Here are a few things of interest today…

The Azizabad Air Strike

Initially the US military denied that they had made a mistake. In fact, they continued to deny that they had made a mistake for days following the devastating air strike on the village of Azizabad in the Afghan province of Herat that left some 90 people dead, including women and children – which was independently confirmed by the United Nations.

That said; authorities in Afghanistan have arrested three men suspected of providing false intelligence regarding the strike, claiming that there was a Taliban presence in the village. The US continues to assert that a top Taliban commander and other insurgents were killed during the attack.

More from Tom Dispatch.

Harper Promises To Withdraw Canadian Forces In 2011

Campaign promises are one thing, following through on them is another matter altogether.

Two days ago, while campaigning in Toronto, the Prime Minister pledged to withdraw the majority of Canadian Forces from Afghanistan in 2011, which is when the current mandate ends…

“He said that by 2011, Canadians will have been in Kandahar for six years. He acknowledged that neither the public nor the troops themselves had any appetite to stay longer and that only a small group of advisers might remain.

Mr Harper made his pledge as recent opinion polls showed that there was lukewarm public support for the mission.

Canada has lost 97 soldiers and a diplomat in Afghanistan.

Mr Harper faces the very real possibility of the number of Canadian soldiers killed there rising to the symbolic figure of 100 during the election campaign.”

Take note of one very important assertion in that quote – “He acknowledged that neither the public nor the troops themselves had any appetite to stay longer”.

That, right there, is something that should not be forgotten in the future if Harper remains Prime Minister and uses the deaths of more Canadians as justification for ‘seeing the mission through in their name’.

FBI On The Verge Of Being Granted Unprecedented Powers

From the New York Times…

“The Justice Department made public on Friday a plan to expand the tools the Federal Bureau of Investigation can use to investigate suspicions of terrorism inside the United States, even without any direct evidence of wrongdoing.

Justice Department officials said the plan, which is likely to be completed by the end of the month despite criticism from civil rights advocates, is intended to allow F.B.I. agents to be more aggressive and pre-emptive in assessing possible threats to national security.

It would allow an agent, for instance, to pursue an anonymous tip about terrorism by conducting an undercover interview or watching someone in a public place. Such steps are now prohibited unless there is more specific evidence of wrongdoing.”

I can just see it now. Some xenophobic asshole that’s having a dispute with his ‘ethnic’ neighbour over a tree’s branches extending over his back fence is going to be on the phone with the local Bureau Office claiming that suspicious activity has been taking place next door.

Polar Bears

It’s God’s world, we just happen to live in it. Which means that global warming is a myth, despite the fact that chunks of Greenland are falling into the North Atlantic and a whole host of other fun stuff. To those that believe it a ‘leftist hoax’, the earth has undergone changes in the past and therefore there’s really no need to panic. It doesn’t matter than the world’s scientific community overwhelmingly believes it to be a real threat, nor that they represent the world’s preeminent experts on the subject. Any fool with a computer can discount global warming by doing a Google search and finding ‘evidence’ to the contrary.

For every scientist out there that believes it an ‘overblown’ issue, there are a thousand that don’t. That right there should say something.

Moving on to the affects of global warming on the natural world, some of you might recall that not too long ago the government of Alaska moved to counter the Polar Bear being listed as a threatened species. As The Nation’s Mark Hertsgaard points out, we shouldn’t overlook who played a key role in Alaska’s opposition to it…

“It wasn’t much noticed at the time, but three weeks before she was chosen as John McCain’s vice presidential running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin played a key supporting role in the latest episode of the Bush Administration’s eight-year war on the Endangered Species Act, one of the cornerstones of American environmental law. On August 4 Alaska sued the government for listing the polar bear as a “threatened” species, an action, the lawsuit asserted, that would harm “oil and gas…development” in the state. In an accompanying statement, Palin complained that the listing “was not based on the best scientific and commercial data available” and should be rescinded.

The Bush Administration had not wanted to designate the polar bear as threatened in the first place; now Palin’s lawsuit provided cover to backtrack on the decision. The Interior Department had issued the listing only after environmental groups filed two lawsuits, and the courts ordered compliance. While the polar bear population was currently stable, the plaintiffs argued, greenhouse gas emissions were melting the Arctic ice that polar bears rely on to hunt seals, their main food source. A study by the US Geological Survey supported this argument, concluding that two-thirds of all polar bears could be gone by 2050 if Arctic ice continues to melt as scientists project. The listing was the first time global warming had been cited as the sole premise in an Endangered Species Act case, and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne clearly wanted it to be the last. When Kempthorne announced the polar bear listing on May 14, he emphasized that it would not affect federal policy on global warming or block development of “our natural resources in the Arctic.”

