TBR News February 9, 2016
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. February 9, 2016: ”It is a badly-kept secret in certain government and scienfitic circles that the US is working steadily towards a colonization of Mars. The technology is available and what is needed will be the very significant funding. To get this from Congress will take a great deal of preliminary propaganda and media puff. Why colonize Mars? This planet is becoming dangerously overcrowded and our natural resources are being drained. Also, there aare the ever-present threats of war and religious terrorism that also would entail the spending of huge sums of taxpayer’s money with little visable results (saving for the damages that could be caused by even a limited nuclear episode)The thinking is that if the US can set up a colony well-removed from the home planet, at least some of the race will survive and possibly, Mars might make a good launching pad for rocketry.”
Conversations with the Crow
On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. After Corson’s death, Trento and his Washington lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever
After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.
Douglas had been in close contact with Crowley and had long phone conversatins with him. He found this so interesting and informative that he taped and later transcribed them.
These conversations have been published in a book: ‘Conversations with the Crow” and this is an excerpt.
Conversation No. 110
Date: Saturday, November 1, 1997
Commenced: 8:45 AM CST
Concluded: 9:14 AM CST
GD: Good morning, Robert. Am I too early for you there? RTC: No, you’re fine for now, Gregory but Emily wants to visit friends in an hour or so and I am obliged to tag along. I would much rather stay at home but wives have some authority so I go. How are you today? GD: Functioning. I got up with the sun which is not usual hence the early call. I was going to extract some material from Malthus but decided to go to bed early. Even though Malthus is very, very important with what is coming up, I realize that even if I published his work, no one would read it or care. It’s true that population is increasing geometrically and food supplies arithmetically but no one would care about this, even though it is going to impact terribly on them very soon. And the Internet, such as it is, is so full of nut crap that the real issues are virtually swamped. Well, your people at the CIA
can certainly control most of our media but they really can’t get at the Internet because it is far too diffuse. I predict that once the newer generations, who are freaking out over the Internet and the chance to be recognized by other pimple factories will stop reading the print media and read the very abbreviated but easy to digest news on the Internet. And you can’t control that, can you? RTC: I’ve never given the subject any real thought. I’m out of service these many years and the future is not for me to worry about.
GD: Well then, consider the past and why we are heading over the cliff down into the quarry. America was a self-contained country before the First World War, isolationist in the inter-war years and activist during and after the Second. We had destroyed Japan and Germany because Roosevelt hated them. He hated the Japanese because his maternal grandfather was a smuggler of Chinese into this country and he also smuggled opium. The Japanese were in China and were very brutal so Roosevelt had family reasons for hating them. And back some years, Roosevelt’s family were German Jews and he hated Hitler for his persecution of his ancestor’s people. Hence his instigation of the war. After he was dead and rotting in his rose garden, Truman rebuilt the industry of both Germany and Japan and kept both countries as fiefdoms of this country. The new enemy? Russia. Why? As a unifying factor. Once beloved by the Roosevelt liberals, the Stalin people were now evil and were going to invade us. Naturally, we had to keep up a huge army and start a weapons race to protect the virgins of Topeka from brutal Slavic rapes. I knew Gehlen and I know the origins of the Cold War. Faked, of course, but then so much of what we do is faked. Your agency started out as a private information collector for Truman and now, like the Army, you are a state-within-a-state. Semi-autonomous, you set policies, lie to presidents, co-mingle and cooperate with major business and banking interests, control most of our news and so on. Admit it, why not? RTC: I consider that to be a very one-sided and very unfair analysis, Gregory. It sounds like something in Pravda.
GD: Well, Pravda means truth in English so we can go from there. Yes, two sides to every issue and often more. But in turning this country into England of the nineteenth century, you have been empire-building all over the world. Yes, of course, we must defend ourselves against the evil Communists who are going to invade Alaska and rape moose. Your agency and the Army can get huge sums of money from a frightened Congress, money you never have to account for. If some populist like Mossadegh or Castro comes to power in an area where major American industry is threatened, the CIA rushed to the President with breathless, and entirely fictional, stories of Communist expansion and the Army and your people managed to foment rebellion in the country involved and save your friend’s huge investments. I give you United Fruit in Guatemala and certain oil in Sumatra, not to mention the deals you cut with the French Michelin rubber company to send our troops to protect their enormously valuable rubber plantations in Vietnam. Fifty thousand dead Americans are not worth the price, believe me. But the end of all this is that we are now the brutal policeman of the world, beating up people our bosses don’t like, despoiling their countries, killing their leaders. And the price of all this? Universal enmity and envy. If we stumble, as we did in Vietnam, others are watching to see if we fall from power. We have not, at least so far, but like England at the end of the nineteenth century, the price of keeping up the empire got to be too great and they fell until now they are of less importance than Iceland. That’s the price of empire, Robert, eternal vigilance but a fat citizenry grows too fond of their manifest pleasures so eventually, coalitions are formed and God knows how many revolts, massacres, terrorism and so on will be loosed on the land. The Bible says that he who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind and I have a strong feeling that this whirlwind will be coming. And we are ruled by arrogance, not common sense. Having outbid Russia and causing an internal collapse, we should have rushed to embrace the newly-freed Russians instead of installing your man, the drunken and obedient Yeltsin and trying to rape the country with great glee. That failed and left a terrible legacy of hatred. Make friends, Robert, not enemies. No one needs enemies. Study Bismarck who was brilliant in keeping his country safe from enemy plots and coalitions. Form a group here, another there, keep the enemies from uniting. But men like Bismarck are very rare and most of our leaders are very stupid people with no idea of history. History repeats itself, Robert, with slight variations but most people, and their leaders as well, don’t read history and if they did, it would be some pap by Barbara Tuchman. Now we have a huge empire, kept going by the threat of force, just as the British had. Not a broad based-empire but a narrow based one. If you allow world opinion to feed on itself, you will have a legion of petty enemies, all waiting for us to stumble and if we do, God help us all.
RTC: Gregory, you have just shown very clearly why our agency is so vital to the protection of American interests. Why, if it weren’t for the CIA, enemies would all gang up on us. Right?
