January 2008
Monthly Archive
January 23, 2008
Political pressure from Sweden and the United States has gagged scientific warnings on the perils of oil drilling in the Arctic ocean.
A group of scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Arctic Research division, led by director John Calder, together with 150 scientists with the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) spent four years compiling a report entitled “Arctic Oil & Gas” in which they laid out the environmental risks unique to the region. From Spiegel Online:
Among other things, Calder’s report warns against the dangers posed by faulty pipes and tanker accidents. “Oil spills are especially dangerous in the Arctic, because its cold and heavily season-dependent ecosystems take a long time to recover. Besides, it is very difficult to remove the damage from oil spills in remote and cold regions, especially in parts of the ocean where there is ice.” Calder also criticizes the destruction of landscapes that comes with building pipelines and describes the way Arctic villages would change once the oil money upends all traditional social structures.
But despite these commendable warnings, there is a significant problem behind the work of Calder and other scientists: it has been devalued by political wrangling. Until recently, the summary ended with more than 60 recommendations the scientists had compiled for politicians. Those recommendations have since disappeared.
The modifications are the result of quarrels within the Arctic Council, which commissioned the AMAP study. Unanimity is required between the permanent members of the Council, which include the Scandinavian countries, Iceland, Canada, the United States and Russia — but Sweden and the US were opposed to the document. Sources at the Tromsø meeting said the Americans didn’t even want the term “climate change” to be used in the final report.
John Calder remains perplexed. His report, originally intended as a milestone in the development of the Arctic oil and gas industry, could end up being largely ignored because its most important section, the recommendations for action, is missing.
“Risks cannot be completely ruled out,” the authors write in the penultimate chapter of the AMAP report. It is statements like these that have prompted the environmental organization World Wildlife Fund, which presented its own report in Tromsø on the risks of oil accidents in Arctic environs, to call for an end to exploration for new oil and gas reserves in the Arctic.
“The Arctic has an almost unparalleled level of ecological sensitivity and one of the lowest levels of capacity in terms of cleaning up after an accident,” said James Leaton of WWF’s chapter in the United Kingdom.
January 23, 2008
Is this what Canadian soldiers are dying to save?
The Guardian reports that an Afghan journalist has been sentenced to death for insulting Allah:
“An Afghan journalist sentenced to death for distributing an article “violating Islam” is actually being punished for his brother’s writing detailing abuses by northern warlords, a media group claimed today.
Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, 23, was sentenced to death yesterday by a three-judge panel in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.
It was said he distributed a report he printed off the internet to fellow journalism students at Balkh University.
The judges said the article humiliated Islam, and members of a clerics’ council had pushed for Kambakhsh to be punished.”
But Jean MacKenzie, country director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which helps train Afghan journalists, said Kambakhsh is being punished for stories written for IWPR by his brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi.
“We feel very strongly that this is a complete fabrication on the part of the authorities up in Mazar, designed to put pressure on Parwez’s brother Yaqub, who has done some of the hardest-hitting pieces outlining abuses by some very powerful commanders in Balkh and the other northern provinces,” MacKenzie said.
“So we feel that what is happening with Parwez is not a very veiled threat against Yaqub Ibrahimi,” MacKenzie said.
Ibrahimi wrote stories for IWPR late last year quoting villagers accusing Afghan member of parliament Piram Qul of being behind murders and kidnappings.
Qul – a former commander in the militant and political group Jamiat-e-Islami and a current parliamentarian from Takhar province – denied the allegations.
Yeah, this sounds like a government worth saving, eh? We’re paying an open ended blood price for these goons. It’s about time our government took Karzai by the lapels and told him to damn well clean up that nest of vipers he calls a parliament.
January 23, 2008
Some Bush sympathizers still maintain that Shrub, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz and others were merely “mistaken” about the claims they made about Saddam Hussein and Iraq leading up to the invasion and afterward. Honest mistake = no war crime (supposedly). Others believe these con artists embarked on a deliberate scheme of deception and outright lies. Well, the verdit’s in and guess what? They lied – and they lied and lied and lied.
Now their lies have been logged, sorted, digested, analyzed and compiled into a neat, searchable database you can find at: http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/
IRAQ: The War Card presents 935 Weapons of Mass Deception spewed out for public consumption by the Bush regime in the two years following September 11, 2001. These are lies about the security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime.
“On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials [Cheney, Rusmfeld, Rice], along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war.
President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).
The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews.”
The War Card site features a free, 380,000-word searchable database. The following chart demonstrates how their campaign of lies peaked in the weeks prior to the invasion:
Take a look at the site. The conclusion is inescapable. There was nothing mistaken about the claims spun by the Bush gang to goad their congress and people into unprovoked, pre-emptive war on Iraq. Like other thug regimes before them, they just flat out lied to their own people and the world – and they did it with straight faces.
January 22, 2008
A cabal of retired top generals argue that the West must expressly reserve the right to pre-emptive nuclear attack to halt the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. From
The Guardian:The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the “imminent” spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new Nato by five of the west’s most senior military officers and strategists. Calling for root-and-branch reform of Nato and a new pact drawing the US, Nato and the European Union together in a “grand strategy” to tackle the challenges of an increasingly brutal world, the former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands insist that a “first strike” nuclear option remains an “indispensable instrument” since there is “simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world”.
This takes the doctrine of pre-emptive war well past its bounds. The doctrine permitted one nation to attack another about to launch an attack of its own. In other words, the nation about to be attacked was allowed to strike first.
What these generals are advocating has nothing to do with being attacked. The mere acquisition or attempt to acquire WMDs would be enough to justify nuclear pre-emption. What’s wrong with that? Plenty.
For starters, whose intelligence do we use in deciding who is and isn’t acquiring nuclear weapons? The Americans have the largest intelligence machine – a combined budget of $50-billion annually. It failed to detect the Pakistani or Indian nuclear weapons programmes. It completely botched Iraq but that wasn’t discovered in time to block the American invasion. It botched Iran until redeeming itself at the last minute. It botched Korea. No, we can’t trust the demonstrably incompetent US intelligence services or the ginned-up nonsense spewed from the White House. The same has to go for the sycophantic Pentagon. And the Brits haven’t been significantly better. For that matter, NATO has been a bust too.
Which politicians do we rely on in reaching these fundamental decisions? George Bush? Rudy Giuliani? No, I don’t think so. The American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation?
The simple fact is there’s no nation, no service and no leader in the West deserving to be entrusted with the decision for a nuclear first strike. That’s reason enough to scrub it right there. But there are other reasons, lots of them.
What of Israel? If the West was to attack a small country under this doctrine, would it not justify the same treatment of Israel and its nuclear arsenal? If the US was to say that Israel is exempt due to American protection, what would prevent other nuclear states from extending the very same protection to smaller nations of their choosing?
Then there’s the civilian question. Nations covertly seeking to develop WMDs will undoubtedly locate their installations in heavily populated areas. How many nations are prepared to countenance a pre-emptive nuclear attack on a civilian population? For the West it would tear alliances to shreds. For the rest of the world it would evolve alliances very hostile to the West.
This lunatic talk of nuclear pre-emption comes at a time of rising global, superpower instability. I know, I know we’re now in a unipolar world with but one superpower. That doesn’t mean there aren’t several newcomers moving up and there’s an arms race underway in almost every one of them.
Russia, China and India are all going full out to rearm their nations. Russia is developing a new generation of missiles and warheads designed to defeat America’s anti-ballistic missile defence systems. China is developing a blue water navy complete with missile subs and plans on extending its force into space. Even India is re-arming, greatly expanding its own naval and air forces.
The West’s economic and political hegemony faces new challenges from these emerging powers. How will they respond to a West that declares it has the right to a nuclear first-strike independent of the Security Council? I think it would give some of them even more reason to distrust the West at a time when we need their support and cooperation more than ever. The last thing we need to do is to lower the nuclear threshhold.
This policy will drive smaller nations to seek the protection of larger states. They know from recent example how the West can make “mistakes” even mistakes of convenience. I would think we would find a lot of smaller states searching for a benevolent big brother, one not of our choosing. Smaller states with the resources upon which the West is so dependent.
No, this policy is lunacy writ large and it could have repercussions, short and long-term that could make us rue the day we contemplated it. It’s time to put these old warhorses back in the stable and tell them to stay there.
Do we really want the world to return to a state of teetering on the brink of Mutually Assured Destruction?
January 22, 2008
It took a while but I got through the Manley report on Afghanistan. At first I was somewhat impressed. With a few glaring exceptions the Panel seems to have managed a fair grasp of the facts. Much of the stuff was obvious but it was assuring to see them acknowledge it.
It’s when the report got into the political questions that their views became hard to accept, at times hard even to believe. This is ultimately a political discussion and the report leaves a bottomless pit of wiggle room, more than enough to allow it to be exploited by all sides of the issue. The closer you get to the end of it the more it appears a colossal waste of time.
A Few Salient Points:
“Without systematic performance standards, accounts of security successes or failures are mainly anecdotal …the Afghan and ISAF governments need first to craft a much more coherent and unified security strategy, and then impose practical, verifiable criteria for gauging and analyzing the course of that strategy.”
“…the Panel observed harmful shortcomings in the NATO/ISAF counterinsurgency campaign. The most damaging shortfalls included an insufficiency of forces in the field, especially in high-risk zones in the South; a top-heavy command structure at ISAF headquarters in Kabul; an absence of a comprehensive strategy directing all ISAF forces in collaboration with the Afghan government; limitations placed by some NATO governments on their units, which effectively keep those units out of the conflict… …These and other deficiencies reflect serious failures of strategic direction, and persistent fragmentation in the efforts of ISAF and NATO governments and between them and the Afghan government.”
Okay, John, there are these several critical, potentially even fatal flaws in the way business is being handled in Afghanistan. Why then don’t you tell us what they mean for the Canadian mission and what we’re to do if they’re not set right? You’ve pointed out the obvious but dodged any mention of what Canada should do in response. That’s a huge failure.
The report envisions Canada aiding the Kabul government in formulating a basis for negotiations between the central authority and the “good” Taliban wishing to renounce violence. The Panel still wants Taliban leaders responsible for former atrocities prosecuted. Here they overlook the fact that some of the “Northern Alliance” warlords were hardly better and yet used their control of the parliament to pass an amnesty for themselves. I think one-sided justice is going to create a non-starter for negotiations with the Taliban.
The Manley Panel report also skips over the reaction that any power-sharing deal with the Taliban is likely to trigger in the Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara warlords in the north who’ve been spending the last couple of years rearming and reconstituting their militias in anticipation of just such an eventuality.
The Panel seems to gloss over the fractures that underlie the Kabul government. It is a coalition of the willing – for now. The lack of trust and unity contribute, perhaps more than anything else, to Karzai’s inability to purge his government of corruption and move on the opium bosses. Enormous pressures have been brought on Karzai by the Americans and ISAF but he’s been unable or unwilling to crack down.
In the event of an ethnic or tribal breakdown in the central government what would befall the Afghan National Army? Would it remain loyal to the remnants of a Kabul government or break up into its constituent tribal elements and head for home? In that event do we sit on the sidelines of a renewed civil war or do we just take on a brand new bunch of enemiese to combat?
Leaving aside all the unasked questions, the manner in which the Manley Panel construed Canada’s mission was, in my view, biased, distorted, perhaps even dishonest.
…the Panel could find no operational logic for choosing February, 2009 as the end date for Canada’s military operation in Kandahar – and nothing to establish February, 2009 as the date by which the mission would be completed.
Here the Manley bunch is being wilfully disingenuous. February, 2009 was chosen not on the basis of operational logic or on any fanciful notions that the mission would be completed by then. To suggest that is pure sophistry and undermines any trust that should be placed in Manley’s vision.
Parliament merely decided (following a farcical debate in which essential questions were never asked, much less answered) to carry ISAF’s load in Kandahar until that date. ISAF and NATO were never released from the obligation to find replacements for us after that although Manley suggests that the extension was some form of de facto undertaking to stay for however long it takes to “win” in Afghanistan.
Manley is implying a much greater commitment than was ever undertaken. Staying to the end was never discussed in the debates leading up to the 2009 extension. It was certainly never explained to the Canadian people. He’s pulling that straight out of his ass and he knows it. He also knows that, without this sort of chicanery, his arguments for remaining are seriously undermined. It is entirely reasonable in a conflict such as this to expect to be relieved after a period of service especially given that NATO is an alliance with a strength over over a million soldiers.
Manley’s recommendation that Canada’s military mission to Kandahar be “conditionally extended” beyond 2009 leaves the future of our effort to be determined, not by Canadians, but by Brussels. The Panel even presume to put a tidy price on it – another 1,000-strong battle group furnished by other NATO members. They’ve done all the math having no idea what may be coming from Pakistan or the Taliban or the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara warlords or the drug barons. It sounds positively sophomoric. 1,000 won’t do the job that we’re facing today. What assurances can Manley’s Panel give that the price he demands for indefinite Canadian commitment will have any relevance in a year from now much less two or three? The answer is none whatsoever.
“If no undertakings on the battle group are received from ISAF partner countries by February, 2009, or if the necessary equipment is not procured, the Government should give appropriate notice to the Afghan and allied governments of its intention to transfer responsibility for security in Kandahar.”
Gee, that’s cute. What sort of notice does Manley have in mind and to whom does he suggest we “transfer responsibility for security in Kandahar?” What a load of nonsense.
In my initial assessment of this report based on news accounts I gave it a D+/C-. Having read it myself, I’d drop that to a very solid F.
January 22, 2008
The men shown here are hunting for unexploded cluster bomblets from Israeli weapons fired into southern Lebanon. The UN reports they’re still finding an average of ten new sites every month. Israel, which left the Lebanese countryside littered with these weapons, won’t tell the UN where they are. From the UN Human Affairs Office news service, IRIN:
“Deminers clearing Israeli-dropped cluster bombs in south Lebanon are turning up an average of 10 new sites per month, while Israel continues to ignore requests for data that would assist clearing the estimated one million unexploded bomblets, which continue to kill and maim civilians and decimate rural livelihoods. A single cluster bomb can disperse hundreds of bomblets.
All these weapons systems are computerised and grid references are entered before the bombs drop. Not receiving the cluster bomb strike data from the Israelis remains our biggest obstacle to clearance,” Dalya Farran, a spokeswoman for the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre for South Lebanon (MACSL), told IRIN. The UN estimates that Israel rained down around four million bomblets – most US-supplied – onto south Lebanon in the last three days of its 2006 July war with Hezbollah fighters, when a ceasefire had already been agreed.
Cluster bombs, or sub-munitions, are legal, and manufacturers say their failure rates should be between 10-15 percent. The UN estimates in general the weapons fail between 20-30 percent of the time. In south Lebanon MACSL estimates between 30-40 percent of the bombs dropped failed to explode, rising up to 80 percent in some places.
The high failure rate may partly be explained by Israel’s use of Vietnam-war era munitions, such as the M42, M77 and Blue 63, all US or Israeli-made and the MZD2, made in China, many of which MACSL said had gone beyond their expiry date by the time they were dropped on Lebanon.
The Israelis also dropped the new M85 cluster bomb that is designed to self destruct if it fails to explode on impact and which manufacturers say has a 1 percent failure rate. MACSL’s Dalya Farran said they estimate the bomb, used for the first time on battlefields in Lebanon, had a 10 percent failure rate.”
Refusing to assist in clearing these weapons or at least disclosing where they can be found is state terrorism, plain and simple. These weapons are serving no military purpose unless the Israeli government and its military see some benefit in killing and maiming Lebanese civilians.
January 22, 2008
A few days back I wrote that if the Manley report didn’t address the lack of troops in Kandahar, it would be rubbish.
Surprise, surprise. The report does focus on the force level issue and says that, if NATO doesn’t put up an extra 1,000 soldiers to aid the Canadian contingent, we ought to say sayonara and leave.
What’s unclear is whether Manley is talking about an extra 1,000 combat troops. That would actually double the existing Canadian fighting force. It would also require an additional contingent of support personnel.
The report also is understood to focus on the need for medium-lift helicopters. Those are already on order but aren’t expected to begin arriving until 2011.
So, what would an extra 1,000 troops do in a province that’s 54,000 sq. kms. in area with a population just shy of 900,000? The sad truth is, not much. That would be one combat soldier or counterinsurgent for every 450-civilians, not the 1:25 ratio formulated by Petraeus in the new US counterinsurgency field manual. Together with new helicopters it would permit us to establish a respectable fast reaction force but it wouldn’t be enough to maintain permanent security in the villages throughout the countryside. Even with the additional forces we’ll still be a garrison force with a few firebases or outposts.
Then there are all the “what ifs” in these recommendations. What if Brussels, already on notice that the Dutch are leaving in 2010, can’t come up with the reinforcements the Manley report identifies as essential? What if we don’t come up with the medium-lift helicopters? What if NATO does deliver the reinforcements but they come with the “caveats” so many nations impose that render them essentially useless?
