In America, whether it comes to tackling crime, or the most severe mental illness, there’s a popular sentiment that says the best solution is to “lock ’em up and throw away the keys.” That’s part of the reason this country has a higher incarceration rate than any other. A knee-jerk response to the Newtown massacre is likely to be a push to reduce legal obstacles to involuntary treatment.
Christian Science Monitor reports: Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza may have been motivated by anger at his mother because of plans to have him committed for treatment, Fox News reported Thursday, citing comments from the son of an area church pastor and an unnamed neighborhood source. Fox also cited an unnamed senior law enforcement official saying anger at plans for “his future mental-health treatment” were being investigated as a possible motive.
While the Fox reports are still uncorroborated, other media reports paint a general picture that suggests Ms. Lanza was growing increasingly concerned about the mental health of her son.
These reports are bringing to light a debate over where to set the bar when it comes to forcing an individual into treatment – and whether those caring for people with mental-health issues have enough resources available to head off potential crises before they happen.
On one hand, warning signs are often apparent, so making it easier to commit someone for involuntary treatment could save lives.
The young adult men who end up being violent often “have others in their lives … who are trying desperately to get help before something bad happens. They can see it coming down the pike,” says Liza Gold, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine. But caregivers “have run up against these commitment laws that are so restrictive – that come down so far on the side of civil liberties and privacy – that it is almost impossible to contain, hospitalize, treat someone with a chronic and escalating mental illness.”
On the other hand, forced treatment can also be emotionally wrenching for the patient and cause lingering anger, mental-health experts say.
“People who are forcibly treated so often feel traumatized by it,” says Robert Whitaker, author of “Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.” “Women in particular will sometimes talk about it almost like a quasi-rape, because sometimes they are held down and injected,” he says.
“That’s Crazy,” is a documentary that shows forced treatment from the perspective of someone who has been stripped of the right to make choices concerning his own health:
Adam Lanza couldn’t have killed twenty children without access to lethal weapons. But the rage that led to a massacre might never have been triggered without access to lethal drugs. As the British psychiatrist Dr. David Healy has said: “psychotropic drugs of pretty well any group can trigger violence up to and including homicide.”
Alongside the emerging debate on gun control in America, another conversation on mental health is also unfolding. Unfortunately, much of the latter conversation is poorly informed and based on false assumptions, namely that the primary weakness in the mental health system is lack of universal access, and that when mental health care is available, it is effective.
There is a popular view that the crucial factor in averting mental health crises that end with catastrophic consequences, is that the patient must stay on his medication. Drugs make dangerous people safe and so long as they keep taking them, the rest of us having nothing to worry about — that’s the idea.
Since 1997, when the FDA opened the floodgates, Americans have been exposed to a massive amount of direct-to-consumer advertising from the pharmaceutical industry — a form of advertising that is illegal throughout the world except for in only one other country, New Zealand. One of the principal results has been to make psychotropic drugs into the most profitable sector of the drug market. As a trade magazine trumpets, “Psychiatric drugs: a booming business.”
Not only has advertising helped boost sales of these drugs, but more broadly it has served to indoctrinate the population at large into believing that whatever problems an individual might be experiencing, a remedy can be found in the shape of a pill. The marketing directive — ask your doctor if Seroquel/Lunesta/Zyprexa/etc is right for you — has become a such-repeated formula that it has won well-deserved parodies. Nevertheless, this kind of advertising works and has been highly effective in conditioning us to believe that mental health is now all simply about tuning brain chemistry with psychotropic drugs.
Whereas it was once more commonly understood that the healthy formation of a person involved parenting, education, acquisition of social skills, nurturing social relationships, and the development of self-knowledge — a life-long process — nowadays people and their problems are being reduced to brains and their imbalances. Problems in families and in societies are reduced to problem-children — children who can be ‘fixed’ with a suitable cocktail of drugs. And by offering a quick-fix alternative to the real work of crafting collective pathways to sanity, the pharmaceutical industry has turned a huge profit.
An example of the dangers of a drug-dependent approach to mental health was laid out in a PBS report last year on the medication of foster children. Powerful anti-psychotic drugs that were once only prescribed to adults are now being given to children, less for the benefit of their health than as an expedient form of social management. Kids are being confined in chemical straightjackets. But as one mother says of her adopted son who she has nurtured back to a full life, “he needed understanding, not Depakote; he needed empathy and an ear and a shoulder to cry on, not Zyprexa.”
(If the video below won’t play, go to the site where it was originally posted.)
Guns are for emotional cripples. They help weak people feel strong. They help fearful people feel safe. They offer lonely people the reassuring sensation of cold steel. They protect the freedom of people who don’t enjoy freedom.
Anyone who thinks that owning a gun has something to do with being a real American has confused patriotism with dedication to self-preservation, since no ones gun can protect this country; at most it might protect the guy with his finger on the trigger.
Firmin DeBrabander writes: [A]n armed society — especially as we prosecute it at the moment in this country — is the opposite of a civil society.
The Newtown shootings occurred at a peculiar time in gun rights history in this nation. On one hand, since the mid 1970s, fewer households each year on average have had a gun. Gun control advocates should be cheered by that news, but it is eclipsed by a flurry of contrary developments. As has been well publicized, gun sales have steadily risen over the past few years, and spiked with each of Obama’s election victories.
