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Like most of you, I imagine, I watched the news last evening and late through the night with a growing sense of sadness and chill. That there could be that kind of inhumanity. That there will be, now, yet another lasting legacy of loss. That every single pundit said essentially the same thing:
This is the world now. The Russian airline. Lebanon. Paris. Random, heartbreaking ruin is here to stay.What can I do, what can we do, are we to sit here and cower? We are all asking ourselves some version of the question, and I for my part wonder this: If, as we learn, the terror cells rely, at least in part, on social media to coordinate and trigger the attacks, do we, as a world, actually need social media as it exists right now?
Could we take away a primary organizing tool, at least for long enough to scramble the forces?
Certainly we once got along just fine without it. Didn't we?
What if we stepped away from the social media platforms in such numbers that the terrorists and their awful plans would be naked and exposed? What if we acknowledged that advertising our own needs, wins, losses, jokes, shoe sizes, garden weeds, disgust, caloric intake, presidential candidate rants is less important than providing terrorists with a platform for mass destruction? What if we simply said, Enough. Let us return to flesh-and-blood community, to traditional media, to town halls, to talking to one another instead of at one another.
Let us strip the terrorists of one of their most powerful tools.
(A friend has noted, rightfully, that the terrorists are perfectly capable of building their own tools. I guess I wonder if made-for-terror-purposes intranet feeds wouldn't be more easily monitored than looking for needles inside the haystacks of internationally shared feeds. And I also realize I'm probably being naive. But.)
It seems that this would be a whole lot easier than combing through the names and associations of countless disaffected soldiers of a bloody but poorly specified war. A lot less expensive (money, lives, collateral damage) than war. A lot more quickly implemented.
Social media is something that we have the power to reinvent, redirect, contain, use differently.
Given the quagmire that faces us, the dangers afoot, the lack of any other reasonable solution, isn't it worth trying? If we step away, for awhile, from the big platforms, the only people using them will be those who are using them for the wrong purposes. And there they will be, standing in the discoverable light.
By: Alice,
on 3/23/2015
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In July 2014 Yusuf Sarwar and his associate, Mohammed Ahmed, both aged 22, pleaded guilty to conduct in preparation of terrorist acts, contrary to s5 of the Terrorism Act. Sarwar was given an extended sentence (for ‘dangerous’ offenders under s226A of the Criminal Justice Act 2013) comprising 12 years and eight months custody, plus a 5 year extension to his period of release on licence.
The post Sentencing terrorists: key principles appeared first on OUPblog.
Teen was six on 9-11.
The next day she started cutting out little stick figures and laying them on the ground. She asked if she had enough to represent all the dead people.
I said no. Maybe that wasn't the right thing, I don't know. We were all in a daze.
She kept drawing and cutting.
It was never enough.
I still have an envelope filled with all the dead.
By: Lauren,
on 8/19/2011
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By Charles Kurzman
Last month, a few hours after a bomb exploded in downtown Oslo, I got a call from a journalist seeking comment. Why did Al Qaeda attack Norway? Why not a European country with a larger Muslim community, or a significant military presence in Muslim societies? I said I didn't know.
A second media inquiry soon followed: Given NATO's involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the number of disaffected Muslims in Europe, why don't we see more attacks like the one in Norway? This question was more up my alley. I recently
By: Lauren,
on 4/27/2011
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By Karen Greenberg
The most amazing fact about the more than 700 previously unseen classified Guantánamo documents released by WikiLeaks and several unaffiliated news organizations the night of Sunday, April 24, is how little in them is new. The information in these documents — admittedly not classified “top secret” but merely “secret” — spells out details that buttress what we already knew, which is this: From day one at Guantánamo, the U.S. national security apparatus has known very little about the detainees in custody. The United States does not know who they are, how to assess what they say, and what threat they ultimately pose.
