Why Republicans keep telling everyone they’re not scientists

The New York Times reports: Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, a Republican who is fighting a Democratic challenge from former Gov. Charlie Crist, was asked by The Miami Herald if he believes climate change is significantly affecting the weather. “Well, I’m not a scientist,” he said.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who is locked in a tight re-election race, was asked this month by The Cincinnati Enquirer if he believes that climate change is a problem. “I’m not a scientist,” he said.

House Speaker John A. Boehner, when asked by reporters if climate change will play a role in the Republican agenda, came up with a now-familiar formulation. “I’m not qualified to debate the science over climate change,” he said.

“I’m not a scientist,” or a close variation, has become the go-to talking point for Republicans questioned about climate change in the 2014 campaigns. In the past, many Republican candidates questioned or denied the science of climate change, but polls show that a majority of Americans accept it — and support government policies to mitigate it — making the Republican position increasingly challenging ahead of the 2016 presidential elections.

“It’s got to be the dumbest answer I’ve ever heard,” said Michael McKenna, a Republican energy lobbyist who has advised House Republicans and conservative political advocacy groups on energy and climate change messaging. “Using that logic would disqualify politicians from voting on anything. Most politicians aren’t scientists, but they vote on science policy. They have opinions on Ebola, but they’re not epidemiologists. They shape highway and infrastructure laws, but they’re not engineers.” [Continue reading…]

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White House-Pentagon friction reveals weakness of coalition against ISIS

Mark Perry writes: When U.S. President Barack Obama appointed retired Marine Gen. John Allen to serve as his special envoy to the global coalition against the Islamic State, the news was greeted with applause from the jihadi group’s greatest enemies. Kurdish and Iraqi Sunni leaders welcomed the appointment, with good reason — these same leaders had requested that Allen, widely known as one of Obama’s favorite generals, be appointed to the position.

But not everyone was pleased, especially at the Pentagon, where top generals had deep misgivings over how Obama had chosen to manage the campaign against the Islamic State.

Among the dissenters was the head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Lloyd Austin, who took a dim view of Allen’s role. Austin complained to aides that Allen would report directly to the president — bypassing both himself and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Austin believed that Allen’s appointment would lead to confusion about who was really leading the effort, a senior U.S. officer who serves with Austin told me several days after the appointment. “Why the hell do we need a special envoy — isn’t that what [Secretary of State] John Kerry’s for?” this senior officer asked.

Austin’s private doubts echoed the deep skepticism among a host of serving and retired officers who served in the region, this same senior officer said. [Continue reading…]

The Daily Beast reports: Top military leaders in the Pentagon and in the field are growing increasingly frustrated by the tight constraints the White House has placed on the plans to fight ISIS and train a new Syrian rebel army.

As the American-led battle against ISIS stretches into its fourth month, the generals and Pentagon officials leading the air campaign and preparing to train Syrian rebels are working under strict White House orders to keep the war contained within policy limits. The National Security Council has given precise instructions on which rebels can be engaged, who can be trained, and what exactly those fighters will do when they return to Syria. Most of the rebels to be trained by the U.S. will never be sent to fight against ISIS.

Making matters worse, military officers and civilian Pentagon leaders tell The Daily Beast, is the ISIS war’s decision-making process, run by National Security Adviser Susan Rice. It’s been manic and obsessed with the tiniest of details. Officials talk of sudden and frequent meetings of the National Security Council and the so-called Principals Committee of top defense, intelligence, and foreign policy officials (an NSC and three PCs in one week this month); a barrage of questions from the NSC to the agencies that create mountains of paperwork for overworked staffers; and NSC insistence on deciding minor issues even at the operational level.

“We are getting a lot of micromanagement from the White House. Basic decisions that should take hours are taking days sometimes,” one senior defense official told The Daily Beast.

Other gripes among the top Pentagon and military brass are about the White House’s decision not to work with what’s left of the existing Syrian moderate opposition on the ground, which prevents intelligence sharing on fighting ISIS and prevents the military from using trained fighters to build the new rebel army that President Obama has said is needed to push Syrian President Bashar al-Assad into a political negotiation to end the conflict. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq says 322 tribe members killed, many bodies dumped in well

Reuters reports: Islamic State militants have killed 322 members of an Iraqi tribe in western Anbar province, including dozens of women and children whose bodies were dumped in a well, the government said in the first official confirmation of the scale of the massacre.

