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Nigeria: Priest Freed And Kidnappers Arrested

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“Our priest is here with me and is well. We paid no ransom and the four kidnappers have already been arrested,” Monsignor Anthony Adaji, Bishop of Idah, told MISNA in regard to the abduction of Father Innocent Umor.

The priest was abducted on Sunday night from his parish of Ikanepo, in the central-southern state of Kogi. Fr. Innocent was freed by the kidnappers in a police operation from fear of being captured, which they in fact were.

Bishop Adaji stressed that he paid no ransom despite the kidnappers had demanded $20,000: “Paying ransoms would encourage crime and kidnappings would become more frequent”.

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Kenya: 16 Muslim Preachers Arrested, Suspected Of Recruiting For Al Shabab

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Police in Kenya’s Marsabit county have arrested 16 Muslim preachers suspected of recruiting for the Somali al Shabab Islamist armed group, reports MISNA.

According to Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper, the arrests took place in the Karare area after police were tipped off by local informants.

The preachers arrived in the area three days ago and were said to be from other areas of Kenya, in particular the Somali-majority Eastleigh area of Nairobi, Sololo, Moyale and Isiolo.

The suspects were handed over to the Anti-Terrorism Police Unit in Nairobi, reports the Daily Nation. Police have intensified the crackdown on al Shabab countrywide since the April 2 attack on the Garissa University that left 148 dead.

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Germany Limits Cooperation With NSA

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Germany’s Foreign Intelligence Service (BND) has restricted cooperation with its U.S. partner in response to a scandal over their alleged joint spying on European interests, German media reported on Thursday.

According to the reports, the BND has stopped sharing internet surveillance data with the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) since the start of the week, and its listening station in Bad Aibling in the southern German state of Bavaria is passing on only information from fax messages and telephone calls.

Berlin has demanded that the NSA provide justifications for each online surveillance request, the reports added. Such a rule is believed to have long been in place for fax and phone surveillance conducted by the BND for the NSA.

German media reported earlier that the BND had targeted European interests for surveillance on behalf of the NSA for years. Their targets included not only suspected extremists and criminals, but also European companies and government leaders as well as EU institutions.

The German government has so far declined to release a list of the NSA’s requested search terms, citing its ongoing consultations with Washington.

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US Senator Wyden Demands New Disclosure Rules For Political Ads

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Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore. wants federal regulators to update and expand disclosure rules that govern commercial and political ads.

Wyden said the update is needed because it directs the Federal Communications Commission to act upon campaign finance excesses and abuses spawned by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010.

Wyden cosponsored legislation this week that would direct the Sunshine in Sponsorship Identification Act introduced by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and also cosponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), and Gary Peters (D-Mich.)

“Untold billions of dollars are spilling into the U.S. campaign system from special interests manipulating the system from the shadows,” Wyden said.

“The FCC simply must update its rules to pull these big-spending special interests from the dark corners of politics into the sunlight,” Wyden said. “Voters in Oregon and nationwide deserve basic information about who’s paying for the ads that are besieging them.”

Wyden has long advocated for campaign finance reform, writing the “Stand by Your Ad” law included in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 requiring leaders of corporations, unions and other organizations to identify that they are behind political ads; and cosponsoring legislation to create a constitutional amendment allowing Congress and the states to regulate and restore faith in our campaign finance laws.

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HRW Notes Silence Surrounds Zimbabwe’s ‘Disappeared’ Activist

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Zimbabwe authorities should urgently provide information on the whereabouts of a prominent human rights activist, Itai Dzamara, Human Rights Watch said Friday. Five armed men abducted Dzamara on March 9, 2015. He has not been heard from since, raising grave concerns that he has been forcibly disappeared.

Family members told Human Rights Watch that state security agents had repeatedly threatened Dzamara prior to his abduction, warning him that something would happen if he did not halt his activism. Authorities have denied involvement in his abduction.

“Zimbabwe authorities appear to be doing nothing to find Itai Dzamara, increasing concerns about his safety,” said Dewa Mavhinga, Southern Africa senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The threats against Dzamara by state security agents are a red flag for Zimbabwe’s international allies to press the government to come clean about what happened to him.”

Dzamara, a 36-year-old journalist and human rights activist, is a leader of the Occupy Africa Unity Square protest group. He has led a number of peaceful protests against the deteriorating political and economic environment in Zimbabwe, petitioned President Robert Mugabe to resign to allow for fresh elections, and called for reforms to the electoral system.

On several occasions in 2014 and 2015, police and supporters of Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party assaulted Dzamara. During a peaceful protest in November 2014, about 20 uniformed police handcuffed and beat Dzamara unconscious with batons. When his lawyer, Kennedy Masiye, tried to intervene, the police beat him as well, breaking his arm. Both were hospitalized.

Two days before he was abducted, Dzamara addressed a political rally organized by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T), calling for mass protests against worsening repression and economic conditions in Zimbabwe.

On March 9, 2015, at about 10 a.m., the five unidentified men dragged Dzamara out of the barber shop where he was having his hair cut near his home in the Glenview suburb of Harare, the capital. The men handcuffed him, forced him into a white pickup truck, and drove off, witnesses said.

Zimbabwe authorities have denied any government involvement in the abduction. On April 10, Information Minister Jonathan Moyo, in response to a Human Rights Watch inquiry about Dzamara’s whereabouts, tweeted, “I don’t know, and I have no basis for knowing.”

On March 13, Dzamara’s wife, Sheffra Dzamara, approached the high court in Harare to compel state authorities to search for her husband. Judge David Mangota ordered the home affairs minister, the police commissioner-general, and the director-general of the Central Intelligence Organization (CIO) “to do all things necessary to determine his whereabouts.” The ruling included an order to advertise on all state media and work closely with lawyers appointed by Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights to search for Dzamara “at all such places as may be within their jurisdiction.” The judge ordered the government to report to the court every two weeks on its progress with the case until Dzamara is found.

Senior state security officials have yet to comply with the High Court’s orders.

On April 25, activists organized a car procession to raise awareness about Dzamara’s presumed enforced disappearance. Police arrested 11 of the activists and detained them for six hours, then released them without charge.

Sheffra Dzamara reported in early April that unidentified men were keeping her under constant surveillance and that she feared for her life. Zimbabwean authorities should immediately take steps to ensure the safety of Dzamara’s wife and children, Human Rights Watch said.

Human rights activists in Zimbabwe face severe restrictions on their work. Police frequently misuse laws such as the Public Order and Security Act (POSA) and the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) to ban lawful public meetings and gatherings. Opposition and other activists are unjustly prosecuted under these laws. The government should repeal or appropriately amend both laws to bring them in line with the new constitution and Zimbabwe’s obligations under international law.

Enforced disappearances are defined under international law as the arrest or detention of a person by state officials or their agents followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty, or to reveal the person’s fate or whereabouts. Enforced disappearances violate a range of fundamental human rights protected under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Zimbabwe is a party, including prohibitions against arbitrary arrest and detention; torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment; and extrajudicial execution.

“The Zimbabwean government should immediately establish Dzamara’s whereabouts, and ensure the protection of all his rights,” Mavhinga said. “Failure to do so would demonstrate to the world that Zimbabwe’s poor human rights record has not improved.”

The post HRW Notes Silence Surrounds Zimbabwe’s ‘Disappeared’ Activist appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Radical Texas Marijuana Legalization Bill Passes In State House Committee – OpEd

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By Adam Dick

Texas took a step toward leapfrogging past all the states that have legalized marijuana for medical and recreational use so far. In March, Texas State Rep. David Simpson introduced legislation (HB 2165) that would remove references to marijuana from the state criminal code so the plant would be legal just as are tomatoes. And, you know what, Simpson’s bold, no-compromise, forget about “taxing and regulating” move is yielding success in a state many people write off as destined either to never legalize marijuana or to be one of the last states to legalize marijuana. On Wednesday, the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee approved Simpson’s bill by a 5 to 2 bipartisan majority — after HB 2165 was moderated in the committee to retain marijuana restrictions for juveniles.

The committee’s approval of HB 2165 clears the bill for a debate and vote on the House floor. However, as suggested in the Dallas Morning News, the House may not make time for floor consideration of the bill in the remainder of this session, which is scheduled to end June 1. Still, the strong committee vote for a radical legalization bill in the Texas House committee bodes well for marijuana legalization in the state. It also bodes well for enacting marijuana legalization in America that respects freedom to a much greater degree than does any of the legalization programs adopted in any states thus far.

This article was published by the RonPaul Institute.

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The Enigma Of Bernie Sanders – OpEd

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He has thrown his hat into the ring as the populist spoiler. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who would have been the ideal anti-Hillary Clinton candidate, seems to lurk in the background as a threatening promise. “Financial institutions shouldn’t be allowed to cheat people,” she suggested to those attending the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Finance & Society conference. “Can I have an amen on that?”[1] With all that about, it has fallen to Bernie Sanders to create a bit of a ruckus in the Democratic camp, a person who has shunned such tags as “progressive” or “liberal” in favour of “democratic socialist”.

In somewhat clumsy fashion, Charles W. Cooke attempted to heap some praise on the candidate who anticipates giving the Clinton campaign a few headaches. “Unlike the vast majority of American politicians, Sanders has not contrived to determine the most electable point on his part of the ideological spectrum and then to present its presumptions as if they were his own, but has instead determined to present himself to the public as he actually is” (National Review Online, Apr 29).

Sanders has a considerable swathe of targets in the Hillary dossier, which is looking more pneumatic with each passing day of campaigning. There will be the free trade train which is chugging away to secrecy and non-consultation, a point Clinton is mor likely to celebrate than not. She is hardly in any mood to take on the moneyed classes, despite doffing the symbolic hat to America’s common voter. “Why don’t you tell me what Hillary Clinton is campaigning on?” Sanders demanded of an MSNBC host.

It takes the ostensibly corporate driven nature of US politics to make Sanders look screamingly radical. “What’s wrong with being more like Scandinavia?” is the sort of question that will make the militia run for their weaponry and the Tea Party mount the stump. For Sanders, democratic socialism is standard, and fairly mundane Scandinavian fare – one just needs to “know what democratic socialism is.”

Central here are the basics of social justice; and anything with social in the equation of American politics sits very uncomfortably with the Social Darwinian instinct. Crippling poverty and hunger exist in parallel worlds with Silicon Valley and the start-up mentality. Sanders noted the words of Michael Reisch of the University of Maryland in testimony before his Senate subcommittee on health and ageing in 2014. “Poverty is a thief. Poverty not only diminishes a person’s life chances, it steals years from one’s life.”[2]

In his own observations on the subject, Sanders has noted the astral disparities between life expectancy in regions of the United States, even localising their effects to neighbourhoods. But he does not reflect upon them as a sociologist shaded by Marxist sentiment. He, too, has an eye on the money cost to the country. Poverty, in other words, does not merely reduce life; it increases losses more broadly speaking. “If people don’t have access to health care, if they don’t have access to education, if they don’t have access to jobs and affordable housing then we end up paying not only in terms of human suffering and the shortening of life expectancy but in actual dollars.”

Then comes reference to the participatory element in a country that is ritualistically estranged from its political roots. A vote is necessary to the pantomime, but is generally irrelevant to shifting the political status quo. In contrast, “The voter turnout [in Denmark, Norway, Sweden] is a lot higher than it is in the United States.”[3]

Suggesting a Canadian-styled Medicare system is already going to send the anti-socialising forces into a spin even if it seems banal in most other cases. Other regulatory pushes, insinuating the state into responsible roles for public welfare will do the same. Sanders wishes to audit the Federal Reserve, a point he shares with Ron Paul, but oversight is the demon of the plunder’s mission.