Furthermore, of the weapons that proliferate amongst the armed public, an increasing number are high caliber weapons (the weapon of choice in the goriest shootings in recent years). Then there is the legal landscape, which looks bleak for the gun control crowd.
Every state except for Illinois has a law allowing the carrying of concealed weapons — and just last week, a federal court struck down Illinois’ ban. States are now lining up to allow guns on college campuses. In September, Colorado joined four other states in such a move, and statehouses across the country are preparing similar legislation. And of course, there was Oklahoma’s ominous Open Carry Law approved by voters this election day — the fifteenth of its kind, in fact — which, as the name suggests, allows those with a special permit to carry weapons in the open, with a holster on their hip.
Individual gun ownership — and gun violence — has long been a distinctive feature of American society, setting us apart from the other industrialized democracies of the world. Recent legislative developments, however, are progressively bringing guns out of the private domain, with the ultimate aim of enshrining them in public life. Indeed, the N.R.A. strives for a day when the open carry of powerful weapons might be normal, a fixture even, of any visit to the coffee shop or grocery store — or classroom.
As N.R.A. president Wayne LaPierre expressed in a recent statement on the organization’s Web site, more guns equal more safety, by their account. A favorite gun rights saying is “an armed society is a polite society.” If we allow ever more people to be armed, at any time, in any place, this will provide a powerful deterrent to potential criminals. Or if more citizens were armed — like principals and teachers in the classroom, for example — they could halt senseless shootings ahead of time, or at least early on, and save society a lot of heartache and bloodshed.
As ever more people are armed in public, however — even brandishing weapons on the street — this is no longer recognizable as a civil society. Freedom is vanished at that point.
Foreign Policy: In the wake of a terrible tragedy like Friday’s elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, most people immediately begin groping for answers.
On Sunday, a family member claimed that Nancy Lanza, mother of 20-year-old gunman Adam Lanza, owned the guns used in the shooting because she was some manner of survivalist. The reasons Adam Lanza did what he did may well be complex. But if the report proves to be true — and many, many reports about the Lanzas have not — it may provide context for his actions.
Survivalism, sometimes referred to as “doomsday prepping” or simply “prepping,” is a movement based on the fear that society is on the brink of imminent, or at least foreseeable, collapse and that it’s sensible to prepare for that possibility.
“Survivalist” is a very broad category, and it includes a strikingly diverse collection of people, many of whom, it should be emphasized, are perfectly nice and have fears that are simply amplified versions of those that keep mainstream Americans awake at night. There are at least tens of thousands of prepper families in the United States, covering a broad range of practices, most of which are not particularly unreasonable.
Someone who closely followed the preparedness guidelines issued by the Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control, or FEMA might find themselves the butt of “survivalist” jokes from their friends and family. But those friends would have been grateful to have a prepper friend if they lived in certain parts of the East Coast when Hurricane Sandy struck.
Preppers go beyond the average household’s disaster preparedness regime of having a couple flashlights with batteries in them. Their precautions can include everything from keeping a supply of canned goods to stocking generators and building elaborate bunkers. Many preppers also keep guns and a supply of ammunition in anticipation of the breakdown of law and order, as well as for hunting after the local Whole Foods has been abandoned to looters.
Shortly after press reports about Nancy Lanza’s alleged survivalism appeared, the American Preppers Network issued a statement, which said: “Our members, and others around the globe who share our philosophy of being prepared in times of emergency, are sickened by this event. We too are fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters and to associate APN or any legitimate organization that stresses preparing for emergencies with this barbaric act goes against everything we collectively stand for.”
Despite this statement, which is generally correct, prepper subculture can go further than intensive or even excessive preparation. Most survivalism is based around fear of a sometimes ambiguous, sometimes specific disaster that is just around the corner, most commonly referred to by preppers as SHTF, short for “shit hits the fan.” Because SHTF can be anything from the collapse of the dollar to an electromagnetic pulse detonation to a race war, survivalist tendencies are sometimes — but not always — paired with malignant forms of extremism, such as ideological racism, sovereign citizenship, apocalyptic religion, or anti-government beliefs on both the right and the left sides of the political spectrum. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, for instance, took part in survivalist subculture in addition to their anti-government ideology, and extensive sections of the white nationalist Web forum Stormfront are dedicated to discussions of SHTF. But survivalism tends to be an add-on to such ideologies, not a fundamental cause. [Continue reading…]
From the perspective of the preppers, they probably see their philosophy as an extension of the boy scouts’ motto: be prepared. And for the rest of us, survivalists may look like oddballs subject to irrational, paranoiac fears.
But whatever the particular flavor of Apocalyptic vision they favor, the survivalist outlook is fundamentally misanthropic. It doesn’t simply anticipate the world going to hell, but nurtures the hope that as society gets destroyed, for those who were already sufficiently prepared there is still hope of a decent life — even if that means having to live inside some kind of well-armed fortress.
From this perspective, the world is out there, set apart from the individual who guards his own interests. There are no collective interests. There is no commonwealth.
While for the benefit of those of us ignorant about guns, the New York Times reports on the AR-15 — weapon of choice among men intent on mass killing along with the many Americans “who want to be prepared for an Armageddon-type situation” — and petition drives and gun-control op-eds are putting pressure on the White House and Congress to take “meaningful action” to prevent another Sandy Hook massacre, gun manufacturers and arms dealings must be loving every minute of the current anti-gun fever. Why? Because every time the threat of new legislation looms on the horizon gun lovers rush to the store to stock up.
