Suspected drone strikes kill 12 civilians in Yemen

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports: Two suspected US drone strikes have killed up to 12 civilians in the south of Yemen.

Reports vary but between 14 and 15 people have been killed in a double air strike on the southern city of Jaar. Of these, as many as a dozen are being reported as civilians. Up to 21 civilians have also been reported injured.

Witnesses said the first strike targeted alleged militants meeting in a house. Civilians who had flocked to the impact site were killed in a follow-up strike. Although the attack is unconfirmed, if accurate this tactic would echo the grim hallmarks of US drone tactics in Pakistan.

Earlier this year the Bureau exposed a CIA practice of ‘follow-up’ strikes in an investigation with the Sunday Times. On at least a dozen occasions twin strikes killed at least 50 civilians. The civilians died when they rushed to help victims of an initial attack and were hit by a second, follow-up strike.

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Israel’s drone dominance

Jefferson Morley writes: Stark Aerospace of Mississippi is perhaps the only foreign-owned company with FAA permission to fly a drone in U.S. airspace. Based in the town of Columbus, the home of Mississippi State University, Stark is a subsidiary of the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries — not that you could tell from looking at the company’s website, executive leadership or affiliations. You have to go to the Mississippi secretary of state website to learn that two of Stark’s three directors are Israelis.

So too with the America’s drone industry. The Israeli influence is not visible but it is real, documented and extremely relevant to the future of drones in America. If you want to know how drones may change American airspace in coming years, just look to Israel, where the unmanned aerial vehicle market is thriving and drones are considered a reliable instrument of “homeland security.”

“There are three explanations for Israel’s success in becoming a world leader in development and production of UAVs,” a top Israeli official explained to the Jerusalem Post last year. “We have unbelievable people and innovation, combat experience that helps us understand what we need and immediate operational use since we are always in a conflict which allows us to perfect our systems.”

Israel’s drone expertise goes back to at least 1970, according to the UAV page of the Israeli Air Force. Mark Daly, an expert on unmanned aircraft at Jane’s Defense in London, notes the Israelis were the first to make widespread use of drones in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when the aircraft were used to monitor troop movements.

Now, as the Arab media and Western reporters such as Scott Wilson of the Washington Post have reported, the Israeli Defense Force uses fleets of constantly hovering drones to intimidate and control the Arab population in the Gaza Strip. (The residents call these drones “zenana,” which both sounds like the aircraft’s distinctive buzz and is Arabic slang for a nagging wife.) The IDF regularly uses drones for targeted assassinations of suspected militants, saying the drones enable them to use “precision strikes” to avoid hurting civilians. Yet as Human Rights Watch has documented, the drone strikes during the Gaza War killed scores of children who were nowhere near armed combatants.

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Video: The Great Book Robbery

When the Arab-Israeli war raged in 1948, librarians from Israel’s National Library followed soldiers as they entered Palestinian homes in towns and villages. Their mission was to collect as many valuable books and manuscripts as possible. They are said to have gathered over 30,000 books from Jerusalem and another 30,000 from Haifa and Jaffa.

Officially it was a ‘cultural rescue operation’ but for Palestinians it was ‘cultural theft’.

It was only in 2008 when an Israeli PhD student stumbled across documents in the national archive that the full extent of the ‘collection’ policy was revealed.

Using eyewitness accounts, this film tries to understand why thousands of books appropriated from Palestinian homes still languish in the Israeli National Library vaults and why they have not been returned to their rightful owners. Was it cultural preservation or robbery?

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Most mammals won’t flee climate change fast enough

DiscoveryNews reports: As the climate changes over the next century, the ranges of nearly 90 percent of mammal species will shrink — in many cases because animals won’t be able to get to areas where the climate is going to become suitable for them, says new research.

Across the Western Hemisphere, the study also found, nearly 10 percent of mammals will be unable to move fast enough to keep up with changes in climate. In some areas, such as the Amazon, that number will be as high as 40 percent.

And while some animals will do just fine or even better than before, certain animals in certain places face catastrophic losses of survivable habitat. Most at risk are primates, which will likely lose 75 percent of their range because of both inhospitable climate and the inability to get to livable places. [Continue reading…]

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Rebekah Brooks to be charged with perverting the course of justice

The Guardian reports: Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, is to be charged over allegations that she tried to conceal evidence from detectives investigating phone hacking and alleged bribes to public officials.

