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vrijdag 28 maart 2014

Change You Cannot Believe In

Published on Thursday, March 27, 2014 by Common Dreams

Forget Russian Gas, Just Frack Europe: Obama

Obama calls for combination of European fracking and US exports to serve EU energy needs

- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer
President of the European commission Jose Manuel Barroso, US president Barack Obama and president of the European council Herman van Rompuy at the summit in Brussels. (Photonews/Photonews via Getty Images)Speaking after a meeting with European leaders at the EU-US summit in Brussels on Wednesday, President Barack Obama suggested that the U.S. is open to exporting fracked shale gas, once promised as the source of American "energy independence," to the EU  and urged the EU to open up its own fracking reserves amid energy fears related to the crisis in Ukraine. Environmental groups have warned these policies will do nothing by way of energy security and everything for global environmental destruction and climate chaos.
"Once we have a trade agreement in place," Obama said at a news conference in Brussels in reference to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership deal currently in the works, "export licenses for projects for liquefied natural gas destined to Europe would be much easier, something that is obviously relevant in today's geopolitical environment."
European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso reportedly pressed Obama during Wednesday's meeting to ease current restrictions on U.S. gas exports, claiming fears over the future of Russian gas imports, which make up a quarter of EU gas supplies.
While insisting that U.S gas exports could be done sometime in the future, Obama used more candid language to suggest EU leaders should first open up their own shale gas reserves to fracking—amongst other energy options such as increased nuclear power.
"I think it is useful for Europe to look at its own energy assets, as well as how the United States can supply additional energy assets," Obama said. "Because the truth of the matter is, is that just as there’s no easy, free, simple way to defend ourselves, there’s no perfect, free, ideal, cheap energy sources.  Every possible energy source has some inconveniences or downsides. And I think that Europe collectively is going to need to examine, in light of what’s happened, their energy policies to find are there additional ways that they can diversify and accelerate energy independence."
He added: "The United States as a source of energy is one possibility, and we’ve been blessed by some incredible resources.  But we’re also making choices and taking on some of the difficulties and challenges of energy development, and Europe is going to have to go through some of those same conversations as well."
The comments came, Reuters reports, as "a clear reference to opposition in parts of the EU on environmental grounds to nuclear power and the extraction of shale gas."
France and Bulgaria currently ban the controversial drilling practice, which has been known to contaminate ground water supplies and pollute the air, while countries such as Britain and Poland have faced protests against ongoing fracking exploration, as Reuters reports.
Since the onset of the Ukraine crisis has sparked conversations regarding EU energy concerns, environmentalists have warned that the fossil fuel industry and fossil fuel friendly leaders are using the crisis to push through energy policies they have wanted all along—particularly having to do with the production and export of unconventional fossil fuels such as Canada's tar sands and the U.S's shale gas. As Stewart Trew writes at the Council of Canadian's blog today:
Now Canada, political voices in the United States, and the European Commission for that matter, are trying to leverage the political crisis in Ukraine to make a case for more (not less) North American imports of the dirty stuff: tar sands from Alberta and fracked gas from North America’s “boom” in unconventional shale production. The first puts pressure on Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring bitumen from Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast before shipping the final product to Europe and Asia. (The Energy East pipeline would do the same in Canada.)
The second (fracked gas) would require the U.S. to approve new LNG plants and remove energy export restrictions, which the EU is trying to do through trade and investment negotiations with the United States. David Cameron’s government in the UK is also using the crisis to justify a European shale gas boom that environmental groups and the general public strongly opposes.
"Fossil fuels should not be used as a geopolitical bargaining chip, nor should giant oil and gas corporations write our foreign policy,” Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch also recently noted. “The hypocrisy of the call for exports is highlighted by the fact that it will take years for our export facilities to be able to process the volumes of gas proposed for overseas sales."
"There's been a lot of talk about fast tracking and streamlining" the approval process, Mike Tidwell, Executive Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, recently toldCommon Dreams in reference to natural gas export plans and a proposed LNG export terminal in Cove Point, Maryland. "People need to understand that what they are talking about is cutting corners on processes put in place to protect people and the environment."
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U.S. Violations Human Rights