In one particular but quite significant way, Adam Lanza’s death was a typical American suicide: he shot himself
Although only 5 percent of Americans who attempt suicide shoot themselves, 50 percent of suicides are caused by firearms. Guns are simply much more efficient than most other methods through which people try to end their own lives. And although many people imagine the greatest danger guns pose is by being used to murder others, more people die by firing a gun at themselves. Indeed, while gun owners typically say they need their weapons for self protection, 83 percent of gun-related deaths in American homes are the result of suicide.
Since 2001, suicide attack is a phrase that has shaped American perceptions of the Middle East and framed much of U.S. national security policy-making. This is unfortunate for several reasons, not least because there is little evidence that the perpetrators of so-called suicide attacks conduct their operations in order to commit suicide — there are after all much easier ways for someone to kill themselves. Moreover, from what is known about many of the attackers, it is clear that they see the violent ending of their own lives as a means to a greater purpose rather than an end in itself.
In general, suicide attackers are rarely socially isolated, clinically insane, or economically destitute individuals, but are most often educated, socially integrated, and highly capable people who could be expected to have a good future. The profile of a suicide terrorist resembles that of a politically conscious individual who might join a grassroots movement more than it does the stereotypical murderer, religious cult member, or everyday suicide.
In contrast, real acts of suicide are focused resolutely on the termination of life — not what might follow.
When each new school massacre in America is reported, it almost always turns out that the killing finishes when the shooter ends his own life. While it might seem that suicide is in some sense a logical conclusion to the blood-letting — the gunman might reasonably conclude that if he doesn’t shoot himself he will end up getting shot by the police — because the massacre becomes the immediate focus of media attention, the suicide itself is turned into a footnote. A natural reluctance to comment much on the method of the gunman’s death lest such attention suggests he might be worthy of sympathy, also has the effect of making the suicide seem peripheral to the event.
This is a mistake, for it we want to understand what happened in Sandy Hook on Friday morning we should be in no doubt that this was the way Adam Lanza chose to make certain that his own death would not go unnoticed.
Individuals who, for whatever reason, experience extreme social isolation — loners who by their nature tend to go unnoticed — are often perceived as lacking the desire to be socially engaged, but more often their isolation serves to cloak a cauldron of agony and despair born from frustrated social needs.
The way Lanza ended his life suggests that he felt separated from the rest of the world by an unbridgeable chasm. Having concluded that he would never be able to cross that divide, he found company by taking away 27 innocents lives who, to his mind, would be forced join him in oblivion.
While in a typical suicide there is a dread of life and some kind of reconciliation with the fact that we are all destined to die alone, those who kill others before taking their own lives seem trapped in a tormented fight against their own isolation.
Shooting massacres, even when they occur as frequently as several times a year, are still viewed by most Americans as isolated events — anomalies in an otherwise relatively peaceful society. But — to borrow a metaphor from the war on terrorism — the swamp in which this carnage takes place is a pervasive feature of American life: the fragmentation of individual lives separated from social networks and the life-affirming experience of physical contact with others.
Facing the epidemic of isolation in America would require a collective willingness to embark on some profound cultural changes. In many ways, this is a society that strangles its own development by making human relationships subordinate to individual freedom.
Before such changes can begin to take place there will be more tormented souls who try to follow in Lanza’s footsteps. But whether the results are equally catastrophic depends more immediately on one thing: how easily they have access to guns.
Two deranged men go on rampages in two schools and in one case there are no deaths and few serious injuries and in the other, twenty-seven people die.
When Min Yingjun went on the rampage at an elementary school in the Henan province village of Chengping on Friday morning, his attack would surely have been just as deadly as Adam Lanza’s killing spree in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., had Yingjun been carrying similar weapons. But however murderous someone’s intent, a knife simply can’t inflict as much harm as a gun.
In the wake of America’s latest mass killing, the media’s interest is inevitably focusing on the identity of the killer, but what might be a more meaningful profile would be on the weapons he used — weapons that as has already been reported, were legally purchased.
It wasn’t Lanza’s troubled childhood that killed twenty children; it was precision engineering performing exactly in accordance with its designs. The bullets flew through the air precisely in the direction they were being aimed and were just as deadly as their manufacturers intend them to be. Who wants to take the credit?
“We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics,” says President Obama. But having had four years to witness how this president operates, it’s easy to tell when he’s making a vacuous statement. He’s advocating collective action — doesn’t take the lead — and says it should be ‘meaningful’, a phrase loaded with limitless possibilities and zero commitments. His words were greeted with skepticism:
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York spoke for many gun-control advocates, who have been frustrated and disappointed by Mr. Obama’s failure to embrace the issue, when he said he wanted to hear much more.
“Calling for ‘meaningful action’ is not enough. We need immediate action,” said Mr. Bloomberg, who is a leader of a group of mayors against illegal gun ownership.
“We have heard all the rhetoric before,” Mr. Bloomberg added. “What we have not seen is leadership — not from the White House and not from Congress. That must end today.”
The problem is, even the majority of the advocates of gun control are ducking the central issue: the idea that owning a gun deserves constitutional protection.
The right to bear arms sounds like a libertarian form of self expression. It’s like saying, I can’t exercise my birthright as an America unless I can own a gun; that an America which curtails this freedom will no longer be a land of the free.
But is this really why so many Americans own guns? On the contrary, American gun ownership is not an expression of freedom; it shows just how much fear permeates this society.
