UN report faults NATO’s response to civilian toll and Libya’s failure to curb violence

The New York Times reports: NATO has not sufficiently investigated the air raids it conducted on Libya that killed at least 60 civilians and wounded 55 more during the conflict there, according to a new United Nations report released Friday.

Nor has Libya’s interim government done enough to halt the disturbing violence perpetrated by revolutionary militias seeking to exact revenge on loyalists, real or perceived, to the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the report concluded.

Published without publicity on the Web site of the United Nations Human Rights Council, based in Geneva, the report details the results of an investigation by a three-member commission of distinguished jurists. It paints a generally gloomy picture of the level of respect for human rights and international law in Libya, while acknowledging that the problem is a legacy of the long years of violent repression under Colonel Qaddafi.

NATO air raids that killed civilians in Libya have been criticized by rights groups, and the alliance’s refusal to acknowledge or investigate some of the deaths has been the subject of earlier news reports, including an extensive account in The New York Times last December. The new report represents the first time that NATO’s actions in Libya have been criticized under the auspices of the United Nations, where the bombing campaign in the name of protecting civilians from Colonel Qaddafi’s forces was authorized by the Security Council.

The report concluded that Colonel Qaddafi’s forces had perpetuated war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, torture and attacks on civilians using excessive force and rape.

But the armed anti-Qaddafi militia forces in Libya also “committed serious violations,” including war crimes and breaches of international rights law that continue today, the 220-page report said.

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Malik al-Abdeh: How I understand the Syrian revolution

Malik Al-Abdeh: Founder-member of the Movement for Justice and Development (est. 2006) which is a leading force in the Damascus Declaration opposition coalition in Syria. Professionally, I’m an ex-BBC journalist and a King’s College, London and SOAS alumni. Currently serve as the Chief Editor of the pro-democracy satellite channel Barada TV.

And before a few commenters jump up to enlighten me about U.S. State Department funding for Barada TV, don’t bother. I find the content of al-Abdeh’s analysis much more interesting than the ways in which others might attempt to tarnish him. (He also happens to be listed on a site called The Plot Against Syria — a thoroughly entertaining and ridiculous “exposé” of the uprising claimed to be led by “a conspiracy of evil persons” following directions from AIPAC!)

So this is my challenge to anyone who feels inspired to comment: try and say something about the substance of al-Abdeh’s analysis — an analysis that needless to say I find both persuasive and enlightening, which is why I’m posting it. (H/t Brian Whitaker)

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A World Bank for a new world

Jeffrey Sachs writes: The world is at a crossroads. Either the global community will join together to fight poverty, resource depletion and climate change, or it will face a generation of resource wars, political instability and environmental ruin.

The World Bank, if properly led, can play a key role in averting these threats and the risks that they imply. The global stakes are thus very high this spring as the Bank’s 187 member countries choose a new president to succeed Robert Zoellick, whose term ends in July.

The World Bank was established in 1944 to promote economic development, and virtually every country is now a member. Its central mission is to reduce global poverty and ensure that global development is environmentally sound and socially inclusive. Achieving these goals would not only improve the lives of billions of people, but would also forestall violent conflicts that are stoked by poverty, famine and struggles over scarce resources.

US officials have traditionally viewed the World Bank as an extension of United States foreign policy and commercial interests. With the Bank just two blocks away from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, it has been all too easy for the US to dominate the institution. Now, many members, including Brazil, China, India and several African countries, are raising their voices in support of more collegial leadership and an improved strategy that works for all.

From the Bank’s establishment until today, the unwritten rule has been that the US government simply designates each new president: all 11 have been Americans, and not a single one has been an expert in economic development, the Bank’s core responsibility, or had a career in fighting poverty or promoting environmental sustainability. Instead, the US has selected Wall Street bankers and politicians, presumably to ensure that the Bank’s policies are suitably friendly to US commercial and political interests.

Yet the policy is backfiring on the US and badly hurting the world. Because of a long-standing lack of strategic expertise at the top, the Bank has lacked a clear direction. Many projects have catered to US corporate interests rather than to sustainable development. The Bank has cut a lot of ribbons on development projects, but has solved far too few global problems.

