An Open Letter to my Danish Friends

by Stephen Zunes

Dear Friends, This is a letter of apology from an American who has witnessed in horror the extreme anti-Danish reaction in parts of the Islamic world. While the spark may have originated in your country, the tinderbox which caused that spark to explode in such a violent conflagration is largely a result of the policies of the United States. Comments from U.S. government officials chastising your countrymen to be more sensitive about offending religious sentiments in the Middle East may not be inappropriate in and of itself. However, the United States is the last country to preach to others about unnecessarily provoking anti-Western sentiment among the world's Muslims, particularly a nation such as yours which has had such an admirable history of supporting United Nations peacekeeping operations and providing generous financial contributions to Third World development. Radical Islamic movements have risen to the forefront primarily in countries where there has been a dramatic dislocation of the population as a result of war or uneven economic development. The United States has often supported policies that have helped spawn such movements, including support for decades of Israeli attacks and occupation policies which have torn apart Palestinian and Lebanese society and provoked extremist movements in those countries that were unheard of as recently as a generation ago. The U.S.-led overthrow of the constitutional government in Iran in 1953 and subsequent support for the Shah's brutal dictatorship succeeded in crushing that country's democratic opposition, resulting in a 1979 revolution led by hard-line Islamic clerics. The United States directly aided extremist Islamists in Afghanistan when they were challenging the Soviet Union in the 1980s, many of whom have gone on to serve as the core of terror cells throughout the Islamic world. To this day, the United States maintains close ties with Saudi Arabia, which adheres to an extremely rigid and repressive interpretation of Islam and spreads such intolerance through the establishment of schools preaching its extremist theology throughout the Islamic world. The United States provides six times more military aid to the Middle East than it does economic aid, and arms sales are America's number one commercial export to the region, strengthening militarization and weakening financial support for human needs. Furthermore, while threatening war at the mere possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons, the United States maintains close strategic ties to Israel, Pakistan, and India despite their already-existing nuclear arsenals. In addition, the United States has categorically rejected calls by Iran and virtually every Arab state for the establishment of a nuclear weapons-free zone in the region and the U.S. Navy has brought its own tactical nuclear weapons into Middle Eastern waters since the late 1950s. In a part of the world which has been repeatedly conquered by outside powers over the centuries, the growing U.S. military presence has created an increasing amount of resentment. It is no accident that a region so heavily militarized would give rise to militant religious extremism. Despite leading the efforts in recent years to impose debilitating sanctions against the people of Iraq, Libya, and Sudan for their governments' violations of UN Security Council resolutions, the United States has blocked the Security Council from enforcing a series of its resolutions against such Middle East allies as Turkey, Israel, and Morocco for their ongoing occupation of neighboring countries. In addition, the United States has vetoed scores of resolutions calling on Israel to live up to its international legal obligations as an occupying power and has even attacked the International Court of Justice for its 14-1 advisory opinion citing the illegality of Israel's separation wall in the occupied West Bank. Such abuse of international legal institutions gives the Islamic world little faith in secular law-based means of addressing conflict resolution. The United States has also been at the forefront of pushing neoliberal economic models of development in Islamic countries which have resulted in cutbacks in social services, privatization of public resources, foreign takeovers of domestic enterprises, reduction of taxes for the wealthy, the elimination of subsidies for farmers and for basic foodstuffs, and ending protection for domestic industry. While this has spurred some economic growth in some cases, it has also led to a dramatic increase in social and economic inequality. This growing disparity between the rich and the poor has been particularly offensive to Muslims, whose exposure to Western economic influence has been primarily through witnessing some of the crassest materialism and consumerism from foreign imports enjoyed by local elites while the majority suffers in poverty. The failure of state-centric socialist experiments in the Arab world has left an ideological vacuum among the poor seeking economic justice which has been filled by certain radical Islamic movements. U.S.-backed neoliberal economic policies have destroyed traditional economies and turned millions of rural peasants into a new urban underclass populating the teeming slums of North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, providing easy recruits for Islamic activists rallying against corruption, materialism, and economic injustice. The United States has also encouraged Islamic radicalism through its large-scale military, economic, and financial support of Israel's ongoing occupation, repression, and colonization of the Palestinian West Bank. America's failure to be an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has allowed for the dramatic expansion of illegal Israeli settlements which have made the creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible. Despite the Palestinian Authority's willingness to accept just 22% of historic Palestine and to live in peace with the Jewish state, U.S. policy has continued to support Israeli expansionism, giving radical Islamists an opportunity to claim that such moderation will never be rewarded. Despite rhetoric in defense of democracy, the United States remains the primary outside supporter of autocratic regimes throughout the Islamic world from Brunei to Morocco. The Mubarak regime in Egypt, the family dictatorships in the Gulf, the autocracies in the former Soviet Central Asia, and other repressive regimes are kept in power in large part as a result of American support. It is not surprising that those who suffer under such repressive and irresponsible governments will at least in part blame the West for their suffering. In 2003, in a blatant violation of the United Nations Charter, the United States led a coalition of governments in an invasion of Iraq based upon fabricated claims that the Iraqi government had advanced chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs and maintained operational ties to al-Qaida. Since the conquest and the start of the U.S. occupation, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed, many hundreds of detainees have been tortured and abused, crime and unemployment have reached record levels, basic utilities are available only sporadically, and ethnic strife and religious intolerance continues to worsen. Coming after the 2001 U.S.-led attack on Afghanistan­which resulted in thousands of civilian deaths from air strikes and the countryside being taken over by war lords, ethnic militias, and opium magnates­the resentment at the West for inflicting such horrific violence on Muslim peoples has become so severe that the hypersensitivity demonstrated by so many Muslims in reaction to the Danish cartoons should not be surprising. There has been widespread debate in your country regarding Denmark's role in provoking the reaction, ranging from the appropriateness of the cartoons themselves to the Danish government's support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Whatever missteps may have occurred on your side of the Atlantic, however, it is hard to imagine that the extent of the violent reaction would have been nearly as severe as it was if not for the pent up grievances in the Islamic world resulting from many years of irresponsible U.S. policies. And for this, I can only offer my apologies, along with a promise to work along with other conscientious Americans to change U.S. Middle East policy to one which is geared toward promoting peace, justice, and security for all. Stephen Zunes is professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco. He serves as Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project (www.fpif.org) and is the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Couarge Press, 2003.)

