Still not sure whether Israel practices apartheid?

Ynet reports: The Transportation Ministry announced that starting Sunday it will begin operating designated lines for Palestinians in the West Bank.

The bus lines in question are meant, according to the ministry, to transport Palestinian workers from the West Bank to central Israel. The ministry alleges that the move is meant to ease the congestion felt on bus lines used by Jews in the same areas, but several bus drivers told Ynet that Palestinians who will choose to travel on the so-called “mixed” lines, will be asked to leave them.

While officially the new lines are considered “general bus lines,” Ynet learned Saturday that their existence has been made public only in Palestinian villages in the West Bank, via flyers in Arabic urging Palestinians to arrive at Eyal crossing and use the designated lines.

The Transportation Ministry defended the plan, saying it was the result of reports and complaints saying that the buses traveling in the area were overcrowded and rife with tensions between the Jewish and Arab passengers.

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Israel’s idea of ‘two states’ is based on expulsion of Arabs

Ben White writes: The slogan “two states for two peoples” has long been used by those who support the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Ironically, however, such a framework risks cementing Israeli apartheid and Jewish privilege, evoking the same sorts of arguments put forward by defenders of South Africa’s historical regime of systematic discrimination.

There are three problems with the “two states for two peoples” formulation. Firstly, the meaning of a Palestinian “state” has changed to the point that it is problematic to even use the term. Support for Palestinian statehood – at least rhetorically – has become the shared position of everyone from Tony Blair to Netanyahu, via Ariel Sharon. Some Israel advocacy groups (the slightly smarter ones) even campaign on this basis.

So what’s going on here, when someone like Netanyahu can boast to Congress how he has “publicly committed to a solution of two states for two peoples”? Well note the wording of the Israeli government’s position when Ehud Olmert was prime minister and Tzipi Livni was foreign minister.

“The government will strive to shape the permanent borders of the state of Israel as a Jewish state, with a Jewish majority.”

In other words, the question of borders is not so much about land, as it is about demographics. Another example is Yitzhak Rabin. When Shimon Peres lauded the legacy of the assassinated prime minister in November 2011, he claimed that “[Rabin’s] diplomatic path has been accepted and is now held by the majority, a solution of two states for two peoples”.

But what did Rabin mean by this? Shortly before he was killed in 1995, the then-PM told the Knesset that he envisaged a “Palestinian entity … which is less than a state”. Rabin’s “permanent solution” included Jerusalem as Israel’s “united capital” (including the illegal settlements such as Ma’ale Adumim), annexation of colony blocs, the “establishment of blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria”, and a border “in the broadest meaning of that term” down the Jordan Valley. This is a road map to walled-in reservations, not statehood – and it’s remarkably similar to Netanyahu’s own vision. [Continue reading…]

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The perils of perfection

Evgeny Morozov: “When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting” is the reassuring slogan greeting visitors at the Web site for LivesOn, a soon-to-launch service that promises to tweet on your behalf even after you die. By analyzing your earlier tweets, the service would learn “about your likes, tastes, syntax” and add a personal touch to all those automatically composed scribblings from the world beyond.

LivesOn may yet prove to be a parody, or it may fizzle for any number of reasons, but as an idea it highlights the dominant ideology of Silicon Valley today: what could be disrupted should be disrupted — even death.

Barriers and constraints — anything that imposes artificial limits on the human condition — are being destroyed with particular gusto. Superhuman, another mysterious start-up that could enliven any comedy show, promises to offer, as its co-founder recently put it, an unspecified service that “helps people be superhuman.” Well, at least they had the decency not to call it The Übermensch.

Recent debates about Twitter revolutions or the Internet’s impact on cognition have mostly glossed over the fact that Silicon Valley’s technophilic gurus and futurists have embarked on a quest to develop the ultimate patch to the nasty bugs of humanity. If they have their way, no individual foibles would go unpunished — ideally, technology would even make such foibles obsolete.

Even boredom seems to be in its last throes: designers in Japan have found a way to make our train trips perpetually fun-filled. With the help of an iPhone, a projector, a GPS module and Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensor, their contrivance allows riders to add new objects to what they see “outside,” thus enlivening the bleak landscape in their train windows. This could be a big hit in North Korea — and not just on trains.

Or, if you tend to forget things, Silicon Valley wants to give you an app to remember everything. If you occasionally prevaricate in order to meet your clashing obligations as a parent, friend or colleague, another app might spot inconsistencies in your behavior and inform your interlocutors if you are telling the truth. If you experience discomfort because you encounter people and things that you do not like, another app or gadget might spare you the pain by rendering them invisible.