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Foreign warmongers are empowering Iran’s rulers

As parliamentary elections take place in Iran today, Ardeshir Amir-Arjomand, adviser to opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, writes: With Iran’s democratic opposition sitting on the sidelines, the race has been left wide open to two authoritarian factions — one led by the fraudulently elected president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and another by an equally unscrupulous conservative group. Their previous “marriage of convenience” has now dissolved, opening the floodgates to an orgy of mutual mud-slinging and a naked stampede for power.

There are no genuine ideological differences between these factions; what motivates them is a lust for power and control of the country’s oil wealth. And they are competing in a polemical race to describe how they would “stamp out” what, in official spin, is labeled as the “remnants of the sedition” — officialese for Iran’s popular Green protest movement, which was brutally attacked three years ago but has nevertheless survived.

The Green movement was born out of spontaneous mass protests that questioned the validity of a fraudulent vote count. Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Karroubi, while still free, kept emphasizing their commitment to free and fair elections, independence of legal institutions, fully accountable governance and a responsible foreign policy — a far cry from what has come to haunt the country in recent years.

We are painfully aware of the tremendous challenges that lie ahead for Iran in its peaceful resistance to a deeply authoritarian power structure bent on the use of sheer hypocrisy, fear, intimidation and brute force to hold on to power.

This, we realize, is the same challenge that has been with us Iranians for over a century: the peaceful transition to a democratic, pluralistic, developed and prosperous Iran.

Several crucial tasks lie ahead of us. First, our peaceful movement has to survive the ruling authoritarian apparatus, and to build and empower the political organizations needed for the future democratic era. More urgently, though, it has to safeguard the country’s territory, its people and its political independence against the increasing perils of external threats, international adventurism and internal strife. We must oppose warmongering and jingoism, whether from foreigners or our fellow countrymen.

It is disheartening that in the midst of rising military threats against the country, certain hotheaded elements and currents within the ruling coalition appear to welcome the prospect of a military confrontation as a blessing.

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Israel Firsters run NYT ad attacking critics

In a January op-ed for the Tablet, Spencer Ackerman rebuked MJ Rosenberg at Media Matters and others for their use of the phrase Israel Firster:

“Israel Firster” has a nasty anti-Semitic pedigree, one that many Jews will intuitively understand without knowing its specific history. It turns out white supremacist Willis Carto was reportedly the first to use it, and David Duke popularized it through his propaganda network. And yet Rosenberg and others actually claim they’re using it to stimulate “debate,” rather than effectively mirroring the tactics of some of the people they criticize.

Philip Weiss then pointed out that Ackerman was wrong about the origin of the phrase. It had first been used by the late Abram Leon Sachar, the leading American historian of Jews and president of Brandeis University.

Sachar, like many other diaspora Jews, took offense at a view promoted by Israeli Zionists that a Jew can only live a fully Jewish life inside Israel. He referred to those imposing this restrictive view of Jewishness as Israel Firsters.

Language evolves and the phrase now has a more obvious meaning — obvious that is to those of us who do not closely follow the internal struggles of Jewish identity. Israel Firsters are primarily American Jews whose first concern is Israel. They put Israel first. It’s not an antisemitic slur. It’s a literal, plain-as-daylight, description.

The campaign to drag the United States into a war against Iran on behalf of Israel is an Israel Firster campaign. It sure as hell is not being promoted by people who put the interests of the United States first.

The Emergency Committee for Israel ran a full-page ad in the New York Times yesterday promoting their Israel Firster agenda in a thinly veiled attack on the Obama administration and those Democrats who have yet to offer full-blooded support for an attack on Iran. The explicit targets of the ad were the Center for American Progress and Media Matters, but timed to appear just before Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrival in Washington for this year’s AIPAC conference, ECI clearly wanted to give the White House a rap on the shins before the boss comes into town.

But as ThinkProgress notes, ECI has already been roundly condemned inside the American Jewish community.

Last September, the American Jewish Committee’s director David Harris slammed ECI for turning Israel into a partisan wedge issue and exhibiting behavior “counterproductive to its stated aim of supporting Israel.” The head of the National Jewish Democratic Council said, “ECI’s behavior made it crystal clear that the organization is nothing more than a Republican front group bent on turning Israel into a partisan wedge issue.” And today, the Jewish Daily Forward says of the ECI ad: “[It’s] one of the most virulent anti-Jewish advertisements I’ve ever seen. And it came from other Jews.”

