Category Archives: Analysis

Psychologists who sanctioned torture

In an editorial, the New York Times says: The first detailed accounts of the brutal interrogation program the Central Intelligence Agency established after the Sept. 11 attacks noted that psychologists and other medical professionals played key roles in abetting the torture of terrorism suspects. However, much about their role and their degree of responsibility in one of the most macabre and shameful chapters of American history has remained shrouded in secrecy.

A new report by a former federal prosecutor, first disclosed by James Risen in The Times, contains astonishing, disturbing details. It found that top members of the American Psychological Association, the largest professional organization of psychologists, colluded with officials at the Pentagon and the C.I.A. to keep the group’s ethics policies in line with tactics that interrogators working for the agency and the military were employing.

At a time when intelligence and Department of Defense officials were desperate for intelligence that would help them foil new terror plots, they were willing to pay handsomely for experts who could give the torture program a veneer of legitimacy. Prominent psychologists were apparently happy to indulge them. “A.P.A. chose its ethics policy based on its goals of helping D.O.D., managing its P.R., and maximizing the growth of the profession,” the report said.

The 542-page report, which was commissioned by the board of directors of the American Psychological Association, says that some medical personnel at the C.I.A. became concerned about the torture program, which was run by Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, two contractors who were former Air Force psychologists. The critics at the agency expressed concerns about the effectiveness of the interrogation tactics and questioned whether they were in line with the ethics guidelines of the psychologists association.

The association assembled a task force in 2005 to study the concerns. The task force was dominated by “national security insiders,” Mr. Risen reported. They concluded that psychologists could resume assisting in brutal interrogations.

On Friday, Physicians for Human Rights justifiably called on the Department of Justice to begin a criminal investigation into the psychologists association’s role in the Bush administration’s torture program.

“As mental health professionals, our first obligation must be to our patients,” said Dr. Kerry Sulkowicz, a psychiatrist and the vice chairman of the board of Physicians for Human Rights, in a statement. “The A.P.A.’s collusion with the government’s national security apparatus is one of the greatest scandals in U.S. medical history.”

The Obama administration has so far refused to prosecute the torturers. As more evidence about this program comes to light, that position becomes increasingly indefensible.

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The U.S. should follow the lead of Rwanda and others and hold accountable clinicians who torture

Dr Steven Miles writes: The report documenting the role of the American Psychological Association (APA) as an embedded accomplice to torture during the War on Terror is important for its detail, but not for its novelty. The essence of this story has been known for eight years despite APA denials, euphemisms, double-talk and whitewashing; the report simply underscores the truth of what many of us have been saying all along.

The United States Department of Defense (DOD) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) worked hand-in-glove with the APA leadership to dictate and pass a policy document intended to justify and protect psychologists who designed and oversaw interrogation by torture to break prisoners down, despite laws and professional ethics designed to prevent exactly that behavior. The core of the APA position – which was appended to DOD policies – was that psychologists worked for interrogators and had no responsibility for the health of prisoners.

With this cover, psychologists went far beyond “psychological torture”: they oversaw waterboarding, joint-distorting stress positions and the use of military dogs that lunged at and bit prisoners. Behavioral Science Consultation Teams carefully recorded the effects of interrogation “approaches” with names like “fear up harsh” and “ego down” and suggested how to amend these approaches to induce prisoners to exhaustion and compliance.

The APA-DOD-CIA plan succeeded at two of its three aims. It destroyed prisoners and it protected torture psychologists from punishment by licensing boards and from the APA itself. But, as the Senate Select Committee’s Report on CIA torture showed, it failed to produce useful intelligence. This should come as no surprise: psychological and physical torture has long been known to be useless for interrogation.

The latest revelations from the APA report are only a partial accounting of the scope of our government’s torture program. Even the intricacies of how CIA and DOD gained control of policy making at the APA remain murky. The scale of US torture, especially at CIA black sites, for which there is still no accounting of the names and fates of prisoners, remains unknown. Only a small percentage of the Senate report on CIA torture has been released. Only a tiny number of the photographs and videotapes of torture at Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan and the archipelago of CIA black sites have been released.

But the devastating effects of US torture persist. [Continue reading…]

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Why the EU’s increasing failure to protect nature means I may vote No

George Monbiot writes: Had I been asked a couple of years ago how I would vote in the referendum on whether or not the UK should stay in the European Union, my answer would have been unequivocal.