The systematic killings, which one tribal leader said were continuing on Sunday, marked some of the worst bloodshed in Iraq since the Sunni militants swept through the north in June with the aim of establishing medieval caliphate there and in Syria.

The Albu Nimr, also Sunni, had put up fierce resistance against Islamic State for weeks but finally ran low on ammunition, food and fuel last week as Islamic State fighters closed in on their village Zauiyat Albu Nimr.

“The number of people killed by Islamic State from Albu Nimr tribe is 322. The bodies of 50 women and children have also been discovered dumped in a well,” the country’s Human Rights Ministry said on Sunday. [Continue reading…]

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The first shrine of its kind in Iraq is destroyed by ISIS

Sam Hardy reports: Nearly a thousand years old — the “first of its kind in Iraq,” according to Archnet, and one of the last six standing, according to Iraq Heritage — the distinctive muqarnas-domed mausoleum is now a statistic. The tomb of Shia ‘Uqaylid amir Sharaf ad-Dawla Muslim is one of a number of sites that have been destroyed recently. Preceded by the Shrine of Arbaeen Wali (for 40 martyrs in the Islamic conquest of Tikrit) and the Syrian Orthodox “Green Church” of Mar Ahudama in late September, followed by the Yezidi Shrine of Memê Reşan (Meme Reshan) in late October, the Mausoleum of Imam al-Daur was destroyed by the Islamic State on October 23.

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Hustlers, con men & dupes cashing in on the war on terror

Jeff Stein writes: At long last we can retire Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as the icons of investigative reporting. With his second book probing the dark tunnels of the so-called war on terror, James Risen has established himself as the finest national security reporter of this generation, a field crowded with first-rank talent at The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, Reuters, McClatchy Newspapers and the New York Times, his employer and sometimes bane.

Bane, because in 2004, the executive editor of the Times, cowed by Bush administration officials, twice spiked Risen’s story revealing that the National Security Agency had launched a massive, covert wiretapping program that was riffling through the personal communications of hundreds of millions of Americans without even a secret court order. Unbowed, Risen got a contract for a book that would reveal the NSA’s extralegal program. Only when the publication of State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration appeared imminent did his editors, cornered, allow Risen to publish a version of it (co-authored with his colleague Eric Lichtblau) in the paper. And that disturbing saga provides the backdrop to Risen’s new book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War.

After turning the last page of his latest volume, one might wonder what other important stories the Times has spiked in recent years. Although parts of Risen’s new revelations have been published in the Times or elsewhere, here they are fleshed out in richly reported chapters studded with eye-popping new charges. Read together, they offer an original and deeply disturbing perspective on the war on terror. It is, Risen writes, a story of “how greed and the hunt for cash have all too often become the main objects of the war on terror.”

In fine detail, he demonstrates how the courts, Congress and the national security and law enforcement agencies of the executive branches – aided and abetted by the high priests of the media – have been corrupted in the hugely profitable business of pursuing terrorists. “[T]he search for money and power have become the hallmarks of the war on terror,” Risen writes of one of the many unsavory episodes in the book. “The story,” he says of another episode, “shows how, during the war on terror, greed and ambition have been married to unlimited rivers of cash in the sudden deregulation of American national security to create a climate in which clever men could seemingly create rogue intelligence operations with little or no adult supervision.”

The U.S.-led war in Iraq, as we already know, was rife with lax supervision and thievery. But Risen adds an astonishing new chapter to that reprehensible folly. He tells the story of how billions of dollars intended to rebuild Iraq, shrink-wrapped in packets of $100 bills, were shipped out of a Federal Reserve warehouse in New Jersey to Baghdad and eventually made their way to secret Lebanese bunkers (an account excerpted by the Times last week).

“Approximately $2 billion of the money that was flown from the United States to Baghdad” to prop up the Iraqi government after Saddam Hussein was toppled, “was stolen and secretly transported out of Iraq in what may be one of the largest robberies in modern history,” he writes. “…In addition to cash, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold was stolen from the Iraqi government and is also being hidden in Lebanon, current and former U.S. officials have said.”

