Almost every scandal produces unlikely heroes, workaday or even flawed men and women who don’t make headlines but perform courageous acts of conscience, often behind the scenes and in the face of enormous pressure. Several such characters emerged recently from what has otherwise been a disgraceful chapter of American history involving the abuse of foreign detainees held by U.S. forces in Cuba, Afghanistan and Iraq. An extensive report released last week by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General is the first official document to lay out in exhaustive detail the extent of the fissures created within the administration because of disagreements over interrogation and detention policies. The report depicts the struggles of several Justice Department and FBI officials to thwart interrogation tactics they considered ineffective at best and illegal at worst. In the process, they stuck their necks out by clashing with military and CIA interrogators and Defense Department and CIA higher-ups, and they pressed their case at the White House, even when that task seemed futile. It was Pasquale D’Amuro, chief of counterintelligence at the FBI, who first directed FBI agents based in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002 to have nothing to do with interrogations that […]
The invasion of Iraq by Britain and the US has trebled the price of oil, according to a leading expert, costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone. The oil economist Dr Mamdouh Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation (Unido), told The Independent on Sunday that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of the record $135 a barrel reached last week, if it had not been for the Iraq war. He spoke after oil prices set a new record on 13 consecutive days over the past two weeks. They have now multiplied sixfold since 2002, compared with the fourfold increase of the 1973 and 1974 ‘oil shock’ that ended the world’s long postwar boom. Goldman Sachs predicted last week that the price could rise to an unprecedented $200 a barrel over the next year, and the world is coming to terms with the idea that the age of cheap oil has ended, with far-reaching repercussions on their activities. Dr Salameh, director of the UK-based Oil Market Consultancy Service, and an authority on Iraq’s oil, […]
Getting ordinary plastic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an environmental dream come true. After all, we produce 500 billion a year worldwide and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. They take up space in landfills, litter our streets and parks, pollute the oceans and kill the animals that eat them. Now a Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster — in three months, he figures. Daniel Burd’s project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment. Daniel, a 16-year-old Grade 11 student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, got the idea for his project from everyday life. ‘Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me,’ he said. ‘One day, I got tired of it and I wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags.’ The answer: not much. So he […]
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has continued to take heat from Republicans for insisting he would talk with the leaders of unfriendly nations. Now Senator Joe Biden, has come to his defense in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. Advertisement ‘You either talk, you maintain the status quo, or you go to war,’ Biden writes. ‘If Mr. McCain has ruled out talking, we’re stuck with an ineffectual policy or military strikes that could quickly spiral out of control. … Equally unwise is the Bush-McCain fixation on regime change.’ When Biden appeared on NBC to discuss his op-ed, host Matt Lauer was quick to probe for signs of weakness. ‘By coming to Senator Obama’s defense in this op-ed piece, are you admitting that he is somewhat vulnerable on this?’ Lauer asked. ‘No,’ Biden replied. ‘What I’m saying is I’m sick and tired of Republicans characterizing Democrats generally … as being weak on national security. The truth is, we’ve never been weaker in the last hundred years in terms of our position in the world. … I’ve never seen a time … when America’s been less respected around the world and has had less leverage, and the idea […]
Our ‘terror trials’ aren’t working. The prosecutions of a fistful of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay-just getting underway after more than six years-are barely moving forward. Evidence is flimsy and stale. Prisoners claiming to have been abused and subjected to involuntary use of drugs are refusing to participate in their trials. There may yet be verdicts at Guantánamo. But following years of abuse, neglect and secrecy, there won’t be justice. The other place we won’t see legal accountability is at the upper levels of the Bush administratiom, where evidence of lawbreaking is largely dismissed or ignored. I want to be clear that there is no moral equivalence between the actions of members of the Bush administration and those of alleged ‘enemy combatants’ at Guantánamo. But both the tribunals at Guantánamo and the wrongdoing in the Bush administration reflect how legal processes can fail under extreme political pressure. Outside the Bush administration, there is bipartisan agreement that Guantánamo should be shut down and the military commissions scrapped. A compelling case could have been made for Nuremburg-style trials for some of the prisoners there-including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. But the CIA admits Mohammed was waterboarded, rendering his […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
