Category Archives: Issues

A dubious history of targeted killings in Afghanistan

Der Spiegel reports: Death is circling above Helmand Province on the morning of Feb. 7, 2011, in the form of a British Apache combat helicopter named “Ugly 50.” Its crew is searching for an Afghan named Mullah Niaz Mohammed. The pilot has orders to kill him.

The Afghan, who has been given the code name “Doody,” is a “mid-level commander” in the Taliban, according to a secret NATO list. The document lists enemy combatants the alliance has approved for targeted killings. “Doody” is number 3,673 on the list and NATO has assigned him a priority level of three on a scale of one to four. In other words, he isn’t particularly important within the Taliban leadership structure.

The operations center identified “Doody” at 10:17 a.m. But visibility is poor and the helicopter is forced to circle another time. Then the gunner fires a “Hellfire” missile. But he has lost sight of the mullah during the maneuver, and the missile strikes a man and his child instead. The boy is killed instantly and the father is severely wounded. When the pilot realizes that the wrong man has been targeted, he fires 100 rounds at “Doody” with his 30-mm gun, critically injuring the mullah.

The child and his father are two of the many victims of the dirty secret operations that NATO conducted for years in Afghanistan. Their fate is described in secret documents to which SPIEGEL was given access. Some of the documents concerning the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the NSA and GCHQ intelligence services are from the archive of whistleblower Edward Snowden. Included is the first known complete list of the Western alliance’s “targeted killings” in Afghanistan. The documents show that the deadly missions were not just viewed as a last resort to prevent attacks, but were in fact part of everyday life in the guerilla war in Afghanistan. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

On North Dakota’s tribal lands, oil, corruption, and murder

Deborah Sontag and Brent McDonald report: Tex G. Hall, the three-term tribal chairman on this remote, once impoverished reservation, was the very picture of confidence as he strode to the lectern at his third Annual Bakken Oil and Gas Expo and gazed out over a stuffed, backlit mountain lion.

Tall and imposing beneath his black cowboy hat, he faced an audience of political and industry leaders lured from far and wide to the “Texpo,” as some here called it. It was late April at the 4 Bears Casino, and the outsiders endorsed his strong advocacy for oil development and the way he framed it as mutually beneficial for the industry and the reservation: “sovereignty by the barrel.”

“M.H.A. Nation is No. 1 for tribal oil produced on American soil in the United States right now currently today,” Mr. Hall proudly declared, referring to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation.

But, in a hall decorated with rigs and tepees, a dice throw from the slot machines, Mr. Hall’s self-assurance belied the fact that his grip on power was slipping. After six years of dizzyingly rapid oil development, anxiety about the environmental and social costs of the boom, as well as about tribal mismanagement and oil-related corruption, had burst to the surface.

By that point, there were two murder cases — one person dead in Spokane, Wash., the other missing but presumed dead in North Dakota — tied to oil business on the reservation. And Mr. Hall, a once-seemingly untouchable leader, was under investigation by his tribal council because of his connections to an Oregon man who would later be charged with murder for hire in the two deaths.

In 2012, the man, James Henrikson, 35, who had five felony convictions in his past, operated a trucking company called Blackstone out of the tribal chairman’s garage. Blackstone worked primarily for the chairman’s own private oil field company, enjoying privileged access to business on the reservation as his subcontractor.

Blackstone also worked directly for the tribal government, earning $570,000 for a job watering road dust that was never put out to bid. Mr. Hall voted to approve the payment, but because he did not think he had any conflict of interest, he said, he never disclosed his business relationship to the company.

The relationship was personal, too: Mr. Henrikson and his wife vacationed in Hawaii with the tribal chairman and his family. Mr. Henrikson had an extramarital affair with, and impregnated, the now 21-year-old daughter of the chairman’s longtime girlfriend; Mr. Hall considers the baby his grandson.

In an interview last week, Mr. Hall said Mr. Henrikson was a “professional con” who had cemented their business deal when Mr. Hall was ill and distracted, bringing flowers and a contract to his hospital room to be signed. “I got ripped off and taken advantage of,” he said. “The people didn’t really know that when the news first broke.’’

In January, Mr. Hall’s link to Mr. Henrikson, Mr. Henrikson’s link to the murder case in Spokane, and the murder’s link to the reservation were revealed after the alleged hit man was arrested. The revelations jolted Fort Berthold into a tumultuous year of questioning and change.