None of this points makes Sanders a “socialist” at all.   But that does not stop Forbes Magazine from suggesting, through Tim Worstall, that Sanders is “an avowed socialist” with a vital difference: the media will cover his exploits, give him coverage and some measure of exposure. “Rather than debating whatever the merits or not of the 3 degree differences between the Republican or Democratic position on anything we can proffer up truly radical policies.”[4]

We are not left with a banquet of options. Do you want Sanders, the unvarnished, direct sort of chap who is a sanitised faux radical, or the Nebuchadnezzar of the focus-group, the synthetic, hologram nightmare that is the Clinton factory? He has already raised $1.5 million on his first day of campaigning, and secured 175,000 pledge volunteers.[5]

US political society will prevent Sanders from getting to the White House, as will the Clinton machine, but that won’t stop him trying. Whether Sanders instils an element of sanity over such matters as a frayed safety net and equitable taxation may well receive a traditional rebuke. It is, after all, nigh impossible to succeed in a political race that avoids all references to change inspired by the left in favour of right-wing varieties and populist cameos.

Notes:
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/elizabeth-warrens-challenge-to-hillary-clinton

[2] http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/poverty-is-a-death-sentence

[3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/03/bernie-sanders-campaign_n_7199546.html

[4] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/05/02/policies-for-bernie-sanders-i-abolish-child-poverty-in-the-united-states/

[5] http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/5-great-things-have-happened-bernie-sanders-he-announced

The post The Enigma Of Bernie Sanders – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Saudi Arabia Says Yemen Truce Begins On Tuesday

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Saudi Arabia said on Friday a five-day humanitarian cease-fire in Yemen would begin on Tuesday if the Iranian-allied Houthi militia it has been fighting agreed to the pause.

“This is a chance for the Houthis to show they care about their people, and we hope they take up this offer for the good of Yemen,” Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir told a news conference with US Secretary of State John Kerry.
Al-Jubeir said the date of the cease-fire was set to allow time for donors to coordinate aid supplies. It would come into force at 11 p.m. (2000 GMT).

“It is critically important that all countries are able to send as much relief, as efficiently, as quickly to as many Yemenis as possible,” he added. The offer of a truce came days after the Houthis shelled Saudi border towns, prompting more airstrikes.

“A humanitarian catastrophe is building … and clearly this is an important moment,” Kerry said.

Without naming Iran, Kerry said those who supported the Houthis should encourage the group’s leaders and rank-and-file to “live by this opportunity.”

He added: “The US is working with the international community now to try to organize as much humanitarian assistance as possible to flow once that cease-fire takes effect working through the United Nations.”

Kerry said the cease-fire opened the door the possibility of peace talks between the warring parties. He said, however, the truce “is not peace” and said it was important that Yemen’s leaders tried to reach a lasting political settlement.

“They are going to have to make tough choices more than just a cease-fire because even the most durable of cease-fire is not a substitute for peace,” he said.

Kerry said that while the Saudis would not respond to small accidental incidents where the message of a cease-fire might not have reached, this would not be extended to big actions that could be seen as a breach of a cease-fire.

Al-Jubeir said the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen is ready to halt airstrikes if Houthis cooperate.

Kerry also said there were “some indications but no certainty” that Houthis will accept the truce.

“It is not hard if you pass the word and give strict orders to your people,” Kerry said. “Our hope is that the Houthis will spread the word rapidly.”

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Martyr’s Day: Yarmouk, Syria – OpEd

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This past week, on May 6th, Syria commemorated its national holiday known as Martyr’s Day. This year being the 99th anniversary of the execution of 21 Syrian nationalists, betrayed by retreating Beirut based French officials who were supposedly their allies.

The slaughter took place at Marjeh Square in downtown Damascus for alleged anti-Turkish activities. It was ordered by one Jamal Pasha, also known as “Al Jazzar” (‘The Butcher’) who at the time was the Ottoman, Turkey,“Vilayet” of ‘Greater Syria’. The latter term having been coined to designate the approximate area included in present-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and still Zionist-occupied Palestine, which was a key part of the 1301-1918 Ottoman Empire.

President Bashar Assad, despite rebel social media claims this week that he had been assassinated, appeared well and relaxed at a nearby school amidst throngs of chanting and obviously surprised supporters. In his first remarks since rebels seized Jisr al-Shughour, and the city of Idlib as well as and the Qarmid military base last week, Syria’s President argued to the crowd that “wars involved thousands of battles with ebb and flows, gains and losses, and ups and downs. Everything fluctuates except one thing, which is faith in the soldier and his belief in ultimate victory. So when setbacks occur, it is our duty as a society to boost the morale of the soldier and not wait for him to raise ours.” He added that “Psychological defeat is the final defeat and we are not worried.”

Martyrs’ Day in occupied Palestine, named after Ahmad Musa, who, according to PLO leader Yasser Arafat, was the first martyr to fall in the “Palestinian Revolution” in 1965, is also commemorated in Syria’s 13 Palestinian camps, some now partially destroyed. This year, given all the displacements of Yarmouk residents and continuing carnage and siege of the estimated 8-15,000 still trapped, an additional joint Syrian-Palestinian Martyr’s manifestation is scheduled for 5/8/2015 at 1 p.m. on the north side of Yarmouk camp. An American delegation, which on 5/7/15 was briefed at length on the current humanitarian and military situation by Syrian army and Palestinian commanders just inside the camp, will attend.

The “Return to Yarmouk” event is being organized by former Yarmouk residents from a beat-up shredded UNHCR tent across the street from the North-side entrance to Yarmouk. The Martyr’s Day event will have the theme “Return to Yarmouk” and will launched a campaign to pressure all the parties to finally achieve, after half a dozen failed attempts over the past nearly two years, enough Musalaha (‘reconciliation’) to acheive a credible ceasefire, allow in humanitarian aid, security and the return of those who since December of 2012 fled for their lives. Thousands of former Yarmouk residents currently exist wherever they can find shelter on the edge of Yarmouk while waiting for a chance to return to what is left of their neighborhood and homes.

There are many conflicting reports these days about current conditions deep inside Yarmouk. Based on briefings this week as well as crossed-checked data, the following tentative ‘snapshot’ comes into focus.

Parts of 4-5 thousand Yarmouk families are still inside for a total estimated current population of between 8 to 15,000 persons, mainly Palestinian but also some Syrian. Most are trapped or being used a human shields. But there are a few who have decided to remain with family members who are fighters in various militia. UNWRA uses the figure 18,000 including 3.500 children still trapped inside and in dire need of humanitarian aid. As of March 2011, according to UNWRA, Palestinians living in Syria numbered some 581,000 – one third of whom had been living in the Yarmouk camp.

As confirmed by other eye-witnesses, including Nour Samaha, the northern section of Yarmouk camp is now under the control of the PFLP-GC, while the Syrian army and the National Defense Force, a government-funded militia, surround the western and northern outskirts. Practically all the rest of the camp is under the control of al-Nusra Front, the Islamic State, and other opposition groups.

Da’ish (ISIS) and Jabhat al Nusra have now joined ranks for mutual benefits as we are seeing in some other parts of Syria. Contrary to some media reports ISIS has not abandoned or retreated from Yarmouk but on the contrary they are actively recruiting, offering approximately $ 400 monthly salaries, free cigarettes (despite their claimed Koranic based rejection of the disgusting habit) and a Kalashnikov or similar weapon.

Contrary to some media reports, the formerly pro-Hamas Palestinian militia Aknaf Bait al-Maqdis, which has been solely active in Yarmouk camp has not disbanded. Rather, Aknaf has split its ranks. Approximately 150 of its fighters have joined the Da’ish-Nusra collaboration inside the camp with roughly the same number joining pro-government forces such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), which continues, despite some rumors, to be headed by pro-Syrian, Ahmed Jibril.

The current known allies of Aknaf Bait al-Maqdis include Jaysh al-Islam, Jaysh al-Ababil, Liwa Sham al-Rasul, and Da’ish (ISIS). Its enemies include the Syrian army, Hezbollah, National Defense Force, and the PFLP_GC and al-Nurse Front. But some alliances are shifting. This according to the political and military commander of the PFLP-GC and army sources who requested they not be named.

Rebels currently control between 50-75 percent of the camp according to army and PFLP-GC briefings conducted on 5/7/15. Officers explained to this observer and his colleagues that a laboriously crafted cease-fire was in place and set to be implemented by the end of March 2015, when suddenly Daesh and Nusra launched their attack on the camp, scuttling the efforts of many including most Palestinian factions.

Increasingly the battles inside Yarmouk are being wages from tunnels. Since 1 April, when Da’ish invaded Yamouk, and the government retaliated, at least 18 civilians are reported to have been killed from barrel bombs or from having been caught in cross-fire or shot by snipers. Camp resident report that their greatest fears these days are ISIS snipers and night-time dropped barrel bombs.

As fighting has yet again intensified, the trickle of desperately needed humanitarian aid instantly dried up and residents continue to starve. In mid-2013, approximately 170 Palestinian refugees starved to death when a siege began and has now lasted for nearly 700 days.
All the relief organizations in Yarmouk have now closed down their centers and left the camp. Essentially no medical services remain and six Palestine Hospital staff were recently injured and most of the rest have fled out of fear of Da’ish arriving via tunnels which some claim they can hear being dug. Others claim that since 1 April, at least 18 civilians are reported to have been killed as a result of barrel bombs or from having been caught in cross-fire or shot by snipers, and at least three Palestinian fighters captured by IS forces were beheaded. If they can, Yarmouk residents are fleeing mainly due to fear of increasing numbers of snipers and nighttime barrel bombing.

UNRWA cannot do much given the enormity of the crisis and has repeatedly expressed, so far in vain, strong concern for the security of civilians and has demanded access to those civilians who remain inside Yarmouk. But their courageous staffs and Syrian volunteers have been doing what they can these past several days.

The UN Country Team, representing all UN humanitarian agencies in Syria, was about to arrange this week a 22-truck convoy of critical humanitarian items to Yalda, Babila and Beit Saham in partnership with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) and with representatives from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the World Food Program (WFP), the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN Department for Safety and Security (UNDSS) as well as UNWRA. But failed to achieve their goals. Chris Gunness, a UNRWA spokesman, told the Associated Press that the agency has not been able to send any food or convoys into the camp since the recent fighting started. “That means that there is no food, there is no water and there is very little medicine,” he said. “The situation in the camp is beyond inhumane. People are holed up in their houses, there is fighting going on in the streets. There are reports of bombardments. This has to stop and civilians must be evacuated.”

UNRWA medical personnel did establish a mobile health point in Yalda, treating 325 patients over the course of the day. The team initiated a vaccine campaign, serving 28 children. The UNRWA team also provided food supplies to two community kitchens, sufficient to feed 900 individuals for one week. 1,200 packets of bread were delivered to civilians in Yalda, Babila and Beit Saham. UNRWA missions deliver a broad range of critical humanitarian materials to each of these families, including food, medical supplies, water purification treatments, mattresses, blankets, family kitchen sets and hygiene kits.

UNRWA continues to provide humanitarian assistance to the civilians outside of Yarmouk who remain displaced in Tadamoun, an area on the north-eastern periphery. The Agency is also providing some daily hot lunches for civilians, complemented by regular distribution of canned food.
A Syrian army commander, headquartered on the edge of Yarmouk advised this observer on 6/7/2015 that the Syrian government and UNWRA will relocate hundreds of recently escaped camp residents of secured housing in the coming week.

The Return to Yarmouk campaign announced this week shows potential to become a movement with wide support from the government, civil society and even some militia remnants. It is being led by Yarmouk refugees, some returning from Lebanon.

All people of good will can only hope that this Syrian and Palestinian Martyr’s Day effort succeeds and that despite the odds, Return to Yarmouk, will happen soon.

The post Martyr’s Day: Yarmouk, Syria – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

1937: The Ghost That Haunts Wall Street – Analysis

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By Brendan Brown*

If the stock market had a living mind, then the primordial force operating within its subconscious would be 1937. Many contemporaries viewed that year’s equities crash (the Dow Jones index dropped 40 percent) and subsequent global depression as bolts from an almost blue sky. The preceding four years of radical monetary-policy experiments under the Roosevelt Administration had pushed speculative temperatures in equity and commodity markets to record high levels. So it’s hardly a surprise that six years of similar experimentation (2009-14) and accompanying asset-market froth have inspired many investors and commentators to start considering the possibility that another 1937 might be looming ahead. Yes, you can do a Google search and find any number of recent false alerts. But a faulty fire alarm doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as a future fire. The real and important question is: How can we design a better alarm system?

