(Click here to watch the whole debate from the beginning.)
Video: Tom Friedman on the power of the Israel lobby in U.S. politics
Category Archives: Issues
The Supreme Court’s GM-friendly patent ruling
Wired: The U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling that naturally occurring genes can’t be patented looks, on the surface, like terrible news for biotech companies. It would appear to strike down thousands of patents claiming intellectual property rights over isolated genetic sequences — the very DNA patents that anchor countless business plans.
Yet biotech stocks saw a small increase on the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index yesterday, and the effect of the ruling was even more dramatic for Myriad Genetics, the Utah company whose patents were in question. Myriad’s stock price closed up nearly 10 percent, at one point topping $38. That’s the highest since 2009, the year the lawsuit against its patents on BRCA1 and BRCA2, two genes associated with early-onset breast and ovarian cancer, was filed.
There’s a reason investors rejoiced over a decision that, superficially, seems to strip so many companies of their most valuable assets. John Wilbanks, who runs the Science Commons project at Creative Commons, says that competitive advantage comes not from the DNA data itself but from the ways companies figure out to use it.
“It’s clearly not as terrifying a ruling for the industry compared to what it could have been,” Wilbanks said. “It’s a decision that says that data is free, and that’s in line with what patent law has always said, which is that you can’t patent data. That’s what a gene sequence is.
“By making that data free, there is a lot of room for public good and public and private innovation.”
At the same time, the court did not strike down patents on “new applications of knowledge,” or on DNA whose sequence has been altered. In other words, biotechnologists still have plenty of room to develop proprietary innovations that use DNA data in new ways. Businesses can be build on genetic insights applied to new processes, methods or algorithms, which in most cases would still be patentable.
This distinction between the data and its uses echoes the sentiment among experts that real innovation comes after genes and gene mutations are identified. [Continue reading…]
Video: The rise of autonomous robotic weapons of war
Guantanamo doctors are violating medical ethics
In the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr George Annas, Dr Sondra Crosby and Dr Leonard Glantz write: American physicians have not widely criticized medical policies at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp that violate medical ethics. We believe they should. Actions violating medical ethics, taken on behalf of the government, devalue medical ethics for all physicians. The ongoing hunger strike at Guantanamo by as many as 100 of the 166 remaining prisoners presents a stark challenge to the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to resist the temptation to use military physicians to “break” the strike through force-feeding.
President Barack Obama has publicly commented on the hunger strike twice. On April 26, he said, “I don’t want these individuals [on hunger strike] to die.” In a May 23 speech on terrorism, the President said, “Look at our current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are . . . on a hunger strike. . . . Is this who we are? . . . Is that the America we want to leave our children? Our sense of justice is stronger than that.” How should physicians respond? That force-feeding of mentally competent hunger strikers violates basic medical ethics principles is not in serious dispute. Similarly, the Constitution Project’s bipartisan Task Force on Detainee Treatment concluded in April that “forced feeding of detainees [at Guantanamo] is a form of abuse that must end” and urged the government to “adopt standards of care, policies, and procedures regarding detainees engaged in hunger strikes that are in keeping with established medical professional ethical and care standards.” Nevertheless, the DOD has sent about 40 additional medical personnel to help force-feed the hunger strikers.
The ethics standard regarding physician involvement in hunger strikes was probably best articulated by the World Medical Association (WMA) in its Declaration of Malta on Hunger Strikers. Created after World War II, the WMA comprises medical societies from almost 100 countries. Despite its checkered history, its process, transparency, and composition give it credibility regarding international medical ethics, and its statement on hunger strikers is widely considered authoritative. The WMA’s most familiar document is the Declaration of Helsinki — ethical guidelines for human-subjects research. The Declaration of Malta states that “Forcible feeding [of mentally competent hunger strikers] is never ethically acceptable. Even if intended to benefit, feeding accompanied by threats, coercion, force or use of physical restraints is a form of inhuman and degrading treatment.” The Declaration of Malta aims to set the same type of ethical norm as the Helsinki document. Physicians can no more ethically force-feed mentally competent hunger strikers than they can ethically conduct research on competent humans without informed consent. [Continue reading…]
Britain’s legacy of torture
David M. Anderson writes: The British do not torture. At least, that is what we in Britain have always liked to think. But not anymore. In a historic decision last week, the British government agreed to compensate 5,228 Kenyans who were tortured and abused while detained during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s. Each claimant will receive around £2,670 (about $4,000).
