Video: Syria’s ‘terrorists’ by association
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James Hansen leaves NASA to become a full-time activist fighting climate chaos
Scientific American: Why did James Hansen retire on April 2 after 32 years as director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies? As he told the enterprising students of Columbia University’s Sustainability Media Lab who captured him in the following video, “I want to devote full time to trying to help the public understand the urgency of addressing climate change.”
It’s not exactly the “spend more time with my family” excuse often give by retiring government officials, but his family is nonetheless the reason for this change. He’s worried about preventing “climate chaos” and instead preserving the relatively stable climate of the past 10,000 years—when human civilization developed and flourished—for his five grandchildren.
That means full-time activism for the 72-year-old, and perhaps the risk of getting arrested at more coal-mine or tar-sand protests.
In letter to Obama, human rights groups question legality and secrecy of drone killings
The New York Times reports: In a letter sent to President Obama this week, the nation’s leading human rights organizations questioned the legal basis for targeted killing and called for an end to the secrecy surrounding the use of drones.
The “statement of shared concern” said the administration should “publicly disclose key targeted killing standards and criteria; ensure that U.S. lethal force operations abroad comply with international law; enable meaningful Congressional oversight and judicial review; and ensure effective investigations, tracking and response to civilian harm.”
The nine-page letter, signed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, the Open Society Foundations and several other groups, is the most significant critique to date by advocacy groups of what has become the centerpiece of the United States’ counterterrorism efforts.
While not directly calling the strikes illegal under international law, the letter lists what it calls troubling reports of the criteria used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command to select targets and assess results. The reported policies raise “serious questions about whether the U.S. is operating in accordance with international law,” the letter says. It is also signed by the Center for Civilians in Conflict and units of the New York University and Columbia Law Schools. [Continue reading…]
Video: The bombing of Al-Bara
Olly Lambert, whose film “Syria Behind the Lines” featured on PBS’s Frontline this week, recounts the bombing of Al-Bara.
Maintaining conflict, stopping bloodshed: Lessons from 15 years of peace in Northern Ireland
Haggai Matar writes: Although Republicans and Unionists still have extremely different ideas as to where the country should be heading they still accept each other’s right to imagine opposite identities and futures. Fifteen years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, there is much Israelis and Palestinians can learn from Northern Ireland.
“No two conflicts are alike, and a solution that fits one conflict could never be copied successfully to anywhere else.” The same sentence, in minor variations, was said to me by countless members of the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly, as well as journalists, academics and political activists during my short visit to Belfast about a month ago (which resulted in a piece published in Haaretz in Hebrew today). Had it not been coming from people who disagree on pretty much everything else and who support rival political parties, one might even assume they were all simply stating the party line.
All of them have a lot of experience talking to people like myself. Over the past couple of years most of them have either hosted or have been hosted by politicians, NGOs and journalists from conflict zones around the world trying to learn something from the model that put an end to the three decades of bloodshed during “The Troubles,” and the hundreds of years of conflict that preceded that period. But while it is true that one cannot simply copy and paste the Good Friday Agreement (signed this week 15 year ago, full text in PDF here) in order to create world peace, there is nothing wrong with tapping into the world of knowledge and experience the people of Northern Ireland have gained in order to try and rethink our own troubles here. [Continue reading…]
AIPAC supports ethnic discrimination against U.S. citizens visiting Israel
JTA reports: A legislative effort led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to enable Israelis to enter the United States without visas may be stymied by the government – Israel’s government.
The hitch is Israel’s inability or unwillingness to fully reciprocate, something required for visa-free travel to the United States. Israel, citing security concerns, insists on the right to refuse entry to some U.S. citizens.
AIPAC is pushing for an exemption for Israel from this rule. But congressional staffers say Israel is unlikely to get such an exemption, which U.S. lawmakers view as an attempt to bar Arab Americans from freely entering Israel.
“It’s stunning that you would give a green light to another country to violate the civil liberties of Americans traveling abroad,” said a staffer for one leading pro-Israel lawmaker in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The exemption AIPAC is pushing for appears in the Senate version of the U.S.-Israel Strategic Partnership Act, one of the key issues for which AIPAC urged supporters to lobby after its policy conference last month.
The language in that bill, proposed by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), requires that the Homeland Security secretary grant Israel visa waiver status after certifying with the secretary of state that Israel “has made every reasonable effort, without jeopardizing the security of the State of Israel, to ensure that reciprocal travel privileges are extended to all United States citizens.”
House staffers say that lawmakers, pro-Israel leaders among them, have raised objections to the clause, “without jeopardizing the security of the State of Israel,” because it appears to validate what they see as Israel’s tendency to turn away Arab Americans without giving a reason.
