Johann Hari | ukwatch.net

Lies, kidnapping and a mysterious laptop

JamieSW — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 23:19:17 +0000

Sometimes you hear a stray sentence on the news that makes you realise you have been lied to. Deliberately lied to; systematically lied to; lied to for a purpose. If you listened closely over the past few days, you could have heard one such sentence passing in the night-time of news.

As Ingrid Betancourt emerged after six-and-a-half years – sunken and shrivelled but radiant with courage – one of the first people she thanked was Hugo Chavez. What? If you follow the news coverage, you have been told that the Venezuelan President supports the Farc thugs who have been holding her hostage. He paid them $300m to keep killing and to buy uranium for a dirty bomb, in a rare break from dismantling democracy at home and dealing drugs. So how can this moment of dissonance be explained?

Yes: you have been lied to – about one of the most exciting and original experiments in economic redistribution and direct democracy anywhere on earth. And the reason is crude: crude oil. The ability of democracy and freedom to spread to poor countries may depend on whether we can unscramble these propaganda fictions.

Venezuela sits on one of the biggest pools of oil left anywhere. If you find yourself in this position, the rich governments of the world – the US and EU – ask one thing of you: pump the petrol and the profits our way, using our corporations. If you do that, we will whisk you up the Mall in a golden carriage, no matter what. The “King” of Saudi Arabia oversees a torturing tyranny where half the population – women – are placed under house arrest, and jihadis are pumped out by the dozen to attack us. It doesn’t matter. He gives us the oil, so we hold his hand and whisper sweet crude-nothings in his ear.

It has always been the same with Venezuela – until now. Back in 1908, the US government set up its ideal Venezuelan regime: a dictator who handed the oil over fast and so freely that he didn’t even bother to keep receipts, never mind ask for a cut. But in 1998 the Venezuelan people finally said “enough”. They elected Hugo Chavez. The President followed their democratic demands: he increased the share of oil profits taken by the state from a pitiful one per cent to 33 per cent. He used the money to build hospitals and schools and subsidised supermarkets in the tin-and-mud shanty towns where he grew up, and where most of his countrymen still live.

I can take you to any random barrio in the high hills that ring Caracas and show you the results. You will meet women like Francisca Moreno, a gap-toothed 76-year-old granny I found sitting in a tin shack, at the end of a long path across the mud made out of broken wooden planks. From her doorway she looked down on the shining white marble of Caracas’s rich district. “I went blind 15 years ago because of cataracts,” she explained, and in the old Venezuela people like her didn’t see doctors. “I am poor,” she said, “so that was that.” But she voted for Chavez. A free clinic appeared two years later in her barrio, and she was taken soon after for an operation that restored her sight. “Once I was blind, but now I see!” she said, laughing.

In 2003, two distinguished Wall Street consulting firms conducted the most detailed study so far of economic change under Chavez. They found that the poorest half of the country have seen their incomes soar by 130 per cent after inflation. Today, there are 19,571 primary care doctors – an increase by a factor of 10. When Chavez came to power, just 35 per cent of Venezuelans told Latinobarometro, the Gallup of Latin America, they were happy with how their democracy worked. Today it is 59 per cent, the second-highest in the hemisphere.

For the rich world’s governments – and especially for the oil companies, who pay for their political campaigns – this throws up a serious problem. We are addicted to oil. We need it. We crave it. And we want it on our terms. The last time I saw Chavez, he told me he would like to sell oil differently in the future: while poor countries should get it for $10 a barrel, rich countries should pay much more – perhaps towards $200. And he has said that if the rich countries keep intimidating the rest he will shift to selling to China instead. Start the sweating. But Western governments cannot simply say: “We want the oil, our corporations need the profits, so let’s smash the elected leaders standing in our way.” They know ordinary Americans and Europeans would gag.

So they had to invent lies. They come in waves, each one swelling as the last crashes into incredulity. First they announced Chavez was a dictator. This ignored that he came to power in a totally free and open election, the Venezuelan press remains uncensored and in total opposition to him, and he has just accepted losing a referendum to extend his term and will stand down in 2013.

When that tactic failed, the oil industry and the politicians they lubricate shifted strategy. They announced that Chavez was a supporter of Terrorism (it definitely has a capital T). The Farc is a Colombian guerrilla group that started in the 1960s as a peasant defence network, but soon the pigs began to look like farmers and they became a foul, kidnapping mafia. Where is the evidence Chavez funded them?

On 1 March, the Colombian government invaded Ecuador and blew up a Farc training camp. A few hours later, it announced it had found a pristine laptop in the rubble, and had already rummaged through the 39.5 million pages of Microsoft Word documents it contained to find cast-iron “proof” that Chavez was backing the Farc. Ingrid’s sister, Astrid Betancourt, says it is plainly fake. The camp had been totally burned to pieces and the computers had clearly, she says, been “in the hands of the Colombian government for a very long time”. Far from fuelling the guerrillas, Chavez has repeatedly pleaded with the Farc to disarm. He managed to negotiate the release of two high-profile hostages – hence Betancourt’s swift thanks. He said: “The time of guns has passed. Guerilla warfare is history.”