Sunny, smooth, clean: with Silicon Valley at the helm, our life will become one long California highway. [Continue reading…]

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Why online civility matters

Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele write: In the beginning, the technology gods created the Internet and saw that it was good. Here, at last, was a public sphere with unlimited potential for reasoned debate and the thoughtful exchange of ideas, an enlightening conversational bridge across the many geographic, social, cultural, ideological and economic boundaries that ordinarily separate us in life, a way to pay bills without a stamp.

Then someone invented “reader comments” and paradise was lost.

The Web, it should be said, is still a marvelous place for public debate. But when it comes to reading and understanding news stories online — like this one, for example — the medium can have a surprisingly potent effect on the message. Comments from some readers, our research shows, can significantly distort what other readers think was reported in the first place.

But here, it’s not the content of the comments that matters. It’s the tone.

In a study published online last month in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, we and three colleagues report on an experiment designed to measure what one might call “the nasty effect.”

We asked 1,183 participants to carefully read a news post on a fictitious blog, explaining the potential risks and benefits of a new technology product called nanosilver. These infinitesimal silver particles, tinier than 100-billionths of a meter in any dimension, have several potential benefits (like antibacterial properties) and risks (like water contamination), the online article reported.

Then we had participants read comments on the post, supposedly from other readers, and respond to questions regarding the content of the article itself.

Half of our sample was exposed to civil reader comments and the other half to rude ones — though the actual content, length and intensity of the comments, which varied from being supportive of the new technology to being wary of the risks, were consistent across both groups. The only difference was that the rude ones contained epithets or curse words, as in: “If you don’t see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these kinds of products, you’re an idiot” and “You’re stupid if you’re not thinking of the risks for the fish and other plants and animals in water tainted with silver.”

The results were both surprising and disturbing. Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself. [Continue reading…]

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We are what we quote

Speech is quotation. That is unless someone chooses to construct a language of their own and is content to be understood by no one else.

There is in practice only so far we can go in making words our own, since a word’s ability to possess meaning depends on it being shared. And virtually all of these meanings come used — rare is the word and meaning freshly minted. And yet from this supply of endlessly re-used terms, we can construct a limitless number of novel pieces of language. Duplication and uniqueness get wrapped together.

Out of this endless supply of new sentences however, some turn out so well-formed they demand repetition.

Geoffrey O’Brien asks: What is the use of quotations? They have of, course, their practical applications for after-dinner speakers or for editorialists looking to buttress their arguments. They also make marvelous filler for otherwise uninspired conversations. But the gathering of such fragments responds to a much deeper compulsion. It resonates with the timeless desire to seize on the minimal remnant — the tiniest identifiable gesture — out of which the world could, in a pinch, be reconstructed. Libraries may go under, cultures may go under, but single memorizable bits of rhyme and discourse persist over centuries. Shattered wholes reach us in small disconnected pieces, like the lines of the poet Sappho preserved in ancient treatises. To collect those pieces, to extrapolate lost worlds from them, to create a larger map of the human universe by laying many such pieces side by side: this can become a fever, and one that has afflicted writers of all eras.

Anyone, of course, might develop a passion for quotes, but for a writer it’s a particularly intimate connection. A good quotation can serve as a model for one’s own work, a perpetual challenge with the neatness and self-sufficiency of its structure laid bare in the mind. How does it work? How might a quotation be done differently, with the materials and urgencies of a different moment? Perhaps writers should begin, in fact, by inwardly uttering again what has already been uttered, to get the feel of it and to savor its full power.

Quotes are the actual fabric with which the mind weaves: internalizing them, but also turning them inside out, quarreling with them, adding to them, wandering through their architecture as if a single sentence were an expansible labyrinthine space.

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America’s barbarous roots

Daniel K. Richter writes: Colonial history, I’ve often told my students, isn’t pretty. The well-scrubbed Williamsburg, Virginia, that tourists see today would have been unrecognizable to Thomas Jefferson, much less to the enslaved laborers who made up most of its population in the eighteenth century. And almost anywhere in British North America during that century was a paradise compared to what had existed a hundred years earlier. Today’s images of the seventeenth century — up the road from Williamsburg at Historic Jamestowne or down the road from Harvard at Plimouth Plantation — aren’t so well scrubbed. But neither site can begin to recreate the stench, the terror, the misery that haunted every place and everybody in that bloody era. Living-history museums dare not drive away those they hope to educate by revealing too much of the bitter truth. And so Web surfers are cheerily invited to “Dine at Plimouth Plantation.” In the accompanying photograph, a jolly Jacobean couple stands behind a modern man hoisting a huge roast turkey leg, while a multiracial tableful of guests lift their glasses and entice visitors to join them. What, one wonders, might the starving band of seventeenth-century religious zealots — who had watched half their compatriots perish during their first horrible winter on Cape Cod — have made of this cheerful picture?

