Global Warming: Prevention and Adaptation

Problems caused by climate change are inseparable from the problems of empire, militarism, and wars.  We are fighting five illegal wars now, one of them ten years of waste and killing, another eight, with some nine hundred military bases around the world, creating deficit and debt in the trillions of dollars annually, paid for on credit from China and Japan.   Read Barry Sanders' The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism for what imperialism costs.    Then read one of these books on climate change, and reflect upon the trillions of dollars to be needed if we are to survive that too.   The only reasonable conclusion is for us all to cry out for the cessation of  of empire and the preparation for warming.  Dick

NEWS RELEASE

April 30, 2011

Contact Dick Bennett 442-4600

BOOK FORUM ON CLIMATE CHANGE

OMNI BOOK FORUMS Presents a Forum on Climate Change:

Friday, May 20, 2011, 6:30, at OMNI,

3274 Lee Ave.

(between Liquor World and Office Depot).  

The infant children today will grow up under the climate change of global warming for the rest of their lives.  As they get older, they must cope with knowing that the climate around them will become increasingly hostile.   And the conditions will worsen for their children, our grandchildren.   Every child on earth will face a similar fate.   The books discussed at this Forum explain this global crisis and put forth ways we might prevent (reduce C02), mitigate (flood walls), and adapt to (moving inland) the worst effects.   The authors have tried to prevent warming.   Scientists have been warning the world for as far back as the 1980s.   Now their vision is turning to reducing harms.    Their hope is that finally the nations and the people of the world will join together to prevent the worst for all people.

FORUM PANELISTS

Robert McAfee:  Eric Roston,     THE CARBON AGE: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat .   2008. 

Barbara Fitzpatrick:   Peter Ward, The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World without Ice Caps.   2010

Art Hobson:  James Hansen,  Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.  Bloomsbury, 2009.   And:   Bryan Lovell, Challenged by Carbon: the Oil Industry and Climate Change.  Cambridge UP, 2010.  

Steve Boss:  Mark Hertsgaard, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.  Houghton Mifflin, 2011.

Joanna Pollock: Heather Rogers, Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution. Scribner, 2010

Here’s my short list of recent books (2009-2011) (except for Climate Refugees, originally published in 2007, because it is unique as far as I know). 

--Archer, David.  The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate.  Princeton UP, 2009.

--Collectif Argos.  Climate Refugees.  MIT, 2010.  (Orig. Fr. Ed. 2007).

--Gore, Al.  Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.  Melcher, Rodale, 2009.

X--Hansen, James.  Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.  Bloomsbury, 2009.  (Art Hobson)

X--Hertsgaard, Mark.  Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.  Houghton Mifflin, 2011.  (Steve Boss)

X—Lovell, Bryan.  Challenged by Carbon: the Oil Industry and Climate Change.  Cambridge UP, 2010.   (Art Hobson)

--Lovelock, James.  The Vanishing Face of Gaia.  Basic Books, 2009.  

--Paskal, Cleo.  Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic, and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map.  Palgrave, 2010.

--Pollack, Henry.  A World Without Ice.  Avery/Penguin, 2009

X--Rogers, Heather.  Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution.  Scribner, 2010.  (Joanna Pollock)

X--Roston,  Eric.   The Carbon Age.  (Robert McAfee)

--Schweiger, Larry.  Last Chance: Preserving Life on Earth.  Fulcrum, 2009.

--Stager, Curt.  Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth.  St. Martin’s, 2011.

 X--Ward, Peter.  The Flooded Earth; Our Future in a World without Ice Caps.   2010.  (Barbara Fitzpatrick)

OMNI’S BOOK FORUM ON CLIMATE CHANGE:   PREVENT/MITIGATE, ADAPT by Dick Bennett

     Many articles begin with a concrete example of what is to follow.  I might tell you about my granddaughter, as James Hansen does in Storms of my Grandchildren, or about my daughter, as does Mark Hertsgaard in Hot. It’s concrete, affecting, memorable.  But in this instance, I’ll do the opposite, and place discussion in the largest context.    Mark Lynas does this in Six Degrees, in which chapter by chapter he darkens the future as it is imagined growing hotter (Our Future on a Hotter Planet).   But an even larger context. 

      Our Inter-glacial Anthropocene Warming

      Curt Stager’s Deep Future  is sub-titled: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth.   I will conclude with this “deep future,” but first let’s see what he shares with the authors of the books of our Forum.   He would understand “the ways in which our actions today may influence the long-term future of the world.”  No better epitome for these books might be stated.   Stager simply expands the time scale from hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. 

