Bush Listened, but Did He Hear?
By Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post
Friday, December 8, 2006; A39
I've been in this business long enough to recognize journalism when I see it. The first tip-off was the way the canny old pros in the Iraq Study Group (not one of whom I'd play poker with for money) studded their report's brief executive summary with explosive phrases -- a "grave and deteriorating" situation, a looming "humanitarian catastrophe," withdrawal of combat troops by "the first quarter of 2008." As an old editor once told me, hit the readers hard at the top of the story before they yawn and turn the page.
It turns out that James Baker, Lee Hamilton and the other members of the group didn't have to worry about holding readers' attention. The 96-page main report -- an attempt to find a way for George W. Bush to get us out of his Iraq debacle without provoking World War III -- is full of solid reporting and analysis, with surprises along the way that make your jaw drop.
There's only one reader who really counts, though, and I doubt he'll be impressed. The Decider isn't in the habit of letting mere facts get in the way of blind conviction.
At least the five senior Republicans and five senior Democrats who made up the panel have put down a marker. Facts do count, they remind us, and the possibility that the Iraq misadventure will spark a wider regional war is enough to powerfully concentrate the mind.
"I've been on a lot of presidential commissions in my life, going back to 1965. This was the toughest, but also the one where there was more cooperation and common purpose," Vernon Jordan told me by phone Wednesday as he sat down to dinner, the first meal he'd had time for on a day that began at 7 a.m. with a White House meeting with the president.
"This was the only commission I've seen where there was no argument, no falling out, nobody storming out of the room," Jordan said.
Roughly the first half of the report is pure journalism, an example of what old foreign correspondents used to call a "situationer" -- a snapshot overview of whatever country one's editors thought needed assessing. I learned things I hadn't known.
For example, I knew that the Iraqi army was a mess and that the Iraqi police force is full of sectarian thugs. But I didn't know that Iraq had another armed force, bigger than the police -- the 145,000-strong Facilities Protection Service, which is supposed to guard military infrastructure. One "senior U.S. official" described this shadowy force as "incompetent, dysfunctional, or subversive." How comforting.
I also wasn't aware that the Baghdad city government is a "Shia dictatorship" that allocates services along sectarian lines, consigning one Sunni neighborhood to "less than two hours of electricity each day" and waist-high piles of trash.
The second half of the report is less a news story than a long op-ed piece. The panel ruled out my preferred exit strategy, which it dismisses as "precipitate withdrawal." (I prefer to call it "wake up and smell the coffee.'') The report explains how splitting Iraq into three autonomous parts would be an unacceptably bloody process, as well as intolerable to the neighbors; and how the option of sending a lot more troops to Iraq, as Sen. John McCain advocates, is moot given that we don't have a lot more troops to send.
The report is harshest on the president's "stay the course" option, pointing out that the longer we remain, the worse the situation in Iraq seems to get -- and the more American troops are maimed or killed.
The document concludes with 79 recommendations, most of which are eminently reasonable and none of which will get us out of Iraq overnight. The president will probably reject some out of hand -- talking directly with Syria and Iran, for example. And while it would be good if the president finally realized that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would lower the temperature throughout the Middle East, I'm pretty sure it will take more than a phone call to persuade the Israeli government to give up the Golan Heights.
Jordan said that when the members of the panel met with Bush on Wednesday, the president's attitude was encouraging. "My mama used to say that a lot of people listen, but they don't hear," Jordan said. "Bush both listened and heard us."
That's a good sign. But the administration has set in motion its own multiple reviews of Iraq policy, and the official White House position is that the Iraq Study Group's viewpoint will be just one of many the president takes into account -- which is a bad sign. Would someone please tell the president that even his new secretary of defense doesn't think we're winning this war?
eugenerobinson@washpost.com
Friday, December 08, 2006
The Cheney Baby
It's a Cheney!
Reality Is a Blessed Event
By Ruth Marcus
Friday, December 8, 2006; A39
My only regret about Mary Cheney's pregnancy is that it didn't happen earlier -- say, during the 2004 presidential race, when Cheney was working for her father's campaign and his running mate was busy trying to write discrimination against people like her into the Constitution.
Imagine a hugely pregnant Mary Cheney sitting in the vice president's box at the convention. Imagine Cheney and her partner, Heather Poe, cuddling their newborn onstage at the victory celebration.
How perfectly that would have illustrated the clanging disconnect between the Republican Party's outmoded intolerance and the benign reality of gay families today.
Better late than never. Cheney's no crusader; she has little interest in becoming the poster mom for gay parenthood. But whether she intends it or not, her pregnancy will, I think, turn out to be a watershed in public understanding and acceptance of the phenomenon. This is the Ellen DeGeneres moment of national politics.
Acceptance won't come immediately, of course, and certainly not from all quarters. The folks who have fits about "Heather Has Two Mommies" are beside themselves over "Heather Is One of Two Mommies." Especially because the other mommy is -- as Mary Cheney is inevitably described -- The Vice President's Openly Gay Daughter.
"Unconscionable," said Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America. "Her action repudiates traditional values and sets an appalling example for young people at a time when father absence is the most pressing social problem facing the nation," Crouse wrote on the TownHall.com blog. "Her child will have all the material advantages it will need, but it will still encounter the emotional devastation common to children without fathers."
"I think it's tragic that a child has been conceived with the express purpose of denying it a father," pronounced Robert Knight of the Media Research Center. The couple, he said is seeking to "create a culture that is based on sexual anarchy instead of marriage and family values."
I can understand that people -- especially those who have no personal experience with gay families -- are uncomfortable with the notion of children without a parent of each gender. What I can't understand is using words such as "unconscionable" or "tragic" to describe the choice of two people who love each other and want to create a family together.
To be a badly wanted child (one thing that's indisputable about the children of same-sex couples: the parents had to work to make it happen) in a home with two loving parents is no tragedy. If they're worried about "emotional devastation," the Crouses and Knights of the world would do better to reserve their lamentations for children in poverty, those who are abused or neglected, or for children in families splintered by divorce.
As to sexual anarchy, Mary Cheney and Heather Poe represent its antithesis. This is a couple who've been together for 15 years. In her mind, as Cheney told "Primetime Live" this year, "Heather and I already are married. We have built a home and a life together. I hope I get to spend the rest of my life with her. The way I look at it is, we're just waiting for state and federal law to catch up with us."
That could take some time, especially if Mary Cheney's political party has anything to do with it. As a resident of Virginia, which does not permit a gay parent to adopt, Poe will have no legal connection to the child that she and Cheney clearly intend to have and raise together. If the couple were to split up, Poe would have no legal right to see the child.
Virginia's newly adopted and expansively drafted constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage casts doubt on the ability of Cheney and Poe to write binding medical directives and wills. Without any legal protection, state or federal, against job discrimination -- the Bush administration opposes extending anti-discrimination laws to cover sexual orientation -- Mary Cheney could be fired simply because she is gay.
In fact, perhaps because it's less susceptible to being hijacked by the extremes, the business world is outpacing the political sphere in recognizing and responding to the new, out-of-the-closet reality of gay Americans. More than half of the Fortune 500 companies offered health benefits for domestic partners this year, up from just 28 a decade earlier, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
The latest issue of Fortune describes how companies seeking to attract and retain gay workers are offering bereavement leave if a same-sex partner dies, adoption assistance or paid leave for gay employees who have children, and relocation help for gay partners when employees are transferred. "Put another way, gay marriage -- an idea that has been banned by all but one of 27 states that have voted on it -- has become a fact of life inside many big companies," the magazine said.
Perhaps Cheney's high-profile pregnancy will help the Republican Party come to grips with those facts of life. If not, though, she's going to have to explain to her child what mommy was doing trying to help a party that doesn't believe in fairness for families like theirs.
marcusr@washpost.com
Reality Is a Blessed Event
By Ruth Marcus
Friday, December 8, 2006; A39
My only regret about Mary Cheney's pregnancy is that it didn't happen earlier -- say, during the 2004 presidential race, when Cheney was working for her father's campaign and his running mate was busy trying to write discrimination against people like her into the Constitution.
Imagine a hugely pregnant Mary Cheney sitting in the vice president's box at the convention. Imagine Cheney and her partner, Heather Poe, cuddling their newborn onstage at the victory celebration.
How perfectly that would have illustrated the clanging disconnect between the Republican Party's outmoded intolerance and the benign reality of gay families today.
Better late than never. Cheney's no crusader; she has little interest in becoming the poster mom for gay parenthood. But whether she intends it or not, her pregnancy will, I think, turn out to be a watershed in public understanding and acceptance of the phenomenon. This is the Ellen DeGeneres moment of national politics.
Acceptance won't come immediately, of course, and certainly not from all quarters. The folks who have fits about "Heather Has Two Mommies" are beside themselves over "Heather Is One of Two Mommies." Especially because the other mommy is -- as Mary Cheney is inevitably described -- The Vice President's Openly Gay Daughter.
"Unconscionable," said Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America. "Her action repudiates traditional values and sets an appalling example for young people at a time when father absence is the most pressing social problem facing the nation," Crouse wrote on the TownHall.com blog. "Her child will have all the material advantages it will need, but it will still encounter the emotional devastation common to children without fathers."
"I think it's tragic that a child has been conceived with the express purpose of denying it a father," pronounced Robert Knight of the Media Research Center. The couple, he said is seeking to "create a culture that is based on sexual anarchy instead of marriage and family values."
I can understand that people -- especially those who have no personal experience with gay families -- are uncomfortable with the notion of children without a parent of each gender. What I can't understand is using words such as "unconscionable" or "tragic" to describe the choice of two people who love each other and want to create a family together.
To be a badly wanted child (one thing that's indisputable about the children of same-sex couples: the parents had to work to make it happen) in a home with two loving parents is no tragedy. If they're worried about "emotional devastation," the Crouses and Knights of the world would do better to reserve their lamentations for children in poverty, those who are abused or neglected, or for children in families splintered by divorce.
As to sexual anarchy, Mary Cheney and Heather Poe represent its antithesis. This is a couple who've been together for 15 years. In her mind, as Cheney told "Primetime Live" this year, "Heather and I already are married. We have built a home and a life together. I hope I get to spend the rest of my life with her. The way I look at it is, we're just waiting for state and federal law to catch up with us."
That could take some time, especially if Mary Cheney's political party has anything to do with it. As a resident of Virginia, which does not permit a gay parent to adopt, Poe will have no legal connection to the child that she and Cheney clearly intend to have and raise together. If the couple were to split up, Poe would have no legal right to see the child.
Virginia's newly adopted and expansively drafted constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage casts doubt on the ability of Cheney and Poe to write binding medical directives and wills. Without any legal protection, state or federal, against job discrimination -- the Bush administration opposes extending anti-discrimination laws to cover sexual orientation -- Mary Cheney could be fired simply because she is gay.
In fact, perhaps because it's less susceptible to being hijacked by the extremes, the business world is outpacing the political sphere in recognizing and responding to the new, out-of-the-closet reality of gay Americans. More than half of the Fortune 500 companies offered health benefits for domestic partners this year, up from just 28 a decade earlier, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
The latest issue of Fortune describes how companies seeking to attract and retain gay workers are offering bereavement leave if a same-sex partner dies, adoption assistance or paid leave for gay employees who have children, and relocation help for gay partners when employees are transferred. "Put another way, gay marriage -- an idea that has been banned by all but one of 27 states that have voted on it -- has become a fact of life inside many big companies," the magazine said.