The eminent Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn, Ph.D. ’53, LL.D. ’99, has a pretty good idea. “Death was everywhere,” he says in his aptly named new book, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675. “America, for these hopeful utopians, had become a graveyard.” No one is better qualified to survey the carnage at Plymouth than Bailyn, now Adams University Professor emeritus, who began teaching at Harvard in 1953, published the first of his more than 20 books in 1955, and has earned the Pulitzer Prize for history twice. The heaping dishes he would serve to latter-day Plymouth diners are not pretty to look at — indeed they often purposefully turn the stomach — but they provide some necessary doses of past reality that only someone of his vast learning and experience could prepare.

The Barbarous Years resumes a series that Bailyn began in 1986, with the publication of a brief overview called The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction, and a massive tome entitled Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution. The opening pages of the shorter volume conjure “a satellite circling the globe from the early medieval period to the advent of industrialism.” Its camera, Bailyn says, would reveal that “the transforming phenomenon was…the massive transfer to the Western Hemisphere of people from Africa, from the European mainland, and especially from the Anglo-Celtic fringes of the British Isles.” Voyagers to the West is a high-resolution snapshot, developed from intense analysis of every recorded departure from the British Isles for North America between late 1773 and early 1776. Packed with numbers, tables, graphs, and maps, it traces broad patterns. But Voyagers is also full of personal stories revealing the motives, experiences, and emotions of those who made new homes in North America.

As Bailyn admits, for the seventeenth century “the data do not exist” for this kind of comprehensive analysis. The Barbarous Years must therefore be far more impressionistic than its predecessor, although it does the best it can with the fragmentary passenger lists, port records, and other materials available. Colorful characters — familiar and often unfamiliar — leap from its deeply researched pages. Groups of chapters organized by region — Virginia and Maryland, New Netherland and New Sweden, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay — survey what is known about the varied backgrounds, controversies, and personalities in the founding years of European colonization in each place.

The three regions, each treated mostly in isolation from the others, differed in geography, environment, and economy, but “of one characteristic of the immigrant population there can be no doubt. They were a mixed multitude.” Chesapeake colonists spanned a vast range of social statuses, and they came from all over the British Isles. New England Puritans mostly sprang from middling social strata but brought with them multiple local traditions of farming and government. And once they escaped their common enemies in England, they discovered huge theological disagreements among themselves. Meanwhile, New Netherland and short-lived New Sweden — the substrate on which, after two military conquests, the later English colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware would be built — “left behind, on the shores of North America, one of the strangest assemblages of people that region would ever know,” a “farrago” of Finns, Jews, Walloons, and motley others.

Presiding over this assemblage were Dutch rulers like Willem Kieft and Petrus Stuyvesant, “the chronicle of whose administrations read at times like Tacitus’s annals of imperial Rome.” Dominant figures in New England and the Chesapeake were no less remarkable, and their populaces no more governable. Chaos and violence were the orders of the day, not just among the colonists themselves but especially in their relations with indigenous people. Beginning with its title, The Barbarous Years highlights the brutality that Europeans and Indians inflicted on each other.

Still, for all the book’s learned strengths, its discussions of Native Americans are disappointing, even for a study focused on European migrants rather than Indian affairs. Many of the problems involve unfortunate choices of language, beginning with the decades-old decision to call the series The Peopling of British North America. [Continue reading…]

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The gun industry’s deadly addiction

Tim Dickinson writes: For gunmakers, the political fight over assault rifles and high-capacity pistols is about more than just profits – it’s about the militarization of the marketplace and represents a desperate bid by gunmakers to prop up a decaying business. The once-dependable market for traditional hunting guns has fallen off a cliff. To adapt, the firearms industry has embraced a business strategy that requires it to place the weapons of war favored by deranged killers like Adam Lanza and Jared Loughner into the homes and holsters of as many Americans as possible. “They’re not selling your dad’s hunting rifle or shotgun,” says Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, a top industry watchdog. “They’re selling military-bred weaponry.”

As recently as 2008, shotguns, rifles and other traditional hunting weapons made up half of all new civilian gun sales in America, according to SEC documents – a brisk billion-dollar business. Today, hunting guns account for less than a quarter of the market, and the hunting industry is forecasting a 24 percent drop in revenue by 2025. Gunmakers are on the wrong side of the same demographic curves that haunt the modern Republican Party. Its customer base is too old, too white, too male and too Southern. According to Gallup, 61 percent of white males in the South own guns today. Nationwide, just 18 percent of Latinos do. “The white males are aging and dying off,” says Sugarmann. Flooding the market with battle-ready guns, he says, “is an effort to find one new, shiny thing to sell them.”