GD: Yes, right, but can you keep it up? The Christian ninnies are after Clinton because they want to replace him with Pat Robertson and close all the businesses down on Sunday so the sheep can go to church and stuff the collection plates. They want a permanent Republican, very right-wing religious dictatorship here but it won’t work. No one on their side is smart enough to pull it off on a permanent basis. They have to get full public cooperation and they are far too stupid to do this. Yapping about moral majorities or the imminent arrival of Jesus won’t make it, believe me. Yes, I know you people view these nuts as useful tools and they are but only up to a point. Eventually the public will tire of looking for Jesus and turn to Saturday football games and cocaine. And sometimes beer. No wonder Americans are getting to be masses of jiggling blubber. Sitting on their couches, watching the trash on the idiot box and stuffing their faces with salted fat. Diabetes, heart attacks and what all right along with lung cancer and heart attacks from their cigarettes. And consider that while our population is booming, education has collapsed here. Teachers dare not instill curiosity in their pupils and just keep promoting them upwards and outwards to get rid of them. The idiots of the country breed and their worthless calves are so dumb most of them can barely read or write and are couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the directions were on the heel. And corporations are sending all the cheap jobs to Manila and Bombay because the greedy unions have forced wages up to the point where profits topple. Pretty soon, the enormous mass of semi-literate graduates who used to get jobs in industry will have no prospects and turn to rampant drug use and its attendant petty crime. No, we need someone with balls and so far, I haven’t seen anything on the political scene that have any. And of course, they have no brains either. We always get what we pay for, Robert, every time. And recall Genesis? ‘And slime had they for mortar…’
(Concluded at 9:14 AM CST)
SECRECY NEWS
From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2016, Issue No. 12
February 8, 2016
NSC STAFFER JOHN FICKLIN RETIRES
John W. Ficklin retired last month from his position as Senior Director for Records and Access Management at the National Security Council. In that capacity he was responsible for declassification of White House records, among other records management duties. He also chaired an interagency classification reform committee that met (and still meets) to consider improvements in classification practices.
Mr. Ficklin was the subject of a moving profile in the Washington Post yesterday. See “Long White House tradition nears end for a family descended from a slave” by Juliet Eilperin, February 7.
His successor at the National Security Council is John P. Fitzpatrick, the former director of the Information Security Oversight Office. On the occasion of Mr. Fitzpatrick’s appointment, the title of the NSC position has been changed to reflect an expanded portfolio of security policy issues. He is now the Senior Director for Records Access and Information Security Management.
A new director of the Information Security Oversight Office has not yet been named.
THE “GIG” ECONOMY, AND MORE FROM CRS
A new report from the Congressional Research Service examines the “gig” economy and its implications for workers.
“The gig economy is the collection of markets that match providers to consumers on a gig (or job) basis in support of on-demand commerce. In the basic model, gig workers enter into formal agreements with on-demand companies (e.g., Uber, TaskRabbit) to provide services to the company’s clients. Prospective clients request services through an Internet-based technological platform or smartphone application that allows them to search for providers or to specify jobs. Providers (i.e., gig workers) engaged by the on-demand company provide the requested service and are compensated for the jobs.”
“Recent trends in on-demand commerce suggest that gig workers may represent a growing segment of the U.S. labor market. In response, some Members of Congress have raised questions, for example, about the size of the gig workforce, how workers are using gig work, and the implications of the gig economy for labor standards and livelihoods more generally.” See What Does the Gig Economy Mean for Workers?, February 5, 2016.
Another new CRS publication considers a scenario in which the next Congress could revoke any final agency rules that are issued by the Obama Administration after May 2016. See Agency Final Rules Submitted After May 16, 2016, May Be Subject to Disapproval in 2017 Under the Congressional Review Act, CRS Insight, February 4, 2016.
Other new or newly updated CRS reports that have been withheld from public release include the following.
Is Biopower Carbon Neutral?, udpated February 4, 2016
State Minimum Wages: An Overview, updated February 3, 2016
Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program: An Overview, updated February 3, 2016
CFTC’s Auditor Finds “Material Error” in FY2015 Financial Statements, CRS Insight, February 3, 2016
Is Broadband Deployment Reasonable and Timely?, CRS Insight, February 3, 2016
Military Maternity and Parental Leave Policies, CRS Insight, February 3, 2016
Zika Virus: Global Health Considerations, CRS Insight, February 2, 2016
Russian firepower helps Syrian forces edge toward Turkey border
February 8, 2016
by Suleiman Al-Khlidi
Reuters
The Syrian army advanced toward the Turkish border on Monday in a major offensive backed by Russia and Iran that rebels say now threatens the future of their nearly five-year-old insurrection against President Bashar al-Assad.
Iranian backed-militias played a key role on the ground as Russian jets intensified what rebels call a scorched earth policy that has allowed the military back into the strategic northern area for the first time in more than two years.
“Our whole existence is now threatened, not just losing more ground,” said Abdul Rahim al-Najdawi from Liwa al-Tawheed, an insurgent group.
“They are advancing and we are pulling back because in the face of such heavy aerial bombing we must minimize our losses.”
The Syrian military and its allies were almost five km (3 miles) from the rebel-held town of Tal Rafaat, which has brought them to around 25 km (16 miles) from the Turkish border, the rebels, a residents and a conflict monitor said.
The assault around the city of Aleppo in northern Syria has prompted tens of thousands to flee toward Turkey, which is already sheltering more than 2.5 million Syrians, the world’s largest refugee population.
In the last two days escalating Russian bombardment of towns north west of Aleppo, Anadan and Haritan, brought several thousand more, according to a resident in the town of Azaz.
Rebel-held areas in and around Aleppo are still home to 350,000 people, and aid workers have said they could soon fall to the government. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan was quoted at the weekend as saying Turkey was under threat.
Damascus says it wants to take back full control of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city before the civil war erupted five years ago. It would be a huge strategic prize for Assad’s government in a conflict that has killed at least 250,000 people across the country and driven 11 million from their homes.
After around a week of heavy Russian air strikes, Syrian government troops and their allies broke through rebel defenses to reach two Shi’ite towns in northern Aleppo province on Wednesday, choking opposition supply lines from Turkey.
SUPPLY LINE
The Syrian army’s success in opening a route to the Shi’ite towns of Nubul and Zahraa enabled it to cut a main highway that linked rebel held areas in the northern countryside of Aleppo with the eastern part of Aleppo held by insurgents since 2012.