“The danger of 1937” can be described in generic terms. Since its very inception, the Federal Reserve has repeatedly experimented with monetary stimulus as a tool to quicken expansion in the aftermath of serious recessions. Some of these stimulus programs have been more radical than others, and some that appeared radical while they were underway now seem somewhat less so in hindsight. But the essential element of all such programs has been the same: aggressive monetary-base expansion, beyond what would occur under a policy principally devoted to monetary stability. The “stimulus” in question always involves some combination of dollar depreciation and asset-price inflation, with ultra-low interest rates first fuelling capital outflows and then a broader chase for alternative sources of yield in trading markets. Asset-price inflation carries an inherent risk of violent reversal due to the uncertain timing of eventual stimulus withdrawal by the Fed, anticipation of which causes the dollar to rebound. That risk is deferred or even “indefinitely postponed” for only so long as a potential or actual near-miracle continues to justify ballooning market prices and compensate for any drag from a stronger dollar (intensified by foreign currency-devaluation policies). In the absence of such an out-of-the ordinary X-factor, the prospect of a 1937-style crash and recession becomes ever more real.

I. BESTCASE SCENARIOS

Two previous episodes in modern U.S. monetary and business-cycle history represent a reasonably “happy-ending” version of the basic either/or phenomenology at play, here.

The Early-Mid 1920s. America experienced a serious recession in 1920 and 1921. Benjamin Strong’s Federal Reserve Bank responded with a major monetary stimulus, which everyone agrees helped spark the initial stock market boom. In 1923, however, the global situation darkened (the French incursion into the Ruhr; German hyperinflation, the Tokyo earthquake); the U.S. dipped back into a mild recession; and Wall Street started to quiver. It seemed that Fed-induced asset-price inflation was about to give way to asset-price deflation, intensifying the downturn. This time, though, various X-factor miracles did come riding to the rescue: a technological revolution (mass electrification and the automobile) and accompanying surge in productivity and capital spending; Germany’s economic boom following international stabilization of its currency; and global détente in the form of French-German “Locarno Pact” rapprochement. Thus did the Fed enjoy a lucky exit from its early-cycle interventions. (And thereafter did the Fed bungle this happy ending—out of a misplaced focus on stable prices, which were stable or falling, in any case—by attempting to restrain the natural rise in interest rates that accompanies economic good times. The eventual consequence was a global bubble-and-burst of epic proportions. But the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and Germany’s bankruptcy in 1931 is a story for another day!)

The Early-Mid 1990s. In the wake of the late-1980s bust (the stock market crash and S&L, real estate, junk bond, and Enron crises), the Federal Reserve Bank under Alan Greenspan adopted vigorous stimulus policies in an effort to speed recovery from the recession of 1990-2. Again—in combination with a currency offensive launched by the Clinton administration—the Fed’s easy monetary policy produced asset-price inflation: a powerful uptick in the U.S. stock market and a boom in carry-trade activity into Mexican, Italian, and Canadian high-yield sovereign debt. Then, as the Fed moved towards normalization in 1994, asset-price deflation began to emerge (the Mexican debt crisis, a stock market downturn, and a sell-off of high-yield sovereign debt as currency values plunged in Canada and Italy)—and Wall Street started to quiver. But again, there was an X-factor rescue: the internet and telecommunications boom produced a surge in business investment and productivity and the stock market began a powerful new upswing despite the Fed’s monetary policy normalization. (And alas, once more, the Fed proceeded to throw away this good fortune by imposing a regime of artificially low interest rates, thus encouraging investors to seek higher returns in much riskier trading-market instruments, and eventually bringing the cycle to its predictable close with an asset-bubble burst—the most famous example being the Nasdaq crash).

II. THE WORSTCASE SCENARIO

Federal Reserve Bank stimulus programs designed to accelerate recovery from serious economic recessions do not all end the same way, of course. The Fed does not always go on to make a hash of the positive outcome, for one thing—simply because, more often than not, no X-factor “white hat” cavalry charge materializes, and there is no positive outcome to begin with. When the only X-factors on the horizon are threatening ones, in fact, things generally tend to go very badly, indeed. Here, the starkest historical case in point is the then-unprecedented monetary experiment undertaken during the Great Depression by the first Roosevelt Administration beginning in 1933.

The mid-late 1930s. The New Deal monetary experiment involved two major policy decisions. The first was an exit from the gold standard (and sharp devaluation of the dollar). The second—made possible by a wave of foreign capital inflows during 1934-36, which the Treasury Department converted into Fed-financed gold purchases—was an enormous expansion of the monetary base coupled with short-term interest rates pegged at virtually zero. It was unclear even at the time whether this exercise in quantitative easing (though the phrase was not then in use) was “necessary” or particularly helpful. A remarkably strong business-cycle recovery was already underway in 1934-36, primarily and simply because the Depression had pushed the price of goods so low (down by roughly 30 percent) that consumers and businesses were beginning to spend forward in anticipation of a rebound.

What did become clear by the mid-1930s, however, was that New Deal monetary experimentation had a dark side: fantastic asset-price inflation in U.S. equity and commodity markets, still below peak pre-Depression levels, but alarming enough to inspire widespread talk about possible dollar revaluation and Fed-policy normalization. What followed was a period of minor, reactive zigs and zags in Washington. In late 1936 Fed and Treasury officials took several initial steps towards withdrawing monetary stimulus, causing short-term interest rates and long-term bond yields to rise a tiny bit (less than 50 and 40 basis points, respectively) in the early months of 1937. In mid-spring of 1937, in response to a first dip in the equity markets and a flat-lining of general economic indicators, the Fed intervened again, this time to reverse course in the bond market to lower long-term interest rates. But none of it was enough to forestall the inevitable. Speculative temperatures had pushed asset prices to unsustainable highs. And—crucially—all the X-factors were bad: election results and Supreme Court verdicts that spooked Wall Street; a French government unable to stabilize the franc after the demise of the gold bloc; a Japanese Imperial Army engaged in full-scale war with China.

By the second half of August 1937 an inexorable stock market selloff was underway. By the end of March 1938, during a recession that would wipe out 18.2 percent of U.S. GDP before it ended in June, the Dow had lost nearly half its pre-selloff value.

III. 1937 AND TODAY: HOW BEST TO DETECT AND PLAN FOR A POSSIBLE RECURRENCE

On the face of it, the current U.S. business-cycle (dating from the trough of spring 2009) has reached a stage that looks a good deal more like 1937 than 1923 or 1995. The effects of a sustained and quite radical, mid-1930s-style monetary experiment are increasingly obvious. Everyone and his dog is now aware that the Federal Reserve Bank’s super-low interest rates have produced considerable froth across a wide array of markets: high-yield credits, high-end residential real estate, and (most of all) private equity. In certain such markets, this asset-price inflation has already begun to leak significant air; emerging-market currencies, oil credits, and commodities like iron ore have all plummeted (though the Beijing-sponsored Shanghai equity-market bubble has helped to trigger a recent partial rebound by generating optimism about future Chinese economic prospects). The early-stage dollar devaluation in this U.S. business cycle has been fully reversed. A perfectly understandable expectation has taken hold that the Fed will sooner or later decide to normalize its policies, having already “tapered” away from quantitative easing, and now setting a tentative timetable for the return of above-zero interest rates. And there appears to be no imminent X-factor to cushion the blow; quite the contrary, the geo-political skies are now darker than they have been at any point since the end of the Cold War, while U.S. productivity growth continues to languish amidst lacklustre business investment. Put bluntly: the danger of a 1937-style crash and recession is greater than usual—something only a fool would dismiss out of hand.

It’s not something guaranteed to happen, on the other hand. Nor would it be possible to forecast its arrival or severity with meaningful precision, in any event. The key questions, then, are not so much about “if” and “when” and “just bad, or truly cataclysmic?” As suggested at the outset, they key questions, instead, are: What’s the best warning system? Where should investors and policymakers post their sentries? How should those sentries interpret what they see—is it an isolated trashcan fire or a full-scale conflagration? These are all issues of preparation —and continual readjustment in response to varying degrees of risk. And where judgments of risk are concerned, two factors in particular are worthy of special attention and subtle understanding.

The speculative element in Federal Reserve decision-making. Fed policymaking—both for the Bank’s own practitioners and third-party observers—is a fiendishly tricky enterprise. According to conventional folklore, for instance, all would have been well in 1937 had the Fed not prematurely started to normalize monetary policy in late 1936; fears of a steep recession would not have intensified, and investors would not have felt frantic to dump their equity holdings. Maybe. But maybe not. Basic economic laws cannot be permanently revoked, after all. Eventually, whenever overheated commodity and equity markets reach a boiling point (fuelled by quantitative easing’s artificially depressed interest rates, which make safer bonds and bills unattractive), some degree of corrective freeze will set in—and the value of high-risk assets will collapse—unless a near-miracle occurs. It is just as likely that the Fed’s “premature” normalization in 1936 actually eased the pain of Wall Street’s 1937 collapse—by preventing an even steeper pre-crash peak. Today, almost 80 years later, we still can’t say for sure what the “right” monetary-policy move should have been—even after taking account of a whole series of earlier, quite clearly wrong moves.

Fed officials wrestling with these same problems in the moment can hardly be expected to fare much better. A red flag has gone up over anticipated or already evident asset-price inflation. There may be prominent authorities willing to pretend otherwise, but doing nothing at all in the near term, murmuring about normalization at some unspecified point in the future, and assuming that the situation can smoothly cure itself in the meantime—without divine intervention or anybody getting hurt—is not a serious option; it’s a fantasy. In the real world, the Fed’s choice is a stark one: The Bank can start pressing on the brake—normalize now —and risk triggering a market down-turn all by itself. Or the Fed can decline to intervene, hope for the necessary X-factor, and ride things out from the spectator seats. In either case (the necessary X-factor being so rare), an eventual market down-turn is likely to occur. And in either case, the question whether that down-turn might have been less severe had the Fed acted differently will remain effectively unanswerable. What if your father hadn’t run into your mother that day on the subway? There’s no way to know.

Plenty of people do their best to know, anyway, of course. The Fed “does its best.” And outsiders expend an enormous amount of time and energy trying to guess what the Fed will guess is the right course of action, a speculative phenomenon that plays an outsized role in short-term market fluctuations, and one which—for that reason alone—investors cannot afford to ignore. Nevertheless, narrow-focused attention on Federal Reserve Bank decision-making does not make for the most robust or confidence-inspiring fire-alarm system.

Historical and statistical yardsticks. Past experience provides more generally dependable—if necessarily limited—guidance. We know from previous history that price inflation tends to infect different asset markets at different times, but the overarching cycle follows an established and predictable sequence. At mid-phase, the earliest-afflicted markets are already beginning to deflate, even as later-to-the-party markets are still climbing to their highest (and shakiest) ladder rungs. As suggested above, this is where we seem to find ourselves today, with emerging-market currencies, oil credits, and certain commodity markets all past their peaks and in decline—while high-yield credits, high-end real estate, and private equity remain quite frothy. What comes next will be the cycle’s end phase—that, too, we know from previous history—in which a steep slide occurs across nearly every asset market.

History is of relatively little use, however, in assessing when exactly this next end phase will arrive. For that we must largely depend on a reading of “the numbers.” And we must read with discernment. Some conventionally employed statistical measurements are more reliable and meaningful than others. Some conventionally employed statistical measurements aren’t reliable or meaningful at all, in fact. Until very, very recently, for example—on May 6, Janet Yellen finally conceded that U.S. stock valuations are “quite high” and pose “potential dangers” to financial stability—Fed officials have aggressively minimized the risks of equity-market froth by citing the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio on the S&P 500 (now around 20, still within the upper limit of a normal range). Fed officials have further pointed out that the earnings yield on stocks (the inverse of the P/E ratio) remains about 4.5 percentage points higher than real long-term interest rates (measured by the yield on “TIPS,” 10-year inflation-protected U.S. Treasury bonds), and thus represents a reasonable (if not particularly rich) reward for bearing risk; earnings yields on stocks provided much lower relative rewards during previous periods of obvious market froth like 1929 or 2000.