For the moment, that strategy is paying handsome dividends. Handgun sales have jumped 70 percent since 2008, racking up an estimated $1.5 billion in sales last year. Powerful pistols – sold under brands like Beretta, Glock and Ruger – have replaced traditional hunting guns as the industry’s cash cow. Revenue from assault rifles is growing at an even faster clip – having doubled in the past five years, to $489 million. Gaudy profit margins have become the norm: Top gunmakers enjoy gross profits of 30 percent or more. Ammunition manufacturers, too, boast of being fat and happy. And it’s no wonder: AR-15 enthusiasts brag they can fire up to 400 rounds in 60 seconds. Paying roughly 50 cents a bullet, such shooters are blowing through $200 worth of ammo in a hot minute.

Much of the industry’s recent success is linked to politics – in particular, to the gun-buying public’s anxiety about the first black man in the White House. The phenomenon is reflected in Smith & Wesson’s SEC filings, which trumpeted “strong consumer demand for our firearm products following a new administration taking office in Washington, D.C., in 2009.” Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas has joked that Barack Obama is “his own stimulus plan for the gun industry.” [Continue reading…]

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Head of Chadian army claims troops kill Belmoktar

The Associated Press reports: Chad’s military chief announced late Saturday that his troops deployed in northern Mali had killed Moktar Belmoktar, the terrorist who orchestrated the attack on a natural gas plant in Algeria that left 36 foreigners dead.

The French military, which is leading the offensive against al-Qaida-linked rebels in Mali, said they could not immediately confirm the information.

Local officials in Kidal, the northern town that is being used as the base for the military operation, cast doubt on the assertion, saying Chadian officials are attempting to score a PR victory to make up for the significant losses they have suffered in recent days.

Known as the “one-eyed,” Belmoktar’s profile soared after the mid-January attack and mass hostage-taking on a huge Algerian gas plant. His purported death comes a day after Chad’s president said his troops had killed Abou Zeid, the other main al-Qaida commander operating in northern Mali.

If both deaths are confirmed, it would mean that the international intervention in Mali had succeeded in decapitating two of the pillars of al-Qaida in the Sahara.

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‘They beat us like animals’: Egypt’s children detained, abused

Al Ahram: In an impoverished district of Alexandria, Sherifa Abdel-Meneem described finding bruises and gashes all over her 13-year-old son’s body, Abdel-Rahman, who was picked up by Egyptian security forces at a protest on 27 January and detained for over two weeks.

“He won’t tell me where the marks come from or what the security forces did to him, he’s too scared… when he went missing no words can describe how I felt, I wasn’t sure I’d see my son ever again,” said Abdel-Meneem.

The latest spat of arrests during a political context occurred on Tuesday, when the Egyptian Coalition for Children’s Rights reported a further 13 children were taken during a police raid on Cairo’s Tahrir Square. One of boys picked up by the police, Walid Ahmed Abdel Sayed, was12 years old.

Since the start of 2013, rights groups have been reporting an increase in police brutality towards children.

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The Holocaust just got more shocking

The New York Times reports: Thirteen years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.

“We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the numbers are unbelievable.”

The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.

Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site — the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully clear. [Continue reading…]

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Zionism = Jewish rule = racism

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a speech on Wednesday at the UN’s Alliance of Civilizations forum said:

Unfortunately the modern world has not passed the test when it comes to Syria. In the last two years, we have seen close to 70,000 people lose their lives, and every single day we see innocent children, women, civilians, killed. And the fact that the world has not reacted to this situation seriously injures the sense of justice. In the same way, rising racism in Europe is a serious, problematic area, vis-à-vis the Alliance of Civilizations project.

In addition to indifference vis-à-vis the Muslim countries, we also see harsh, offending, insulting behavior towards Muslims who live in countries other than their own, and this continues to be an unconscionable act that has been ongoing around the world. We should be striving to better understand the beliefs of others but instead we see that people act based on prejudice and exclude others and despise them. And that is why it is necessary that we must consider — just like Zionism or anti-Semitism or fascism — Islamophobia as a crime against humanity.

Not surprisingly, the only part of that statement that has drawn attention is to equate Zionism with fascism. That’s a claim that never goes down well.

Max Fisher writes:

Does condemning Zionism make you anti-Semitic? Not in Erdogan’s mind, it seems. That’s not a question for me to parse, but it’s worth noting that a lot of people seem to perceive any condemnation of Zionism as a condemnation of, if not all Jews, then certainly the ones living in Israel.

