Nobel Peace Prize
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| Nobel Peace Prize winners Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi. Photograph: Fabio De Paola for the Guardian |
Afghanistan
Thirteen year ago on October 7, the US began bombing Afghanistan. That step marked the beginning of Bush's "war on terror", and the war in Afghanistan has become the longest in American history. Besides the loss of life, the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars will eventually cost the US between $4 trillion and $6 trillion. This estimate was made before the latest American military operation in Iraq and Syria and assumes that nobody will listen to the Congressional hawks incredibly clamoring for tens of thousands more troops in the area. Sadly, nearly 40,000 international troops - about three-quarters of them American - are still there. The US recently signed a Bilateral Security Agreement with Afghanistan, which, as The Guardian reported on September 30, guarantees that US and NATO troops will not have to withdraw by year’s end, and permits their stay “until the end of 2024 and beyond.” The entry into force of the deal ensures that Barack Obama, elected president in 2008 on a wave of anti-war sentiment, will pass off both the Afghanistan war and his new war in Iraq and Syria to his successor. In 2010, his vice-president, Joe Biden, publicly vowed the US would be “totally out” of Afghanistan “come hell or high water, by 2014.” Almost 10,000 US troops will remain in Afghanistan after year-end.
Khorasan
Since ISIS was acknowledged to have no intention of bringing its jihad to the US, the Administration was having a hard time justifying its bombing campaign in Syria. Enter Khorasan - an unheard of jihadist group allegedly with designs to attack the "homeland" - to save the day for the militarists. Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain in a hard-hitting report in The Intercept disclose how the Administration and the military created a wholesale concoction of a brand new terror threat that was branded “The Khorasan Group"...Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore.” Greenwald and Hussain document the growth of the "Khorasan threat" in the media. The Obama administration needed propagandistic and legal rationale for bombing yet another predominantly Muslim country. While emotions over the ISIS beheading videos were high, they were not enough to sustain a lengthy new war. So after spending weeks promoting ISIS as Worse Than Al Qaeda™, they unveiled a new, never-before-heard-of group that was Worse Than ISIS™. Overnight, as the first bombs on Syria fell, the endlessly helpful U.S. media mindlessly circulated the script they were given: this new group was composed of “hardened terrorists,” posed an “imminent” threat to the U.S. homeland, was in the “final stages” of plots to take down U.S. civilian aircraft, and could “launch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9/11 attacks from 2001.”... But once it served its purpose of justifying the start of the bombing campaign in Syria, the Khorasan narrative simply evaporated as quickly as it materialized. Foreign Policy‘s Shane Harris, with two other writers, was one of the first to question whether the “threat” was anywhere near what it had been depicted to be...On September 25, The New York Times — just days after hyping the Khorasan threat to the homeland — wrote that “the group’s evolution from obscurity to infamy has been sudden.” And the paper of record began, for the first time, to note how little evidence actually existed for all those claims about the imminent threats posed to the homeland. Besides the exaggerated "imminent threat," there were serious questions about whether the Khorasan Group even exists in any meaningful or identifiable manner. Tom Englehardt in his October 7 post at TomDispatch "Inside the American Terrordome" takes aim at the terror-phobia and the "soundtrack of hysteria" that has gripped this country since the attacks of September 11. Referencing the Greenwald/Hussain report, he writes: the whole Khorasan story began to disassemble within a day or so of the initial announcement and the bombing strikes in Syria. It took next to no time at all for that “imminent threat” to morph into “aspirational” planning; for reporters to check with their Syrian sources and find that no one knew a thing about the so-called Khorasan Group... As ever, however, pointing out the real dangers in our world was left largely to non-mainstream sources, while the threat to our way of life, to Washington and New York, lingered in the air.