“That murder was the last straw,” said Marilyn Hudson, 78, a tribal elder and historian. “Now you have a murder, a hit man, and a five-time convicted felon operating as an oil contractor working directly with the chairman. It’s like our reservation got hijacked by the plot of a bad movie.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Greece’s Syriza can transform the EU from within – if Europe will let it

Costas Lapavitsas writes: The Greek parliament has failed to elect a new president and the country’s constitution dictates that there should now be parliamentary elections. These will be critical for Greece and also important for Europe. A victory for Syriza, the main leftwing party, would offer hope that Europe might, at last, begin to move away from austerity policies. But there are also grave risks for Greece and the European left.

The rise of Syriza is a result of the adjustment programme imposed on Greece in 2010. The troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) provided huge bailout loans, with the cost of unprecedented cuts in public expenditure, tax increases and a collapse in wages. It was a standard, if extreme, austerity package, with one vital difference: austerity could not be softened by devaluing the currency as, for instance, had happened in the Asian crisis of 1997-98. Greek membership of the euro had closed all escape routes.

Brutal austerity succeeded in stabilising Greece and keeping it in the economic and monetary union by destroying its economy and society. The budget deficit has been drastically reduced, the current account deficit has turned into a surplus and the prospect of default on foreign debt has receded. But GDP has contracted by 25%, unemployment has shot above 25%, real wages have fallen by 30% and industrial output has declined by 35%. The human cost has been immeasurable, amounting to a silent humanitarian crisis. Homelessness has rocketed, primary healthcare has collapsed, soup kitchens have multiplied and child mortality has increased. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Gmail access is blocked in China after months of disruption

The New York Times reports: The Chinese government appears to have blocked the ability of people in China to gain access to Google’s email service through third-party email clients, which many Chinese and foreigners had been relying on to use their Gmail accounts after an earlier blocking effort by officials, according to Internet analysts and users in China.

The blocking began last Friday and has ignited anger and frustration among many Internet users in China. Data from Google shows traffic to Gmail dropping to zero from Chinese servers.

The new step in blocking Gmail has consequences that go well beyond making it difficult for users to access personal emails. Some foreign companies use Gmail as their corporate email service, for example. Now, the companies will have to ensure that their employees have software known as VPNs, or virtual private networks, to access Gmail.

That software allows users to bypass the Chinese Internet censorship controls commonly known as the Great Firewall, but the authorities also attempt to inhibit the software.[Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

War in Afghanistan ends — except for the fighting

Reuters reports: The U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan formally ended its combat mission on Sunday, more than 13 years after an international alliance ousted the Taliban government for sheltering the planners of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on American cities.

About 13,000 foreign troops, mostly Americans, will remain in the country under a new, two-year mission named “Resolute Support” that will continue the coalition’s training of Afghan security forces.

The Afghan army and police are struggling to fight against Taliban militants who this year killed record numbers of Afghans.

“Today marks an end of an era and the beginning of a new one,” said U.S. General John Campbell, commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), at the ceremony marking the end of the mission held at the ISAF headquarters in Kabul. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: In a large swath of the Taliban heartland in southern Afghanistan, government centers are facing a long-dormant concern this winter: Four years after the American troop surge helped make such places relatively secure, they are back under threat from the insurgents.

The fighting in Helmand Province in the south has been particularly deadly, with over 1,300 security force members killed between June and November. And the insurgents’ siege of several key districts has continued long after the traditional end of the fighting season.

It has been so bad that the 90-bed hospital for war wounded run in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, by the international aid group Emergency was still running nearly full in early December, according to Emanuele Nannini, the group’s coordinator. While the group keeps no statistics on how many of its patients are fighters, and treats all sides, a rough estimate is that half of the patients are Afghan police officers, from both national and local forces. Soldiers are treated in military hospitals, which do not divulge their statistics.

“This year is much worse than previous years,” said Dr. Abdul Hamidi, a police colonel who is head of medical services for the national police in Helmand. “We’ve heard that the Quetta Shura has a big push to raise their flags over three districts by January, and has ordered their people to keep fighting until they do,” he said, referring to the exiled Taliban leadership council in Pakistan.

One of the differences is that this year, the American forces, and their close air support, have been almost completely absent from the field. And though the Afghan forces are holding on, for the most part, they are taking punishingly heavy losses. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Has the Kurdish victory at Sinjar turned the tide of ISIS war?