One might assume that U.S. officials would be deeply interested in finding out what happened to that money, not to mention eager to get it back. But, no. [Continue reading…]

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Amazon rainforest losing ability to regulate climate, scientist warns

The Guardian reports: The Amazon rainforest has degraded to the point where it is losing its ability to benignly regulate weather systems, according to a stark new warning from one of Brazil’s leading scientists.

In a new report, Antonio Nobre, researcher in the government’s space institute, Earth System Science Centre, says the logging and burning of the world’s greatest forest might be connected to worsening droughts – such as the one currently plaguing São Paulo – and is likely to lead eventually to more extreme weather events.

The study, which is a summary drawing from more than 200 existing papers on Amazonian climate and forest science, is intended as a wake-up call.

“I realised the problem is much more serious than we realised, even in academia and the reason is that science has become so fragmented. Atmospheric scientists don’t look at forests as much as they should and vice versa,” said Nobre, who wrote the report for a lay audience. “It’s not written in academic language. I don’t need to preach to the converted. Our community is already very alarmed at what is going on.”

A draft seen by the Guardian warns that the “vegetation-climate equilibrium is teetering on the brink of the abyss.” If it tips, the Amazon will start to become a much drier savanna, which calamitous consequences. [Continue reading…]

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Evidence of Assad’s use of mass murder provokes outrage but nothing more from the U.S.

The New York Times reports: Wearing a blue hood to shield his identity, a former Syrian police photographer briefed a congressional committee over the summer on the photos he had smuggled out of the country to document the deaths of thousands of prisoners killed in President Bashar al-Assad’s jails. At a White House meeting, President Obama’s senior aides welcomed him as a man of uncommon courage who had revealed unspeakable atrocities.

But now the Syrian government’s most celebrated defector, who uses the pseudonym Caesar, is no longer optimistic that the United States has the will to stop the abuses that have shocked the conscience of the world.

His photographs have generated outrage but no fresh action against the Assad government. And instead of intervening militarily to support opponents of Mr. Assad, Mr. Obama is mounting airstrikes to defend Kurds, Yazidis and Turkmen in Syria and Iraq from the Islamic State.

“I completely understand how he came to the defense of two American victims killed by the extremist ISIS terror group,” Caesar said in a message earlier this month from an undisclosed location in Europe that was conveyed by the Coalition for Democratic Syria, a Syrian-American organization that sponsored his trip to Washington. “But I and millions of Syrians feel depressed when we see that the killer of thousands of prisoners is left unchecked,” he added. “I believe my cause demands action and a clear position by the president of the United States.”

Caesar’s complaint reflects a broader discontent within the moderate Syrian opposition that is posing a new challenge for the Obama administration’s strategy to counter the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL. While ruling out United States military intervention against Mr. Assad, the administration has committed to training thousands of opposition fighters in Saudi Arabia and Turkey so they can eventually defend territory in Syria that is wrested from the Islamic State’s control. But those fighters must come from the same constituency that has been increasingly troubled by the American reluctance to act more forcefully against Mr. Assad.

“There is a sense that there is discrimination against them, that the atrocities they are suffering at the hands of Assad are somehow less deserving than what is befalling other communities,” said Emile Hokayem, an expert on Middle East affairs at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “For most of these rebels, Assad is the greatest evil, not ISIL. For the U.S., it is the opposite,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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The U.S. can’t effectively promote democracy abroad unless it works better at home

Larry Diamond writes: In the global democracy promotion community, few actors are paying attention to the growing signs of fragility in the more liberal developing democracies, not to mention the more illiberal ones.

Broadly, we know why democracy and freedom are slipping back. What Francis Fukuyama calls “neo-patrimonial” tendencies are resurgent. Leaders who think they can get away with it are eroding democratic checks and balances, hollowing out accountability institutions, overriding term limits and normative restraints, and accumulating power and wealth for themselves and their families, cronies, clients, and parties.

Space for opposition parties, civil society, and the media is shrinking, and international support for them is drying up. Ethnic, religious, and other identity cleavages polarize many societies that lack well-designed democratic institutions to manage those cleavages. State structures are too often weak and porous, unable to secure order, protect rights, meet the most basic social needs, or rise above corrupt, clientelistic, and predatory impulses. Democratic institutions — parties and parliaments — are often poorly developed, and the bureaucracy lacks the policy expertise, and even more so the independence, neutrality, and authority, to effectively manage the economy. So weak economic performance, and certainly rising inequality, is added to the mix.

