Category Archives: Vintage

The Human Soldiers Behind Obama’s Drone War

by AdelaidPonce Posted on May 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Enemies, innocent victims, and soldiers have always made up the three faces of war. With war growing more distant, with drones capable of performing on the battlefield while their “pilots” remain thousands of miles away, two of those faces have, however, faded into the background in recent years. Today, we are left with just the reassuring “face” of the terrorist enemy, killed clinically by remote control while we go about our lives, apparently without any “collateral damage” or danger to our soldiers. Now, however, that may slowly be changing, bringing the true face of the drone campaigns Washington has pursued since 9/11 into far greater focus.

Imagine if those drone wars going on in Pakistan and Yemen (as well as the United States) had a human face all the time, so that we could understand what it was like to live constantly, in and out of those distant battle zones, with the specter of death. In addition to images of the “al-Qaeda” operatives who the White House wants us to believe are the sole targets of its drone campaigns, we would regularly see photos of innocent victims of drone attacks gathered by human rights groups from their relatives and neighbors. And what about the third group— the military personnel whose lives revolve around killing fields so far away—whose stories, in these years of Washington’s drone assassination campaigns, we’ve just about never heard?

After all, soldiers no longer set sail on ships to journey to distant battlefields for months at a time. Instead, every day, thousands of men and women sign onto their computers at desks on military bases in the continental United States and abroad where they spend hours glued to screens watching the daily lives of people often on the other side of the planet. Occasionally, they get an order from Washington to push a button and vaporize their subjects. It sounds just like—and the comparison has been made often enough—a video game, which can be switched off at the end of a shift, after which those pilots return home to families and everyday life.

And if you believed what little we normally see of them—what, that is, the Air Force has let us see (the CIA part of the drone program being off-limits to news reporting)—that would indeed seem to be the straightforward story of life for our drone warriors. Take Rene Lopez, who in shots of a recent homecoming welcome at Fort Gordon in Georgia appears to be a doting father. Photographed for the local papers on his return from a tour in Afghanistan, the young soldier is seen holding and kissing his infant daughter dressed in a bright pink top. He smiles with delight as the wide-eyed child tries on his military hat.

From an online profile posted to LinkedIn by Lopez last year, we learn that the clean-cut US Army signals intelligence specialist claims to be an actor in the drone war in addition to being a proud parent. To be specific, he says he has been working in the dark arts of hunting and killing “high value targets” using a National Security Agency (NSA) tool known as Gilgamesh.

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The Human Soldiers Behind Obama’s Drone War

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Tim Geithner on Why Obama Passed Over Elizabeth Warren to Head the Consumer Protection Bureau

by hoseawilder7387 Posted on May 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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There is no love lost between Tim Geithner, the former US treasury secretary, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Geithner and Warren memorably clashed during hearings over the $700 billion bank bailout (Warren at the time chaired Congress’ bailout watchdog panel), and many progressives believed that Geithner denied Warren her rightful place as the full-time director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

In his new book, Stress Test, Geithner denies blocking Warren and describes his relationship with the progressive favorite as “complicated.” He praises her “smart and innovative” ideas about consumer protection, which, over dinner in Washington with Warren, he discovers are “more market-oriented, incentive-based, and practical than her detractors realized.” In the same breath, though, Geithner jabs Warren for running her bailout oversight hearings “like made-for-YouTube inquisitions rather than serious inquiries.” (Geithner’s not the only one to point out Warren’s embrace of the viral video clip: Listen to Buzzfeed reporter John Stanton’s comments in this MSNBC roundtable.)

So why did the Obama administration pass over Warren to run the new bureau? Geithner writes, “There was a lot to be said for making Warren the first CFPB director, but one consideration trumped all others: The Senate leadership told the White House there was no chance she could be confirmed.” Warren’s eventual gig—a presidentially-appointed acting director charged with getting the new bureau up and running—was Geithner’s idea, he says:

Chief of staff Mark Patterson and I thought about options, and after a few discussions with Rahm, I proposed that we make Warren the acting director, with responsibility for building the new bureau, while we continued to look for alternative candidates. This would give her a chance to be the public face of consumer protection, which she was exceptionally good at, and the ability to recruit a team of people to the new bureau right away, which she wouldn’t have been allowed to do if she had been in confirmation limbo.

