Hi all. I hope your weekend was better than mine. My computer is completely on the fritz. It blue-screened about ten times on Saturday, despite Check Disk saying all was fine. So, I don’t know if I can host this afternoon’s Pony Party. I’ll try, though!

So, in light of my computer disaster, might I offer up some Windows haiku. This is a modification of a Windows haiku I saw in the 90s, which referred to NT.

Windows XP crashed

I saw the blue screen of death

No one hears my screams

Eek!

She seems to be stronger, but what they want her to be is weak

She could play pretend, she could join the game, boy

She could be another clone

Monday’s Headlines: Senate panel critiques prewar claims by White House: Surging costs of groceries hit home: Pope could face protests in Ireland over abuse cases: Climate change may spark conflict with Russia, EU told: Pakistan judges may be reinstated in coalition deal: Thirsty land sucked dry to irrigate Olympics: President Robert Mugabe accused of taking company cash to buy votes: Rare pygmy hippos caught on film: Toddler Returns to Iraq After Life-Saving Surgery: Studies: Iraq costs US $12B per month: New docs detail Colombian rebel ties

Carbon Output Must Near Zero To Avert Danger, New Studies Say

The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.

Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.

USA

Senate panel critiques prewar claims by White House

‘Nobody is going to be happy’ with the long-delayed report’s mixed verdict on whether the Bush administration misused intelligence to argue for war with Iraq, an official says.

WASHINGTON — After an acrimonious investigation that spanned four years, the Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to release a detailed critique of the Bush administration’s claims in the buildup to war with Iraq, congressional officials said.

The long-delayed document catalogs dozens of prewar assertions by President Bush and other administration officials that proved to be wildly inaccurate about Iraq’s alleged stockpiles of banned weapons and pursuit of nuclear arms.

But officials say the report reaches a mixed verdict on the key question of whether the White House misused intelligence to make the case for war.

Surging costs of groceries hit home

Bread, eggs, milk prices up sharply

American families, already pinched by soaring energy costs, are taking another big hit to household budgets as food prices increase at the fastest rate since 1990.

After nearly two decades of low food inflation, prices for staples such as bread, milk, eggs, and flour are rising sharply, surging in the past year at double-digit rates, according to the Labor Department. Milk prices, for example, increased 26 percent over the year. Egg prices jumped 40 percent.

Europe

Pope could face protests in Ireland over abuse cases

The first papal visit to Ireland in 29 years could be marred by protests if the Pope refuses to meet victims of sexual abuse by priests over many years.

An organisation representing some of the victims of paedophile priests has written to the Irish Conference of Catholic Bishops asking for a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI during a visit expected to take place next year.

The bishops were to receive the warning during a special session held today to discuss matters including ongoing paedophile scandals.

Sean O’Conaill, the coordinator of Voice of the Faithful in Ireland, which includes Catholic priests as well as abuse victims, said that if the bishops refused to arrange a meeting between the victims and the Pope there would be “outrage and disgust”.

Climate change may spark conflict with Russia, EU told

Alert over scramble for control of energy resources in the Arctic

European governments have been told to plan for an era of conflict over energy resources, with global warming likely to trigger a dangerous contest between Russia and the west for the vast mineral riches of the Arctic.

A report from the EU’s top two foreign policy officials to the 27 heads of government gathering in Brussels for a summit this week warns that “significant potential conflicts” are likely in the decades ahead as a result of “intensified competition over access to, and control over, energy resources”.

The seven-page report, obtained by the Guardian, has been written by Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy supremo, and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the commissioner for external relations. It predicts that global warming will precipitate security issues for Europe, ranging from energy wars to mass migration, failed states and political radicalisation.

Asia

Pakistan judges may be reinstated in coalition deal



Pakistan’s two largest parties agreed to form a coalition government yesterday and promised to reinstate judges fired last year by Pervez Musharraf, raising the prospect of fierce antagonism between president and cabinet.

Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister once exiled by Musharraf, and Asif Ali Zardari, widow of Benazir Bhutto, announced a power-sharing deal at a resort town in the foothills of the Himalayas.

The deal dashes Musharraf’s hope that the party which backs him – a poor third in last month’s election – might get a role in the government. Zardari’s Pakistan People’s party won 120 seats in the 342-seat National Assembly, followed by Sharif’s party with 90. The former ruling party aligned with Musharraf won 51.

Thirsty land sucked dry to irrigate Olympics

By Clifford Coonan in Tang County, Hebei

Monday, 10 March 2008

It has not rained in Tang County since August and Liu Haishui is not expecting much from his peach crop this year.

Water was always scarce in this arid northern Chinese township several hundred kilometres from Beijing, but competition for it is more intense than ever as his land adjoins a new canal, which is going to pump 300 million cubic metres of water to Beijing to make sure that everything looks lush and green for August’s Olympic Games.

Africa

President Robert Mugabe accused of taking company cash to buy votes

President Mugabe has shored up his election campaign with a handover of millions of pounds of imported vehicles, machinery and cattle paid for with money seized from private companies and local and international aid agencies, business sources say.

On Saturday Mr Mugabe, 84, presided over the distribution of 500 tractors, 20 combine harvesters and an array of modern farm equipment as well as 50,000 ox-drawn ploughs, 60,000 ox carts, tools, cattle, buses, motorcycles, generators and diesel.

The goods were to be distributed around the farming districts, he said, under the agricultural mechanisation programme, which would produce “the sound of machinery tilling the land in places far and wide and announcing with an irreversible finality that our land has returned to us”.

Rare pygmy hippos caught on film

Two civil wars, illegal logging and poaching – it was thought this was more than enough to wipe out Liberia’s population of pygmy hippos.

But this rare and endangered species has survived against the odds and there are photographs to prove it.

A team led by the Zoological Society of London travelled to the West African country.

It was delighted to discover that, despite their fears, the hippo population had not been wiped out.

Middle East

Toddler Returns to Iraq After Life-Saving Surgery



HADITHA, Iraq – She is an amazingly lucky girl in a country where bad luck is everywhere. But 2-year-old Amenah al-Bayati is not aware of her good fortune.

She is still ignorant of how ruthlessly death stalks her country. She was not yet born when, in 2005, American marines killed 24 civilians, including five children, after their convoy hit a roadside bomb in this farming town on the Euphrates. She was too young to understand the politics that briefly landed her father in jail, suspected of ties to the insurgency.

Studies: Iraq costs US $12B per month

The flow of blood may be ebbing, but the flood of money into the Iraq war is steadily rising, new analyses show. In 2008, its sixth year, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month, triple the “burn” rate of its earliest years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes report in a new book.

Beyond 2008, working with “best-case” and “realistic-moderate” scenarios, they project the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion – or more – by 2017.

Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could alone add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.

Latin America

New docs detail Colombian rebel ties

BOGOTA, Colombia – Newly published documents released by Colombia’s security forces claim the leftist presidents of Venezuela and Ecuador conspired for months with rebel insurgents who seek to overthrow the country’s U.S.-allied government.

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The 16 documents were published Sunday by the news magazine Semana. They also detail previously unknown relationships held or sought by Latin America’s oldest and most potent rebel force, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

One is a letter to Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi asking for $100 million to buy surface-to-air missiles. Another discusses an apparent effort by U.S. Democrats to have celebrated novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez mediate talks with the insurgents – possibly with former President Clinton’s involvement.

(10 am – promoted by ek hornbeck)

“Alternative procedures.” “Valuable tools in the war on terror.” “Specialized interrogation procedures.” “Safe and lawful techniques.” “Good policies.”

George W. Bush has more euphemisms for torture than his creepy Veep, Cheney, has expletives on supply.