      For the “present,” that is, for the next thousands of years--the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans--, long-term, human-made warming will continue to produce increasing heat and sea-level rise, weather extremes, and other catastrophes to thousands of species.  The carbon crisis is already upon us; enormous environmental changes are inevitable.

     Preventing the Worst 

     But humans still have considerable control over the extent to which the warming will play out.   We can choose to produce more or less heat and disasters; we can limit the extent of warming, as all of these writers explain, depending on how much fossil fuel we have chosen to burn in the past (and that harm is done), and will choose to burn during the next hundreds and even thousands of years.   We can make life for future, or at least for distant, generations better than had we done nothing now to reduce C02.

       Mark Lynas is somewhat hopeful that we can contain C02 to 400ppm, which would hold temperature to a 2 degrees rise.   His final chapter is entitled, “Choosing Our Future.”  

        Much less optimistic but still focused on controlling C02 is The Flooded Earth by Peter Ward.  Even though Ward discusses more than one kind of catastrophic flood (“more than any other factor, the ever-increasing number of humans causes the seas to rise”), finally, he imagines, governments responded, and in time  prevented the worst by severe restrictions and massive new technology, enforced emission reduction, and geoengineering—until in 3200 CE carbon dioxide was capped at 550ppm.  This human achievement is “the best we can hope for.”  But it required—it will require--enormous changes in human behavior and technology.  And he ends the book with specific strategies that, “if successfully employed, could indeed give us hope that the ice sheets will not uncontrollably melt and that the seas will not catastrophically rise.”    If we do not change our attitudes and behavior, however, the earth will grow “so warmed that not only do we lose the ice caps but we also ensure a mass extinction.”

         All of the authors make the same argument:  we are heading for a warming, flooding, drying, extreme-weather, over-populated world unless we choose to stop how we live and develop extraordinary technologies.   But they are not confident we have the will to do what is necessary.  Consequently, some of the authors turn to adaptation—to what we can do to prevent the worst effects of warming.

         Adaptation.

           Mark Hertsgarrd in Hot  recounts the history of adaption--that is, in addition to trying to prevent excessive warming we must also plan for its consequences, including rising seas and weather extremes.  The idea is new.   Not until 2007, for example, did the European Union “begin discussing adaptation.”   And the idea has been opposed.  TheBush administration denied the idea just as it had denied warming.  For example, his administration killed a key adaptation tool, the National Climate Assessment of the vulnerabilities of various regions of the U.S. (hurricanes, rising sea levels) and plans for coping with them.   Many climatologists opposed the concept because they believed it would distract leaders from focusing on the prevention of warming.   

        But Hertsgaard observes that adaptation is commanding more attention “as the impacts of climate change become increasingly obvious and disruptive,” and he cites recent recognition of adaptation by Al Gore, Ban Ki-Moon, the Copenhagen climate summit, and many more influential individuals and agencies.  

        The one book of which I am aware that is focused entirely on adaptation is Climate Refugees, published four years ago.   The authors accept the warming the scientists are reporting and grapple with the consequences that millions of warming-caused migrants will face—some 50 million by 2010 and 200 million by the end of the century.  The suffering will be incalculable, and relief requiring enormous amounts of transportation, medical care, housing, and settlements.   Inadequate planning will lead surely to violence.   Countries less affected by warming will have to accept a new definition of refugee as one who has fled his or her homeland to escape danger; countries will have to open their borders to asylum for persons displaced by warming.   Or expect global chaos.

        The chapters of the book focus on countries already endangered and the methods necessary for helping them:   Bangladesh (much submerged), Chad (lakes drying), Maldives and Tuvalu (being submerged), China (desertification), Nepal (glaciers disappearing) we have perhaps already known about, but probably few of us would have thought our own country would be included in such a book (Alaska, Gulf Coast).  The warming future is already drowning or drying us, and we are called to a global Manhattan Project to care for the victims.