US human rights record chastised in UN report

UN human rights committee raises concerns over torture, drone strikes, the death penalty and NSA data collection
Guantanamo Bay
The UN committee also criticised Barack Obama for failing to keep his promise to close Guantánamo Bay. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
The UN has delivered a withering verdict on the US's human rightsrecord, raising concerns on a series of issues including torture, drone strikes, the failure to close Guantánamo Bay and the NSA's bulk collection of personal data.
The report was delivered by the UN's human rights committee in an assessment of how the US is complying with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR], which has been in force since the mid 1970s.
The committee, which is chaired by the British law professor Sir Nigel Rodley, catalogued a string of human rights concerns, notably on the mass surveillance exposed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.
It said the collection of the contents of communications from US-based companies under the Prism program had an adverse impact on the right to privacy. It added that the legal oversight of such programs had largely been kept secret and failed to protect the rights of those affected.
The UN committee urged the US to overhaul its surveillance activities to ensure they complied with US law and conformed to US obligations under the ICCPR.
The comments come as the Obama administration sets out how it proposes to end the mass collection of Americans' phonecall data and make the searching of records held by telephone companies subject to a court order.
In its 11-page report, the committee also criticised the US for failing to prosecute senior members of its armed forces and private contractors involved in torture and targeted killings.
It noted that only a "meagre number" of criminal charges had been brought against low-level operatives. It also expressed concern that all investigations into enforced disappearances and torture conducted under the CIA's rendition programme were closed in 2012, and that the details of the programme remained secret, creating barriers to accountability and redress for victims.
The US is urged to "ensure that all cases of unlawful killing, torture or other ill-treatment, unlawful detention, or enforced disappearance are effectively, independently and impartially investigated, that perpetrators, including, in particular, persons in command positions, are prosecuted and sanctioned".
The committee was also scathing about Washington's legal justification for targeted killings using drones. The US claims such strikes, which have killed dozens of insurgents and civilians, are an act of self-defence as part of armed conflicts with al-Qaida and the Taliban. The committee criticised such justifications as too broad, and said it was unclear what precautionary measures were taken to avoid civilian deaths.
It urged the US to review the legal justification for drone strikes and said they should be subject to independent oversight.
The committee chides Obama for his failure to fulfil a commitment to close Guantánamo Bay. It notes that many detainees have been held there, and in military prisons in Afghanistan, for more than a decade without charge or trial. It call on the US to speed up the transfer of detainees and ensure that any criminal cases are dealt with by the US justice system rather than a military commission.
The committee also expressed alarm about the continued use of the death penalty in a 16 states, the "still high number" number of fatal shootings by certain police forces, notably in Chicago and the high proportion of black people in the country's jails.
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De Oekraïne 42

OpEdNews Op Eds 


The Danger of False Narrative


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The American people got a nasty taste of the danger that can come with false narrative when they were suckered into the Iraq War based on bogus claims that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction that he planned to share with al-Qaeda.
Nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers died in the conflict along with hundreds thousands of Iraqis. The war's total financial cost probably exceeded $1 trillion, a vast sum that siphoned off America's economic vitality and forced cutbacks in everything from education to road repair. Plus, the war ended up creating an Iraqi base for al-Qaeda terrorists that had not existed before.
But perhaps an even more dangerous problem coming out of the Iraq War was that almost no one in Official Washington who pushed the false narrative -- whether in politics or in the press -- was held accountable in any meaningful way. Many of the same pols and pundits remain in place today, pushing similar false narratives on new crises, from Ukraine to Syria to Iran.
Those false narratives -- and their cumulative effect on policy-making -- now represent a clear and present danger to the Republic and, indeed, to the world. The United States, after all, is the preeminent superpower with unprecedented means for delivering death and destruction. But almost nothing is being done to address this enduring American crisis of deception.
Today, Official Washington is marching in lockstep just as it did in 2002-03 when it enforced the misguided consensus on Iraq's WMD. The latest case is Ukraine where Russian President Vladimir Putin is accused of committing "aggression" to expand Russian territory at the expense of noble "democratic" reformers in Kiev.
Not only is this the dominant storyline in the U.S. media; it is virtually the only narrative permitted in the mainstream press. But the real narrative is that the United States and the European Union provoked this crisis by trying to take Ukraine out of its traditional sphere of influence, Russia, and put it in to a new association with the EU.