Khales Joumah writes: Extremist fighters from the group known as the Islamic State have left the Sinjar area the same way they came in during August this year: without any real combat or pitched battles.

“I feel as if I’m watching the same thing I saw five months ago,” says Maizar al-Shammari, standing in front of his house, which is on the road into Sinjar, watching Iraqi Kurdish troops move forward. “At that time the Peshmerga [Iraqi Kurdish forces] withdrew without a fight. Today the Islamic State group is doing the same thing. It’s as if they just decided to swap roles,” he says.

Ever since the Iraqi Kurdish military began to fight with the self-proclaimed Islamic State, widely known as ISIS or ISIL, Sinjar has been an important piece of terrain for all comers in the conflict.

For ISIS it involves a major supply route. For the Iraqi Kurds the Sinjar region holds a lot of what is described as disputed territory—that is, land that is supposedly part of Iraq proper but which the Iraqi Kurds believe should belong to their semi-autonomous zone. They also believe that the Yazidi, an ethno-religious group, that live in Sinjar and have been particularly targeted by ISIS, are Kurds directly related to them.

Meanwhile the international coalition that is fighting against ISIS, mostly by airstrikes, sees the Sinjar area as having strategic importance; if blocked, the potential is there to separate ISIS in Iraq from ISIS in Syria. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Pope Francis ready to confront political challenge of tackling climate change

The Guardian reports: He has been called the “superman pope”, and it would be hard to deny that Pope Francis has had a good December. Cited by President Barack Obama as a key player in the thawing relations between the US and Cuba, the Argentinian pontiff followed that by lecturing his cardinals on the need to clean up Vatican politics. But can Francis achieve a feat that has so far eluded secular powers and inspire decisive action on climate change?

It looks as if he will give it a go. In 2015, the pope will issue a lengthy message on the subject to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, give an address to the UN general assembly and call a summit of the world’s main religions.

The reason for such frenetic activity, says Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, is the pope’s wish to directly influence next year’s crucial UN climate meeting in Paris, when countries will try to conclude 20 years of fraught negotiations with a universal commitment to reduce emissions.

“Our academics supported the pope’s initiative to influence next year’s crucial decisions,” Sorondo told Cafod, the Catholic development agency, at a meeting in London. “The idea is to convene a meeting with leaders of the main religions to make all people aware of the state of our climate and the tragedy of social exclusion.”

Following a visit in March to Tacloban, the Philippine city devastated in 2012 by typhoon Haiyan, the pope will publish a rare encyclical on climate change and human ecology. Urging all Catholics to take action on moral and scientific grounds, the document will be sent to the world’s 5,000 Catholic bishops and 400,000 priests, who will distribute it to parishioners.

According to Vatican insiders, Francis will meet other faith leaders and lobby politicians at the general assembly in New York in September, when countries will sign up to new anti-poverty and environmental goals.

In recent months, the pope has argued for a radical new financial and economic system to avoid human inequality and ecological devastation. In October he told a meeting of Latin American and Asian landless peasants and other social movements: “An economic system centred on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it.

“The system continues unchanged, since what dominates are the dynamics of an economy and a finance that are lacking in ethics. It is no longer man who commands, but money. Cash commands.

“The monopolising of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness,” he said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Chinese viewers mostly give thumbs up for The Interview

The New York Times: Even before Americans began flocking to theaters on Christmas Eve to see “The Interview” — Sony Pictures’ comedy about a C.I.A. plot to kill the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un — Chinese film fans by the thousands were downloading mostly pirated versions of the movie on domestic video-sharing websites. By midday on Friday, more than 300,000 people had seen the film and the reviews, by and large, were favorable.

“Perfect, the greatest film in history, all hail Sony,” read one online comment. Said another, “Their ability to amuse is out of this galaxy,” referring to the film’s stars, Seth Rogen and James Franco.