              And the longest future?   Stager knows what these authors know, agrees with their predictions, similarly suggests various palliatives.   We can prevent the worst heat to prevent the worst consequences thousands of years from now.  If we choose.   But ironically the heat has the advantage of delaying the eventual glacial return, and the sequestered coal (if we choose) could be used to lessen the severity of the cold.    What distinguishes him from the others, that is, is his extraordinarily long-term view (Hertsgaard's subtitle is: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth).   Eventually, he explains, “many millennia” in the future, C02 concentrations will return to their normal ranges, bringing down greenhouse temperatures.   But the process will occur extremely slowly.  “A full return to preindustrial conditions will take tens of thousands—perhaps even hundreds of thousands—of years.” 

      And then?   Our human-caused inter-glacial warming period, Anthropocene, will be followed by another much longer, much worse glacial period.  His conclusion is monumentally ironical:  “in this immensely long tale…climate change will mostly come to mean global cooling.”  

War on Terror/Osama: Consequences for US

Contents
Balko:   US War on Terror is War on US
Vets for Peace: War on Terror, Killing Osama Not Justice

Radley Balko, The Agitator
He Won

Monday, May 2nd, 2011

In The Looming Tower, the Pulitzer-winning history of al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11, author Lawrence Wright lays out how Osama bin Laden’s motivation for the attacks that he planned in the 1990s, and then the September 11 attacks, was to draw the U.S. and the West into a prolonged war—an actual war in Afghanistan, and a broader global war with Islam.

Osama got both. And we gave him a prolonged war in Iraq to boot. By the end of Obama’s first term, we’ll probably top 6,000 dead U.S. troops in those two wars, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. The cost for both wars is also now well over $1 trillion.

We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11 . . . .

• We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured. . . .

"Yes, Bin Laden the man is dead. But he achieved all he set out to achieve, and a hell of a lot more. He forever changed who we are as a country, and for the worse. Mostly because we let him. That isn't something a special ops team can fix."
READ MORE  http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/133-133/5823-osama-bin-laden-won



                 News from Veterans For Peace    
                         216 S. Meramec Avenue St. Louis, MO 63105 (314) 725-6005
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/
Justice Has Been Done?
May 3, 2011
“Justice has been done,” said President Obama. 
“Justice has been done.” 
“Justice has been done.”
Justice has been done!?  Justice?  Justice??  For the last ten years, we’ve been engaged in an exercise of justice?  That’s what you call what we’ve been doing? 
Are we supposed to take out a large magnifying glass and a delicate pair of tweezers and from within a bottomless pool of blood, gore, death, suffering and devastated economies, isolate one raid that killed Osama bin Laden …and then celebrate that “Justice has been done?”
We cannot.  It is simply not possible to call what we’ve been doing these past ten years, “justice.”
Real justice and a real call for celebration would have been to treat the attacks of September 11, 2001 for what they were, a massive, international criminal act and then set about dealing with it as we would any massive international crime – using international police forces to identify suspects, apprehend them, charge them, try them and punish the guilty.  And we could have secured more than justice.
On September 12, 2001, a grieving world stood in full sympathy alongside the U.S., ready to assist.  America, looked up to by so many, could have led the world into a new day where nations work together to prove once and for all that war is not the answer.  Justice and so much more were within our reach.
Ah, but our government leaders weren’t interested in justice.  They were interested in taking advantage of a rare “opportunity” to forcibly expand the Empire into a strategic corner of the world, no matter the cost in blood or treasure.  That’s what we’ve been doing for a decade after Osama bin Laden became infamous.  Of the millions of tragedies we could count in this past decade we can now add one more: May 2, 2011 will be remembered as an historical footnote for the day bin Laden, his wife and a handful of aides were killed.
The much larger story will be that millions of innocent people were killed, wounded, orphaned and displaced; ethnic and religious hatreds were fanned into wildfires; cities and towns from Maine to California grieved the death or the disfigured crippling of a loved one; our entire economy was thrown into chaos – because we spent over a trillion dollars not pursuing justice, but empire.
Collateral damage?  That foul term, come to popularity in these wars, includes every extended family of a war casualty, every city and state struggling to forestall bankruptcy and still provide fire protection, police, schools, medical services, libraries…
In fact, it is impossible to understand the cost of Empire’s wars in the aggregate.  It is simply beyond human comprehension, and for good reason.  It would send us into shock if we were to grasp it.  The only way we can get a taste of it is to stop for a moment and feel a mother’s pain as she’s handed a folded flag at graveside; visit, ghost-like, a mud-brick home in the middle of the night in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan and sit quietly with sobbing parents trying to make sense of why their youngest child was just incinerated by
a drone strike and their oldest poisoned by the only water there was to drink; listen to the 50 year-old father from Ohio cry because he has just been thrown out of work and his family is soon to be thrown out of their home. 
If every American tried this exercise in the quiet of every night for only two weeks, a tsunami of grief and righteous anger would spring from every town, overcoming every political institution in its path until our country was finally set on a direction to where the needs of common people matter more than the dreams of war profiteers and craven politicians doing the bidding of Empire. 
....Mike Frenetic

Newsletter on Killing Osama Bin Laden

US/NATO Attack on Libya

OMNI LIBYA NEWSLETTER, May 2, 2011.   Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace

Contents

Why Gaddafi and Not the Other Tyrants?