The money is paltry. But the principle it establishes, and the history it rewrites, are both profound. This is the first historical claim for compensation that the British government has accepted. It has never before admitted to committing torture in any part of its former empire.
In recent years there has been a clamor for official apologies. In 2010, Britain formally apologized for its army’s conduct in the infamous “Bloody Sunday” killings in Northern Ireland in 1972, and earlier this year Prime Minister David Cameron visited Amritsar, India, the site of a 1919 massacre, and expressed “regret for the loss of life.”
The Kenyan case has been in process for a decade in London’s High Court. The British fought to avoid paying reparations, so the decision to settle is a significant change of direction. The decision comes months ahead of the 50th anniversary of the British departure from Kenya — once thought of as the “white man’s country” in East Africa. [Continue reading…]
Samantha Power reversal: Another Israel lobby win
M.J. Rosenberg writes: The month of March 2002 was a terrible time in both Israel and the West Bank. Some 100 Israelis were killed by Palestinian suicide bombers. In response, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon launched a military operation in the West Bank allegedly killing some 500 Palestinians. Children made up a significant number of the victims on both sides. The prospects for an end to violence, let alone peace, appeared lower than at any time previously.
It was against that background that Harvard professor, Samantha Power, now President Obama’s nominee to serve as U.N. ambassador, spoke of the need for U.S. intervention.
She told an interviewer that she did not believe that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon or Palestinian President Yasir Arafat would ever stop the killing on their own and that “external intervention is required.” She specifically called on the United States to “put something on the line,” by which she meant the “imposition of a solution on unwilling parties.” Admitting that the idea of imposing a settlement was “fundamentally undemocratic,” she said it was preferable to “deference” to leaders who seem “politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people.”
This was not surprising coming from Power. She is the leading advocate of what is known as “liberal interventionism.” She has said that as a child she was shaken by the world’s indifference to the Holocaust. Her feelings were deepened by her experiences as a journalist in Bosnia. Ever since, most notably in the case of Libya, Power has recommended “going in” to stop the killing of innocents. Right or wrong, it’s who she is.
Unfortunately for Power, the reality of U.S. politics dictates that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict be exempted from rules or theories one applies elsewhere. That is why some of the most aggressively anti-war, pro-human rights progressives in Congress, the media and the blogosphere simply go silent, at best, on the subject of the Israeli occupation or, at worst, openly support military actions like Israel’s wars in Gaza. They know that the Israel lobby will make life very difficult for those who insist on applying the same moral yardstick to Israel as to other nations.
Power alluded to that fact of life in the same interview in which she called for intervention. Right after calling on the United States to impose a peace settlement, she added that “might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import.”
It did. Six years later when Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama listed Power as one of his foreign policy advisors, members of the lobby crowd went ballistic. [Continue reading…]
Former drone operator says he’s haunted by his part in more than 1,600 deaths
NBC News: A former Air Force drone operator who says he participated in missions that killed more than 1,600 people remembers watching one of the first victims bleed to death.
Brandon Bryant says he was sitting in a chair at a Nevada Air Force base operating the camera when his team fired two missiles from their drone at three men walking down a road halfway around the world in Afghanistan. The missiles hit all three targets, and Bryant says he could see the aftermath on his computer screen – including thermal images of a growing puddle of hot blood.
From the war on terror to austerity: a lost decade for women and human rights
Heather McRobie writes: A recurring theme at the Nobel Women’s Initiative conference in Belfast has been a reflection on the last decade in terms of its global impact on women and human rights. A picture emerged of a period wherein the excuse of ‘war on terror’ as a justificatory narrative for exclusivist identities, state violence and violence against women gave way to official austerity narratives that, in their own way, entrench inequalities and disempower women. Central to the decade was the elevation of the sanctity of the nation state’s security or perceived security, often – paradoxically – at the expense of both its citizens and those outside its borders.