In one sign of the enthusiasm for the film, whose theatrical release was initially held up after a hacking attack on the studio, “The Interview” scored an 8.0 rating on the Chinese Internet movie database Douban, with more than 10,000 people posting reviews. In their comments, some people acknowledged having not seen the film, but wanted to show their support for what many approvingly described as an act of subversion against North Korea. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

In photos: 48 hours under siege by ISIS militants in Kobane

Vice News: On December 19, VICE News entered the besieged Syrian Kurdish city of Kobane with the help of smugglers and the Syrian Kurdish militia, known as the People’s Protection Units (YPG). The city was preparing to enter its 100th day of fighting a fierce siege by the Islamic State (IS). Fighters with IS had been pushed back by a combination of US airstrikes and heavy artillery from a small contingency of Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters. Surrounded by IS on three sides, and a Turkish military hostile to Kurdish forces on the fourth, Kobane has become a symbol of resistance for those fighting IS. YPG fighters now estimate they control approximately 75 percent of the city, and US military sources say over 1,000 IS militants have been killed. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Court releases schoolboy arrested for ‘insulting’ Erdogan

AFP reports: A Turkish court on Friday freed a 16-year-old high school pupil arrested for “insulting” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, amid accusations his detention was the latest sign of a lurch to authoritarianism under the strongman leader.

The boy, Mehmet Emin Altunses, was released following a complaint by his lawyer, but he still faces trial in the future, the official Anatolia news agency reported.

Altunses was met by his parents as he left the main courthouse building in the city and immediately fell into the arms of his mother, Turkish television pictures showed.

But the teen defiantly declared his political activism would continue, saying he was not a terrorist but a “soldier” of modern Turkey’s secular founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

“There is no question of taking a step back from our path, we will continue along this road,” he said.

Altunses had delivered a speech on Wednesday in the central Turkish city of Konya, a bastion of the ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP), where he accused Erdogan and the ruling party of corruption. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Tunisia is still a ray of hope for the Middle East

Berny Sèbe writes: Let’s face it: once a term laden with hope for the Middle East, the idea of an “Arab Spring” has become merely depressing.

Assorted humanitarian disasters have followed in its wake – think of the unspeakable violence by the so-called Islamic State, or the disintegration of Libya’s social and political fabric. In Egypt, the die-hard habit of letting the army choose the country’s rulers has returned. Elsewhere, as in Bahrain, revolts nipped in the bud – or repressed with the help of muscular police forces – have been silenced for good.

And yet, the cradle of the Arab Spring is once again leading the way. With the peaceful election of Beji Caid Essebsi, Tunisia, the first Arab country where popular protests proved to be enough to get rid of an autocrat, has just shown the world that an orderly management of a revolution was always an option on the table.

In four short years, Tunisia has gone through the entire cycle of ousting an apparently lifelong president, electing a constituent assembly, producing a new constitution, and organising a round of fully democratic legislative and presidential elections.

It has successfully navigated the murky waters of post-revolutionary instability, when the future of a country becomes so open that the temptation to use political violence can be much stronger than the discipline needed to bow to the verdict of ballot boxes. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Saudi women drivers to be tried in terrorism court

BBC News reports: Two Saudi women who were detained for defying a ban on female drivers are to be tried in a terrorism court, activists say.

Loujain al-Hathloul, 25, and Maysa al-Amoudi, 33, have been in detention for nearly a month.

The women’s cases had reportedly been transferred over comments they had made on social media – rather than for their driving, according to activists.

Saudi Arabia is the world’s only country to forbid women from driving. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Sliding oil prices force Saudi to dig into reserves for 2015 budget

The Associated Press reports: Saudi Arabia’s Cabinet on Thursday endorsed a 2015 budget that projects a slight increase in spending and a significant drop in revenues due to sliding oil prices, resulting in a nearly $39 billion deficit.

In a sign of mounting financial pressure, the Finance Ministry said the government would try to cut back on salaries, wages and allowances, which “contribute to about 50 percent of total budgeted expenditures.” That could stir resentment among the kingdom’s youth, who make up a majority of the population and are increasingly struggling to find affordable housing and salaries that cover their cost of living.

The price of oil— the backbone of Saudi Arabia’s economy — has fallen by about a half since the summer. Saudi Arabia is extremely wealthy, but there are deep wealth disparities and youth unemployment is expected to mushroom absent a dramatic rise in private sector job creation. The International Monetary Fund says almost two-thirds of employed Saudis work for the government. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The year the climate changed everything

Brian Merchant writes: That 2014 is turning out to be the hottest year ever recorded is, sadly, not particularly remarkable. Nor was it really notable that, despite the global swelter, most of humanity was content to pump out a record-breaking volume — 35 billion tons — of additional heat-trapping carbon pollution.

