And the original…
Music: Kurt Elling — ‘Minuano’
Torture by Iraqi militias: The report Washington did not want you to see
Reuters reports: It was one of the most shocking events in one of the most brutal periods in Iraq’s history. In late 2005, two years after the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, U.S. soldiers raided a police building in Baghdad and found 168 prisoners in horrific conditions.
Many were malnourished. Some had been beaten.
The discovery of the secret prison exposed a world of kidnappings and assassinations. Behind these operations was an unofficial Interior Ministry organisation called the Special Investigations Directorate, according to U.S. and Iraqi security officials at the time.
The body was run by militia commanders from the Badr Organisation, a pro-Iran, Shi’ite political movement that today plays a major role in Baghdad’s war against Islamic State, the Sunni militant group.
Washington pressured the Iraqi government to investigate the prison. But the findings of Baghdad’s investigation – a probe derided by some of its own committee members at the time as a whitewash – were never released.
The U.S. military conducted its own investigation. But rather than publish its findings, it chose to lobby Iraqi officials in quiet for fear of damaging Iraq’s fragile political setup, according to several current and former U.S. military officials and diplomats.
Both reports remain unpublished. Reuters has reviewed them, as well as other U.S. documents from the past decade.
The documents show how Washington, seeking to defeat Sunni jihadists and stabilise Iraq, has consistently overlooked excesses by Shi’ite militias sponsored by the Iraqi government. The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have both worked with Badr and its powerful leader, Hadi al-Amiri, whom many Sunnis continue to accuse of human rights abuses.
Washington’s policy of expediency has achieved some of its short-term aims. But in allowing the Shi’ite militias to run amok against their Sunni foes, Washington has fueled the Shia-Sunni sectarian divide that is tearing Iraq apart.
The decade-old U.S. investigation of the secret prison implicates officials and political groups in a wave of sectarian killings that helped ignite a civil war. It also draws worrying parallels to the U.S. government’s muted response today to alleged abuses committed in the name of fighting Islamic State.
Those accused of running the secret prison or of helping cover up its existence include the current head of the Iraqi judiciary, Midhat Mahmoud, Transport Minister, Bayan Jabr, and a long revered Badr commander popularly referred to as Engineer Ahmed. [Continue reading…]
Rouhani allies embrace censored reformers ahead of Iranian polls
Bloomberg reports: Allies of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani are challenging restrictions on top reformist politicians as wrangling with conservative rivals heats up ahead of elections next year.
The state-run Ettelaat newspaper ran a front-page editorial last week criticizing as unlawful a ban on publishing the name and picture of former President Mohammad Khatami. A day earlier, Rouhani’s brother Hossein Fereydoun had visited opposition leader Mehdi Karrubi, who’s under house arrest and accused of sedition by hardliners.
Buoyed by Rouhani’s success in striking July’s nuclear deal with world powers in the face of domestic resistance, a reformist camp largely silenced since 2009 is showing signs of renewed ambition. Elections for parliament and the assembly that will choose Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s successor could embolden Rouhani, who’s seeking to control a majority in the legislature.
Infighting “is reaching the highest and most sensitive” level since Rouhani won a four-year term in 2013, said Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Washington DC-based Middle East Institute. “How Rouhani chooses to respond to the hardline pushback against his agenda, and the degree to which he is successful, will be a major indicator of political life in Iran for the remainder of his presidency.” [Continue reading…]
Reuters adds: An Iranian committee is examining potential candidates to be the next Supreme Leader, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said on Sunday, breaking a taboo of talking publicly about succession in the Islamic Republic. [Continue reading…]
Earlier, the New York Times reported: Iran’s conservative judicial authorities indicted the managing editor of a prominent daily newspaper on Tuesday, saying that he had violated prohibitions on the coverage of Mohammad Khatami, a reformist-minded former president they now describe as a seditionist.
Rights activists said the indictment was a sign not only of the escalating repression of the news media in Iran, but also of heightening tensions between hard-line factions and the administration of the current president, Hassan Rouhani, with parliamentary elections due in February.