The latest gains by the Syrian government brings it to the closest point to the Turkish border area since August 2013, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The capture of the towns of Mayer and then Kafin, just north of Nubul and Zahraa, in the past 24 hrs have opened the road toward Tal Rifaat, the next focus of the army assault. The capture of that would leave only the town of Azaz before the Turkish border itself.
The prospect of the loss of Azaz, just a few miles from the Bab al Salama border crossing, would virtually wipe out the insurgents from their main stronghold in northwest Syria.
Russian bombing has for weeks targeted rebel routes to the main border crossing that was once a major gateway from Europe and Turkey to the Gulf and Iraq.
Since it fell to insurgents, the crossing has been both a major commercial lifeline and arms supply route for rebel-held areas in Idlib and Aleppo provinces.
The army’s advance has also been indirectly helped by Kurdish-led YPG militias who control the city of Afrin, south west of Azaz. They have seized a string of villages including Ziyara and Khreiybeh in the last few days, rebels said.
The Observatory also said they had secured the villages of Deir Jamal and Maranaz from Islamist insurgents.
Four months of Russian air strikes have tipped the momentum of the war Assad’s way. With Moscow’s help and allies including Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iranian fighters, the Syrian army is regaining areas on key fronts in the west.
(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
‘Me or terrorists?’ Furious Erdogan tells US to choose between Turkey and Syrian Kurds
February 8, 2016
RT
Riled by a meeting between a US official and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which controls the Syrian town of Kobane, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has told Washington to choose between Turkey and, as he put it, the “terrorists.”
A delegation featuring Brett McGurk, the United States’ envoy to the coalition it leads against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), met the YPG over the last weekend in January. The YPG took full control of Kobane late last June, in what was a powerful symbol of Kurdish resistance.
“He [Brett McGurk] visits Kobane at the time of the Geneva talks and is awarded a plaque by a so-called YPG general?” Erdogan told reporters on his plane while returning from a trip to Latin America and Senegal, the Beser Haber newspaper reported.
“How can we trust [you]?” Erdogan said.
“Is it me who is your partner, or the terrorists in Kobane?” the Turkish president said, adding that both the PYD and the YPG are “terrorist organizations.” Ankara considers them to be part of the PKK, banned in Turkey as a terrorist group.
According to US officials, the trip appeared to be the first of its kind to northern Syria since 2013. It took place after the YPG’s political wing, Syria’s Democratic Union Party (PYD), was excluded from new peace talks in Geneva. Ankara had threatened to boycott the talks if the PYD were invited.
The conflict between the Turkish government and Kurdish insurgent groups demanding greater autonomy for the large ethnic group has been continuing for decades. With several failed ceasefires between the sides, Ankara has been blamed by a number of human rights groups for putting civilian lives at risk in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast.
In August, Ankara launched a ground operation to crack down on Kurdish fighters linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The violence ended a two-year truce with Kurdish militants fighting a guerrilla war for independence.
“Turks have a phobia of Kurds because they are scared of their Turkish Kurds, some 20 million of them living in Turkey,” Abd Salam Ali, the Kurdish Democratic Union Party’s representative to Russia, told RIA Novosti, adding that “Kurds have interfered with Erdogan’s plans in Turkey.”
“Islamic State has military bases in Turkey, and is using it as a corridor. Turkey currently plays a role similar to the one Pakistan played in the 1980s. When the Soviet forces were stationed in Afghanistan, jihadists arrived there through Pakistan, along with the money and arms,” Abd Salam Ali noted.
“Now Turkey is exactly the same corridor [for militants in Syria], and it plays its own game. But Kurds appeared to stand in [Ankara’s] way. They have forced IS away from Rojava [also known as Syrian Kurdistan]. There’s only one piece left, a 90km-long territory between the Kurdish towns. If we force IS out of there and reconnect the Kurdish cantons, Turkey won’t be able to influence [the situation in Syria].”
Late last month, President Erdogan once again refused to search for a peaceful solution to the conflict, which began back in 1984 and has taken at least 40,000 lives, mainly Kurds. He pledged that “those with guns in their hands and those who support them will pay the price of treason,” referring to the Kurdish militants, deemed terrorists by the government.
According to Turkey’s General Staff, the number of PKK members killed during military operations in the southeastern districts of Cizre and Sur reached 733 on Sunday. But according to Amnesty International estimates, at least 150 civilians, among them children, have been killed during the Turkish operation, with more than 200,000 lives put at risk.
Turkey’s security operations in the mainly Kurdish southeast resemble a “collective punishment,” the human rights watchdog said last month. Amnesty slammed the international community for choosing to turn a blind eye to what Ankara has been doing to the Kurds.
“While the Turkish authorities appear determined to silence internal criticism, they have faced very little from the international community. Strategic considerations relating to the conflict in Syria and determined efforts to enlist Turkey’s help in stemming the flow of refugees to Europe must not overshadow allegations of gross human rights violations. The international community must not look the other way,” John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International’s Europe and Central Asia Program Director, pointed out.
Up to 21 academics were detained by Turkish authorities in mid-January for signing a petition demanding that Ankara abandon its military crackdown on Kurdish rebels in the southeast of the country. The petition denouncing Turkey’s military operation against Kurds was signed by as many as 1,200 academics. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said they all sided with the Kurdish militants, who are considered terrorists by the government. “Unfortunately these so-called academics claim that the state is carrying out a massacre. You, the so-called intellectuals! You are dark people. You are not intellectuals,” he stated
With regime gains, fight in Syria turns against Turkey
Gains by Syria’s regime in the Aleppo province may be the beginning of the end for the rebels. The battlefield losses have also delivered a blow to Turkey’s policies on Syria.
September 8, 2016
DW
Backed by relentless airstrikes by Russia, government forces and allied Shiite militia may have altered the course of Syria’s five-year civil war over the past week, delivering a series of blows to rebel factions that have also managed to challenge Turkey’s core strategic interests.
Days after virtually encircling Aleppo, where rebels have controlled the eastern portion of the city since 2012, the regime and allied Hezbollah and Iranian forces have advanced to within 25 kilometers (15 miles) of Syria’s border with Turkey and the key rebel-held logistical hub of Azaz.
Ankara has been one of the main external backers of the armed opposition centered in Idlib and Aleppo provinces, acting as a conduit for weapons, supplies and fighters as well as a safe haven for opposition forces.
