Check It Out for Tuesday, April 14th
Anne Miller writes at Truthout about rethinking Afghanistan: "The lack of serious scrutiny of the president's Afghanistan policy is nothing short of stupefying, especially given our recent misadventures in Iraq. Where is the critical debate?
"The mantra of many Democrats is that military force alone won't solve the problem in Afghanistan. The "problem" seems to be how to keep the corrupt US-backed central government in Kabul from falling, and what to do about the thousands of al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Meanwhile, many conservative members of Congress lament that the president isn't sending additional brigades.
"Congress and the public should be asking what President Obama realistically thinks the US military can accomplish with an additional 21,000 US forces in Afghanistan. What can they do that soldiers from forty-one countries in seven and a half years have been unable to accomplish? And what the British and the Soviets were unable to accomplish before that?
"Last summer, while then-candidate Obama was talking about "finishing the job" in Afghanistan, the RAND Corporation, a nonpartisan think tank, issued a detailed report that concluded that since 1968, only seven percent of all terrorist groups have been ended as a result of military force. The report makes the strong recommendation that the US should have "a light military footprint or none at all" in Muslim countries to help mitigate the threat of terrorism. According to a February 2009 ABC poll, only 18 percent of Afghanis support more US troops in their country."
Maricel Drazer at IPS News writes about littering space. "Tonnes of space garbage is orbiting the Earth and posing serious threats to active satellites and manned space missions, and to astronauts when they conduct space walks outside of their ships.
"Humans have generated an estimated 6,000 tonnes of space garbage, including the proven existence of 13,000 objects larger than 10 centimetres, nearly all left to the universe by the former Soviet Union, the United States, China, France, Japan and India.
"More than 300 experts from 21 countries discussed these matters at the fifth European Conference on Space Debris, held by the European Space Agency (ESA) in Darmstadt, Germany from Mar. 30-Apr. 2.
"According to the latest ESA estimates, some 600,000 objects larger than one centimetre are swarming in the Earth's orbit. These include inactive satellites, old rockets, fragments of spaceships, and paint chips, left after more than 50 years of human activity in outer space.
"The main inventory of space debris comes from the U.S. Defence Department's Space Surveillance Network. The rest of the countries rely heavily on that system for their knowledge of the situation.
"Furthermore, the number of pieces of debris orbiting the planet continues to grow due to collisions.
" 'The situation is serious. The increase in these objects in space is not regulated,' Holger Krag, an expert with ESA's space operations centre, told Tierramérica.
" 'We fear that there will be more and more collisions that generate innumerable fragments, which in turn impact other satellites,' said Krag. 'And at some point, space at distances of up to 2,000 kilometres (the area with most satellite paths) from Earth will no longer be usable for space travel.'
"At speeds of 40,000 km per hour, even tiny fragments of space debris can cause serious damage to spaceships.
"The danger was driven home on Feb. 10, when the U.S. satellite Iridium 33 ran into the Russian Cosmos 2251 satellite, which was out of service. Both were reduced to hundreds of shards, joining the ranks of space garbage.
"However, experts consider much more serious the intentional destruction of the Chinese satellite Fengyun 1C with a missile launched from Earth by Chinese authorities in January 2007.
" 'That one action increased the presence of space debris by 25 percent. It was dramatic, and we are still dealing with the consequences today,' Krag said.
"On Mar. 12, the crew of the International Space Station had to seek refuge in the Soyuz space capsule for 10 minutes due to the possibility of their vessel's collision with space debris."
Johann Hari at The Independent months ago about piracy history and the ongoing situation long before the Maersk Alabama incident:
"At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: 'If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters.'
This is the context in which the 'pirates' have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent 'strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence.'
"No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: 'We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas.'
"Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won't act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world's oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.
"The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know 'what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.' The pirate smiled, and responded: 'What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.' Once again, our great imperial fleets sail – but who is the robber?"