On Saturday, in his weekly radio address, President Bush announced his veto of the Congressional Intelligence bill, which included a ban on CIA use of certain “enhanced” interrogation methods, like waterboarding. Bush defended the use of the so-called “alternative procedures” practiced by the CIA, as necessary for field intelligence officers interrogating “hardened terrorists.” The play upon the fear of Americans of terrorist attack in the aftermath of the horrific 9/11 events turns upon well-understood traumatic mechanisms in the human psyche.

But I want to concentrate on one telling aspect of Bush’s torture apologia. Regarding the attempt by Congress to limit the intelligence agencies to interrogation practices based upon the Army Field Manual (which forbids use of hooding, waterboarding, sexual humiliation, etc.), Bush said (emphasis added):

Limiting the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods to those in the Army field manual would be dangerous because the manual is publicly available and easily accessible on the Internet. Shortly after 9/11, we learned that key Al Qaida operatives had been trained to resist the methods outlined in the manual. And this is why we created alternative procedures to question the most dangerous Al Qaida operatives, particularly those who might have knowledge of attacks planned on our homeland. The best source of information about terrorist attacks is the terrorists themselves. If we were to shut down this program and restrict the C.I.A. to methods in the field manual, we could lose vital information from senior Al Qaida terrorists, and that could cost American lives.

While Bush touts various terrorist operations foiled by use of torture, a major Congressional player had a different view:

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he had heard nothing to suggest that the CIA, through enhanced interrogation methods, had obtained information to thwart a terrorist attack.

Secrets, Secrets, Secrets… Shhh!

The secret “enhanced” CIA interrogation techniques were authorized by Bush in July 2006, in a secret Executive Order vetted by Steven Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel. This authorization was needed after a 2006 Supreme Court decision had determined that Al Qaida prisoners were subject to the Geneva Conventions. Even earlier secret recommendations — most famously, then-new Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s February 2005 memorandum recommending government torture, which only came to light last year — demonstrated the tenacity of the Bush Administration’s quest to give the CIA and possibly other intelligence agencies the green light for torture.

In his radio address, Bush claims that if the terrorists had access to government interrogation methods, they would be able to prepare themselves to withstand the torture. Indeed, this is the rationale for the 50-year-old military SERE program. SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, and each branch of the military conducts its own version of it. It was SERE military psychologists, Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, who were accused by a Pentagon Office of Inspector General Report last year of reverse-engineering SERE training into torture instruction to U.S. military/CIA forces abroad. (Katherine Eban at Vanity Fair also wrote a great article on this matter last summer.)

So I suppose this is what Bush is referring to when he says that the government had to create “alternative procedures” to counter the presumed wiliness of the “hardened terrorists.” Except this is a lie. As regular readers of my blog know, government torture has been well-researched for over 50 years. It also went operational around the same time. The not-unsavvy terrorists certainly know where to go on the Internet to read the CIA’s KUBARK Counter-intelligence Interrogation Manual, declassified by the United States in the 1990s, or any of a number of books openly for sale that describe the same.

The KUBARK manual describes the use of fear, isolation, sensory deprivation, temperature extremes, sleep deprivation, fear, and other techniques to induce regression and dependency in prisoners, in order to make them malleable to an experienced interrogator. SERE techniques were derived from presumed extreme sorts of torture that could be encountered by U.S. servicemen who found themselves prisoners of a government or group who didn’t follow the Geneva Conventions. How ironic that the most famous state to announce it wouldn’t follow Geneva protocols would be… the United States!

Bush does have a point. Knowledge of torture techniques and counter-measures can help a prisoner subjected to torture or cruel treatment, up to a point. Personality factors play a much larger role, as the KUBARK manual points out (including a CIA bibliography on the subject). Besides, there a multitude of sources available for the enemy government or sophisticated organization to gather such information. The Congressional bill does not discuss torture counter-measures, to my knowledge.

The government — and Bush is following advice from the CIA — wants to keep its torture techniques secret because when a detainee does not know what’s coming, it increases anxiety and fear, which creates greater confusion and psychological regression. In the spook biz, they call this extending the “shock of capture.”