Several speakers reflected on the ‘war on terror’ period in terms of its interrelated assault on human rights and women. The human rights violations and mass violation of human dignity enacted under the guise of the ‘war on terror’ runs from arbitrary detention to drone-strikes, from Guantanamo to Yemen to the encroachment of the rights of ‘citizens’ in the homelands that those who instigated the ‘war on terror’ were claiming to ‘protect’. The attack on women was similarly wide-sweeping: from the neo-colonial appropriation of the discourse of ‘women’s rights’ – toothless and sanitised in its neo-con costume – as an empty vessel to further the cause of militarism in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the ossification of rigid binary gender roles in the ‘homeland’ of America; rapes were committed by occupying soldiers at sites of invasion while in countries such as Yemen and Pakistan women’s lives were eroded by the chaos in their lives caused by the ‘war on terror’.
Amina Mama, Director of the Women and Gender Studies programme at UC Davis, spoke at the conference about how the process of militarisation works in tandem with the construction and reinforcement of rigid, exclusivist gender roles, creating matrixes of power-structures in favour of the nation state and military and against alternative, non-hierarchical ways of being. The epidemic levels of sexual assault within the US military itself – while due to its own complex set of causes – in some sense plays out this dynamic in microcosm, in the interlocking of patriarchy and militarism that is central to the dominant conception of Western statecraft. [Continue reading…]
Will the Israel lobby block Samantha Power’s appointment to the UN?
Even if Samantha Power’s nomination as U.S. ambassador to the UN is not blocked by the Senate, I don’t expect we’ll hear her reassert her view that a resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict will require an imposed solution, including the use of a “mammoth protection force,” or that the U.S. should stop spending billions supporting Israel’s military forces but should instead be investing the same amounts in a Palestinian state. But, what seems certain is that the following clip from a 2002 interview will be reappearing on lots of Zionist websites and that the Israel lobby will kick into high gear to oppose her nomination. Unless, that is, their failure to block Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Defense Secretary has led organizations such as the Emergency Committee for Israel to adopt some tactical changes.
Maybe the White House figures that its opponents will reserve all their venom for Susan Rice, and thus allow Powers to take up office without strong opposition.
Jeffrey Goldberg writes: Just a few months ago, Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and now President Barack Obama’s choice to be the next national security adviser, saw her main chance to become secretary of state dissipate before her eyes, as Senate Republicans (with John McCain and Lindsey Graham in the lead) excoriated her for, as they saw it, misleading the public about the attacks on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year. (My thoughts about the attacks on Rice can be found here.)
Rice was forced to withdraw her name, and Senator John Kerry was awarded the job. Now Rice will be, in effect, Kerry’s supervisor. McCain and Graham, by turning Rice into the scapegoat of the Benghazi debacle, have inadvertently allowed the president to bring her into the innermost ring of power, in a role that requires no Senate confirmation.
Netanyahu signals readiness to consider 2002 Arab peace plan
Reuters reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled readiness on Wednesday to consider a 2002 Arab peace plan whose terms were recently softened to include possible land swaps between Israel and the Palestinians.
“We are listening to every initiative – the Arab initiative has been mentioned – and we are prepared to discuss initiatives that are proposals and not edicts,” he said in a speech in parliament.
Netanyahu spoke during a debate on the plan, proposed at an Arab League summit 11 years ago. Israel had rejected the initiative that offered normalized ties for it with much of the Arab world, citing its call for complete withdrawal from land captured in the 1967 Middle East war as a main stumbling block.
The shooting of Ibragim Todashev: is the lawlessness of Obama’s drone policy coming home?
George Monbiot writes: Did the FBI execute Ibragim Todashev? He appears to have been shot seven times while being interviewed at home in Orlando, Florida, about his connection to one of the Boston bombing suspects. Among the shots was the assassin’s hallmark: a bullet to the back of the head. What kind of an interview was it?
An irregular one. There was no lawyer present. It was not recorded. By the time Todashev was shot, he had apparently been interrogated by three agents for five hours. And then? Who knows? First, we were told, he lunged at them with a knife. How he acquired it, five hours into a police interview, was not explained. How he posed such a threat while recovering from a knee operation also remains perplexing.