“It is absurd that Khatami, president for eight years, has been declared essentially nonexistent to such an extent that disseminating his picture and voice is considered a crime,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, an advocacy group based in New York. [Continue reading…]
Absurd indeed.
It is likewise absurd to view the factions that would try to enforce this kind of political repression as belonging to an “Axis of Resistance.”
Let’s hope that as Iran’s reformists once again grow in confidence, they don’t end up facing the same kind of ruthless oppression that strangled the Green Movement in 2009.
That was an uprising that deserved global support and only the regime’s most rigid loyalists could have viewed it otherwise.
When languages die, we lose a part of who we are
By Anouschka Foltz, Bangor University
The 2015 Paris Climate Conference (COP21) is in full gear and climate change is again on everyone’s mind. It conjures up images of melting glaciers, rising sea levels, droughts, flooding, threatened habitats, endangered species, and displaced people. We know it threatens biodiversity, but what about linguistic diversity?
Humans are the only species on the planet whose communication system exhibits enormous diversity. And linguistic diversity is crucial for understanding our capacity for language. An increase in climate-change related natural disasters may affect linguistic diversity. A good example is Vanuatu, an island state in the Pacific, with quite a dramatic recent rise in sea levels.
There are over 7,000 languages spoken in the world today. These languages exhibit enormous diversity, from the number of distinctive sounds (there are languages with as few as 11 different sounds and as many as 118) to the vast range of possible word orders, structures and concepts that languages use to convey meaning. Every absolute that linguists have posited has been challenged, and linguists are busy debating if there is anything at all that is common to all languages in the world or anything at all that does not exist in the languages of the world. Sign languages show us that languages do not even need to be spoken. This diversity is evidence of the enormous flexibility and plasticity of the human brain and its capacity for communication.
Studying diverse languages gives us invaluable insights into human cognition. But language diversity is at risk. Languages are dying every year. Often a language’s death is recorded when the last known speaker dies, and about 35% of languages in the world are currently losing speakers or are more seriously endangered. Most of these have never been recorded and so would be lost forever. Linguists estimate that about 50% of the languages spoken today will disappear in the next 100 years. Some even argue that up to 90% of today’s languages will have disappeared by 2115.
The Paris climate agreement — infographic
By Emil Jeyaratnam, The Conversation; James Whitmore, The Conversation; Michael Hopkin, The Conversation, and Wes Mountain, The Conversation
On December 12, 2015 in Paris, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change finally came to a landmark agreement.
Signed by 196 nations, the Paris Agreement is the first comprehensive global treaty to combat climate change, and will follow on from the Kyoto Protocol when it ends in 2020. It will enter into force once it is ratified by at least 55 countries, covering at least 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Here are the key points.
Why soft climate deals are better than tough ones
By Richard Fairchild, University of Bath and Baris Yalabik, University of Bath
The Paris climate talks have been heralded as a historic deal. But while they have been praised for the very feat of reaching an agreement and for setting an ambitious aim to keep warming below 2℃ and endeavouring to limit it to 1.5℃, the agreement has been criticised for being weak. In terms of achieving the 1.5℃ limit, it is up to the states themselves to change their behaviour and they can pull out of the agreement at any point. This, however, might not be such a bad thing.
A significant amount of research into the mixed successes of past international environmental agreements shows that tough agreements are not always as successful as less ambitious ones. There was failure to reach agreement in the Hague negotiations in 2000, then failure by the US to ratify the Kyoto protocol in 2001. Triumphs, including the Bonn and Marrakesh Accords in 2001, have been put down to some provisions in the original treaty being watered down considerably.
In fact there is significant evidence that softer, more accommodating agreements have resulted in greater compliance, for the betterment of the planet. The same evidence indicates that the agreements with the toughest targets for reducing emissions have failed. Countries either quit the agreements or break the rules and return to old, selfish, excessive polluting ways. And there are analyses using game theory that demonstrate how softer targets are more successful.