The regime’s advance effectively cuts off rebel-controlled eastern Aleppo from supply lines running north to the Turkish border crossing at Bab al-Salama/Oncupinar, but the border crossing at Reyhanli/Bab al-Hawa remains open west of Aleppo and under the control of Turkey’s preferred Islamist group, Ahrar al-Sham, thus keeping rebel supply lines in Idlib open.
The narrow sliver of contested rebel territory running north from Aleppo to the border is under Russian and regime assault from the south and by the “Islamic State” (IS) from the east.
From Syria’s western canton of Afrin, the YPG Kurdish militia, which have ties to Kurdish rebels in Turkey, are advancing on Azaz, a further blow to Turkish- backed rebels.
The Kurds – who on and off have fought against Turkmen and Islamist rebel groups backed by Turkey – are benefiting from the airstrikes by Russia and appear to have reached a tactical understanding with Russia and the regime.For Turkey, the section of territory controlled by IS along the border between Azaz and Jarabulus is vital because it separates the noncontiguous Kurdish-controlled cantons of Afrin from territories in northeast Syria.
A fatal setback?
The regime advance in the northern Aleppo countryside adds to a string of successes on the back of four months of Russian airstrikes in the south, Latakia and Idlib that helped to scuttle UN-backed peace talks in Geneva last week.
Now in a position of strength, Russia and the regime appear to be trying to divide and crush the opposition and, in some cases, negotiate the withdrawal of rebels and the restoration of regime control in certain towns and neighborhoods.
Otherwise, the regime will continue with a strategy of siege, starvation and bombardment.
Hossam Abouzahr, the editor of Syria Source at the Atlantic Council, told DW that the balance of power has shifted so dramatically that the armed opposition faces an existential struggle for survival.
“The asymmetrical balance is so much in favor of the regime,” he said. “It is the beginning of the end for the opposition. They are not able to hold out against the Russian air force.”
Abouzahr said that once Aleppo is surrounded, the question will be whether the regime will leave the city trapped and conserve resources to go after other rebel-controlled areas one by one or fully lay siege and retake the city.
Rush to border
The regime offensive in Aleppo city and province has sent tens of thousands of civilians fleeing to the border with Turkey as fear mounts that Syria’s largest city and former commercial hub could face a sustained siege.
Turkish officials have warned that hundreds of thousands of people could ultimately be forced to the border.
Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told DW that recent events in Aleppo have undermined Turkish interests but the country still has options.
“Ankara still has a lot of cards to play,” Stein said. “Turkey is the most important external backer of the Syrian opposition and will not simply look on as Russian, regime and Iranian forces surround Aleppo.”
Stein said Ankara’s options included increasing support to the opposition in Idlib through the Bab al-Hawa border crossing or demanding that Syrians displaced from Aleppo be protected inside Syria opposite the border crossing at Oncupinar.
The idea of a safe zone has been floated by Turkey since the early days of the conflict but has garnered little international support.
Somalia plane bomber was meant to board Turkish flight: airline executive
February 8, 2016
by Drqazin Jorgic
Reuters
Nairobi-A suspected suicide bomber who blew a hole in the fuselage of a Daallo Airlines plane last week and forced it to make an emergency landing in Mogadishu was meant to be on a Turkish Airlines flight, Daallo’s chief executive said on Monday.
The bomber was sucked out of the plane through the 1-metre-wide (1-yard-wide) hole when the blast ripped open the pressurized cabin in flight, officials said. The pilot landed the plane in the Somali capital, from where it had taken off.
No group has so far taken responsibility for the attack but U.S. officials said on Monday the United States suspects Islamist militant group al Shabaab, which has links to al Qaeda, was responsible for the blast.
Daallo Airlines chief executive, Mohamed Yassin, said most of the passengers who were on the bombed flight were scheduled to fly with Turkish Airlines, but were flown to Djibouti by one of his planes after the Turkish carrier canceled its flight, citing bad weather.
“That particular passenger (who was behind the blast) boarded the aircraft on a Turkish Airlines boarding pass and was on the list for the Turkish Airlines manifest,” Yassin told Reuters by telephone from Dubai.
Yassin said Daallo picked up the 70 stranded Turkish Airlines passengers to fly them to Djibouti, including the suicide bomber. In total, the flight had 74 passengers.
Turkish Airlines spokesman Yahya Ustun confirmed the carrier had canceled a flight to Mogadishu last week due to bad weather and said the company will not make any further comment.
Somalia, mired in conflict since civil war broke out in 1991, has few air links outside East Africa. In 2012, Turkish Airlines became the first major international commercial airline to fly out of Somalia in more than two decades.
Mogadishu’s heavily guarded airport, which is often compared to the Green Zone in Baghdad, has several safety perimeter fences and checkpoints. It houses a large U.N. compound along with several other Western embassies.
Somali officials said an investigation had been launched and arrests made, including airport workers.
U.S. officials said investigators believe the bomb was hidden in a laptop computer, and that the bomber had some type of connection to airline or airport personnel.
CCTV footage released by the Somali National Intelligence Agency (NISA) appears to show two airport workers inside the terminal handing the suicide bomber a laptop, according to the government spokesman.
“Some of the people that we have arrested are cooperating,” spokesman Abdisalam Aato told Reuters. He said security at the airport has been stepped up and that the government was seeking new technologies to improve screenings.
Al Shabaab, which wants to topple the government and impose a harsh version of Islamic law, has targeted the airport in the past. It has also attacked the Turkish embassy in Mogadishu.
Yassin said Daallo has been reassured by Somali officials that security was being improved, and will keep flying to Somalia. We have been there for 25 years,” he said. “Our efforts to keep Somalia linked to the rest of the world will continue.”
(Writing by Drazen Jorgic; Additional reporting by Abdi Sheikh in Mogadishu, Ceyda Caglayan in Istanbul and Mark Hosenball in Washington; Editing by George Obulutsa, Dominic Evans and Jonathan Oatis)
Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda: The U.S. Military Bombs in the Twenty-First Century
by Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch
Here’s my twenty-first-century rule of thumb about this country: if you have to say it over and over, it probably ain’t so. Which is why I’d think twice every time we’re told how “exceptional” or “indispensable” the United States is. For someone like me who can still remember a moment when Americans assumed that was so, but no sitting president, presidential candidate, or politician felt you had to say the obvious, such lines reverberate with defensiveness. They seem to incorporate other voices you can almost hear whispering that we’re ever less exceptional, more dispensable, no longer (to quote the greatest of them all by his own estimate) “the greatest.” In this vein, consider a commonplace line running around Washington (as it has for years): the U.S. military is “the finest fighting force in the history of the world.” Uh, folks, if that’s so, then why the hell can’t it win a damn thing 14-plus years later?