A week after Palin’s lawsuit, Kempthorne delivered on that pledge. On August 11 he proposed new rules that could allow federal agencies to decide for themselves whether their actions will imperil a threatened or endangered species. The rule reverses precedent: since passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, scientists from the Fish and Wildlife Service have made such determinations independent of the agency involved. Under the new rule, if the Army Corps of Engineers is building a dam, the corps can decide whether it is putting species at risk. To make sure no one missed the point, Kempthorne told reporters that the new rule, which he termed “a narrow regulatory change,” would keep the Endangered Species Act from becoming “a back door” to making climate change policy.

Hated by the right wing as an infringement on property rights, the Endangered Species Act has been on Bush’s hit list since the beginning of his presidency, when he chose Gale Norton as his first Interior Secretary. A Republican woman of the West like Palin, Norton assailed the act and did all she could to undermine it. “The Bush Administration has listed only sixty species as threatened or endangered, compared with 522 under Clinton and 231 under the first President Bush,” says Noah Greenwald, science director of the Center for Biological Diversity, the lead plaintiff in the polar bear case. “And it took a court order to make each of those sixty listings happen.”

As time passes, and we continue to grow and develop as a species, despite our many achievements, be they in the arts or architecture or flight, one accomplishment will remain the most important in human history no matter what occurs in the years ahead. We may, in the future, cure Cancer and AIDS, put a person on Mars, or even find a way to curb the planet’s food crises. But despite all of these things, mankind’s greatest achievement is, and will always be, the photograph.

A single image, captured in time, for all time.

Why, you ask, do I believe the photograph to be of such importance? Because, in the century ahead, photographs, along with film, will be all that will remain of many of this world’s inhabitants. Fifty years from now school children may very well only know what a Polar Bear looks like because of photographs. The same can be said of numerous other species that are widely known. Of course, species are rendered extinct on a weekly basis as it is, but most of them aren’t all that familiar to us – certainly not familiar enough to be glorified in the pages of future textbooks.

One wonders what questions the children of the future will ask as to why the Polar Bear did not survive? One wonders what responses will be provided by those children’s teachers?

There, frozen in time, the image of that majestic Arctic bear will remain for generations to gaze upon, as if a thing of legend, almost other-worldly, the inhabitant of a time long since past. And as time passes, so too will the reason for its destruction be forgotten.

Here we find ourselves, on the verge of a photograph, looking to those in positions of responsibility to make the right choices. And with such a profound issue presented them, you need not guess at how they intend to respond…

“The state Legislature is looking to hire a few good polar bear scientists. The conclusions have already been agreed upon — researchers just have to fill in the science part.

A $2 million program funded with little debate by the Legislature last month calls for using state money to fund an “academic based” conference that highlights contrarian scientific research on global warming. Legislators hope to undermine the public perception of a widespread consensus among polar bear researchers that warming global temperatures and melting Arctic ice threaten the polar bears’ survival.

Republican legislative leaders say a federal decision to declare the polar bears “threatened” by climate change would have troubling effects on Arctic oil development and the state’s economic future.

Last week a federal judge ordered the Bush administration to release its already-tardy decision under the Endangered Species Act by May 15. By law, such a decision must be based strictly on science, not on possible economic consequences.

Legislative leaders said they are frustrated that researchers skeptical of the doomsday scenario get marginalized as crackpots or industry shills by the media and scientific agencies.

“We want to have the money to hire scientists to answer the Interior (Department) scientists,” House Speaker John Harris, R-Valdez, said last week.

The $2 million is also to be used for a national public relations campaign to promote the findings of the conference.

Critics say it’s a waste of state money because all the hard scientific research points in the other direction.

“This truly is the conference to nowhere,” said University of Alaska researcher Rick Steiner, who has pressed the Palin administration unsuccessfully for five months to release any scientific backup for its position opposing the federal polar bear listing.

The time for debate is over, especially when the opposition is using “junk science,” said Melanie Duchin with Greenpeace in Alaska. “This is clearly the same sort of ‘question, deny and delay’ tactic used by Exxon Mobil and the Bush administration to confuse the public over the severity of global warming and stall any meaningful action to deal with the problem.”

In the documentary 11th Hour, former CIA Director James Woolsey, of all people, makes a very important point with regards to the correlation between consumerism and industrial opportunism and the ability to affect change in a very short period of time given what are traditionally viewed as ‘exceptional circumstances’.