The EU seemed to me to be a civilising force, restraining the cruel and destructive tendencies of certain member governments (including our own), setting standards that prevented them from destroying the natural world or trashing workers rights, creating a buffer between them and the corporate lobby groups that present an urgent threat to democracy.

Now I’m not so sure. Everything good about the EU is in retreat; everything bad is on the rampage.

I accept the principle of sharing sovereignty over issues of common concern. I do not accept the idea of the rich nations combining to crush the democratic will of the poorer nations, as they are seeking to do to Greece.

I accept the principle that the EU should represent our joint interests in creating treaties for the betterment of humankind. I do not accept that it has a right to go behind our backs and quietly negotiate a treaty with the US – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – that transfers power from parliaments to corporations.

I accept the principle that the EU could distribute money to the poor and marginalised. I do not accept that, as essential public services are cut, €57bn (£41bn) a year should be sloshed into the pockets of farmers, with the biggest, richest landowners receiving the largest payments. The EU’s utter failure to stop this scandal should be a source of disillusionment even to its most enthusiastic supporters.

While these injustices, highly damaging to the reputation of the EU among people who might otherwise be inclined to defend it, are taking place, at the same time the EU’s restraints on unaccountable power are in danger of being ripped away. [Continue reading…]

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Is consciousness an engineering problem?

Michael Graziano writes: The brain is a machine: a device that processes information. That’s according to the last 100 years of neuroscience. And yet, somehow, it also has a subjective experience of at least some of that information. Whether we’re talking about the thoughts and memories swirling around on the inside, or awareness of the stuff entering through the senses, somehow the brain experiences its own data. It has consciousness. How can that be?

That question has been called the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, where ‘hard’ is a euphemism for ‘impossible’. For decades, it was a disreputable topic among scientists: if you can’t study it or understand it or engineer it, then it isn’t science. On that view, neuroscientists should stick to the mechanics of how information is processed in the brain, not the spooky feeling that comes along with the information. And yet, one can’t deny that the phenomenon exists. What exactly is this consciousness stuff?

Here’s a more pointed way to pose the question: can we build it? Artificial intelligence is growing more intelligent every year, but we’ve never given our machines consciousness. People once thought that if you made a computer complicated enough it would just sort of ‘wake up’ on its own. But that hasn’t panned out (so far as anyone knows). Apparently, the vital spark has to be deliberately designed into the machine. And so the race is on to figure out what exactly consciousness is and how to build it.

I’ve made my own entry into that race, a framework for understanding consciousness called the Attention Schema theory. The theory suggests that consciousness is no bizarre byproduct – it’s a tool for regulating information in the brain. And it’s not as mysterious as most people think. As ambitious as it sounds, I believe we’re close to understanding consciousness well enough to build it.

In this article I’ll conduct a thought experiment. Let’s see if we can construct an artificial brain, piece by hypothetical piece, and make it conscious. The task could be slow and each step might seem incremental, but with a systematic approach we could find a path that engineers can follow. [Continue reading…]

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The Chinese stock meltdown that makes the Greece saga look trivial

Bloomberg reports: By any standard, the selloff in Chinese stocks over the past month has been epic. Here’s a look at the turmoil by numbers.

The Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index has lost 28 percent since its peak on June 12, the worst selloff in two decades. About $3.9 trillion in market valuation has evaporated, more than the total annual output of Germany — the world’s fourth-largest economy — and 16 times Greece’s gross domestic product. The benchmark is still up 82 percent in the past year, the most among the world’s major markets.

As shares tumbled, companies rushed to apply for trading suspension. More than 1,400 companies stopped trading on mainland exchanges, locking sellers out of 50 percent of the market. The China Securities Regulatory Commission also banned major shareholders, corporate executives, and directors from selling stakes in listed companies for six months. [Continue reading…]

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Greece seeks $59.2 billion bailout as Tsipras bows to demands

Bloomberg reports: In an 11th-hour bid to stay in the euro, the government of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras offered to meet most of the demands made by creditors in exchange for a bailout of 53.5 billion euros ($59.4 billion).

European and U.S. equity-index futures jumped on Friday after the proposal was submitted to creditor institutions late on Thursday. The package of spending cuts, pension savings and tax increases almost mirrored that from creditors on June 26, which was rejected by Greek voters in a July 5 referendum. It will face its first hurdle in the Greek Parliament on Friday.