While there's nothing inherently wrong with Ukraine joining with the EU or staying with Russia (or a combination of the two) -- depending on the will of the people and their elected representatives -- this latest U.S./EU plan was motivated, at least in part, by hostility toward Russia.
That attitude was expressed in a Sept. 26, 2013, op-ed in the Washington Post by Carl Gershman, the neoconservative president of the National Endowment for Democracy, which doles out more than $100 million in U.S. funds a year to help organize "activists," support "journalists" and finance programs that can be used to destabilize targeted governments.
Gershman, whose job amounts to being a neocon paymaster, expressed antagonism toward Russia in the op-ed and identified Ukraine as "the biggest prize," the capture of which could ultimately lead to the ouster of Putin, who "may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself."
The NED, which was founded in 1983 to do in relative openness what the CIA had long done in secret, listed 65 projects that it was financing in Ukraine, using U.S. taxpayers' money. In other words, Gershman's op-ed reflected U.S. policy -- at least inside the State Department's still-neocon-dominated bureaucracy -- which viewed the EU's snatching of Ukraine from Russia's embrace as a way to weaken Russia and hurt Putin.
"European Aspirations"
Later, as the Ukrainian crisis unfolded, another neocon, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, reminded Ukrainian businessmen that the United States had invested $5 billion in their "European aspirations," implying that the U.S. expected something for all this money.
You might wonder why the American taxpayers should spend $5 billion on the "European aspirations" of Ukraine when there are so many needs at home, but a more relevant question may be: Why is the United States spending that much money to stir up trouble on Russia's border? The Cold War is over but the hostility continues.
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates described this thinking in his memoir, Duty,  explaining the view of President George H.W. Bush's Defense Secretary Dick Cheney: "When the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, Dick wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world."
As Vice President, Cheney and the neocons around him pursued a similar strategy during George W. Bush's presidency, expanding NATO aggressively to the east and backing anti-Russian regimes in the region including the hardline Georgian government, which provoked a military confrontation with Moscow in 2008.
Since President Barack Obama never took full control of his foreign policy apparatus -- leaving the Bush Family apparatchik Gates at Defense and naming neocon-leaning Democrat Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State -- the bureaucratic momentum toward confronting Russia continued. Indeed, the elevation of operatives like Nuland, the wife of prominent neocon Robert Kagan, gave new impetus to the anti-Russian strategy.

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Boycot Israel 119

De boycot beweging heeft Palestijnen sterker gemaakt, zegt medeoprichter Ramadan

Door: Levin Zühlke - van Hulzen - Geplaatst op: 26 maart 2014

EEN INTERVIEW DOOR ADRI NIEUWHOF

Adnan Ramadan

Adri Nieuwhof is consultant en was vele jaren actief in het Komitee Zuidelijk Afrika. Vanaf de eerste jaren na 2000 hield zij zich bezig met de Israëlisch-Palestijnse kwestie. Zij adviseerde bij het opzetten van de BDS-campagne. Zij vertaalde dit interview voor Jaffadok.
De Palestijnse beweging voor boycott, desinvestering en sancties (BDS) krijgt internationaal veel aandacht maar roept ook weerstand van politici en officials uit bijvoorbeeld Nederland, Europa en Israël. Hoeveel weet u over het ontstaan van de beweging?
Ik heb Adnan Ramadan, een van de mede-oprichters van de beweging, in 2005 voor het eerst ontmoet in Beit Sahour bij Bethlehem in de bezette Westelijk Jordaanover. Het jaar waarin de Palestijnen hun BDS oproep lanceerden (http://www.bdsmovement.net/call). Ramadan is geboren en getogen in het Dheisheh vluchtelingenkamp in Bethlehem. Na het afronden van zijn studie aan de Universiteit van Bethlehem werkte hij onder meer bij de onderzoeksafdeling van de YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) in Beit Sahour. Nu, bijna negen jaar later, heb ik Adnan via skype geïnterviewd over zijn visie op hoe de beweging zich heeft ontwikkeld.
Hij spreekt over de geschiedenis van BDS, waarbij hij een belangrijk en vaak vergeten punt benadrukt: de beweging onstond en werd opgericht door Palestijnen in Palestina. De resultaten van de beweging gaan de oorspronkelijke verwachtingen ver te boven.