So what now? Now they claim he is a drug dealer, he funds Hezbollah, he is insane. Sometimes they even stumble on some of the real non-fiction reasons to criticise Chavez and use them as propaganda tools. (See our Open House blog later today for a discussion of this). As the world’s oil supplies dry up, the desire to control Venezuela’s pools will only increase. The US government is already funding separatist movements in Zulia province, along the border with Colombia, where Venezuela’s largest oilfields lie. They hope they can break away this whiter-skinned, anti-Chavez province and then drink deep of the petrol there.

Until we break our addiction to oil, our governments will always try to snatch petro-profits away from women like Francisca Moreno. And we – oil addicts all – will be tempted to ignore the strange, dissonant sentences we sometimes hear on the news and lie, blissed-out, in the lies.

This smearing of Israel's critics must stop

JamieSW — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:12:34 +0000

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is now nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, and now even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn’t especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me “a Jew-lover”, “a Zionist-homo pig” and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage is being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements onto Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn’t controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile ‘pro-Israel’ writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and CAMERA – said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

Any attempt to accurately describe the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, ‘Honest Reporting’ claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews “poisoning the wells.” If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained – in labour – by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, ‘Honest Reporting’ will say you didn’t explain “the real cause”: the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.

The former editor of Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups “nascent McCarthyism”. Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of ‘The Case For Israel.’ He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: “Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary… It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal.” If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.

The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission statement: “Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and security.” Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them “Jews For Genocide”, and said they “encourage” the “killers” of Jews. Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an “artificial” people who can be collectively punished because they are “a terrorist population.” She believes that while “individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project.” Honest Reporting quotes Phillips frequently as their model of reliable reporting.

These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter’s decision to speak to the elected Hamas government “border[ed] on anti-Semitism.” A Ha’aretz poll last month found that 64 percent of Israelis want their government to do just that.

As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it – so last year he wrote a book called ‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’. It is a bland and factual canter through the major human rights reports. There is nothing there you can’t read in the mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter’s comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B’tselem says this “bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime”. Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has widely called “a racist”. Several leading Universities have even refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.

These campus-battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called ‘From Time Immemorial’ by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters’ hoax for his book ‘The Case For Israel’, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed that Finkelstein’s mother – who made it through Maidenek and two slave-labour camps – had collaborated with the Nazis.

The campaign worked. Finkelstein – a distinguished scholar, lauded by some of the leading figures in Holocaust historiography – was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the truth.

Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and ‘Honest Reporting’ becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews – the majority – are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism – which is growing: my Jewish nephews go to a school with bomb-proof windows – harder to deal with.

To respond to this new McCarthyism, we need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

POSTSCRIPT: In my column today, I talk about how an organisation called ‘Honest Reporting’ orchestrates barrages of complaints against writers who criticise the Israeli government. I thought it might be interesting to give readers a taster of what these e-mails are like. Don’t read them if you are offended by swearing and references to child molestation.

Hundreds have asked a variant of “why do you never criticise Muslims or Arabs?” I always e-mail back with links to dozens of articles in which I have vehemently criticised Islamic fundamentalists and the governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and for which I have been widely (and stupidly) accused of “Islamophobia.” So far, one has written back to acknowledge they were wrong. The rest either go silent, or change the subject.

To be fair, a handful of the e-mails have been polite and rational, and I’ve had an interesting if heated exchange with those readers. But the vast majority are, I’m afraid, like the following three.

(To give some context, in the article they are responding to I described the raw sewage I’ve seen pumped out from Israeli settlements on the West Bank at the Palestinians and how it smells.)

Ivan Stux from ivanstux@hotmail.com writes: “When I pass male homosexuals on the street, I sometimes can smell a distinctive pungent scent of shit emanating from them. Might it be that the smell of shit you are sensing as you describe in your article comes from your own behind or mouth, or both, because you forgot to wash after you have been copulated by a man? Does that make you a dirty M.F. (as in male fucked)?”

Somebody who doesn’t give their name e-mails from southernwolf@gmail.com to say: “When I think of ‘Hari’ I smell shit. You aren’t good enough to write about Israel, Jew hater. Long after the so called “Palestinians” have faded into the shithole of history where they belong Israel will remain, proud and strong. By then Jew haters like you will have another “cause”.”

John Norman from jdnorman@btopenworld.com writes: “Surely, it’s your own smell that you smell when you write about Israel. After all, a fat faggot like yourself cant smell of anything else. It must have been your Swiss-nazi Dad that fucked you up the arse when you were a kid and fucked yr tiny brain box to bits. How you were awarded the Orwell Prize for journalism must remain an unexplained enigma for decades to come.”

I’ll spare you the hundreds more along the same lines.

Why is Britain arming far-right militias?

Tim Holmes — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 05:16:37 +0000

On the website of the British Foreign Office, a small photograph recently appeared. It shows Kim Howells, our Foreign Office minister, looking into the camera, smiling, as he is surrounded by gun-yielding men accused of murder. He had not been taken hostage. No: he was there to represent a government that gives these men money and military aid.