Perhaps Cheney's high-profile pregnancy will help the Republican Party come to grips with those facts of life. If not, though, she's going to have to explain to her child what mommy was doing trying to help a party that doesn't believe in fairness for families like theirs.
marcusr@washpost.com
Friday, December 01, 2006
This is too scary: Drug stores
Report sparks changes at pharmacy chains
By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press WriterFri Dec 1, 6:43 AM ET
The nation's largest drugstore chains say they are working to better protect patient privacy after an investigative TV report turned up sensitive information about hundreds of customers in trash bins in cities around the country.
Indianapolis TV station WTHR inspected nearly 300 trash bins and found nearly 2,400 patient records, including pill bottles, customer refill lists and prescription labels. Most of the bins belonged to Walgreens Co., CVS Corp. or Rite Aid Corp. The inspections were done in more than a dozen cities ranging from Boston to Louisville, Ky., to Phoenix.
The station said its investigation began after a grandmother from Bloomington, Ind., was robbed at her front door by a thief authorities said found her address in a CVS trash bin. The man posed as a pharmacy employee to try to steal her prescription for the painkiller Oxycontin, the authorities said.
As part of its response, Deerfield, Ill.-based Walgreens Co. said it was now instructing staff to lock outdoor trash bins at all times and was reviewing the way it disposes of patient information.
In Woonsocket, R.I., where CVS is headquartered, 460 patient records were found in CVS trash bins, the station said. Responding to the findings, CVS sent a statement acknowledging it was unacceptable that patient information could be retrieved from the bins.
"Nothing is more central to our health care operations than maintaining the privacy of health information," the CVS statement said.
The report aired in multiple installments up through this month.
CVS, which operates about 6,200 stores nationwide, said it was now requiring all trash generated in its pharmacies — and not just trash containing patient information — to be placed in special bags which are then returned to CVS warehouses. It said it was also holding in-store training sessions to review proper procedures for handling of the pharmacy trash.
"Our policy, when it's followed correctly, is foolproof," said CVS spokesman Mike DeAngelis. "But if there's a lack of execution, that's where issues arise. So we've enhanced the policies and procedures in order to make sure that they are followed."
Walgreens, the nation's biggest drugstore chain by revenue, said it had e-mailed all of its stores to reiterate its policy for handling patient information.
The company also said it was now requiring that patient vials be returned to pharmacy warehouses to be thrown out. Previously, staff had been instructed to either black out patient information or remove the label from the vial before putting it in the trash. Outside trash bins are also to be locked at all times, the company said.
Walgreens spokeswoman Carol Hively said Thursday the company was concerned certain employees were not following proper procedures and was trying to reinforce the rules. But she said other TV stations that have conducted similar investigations have not found privacy problems.
"We feel that having seen these other reports from around the country where other TV stations randomly selected Walgreens stores and there was a good outcome makes us feel that these efforts were successful," she said.
Camp Hill, Pa.-based Rite Aid Corp., the nation's third-largest drugstore chain, is enforcing current policies and has not made changes, said spokeswoman Jody Cook. She said company policy calls for pharmacies to shred confidential patient information, such as prescription labels. If the store is not set up to do that, then the information is to be sent back to pharmacy warehouses to be destroyed.
"We have policies in place to protect patient information, so really it was more of a retraining," Cook said.
By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press WriterFri Dec 1, 6:43 AM ET
The nation's largest drugstore chains say they are working to better protect patient privacy after an investigative TV report turned up sensitive information about hundreds of customers in trash bins in cities around the country.
Indianapolis TV station WTHR inspected nearly 300 trash bins and found nearly 2,400 patient records, including pill bottles, customer refill lists and prescription labels. Most of the bins belonged to Walgreens Co., CVS Corp. or Rite Aid Corp. The inspections were done in more than a dozen cities ranging from Boston to Louisville, Ky., to Phoenix.
The station said its investigation began after a grandmother from Bloomington, Ind., was robbed at her front door by a thief authorities said found her address in a CVS trash bin. The man posed as a pharmacy employee to try to steal her prescription for the painkiller Oxycontin, the authorities said.
As part of its response, Deerfield, Ill.-based Walgreens Co. said it was now instructing staff to lock outdoor trash bins at all times and was reviewing the way it disposes of patient information.
In Woonsocket, R.I., where CVS is headquartered, 460 patient records were found in CVS trash bins, the station said. Responding to the findings, CVS sent a statement acknowledging it was unacceptable that patient information could be retrieved from the bins.
"Nothing is more central to our health care operations than maintaining the privacy of health information," the CVS statement said.
The report aired in multiple installments up through this month.
CVS, which operates about 6,200 stores nationwide, said it was now requiring all trash generated in its pharmacies — and not just trash containing patient information — to be placed in special bags which are then returned to CVS warehouses. It said it was also holding in-store training sessions to review proper procedures for handling of the pharmacy trash.
"Our policy, when it's followed correctly, is foolproof," said CVS spokesman Mike DeAngelis. "But if there's a lack of execution, that's where issues arise. So we've enhanced the policies and procedures in order to make sure that they are followed."
Walgreens, the nation's biggest drugstore chain by revenue, said it had e-mailed all of its stores to reiterate its policy for handling patient information.
The company also said it was now requiring that patient vials be returned to pharmacy warehouses to be thrown out. Previously, staff had been instructed to either black out patient information or remove the label from the vial before putting it in the trash. Outside trash bins are also to be locked at all times, the company said.
Walgreens spokeswoman Carol Hively said Thursday the company was concerned certain employees were not following proper procedures and was trying to reinforce the rules. But she said other TV stations that have conducted similar investigations have not found privacy problems.
"We feel that having seen these other reports from around the country where other TV stations randomly selected Walgreens stores and there was a good outcome makes us feel that these efforts were successful," she said.
Camp Hill, Pa.-based Rite Aid Corp., the nation's third-largest drugstore chain, is enforcing current policies and has not made changes, said spokeswoman Jody Cook. She said company policy calls for pharmacies to shred confidential patient information, such as prescription labels. If the store is not set up to do that, then the information is to be sent back to pharmacy warehouses to be destroyed.
"We have policies in place to protect patient information, so really it was more of a retraining," Cook said.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Coulter, our first lady of ignorance
Coulter is at her most ignorant in this piece of trash.
WHAT CAN I DO TO MAKE YOUR FLIGHT MORE UNCOMFORTABLE?
By Ann CoulterWed Nov 22, 8:04 PM ET
Six imams removed from a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix are calling on Muslims to boycott the airline. If only we could get Muslims to boycott all airlines, we could dispense with airport security altogether.
Witnesses said the imams stood to do their evening prayers in the terminal before boarding, chanting "Allah, Allah, Allah" -- coincidentally, the last words heard by hundreds of airline passengers on 9/11 before they died.
Witnesses also said that the imams were talking about Saddam Hussein, and denouncing America and the war in Iraq. About the only scary preflight ritual the imams didn't perform was the signing of last wills and testaments.
After boarding, the imams did not sit together and some asked for seat belt extensions, although none were morbidly obese. Three of the men had one-way tickets and no checked baggage.
Also they were Muslims.
The idea that a Muslim boycott against US Airways would hurt the airline proves that Arabs are utterly tone-deaf. This is roughly the equivalent of Cindy Sheehan taking a vow of silence. How can we hope to deal with people with no sense of irony? The next thing you know, New York City cab drivers will be threatening to bathe.
Come to think of it, the whole affair may have been a madcap advertising scheme cooked up by US Airways.
It worked with me. US Airways is my official airline now. Northwest, which eventually flew the Allah-spouting Muslims to their destinations, is off my list. You want to really hurt a U.S. air carrier's business? Have Muslims announce that it's their favorite airline.
The clerics had been attending an imam conference in Minneapolis (imam conference slogan: "What Happens in Minneapolis -- Actually, Nothing Happened in Minneapolis"). But instead of investigating the conference, the government is now investigating my favorite airline.
What threat could Muslims flying from Minnesota to Arizona be?
Three of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 received their flight training in Arizona. Long before the attacks, an FBI agent in Phoenix found it curious that so many Arabs were enrolled in flight school. But the FBI rebuffed his request for an investigation on the grounds that his suspicions were based on the same invidious racial profiling that has brought US Airways under investigation and into my good graces.
Lynne Stewart's client, the Blind Sheik, Omar Abdel-Rahman, is serving life in prison in a maximum security lock-up in Minnesota. One of the six imams removed from the US Airways plane was blind, so Lynne Stewart was the one missing clue that would have sent all the passengers screaming from the plane.
Wholly apart from the issue of terrorism, don't we have a seller's market for new immigrants? How does a blind Muslim get to the top of the visa list? Is there a shortage of blind, fanatical clerics in this country that I haven't noticed? Couldn't we get some Burmese with leprosy instead? A 4-year-old could do a better job choosing visa applicants than the U.S. Department of Immigration.
One of the stunt-imams in US Airways' advertising scheme, Omar Shahin, complained about being removed from the plane, saying: "Six scholars in handcuffs. It's terrible."
Yes, especially when there was a whole conference of them! Six out of 150 is called "poor law enforcement." How did the other 144 "scholars" get off so easy?
Shahin's own "scholarship" consisted of continuing to deny Muslims were behind 9/11 nearly two months after the attacks. On Nov. 4, 2001, The Arizona Republic cited Shahin's "skepticism that Muslims or bin Laden carried out attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon." Shahin complained that the government was "focusing on the Arabs, the Muslims. And all the evidence shows that the Muslims are not involved in this terrorist act."
In case your memory of that time is hazy, within three days of the attack, the Justice Department had released the names of all 19 hijackers -- names like Majed Moqed, Ahmed Alghamdi, Mohand Alshehri, Ahmed Ibrahim A. Al Haznawi and Ahmed Alnami. The government had excluded all but 19 passengers as possible hijackers based on extensive interviews with friends and family of nearly every passenger on all four flights. Some of the hijackers' seat numbers had been called in by flight attendants on the planes.
By early October, bin Laden had produced a videotape claiming credit for the attacks. And by Nov. 4, 2001, The New York Times had run well over 100 articles on the connections between bin Laden and the hijackers -- even more detailed and sinister than the Times' flowcharts on neoconservatives!
Also, if I remember correctly, al-Qaida had taken out full-page ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter thanking their agents for the attacks.
But now, on the eve of the busiest travel day in America, these "scholars" have ginned up America's PC victim machinery to intimidate airlines and passengers from noticing six imams chanting "Allah" before boarding a commercial jet.
WHAT CAN I DO TO MAKE YOUR FLIGHT MORE UNCOMFORTABLE?
By Ann CoulterWed Nov 22, 8:04 PM ET
Six imams removed from a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix are calling on Muslims to boycott the airline. If only we could get Muslims to boycott all airlines, we could dispense with airport security altogether.
Witnesses said the imams stood to do their evening prayers in the terminal before boarding, chanting "Allah, Allah, Allah" -- coincidentally, the last words heard by hundreds of airline passengers on 9/11 before they died.
Witnesses also said that the imams were talking about Saddam Hussein, and denouncing America and the war in Iraq. About the only scary preflight ritual the imams didn't perform was the signing of last wills and testaments.