Adri Nieuwhof: Wat waren voor jou de belangrijkste redenen om mee te helpen aan het bedenken en lanceren van de BDS oproep?

Adnan Ramadan: Wij hebben elkaar leren kennen toen we een workshop organiseerden voor OPGAI (Occupied Palestine and Golan Heights Advocacy Initiative) waar we de oproep tot BDS bespraken. Ik coördineerde destijds dit netwerk en ik was de manager van het Joint Advocacy Initiative van de YMCA en YWCA (World Young Women’s Christian Association). Daaruit volgt dat ik een mede-oprichter ben van de BDS-campagne, en ik heb een aantal jaren aan het secretariaat van de campagne gewerkt.
Het was een jaar na de uitspraak van het Internationaal Gerechtshof over de bouw van de apartheidsmuur door Israël in de bezette Westelijke Jordaanoever. Palestijnse maatschappelijk organisaties en andere spelers in de Palesijnse gemeenschap discussieerden veel over hoe wij de solidariteitsbeweging een degelijk instrument konden geven, met een heldere visie en gebaseerd op een grondige analyse van het conflict tussen Palestina en de Israëlis. Wij vonden de ervaring van Zuid-Afrika erg inspirerend. Dus er was de opvatting om het voorbeeld van het volk van Zuid-Afrika te volgen. In het bijzonder omdat overheden zich op dat moment ver hielden van het uitoefenen van enige druk op Israël. Wij besloten ons met een eensgezinde oproep en strategie te richten tot maatschappelijke organisaties over de hele wereld. Wij hebben een internationale donor organisatie gevraagd om een workshop met mensen uit Zuid-Afrikca en van de internationale solidariteitsbeweging met Zuid-Afrika te steunen. Dus wij hebben jou en Bangani Ngeleza uit Zuid-Afrika uitgenodigd om naar Beit Sahour te komen.
De uitkomst van onze workshop was om de oproep voor BDS uit te sturen. We hebben met Palestijnse netwerken gecoördineerd om de oproep gezamenlijk uit te sturen, met het Palestijnse Niet-Goevernementele Organisatie Netwerk (PNGO), met Ittijah – de koepel van Palestijnse maatschappelijke organisaties in historisch Palestina, de Palestijnse Campagne voor de Academische en Culturele Boycot van Israël (PACBI), OPGAI and Stop the Wall. De oproep werd later ondertekend door verschillede organisaties, voornamelijk Palestijnse basisorganisaties in Libanon, Syrië, de Westelijke Jordaanoever en veel delen van de Palestijnse gemeenschap.

AN: Wat waren jullie verwachtingen? Werd daaraan voldaan?