Though Tsipras ceded ground, he insists long-term debt needs to be made more manageable to allow Greece to recover from a crisis that has erased a quarter of its economy. He has a growing support base that includes the U.S., European Union President Donald Tusk and the International Monetary Fund. [Continue reading…]

Alex Andreou writes: This is my initial reaction to the deal proposal by Greece: it is more austerity -harsh austerity at that – and many of the measures are recessionary. Distribution of the burden seems to me fairer than before. If the upside is access to a significant stimulus package (front-loaded), a smoothing of the measures (back-loaded) and substantial restructuring of debt, to make it definitively viable, it will probably be seen as worth it. It is certainly capable of being sold as worth it.

Essentially, everyone managing to keep their position/perks/income in the context of an economy which is in the middle of a death spiral, is meaningless. If the economy begins to recover, then things which were unbearable, become bearable. Austerity becomes a background noise, rather than a preoccupation and a progressive government will be able to offset the damage. It is a delicate balance.

Market confidence is a strange creature. There is a lot of money sloshing around at the moment, taken out of China which is in free-fall. Money which is bulging to be invested. All it takes is an intangible notion that Greece has hit the low point, for investment to return. Whether this package achieves that balance or not, will have to be assessed over time, as the detail of each measure becomes known and away from the adrenaline and hysteria of negotiation fever. [Continue reading…]

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Hacks of OPM databases compromised 22.1 million people, federal authorities say

The Washington Post reports: Two major breaches last year of U.S. government databases holding personnel records and security-clearance files exposed sensitive information about at least 22.1 million people, including not only federal employees and contractors but their families and friends, U.S. officials said Thursday.

The total vastly exceeds all previous estimates, and marks the most detailed accounting by the Office of Personnel Management of how many people were affected by cyber intrusions that U.S. officials have privately said were traced to the Chinese government.

But even beyond the rising number of apparent victims, U.S. officials said the breaches rank among the most potentially damaging cyber heists in U.S. government history because of the abundant detail in the files. Officials said hackers accessed not only personnel records of current and former employees but also extensive information about friends, relatives and others listed as references in applications for security clearances for some of the most sensitive jobs in government. [Continue reading…]

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In Ramadi, the ISIS settles in, fixing roads and restoring electricity

The Washington Post reports: Six weeks after routing Iraqi security forces from Ramadi, Islamic State militants have entrenched themselves in the city, repairing key infrastructure, managing local government and building up defenses to thwart any attacks.

Their efforts are likely to hamper government attempts to retake Ramadi, which lies about 80 miles west of Baghdad. Iraqi forces and allied militias have not yet mounted a promised offensive, and the delay, residents say, has allowed the Sunni jihadists to cement their role as overlords, supervising everything from local mosques and road repairs to fuel distribution.

The group, known for its brutality, has also long sought to portray itself as a genuine state capable of providing efficiently for its Muslim citizens. From Raqqa and Deir al-Zour in Syria to Mosul and now Ramadi in Iraq, its claim to legitimacy has rested in large part on its ability to run such a state, even as it shocks and alienates residents with punishments such as public beheadings.

When the group’s fighters entered the city, “they seized everyone’s weapons and killed opponents,” said Hisham al-Hashemi, an expert on the Islamic State and adviser to the Iraqi government. “But now there is daily life. There is food in the markets and electricity. It’s like normal.

“As long as the government operation is delayed, it will give [the militants] the opportunity to secure their positions” in Ramadi, he said. [Continue reading…]

Following a visit to the Pentagon by President Obama on Monday, the New York Times reported: The president offered no timetable for an Iraqi counterattack to reclaim Ramadi and did not announce any new steps to assist Iraqi troops in retaking the city, such as using American troops to call in airstrikes. But he insisted that the plans he announced last month were already bearing fruit. “More Sunni volunteers are coming forward,” Mr. Obama said. “Some are already being trained, and they can be a new force against ISIL.”

The assault force would be led by Iraq’s counterterrorism service and would include the Iraqi federal police and army soldiers. The effort is expected to number about 6,000 troops, according to an Iraqi war plan that has been significantly shaped by American advisers sent to Al Taqqadum, an Iraqi base east of Ramadi.