Michael Klare: Go green young woman, young man
Excuse me if I take a flier today and write an introduction on the good news about climate change. Yep, the good news. It would, of course, be easy enough to do the opposite. When it comes to climate change, gloomy is a cinch. Just about any piece on the subject is likely to depress the hell out of you. Did you know — as I learned only recently from a New York Times article — that sea levels rose at a rate of 1.7 millimeters annually during the previous century, but from 1993 on, that rate has nearly doubled to 3.2 millimeters? Later this century, scientists estimate that it could be “16 millimeters a year, or about six-tenths of an inch” — at least three feet by century’s end and possibly worse, depending on what’s melting and how fast. If you’re a coastal dweller as I am (the eastern U.S.), that should give you pause, and if you live in a coastal area of China, you should be getting nervous. But I did say good news, didn’t I, and it is the weekend that 195 countries reached a climate agreement in Paris, isn’t it? So here goes.
Let’s start with the divestment movement. In Paris recently, the heroic 350.org announced a startling figure. More than 500 institutions representing $3.4 trillion in assets have agreed to get rid of all or part of the fossil fuel investments in their portfolios. That represents a big leap forward for divestment. And this is just one aspect of a growing global climate change movement that wants to point us toward the exit when it comes to the age of carbon and is proving that it can’t be ignored. And speaking of carbon emissions, here’s a little news flash from the atmospheric front lines: it’s just faintly possible that those emissions are peaking ahead of schedule. Despite a modest global economic recovery, for the last couple of years greenhouse gas emissions have flat-lined and they may even fall by a modest 0.6% in 2015. Don’t dance a jig yet. This may not even be the “peak emissions” moment, but if not, it could be coming more quickly than expected.
On a planet getting hotter all the time, this isn’t exactly nirvana-style news, but add this in: it had been hoped that somehow the negotiating nations of the world gathered in Paris these last two weeks might agree to the goal of keeping the prospective rise in temperature on planet Earth to 2 degrees Celsius. As it happens, climate scientists have increasingly been warning that even that number could result in devastating environmental disruptions. To the surprise of all, the aspirational number now mentioned in the Paris agreement is 1.5 degrees Celsius. (Humanity has already fossil-fueled the temperature upward by about a degree since the industrial revolution began.) Of course, agreeing on such a figure is one thing. Coming anywhere near achieving it is another.
Still, good news and climate change are not normally associated, so let’s give a tiny cheer for these glimpses of upbeat news this week, as well as for the agreement just reached, and then consider what’s positive in the long-term outlook for all of us. There, too, as TomDispatch‘s invaluable energy expert Michael Klare suggests, there’s a green glow on the horizon amid the gloom when it comes to renewable energy sources. So don’t pop that champagne cork yet, but do read on! Tom Engelhardt
A new world beckons
The future belongs to renewables
By Michael T. KlareHistorically, the transition from one energy system to another, as from wood to coal or coal to oil, has proven an enormously complicated process, requiring decades to complete. In similar fashion, it will undoubtedly be many years before renewable forms of energy — wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and others still in development — replace fossil fuels as the world’s leading energy providers. Nonetheless, 2015 can be viewed as the year in which the epochal transition from one set of fuels to another took off, with renewables making such significant strides that, for the first time in centuries, the beginning of the end of the Fossil Fuel Era has come into sight.
Refugees in a world in which the stranger’s welcome is in doubt
Richmond Eustis writes: In my first class on “The Odyssey” at the University of Jordan, my students surprised me with readings far darker than any I’d encountered in my classes in the U.S. I have taught this work in translation perhaps a dozen times. In teaching the work, I like to focus on depictions of terrain: lush Ogygia, rocky Ithaka, the perilous wilderness of the wine-dark sea. And still smoldering on the shore behind them, the ruins of Troy. There are nymphs and witches, seduction and intrigues, gruesome violence and angry gods. There is an awkward adolescent becoming a man, a clever hero taking vengeance on his enemies, and a crafty wife thwarting the designs of boorish suitors. There is the joyful reunion of a loving, long-parted couple, and the restoration of order to a troubled oikos. “The Odyssey” is romance and comedy.
But that’s not how my students in Jordan read it at all. Many of them are Syrian, or Iraqi, or Palestinian refugees. In their written responses to the first three books, much of the class wrote some variation of: “We know this story. We know what it is to be unable to go home, to show up with nothing at the door of strangers and hope they greet us with kindness instead of anger. We know what it’s like to wonder about the fate of family members, caught up in wars that seem to go on forever, and to hope that one day we will see them again.”