While the ECI is quick to casually throw around divisive language, it is much slower to condemn its own ties to ethnic and religious intolerance. In October, ECI board member Rachel Abrams raised eyebrows for calling Palestinian militants “savages,” “unmanned animals,” and “food for sharks,” in a blog post.

What’s strange about most Israel Firsters is that while they do very little to conceal their primary allegiance, they refuse to actually declare that they put Israel first. For instance, a couple of years ago when Sheldon Adelson said, “the uniform that I wore in the military unfortunately was not an Israeli uniform, it was an American uniform,” I don’t think he was making a fashion statement. He was talking about the country dearest to his heart — the one he most passionately wants to defend. So why do he and others recoil when their affinity is given a name? Maybe Israel Firster needs an extra nuance added — in-the-closet Israel Firster is perhaps more accurate.

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Consequences of an attack on Iran are no joke

Marsha B Cohen writes: The ever-smirking Israeli Minister of Defense, Ehud Barak, has calculated that the casualties of a war with Iran could be limited to fewer than 500. “There won’t be 100,000 dead, not 10,000 dead nor 1,000 dead. Israel will not be destroyed,” Barak said reassuringly during a November radio interview quoted by the Washington Post. “If everyone just goes into their houses, there won’t be 500 dead, either,” he said.

Barak means Israelis. As for Iranians, who’s counting? Who cares?

No one is talking about the harm that “surgical air strikes” against “suspected Iranian nuclear facilities” with GBU-28 “bunker-buster” bombs, which derive their ability to penetrate concrete and earth from depleted uranium, would inflict on 74 million Iranians, nearly a quarter of whom are under the age of 14 and under and half of whom are under the age of 30. (Where are those self-designated “pro-life” voices that should be expressing outrage? Or does “the right to life” evaporate as soon as a fetus exits the womb?)

No worries are being expressed about the release of radioactive materials into the biosphere of Central Asia (and by eventual extension, the entire earth). If the depleted uranium in the bombs comes into contact with radioactive nuclear materials present in the targeted nuclear research sites–nearly all of which operate under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision–the potential for disaster would be magnified exponentially.

Israeli Military Intelligence Chief Major General Aviv Kochavi grimly told the hawkish Herziliya Conference recently that Iran possesses more than 4 tons of low-grade enriched uranium as well as almost 100 kilograms of uranium enriched at 20%. If true, is it really a good idea to send these radioactive materials spewing into the air and water of Central Asia and beyond? Is it any wonder that Russia, China and India–all whom are much closer geographically to Iran, as well as downwind of the direction in which radiation and toxin-tainted winds would initially blow–are the UN Security Council members most opposed to attacking Iran?

Nor is anyone questioning the wisdom of dropping unprecedented numbers of 5000 lb. “bunker busters” capable of penetrating 100 feet of earth or 20 feet of concrete into the bowels of an already earthquake-prone region. No one seems to care about the irreparable and uncontainable environmental damage that could be done to miles of Iranian coastline: the adjacent Caspian Sea to the north, the Arabian Sea to the south, and the Persian Gulf to the west. What about the permanent damage to the underground aquifers of Central Asia, where water is already scarce? If fracking for natural gas can render US drinking water flammable, imagine what pounding some of the most plentiful natural gas fields with bombs could do.

Prognosticating the full extent of the damage that could and would be inflicted upon Iran and upon Iranians is difficult to impossible. No one outside of top security circles can even guess the number of targets of an Israeli and/or US attack (the BBC suggests five in addition to Bushehr). Other variables include the quantity or capacity of the weaponry that would be employed, whether Israel plans on using nuclear weapons, whether so-called “precision surgical strikes” reached or missed their intended targets, all of which would affect the scale of “collateral damage” to human beings, infrastructure, homes and apartments, schools, mosques and World Heritage sites as a consequence of “bomb-bomb-bombing” Iran’s suspected nuclear research facilities.

