medically qualified toxicopathologist based at the University of Ulster and a signatory to the statement, said: “A substantial number of studies suggest that GM crops and foods can be toxic or allergenic. It is often claimed that millions of Americans eat GM foods with no ill effects. But as the US has no GMO labeling and no epidemiological studies have been carried out, there is no way of knowing whether the rising rates of chronic diseases seen in that country have anything to do with GM food consumption or not. Therefore this claim has no scientific basis.” [Continue reading…]

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The phenomenology of a drone strike

Nasser Hussain writes: Let us then take a closer look at the visual regime of the drone. Let us see what a drone sees (and what it does not). Here is a representative clip, chosen more or less randomly from the many available online.

While many commentators worry about the “video-game style warfare” of such footage, the comparison is both exaggerated and inapt. Contrary to drone footage, video games offer a deeply immersive environment in which at least the player’s virtual life is at stake. Perhaps what fuels the comparison of drone footage to video games is the aura of detachment they share. The worry is that detachment eases the ability to kill.

In his study On Killing, Dave Grossman, a colonel in the military, argues persuasively for a correlation between distance and the ease of killing.

On the one hand, the video feed of drone footage transmitted to a distant location, precisely fits Grossman’s maximum range category: “a range at which the killer is unable to perceive his individual victims without using some form of mechanical assistance—binoculars, radar, periscope, remote TV camera, and so on.” At this distance, Grossman reports, “I have not found a single instance of individuals who have refused to kill the enemy under these circumstances, nor have I found a singe instance of psychiatric trauma associated with this type of killing.” On the other hand, the drone’s ability to zoom in to a sight line just a few hundred feet above the ground produces images of startling intimacy. In the end, we should be less concerned with how the mediation of the drone’s camera increases or decreases the pilot’s willingness to fire—since that decision is dispersed along a complex chain of command, referred to in military circles as the “kill chain”—than with how the purely visual quality reinforces certain conditions of control and asymmetric violence.

Looking at the clip again, one element is obviously missing: sound. Although the pilots can hear ground commands, there is no microphone equivalent to the micro-scopic gaze of the drone’s camera. This mute world of dumb figures moving about on a screen has particular consequences for how we experience the image. As Michel Chion notes in The Voice in Cinema, although sound or voice is easily swallowed up by the image, it nonetheless structures the image: “only the creators of a film’s sound — recordist, sound effects person, mixer, director — know that if you alter or remove these sounds, the image is no longer the same.” In the case of the drone strike footage, the lack of synchronic sound renders it a ghostly world in which the figures seem unalive, even before they are killed. The gaze hovers above in silence. The detachment that critics of drone operations worry about comes partially from the silence of the footage.

The camera angle is always the same: the overhead shot. By definition, the overhead shot excludes the shot/reverse shot, the series of frontal angles and edits that make up face-to-face dialogue. With the overhead shot, there is no possibility of returning the gaze. The overhead shot neither invites nor permits participation in its visual economy. It is the filmic cognate of asymmetric war.

Asymmetric war is typically a conflict between a regular army and a guerilla force, but could describe any conflict in which one side cannot retaliate in kind. [Continue reading…]

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The deadly fury that demonization unleashes

Katrin Bennhold writes: From a comfortable couch in his London living room, Sean O’Callaghan had been watching the shaky televised images of terrified people running from militants in an upscale mall in Kenya. Some of those inside had been asked their religion. Muslims were spared, non-Muslims executed.

“God, this is one tough lot of jihadis,” said a friend, a fellow Irishman, shaking his head.

“But we used to do the same thing,” Mr. O’Callaghan replied.

There was the 1976 Kingsmill massacre. Catholic gunmen stopped a van with 12 workmen in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, freed the one Catholic among them and lined up the 11 Protestants and shot them one by one.

Mr. O’Callaghan, a former paramilitary with the Irish Republican Army, has particular insight into such coldblooded killing.