Americans own guns to protect themselves from other Americans and even at its circular extreme in order to protect their right to own guns.
But don’t children have an even more important right: to be able to go to school without getting shot?
How many American senators have the courage and integrity required to say this? At least one, but not many others. That one was the senator being quoted: Chuck Hagel.
Americans who put Israel first don’t like the ring of Hagel’s words, both because it suggests he might lack sufficient loyalty to Israel and also because that kind of statement shines a light on their own lack of loyalty to the U.S..
Still, aside from those who place their primary allegiance to the Jewish state, it’s hard for others to find much fault in Hagel’s position as described by Aaron David Miller in The Much Too Promised Land (2008):
[P]olitical pressures have taken a serious toll by conditioning a key branch of the American government to be reflexively pro-Israel at a time when serious questions need to be asked and debated about Middle East policy. Congress has little stomach to serve as a forum for this dialogue and debate, let alone to play a role in seriously pressing an administration to pursue Arab-Israeli diplomacy. Some members in both the Senate and the House are willing to be critical of Israel or of AIPAC or to take positions that appear sensitive to Arab or Palestinian concerns, but certainly not many.
One who is willing is Chuck Hagel, the two-term Republican senator from Nebraska. Of all my conversations, the one with Hagel stands apart for its honesty and clarity. If I wanted to be in a safe business, he began, “I’d sell shoes.” Hagel’s logic chain is pretty compelling. America is Israel’s best friend, but it also has key interests in the Arab and Muslim world that, particularly since 9/11, it must try to protect. Being too one-sided when it comes to the Arab-Israeli isn’t good either for Israel or for America. And far too often Congress shrinks from making this clear.
“This is an institution that does not inherently bring out a great deal of courage,” Hagel continues. Most of the time members play it safe and adopt an “I’ll support Israel” attitude. AIPAC comes knocking with a pro-Israel letter, and “then you’ll get eighty or ninety senators on it. I don’t think I’ve ever signed one of those letters. When someone would accuse him of not being pro-Israel because he didn’t sign the letter, Hagel told me he responds: “I didn’t sign the letter because it was a stupid letter.”
Few legislators talk this way on the Hill. Hagel is a strong supporter of Israel and a believer in shared values. “The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here,” but as he put it, “I’m a United States senator. I’m not an Israeli senator.”
Landfill Harmonic is an upcoming feature-length documentary about a remarkable musical orchestra in Paraguay, where young musicians play instruments made from trash. For more information about the film, please visit facebook.com/landfillharmonicmovie.
I was sent this video by a reader and shortly after that, by coincidence, saw it posted on the website of my local curbside recycling service. It’s clearly going viral.
Looking at the filmmakers’ Facebook page, it’s also clear that lots of viewers feel this documentary has an inspiring message. I too feel the inspiration, but I’m not so clear about the message.
Across the planet, there are millions of people who survive by sifting through garbage in search of objects of value. In America, this scavenging operates at arguably the most primitive level — less often by scouring landfills than by plucking food from trash cans and household items from dumpsters as people with no homes do what they can to survive. But wherever this activity happens, the same equation is at play: in the objects that one group of people see as worthless, another group of people find value.
From a purely materialistic perspective a story about people making violins from trash looks like extraordinary resourcefulness in a world of extreme inequality, but consider where this resourcefulness comes from — it isn’t simply an expression of a hunger that drives some people to make something out of nothing.
The eyes and hands that turn tin cans and other found objects into a musical instrument are guided by minds that don’t see trash — they see discarded materials waiting to be turned to a new purpose. Or, to put it another way, while poverty can feed desperation, it can also fuel an inventive imagination. And such an imagination sees the possibilities in what is present as clearly as the limitations imposed by what is absent.
(If to my eye there is a somewhat depressing element in this story, it is that the creativity that gave birth to these instruments then gets channeled into a somewhat less creative endeavor: the imitation of the music bequeathed by European colonists rather than an exploration of indigenous idioms. Too often, those who struggle to rise out of poverty, do so by trying to model themselves on their own oppressors.)
I see on Facebook some well-meaning inquiries from individuals wanting to know how they might donate unwanted instruments — couldn’t a shortage of instruments in one country be resolved by diminishing the glut from elsewhere?
All across America there must be thousands of violins and trumpets stuffed in the back of closets, discarded and forgotten, waiting to be placed into appreciative hands. But why were they abandoned in the first place?
We live in a land of excesses — too much stuff and too many sources of instant gratification. Learning to play music is hard and painful and demands patience and discipline. Why struggle to play music when it is so much easier to listen to it?
We have reduced culture to a commodity. Its creators possess what most of us regard as a rare attribute, talent, and thanks to the mass production of devises like iPods we can passively consume the creativity of others.
Whether talent is less rare than we imagined we may never discover because we are content to rely on the talent of others rather than delve within and explore our own.
Maybe the message from the children in Cateura says less about how much they have made from so little and more about what we have lost through having so much.
As a people, Americans are inclined towards fundamentalism and fundamentalism is not at its core about religion — it’s about belief buttressed by a disdain for reason.
The national dogma of the last decade or so has been an unquestioned belief in the righteousness and importance of fighting terrorism. In as much as this belief could be given a veneer of rationality, it is essentially this: America is good and terrorism is evil. Good must prove that it is stronger than evil.