AR: Onze verwachting was dat er ten minste een eensgezinde oproep van de Palestijnse gemeenschap zou zijn. Veel van onze vrienden of mensen die met ons sympathiseerden of van onze rechten overtuigd waren, werden in verwarring gebracht door de vele oproepen die door verschillende delen van onze gemeenschap werden gedaan. Door als Palestijnen onze verwachtingen te verenigen, boden we de internationale solidariteitsbeweging duidelijkheid. Sommige mensen zeiden dat de oproep erg extreem was omdat veel groepen zouden weigeren om Israël te beschrijven als racistisch of als een discriminerend systeem, of om het met Zuid-Afrika te vergelijken, terwijl de feitelijke situatie veel verder gaat.
Dus we besloten om door te gaaan, en we kregen veel steun – meer dan 170 Palestijnse organisaties ondertekenden de oproep. De BDS beweging is nu het grootste netwerk in Palestina. Het succes van de oproep op internationaal niveau was ver boven onze verwachtingen, speciaal na de oorlog tegen Gaza in 2008-2009. Het is een instrument waarmee mensen op tal van manieren mee kunnen doen. Het biedt de mogelijkheid om de de waarheid bloot te leggen en uit te leggen wat er gebeurt.
In 2005 was er veel verwarring die door ons, de Palestijnen, was gecreëerd door de manier waarop wij onze zaak internationaal naar voren brachten. Het doen van een oproep gebaseerd op internationaal recht, VN-resoluties, op een analyse van de situatie, was een manier om terug te keren naar de oorsprong van het conflict. De BDS campagne kon mogelijkheden bieden voor politieke verandering, niet alleen voor solidariteit en druk op politieke besluitvormers. Het kon nieuwe mogelijkheden bieden voor verandering in de machtsrelatie tussen Palestina en Israël, en ook op intern niveau.

AN: Kun je uitleggen hoe dit werkte?

AR: Het officiële politieke proces liep vooral via onderhandelingen. Israël gebruikte de onderhandelingen om te zeggen dat er een Palestijnse staat is, een Palestijns politiek systeem en economie. Alles is er en het is hun probleem als ze er niet in slagen om het systeem te ontwikkelen. Tegelijkertijd brachten zij het idee aan de man dat het Palestijnse volk een bedreiging is voor de Israëlische samenleving, voor de staat. “Veiligheid” is de reden voor al hun maatregelen. De onderhandelingen waren een soort paraplu om het marketen van dergelijke ideeën te legitmeren.
Naar de andere stem werd niet geluisterd, de stem van het Palestijnse volk dat in deze complexe situatie moet leven, dat lijdt en elke dag verliest. De BDS-oproep ging over deze andere stem, over een andere analyse en liet Israël zien zoals het is. Niet als een democratische staat, zoals zij zeggen. De BDS-oproep zorgde voor een nieuw politiek debat omdat die geen onderdeel was van het nationale politieke systeem of politieke facties.
De maatschappelijke organisaties die bij de oproep betrokken waren werkten op tal van terreinen, zij hadden partners en vrienden over de hele wereld. De oproep was geloofwaardiger omdat die van organisaties aan de basis kwam die hun partners kennen. De oproep voor BDS maakte ook ruimte voor een nieuwe manier van denken in de Palestijnse gemeenschap. Het liet zien dat er nieuwe, geweldloze instrumenten zijn om te strijden, en die serieuze gevolgen kunnen hebben. Geweld was internationaal een van de belangrijke discussiethema’s omdat Israël er in slaagde om de Palestijnse strijd als een gewelddadige strijd te verkopen. Door de BDS-oproep konden we een ander beeld van de Palestijnen laten zien.

AN: Zou je zeggen dat de BDS-oproep de Palestijnen sterker heeft gemaakt?

AR: Zeker. Als ik met internationale vrienden of partners over de situatie sprak, dan vroegen ze “wat wil je precies van ons?” Zij vertelden mij dat zij tegenstrijdige oproepen en verzoeken kregen van Palestijnen. In het algemeen heeft het ons sterker gemaakt om deze solide en duidelijk gedefinieerde oproep te hebben.
Ten tweede, als Palestijnen die bij BDS betrokken zijn, geeft het ons de mogelijkheid om onder elkaar op een andere manier te denken, te handelen. De ervaring met BDS is positief door het opzetten van het secretariaat en het dagelijks contact hebben, niet door fysieke nabijheid maar op andere manieren, door het groepleiderschap.
Er was veel gevoeligheid over hoe we dit moesten leiden: zouden we terugvallen op persoonlijke invloeden, of politieke agenda’s van verschillende groepen? Het BDS werk bood een nieuw model van groepsbesluitvorming, van op een open manier zaken regelen, creatieve ideeën een kans geven. Door BDS konden Palestijnen voor het eerst hun leiders presenteren. Daarvoor waren er alleen de politieke partijen.