Almost assuredly an attack on facilities buried deep within the earth would utilize “bunker busting” guided bomb units (GBUs) that gain their power to penetrate from depleted uranium. The cost in lives, injuries, and long-term dangers to the health of civilians, including genetic damage to unborn future generations from toxins and radioactive materials in the depleted uranium bombs dropped and nuclear materials leaked is also incalculable. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi Arabia may be tied to 9/11, 2 ex-senators say

The New York Times reports: For more than a decade, questions have lingered about the possible role of the Saudi government in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, even as the royal kingdom has made itself a crucial counterterrorism partner in the eyes of American diplomats.

Now, in sworn statements that seem likely to reignite the debate, two former senators who were privy to top secret information on the Saudis’ activities say they believe that the Saudi government might have played a direct role in the terrorist attacks.

“I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the September 11th attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia,” former Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, said in an affidavit filed as part of a lawsuit brought against the Saudi government and dozens of institutions in the country by families of Sept. 11 victims and others. Mr. Graham led a joint 2002 Congressional inquiry into the attacks.

His former Senate colleague, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a Democrat who served on the separate 9/11 Commission, said in a sworn affidavit of his own in the case that “significant questions remain unanswered” about the role of Saudi institutions. “Evidence relating to the plausible involvement of possible Saudi government agents in the September 11th attacks has never been fully pursued,” Mr. Kerrey said.

Their affidavits, which were filed on Friday and have not previously been disclosed, are part of a multibillion-dollar lawsuit that has wound its way through federal courts since 2002. An appellate court, reversing an earlier decision, said in November that foreign nations were not immune to lawsuits under certain terrorism claims, clearing the way for parts of the Saudi case to be reheard in United States District Court in Manhattan.

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AP’s probe into NYPD intelligence operations

Since August, AP has been publishing stories from its ongoing investigation into secret intelligence operations set up by the New York Police Department following the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

AP’s investigation has revealed that the NYPD dispatched undercover officers into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program. Police also used informants, known as “mosque crawlers,” to monitor sermons, even when there was no evidence of wrongdoing.

The AP also determined that police subjected entire neighborhoods to surveillance and scrutiny, often because of the ethnicity of the residents, not because of any accusations of crimes. Hundreds of mosques and Muslim student groups were investigated and dozens were infiltrated. Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD’s intelligence unit after 9/11.

Click here to see the AP investigative team’s body of work to date.

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Netanyahu wants Obama to promise war

This is what blackmail looks like.

Israel will start a war with Iran and inevitably drag America into this war — unless President Obama makes a promise. He must promise that the United States will start the war at the time of Israel’s choosing.

Here’s how Amos Yadlin, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence and now director of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, presents the bargain, based on the premise that Israel’s window of opportunity for attacking Iran will shortly close:

On Monday, Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel are to meet in Washington. Of all their encounters, this could be the most critical. Asking Israel’s leaders to abide by America’s timetable, and hence allowing Israel’s window of opportunity to be closed, is to make Washington a de facto proxy for Israel’s security — a tremendous leap of faith for Israelis faced with a looming Iranian bomb. It doesn’t help when American officials warn Israel against acting without clarifying what America intends to do once its own red lines are crossed.

Mr. Obama will therefore have to shift the Israeli defense establishment’s thinking from a focus on the “zone of immunity” [the point at which Iran’s nuclear program is invulnerable to an Israeli attack] to a “zone of trust.” What is needed is an ironclad American assurance that if Israel refrains from acting in its own window of opportunity — and all other options have failed to halt Tehran’s nuclear quest — Washington will act to prevent a nuclear Iran while it is still within its power to do so.

I hope Mr. Obama will make this clear. If he does not, Israeli leaders may well choose to act while they still can.

So here we approach another war and whether the war comes sooner or later hinges on whether the Israelis have the courage to trust Obama and whether Obama is indeed worthy of such an enormous leap of faith.

In this drama the Israelis cast themselves with the nobility to exercise restraint, the daring to take on a challenge from which others might shrink, and the vision to foresee dangers about which the rest of us are less alert.

Can Obama and can the United States ascend to such moral heights? Tune into to next week’s AIPAC conference to find out.

But wait a minute. The red line that the Israelis want Obama to pledge his commitment is a red line that most observers say Iran has already crossed: acquiring nuclear weapons capability. It already has a stockpile of enriched uranium sufficient to make several weapons by most estimates.