Are most Americans worried about Jabhat al-Nusra? No. They’ve never heard of it. But if told that it is an al Qaeda affiliate, then most — whether Republicans or Democrats — will be duly concerned. Why? Because if it’s an al Qaeda affiliate then we all know what it wants to do: destroy America.
Is there any evidence that Jabhat al-Nusra, currently leading the fight against the Assad regime, will soon or ever turns its attention to destroying America? Not that I’ve seen. Even so, the State Department thought it would be a good idea to designate the group as a terrorist organization.
The Syrian National Coalition, which the United States now regards as the legitimate representative body for the Syrian people, thinks otherwise.
But didn’t some members of the Nusra Front demonstrate their anti-American tendencies by fighting against American troops in Iraq? Not exactly. Fighting against an American occupation is not the same as fighting against America. Moreover, the fight in Syria is yet another demonstration of how fluid America’s alliances often are. It’s not long ago that the demon at the center of this fight — Bashar al-Assad — was himself an American ally of sorts, valued in particular because of his willingness to interrogate and torture prisoners on the CIA’s behalf.
McClatchy reports: Right after the United States formalized its backing of a new Syrian opposition group Wednesday, the mutual unease underpinning the partnership surfaced as the group’s leader openly criticized the United States for declaring the rebel movement’s Nusra Front a terrorist group linked to al Qaida in Iraq.
Sheik Moaz al Khatib, head of the Syrian National Coalition of Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, asked the Obama administration to rethink its labeling of the Nusra Front, stressing that the militant faction was integral to the fight against the regime of President Bashar Assad.
“The logic under which we consider one of the parts that fights against the Assad regime as a terrorist organization is a logic one must reconsider,” Khatib told reporters in Marrakesh, Morocco, after more than 100 nations agreed to recognize his group as the “legitimate representative” of the Syrian people.
Khatib’s tacit endorsement of Nusra was echoed by many rebel commanders inside Syria and signals a thorny road ahead as U.S. officials attempt to disentangle nationalist or relatively moderate rebel factions from the Islamist extremists who have become perhaps the leading military force in the nearly two-year fight to topple Assad.
“We love our country. We can differ with parties that adopt political ideas and visions different from ours. But we ensure that the goal of all rebels is the fall of the regime,” added Khatib, a Muslim cleric who’s complained in the past that blueprints for a post-Assad transition were too secular.
U.S. officials did not react to Khatib’s statements, but Deputy Secretary of State William Burns said in Morocco that Khatib had been invited to visit Washington soon. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: Climate change has the potential to stoke regional instabilities and fuel international tensions, according to a major new report from the US National Intelligence Council.
Released yesterday, the Global Trends 2030 report seeks to map out the security trends that will shape international relations over the next two decades. It is the latest in a series of studies from national security bodies around the world to acknowledge that climate change and its likely impacts on food, water, and natural resource supplies represents an emerging security threat.
“Demand for food, water, and energy will grow by approximately 35, 40 and 50 per cent respectively, owing to an increase in the global population and the consumption patterns of an expanding middle class,” the report states. “Climate change will worsen the outlook for the availability of these critical resources.”
The report argues that scarcities can be avoided, but only if co-ordinated steps are taken to improve productivity and efficiency across a raft of industries and economies.
“We are not necessarily headed into a world of scarcities, but policymakers and their private sector partners will need to be proactive to avoid such a future,” the report states. “Many countries probably won’t have the wherewithal to avoid food and water shortages without massive help from outside.”
It also acknowledges that a series of technology breakthroughs will be needed to address climate-related risks. “Key technologies likely to be at the forefront of maintaining [energy, food and water] resources in the next 15-20 years will include genetically modified crops, precision agriculture, water irrigation techniques, solar energy, advanced bio-based fuels, and enhanced oil and natural gas extraction via fracturing,” the report argues.
“Given the vulnerabilities of developing economies to key resource supplies and prices and the early impacts of climate change, key developing countries may realise substantial rewards in commercialising many next-generation resource technologies first.”
So, in order to mitigate the effects of the environmental damage caused by the excessive use of fossil fuels, the “intelligence” community recommends expanding the use of environmentally destructive fracking, increased toxification of agricultural land through the use of GMOs and in the process there will be profits to be made. Something’s wrong with this picture.
How much influence does Washington have over the war in Syria? Somewhere between little and none.
How is that evident?
Look at the efforts to marginalize Jabhat al-Nusra, the militant group commonly described as an affiliate of al Qaeda in Iraq.
The State Department is considering designating the group as a terrorist organization and this has brought a swift response from Syria: 83 battalions of rebel fighters have issued a statement expressing solidarity with Al Nusra (h/t Joshua Landis) and told the Americans to mind their own business.
Washington still seems to be populated by puppet masters who imagine they can choreograph a process through which “moderates” are peeled away from “extremists”. What seems to have escaped the attention of these puppeteers is that their puppets do not actually have strings attached. They operate with their own free will.
As the United States pushes the Syrian opposition to organize a viable alternative government, it plans to blacklist the Nusra Front as a terrorist organization, making it illegal for Americans to have financial dealings with the group and most likely prompting similar sanctions from Europe. The hope is to remove one of the biggest obstacles to increasing Western support for the rebellion: the fear that money and arms could flow to a jihadi group that could further destabilize Syria and harm Western interests.
When rebel commanders met Friday in Turkey to form a unified command structure at the behest of the United States and its allies, jihadi groups were not invited.