Deal with Saudis

Bombing a School for Children

Killing Gaddafi’s Son and Grandchildren

The Anti-Empire Report

May 2nd, 2011   by William Blum
 www.killinghope.org,  http://www.killinghope.org/bblum6/aer93.html

Iraq: Let us not forget what "humanitarian intervention" looks like.

Libya: Let us not be confused as to why Libya alone has been singled out for "humanitarian intervention".

On April 9, Condoleezza Rice delivered a talk in San Francisco. Or tried to. The former Secretary of State was interrupted repeatedly by cries from the audience of "war criminal" and "torturer". (For which we can thank our comrades in Code Pink and World Can't Wait.) As one of the protesters was being taken away by security guards, Rice made the kind of statement that has now become standard for high American officials under such circumstances: "Aren't you glad this lady lives in a democracy where she can express her opinion?" She also threw in another line that's become de rigueur since the US overthrew Saddam Hussein, an argument that's used when all other arguments fail: "The children of Iraq are actually not living under Saddam Hussein, thank God." ¹

My response to such a line is this: If you went into surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your entire leg, what would you think if someone then remarked to you how nice it was that "you actually no longer have a knee problem, thank God." ... The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam problem.

Unfortunately, they've lost just about everything else as well. Twenty years of American bombing, invasion, occupation and torture have led to the people of that unhappy land losing their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women's rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives ... more than half the population either dead, disabled, in prison, or in foreign exile ... the air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium ... the most awful birth defects ... unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children ... a river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris ... through a country that may never be put back together again.

In 2006, the UN special investigator on torture declared that reports from Iraq indicated that torture "is totally out of hand. The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein." Another UN report of the same time disclosed a rise in "honor killings" of women. ²

"It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003," reported the Washington Post on May 5, 2007.

"I am not a political person, but I know that under Saddam Hussein, we had electricity, clean drinking water, a healthcare system that was the envy of the Arab world and free education through college," Iraqi pharmacist Dr. Entisar Al-Arabi told American peace activist Medea Benjamin in 2010. "I have five children and every time I had a baby, I was entitled to a year of paid maternity leave. I owned a pharmacy and I could close up shop as late as I chose because the streets were safe. Today there is no security and Iraqis have terrible shortages of everything — electricity, food, water, medicines, even gasoline. Most of the educated people have fled the country, and those who remain look back longingly to the days of Saddam Hussein." ³

And this from two months ago:

"Protesters, human rights workers and security officials say the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has responded to Iraq's demonstrations in much the same way as many of its more authoritarian neighbors: with force. Witnesses in Baghdad and as far north as Kirkuk described watching last week as security forces in black uniforms, tracksuits and T-shirts roared up in trucks and Humvees, attacked protesters, rounded up others from cafes and homes and hauled them off, blindfolded, to army detention centers. Entire neighborhoods ... were blockaded to prevent residents from joining the demonstrations. Journalists were beaten." ⁴

So ... can we expect the United States and its fellow thugs in NATO to intervene militarily in Iraq as they're doing in Libya? To protect the protesters in Iraq as they tell us they're doing in Libya? To effect regime change in Iraq as they're conspiring, but not admitting, in Libya?

Similarly Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria ... all have been bursting with protest and vicious government crackdown in recent months, even to a degree in Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive societies in the world. Not one of these governments has been assaulted by the United States, the UK, or France as Libya has been assaulted; not one of these countries' opposition is receiving military, financial, legal and moral support from the Western powers as the Libyan rebels are — despite the Libyan rebels' brutal behavior, racist murders, and the clear jihadist ties of some of them. ⁵ The Libyan rebels are reminiscent of the Kosovo rebels — mafiosos famous for their trafficking in body parts and women, also unquestioningly supported by the Western powers against an Officially Designated Enemy, Serbia.