None of the other 37 countries currently in the visa-free program has such a caveat written into law. [Continue reading…]
Ten years on — Riverbend’s reflections on Iraq
Riverbend writes: April 9, 2013 marks ten years since the fall of Baghdad. Ten years since the invasion. Since the lives of millions of Iraqis changed forever. It’s difficult to believe. It feels like only yesterday I was sharing day to day activities with the world. I feel obliged today to put my thoughts down on the blog once again, probably for the last time.
In 2003, we were counting our lives in days and weeks. Would we make it to next month? Would we make it through the summer? Some of us did and many of us didn’t.
Back in 2003, one year seemed like a lifetime ahead. The idiots said, “Things will improve immediately.” The optimists were giving our occupiers a year, or two… The realists said, “Things won’t improve for at least five years.” And the pessimists? The pessimists said, “It will take ten years. It will take a decade.”
Looking back at the last ten years, what have our occupiers and their Iraqi governments given us in ten years? What have our puppets achieved in this last decade? What have we learned?
We learned a lot.
We learned that while life is not fair, death is even less fair- it takes the good people. Even in death you can be unlucky. Lucky ones die a ‘normal’ death… A familiar death of cancer, or a heart-attack, or stroke. Unlucky ones have to be collected in bits and pieces. Their families trying to bury what can be salvaged and scraped off of streets that have seen so much blood, it is a wonder they are not red.
We learned that you can be floating on a sea of oil, but your people can be destitute. Your city can be an open sewer; your women and children can be eating out of trash dumps and begging for money in foreign lands. [Continue reading…]
Education should offer people a greater sense of being human
Alan Smith writes: You OK?” said Casey.
“Yeah fine. I’m all right,” I said, but I wasn’t.
“It was an upsetting morning,” he said. “I feel upset myself.”
“Tell you what, Case, if I never meet another psychopath again as long as I live, it’ll be far too soon.” And I knew that I had lost the stomach for the whole damned business. If I carried on in prison, I would have to do it differently; I would have to admit that it was prison.
In 14 years, I had never excluded anyone, no matter how difficult they were. It had all been a bit of a club where everyone was good and bright and sensitive, especially when they weren’t. But now, my bottle had gone and I wanted to get under the duvet and stay there. Casey gave me a hug: “Retire, man. You don’t need all this shit.”
I suppose it had all been creeping up on me for a while. What I had to face up to was that I was becoming more and more indifferent. It was a difficult thing to do. There were moments, more and more of them, when I didn’t care about the things that happened, who they happened to. This was the selfishness that prison rubs into your skin. I listened to what Arthur had to say, nodded the right things back at him and then shrugged him off. Arthur led a life of growing desperation. He had an indeterminate sentence and lived from one parole board to the next, with no real idea if release would be sooner or later. He talked to me about his wife, his children, his father and, I said to myself, if I could do anything to help him out I would. Anyone could see that he was a decent sort of a bloke. If he managed to get into the education block a bit early, he gave our room a bit of a tidy, got the office vacuum cleaner and did the floor. If he caught me doing it he told me off: “You shouldn’t be doing that.” I liked him; we got on.His robust spirit was slowly winding down and sometimes he snapped at people, took refuge in contempt, laughed a lot less than he used to. But I shrugged him off. I caught myself doing it, caught myself thinking of something clever to say, making up something clever to tell myself so that I could slip away.
I had always tried to avoid this failure that begins with indifference. I had never tried to manage the men I met, deflect them, stand behind a platitude, promise anything and then lose the paperwork. That’s the track I had started to head down, towards that quiet life that I’d do anything to have. I could see it happening.
And so, after almost 14 years, it was time to go. I couldn’t just walk away, just leave the guys flat. I offered them a deal. I would stay as long as they did. There was a certain amount of dark laughter. “You might have a long wait,” said one. Sue, the education manager, agreed to let the class run down, no more new faces.
Teaching in a prison means that from time to time, someone who is really difficult walks through the door. I always felt obliged to persist, not to simply chuck them out. “You can’t treat people like that,” I would say when the guys advised me what they would do to the current nutter. Now, I had started to agree with them and it felt like failure. I was becoming growingly aware that when I heard about someone stabbing a man – “They reckon I stabbed him 47 times,” or about pouring boiling, sugary water over someone or about saving up stale piss to throw, there I was nodding and making notes and thinking, “Oh that’s good, I might be able to use that in a novel”. I knew that something was wrong but, just as it had been when I was a child, the wrongness had no purchase on me.