Gun Laws
In its October 6 issue, The Nation asks "Whatever happened to gun control?" The Newtown tragedy was supposed to change everything about gun politics. It hasn't. The Nation considers Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty's (D-CT) Congressional race. It's close and she is one of 25 Democratic Representatives considered at risk of an upset. Esty represents the district that includes Newtown and has been a champion of tougher gun control laws. She co-sponsored a raft of gun-violence prevention bills in the House, including the only gun-control measure to pass Congress after Newtown—a bill to provide $19.5 million to improve the federal background-check system...But twenty-one months after the shootings and with the midterm elections approaching, Esty is facing a situation that would have seemed absurd and even impossible [in the days after Newtown]: her opponent, Mark Greenberg, opposes new federal gun laws. Newtown was supposed to change everything—and for a moment, it appeared it had. Support inside Connecticut for stricter gun laws approached 60 percent in the months after the shooting. In April 2013, a package of reforms touted as the “toughest gun laws in the country” passed the Legislature with wide bipartisan support and was signed into law by Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy. But now, most polls show Malloy trailing his Republican opponent, Tom Foley, who opposes new gun laws. How did it happen? And how did the proposals for reasonable measures to prevent gun violence get stymied at the Federal level? The NRA was even in negotiations on a universal background check bill. But persistent misinformation and agitation by far-right members of Congress and gun groups even more rigid than the NRA slowly doomed the effort. Republicans who said they’d support background-check legislation started to waver, often citing bogus fears of a national gun registry that the bill explicitly forbade. The NRA began feeling the heat from groups like Gun Owners of America, which urged a no-compromise approach, and its lobbyists dropped out of the negotiations. In spite of the unlikelihood of any Congressional action on preventing gun violence for the foreseeable, The Nation is encouraged by the laws passed at the state level. An untold story of the post-Newtown debate over gun control is how much happened at the state level: while the national media deemed gun control impossible after Congress failed to act, eight states made significant or sweeping changes to gun laws, while only four states significantly weakened them, according to analysis by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Mark Follman at Mother Jones crunched the numbers and found that more than half of all Americans now live in a state with stronger gun control laws than existed before Newtown. Washington State, Nevada and Illinois have initiatives on the 2014 ballot so there may be even more progress. Many people are getting involved outside the electoral and legislative arenas as well by joining a wide-ranging movement to keep guns out of public spaces. Americans for Responsible Solutions is "micro-targeting" specific groups for support of reforming gun laws and there is real optimism among the various reform groups, But on the national level, for these mid-terms at least, candidates are treading cautiously with the result that in an election cycle with no overriding theme, gun control occupies a place somewhere alongside farm subsidies or the Export-Import Bank as an issue on the campaign trail.
Hong Kong
The Hong Kong student protests are petering out. With numbers shrinking rapidly, and hopes of winning meaningful reform fading even faster, the question now is what lies ahead for these “angry – but peaceful” young men and women. Will the unprecedented protests embolden them to fight for their beliefs in future, or convince them that resistance to Beijing’s will is futile? “People are criticising what we are doing as pointless and saying we won’t achieve anything, but history has shown us that is not the case,” student leader Joshua Wong told the crowd last week. “All our actions are like planting a seed.”...Beijing’s attempts to introduce a draconian national security law in 2003 and “patriotic education” in 2012 were turning points. Then came the decision to tightly restrict the long-promised universal suffrage. “People are finally saying: This is it – this is the end – and this has fuelled this sudden anger and frustration,” Hong Kong-based author Suzanne Pepper said. There are economic as well as political reasons for the protests. The emphasis on tourism and an influx of mainlanders has increased the competition for professional jobs, housing and seats on public transport. The salaries of young people are down, in real trerms, about 15-20% since 2000 housing prices are soaring, and income inequality is among the highest in the developed world. [The Guardian, October 7] Change, if any, will come slowly. Hong Kong officials had agreed to meet with student representatives but then called off a meeting [scheduled for] Friday with student leaders of the pro-democracy movement. Chief Secretary Carrie Lam said it would be "impossible to have a constructive dialogue" after protest leaders called for an increase in efforts to occupy main protest areas. [BBC, October 9]
Ebola
The (US) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sent a team to Nigeria to learn more about how Nigeria managed to contain the outbreak there so effectively. Ebola first arrived in Lagos, Nigeria—one of the largest cities in the world—on July 20. Global health officials feared the worst, warning that the disease could wreak untold havoc in the country. But it hasn't turned out that way. To date, Nigeria has reported only 20 confirmed or probable Ebola cases in a nation of 174 million people. Equally remarkable, there have only been eight deaths...In fact, Nigeria could be declared Ebola-free as early as October 12. The Nigerians' success resulted from early identification, isolation and treatment, a coordinated approach with a center of operations, and fast tracking of contacts of the infected person. [Mother Jones, October 10] Meanwhile, Republican Senators are blocking approval of the transfer of $1 billion in funds in the DOD budget to combat the disease - partly because it focuses on Africa rather than the US and partly because of the "thin" Defense budget (Note: the US military budget is nearly 40% of the global total spent on the military. $1 billion is less than 0.2% of our military budget). You can't make this stuff up. Read more on these latest obstructions at The Daily Kos. And at The Nation.
UPDATE: Senator Inhofe, the Senate Armed Services ranking Republican, lifted his objections and $750 million of the requested $1 billion will be transferred. [Reuters, Oct. 10]
"A Wild Week for Voting Rights" [Liz Kennedy at Demos, October 10] - The Supreme Court began its term by reinstating voting restrictions in Ohio and North Carolina after federal appeals courts put these laws on hold for unfairly burdening voting rights, particularly for people of color...[On October 9], the Court took action to stop Wisconsin’s voter ID requirement from going into effect only weeks before Election Day, and a federal court struck down Texas’s voter ID law after a trial on the merits, ruling for voters in both cases.
[Update: The US Supreme Court reversed the Texas trial court's decision on Saturday, October 18. The discriminatory Texas ID law will be in effect and could disenfranchise as many as 600,000 voters.]
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