If you don’t mind a little what-if history lesson, it’s just possible that events might have turned out differently and, instead of repeating that “finest fighting force” stuff endlessly, our leaders might actually believe it. After all, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it took the Bush administration only a month to let the CIA, special forces advisers, and the U.S. Air Force loose against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s supporters in Afghanistan. The results were crushing. The first moments of what that administration would grandiloquently (and ominously) bill as a “global war on terror” were, destructively speaking, glorious.
If you want to get a sense of just how crushing those forces and their Afghan proxies were, read journalist Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, the best book yet written on how (and how quickly) that war on terror went desperately, disastrously awry. One of the Afghans Gopal spent time with was a Taliban military commander nicknamed — for his whip of choice — Mullah Cable, who offered a riveting account of just how decisive the U.S. air assault on that movement was. In recalling his days on the front lines of what, until then, had been an Afghan civil war, he described his first look at what American bombs could do:
“He drove into the basin and turned the corner and then stepped out of the vehicle. Oh my God, he thought. There were headless torsos and torso-less arms, cooked slivers of scalp and flayed skin. The stones were crimson, the sand ocher from all the blood. Coal-black lumps of melted steel and plastic marked the remains of his friends’ vehicles.
“Closing his eyes, he steadied himself. In the five years of fighting he had seen his share of death, but never lives disposed of so easily, so completely, so mercilessly, in mere seconds.”
The next day, he addressed his men. “Go home,” he said. “Get yourselves away from here. Don’t contact each other.”
“Not a soul,” writes Gopal, “protested.”
Mullah Cable took his own advice and headed for Kabul, the Afghan capital. “If he somehow could make it out alive, he promised himself that he would abandon politics forever.” And he was typical. As Gopal reports, the Taliban quickly broke under the strain of war with the last superpower on the planet. Its foot soldiers put down their arms and, like Mullah Cable, fled for home. Its leaders began to try to surrender. In Afghan fashion, they were ready to go back to their native villages, make peace, shuffle their allegiances, and hope for better times. Within a couple of months, in other words, it was, or at least shoulda, woulda, coulda been all over, even the shouting.
The U.S. military and its Afghan proxies, if you remember, believed that they had trapped Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda fighters somewhere in the mountainous Tora Bora region. If the U.S. had concentrated all its resources on him at that moment, it’s hard to believe that he wouldn’t have been in American custody or dead sooner rather than later. And that would have been that. The U.S. military could have gone home victorious. The Taliban, along with bin Laden, would have been history. Stop the cameras there and what a tale of triumph would surely have been told.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda.
Keeping the Cameras Rolling
There was, of course, a catch. Like their Bush administration mentors, the American military men who arrived in Afghanistan were determined to fight that global war on terror forever and a day. So, as Gopal reports, they essentially refused to let the Taliban surrender. They hounded that movement’s leaders and fighters until they had little choice but to pick up their guns again and, in the phrase of the moment, “go back to work.”
It was a time of triumph and of Guantánamo, and it went to everyone’s head. Among those in power in Washington and those running the military, who didn’t believe that a set of genuine global triumphs lay in store? With such a fighting force, such awesome destructive power, how could it not? And so, in Afghanistan, the American counterterror types kept right on targeting the “terrorists” whenever their Afghan warlord allies pointed them out — and if many of them turned out to be local enemies of those same rising warlords, who cared?
It would be the first, but hardly the last time that, in killing significant numbers of people, the U.S. military had a hand in creating its own future enemies. In the process, the Americans managed to revive the very movement they had crushed and which, so many years later, is at the edge of seizing a dominant military position in the country.
And keep in mind that, while producing a recipe for future disaster there, the Bush administration’s top officials had far bigger fish to fry. For them and for the finest fighting force etc., etc., Afghanistan was a hopeless backwater — especially with Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein there in Baghdad at the crossroads of the oil heartlands of the planet with a target on his back. As they saw it, control of much of the Greater Middle East was at stake. To hell with Osama bin Laden.
And so, in March 2003, less than a year and a half later, they launched the invasion of Iraq, another glorious success for that triple-F force. Saddam’s military was crushed in an instant and his capital, burning and looted, was occupied by American troops in next to no time at all.
Stop the cameras there and you’re still talking about the dominant military of this, if not any other century. But of course the cameras didn’t stop. The Bush administration had no intention of shutting them off, not when it saw a Middle Eastern (and possibly even a global) Pax Americana in its future and wanted to garrison Iraq until hell froze over. It already assumed that the next stop after Baghdad on the Occident Express would be either Damascus or Tehran, that America’s enemies in the region would go down like ten pins, and that the oil heartlands of the planet would become an American dominion. (As the neocon quip of that moment had it, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”)It was a hell of a dream, with an emphasis on hell. It would, in fact, prove a nightmare of the first order, and the cameras just kept rolling and rolling for nearly 13 years while (I think it’s time for an acronym here) the FFFIHW, also known as the Finest Fighting Force etc., etc., proved that it could not successfully:
*Defeat determined, if lightly armed, minority insurgencies.
*Train proxy armies to do its bidding.
*Fight a war based on sectarian versions of Islam or a war of ideas.
*Help reconstruct a society in the Greater Middle East, no matter how much money it pumped in.
*Create much of anything but failed states and deeply corrupt ruling elites in the region.
*Bomb an insurgent movement into surrender.
*Drone-kill terror leaders until their groups collapsed.
*Intervene anywhere in the Greater Middle East in just about any fashion, by land or air, and end up with a world in any way to its liking.
Send in the…
It’s probably accurate to say that in the course of one disappointment or disaster after another from Afghanistan to Libya, Somalia to Iraq, Yemen to Pakistan, the U.S. military never actually lost an encounter on the battlefield. But nowhere was it truly triumphant on the battlefield either, not in a way that turned out to mean anything. Nowhere, in fact, did a military move of any sort truly pay off in the long run. Whatever was done by the FFFIHW and the CIA (with its wildly counterproductive drone assassination campaigns across the region) only seemed to create more enemies and more problems.