On a sunny August day in 1974, he walked into a bar in Omagh, Northern Ireland, drew a short-barreled pistol and shot a man bent over the racing pages at the end of the counter, a man he had been told was a notorious traitor to the Irish Catholic cause.

Historical parallels are inevitably flawed. But a recent flurry of horrific bloodletting — the attack in Nairobi that left 60 dead, the execution by Syrian jihadis of bound and blindfolded prisoners, an Egyptian soldier peering through his rifle sight and firing on the teenage daughter of a Muslim Brotherhood leader — raises a question as old as Cain and Abel: Do we all have it in us?

Many experts think we do. For Mr. O’Callaghan, it was a matter of focus.

“What you’re seeing in that moment,” he said in an interview last week, “is not a human being.”

It is dangerous to assume that it takes a monster to commit a monstrosity, said Herbert Kelman, professor emeritus of social ethics at Harvard. [Continue reading…]

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NSA hacked Mexican president’s email

Der Spiegel reports: The NSA has been systematically eavesdropping on the Mexican government for years. It hacked into the president’s public email account and gained deep insight into policymaking and the political system. The news is likely to hurt ties between the US and Mexico.

The National Security Agency (NSA) has a division for particularly difficult missions. Called “Tailored Access Operations” (TAO), this department devises special methods for special targets.

That category includes surveillance of neighboring Mexico, and in May 2010, the division reported its mission accomplished. A report classified as “top secret” said: “TAO successfully exploited a key mail server in the Mexican Presidencia domain within the Mexican Presidential network to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon’s public email account.”

According to the NSA, this email domain was also used by cabinet members, and contained “diplomatic, economic and leadership communications which continue to provide insight into Mexico’s political system and internal stability.” The president’s office, the NSA reported, was now “a lucrative source.” [Continue reading…]

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Jewish Americans see generational split on Israel-Palestine

Sarah Posner writes: In an eatery here, 28-year-old Israeli human rights activist Avner Gvaryahu described the first time he came face to face with a Palestinian.

He was 19 and serving in the Israel Defense Forces when his unit invaded the home of a Palestinian family in the dead of night. They were there to perform a “straw widow,” a raid during which soldiers forcibly seize control of a Palestinian civilian home.

“This is the reality of the occupation,” said Gvaryahu, now the Jewish diaspora coordinator for the Israeli human rights group Breaking the Silence, which, using the testimony of veterans such as himself, educates the Israeli public about military tactics and abuses in the occupied territories.

“This is the story of my generation,” said Gvaryahu, who said only a small fraction of Israelis serve in combat units in the West Bank. “No one knows about it. They don’t really understand what we’re asked to do.”

He was on tour for Breaking the Silence’s book “Our Harsh Logic,” the timing of which coincided with the publication of the Pew Research Center’s major survey of Jewish American attitudes. The survey showed an increasing secularization of American Jews, and decreasing affiliation with synagogues and organized religion, a phenomenon that exists within American Christianity as well. It also tracked changes in Jewish American attitudes to Israel.

While 30 percent of respondents professed to be very attached to Israel and 39 percent said they felt “somewhat” attached, 31 percent answered that they felt not very or not at all attached to Israel. Asked whether caring about Israel was an “essential” part of being Jewish, 43 percent answered in the affirmative. And the Pew researchers noted a demographic shift: “Older Jews are more likely than younger Jews to see caring about Israel as an essential part of what being Jewish means to them,” the study noted, with more than half of respondents over 65 believing that caring about Israel was an essential part of their Jewish identity, whereas only 32 percent of respondents under 30 shared that belief. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt ‘looking to Russia’ for arms after U.S. aid freeze

The Times of Israel reports: Egypt is looking to Russia to supply it with arms now that the US has frozen much of its military aid to the Egyptians, Israeli television reported Friday night.

The “historic achievement,” under which the US brought Egypt into its orbit in the years since the 1979 Camp David Israel-Egypt peace treaty, is about to “go down the drain,” the Channel 2 report said.

It referred to comments earlier this week by Egypt’s Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy, who said ties between Cairo and Washington were in “turmoil” and told CNN that Egypt would have to “find other sources” to meet its national security needs.