By tracing the story of this photograph, we can trace the worst aspects of British foreign policy – and find clues to why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have crashed into their current bloody dead-end.

Howells was in Colombia, a country locked in one of the worst civil wars of the past century. It began over forty years ago, when parts of the hungry, mixed-race majority began to fight against the fact that a tiny white land-owning elite held virtually all the country’s wealth. Since then, it has hardened into a conflict between two gnarled human rights-abusing wings.

To the left, there is a slew of guerrilla groups – most prominently the FARC and the ELN – who fund themselves by kidnapping, extortion, recruiting child soldiers and ‘taxing’ drug-producers.

To the right, there is the Colombian government and the right-wing paramilitary death-squads it has unleashed against any community of civilians suspected of leftish sympathies, or of challenging the elite. That’s why to be a trade unionist in Colombia – organising for better wages and working conditions for your colleagues – is to carry a tombstone on your back: more than 3000 have been assassinated since 1986, more than in the rest of the world combined.

Between them, these violent wings have killed more than 30,000 people and driven three million people from their homes.

And Howells – our representative – was posing with some of the worst abusers. He was huddled with the High Mountain Brigades, who Amnesty International says have been involved in hunting down and murdering trade unionists. Standing next to him was General Mario Montoya, who is so densely linked to paramilitary death-squads that even the US Congress has cut off chunks of his funding.

Here’s what our taxes and support deliver to ordinary Colombians. On January 10th, at 10.30am, Colombian soldiers wearing balaclavas burst into the house of Rosa Maria Zapata house, a 56 year old indigenous woman. When the soldiers pointed their guns at her and barked that they wanted to know where the guerrillas were, she screamed back that she didn’t know; she doesn’t know any guerrillas. They told her she was hiding weapons for the FARC. They told her they knew. She howled and protested. So they started searching – and a moment later she heard gunfire. The police announced they had killed the guerrilla. She went running – and found her severely disabled 22-year old son dead.

The British pro-peace group ‘Justice for Colombia’ believes these soldiers received British training. They have documented 36 other civilians murdered by British-trained forces in a six-month period, and they are asking the Foreign Office to finally outline exactly where our money goes – rather than hiding behind the shroud of National Security.

Worse, we are funding a military that is so densely enmeshed with the union-slaying paramilitaries that they are known as the “sixth brigade” of the Colombian armed forces. The relationship was symbolised in a famous football game in the 1990s. The local community in Cacarica were made to gather at the local football field to watch a match. It sounds touching. But the head of the local left-leaning community leader, Marino Lopez, was used as the ball, after being hacked from his body with a chainsaw. Uribe is now offering a ‘peace deal’ to the right-wing paras like this that allows them to escape proportionate punishment, but offers no such deal to the left.

So how has Howells responded? Easily: he has called his critics supporters of terrorism. Last week, in the House of Commons, he declared, “This has all been created by the organisation ‘Justice for Colombia’, which supports FARC, a band of gangsters and drug smugglers.” He also announced that the FARC is responsible for “most” of the murders in Colombia.

Both were straightforward repetitions of the Colombian far right propaganda line. In reality, ‘Justice For Colombia’ – which is supported by more than half of all Labour MPs – is opposed to all violence within Colombia. And the FARC – while unequivocally disgusting – are responsible for far fewer murders than the government and right-wing death-squads, according to every major study.

So how did this happen? How did a minister in a Labour government end up defending a hard-right Colombian regime?

The British government says they have become the second biggest military donor to Colombia (after the US) because they want to promote human rights there. But if you had a few million pounds to support human rights in that country, the idea you would give it to the High Mountain Brigades is simply surreal. Sure, the government claims to be giving “human rights training” along with their weapons licenses and cash, to “iron out” abuses. But as the historian Mark Curtis explains: “The Colombian military is responsible for its violations not by accident… It is part of a concerted and active policy to nullify the opposition and terrify the general population into further submission.”

No – the explanations for British backing lie elsewhere. The first is a desire to support the United States, because we project our power in the world largely by being a loyal adjunct to American military might. If Britain wasn’t offering these funds, the Bush administration would be alone in the world in backing Uribe, against a Latin America tipping towards the left and urging peace talks with the FARC.

And we are doing it to support the global, unwinnable ‘war on drugs.’ Since Bill Clinton’s Presidency, the US has been spraying hundreds of thousands of tonnes of chemical poisons onto the vast tracts of Colombia where the coca leaves essential for cocaine production are grown. All plants and trees die in their wake. Birth defects and cancer rates are rising. Some of the most precious biodiversity on earth is destroyed. And the effect on drug production? It simply moves to another area.

(It is only the drug-producing areas controlled by the FARC that have been fumigated. The areas in the North, controlled by the right, remain untouched.)

Drug production is so profitable and so popular it cannot be fumigated off the face of the real world. Drug prohibition hands great swathes of the Colombian economy to armed criminal gangs, from the FARC to the right. It ensures they will always have enough money to buy enough guns to outshoot the government and preserve their patches of territory.