These numbers are utterly misleading, however—as Ms. Yellen’s space-of-one-day change of mind about their meaning might well suggest. As a matter of historical fact, P/E ratios were also within a normal range on the eve of the 1937 Crash. And as a matter of principle, “normality”—like beauty—lies in the eye of the beholder. If present reported earnings are far above sustainable long-run trends (and inflated by widespread financial engineering), then rational investors should not pay as high a price for equities (relative to earnings) as they would during “normal times.” And today there are indeed grounds for caution of this sort. Underlying U.S. corporate profits relative to national income are edging down from an all-time peak reached in 2013. The corporate sector is massively engaged in so-called “financial arbitrage” (equity buy-backs related to a disguised rise in leverage, “carry trades” in high-yield bonds, and so forth) which produces superficially flattering earnings-per-share performance reports in the near term, but also involves exposure to large and unknown future risks. This is all reminiscent of the Zai-tek boom in Japan during the late 1980s.

Neither should a rational investor be especially reassured by the TIPS part of this equation. Historically low long-term interest rates, the result in large part of Federal Reserve manipulations, mean that the earnings yield spread between stocks and bonds has not been compressed below normal—despite frothy valuations for equities. The statistical evidence on which an investor might otherwise base a judicious risk-reward calculation has thus been distorted by monetary policy experimentation at the Fed. Yes, there are economists who hypothesise about secular stagnation and argue that long-term interest rates will remain low far into the future. But secular stagnation would mean a dismal outlook for corporate earnings growth, hardly a positive sign for equities. So why would a real-world market actor with serious money to lose make a bet on such a hypothetical?

Maybe because he thinks he’s smart enough to stay at the party just a little while longer—and then beat everyone else out the door in the nick of time. Maybe because, once he’s started dancing to the tune, he finds it impossible to resist soothing lyrics like “there is nowhere else to go [but equities] in a zero-rate world” and “1937 is the most overworked analogy in economics” (as a strikingly confident Wall Street Journal editorial announced back in March). Maybe the Fed won’t start a policy normalization any time soon.

But that’s an awful lot of “maybes.” Come what may, it seems highly unlikely that the Ghost of 1937 will make a quiet exit from the scene. Janet Yellen is now hoping to banish the Ghost by talk alone—gently commenting on stretched valuations in order to dilute market froth in a “controlled” manner. Unfortunately, history and economic principle are not on her side.

About the author:
*Brendan Brown, Brendan Brown at Hudson Institute

Source:
This article was published by the Hudson Institute

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High Costs Of Cheap Oil – Analysis

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Low energy prices lock the world into fossil-fuel consumption and infrastructure – new taxes could encourage alternative.

By Deepak Gopinath*

The consensus around the collapse in oil prices is that the trend a net positive for the world economy and global growth. Sure, exporters like Venezuela and Russia suffer, but that’s outweighed by the increased spending by governments and consumers with more cash to burn – no small thing when the global economy is suffering from a crisis in demand.

Meanwhile environmentalists take comfort in the shelving of billions of dollars worth of dirty oil and gas projects by cash-strapped energy companies. More importantly, smaller exploration and production budgets will help the world meet the international goal of limiting the global mean temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by keeping more fossil fuels in the ground.

But this Pollyannaish narrative surrounding the benign impact of low energy costs overlooks a subtle and powerful process known as “lock-in.” Far from ushering in a post–fossil fuel world, cheaper oil will only lock us into energy-supply, transportation, industrial and agricultural systems that depend on and facilitate continued use of hydrocarbons while discouraging attempts to develop alternatives.

The International Energy Agency in a 2011 report issued a warning: Four-fifths of the total energy-related CO2 emissions permissible by 2035 to limit global warming to 2 degrees C are already “locked-in” by existing capital stock. High-carbon infrastructure – power plants, pipelines, factories, inefficient buildings, roads and transport vehicles – built today will last and pollute for decades to come. According to the IEA report, the world had just five years to retool the world’s hydrocarbon-based infrastructure to avoid missing emission targets. Not only is available time running out, the task has been complicated by the collapse in oil, coal and natural gas prices.

The concept of lock-in was first devised by economists in the 1990s to describe how technologies and technological systems tend to follow specific paths that are difficult and costly to escape, thanks to scale and learning effects, user-friendliness, and support of governments and private interest groups. In consequence, such technologies remain in vogue despite the development of superior substitutes. This is why we still type on QWERTY keyboards and rely on internal-combustion engines. It also explains why, despite knowing better and having alternatives, we continue to rely on hydrocarbon- intensive technologies developed at a time when fossil fuels were abundant and the long-term consequences of greenhouse gas emissions were poorly understood.

Here’s how lock-in works in advanced economies: The US agricultural system is extremely good at producing vast quantities of corn, wheat, soybeans and meat at low prices. However, the industry is heavily dependent on oil and gas and extremely energy inefficient. Agriculture accounts for 20 percent of US fossil fuel use – oil and gas used in making fertilizers and pesticides, running farm machinery and transporting food across the country – and almost a third of its greenhouse gas emissions. According to writer and food industry expert Michael Pollan, the US agricultural industry burns 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy. Moving away from the existing fossil fuel–based industrial agricultural system to one that relies directly on sunlight to produce goods would be difficult and expensive. Industry resistance and political opposition would run high, especially over prices. As a result the United States is locked-in to a carbon-intensive agricultural system. Cheaper fossil fuel only tightens those chains.

Lower energy prices locks society into a fossil-fuel future in other ways. In heavily automobile-dependent countries such as the United States, public transportation continues to get short shrift in government budgets. Boeing and Airbus are concerned that lower fuel prices will reduce demand for their energy-efficient jets as airlines – energy efficiency was primarily a competitive strategy by aircraft manufacturers, used to drive sales since fuel is the single largest expense, and they prefer to keep aging planes in their fleet for longer. Like airlines, other firms could also delay moving to energy-efficient designs.

In addition, lower oil prices stimulate demand for fossil-fueled technologies. US car sales have rebounded, led by purchases of gas-guzzling SUVs. If those vehicles last an average of seven years before they are scrapped, then that locks-in higher fuel consumption and emissions for that period regardless of oil prices. An increase in the number of cars creates demand for new and better roads and bridges. Indeed, President Barack Obama has announced new taxes on US firms parking cash overseas to fund a nationwide infrastructure overhaul. More and better roads and bridges reduce the effective cost of driving and purchasing personal vehicles, further fuelling demand and greenhouse gas emissions in a vicious cycle.

Consider how these dynamics will play out in fast-growing economies like India and China. Non-OECD countries account for 90 percent of population growth, 70 percent of the increase in economic output and 90 percent of energy demand growth over the period from 2010 to 2035, according to the International Energy Agency. Choices made today regarding energy supply infrastructure and manufacturing, building, agricultural and transportation technologies determine what kind of world our children and grandchildren will inherit. Indeed, one of the only ways developing countries can avoid hydrocarbon lock-in is to skip that stage in their development altogether and move directly to alternatives.

Unfortunately, emerging markets are busy locking themselves into hydrocarbon-intensive technologies and infrastructure, too. In India, megacities like New Delhi are ringed by sprawling suburbs and satellite cities, which encourage automobile ownership in the absence of public transportation alternatives. In New Delhi alone 1,400 vehicles are added to the roads every day. That in turn creates demand for more roads, which then encourages more car purchases. Instead of developing comprehensive policies to curb use of automobiles, the Indian government has sought to make them cheaper and easier to own.

Beijing and other major Chinese cities are also suffering from the same malaise. A 2009 World Bank study found that extensive road investments around Beijing encouraged and locked in urban sprawl and decentralization making subsequent investments in public transit less effective in reducing vehicle kilometers traveled by car, gasoline use and carbon-dioxide emissions.

Both countries continue to make poor energy supply choices. India is taking advantage of abundant and cheap coal to embark on a plan to double coal-fired electricity generation, which currently accounts for 60 percent of the total, by 2022 – this despite the fact that India’s thermal power plants operate at some of the lowest efficiencies in the world. China, too, remains heavily dependent on coal despite government efforts to increase use of natural gas. The recent viral success of Under the Dome, a documentary on the country’s air pollution, viewed by tens of millions of Chinese before it was banned, could be a catalyst for positive changes to energy policy.

With few exceptions, these patterns of hydrocarbon-intensive development are being replicated throughout the developing world. So how do we neutralize the reinforcing effects cheap oil has on hydrocarbon lock-in? One partial solution is to go beyond eliminating fossil-fuel subsidies, which many countries have already done, and impose significant consumption taxes as well. These would mitigate the negative impacts of low fossil fuel costs and encourage exploring alternatives to hydrocarbon-based technologies. These changes will be expensive and politically unpopular, but necessary. The costs of inaction are unimaginable.


*Deepak Gopinath is a New Delhi-based economic analyst and writer.

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PTSD Linked To Accelerated Aging

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In recent years, public health concerns about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have risen significantly, driven in part by affected military veterans returning from conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere. PTSD is associated with number of psychological maladies, among them chronic depression, anger, insomnia, eating disorders and substance abuse.

Writing in the May 7 online issue of American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System suggest that people with PTSD may also be at risk for accelerated aging or premature senescence.

“This is the first study of its type to link PTSD, a psychological disorder with no established genetic basis, which is caused by external, traumatic stress, with long-term, systemic effects on a basic biological process such as aging,” said Dilip V. Jeste, MD, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Neurosciences and director of the Center on Healthy Aging and Senior Care at UC San Diego, who is the senior author of this study.

Researchers had previously noted a potential association between psychiatric conditions, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and acceleration of the aging process. Jeste and colleagues determined to see if PTSD might show a similar association by conducting a comprehensive review of published empirical studies relevant to early aging in PTSD, covering multiple databases going back to 2000.

There is no standardized definition of what constitutes premature or accelerated senescence. For guidance, the researchers looked at early aging phenomena associated with non-psychiatric conditions, such as Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, HIV infection and Down’s syndrome. The majority of evidence fell into three categories: biological indicators or biomarkers, such as leukocyte telomere length (LTL), earlier occurrence or higher prevalence of medical conditions associated with advanced age and premature mortality.

In their literature review, the UC San Diego team identified 64 relevant studies; 22 were suitable for calculating overall effect sizes for biomarkers, 10 for mortality.

All six studies looking specifically at LTL found reduced telomere length in persons with PTSD. Leukocytes are white blood cells. Telomeres are stretches of protective, repetitive nucleotide sequences at the ends of chromosomes. These sequences shorten with every cell replication and are considered a strong measure of the aging process in cells.

The scientists also found consistent evidence of increased pro-inflammatory markers, such as C-reactive protein and tumor necrosis factor alpha, associated with PTSD.

A majority of reviewed studies found increased medical comorbidity of PTSD with several targeted conditions associated with normal aging, including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, gastrointestinal ulcer disease and dementia.

Seven of 10 studies indicated a mild-to-moderate association of PTSD with earlier mortality, consistent with an early onset or acceleration of aging in PTSD.

“These findings do not speak to whether accelerated aging is specific to PTSD, but they do argue the need to re-conceptualize PTSD as something more than a mental illness,” said first author James B. Lohr, MD, professor of psychiatry. “Early senescence, increased medical morbidity and premature mortality in PTSD have implications in health care beyond simply treating PTSD symptoms. Our findings warrant a deeper look at this phenomenon and a more integrated medical-psychiatric approach to their care.”

Barton Palmer, PhD, professor of psychiatry and a coauthor of the study, cautioned that “prospective longitudinal studies are needed to directly demonstrate accelerated aging in PTSD and to establish underlying mechanisms.”