To sum up, the finest you-know-what in the history of you-know-where has proven to be a clumsy, largely worthless weapon of choice in Washington’s terror wars — and increasingly its leadership seems to know it. In private, its commanders are clearly growing anxious. If you want a witness to that anxiety, go no further than Washington Post columnist and power pundit David Ignatius. In mid-January, after a visit to U.S. Central Command, which oversees Washington’s military presence in the Greater Middle East, he wrote a column grimly headlined: “The ugly truth: Defeating the Islamic State will take decades.” Its first paragraph went: “There’s a scary disconnect between the somber warnings you hear privately from military leaders about the war against the Islamic State and the glib debating points coming from Republican and Democratic politicians.”
For Ignatius, channeling his high-level sources in Central Command (whom he couldn’t identify), things could hardly have been gloomier. And yet, bleak as his report was, it still qualified as an upbeat view. His sources clearly believed that, if Washington was willing to commit to a long, hard military slog and the training of proxy forces in the region not over “a few months” but a “generation,” success would follow some distant, golden day. The last 14-plus years suggest otherwise.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at what those worried CENTCOM commanders, the folks at the Pentagon, and the Obama administration are planning for the FFFIHW in the near future. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that, with almost a decade and a half of grisly military lessons under their belts, they are evidently going to pursue exactly the kinds of actions that have, for some time, made the U.S. military look like neither the finest, nor the greatest anything. Here’s a little been-there-done-that rundown of what might read like past history but is evidently still to come:
Afghanistan: So many years after the Bush administration loosed the U.S. Air Force and its Special Operations forces on that country and “liberated” it, the situation, according to the latest U.S. general to be put in command of the war zone, is “deteriorating.” Meanwhile, in 2015, casualties suffered by the American-built Afghan security forces reached “unsustainable” levels. The Taliban now control more territory than at any time since 2001, and the Islamic State (IS) has established itself in parts of the country. In response, more than a year after President Obama announced the ending of the U.S. “combat mission” there, the latest plans are to further slow the withdrawal of U.S. forces, while sending in the U.S. Air Force and special operations teams, particularly against the new IS fighters.
Libya: Almost five years ago, the Obama administration (with its NATO allies) dispatched overwhelming air power and drones to Libyan skies to help take down that country’s autocrat, Muammar Gaddafi. In the wake of his death and the fall of his regime, his arsenals were looted and advanced weapons were dispatched to terror groups from Mali to the Sinai Peninsula. In the ensuing years, Libya has been transformed not into a thriving democracy but a desperately failed state filled with competing sectarian militias, Islamic extremist outfits, and a fast-growing Islamic State offshoot. As the situation there continues to deteriorate, the Obama administration is now reportedly considering a “new” strategy involving “decisive military action” that will be focused on… you guessed it, air and drone strikes and possibly special operations raids on Islamic State operations.
Iraq: Another country in which the situation is again deteriorating as oil prices plunge — oil money makes up 90% of the government budget — and the Islamic State continues to hold significant territory. Meanwhile, Iraqis die monthly in prodigious numbers in bloody acts of war and terror, as Shiite-Sunni grievances seem only to sharpen. It’s almost 13 years since the U.S. loosed its air power and its army against Saddam Hussein, disbanded his military, trained another one (significant parts of which collapsed in the face of relatively small numbers of Islamic State fighters in 2014 and 2015), and brought together much of the future leadership of the Islamic State in a U.S. military prison. It’s almost four years since the U.S. “ended” its war there and left. Since August 2014, however, it has again loosed its Air Force on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, while dispatching at least 3,700 (and possibly almost 4,500) military personnel to Iraq to help train up a new version of that country’s army and support it as it retakes (or in fact reduces to rubble) cities still in IS hands. In this context, the Obama administration now seems to be planning for a kind of endless mission creep in which “hundreds more trainers, advisers, and commandos” will be sent to that country and neighboring Syria in the coming months. Increasingly, some of those advisers and other personnel will officially be considered “boots on the ground” and will focus on helping “the Iraqi army mount the kind of conventional warfare operations needed to defeat Islamic State militants.” It’s even possible that American advisers will, in the end, be allowed to engage directly in combat operations, while American Apache helicopter pilots might at some point begin flying close support missions for Iraqi troops fighting in urban areas. (And if this is all beginning to sound strangely familiar, what a surprise!)
Syria: Give Syria credit for one thing. It can’t be classified as a three-peat or even a repeat performance, since the FFFIHW wasn’t there the previous 14 years. Still, it’s hard not to feel as if we’ve been through all this before: the loosing of American air power on the Islamic State (with effects that devastate but somehow don’t destroy the object of Washington’s desire), disastrous attempts to train proxy forces in the American mold, the arrival of special ops forces on the scene, and so on.
In other words, everything proven over the years, from Afghanistan to Libya, not to bring victory or much of anything else worthwhile will be tried yet again — from Afghanistan to Libya. Above all, of course, a near-religious faith in the efficacy of bombing and of drone strikes will remain crucial to American efforts, even though in the past such military-first approaches have only helped to spread terror outfits, chaos, and failed states across this vast region. Will any of it work this time? I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Declaring Defeat and Coming Home
At some point, as the Vietnam War dragged on, Republican Senator George Aiken of Vermont suggested — so the legend goes — that the U.S. declare victory and simply come home. (In fact, he never did such a thing, but no matter.) Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and their adviser Henry Kissinger might, however, be said to have done something similar in the end. And despite wartime fears — no less rabid than those about the Islamic State today — that a Vietnamese communist victory would cause “dominoes” to “fall” and communism to triumph across the Third World, remarkably little happened that displeased, no less endangered, the United States. Four decades later, in fact, Washington and Vietnam are allied increasingly closely against a rising China.
In a similar fashion, our worst nightmares of the present moment — magnified in the recent Republican debates — are likely to have little basis in reality. The Islamic State is indeed a brutal and extreme sectarian movement, the incarnation of the whirlwind of chaos the U.S. let loose in the region. As a movement, however, it has its limits. Its appeal is far too sectarian and extreme to sweep the Greater Middle East.
Its future suppression, however, is unlikely to have much to do with the efforts of the finest fighting force in the history of the world. Quite the opposite, the Islamic State and its al-Qaeda-linked doppelgangers still spreading in the region thrive on the destructive attentions of the FFFIHW. They need that force to be eternally on their trail and tail.