Not a question to parse? Meaning, that’s not territory into which a humble blogger at the Washington Post wants to venture. But let’s be clear, this really isn’t such a perilous issue that it can’t be clarified with a few facts.

Firstly, it might come as news to Fisher and some others, but a significant proportion of Jewish Israelis are not Zionists. Neither of course are the 20% of Israel’s population who are not Jewish.

But what is Zionism? The neatest definition I’ve heard came from an American rabbi at J Street: Zionism means having a country where Jews are “in charge.” (The rabbi describing Zionism this way seemed to think it perfectly reasonable that many Jews would want to live in a country run by Jews.) Liberal Zionists like to characterize this as a form of self-determination — a desire for Jews not to be ruled over by non-Jews. But this skirts around the utterly obvious and inevitable consequence of Jewish rule: that it involves non-Jews be ruled over by Jews. In other words, it is the practice of Jewish supremacy.

Zionists never tire of warning about “demographic threats.” In the simplest terms, the demographic threat would become insurmountable if Jews became a minority in the territory controlled by the state of Israel. Still, the demographic threat looms large even before that point is reached.

What this concern with a demographic threat makes clear is that Zionism is untenable in a state where Jews and non-Jews are treated as equals.

Demography hinges on numbers. How large does the Jewish majority need to be to sustain a Jewish state, and how many of them need to be Zionists?

Does Zionism’s intrinsic refusal to treat human beings as equals, constitute a crime against humanity? I’m not sure because that’s a technical term with a legal application. What should be beyond debate is that Zionism is a form a racism.

Yet Zionism enjoys a unique status: anyone who criticizes it gets swiftly vilified by the Western political and media establishment and few people even have the courage to question its meaning.

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The dangerous logic of the Bradley Manning prosecution

Yochai Benkler writes: After 1,000 days in pretrial detention, Private Bradley Manning yesterday offered a modified guilty plea for passing classified materials to WikiLeaks. But his case is far from over—not for Manning, and not for the rest of the country. To understand what is still at stake, consider an exchange that took place in a military courtroom in Maryland in January.

The judge, Col. Denise Lind, asked the prosecutors a brief but revealing question: Would you have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?

The prosecutor’s answer was simple: “Yes Ma’am.”

The question was crisp and meaningful, not courtroom banter. The answer, in turn, was dead serious. I should know. I was the expert witness whose prospective testimony they were debating. The judge will apparently allow my testimony, so if the prosecution decides to pursue the more serious charges to which Manning did not plead guilty, I will explain at trial why someone in Manning’s shoes in 2010 would have thought of WikiLeaks as a small, hard-hitting, new media journalism outfit—a journalistic “Little Engine that Could” that, for purposes of press freedom, was no different from the New York Times. The prosecutor’s “Yes Ma’am,” essentially conceded that core point of my testimony in order to keep it out of the trial. That’s not a concession any lawyer makes lightly.

But that “Yes Ma’am” does something else: It makes the Manning prosecution a clear and present danger to journalism in the national security arena. The guilty plea Manning offered could subject him to twenty years in prison—more than enough to deter future whistleblowers. But the prosecutors seem bent on using this case to push a novel and aggressive interpretation of the law that would arm the government with a much bigger stick to prosecute vaguely-defined national security leaks, a big stick that could threaten not just members of the military, but civilians too. [Continue reading…]

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How Bradley Manning decided to make public the ‘Collateral Murder’ video

From the transcript of Bradley Manning’s statement (compiled by Alexa O’Brien) which he read to the court in Fort Meade, Maryland on Thursday: During the mid-February 2010 time frame the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division targeting analysts, then Specialist Jihrleah W. Showman discussed a video that Ms. Showman had found on the ‘T’ drive.

The video depicted several individuals being engaged by an aerial weapons team. At first I did not consider the video very special, as I have viewed countless other war porn type videos depicting combat. However, the recording of audio comments by the aerial weapons team crew and the second engagement in the video of an unarmed bongo truck troubled me.

As Showman and a few other analysts and officers in the T-SCIF [Temporary Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility] commented on the video and debated whether the crew violated the rules of engagement or ROE in the second engagement, I shied away from this debate, instead conducting some research on the event. I wanted to learn what happened and whether there was any background to the events of the day that the event occurred, 12 July 2007.

Using Google I searched for the event by its date by its general location. I found several new accounts involving two Reuters employees who were killed during the aerial weapon team engagement. Another story explained that Reuters had requested for a copy of the video under the Freedom of Information Act or FOIA. Reuters wanted to view the video in order to understand what had happened and to improve their safety practices in combat zones. A spokesperson for Reuters was quoted saying that the video might help avoid the reoccurrence of the tragedy and believed there was a compelling need for the immediate release of the video.