Given this vacuum of ignorance, U.S. officials decided at the outset that it was better to be safe than sorry. Therefore, any imaginable way in which behavior or statements could be deemed dangerous led to individual detainees being classified as “high risk.” The result was the policy we have seen since 2002 — a policy of assessing potential danger based on details like what kind of watches the detainees wore, the way they drew on the dirt floors of their cages, and whether they had travel documents on them. In addition, the just-released documents reaffirm the fact that much of the material on the detainees apparently came from hearsay derived from what seems to have been a limited number of interrogations, some performed under circumstances amounting to torture.
It is not just the conclusions of Guantánamo critics like myself that are being verified by these newly found documents. The conclusions of the judges who have sifted through available information to determine just who deserves to be at Guantánamo and who is being held on the basis of insufficient evidence have also been reinforced. In 58 habeas cases spanning both George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s administrations, federal judges have determined that in 36 of the cases there is insufficient evidence to hold these individuals and that often the detention was based on information obtained through hearsay, frequently the result of torture. In other words, the little evidence that existed was largely unreliable.
The sad fact is that these documents tell us more about ourselves than about the detainees. They tell us that U.S. officials to this day know very little based on hard evidence about the majority of those who have been held at Guantánamo, that assessments of risk have all too often been based on flights of imagination that tend to enhance the sense of power and capability of al Qaeda, and that the criteria for determining risk are at best murky. Those deemed to pose a risk ranged from individual detainees who proclaimed angry threats against their guards to those who were believed to have been actively involved in terrorism.
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once pointed out, in reference to the failure to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Although the quip may seem facile, it is actually a candid assessment of what has gone wrong at Guantánamo from the time it opened in January 2002. It continues to go wrong to this day. The proper, lawful, most security-minded restatement of Rumsfeld’s maxim would be this: Absence of evidence requires better intelligence, more careful judgments, and more savvy realism. Without facts, it is not only the just treatment of detainees that is at issue — it is the security of the United States itself.
Karen Greenberg is executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law and author of
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By: Lauren,
on 3/10/2011
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By Ervin Staub
A few hours after the 9/11 attacks, speaking on our local public radio station in Western Massachusetts, struggling with my tears and my voice, I said that this horrible attack can help us understand people’s suffering around the world, and be a tool for us to unite with others to create a better world. Others also said similar things. But that is not how events progressed.
Our response to that attack led to three wars we are still fighting, including the war on terror. How we fight these wars and what we do to bring them to an end will shape our sense of ourselves as a moral people, our connections to the rest of the world, our wealth and power as a nation, and our physical security. What can we do to reduce hostility toward us, strengthen our alliances, and regain our moral leadership in the world?
One of the basic principles of human conduct is reciprocity. As one party strikes out at another, the other, if it can, usually responds with force. Often the response is more than what is required for self-defense. It is punitive, taking revenge, teaching the other a lesson. But the first party takes this as aggression, and responds with more violence. Israelis and Palestinians for many years engaged in mutual and often escalating retaliation, sometimes reciprocating immediately, sometimes, the Palestinians especially, the weaker party, waiting for the right opportunity.
Many young Muslims, and even non-Muslims converting to Islam, have been “radicalized” by our drone attacks, and our forces killing civilians in the course of fighting. The would-be Times Square bomber has talked to people about his distress and anger about such violence against Muslims. While we kill some who plan to attack us, especially as we harm innocent others, more turn against us.
Of course, we must protect ourselves. But positive actions are also reciprocated—not always, but often, especially if the intention for the action is perceived as positive. Non-violent reactions and practices must be part of effective self-defense. Respect is one of them. Many Muslims were killed in the 9/11 attacks, and we should have specifically included them in our public mourning. Many Arab and Muslim countries reached out to us afterwards, even Iran, and we should have responded more than we did to their sympathy and support. Effective reaching out is more challenging now, and after the mid-term elections the world might see reaching out by President Obama as acting out of weakness. But the U.S. is still the great power, and both the administration and members of Congress ought to reach out to the Muslim world.