By “other sources,” said the TV report, Fahmy was referring to Russia, with whom Egypt was now looking to conclude a major arms deal.

This would represent a major change of orientation for Egypt, since its entire army had been built on US equipment for the past three decades.

The news came four days after reports that Israel had argued “directly and bluntly” with the Obama administration against US aid cuts to Egypt, telling Washington it was making “a strategic error” in reducing financial assistance to Cairo in the wake of the military’s ouster of president Mohammed Morsi. [Continue reading…]

U.S. military support for Egypt is much like that it provides to other countries: it’s involves the desire to foster political cooperation through dependence. However much independence Egypt’s current rulers might now want to assert, military support from Russia won’t remove the need for American hardware. With its F-16 fighters, Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, and C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, the Egyptian military remained tied to the U.S.

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Hamas rejects Palestinian negotiations with Israel based on U.S. ‘blackmail’

Ma’an News Agency reports: Prime minister of the Hamas-run government in the Gaza Strip Ismail Haniyeh on Saturday called on Palestinians to oppose any new negotiations with Israel, arguing that they “jeopardize the Palestinian issue and the Palestinian people’s rights.”

“These negotiations mark the violation of the Palestinian national consensus as negotiations are carried out as a result of US pressure and blackmail,” he said, urging Palestinians to protect Jerusalem and never abandon any Palestinian right, especially the right of return of refugees.

Haniyeh made the comments during a speech delivered in Gaza City on the second anniversary of the prisoner swap between Hamas and Israel which saw 1,027 Palestinian prisoners freed in a deal for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

In order to ensure the protection of Palestinian rights, “negotiations must stop and the Oslo approach must be ignored. Political forces must together find a new national strategy adopting diverse visions and means,” he continued.

“To confront any dangers or possible compromises emerging from negotiations,” added Haniyeh, “Palestinian factions and dignitaries should get together and build a Palestinian national strategy.”

This strategy, Haniyeh said, must include all possible options including armed resistance and popular resistance in addition to political and diplomatic means including academic and diplomatic divestment using all regional and international platforms.

Haniyeh also reiterated that his movement remained committed to reconciliation with the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority on the basis of the agreements reached through Cairo dialogue.

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Jewish fear of irresistible Arab men

Ma’an News Agency reports: Jewish women have been banned from working night shifts as a part of their national service at hospitals in Israel in order to avoid “contact with Arabs,” Israeli Channel 10 reported on Wednesday.

Israeli National Service Administration Director Sar-Shalom Jerbi issued the directive two weeks ago banning any volunteer shifts past 9 p.m. for women fulfilling their national service duties.

The director explained that “we reached the decision based on concern for our volunteers, and Minister [Naftali] Bennett gave his blessing.”

Naftali Bennett is the leader of the far-right Israeli political party “Jewish Home,” and is currently the minister of religious services.

Many young Jewish women in Israel choose to volunteer at hospitals in order to fulfill their national service requirements. The national service is an alternative to service in the Israeli army, which is required for most Israeli Jews.

The decision marks a victory for an intense campaign led by religious Zionist rabbis and other right-wing groups within Israel to prevent contact of any sort between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, especially between Jewish women and Palestinian men.

According to the Channel 10 report, these groups began a campaign against women’s night-time service last year after reports surfaced of “intimate relations” between some Jewish volunteers and Palestinian doctors at hospitals.

In response to the decision, the director of the Lehava organization which was involved in the campaign issued a statement lamenting that the move did not go far enough. “Unfortunately, this is too narrow and too late a step. National service should be terminated anywhere there are non-Jews,” he said.

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Kafranbel’s fight against isolationism abroad and at home

Kafranbel

Amal Hanano traveled to Kafranbel in northern Syria, famous for its witty posters and banners, where she met 40-year-old Raed Faris and his partner, 33-year-old Ahmad Jalal, the creative couple behind the banners.

For six weeks this summer, Kafranbel went silent.