There are (or at least should be) moments in history when ruling elites suddenly add two and two and miraculously come up with four. This doesn’t seem to be one of them or else the Obama administration wouldn’t be doubling down on a militarized version of the same-old same-old in the Greater Middle East, while its Republican and neocon opponents call for making the sand “glow in the dark,” sending in the Marines (all of them), and bombing the hell out of everything.
Under the circumstances, what politician in present-day Washington would have the nerve to suggest the obvious? Isn’t it finally time to pull the U.S. military back from the Greater Middle East and put an end to our disastrous temptation to intervene ever more destructively in ever more repetitious ways in that region? That would, of course, mean, among other things, dismantling the vast structure of military bases Washington has built up across the Persian Gulf and the rest of the Greater Middle East.
Maybe it’s time to adopt some version of Senator Aiken’s mythical strategy. Maybe Washington should bluntly declare not victory, but defeat, and bring the U.S. military home. Maybe if we stopped claiming that we were the greatest, most exceptional, most indispensable nation ever and that the U.S. military was the finest fighting force in the history of the world, both we and the world might be better off and modestly more peaceful. Unfortunately, you can toss that set of thoughts in the trash can that holds all the other untested experiments of history. One thing we can be sure of, given the politics of our moment, is that we’ll never know.
Anti-Islam Groups Rally Across Europe; Clashes in Amsterdam
February 6, 2016
AP
Protesters rallied against Islam and immigration in several European cities Saturday, sometimes clashing with police or counter-demonstrators amid growing tensions over the massive influx of asylum-seekers to the continent.
Riot police clashed with demonstrators in Amsterdam as supporters of the anti-Islam group PEGIDA tried to hold their first protest meeting in the Dutch capital. Only about 200 PEGIDA supporters were present, outnumbered by police and left-wing demonstrators who shouted, “Refugees are welcome, fascists are not!”
Dutch riot police detained several people as officers on horseback intervened to separate the two groups of demonstrators. It was not immediately clear how many people were detained.
In Germany, up to 8,000 people took part in a PEGIDA rally in Dresden, according to the independent group Durchgezaehlt, which monitors attendance figures. Up to 3,500 people took part in a counter-demonstration on the other side of the Elbe River that divides the city, it said.
No incidents were reported at the event.
In the northern French city of Calais, police dispersed a rowdy anti-migrant protest with tear gas after clashes with protesters and detained several far-right demonstrators.
Around 150 militants from the anti-Islam, anti-immigration group PEDIGA gathered Saturday chanting slogans like: “We must not let Calais die!”
Calais has been a focal point for migrants who want to slip into Britain via the Channel Tunnel. Several thousand have been living there in slums for months.
PEGIDA, whose German acronym stands for ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West,’ has become a magnet for far-right and anti-immigrant sentiment since it was founded in Dresden two years ago. After a drop in attendance last spring, the group saw a rise in support from people angered by the unprecedented influx into Europe of refugees from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
Aside from its nationalist and anti-Islam stance, the group has also sided strongly with Russia. Several Russian flags were flown at Saturday’s rally in Dresden, along with banners including “Peace with Russia” and “Stop war against Syria.”
Smaller PEGIDA-style protests were also taking place in France, Britain, Poland, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Denmark, Finland and Estonia.
Hacker posts info of 9k DHS staff, says FBI is next
February 8, 2016
RT
Names and addresses of over 9,000 Homeland Security employees were dumped on the internet by unknown hackers after they tricked their way into a Department of Justice computer. The hackers say a list of 20,000 FBI employees is next.
Tweeting as @DotGovs, the hackers posted a link pointing to a plain-text post on CryptoBin listing names, job titles, work emails, phone numbers and the states for over 9,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The list includes computer specialists, procurement officers, budget analysts, directors and senior advisers.
Several news outlets were contacted by the hackers on Sunday evening and given a preview of the data, including Vice’s Motherboard blog and FedScoop. According to the sites, the information in the leak was accurate.
“We take these reports very seriously, however there is no indication at this time that there is any breach of sensitive or personally identifiable information,” DHS spokesman S.Y. Lee said in a statement Monday morning.a
The hackers told Motherboard they accessed the information by compromising an email account of a Justice Department official. They used the email address to “social engineer” access to the DOJ intranet, calling technical support to give them a password.
“So I called up, told them I was new and I didn’t understand how to get past [the portal],” one of the hackers told Motherboard. “They asked if I had a token code, I said no, they said ‘that’s fine – just use our one’.”
At that point, the hackers gained access to about a terabyte of data, and managed to download about 200 gigabytes.
This is for Palestine, Ramallah, West Bank, Gaza, This is for the child that is searching for an answer,” the hackers said at the beginning of their CryptoBin post. Both the message and the method used in the hack resemble those of a different group of anonymous hackers that last year breached the private email accounts of CIA Director John Brennan and National Intelligence Director James Clapper.
Hit by a series of high-profile data breaches in recent years, the US government is demanding more cyber security funding. Last week, Defense Secretary Ash Carter requested nearly $7 billion for the Pentagon’s cyber operations budget in 2017, to “further DOD’s network defenses… build more training ranges for our cyber warriors; and also develop cyber tools and infrastructure needed to provide offensive cyber options.”
The Pentagon’s cyber budget for the current fiscal year is $5.5 billion.
Sea-level rise ‘could last twice as long as human history’
Research warns of the long timescale of climate change impacts unless urgent action is taken to cut emissions drastically
February 8, 2016.
by Damian Carrington
The Guardian
Huge sea-level rises caused by climate change will last far longer than the entire history of human civilisation to date, according to new research, unless the brief window of opportunity of the next few decades is used to cut carbon emissions drastically.
Even if global warming is capped at governments’ target of 2C – which is already seen as difficult – 20% of the world’s population will eventually have to migrate away from coasts swamped by rising oceans. Cities including New York, London, Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, Calcutta, Jakarta and Shanghai would all be submerged.
Populations at risk
“Much of the carbon we are putting in the air from burning fossil fuels will stay there for thousands of years,” said Prof Peter Clark, at Oregon State University in the US and who led the new work. “People need to understand that the effects of climate change won’t go away, at least not for thousands of generations.”
“The long-term view sends the chilling message of what the real risks and consequences are of the fossil fuel era,” said Prof Thomas Stocker, at the University of Bern, Switzerland and also part of the research team. “It will commit us to massive adaptation efforts so that for many, dislocation and migration becomes the only option.”