In its depiction of Odysseus’ journey, “The Odyssey” is a survey of the Ancient Greek practice of xenia—reciprocal hospitality. But for my students, it depicts the exile’s anxiety in a world in which the principle of xenia is threatened, in which the stranger’s welcome is in doubt. Odysseus asks himself many times about the inhabitants of the unknown islands: “Savages are they, strangers to courtesy? Or gentle folk who know and fear the gods?” Today, this set of questions from an ancient work has surfaced again in the political debates in the U.S. and the rest of the world: What is the morally appropriate way to respond to a stranger in need, a person from a distant land who arrives on your shore in need of aid and shelter? What obligations do civilized people owe to the destitute stranger in a world aflame with slaughter and destruction? And how are we to think about those who refuse to acknowledge any such obligations? [Continue reading…]
Marine Le Pen lost this time, but the mainstream is still flowing in her direction
Christopher Dickey writes: So, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front party, which placed first in six of 13 French regions last week, failed to win the second round in a single one this week.
But there’s no joy in the mainstream French political establishment, or in the mainstream French media that worked hard to defeat Le Pen and her candidates, because the mainstream is still flowing in her direction, and everyone knows it.
Indeed, traditional politicians here regard Le Pen with something like the same horror that the American mainstream regards Donald Trump, and for some of the same reasons. Seen as sly, anti-immigrant, implicitly racist populists, both are portrayed in the political language of Europe as “fascists.” But there are limits to the analogy.
The National Front, whose platform would do away with open European borders, the euro currency, and indeed “Europe” itself, has become not just a third party in the multi-party French system, it has become the third party. And when presidential elections roll around about 18 months from now, there is every chance that Le Pen will make it into the sudden-death second-round run-off. [Continue reading…]
Syrians yearn for peace, but not under Assad
Hassan Hassan writes: Three months after the spark that gave rise to the uprisings of 2011, Syria changed forever. No doubt many Syrians will now wish for a reset of the situation so they could do things differently, but a reset does not necessarily mean a desire for life under the same regime, in the same way that many Iraqis hanker for the pre-war stability they enjoyed rather than a wish to live under Saddam Hussein’s rule again.
This distinction is worth bearing in mind as a new round of peace talks – including attempts to deal with rising extremism – begins by countries involved in the Syrian conflict.
Over the weekend, Syrians reflected on the beginnings of the conflict through a campaign of support for the Free Syrian Army.
Each one of the past five years was defined by a broad theme that would add to the intractability of the Syrian conflict. [Continue reading…]
Turkish troops said to leave Iraqi camp after Baghdad orders them out
Reuters reports: Some Turkish troops started leaving their camp in Iraq and moving north on Monday, a Turkish military source and a senior official said, days after Baghdad protested to the United Nations and ordered them out.
Any move northwards would take them back closer to Iraq’s border with Turkey, but the officials did not say where they were going and it was unclear how far Ankara was bowing to pressure to bring its soldiers home.
Iraq said in early December hundreds of Turkish troops had arrived in its territory without its knowledge, calling it a hostile act.
Turkey said at the time the troops were meant to guard an international mission training and equipping Iraqi forces who are preparing for an offensive to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul, seized by Islamic State militants more than a year ago.
But the move was widely seen as a Turkish attempt to establish a greater foothold in the simmering conflicts across its border, which have already pulled in other regional and global powers. [Continue reading…]
Signs that ISIS’s propaganda machine is losing its edge
The Economist reports: although IS still churns out plenty of propaganda, both its quantity and reach are diminishing. Tabulating the number of pictures uploaded in media releases by the group, Aaron Zelin, a fellow at King’s College London, notes a marked decline since a peak in midsummer. Citing other researchers as well as his own observations, Mr Zelin also believes the quality of productions has fallen.