So while Netanyahu badgers Obama to promise war, the question shouldn’t be whether at the appointed time this war kicks off; instead it should be — given that Iran has crossed the red line that Israel set — why has Israel not already launched an attack?

The truth is that is that this war that Israel insists must be fought is a war that Israel would much prefer the United States to fight and pay for on Israel’s behalf.

If Israel’s interests and those of the U.S. were truly the same when it comes to Iran, then neither should need to cajole the other into action. The current tension is instead a reflection of the fact that the two countries interests are not the same.

Indeed, the objective which at this point is still only gradually being wheeled into position is a goal utterly beyond Israel’s much vaunted military capabilities: regime change in Tehran.

And even though that goal has not explicitly been adopted by the Obama administration, Obama’s language already hints at capitulation to Israeli and rightwing pressure. His choice of metaphor for describing pressure on Iran is one which any political leadership would treat as a mortal threat.

A noose is never tightened in preparation for negotiations or compromises.

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Occupy vigilantes write new Volcker Rule script

Susan Antilla writes: It isn’t every day that a reporter gets to sit in on a high-stakes policy meeting in New York’s financial district, but that’s exactly what I did on a balmy evening in late February at 60 Wall Street, the U.S. headquarters of Deutsche Bank AG.

No, the bank didn’t lose its institutional marbles and give me clearance to scribble notes while its cognoscenti mapped out corporate strategy. The confab I dropped in on was taking place under potted palm trees in the bank’s ground-floor public atrium, and the participants were 13 members of Occupy the SEC, a spinoff group of the Occupy Wall Street movement. I can’t help but conclude that their plans for petitions, marches, op-eds and sit-down meetings with banking regulators will be inflicting Wall Street with a long, nasty attack of agita.

Occupy Wall Street and its working groups, including Occupy the SEC, were supposed to be dead, in case you missed the obituaries. Now the protesters are messing with detractors’ heads with the emergence of a media-savvy collection of legal, banking and activist members who come off as sane and authoritative. This is not the way the Occupy bashers’ “welfare-bum hippies” propaganda script was supposed to play out.

On Feb. 13, seven writers who described themselves as “concerned citizens, activists and financial professionals” filed a 325-page comment letter to financial regulators, outlining their concerns about loopholes in the “Let’s Try to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis” proposal known as the Volcker rule.

It was among the longest and most detailed of 16,000 letters sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency during the public-comment period.

We may call it a “public” comment period, but in the real world it is deep-pocketed business interests, not Mom and Pop, who usually have the juice to persuade officials to amend financial regulations. It’s no surprise that Wall Street has been working furiously to dilute the rule’s restrictions on how banks trade and what investments they can own, and the industry has a heap of comment letters on the Volcker rule to show for it.

This time, though, there is a noisy voice plugging for the little guy, and it carries weight that these rabble-rousers understand the banking industry from the inside.

Or, as Occupy the SEC member Alexis Goldstein — who has worked at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank — explained the group’s line-by-line analysis of the Volcker Rule to me: “We’d say ‘OK, I’m a bank, so how am I gonna get around this rule?’”

Even veteran activists who advocate regularly for the public were wowed. “They understood the nonsense in the proposed rule,” said Bartlett Naylor, financial policy counsel at Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. Public Citizen, which also wrote a Volcker comment letter, was “humbled” by the Occupy effort, Naylor said. [Continue reading…]

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Can Occupy pull off a general strike?

Natasha Lennard reports: For some months now, the allure of the general strike has quietly persisted in the Occupy movement. In recent weeks, calls for a nationwide general strike on May 1 have grown louder; more than two months in advance of the date, a deluge of propaganda – posters, banner drops and short online videos – portends a May Day that promises to up the Occupy ante.

The Arab Spring was galvanized by general strikes in Tunisia and Egypt, while in Greece general strikes regularly rupture business-as-usual and bring thousands onto the streets. In headier conceptions, the general strike – a withdrawal from and an attack on capitalism – is the most radical act of defiance available. Little wonder, then, that a general strike was attempted in Oakland, Calif., on Nov. 2. The call for a nationwide general strike, originated in Occupy Los Angeles, has gleaned support from Occupy groups around the United States, with the help of a Twitter hashtag (#M1GS) and a Facebook event that has more than 12,000 promised attendees.