The Nusra Front’s ally, Al Qaeda in Iraq, is the Sunni insurgent group that killed numerous American troops in Iraq and sowed widespread sectarian strife with suicide bombings against Shiites and other religious and ideological opponents. The Iraqi group played an active role in founding the Nusra Front and provides it with money, expertise and fighters, said Maj. Faisal al-Issawi, an Iraqi security official who tracks jihadi activities in Iraq’s Anbar Province.
But blacklisting the Nusra Front could backfire. It would pit the United States against some of the best fighters in the insurgency that it aims to support. While some Syrian rebels fear the group’s growing power, others work closely with it and admire it — or, at least, its military achievements — and are loath to end their cooperation.
Leaders of the Free Syrian Army, the loose-knit rebel umbrella group that the United States seeks to bolster, expressed exasperation that the United States, which has refused to provide weapons throughout the conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people, is now opposing a group they see as a vital ally.
The Nusra Front “defends civilians in Syria, whereas America didn’t do anything,” said Mosaab Abu Qatada, a rebel spokesman. “They stand by and watch; they look at the blood and the crimes and brag. Then they say that Nusra Front are terrorists.”
He added, “America just wants a pretext to intervene in Syrian affairs after the revolution.”
The United States has been reluctant to supply weapons to rebels that could end up in the hands of anti-Western jihadis, as did weapons that Qatar supplied to Libyan rebels with American approval. Critics of the Obama administration’s Syria policy counter that its failure to support the rebels helped create the opening that Islamic militants have seized in Syria.
The Nusra Front’s appeals to Syrian fighters seem to be working.
At a recent meeting in Damascus, Abu Hussein al-Afghani, a veteran of insurgencies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, addressed frustrated young rebels. They lacked money, weapons and training, so they listened attentively.
He told them he was a leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, now working with a Qaeda branch in Syria, and by joining him, they could make their mark. One fighter recalled his resonant question: “Who is hearing your voice today?”
On Friday, demonstrators in several Syrian cities raised banners with slogans like, “No to American intervention, for we are all Jebhat al-Nusra,” referring to the group’s full name, Ansar al-Jebhat al-Nusra li-Ahl al-Sham, or Supporters of the Front for Victory of the People of Syria. One rebel battalion, the Ahrar, or Free Men, asked on its Facebook page why the United States did not blacklist Mr. Assad’s “terrorist” militias.
Another jihadist faction, the Sahaba Army in the Levant, even congratulated the group on the “great honor” of being deemed terrorists by the United States.
Perhaps it’s inaccurate to say that the U.S. has little influence. Better to say, it does indeed exert great influence whose outcome is predictably the opposite of the one intended. In this ‘art’ of reshaping the Middle East, the Obama administration seems no less skilled than the Bush administration.
Reuters reports: Syrian rebel groups have chosen Brigadier Selim Idris, a former officer in President Bashar al-Assad’s army, to head their new Islamist-dominated military command, opposition sources said on Saturday.
Idris, whose home province of Homs has been at the forefront of the Sunni Muslim-led uprising, was elected by 30 military and civilian members of the joint military command after talks attended by Western and Arab security officials in the Turkish city of Antalia.
“Saleh is not ideological, but he has been appointed top aides who are close to Salafist rebels,” one of the sources who has been following the meeting said.
The joint command named Islamist commanders Abdelbasset Tawil from the northern province of Idlib and Abdelqader Saleh from the adjacent province of Aleppo to serve as Idris’s deputies, the source said.
The unified command includes many with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Salafists, who follow a puritanical interpretation of Islam. It excludes the most senior officers who had defected from Assad’s military.
Its composition, estimated to be two-thirds from the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, reflects the growing strength of Islamist fighters on the ground and resembles that of the civilian opposition leadership coalition created under Western and Arab auspices in Qatar last month.
Absent from the group is Colonel Riad al-Asaad, founder of the Syrian Free Army and Brigadier Mustafa al-Sheikh, a senior officer known for his opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood.
As for the broad Western concern about the danger Western-supplied arms falling into the hands of Al Nusra fighters, the issue is rapidly becoming a moot point. As more and more Syrian military bases are taken over by rebels including Al Nusra, it is the Syrian government’s own arsenal that is becoming instrumental in its downfall. The video below shows the major Regime 111 base west of Aleppo, shortly after it was captured by Al Nusra yesterday. EA WorldView says: “large amounts of equipment, including anti-aircraft weapons, tanks, and artillery pieces, were stored on the base, and with this base captured the insurgents will now be able to focus this weaponry, and their previously captured equipment, on the remaining Assad bases inside and around Aleppo.”
One of the warnings most frequently issued by critics of NATO intervention in Libya was the danger this would pose by setting a precedent: if the West intervenes on behalf of Gaddafi’s opponents, then all across the Arab world, those who rise up to challenge their authoritarian rulers will expect similar outside support. This fear then fed widespread skepticism about the magnitude of the imminent threat to the population in Benghazi. Was an atrocity really about to take place or was this prediction merely being used as a pretext for intervention?
Subsequent events across the region have demonstrated that even if there were some pro-interventionists who imagined that Libya set a precedent, it has instead served if anything as a model not to be followed. Moreover, as warnings about the peril of chemical weapons in Syria are issued, the Obama administration seems to have drawn another lesson from Benghazi: an atrocity can only serve as a justification for military action after it has taken place.