An Iraqi follow-on force of up to 5,000 tribal fighters along with Iraqi provincial police officers would be assigned to hold the city and nearby areas in Anbar Province if they were retaken from the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

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After backing regime, Syrian minorities face peril

The Wall Street Journal reports: Ever since the Syrian revolution began in 2011, President Bashar al-Assad tried to cast it as a religious conflict with radical Sunni Islam in which he would wear the mantle of protector of the country’s numerous minorities.

The plan has worked to a great degree, with Mr. Assad’s own Alawite community as well as Shiites, Christians, Druse and, initially, even the Kurds, backing him against a predominantly Sunni rebellion that has become progressively more bloody and sectarian.

But now, as the regime is reeling under attack by the murderous Islamic State militants in the east and a rebel coalition that includes the al Qaeda affiliate Nusra Front in the north, these minorities face the growing danger of being wiped out alongside Mr. Assad.

“As bad as things have been in Syria, they could get a whole lot worse,” warned Ryan Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to Damascus and dean of the Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University. [Continue reading…]

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More than 4 million refugees have fled from Syria

The New York Times reports: The number of Syrians who have fled into neighboring countries to escape the civil war has reached more than four million, the United Nations said Thursday, and with the fighting dragging into its fifth year the number is still rising.

More than 24,000 people crossed into Turkey to escape fighting in northern Syria in June, pushing the number now sheltering in neighboring countries past four million, increasing the Syrian refugee population by one million in just 10 months, the United Nations refugee agency reported.

International aid agencies say the fighting has driven at least 7.6 million people who remain in the country from their homes.

“This is the biggest refugee population from a single conflict in a generation,” Antonio Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, said in a statement. Mr. Guterres, once again, warned that international aid was not keeping pace with the scale of the crisis, and that many refugees were “sinking deeper into poverty.”

“Worsening conditions are driving growing numbers toward Europe and further afield,” Mr. Guterres said, “but the overwhelming majority remain in the region.”

The latest influx into Turkey raised the number of Syrian refugees there to 1.8 million, giving it the biggest refugee population in the world, the United Nations reported. As many as 1.2 million Syrians are now sheltering in Lebanon, more than 629,000 are in Jordan and close to quarter of a million have fled to Iraq.

The United Nations has appealed for $5.5 billion in aid in 2015 to deal with the humanitarian fallout of the Syria crisis. But by the end of June it had received less than a quarter of that amount, the refugee agency said. [Continue reading…]

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The U.S. must save Greece

Joseph E. Stiglitz writes: As the Greek saga continues, many have marveled at Germany’s chutzpah. It received, in real terms, one of the largest bailout and debt reduction in history and unconditional aid from the U.S. in the Marshall Plan. And yet it refuses even to discuss debt relief. Many, too, have marveled at how Germany has done so well in the propaganda game, selling an image of a long-failed state that refuses to go along with the minimal conditions demanded in return for generous aid.

The facts prove otherwise: From the mid-90’s to the beginning of the crisis, the Greek economy was growing at a faster rate than the EU average (3.9% vs 2.4%). The Greeks took austerity to heart, slashing expenditures and increasing taxes. They even achieved a primary surplus (that is, tax revenues exceeded expenditures excluding interest payments), and their fiscal position would have been truly impressive had they not gone into depression. Their depression — 25% decline in GDP and 25% unemployment, with youth unemployment twice that — is because they did what was demanded of them, not because of their failure to do so. It was the predictable and predicted response to the austerity.

The question now is: What’s next, assuming (as seems ever more likely) they are effectively thrown out of the euro? It’s likely that the European Central Bank will refuse to do its job—as the Central Bank for Greece, it should do what every central bank is supposed to do, act as a lender of last resort. And if it refuses to do that, Greece will have no option but to create a parallel currency. The ECB has already begun tightening the screws, making access to funds more and more difficult.

This is not the end of the world: Currencies come and go. The euro is just a 16-year-old experiment, poorly designed and engineered not to work—in a crisis money flows from the weak country’s banks to the strong, leading to divergence. GDP today is more than 17% below where it would have been had the relatively modest growth trajectory of Europe before the euro just continued. I believe the euro has much to do with this disappointing performance. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: As Greece hurtles toward a Sunday deadline for either reaching a bailout deal or risking a hasty exit from the eurozone, the one certainty is that its economy is already on the brink of collapse.

Businesses and humanitarian organizations are warning that the social and commercial damage now evident could become deeper and longer lasting if Greece and its international creditors cannot finally come to terms on a new bailout package.