For a movement seeking new directions and escalations, the general strike is historically resonant and attractively bold. But can it work in the United States? And, if so, how?

As with most things Occupy, it’s unclear. Many different notions about a general strike and organizing for May Day are developing through autonomous working groups and alliances that are building between labor organizers and immigrant rights groups. It was, after all, a mass boycott against U.S. businesses by immigrant workers (both legal and illegal) on May 1, 2006 — dubbed “A day without an immigrant” — that revitalized May Day in the United States. Indeed, the specific language agreed to in the Occupy New York general assembly to endorse a general strike nods to this immigrant justice work. It reads:

“May Day 2012 : Occupy Wall Street stands in solidarity with the calls for a day without the 99 percent, a general strike and more!! On May Day, wherever you are, we are calling for: No Work, No School, No Housework, No Shopping, No Banking. Take the Streets!”

The sentences were painstakingly crafted over weeks of meetings by an OWS general strike planning group composed of contentious bedfellows including traditional labor activists, insurrectionary anarchists, immigrant justice workers and every permutation and cross-over in between. Disagreement raged about whether the language of general strike would alienate or put at risk unionized and immigrant workers (another reason for the inclusion of “a day without the 99 percent”). Make no mistake: Calling for a general strike in the United States carries profound risks.

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Stratfor, WikiLeaks and the Obama administration’s war against truth

Amy Goodman writes: WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website, has again published a massive trove of documents, this time from a private intelligence firm known as Stratfor. The source of the leak was the hacker group Anonymous, which took credit for obtaining more than 5m emails from Stratfor’s servers. Anonymous obtained the material on 24 December 2011, and provided it to WikiLeaks, which, in turn, partnered with 25 media organizations globally to analyze the emails and publish them.

Among the emails was a short one-liner that suggested the US government has produced, through a secret grand jury, a sealed indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In addition to painting a picture of Stratfor as a runaway, rogue private intelligence firm with close ties to government-intelligence agencies serving both corporate and US military clients, the emails support the growing awareness that the Obama administration, far from diverging from the secrecy of the Bush/Cheney era, is obsessed with secrecy, and is aggressively opposed to transparency.

I travelled to London last Independence Day weekend to interview Assange. When I asked him about the grand jury investigation, he responded:

“There is no judge, there is no defense counsel, and there are four prosecutors. So, that is why people that are familiar with grand-jury inquiries in the United States say that a grand jury would not only indict a ham sandwich, it would indict the ham and the sandwich.”

As I left London, the Guardian newspaper exposed more of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp phone-hacking scandal, which prompted the closing of his tabloid newspaper, the largest circulation Sunday newspaper in the UK, the News of the World. The coincidence is relevant, as the News of the World reported anything but what its title claimed, focusing instead on salacious details of the private lives of celebrities, sensational crimes, and photos of scantily-clad women. Through this and his other endeavours, Murdoch amassed a reported personal fortune of $7.6bn. [Continue reading…]

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New evidence suggests Stone Age hunters from Europe discovered America

The Washington Post reports: When the crew of the Virginia scallop trawler Cinmar hauled a mastodon tusk onto the deck in 1970, another oddity dropped out of the net: A dark, tapered stone blade, nearly eight inches long and still sharp.

Forty years later, this rediscovered prehistoric slasher has reopened debate on a radical theory about who the first Americans were and when they got here.

Archaeologists have long held that North America remained unpopulated until about 15,000 years ago, when Siberian people walked or boated into Alaska and down the West Coast.

But the mastodon relic turned out to be 22,000 years old, suggesting the blade was just as ancient.

Whoever fashioned that blade was not supposed to be here.

Its makers likely paddled from Europe and arrived in America thousands of years ahead of the western migration, argues Smithsonian Institution anthropologist Dennis Stanford, making them the first Americans.

“I think it’s feasible,” said Tom Dillehay, a prominent archaeologist at Vanderbilt University. “The evidence is building up and it certainly warrants discussion.”