Brooks, one of the most high-profile figures in the newspaper industry, will be charged later on Tuesday with three counts of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in July last year at the height of the police investigation, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced.

She is accused of conspiring with others, including her husband, Charlie Brooks, the racehorse trainer and friend of the prime minister, and her personal assistant, to conceal material from detectives.

Brooks and her husband were informed of the charging decision – the first since the start of the Operation Weeting phone hacking investigation last January – when they answered their bail at a police station in London this morning.

They are among six individuals from News International, along with the company’s head of security, Mark Hanna, to be charged over allegations that they removed material, documents and computers to hide them from officers investigating phone hacking. The charge is a serious one which carries a maximum penalty of life, although the average term served in prison is 10 months.

In a statement Brooks and her husband – who are both close to David Cameron – condemned the decision made by senior lawyers and overseen by Keir Starmer QC, the director of public prosecutions.

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The poetry of al Qaeda and the Taliban

Faisal Devji writes about an aspect of al Qaeda and Taliban communications that most terrorism analysts overlook: the interest that bin Laden and others have in poetry.

Readers going through the cache of letters that were released early this month from Osama bin Laden’s hideaway in Abbottabad, Pakistan, may have been taken aback by a reference — in the midst of discussions of tactics, regional politics and exchange rates for ransom money — to poetry.

One letter written by Bin Laden and perhaps an associate went from criticizing the news media’s coverage of Al Qaeda to commenting on a pre-Islamic tradition of satirical poetry called hija, which Arab tribes once used to mock their enemies. It’s easy to imagine that counterterrorism analysts wondered how to interpret that one.

In fact, poetry has long been a part of Muslim radicalism; the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, for example, was the author of a large collection of verse. Today, the Taliban’s Web site features poems written by the group’s members and sympathizers, both men and women. Recitations are frequently recorded and stored on cellphones and transferred from one person to another by way of Bluetooth technology.

Many Afghan and Al Qaeda poems — which come from distinct but hybrid literary traditions — are, as might be expected, political. In a statement broadcast on Al Jazeera in December 2001, Osama bin Laden quoted the following verses from one of his favorite contemporary poets, Yusuf Abu Hilala, changing the last line and replacing the word “castles” in the original with “towers,” as a reference to the destruction of the World Trade Center:

Though the clothes of darkness enveloped us and the poisoned tooth bit us,

Though our homes overflowed with blood and the assailant desecrated our land,

Though from the squares the shining of swords and horses vanished,

And sound of drums was growing

The fighters’ winds blew, striking their towers and telling them:

We will not cease our raids until you leave our fields.

If Al Qaeda’s writers tend to be preoccupied with what they see as Islam’s long and global history of conflict with Christendom, from the Crusades to the war on terror, Taliban poets tend to refer to the literature produced in their part of the world by nationalist and socialist movements over the course of the 20th century. And if Al Qaeda poems are characterized by the swords, charging horses and fiery deserts of pre-Islamic lore, Taliban poets praise more recent warriors like Malalai, a 19th-century battlefield heroine. The chief examples of historical conflict in Taliban poetry are the Anglo-Afghan wars, of which today’s United States-led war in Afghanistan is seen as a pale reflection.

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Obama administration ready to legalize Washington’s favorite terrorist organization

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Obama administration is moving to remove an Iranian opposition group from the State Department’s terrorism list, say officials briefed on the talks, in an action that could further poison Washington’s relations with Tehran at a time of renewed diplomatic efforts to curtail Iran’s nuclear program.

The exile organization, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MeK, was originally named as a terrorist entity 15 years ago for its alleged role in assassinating U.S. citizens in the years before the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and for allying with Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein against Tehran.

The MeK has engaged in an aggressive legal and lobbying campaign in Washington over the past two years to win its removal from the State Department’s list. The terrorism designation, which has been in place since 1997, freezes the MeK’s assets inside the U.S. and prevents the exile group from fundraising.

Senior U.S. officials said on Monday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has yet to make any final decision on the MeK’s status. But they said the State Department was looking favorably at delisting MeK if it continued cooperating by vacating a former paramilitary base inside Iraq, called Camp Ashraf, which the group had used to stage crossborder strikes into Iran.

The group has already renounced terrorism, which was the main earlier sticking point. Residents have resisted leaving the camp because they feared retribution if they were returned to Iran and political irrelevancy abroad.