Perhaps more seriously for the group, it is having a harder time getting its message out, too. Aside from the restriction on personal internet use, which affects recruiting, Western governments have successfully prodded a growing number of social-media carriers to make much more serious efforts to weed out and block accounts sympathetic to IS. Twitter has shut thousands of suspect accounts in the past year; before that, there were reckoned to be over 20,000 IS Twitter accounts. YouTube is much quicker to take down ugly content than before. Telegram, an encrypted instant messaging service that had been increasingly adopted by IS as a main channel for its media output, has been blocking the group since mid-November.
As a sign of its growing isolation on the internet, IS announced shortly after the Paris attacks that it would shift its propaganda archive to the “dark web”, a hard-to-trace part of the internet largely inaccessible to ordinary web browsers.
As if this were not enough, IS is also suffering from media competition. Its biggest rival, al-Qaeda, has lately boosted both the quality and quantity of its own press releases. Perhaps more galling still, another, less radical Islamist fighting group in Syria, al-Jabha al-Shamiya, recently produced a video that deliberately mocked the style and content of IS’s notorious productions. It showed a group of orange-clad prisoners—actually captured IS fighters—being lined up and made to kneel before their executioners. But instead of pulling their triggers, the soldiers proceed to pocket their pistols, and the astonished prisoners are treated to a sermon about the Islamic duty of mercy, before being led back to jail. [Continue reading…]
Syrian rebels took one very small step closer to negotiating an end to the war
Vice News reports: The Syrian opposition came together in Riyadh this week for a conference sponsored by the Saudi government — and by the time it ended Thursday, it was the most successful attempt to date to unify Syria’s fractious opposition and ultimately produce a negotiated solution to the Syrian civil war. But there was a potentially crippling problem: One of the biggest rebel groups in Syria, the Salafist brigade Ahrar al-Sham, withdrew from the proceedings just as they were concluding, leaving the negotiators without a key player.
Other brigades endorsed the conference platform, and armed rebels will hold 11 of 34 seats in a new body to oversee negotiations with the regime of Bashar al-Assad. That’s less than their weight on the ground, yet enough to give them a real stake in talks. But the defection by Ahrar al-Sham, which has apparently sided with jihadist irreconcilables who want nothing to do with a negotiated solution, means the prospect of a settlement may be slightly closer but is still remote. [Continue reading…]
Chaos in Libya: It’s the oil, stupid
Issandr El Amrani writes: There seems no end to the bad news coming out of Libya.
UN-led negotiations to unite the divided country — it has two parliaments, two governments, two militia coalitions that have been competing for control of a rapidly failing state since summer 2014 — are stalling. Fighting continues apace in Benghazi, the city that was the first to rebel against the rule of Muammar al-Gaddafi in 2011 and is now a byword for extremism. The Islamic State is growing by the day in the Gulf of Sirte in the center of the country, imposing its cruel dictates and making inroads elsewhere in the country. Criminal gangs – often the same militias that have had the run of the country since Gaddafi’s fall – are doing a brisk trade in people smuggling, sending off desperate migrants and refugees on rickety boats across the Mediterranean.
Oh, and by the way, Libya is also going broke.
That last tidbit should be surprising. Libya has Africa’s largest oil reserves and has long been an important supplier of light sweet crude, the kind made into gasoline and kerosene. It also had tons of money in both hoards of cash reserves and investments across the globe.
But the oil, which used to bring in 96 percent of the country’s income, is not flowing anymore. From a high of at least 1.6 million barrels per day at the beginning of 2011, Libya is lucky to export a fourth of that today. Militias have taken control of oil fields, pipelines and export facilities across the country. At first, they sought to extort the central government to keep the oil flowing. But since the country was divided into two rival governments, they are simply fighting to keep oil revenue from each other: you take over my oilfield, I block your pipeline. Since earlier this year, IS has jumped into the fray, simply destroying facilities to keep any government from getting its revenues — although, in the longer term, it may very well want to control the oil itself. [Continue reading…]
Millet: The missing piece in the puzzle of prehistoric humans’ transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers
New research shows a cereal familiar today as birdseed was carried across Eurasia by ancient shepherds and herders laying the foundation, in combination with the new crops they encountered, of ‘multi-crop’ agriculture and the rise of settled societies. Archaeologists say ‘forgotten’ millet has a role to play in modern crop diversity and today’s food security debate.