The report, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, notes most research looks at the impacts of global warming by 2100 and so misses one of the biggest consequences for civilisation – the long-term melting of polar ice caps and sea-level rise.
This is because the great ice sheets take thousand of years to react fully to higher temperatures. The researchers say this long-term view raises moral questions about the kind of environment being passed down to future generations.
The research shows that even with climate change limited to 2C by tough emissions cuts, sea level would rise by 25 metres over the next 2,000 years or so and remain there for at least 10,000 years – twice as long as human history. If today’s burning of coal, oil and gas is not curbed, the sea would rise by 50m, completely changing the map of the world.
“We can’t keep building seawalls that are 25m high,” said Clark. “Entire populations of cities will eventually have to move.”
By far the greatest contributor to the sea level rise – about 80% – would be the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. Another new study in Nature Climate Change published on Monday reveals that some large Antarctic ice sheets are dangerously close to losing the sea ice shelves that hold back their flow into the ocean.
Huge floating sea ice shelves around Antarctica provide buttresses for the glaciers and ice sheets on the continent. But when they are lost to melting, as happened the with Larsen B shelf in 2002, the speed of flow into the ocean can increase eightfold.
Johannes Fürst, at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany and colleagues, calculated that just 5% of the ice shelf in the Bellingshausen Sea and 7% in the Amundsen Sea can be lost before their buttressing effect vanishes. “This is worrying because it is in these regions that we have observed the highest rates of ice-shelf thinning over the past two decades,” he said.
Avoiding the long-term swamping of many of the world’s greatest cities is already difficult, given the amount carbon dioxide already released into the atmosphere. “Sea-level rise is already baked into the system,” said Prof Stocker, one of the world’s leading climate scientists.
However, the rise could be reduced and delayed if carbon is removed from the atmosphere in the future, he said: “If you are very optimistic and think we will be in the position by 2050 or 2070 to have a global scale carbon removal scheme – which sounds very science fiction – you could pump down CO2 levels. But there is no indication that this is technically possible.” A further difficulty is the large amount of heat and CO2 already stored in the oceans.
Prof Stocker said: “The actions of the next 30 years are absolutely crucial for putting us on a path that avoids the [worst] outcomes and ensuring, at least in the next 200 years, the impacts are limited and give us time to adapt.”
The researchers argue that a new industrial revolution is required to deliver a global energy system that emits no carbon at all. They conclude: “The success of the [UN climate summit in] Paris meeting, and of every future meeting, must be evaluated not only by levels of national commitments, but also by looking at how they will lead ultimately to the point when zero-carbon energy systems become the obvious choice for everyone.”
“We are making choices that will affect our grandchildren’s grandchildren and beyond,” said Prof Daniel Schrag, at Harvard University in the US. “We need to think carefully about the long timescales of what we are unleashing.”
Millions could die as world unprepared for pandemics, says UN
Panel convened to analyse deadly outbreaks says capacity to respond to communicable diseases remains ‘woefully insufficient’
February 8, 2016
by Sarah Boseley
The Guardian
A global epidemic far worse than the Ebola outbreak is a real possibility and could kill many millions if the world does not become better prepared to deal with the sudden emergence and transmission of disease, the UN has said in a hard-hitting report.
The report has emerged in draft form, as experts rally to deal with the rapid spread of the Zika virus across Latin America, which has been linked to thousands of cases of brain damage in babies.
Countries in the region have again been caught off-guard because of the lack of scientific knowledge about the virus and the absence of good data on microcephaly, a condition in which babies’ heads fail to grow properly in the womb.
The report comes from the high-level panel on the global response to health crises, set up by the UN secretary general in April 2015, as the Ebola epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people finally waned. Several other inquiries into what occurred, and the slow and inadequate response by the World Health Organisation (WHO), have reported and fed into the UN panel’s conclusions.
“The high risk of major health crises is widely underestimated, and … the world’s preparedness and capacity to respond is woefully insufficient. Future epidemics could far exceed the scale and devastation of the west Africa Ebola outbreak,” says the panel’s chair, Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete from Tanzania, outlining their findings in the preface.
“Too often, global panic about epidemics has been followed by complacency and inaction. For example, the 2009 influenza pandemic prompted a similar review of global preparedness, but most of its recommendations were not addressed. Had they been implemented, thousands of lives could have been saved in west Africa. We owe it to the victims to prevent a recurrence of this tragedy.”
The report, which has been posted online in advanced, unedited form in the UN’s Daily Journal, is not just about the mishandling of Ebola, but about the crucial need for the world to put in place systems to detect and fight new disease threats.
“Notwithstanding its devastating impact in west Africa, the Ebola virus is not the most virulent pathogen known to humanity,” says the report. “Mathematical modelling by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has shown that a virulent strain of an airborne influenza virus could spread to all major global capitals within 60 days and kill more than 33 million people within 250 days.”
Other diseases that have recently caused widespread suffering include four major outbreaks of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers) in Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Korea, the pandemics of avian and swine flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars). “These all serve as stark reminder of the threat to humanity posed by emerging communicable diseases,” says the report.
The panel says surveillance and response to outbreaks must be led by the WHO, but the key role should be played by a centre for emergency preparedness and response. The centre “must have real command and control capacity”, says the report, and it should have the best technology available to identify, track and respond to an emerging threat.
The report also says countries must report on their state of compliance to WHO every year and must be regularly reviewed.All countries must give the WHO more money, says the report – an increase of at least 10% in their funding. In addition, they must put $300m for a contingency fund for emergencies, not $100m as recently set up. A further fund worth $1bn must be set up for the development of vaccines, drugs and testing equipment.
Prof Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, said: “Epidemic and pandemic diseases are among the greatest of all threats to human health and security, against which we have for too long done too little to prepare. After four inquiries into the preventable tragedy of Ebola, there is now a strong consensus about what must be done. The WHO’s leadership and member states must make 2016 the year of decision and act now to build a more resilient global health system.
“As the UN panel and the other inquiries recommend, the cornerstones of better health security must be a strong, independent WHO centre to lead outbreak preparedness and response, new mechanisms and financing for developing vaccines, drugs and diagnostics for potential epidemic threats, strong community engagement and investment in basic health infrastructure in every country, not just those that can afford it.”