After boarding, the imams did not sit together and some asked for seat belt extensions, although none were morbidly obese. Three of the men had one-way tickets and no checked baggage.
Also they were Muslims.
The idea that a Muslim boycott against US Airways would hurt the airline proves that Arabs are utterly tone-deaf. This is roughly the equivalent of Cindy Sheehan taking a vow of silence. How can we hope to deal with people with no sense of irony? The next thing you know, New York City cab drivers will be threatening to bathe.
Come to think of it, the whole affair may have been a madcap advertising scheme cooked up by US Airways.
It worked with me. US Airways is my official airline now. Northwest, which eventually flew the Allah-spouting Muslims to their destinations, is off my list. You want to really hurt a U.S. air carrier's business? Have Muslims announce that it's their favorite airline.
The clerics had been attending an imam conference in Minneapolis (imam conference slogan: "What Happens in Minneapolis -- Actually, Nothing Happened in Minneapolis"). But instead of investigating the conference, the government is now investigating my favorite airline.
What threat could Muslims flying from Minnesota to Arizona be?
Three of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 received their flight training in Arizona. Long before the attacks, an FBI agent in Phoenix found it curious that so many Arabs were enrolled in flight school. But the FBI rebuffed his request for an investigation on the grounds that his suspicions were based on the same invidious racial profiling that has brought US Airways under investigation and into my good graces.
Lynne Stewart's client, the Blind Sheik, Omar Abdel-Rahman, is serving life in prison in a maximum security lock-up in Minnesota. One of the six imams removed from the US Airways plane was blind, so Lynne Stewart was the one missing clue that would have sent all the passengers screaming from the plane.
Wholly apart from the issue of terrorism, don't we have a seller's market for new immigrants? How does a blind Muslim get to the top of the visa list? Is there a shortage of blind, fanatical clerics in this country that I haven't noticed? Couldn't we get some Burmese with leprosy instead? A 4-year-old could do a better job choosing visa applicants than the U.S. Department of Immigration.
One of the stunt-imams in US Airways' advertising scheme, Omar Shahin, complained about being removed from the plane, saying: "Six scholars in handcuffs. It's terrible."
Yes, especially when there was a whole conference of them! Six out of 150 is called "poor law enforcement." How did the other 144 "scholars" get off so easy?
Shahin's own "scholarship" consisted of continuing to deny Muslims were behind 9/11 nearly two months after the attacks. On Nov. 4, 2001, The Arizona Republic cited Shahin's "skepticism that Muslims or bin Laden carried out attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon." Shahin complained that the government was "focusing on the Arabs, the Muslims. And all the evidence shows that the Muslims are not involved in this terrorist act."
In case your memory of that time is hazy, within three days of the attack, the Justice Department had released the names of all 19 hijackers -- names like Majed Moqed, Ahmed Alghamdi, Mohand Alshehri, Ahmed Ibrahim A. Al Haznawi and Ahmed Alnami. The government had excluded all but 19 passengers as possible hijackers based on extensive interviews with friends and family of nearly every passenger on all four flights. Some of the hijackers' seat numbers had been called in by flight attendants on the planes.
By early October, bin Laden had produced a videotape claiming credit for the attacks. And by Nov. 4, 2001, The New York Times had run well over 100 articles on the connections between bin Laden and the hijackers -- even more detailed and sinister than the Times' flowcharts on neoconservatives!
Also, if I remember correctly, al-Qaida had taken out full-page ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter thanking their agents for the attacks.
But now, on the eve of the busiest travel day in America, these "scholars" have ginned up America's PC victim machinery to intimidate airlines and passengers from noticing six imams chanting "Allah" before boarding a commercial jet.
Makes sense to me
Leaving Iraq, Honorably
By Chuck Hagel
The Washington Post
Sunday 26 November 2006
There will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq. These terms do not reflect the reality of what is going to happen there. The future of Iraq was always going to be determined by the Iraqis - not the Americans.
Iraq is not a prize to be won or lost. It is part of the ongoing global struggle against instability, brutality, intolerance, extremism and terrorism. There will be no military victory or military solution for Iraq. Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger made this point last weekend.
The time for more U.S. troops in Iraq has passed. We do not have more troops to send and, even if we did, they would not bring a resolution to Iraq. Militaries are built to fight and win wars, not bind together failing nations. We are once again learning a very hard lesson in foreign affairs: America cannot impose a democracy on any nation - regardless of our noble purpose.
We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam. Honorable intentions are not policies and plans. Iraq belongs to the 25 million Iraqis who live there. They will decide their fate and form of government.
It may take many years before there is a cohesive political center in Iraq. America's options on this point have always been limited. There will be a new center of gravity in the Middle East that will include Iraq. That process began over the past few days with the Syrians and Iraqis restoring diplomatic relations after 20 years of having no formal communication.
What does this tell us? It tells us that regional powers will fill regional vacuums, and they will move to work in their own self-interest - without the United States. This is the most encouraging set of actions for the Middle East in years. The Middle East is more combustible today than ever before, and until we are able to lead a renewal of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, mindless destruction and slaughter will continue in Lebanon, Israel and across the Middle East.
We are a long way from a sustained peaceful resolution to the anarchy in Iraq. But this latest set of events is moving the Middle East in the only direction it can go with any hope of lasting progress and peace. The movement will be imperfect, stuttering and difficult.
America finds itself in a dangerous and isolated position in the world. We are perceived as a nation at war with Muslims. Unfortunately, that perception is gaining credibility in the Muslim world and for many years will complicate America's global credibility, purpose and leadership. This debilitating and dangerous perception must be reversed as the world seeks a new geopolitical, trade and economic center that will accommodate the interests of billions of people over the next 25 years. The world will continue to require realistic, clear-headed American leadership - not an American divine mission.
The United States must begin planning for a phased troop withdrawal from Iraq. The cost of combat in Iraq in terms of American lives, dollars and world standing has been devastating. We've already spent more than $300 billion there to prosecute an almost four-year-old war and are still spending $8 billion per month. The United States has spent more than $500 billion on our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And our effort in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate, partly because we took our focus off the real terrorist threat, which was there, and not in Iraq.
We are destroying our force structure, which took 30 years to build. We've been funding this war dishonestly, mainly through supplemental appropriations, which minimizes responsible congressional oversight and allows the administration to duck tough questions in defending its policies. Congress has abdicated its oversight responsibility in the past four years.
It is not too late. The United States can still extricate itself honorably from an impending disaster in Iraq. The Baker-Hamilton commission gives the president a new opportunity to form a bipartisan consensus to get out of Iraq. If the president fails to build a bipartisan foundation for an exit strategy, America will pay a high price for this blunder - one that we will have difficulty recovering from in the years ahead.
To squander this moment would be to squander future possibilities for the Middle East and the world. That is what is at stake over the next few months.
By Chuck Hagel
The Washington Post
Sunday 26 November 2006
There will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq. These terms do not reflect the reality of what is going to happen there. The future of Iraq was always going to be determined by the Iraqis - not the Americans.
Iraq is not a prize to be won or lost. It is part of the ongoing global struggle against instability, brutality, intolerance, extremism and terrorism. There will be no military victory or military solution for Iraq. Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger made this point last weekend.
The time for more U.S. troops in Iraq has passed. We do not have more troops to send and, even if we did, they would not bring a resolution to Iraq. Militaries are built to fight and win wars, not bind together failing nations. We are once again learning a very hard lesson in foreign affairs: America cannot impose a democracy on any nation - regardless of our noble purpose.
We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam. Honorable intentions are not policies and plans. Iraq belongs to the 25 million Iraqis who live there. They will decide their fate and form of government.
It may take many years before there is a cohesive political center in Iraq. America's options on this point have always been limited. There will be a new center of gravity in the Middle East that will include Iraq. That process began over the past few days with the Syrians and Iraqis restoring diplomatic relations after 20 years of having no formal communication.
What does this tell us? It tells us that regional powers will fill regional vacuums, and they will move to work in their own self-interest - without the United States. This is the most encouraging set of actions for the Middle East in years. The Middle East is more combustible today than ever before, and until we are able to lead a renewal of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, mindless destruction and slaughter will continue in Lebanon, Israel and across the Middle East.
We are a long way from a sustained peaceful resolution to the anarchy in Iraq. But this latest set of events is moving the Middle East in the only direction it can go with any hope of lasting progress and peace. The movement will be imperfect, stuttering and difficult.
America finds itself in a dangerous and isolated position in the world. We are perceived as a nation at war with Muslims. Unfortunately, that perception is gaining credibility in the Muslim world and for many years will complicate America's global credibility, purpose and leadership. This debilitating and dangerous perception must be reversed as the world seeks a new geopolitical, trade and economic center that will accommodate the interests of billions of people over the next 25 years. The world will continue to require realistic, clear-headed American leadership - not an American divine mission.
The United States must begin planning for a phased troop withdrawal from Iraq. The cost of combat in Iraq in terms of American lives, dollars and world standing has been devastating. We've already spent more than $300 billion there to prosecute an almost four-year-old war and are still spending $8 billion per month. The United States has spent more than $500 billion on our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And our effort in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate, partly because we took our focus off the real terrorist threat, which was there, and not in Iraq.
We are destroying our force structure, which took 30 years to build. We've been funding this war dishonestly, mainly through supplemental appropriations, which minimizes responsible congressional oversight and allows the administration to duck tough questions in defending its policies. Congress has abdicated its oversight responsibility in the past four years.
It is not too late. The United States can still extricate itself honorably from an impending disaster in Iraq. The Baker-Hamilton commission gives the president a new opportunity to form a bipartisan consensus to get out of Iraq. If the president fails to build a bipartisan foundation for an exit strategy, America will pay a high price for this blunder - one that we will have difficulty recovering from in the years ahead.
To squander this moment would be to squander future possibilities for the Middle East and the world. That is what is at stake over the next few months.
Are Americans indifferent about the war in Iraq?
While Iraq Burns
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times
Monday 27 November 2006
Americans are shopping while Iraq burns.
The competing television news images on the morning after Thanksgiving were of the unspeakable carnage in Sadr City - where more than 200 Iraqi civilians were killed by a series of coordinated car bombs - and the long lines of cars filled with holiday shopping zealots that jammed the highway approaches to American malls that had opened for business at midnight.
A Wal-Mart in Union, N.J., was besieged by customers even before it opened its doors at 5 a.m. on Friday. "All I can tell you," said a Wal-Mart employee, "is that they were fired up and ready to spend money."
There is something terribly wrong with this juxtaposition of gleeful Americans with fistfuls of dollars storming the department store barricades and the slaughter by the thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including old people, children and babies. The war was started by the U.S., but most Americans feel absolutely no sense of personal responsibility for it.
Representative Charles Rangel recently proposed that the draft be reinstated, suggesting that politicians would be more reluctant to take the country to war if they understood that their constituents might be called up to fight. What struck me was not the uniform opposition to the congressman's proposal - it has long been clear that there is zero sentiment in favor of a draft in the U.S. - but the fact that it never provoked even the briefest discussion of the responsibilities and obligations of ordinary Americans in a time of war.
With no obvious personal stake in the war in Iraq, most Americans are indifferent to its consequences. In an interview last week, Alex Racheotes, a 19-year-old history major at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, said: "I definitely don't know anyone who would want to fight in Iraq. But beyond that, I get the feeling that most people at school don't even think about the war. They're more concerned with what grade they got on yesterday's test."