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source: Common Dreams

U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."

"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."

After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification, began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard, director of the office.

Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be secret.

"If those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind."

If Mr. Leonard finds that documents are being wrongly reclassified, his office could not unilaterally release them. But as the chief adviser to the White House on classification, he could urge a reversal or a revision of the reclassification program.

A group of historians, including representatives of the National Coalition for History and the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, wrote to Mr. Leonard on Friday to express concern about the reclassification program, which they believe has blocked access to some material at the presidential libraries as well as at the archives.

Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996.

Another historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had copied years ago whose reclassification he considers "silly," including a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program.

Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be declassified after 25 years unless there is particular reason to keep them secret. While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago.

One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.

Mr. Aid said he believed that because of the reclassification program, some of the contents of his 22 file cabinets might technically place him in violation of the Espionage Act, a circumstance that could be shared by scores of other historians. But no effort has been made to retrieve copies of reclassified documents, and it is not clear how they all could even be located.

"It doesn't make sense to create a category of documents that are classified but that everyone already has," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington University. "These documents were on open shelves for years."

The group plans to post Mr. Aid's reclassified documents and his account of the secret program on its Web site, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv, on Tuesday.

The program's critics do not question the notion that wrongly declassified material should be withdrawn. Mr. Aid said he had been dismayed to see "scary" documents in open files at the National Archives, including detailed instructions on the use of high explosives.

But the historians say the program is removing material that can do no conceivable harm to national security. They say it is part of a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which has increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of Information Act.

Experts on government secrecy believe the C.I.A. and other spy agencies, not the White House, are the driving force behind the reclassification program.