Despite the submission of the FOIA request, the news account explained that CENTCOM replied to Reuters stating that they could not give a time frame for considering a FOIA request and that the video might no longer exist. Another story I found written a year later said that even though Reuters was still pursuing their request. They still did not receive a formal response or written determination in accordance with FOIA.

The fact neither CENTCOM or Multi National Forces Iraq or MNF-I would not voluntarily release the video troubled me further. It was clear to me that the event happened because the aerial weapons team mistakenly identified Reuters employees as a potential threat and that the people in the bongo truck were merely attempting to assist the wounded. The people in the van were not a threat but merely ‘good samaritans’. The most alarming aspect of the video to me, however, was the seemly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have.

The dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as quote “dead bastards” unquote and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers. At one point in the video there is an individual on the ground attempting to crawl to safety. The individual is seriously wounded. Instead of calling for medical attention to the location, one of the aerial weapons team crew members verbally asks for the wounded person to pick up a weapon so that he can have a reason to engage. For me, this seems similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.

While saddened by the aerial weapons team crew’s lack of concern about human life, I was disturbed by the response of the discovery of injured children at the scene. In the video, you can see that the bongo truck driving up to assist the wounded individual. In response the aerial weapons team crew– as soon as the individuals are a threat, they repeatedly request for authorization to fire on the bongo truck and once granted they engage the vehicle at least six times.

Shortly after the second engagement, a mechanized infantry unit arrives at the scene. Within minutes, the aerial weapons team crew learns that children were in the van and despite the injuries the crew exhibits no remorse. Instead, they downplay the significance of their actions, saying quote ‘Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kid’s into a battle’ unquote.

The aerial weapons team crew members sound like they lack sympathy for the children or the parents. Later in a particularly disturbing manner, the aerial weapons team verbalizes enjoyment at the sight of one of the ground vehicles driving over a body– or one of the bodies. As I continued my research, I found an article discussing the book, The Good Soldiers, written by Washington Post writer David Finkel.

In Mr. Finkel book, he writes about the aerial weapons team attack. As, I read an online excerpt in Google Books, I followed Mr. Finkel’s account of the event belonging to the video. I quickly realize that Mr. Finkel was quoting, I feel in verbatim, the audio communications of the aerial weapons team crew.

It is clear to me that Mr. Finkel obtained access and a copy of the video during his tenue as an embedded journalist. I was aghast at Mr. Finkel’s portrayal of the incident. Reading his account, one would believe the engagement was somehow justified as ‘payback’ for an earlier attack that lead to the death of a soldier. Mr. Finkel ends his account by discussing how a soldier finds an individual still alive from the attack. He writes that the soldier finds him and sees him gesture with his two forefingers together, a common method in the Middle East to communicate that they are friendly. However, instead of assisting him, the soldier makes an obscene gesture extending his middle finger.

The individual apparently dies shortly thereafter. Reading this, I can only think of how this person was simply trying to help others, and then he quickly finds he needs help as well. To make matter worse, in the last moments of his life, he continues to express his friendly gesture– only to find himself receiving this well known gesture of unfriendliness. For me it’s all a big mess, and I am left wondering what these things mean, and how it all fits together. It burdens me emotionally.

I saved a copy of the video on my workstation. I searched for and found the rules of engagement, the rules of engagement annexes, and a flow chart from the 2007 time period– as well as an unclassified Rules of Engagement smart card from 2006. On 15 February 2010 I burned these documents onto a CD-RW, the same time I burned the 10 Reykjavik 13 cable onto a CD-RW. At the time, I placed the video and rules for engagement information onto my personal laptop in my CHU [Containerized Housing Unit]. I planned to keep this information there until I redeployed in Summer 2010. I planned on providing this to the Reuters office in London to assist them in preventing events such as this in the future.

However, after the WLO [Wikileaks Organization] published 10 Reykjavik 13 I altered my plans. I decided to provide the video and the rules of engagement to them so that Reuters would have this information before I re-deployed from Iraq. On about 21 February 2010, I described above, I used the WLO submission form and uploaded the documents. The WLO released the video on 5 April 2010. After the release, I was concern about the impact of the video and how it would been received by the general public.

I hoped that the public would be as alarmed as me about the conduct of the aerial weapons team crew members. I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan are targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare. After the release I was encouraged by the response in the media and general public, who observed the aerial weapons team video. As I hoped, others were just as troubled– if not more troubled that me by what they saw.