The people of the town had been coming to Faris for months. They begged him to stop creating the antagonistic banners and organizing the protests that had attracted international attention. They blamed the protests for the regime’s air raids that were devastating the town.

This is the twisted logic that plagues people in Syria. Facing continuously escalating violence, many civilians have directed blame toward the revolution. Obviously, you can’t blame the Syrian regime for being vicious and relentless — that’s just what it is, and always was. It was the revolution that should have known its limits: In many Syrians’ eyes, the revolution had brought death and destruction, invited unwanted extremists, and steered the country to the point of no return. Returning to silence, they reasoned, was the way to end the nightmare that had been unleashed on their country.

Faris tried to compromise. He moved the protests to an inconspicuous side street, away from the main square. He banned children from attending the Friday protests and changed the set time of the gathering. Nothing stopped the residents’ complaints. And so after a protest on July 15 that featured a banner dedicated to Trayvon Martin’s family, he stopped.

“Without popular support, we can’t do this anymore,” Faris said. At first he was angry — especially when the air raids did not stop. On July 27, during the holy month of Ramadan, the bombs fell at sunset while the town broke its fast. Several people were killed in the now-silent town. And still the people blamed the protests.

“While I search for your mistakes and you search for mine, while we search for someone to blame, we realize that we have lost because we no longer trust each other,” Faris wrote on his Facebook page on July 31. “Our revolution needs us all. Let us search for each other, for victory is nothing but grasping each others’ hands in solidarity.”

After a few weeks, Faris’s anger waned. The time off had given him time to reflect. He stopped focusing on what the world wanted to hear and see. Instead, he began to listen to the town, and worked on a plan to regain his lost legitimacy.

One August evening, activists set up screens, projectors, and sound systems in five different public spaces across Kafranbel. For two hours, news was broadcast on the screens — a report from Al Jazeera, a compilation of YouTube videos, and a special local news broadcast produced by the media team. Men stopped on the street to watch. They pulled up chairs and lined the sidewalks. Some had not watched the news for months. Others had not seen the YouTube videos at all.

After two years of projecting Kafranbel to the world, Faris had brought back the world into Kafranbel.

The media team started to put together the broadcasts every day. They compiled videos of the early protests, of the banners shared around the word, and stories about Kafranbel’s martyrs. Faris and his team ignored calls from journalists who asked for new banners and cartoons. They didn’t even create artwork or organize a protest after the horrific Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack on the eastern Damascus suburbs.

After a few weeks of these outdoor events, people requested that the protests and banners return. They regained their pride in their town’s defiance. And so on Aug. 30, Kafranbel reclaimed its revolutionary role.

Isolationism — which many Syrians view as President Barack Obama’s foreign policy with regards to their home country — works both ways. Many activists inside and outside Syria realize that there is no longer a reason to convince the world to action. No one is coming to save Syria.

The collective message of Kafranbel’s body of work is the opposite of isolationism. It’s an awakening to the world after decades of neglect and forced isolation by the Assad regime. Sadly, Syrians have realized their costly awakening has come to an unwelcoming world.

Over the last two and a half years, Kafranbel’s banners projected the same message over and over: “Listen to us. Watch us. Respond.”

The message is slightly different now. Children and men alike proudly walk the streets of Kafranbel. They chant for their brave town. They are no longer hiding on side streets or standing on a stage for the world. Instead, their message is: “We are here. We are not going anywhere. Watch us if you wish.”

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Obama colludes with CIA in effort to block release of Senate’s damning report on torture

Jane Mayer reports: Last night, along with the bill reopening the government, the Senate confirmed Stephen W. Preston, the top lawyer at the C.I.A., to move to the Pentagon to serve in the same role there. The vote slipped by unnoticed by most, but on close inspection, it revealed previously unreleased documents that lift the lid on an unusual standoff between Congress and the Obama Administration’s C.I.A. At its core is a bitter disagreement over an apparently devastating, and still secret, report by the Senate Intelligence Committee documenting in detail how the C.I.A.’s brutalization of terror suspects during the Bush years was unnecessary, ineffective, and deceptively sold to Congress, the White House, the Justice Department, and the public. The report threatens to definitively refute former C.I.A. personnel who have defended the program’s integrity. But so far, to the consternation of several members of the Intelligence Committee, the Obama Administration, like Bush’s before it, is keeping the damning details from public view.