"I think it's driven by the individual agencies, which have bureaucratic sensitivities to protect," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, editor of the online weekly Secrecy News. "But it was clearly encouraged by the administration's overall embrace of secrecy."

National Archives officials said the program had revoked access to 9,500 documents, more than 8,000 of them since President Bush took office. About 30 reviewers — employees and contractors of the intelligence and defense agencies — are at work each weekday at the archives complex in College Park, Md., the officials said.

Archives officials could not provide a cost for the program but said it was certainly in the millions of dollars, including more than $1 million to build and equip a secure room where the reviewers work.

Michael J. Kurtz, assistant archivist for record services, said the National Archives sought to expand public access to documents whenever possible but had no power over the reclassifications. "The decisions agencies make are those agencies' decisions," Mr. Kurtz said.

Though the National Archives are not allowed to reveal which agencies are involved in the reclassification, one archivist said on condition of anonymity that the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency were major participants.

A spokesman for the C.I.A., Paul Gimigliano, said that the agency had released 26 million pages of documents to the National Archives since 1998 and that it was "committed to the highest quality process" for deciding what should be secret.

"Though the process typically works well, there will always be the anomaly, given the tremendous amount of material and multiple players involved," Mr. Gimigliano said.

A spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency said he was unable to comment on whether his agency was involved in the program.

Anna K. Nelson, a foreign policy historian at American University, said she and other researchers had been puzzled in recent years by the number of documents pulled from the archives with little explanation.

"I think this is a travesty," said Dr. Nelson, who said she believed that some reclassified material was in her files. "I think the public is being deprived of what history is really about: facts."

The document removals have not been reported to the Information Security Oversight Office, as the law has required for formal reclassifications since 2003.

The explanation, said Mr. Leonard, the head of the office, is a bureaucratic quirk. The intelligence agencies take the position that the reclassified documents were never properly declassified, even though they were reviewed, stamped "declassified," freely given to researchers and even published, he said.

Thus, the agencies argue, the documents remain classified — and pulling them from public access is not really reclassification.

Mr. Leonard said he believed that while that logic might seem strained, the agencies were technically correct. But he said the complaints about the secret program, which prompted his decision to conduct an audit, showed that the government's system for deciding what should be secret is deeply flawed.

"This is not a very efficient way of doing business," Mr. Leonard said. "There's got to be a better way."

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source: New York Times

Predators 'drove human evolution'

By Paul Rincon
BBC News science reporter, St Louis

The popular view of our ancient ancestors as hunters who conquered all in their way is incorrect, scientists have told a conference in St Louis, US.

Instead, they say, early humans were on the menu for predatory beasts.

This may have driven humans to evolve increased levels of co-operation, according to their theory.

Despite humankind's considerable capacity for war and violence, we are highly sociable animals, according to anthropologists.

James Rilling at Emory University in Atlanta, US, has been using brain imaging techniques to investigate the biological mechanisms behind co-operation.

He has imaged the brains of people playing a game under experimental conditions that involved choosing between co-operation and non-co-operation.

From the parts of the brain that were activated during the game, he found that mutual co-operation is rewarding.

People also reacted negatively when partners do not co-operate.

Dr Rilling also discovered that his subjects seemed to have enhanced memory for those people that did not reciprocate in the experiment.

Man 'the hunted'

By contrast, our closest relatives - chimpanzees - have been shown not to come to the aid of others, even when it posed no cost to themselves.

"Our intelligence, co-operation and many other features we have as modern humans developed from our attempts to out-smart the predator," said Robert Sussman of Washington University in St Louis.

According to the theory espoused by professor Sussman, early humans evolved not as hunters but as prey for animals such as wild dogs, cats, hyenas, eagles and crocodiles.

He points to the example of one ape-like species thought to be ancestral to humans: Australopithecus afarensis

A. afarensis was what is known as an "edge species"; it could live in trees and on the ground and could take advantage of both.