The U.S. officials said Mrs. Clinton would make her final decision on the MeK’s status no less than 60 days after the last MeK member is relocated from Camp Ashraf to a new transit facility near Baghdad international airport. The U.S. is working with the United Nations to resettle Camp Ashraf residents in third countries. Roughly 1,200 people remain at the camp from an earlier population of over 3,000.

“The MeK’s cooperation in the successful and peaceful closure of Camp Ashraf…will be a key factor in her decision regarding the MeK’s [foreign-terrorist organization] status,” said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland on Monday.

Western and Iranian diplomats are concerned that the MeK issue could draw serious recriminations from Tehran, which has been fixated on neutralizing the group. Many of Iran’s top leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were targets of MeK attacks during the 1980s.

Iran has regularly accused Western countries of hypocrisy for providing shelter to MeK members while criticizing Tehran’s support for militant groups, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. “We believe that despite the claims that others make about fighting terrorism, they [Western nations] provide the most support for terrorist groups,” Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, said last week. “In Europe, the MeK has already been removed from the list of terrorist organizations and they are completely safe to continue their activities.” [Continue reading…]

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Barack Obama, the Great Deceiver

Yves Smith writes: Barack Obama swept into office on a tide of giddy enthusiasm. His “Hope and Change” was a pledge to reverse Bush era policies, including socialism for the rich, adventurism in the Middle East, and attacks on civil liberties. He announced his intention to serve as a transformational leader, invoking Abraham Lincoln, FDR and Ronald Reagan as role models. Despite the frigid temperatures, people poured into Washington, DC to hear his inauguration speech, wanting to be part of a remarkable passage.

It wasn’t simply that Obama was the first black president, but also that the economic devastation of the financial crisis opened up a historic opportunity to remake the social contract, to punish the reckless and greedy, no matter how lofty, and to build new foundations and safeguards for ordinary citizens. Obama, with his youthful vigor, his technocratic command of policy details, his “no drama” steadiness, his mastery of oratory, seemed uniquely suited to this time of need. His personal history of repeatedly breaking new ground fed optimism that he could do so for the nation as a whole.

Those times of heady promise are now a cruel memory. Again and again, Obama has shown his true colors. It isn’t simply that Obama lied. Politicians lie. But there are norms for political lying. The depth and dependability of Obama’s misrepresentations constitute a difference in kind.

His pattern of grand promises producing at-best-in-name only and at worst outright bait and switch was well established by his 2008 campaign. Some close observers pointed out his past legerdemain, for instance, his misleading account of his years in New York, his record of fronting for finance and real estate interests in Chicago, his promise to bring a state-wide health care program to Illinois, which in the end was walked back to a mere study. And there were more decisive tells in 2008: the high level of Wall Street funding for his campaign, the inclusion of neoliberal “Chicago boys” in his economics team, his reversal on FISA after promising to filibuster it, which gave retroactive immunity to telecoms for aiding and abetting illegal wiretapping, and his whipping for TARP.

Obama didn’t make compromises necessary to lead effectively. He entered office with majorities in both houses and a country eager for a new direction. He has repudiated or retraded every pledge he made. He promised transformational leadership, and instead emulated Wall Street, devising complex programs that to sell average Americans short and reap his funders handsome rewards in the process. Rather than elevate his fellow citizens, Obama’s transactional focus and neoliberal philosophy have kicked the struggling middle class down the road greased by the right. [Continue reading…]

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Why is the NYT enabling a U.S. govt smear campaign against reporters exposing the drone wars?

John Hanrahan at NiemanWatchdog writes: A human rights lawyer and a group of investigative journalists who have exposed the extensive civilian casualties from CIA drone strikes in Pakistan are being smeared by anonymous U.S. government officials, who have even accused them of being sympathetic to al Qaeda.

Two of the anonymous accusations came in articles in The New York Times, despite the paper’s own rules against personal attacks by unnamed sources.

Pakistani human rights attorney Shahzad Akbar and the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) say the campaign is intended to deter mainstream news organizations from reporting that the White House is lying about how many innocent people are being killed by the drone strikes. [Continue reading…]

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Palestinian hunger-striking detainees sign deal with Israeli prison authority

Update: Numerous tweets from Ali Abunimah et al claim the hunger strike of Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahleh has not ended. Awaiting further reports.
2nd update — @muiz: At 2am in #Palestine, almost 2 hours into their national record-breaking 78th day of #PalHunger-strike, THAER & BILAL agreed to end protest.