So why is only Libya the target for US/NATO missiles? Is there some principled or moral reason? Are the Libyans the worst abusers of their people in the region? In actuality, Libya offers its citizens a higher standard of living. (The 2010 UN Human Development Index, a composite measure of health, education and income ranked Libya first in Africa.) None of the other countries has a more secular government than Libya. (In contrast some of the Libyan rebels are in the habit of chanting that phrase we all know only too well: "Allah Akbar".) None of the others has a human-rights record better than that of Libya, however imperfect that may be — in Egypt a government fact-finding mission has announced that during the recent uprising at least 846 protesters were killed as police forces shot them in the head and chest with live ammunition. ⁶ Similar horror stories have been reported in Syria, Yemen and other countries of the region during this period.

It should be noted that the ultra-conservative Fox News reported on February 28: "As the United Nations works feverishly to condemn Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi for cracking down on protesters, the body's Human Rights Council is poised to adopt a report chock-full of praise for Libya's human rights record. The review commends Libya for improving educational opportunities, for making human rights a "priority" and for bettering its "constitutional" framework. Several countries, including Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia but also Canada, give Libya positive marks for the legal protections afforded to its citizens — who are now revolting against the regime and facing bloody reprisal."

Of all the accusations made against Gaddafi perhaps the most meaningless is the oft-repeated "He's killing his own people." It's true, but that's what happens in civil wars. Abraham Lincoln also killed his own people.

Muammar Gaddafi has been an Officially Designated Enemy of the US longer than any living world leader except Fidel Castro. The animosity began in 1970, one year after Gaddafi took power in a coup, when he closed down a US air force base. He then embarked on a career of supporting what he regarded as revolutionary groups. During the 1970s and '80s, Gaddafi was accused of using his large oil revenues to support — with funds, arms, training, havens, diplomacy, etc — a wide array of radical/insurgent/terrorist organizations, particularly certain Palestinian factions and Muslim dissident and minority movements in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia; the IRA and Basque and Corsican separatists in Europe; several groups engaged in struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa; various opposition groups and politicians in Latin America; the Japanese Red Army, the Italian Red Brigades, and Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang.

It was claimed as well that Libya was behind, or at least somehow linked to, an attempt to blow up the US Embassy in Cairo, various plane hijackings, a bomb explosion on an American airliner over Greece, the blowing up of a French airliner over Africa, blowing up a synagogue in Istanbul, and blowing up a disco in Berlin which killed some American soldiers. ⁷

In 1990, when the United States needed a country to (falsely) blame for the bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Libya was the easy choice.

Gaddafi's principal crime in the eyes of US President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) was not that he supported terrorist groups, but that he supported the wrong terrorist groups; i.e., Gaddafi was not supporting the same terrorists that Washington was, such as the Nicaraguan Contras, UNITA in Angola, Cuban exiles in Miami, the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala, and the US military in Grenada. The one band of terrorists the two men supported in common was the Moujahedeen in Afghanistan.

And if all this wasn't enough to make Gaddafi Public Enemy Number One in Washington (Reagan referred to him as the "mad dog of the Middle East"), Gaddafi has been a frequent critic of US foreign policy, a serious anti-Zionist, pan-Africanist, and pan-Arabist (until the hypocrisy and conservatism of Arab governments proved a barrier). He also calls his government socialist. How much tolerance and patience can The Empire be expected to have? When widespread protests broke out in Tunisia and Egypt, could Washington have resisted instigating the same in the country sandwiched between those two? The CIA has been very busy supplying the rebels with arms, bombing support, money, and personnel.

It may well happen that the Western allies will succeed in forcing Gaddafi out of power. Then the world will look on innocently as the new Libyan government gives Washington what it has long sought: a host-country site for Africom, the US Africa Command, one of six regional commands the Pentagon has divided the world into. Many African countries approached to be the host have declined, at times in relatively strong terms. Africom at present is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. According to a State Department official: "We've got a big image problem down there. ... Public opinion is really against getting into bed with the US. They just don't trust the US." ⁸ Another thing scarcely any African country would tolerate is an American military base. There's only one such base in Africa, in Djibouti. Watch for one in Libya sometime after the dust has settled. It'll be situated close to the American oil wells. Or perhaps the people of Libya will be given a choice — an American base or a NATO base.