His thoughts were echoed by other students, including John Cafarelli, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of New Hampshire, who was asked if he had any friends who would be willing to join the Army. "No, definitely not," he said. "None of my friends even really care about what's going on in Iraq."
This indifference is widespread. It enables most Americans to go about their daily lives completely unconcerned about the atrocities resulting from a war being waged in their name. While shoppers here are scrambling to put the perfect touch to their holidays with the purchase of a giant flat-screen TV or a PlayStation 3, the news out of Baghdad is of a society in the midst of a meltdown.
According to the United Nations, more than 7,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in September and October. Nearly 5,000 of those killings occurred in Baghdad, a staggering figure.
In a demoralizing reprise of life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, the U.N. reported that in Iraq: "The situation of women has continued to deteriorate. Increasing numbers of women were recorded to be either victims of religious extremists or 'honor killings.' Some non-Muslim women are forced to wear a headscarf and to be accompanied by spouses or male relatives."
Journalists in Iraq are being "assassinated with utmost impunity," the U.N. report said, with 18 murdered in the last two months.
Iraq burns. We shop. The Americans dying in Iraq are barely mentioned in the press anymore. They warrant maybe one sentence in a long roundup article out of Baghdad, or a passing reference - no longer than a few seconds - in a television news account of the latest political ditherings.
Since the vast majority of Americans do not want anything to do with the military or the war, the burden of fighting has fallen on a small cadre of volunteers who are being sent into the war zone again and again. Nearly 3,000 have been killed, and many thousands more have been maimed.
The war has now lasted as long as the American involvement in World War II. But there is no sense of collective sacrifice in this war, no shared burden of responsibility. The soldiers in Iraq are fighting, suffering and dying in a war in which there are no clear objectives and no end in sight, and which a majority of Americans do not support.
They are dying anonymously and pointlessly, while the rest of us are free to buckle ourselves into the family vehicle and head off to the malls and shop.
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times
Monday 27 November 2006
Americans are shopping while Iraq burns.
The competing television news images on the morning after Thanksgiving were of the unspeakable carnage in Sadr City - where more than 200 Iraqi civilians were killed by a series of coordinated car bombs - and the long lines of cars filled with holiday shopping zealots that jammed the highway approaches to American malls that had opened for business at midnight.
A Wal-Mart in Union, N.J., was besieged by customers even before it opened its doors at 5 a.m. on Friday. "All I can tell you," said a Wal-Mart employee, "is that they were fired up and ready to spend money."
There is something terribly wrong with this juxtaposition of gleeful Americans with fistfuls of dollars storming the department store barricades and the slaughter by the thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including old people, children and babies. The war was started by the U.S., but most Americans feel absolutely no sense of personal responsibility for it.
Representative Charles Rangel recently proposed that the draft be reinstated, suggesting that politicians would be more reluctant to take the country to war if they understood that their constituents might be called up to fight. What struck me was not the uniform opposition to the congressman's proposal - it has long been clear that there is zero sentiment in favor of a draft in the U.S. - but the fact that it never provoked even the briefest discussion of the responsibilities and obligations of ordinary Americans in a time of war.
With no obvious personal stake in the war in Iraq, most Americans are indifferent to its consequences. In an interview last week, Alex Racheotes, a 19-year-old history major at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, said: "I definitely don't know anyone who would want to fight in Iraq. But beyond that, I get the feeling that most people at school don't even think about the war. They're more concerned with what grade they got on yesterday's test."
His thoughts were echoed by other students, including John Cafarelli, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of New Hampshire, who was asked if he had any friends who would be willing to join the Army. "No, definitely not," he said. "None of my friends even really care about what's going on in Iraq."
This indifference is widespread. It enables most Americans to go about their daily lives completely unconcerned about the atrocities resulting from a war being waged in their name. While shoppers here are scrambling to put the perfect touch to their holidays with the purchase of a giant flat-screen TV or a PlayStation 3, the news out of Baghdad is of a society in the midst of a meltdown.
According to the United Nations, more than 7,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in September and October. Nearly 5,000 of those killings occurred in Baghdad, a staggering figure.
In a demoralizing reprise of life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, the U.N. reported that in Iraq: "The situation of women has continued to deteriorate. Increasing numbers of women were recorded to be either victims of religious extremists or 'honor killings.' Some non-Muslim women are forced to wear a headscarf and to be accompanied by spouses or male relatives."
Journalists in Iraq are being "assassinated with utmost impunity," the U.N. report said, with 18 murdered in the last two months.
Iraq burns. We shop. The Americans dying in Iraq are barely mentioned in the press anymore. They warrant maybe one sentence in a long roundup article out of Baghdad, or a passing reference - no longer than a few seconds - in a television news account of the latest political ditherings.
Since the vast majority of Americans do not want anything to do with the military or the war, the burden of fighting has fallen on a small cadre of volunteers who are being sent into the war zone again and again. Nearly 3,000 have been killed, and many thousands more have been maimed.
The war has now lasted as long as the American involvement in World War II. But there is no sense of collective sacrifice in this war, no shared burden of responsibility. The soldiers in Iraq are fighting, suffering and dying in a war in which there are no clear objectives and no end in sight, and which a majority of Americans do not support.
They are dying anonymously and pointlessly, while the rest of us are free to buckle ourselves into the family vehicle and head off to the malls and shop.
Monday, November 27, 2006
Is anyone surprised?
Rumsfeld Approved of Torture Says Former US General
Reuters
Saturday 25 November 2006
Madrid - Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the prison's former U.S. commander said in an interview on Saturday.
Former U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski told Spain's El Pais newspaper she had seen a letter apparently signed by Rumsfeld which allowed civilian contractors to use techniques such as sleep deprivation during interrogation.
Karpinski, who ran the prison until early 2004, said she saw a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld detailing the use of harsh interrogation methods.
"The handwritten signature was above his printed name and in the same handwriting in the margin was written: "Make sure this is accomplished"," she told Saturday's El Pais.
"The methods consisted of making prisoners stand for long periods, sleep deprivation ... playing music at full volume, having to sit in uncomfortably ... Rumsfeld authorized these specific techniques."
The Geneva Convention says prisoners of war should suffer "no physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion" to secure information.
"Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind," the document states.
A spokesman for the Pentagon declined to comment on Karpinski's accusations, while U.S. army in Iraq could not immediately be reached for comment.
Karpinski was withdrawn from Iraq in early 2004, shortly after photographs showing American troops abusing detainees at the prison were flashed around the world. She was subsequently removed from active duty and then demoted to the rank of colonel on unrelated charges.
Karpinski insists she knew nothing about the abuse of prisoners until she saw the photos, as interrogation was carried out in a prison wing run by U.S. military intelligence.
Rumsfeld also authorized the army to break the Geneva Conventions by not registering all prisoners, Karpinski said, explaining how she raised the case of one unregistered inmate with an aide to former U.S. commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.
"We received a message from the Pentagon, from the Defense Secretary, ordering us to hold the prisoner without registering him. I now know this happened on various occasions."
Karpinski said last week she was ready to testify against Rumsfeld, if a suit filed by civil rights groups in Germany over Abu Ghraib led to a full investigation.
President Bush announced Rumsfeld's resignation after Democrats wrested power from the Republicans in midterm elections earlier this month, partly due to public criticism over the Iraq war.
Additional reporting by Diane Bartz in Washington
Reuters
Saturday 25 November 2006
Madrid - Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the prison's former U.S. commander said in an interview on Saturday.
Former U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski told Spain's El Pais newspaper she had seen a letter apparently signed by Rumsfeld which allowed civilian contractors to use techniques such as sleep deprivation during interrogation.
Karpinski, who ran the prison until early 2004, said she saw a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld detailing the use of harsh interrogation methods.
"The handwritten signature was above his printed name and in the same handwriting in the margin was written: "Make sure this is accomplished"," she told Saturday's El Pais.
"The methods consisted of making prisoners stand for long periods, sleep deprivation ... playing music at full volume, having to sit in uncomfortably ... Rumsfeld authorized these specific techniques."
The Geneva Convention says prisoners of war should suffer "no physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion" to secure information.
"Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind," the document states.
A spokesman for the Pentagon declined to comment on Karpinski's accusations, while U.S. army in Iraq could not immediately be reached for comment.
Karpinski was withdrawn from Iraq in early 2004, shortly after photographs showing American troops abusing detainees at the prison were flashed around the world. She was subsequently removed from active duty and then demoted to the rank of colonel on unrelated charges.
Karpinski insists she knew nothing about the abuse of prisoners until she saw the photos, as interrogation was carried out in a prison wing run by U.S. military intelligence.
Rumsfeld also authorized the army to break the Geneva Conventions by not registering all prisoners, Karpinski said, explaining how she raised the case of one unregistered inmate with an aide to former U.S. commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.
"We received a message from the Pentagon, from the Defense Secretary, ordering us to hold the prisoner without registering him. I now know this happened on various occasions."
Karpinski said last week she was ready to testify against Rumsfeld, if a suit filed by civil rights groups in Germany over Abu Ghraib led to a full investigation.
President Bush announced Rumsfeld's resignation after Democrats wrested power from the Republicans in midterm elections earlier this month, partly due to public criticism over the Iraq war.
Additional reporting by Diane Bartz in Washington
What a mess!
Wartime Sacrifices
By Arlen Parsa
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Sunday 25 November 2006
Never before in American history has such a costly war been fought with so little immediate sacrifice asked of all Americans. Less than one year into his first term, President Bush made clear the terms of his war: every other country was either with us, or against us.
Just this year, the president raised the stakes again, saying that his "War on Terror" (how you can wage war against a tactic escapes me) is the "calling of our generation" and that America is once again a participant in a grand "struggle for civilization." This rhetoric should come as no surprise considering that the commander in chief has already likened himself to other wartime leaders such as Winston Churchill and compared his "War on Terror" to World War II. Even his branding of the two sides involved in the fight - the "Axis of Evil" versus "America and her allies" - is the same "axis versus allies" language used in Churchill's war. Yet, for such a war with so much in the balance, our leaders have asked surprisingly little of us.
President Bush has encouraged Americans to go about their daily lives: take vacations, he once suggested. He certainly took his own advice, having taken well over 300 days off so far. Clinton took only about 150 days off in all of his eight years as president - and he wasn't even leading the free world in a struggle for civilization itself.
More Americans have now died as part of the president's so-called "War on Terror" than perished in the terrorist attacks of September 11th. America has now been fighting in the name of "civilization itself" for longer than it ever was during World War I and World War II. Outgoing secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld has predicted that it could take "any number of years ... five, six, eight, ten, twelve years" to achieve peace in Iraq alone - much less win the "greater War on Terror."
At the same time, President Bush became the very first American president ever to grant tax cuts during a time of war. The largest corporations have gotten billions of dollars of taxes back from the government, and the wealthiest Americans annually get more money back in the form of tax refunds than the average American earns in a year. Meanwhile, the largest federal surplus ever (which Bush inherited from Clinton) quickly turned into the largest deficit ever. When President Bush's Democratic predecessor left office, American national debt lingered around 5.5 trillion dollars, and was shrinking at a faster rate than it ever had before. Years into Bush's presidency, we find ourselves with the largest national debt in history (the president's new debt ceiling is now 9 trillion dollars, which the US is expected to surpass before he leaves office).