The domestication of the small-seeded cereal millet in North China around 10,000 years ago created the perfect crop to bridge the gap between nomadic hunter-gathering and organised agriculture in Neolithic Eurasia, and may offer solutions to modern food security, according to new research.
Now a forgotten crop in the West, this hardy grain – familiar in the west today as birdseed – was ideal for ancient shepherds and herders, who carried it right across Eurasia, where it was mixed with crops such as wheat and barley. This gave rise to ‘multi-cropping’, which in turn sowed the seeds of complex urban societies, say archaeologists.
A team from the UK, USA and China has traced the spread of the domesticated grain from North China and Inner Mongolia into Europe through a “hilly corridor” along the foothills of Eurasia. Millet favours uphill locations, doesn’t require much water, and has a short growing season: it can be harvested 45 days after planting, compared with 100 days for rice, allowing a very mobile form of cultivation.
Nomadic tribes were able to combine growing crops of millet with hunting and foraging as they travelled across the continent between 2500 and 1600 BC. Millet was eventually mixed with other crops in emerging populations to create ‘multi-crop’ diversity, which extended growing seasons and provided our ancient ancestors with food security.
The need to manage different crops in different locations, and the water resources required, depended upon elaborate social contracts and the rise of more settled, stratified communities and eventually complex ‘urban’ human societies.
Researchers say we need to learn from the earliest farmers when thinking about feeding today’s populations, and millet may have a role to play in protecting against modern crop failure and famine.
Music: Kurt Elling — ‘Nature Boy’
Five things you need to know about the Paris climate deal
By Simon Lewis, UCL
The UN climate talks in Paris have ended with an agreement between 195 countries to tackle global warming. The climate deal is at once both historic, important – and inadequate. From whether it is enough to avoid dangerous climate change to unexpected wins for vulnerable nations, here are five things to help understand what was just agreed at COP21.
1. This is a momentous, world-changing event
The most striking thing about the agreement is that there is one. For all countries, from superpowers to wealthy city-states, fossil fuel-dependent kingdoms to vulnerable low-lying island nations, to all agree to globally coordinate action on climate change is astonishing.
And it is not just warm words. Any robust agreement has to have four elements. First, it needs a common goal, which has now been defined. The agreement states that the parties will hold temperatures to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”.
Second, it requires matching scientifically credible reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. The agreement is woollier here, but it does state that emissions should peak “as soon as possible” and then be rapidly reduced. The next step is to:
Achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century, on the basis of equity …
Third, as current pledges to reduce emissions imply a warming of nearly 3°C above pre-industrial levels, there needs to be a mechanism to move from where countries are today, to zero emissions. There are five-year reviews, and “the efforts of all parties will represent a progression over time”, which means at each step countries should increase their levels of emission cuts from today’s agreements.
Finally, this all means developed countries need to rapidly move from fossil fuel energy to renewable sources. But the challenge is larger for the developing world: these countries must leapfrog the fossil fuel age. They need funds to do so and a key part of the agreement provides US$100 billion per year to 2020, and more than that after 2020.
Paris emissions cuts aren’t enough – we’ll have to put carbon back in the ground
By Myles Allen, University of Oxford
I wonder how many of the delegates in Paris realise that they have just created the mother of all “take-back schemes”.
As a consumer, you may have already come across this sort of deal: if you don’t want to dispose of the packaging of your new sofa, you can take it back to IKEA and it’s their problem. In many places, you can even take back the sofa itself when your kids have wrecked it. For the Paris climate deal to succeed something similar will have to happen, where companies that rely on fossil fuels will be obliged to “take back” their emissions.
The agreement reaffirms a commitment to stabilising temperature rises well below 2℃, and even retains the option of limiting warming to 1.5℃ if possible. But it also confirms national targets that do little more than stabilise global emissions between now and 2030.
Given those emissions, sticking to within 2℃ will require us to take lots of carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in the ground. The parties to the agreement are, in effect, saying “we’re going to sell this stuff, and we’re going to dispose of it later”.