We got down to four and then, out of the blue, there was a run of golden, other-worldly mornings when we read Chaucer. Chaucer. It started when Ten-Foot thought I was kidding when I said that there was a marxist account of language. They couldn’t get enough of the Canterbury Tales, that lovely run of characters. It cheered me up to know again that anything good, no matter how old, obscure or difficult always commanded a hearing. We took our time over the spelling and where words might have come from or gone to. I told them about David Crystal and the notion of polite rather than correct English. We really got into it. The college didn’t want to pay me for a class of four; I was willing to pay them. The men’s enthusiasm reassured me that I hadn’t wasted my time. What, after all, does education offer to people if not a greater sense of being human? [Continue reading…]
Sequestering the war on terror
Amy Davidson writes: “Stunning,” Judge Lewis Kaplan said Monday, to the defense lawyers for Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden, who is being tried on terrorism conspiracy charges. They had just asked him to delay the trial, not for any of the reasons one might expect in this sort of case, like new evidence or classified case files or a defendant stashed in the limbo of Guantánamo — Ghaith is in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan, which seems to be holding him just fine. The problem is the budget fight in Congress, of all things: thanks to sequestration, the federal public defenders on the case have been told they’ll be furloughed for days adding up to five and a half weeks. “It’s extremely troublesome to contemplate the possibility of a case of this nature being delayed because of sequestration,” Kaplan said. There are days when it can be hard to sort out the absurdities of the legal side of the war on terror from the absurdity of Washington in general.
It is a good thing that Ghaith is in a real court, at least, and not at Guantánamo, whose dysfunction has been thrown into relief in the last few weeks by a mass hunger strike. There are Republicans who are angry that he isn’t. “Taking the sequester scare tactics to a new level, now it appears we’ll have a confessed al Qaeda member sitting in an N.Y.C. jail and eating up taxpayer dollars while he waits out a manufactured delay in a trial that shouldn’t have been held on U.S. soil in the first place,” Senator John Cornyn told the Free Beacon, in a quote that might win a contest for packing multi-headed, multi-topic wrongheadedness into a single sentence. It costs many more taxpayer dollars to confine someone to Guantánamo indefinitely; why not try him in the city that was attacked on 9/11?
That said, the Obama Administration needs to be sure not to let sequestration get it off track in this case. Bringing Ghaith to Manhattan was a rare healthy response to the Republican tactic of making it hard for the Administration to get anyone out of Guantánamo — even the dozens of people who have been cleared for release (hence the hunger strike). Mostly, the Obama Administration has been fearful, in a way that has turned absurdity into lethality. Its frustrations with Guantánamo have led it to turn to drone strikes rather than to the guards at the M.C.C. It has built up another rickety extrajudicial program — the drone war — even as it has all but given up on the fight to close Guantánamo. That is not an argument for Guantánamo, just as saying that when you torture people you don’t kill them isn’t an argument for either torture or drones. You can say no to both. [Continue reading…]
No chance of peace with Netanyahu, time for Obama to push back
M.J. Rosenberg writes: In 1990, Secretary of State James Baker had basically had it up to here with the Israeli government. The (George H.W.) Bush administration had been trying to entice Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir into negotiations with the Palestinians but he kept adding new conditions to get the U.S. off his back.
To be acceptable to Shamir, any Palestinian interlocutors had to have no connections with the PLO, none with any associates of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and could not be from Jerusalem. Beyond that, the Israelis would decide which Palestinians were acceptable as negotiating partners based on their idea of merit (only pro-Israel Palestinians would do, apparently).
Baker was fuming but held his tongue until he went before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to discuss Middle East prospects. But then something happened and, for perhaps the last time ever, a top U.S. government official told the Israelis what he really thought. [Continue reading…]
Syrian security situation: worse than we are being told?
Alex Thomson writes: The government in Syria is brutal, repressive and founded upon the torture and abuse of the Syrian people on an industrial scale. I’ve said it before. I say it again.
Its army has shelled and shot foreign journalists in Homs and Aleppo. At least one freelance reporter is believed to have disappeared in government hands.
However it is the groups fighting to overthrow President Assad who must also account for talking about “freedom”, “good” and “right” on the one hand, and repeatedly attacking, killing and kidnapping journalists on the other.
As I write,there are four more victims – Italian journalists – detained in the rebel-held areas of northern Syria.
Many others have been killed and Syrian journalists working for any media outlet based in Damascus are considered targets, and constantly threatened, kidnapped and killed. We can argue about whether or not such journalists are merely mouthpieces for the regime. But I say you cannot be a la carte about this.
Either you believe journalists should not be killed or attacked for doing their job as non-combatants, or you do not.