"Primates that are edge species, even today, are basically prey species, not predators," professor Sussman explained.

Hard target

Dr Agustin Fuentes at the University of Notre Dame agrees with the predation hypothesis.

He believes early humans were subject to several evolutionary pressures, including predation.

But he also thinks they were expending more energy at this time and that child-rearing became more demanding.

All these factors contributed to an emergence of sociable behaviour in hominids that made them harder targets for predators.

Dr Fuentes points to fossil evidence of predation in two different groups of humanlike species: Australopithecus and Paranthropus.

The latter group seems to have gone extinct, but could not adapt to these new pressures, going extinct between one and 1.2 million years ago.

The scientists outlined their work at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in St Louis, US.

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source: BBC News

Europe's Contempt For Other Cultures Can't Be Sustained

A continent that inflicted colonial brutality all over the globe for 200 years has little claim to the superiority of its values

By Martin Jacques

02/17/06 "The Guardian" -- -- Is the argument over the Danish cartoons really reducible to a matter of free speech? Even if we believe that free speech is a fundamental value, that does not give us carte blanche to say what we like in any context, regardless of consequence or effect. Respect for others, especially in an increasingly interdependent world, is a value of at least equal importance.

Europe has never had to worry too much about context or effect because for around 200 years it dominated and colonised most of the world. Such was Europe's omnipotence that it never needed to take into account the sensibilities, beliefs and attitudes of those that it colonised, however sacred and sensitive they might have been. On the contrary, European countries imposed their rulers, religion, beliefs, language, racial hierarchy and customs on those to whom they were entirely alien. There is a profound hypocrisy - and deep historical ignorance - when Europeans complain about the problems posed by the ethnic and religious minorities in their midst, for that is exactly what European colonial rule meant for peoples around the world. With one crucial difference, of course: the white minorities ruled the roost, whereas Europe's new ethnic minorities are marginalised, excluded and castigated, as recent events have shown.

But it is no longer possible for Europe to ignore the sensibilities of peoples with very different values, cultures and religions. First, western Europe now has sizeable minorities whose origins are very different from the host population and who are connected with their former homelands in diverse ways. If European societies want to live in some kind of domestic peace and harmony - rather than in a state of Balkanisation and repression - then they must find ways of integrating these minorities on rather more equal terms than, for the most part, they have so far achieved. That must mean, among other things, respect for their values. Second, it is patently clear that, globally speaking, Europe matters far less than it used to - and in the future will count for less and less. We must not only learn to share our homelands with people from very different roots, we must also learn to share the world with diverse peoples in a very different kind of way from what has been the European practice.
Europe has little experience of this, and what experience it has is mainly confined to less than half a century. Old attitudes of superiority and disdain - dressed up in terms of free speech, progress or whatever - are still very powerful. Nor - as many liberals like to think - are they necessarily in decline. On the contrary, racial bigotry is on the rise, even in countries that have previously been regarded as tolerant. The Danish government depends for its rule on a racist, far-right party that gained 13% of the seats in the last election. The decision of Jyllands-Posten to publish the cartoons - and papers in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere to reprint them - lay not so much in the tradition of free speech but in European contempt for other cultures and religions: it was a deliberate, calculated insult to the beliefs of others, in this case Muslims.

This kind of mentality - combining Eurocentrism, old colonial attitudes of supremacism, racism, provincialism and sheer ignorance - will serve our continent ill in the future. Europe must learn to live in and with the world, not to dominate it, nor to assume it is superior or more virtuous. Any continent that has inflicted such brutality on the world over a period of 200 years has not too much to be proud of, and much to be modest and humble about - though this is rarely the way our history is presented in Britain, let alone elsewhere. It is worth remembering that while parts of Europe have had free speech (and democracy) for many decades, its colonies were granted neither. But when it comes to our "noble values", our colonial record is always written out of the script.