So, those who are alarmed that the specter of WMD is being raised now in order to justify direct military involvement by the U.S. in Syria can take comfort in this thought: the deaths of tens of thousands of Syrians over the last two years has not been enough to draw America into another war. The only thing that would precipitate such involvement would be the deaths of thousands more and even then, these would have to occur over a period of days rather than months.
The lesson from Libya is that the U.S. will not intervene to prevent genocide; it will only intervene after genocide has already occurred. Indeed, the administration’s red line is merely that if Assad uses chemical weapons, there will be “consequences” — no one has actually spelled out what those consequences might be, so even in such an event we should not assume that military action will follow.
Fareed Zacharia writes: As we debate whether the two parties can ever come together and get things done, here’s something President Obama could probably do by himself that would be a signal accomplishment of his presidency: End the war on terror. Or, more realistically, start planning and preparing the country for phasing it out.
For 11 years, the United States has been operating under emergency wartime powers granted under the 2001 “Authorization for Use of Military Force.” That is a longer period than the country spent fighting the Civil War, World War I and World War II combined. It grants the president and the federal government extraordinary authorities at home and abroad, effectively suspends civil liberties for anyone the government deems an enemy and keeps us on a permanent war footing in all kinds of ways.
Now, for the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, an administration official has sketched a possible endpoint.
In a thoughtful speech at the Oxford Union last week, Jeh Johnson, the outgoing general counsel for the Pentagon, recognized that “we cannot and should not expect al-Qaeda and its associated forces to all surrender, all lay down their weapons in an open field, or to sign a peace treaty with us. They are terrorist organizations. Nor can we capture or kill every last terrorist who claims an affiliation with al-Qaeda.”
But, he argued, “There will come a tipping point . . . at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al-Qaeda and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, such that al-Qaeda as we know it, the organization that our Congress authorized the military to pursue in 2001, has been effectively destroyed.” At that point, “our efforts should no longer be considered an armed conflict.”
Phasing out or modifying these emergency powers should be something that would appeal to both left and right. James Madison, father of the Constitution, was clear on the topic. “Of all the enemies to public liberty,” he wrote, “war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
If you want to know why we’re in such a deep budgetary hole, one large piece of it is that we have spent around $2 trillion on foreign wars in the past decade. [Continue reading…]
And ending the war on terror wouldn’t just save money — it would allow for the possibility that America as a nation might be able to climb out of one of the most destructive expressions of collective insanity into which any nation has ever fallen.
Politics might dictate that this war can only be ended through some kind of declaration of victory, but an honest reckoning will eventually require acknowledging that this was the greatest blunder in America’s history. A trap was laid, and like a brainless giant, the United States stepped right into it.
Who could imagine that by making the meager investment of a few flying lessons and some box cutters, a small band of fanatics could persuade a country that prides itself as “the greatest nation on earth” to near bankrupt itself, act with such stupidity and inflict such enormous harm?
The New York Times reports: When President Obama first warned Syria’s leader, President Bashar al-Assad, that even making moves toward using chemical weapons would cross a “red line” that might force the United States to drop its reluctance to intervene in the country’s civil war, Mr. Obama took an expansive view of where he drew that boundary.
“We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people,” he said at an Aug. 20 news conference. He added: “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”
But in the past week, amid intelligence reports that some precursor chemicals have been mixed for possible use as weapons, Mr. Obama’s “red line” appears to have shifted. His warning against “moving” weapons has disappeared from his public pronouncements, as well as those of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The new warning is that if Mr. Assad makes use of those weapons, presumably against his own people or his neighbors, he will face unspecified consequences.
It is a veiled threat that Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta repeated Thursday: “The president of the United States has made very clear that there will be consequences, there will be consequences if the Assad regime makes a terrible mistake by using these chemical weapons on their own people.”
The White House says the president has not changed his position at all — it is all in the definition of the word “moving.”
Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said Thursday that “ ‘moving around’ means proliferation,” as in allowing extremist groups like Hezbollah, which has training camps near the weapons sites, to obtain the material.
Whenever the White House needs to make a statement utterly lacking in credibility, they always call on Tommy Vietor — that seems to be his specialty. What has moved around is the administration’s stance and the clarification comes from Panetta.
Obama’s statement in August implied that the U.S. would act to prevent Assad from using chemical weapons. The U.S. position now is that Assad will suffer serious consequences if he uses them — a tacit acknowledgment that the U.S. is not actually capable of preventing these weapons being used.
The New York Times reports: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday warned President Bashar al-Assad of Syria not to use chemical weapons and said that the United States was prepared to act if he ignored the warning.
“This is a red line for the United States,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I am not going to telegraph in any specifics what we would do in the event of credible evidence that the Assad regime has resorted to using chemical weapons against their own people. But suffice it to say we are certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur.”
There have been signs in recent days of heightened activity at some of Syria’s chemical weapons sites, according to American and Israeli officials familiar with intelligence reports. Mrs. Clinton did not confirm the intelligence reports or say what sort of activity was occurring.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry, in a swift response, said the government “would not use chemical weapons, if it had them, against its own people under any circumstances.” The statement was reported on Syrian state television and on the Lebanese channel LBC.
Ostensibly, this reiteration of a red line President Obama already laid down in August has been precipitated by observations which suggest “some potential chemical weapon preparation.” Still, these tokens of assertiveness from the U.S. and its allies do nothing to abate the ongoing carnage. Indeed, they underline the fact that 40,000 Syrians killed without the use of chemical weapons is in some sense tolerable.