And then there is the political raison d’etre: Bush doesn’t want the general public to know what barbarities are practiced in their name. Unfortunately, there are still too many Americans willing to play ostrich and pretend they don’t know what’s going on, ducking behind Bush and his surrogates’s platitudes and lying homilies. Meanwhile, Bush’s congressional critics (mostly Democrats) portray the Army Field Manual as providing a “bright line” between torture and acceptable interrogation technique.

Except this isn’t true, either. The Army Field Manual’s Appendix M allows selective use of CIA KUBARK-style torture, including use of isolation (also used at Guantanamo today), sleep deprivation, “harsh” induction of fear and play upon a detainees phobias, and the use of sensory deprivation goggles and gloves — and this despite the fact the AFM in its main text says it forbids use of sensory deprivation. (The NY Times article and others on AFM often mention the use of isolation, wrongly reporting it as limited to 30 days, and not mentioning at all the use of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation goggles, and “fear up harsh” techniques.)

The Torture Issue Won’t End When Bush Is Gone

Spywork is famously presented as a house of mirrors, a wasteland of lies and deceptions. Bush’s radio address/veto continues this grand tradition of obfuscation and doublespeak. And it’s clear where the lame duck president gets his marching orders. From today’s New York Times:

In a memo to CIA employees Saturday, CIA Director Michael Hayden said the Army Field Manual does not “exhaust the universe” of lawful interrogation techniques. “”There are methods in the CIA’s program that have been briefed to our oversight committees, are fully consistent with the Geneva Convention and current U.S. law and are most certainly not torture,” Hayden wrote.

We are very, very far from cleaning up this mess. In the choice between secret CIA torture and its somewhat cleaned up Army Field Manual version, there’s very little to make a human rights advocate very happy. The Democratic candidates have made some stir that they would change things, stop the torture, and from Obama, the secret renditions, too; restore habeas corpus, etc. But they aren’t exactly out front on the issue, and seem susceptible to military influence, and threats they are “too soft” on “terrorism.”

Torture is a hydra-headed beast. It exists around the world, and the U.S. is hardly alone, even among Western so-called democracies, in practicing the barbaric “question.” It will take a mass movement, something akin to the abolition of slavery or women’s rights movements of the 19th century to change this fundamental evil in human society. For now, we must fight as we can, and try to undo the deadly combination of militarism, self-satisfied careerism, greed and bloodlust that has characterized the Bush torture regime.

One could do worse than to follow right now this hyperlink to Physicians for Human Rights website page on fighting torture. A long journey must begin with some first step.

Also posted at Invictus, American Torture, and Daily Kos

Feeling guilty about blogging yet?

Second Life avatars and Brazilians: the same carbon footprint

by Aurelia End, AFP

Thu Mar 6, 2:23 PM ET

HANOVER, Germany (AFP) – What do an avatar on Second Life and the average inhabitant of Brazil in the real world have in common? Incredibly, they both use the same amount of electricity.

It is perhaps not a fair example as the average virtual being in the online community is not active all the time, but the statistic does show that all that time the rich world spends online has an impact on the environment.

And how. Providing energy to work the Internet needs the equivalent of 14 power stations, which in turn cough out the same amount of harmful carbon dioxide emissions as the airline industry, research has estimated.

Sonic the Hedgehog, climate killer?

by Simon Sturdee, AFP

Fri Mar 7, 12:15 PM ET

HANOVER, Germany (AFP) – “I don’t care, we’re all going to die anyway,” says 17-year-old Christian, to laughs from his friends as they play video games at the CeBIT IT fair in Germany.

What he does not care about is the environmental impact of the games console he and his mates are playing in a giant exhibition hall crammed full of other teenagers playing the latest shoot-em-ups, driving games and the like.

Whereas many of the 5,500 exhibitors at CeBIT in Hanover, Germany like IBM and Deutsche Telekom have been at pains to trumpet their green credentials, in Hall 22 there is not a tree-hugger in sight.