The Washington Post opinion section recently announced that it has hired seven new columnists. One of them is Jim Geraghty, a longtime National Review writer with a brain the size and power of a AAA battery.
I’ve been fascinated by Geraghty ever since a post he wrote in 2006 about the Iraq/weapons of mass destruction issue. To understand how badly Geraghty went astray here, you need some background that he apparently lacked.
I have to emphasize that this background was available in 2006 to anyone who 1) could read English, 2) had a library card and internet connection, and 3) possessed enough intellectual capacity to eat breakfast by putting cereal in their mouth rather than into their ears. It was quality number 3 where Geraghty fell short.
As of 1981, Saddam Hussein’s government had only vague and unorganized ambitions to build nuclear weapons. On June 7 that year, Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak reactor near Baghdad. This would later be hailed by The Atlantic’s current editor Jeffrey Goldberg as “halting — forever, as it turned out — Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.”
In reality, the Osirak bombing generated Saddam’s serious nuclear ambitions. The Osirak reactor was badly suited to create weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. But — as Iraqi scientists unanimously said after the 2003 U.S. invasion — the Iraqi vulnerability demonstrated by the Israeli attack caused Saddam to immediately order the building of a real nuclear weapons program.
This program made significant strides during the 1980s, thanks in part to $5 billion in funding from Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, concerned by the rise of Shia Iran, wanted to support the creation of a “Sunni bomb” and to eventually take possession of some of the nuclear devices if Iraq succeeded. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were well aware of this but ignored it because Iraq was then seen as a U.S. ally.
By the time Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, its nuclear weapons program was as little as a year away from constructing a functioning nuclear bomb. However, the inspections conducted by the United Nations after the 1991 Gulf War totally dismantled the Iraqi nuclear effort. As the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group reported after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Saddam “ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program.”
For obvious reasons, this conclusion made George W. Bush’s super fans unhappy. The justification for Operation Iraqi Freedom had been the threat posed by Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction. Wasn’t it possible that the CIA and the entire U.S. military had missed Iraq’s huge arsenal of WMD? In fact, didn’t it seem suspicious that these agents of the deep state were so unanimous in their conclusions that Iraq had nothing?
The solution, congressional Republicans decided, was to “leverage the internet” by putting online the tons of Iraqi government documents captured by the U.S. and its allies. Then the right’s sleuths could comb through them and uncover the secrets that surely lay therein. After Republicans on the Hill proposed legislation requiring this, the Bush administration uploaded the material to a website named Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal.
There turned out to be just one problem. The Iraqi government had written extensive reports for the U.N. about their nuclear program. As the New York Times stated in a November 3, 2006, story, these documents included “detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.” And this was now available to anyone on earth with access to the internet. Whoops! The U.S. government quickly took the entire website down.
Here’s how the Times described what had happened. Note in particular the sentence at the end:
Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.
Now we come to Geraghty’s post in reaction to the Times story. Here’s what he wrote:
I’m sorry, did the New York Times just put on the front page that IRAQ HAD A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM AND WAS PLOTTING TO BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB?
This EXCITING ALL-CAPS BOLD QUESTION deserves an EXCITING ALL-CAPS BOLD ANSWER. Here it is:
NO.
Anyone with any curiosity about the saga of Iraq and its nuclear weapons program would have understood what this sentence — “Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away” — meant. This was not declaring that Iraq was just a year away from building a nuclear weapon right before the 2003 war, but that it had been a year away 13 years earlier, in 1990. What the Times was saying wasn’t any kind of revelation; it was something that had been known since the early 1990s.
This is the first funny aspect of Geraghty’s glitchy old noodle. What really happened with Iraq and nuclear weapons is a fascinating tale of international intrigue and brazen government lies, by the U.S. government in particular. Yet he’d never bothered to learn anything whatsoever about it, presumably because the reality would have made him sad. Meanwhile, he did not allow the fact that his mind was a completely blank slate to stop him from having strong opinions about this subject and expressing them before all the world.
The second funny part is that Geraghty didn’t have to know anything about this to realize that he was obviously wrong. The question of whether Iraq had a nuclear weapons program had recently been the biggest political issue on the entire planet. Even knowing nothing at all, Geraghty should have been able to figure out that the Times probably wouldn’t reveal the total vindication of George W. Bush and his war in one confusingly written sentence in paragraph 14 of a story about something else. Likewise, it seems unlikely that the Bush administration would have failed to mention that they’d been proven completely right.