There is another way. More and more Colombians believe it is only by brining drugs into the legal economy – where they can be controlled and taxed – that the guerrillas and paramilitaries can be stripped of their cash-flow, and the Colombian state slowly unified. The people arguing for this are wildly diverse: from the current Conservative Interior Minister, Carlos Holguin, to the former Attorney General Gustavo de Greiff who busted the notorious Medelin drug cartel, to the coutnry’s most popular singer, Juan Esteban Aristizabal. They all believe an end to drug prohibition is the only long-term solution to the civil war. Yet Britain demands the opposite.

There is one more crucial reason why we are supporting the Colombian military. The British oil firm BP controls half of Columbia’s petrol output. The historian Mark Curtis argues the UK is keen to ensure resources “remain in the correct hands” – that is, “our” hands. In a highly unequal country angry at seeing its resources siphoned off by foreigners, that means supporting an elite who are willing to use violence to keep the majority in their place.

These three factors can help us to understand why the military actions thousands of miles away from the jungles of Colombia – in Afghanistan and Iraq – have gone so wrong. As in Colombia, we got in, in large part, out of loyalty to the US: Tony Blair bragged he had “not disagreed with the US on a major issue” in his whole time in office.

We have misgoverned Afghanistan so badly because we are inflicting on the country the same ‘war on drugs’ we have wished on Colombia. If we turned up in any country on earth and announced we were there to destroy 40 percent of their economy, the people would fight back. The fact that the 40 percent consists of opium fields makes no difference to dirt-poor farmers. This is why we are losing Southern Afghanistan even to the hated Taliban.

And the US-UK government has misgoverned Iraq so catastrophically because – as in Colombia – it was primarily driven by a desire to ensure that control of the country’s resources went to The Right People. The protection of the Oil Ministry, while Baghdad’s museums and hospitals and universities were looted and burned all around it, is only the most bleak symbol of this.

The image of Kim Howells squatting with a unit who have tortured and butchered trade unionists can be seen as a Rosetta Stone for the dark side of our foreign policy. It is a reminder that, if we want to turn Britain into a force for human rights in the world, we have to campaign long and hard to turn much of it around. If we don’t, it will end with more women like Rosa Maria Zapata, clutching her dead disabled son and asking why.

Fatal Distraction

Tim Holmes — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:35:17 +0000

Do you check every item you buy to make sure it is green and planet-friendly? Do you buy carbon offsets every time you fly? Stop. It is time to be honest: green consumerism is at best a draining distraction, and at worst a con. While the planet’s fever gets worse by the week, we are guzzling down green-coloured placebos and calling it action. There is another way. Our reaction to global warming has gone in waves. First we were in blank denial: how can releasing an odourless, colourless gas change the climate so dramatically? Now we are in a phase of displacement: we assume we can shop our way out of global warming, by shovelling a few new lightbulbs and some carbon offsets into our shopping basket.

This is a self-harming delusion. It’s hard to give a sense of the contrast today between the magnitude of our problem, and the weediness of our response so far. But the best way is offered by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen.

He explains that until 10,000 years ago, the planet’s climate would fluctuate violently: sometimes it would veer by 12 degrees centigrade in just a decade. This meant it was impossible to develop agriculture. Crops couldn’t be cultivated in this climatic chaos, so human beings were stuck as a tiny smattering of hunter-gatherers.

But then the climate settled down into safe parameters – and humans could settle down too. This period is called the Holocene, and it meant that for the first time, we could develop farming and cities. Everything we know as human civilisation is thanks to this unprecedented period of climatic stability.

Today, we are bringing this era to an end. By pumping vast amounts of warming gases into the atmosphere, we are creating a new era: the Anthropocene, in which man makes the weather. There is an imminent danger of it bursting beyond these safe parameters, and bringing about a return to the violent, volatile variations that prevented our ancestors from progressing beyond spears and sticks.

Those are the stakes. Every week, there is greater evidence that we are nudging further from our safety zone. The hottest year of the 20th century – 1947 – is now merely the average for the 21st century.

And what are we doing? Many good, well-intentioned people are beginning to grasp this problem – and then assuming green consumerism is the only answer to hand. They shop around for items that have not been freighted thousands of miles to make it to their supermarket shelves. They change their lightbulbs. They turn down the thermostat a few degrees. They make sure they buy products that don’t sit on electricty-burning standby all day. They buy the more energy-efficient cars, and scorn SUV drivers.

I don’t want to attack these people. They are an absolutely essential part of any solution. But we have to be honest. This is not even the beginning of a solution – and by pouring so much energy into it, we may actually be forestalling the real solution. I know a huge number of people who are sincerely worried about global warming, but they assume they have Done Their Bit through these shifted consumption patterns. The truth is: you haven’t.

In reality, dispersed consumer choices are not going to keep the climate this side of a disastrous temperature rise. The only way that can ever happen is by governments legislating to force us all – green and anti-green – to shift towards cleaner behaviour. Just as the government in the Second World War did not ask people to eat less voluntarily, governments today cannot ask us to burn fewer greenhouse gases voluntarily .