At first he drew the knife while being interviewed. Then he acquired it during a break from the interview. Then it ceased to be a knife and became a sword, then a pipe, then a metal pole, then a broomstick, then a table, then a chair. In one account all the agents were in the room at the time of the attack; in another, all but one had mysteriously departed, leaving the remaining officer to face his assailant alone.
If – and it remains a big if – this was an extrajudicial execution, it was one of hundreds commissioned by US agencies since Barack Obama first took office. The difference in this case is that it took place on American soil. Elsewhere, suspects are bumped off without even the right to the lawyerless interview Ibragim Todashev was given. [Continue reading…]
Ambiguous drone policies cast doubt on Obama’s lofty pledges
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: It was a “season of fear”, he said. Government trimming facts and evidence “to fit ideological predispositions”; making decisions based on fear rather than foresight; setting aside principles “as luxuries that we could no longer afford”. “We went off course,” he concluded.
It was a fine speech: thoughtful, bold and idealistic. The US president, Barack Obama, delivered it at the National Archives in Washington on May 21, 2009.
Last Thursday, when Mr Obama addressed the question of national security again during his National Defense University speech, he sounded equally high-minded. But where in his first speech he addressed the excesses of his predecessor, this time he had his own to consider. The most serious of these were born of Mr Obama’s inability to deliver fully on promises he made in his earlier address.
At the National Archives, Mr Obama vowed to end torture, shut CIA black sites and close Guantanamo. It was the clean break he had promised. But faced with a Republican backlash, Mr Obama caved. Torture and black sites were abolished but Guantanamo remained. Torture memos were released but torturers roamed free. To shield himself against charges of weakness, Mr Obama escalated the covert war.
The war since its inception was governed as much by security considerations as by its political logic. By eschewing large-scale military deployment in favour of drones and special forces, and through aggressive prosecution of journalists and whistle-blowers, Mr Obama has kept his actions secret, releasing himself from domestic political constraints, claiming successes where they have occurred, disowning failures. [Continue reading…]
U.S. drone attacks are further radicalising Pakistan
Imran Awan writes: The US airstrike last week, which killed the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) second in command Wali ur Rehman has again raised the contentious issue about the legality of US drone strikes in Pakistan. The United States, like many of its allies across the international community were quick to hail this operation a success. Yet underneath this bravado lays a very serious question and that is” despite killing high profile figures such as Wali ur Rehman and Baitullah Mehsud in 2009, the methods used to target the Taliban may in actual fact be acting as a recruitment tool for extremist organisations in Pakistan who have an apathy towards the Taliban.
The latest airstrike came as the dust was settling from the recent Pakistani elections. At a crucial time when the TPP were willing to hold “peace talks” with the new Pakistani Nawaz Sharif administration, this US airstrike seems to again have reignited anti-US/Pak relations. The drone strikes are mainly used in the federally administered tribal areas, and whilst accurate statistics about the number of drone strikes and casualties are difficult to ascertain because of the nature of access, the Bureau of Investigative Journalists has argued that at least 2,541 to 3,540 people have been killed in drone attacks and almost 411 to 884 of those are civilians.
When Imran Khan, the cricketer turned politician and leader of the Pakistani Tehreek-e-Insaf party famously said he would shoot down a drone if elected as Pakistan’s next prime minister, many commentators viewed it as light satire appealing to the middle class vote. Yet his statement does appear to represent the majority of Pakistani’s views on drone attacks. A 2011 Pew poll of drone attacks, for example, showed that 89% of Pakistani citizens argue that drones kill innocent people. Moreover, a report published by Stanford and New York Universities in 2011 showed the scale of the psychological impact drone attacks had on Pakistani civilians who felt “terrorised” by them. [Continue reading…]
Video: Marching against Monsanto
Video: Media, ‘terrorism’ and the Woolwich murder
Guantánamo hunger strikers demand new doctors in letter of protest
The Guardian reports: Thirteen Guantánamo Bay detainees on hunger strike have written an open letter to their military doctors insisting they receive independent, non-military medical treatment – and appealing to the conscience of their physicians.