“Greece already has a humanitarian crisis, and we’ll have to prepare for a harder aftermath if a deal collapses,” Nikitas Kanakis, the president of the board of directors of the Athens chapter of Doctors of the World, a health care charity, said on Wednesday. “I’m not sure how proud we should feel about letting social destruction return within Europe.”

With banks closed and the government virtually out of money, Greece has become isolated from the international economy — a big problem for a country that relies on imports for 65 percent of its goods. [Continue reading…]

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Germans forget postwar history lesson on debt relief in Greece crisis

Eduardo Porter writes: As negotiations between Greece and its creditors stumbled toward breakdown, culminating in a sound rejection on Sunday by Greek voters of the conditions demanded in exchange for a financial lifeline, a vintage photo resurfaced on the Internet.

It shows Hermann Josef Abs, head of the Federal Republic of Germany’s delegation in London on Feb. 27, 1953, signing the agreement that effectively cut the country’s debts to its foreign creditors in half.

It is an image that still resonates today. To critics of Germany’s insistence that Athens must agree to more painful austerity before any sort of debt relief can be put on the table, it serves as a blunt retort: The main creditor demanding that Greeks be made to pay for past profligacy benefited not so long ago from more lenient terms than it is now prepared to offer.

But beyond serving as a reminder of German hypocrisy, the image offers a more important lesson: These sorts of things have been dealt with successfully before. [Continue reading…]

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Explainer: What’s the turmoil in the Chinese stock market all about?

By Michele Geraci, University of Nottingham

The Chinese stock markets have experienced significant turmoil in recent weeks, with the Shanghai Composite Index – the country’s major reference – falling by 32% since June 12. But this fall was preceded by an equally sharp rise of 150% over the previous nine months. In the 20 years since I have been working in finance, I’ve never seen anything like this. So what is going on with the Chinese stock market?

There are several reasons for this unusual behaviour: firstly, when I teach stock market investment to my Chinese students, I always remind them that the Shanghai stock exchange should be thought of more as a casino, rather than as a proper stock market. In normal stock markets, share prices are – or, at least, should be – linked to the economic performance of the underlying companies. Not so in China, where the popularity of the stock market directly correlated with the fall in casino popularity.

Stocks and casinos

In China, given the low credibility of the financial statements published by listed companies, investors need to rely on other tools to predict share price performance. These tools include a heavy reliance on technical analysis and charts – a method that tends to predict future share price based purely on the company’s past performance, with no regards to its fundamentals. Even the name of the company is often neglected; all that matters is the historic price performance.

While this technique is also used in Western markets, my experience in China is that it is the predominant method for investment. Hence the disconnect between a share’s price movements and economic fundamentals.

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Why Hillary Clinton is moving left on every issue except Israel

Peter Beinart writes: From immigration to campaign finance reform to criminal justice, Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy is clear: Move to Barack Obama’s left, to energize liberal voters. Except on Israel, where she’s moving to Barack Obama’s right, to energize hawkish donors.

The latest example is a just-released letter about her opposition to the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel (BDS). Among the most significant things about the letter is one of the people to whom it’s addressed: Haim Saban. (Hillary sent similar letters to at least two other Jewish organizational officials, Malcolm Hoenlein and Jack Rosen). Saban is neither an expert on the Middle East nor on Jewish law or culture. He’s a guy who writes large checks. These days, if Joseph Ber Soleveitchik or Abraham Joshua Heschel wanted to correspond with a presidential candidate, they’d first be asked to donate to his Super PAC.

And Saban isn’t just any mega-donor. He’s a mega-donor who thinks Barack Obama has been bad for Israel. As Connie Bruck reported a few years ago in The New Yorker, Saban was so suspicious of Obama’s views on Iran in 2008 that he considered backing John McCain. Saban’s preferred approach: “I would bomb the daylight out of these sons of bitches.” Not surprisingly, one Saban advisor told Bruck, “I don’t think Haim feels particularly positive about Bibi’s performance. But he certainly isn’t happy about Obama’s.”

Reading Hillary’s letter in light of its recipient, a few things become clear. First, don’t expect her to express much concern for Palestinians. In his campaign book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama emphasized the common humanity of Palestinians and Israeli Jews. “Traveling through Israel and the West Bank,” he wrote. “I talked to Jews who’d lost parents in the Holocaust and brothers in suicide bombings; I heard Palestinians talk of the indignities of checkpoints and reminisce about the land they had lost. I flew by helicopter across the line separating the two peoples and found myself unable to distinguish Jewish towns from Arab towns, all of them like fragile outposts against the green and stony hills.”