This brings us to the third funny thing about Geraghty and his frayed dendrites. He took his complete ignorance and used it as a foundation on which to build a gigantic skyscraper of addled conspiracism. The New York Times, you see, intended to make Bush look bad, but instead they “just tore the heart out of the antiwar argument, and they are apparently completely oblivious to it.” Also, this clearly means that Iraq was in fact seeking yellowcake in Niger.
This immediate leap to conspiracies is the bane of conservative thought and as common as dirt. If you don’t understand basic facts about the world, you’ll inevitably fill in the blanks to force everything to make “sense.” E.g., Climate scientists are all working together to keep the sweet grant money flowing, or Anthony Fauci wants us to get vaccinated because it saps our precious bodily fluids.
Geraghty seems never to have mentioned his extraordinary discovery again. Seventeen years later, his first column for the Post indicates he’s still speeding down the Boulevard of Thought at his standard two miles an hour.
In the column Geraghty vociferously praises the smarts of Hung Cao, a GOP congressional candidate in Virginia. Cao is perhaps best known for declaring, in response to a question about gun control right after the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, that “most people get bludgeoned to death and stabbed to death than they get shot.” In reality, guns are used in almost 80 percent of U.S. homicides. You can see why Geraghty saw someone whose skull is filled with mashed potatoes and recognized a kindred spirit.
In any case, the Post’s readers will now be treated to more of the Geraghty oeuvre. The Post’s Editorial Page Editor David Shipley said in the paper’s announcement that the Post had been striving to reach “an even broader readership.” Geraghty’s hiring demonstrates that they absolutely mean this.
Enlarge / A still image from the short film Dog and Boy,, which uses image synthesis to help generate background artwork. (credit: Netflix)
Over the past year, generative AI has kicked off a wave of existential dread over potential machine-fueled job loss not seen since the advent of the industrial revolution. On Tuesday, Netflix reinvigorated that fear when it debuted a short film called Dog and Boy that utilizes AI image synthesis to help generate its background artwork.
Directed by Ryotaro Makihara, the three-minute animated short follows the story of a boy and his robotic dog through cheerful times, although the story soon takes a dramatic turn toward the post-apocalyptic. Along the way, it includes lush backgrounds apparently created as a collaboration between man and machine, credited to "AI (+Human)" in the end credit sequence.
A still image from the short film Dog and Boy that features AI-assisted background art. [credit:
Netflix ]
In the announcement tweet, Netflix cited an industry labor shortage as the reason for using the image synthesis technology:
As many as 29,000 network storage devices manufactured by Taiwan-based QNAP are vulnerable to hacks that are easy to carry out and give unauthenticated users on the Internet complete control, a security firm has warned.
The vulnerability, which carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10, came to light on Monday, when QNAP issued a patch and urged users to install it. Tracked as CVE-2022-27596, the vulnerability makes it possible for remote hackers to perform a SQL injection, a type of attack that targets web applications that use the Structured Query Language. SQL injection vulnerabilities are exploited by entering specially crafted characters or scripts into the search fields, login fields, or URLs of a buggy website. The injections allow for the modifying, stealing, or deleting of data or the gaining of administrative control over the systems running the vulnerable apps.
QNAP’s advisory on Monday said that network-attached storage devices running QTS versions before 5.0.1.2234 and QuTS Hero versions prior to h5.0.1.2248 were vulnerable. The post also provided instructions for updating to the patched versions.
( Middle East Monitor ) – “We are anonymous because we fear retaliation.” This text was part of a letter signed by 500 Google employees last October, in which they decried their company’s direct support for the Israeli government and military.
In their letter, the signatories protested a $1.2 billion contract between Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Israeli government which provides cloud services for the Israeli military and government that “allows for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land”.
This is called Project Nimbus. The project was announced in 2018 and went into effect in May 2021, in the first week of the Israeli war on besieged Gaza, which killed over 250 Palestinians and wounded many more.
The Google employees were not only disturbed by the fact that, by entering into this agreement with Israel, their company became directly involved in the Israeli occupation of Palestine, but were equally outraged by the “disturbing pattern of militarization” that saw similar contracts between Google – Amazon, Microsoft and other tech giants – with the US military, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other policing agencies.
In an article published in The Nation newspaper in June, three respected US academics have revealed the financial component of Amazon’s decision to get involved in such an immoral business, arguing that such military-linked contracts have “become a major source of profit for Amazon.” It is estimated, according to the article, that AWS alone was responsible for 63 per cent of Amazon’s profits in 2020.