But even as we show respect and work on good connections, we ought to stop supporting repressive Muslim regimes. That has been one of the grievances against us. An important source of Al-Qaeda has been Egyptian terrorists, who fought against a secular repressive Egyptian regime. Then as Al-Qaeda was organized by the Mujahideen, who fought against and defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, they turned from such “near enemies” against the far enemy, the United States, which supported these repressive regimes.
Another important matter is dialogue between parties. Dialogue can be abused, used simply to gain time, or as a show to pacify third parties, or can even be a fraud as in Afghanistan where an “impostor” played the role of a Taliban leader in dialogue with the government . The Bush administration strongly opposed dialogue with terrorists—but then with money and other inducements got Sunnis in Iraq, who have been attacking us, to work with us. In persistent dialogue, in contrast to the very occasional negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, the parties can develop relationships, gain trust, and then become ready to resolve practical matters.
To resolve our wars, we cannot simply bomb and shoot. We must also
By: Lauren,
on 10/22/2010
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By Bram Vermeer
Overoptimism and overpessimism sells. But let’s face reality. Here are 10 things we won’t have by 2030:
1. Asteroid bomb
Asteroids with a diameter of more than 100 m (109 yd) reach our planet once every 2000 years. Distressing as that may be, their impact remains local. Bad luck if this asteroid hits Washington DC, but humankind as a whole will be able to survive that. The likelihood of a collision that has a real global impact is still 1000 times smaller. So we’d better prepare for more likely catastrophes, like flu pandemics and water shortages.
2. Moore’s law
The incredible miniaturization of microelectronics will inevitably come to a halt. Extrapolating the current pace, we will reach components of atomic sizes by 2020. But long before that, we will have given up the endeavor of making electronics smaller. We face tremendous technical difficulties in the next steps of miniaturization. Even if we succeed, the costs would be staggering. The speed of single processors already stalled at a few gigahertz. We would be better off investing in connecting processors with sensors and small motors, which would make clever devices that interact with us better.
3. Population stabilization
In many countries, birth and death rates are declining, but not at the same pace. It would require careful tuning of the number of babies to achieve demographic stabilization. There is no such stabilization in natural ecosystems, and we won’t see it in human society either. So be prepared for population growth, population decline, and an uneven age distribution in societies. All of these are concerning.
4. Singularity
Will machines outwit humans and take over our civilization? For robots to procreate, they would have to take possession of mines, material plants, microelectronics foundries, assembling sites, and probably some military facilities as well. The collective power of 8 billion human minds will certainly prevent that in the next decades and defeat any machine “gone wild”. And what about our PCs, brain aids, and other appliances becoming increasingly part of us? I think we already crossed that boundary when we started to use cells. We live in a symbiotic relationship with technology, which means that we continuously have to nurture it. Technological evolution is about mastering science, not about submission to it.
5. The greenhouse flood
I live below sea level, as do many people in the Netherlands. The water authorities are already raising the dikes in preparation for climate change. By 2030 the sea level will have risen by only 4 cm (1.6″). So I needn’t be afraid for my house. Climate change is slow compared to the length of a human life. Precisely that makes it difficult for us to act. Also, counteractions only take effect slowly. But I am worried for the generations to come. The last time the earth saw a CO2 level comparable to what we are experiencing now, seas were 70 m (77 yd) higher. Long after 2030, we’ll probably have to give up the lowest parts of my home country. The same is probably true for cities like New Orleans.
6. Clean electric cars
Even in the most optimistic of scenarios, only 10 percent of all cars in Western societies will be electric by 2030. And even these cars won’t really be clean as they depend on fuels burnt in power plants. Worldwide we are still building two new coal-fired power plants a week; the pace of installing renewable power is much, much slower. Moving away from fossil energy is a huge task that requires more than adjustments. We have to prepare for a transformation that touches all aspects of society. Probably we’ll have to rethink the very concept of moving by car.