It isn’t easy to develop democracy in poor countries and weak states. And there is a significant failure rate even in middle-income countries. But if we don’t become more focused, more creative, more determined, more resourceful, and less apologetic in promoting democracy, the democratic recession is going to mutate into a wave of democratic regression, a bleak period for freedom, political stability, and the American national interest.

So what is to be done?

We need to begin by disaggregating the problem. Let’s start at the top of the hierarchy of democratic development and work down. I used to add at the end of this kind of lecture a reflective caveat,

“Physician, heal thyself.” In other words, we can’t be credible and effective in promoting democracy abroad if we don’t reform and improve its functioning at home. That was usually the last imperative I mentioned. Now it needs to be the first.

Like many of you who travel widely, I am increasingly alarmed by how pervasive and corrosive is the worldwide perception — in both autocracies and democracies — that American democracy has become dysfunctional and is no longer a model worth emulating. Fortunately, there are many possible models, and most American political scientists never recommended that emerging democracies copy our own excessively veto-ridden institutions. Nevertheless the prestige, the desirability, and the momentum of democracy globally are heavily influenced by perceptions of how it is performing in its leading examples. If we do not mobilize institutional reforms and operational innovations to reduce partisan polarization, encourage moderation and compromise, energize executive functioning, and reduce the outsized influence of money and special interests in our own politics, how are we going to be effective in tackling these kinds of challenges abroad? [Continue reading…]

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Afghanistan’s opium industry now employs more people than its military

Business Insider: Afghanistan’s opium economy provides more employment — “up to 411,000 full-time-equivalent jobs” — than even the country’s armed forces, according to a quarterly report released today by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

The country’s poppy cultivation is at an all-time high, covering more than 200,000 hectares, another SIGAR report found earlier this month.

Opium and its derivatives are the country’s largest export, worth $3 billion in 2013, an increase from $2 billion in the year before.

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The FBI’s secret House meeting to get access to your iPhone

National Journal reports: The Obama administration is ramping up its campaign to force technology companies to help the government spy on their users.

FBI and Justice Department officials met with House staffers this week for a classified briefing on how encryption is hurting police investigations, according to staffers familiar with the meeting.

The briefing included Democratic and Republican aides for the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, the staffers said. The meeting was held in a classified room, and aides are forbidden from revealing what was discussed.

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Sunni tribal leaders’ pleas for help were ignored by Iraqi govt. before massacre by ISIS

Reuters reports: Iraqi tribal leader Sheikh Naeem al-Ga’oud and his men once helped U.S. Marines drive al Qaeda out of their Anbar Province stronghold. He doesn’t even put up a brave face when it comes to his current enemy the militants of Islamic State.

This week the al Qaeda offshoot massacred more than 200 members of his Albu Nimr tribe in retaliation for months of resistance.

Ga’oud says he has good reason to fear many more will be rounded up, shot at close range and dumped in mass graves, with little chance that the Iraqi government or United States will come to the rescue of his tribe or any other any time soon.

“A day before the attack we told them (the government) that we will be targeted by the Islamic State. I talked to the commander of the air force, with several commanders,” he told Reuters in an interview.

“We gave them the coordinates of the places where they were, but nobody listened to us,” he said. Asked why he believed the government had not helped, he nearly cried and said: “I don’t know.”

Islamic State fighters have made a practice of executing Shi’ite prisoners when they seize a town, but the shooting of members of the Albu Nimr tribe in the city of Hit on Wednesday appears to be their worst mass killing yet of fellow Sunnis. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq Peshmerga fighters arrive in Kobane

BBC News reports: Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters have crossed the Turkish border to help defend the Syrian town of Kobane from Islamic State.

Sources inside the town told BBC Arabic the unit was heading to the frontline about 4km west of Kobane.

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Western fascination with ‘badass’ Kurdish women

Dilar Dirik writes: A young Kurdish woman called “Rehana” has garnered a great deal of media attention over the past few days, after reports emerged claiming that she had killed more than a hundred ISIL fighters – single-handedly. A picture of the smiling beauty, wearing combat gear and toting a rifle, is still making the rounds of social media. Even as Rehana’s circumstances remain uncorroborated, the overabundance of attention she has received raises several important questions. It adds to the plethora of reports out there glamorising the all-female Kurdish battalions taking on ISIL fighters, with little attention to the politics of these brave women.