“I cannot trust your advice, because you are responsible to your superior military officers who require you to treat me by means unacceptable to me, and you put your duty to them above your duty to me as a doctor,” the detainees write in an open letter from the detention center obtained by the Guardian. “Your dual loyalties make trusting you impossible.”
The signatories, who include former UK resident Shaker Aamer, protest that the force-feedings administered by military physicians at Guantánamo are “extremely painful” and “in violation of the ethics of your profession.” The May 30 letter was co-ordinated by attorneys for the 13 detainees, nine of whom signed the statement directly. Four signed through their lawyers.
Another nine lawyers, some of whom represent Guantánamo detainees, added their names to the letter. [Continue reading…]
The new and the ordinary in the Middle East
Rami G. Khouri writes: Every once in a while the Middle East region experiences a series of major and simultaneous developments in several different arenas, indicating that something important is taking place. We are passing through just such a moment this week, with quite dramatic developments in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine-Israel, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and several Arabian Peninsula states, without any sign of what is truly historic and new and what is a passing phenomenon.
Conspiracy theorists will be disappointed to learn that nobody is in charge, as they had long imagined, or is pulling strings to achieve predetermined objectives, like the break-up of large Arab countries into a series of ethnic principalities, or the control of Arab countries by Islamist groups beholden to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United States. Local dynamics primarily drive each set of major changes across the region, with cross-border linkages following as a corollary in most cases.
Iraq is pursuing its own post-war domestic conflicts and stresses and trying to figure out the balance among its Arab and Kurdish components, its Iraqi and Iranian interests, and the frail communalism among Iraqi Arab Shiites and Sunnis. The United States is pushing hard to revive a Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiation by focusing on three tactics that have repeatedly failed and probably will fail again: tripartite meetings with Jordan; talks between Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas, who would not recognize a credible peace process if they found it in their soup; and, a proposed $4 billion development initiative for occupied Palestinian territories that focuses on economic development rather than liberation as the antidote to the depressed condition in Arab Palestine. [Continue reading…]
How patent protection is threatening lives
Council on Foreign Relations: Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, closed the annual World Health Assembly this week [May 27] sounding alarm about a new SARS-like virus circulating primarily in Saudi Arabia.
“My greatest concern right now is the novel coronavirus,” Chan warned the representatives of two hundred nations gathered in Geneva. “We do not know where the virus hides in nature. We do not know how people are getting infected. Until we answer these questions, we are empty-handed when it comes to prevention.”
But impeding an effective response is a dispute over rights to develop a treatment for the virus. The case brings to the fore a growing debate over International Health Regulations, interpretations of patent rights, and the free exchange of scientific samples and information. Meanwhile, the epidemic has already caused forty-nine cases in seven countries, killing twenty-seven of them.
At the center of the dispute is a Dutch laboratory that claims all rights to the genetic sequence of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus [MERS-CoV]. Saudi Arabia’s deputy health minister, Ziad Memish, told the WHO meeting that “someone”–a reference to Egyptian virologist Ali Zaki–mailed a sample of the new SARS-like virus out of his country without government consent in June 2012, giving it to Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam.
“The virus was sent out of the country and it was patented, contracts were signed with vaccine companies and anti-viral drug companies, and that’s why they have a MTA [Material Transfer Agreement] to be signed by anybody who can utilize that virus, and that should not happen,” Memish said.
Though Memish referred to a “patent,” the Dutch team has not patented the viral genetic sequence but has placed it under an MTA, which requires sample recipients to contractually agree not to develop products or share the sample without the permission of Erasmus and the Fouchier laboratory. Memish said that the Dutch MTA was preventing Saudi Arabia from stopping the MERS-CoV outbreak, which appears to have started eleven months ago in the Eastern part of his country. The Dutch team denies the MTA is slowing work on the outbreak, saying it has given virus samples to any lab that has requested it.
Courts in North America and Europe have ruled that it is possible to patent life forms or their genetic sequences, spurring the practice of claiming patent control on newly identified microoganisms. Such patents give owner rights over royalties on all products derived from the genetic sequence, including vaccines, diagnostics, and genetically targeted treatments. But they have spawned controversy outside of wealthy countries, since they are perceived as guaranteeing profits for Western pharmaceuticals at the expense of country-of-origin use and access. [Continue reading…]