And K'Naan at URB Magazine via AlterNet adds to the piracy background information and why Somalis don't often condemn these pirates.
"Somalia has been without any form of a functioning government since 1991. And despite its failures, like many other toddler governments in Africa, sprung from the wells of post-colonial independence, bad governance and development loan sharks, the specific problem of piracy was put in motion in 1992.
"Already by this time, local fishermen in the coastline of Somalia have been complaining of illegal vessels coming to Somali waters and stealing all the fish. And since there was no government to report it to, and since the severity of the violence clumsily overshadowed every other problem, the fishermen went completely unheard. But it was around this same time that a more sinister, a more patronizing practice was being put in motion. A Swiss firm called Achair Parterns, and an Italian waste company called Progresso, made a deal with Ali Mahdi, that they could dump containers of waste material in Somali waters. These European companies were said to be paying Warlords about $3 a ton, where as in to properly dispose of waste in Europe costs about $1000 a ton.
"In 2004, after Tsunami washed ashore several leaking containers, thousand of locals in the Puntland region of Somalia started to complain of severe and previously unreported ailments, such as abdominal bleeding, skin melting off and a lot of immediate cancer-like symptoms. Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environmental Program, says that the containers had many different kinds of waste, including 'Uranium, radioactive waste, lead, cadmium, mercury and chemical waste..."
"...The truth is, if you ask any Somali if they think getting rid of the pirates only means the continuous rape of our coast by unmonitored Western vessels, and the production of a new cancerous generation, we would all fly our pirate flags high.
"It is time that the world gave the Somali people some assurance that these Western illegal activities will end, if our pirates are to seize their operations. We do not want the EU and NATO serving as a shield for these nuclear waste-dumping hoodlums. It seems to me that this new modern crisis is a question of justice, but also a question of whose justice. As is apparent these days, one man's pirate is another man's coast guard."
James McEnteer at Counterpunch on Peru teaching on holding elected officials accountable for abuse of power.
"Peru’s Supreme Court sentenced former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori to twenty-five years in prison last week for creating death squads during his presidency – from 1990 to 2000 – which murdered dozens of people. More than seventy thousand people died during Fujimori’s reign in the war between his iron-fisted administration and Maoist guerilla sic) groups, the “Shining Path,” and the “Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.”
"After a fifteen-month trial, the presiding judge, Cesar San Martin, said, “The charges have been proved beyond all reasonable doubt.” The court found that Fujimori targeted various political opponents for kidnapping and assassination. Fujimori was also found guilty of killing fifteen people, including an 8-year-old boy, at a suburban Lima barbecue.
"Earlier Fujimori received a six-year prison term for ordering an illegal search. He still faces two corruption trials. He resigned from office while in Japan, which granted him political asylum because of his Japanese ancestry. In 2005 he left Japan for Chile, apparently to re-launch his Peruvian political career. He was detained there and extradited to Lima to face trial in 2007. Why did Fujimori abandon his Japanese safe haven? Was he deluded by a messianic belief that he could get away with anything, as he had for a decade as president?
"The Lima judicial proceeding represents a major milestone, the first trial of a democratically elected head of state in his own country. It was also courageous, considering Peru’s violent past and Fujimori’s continuing popularity. His daughter is a member of the legislature and intends to run for the presidency in 2011. She has vowed to pardon her father if elected.
Apologists say the brutal tactics of the military regime were necessary to combat terrorist threats. That defense should chill the hearts of U.S. citizens, since that is precisely Dick Cheney’s rationale for the illegal kidnappings, torture and detentions without charge – our very own “dirty war” – that became U.S. policy in the Bush years.
"Peru and Argentina understand that unless they identify and condemn the abuses of power committed by their own governments, their current and future regimes will lack legitimacy. 'The past is not dead. It’s not even past,' as William Faulkner said. To pretend otherwise is to implicate current and future governments – of Peru, Argentina or the United States – in those crimes and abuses."
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