This is perhaps ironic because Republicans have always prided themselves in their ability to reduce the size of government and maintain fiscal responsibility. Democrats, on the other hand, are oft portrayed as irresponsible, big tax-and-spend liberals. Under the current White House administration, however, it seems that the Republican party has become the party of big-spenders and no-taxers. If there's a worse way to run government during a war that supposedly threatens every civilized culture in the entire world and will supposedly drag on for ages (many in the administration are already calling it "The Long War"), I can't think of it.
Of course, they didn't plan things this way. Originally, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had wanted to wage his war in Iraq "on the cheap." He ignored the suggestions of his top generals who said that his mission would need far more troops than he had allotted. Rumsfeld even fired highly-decorated four-star general Eric Shinseki after the latter maintained that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed in Iraq to secure the country after invasion and prevent an insurgency (key members of the White House administration later claimed that nobody had predicted an insurgency would arise after the invasion). Instead, a meager force of American troops went into Iraq with lightly-armored humvees and inadequate body armor.
Our soldiers resorted to bulking up their 'thin-skinned humvees' with scrap metal they found in Iraqi junkyards (which they termed "hillbilly armor"). Later on, a group of Congressional Republicans voted against sending more body armor for American soldiers because they wanted to keep the budget down. Poor military families back home passed collection plates at church asking for donations that would help cover the few hundred dollars it would cost to send their sons and daughters the life-saving vests that they had been deployed without. "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want," Rumsfeld told one soldier who confronted him about it with a trembling voice at a televised question and answer session.
The White House has promised time and time again that during this conflict (in which the entire world is at stake) there would be under no circumstances a draft. Rich sons and daughters would never be called up to serve alongside their less-well-off fellow Americans in Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else. "We will have an all-volunteer army" the president has loudly proclaimed. The military for its part has kept quiet, but bent over backwards not to reinstate conscription.
The Pentagon has lowered the IQ requirement and lowest acceptable test scores of enlistees, and increased the maximum age at which people can enlist (now 42 years old). And now, there are even foreigners serving in our armed forces. Still no gay people allowed, though. (It was reported earlier this year that Pentagon manuals still defined homosexuality as a mental disorder like schizophrenia, a consensus that the medical community abandoned in the 1970s.) The Reserves and National Guard have been sent to Iraq, and some of them are on their second tour of duty. Reports circulated not long ago that one recruiter was so desperate to fulfill his monthly enlistment quota, he persuaded an autistic kid to sign on the dotted line (after great embarrassment, the Army was later forced to let him go).
President Bush and his fellow powerful Republicans have viciously attacked Democrats and others who don't embrace their war endlessly. When the president is challenged (which is seldom), he backs away from his harsh rhetoric and replaces it instead with a condescending glare. People who don't agree with me aren't unpatriotic, he replies; they just "don't understand the stakes in the War on Terror."
December is coming up, and President Bush is expected to be on vacation for much of the month. If he continues taking time off at the rate he has been, by the time he leaves his second term, the president will have vacationed for more than 1 of his 8 years in office. Earlier this year, the Pentagon ordered an entire brigade of soldiers back to Iraq - before they had even made it home from their first tour. They literally turned around and boarded airplanes headed in the opposite direction. At least the president will be home for Christmas. Not everyone is so fortunate.
During World War II, Churchill ordered strict food rationing. World War I vets formed the British Home Guard to fend off the potential German invasion with pitchforks and shotguns more suited to hunting with bird-shot (while all the younger men and equipment were on the front lines fighting the Axis). Nowadays, putting yellow "Support Our Troops" magnets on your SUV is strictly optional and tax cuts are mandatory. President Bush thinks history will look back upon his war as just as important as the one Churchill and the rest of the world waged half a century ago. From the way this president acts, you wouldn't think so.
Arlen Parsa is a documentary film student at Columbia College Chicago. In between classes, Parsa writes about American politics and current events at TheDailyBackground.com.
By Arlen Parsa
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Sunday 25 November 2006
Never before in American history has such a costly war been fought with so little immediate sacrifice asked of all Americans. Less than one year into his first term, President Bush made clear the terms of his war: every other country was either with us, or against us.
Just this year, the president raised the stakes again, saying that his "War on Terror" (how you can wage war against a tactic escapes me) is the "calling of our generation" and that America is once again a participant in a grand "struggle for civilization." This rhetoric should come as no surprise considering that the commander in chief has already likened himself to other wartime leaders such as Winston Churchill and compared his "War on Terror" to World War II. Even his branding of the two sides involved in the fight - the "Axis of Evil" versus "America and her allies" - is the same "axis versus allies" language used in Churchill's war. Yet, for such a war with so much in the balance, our leaders have asked surprisingly little of us.
President Bush has encouraged Americans to go about their daily lives: take vacations, he once suggested. He certainly took his own advice, having taken well over 300 days off so far. Clinton took only about 150 days off in all of his eight years as president - and he wasn't even leading the free world in a struggle for civilization itself.
More Americans have now died as part of the president's so-called "War on Terror" than perished in the terrorist attacks of September 11th. America has now been fighting in the name of "civilization itself" for longer than it ever was during World War I and World War II. Outgoing secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld has predicted that it could take "any number of years ... five, six, eight, ten, twelve years" to achieve peace in Iraq alone - much less win the "greater War on Terror."
At the same time, President Bush became the very first American president ever to grant tax cuts during a time of war. The largest corporations have gotten billions of dollars of taxes back from the government, and the wealthiest Americans annually get more money back in the form of tax refunds than the average American earns in a year. Meanwhile, the largest federal surplus ever (which Bush inherited from Clinton) quickly turned into the largest deficit ever. When President Bush's Democratic predecessor left office, American national debt lingered around 5.5 trillion dollars, and was shrinking at a faster rate than it ever had before. Years into Bush's presidency, we find ourselves with the largest national debt in history (the president's new debt ceiling is now 9 trillion dollars, which the US is expected to surpass before he leaves office).
This is perhaps ironic because Republicans have always prided themselves in their ability to reduce the size of government and maintain fiscal responsibility. Democrats, on the other hand, are oft portrayed as irresponsible, big tax-and-spend liberals. Under the current White House administration, however, it seems that the Republican party has become the party of big-spenders and no-taxers. If there's a worse way to run government during a war that supposedly threatens every civilized culture in the entire world and will supposedly drag on for ages (many in the administration are already calling it "The Long War"), I can't think of it.
Of course, they didn't plan things this way. Originally, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had wanted to wage his war in Iraq "on the cheap." He ignored the suggestions of his top generals who said that his mission would need far more troops than he had allotted. Rumsfeld even fired highly-decorated four-star general Eric Shinseki after the latter maintained that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed in Iraq to secure the country after invasion and prevent an insurgency (key members of the White House administration later claimed that nobody had predicted an insurgency would arise after the invasion). Instead, a meager force of American troops went into Iraq with lightly-armored humvees and inadequate body armor.
Our soldiers resorted to bulking up their 'thin-skinned humvees' with scrap metal they found in Iraqi junkyards (which they termed "hillbilly armor"). Later on, a group of Congressional Republicans voted against sending more body armor for American soldiers because they wanted to keep the budget down. Poor military families back home passed collection plates at church asking for donations that would help cover the few hundred dollars it would cost to send their sons and daughters the life-saving vests that they had been deployed without. "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want," Rumsfeld told one soldier who confronted him about it with a trembling voice at a televised question and answer session.
The White House has promised time and time again that during this conflict (in which the entire world is at stake) there would be under no circumstances a draft. Rich sons and daughters would never be called up to serve alongside their less-well-off fellow Americans in Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else. "We will have an all-volunteer army" the president has loudly proclaimed. The military for its part has kept quiet, but bent over backwards not to reinstate conscription.
The Pentagon has lowered the IQ requirement and lowest acceptable test scores of enlistees, and increased the maximum age at which people can enlist (now 42 years old). And now, there are even foreigners serving in our armed forces. Still no gay people allowed, though. (It was reported earlier this year that Pentagon manuals still defined homosexuality as a mental disorder like schizophrenia, a consensus that the medical community abandoned in the 1970s.) The Reserves and National Guard have been sent to Iraq, and some of them are on their second tour of duty. Reports circulated not long ago that one recruiter was so desperate to fulfill his monthly enlistment quota, he persuaded an autistic kid to sign on the dotted line (after great embarrassment, the Army was later forced to let him go).
President Bush and his fellow powerful Republicans have viciously attacked Democrats and others who don't embrace their war endlessly. When the president is challenged (which is seldom), he backs away from his harsh rhetoric and replaces it instead with a condescending glare. People who don't agree with me aren't unpatriotic, he replies; they just "don't understand the stakes in the War on Terror."
December is coming up, and President Bush is expected to be on vacation for much of the month. If he continues taking time off at the rate he has been, by the time he leaves his second term, the president will have vacationed for more than 1 of his 8 years in office. Earlier this year, the Pentagon ordered an entire brigade of soldiers back to Iraq - before they had even made it home from their first tour. They literally turned around and boarded airplanes headed in the opposite direction. At least the president will be home for Christmas. Not everyone is so fortunate.
During World War II, Churchill ordered strict food rationing. World War I vets formed the British Home Guard to fend off the potential German invasion with pitchforks and shotguns more suited to hunting with bird-shot (while all the younger men and equipment were on the front lines fighting the Axis). Nowadays, putting yellow "Support Our Troops" magnets on your SUV is strictly optional and tax cuts are mandatory. President Bush thinks history will look back upon his war as just as important as the one Churchill and the rest of the world waged half a century ago. From the way this president acts, you wouldn't think so.
Arlen Parsa is a documentary film student at Columbia College Chicago. In between classes, Parsa writes about American politics and current events at TheDailyBackground.com.
If this isn't civil war, what is it?
No One to Lose To
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
Saturday 25 November 2006
After the Thanksgiving Day Massacre of Shiites by Sunnis, President Bush should go on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and give an interview headlined: "If I did it, here's how the civil war in Iraq happened."
He could describe, hypothetically, a series of naïve, arrogant and self-defeating blunders, including his team's failure to comprehend that in the Arab world, revenge and religious zealotry can be stronger compulsions than democracy and prosperity.
But W. is not yet able to view his actions in subjunctive terms, much less objective ones. Bush family retainers are working to deprogram him, but the president is loath to strip off his delusions of adequacy.
W. declined to tear himself away from his free-range turkey and pumpkin mousse trifle at Camp David and reassure Americans about the deadliest sectarian attack in Baghdad since the U.S. invaded. More than 200 Shiites were killed and hundreds more wounded by car bombs and a mortar attack in Sadr City. October was the bloodiest month yet for civilians, and in the last four months, some 13,000 men, women and children have died.
American helicopters and Iraqi troops did not arrive for two hours after Sunni gunmen began a siege on the Health Ministry controlled by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who has a militia that kills Sunnis and is married to the Maliki government.
Continuing the cycle of revenge yesterday, Shiite militiamen threw kerosene on six Sunnis and set them on fire, as Iraqi soldiers watched, and killed 19 more.