And remember — in the context of recent history concerning Iraq, North Korea, and Iran — if Libya had nuclear weapons the United States would not be attacking it.

Or the United States could realize that Gaddafi is no radical threat simply because of his love for Condoleezza Rice. Here is the Libyan leader in a March 27, 2007 interview on al-Jazeera TV: "Leezza, Leezza, Leezza ... I love her very much. I admire her, and I'm proud of her, because she's a black woman of African origin."

Over the years, the American government and media have fed us all a constant diet of scandalous Gaddafi stories: He took various drugs, was an extreme womanizer, was bisexual, dressed in women's clothing, wore makeup, carried a teddy bear, had epileptic fits, and much more; some part of it may have been true. And now we have the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, telling us that Gaddafi's forces are increasingly engaging in sexual violence and that they have been issued the impotency drug Viagra, presumably to enhance their ability to rape. ⁹ Remarkable. Who would have believed that the Libyan Army had so many men in their 60s and 70s?

As I write this, US/NATO missiles have slammed into a Libyan home killing a son and three young grandchildren of Gaddafi, this after repeated rejections of Gaddafi's call for negotiations — another heartwarming milestone in the glorious history of humanitarian intervention, as well as a reminder of the US bombing of Libya in 1986 which killed a young daughter of Gaddafi.

DEAL WITH SAUDIS

Libya: A Pig in a Poke?

by Kevin Carson, April 15, 2011

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Some disconcerting facts, or at least disconcerting questions, are beginning to emerge regarding Obama’s Libyan intervention.
First of all, the Asia Times reported on April 2 that Saudi Arabia engineered an Arab League voting bloc to approve the American intervention in Libya, in return for Obama giving the Saudis a free hand to intervene in Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy movement — so troubling to the conservative monarchies of the Gulf — in that country.

Read more:   http://original.antiwar.com/kevin-carson/2011/04/14/libya-a-pig-in-a-poke/

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/30/us-libya-school-idUSTRE73T24620110430

“children school hit in NATO strike”

By Lin Noueihed,  TRIPOLI | Sat Apr 30, 2011

Related News

·                                 Libya's Gaddafi survives air strikes, son killed

Sat, Apr 30 2011

·                                 NATO strikes in Misrata but shelling resumes

Wed, Apr 27 2011

·                                 Deadlock in Libya exposes international rifts

Tue, Apr 26 2011

·                                 WRAPUP 7-U.S. and Britain aim to step up pressure on Gaddafi

Tue, Apr 26 2011

·                                 Heavy fighting in Misrata and Libyan mountains

Mon, Apr 25 2011

·                                 World »

·                                 Libya »

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Shattered glass litters the carpet at the Libyan Down's Syndrome Society, and dust covers pictures of grinning children that adorn the hallway, thrown into darkness by a NATO strike early on Saturday.

It was unclear what the target of the strike was, though Libyan officials said it was Muammar Gaddafi himself, who was giving a live television address at the time.
"They maybe wanted to hit the television. This is a non-military, non-governmental building," said Mohammed al-Mehdi, head of the civil societies council, which licenses and oversees civil groups in Libya.
The missile completely destroyed an adjoining office in the compound that houses the government's commission for children.
The force of the blast blew in windows and doors in the parent-funded school for children with Down's Syndrome and officials said it damaged an orphanage on the floor above.
"I felt sad really. I kept thinking, what are we going to do with these children?" said Ismail Seddigh, who set up the school 17 years ago after his own daughter was born with Down's.
"This is not the place we left on Thursday afternoon."
There were no children at the school when the missiles hit early on Saturday morning, since Friday begins the weekend in Libya. Children had been due to come in on Saturday morning.
A mound of rubble was all that remained of one wing of the main building that adjoined the school, though an antenna of some kind protruded from the ruins.
Both Mehdi and Seddigh said they had assumed that the antenna on the building was there to strengthen mobile phone signals and were not aware of any other use.
In the rubble of the main building, a shredding machine packed with sliced up documents lay on its side. A fax and phone were nearby and shelves of files could be seen.
The Libyan government has repeatedly said that NATO airstrikes have hurt and killed civilians but has not responded to requests by journalists to visit the hospitals, making it tough to verify casualty figures.
NATO has hit inside or near Gaddafi's compound before, or struck military or logistical sites. Saturday's government-organized visit was the first to bring journalists -- whom government minders watch closely -- to a civilian site.
Inside the school, the power had been knocked out by the strikes, the floor was wet because of a leaking pipe and desks were covered in glass and debris.
Seddigh's school prepared children with Down's Syndrome up to the age of 6 to go to normal schools, giving them speech therapy, handicrafts and sports sessions and teaching them to read and write. It handles 50 to 60 children a day.
(Reporting by Lin Noueihed)

01/05/2011

Gaddafi's son, 3 grandchildren killed

Tripoli: Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi escaped a NATO missile strike in Tripoli on Saturday, but his youngest son and three grandchildren under the age of 12 were killed, a government spokesman said.