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US Raises Defense Level At Military Bases

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By Cheryl Pellerin

The commander of U.S. Northern Command has elevated the force protection level for all Defense Department facilities in the continental United States, but not because of a specific threat, Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren said Friday.

Force protection condition levels, or FPCON levels, range from Alpha, which applies when an increased general and unpredictable terrorist threat exists against personnel or facilities, to Delta, which applies in an immediate area where a terrorist attack has occurred or is imminent.

Today, Northcom raised the force protection level at all DoD facilities nationwide from Alpha to Bravo. Bravo applies when an increased or more predictable threat of terrorist activity exists.

“I won’t go into the specifics of what that means because it is information that a potential adversary could use against us,” Warren said.

But in general, he added, at DoD posts, camps and stations, the elevated FPCON level means more comprehensive checking of those entering the facilities, heightened awareness of personnel at the facilities, and in some circumstances, more security personnel on duty at the facilities.

Increased Vigilance

“As far as what the American public can expect to see,” Warren said, “broadly speaking there won’t be a change, but in specific areas there could be longer lines as personnel enter posts, camps and stations around the nation, [and this] could have traffic implications.”

At Northcom in Colorado Springs, Colorado, spokesman Air Force Master Sgt. Chuck Marsh said that raising the baseline force protection condition “was a prudent measure to remind installation commanders at all levels within our area of responsibility to ensure increased vigilance in safeguarding our DoD personnel, installations and facilities.”

The raised FPCON level is in addition to random drills or exercises performed at all DoD facilities, Marsh added, “and they’re all a means to insure that we effectively execute our force protection mission.”

The New Normal

The FPCON level was raised at this time because of a general environment of heightened threats, he said.

“This is the new normal,” Marsh said, “so we’re going to be doing random security [protection] measures … to be able to best execute the safety and security of our people and our facilities.”

According to Northcom, the commander last raised the FPCON level from Alpha to Bravo in 2011 in preparation for the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

At the Pentagon, Warren said, the FPCON level has been at Alpha but “with selected measures from Bravo in effect. Now it’s Bravo.”

Threat Level ‘Has Increased’

This is an acknowledgement, Warren added, that “right now we believe the threat level nationwide has increased.”

According to Northcom, the potential for another attack is always possible and implementing random force protection measures is one way to minimize the likelihood of an attack on an installation or service members.

“Some of you can see for yourselves — you can look at Twitter or at other social media sites and see threats,” Warren said.

“We have a little bit more capability than you do so we see a little bit more than you do. Some of [the threats] are international, some are domestic … but it’s an overall increase in the environment,” he said.

Warren added, “It’s as if the temperature of the water has gone up a degree or two.”

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The Dilemmas Of Captivity – Analysis

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By Paul J. Springer*

For as long as humans have engaged in warfare, some unfortunates have been forced to surrender to the enemy and place their trust in the people who previously they had tried to kill. Surrendering on the battlefield is one of the most dangerous and harrowing experiences that a combatant might have to undertake, regardless of the time period or the form of conflict. However, in the twenty-first century, not only does the act of surrender carry an inherent danger, there is no guarantee that the treatment meted out by the captor will follow the international guidelines that have been established over the previous two centuries. Thus, the mere concept of captivity contains certain dilemmas for the modern combatant, and attempts to surrender may become the exception rather than the norm for international and sub-state conflicts. If so, then it follows that the conduct of warfare is falling further from the ideal established by mid-twentieth century international law, and may be descending into an era of increased lawlessness and, at times, total barbarism.

Defining Prisoners of War

From a legal standpoint, there are four characteristics that must be satisfied if an individual is to be considered a prisoner of war (POW). These requirements are ensconced in the Geneva Convention Relative to Prisoners of War, which was first negotiated in 1929 and subsequently revised in 1949. In each iteration, the treaty reflected the ideals, the best practices, and the lessons learned from one of the World Wars, and its signatories joined the pact in the hope of mitigating some of the worst aspects of warfare. Millions of captives have benefitted from the provisions of these conventions, which essentially operate under the principle that once a combatant has ceased to offer effective resistance and agreed to surrender, he or she should be protected from the effects of war to the maximum extent possible. In exchange for this safety and security, the captive agrees not to continue active resistance in the conflict at hand, at least until duly released or exchanged. To qualify for POW status, a combatant must first be recognized as a lawful combatant. This status is conveyed through four mechanisms, all of which must be satisfied or the individual cannot claim protection under the convention.

  • First, he or she must be part of an identifiable hierarchical organization in which the commander is responsible for the behavior of subordinates. For most cases, this simply requires being a member of a military organization in which officers command the unit.
  • Second, the combatant must wear a uniform or some other recognizable form of device that distinguishes the unit from non-combatants. This might be a full military uniform, or it might simply be a unique identifier such as a distinctive bandanna such as that worn by Hamas militants.
  • Third, the combatant must carry arms openly. Attempting to hide one’s status as a combatant by concealing weaponry under the clothing, or other means of subterfuge, can result in the loss of POW protections.
  • Finally, combatants who expect to be protected by the laws of warfare must in turn conduct their own operations in compliance with the same laws. Failure to do so, such as by refusing to accept prisoners, results in the forfeiture of legal protections.[1]

These norms developed over a period of centuries. Prior to the modern era, there was a wide variety of responses to the taking of prisoners, but few of them were particularly kind to the prisoners themselves. In the classical era, prisoners might be killed outright or enslaved by their captors. The particularly noteworthy prisoners might manage to be ransomed, but for the rank-and-file, surrender often meant complete submission.[2] By the seventeenth century, though, a new approach to the relationship between states and combatants began to emerge. Hugo de Grotius, a Dutch jurist who was held prisoner during the Thirty Years War, essentially set out to codify the acceptable practices regarding warfare in his three volume work De Jure Belli ac Pacis. In it, he clarified when a nation might legally resort to warfare, and then what rules applied to the conduct of those legal wars.[3] His work was expanded upon by the likes of Charles-Louis de Montesquieu and Emmerich de Vattel in the eighteenth century, and perhaps most importantly, by Francis Lieber in the nineteenth.[4]

Changing Expectations and the Advent of Modern Warfare

Lieber, working on behalf of General-in-Chief of the U.S. Army Henry Halleck, sought to codify the limits of warfare in the industrial age. His work, commonly called the Lieber Code, was issued by the U.S. War Department as General Orders No. 100 (1863), “Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field.” In this work, Lieber devoted a substantial amount of time and detail to the capture and maintenance of POWs, arguing that they are the property of the capturing state and not the units or individuals who capture them.[5] Lieber expressly required that they be given adequate food, shelter, and medical care to maintain their health, and that they be protected until they could be exchanged. The consideration was not merely an academic question—Lieber was well aware of the terrible conditions that pervaded Civil War prisons, both North and South. In those camps, the death rate exceeded 15 percent, with nearly 40 percent of the unfortunates condemned to Camp Sumter, near Andersonville, Georgia, dying in the 11 months of operation.[6] The Lieber Code, if followed, guaranteed a bare minimum standard of conditions that would at the very least keep prisoners alive. As such, a soldier who surrendered could expect to survive the war and eventually return home, making surrender a truly viable option under certain circumstances. Given the massive size of industrial-era armies, this made the complete annihilation of armies possible—if they could be induced to surrender, they would be removed from the battlefield in their entirety. If, on the other hand, they chose to fight to the bitter end, the casualties incurred on both sides guaranteed a bloody outcome indeed. Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant grasped this principle far quicker and more completely than his peers, over the course of the war, he managed to capture three Confederate Armies as a whole, while none of his peers managed the feat more than once.[7] For the most part, there was little effort to make use of Civil War prisoners, merely confining them was a difficult enough task, but the lack of utilization changed in the twentieth century.

World War I involved armies numbering in the millions, conducting warfare on a scale never before seen. Three million combatants became prisoners of the enemy, and for the most part, were well-treated. Perhaps the possibility of retaliation kept passions in check, or perhaps, the prisoners were protected because they were perceived to have an intrinsic value. On both sides of the front lines, raids for prisoners were conducted on almost a nightly basis, and a massive infrastructure was created to exploit them for intelligence purposes. Once a prisoner had been interrogated and determined to possess no further information of value to the captor, he was sent well behind the lines and, if an enlisted man, sent to a labor camp where he was employed on virtually anything but work in direct support of the war effort. Thus, rather than being a drain on the resources of the captor, prisoners came to have an intrinsic value.[8]

By World War II, this concept had been expanded even further, and the millions of prisoners taken on all sides were required to labor for the benefit of their captors on a scale never before seen. In the United States, the labor of prisoners had enough effect on the economy to provoke substantial protest from labor unions, which considered the availability of POW labor to be one of the reasons that wages did not rise as quickly as they otherwise might.[9] In Germany, prisoners of the Western powers fared relatively well, although shortages near the end of the war made for fairly short rations. On the Eastern Front, though, the war remained an incredibly brutal and nasty affair, and soldiers captured by either the Germans or the Soviets had little chance of surviving to the end of the conflict. In that theater, the POW survival rate hovered around 10 percent for the war, with the other 90 percent being worked until they died or simply executed out of hand. In the Pacific Theater, Japanese prisoners fared relatively well, when they were captured, although the bushido code made such captures relatively rare prior to 1944. American interrogators were delighted to discover that most Japanese prisoners, when taken, would answer almost any question put to them, in large part because their leaders never offered guidance for how to act as a captive.[10] Unfortunately, on a number of occasions, Japanese troops pretended to offer their surrender and then brandished weapons and attacked their would-be captors. As a result, for a period of nearly two years, many American units stopped asking if the enemy wanted to surrender, and instead fought a war of no-quarter.[11]

With the advent of the Cold War, the nature of military captivity massively changed. If most prisoners through World War II accepted the notion that they were out of the fight once behind barbed wire, the same could not be said for prisoners from communist nations during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. In both cases, ideologues deliberately surrendered with the intended purpose of organizing resistance within the POW camps. In Korea, this resistance initially came in the form of protests, marches, and attempts to distract the guard personnel. When those attempts met with success, the North Korean and Chinese prisoners tried, and on a number of occasions succeeded, to provoke their captors into attacking the compound and creating an incident suitable for propaganda purposes. The communists inevitably portrayed any POW deaths as an atrocity, a deliberate attack upon a helpless population. At one point, when American authorities chose to reassert control over the POW compound at Koje-do, they discovered a massive cache of improvised and stolen weapons within the compound, including a number of rifles, hand weapons, and at least one grenade launcher.[12]

The communists also considered the war to be underway within the compounds under their control, where United Nations troops were interned for the war. They engaged in a massive campaign of indoctrination, later often called “brainwashing,” by which they attempted to recruit Western troops to communist service. A large percentage of American and British soldiers signed confessions of illegal behavior, including the use of chemical and biological weapons. Some offered public testimonials, either spoken or written, attesting to the humanity of their captors and the righteousness of the communist cause. Twenty-one went so far as to refuse repatriation at the end of the war.[13] The communist attempt to use the POW compounds as another avenue to continue the fight largely backfired, primarily because more than 22,000 Chinese and North Korean POWs refused repatriation at the end of the war, a clear repudiation of the visions of a communist utopia being bandied about by the armistice negotiators. For their part, the U.S. military authorities were horrified by the behavior of their troops held by the enemy, and debated court-martialing anyone who could be found to have offered aid and comfort to the enemy.[14] In the end, the court-martial plan was largely shelved, in large part because it would have required a rather embarrassing and very public trial, and also because authorities convinced themselves that the collaboration activities had been conducted under duress. However, in 1955, the Department of Defense released the Fighting Man’s Code, a short list of general provisions that in part required troops to never surrender, and if captured, to offer nothing of use to the captor.[15]

In Vietnam, the communist approach to POW operations continued unabated, although without the large-scale conventional fighting that characterized the Korean War, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese took relatively few prisoners. Most of those taken were aircrews whose aircraft were shot down and who were captured after bailing out. Hundreds of such aviators were confined at the “Hanoi Hilton,” where the North Vietnamese felt emboldened to torture them on a regular basis. The United States chose to turn all but a few of its captures over to the South Vietnamese government. In much the same fashion as during the Korean War, many of the prisoners were soon engaging in active resistance. Further, guerrilla attacks on the POW compounds were not launched to release their comrades, but rather to create casualties among the POW population in the hope of creating an international propaganda victory. Thus, the island prison of Phu Quoc was repeatedly shelled by Viet Cong mortars, killing dozens of prisoners, who were then trumpeted as victims of the captors. Red Cross visitors to the South Vietnamese camps found some evidence of torture and inhumane treatment, and launched public campaigns to improve conditions in the camps.[16] Not surprisingly, they were given no access to the camps in North Vietnam, although certain Western celebrities were invited to tour the camps. The most notorious visit came from Jane Fonda, who later claimed that the prisoners she saw were well-fed and not mistreated in any way. Her statements earned the permanent enmity of the captives she saw, one of whom passed her a list of social security numbers of captives in the camp. She immediately turned the list over to the camp authorities, who punished the prisoners as soon as Fonda left the camp.