To be ripped apart by explosives or shrapnel, or crushed under the rubble of collapsing buildings — these are the methods of killing that fall short of Washington’s red line. And this begs the question: do warning’s such as Clinton’s actually constrain Assad’s behavior or merely confirm how much latitude he already has?
The Associated Press reports: Israel’s decision to approve 3,000 new homes on occupied territory drew sharp condemnation from European allies on Monday, with at least three governments summoning ambassadors to express their disapproval of an action they say undermines an already troubled peace process.
The Israeli envoy to Paris was called to a meeting late Monday morning, according to a statement from the French foreign ministry spokesman, Philippe Lalliot. France, which was the first major European country to announce support for the Palestinian effort to win recognition at the U.N., also sent a letter to the Israeli government, calling the settlement decision “a considerable obstacle to the two-state solution.”
Britain and Sweden also summoned the Israeli ambassadors, and Germany said the decision would hurt Israel’s ability to negotiate a long-term peace agreement.
None of the European governments openly threatened any concrete measures to punish Israel.
Earlier, Haaretz reported a senior European diplomat saying: “This time it won’t just be a condemnation, there will be real action taken against Israel.”
Is huffing and puffing, real action? So far it just looks like the familiar ritual of condemnation. For Israel to really feel the heat will require more than stern disapproval being expressed to a couple of Israeli ambassadors.
The Economist: A mob attacked Alexander Aan even before an Indonesian court in June jailed him for two and a half years for “inciting religious hatred”. His crime was to write “God does not exist” on a Facebook group he had founded for atheists in Minang, a province of the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Like most non-believers in Islamic regions, he was brought up as a Muslim. And like many who profess godlessness openly, he has been punished.
In a handful of majority-Muslim countries atheists can live safely, if quietly; Turkey is one example, Lebanon another. None makes atheism a specific crime. But none gives atheists legal protection or recognition. Indonesia, for example, demands that people declare themselves as one of six religions; atheism and agnosticism do not count. Egypt’s draft constitution makes room for only three faiths: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
Sharia law, which covers only Muslims unless incorporated into national law, assumes people are born into their parents’ religion. Thus ex-Muslim atheists are guilty of apostasy—a hudud crime against God, like adultery and drinking alcohol. Potential sanctions can be severe: eight states, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Mauritania and Sudan have the death penalty on their statute books for such offences.
In reality such punishments are rarely meted out. Most atheists are prosecuted for blasphemy or for inciting hatred. (Atheists born to non-Muslim families are not considered apostates, but they can still be prosecuted for other crimes against religion.) Even in places where laws are lenient, religious authorities and social attitudes can be harsh, with vigilantes inflicting beatings or beheadings.
Many, like Kacem el-Ghazzali, a Moroccan, reckon the only solution is to escape abroad. The 23-year-old was granted asylum in Switzerland after people found out he was the author of an anonymous blog, Atheistica.com. Even in non-Muslim lands ex-believers are scared of being open, says Nahla Mahmoud, a 25-year-old Sudanese atheist who fled to Britain in 2010. “Muslim communities here don’t feel comfortable with having an ex-Muslim around,” she says, noting that extremists living in the West may harass non-believers there too.
Facebook groups for atheists, mostly pseudonymous, exist in almost every Muslim country. Social media give non-believers more clout—but also make them more conspicuous, and therefore vulnerable. But the real blame lies with religious intolerance. In the 1950s and 1960s secularism and tolerance prevailed in many majority-Muslim countries; today religion pervades public and political life. Sami Zubaida, a scholar at London’s Birkbeck College, speaks of increasing polarisation, with “growing religiosity at one end of the spectrum and growing atheism and secularism at the other.”
The rise to power of Islamist parties after the Arab revolutions is likely to make life more miserable still for those who leave Islam. New rulers in Tunisia and Egypt have jailed several young people who have been outspoken about their lack of belief. Such cases occurred before the revolutions, but seem to have become more common. Alber Saber Ayad, an Egyptian Christian activist who ran a Facebook page for atheists, has been in custody since September for “insulting religion”. His alleged offence was posting a link to an infamous YouTube video that caused protests in the Islamic world that month. He was arrested by a Christian policeman: Egypt’s Coptic church does not look kindly on atheism either.
The irony and perversity of religious intolerance — or any other form of intolerance — is that it rewards hypocrisy and deceit. In other words, such efforts to police faith will primarily have the effect of making most of the faithless prudently disguise their true beliefs. A few will dare to speak out, but many more will remain married to a religion of convenience.
The protectors of the faith would apparently rather have their houses of worship accommodate hollow expressions of faith rather than encourage individuals to act with integrity.
When ideology thus becomes a bludgeon of conformity, what this suggests is that the core of faithlessness actually resides in the hearts of those who fix their attention on the beliefs of others. A faith that depends on such rigid external buttresses is no faith at all.
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One who is willing is Chuck Hagel, the two-term Republican senator from Nebraska. Of all my conversations, the one with Hagel stands apart for its honesty and clarity. If I wanted to be in a safe business, he began, “I’d sell shoes.” Hagel’s logic chain is pretty compelling. America is Israel’s best friend, but it also has key interests in the Arab and Muslim world that, particularly since 9/11, it must try to protect. Being too one-sided when it comes to the Arab-Israeli isn’t good either for Israel or for America. And far too often Congress shrinks from making this clear.