It is not enough for you to change your bulbs. Everyone has to change their bulbs. It is not enough for you to eat less meat. Everyone has to eat less meat. It is not enough for you to fly less. Everyone has to fly less. (And yes, I hate these facts as much as you do. But I will hate the reality of runaway global warming even more.)

The only way we will get to the situation where we are all required by law to burn fewer greenhouse gases is if enough people pressure the government, demanding it. Green consumer choices often drain away people’s political energies to do this. You have a limited amount of time to spend on any political cause. If you have an hour a week to dedicate to acting on global warming, and you spend it scouring the supermarket shelves for the product shipped the shortest distance, that time and energy is gone; you feel you’ve done what you can. Part of you might also assume: I’ve made these choices; other people will too; in time, we’ll all be persuaded. But we don’t have time.

There is a much better way for you to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Every minute you would have spent shopping around for a greener choice, you should spend volunteering for Greenpeace, or Friends of the Earth, or Plane Stupid, or the Campaign Against Climate Change. Every hundred-pound premium you would spend to buy a greener product, donate it to them instead. Why? Because by becoming part of this collective action – rather than by clinging to dispersed personal choices – you will help to change the law, so everyone will have to be greener, not just nice people like you.

It works. Green campaigners from Australia to Canada to Japan have successfully banned the old lightbulbs, so only the energy-saving lightbulbs are on offer there now. Green campaigners have prompted the Mayor of London to force SUV drivers to pay a punitive £6,000-a-year premium to drive through our city, forcing many of them to shift to greener cars. These are the first tiny steps towards banning – or massively restricting – the other technologies that are unleashing Weather of Mass Destruction.

Of course, some sincere and well-intentioned people have libertarian concerns about this approach at first glance. Why should we force people to choose the green option? Isn’t it better to rely on persuasion and voluntary choice? But even the most hardcore libertarians agree that your personal liberty ends where you actively harm the liberty of another person. Greenhouse gas emissions are undeniably harming tens of millions of people – and endangering the ground on which all human liberty rests: a stable and safe climate.

Just as no libertarian would argue you should have the right to buy and fire a nuclear weapon, no libertarian should argue you have the right to burn unlimited greenhouse gases. Once confronted with this argument, the only people who cling to a libertarian defence of fossil fuels are people who take money from the fossil fuel industry itself, like Spiked Online. They have to scrape together any old excuse.

So enough with the placebos. Enough with the fake-libertarian excuses. As the climate that sustains human life unravels around us, we are long past the moment when we need real medicine – and the only one we have is hard government legislation.

Cluster Bombs Are An Evil We Must Ban Outright

Tim Holmes — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 23:29:57 +0000

Welcome to Cluster’s last stand – the final fight of a weapon that has shredded a hundred thousand legs and arms and eyes since it was lovingly created by the Nazis in the 1940s.

This week, the Austrian government has banned cluster bombs and begun to dismantle its stockpile of 10,000. Official delegates from 138 countries, representing two-thirds of humanity, are now on their way back from the turning-point conference in Vienna to prepare for a treaty in 2008 that will ban them outright. But a handful of superpowers – most notably Russia, the US and China – are clinging to their right to shred civilians, and the British government is dancing awkwardly between the two camps.

Cluster munitions are bombs that, as they fall, separate into dozens of smaller, bright yellow “bomblets”, each about the size of a can of Coke. Every one carries flying shards of metal that can tear through a quarter-inch of steel. They fall as “steel rain” over an entire kilometre, and they cut up anything they hit.

These weapons are wildly indiscriminate. You can’t aim them, any more than you can aim your handbag when you empty it out on to the floor. When the British dropped 2,000 cluster bombs on Basra in 2003, they landed on the roofs of schools and civilian homes as much as on Saddam’s men. Worse still, many of the submunitions do not explode when they hit the ground; instead they stay there for year after year, waiting for someone – anyone – to stumble across them.

Children are particularly fond of picking them up, since they look like brightly-coloured toys. That’s what happened recently to four-year-old Aya Zayoun. She found one of the 4 million bomblets dropped on Lebanon by the Israelis in the last 72 hours of the 2006 war, and she thought it was a toy bell.

Aya excitedly toddled into her living room to show it to her parents and big sister and brother – where it blew up, the steel ripping through all their flesh. They were lucky: they lost only limbs, not their lives. Some 255 Lebanese civilians have not been so fortunate. Last month, there was a hailstorm for the first time since the war, and the hills of Lebanon echoed to the sound of hundreds of submunitions exploding.

They can wait patiently for decades. A few weeks ago, 17-year-old Choen Ha and two of his friends in Vietnam stumbled across four steel balls in the jungle. They took turns tossing them to each other, and then began to play marbles with them. Finally, one of them detonated. Choen was only saved by his family spending their entire life savings on his treatment; his best friend was shredded in front of him. The UN estimates that at the current clear-up rate, explosions like this will continue in Vietnam every week for another century. These bombs were dropped before I was born. They will still be killing after I am dead.