POWs in the Post-Cold War Era

In 1990, as an American-led coalition prepared to drive the Iraqi Army out of its occupation of Kuwait, little thought was given to how POWs might be interned during the conflict.[17] The raw number of surrenders surprised and overwhelmed coalition authorities, who literally disarmed the Iraqis and sent them marching, unsupervised, toward the Saudi border. Upon arrival in Saudi Arabia, the first POWs were ordered to complete the construction of their own prison compound, which they did in remarkably good order. Minimal attempts to interrogate prisoners were commenced, but the war ended so quickly that these efforts were soon abandoned. The Red Cross referred to the 1991 Gulf War as the best level of POW care ever achieved in a modern conflict. A handful of coalition personnel were captured by the Iraqi military, most of them aircrew from the handful of aircraft shot down in the war. Several were paraded before media outlets showing a substantial number of injuries, but most later reported that the majority of their injuries came in the crash of their airplanes, not at the hands of their captors. They reported some physical abuse, and poor food and medical supplies, but all survived their captivity.[18]

As the United States entered the twenty-first century, it had every reason to believe that future conflicts would resemble those of the most recent past, and expected that POW operations would be conducted in much the same fashion. Regrettably, this assumption meant that very little effort was put into planning for POWs—after all, improvisation during wartime had always served relatively well, and there was no reason to assume that would not remain the case going forward. When the September 11 attacks occurred, it became clear that the United States faced a new form of conflict, but the parameters of that war were not immediately clear. While it was obvious that a military response against Al Qaeda would soon be forthcoming, the question of whether or not Al Qaeda fighters could claim protection under the Geneva Convention remained unresolved. Given that these combatants did not fulfill all four of the requirements, it is clear that they had no legal right to expect protection under the convention. Their Taliban hosts, on the other hand, might indeed be able to claim that protection, assuming they remained in compliance with the requirements.[19]

The Bush Administration had little choice about getting quickly involved in the war in Afghanistan, but it gave little thought to how to handle captured enemies. It is possible that this important consideration simply fell by the wayside, or that most leaders assumed that Al Qaeda was comprised entirely of fanatics who would not consider surrendering. Nevertheless, within a few months, the United States possessed hundreds of prisoners, and had little idea of where to put them. After a lengthy debate, a compound at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was determined to be the “least worst place” for the prisoners.[20] This location offered a secure facility far from the area of operations, and at the same time, completely divorced from any media scrutiny. Because it was outside of the United States, internees could not hope to claim any constitutional protections, and at the same time they did not qualify for Geneva protections. Thus, they were locked in a form of legal limbo, with no inherent rights to protest their conditions or even to argue that they should not be in captivity at all. Conditions at the compound were initially very rough, and the first images to emerge from the prison showed shackled and prostrate prisoners in stress positions, undergoing harsh interrogations, and generally appearing to be mistreated by the government. The president’s assurance that the prisoners would be generally treated in accordance with the Geneva requirements did little to silence his critics, who pointed out that there was no mechanism to separate accidental captures from hard-core Al Qaeda fighters. When word of water-boarding began to slip out of the compound, human rights activists immediately protested that the government was engaged in torture. Intelligence agencies remained largely mum on the issue, although a number of officials speaking off the record suggested that the techniques were being used to prevent the next September 11 attack.[21]

Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and the Collapse of the POW System

When the United States led another coalition to attack Iraq in 2003, it had almost no plan for the capture and detention of Iraqi prisoners, despite expectations that more than 100,000 might attempt to surrender.[22] The drive toward Baghdad was expected to take only a matter of a few days, after which the Hussein regime would be removed, the population would embrace the occupiers, and the need for POW facilities would simply evaporate. Of course, this is not remotely what happened in the invasion and subsequent events. The rush to reach Baghdad left no resources for POW care, with the result that large numbers of prisoners were either lightly guarded in the open, or they were stashed in extremely secure facilities not intended for POWs. The worst of these facilities was an infamous prison from the Saddam era, Abu Ghraib. There, at a prison designed for no more than a couple thousand prisoners, more than 8,000 were crammed into a compound under almost constant insurgent attack.[23]

The stresses of keeping an enormous captive population in check while under enemy mortar and sniper fire contributed to an untenable situation at Abu Ghraib. The captors, many of them members of a reserve unit comprised largely of prison guards, had no heavy weapons with which to respond to the enemy attacks. Thus, they began to retaliate against the only target they could reach, the prisoners under their control. Soon, photographs of the abuses being perpetrated by some of the guards began to circulate on the Internet. Among other things, the photos depicted Iraqi prisoners forced to strip naked and assume humiliating positions; a hooded and caped man with electrodes attached to his body while standing in a stress position; Sergeant Charles Graner openly beating prisoners; Private First Class Lynndie England posing with naked POWs; and numerous American personnel posing over a dead prisoner’s body.[24]

The photos provoked enormous outrage throughout the Arab world, particularly in Iraq. Countless angry Iraqis flocked to the insurgency, determined to avenge the wrongs being done to their countrymen. Interrogations of captured insurgents revealed that the Abu Ghraib abuses were the largest motivating factor for joining the insurgency, leading to thousands of attacks upon coalition personnel. The United States had literally handed Al Qaeda’s local franchise the greatest recruitment tool in its history. The Abu Ghraib scandal rocked the U.S. military and the civilian population as well, with calls for a series of investigations that led to prosecutions of the individuals involved; the removal of virtually every leader in the chain of command of the prison guard unit; and a massive reduction in the public approval of the war effort. The scandal was entirely preventable, had authorities only determined to follow the requirements of the Geneva Convention. Clearly, the captive Iraqi troops qualified for Geneva protections, one of which is that POWs should never be placed into a criminal prison facility, largely to ensure that they are never treated as criminals. The shocking lack of oversight within the prison, and the incredibly poor judgment of the personnel within the compound, illustrated a larger problem within the military regarding POWs: they are simply not seen as an important aspect of modern warfare, and planning for POWs, if it is conducted at all, tends to be marginal and improvisational. Responsibility for POW upkeep almost inevitably devolves to National Guard and Reserve units, neither of which receives the level of training common to Regular units. The lack of prioritization demonstrates that the lessons of previous wars regarding the utility of POWs have largely been lost, even though the rules and the advantages of taking prisoners have not changed. Inducing the surrender of a large military unit is still the fastest and most cost-effective way to remove it from the battlefield. However, units and individuals will not surrender if they believe they will not be treated with at least a minimum standard of respect and security.

Avoiding the Problem of POWs

Rather than correcting its behavior, the U.S. military instead seems to have largely adopted a policy of avoiding situations in which prisoners might be taken. One of the promises of President Barack Obama during his 2008 campaign was to immediately close the Guantanamo Bay prison. Yet, more than six years into the Obama Administration, the prison remains in operation, and shows no signs of closing in the near future. However, to avoid a swelling number of inmates, the military approach to operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere has largely been a war of distance, particularly one carried out by airstrikes launched from remotely-piloted aircraft (RPAs). These so-called “drone strikes” have occurred in more than a half-dozen nations, only two of which (Afghanistan and Iraq) are explicitly covered by the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for the Use of Military Force. Given the unlikelihood of surrender to an RPA, this type of warfare essentially bypasses the question of captivity.[25] The number of RPA strikes rose drastically from the Bush to the Obama Administration, reflecting a greater technological capacity, but also showing an increased willingness to rely on the “shoot first, capture later” principle. Truly, the standard of “dead or alive” tilted in favor of the former.

The RPA campaign has proven relatively effective at eliminating many of the most feared and dangerous terror organization leaders. While Osama bin Laden was not killed by an RPA strike, the intelligence collected by such devices played an enormous role in discovering his location. Several other key commanders have been killed, including Baitullah and Hakimullah Mehsud in Pakistan and Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. The deaths of all three were significant in the war to destroy Al Qaeda and its affiliates and partners. Not only do such strikes have a high probability of locating and terminating valuable leadership targets, they also place no American personnel directly in harm’s way, making the cost of the operations very palatable to political leaders. In fact, only one American has even arguably been described as a prisoner of war in the entire Afghanistan campaign. Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, recently convicted of desertion, spent five years in captivity with an Al Qaeda affiliate. In 2014, the Obama Administration chose to release five prisoners from Guantanamo in exchange for Bergdahl’s release. Although critics of the deal have howled that it set a dangerous precedent by rewarding hostage-taking, and that trading five dangerous terrorists for a deserter merely rewarded the enemy, it has never been the practice of the United States to outsource punishment for desertion. Further, without interrogating Bergdahl, it was impossible to determine if he had intentionally deserted his post or been kidnapped by his eventual captors. Given that American and coalition troops maintain a very high level of vigilance, it is unlikely that significant numbers of their personnel will be captured and used as hostages to force exchanges.[26]

With the conduct of warfare in a manner that effectively prevents captures, the issue of POWs will almost certainly become an even lower priority for the U.S. Department of Defense. The remaining population of Guantanamo has gradually declined, with more than half of the total 779 inmates released during the Bush Administration, and a further 115 released since 2009. There are currently 122 men held captive in Guantamo, from 22 nations. Although 56 have technically been cleared for release by the U.S. government, thus far, no nation has agreed to receive them. A further 34 have been deemed too dangerous to release, but the government does not possess enough evidence to prosecute them for terrorist activities.[27] Because they are essentially in a legal limbo, there is very little that they can do to effect their own release, and there is not much public call for any change in the current policy of semi-permanent detention.[28] If the United States is truly abandoning the effort to capture enemy prisoners, it is sacrificing any chance at intelligence collection from captives, and at the same time, almost guaranteeing that enemy combatants will resist to the death in future conflicts, likely increasing the number of U.S. casualties that will result from any such wars. By abandoning its previous adherence to the laws and customs of armed conflict, the United States military risks losing its status as the world leader in humanitarian efforts to mitigate the worst aspects of war, and at the same time, puts its own personnel at risk. It is a dangerous course, and one that should be reconsidered in light of the potential consequences.

This essay is based on a presentation to a history institute  for teachers on “Ethical Dilemmas in American Warfare,” April 2015, sponsored by the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Butcher History Institute, the First Division Museum at Cantigny, and Carthage College.  This weekend-long conference was our 11th history weekend at the First Division Museum on topics in American military history and our 52nd history weekend since 1992.  See the E-Book American Military History: A Resource for Teachers and Students, edited by Paul H. Herbert and Michael P. Noonan and jointly published by FPRI and the First Division Museum.

The views presented in this work belong solely to the author, and do not represent the official positions of the U.S. government, Department of Defense, or U.S. Air Force.

About the author:
*Paul J. Springer
, Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Program on National Security, is an associate professor of comparative military history at the Air Command and Staff College, located at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. He is the author of America’s Captives (University Press of Kansas, 2010); Military Robots and Drones (ABC-Clio, 2013); Transforming Civil War Prisons: Lincoln, Lieber, and the Laws of War (Routledge, 2014); and America’s Wars: A Military History of the United States, 1500-Present (Naval Institute Press, 2015). He is the series editor of Transforming War and The History of Military Aviation, both with the Naval Institute Press. He holds a PhD in history from Texas A&M, and has taught there and at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI

Notes:
[1] “Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War,” Geneva, July 27, 1929, available at https://www.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/305?OpenDocument.