What stands out in Geithner’s retelling is the depth of President Obama’s admiration for Warren, and how much Obama agonized over what to do with Warren and the consumer bureau. The bureau was, after all, her idea. Here’s what Geithner writes:

The President was torn. Progressives were turning Warren into another whose-side-are-you-on litmus test. The head of the National Organization for Women publicly accused me of blocking Warren, calling me a classic Wall Street sexist. Valerie Jarrett, the President’s confidante from Chicago, was pushing hard for Warren, too, and she was worried I would stand in the way. At a meeting with Rahm and Valerie, I told the group that if the President wanted to appoint Warren to run the CFPB, I wouldn’t try to talk him out of it, but everyone in the room knew she had no chance of being confirmed. The president, who almost never called me at home, made an exception on this issue. It was really eating away at him. He had a huge amount of respect for Warren, but he didn’t want an endless confirmation fight, and he was hesitant to nominate someone so divisive that it would undermine the agency’s ability to get up and running, as well as its ability to build broader legitimacy beyond the left.

As soon as Warren got to the CFPB, she began trying to lure away Geithner’s own staffers. “She was unapologetic when my team finally confronted her about it,” he writes, “and you had to respect her determination to get things done.”

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Tim Geithner on Why Obama Passed Over Elizabeth Warren to Head the Consumer Protection Bureau

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This Is What a Holy Shit Moment for Global Warming Looks Like

by PeterAsheqwiq Posted on May 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you truly understand global warming, then you know it’s all about the ice. That’s what matters. Planet Earth has not always had great ice sheets at the poles, of the sort that currently exist atop Greenland and Antarctica. In other periods, much of that water has instead been in liquid form, in the oceans—and the oceans have been much higher.

How much? According to the National Academy of Sciences, the globe’s great ice sheets contain enough frozen water to raise sea levels worldwide by more than 60 meters. That’s about 200 feet. And it makes all the sea level rise that we’ve seen so far due to global warming appear piddly and insignificant.

That’s why scientists have long feared a day like this would come. Two new scientific papers, in the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters, report that major glaciers that are part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appear to have become irrevocably destabilized. The whole process may still play out on the scale of centuries, but due to the particular dynamics of this ice sheet, the collapse of these major glaciers now “appears unstoppable,” according to NASA (whose researchers are behind one of the two studies).

Visualization of Antarctic temperature changes. NASA Earth Observatory

The first study, by researchers at NASA and the University of California-Irvine, uses satellite radar to examine an array of large glaciers along the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica, which collectively contain the equivalent of four feet of sea level rise. The result is the documentation of a “continuous and rapid retreat”—for instance, the Smith and Kohler glaciers have retreated 35 kilometers since 1992—and the researchers say that there is “no major obstacle that would prevent the glaciers from further retreat.” In the NASA press release, the researchers are still more vocal, with one of them noting that these glaciers “have passed the point of no return.”

The other group of researchers, based at the University of Washington, reach similar conclusions with their paper in Science. But they do so by using an computer model to study one of these glaciers in particular: The Thwaites Glacier, pictured above, which contains about two feet of sea level rise and is retreating rapidly. “The simulations indicate that early-stage collapse has begun,” notes their paper. What’s more, the Thwaites Glacier is a “linchpin” for the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet; its rapid collapse would “probably spill over to adjacent catchments, undermining much of West Antarctica.” And considering that the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains enough water to raise sea levels by 10 to 13 feet, that’s a really big deal.

It is, again, important to emphasize that just because these glaciers may have passed the “point of no return” does not mean that dramatic sea level rise happens tomorrow. There is a limit to how fast glaciers and ice sheets can move, and the Science paper emphasizes that the entire process may take several hundred years and possibly as much as a millennium.

In the grand scheme of things, though, the consequence would be a very different planet. And West Antarctica is just the beginning. According to glaciologist and Greenland expert Jason Box, when you compare where we are now to where atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and ocean levels stood in past warm periods of Earth’s history, you can infer that human beings have already set in motion 69 feet of sea level rise.