Woolsey’s point of reference was the transformation of the US auto industry into an industrial mechanism with which to produce aircraft, tanks, and a variety of other military necessities during the early stages of America’s involvement in the Second World War. That transformation took, believe it or not, merely six months. Put into context, if the disastrous environmental reality that we are currently facing was seriously addressed by government, the implementation of alternative energy use, that being non-carbon based energy (fossil fuels), could be introduced in a very timely fashion. It would also create jobs, which would replace those lost in the transformation. The only loser in that transformation would be the corporate oil sector, which possesses such enormous influence that, in truth, they are largely responsible for the inability, or unwillingness, of government to act. Ultimately, greed has become the foremost factor in the inability to seriously implement alternative energy sources that would significantly impact the amount of damage that fossil fuels do on a daily basis.

Of course, many economists will argue tooth and nail that such a transformation would be disadvantageous. But that supposes that the economy is of greater significance than the environment. The only problem with such logic is that economies can grow; as can populations and the waste they produce. The environment, on the other hand, cannot expand to match it. It is a limited and immovable thing, and therefore unalterable with regards to meeting the demands of economic growth.

In the last half of the twentieth century the world’s population has grown faster than at any other point in human history. In fact, during that period it has increased so much that that increase alone constitutes a figure greater than the population of the planet at any time prior to the industrial revolution. During that increase, the primary source of energy used by the population of the planet has been carbon based – which includes everything from food production to transportation to the production of electricity.

For the majority of human history our species relied on available sunlight for energy. But since the discovery of fossil fuels, we have become wholly dependent on an energy source that is not only unsustainable, but also catastrophically damaging with regards to its impact on the environment. Thus, we now find ourselves in an era in which we are forced to make a very important choice – to either disregard the realities of that dependency and its ramifications or to address our dependence on fossil fuels and work to eliminate it.

In the end, and despite our intelligence, our species may very well constitute nothing more than a global parasite, one that, having been given the chance to grow and consume the benefits of its host may very well find itself the author of its own destruction because of it. Given that, it should also not be overlooked that despite the damage caused, our host will outlast us, no matter how superior we believe ourselves to be. It has, in the billions of years of its existence, seen life forms come and go, and to think that we are somehow immune to that natural eventuality is, perhaps, the primary reason that we refuse to alter our perspective.

Of course, there are those that faithfully believe that a higher power created the world and that what we do to it doesn’t matter because is it, in the end, part of a greater divine plan. There is little that can be said to such individuals regarding this subject, only that if a divine plan does exists, our eventual demise is a part of it, and that the endurance and eventual reconstitution of the natural world is as well. Unless, that is, God’s plan is to also destroy the natural world in the process.

There are numerous things to touch on this morning. Here are some of the stories that I have been following…

Chavez Says He Will Step Down At End Of Term

After last week’s defeat of proposed constitutional reforms, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has said that he will step down when is term is up in 2013. Chavez has vowed to keep fighting to have the reforms passed, requiring a petition of 15% of voters to secure the possibility of a new referendum.

Vancouver Airport Reforms Announced

The Vancouver International Airport will spend $1.4 million dollars a year to “improve service for international travelers”. The measures include the following…

Had such measures already been in place, Robert Dziekanski would still be alive today.

Canada Fourth Worst In Climate Change Performance

Based on emissions produced over the last year, climate change policies, and emission level reduction efforts, Canada has ranked fourth to last in the world behind Australia, the United States, and Saudi Arabia.

Canada is currently rated 53rd out of 56 countries, a drop from 51st place a year ago. Well done, Mr. Harper.

$1 Billion Worth Of Military Equipment Missing In Iraq

According to CBS News…

“Tractor trailers, tank recovery vehicles, crates of machine guns and rocket propelled grenades are just a sampling of more than $1 billion in unaccounted for military equipment and services provided to the Iraqi security forces, according to a new report issued today by the Pentagon Inspector General and obtained exclusively by the CBS News investigative unit. Auditors for the Inspector General reviewed equipment contracts totaling $643 million but could only find an audit trail for $83 million.

The report details a massive failure in government procurement revealing little accountability for the billions of dollars spent purchasing military hardware for the Iraqi security forces. For example, according to the report, the military could not account for 12,712 out of 13,508 weapons, including pistols, assault rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers and machine guns.”

I’d say something witty, but it depressingly doesn’t come as a surprise.