7. Invasion of nanobots<
By: La Bloga,
on 1/2/2010
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humbug: something designed to deceive or mislead; nonsense or drivel
On the second day of 2010, the pressure is on: "Did you make a resolution? Are you keeping it? What's yours?" Such questions fade as the month passes, but for the moment, it's tradition to find one more thing to stress about. As if we needed something else!
This isn't going to be about my resolutions that you could care less about: you've got enough crosses and crutches of your own to bear. What it's about is resolutions that should be tossed into history's trash bin because they're less important than we think or we need to instead find something more meaningful. To begin with--humbug to New Year's resolutions!
Humbug to losing weight
If you're obese or overweight, make out your will. But first find a BMI calculator that understands Chicanos are mostly shorter and stockier than Anglos. Don't go here, because whether I enter I'm Hispanic or Caucasian, it still gives me the same message: "Your BMI is 30.5 - obese."
If you want to lose weight, go here for another book that would be good to read but that you'll forget as soon as you smell the queso-grasa-carne homemade enchiladas Abuela's cooking.
Humbug! If you want to lose weight, stop eating all the good stuff. But remember losing too much will eliminate love handles and, well, you know what those are good for.
Humbug to smoking being addictive
Cigarette companies want us to believe smoking is worse than a habit--that it's addictive. All a smoker's got to do to realize this is humbug is to take a cross-country flight. Sure, when you get to your destination the first thing you do is run to the tarmac or curb to light up. But, fact is, you made it there, and the nicotine DTs were tolerable. Try doing that to a heroin addict and see whether his is "just" a habit.
If you do want to quit, don't follow the advice of Lisa's advice on a quit-smoking commercial: "You're not my crutch. I don't need a crutch." I don't know what planet Lisa lives on, but it's not Earth. Lisa must not have been pink-slipped or downsized, never did a subprime on her house, doesn't have a kid condemned to 20 years of college loan payments, never tried that cross-country flight that a terrorist might also take, doesn't have sobrinos in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Nextistan, and her planet must not be Pluto (if you still call it a planet).
Smoking's not healthy, but it might be less dangerous than Lisa's medicine that carries this Most important safety information:
"If you notice agitation, hostility, depression, or changes in behavior, thinking, or mood atypical for you, or you develop suicidal thoughts or actions, anxiety, panic, aggression, anger, mania, abnormal sensations, hallucinations, paranoia, or confusion, stop taking it. Also depression or other menta
By: Rebecca,
on 9/19/2008
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Yuval Ginbar is a scholar and human rights activist, and has recently written a book for us called Why Not Torture Terrorists?: Moral, Practical and Legal Aspects of the “Ticking Bomb” Justification for Torture. In the post below he gives his opinions on the Israeli academics who support the use of torture in the “war on terror” and are seeking its legitimization.
Apologies. What follows are not sensational revelations about Israel’s secret involvement in torture worldwide (though there have been some reports to that effect). I am referring to a possibly less exciting phenomenon, which is all in the public domain. To me, however, it is no less worrying: Israel has produced a surprising yield of academics who support torture and seek its legitimization, if not legalisation. Publishing widely, including in the most prestigious journals and publishing houses, they advocate the use of interrogational torture in the “war on terror”.
There are variations, of course. One favours torture to be authorized by a “public committee” – a variant of Alan Dershowitz’ “torture warrants” idea. Others propose allowing “only” methods that are “short of torture,” including one who attempts to show Americans how some forms of “coercive interrogation” would accord with their Constitution. However, the methods that the “torture lite” academics recommend, such as sleep and sensory deprivation, become by all accounts - legal, “common sensical” and factual - full torture, at least over time. No - guidance on how interrogators would know when to stop are not attached. Nor are any examples of how such methods were used without becoming torture. This is because no such examples exist.