[2] Lawrence H. Keeley, War before Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 83-88; June Namias, White Captives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 3-5; J. Norman Heard, White into Red (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1973), 1-2; Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola and James Arthur Levernier, The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550-1900 (New York, Twayne Publishers, 1993), 208.

[3] Hugo de Grotius, De Jure Belle ac Pacis, trans. Francis W. Kelsey (1625; reprint, 1925), available at http://www.longang.com/exlibris/grotius/.

[4] Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law (1758), available at http://www.longang.com/exlibris/vattel/.

[5] U.S. War Department, General Orders No. 100, April 24, 1863, Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, 127 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1888-1901), series II, 5:671-682; Leon Friedman, ed., The Law of War: A Documentary History, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1972), 1:158-186.

[6] Lonnie Speer, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1997), 332.

[7] Grant induced the surrender of Confederate Armies at Fort Donelson (February 16, 1862, approximately 15,000 troops); Vicksburg (July 4, 1863, approximately 32,000 troops); and Appomattox (April 9, 1865, approximately 28,000 troops).

[8] U.S. Army, United States Army in the World War, 1917-1919, vol. 15, Reports of the Commander in Chief, Staff Sections and Services (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1991), 330-331.

[9] Paul Springer, America’s Captives: Treatment of POWs from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 155-161.

[10] Arnold P. Krammer, “Japanese Prisoners of War in America,” Pacific Historical Review 52 (February 1983): 70-80.

[11] Allison Gilmore, You Can’t Fight Tanks with Bayonets: Psychological Warfare against the Japanese Army in the Southeast Pacific (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 150-156.

[12] Samuel M. Meyers and William C. Bradbury, “The Political Behavior of Korean and Chinese Prisoners of War in the Korean Conflict: A Historical Analysis,” in Mass Behavior in Battle and Captivity: The Communist Soldier in the Korean War, ed. William C. Bradbury, Samuel C. Meyers, and Albert D. Biderman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 209-211.

[13] Nineteen of the twenty-one eventually returned to the United States. One died in China, of natural causes, and one remains in China to this day. In comparison, though, more than 22,000 Chinese and North Korean POWs refused repatriation.

[14] William H. Vatcher Jr., Panmunjom: The Story of the Korean Military Armistice Negotiations (New York: Praeger, 1958), 118-119.

[15] Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Executive Order 10631: Code of Conduct for Members of the Armed Forces of the United States,” August 17, 1955, available at http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/10631.html.

[16] Springer, America’s Captives, 181-184.

[17] U.S. Department of Defense, Final Report to Congress on the Conduct of the Persian Gulf War (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1992), 86, 473, 577.

[18] John Norton Moore, Crisis in the Gulf: Enforcing the Rule of Law (New York: Oceana, 1992), 70.

[19] Steven Strasser, ed., The Abu Ghraib Investigations: The Official Reports of the Independent Panel and the Pentagon on the Shocking Prisoner Abuse in Iraq (New York: Public Affairs, 2004) 4-5. Mark Danner, ed., Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004), 105-106.

[20] Karen Greenberg, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4-5.

[21] Strasser, Abu Ghraib Investigations, xvi-xvii, 32-33; Danner, Torture and Truth, 199-204; Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1239.

[22] John Keegan, The Iraq War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 81; Sara Beck and Malcolm Downing, eds., The Battle for Iraq: BBC News Correspondents on the War against Saddam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 22; Anthony H. Cordesman, The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2003), 247.

[23] Beck and Downing, Battle for Iraq, 156-157; John Lee Anderson, The Fall of Baghdad (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 109, 364, 370-371.

[24] Danner, Torture and Truth, 3; Strasser, Abu Ghraib Investigations, xvi-xviii.

[25] In both 1991 and 2003, Iraqi troops indicated a desire to surrender to unmanned aircraft operating in the skies above. In both cases, the RPA operator was able to direct ground forces to intercept the Iraqis and accept their surrender.

[26] In comparison, the Israeli government agreed on October 18, 2011, to swap Gilad Shalit, an IDF sergeant, for 1027 Palestinian prisoners demanded by Hamas in exchange for Shalit’s release. See Barak Ravid, Avi Issacharoff, and Jack Khoury, “Israel, Hamas reach Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange deal, officials say,” Haaretz, October 11, 2011; “Captured soldier Gilad Shalit returns to Israel after five years in captivity,” News.com.au, October 18, 2011, http://www.news.com.au/world/captured-soldier-gilad-shalit-returns-to-is….

[27] American Civil Liberties Union, “Guantanamo by the Numbers,” January 9, 2015, https://www.aclu.org/infographic/guantanamo-numbers.

[28] A similar policy of essentially permanent detention was actually used to maintain War Department control over Geronimo and his Apache followers, who remained classified as prisoners of war from their surrender in 1886 until after his death in 1909.

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Cluster Bombs: Saudi Use, USA Sales, And The Review Conference On Their Prohibition – OpEd

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By René Wadlow*

The Saudi-led aggression on Yemen has on at least two separate occasions used cluster bombs to attack villages in Yemen’s northern Saada Province according to a report of the nongovernmental organization Human Rights Watch. Cluster munitions are imprecise weapons which often fail to detonate on impact, leaving the unexploded bomb lets on the ground, ready to kill or maim when disturbed or handled.

The failure rate of cluster munitions is high, ranging from 30 to 80 percent. But “failure” may be the wrong word. They may, in fact, designed to kill later. Reports from humanitarian organizations and mine-clearing groups have shown that civilians make up the vast majority of the victims of cluster bombs, especially children attracted by their small size and often bright colors.

Cluster weapons had been largely used by USA forces during the Vietnam War, especially along the No Chi Minh Trail in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The impact is still being felt, and much land is unfit for cultivation. (1)

The revulsion at the consequences and long-lasting impact led to the start of negotiations in Geneva leading to the Convention on Prohibition on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons which may be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to have Indiscriminate Effects − called by its friends “the 1980 Inhumane Weapons Convention.”

My NGO text presented during the negotiations in August 1979 for the Citizens of the World on “Anti-Personnel Fragmentation Weapons” called for a ban based on the 1868 St Petersburg Declaration − at the time the only law of war standard which seemed to apply. As I have been concerned with investigation and judgment on violations of the laws of war, I recommended that “permanent verification and dispute-settlement procedures be established which may investigate all charges of the use of prohibited weapons whether in inter-State or internal conflicts and that such a permanent body include a consultative committee of experts who could begin their work without a prior resolution of the UN Security Council.” The procedures I proposed were drawn from the 1976 negotiations on the convention to ban the use of environmental modification techniques for military or other hostile purposes.

The 1980 Inhumane Weapons Convention was to be a “framework” convention, and prohibitions on specific inhumane and indiscriminate weapons were to be negotiated separately, with investigation procedures, if any, to be negotiated for each weapon. Thus the cluster bomb issue was set aside as memories of the Vietnam War faded from the disarmament agenda.

Unfortunately, governments like world public opinion react only when faced by a crisis. Thus cluster bombs returned to the world agenda as a justified reaction to the wide use by Israel in south Lebanon during July-August 2006. It is estimated by the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre (UNMACC) that one million cluster bombs were fired on south Lebanon during the 34 days of war, many during the last two days of war when a ceasefire was a real possibility. The Hezbollah militia also shot off rockets with cluster bombs into northern Israel. It was this indiscriminate use of cluster bombs against Lebanon in a particularly senseless and inconclusive war that finally led to a sustained effort for a ban on cluster weapons.

In a remarkable combination of civil society pressure and leadership from a small number of progressive States a strong 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions was drafted. It prohibits production, transfer, stockpiling and use of cluster munitions. The Convention also reacquires the destruction of stockpiles, clearance of areas contaminated by remnants and victim assistance.

The inspection, investigation, dispute settlement aspects of the Convention are weak. It was hoped that the treaty\’s unequivocal language was so strong that even countries refusing to sign the Convention would be reluctant to use the weapon. Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the USA have all refused to sign the Convention. Thus the use by Saudi Arabia of cluster bombs in Yemen and the sale of cluster weapons to Saudi Arabia by the USA is legal. Some 90 States have ratified the Convention, and 26 have signed but not yet ratified.

I would argue that the large number of ratifications and the general framework of humanitarian law make the use and sale of cluster munitions a violation of world law. For world citizens, “world law” is the law and values of the world community which go beyond “international law” which is treaty law between two or more States.

Because the world situations which lead to disarmament agreements keep changing, and appreciations by governments of what is “world law” keep evolving, as with the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, a five-year-interval Review Conference was included in the cluster-weapon ban convention. The Review Conference will be held in September 2015 in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

The meeting of the Preparatory Commission for the Review Conference will start meeting on 24 June at the United Nations in Geneva. During the period between now and the 24 June start, governments will be preparing their positions. Thus I would recommend that representatives of non-governmental organizations and all persons of good will contact their government to see what forms of investigation and dispute settlement procedures they favor and what steps they plan to take concerning the allegations of Saudi Arabian use.

*René Wadlow, President and a Representative to the United Nations (Geneva) Association of World Citizens

Notes:
1. See: R.Cave, A Lawson and A Sherriff. Cluster Munitions in Albania and Lao PDR (Geneva: UN Institute for Disarmament Research). For a view of the broader use of weapons in the Vietnam War see: Eric Prokosch. Technology of Killing: A Military and Political History of Anti-Personnel Weapons (London: Zed Books, 1995)

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Kurds Urge US To Arm Them Directly

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The leader of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region urged the United States to directly arm his forces battling Daesh (ISIS), AFP has reported.

Massud Barzani said that this was the preferred option, rather than weapons passing through the federal government in Baghdad.

The Kurdish leader has been in Washington for a week lobbying for support. He thanked President Barack Obama, but insisted his troops needed weapons directly.

Barzani said the central government had not kept to a deal agreed in 2007 between US, Iraqi and Kurdish commanders that Kurdistan’s peshmerga militia receive its share of US military aid from Baghdad.

“We eventually ended up having the peshmerga not receiving a bullet or a piece of weaponry from Baghdad,” Barzani told reporters.

Original article

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Saudi Arabia’s Attack On Yemen – OpEd

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The Saudi regime is notoriously adept at funding wars, but exceptionally poor at fighting them.

On March 25, a massive aerial bombing campaign began against Zaidi Houthi rebels who had recently assumed control of Yemen’s capital and forced its U.S. and Saudi-backed president, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, to flee first to the southern port city of Aden and then to Riyadh.

This is the second Saudi attack on Yemen—the Arab world’s poorest country bordering one of its richest—in less than six years. “Operation Scorched Earth” was launched by the Yemeni government against the Houthis in August 2009. In November of that year, Saudi troops amassed on the border and began shelling Saada governorate in northwest Yemen where the rebels were based.

The Saudi offensive creased tens of thousands of internally displaced civilians, teeming refugee camps and rampant malnutrition. The Houthis, in the face of overwhelming firepower and far worse off then than today, nevertheless kept Saudi troops at bay and inflicted higher than expected causalities on their forces. Six years later and with nearly all Arab countries aligned against them, they are doing so again.

To put Yemen’s current predicament in context some background history is helpful.

The Zaidi Shia form at least a quarter of Yemen’s population and are concentrated in the north of the country. This area was once ruled by Hashimite Zaidis (those descended from the line of the Prophet Muhammad) for more than 1,000 years until they were overthrown in 1962 by an alliance of nationalist military officers who then founded the Yemen Arab Republic. Zaidi Muslims are nominally categorized as Shia Muslims although they are actually closer to the Sunni schools of jurisprudence.