Preston’s confirmation became a proxy skirmish in the fight. Obama reportedly hoped to get Preston confirmed before the congressional recess this past summer. Instead, Senator Mark Udall, a Democrat from Colorado, who is a member of both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Armed Services Committee, put a “hold” on Preston’s confirmation until he answered a set of additional, and previously undisclosed, questions. A copy of these seven questions, and Preston’s answers, obtained by The New Yorker (below), sheds new light on the conflict.

The questions and answers make clear that Udall, who has pushed vigorously for the report’s release, voted to confirm Preston only after he believed that the general counsel distanced himself from his own intelligence agency’s defiant and defensive stance on the six-thousand-three-hundred page report, which cost forty million dollars to produce. Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, including Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, are pushing to declassify and publicly release it. But John Brennan, the agency’s director, a career C.I.A. officer, and an Obama confidant, is apparently resisting disclosure, and challenging many of the report’s conclusions.

On June 27th, the C.I.A. delivered an impassioned rebuttal of the report to the committee. Last month marked the last of numerous meetings between C.I.A. and Intelligence Committee personnel over the disputed report. They did not go well, according to several informed sources. Meanwhile, despite Obama’s calls for increased transparency, the White House has apparently sat on the sidelines, urging the two intransigent sides to work out their differences. Without White House involvement, the standoff is likely to remain a huge battle. [Continue reading…]

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How the CIA and the Taliban undermined the global campaign to eradicate polio

The New York Times, July 2012: Did the killing of Osama bin Laden have an unintended victim: the global drive to eradicate polio?

In Pakistan, where polio has never been eliminated, the C.I.A.’s decision to send a vaccination team into the Bin Laden compound to gather information and DNA samples clearly hurt the national polio drive. The question is: How badly?

After the ruse by Dr. Shakil Afridi was revealed by a British newspaper a year ago, angry villagers, especially in the lawless tribal areas on the Afghan border, chased off legitimate vaccinators, accusing them of being spies.

And then, late last month, Taliban commanders in two districts banned polio vaccination teams, saying they could not operate until the United States ended its drone strikes. One cited Dr. Afridi, who is serving a 33-year sentence imposed by a tribal court, as an example of how the C.I.A. could use the campaign to cover espionage.

“It was a setback, no doubt,” conceded Dr. Elias Durry, the World Health Organization’s polio coordinator for Pakistan. “But unless it spreads or is a very longtime affair, the program is not going to be seriously affected.”

Reuters, October 18, 2013: A Taliban ban on vaccination is exacerbating a serious polio outbreak in Pakistan, threatening to derail dramatic progress made this year towards wiping out the disease worldwide, health officials say.

Health teams in Pakistan have been attacked repeatedly since the Taliban denounced vaccines as a Western plot to sterilize Muslims and imposed bans on inoculation in June 2012.

In North Waziristan, a region near the Afghan border that has been cordoned off by the Taliban, dozens of children, many under the age of two, have been crippled by the viral disease in the past six months.

And there is evidence in tests conducted on sewage samples in some of the country’s major cities that the polio virus is starting to spread beyond these isolated pockets and could soon spark fresh polio outbreaks in more densely populated areas.

“We have entered a phase that we were all worried about and were afraid might happen,” Elias Durry, head of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) in Pakistan, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

“The risk is that as long as the virus is still circulating, and as long as we have no means of reaching these children and immunizing them to interrupt virus transmission, it could jeopardize everything that has been done so far – not only in Pakistan, but also in the region and around the globe.”

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U.S. has killed far more civilians with drones than it admits, says UN report

The Guardian reports: A United Nations investigation has so far identified 33 drone strikes around the world that have resulted in civilian casualties and may have violated international humanitarian law.