At this time, I began seeing reports claiming that the Department of Defense an CENTCOM could not confirm the authenticity of the video. Additionally, one of my supervisors, Captain Casey Fulton, stated her belief that the video was not authentic. In her response, I decided to ensure that the authenticity of the video would not be questioned in the future. On 25 February 2010, I emailed Captain Fulton, a link to the video that was on our ‘T’ drive, and a copy of the video published by WLO that was collected by the open source center, so she could compare them herself.

Around this time frame, I burned a second CD-RW containing the aerial weapons team video. In order to made it appear authentic, I placed a classification sticker and wrote Reuters FOIA REQ on its face. I placed the CD-RW in one of my personal CD cases containing a set of ‘Starting Out in Arabic CD’s.’ I planned on mailing out the CD-RW to Reuters after our re-deployment, so they could have a copy that was unquestionably authentic.

Almost immediately after submitting the aerial weapons team video and rules of engagement documents I notified the individuals in the WLO IRC [Instand Relay Chat] to expect an important submission. I received a response from an individual going by the handle of ‘ox’– at first our conversations were general in nature, but over time as our conversations progressed, I accessed this individual to be an important part of the WLO.

Due to the strict adherence of anonymity by the WLO, we never exchanged identifying information. However, I believe the individual was likely Mr. Julian Assange [he pronounced it with three syllables], Mr. Daniel Schmidt, or a proxy representative of Mr. Assange and Schmidt.

As the communications transfered from IRC to the Jabber client, I gave ‘ox’ and later ‘pressassociation’ the name of Nathaniel Frank in my address book, after the author of a book I read in 2009.

After a period of time, I developed what I felt was a friendly relationship with Nathaniel. Our mutual interest in information technology and politics made our conversations enjoyable. We engaged in conversation often. Sometimes as long as an hour or more. I often looked forward to my conversations with Nathaniel after work.

The anonymity that was provided by TOR and the Jabber client and the WLO’s policy allowed me to feel I could just be myself, free of the concerns of social labeling and perceptions that are often placed upon me in real life. In real life, I lacked a closed friendship with the people I worked with in my section, the S2 section.

In my section, the S2 section supported battalions and the 2nd Brigade Combat Team as a whole. For instance, I lacked close ties with my roommate to his discomfort regarding my perceived sexual orientation. Over the next few months, I stayed in frequent contact with Nathaniel. We conversed on nearly a daily basis and I felt that we were developing a friendship.

Conversations covered many topics and I enjoyed the ability to talk about pretty much everything, and not just the publications that the WLO was working on. In retrospect that these dynamics were artificial and were valued more by myself than Nathaniel. For me these conversations represented an opportunity to escape from the immense pressures and anxiety that I experienced and built up through out the deployment. It seems that as I tried harder to fit in at work, the more I seemed to alienate my peers and lose respect, trust, and support I needed.

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An Air Force rape victim speaks out

The New York Times reports: After her Air Force training instructor raped Virginia Messick, a young recruit, he told her it was fun and they should do it again, she remembers. Then he threw her clothes at her and ordered her to take a shower.

Ms. Messick was unable to move, cry or scream. She was a 19-year-old from rural Florida, in her fifth week of basic training at Lackland Air Force Base, and she had just been assaulted by the man the Air Force had entrusted with her life.

After the April 2011 attack, Ms. Messick completed basic training, following orders from the instructor for nearly a month more. Afraid of the consequences, she did not tell anyone what he had done. “How am I supposed to go about reporting something,” asked Ms. Messick, “when the person I’m supposed to report to is the person who raped me?”

Now, after leaving the Air Force, Ms. Messick is the first victim of a still-unfolding sexual assault scandal at Lackland to speak publicly about what she has endured. Since accounts of sexual violence at the base began to surface in late 2011, it has emerged as the largest such episode in Air Force history.

Ms. Messick, now 21, is one of 62 trainees identified as victims of assault or other improper conduct by 32 training instructors between 2009 and 2012 at Lackland, a sprawling base outside San Antonio that serves as the Air Force’s basic training center for enlisted personnel. So far, seven Air Force instructors have been court-martialed, including Staff Sgt. Luis Walker, now serving a 20-year sentence for crimes involving 10 women, including Ms. Messick. Eight more court-martial cases are pending. Fifteen other instructors are under investigation, and two senior officers have been relieved of command. [Continue reading…]

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When the jihad came to Mali

Joshua Hammer writes: The town of Konna lies along the eastern bank of the Niger River in central Mali, a semi-desert, speckled with thorn trees, that turns vibrantly green during the brief summer rains. For nearly a year, since rebel Tuaregs—the nomadic Berber people who live in the interior Sahara region of North Africa—and Islamic militants seized control of northern Mali, this settlement of 20,000 marked the limit of government-held territory. Five hundred troops in pickup trucks with mounted machine guns stood guard in the bush just north of the town. Beyond lay empty scrubland and a paved road to Timbuktu and Gao, the two main population centers under the jihadists’ control.