At the height of the last Ice Age, Stanford says, mysterious stone-age European people known as the Solutreans paddled along an ice cap jutting into the North Atlantic. They lived like Inuits, harvesting seals and seabirds.

The Solutreans eventually spread across North America, Stanford argues, hauling their distinctive blades with them.

When Stanford proposed this “Solutrean hypothesis” in 1999, colleagues roundly rejected it. One prominent archaeologist suggested Stanford was throwing his career away.

But now, 13 years later, Stanford and Exeter University archaeologist Bruce Bradley lay out a detailed case – bolstered by the curious blade and other stone tools recently found in the mid-Atlantic – in a new book, Across Atlantic Ice.

“I drank the Solutrean Kool-aid,” said Steve Black, an archaeologist at Texas State University in San Marcos. “I had been very dubious. It’s something a lot of [archaeologists] have dismissed out of hand. But I came away from the book feeling like it’s an extremely credible idea that needs to be taken seriously.”

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Syria crisis: Opposition sets up military bureau

BBC News reports: Syria’s main political opposition group has formed a military bureau to unify armed resistance to the government.

The Syrian National Council (SNC) said the bureau would bring armed groups under a central command and control the flow of weapons to avoid “chaos”.

The government launched a ground assault in the city of Homs this week after weeks of shelling.

The UN’s rights council has passed a resolution condemning “systematic violations” against civilians.

The motion, supported by 37 nations, called for the regime to allow access for aid agencies, and demanded an immediate halt to the violence.

China and Russia, which have both vetoed UN resolutions on Syria, voted against the proposal. Cuba also rejected the motion.

The vote carries no legal weight, but analysts say it may embolden diplomats to take a tougher line in UN Security Council debates.

SNC leader Burhan Ghalioun announced the new military bureau at a news conference in Paris.

He said the uprising had begun as a non-violent movement, but the council had to “shoulder its responsibilities in light of this new reality”.

Mr Ghalioun said the bureau would function like a defence ministry and be staffed by soldiers from the main armed group, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), as well as civilians.

It would control the supply of arms, track and organise armed groups, manage funding and seek guidance from foreign experts, he said, insisting its function was only to protect peaceful protesters.

Mr Ghalioun said the FSA had agreed to the new organisation.

However, the head of the FSA, Col Riyad al-Assad, has declared his organisation will not co-operate with the new bureau, says the BBC’s Jim Muir, in neighbouring Lebanon.

It is extraordinary, our correspondent explains, because the announcement specifically mentioned that the bureau was being established in order to provide arms to the FSA, as well as political control.

What Col Assad is saying is that the FSA does not want any political interference and has its own military strategy, which is to keep fighting the government, our correspondent says.

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Syrian rebels say they are withdrawing from Baba Amr

The New York Times reports: After a bruising, 27-day siege under intensifying bombardment, rebels holed up in the shattered Baba Amr district of the central Syrian city of Homs announced a “tactical withdrawal” on Thursday, apparently handing victory to forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad but raising concerns about the plight of civilians in the neighborhood.

A campaign of raids and arrests began almost immediately in the area, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in Britain, which said 17 people had died in Baba Amr on Thursday.

Baba Amr had become an emblem of resistance with fighters maintaining their defiance despite daily reports of a pounding by artillery, sniper and tank fire as government forces encircled them. The announcement of a rebel pullout, a day after government forces seemed to crank up military pressure on the neighborhood, came as Western and Arab nations pressed to deepen the diplomatic isolation of the Damascus authorities.

A statement from the fighters within the neighborhood, the “Revolutionary Brigades of Baba Amr,” said they were making a tactical retreat because of the “drastic humanitarian situation for the residents” who are lacking food, medicine, water, electricity and any means of communication.

The government shelling, which began on Feb. 4, had practically leveled Baba Amr, the statement said, and the government forces enjoyed an overwhelming superiority in firepower from helicopters to tanks to mortars.

With about 4,000 residents left, the statement held the government soldiers responsible for the safety of those left and called for international humanitarian organizations like the Red Cross to be allowed to deploy in the quarter.

There are widespread concerns that the army units might exact revenge on the residents for holding out for a month — not least because the Syrian government has a history of murdering the residents of rebellious neighborhoods as it did in nearby Hama in 1982.

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