But perhaps the speciality of pro-torture Israeli academics is devising schemes which would, they say, enable an absolute legal prohibition on torture to co-exist with allowing its use in “ticking bomb situations” – a “relativized” absolute prohibition, as one of them (seriously) quipped. Some have proposed that while torture should be prohibited by law absolutely, if a leader orders torture in extreme situations, his act would later undergo “ex post-facto ratification”. Others propose a modification of deontological morality so as to allow torture in extreme situations, as long as it is not “officialized”.
However heavily endowed with academic titles the writers are, however extensive and thorough their research is, and however rich their essays and books are with references, cases and footnotes, the results are invariably absurd, as the very combination they seek is self-contradictory. In my book I analyse several of these “have-your-cake-and-eat-it” solutions. Actually, perhaps a more apt – and updated -description would be the “yeah-but-no-but” approaches to torture. They ultimately make as much sense as Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard.
All this could all have been quite amusing were it not for the fact that such scholars – and other, non- Israeli ones, of course - are advocating that our officials be allowed, through one moral or legal scheme or another, to inflict excruciating pain on helpless prisoners, demolishing in the process an international legal and moral consensus it took humanity hundreds of years to achieve. And were it not for the fact that a “yeah-but-no-but” torture system, which most of the Israeli academics are in effect modelling their proposals on, is actually in operation – you guessed it – in Israel.
In 1999 Israel’s Supreme Court prohibited issuing the General Security Service (GSS) with instructions on how to inflict what was euphemistically called “moderate physical pressure” on Palestinian detainees, as had been the custom until then, and ruled that GSS agents cannot be authorized to inflict such “pressure”. The Court cited the absolute prohibition on torture in international law. So far so good. However, when it comes to “ticking-time bomb” situations, the Court ruled that the case of a GSS interrogator who tortures (the Court too preferred a euphemism: “applied physical interrogation methods”) would then be considered by the Attorney-General, and if need be by the courts, where “his potential criminal liability shall be examined in the context of the ‘necessity’ defence” – a criminal law defence which, as currently held in Israeli law, justifies actions in extreme situations if they produce the “lesser evil”.
The result has been predictable. Within a couple of years the GSS itself was admitting it was torturing – oops! – euphemism time again: using “exceptional interrogation measures” – in dozens of cases annually. All were cases of “ticking bombs”, of course. Figures from human rights NGOs, such as the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, have been much higher. Number of GSS interrogators convicted of torturing (or any other offence)? Zero. Prosecutions? Zero. Criminal investigations? Zero. Once introduced as a means of legitimizing torture, the “ticking bomb” and its legal corollary, the “necessity defence”, have overwhelmed the system.
Israel is not the focus of my book, but of the four “models of legalized torture” described and analysed there, two have, unfortunately, been in operation in Israel, in one form or another. Then there is the “torture warrants” model. The fourth is, of course, the US model.
But what about the big questions? Is ‘waterboarding’ or (perhaps more importantly) other, less blatant interrogation techniques considered torture under international law? Does international law allow the use of painful techniques falling short of torture, or the use of the “necessity defence” to exonerate torturers? What happens to a state, morally and practically, once it allows anti-terrorist torture? And – maybe the biggest question - would it not be morally justifiable to torture terrorists in order to save many innocent lives in “ticking bomb situations”? In other words – Why Not Torture Terrorists?
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what's with this obsession with cavity searches? sounds like a humbugger to me! happy new year. oh, and by the way, one day in 1969, i'd just opened a carton of marlboros, tapped a cigarette from the first box, put it in my mouth and walked up to the chow hall door. something hit me right between the eyes, i still know not what. i whipped that cig out from my lips, dumped the pack and the carton into the trash can and walked inside for my free meal. i haven't smoked a tobacco cigarette since. quitting once and for all is easy.
Humbug Obama, right on! A field negro if I ever seen one. Good post.