AN: Sommige mensen zeggen dat de BDS-campagne zich op de nederzettingen zou moeten richten. Wat is jouw reactie?

AR: Praten over de boycot van nederzettingen is terugkeren naar verwarring. Voor ons, Palestijnen, is Israël één staat. Er is niet een staat voor kolonisten en een staat voor anderen. Er is één politiek systeem, één veiligheissysteem, één economisch systeem. Alles is verbonden, komt voort uit hetzelfde beleid en dezelfde mentaliteit. Laten we teruggaan naar de hoofdoorzaak van het conflict: de zionistische beweging wil laten zien dat er een land is zonder volk voor een volk zonder land, waarbij het bestaan van het Palestijnse volk en hun rechten worden ontkend. Zij brengen mensen uit de hele wereld naar hier, als ze joods zijn, en laten hen zich hier vestigen.
Wanneer we spreken van Israël boycotten, dan hebben we het over het boycotten van een systeem van heersen, een manier van denken en gedragen, die het bestaan van het Palestijnse volk en hun rechten ontkent. Helaas heeft de Palestijnse Authoriteit (PA) — op basis van hun verdragen en hun mentaliteit — opgeroepen voor een boycot van alleen maar producten uit de nederzettingen.
Dit kan enkele kleine problemen veroorzaken voor enkele kleine industrieën hier of daar. Het biedt geen mogelijkheden voor echte politieke oplossingen en verandering in de Israëlische gemeenschap. De PA heeft op deze manier geprobeerd de hele BDS-campagne in te sluiten en er met de successen vandoor te gaan. Hun aanpak heeft veel obstakels opgeworpen in verschillende landen. Er zijn veel botsingen geweest tussen BDS-activisten en mensen die de officiële politiek van de PA uitdragen.
Voor mij gaat de oproep van Palestijnse maatschappelijke organisaties duidelijk over het boycotten van Israël en roept op tot sancties tegen Israël. Maar ieder kan besluiten – op basis van zijn analyse, omstandigheden en soms wetten — hoe te reageren op de oproep. Bijvoorbeeld, mensen in Nederland willen zich misschien richtten op een boycot van producten uit de nederzettingen. Het belangrijkste is dat zij op onze oproep reageren.

AN: Wanneer is de BDS-beweging overbodig? Wanneer is ons werk klaar?

AR: BDS is niet langer nodig als aan onze eisen is voldaan, die zijn: een einde aan de bezetting, de terugkeer van de Palestijnse vluchtelingen naar hun land en gelijkheid voor de mensen die in Israël en Palestina leven. BDS is belangrijk omdat muren een andere aanpak afsluiten. De verandering die in de Israëlische gemeenschap plaatsvindt is ernstig en gevaarlijk en geeft de racistische en discriminerende mentaliteit weer: land afpakken van de Palestijnen of hen doden of hen naar andere landen sturen. En het komt dagelijks van het politiek leiderschap en de regering in Israël. De feitelijke situatie is dat we zien hoe nederzettingen de bewoonde gebieden van Palestina omsingelen, wij zien de politieke en economische druk op het Palestijnse volk om dit land te verlaten, om ze wanhopig te maken, om ze te verzwakken.
Israël is er op uit om ze hun hulpbronnen af te nemen, niet alleen het land maar ook het water en andere bronnen en om elk aspect van hun leven te controleren. Het maakt deel uit van een samenhangend programma, en de onderhandelingen zijn daar onderdeel van. De noodzaak van de oproep tot BDS wordt steeds belangrijker.
Met BDS zien we resultaten. We hebben meer resultaten nodig. Het zal ons aanmoedigen.