It wasn’t remarkable that the world’s climate scientists issued a series of reports bearing the international climatology community’s strongest warnings yet. (It is “extremely likely” that human influence is the “dominant cause” of today’s warming, which is scientist for “wake up.”)

Or that California experienced the worst drought in at least 1,200 years.

Or that a massive ice sheet in Antarctica thawed and collapsed, all but guaranteeing 10 feet of global sea level rise from it alone. It may take a long time — hundreds of years, even—but it’s locked in.

Or that the Pentagon is officially preparing plans for waging wars in a warming world.

Or that vast plumes of methane, a super-heat-trapping gas, are bubbling up in the Arctic at a rate not seen before.

Or that conservative politicians, pundits, and voters ignored it all, continuing their tradition of brushing off climate change as a liberal contrivance, and of convening hearings to haughtily disavow one of the most robust scientific consensuses ever established.

None of those deeply unnerving developments were particularly surprising in 2014—they all simply reflect the new machinations of the world we now inhabit. We live in the age of perpetual, incremental environmental decline. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

John Muir’s last stand

Tom Butler and Eileen Crist write: In this centennial anniversary of Muir’s death, it is disturbing, but not surprising, that the man and his legacy are suffering the slings and arrows of critics. These attacks are concurrent with an ongoing assault on traditional conservation ideas and tactics from some academics, think tanks, and practitioners affiliated with large nonprofits. This body of thinkers, variously called “new conservationists,” “eco-pragmatists,” or “postmodern greens,” have articulated a set of views about where they think conservation should go in the so-called Anthropocene, the new epoch of human dominion. Wilderness preservation is not on their wish list this Christmas, though corporate partnerships are.

The postmodern greens aim to reorient conservation’s primary focus away from establishing protected areas intended to help prevent human-caused extinctions and to sustain large-scale natural ecosystems. Instead, they advocate sustainable management of the biosphere to support human aspirations, particularly for a growing global economy. If some species go extinct that may be regrettable, goes their thinking, but the bottom line is that nature is resilient. As long as “working landscapes” (places we manipulate to produce commodities) are managed well enough to sustain “ecosystem services” (things like water filtration, soil health, and crop pollination), human welfare can be supported without lots of new protected areas (habitat for other species) getting in the way of economic growth.

Some of the most prominent of these new conservationists have warned against critiquing the techno-industrial growth economy that is everywhere gobbling up wild nature. “Instead of scolding capitalism,” they write, “conservationists should partner with corporations in a science-based effort to integrate the value of nature’s benefits into their operations and cultures.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Tunisia: Cheers and doubts

Robin Wright writes: The celebratory honking and shouting on Habib Bourguiba Avenue, the elegant boulevard that runs through Tunisia’s capital, began within seconds of the announcement that Sunday’s election had produced the country’s first democratically elected President—the culmination of an uneasy transition that began, in 2011, with the Jasmine Revolution. In a tight runoff, Beji Caid Essebsi, who recently turned eighty-eight, was declared the winner. He is Tunisia’s most experienced politician; he has served as defense minister, foreign minister, and interior minister. But these positions were held under Tunisia’s two most autocratic leaders, and Essebsi personifies the old guard—known by critics as the Remnants.

Tunisia has emerged as a model for Arab nations. Its three elections since October, held in unheated schools around the country, have been serious and well run—especially compared to the flagrant vote-buying and vote-rigging elsewhere in the Middle East. Tunisians “raised the bar of what is possible,” Ken Dryden, the former Canadian M.P. (and hockey star), who served as an international monitor for the election, said. “They have done their part.” Yet the country, with a population of eleven million, has also provided roughly three thousand fighters—more than any other nation—to the Islamic State and the Al Nusra Front as they sweep through Syria and Iraq. (Tunisia’s government says it has prevented almost nine thousand more from joining.) “Any time these people decide to go to their deaths, it’s because they don’t accept conditions of life. They believe they are rejected by society,” Karim Helali, of Afek, or Horizons, a progressive party favored by Tunisia’s young people, told me.

Essebsi defeated a human-rights activist, Moncef Marzouki, who was appointed to serve as interim President in 2011, while the country wrote a new constitution. The process took three years. During that time, Tunisia grappled with the assassination of two leading politicians, the rise of an extremist underground, attacks on the U.S. Embassy and an American school in Tunis, and thousands of labor strikes. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail