Month: May 2011

Cutting Off The Crackdown

The NYT raises an alarm:

A military crackdown on Syria’s seven-week uprising escalated Sunday, with reinforcements sent to two cities, more forces deployed in a southern town and nearly all communications severed to besieged locales, activists and human rights groups said. Fourteen people were killed in the city of Homs, they said, and hundreds were arrested. The breadth of the assault — from the Mediterranean coast to the poor steppe of southern Syria — seemed to represent an important turn in an uprising that has posed the gravest challenge to the 11-year-long rule of President Bashar al-Assad.

And he seems to be getting help from Iran:

[I]n past days, those activists have complained that they have been almost entirely unable to speak with people in Homs and Baniyas, the most besieged places. Even satellite phones that protest organizers had smuggled across Syria were not working. … The reasons for the newfound ability to sever communications were unclear, but Obama administration officials have said Iran, which faced a similar uprising in 2009, has provided the Syrian government, a longtime ally, with coercive supplies like tear gas, along with communications equipment that might help interrupt activists’ phones.

Enduring America's early morning view:

And so a new phase in the conflict in Syria, as the military moved its occupation from Daraa in the south to the nearby town of Tafas, the coastal city of Baniyas, and Homs, the country's third-largest city with more than one million people. Activists indicate at least a dozen residents died in Homs on Friday, and there were reports yesterday that a 12-year-old was killed as the military moved in early on Sunday morning.

State TV continues to rationalise the military action with its own claims of violence, reporting that an armed gang shot dead 10 workers on their way back from Lebanon in an ambush near Homs.

Claimed video [above] of a demonstration in Baniyas at the funeral of a protester: "We sacrifice our blood and soul for martyrs / We sacrifice our blood and soul for Baniyas / There is no God but Allah, and martyrs are blessed by Allah / God is great, God is great".

Check AJE's live-blog for the latest.

Cheney Returns

It's maddening to me – but entirely predictable – that Obama's successful coup in finding and killing Osama bin Laden should be turned by the GOP into a defense of torture. It is almost as if they cannot explain how on their watch, when torture was widespread in every branch of the services and authorized by the White House, they were unable to get bin Laden, indeed unable to make any serious progress either in the terror war, where they let Osama get away in Tora Bora, or in the democratization of the Middle East.

There is Torture7 being tortured, thereby leaving open the question of whether the shred of information he provided could have been gotten by non-barbaric methods; and two denied any knowledge of the courier under the torture technique called "waterboarding." So in order to defend torture, Cheney has to say that it's a success when the tortured tell lies. Heads he wins, tails we lose. Moreover, in the last two years or so, torture has been forbidden – although its legacy remains with war criminals protected by the US government, in violation of Geneva – and it was after those two years of a return to decency that bin Laden was found and killed. As for the Bush administration's over-arching goal – democratization of the Middle East – it was only under Obama that we got the Green Revolution in Iran, the successful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, and the power-struggles now happening in Syria and Libya.

When these Bush administration fanatics are presented with clear evidence that Obama has been far more successful against terror and its causes than they ever were, they return to their precious, their torture program, and claim ludicrously that, without it, bin Laden would not have been captured. Rumsfeld joined in the chorus of mass distraction this weekend on the same basis. All this really tells you is that these people realize that if their torture regime is definitively found to have been counter-productive in their lifetimes, if bin Laden was caught two years after the torture program was ended and with no evidence it helped, then their barbaric policy will be exposed once again as unnecessary, un-American, unproductive, and a violation of core human values.

Cheney calls investigations into war crimes that went beyond the authorized torture techniques "an outrage." Well, he would, wouldn't he? He knows where the war crimes trail ends up – in his office. And he knows where he should be if we were governed by the rule of law: in jail. The real outrage is that he is still walking free – and doing all he can to entrench torture in the American way of war.

(Photograph: the corpse of a detainee at Abu Ghraib who died under Bush-authorized torture techniques.)

The US: A Torture State

Under the Convention Against Torture, member states can refuse to extradite citizens to another country where they might be subject to torture. A Canadian court has just denied extradition of an al Qaeda suspect to the US on exactly those grounds. We are no longer trustworthy when it comes to prisoner treatment:

The Ontario Court of Appeal has upheld a decision to halt extradition proceedings for an alleged Al-Qaeda arms supplier, citing the extent of US human rights abuses tied to his capture in Pakistan. A 3-0 ruling by the court ruled that a Toronto judge was justified in releasing Abdullah Khadr, the older brother of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp's youngest detainee Omar Khadr. Both are Canadian. Khadr's lawyer Dennis Edney hailed what he called a "victory for the rule of law." "Evidence should be (obtained while respecting) human rights, and it was not," he told AFP.

We Are Only As Good As Our Tools

Last week the NYT praised supercomputers. Marcelo Gleiser expands on the piece:

As I tell my students, most of the easy problems (those that can be solved analytically) have been dealt with. Now, we must move on to the tough, nonlinear domain. Among the many open problems in many fields, here are three: the climate, the emergence of mind, and the origin of life. Not too shabby. None will be thoroughly understood without computers or, as scientist Katy Börner of Indiana University calls them, our "macroscopes."

“Like A Goose Being Prepped For Foie Gras”

Roger Ebert generously shares what it's like to be fed through a stomach tube:

I feel the that the less mystery we make about life and illness, the better. When people know what's going on with me, they're not nearly as freaked out as you might imagine. My body may be ready for the Texas Chainsaw Museum, but I'm here, and it's a beautiful day, and my numbers are just great.

Mental Health Break

Terje Sorgjerd writes of his experience:

I had the pleasure of visiting El Teide. Spain's highest mountain @(3718m) is one of the best places in the world to photograph the stars and is also the location of Teide Observatories, considered to be one of the world's best observatories. The goal was to capture the beautiful Milky Way galaxy along with one of the most amazing mountains I know.

The Psychology Of Terror

Kris Broughton reconsiders it using stats from Brian Michael Jenkins' book Unconquerable Nation:

Psychologists have learned that we rank fatal events by roughly squaring the death toll per event. An automobile accident with one fatality is seen as one fatality. One hundred accidents with one fatality apiece are still seen as 100 deaths. But a single event with ten fatalities has the same psychological impact as 100 individual fatalities, and an event with 100 deaths has the impact of 10,000 deaths.

This is why we pay more attention to increasingly rare airline crashes, which usually involve many fatalities, than we do to the much larger national death toll from automobile accidents. The terrorist attack on 9/11, with nearly 3,000 dead, had the psychological impact of millions dying.