Compare that to Hillary’s letter. Yes, she reaffirms her support for two states. But only because “Israel’s long-term security and future as a Jewish state depends on having two states for two peoples.” Not because Palestinians have legitimate grievances or aspirations. And Hillary reaffirms that support in a letter to Saban, a man who, like her, supports Palestinian statehood because it preserves Israel’s Jewish majority but has so little regard for Palestinians that at an event last November, he endorsed Sheldon Adelson’s contention that they are an “invented people.” [Continue reading…]

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Gaza one year after Israel’s Operation Protective Edge

Jadaliyya interviewed Nathan Thrall:
Jadaliyya (J): One year after Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, how would you describe the popular mood in the Gaza Strip? Is OPE still relevant for people, and if so, how? Do people reflect back on achievements, losses, or both?

Nathan Thrall (NT): There is widespread consensus among Gaza’s residents today that conditions there have never been worse. There is also widespread fatalism about the unlikelihood of breaking from the pattern of recurrent war with Israel. Walking in neighborhoods that were completely destroyed during the war, such as Shuja’iyya in Gaza City and parts of Beit Hanoun, I heard residents state pridefully that Israel had achieved nothing during the war and that they were ready to face Israel again. In the same breath, however, many of these same people then asked warily whether I thought a new war was coming. It’s clear that Gazans desperately want a normal life, free of war and free of the blockade. It’s also clear that they are quite likely to continue living with both.

The war looms behind the most quiet and normal scenes of daily life in Gaza. During the war, a close friend in Gaza City made each member of his family pack a small bag containing his or her most valuable documents, photographs, and belongings before placing the bag beside the front door. That way he and his wife, sons, and daughters would be able to evacuate the building quickly, without having to waste time arguing about which belongings were worth risking their lives to retrieve. Nearly one year later, those bags still sit beside the front door.

Since the war concluded there have been a number of bombings in Gaza. Some of these were Israeli airstrikes following a rocket launching that Hamas was unable to prevent. More often they were bombs detonated by Gazans, either salafi-jihadis or unidentified attackers targeting the homes and offices of Hamas and Fatah officials. In one instance in May, several died and dozens were injured when Israeli ordinance from the war exploded in Beit Lahiya. When I have been present in Gaza for some of these incidents, the first worry of Gaza residents I spoke with — in some cases, the first rumor spread among them — has been that the explosion marked the beginning of a new war with Israel.

The problems that helped precipitate the war not only remain unresolved but in many cases have become more acute.[Continue reading…]

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Egypt’s extrajudicial killings

Omar Ashour writes: “The hands of justice is chained by laws,” said Abdel Fattah el-Sisi during the funeral of his prosecutor-general, Hisham Barakat. “Courts are not suitable for this moment … laws are not suitable for this moment,” he continued.

A day later, 13 of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) leaders and member were killed by the regime’s security forces, which blamed the MB for Barakat’s assassination. The MB claimed that their members were killed after being held, searched, and fingerprinted. The security forces claim that they were killed in a firefight, after resisting arrest. Some of the names of the dead are well known within Egyptian civil society. Nasser al-Hafy was a lawyer and a former member of parliament under the banned Freedom and Justice Party (FJP).

“I know him [Hafy] well and I dealt with him. I cannot imagine him being involved in an activity that can possibly lead to violence … forget about resisting authorities. This is an unacceptable lie,” said Dr Ayman Nour, a liberal politician who challenged Mubarak in the 2005 elections.

This was not the only recent blow to the Brotherhood. [Continue reading…]

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Internal documents show fossil fuel industry has been aware of climate change for decades

Elliott Negin writes: Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse created a stir recently when he speculated that fossil fuel companies may be violating federal racketeering law by colluding to defraud the public about the threat posed by carbon pollution.

Whitehouse likened their actions to those of the tobacco companies that conspired to manufacture doubt about the link between smoking and disease when they were all too aware of it. In 2006, a federal district court ruled that the tobacco industry’s deceptive campaign to maximize its profits by hoodwinking the public amounted to a racketeering enterprise.