The report by the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson QC, calls on the US to declassify information about operations co-ordinated by the CIA and clarify its positon on the legality of unmanned aerial attacks.

Published ahead of a debate on the use of remotely piloted aircraft, at the UN general assembly in New York next Friday, the 22-page document examines incidents in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan and Gaza.

It has been published to coincide with a related report released earlier on Thursday by Professor Christof Heyns, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, which warned that the technology was being misused as a form of “global policing”.

Emmerson, who travelled to Islamabad for his investigation, said the Pakistan ministry of foreign affairs has records of as many as 330 drone strikes in the country’s north-western tribal areas since 2004. Up to 2,200 people have been killed – of whom at least 400 were civilians – according to the Pakistan government.

In Yemen, Emmerson’s report says that as many as 58 civilians are thought to have been killed in attacks by UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). “While the fact that civilians have been killed or injured does not necessarily point to a violation of international humanitarian law, it undoubtedly raises issues of accountability and transparency,” the study notes. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s FM on nuclear proposal: secrecy is sign of seriousness

Al Monitor reports: Following the conclusion of the first nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 since the election of President Hassan Rouhani, buzz over the exact details of what transpired in Geneva is aplenty.

The exact contents of the Iranian proposal, formulated in a Powerpoint presentation titled, “Closing an Unnecessary Crisis, and Opening a New Horizon,” are unclear. However, reports have surfaced with purported details of the Iranian position.

Amid the reports, officials in Tehran involved in the nuclear negotiations remain adamant in their insistence that their proposal will remain under wraps pending an agreement.

In an interview with Al-Monitor, Iranian Foreign Minister and chief nuclear negotiator Mohammad Javad Zarif, referring to the reports about alleged details of the Iranian proposal, categorically denied their authenticity. “These are speculations that have little in common with reality,” he told Al-Monitor, maintaining his posture that “our refusal to unveil details of the proposal is a sign of our sincerity and seriousness.”

Asked about the anonymity of the source who claimed to have knowledge about the details of the Iranian proposal, Zarif said, “None of the officials involved in the nuclear negotiations speak off the record. We only speak on the record.” [Continue reading…]

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Saudi Arabia rejects U.N. Security Council seat in protest move

The New York Times reports: Saudi Arabia stunned the United Nations and even some of its own diplomats on Friday by rejecting a highly coveted seat on the Security Council, a decision that underscored the depth of Saudi anger over what the monarchy sees as weak and conciliatory Western stances toward Syria and Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival.

The Saudi decision, which could have been made only with King Abdullah’s approval, came a day after it had won a Security Council seat for the first time, and it appeared to be unprecedented.

The Saudi Foreign Ministry released a statement rejecting the seat just hours after the kingdom’s own diplomats — both at the United Nations and in Riyadh, the Saudi capital — were celebrating their new seat, the product of two years of work to assemble a crack diplomatic team in New York. Some analysts said the sudden turnabout gave the impression of a self-destructive temper tantrum.

But one Saudi diplomat said the decision came after weeks of high-level debate about the usefulness of a seat on the Security Council, where Russia and China have repeatedly drawn Saudi anger by blocking all attempts to pressure Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. Abdullah has voiced rising frustration with the continuing violence in Syria, a fellow Muslim-majority nation where one of his wives was born. He is said to have been deeply disappointed when President Obama decided against airstrikes on Syria’s military in September in favor of a Russian-proposed agreement to secure Syria’s chemical weapons. [Continue reading…]

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GCHQ revelations show Britain needs a parliamentary inquiry into mass surveillance

Member of Parliament Tom Watson writes: Spymasters past and present have been busy of late condemning Edward Snowden and the Guardian. The “most catastrophic loss to British intelligence ever” is how Sir David Omand described the whistleblower’s leaks of confidential data.

The MI5 chief, Andrew Parker, stopped short of a direct attack on the Guardian for exposing GCHQ’s data surveillance programme Tempora, but his speech claimed that publishing such information gives terrorists the ability “to strike at will”.