at Geen opmerkingen:

donderdag 27 maart 2014

Tom Engelhardt 57



March 27, 2014
Tomgram: Nick Turse, America's Non-Stop Ops in Africa
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: It seems that even the Pentagon reads TD.  In February, TomDispatch Managing Editor Nick Turse wrote an article taking the Department of Defense to task for whitewashing the history of the Vietnam War at a website it set up to memorialize the 50th anniversary of that catastrophe.  Among other offenses, the piece documented an attempt to rebrand the infamous My Lai massacre as an “incident” and downgrade the civilian death toll by hundreds.  Look at the Pentagon’s Vietnam timeline today and you’ll find that My Lai is, indeed, referred to as a massacre and with a more realistic body count.  In fact, all the timeline entries taken to task by Turse have been changed (as have others), even if they still leave much to be desired.  Call it a modest victory for TomDispatch and Turse, author of a paradigm-shifting history of that conflict, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.  Tom]

After years in the shadows, U.S. Navy SEALs emerged in a big way with the 2011 night raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Afterward, they were lauded in print as supermen, feted by the president, and praised by the first lady. Soon, some of the country’s most secretive and elite special operators were taking the big screen by storm with 2012’s blockbuster Zero Dark Thirty and a film starring actual Navy Seals, Act of Valor.

Last year, yet another Hollywood smash, Captain Phillips, featured heroic SEALs. This time, the elite mariners weren’t slipping into a compound in Pakistan or on some crazy global quest, but killing pirates off the coast of Africa. The location was telling.

In recent years, as stories of SEAL exploits have bubbled up into the news, the operations of America’s secret military have been on an exponential growth spurt (with yet more funding promised in future Pentagon budgets) -- and a major focus of their activities has been Africa.  In 2012, for example, SEALs carried out a hostage rescue mission in Somalia.  Last fall, word of a SEAL mission in that country hit the news after a bid to kidnap a terror suspect went south, and the Americans were driven off under heavy fire.  (That same night, ArmyDelta Force commandos successfully captured a Libyan militant in a night raid.)  A few months later, three of four SEALs conducting an evacuation mission in South Sudan were wounded when the aircraft they were flying in was hit by small arms fire.  And just recently, SEALs were again in the news, this time for capturing an oil tanker with cargo from Libya that the weak U.S.-backed government there considered stolen.

By all accounts, SEAL missions in Africa are on the rise, and the Navy’s special operators are far from alone.  For the last several years, Nick Turse, author of the bestseller Kill Anything That Moves, has been covering the expansion of U.S. Africa Command and the quiet, under-the-radar growth of U.S. operations on that continent at TomDispatch.  He has repeatedly broken news about the military’s long African reach, its new bases (even if never referred to by that name), and its creation of a logistics network that now stretches across significant parts of the continent.  Today, Turse offers a revealing look at the quickening pace of U.S. military operations in Africa as the Pentagon prepares for future wars, and the destabilization and blowback it is already helping to sow on that continent. Tom 
U.S. Military Averaging More Than a Mission a Day in Africa
Documents Reveal Blinding Pace of Ops in 2013, More of the Same for 2014
By Nick Turse
The numbers tell the story: 10 exercises, 55 operations, 481 security cooperation activities.
For years, the U.S. military has publicly insisted that its efforts in Africa are small scale. Its public affairs personnel and commanders have repeatedly claimed no more than a “light footprint” on that continent, including a remarkably modest presence when it comes to military personnel.  They have, however, balked at specifying just what that light footprint actually consists of.  During an interview, for instance, a U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) spokesman once expressed worry that tabulating the command’s deployments would offer a “skewed image” of U.S. efforts there.
It turns out that the numbers do just the opposite.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
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Extinction