Preoccupied with attempts to sensationalise the ways in which these women defy preconceived notions of eastern women as oppressed victims, these mainstream caricaturisations erroneously present Kurdish women fighters as a novel phenomenon. They cheapen a legitimate struggle by projecting their bizarre orientalist fantasies on it – and oversimplify the reasons motivating Kurdish women to join the fight. Nowadays, it seems to be appealing to portray women as sympathetic enemies of ISIL without raising questions about their ideologies and political aims.

At the same time, critics have accused the Kurdish leadership of exploiting these women for PR purposes – in an attempt to win over western public opinion. While there may be an element of truth to such charges in some cases, those same critics fail to appreciate the different political cultures that exist among the Kurdish people as a whole, scattered across Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. They also ignore the fact that Kurdish women have been engaging in armed resistance for decades without anyone’s notice. [Continue reading…]

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Airstrikes against ISIS do not seem to have affected flow of fighters to Syria

The Washington Post reports: More than 1,000 foreign fighters are streaming into Syria each month, a rate that has so far been unchanged by airstrikes against the Islamic State and efforts by other countries to stem the flow of departures, according to U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials.

The magnitude of the ongoing migration suggests that the U.S.-led air campaign has neither deterred significant numbers of militants from traveling to the region nor triggered such outrage that even more are flocking to the fight because of American intervention.

“The flow of fighters making their way to Syria remains constant, so the overall number continues to rise,” a U.S. intelligence official said. U.S. officials cautioned, however, that there is a lag in the intelligence being examined by the CIA and other spy agencies, meaning it could be weeks before a change becomes apparent.

The trend line established over the past year would mean that the total number of foreign fighters in Syria exceeds 16,000, and the pace eclipses that of any comparable conflict in recent decades, including the 1980s war in Afghanistan. [Continue reading…]

No one needs to be a foreign policy sage to understand that as much as anything else, ISIS is a product of the war in Iraq. But this observation barely qualifies as analysis — it’s more of a harumph; a way of bemoaning another of the consequences of a catastrophic military misadventure. Least of all should it be taken as a prescription for courses of action to be taken or avoided.

To say, for instance, that ISIS is a product of war and therefore more war will have the same effect is to treat war as having a homogeneous nature which in truth it lacks.

As is oft repeated: war is the continuation of politics by other means. But ISIS repeatedly makes it clear how it insists on practicing politics — submit to its rule or face death. It is ISIS which precludes non-military alternatives.

There really shouldn’t be much debate about whether ISIS needs to be fought. The real questions are about who fights, what are realistic goals, and what is the strategic context?

But the fight against ISIS should be a catalyst for and not a distraction from consideration of the region’s deeper ailments only some of which can be attributed to interference by external powers and the injurious effect of Zionism.

Either this continues to be a region that perceives itself through its own divisions or it engages in the long struggle of finding a common purpose. Hopefully that struggle does not have to postponed until after the death of every current national leader.

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Foreign jihadists flocking to Iraq and Syria on ‘unprecedented scale’ says U.N. report

The Guardian reports: The United Nations has warned that foreign jihadists are swarming into the twin conflicts in Iraq and Syria on “an unprecedented scale” and from countries that had not previously contributed combatants to global terrorism.

A report by the UN security council, obtained by the Guardian, finds that 15,000 people have travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside the Islamic State (Isis) and similar extremist groups. They come from more than 80 countries, the report states, “including a tail of countries that have not previously faced challenges relating to al-Qaida”.

The UN said it was uncertain whether al-Qaida would benefit from the surge. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaida who booted Isis out of his organisation, “appears to be maneuvering for relevance”, the report says.

The UN’s numbers bolster recent estimates from US intelligence about the scope of the foreign fighter problem, which the UN report finds to have spread despite the Obama administration’s aggressive counter-terrorism strikes and global surveillance dragnets. [Continue reading…]

Before anyone jumps to the conclusion that this surge in jihadists is the result of Obama’s newly-declared war on ISIS, it should be noted that this influx of foreign fighters has occurred post-2010, the magnet being the war in Syria. Those who argue that fighting against ISIS promotes its growth are in denial about the fact that ignoring ISIS has allowed it to grow even faster.

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