On Wednesday night, January 9, forty pickup trucks filled with Islamist fighters and heavy weaponry descended on Konna. Taken by surprise, government forces managed to repel the initial onslaught. Around midnight, however, another 150 armed jihadist vehicles arrived. A thousand fighters attacked the town’s defenders from three sides, using rocket-propelled grenades and large-caliber machine guns. After an eight-hour battle, the government lines broke. Hundreds of soldiers retreated in panic through the dirt streets of Konna, some of them stripping off their dark-green camouflage uniforms and begging locals for civilian clothes.

Ousmane Bah, a truck driver, watched the Islamists roll into town at 3:45 on Thursday afternoon. Dressed in desert khakis, they blew up a handful of military installations, and herded people to Konna’s mosques. A local street preacher who had joined the militants last year commanded them to gather the corpses of government troops. “Bury your dead dogs,” he told them. The jihadists ordered Konna’s imams to inform the people, Bah said, that “Sharia law is now introduced in Konna, and all women must be covered.”

On Friday morning, according to Bah, the chief jihadist arrived to claim his prize. Iyad Ag Ghali is a burly Tuareg whose black-bearded face is well known in the country. A former diplomat, smuggler, and hostage negotiator, Ghali had now taken on a new identity: the founder and commander of Ansar Dine, or Defenders of the Faith, a radical Islamist organization allied with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a force financed partly by the ransoming of Western hostages. “He was wearing a black turban, and a long blue robe,” Bah told me. “He gathered people together and declared that Ansar Dine and al-Qaeda would run things now.”

Until recently Mali, a nation of 15.8 million people in the Sahel—the arid belt that extends across North Africa—was widely viewed as a gentle if very poor democracy, a favorite of low- budget tourists and world music fans alike. The Festival in the Desert, a kind of African Woodstock in the dunes near Timbuktu, drew thousands of Western and local visitors every January. Timbuktu itself, in the last few years, underwent an unlikely renaissance as a cultural oasis in the Sahara, with half a dozen libraries that preserved a trove of Arabic manuscripts from a millennium ago that had recently been rediscovered.

But the country has long combined poverty, radical Islam, and tendencies to armed rebellion. Mali ranked 178th out of 182 countries assessed by the United Nations Development Program for a World Development Report in 2009. According to UNICEF, it had a 26 percent adult literacy rate in 2010, and a per capita annual income of $600. The Sahara desert, beset by droughts and avoided by governments, is a zone of discontent and lawlessness. Between 1963 and 2006, the region’s Tuareg population mounted four armed uprisings. Each time the government promised more development projects, but the pledges fell short. The Sahara also became a sanctuary for outlaws—including narcotraffickers, cigarette smugglers, and, in the last ten years, jihadists bent on creating a Caliphate across the desert. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. Syria strategy aims to salvage reputation

Shashank Joshi writes: This week, new US Secretary of State John Kerry promised $60m (£40m) to the Syrian National Coalition, the political umbrella group for opponents of President Bashar al-Assad’s beleaguered regime. But there is a certain irony to the fact that, while the cash was pledged to “non-lethal” assistance, US policy is increasingly being forced to accommodate itself to the armed, very much lethal side of Syria’s rebellion.

Last summer, after former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan gave up on his peace plan for Syria, things looked hopeless. President Barack Obama’s top national security officials all fell in line behind a plan to arm selected Syrian rebels.

But, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal, the president vetoed the proposal: He was concerned at whether the weapons would make their way to extremists, make much difference, or provoke Russia into a response.

Although the US had given its support earlier in the year to a Saudi Arabia, Qatari and Turkish effort to funnel arms to Syria, it changed its mind after seeing that jihadists were getting many of the weapons. The flow thinned out.

But fast forward to the beginning of this year, and the picture looks different. Syria-watchers, like the bloggers Eliot Higgins and James Miller, began noticing an influx of arms from the former Yugoslavia to southern Syria – most previous arms having come in from the north, via Turkey.

Piecing together various news reports, it seems that Croatian arms are being purchased by Saudi money, collected by Jordanian aircraft, and smuggled to groups who are almost certainly being vetted by the United States.

Why the shift in policy? First, the timing would indicate that the White House was waiting for last year’s presidential elections to conclude.

Second, the rebels’ performance in the north of Syria, strong as it has been over the last six months, wasn’t having a decisive effect.

The aim of going through Jordan is to open up a new front in the south, and put more pressure on Damascus itself. [Continue reading…]

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