The New York Times and other news outlets have been figuring out if it's time to break with the administration's use of euphemisms like "sectarian conflict." How long can you have an ever-descending descent without actually reaching the civil war?
Some analysts are calling it genocide or clash of civilizations, arguing that civil war is too genteel a term for the butchery that is destroying a nation before our very eyes. Anthony Shadid, The Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Iraq coverage, went back recently and described "the final, frenzied maturity of once-inchoate forces unleashed more than three years ago by the invasion. There was civil-war-style sectarian killing, its echoes in Lebanon a generation ago. Alongside it were gangland turf battles over money, power and survival; a raft of political parties and their militias fighting a zero-sum game; a raging insurgency; the collapse of authority; social services a chimera; and no way forward for an Iraqi government ordered to act by Americans who themselves are still seen as the final arbiter and, as a result, still depriving that government of legitimacy. Civil war was perhaps too easy a term, a little too tidy."
It will be harder to sell Congress on the idea that America's troops should be in the middle of somebody else's civil war than to convince them that we need to hang tough in the so-called front line of the so-called war on terror against Al Qaeda.
With Iraq splitting, Tony Snow indulges in the ludicrous exercise of hair-splitting. He said that in past civil wars, "people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy." In Iraq, "you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it's not clear that they are operating as a unified force." But Lebanon was a shambles with multiple factions, and everybody called that a civil war.
Mr. Snow has said this is not a civil war because the fighting is not taking place in every province and because Iraqis voted in free elections. But that's like saying that the Battle of Gettysburg only took place in one small corner of the country, so there was no real American Civil War. And there were elections during our civil war too. President Lincoln was re-elected months before the war's end.
The president's comparison to how Vietnam turned out a generation later, his happy talk that Iraq is going to be fine, is preposterous.
As Neil Sheehan, a former Times reporter in Vietnam who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Bright Shining Lie," told me: "In Vietnam, there were just two sides to the civil war. You had a government in Hanoi with a structure of command and an army and a guerrilla movement that would obey what they were told to do. So you had law and order in Saigon immediately after the war ended. In Iraq, there's no one like that for us to lose to and then do business with."
The questions are no longer whether there's a civil war or whether we can achieve a military victory. The only question is, who can we turn the country over to?
At the moment, that would be no one.
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
Saturday 25 November 2006
After the Thanksgiving Day Massacre of Shiites by Sunnis, President Bush should go on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and give an interview headlined: "If I did it, here's how the civil war in Iraq happened."
He could describe, hypothetically, a series of naïve, arrogant and self-defeating blunders, including his team's failure to comprehend that in the Arab world, revenge and religious zealotry can be stronger compulsions than democracy and prosperity.
But W. is not yet able to view his actions in subjunctive terms, much less objective ones. Bush family retainers are working to deprogram him, but the president is loath to strip off his delusions of adequacy.
W. declined to tear himself away from his free-range turkey and pumpkin mousse trifle at Camp David and reassure Americans about the deadliest sectarian attack in Baghdad since the U.S. invaded. More than 200 Shiites were killed and hundreds more wounded by car bombs and a mortar attack in Sadr City. October was the bloodiest month yet for civilians, and in the last four months, some 13,000 men, women and children have died.
American helicopters and Iraqi troops did not arrive for two hours after Sunni gunmen began a siege on the Health Ministry controlled by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who has a militia that kills Sunnis and is married to the Maliki government.
Continuing the cycle of revenge yesterday, Shiite militiamen threw kerosene on six Sunnis and set them on fire, as Iraqi soldiers watched, and killed 19 more.
The New York Times and other news outlets have been figuring out if it's time to break with the administration's use of euphemisms like "sectarian conflict." How long can you have an ever-descending descent without actually reaching the civil war?
Some analysts are calling it genocide or clash of civilizations, arguing that civil war is too genteel a term for the butchery that is destroying a nation before our very eyes. Anthony Shadid, The Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Iraq coverage, went back recently and described "the final, frenzied maturity of once-inchoate forces unleashed more than three years ago by the invasion. There was civil-war-style sectarian killing, its echoes in Lebanon a generation ago. Alongside it were gangland turf battles over money, power and survival; a raft of political parties and their militias fighting a zero-sum game; a raging insurgency; the collapse of authority; social services a chimera; and no way forward for an Iraqi government ordered to act by Americans who themselves are still seen as the final arbiter and, as a result, still depriving that government of legitimacy. Civil war was perhaps too easy a term, a little too tidy."
It will be harder to sell Congress on the idea that America's troops should be in the middle of somebody else's civil war than to convince them that we need to hang tough in the so-called front line of the so-called war on terror against Al Qaeda.
With Iraq splitting, Tony Snow indulges in the ludicrous exercise of hair-splitting. He said that in past civil wars, "people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy." In Iraq, "you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it's not clear that they are operating as a unified force." But Lebanon was a shambles with multiple factions, and everybody called that a civil war.
Mr. Snow has said this is not a civil war because the fighting is not taking place in every province and because Iraqis voted in free elections. But that's like saying that the Battle of Gettysburg only took place in one small corner of the country, so there was no real American Civil War. And there were elections during our civil war too. President Lincoln was re-elected months before the war's end.
The president's comparison to how Vietnam turned out a generation later, his happy talk that Iraq is going to be fine, is preposterous.
As Neil Sheehan, a former Times reporter in Vietnam who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Bright Shining Lie," told me: "In Vietnam, there were just two sides to the civil war. You had a government in Hanoi with a structure of command and an army and a guerrilla movement that would obey what they were told to do. So you had law and order in Saigon immediately after the war ended. In Iraq, there's no one like that for us to lose to and then do business with."
The questions are no longer whether there's a civil war or whether we can achieve a military victory. The only question is, who can we turn the country over to?
At the moment, that would be no one.
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Missed votes in Florida
When Votes Disappear
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Friday 24 Novmber 2006
You know what really had me terrified on Nov. 7? The all-too-real possibility of a highly suspect result. What would we have done if the Republicans had held on to the House by a narrow margin, but circumstantial evidence strongly suggested that a combination of vote suppression and defective - or rigged - electronic voting machines made the difference?
Fortunately, it wasn't a close election. But the fact that our electoral system worked well enough to register an overwhelming Democratic landslide doesn't mean that things are O.K. There were many problems with voting in this election - and in at least one Congressional race, the evidence strongly suggests that paperless voting machines failed to count thousands of votes, and that the disappearance of these votes delivered the race to the wrong candidate.
Here's the background: Florida's 13th Congressional District is currently represented by Katherine Harris, who as Florida's secretary of state during the 2000 recount famously acted as a partisan Republican rather than a fair referee. This year Ms. Harris didn't run for re-election, making an unsuccessful bid for the Senate instead. But according to the official vote count, the Republicans held on to her seat, with Vern Buchanan, the G.O.P. candidate, narrowly defeating Christine Jennings, the Democrat.
The problem is that the official vote count isn't credible. In much of the 13th District, the voting pattern looks normal. But in Sarasota County, which used touch-screen voting machines made by Election Systems and Software, almost 18,000 voters - nearly 15 percent of those who cast ballots using the machines - supposedly failed to vote for either candidate in the hotly contested Congressional race. That compares with undervote rates ranging from 2.2 to 5.3 percent in neighboring counties.
Reporting by The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, which interviewed hundreds of voters who called the paper to report problems at the polls, strongly suggests that the huge apparent undervote was caused by bugs in the ES&S software.
About a third of those interviewed by the paper reported that they couldn't even find the Congressional race on the screen. This could conceivably have been the result of bad ballot design, but many of them insisted that they looked hard for the race. Moreover, more than 60 percent of those interviewed by The Herald-Tribune reported that they did cast a vote in the Congressional race - but that this vote didn't show up on the ballot summary page they were shown at the end of the voting process.
If there were bugs in the software, the odds are that they threw the election to the wrong candidate. An Orlando Sentinel examination of other votes cast by those who supposedly failed to cast a vote in the Congressional race shows that they strongly favored Democrats, and Mr. Buchanan won the official count by only 369 votes. The fact that Mr. Buchanan won a recount - that is, a recount of the votes the machines happened to record - means nothing.
Although state officials have certified Mr. Buchanan as the victor, they've promised an audit of the voting machines. But don't get your hopes up: as in 2000, state election officials aren't even trying to look impartial. To oversee the audit, the state has chosen as its "independent" expert Prof. Alec Yasinsac of Florida State University - a Republican partisan who made an appearance on the steps of the Florida Supreme Court during the 2000 recount battle wearing a "Bush Won" sign.
Ms. Jennings has now filed suit with the same court, demanding a new election. She deserves one.
But for the nation as a whole, the important thing isn't who gets seated to represent Florida's 13th District. It's whether the voting disaster there leads to legislation requiring voter verification and a paper trail.
And I have to say that the omens aren't good. I've been shocked at how little national attention the mess in Sarasota has received. Here we have as clear a demonstration as we're ever likely to see that warnings from computer scientists about the dangers of paperless electronic voting are valid - and most Americans probably haven't even heard about it.
As far as I can tell, the reason Florida-13 hasn't become a major national story is that neither control of Congress nor control of the White House is on the line. But do we have to wait for a constitutional crisis to realize that we're in danger of becoming a digital-age banana republic?
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Friday 24 Novmber 2006
You know what really had me terrified on Nov. 7? The all-too-real possibility of a highly suspect result. What would we have done if the Republicans had held on to the House by a narrow margin, but circumstantial evidence strongly suggested that a combination of vote suppression and defective - or rigged - electronic voting machines made the difference?
Fortunately, it wasn't a close election. But the fact that our electoral system worked well enough to register an overwhelming Democratic landslide doesn't mean that things are O.K. There were many problems with voting in this election - and in at least one Congressional race, the evidence strongly suggests that paperless voting machines failed to count thousands of votes, and that the disappearance of these votes delivered the race to the wrong candidate.
Here's the background: Florida's 13th Congressional District is currently represented by Katherine Harris, who as Florida's secretary of state during the 2000 recount famously acted as a partisan Republican rather than a fair referee. This year Ms. Harris didn't run for re-election, making an unsuccessful bid for the Senate instead. But according to the official vote count, the Republicans held on to her seat, with Vern Buchanan, the G.O.P. candidate, narrowly defeating Christine Jennings, the Democrat.
The problem is that the official vote count isn't credible. In much of the 13th District, the voting pattern looks normal. But in Sarasota County, which used touch-screen voting machines made by Election Systems and Software, almost 18,000 voters - nearly 15 percent of those who cast ballots using the machines - supposedly failed to vote for either candidate in the hotly contested Congressional race. That compares with undervote rates ranging from 2.2 to 5.3 percent in neighboring counties.
Reporting by The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, which interviewed hundreds of voters who called the paper to report problems at the polls, strongly suggests that the huge apparent undervote was caused by bugs in the ES&S software.
About a third of those interviewed by the paper reported that they couldn't even find the Congressional race on the screen. This could conceivably have been the result of bad ballot design, but many of them insisted that they looked hard for the race. Moreover, more than 60 percent of those interviewed by The Herald-Tribune reported that they did cast a vote in the Congressional race - but that this vote didn't show up on the ballot summary page they were shown at the end of the voting process.