Ma’an News Agency reports: Detainees on Monday signed a deal with the Israeli prison authority to end their mass hunger strike, officials told Ma’an.

Prisoner representatives from each of the factions agreed to the deal in Ashkelon jail, prisoners society chief Qaddura Fares said in a statement.

Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet confirmed the deal, and prison authorities said detainees would halt their hunger strike within hours, the Israeli news site Ynet reported.

Senior Hamas official Saleh Arouri, who was a member of the negotiations team, said Israel agreed to provide a list of accusations to administrative detainees, or release them at the end of their term.

In comments to the Hamas-affiliated new site Palestine Information Center, he said that under the Egypt-brokered deal Israel agreed to release all detainees from solitary confinement over the next 72 hours.

Israel will also lift a ban on family visits for detainees from the Gaza Strip, and revoke the so-called Shalit law, according to the official. [Continue reading…]

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HRW calls on NATO to investigate civilian deaths in Libya

Human Rights Watch: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has failed to acknowledge dozens of civilian casualties from air strikes during its 2011 Libya campaign, and has not investigated possible unlawful attacks, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The 76-page report, “Unacknowledged Deaths: Civilian Casualties in NATO’s Air Campaign in Libya,” examines in detail eight NATO air strikes in Libya that resulted in 72 civilian deaths, including 20 women and 24 children. It is based on one or more field investigations to each of the bombing sites during and after the conflict, including interviews with witnesses and local residents.

“NATO took important steps to minimize civilian casualties during the Libya campaign, but information and investigations are needed to explain why 72 civilians died,” said Fred Abrahams, special adviser at Human Rights Watch and principal author of the report. “Attacks are allowed only on military targets, and serious questions remain in some incidents about what exactly NATO forces were striking.”

NATO’s military campaign in Libya, from March to October 2011, was mandated by the United Nations Security Council to protect civilians from attacks by security forces of then-Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

The number of civilian deaths from NATO air strikes in Libya was low given the extent of the bombing and duration of the campaign, Human Rights Watch said. Nevertheless, the absence of a clear military target at seven of the eight sites Human Rights Watch visited raises concerns of possible laws-of-war violations that should be investigated.

Human Rights Watch called on NATO to investigate all potentially unlawful attacks and to report its findings to the UN Security Council, which authorized the military intervention in Libya.

NATO should also address civilian casualties from its air strikes in Libya at the NATO heads of state summit, taking place in Chicago on May 20 and 21, Human Rights Watch said.

The Human Rights Watch report is the most extensive examination to date of civilian casualties caused by NATO’s air campaign. It looks at all sites known to Human Rights Watch in which NATO strikes killed civilians. Strikes that resulted in no civilian fatalities – though civilians were wounded or property destroyed – were not included.

The most serious incident occurred in the village of Majer, 160 kilometers east of Tripoli, the capital, on August 8, 2011, when NATO air strikes on two family compounds killed 34 civilians and wounded more than 30, Human Rights Watch said. Dozens of displaced people were staying in one of the compounds.

A second strike outside one of the compounds killed and wounded civilians who witnesses said were searching for victims. The infrared system used by the bomb deployed should have indicated to the pilot the presence of many people on the ground. If the pilot was unable to determine that those people were combatants, then the strike should have been canceled or diverted.

Under the laws of war, parties to a conflict may only direct attacks at military targets and must take all feasible precautions to minimize harm to civilians. While civilian casualties do not necessarily mean there has been a violation of the laws of war, governments are obligated to investigate allegations of serious violations and compensate victims of unlawful attacks.

Human Rights Watch said NATO should also consider a program to provide payments to civilian victims of NATO attacks without regard to wrongdoing, as NATO has done in Afghanistan.

At seven sites documented in the report, Human Rights Watch uncovered no – or only possible – indication that Libyan military forces, weapons, hardware, or communications equipment had been present at the time of the attack. The circumstances raise serious questions about whether the buildings struck – all residential – were valid military targets. At the eighth site, at which three women and four children died, the target may have been a Libyan military officer.

NATO officials told Human Rights Watch that all of its targets were military objectives, and thus legitimate targets. But it has not provided specific information to support those claims, mostly saying a targeted site was a “command and control node” or “military staging ground.”