Plainly some rebel groups do not. But they cannot then prattle on about “freedom” and “liberating” Syria. Some kind of liberation. Some kind of freedom.
And all this presents troubling issues for the western media attempting to cover this war. The rebels’ attrition against journalists and journalism is an important part of their war. It amounts to strategy in its consistency. Yet all too often because of “security concerns”, the western media simply self-censors this out of existence.
Few people in the UK will be aware the a very prominent British journalist and his team have only recently emerged from the terrifying experience of becoming kidnap victims in rebel hands. That story has still not appeared in any media in the UK because a “news blackout” was declared in order to facilitate their release. Few would – or should – have any qualms with that degree of self-censorship.
However, their organisation – a very major force in the British media – has chosen to say nothing about the issue since. The public are entirely unaware this has happened.
In doing so they – and we by extension – have effectively muzzled ourselves and not told an important part of the Syrian war story – a nasty, dark and highly relevant dimension to the the rebel campaign there. The great Syrian question is all about what kind of freedoms people are fighting for. That’s why this issue matters so much.
Proof that the United States has lied in the drone wars
Micah Zenko writes: It turns out that the Obama administration has not been honest about who the CIA has been targeting with drones in Pakistan. Jonathan Landay, national security reporter at McClatchy Newspapers, has provided the first analysis of drone-strike victims that is based upon internal, top-secret U.S. intelligence reports. It is the most important reporting on U.S. drone strikes to date because Landay, using U.S. government assessments, plainly demonstrates that the claim repeatedly made by President Obama and his senior aides — that targeted killings are limited only to officials, members, and affiliates of al Qaeda who pose an imminent threat of attack on the U.S. homeland — is false.
Senior officials and agencies have emphasized this point over and over because it is essential to the legal foundations on which the strikes are ultimately based: the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force and the U.N. Charter’s right to self-defense. A Department of Justice white paper said that the United States can target a “senior operational leader of al-Qa’ida or an associated force” who “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.” Attorney General Eric Holder said the administration targets “specific senior operational leaders of al-Qaeda and associated forces,” and Harold Koh, the senior State Department legal adviser dubbed them “high-level al-Qaeda leaders who are planning attacks.” Obama said during a Google+ Hangout in January 2012: “These strikes have been in the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas] and going after al-Qaeda suspects.” Finally, Obama claimed in September: “Our goal has been to focus on al Qaeda and to focus narrowly on those who would pose an imminent threat to the United States of America.”
As the Obama administration unveils its promised and overdue targeted-killing reforms over the next few months, citizens, policymakers, and the media should keep in mind this disconnect between who the United States claimed it was killing and who it was actually killing. [Continue reading…]
Manning trial judge to U.S.: prove suspect knew leaks would ‘aid enemy’
The Guardian reports: The US government will have to prove that the WikiLeaks source, Bradley Manning, had “reason to believe” that his disclosure of state secrets could be harmful to the US and beneficial to foreign nations, the judge presiding over the soldier’s court martial ruled on Wednesday.
The ruling from Colonel Denise Lind, sitting in a military court at Fort Meade in Maryland, raises the burden of proof for the prosecutors who are trying to have the US soldier jailed for life for his actions in passing hundreds of thousands of classified state documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. Manning has pleaded guilty to the leak, but only to lesser charges that carry an upper sentence of 20 years in military jail.
He has pleaded not guilty to the most serious charge, that he knowingly “aided the enemy”. The charge carries a theoretical death sentence, but the prosecution has indicated it will seek life in military custody instead.
Manning is set to go to full court martial on 3 June, with the trial expected to last for 12 weeks. The scale of the WikiLeaks breach of US intelligence – including war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan, videos of US helicopter attacks, as well as a mountain of diplomatic cables from around the world – coupled with the seriousness of the charges, will ensure the trial will be the most high-profile prosecution of a leaker in a generation.
In a separate ruling, Lind has given the prosecution the green light to call witnesses who will testify that the WikiLeaks material actually reached “the enemy”. The defence, led by a civilian lawyer, David Coombs, had tried to preclude any evidence relating to the end-use of the leaked documents and videos on grounds that it was irrelevant and potentially prejudicial to Manning.
But the judge found that it was relevant, particularly to the key prosecution accusation that the soldier “aided the enemy”. She listed a number of hostile groups as “the enemy” in this case, including al-Qaida, al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula, and an unspecified number of other organisations referred to only by code name.
Facebook widens data targeting
The Wall Street Journal reports: Gunning to win more advertising dollars, Facebook Inc. is using new ways to cull personal information from outside the social network and match it with data submitted by its billion-plus users.