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This Is What a Holy Shit Moment for Global Warming Looks Like

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The West Antarctic glaciers are breaking up with us

by AllieMcdaniels Posted on May 12, 2014

merlot point

The West Antarctic glaciers are breaking up with us

By

Ed Mandarina

|

Evgeny Kovalev spb

It’s Monday, and you probably wanted to ease into the week with a post about cute animals or something. Instead, today scientists broke the news that the West Antarctic ice sheet is now in irreversible collapse, meaning a likely 10 to 15 foot global sea-level rise in coming centuries.

Before you get cranking on that ark (maybe you can have those cute animals after all!), let’s take a deep breath. There’s still uncertainty about how cataclysmic this particular cataclysm is. New York Times blogger Andy Revkin points out that “collapse” is a relative term in geological affairs. Both sets of researchers behind the two separate studies, upcoming in the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters, agree that we could have a good century or two of continued incremental rise before the melt starts to really speed up. It might take anywhere between 200 and 1,000 years before the ice in question is totally gone and the seas have swallowed all the low-lying land from the Jersey Shore to the Philippines.

But according to this new research, there’s no question that it’s going to happen. An upwelling of warm ocean water has made this ice sheet in western Antarctica, which is the largest cache of grounded ice left in the world, particularly unstable. It already releases as much glacial melt every year as leaked by the whole of Greenland. The tepid upwelling that is causing the trouble is the result of high winds over Antarctica, probably intensified by climate change; atmospheric warming and ozone depletion over the continent can’t have helped either.

NASA/Eric RignotCritical glaciers in Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea, including Thwaites, which scientists have identified as the cork in this proverbial wine bottle. Click to embiggen.

None of this should come as a total shock. Scientists have been predicting the possible collapse of these tricky glaciers for years, most notably glaciologist John Mercer, who in 1968 called the West Antarctica sheet a “uniquely vulnerable and unstable body of ice.”

Now scientists report they have proof that the process is well and truly under way. The main warning sign was an accelerated glacial flow in the past few decades, which suggests that ice loss is happening fast enough it will be impossible to arrest, as the New York Times explains:

At this point, a decrease in the melt rate back to earlier levels would be “too little, too late to stabilize the ice sheet,” said Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington and lead author of the new paper in Science. “There’s no stabilization mechanism.”

We “have passed the point of no return,” affirmed the second study’s lead author, Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at UC Irvine and NASA. In a press conference Monday morning, Rignot invoked the image of wine in a corked bottle. The glaciers, which rest in a scoop of land that dips below sea level, are separated from the Southern Seas by a little bit of ice on the edge of the shelf — the stopper. Once that melts away, there’s little to prevent the remaining ice from flowing out and floating into deeper waters, where it will be exposed to more upwelling warm seawater.

“We can tell that the bottle has been uncorked,” Rignot said in the press conference — giving the sentence a grimmer spin than it tends to get at your average picnic or dinner party. Now it’s just a matter of how fast the wine, a.k.a top vintage Antarctic meltwater, runs out into the oceans. Plus, ice is still streaming off the rest of Antarctica and Greenland, where other glaciers may not be far from chronic instability themselves. The total sea-level rise, whenever it happens, stands to kick us out of our coastal cities once and for all.

All of which has me thinking I could use a glass myself.


Source
Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans as Antarctic Ice Melts, New York Times
Western Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse Has Already Begun, Scientists Warn, The Guardian
The “Unstable” West Antarctic Ice Sheet: A Primer, NASA

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WATCH: Iowa GOP Senate Candidate Still Believes There Were Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq

by CecilaMcKenzie Posted on May 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Iowa state senator and US Senate candidate Joni Ernst captured national attention when her campaign’s first TV ad featured the candidate talking about castrating hogs (a subsequent ad featured Ernst at a gun range, implying that she’d shoot Obamacare to bits). But if the Sarah Palin-approved Republican wants to enter national politics, she may need to brush up on some of her facts. Ernst still thinks Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction when the US invaded Iraq, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary.

On Friday, Ernst sat down with the Des Moines Register‘s editorial board for a wide-ranging interview. Ernst served in the Iraq War in 2003, “running convoys through Kuwait and into southern Iraq” according to her campaign website. She defended that war during the interview, saying that the intelligence at the time offered compelling reason to displace Saddam. “Obviously the president thought there was actionable intelligence, she said, “so as an Iraqi War veteran I stand beside that and I’ll stand beside every other soldier I served with in believing we were on a clearly defined mission to go into Iraq.” (Her response in the video above starts at the 23:20 mark.)