War is sometimes justified, to save life – but not if it needlessly slaughters as it goes, and leaves a legacy of death for generations. So how soon can we get a ban on these lingering people-shredders? Pessimists should remember that when a ban on landmines was first mooted in the 1980s, it was mocked as a utopian fantasy. Today, only the leper state of Burma is laying them anew.

There are two potential tracks to end cluster-bombs. One is the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CWW), which almost every country is signed up to. The pro-cluster bomb states are adopting a “go slow, aim low” approach to these talks, obstructing any progress. Frustrated with this failure, last year Norway broke away and set up a rival Oslo Process, as they did with landmines. It now looks like they will get most of the world, but not the very worst offenders, to sign up to a ban next year.

The British government is the most high-profile cluster-bombing state to take part in the Oslo Process. At first, it looked like they wouldn’t show – but at the last minute they did. Gordon Brown pledged to ban “cluster bombs that cause unacceptable civilian casualties”. It looks like a heartening pledge, but it contains a whopping loophole – what is “unacceptable harm”?

Simon Conway, the former soldier who is now director of Landmine Action, says it seems like the British strategy “was made up on the back of a fag packet”.

The British have started bargaining for a definition of cluster bombs that would simply exclude all the cluster bombs they happen to have left on the shelf. The army has a lot of cluster bombs with a self-destruct mechanism, where the bomblet supposedly disables itself after 15 seconds if it doesn’t explode on impact. So the government proposed that cluster bombs with a “fail rate” of less than one per cent should be permitted. This definition has also been picked up by the Democrats in the US Congress, who are passing legislation with the same clause.

That still means a typical cluster-rocket strike would leave 40 landmine-style duds on the ground – and even that hasn’t ever been achieved in practice. The cluster-bombs dropped on Leban-on were marketed by the Israelis as having a less than one per cent fail rate. The Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and British Explosive Ordinance conducted a detailed study, and found that it actually topped 10 per cent.

The British have also tried a different get-out clause. They argued that if a cluster bomb releases fewer than 10 submunitions, then it shouldn’t be called a cluster bomb. It turns out that each CRV7 rocket stockpiled by the British army has – surprise! – nine submunitions. But this redefinition would be pure sophistry. It is fired from a rocket pod that can shoot 19 rockets at a time – meaning it can dump 171 pieces of submunitions on an area. And you can fit four rocket pods into a helicopter at once – so in practice, using these bombs, you could still be indiscriminately dumping 684 submunitions on an area at once.

If we set the bar this low, the ban will be worthless. Privately, the British government excuses its behaviour by arguing that it is necessary to set a lower standard so they can coax the US and Russia to sign up.

We would never have banned any unacceptable weapons with this strategy. When a treaty was created to ban dum-dum bullets in 1899, only nine countries signed up – but gradually, other countries were pressured to join. Similarly, the US has never signed up to the landmine ban – but since it was agreed firmly by the rest of the world in 1997, they have been shamed into not using them. If we hadn’t shown that commitment, if we had filled it with loopholes and sub-clauses, the US would have seen it as a green light to carry on laying landmines regardless.

Next year we need a cast-iron ban. But if the British government carries on with its wriggling and writhing, we may end up with nothing better than a cluster-bomb con.

A Royal Guest to be Proud of?

Tim Holmes — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:32:19 +0000

This week, Gordon Brown and David Cameron will welcome the leader of one of the world’s most vicious dictatorships to Britain. Both men will embrace Abdullah al-Saud, who heads a regime in which, according to Amnesty International, “Fear and secrecy permeate every aspect of life. Every day the most fundamental human rights of people in Saudi Arabia are being violated.”

In his Labour Party conference speech last month, the Prime Minister declared that he would oppose dictatorship everywhere: “The message should go out to anyone facing persecution from Burma to Zimbabwe … human rights are universal.” He has refused to even attend the same summit as the Zimbabwean dictator, Robert Mugabe, on the grounds that “there is no freedom in Zimbabwe, and there is widespread torture and mass intimidation of the political opposition.” David Cameron has also just promised to put “human rights” at the heart of his “foreign policy vision”.

Yet both political leaders refuse to make a commitment to even mention human rights to the dictator. Instead, he will ride in a golden carriage with the Queen, and be guest of honour at a Buckingham Palace banquet. It is the start of a three-day state visit, funded by the British taxpayer. The decision to lavish large sums and the rare prestige of a state visit on Abdullah has attracted severe criticism in Westminster. The Liberal Democrats’ acting leader, Vincent Cable, has refused to attend the banquet. The Labour MP John McDonnell said: “We are feting this man because Saudi Arabia controls 25 per cent of the world’s oil, and because we sell him billions of pounds’ worth of weapons. It is an insult to everything Britain stands for to put these geopolitical concerns ahead of the rights of women, trade unionists and all Saudi people.”

While Abdullah is cheered by our political leaders, many of his victims will be protesting outside. Sandy Mitchell, 52, went to Saudi Arabia to work as an anaesthetic technician at a hospital in Riyadh more than a decade ago – and got a rare outsider’s glimpse into how the tyrant maintains his power. He explains: “One day in 2000 I was getting out of my car at the hospital when I was pounced on. I was battered to the ground, a hood was put over my head, and they manacled my hands and feet. I thought – I’m being kidnapped.”