Even some sections of the media have taken the side of the spooks. The Daily Mail said the Guardian had shown a “lethal irresponsibility”. Now the police have been asked by Tory MP Julian Smith to investigate the Guardian, while Liam Fox has successfully called on parliament to do the same with the support of the prime minister.

In truth, the Guardian is under attack for carrying out its public duty. It acted courageously, in the public interest, to uncover and reveal a government programme that has gained access to the private communications of millions of individuals. Tempora has been mining our internet communications data, en masse, without public knowledge or any kind of public debate. So the newspaper should be thanked for bringing this to our attention so that we can now have a proper conversation about whether mass surveillance is necessary and proportionate in the fight against terrorism. [Continue reading…]

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Libya has become virtually ungovernable

Jason Pack and Mohamed Eljarh write: American Special Forces captured Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, an operative of Al Qaeda living in Libya. Five days later, a group of Libyan militiamen kidnapped their own prime minister, Ali Zeidan. After five hours, having faced no opposition from the police or the army, they released him. The prime minister’s captors made no demands for cash, nor did they overtly request any changes in current government policy. Nor was anyone hurt — an aspect that gave the whole affair the air of a vast publicity stunt.

Some have described the kidnapping as a pseudo-coup. But coups usually aim to overthrow one government and replace it with another. Things are different in Libya.

None of the country’s competing armed factions are capable of governing alone. Each wishes to protect its special privileges while preventing its opponents from governing. Libya is truly ruled by everyone and no one.

In the early days of the anti-Qaddafi rebellion, the rebels’ top brass attempted to form a nascent national army, yet various “civilian” (read: Islamist) groups refused to submit to the proposed chain of command. In July 2011, Islamists were suspected in the murder of the national army’s leader, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes. Since then, myriad civilian militias have proliferated. They dwarf the national army and police force combined. The government has tried to co-opt some of the civilian brigades with big salaries and fancy titles, but most remain loyal only to their commanders.

Consequently, the Libyan government lacks even 100 armed men who would lay their lives on the line to defend the abstract concept of the state. Conversely, the militias can rely on thousands.

In Western Libya, the most staunchly anti-government forces are a loose alliance of Islamists and certain powerful militias from the city of Misurata. Counterbalancing them are non-Islamist militias from the city of Zintan. In the East, “federalist” militias seek to obtain “justice” (meaning more power and money for their region).

As a result of this multipolar struggle, the country has become virtually ungovernable. Each group has its supporters inside the parliament: the Martyrs and the Muslim Brotherhood blocs have worked to further the influence of the Revolutionaries Operations Room — the group that kidnapped Mr. Zeidan. With the Islamists’ support, Nouri Abusahmain became Libya’s president in June. And he quickly bolstered his power as a counterweight to the prime minister by endowing the Revolutionaries Operations Room with $700 million.

Prime Minister Zeidan’s various opponents have long sought to force him out of office. Despite his waning popularity and effectiveness, they failed to oust him via a secret no-confidence vote on Oct. 1. He survived the vote not because he enjoys widespread support but rather because no one can agree on who should replace him. [Continue reading…]

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How do you get people to give a damn about climate change?

Chris Mooney writes: As two top researchers studying the science of science communication – a hot new field that combines public opinion research with psychological studies — Dan Kahan and Stephan Lewandowsky tend to agree about most things.

There’s just one problem. The little thing that they disagree on — whether it actually works to tell people that there’s a “scientific consensus” on climate change — is a matter of huge practical significance. After all, many scientists, advocates, and bloggers are doing this all the time. Heck, Barack Obama and Al Gore are out there doing it. And the central message that the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sought to convey with its latest report, that scientists are now 95-percent certain that humans are driving global warming, is a message about scientific consensus.

In this episode of Inquiring Minds (click below to stream audio), Kahan and Lewandowsky debate this pressing issue. The discussion begins with a paper published in Nature Climate Change last year by Lewandowsky and two colleagues, providing experimental evidence suggesting a consensus message ought to work quite well.

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