Why is Ernst so willing to support Bush’s decision to invade? She hints that she has inside knowledge that there were, indeed, still weapons of mass destruction when the war began. “We don’t know that there were weapons on the ground when we went in,” she said, “however, I do have reason to believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” When a Register reporter quizzed her on what information she has, Ernst said “my husband served in Saudi Arabia as the Army Central Command sergeant major for a year and that’s a hot-button topic in that area.”

Of course, US troops never managed to find any such weapons after the invasion. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld have all conceded that the initial intelligence was flawed.

When asked for clarification, a spokesperson for Ernst’s campaign narrowly walked back her comments over e-mail: “Her point was that we know for a fact that Iraq had chemical weapons in the past, and had even used them. We also know none were found while our troops were on the ground, despite the intelligence at the time. What happened to those weapons she doesn’t know.”

Ernst currently holds a slight lead in the polls in advance of the June 3 primary. If she managed to win the general election—Democrat Bruce Braley is the front-runner for the open seat—Ernst would be the first woman elected to federal office from Iowa.

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WATCH: Iowa GOP Senate Candidate Still Believes There Were Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq

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Quote of the Day: Happy Mother’s Day!

by Sheila23Nhgcdkm Posted on May 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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I had always wanted to be a mother. It’s the first thing I said to your dad. We met at a party in LA in February, 1983. I was a producer at CBS. “What do you want to do with your career at CBS?” he asked me. And I said, “Nothing, I want to get married and have children.” And he said, “Me too. Let’s get married.” And we got married like one month later and now we have you three kids. If we hadn’t been this crazy, you guys wouldn’t exist! So be nice to the baby boomer generation.

—Jeramie Dreyfuss, my mom and the best actress ever to play a psycho killer in a deeply disturbing early-70s horror film. (Happy Mother’s Day, mom! I love you.)

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms! You guys are the best.

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Quote of the Day: Happy Mother’s Day!

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This Video of Michael Sam & His Boyfriend Finding Out He Has Been Drafted Is Amazing

by FeliciaEDU Posted on May 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Earlier today, Michael Sam received a really great phone call. He had become the first openly-gay player to be drafted in NFL history. Cameras were present as he and his boyfriend found out the news together. Watch them share a kiss and beautiful embrace as they learn of the historic decision by the St. Louis Rams:

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This Video of Michael Sam & His Boyfriend Finding Out He Has Been Drafted Is Amazing

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Michael Sam Just Became the First Openly-Gay Football Player to Be Drafted in NFL History

by TabathaAndrus Posted on May 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Boom.

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Michael Sam Just Became the First Openly-Gay Football Player to Be Drafted in NFL History

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Watch This Amazing Sesame Street Video About Having a Parent in Prison

by EnriquetaObryan Posted on May 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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More than three percent of children in the United States have a parent behind bars. These kids must travel hundreds of miles to visit their parents, and one in ten will end up incarcerated themselves before adulthood. But despite this reality, only six states have child welfare policies to address the needs of kids with incarcerated parents. Thank goodness for Sesame Street. Last year, the show shed some light on the challenges these kids face through a new initiative: “Little Children, Big Issues: Incarceration.” Watch as Sesame Street characters discuss the difficulties of growing up with a mom or dad in prison:

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Watch This Amazing Sesame Street Video About Having a Parent in Prison

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What It’s Like to Visit Your Mom in Prison on Mother’s Day

by HartkePoundstone568 Posted on May 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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My foster sister is in prison. Her four children see her briefly once a month, as part of a 368-mile round-trip that takes up their entire Saturday. (Before she was transferred last month, the trip measured 404 miles). She has missed so many milestones and special events in her children’s lives: first days of kindergarten, Christmases, birthdays, Halloweens, first school dances. More than three percent of American children have a parent behind bars; so many that even Sesame Street thought to address the issue in a heartbreaking video and a recent initiative. With Mother’s Day upon us, I have to wonder: As kids grow up, what’s it like when the person they love most is locked away?

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What It’s Like to Visit Your Mom in Prison on Mother’s Day

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