He woke up in the Madhethe interrogation centre, where the Saudi police demanded he confess to being a British spy ordered to plant bombs in the country. He told then the bombs were obviously the work of Saudi Islamists – a view now accepted to be true – so they hung him upside down and began to beat his feet and buttocks with an axe handle for eight days. All the while, he could hear his friend Bill Sampson being gang-raped in the next room.

Mr Mitchell was eventually released after 32 months, when he was swapped for several Saudi citizens being held in Guantanamo Bay. But he warns: “The torture chambers in Saudi weren’t created for me. These rooms were like a human abattoir. There was years’ worth of blood on the floor that nobody bothered to clean. It was all over the walls. We were lucky we survived, but there are countless Saudi people who we never hear about who don’t survive those chambers.”

One man who narrowly escaped these chambers is Yahya al-Faifi, a 47 year old Saudi trade unionist, now hiding from the Saudi secret police in Britain. He worked for BAE Systems in Al Khobar evaluating the flying skills of pilots until 2001, when it was unilaterally announced that the company’s Saudi workers would be receiving a 40 percent pay cut. Al-Faifi decided to organise a trade union to protest. In Saudi Arabia, this is a capital crime. He was immediately fired and placed under constant secret police surveillance. He explains, “I passed information to Human Rights Watch, and this was the last straw. I was told I should ‘take care of my children’, and they would be in danger if I stayed.” He will be risking the further rage of the Saudi police against his family by joining the protests on Wednesday because “I cannot stand by while these crimes happen.”

But life in Saudi Arabia is worst of all for women. While Abdullah offers praise for Britain’s female head of state, in his country all women are kept in effect under house arrest. They are banned from driving, from leaving the house without a male guardian, even in a medical emergency, or from holding a passport. Whenever women try to struggle free from these rules, the “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” – a posse of uniformed thugs who stalk the streets – beat them with batons.

There was a rare glimpse into how this system of gender apartheid works last year when a female Saudi writer called Badria al-Bisher authored a plea for change. She wrote: “Imagine being a woman, and being subject to harassment, beating, or murder, then when your picture is published in local newspapers, along with the criminals’ in all their murderousness, there will still be those who ask if you, the victim, were veiled … Imagine being a woman whose nose, arms, and legs are now broken by your husband, and when you submit a complaint to a judge saying: He beats me! He’d casually reply by saying: Yes? What else? ... Imagine being a woman, and this “guardian” of yours is your 15-year-old son.”

The website on which this appeal appeared has since been shut down. The House of Saud’s dysfunctions are not contained within the Arabian peninsula; they are burning their way out across the world – and backfiring on Britain.

In order to appease their own internal Wahabbi-Islamist extremists, the Saudi dictatorship is handing them tens of billions of oil-dollars to promote their vision across the globe. As the dissident ex-CIA agent Robert Baer says: “Never forget that it is the al-Saud who sign the cheques for these extreme mosque schools all over the world. It’s hush money to divert Muslims’ attention from the [activities of] the al-Saud [royal family].” The Saudi dictatorship is slowly poisoning global Islam, ensuring the most austere and fanatical desert vision liquidates the softer, more mystical strands – and we are already seeing this backfire on to the streets of London and New York.

Privately, government ministers claim Abdullah is slowly reforming the kingdom. They contrast him to the Interior Minister, Naif al-Saud, who blames the September 11 attacks on the Israeli security services and is even more hard line. But Human Rights Watch says that under Abdullah, “reform has been more cosmetic than real”. For example, two of the country’s leading liberal reformists, Abdullah and Isa al-Hamid, are currently awaiting trial. Their “crime” was to support a totally peaceful protest organised by mothers of men who have been seized without explanation by the Saudi state and held for years, without contact, lawyers or trial. Their names will not be uttered by Brown or Cameron this week.

The truth is that the British Government – and all Western societies – are so addicted to Saudi Arabia’s oil that they feel they can’t speak back. They are terrified of seeing the petrol that lubricates our economy (or the arms deals that butter it) being turned off, as it was in 1973 oil crisis. It is only by making a rapid transition away from our dependence on fossil fuels that this depraved relationship with a tyranny can be unpicked – but the Government shows no sign of doing this, preferring to stick to the old exchange of sycophancy, arms deals and crude oil.

As The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman puts it: “Addicts don’t tell the truth to their dealers.” That’s why this week the torturer will be inside Buckingham Palace, and his victims left outside, alone.

Gore tells the truth. His enemies smear him

JamieSW — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:45:38 +0000

Is anyone else going to watch Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech live, just to check? The last time I celebrated a Gore victory it ended with a Bush hangover that thumped for eight years. So I am expecting the ceremony in Stockholm next month to end with George Bush striding to the podium to announce that the Supreme Court has declared him the world’s greatest peacemaker after all, with Gore watching pale-faced in the wings.

Yet there has already been a sour little coda. As news of the Nobel came, it was inevitably paired with a second story: that a British High Court Judge, Mr Justice Burton, had announced that there were nine “errors” in Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth that school-kids had to be warned about when it was shown to them. This verdict was celebrated by global warming deniers across the world as their Scopes Trial, a moment when the judicial system smacked-down science in favour of their dogmas.