Rebels celebrate the news of the killing of Libyan leader Gaddafi's youngest son, Seif al-Arab, on Saturday. Reuters

The strike, which came hours after Gaddafi called for a ceasefire and negotiations in what rebels called a publicity stunt, marked an escalation of international efforts to prevent the Libyan regime from regaining momentum.

Rebels honked horns and chanted "Allahu Akbar" or "God is great" while speeding through the western city of Misrata, which Gaddafi's forces have besieged and subjected to random shelling for two months, killing hundreds. Fireworks were set off in front of the central Hikma hospital, causing a brief panic that the light would draw fire from Gaddafi's forces.

The attack struck the house of Gaddafi's youngest son, Seif al-Arab, when the Libyan leader and his wife were inside. White House spokesman Shin Inouye declined to comment on the developments in Libya, referring questions to NATO. Alliance officials in Brussels said a statement would be issued later Sunday but did not say when.

Seif al-Arab Qadhafi, 29, was the youngest son of Gaddafi and brother of the better known Seif al-Islam Qadhafi, who had been touted as a reformist before the uprising began in mid-February. The younger Gaddafi had spent much of his time in Germany in recent years.

Gaddafi's children had been increasingly engaged in covering up scandals fit for a "Libyan soap opera," including negative publicity from extravagant displays of wealth such as a million-dollar private concert by pop diva Beyonce, according to a batch of diplomatic cables released by the secret-spilling WikiLeaks website.

But Seif al-Arab remained largely in the shadows, although he had a penchant for fast cars and partying when outside Libya.

Muammar Gaddafi and his wife were in the Tripoli house of his 29-year-old son when it was hit by at least one bomb dropped from a NATO warplane, according to Libyan spokesman Moussa Ibrahim.

END OF LIBYA REPORT 5-2-11

Lyn Smith, Voices Against the War: A Century of Protest (British)

Voices Against War: A Century of Protest, by Lyn Smith

By Jonathan Sale  Monday, 9 November 2009

My father had a bad war, but then most pacifists did. He didn't have a very good peace either, as soldiers returned from a victory in which he was only too aware he had played no part.

Some of his wartime correspondence with the sculptor and fellow anti-militarist Henry Moore ended up in the Imperial War Museum. Their testimonies are not in Voices Against War, but Lyn Smith has drawn on the same source. They include the usual suspects like Tony Benn, who wrote an essay on disarmament at the age of 11. Fenner (later Lord) Brockway suffered imprisonment, one night spent in the Tower of London, for being a conscientious objector in the First World War and was still active in the early Sixties when I rattled a collecting tin at a CND meeting, the organisation he helped to found.

More unexpected are the observations of the wife of the RAF commander at Greenham Common. Confronted by angry American women demanding to know why the protesters should be allowed near the base, Ann Marsh replied that the whole point was that this was a free country where people did what they thought right. Such fair-mindedness was not common in the First World War, which saw COs receiving death sentences, although they were not usually carried out. On the home front, women gave the white feather of cowardice to men not in uniform. One recipient pointed to his damaged leg and invited the accusing woman to look for the missing bit – on a battlefield of the Somme.

The quotations speak for themselves, apart from Smith's introductions at the beginning of each section. Moving and powerful contributions come from all classes. William Douglas-Home, brother of the Tory prime minister, Alec, was court-martialled for refusing to obey an order he believed would cause the deaths of French civilians. A A Milne moved in the other direction, from defence of pacifism to defence of the realm: the howitzer at Pooh Corner, as it were.