Whitehouse may be among the first to suggest that the fossil fuel industry is flouting the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), but he’s not the first to point out the parallels between the tobacco industry’s fraudulent campaign and the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to quash government action on climate change. [Continue reading…]

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Ellen Cantarow: Paradise lost — or found?

In September 2014, there was a massive climate change march, estimated at 400,000 people, in New York City and I was there with my family.  It was so jam-packed that, as I wrote at the time, it took my crew an hour and a half just to begin walking and three and a half hours to reach the official starting line for the march.  Todd Gitlin, former president of the 1960s group Students for a Democratic Society, is a man who knows a thing or two about movements and how to recognize them.  After marching in that October rally to save the planet, he wrote a TomDispatch piece in which he anointed what he saw “a genuine global climate movement.” (“Call me a convert, but it’s here; it’s big; it’s real; it matters.”)

And nothing that’s happened since — from a spreading movement to promote divestment from fossil fuel stocks to Pope Francis’s encyclical on a declining planet or the big-tent way he enlisted well-known climate-change activist and author Naomi Klein in his cause — indicates that Gitlin was anything but right. You don’t, however, have to look to God’s vicar or famous activists or masses of demonstrators marching in one big city under every slogan imaginable to convince yourself that something’s happening. On a planet that has already had the hottest five months in recorded history this year, something is happening (even if you don’t quite know what it is, Mr. Jones). If you want proof that this is so and isn’t just a matter of high-profile, big-headline types, you could follow 350.org founder Bill McKibben into deepest Vermont to explore ways in which everyday Americans are retrofitting their homes for a new energy future. Or you could tag along with TomDispatch’s Ellen Cantarow into the American countryside to see how ordinary citizens are fighting courageously — and with ingenious tactics — against Big Energy companies trying to turn this country into “Saudi America” in a drill-baby-drill world.

In the Finger Lakes, an area of New York State you may never have heard of, Cantarow offers a glimpse of the small-scale, local ways in which Americans are standing up to Big Energy corporations. She describes how they are doing their inventive best to seize the day and ensure that our children and grandchildren remain on a planet capable of supporting them. Tom Engelhardt

Dirty energy vs. clean power
The past battles the future at Seneca Lake
By Ellen Cantarow

Let’s amend the famous line from Joni Mitchell’s “Yellow Taxi” to fit this moment in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. There, Big Energy seems determined to turn paradise, if not into a parking lot, then into a massive storage area for fracked natural gas. But there’s one way in which that song doesn’t quite match reality. Mitchell famously wrote, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” As part of a growing global struggle between Big Energy and a movement focused on creating a fossil-fuel-free future, however, the residents of the Finger Lakes seem to know just what they’ve got and they’re determined not to let it go. As a result, a local struggle against a corporation determined to bring in those fracked fuels catches a changing mood not just in the United States but across the world when it comes to protecting the planet, one place at a time, if necessary.

It’s difficult to imagine a more picturesque landscape, a more tranquil locale, a more bucolic garden spot than the Finger Lakes region. Each year, it draws tens of thousands of tourists to gaze at the waterfalls in Watkins Glen, to kayak and canoe in its deep waters, to dine in its farm-to-table restaurants and enjoy the homespun hospitality of its bed and breakfasts. Lush vineyards rustle on tree-studded hillsides. Wine Enthusiast magazine gave it top honors last year, calling it “one of the most vibrant and promising wine regions of the world.” There are fruit and vegetable farms and sugar maples, too. In 2013, the state’s maple syrup production ranked second only to Vermont’s.

The eleven Finger Lakes are among the wonders of the natural world. At 38 miles in length, Seneca Lake is the second longest of them, its 4.2 trillion gallons of water provide drinking water for 100,000 people. Its shallows are home to warm-water fish like smallmouth bass and yellow perch. Its deep waters play host to lake trout and Atlantic salmon and have created a unique microclimate in the surrounding region, neither too cold in winter nor too warm in summer, allowing agriculture to flourish.

Perhaps inspired by the ecological marvel that is their home, many of the Finger Lakes vineyards and vegetable farms rely on sustainable production methods. At the same time, wineries, hundreds of businesses, and individual families have begun converting from the use of fossil fuels to alternative energies. Tompkins County, adjacent to Seneca Lake, has even developed a solar energy program that has inspired similar efforts in counties across the state. A regional wind farm is scheduled to start operating in 2016. Clean and green seems to be the ethos of the region, but all that could change fast — and soon.

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