This is part of a squalid process that has been going on for more than a decade now – the smearing of Al Gore, simply for telling the truth. I looked back over the American reports of the 2000 election this week, as George Bush was vetoing the extension of healthcare to poor children. “He’s gone from being Richard Nixon to Monty Burns,” John Stewart noted. Yet Bush was presented then as a “compassionate conservative” who you’d wanna have a beer with. Gore was presented as a prissy, effeminate asshole, and he was relentlessly mocked for, like, knowing stuff about science and the Middle East and other nerd-speak.

And – worse – Gore was presented as a Pinocchio prone to lying about his political achievements. They said Gore lied about inventing the internet. They said Gore lied about being the inspiration for Love Story. They said Gore lied about discovering toxic sites. The only catch is: it’s the journalists who were lying.

Here’s what really happened. In the 1980s, the internet was just a few computers wired up in the Pentagon for research. As a senator, Gore sponsored the very first bill to turn it into a much wider “information superhighway.” Vincent Cerf, who is widely regarded as the technological founder of the internet, has publicly said that it is thanks to Gore that the internet is used by all of us today. So when Gore said in a 1997 interview that he “took the initiative” in making the internet possible, it was true. The other Gore “lies” have equally impressive truths behind them.

Now a British court has been sucked into the smear machine. This case has been reported as a David vs Goliath battle: a plucky school governor and dad-of-two taking the former Vice-President to the High Court so his kids could be given a “balanced” education rather than having An Inconvenient Truth forced on them. The reality is rather different.

The man who brought this case, Stewart Dimmock, is a member of an organisation called the New Party, which is so far to the right that even the Scottish Tories call it “fascist”. His legal challenge to Gore has been largely funded by business interests with close links to the fuel and mining lobbies. (They call themselves “centre-right”, and claim the funding doesn’t sway them.) Dimmock isn’t Galileo bravely standing against the conventional wisdom; he’s part of the fossil-fuel Vatican.

And, crucially, the judge rejected his denialist arguments entirely. In his verdict, Justice Barton said: “Al Gore’s presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film were broadly accurate.” The thesis that man is disastrously changing the climate by increasing greenhouse gas emissions is, he says, “supported by a vast quantity of research published in peer-reviewed journals worldwide and by the great majority of the world’s climate scientists.”

But the denialists are now so discredited that they have been reduced to cherry-picking a verdict that humiliatingly rejects their arguments. They fixate on the judge’s claim that Gore makes “errors” – when, in all but one instance, it is actually Justice Burton who is mistaken.

“Error” One. Burton says “there is no evidence” that the citizens of low-lying islands like Tuvalu are being evacuated because of rising sea levels. In fact, the programme to evacuate them began in 2002, as a simple phone call to the island’s government – or to the New Zealand embassy, which is taking them in – would have told him. Journalists like Mark Lynas and Andrew Simms have been reporting on this for years.

“Error” Two. Burton says Gore argues that there is “an exact fit” between rises in CO2 and rises in global temperature. This would indeed be wrong – but Gore doesn’t say it. His exact words are: “The relationship is very complicated. But there is one relationship that is more powerful than all the others and it is this. When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer, because it traps more heat from the sun inside.” If you think that’s wrong, you’d fail a Geography GCSE.

“Error” Three: Burton says Gore is wrong to attribute the current slow, protracted death of the world’s coral reefs to global warming. This is bizarre. As Professor Tim Flannery explains, summarising the scientific consensus: “In all, 42 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef bleached in 1998, with 18 per cent suffering permanent damage… It is not fishing or tourists that are killing the reef, it is being done by spiralling CO2 emissions.”

I could go on. True, Gore did make one error. Although they once thought the Gulf Stream was likely to shut down, leaving Europe to freeze, most climatologists don’t think so any more. Instead, they think we will cook. Forgive me if I fail to celebrate.

Yet many news outlets thought it appropriate to wheel out in response someone who the broadcasting regulator found had made a misleading and totally disingenuous film about global warming – Martin Durkin, who “directed” The Great Global Warming Swindle. This is a man who says “legitimate scientists – people with qualifications – are the bad guys.” This is a man whose film was full of elementary howlers, like the claim that volcanoes produce more CO2 than all man’s activities combined. This is a man who has been accused by the scientists tricked into appearing on his films of “pure propaganda”, “disinformation” and being “close to fraud.” This is a man who responded by telling the scientists to “go fuck yourself”. Yet there he was, savaging Gore for producing “a sham.”

I wish Durkin was right. I wish global warming was “a lie.” I like planes and concrete and patio-heaters. But the evidence is overwhelming that Gore is right. It would be nice if we could ignore Durkin and the deniers – but people who live in greenhouse-effects can’t afford to throw stones at the science-huggin’ smart people for long.

The last time Gore was smeared, the result was President George Bush. This time, if Gore’s global campaign to stop runaway global warming is smeared into submission, the results will be even worse.