The Legacy That We Are Leaving: The Extinction of Species

Wednesday, 26 March 2014 11:15By Elizabeth Kolbert, Henry Holt and Co. | Book Excerpt
2014.3.25.PP.Headshot.Main. NewAuthor Elizabeth Kolbert. (Photo: Barry Goldstein)There have been five great extinctions of species on Earth, all of them due to natural causes. In a gripping, harrowing book, Elizabeth Kolbert -- a New Yorker journalist specializing in the environment – explores in detail the ongoing sixth extinction of a massive number of species, this time due to the destructive practices of the human species. Get the book now, "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History" by clicking here. 
The following is the prologue to the book that David Gann, author of The Lost City of Z, calls, "an epic, riveting story of our species that reads like a scientific thriller – only more terrifying because it is real."
Prologue: "The Sixth Extinction"
Beginnings, it's said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. The species does not yet have a name—nothing does—but it has the capacity to name things.
As with any young species, this one's position is precarious. Its numbers are small, and its range restricted to a slice of eastern Africa. Slowly its population grows, but quite possibly then it contracts again—some would claim nearly fatally—to just a few thousand pairs.
The members of the species are not particularly swift or strong or fertile. They are, however, singularly resourceful. Gradually they push into regions with different climates, different predators, and different prey. None of the usual constraints of habitat or geography seem to check them. They cross rivers, plateaus, mountain ranges. In coastal regions, they gather shellfish; farther inland, they hunt mammals. Everywhere they settle, they adapt and innovate. On reaching Europe, they encounter creatures very much like themselves, but stockier and probably brawnier, who have been living on the continent far longer. They interbreed with these creatures and then, by one means or another, kill them off.
The end of this affair will turn out to be exemplary. As the species expands its range, it crosses paths with animals twice, ten, and even twenty times its size: huge cats, towering bears, turtles as big as elephants, sloths that stand fifteen feet tall. These species are more powerful and often fiercer. But they are slow to breed and are wiped out.
Although a land animal, our species—ever inventive—crosses the sea. It reaches islands inhabited by evolution's outliers: birds that lay foot-long eggs, pig-sized hippos, giant skinks. Accustomed to isolation, these creatures are ill-equipped to deal with the newcomers or their fellow travelers (mostly rats). Many of them, too, succumb.
The process continues, in fits and starts, for thousands of years, until the species, no longer so new, has spread to practically every corner of the globe. At this point, several things happen more or less at once that allow Homo sapiens, as it has come to call itself, to reproduce at an unprecedented rate. In a single century the population doubles; then it doubles again, and then again. Vast forests are razed. Humans do this deliberately, in order to feed themselves. Less deliberately, they shift organisms from one continent to another, reassembling the biosphere.
Meanwhile, an even stranger and more radical transformation is under way. Having discovered subterranean reserves of energy, humans begin to change the composition of the atmosphere. This, in turn, alters the climate and the chemistry of the oceans. Some plants and animals adjust by moving. They climb mountains and migrate toward the poles. But a great many—at first hundreds, then thousands, and finally perhaps millions—find themselves marooned. Extinction rates soar, and the texture of life changes.
No creature has ever altered life on the planet in this way before, and yet other, comparable events have occurred. Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they're put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one. When it is still too early to say whether it will reach the proportions of the Big Five, it becomes known as the Sixth Extinction.
The story of the Sixth Extinction, at least as I've chosen to tell it, comes in thirteen chapters. Each tracks a species that's in some way emblematic—the American mastodon, the great auk, an ammonite that disappeared at the end of the Cretaceous alongside the dinosaurs. The creatures in the early chapters are already gone, and this part of the book is mostly concerned with the great extinctions of the past and the twisting history of their discovery, starting with the work of the French naturalist Georges Cuvier. The second part of the book takes place very much in the present—in the increasingly fragmented Amazon rainforest, on a fast-warming slope in the Andes, on the outer reaches of the Great Barrier Reef. I chose to go to these particular places for the usual journalistic reasons—because there was a research station there or because someone invited me to tag along on an expedition. Such is the scope of the changes now taking place that I could have gone pretty much anywhere and, with the proper guidance, found signs of them. One chapter concerns a die-off happening more or less in my own backyard (and, quite possibly, in yours).
If extinction is a morbid topic, mass extinction is, well, massively so. It's also a fascinating one. In the pages that follow, I try to convey both sides: the excitement of what's being learned as well as the horror of it. My hope is that readers of this book will come away with an appreciation of the truly extraordinary moment in which we live.
Copyright 2014 Elizabeth Kolbert. All rights reserved.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT

Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999. Her 2005New Yorker series on global warming, "The Climate of Man," won a National Magazine Award and was extended into a book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, which was published in 2006. Prior to joining the staff of The New Yorker, she was a political reporter for The New York Times.

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