Overall, I give the report a D+/C-. It’s not as bad as I was expecting but its recommendations are still pretty lame and much too narrowly focused to be helpful. It treats Canada and Kandahar as somehow autonomous, a war within a war, not as an integral component of a larger ISAF and US operation. Perhaps this “heads down” approach was necessary to avoid having to weigh the Canadian mission in the failing context of the larger operation. Yet does anyone think we can really sort out our problems in Kandahar immune to the troubles that beset the rest of southern Afghanistan, that lurk across the border in Pakistan’s Tribal Lands and that are smouldering in the warlords’ dens in northern Afghanistan?
Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die.
January 21, 2008
Is it just me or does anyone else see anything a bit contradictory, even offensive, in this?
It’s Martin Luther King day in the US. Yeah! In Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas, however, it’s also Robert E. Lee day. Yeah? Huh?
King’s birthday was January 15, Lee’s fell on January 19. In Arkansas state employees were given the choice of holiday – Lee’s birthday, King’s birthday or, the ever popular, their own birthday. Finally it was decided to toss King in with Lee and celebrate them both on January 19.
January 20, 2008
It’s taken a century and a half of intensive poaching, but the days of the Big Tusker seem to be at an end.
The world’s elephant population has evolved much smaller tusks, half as small as the norm just 150-years ago. The phenomenon has been recorded among both African and Indian elephants. From Environmental News Network:
“Experts believe the rapid evolution of the massive land mammals is due to poaching. Zoologists from Oxford University suggest that ivory poachers, who go for the largest males with the largest tusks, have caused the breeding behaviors of the animals to change rapidly in a short time.
“The largest male African elephants have the largest tusks. These tusks are extremely important in elephant behavior, with the largest tusks usually resulting in more successful intimidation of smaller males or winning fights for female elephants. But when the largest animals are killed, it changes the breeding patterns of the animals. In short, without the largest males for competition, the smaller males with their smaller tusks will breed more successfully, and their offspring will have smaller tusks.”
January 20, 2008
Canada’s federal bootlickers, the SHarper government, are falling all over themselves to avoid their pals being called what they are, torturers. From
CanWest:
ForeignAffairs Minister Maxime Bernier lashed out Saturday at a controversial document identifying the U.S. and Israel as countries it suspects of practising torture, calling it “wrong” and demanding it be rewritten.
“I regret the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual used in the department’s torture awareness training,” said Bernier in a statement.
“It contains a list that wrongly includes some of our closest allies. I have directed that the manual be reviewed and rewritten,” said Bernier.
After making this pronouncement, Maxie swung deftly back to his perch and whiled away the rest of the afternoon tossing his own waste at passing children.
America doesn’t torture? Israel doesn’t torture?
Let’s begin with Israel and this BBC report from February, 2000:
“An official Israeli report has acknowledged for the first time that the Israeli security service tortured detainees during the Palestinian uprising, the Intifada, between 1988 and 1992.
The report, written five years ago but kept secret until now, said the leadership of the security service Shin Bet knew about the torture but did nothing to stop it.
The report did not detail the torture methods used, but human rights organisations say some detainees died or were left paralysed.”
“Most of the violations were not caused by lack of knowledge of the line between what was permitted and what was forbidden, but were committed knowingly,” the report said.
“At the Gaza facility, veteran and even senior investigators committed very grave and systematic violations.”
So, Maxi-pad, that ought to whet your intellectual appetite on the subject of Israel and torture, if you had the slightest interest in anything beyond whitewashing your government’s buddies.
As for the United States? Well we know at least the tip of the iceberg on the waterboarding business. That, Maxi, is also torture – plain and simple just the way you like it. Even former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge has just condemned waterboarding as torture because, well because it is dimmo.
Then there’s that special rendition business – kidnapping folks and flying them off to sunny destinations where, for a few bags of cash, you can hire people to do your torturing for you. Hey Maxi, remember that guy, Maher Arar? He got done up pretty good, didn’t he? We paid him ten million bucks. Why was that again? Oh yeah, I remember now – we paid him because he spent a year in captivity as America’s guest being tortured.
There’s something really creepy about people like the Harpies who choose to erase the historical record to whitewash the evils of their friends. At the end of the day, they all wind up with the same stench.
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