This attitude of disdain, of assumed superiority, will be increasingly difficult to sustain. We are moving into a world in which the west will no longer be able to call the tune as it once did. China and India will become major global players alongside the US, the EU and Japan. For the first time in modern history the west will no longer be overwhelmingly dominant. By the end of this century Europe is likely to pale into insignificance alongside China and India. In such a world, Europe will be forced to observe and respect the sensibilities of others.

Few in Europe understand or recognise these trends. A small example is the bitter resistance displayed on the continent to the proposed takeover of Arcelor by Mittal Steel: at root the opposition is based on thinly disguised racism. But Europe had better get used to such a phenomenon: takeovers by Indian and Chinese firms are going to become as common as American ones. A profound parochialism grips our continent. When Europe called the global tune it did not matter, because what happened in Europe translated itself into a global trend and a global power. No more: now it is simply provincialism.

When Europe dominated, there were no or few feedback loops. Or, to put it another way, there were few, if any, consequences for its behaviour towards the non-western world: relations were simply too unequal. Now - and increasingly in the future - it will be very different. And the subject of these feedback loops, or consequences, will concern not just present but also past behaviour.

For 200 years the dominant powers have also been the colonial powers: the European countries, the US and Japan. They have never been required to pay their dues for what they did to those whom they possessed and treated with contempt. Europeans have treated this chapter in their history by choosing to forget. So has Japan, except that in its case its neighbours have not only refused to forget but are also increasingly powerful. As a consequence, Japan's present and future is constantly stalked by its history. This future could also lie in wait for Europe. We might think the opium wars are "simply history"; the Chinese (rightly) do not. We might think the Bengal famine belongs in the last century, but Indians do not.

Europe is moving into a very different world. How will it react? If something like the attitude of the Danes prevails - a combination of defensiveness, fear, provincialism and arrogance - then one must fear for Europe's ability to learn to live in this new world. There is another way, but the signs are none too hopeful.

· Martin Jacques is a senior visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore - Martinjacques1@aol.com

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source: Information Clearing House

Who Needs Dark Energy?

By Adrian Cho

ScienceNOW Daily News
13 February 2006

Good old gravity--slightly modified--can account for the accelerating expansion of the universe, theoretical physicists report. That means a tuned-up theory of gravity might obviate the need for some sort of bizarre "dark energy" that stretches the cosmos.

Eight years ago, astronomers and astrophysicists announced a radical finding. They had studied stellar explosions called type Ia supernovae and found that the farthest ones were so distant that the universe must be expanding at an ever greater rate (ScienceNOW, 26 February 1998). That suggested some form of dark energy is stretching spacetime, a hypothesis reinforced by measurements of the microwave afterglow (ScienceNOW, 11 February 2003) of the big bang and the clustering of galaxies (ScienceNOW, 18 May 2004). Yet, no one knows what the weird stuff might be.

Now theorists report that the cosmic acceleration might be explained by gravity alone, without the need for dark energy. According to Einstein's theory, spacetime bends and warps in the presence of matter and energy, producing the effects we call gravity. In general relativity, the density of energy and matter essentially equals the curvature of spacetime. But in recent years, researchers have toyed with equations that include not only a term proportional to the curvature but also inverse powers of the curvature.

Those terms are small when spacetime is tightly curved and gravity is strong, so they don't mess up gravity within the solar system. But on gargantuan scales where the curvature is small and gravity is weak, the terms might drive an accelerating expansion. One of the theories can account for the supernova data and does not run afoul of other observations, report Olga Mena and José Santiago of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, and colleagues in 3 February issue of Physical Review Letters. However to fit the data, the theory must still include a type of unobserved matter called "dark matter" Santiago says.

"I'm surprised that it works so well," says Sean Carroll of the University of Chicago in Illinois, who developed the theoretical model upon which the researchers based their work. Such theories are ad hoc and not meant to be the final word, Carroll says. But they might give theorists vital clues about how to construct a fundamental theory without dark energy, which might be more appealing conceptually. Santiago says the next step is to test the theory against the subtler microwave-afterglow and galaxy-cluster data.

Related sites

The paper

Sean Carroll's cosmology primer

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source: ScienceNOW