The rebels were first led by Zaidi cleric Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi—from whom the Houthis derive their name—and his Shabab al-Momineen group who fought the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Their dispute dates to June 2004 when Saleh, the Saudi-backed strongman, charged the Houthis with sedition and claimed their true aim was to revive Zaidi Shia Imamate rule deposed four decades earlier. For their part, the Houthis sought to reverse the systemic political and socioeconomic marginalization their community faced as well as stem the rise of Salafi/Wahabi ideology and the al-Qaeda presence it fostered, both of which had gained an increasing foothold in the country.

Hussein al-Houthi was killed by the army in September 2004 and his brother, Abdul Malik assumed leadership. He now leads the Houthi movement under the group Ansarullah. Worried that the Houthis could transform into a Hezbollah-like organization, the Saudis attacked in 2009. Then, as now, this was done with U.S.-supplied advanced weaponry including surface-to-air missiles, Apache attack helicopters and Phantom jet fighters. Despite their sophisticated arms, Saudi Arabia lost an unusually high number of soldiers in the campaign.

The Houthis persevered; their resilience and desire for equitable representation in government led Saudi Arabia and a coalition of Gulf Cooperation Countries (with the exception of Oman) to attack in March of this year when “Operation Decisive Storm” began. Predictably, its pretext was the tired canard of curbing Iranian influence in the Arabian Peninsula. Direct, material support for the Houthis by Iran has never been clearly demonstrated however.

The real motive for the assault and the process it intended to disrupt was revealed by former U.N. envoy Jamal Benomar in an April interview with the Wall Street Journal. Benomar remarks, “When this campaign started, one thing that was significant but went unnoticed is that the Yemenis were close to a deal that would institute power-sharing with all sides, including the Houthis.”

The Saudi offensive led by the young defense minister and newly-appointed deputy crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, has again exacted a tremendous humanitarian toll: 1,200 killed and more than a quarter of a million people displaced. In 2009, the Saudis were accused of using white phosphorus (as the Israelis had been in their wars on Gaza). Today, they are charged with using cluster bombs (as the Israelis had been in their wars on Lebanon). Human Rights Watch said in a statement, “Credible evidence indicates that the Saudi-led coalition used banned cluster munitions supplied by the United States in air strikes against the Houthi forces.”

Even after all tools of war were placed at their disposal by the West, the House of Saud still pleaded with Pakistan to send (Sunni-only) troops to fight for them. The regime has blockaded the port at Aden and has even resorted to bombing Sanaa’s airport to prevent the delivery of needed relief supplies.

All of these measures have failed to halt the Houthi advance.

Only a political solution will end Yemen’s bloodshed. The GCC though prefers to frame the conflict as an existential one pitting Arabs against Iranians, Sunnis versus Shias. This serves to stoke the sectarian flames already engulfing the region and makes a practical resolution near impossible.

The war has been a disaster for the Yemeni people from the start, both politically and on the most basic humanitarian level. Al-Qaeda now has the potential to flourish as Yemenis are pitted against one another based on sect; the possibility of a just compromise and representative government without Saudi Arabia’s hand-picked man at the helm well forestalled.

Will the Saudi regime find themselves in a military quagmire? The Houthis show no sign of withering under relentless bombing. Or is a decisive ground invasion in the works? There are early signs this may yet occur. But as in Iraq and Syria, the monarchy appears content with the status quo, ensuring chaos, instability and sectarianism prevail.

This article appeared at Counterpunch and is reprinted with permission.

 

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Nike, Obama, And The Fiasco Of The Trans Pacific Partnership – OpEd

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On Friday, President Obama chose Nike headquarters in Oregon to deliver a defense of his proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership.

It was an odd choice of venue.

Nike isn’t the solution to the problem of stagnant wages in America. Nike is the problem.

It’s true that over the past two years Nike has added 2,000 good-paying professional jobs at its Oregon headquarters, fulfilling the requirements of a controversial tax break it wrangled from the state legislature. That’s good for Nike’s new design, research and marketing employees.

Just before the President spoke, Nike announced that if the Trans Pacific Partnership is enacted, Nike would “accelerate development of new advanced manufacturing methods and a domestic supply chain to support U.S. based manufacturing,” thereby creating as many as 10,000 more American jobs.

But that would still be only a tiny fraction of Nike’s global workforce. While Nike makes some shoe components in the United States, it hasn’t assembled shoes here since 1984.

Americans made only 1 percent of the value of Nike products that generated Nike’s $27.8 billion revenue last year. And Nike is moving ever more of its production abroad. Last year, a third of Nike’s remaining 13,922 American production workers were laid off.

Most of Nike’s products are made by 990,000 workers in low-wage countries whose abysmal working conditions have made Nike a symbol of global sweatshop labor.

As wages have risen in China, Nike has switched most of its production to Vietnam where wages are less than 60 cents are hour. Almost 340,000 workers cut and assemble Nike products there.

In other words, Nike is a global corporation with no particular loyalty or connection to the United States. Its loyalty is to its global shareholders.

I’m not faulting Nike. Nike is only playing by the rules.

I’m faulting the rules.

In case you hadn’t noticed, America has a huge and growing problem of inequality. Most Americans are earning no more than the typical American earned thirty years ago, adjusted for inflation – even though the U.S. economy is almost twice as large as it was then.

Since then, almost all the economic gains have gone to the top.

The President is angry at Democrats who won’t support this trade deal.

He should be angry at Republicans who haven’t supported American workers. Their obduracy has worsened the potential impact of the deal.

Congressional Republicans have refused to raise the minimum wage (whose inflation-adjusted value is now almost 25 percent lower than it was in 1968), expand unemployment benefits, invest in job training, enlarge the Earned Income Tax Credit, improve the nation’s infrastructure, or expand access to public higher education.

They’ve embraced budget austerity that has slowed job and wage growth. And they’ve continued to push “trickle-down” economics – keeping tax rates low for America’s richest, protecting their tax loopholes, and fighting off any attempt to raise taxes on wealthy inheritances to their level before 2000.

Now they – and the President – want a huge trade agreement that protects corporate investors but will lead to even more off-shoring of low-skilled American jobs.

The Trans Pacific Trade Partnership’s investor protections will make it safer for firms to relocate abroad – the Cato Institute describes such protections as “lowering the risk premium” on offshoring – thereby reducing corporate incentives to keep jobs in America and upgrade the skills of Americans.

Those same investor protections will allow global corporations to sue the United States or any other country that raises its health, safety, environmental, or labor standards, for any lost profits due to those standards.

But there’s nothing in the deal to protect the incomes of Americans.

We know that when Americans displaced from manufacturing jobs join the glut of Americans competing for jobs that can’t be replaced by lower-wage workers abroad – personal service jobs in retail, restaurant, hotel, hospital, child care, and elder care – all lower-skilled workers face downward pressure on wages.

Jobs being lost to imports pay Americans higher wages than the jobs left behind. Government data show wages in import-competing industries (e.g. manufacturing jobs) beat those in exporting industries overall.

Without a higher minimum wage, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, affordable higher education, and a world-class system of job retraining – financed by higher taxes on the wealthy winners in the American economy – most Americans will continue to experience stagnant or declining wages.

Instead, the Trans Pacific Partnership – which includes twelve nations, including Vietnam, but would be open for every nation to join – would lock us into an expanded version of the very policies that have failed most American for the past twenty years.

No doubt Nike is supporting the TPP. It would allow Nike to import its Vietnamese and Malaysian-made goods more cheaply. But don’t expect those savings to translate into lower prices for American consumers. As it is, Nike spends less than $10 for every pair of $100-plus shoes it sells in the U.S.

Needless to say, the TPP wouldn’t require Nike to pay its Vietnamese workers more. Nikes’ workers are not paid enough to buy the shoes they make much less buy U.S. exported goods.

Nike may be the perfect example of life under TPP, but that is not a future many Americans would choose.

The post Nike, Obama, And The Fiasco Of The Trans Pacific Partnership – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Obama: Honoring The 70th Anniversary Of V-E Day – Transcript

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In this week’s address, US President Barack Obama honored the 70th anniversary of V-E Day. On this occasion, we commemorate the Allied victory in Europe during World War II. It is a day to pay tribute to the men and women who decades ago served and sacrificed for the cause of freedom. This was the generation that, by ending the war, literally saved the world, laying a foundation for peace. The President asked that in addition to commemorating this important anniversary, we honor the men and women in uniform who currently serve our country, and recommit ourselves to the values we share with our allies in Europe and beyond: freedom, security, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law around the world.

Remarks of President Barack Obama
Weekly Address
The White House
May 8, 2015

Hello, everybody. Today marks an historic anniversary—70 years since the Allied victory in Europe during World War II. On V-E Day after the Nazi surrender, people swarmed the streets of London and Paris and Moscow, and the cloud of fear that had hung for so many years finally lifted. Here at home, from small towns to Times Square, crowds gathered in celebration, singing and dancing with joy. There would still be three more months of deadly fighting in the Pacific. But for a few hours, the world rejoiced in the hope of peace.

General Eisenhower announced the news with little fanfare. “The Mission of this Allied Force,” he said, “was fulfilled.” But his simple message belied the extraordinary nature of the Allied victory—and the staggering human loss. For over five years, brutal fighting laid waste to an entire continent. Mothers, fathers, children were murdered in concentration camps. By the time the guns fell silent in Europe, some 40 million people on the continent had lost their lives.

Today, we pay tribute to all who served. They were patriots, like my grandfather who served in Patton’s Army—soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, coast guard, merchant marines—and the women of the WACs and the WAVES and every branch. They risked their lives, and gave their lives so that we, the people the world over, could live free. They were women who stepped up in unprecedented numbers, manning the home front, and—like my grandmother—building bombers on assembly lines.

This was the generation that literally saved the world—that ended the war and laid a foundation for peace.

This was the generation that traded in their uniforms for a college education so they could marry their sweethearts, buy homes, raise children and build the strongest middle class the world has ever known.

This was the generation that included heroes like the Tuskegee Airmen, the Navajo Code Talkers and the Japanese-Americans of the 442nd Regiment—and who continued the fight for freedom here at home, expanding equality and opportunity and justice for minorities and women.

We will be forever grateful for what these remarkable men and women did, for the selfless grace they showed in one of our darkest hours. But as we mark this 70th anniversary, let’s not simply commemorate history. Let’s rededicate ourselves to the freedoms for which they fought.

Let’s make sure that we keep striving to fulfill our founding ideals—that we’re a country where no matter who we are or where we’re from or what we look like or who we love, if we work hard and take responsibility, every American will have the opportunity to make of our lives what we will.

Let’s make sure that we keep striving to fulfill our founding ideals—that we’re a country where no matter who we are or where we’re from or what we look like or who we love, if we work hard and take responsibility, every American will have the opportunity to make of our lives what we will.

Let’s stand united with our allies, in Europe and beyond, on behalf of our common values—freedom, security, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law around the world—and against bigotry and hatred in all their forms so that we give meaning to that pledge: “Never forget. Never again.”

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Spain: Military Transport Plane Crashes, Two Killed

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Four people are dead, and two seriously injured, after an Airbus A400M military transport plane crashed into a pylon near Seville, in southern Spain.

“We express our deepest sympathy,” said a statement Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy, who canceled a public election rally, following the accident. “They were our fellow countrymen.”

The €150 million A400M, assembled in a plant in nearby Seville, was on a test flight, prior to being shipped to Turkey, when the crew contacted air traffic controllers about a technical failure after takeoff. The model had been beset by multiple technical hitches and cost overruns, before finally entering service in 2013.

The aircraft crashed only 1.6km north of international San Pablo Airport, emergency services said. Though the crash occurred outside the perimeter of the airport, the facility is not operational, El Pais reported. Some flights were diverted to the cities of Malaga and Jerez.

The Airbus A400M Atlas is a tactical airlifter that can perform various missions, including electronic surveillance and aerial refueling.

The A400M’s maiden flight took place in December 2009 from Seville, Spain. Germany, Spain, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the UK and Turkey are the jet’s primary operators.

The UK Ministry of Defence said it was pausing its own A400M flights, pending the first results of the investigation.

The post Spain: Military Transport Plane Crashes, Two Killed appeared first on Eurasia Review.

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