If there were bugs in the software, the odds are that they threw the election to the wrong candidate. An Orlando Sentinel examination of other votes cast by those who supposedly failed to cast a vote in the Congressional race shows that they strongly favored Democrats, and Mr. Buchanan won the official count by only 369 votes. The fact that Mr. Buchanan won a recount - that is, a recount of the votes the machines happened to record - means nothing.
Although state officials have certified Mr. Buchanan as the victor, they've promised an audit of the voting machines. But don't get your hopes up: as in 2000, state election officials aren't even trying to look impartial. To oversee the audit, the state has chosen as its "independent" expert Prof. Alec Yasinsac of Florida State University - a Republican partisan who made an appearance on the steps of the Florida Supreme Court during the 2000 recount battle wearing a "Bush Won" sign.
Ms. Jennings has now filed suit with the same court, demanding a new election. She deserves one.
But for the nation as a whole, the important thing isn't who gets seated to represent Florida's 13th District. It's whether the voting disaster there leads to legislation requiring voter verification and a paper trail.
And I have to say that the omens aren't good. I've been shocked at how little national attention the mess in Sarasota has received. Here we have as clear a demonstration as we're ever likely to see that warnings from computer scientists about the dangers of paperless electronic voting are valid - and most Americans probably haven't even heard about it.
As far as I can tell, the reason Florida-13 hasn't become a major national story is that neither control of Congress nor control of the White House is on the line. But do we have to wait for a constitutional crisis to realize that we're in danger of becoming a digital-age banana republic?
Global Warming & Deforestation
Will Forests Adapt to a Warmer World?
By Stephen Leahy
Inter Press Service
Monday 20 November 2006
Toronto - Deforestation remains the greatest current threat to the world's forests, claiming 10 to 15 million hectares of tree-covered areas every year, but climate change may represent a bigger challenge in the long term, scientists say.
"We're like a two-year-old playing with fire ... We're messing around with something dangerous and don't really understand what will happen," says William Laurance, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama, in reference to climate change and the Amazon rainforest.
Forests and other forms of life are now living on an "alien" planet where the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are higher than they have been for a million years.
These unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases are creating a new, hotter planet with weather that is much more extreme than in the past.
What does this mean for the 20 percent of the Earth's original forests that are still standing? Some scientists believe forests will grow faster in a warmer world. Others say they are more likely to burn, or suffer from disease or die from drought.
Laurance and his colleagues have shown that the higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are changing the very nature of the existing forest in the Amazon.
"Trees in the rainforest are growing faster and dying faster, and changing in species composition," he said, adding that the long-term implications of these changes are not known.
Researchers predict that the Amazon region will become hotter and drier, much like last year's record drought where Amazonian rivers dried up and wildfires burned large areas of the surprisingly dry forest.
Rainforests are very vulnerable to consecutive years of drought, warned the US-based Woods Hole Research Centre recently. The Amazon cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down, reported Woods Hole researchers in Santarem, a city on the Amazon River in Brazil.
One of the reasons is that rainforests are rain-making machines. About half of all the rainfall in the Amazon is almost immediately returned to the atmosphere as water vapour via plant respiration. That helps to maintain cloud cover and produce frequent rainfall, especially in the dry season when forests are most vulnerable to droughts and fires, says Laurance.
If the forests dry out too much, they cannot put water vapour into the air, creating a cycle of less and less precipitation.
"In the Amazon, some models suggest that the system could destabilise once more than 30 percent of the forest is lost," said Laurance, acknowledging that this idea is conjecture.
Brazilian scientist and climate expert Carlos Nobre, of the National Institute of Space Research (INPE), has said that 40 percent is the tipping point where the world's greatest forest will irreversibly turn into savanna. About 17 percent of the Amazon is already gone.
Although much smaller in area, the cloud forests of the Andes mountains contain nearly twice as many plant species and four times as many endemic plants as other parts of the world. Conditions there are harsh, with cool to cold temperatures and poor soils, so plants grow slowly. Scientists believe that most plants there will not be able to survive the rising temperatures already underway - which may climb five degrees Celsius by 2100.
"Trees and plants can't move up mountains very far because of the increasingly poorer soils," says Andreas Hamann, a forestry expert at the University of Alberta, Canada.
Species migration for trees can be as slow as a few metres per century, but temperature hikes in North America would require a northwards shift of a 150 km to 550 km for many existing forest ecosystems by 2100.
Rapidly changing temperatures are pushing forest ecosystems out of equilibrium, says Hamann, who recently completed studies on the impacts of climate change on Canadian forests. "It could take 2000 years to re-balance once temperatures stop climbing."
However, "it's not the temperature rise that is the big problem for forests in the short term, it is the changes that come with higher temperatures," Hamann explains.
Higher temperatures are changing weather patterns and producing more extremes, including longer droughts and huge forest fires.
In 2003 alone, Siberia lost 40,000 square kilometres of boreal forest to fires. Alaska and Canada experienced their worst fire year ever in 2004.
Canadian Forest Service researchers say 2.6 million hectares are being lost to fire every year, a huge increase from the more than one million hectares lost in the early 1970s. They have predicted that climate change will create still drier conditions in Canada's and Russia's boreal forests, making future increases in fires a virtual certainty.
Nadezhda Tchebakova, of the Russian Academy of Sciences Forest Research Institute, goes further, predicting that the boreal forests will become so dry by 2090 they will turn into steppe, or grassland.
But climate change will not be the end of forests.
Reforestation and natural regeneration have dramatically increased the amount of forest in at least 22 countries, according to the report published Nov. 13 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. China and India, for example, have more forest cover than they did 15 years ago. Much of the US northeast is nearly all forest now, when 50 to 100 years it was farmland.
"Demand for paper and wood products are down and there is an increased interest in reforestation," says study co-author Jesse Ausubel, of Rockefeller University in New York. These new forests do not have the biodiversity of original, old-growth forests, but they "offer the chance for biodiversity to return".
This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS (Inter Press Service) and IFEJ (International Federation of Environmental Journalists).
By Stephen Leahy
Inter Press Service
Monday 20 November 2006
Toronto - Deforestation remains the greatest current threat to the world's forests, claiming 10 to 15 million hectares of tree-covered areas every year, but climate change may represent a bigger challenge in the long term, scientists say.
"We're like a two-year-old playing with fire ... We're messing around with something dangerous and don't really understand what will happen," says William Laurance, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama, in reference to climate change and the Amazon rainforest.
Forests and other forms of life are now living on an "alien" planet where the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are higher than they have been for a million years.
These unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases are creating a new, hotter planet with weather that is much more extreme than in the past.
What does this mean for the 20 percent of the Earth's original forests that are still standing? Some scientists believe forests will grow faster in a warmer world. Others say they are more likely to burn, or suffer from disease or die from drought.
Laurance and his colleagues have shown that the higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are changing the very nature of the existing forest in the Amazon.
"Trees in the rainforest are growing faster and dying faster, and changing in species composition," he said, adding that the long-term implications of these changes are not known.
Researchers predict that the Amazon region will become hotter and drier, much like last year's record drought where Amazonian rivers dried up and wildfires burned large areas of the surprisingly dry forest.
Rainforests are very vulnerable to consecutive years of drought, warned the US-based Woods Hole Research Centre recently. The Amazon cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down, reported Woods Hole researchers in Santarem, a city on the Amazon River in Brazil.
One of the reasons is that rainforests are rain-making machines. About half of all the rainfall in the Amazon is almost immediately returned to the atmosphere as water vapour via plant respiration. That helps to maintain cloud cover and produce frequent rainfall, especially in the dry season when forests are most vulnerable to droughts and fires, says Laurance.
If the forests dry out too much, they cannot put water vapour into the air, creating a cycle of less and less precipitation.
"In the Amazon, some models suggest that the system could destabilise once more than 30 percent of the forest is lost," said Laurance, acknowledging that this idea is conjecture.
Brazilian scientist and climate expert Carlos Nobre, of the National Institute of Space Research (INPE), has said that 40 percent is the tipping point where the world's greatest forest will irreversibly turn into savanna. About 17 percent of the Amazon is already gone.
Although much smaller in area, the cloud forests of the Andes mountains contain nearly twice as many plant species and four times as many endemic plants as other parts of the world. Conditions there are harsh, with cool to cold temperatures and poor soils, so plants grow slowly. Scientists believe that most plants there will not be able to survive the rising temperatures already underway - which may climb five degrees Celsius by 2100.
"Trees and plants can't move up mountains very far because of the increasingly poorer soils," says Andreas Hamann, a forestry expert at the University of Alberta, Canada.
Species migration for trees can be as slow as a few metres per century, but temperature hikes in North America would require a northwards shift of a 150 km to 550 km for many existing forest ecosystems by 2100.
Rapidly changing temperatures are pushing forest ecosystems out of equilibrium, says Hamann, who recently completed studies on the impacts of climate change on Canadian forests. "It could take 2000 years to re-balance once temperatures stop climbing."
However, "it's not the temperature rise that is the big problem for forests in the short term, it is the changes that come with higher temperatures," Hamann explains.
Higher temperatures are changing weather patterns and producing more extremes, including longer droughts and huge forest fires.
In 2003 alone, Siberia lost 40,000 square kilometres of boreal forest to fires. Alaska and Canada experienced their worst fire year ever in 2004.
Canadian Forest Service researchers say 2.6 million hectares are being lost to fire every year, a huge increase from the more than one million hectares lost in the early 1970s. They have predicted that climate change will create still drier conditions in Canada's and Russia's boreal forests, making future increases in fires a virtual certainty.
Nadezhda Tchebakova, of the Russian Academy of Sciences Forest Research Institute, goes further, predicting that the boreal forests will become so dry by 2090 they will turn into steppe, or grassland.
But climate change will not be the end of forests.
Reforestation and natural regeneration have dramatically increased the amount of forest in at least 22 countries, according to the report published Nov. 13 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. China and India, for example, have more forest cover than they did 15 years ago. Much of the US northeast is nearly all forest now, when 50 to 100 years it was farmland.
"Demand for paper and wood products are down and there is an increased interest in reforestation," says study co-author Jesse Ausubel, of Rockefeller University in New York. These new forests do not have the biodiversity of original, old-growth forests, but they "offer the chance for biodiversity to return".
This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS (Inter Press Service) and IFEJ (International Federation of Environmental Journalists).
Time for Plan C in Iraq
Lost in the Desert
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
Wednesday 22 November 2006
Iraq now evokes that old Jimmy Durante song that goes, "Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go and still have the feeling that you wanted to stay?"
It's hard to remember when America has been so stuck. We can't win and we can't leave.
The good news is that the election finished what Katrina started. It dismantled the president's fake reality about Iraq, causing opinions to come gushing forth from all quarters about where to go from here.
The bad news is that no one, and I mean no one, really knows where to go from here. The White House and the Pentagon are ready to shift to Plan B. But Plan B is their empty term for miraculous salvation.
(Dick Cheney and his wormy aides, of course, are still babbling about total victory and completing the mission by raising the stakes and knocking off the mullahs in Tehran. His tombstone will probably say, "Here lies Dick Cheney, still winning.")
Even Henry Kissinger has defected from the Plan A gang. Once he thought the war could work, but now he thinks military victory is out of the question. When he turns against a war, you know the war's in trouble. He also believes leaving quickly would risk a civil war so big it could destabilize the Middle East.