·                                 Soldier Magazine

Voices Against War: A Century of Protest by Lynn Smith

I DID not expect to find much in the way of original material in this latest offering from the Voices series. I was wrong. Voices Against War proved to be a very thought-provoking and revealing read. As the title suggests the subject matter ranges across a century of anti-war protest and conscientious objection. Beginning with the Great War and progressing through history right up to today’s conflicts, this book really does take the reader inside the ranks of the various anti-war movements.
Maj Mike Peters, AAC

Veterans for Peace Endorses David Swanson's Critique of Murder of Bin Laden

VFP Board of Directors Endorses David Swanson's Position On The Killing of Osama Bin Laden's

vfp@veteransforpeace.org,  News from Veterans For Peace,  

                        

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www.veteransforpeace.org

VFP Board of Directors Endorses David Swanson's Position

On The Killing of Osama Bin Laden, May 2, 2011

“Killing Resolves Nothing” By David Swanson

http://warisacrime.org/node/57708

The plane I was on landed in Washington, D.C., Sunday night, and the pilot came on the intercom to tell everyone to celebrate: our government had killed Osama bin Laden.  This was better than winning the Super Bowl, he said.

Set aside for a moment the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being -- which despite the pilot's prompting nobody on the plane did.  In purely Realpolitik terms, killing foreign leaders whom we've previously supported has been an ongoing disaster.

Our killing of Saddam Hussein has been followed by years of war and hundreds of thousands of pointless deaths.  Our attempts to kill Muammar Gadaffi have killed his children and grandchildren and will end no war if they eventually succeed.  Our attempts to kill Osama bin Laden, including wars justified by that mission, have involved nearly a decade of senseless slaughter in Afghanistan and the rest of the ongoing global "generational" war that is consuming our nation.

The Taliban was willing to turn bin Laden over for trial both before and after September 11, 2001. Instead our government opted for years of bloody warfare. And in the end, it was police action (investigation, a raid, and a summary execution) and not the warfare, that reportedly tracked bin Laden down in Pakistan. After capturing him, our government's representatives did not hold him for trial. They killed him and carried away his dead body.

Killing will lead only to more killing.  There will be no review of bin Laden's alleged crimes, as a trial would have provided.  There will be no review of earlier U.S. support for bin Laden.  There will be no review of U.S. failures to prevent the September 11th attacks.  Instead, there will be bitterness, hatred, and more violence, with the message being communicated to all sides that might makes right and murder is the way in which someone is, in President Obama's words, brought to justice.

Nothing is actually resolved, nothing concluded, and nothing to be celebrated in taking away life.  If we want something to celebrate here, we should celebrate the end of one of the pieces of war propaganda that has driven the past decade of brutality and death.  But I'm not going to celebrate that until appropriate actions follow.  Nothing makes for peace like ceasing to wage war.  Now would be an ideal time to give that a try.

Our senseless wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya must be ended.  Keeping bin Laden alive and threatening, assisted in keeping the war machine churning its bloody way through cities and flesh for years.  No wonder President Bush was, as he said, not interested in tracking bin Laden down.

Ending the wars was our moral duty last week exactly as this week.  But if the symbolism to be found in the removal of a key propaganda piece can be combined with the recent overwhelming U.S. support for ending the wars, to actually end the wars, then I'll be ready -- with clean hands and with no nasty gleam of revenge in my eye -- to pop open the champagne.

But let's return to the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being.  A decade ago that would not have seemed as natural to a U.S. airline pilot.  The automatic assumption would not have been that there could be no dissenters to that celebration.  A decade ago torture was considered irredeemably evil.  A decade ago we believed people should have fair trials before they are declared guilty or killed.  A decade ago, if a president had announced his new power to assassinate Americans, at least a few people would have asked where in the world he got the power to assassinate non-Americans.

Is it too late to go back 10 years in time in some particular ways?  As we put bin Laden behind us, can we put the degredation of our civil liberties and our representative government, and our  honesty, accountability, and the rule of law behind us too?  Can we recover the basic moral deceny that we used to at the very least pretend and aspire to?

Not while we're dancing in the street to celebrate death.

Imagine the propaganda that the U.S. media could make of video footage of a foreign country where the primitive brutes are dancing in the streets to celebrate the murder of a tribal enemy.  That is the propaganda we've just handed those who will view bin Laden as a martyr.  When their revenge comes, we will know exactly what we are supposed to do: exact more revenge in turn to keep the cycle going.

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, but the blind people think that they still see.  The world looks to them like a Hollywood adventure movie.  In those stories, killing somone generally causes a happy ending.  That misconception is responsible for piles and piles of corpses to which more will now be added.

Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day for Peace