The efforts are winning over advertisers such as General Motors Co. and Neiman Marcus Group Inc. but are further raising privacy concerns as Facebook harnesses a mosaic of information about its users.
On Wednesday, Facebook officially plans to roll out a new advertiser tool to help advertisers directly target Facebook users based on their offline spending history.
The tool marries what Facebook already knows about people’s friends and “likes” with vast troves of information from third-party data marketers such as Datalogix Inc., Acxiom Corp. and Alliance Data Systems Corp.’s Epsilon. That includes data on the Web pages that consumers visit, the email lists they have signed up for, and the way they are spending money online and offline.
A data broker like Datalogix, for example, aggregates information about which items and brands a consumer buys through sources like loyalty-card programs. Through software that obscures users’ identifying information such as email addresses and phone numbers, Datalogix and Facebook can combine their databases, and group users based on their offline purchases. Then, through the “partner categories” tool, brands can select which groups should see their advertisements.
For instance, a review of the “partner categories” tool by The Wall Street Journal found that categories often apply to tens of millions of people—for instance, there are some 20 million U.S. users who are heavy juice buyers on the social network.
A small chocolatier can target young parents in New York who buy lots of organic food products, for example. Hyundai Motor Co. recently ran a test to send ads to people identified as “intenders,” or those likely to buy a car soon based on their use of auto-research sites.
While Facebook doesn’t provide data on individuals to advertisers, it now can feed advertisers information on broad swaths of its members including their behavior outside of the social network. [Continue reading…]
Bahrain’s continuing war on doctors
Rula al-Saffar writes: When the Arab Spring swept through Bahrain in 2011, citizens there — just as in other Middle East countries — took to the streets demanding political and economic reforms. Also just as in other Middle East countries, peaceful demonstrations were soon met with a violent crackdown by government forces.
When it began, I knew that it was my duty as a nurse to help. So I made my way to Salmaniya Medical Complex, Bahrain’s only public hospital, to do what I could to aid the overwhelmed staff, even though I did not work there myself. What I witnessed was horrifying: Evidence of the use of live ammunition, bodies battered by tear gas canisters fired at close range, and protesters blinded by the use of bird shot. In the months that closely followed, nearly 50 people were killed as a direct result of the violence against protesters, a number which has risen to over 100 since 2011.
As a healthcare professional, it was my duty to aid the injured. But as a witness to the Bahraini security forces’ violent response to the peaceful protests, I also felt a duty to speak out against the abuses. Many of my colleagues who felt the same way spoke on the record with the media to describe the types of injuries they had seen, shedding light on the nature of the government’s brutality. After authorities barred ambulances from bringing injured protesters to Salmaniya Medical Complex, we joined in protests to demand that the wounded have access to the hospital and care. [Continue reading…]
In Syria, some brace for the next war
The Washington Post reports: As this remote corner of northeastern Syria fast slides out of government control, many Syrians are bracing for what they fear will be another war, between the relatively moderate fighters who first took up arms against the government and the Islamist extremists who emerged more recently with the muscle and firepower to drive the rebel advance.
The capture last month of the city of Raqqah, Syria’s first provincial capital to fall under opposition control, consolidated the gains of an assortment of mostly Islamist-inclined groups across three northeastern provinces. Forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad cling to just a tiny number of scattered bases and could be ejected anytime.
Yet even as the regime continues to hold out, schisms are emerging among rebel groups over ideology, the shape of a future Syrian state and control of the significant resources concentrated in this long-neglected but crucial corner of the country.
“Fighting is unavoidable,” said Abu Mansour, a commander with the rebel Free Syrian Army’s Farouq Brigades, whose men clashed last month with those of the extremist Jabhat al-Nusra movement in the border town of Tal Abiyad, one of several instances in which the tensions have erupted into violence. “If it doesn’t happen today, it will happen tomorrow.” [Continue reading…]
Hamas wants bigger regional role
The Associated Press reports: Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal has set an ambitious agenda for his new term, seeking to transform his Islamic militant movement that rules Gaza into a widely recognized political force, but without making concessions toward Israel needed for international acceptance.
Re-elected last week, Mashaal will try to deepen ties with regional powers Qatar, Turkey and Egypt, which have already given money or political support to Gaza and could be conduits to the U.S. and Europe, several leading Hamas figures said.
Mashaal will also push for a power-sharing deal with his Western-backed Palestinian rival, President Mahmoud Abbas.
Mashaal “wants Hamas to be a recognized and legitimate player,” said Jordan-based analyst Mouin Rabbani, who frequently meets with Palestinian politicians, including Hamas members.
Video: Mark Mazzetti on CIA’s post-9/11 move from spying to assassinations