NATO said the Majer compounds were a “staging base and military accommodation” for Gaddafi forces, but it has not provided specific information to support that claim. During four visits to Majer, including one the day after the attack, the only possible evidence of a military presence found by Human Rights Watch was a single military-style shirt – common clothing for many Libyans – in the rubble of one of the three destroyed houses.

Family members and neighbors in Majer independently said there had been no military personnel or activity at the compounds before or at the time of the attack.

“I’m wondering why they did this; why just our houses?” said Muammar al-Jarud, who lost his mother, sister, wife, and 8-month-old daughter. “We’d accept it if we had tanks or military vehicles around, but we were completely civilians, and you can’t just hit civilians.”

To research the eight incidents, Human Rights Watch visited the sites, in some cases multiple times, inspected weapons debris, interviewed witnesses, examined medical reports and death certificates, reviewed satellite imagery, and collected photographs of the wounded and dead. Detailed questions were submitted to NATO and its member states that participated in the campaign, including in an August 2011 meeting with senior NATO officials involved in targeting.

NATO derived its mandate from UN Security Council Resolution 1973, which authorized the use of force to protect civilians in Libya. The relatively few civilian casualties during the seven-month campaign attests to the care NATO took in minimizing civilian harm, Human Rights Watch said.

Countries such as Russia that have made grossly exaggerated claims of civilian deaths from NATO air strikes during the Libyan campaign have done so without basis, Human Rights Watch said.

“The countries that have criticized NATO for so-called massive civilian casualties in Libya are trying to score political points rather than protect civilians,” Abrahams said.

NATO asserts that it cannot conduct post-operation investigations into civilian casualties in Libya because it has no mandate to operate on the ground. But NATO has not requested permission from Libya’s transitional government to look into the incidents of civilian deaths and should promptly do so, Human Rights Watch said.

“The overall care NATO took in the campaign is undermined by its refusal to examine the dozens of civilian deaths,” Abrahams said. “This is needed to provide compensation for victims of wrongful attacks, and to learn from mistakes and minimize civilian casualties in future wars.”

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Colonized by corporations

Chris Hedges writes: In Robert E. Gamer’s book “The Developing Nations” is a chapter called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.” In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own political class. The useless battles serve as an effective mask for what Gamer calls the “patron-client” networks that are responsible for the continuity of colonial oppression. The squabbles among the oppressed, the political campaigns between candidates who each are servants of colonial power, Gamer writes, absolve the actual centers of power from addressing the conditions that cause the frustrations of the people. Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices are never seriously addressed. “The government merely does the minimum necessary to prevent those few who are prone toward political action from organizing into politically effective groups,” he writes.

Gamer and many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer the best insights into the functioning of our corporate state. We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” including African-Americans. The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. It is an old, old game.

A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt to reform the system or electing progressive candidates, but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political process—Gamer’s “patron-client” networks. It requires the establishment of new mechanisms of governance to distribute wealth and protect resources, to curtail corporate power, to cope with the destruction of the ecosystem and to foster the common good. But we must first recognize ourselves as colonial subjects. We must accept that we have no effective voice in the way we are governed. We must accept the hollowness of electoral politics, the futility of our political theater, and we must destroy the corporate structure itself. [Continue reading…]

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Romney’s education in cruelty

Marjorie Cohn writes: Last week, I was invited to speak to 40 high school freshman about human rights. When we discussed the right to be free from torture, I asked the students if they could think of an example of torture. They said, “bullying.” A major problem among teens, bullying can lead to depression, and even suicide. When most people list the qualities they want to see in their President, “bully” is not one of them.

Yet evidence continues to emerge that Mitt Romney is a bully. When he was a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School, Romney orchestrated and played the primary role in forcibly pinning fellow student John Lauber to the ground and clipping the terrified Lauber’s hair. The soft-spoken Lauber, it seemed, had returned from spring break with bleached-blond hair draped over one eye. Romney, infuriated, declared, “He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” Lauber eyes filled with tears as he screamed for help. One of the other students in the dorm at the time, said, “It was a hack job . . . It was vicious.”

But instead of owning up to his stupidity and expressing regret at his bullying attack on Lauber, Romney told Fox News that he didn’t remember the incident, although he apologized for his pranks that “might have gone too far.” It’s hard to believe that Romney cannot recall an incident that others who assisted in the attack have regretted for years. Or perhaps there were so many more that he doesn’t recall this one.

Lauber wasn’t the only student Romney harassed. Gary Hummel, a gay student who had not yet come out, says Romney shouted, “Atta girl!” when Hummel spoke out in English class. Once again, Romney claims he doesn’t remember that insult.