One would think that something as pressing as global warming would be of significant import to any government, and that whatever steps could be taken would be taken given its ramifications, even if it mean agreeing to the emplacement of binding targets. Unfortunately, our government doesn’t seem bright enough to see it that way…

“Prime Minister Stephen Harper is facing heavy political pressure to agree to binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions as Commonwealth summit delegates in Uganda attempt to form a strong, united front in the fight against climate change.

Other than Australia, whose leader is not at the summit, Canada is the only member of the 53-nation grouping that has not fallen in line with the wording in a climate change resolution calling for binding targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

The three-day conference is trying to reach a consensus before December’s United Nations meeting in Bali, Indonesia, where more than 190 nations will discuss the future of the Kyoto protocol.

“One of the biggest challenges we all face [is] climate change,” Malta’s Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi said Friday in a speech in the Ugandan capital, Kampala. “The challenge of climate change not only requires a united front, but an unprecedented level of co-operation and firm action.”

But the small island nation’s drive for environmental unity faces challenges from Canada’s Conservative government, which does not support binding reductions.”

Economically, Canada gains nothing by agreeing to restrictions. In truth, there are detriments to it. There’s really no arguing that point, nor has there ever been when it comes to the choices made in this country regarding environmental protectionism and commerce. For decades we have laboured under the misconception that forests can be replanted and reconstituted, which is complete nonsense. Reforestation is, in truth, one of the greatest PR achievements of our time. You cut down old growth forests, wipe out entire ecosystems, completely decimate the nutrients in the soil, and then? Well, then you hire well-meaning individuals to plant trees believing that in a century everything will return to the way it was. Of course, that’s a fallacy. Hard wood yield from second growth forests is minimal and by no means significant enough to support the continuation of that industry in the decades ahead. In short, what we have done in the past, and are currently doing, is securing the death of an industry and the loss of jobs while promoting the belief that it’s a sustainable resource.

It’s precisely that sort of arcane thinking that is being employed by the government with regards to agreeing to firm restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. We have significant industries in this country that would be affected by such restrictions, and the truth of the matter is that when it comes to confronting the industrial sector, especially powerful parts of it, the political stakes are too high. So, in short, confronting industry with regards to the regulation of emissions translates into the loss of federal political support. In the end, it has nothing to do with global warming whatsoever.

The IPCC’s recent Report [.pdf] is, of course, of massive import. It’s chalked full of extensive information that documents the devastation being caused by global warming. Personally, I would have thought that the fact that the Northwest Passage was accessible for the first time in recorded history would have been enough to change minds, but it seems all that that fact has produced is a race to see who will be able to get their hands on the natural resources that have long been locked beneath the polar icecap.

Of course, there are those that still believe that the evidence regarding global warming is ‘inconclusive’, or that it’s simply a ‘leftist hoax’. Personally, I have never understood the argument of inconclusiveness; then again, I think you need to possess a special sort of mentality to play Russian roulette with the fate of the planet based on the desire to wait for ‘conclusive evidence’ to be presented. When it comes to the affects of global warming, conclusive evidence will be provided by such dramatically devastating changes that they will be irreversible, not to mention affect the lives of billons of people. By that point, what little can be done to counter its affects will be hurriedly undertaken, but for the most part it will be too late. By then the face of the planet itself will have begun a transformation, climates will have been drastically altered, and countless species of all kinds will have been lost. On top of that there is also the ramifications that it will have on global food production, not to mention the availability of consumable water.

I suppose, if you’re one of those people that places religious fervor before reason, that the issue is moot, it being God’s will, etc, and therefore none of our business. Besides that, we must also not forget those whose greed and ignorance have played a massive role in combating the belief that global warming even exists, let alone that it is globally altering weather patterns and affecting temperatures. It’s also reassuring to know that the political leadership in various nations views the economic impact of seriously confronting the issue more devastating than the issue itself.

For the first time in Nobel history, the coveted Peace Prize has been awarded for environmental activism. It was jointly awarded to former US Vice President Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Gore, in a brief press conference after receiving the news, said that he would donate his half of the $1.5 million dollar prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection.

While it is fantastic that this issue has received such attention by way of the world’s most prestigious award, on the US political front, The Nation’s John Nichols makes some very valid points about Gore’s participation in the upcoming Presidential election…

“…the inconvenient truth is that never has the man who might yet be president needed to more seriously consider his personal legacy–not to mention the small matter of his potential to make the world anew–than now.

There is, after all, the matter of the open space at the end of what is now the most remarkable resume of anyone seeking – or considering seeking – the presidency.

Let’s review.

This is how Al Gore’s resumé reads as of this morning:

Son of a great senator.

Harvard graduate, with honors.

Vietnam veteran.