Kofi Annan, who thought the war was crazy, now says that the United States is "trapped in Iraq" and can't leave until the Iraqis can create a "secure environment" - even though the Iraqis evince not the slightest interest in a secure environment. (The death squads even assassinated a popular comedian this week.)
The retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who thought Mr. Bush's crusade to depose Saddam was foolish and did not want to send in any troops, now thinks we may have to send in more troops so we can eventually get out.
Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, whose soldiers pulled Saddam out of his spider hole and who is returning to Iraq to take charge of the day-to-day fight, has given up talking about a Jeffersonian democracy and now wishes only for a government in Iraq that's viewed as legitimate. He has gone from "can do" to "don't know." He talked to The Times's Thom Shanker about his curtailed goals of reducing sectarian violence and restoring civil authority, acknowledging: "Will we attain those? I don't know."
At a Senate hearing last week, Gen. John Abizaid sounded like Goldilocks meets Guernica, asserting two propositions about the war that are logically at war with each other. He said we can't have fewer troops because the Iraqis need us, but we can't have more because we don't want the Iraqis to become dependent on us.
He contended that increasing the number of our troops would make the Iraqi government mad, but also asserted that decreasing the number would intensify sectarian violence.
This is a poor menu of options.
As Peter Beinart wrote in The New Republic this week, "In a particularly cruel twist, the events of recent months have demolished the best arguments both for staying and for leaving." Noting in the same magazine that "we are approaching a Saddam-like magnitude for the murder of innocents," Leon Wieseltier worried that the problem may be deeper than the number of our troops; it may be Iraq itself. "After we invaded Iraq, Iraq invaded itself.... We are at the mercy of Iraq, where there is no mercy."
Kirk Semple, The Times's Baghdad correspondent, wrote about Capt. Stephanie Bagley, the daughter and granddaughter of military policemen who was enthusiastic a year ago about her job of building a new Iraqi police force. But that was before the militia so inexorably began to infiltrate the police, presumably with the support of some leaders in Iraq's dysfunctional government. Now, with the police begging the Americans not to make them patrol Baghdad's mean streets and showing her their shrapnel wounds, she just wants to get her unit home safely, without losing another soldier. She said her orders were to train a local force to deal with crimes like theft and murder, not to teach them how to fight a counterinsurgency.
Aside from telling Israel to be nicer to the Palestinians, as if there lies Iraq salvation, James Baker will mostly try to suggest that the US talk to Iran and Syria. Yesterday, after the Lebanese Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel, an opponent of Syria, was assassinated in Beirut, President Bush said he suspected that Iran and Syria were behind the murder.
Maybe Mr. Baker had better find Plan C.
The Pentagon is trying to decide whether we should Go Big, Go Long or Go Home.
Go figure.
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
Wednesday 22 November 2006
Iraq now evokes that old Jimmy Durante song that goes, "Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go and still have the feeling that you wanted to stay?"
It's hard to remember when America has been so stuck. We can't win and we can't leave.
The good news is that the election finished what Katrina started. It dismantled the president's fake reality about Iraq, causing opinions to come gushing forth from all quarters about where to go from here.
The bad news is that no one, and I mean no one, really knows where to go from here. The White House and the Pentagon are ready to shift to Plan B. But Plan B is their empty term for miraculous salvation.
(Dick Cheney and his wormy aides, of course, are still babbling about total victory and completing the mission by raising the stakes and knocking off the mullahs in Tehran. His tombstone will probably say, "Here lies Dick Cheney, still winning.")
Even Henry Kissinger has defected from the Plan A gang. Once he thought the war could work, but now he thinks military victory is out of the question. When he turns against a war, you know the war's in trouble. He also believes leaving quickly would risk a civil war so big it could destabilize the Middle East.
Kofi Annan, who thought the war was crazy, now says that the United States is "trapped in Iraq" and can't leave until the Iraqis can create a "secure environment" - even though the Iraqis evince not the slightest interest in a secure environment. (The death squads even assassinated a popular comedian this week.)
The retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who thought Mr. Bush's crusade to depose Saddam was foolish and did not want to send in any troops, now thinks we may have to send in more troops so we can eventually get out.
Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, whose soldiers pulled Saddam out of his spider hole and who is returning to Iraq to take charge of the day-to-day fight, has given up talking about a Jeffersonian democracy and now wishes only for a government in Iraq that's viewed as legitimate. He has gone from "can do" to "don't know." He talked to The Times's Thom Shanker about his curtailed goals of reducing sectarian violence and restoring civil authority, acknowledging: "Will we attain those? I don't know."
At a Senate hearing last week, Gen. John Abizaid sounded like Goldilocks meets Guernica, asserting two propositions about the war that are logically at war with each other. He said we can't have fewer troops because the Iraqis need us, but we can't have more because we don't want the Iraqis to become dependent on us.
He contended that increasing the number of our troops would make the Iraqi government mad, but also asserted that decreasing the number would intensify sectarian violence.
This is a poor menu of options.
As Peter Beinart wrote in The New Republic this week, "In a particularly cruel twist, the events of recent months have demolished the best arguments both for staying and for leaving." Noting in the same magazine that "we are approaching a Saddam-like magnitude for the murder of innocents," Leon Wieseltier worried that the problem may be deeper than the number of our troops; it may be Iraq itself. "After we invaded Iraq, Iraq invaded itself.... We are at the mercy of Iraq, where there is no mercy."
Kirk Semple, The Times's Baghdad correspondent, wrote about Capt. Stephanie Bagley, the daughter and granddaughter of military policemen who was enthusiastic a year ago about her job of building a new Iraqi police force. But that was before the militia so inexorably began to infiltrate the police, presumably with the support of some leaders in Iraq's dysfunctional government. Now, with the police begging the Americans not to make them patrol Baghdad's mean streets and showing her their shrapnel wounds, she just wants to get her unit home safely, without losing another soldier. She said her orders were to train a local force to deal with crimes like theft and murder, not to teach them how to fight a counterinsurgency.
Aside from telling Israel to be nicer to the Palestinians, as if there lies Iraq salvation, James Baker will mostly try to suggest that the US talk to Iran and Syria. Yesterday, after the Lebanese Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel, an opponent of Syria, was assassinated in Beirut, President Bush said he suspected that Iran and Syria were behind the murder.
Maybe Mr. Baker had better find Plan C.
The Pentagon is trying to decide whether we should Go Big, Go Long or Go Home.
Go figure.
Friday, November 24, 2006
A Few Biblical Quotes On Condemning Heterosexuals
Do all homophobic Bible thumpers follow these rules?
The bible says...
"Women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be submissive, as the law also says." (1 Corinthians 14:34)
"Judge for yourselves: Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered? Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her as a covering." (1 Corinthians 11:13-15)
"If any man takes a wife, and goes in on her, and detests her, and charges her with shameful conduct, and brings a bad name on her, and says, 'I took this woman, and when I came to her I found she was not a virgin..." (Deuteronomy 22:13,14)
"But if ... evidences of virginity are not found for the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones..." (Deuteronomy 22:20,21)
"If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed, rather than having two hands, to go to hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched." (Mark 9:43)
"One of illegitimate birth shall not enter the congregation of the Lord." (Deuteronomy 23:2)
"Slaves, obey your human masters with fear and trembling, in the sincerity of your heart, as to Christ." (Ephesians 6:5)
"Slaves, obey your human masters in everything; don't work only while being watched, in order to please men, but work wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord." (Colossians 3:22)
"Slaves are to be submissive to their masters in everything, and to be well-pleasing, not talking back ." (Titus 2:9)
"Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the cruel. " (1 Peter 2:18)
"So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jashar. The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down for about a full day." (Joshua 10:13 NIV)
All are written in the bible and all are disregarded by modern-day evangelicals. So much for the literal word of the bible.
They also seem to forget the second part of this one:
"Jesus said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."
(Matthew 22:37-40)
The bible says...
"Women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be submissive, as the law also says." (1 Corinthians 14:34)
"Judge for yourselves: Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered? Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her as a covering." (1 Corinthians 11:13-15)
"If any man takes a wife, and goes in on her, and detests her, and charges her with shameful conduct, and brings a bad name on her, and says, 'I took this woman, and when I came to her I found she was not a virgin..." (Deuteronomy 22:13,14)
"But if ... evidences of virginity are not found for the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones..." (Deuteronomy 22:20,21)
"If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed, rather than having two hands, to go to hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched." (Mark 9:43)
"One of illegitimate birth shall not enter the congregation of the Lord." (Deuteronomy 23:2)
"Slaves, obey your human masters with fear and trembling, in the sincerity of your heart, as to Christ." (Ephesians 6:5)
"Slaves, obey your human masters in everything; don't work only while being watched, in order to please men, but work wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord." (Colossians 3:22)
"Slaves are to be submissive to their masters in everything, and to be well-pleasing, not talking back ." (Titus 2:9)
"Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the cruel. " (1 Peter 2:18)
"So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jashar. The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down for about a full day." (Joshua 10:13 NIV)
All are written in the bible and all are disregarded by modern-day evangelicals. So much for the literal word of the bible.
They also seem to forget the second part of this one:
"Jesus said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."
(Matthew 22:37-40)
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Controversy Over Science & Religion
A Free-for-All on Science and Religion
The New York Times
By GEORGE JOHNSON
Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book “The God Delusion” is a national best-seller.
Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.
Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.
Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.
She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”
She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.
There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)
A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.
After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called “pop conflict books” like Dr. Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” as “commercialized ideological scientism” — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.
That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,” was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.
With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. “The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”
“Every religion is making claims about the way the world is,” he said. “These are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.”
By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.
Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”
With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?
“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.”
“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”
Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.
“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”
That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”
By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”
“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”
His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”
Dr. Tyson put it more gently. “Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,’ ” he said. “I worry that your methods” — he turned toward Dr. Dawkins — “how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.”
Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, “I gratefully accept the rebuke.”
In the end it was Dr. Tyson’s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.” When Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.”
It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.
“What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops,” Dr. Tyson said. “You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says: ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ ”
“Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,” he said. “Something fundamental is going on in people’s minds when they confront things they don’t understand.”
He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words “algebra” and “algorithm” are Arabic.
But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. “Revelation replaced investigation,” he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.
He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all.
Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.
“She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”
Dr. Dawkins wasn’t buying it. “I won't miss her at all,” he said. “Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.”
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
By GEORGE JOHNSON
Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book “The God Delusion” is a national best-seller.
Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.
Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.
Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.
She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”
She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.
There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)
A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.
After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called “pop conflict books” like Dr. Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” as “commercialized ideological scientism” — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.
That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,” was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.
With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. “The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”
“Every religion is making claims about the way the world is,” he said. “These are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.”
By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.
Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”
With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?
“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.”
“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”
Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.
“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”
That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”
By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”
“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”
His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”
Dr. Tyson put it more gently. “Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,’ ” he said. “I worry that your methods” — he turned toward Dr. Dawkins — “how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.”
Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, “I gratefully accept the rebuke.”
In the end it was Dr. Tyson’s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.” When Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.”
It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.
“What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops,” Dr. Tyson said. “You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says: ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ ”
“Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,” he said. “Something fundamental is going on in people’s minds when they confront things they don’t understand.”
He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words “algebra” and “algorithm” are Arabic.
But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. “Revelation replaced investigation,” he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.
He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all.
Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.
“She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”
Dr. Dawkins wasn’t buying it. “I won't miss her at all,” he said. “Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.”
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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