In still another high school incident, Romney caused English teacher Carl Wonnberger, who had severe vision problems, to smack into a closed door, after which Romney laughed hysterically.

While these episodes demonstrate cruelty, one might dismiss them as the work of an immature high school prankster. But, unfortunately, Romney’s bullying didn’t end in high school. Romney is now famous for driving to Canada with the family dog caged and strapped to the roof of his car.

Moreover, Romney made a career of bullying when he was head of private equity firm Bain Capital. Bain would invest in companies, load them up with debt, and then sell them for huge profits. The companies often had to lay off workers and sometimes were forced into bankruptcy.

Reading the Washington Post‘s detailed report on Romney’s high school behavior brought back a lot of memories. Though the school I attended for seven years in England was not as prestigious as Cranbrook, it was an example of the type of school on which Romney’s was modeled.

We too wore ties and blazers and carried briefcases, called our teachers “masters” and mostly addressed each other by our family names. The 400-year-old school under the direction of a decorated former Royal Air Force commander was a boot camp for the next generation of commanders of industry. We were being groomed to become leaders and an integral part of that process was being taught how to suffer.

The theory was that those who learn how to suffer stoically would acquire the strength and endurance to meet life’s later challenges. Cold showers, smashed knees on the rugby field, respect for authority in a rigid hierarchy, the suppression of individuality under a rigid code of uniformity — all of these forms of discipline were supposed to mold a boy’s character so that he was ready to assume the position of leadership for which he was destined. And leaders these schools did indeed pump out. (Of course they also produced a few rebels.)

But here’s the catch: it’s hard to learn how to suffer without also learning to be callous. Weakness is treated as an object of scorn and compassion finds no place in this brutal approach to life. How is it possible to learn that ones own pain doesn’t matter without also concluding that the pain of others is similarly of little consequence?

Mitt Romney probably didn’t stand out as a noteworthy bully; more likely he faithfully mirrored the twisted educational philosophy by which he had been shaped.

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Louisiana’s prison-industrial complex

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports: Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.

The hidden engine behind the state’s well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt.

Several homegrown private prison companies command a slice of the market. But in a uniquely Louisiana twist, most prison entrepreneurs are rural sheriffs, who hold tremendous sway in remote parishes like Madison, Avoyelles, East Carroll and Concordia. A good portion of Louisiana law enforcement is financed with dollars legally skimmed off the top of prison operations.

If the inmate count dips, sheriffs bleed money. Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars.

Meanwhile, inmates subsist in bare-bones conditions with few programs to give them a better shot at becoming productive citizens. Each inmate is worth $24.39 a day in state money, and sheriffs trade them like horses, unloading a few extras on a colleague who has openings. A prison system that leased its convicts as plantation labor in the 1800s has come full circle and is again a nexus for profit.

In the past two decades, Louisiana’s prison population has doubled, costing taxpayers billions while New Orleans continues to lead the nation in homicides.

One in 86 adult Louisianians is doing time, nearly double the national average. Among black men from New Orleans, one in 14 is behind bars; one in seven is either in prison, on parole or on probation. Crime rates in Louisiana are relatively high, but that does not begin to explain the state’s No. 1 ranking, year after year, in the percentage of residents it locks up.

Read more at Louisiana Incarcerated.

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To understand opposition’s failures, look to Syria’s east

The National reports: If the Syrian opposition’s failure to forge a truly inclusive national movement can be traced to one geographic area, then that failure shows up most clearly in Syria’s east. For it is here where the Syrian National Council has been unable to win over influential leaders. And without them, efforts to topple the regime will remain in jeopardy.

Known as Al Jazira, the eastern part of Syria consists of three provinces and makes up over 40 per cent of the country. The area shares a roughly 480-kilometre-border with Turkey in the north, and nearly the same with Iraq in the east, making it indispensable if the uprising were to evolve into a full-blown armed struggle under external protection (for arming of and providing safe havens to fighters).

Al Jazira is populated by Arab tribes and Kurds; both have historically suffered from the Baathist regime in Damascus. The area is also economically vital for the regime, as it accounts for 70 per cent of Syria’s oil and gas output and is a main source of agricultural and livestock products. If the Assad regime lost control here, it would suffer a heavy blow.

So why hasn’t Al Jazira shifted fully against the regime? [Continue reading…]

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