Award-winning investigative journalist.

Congressman.

Senator.

Vice President.

Winner of the popular vote for President of the United States.

Best-selling author.

Environmental activist.

Academy Award winner.

And, now, Nobel Peace Prize winner–he shares the prize with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change–for “their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about manmade climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

As resumés go, that is one for the top of the pile.

But it begs the question: Shouldn’t a man who has gotten this far be thinking about how to finish the journey?

And isn’t the last stop the Oval Office?

To think that Gore is not pondering these questions today would be absurd.”

I whole-heartedly agree. I firmly believe that Mr. Gore has a responsibility to run, especially after this latest triumph. Given the state of affairs in the United States, it seems insane to me that he wouldn’t; that he would leave the fate of the nation to what I consider lesser candidates – perhaps with the exception of Dennis Kucinich, who has really no chance of winning the Democratic nomination anyway.

If ever there was as time for an individual like Al Gore to run, it’s now. Beyond what he could do environmentally as President, given that the United States is one of the world’s foremost polluters, his impact on the disaster in Iraq, not to mention numerous domestic failures, would be, I believe, significantly positive.

There is no question that whomever inherits the mess left by the Bush administration will have their hands full, not to mention be left in the proverbial hot seat because of it, but I think that if anyone can truly handle that challenge, it’s Al Gore.

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio’s 11th Hour is due out soon, and from watching the trailer for the film I really enjoyed the perspective that it presented. The film addresses the failures of political and corporate leadership, but counterbalances that with a focus on the importance of youth being at the forefront of change, and that they may very well represent, to generations to come, those that acted when action was most crucially needed. It is a fresh new perspective that I think very empowering.

For more information about the film, visit the official website by clicking the link above.

The G8 Summit is underway in Heiligendamm, Germany, during which numerous issues, such as the environment, will no doubt receive a lot of lip service while producing nothing of realistic import. As has become the trend, Bono and Geldof are also attending the summit and are meeting with various heads of state to push anti-poverty and AIDS initiatives. Bono praised President Bush’s recent announcement that he’ll pour some $30 billion dollars over the next five years into the fight against AIDS in Africa. Of course, they had a nice little photo-op together, something that always makes me shiver. There’s just something about willingly standing next to a war criminal with a smile on your face that is unsettling to me. That, and before I even comment on the President’s AID’s package I’d have to be privy to the fine print, which I’m sure is substantial and probably includes caveats with regards to participation in the War On Terror.

Also of interest this morning is a story involving Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan and BAE Systems, the United Kingdoms largest arms dealer…

“A Saudi prince who negotiated a £40bn arms deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia received secret payments for over a decade, a BBC probe has found.

The UK’s biggest arms dealer, BAE Systems, paid hundreds of millions of pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.”

[…]

“The investigation found that up to £120m a year was sent by BAE Systems from the UK into two Saudi embassy accounts in Washington.
The BBC’s Panorama programme has established that these accounts were actually a conduit to Prince Bandar for his role in the 1985 deal to sell more than 100 warplanes to Saudi Arabia.

The purpose of one of the accounts was to pay the expenses of the prince’s private Airbus.

David Caruso, an investigator who worked for the American bank where the accounts were held, said Prince Bandar had been taking money for his own personal use out of accounts that seemed to belong to his government.

He said: “There wasn’t a distinction between the accounts of the embassy, or official government accounts as we would call them, and the accounts of the royal family.”

Mr Caruso said he understood this had been going on for “years and years”.

“Hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars were involved,” he added.

According to Panorama’s sources, the payments were written into the arms deal contract in secret annexes, described as “support services”.

They were authorised on a quarterly basis by the MoD.

Prince Bandar was Saudi ambassador to the US for 20 years

It remains unclear whether the payments were actually illegal - a point which depends in part on whether they continued after 2001, when the UK made bribery of foreign officials an offence.

The payments were discovered during a Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigation.”

You remember Prince Bandar. He was the Saudi ambassador to the US in 2001, the very same that appeared on Larry King Live to do damage control immediately following 9/11 given that the majority of the hijackers were Saudis.

I don’t have a lot of time to spare this morning, but wanted to quickly comment on a story on the BBC’s front page about climate change.

In the article, the BBC reports that the IPCC has concluded that climate change has ‘very likely’ been caused by humans – which means that they’re 90% certain that global warming can be attributed to human activities.

What I want to know is, who, in their right mind, thinks that the drastic changes in climate and weather over the last 20 years haven’t been the result of human activities?

I think that the cover of last week’s Georgia Straight here in town summed it up rather well.