The maxim ‘people before profit’ cannot be any more appropriate than in the Palestinian context, and neither Google nor Amazon can claim ignorance. The Israeli occupation of Palestine has been in place for decades, and numerous United Nations resolutions have condemned Israel for its occupation, colonial expansion and violence against Palestinians. If all of that was not enough to wane the enthusiasm of Google and Amazon to engage in projects that specifically aimed at protecting Israel’s ‘national security’ – read: continued occupation of Palestine – a damning report by Israel’s largest human rights group, B’tselem should have served as that wake up call.
B’tselem declared Israel an apartheid state in January 2021. The international rights group, Human Rights Watch (HRW) followed suit in April, also denouncing the Israeli apartheid state. That was only a few weeks before Project Nimbus was declared. It was as if Google and Amazon were purposely declaring their support of apartheid. The fact that the project was signed during the Israeli war on Gaza speaks volumes about the two tech giants’ complete disregards of international law, human rights and the very freedom of the Palestinian people.
It gets worse. On March 15, hundreds of Google workers signed a petition protesting the firing of one of their colleagues, Ariel Koren, who was active in generating the October letter in protest of Project Nimbus. Koren was the product marketing manager at Google for Education, and has worked for the company for six years. However, she was the kind of employee who was not welcomed by the likes of Google, as the company is now directly involved with various military and security projects.
“For me, as a Jewish employee of Google, I feel a deep sense of intense moral responsibility,” she said in a statement last October. “When you work in a company, you have the right to be accountable and responsible for the way that your labor is actually being used,” she added.
Google quickly retaliated to that seemingly outrageous statement. The following month, her manager “presented her with an ultimatum: move to Brazil or lose her position.” Eventually, she was driven out of the company.
Koren was not the first Google – or Amazon – employee to be fired for standing up for a good cause, nor would, sadly, be the last. In this age of militarism, surveillance, unwarranted facial recognition and censorship, speaking one’s mind and daring to fight for human rights and other basic freedoms is no longer an option.
Amazon’s warehouses can be as bad, or even worse than a typical sweatshop. Last March, and after a brief denial, Amazon apologized for forcing its workers to pee in water bottles – and worse – so that their managers may fulfill their required quotas. The apology followed direct evidence provided by the investigative journalism website, The Intercept. However, the company which stands accused of numerous violations of worker rights – including its engagement in ‘union busting’ – is not expected to reverse course any time soon, especially when so much profits are at stake.
But profits generated from market monopoly, mistreatment of workers or other misconducts are different from profits generated from contributing directly to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Though human rights violations should be shunned everywhere, regardless of their contexts, Israel’s war on the Palestinian people, now with the direct help of such companies, remains one of the gravest injustices that continues to scar the consciousness of humankind. No amount of Google justification or Amazon rationalization can change the fact that they are facilitating Israeli war crimes in Palestine.
To be more precise, according toThe Nation, the Google-Amazon cloud service will help Israel expand its illegal Jewish settlements by “supporting data for the Israel Land Authority (ILA), the government agency that manages and allocates state land.” These settlements, which are repeatedly condemned by the international community, are built on Palestinian land and are directly linked to the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
According to the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, Project Nimbus is the “most lucrative tender issued by Israel in recent years.” The Project, which has ignited a “secretive war” involving top Israeli army generals – all vying for a share in the profit – has also whetted the appetite of many other international tech companies, all wanting to be part of Israel’s technology drive, with the ultimate aim of keeping Palestinians entrapped, occupied and oppressed.
This is precisely why the Palestinian boycott movement is absolutely critical as it targets these international companies, which are migrating to Israel in search for profits. Israel, on the contrary, should be boycotted, not enabled, sanctioned and not rewarded. While profit generation is understandably the main goal of companies like Google and Amazon, this goal can be achieved without necessarily requiring the subjugation of a whole people, who are currently the victims of the world’s last remaining apartheid regime.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.
Enlarge / The Moon is safe from Falcon 9 rockets. (credit: NASA)
About three weeks ago, Ars Technica first reported that astronomers were tracking the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket and were increasingly confident that it would strike the Moon on March 4.
This story set off a firestorm of media activity. Much of this coverage criticized SpaceX for failing to properly dispose of the second stage of its Falcon 9 rocket after the launch of NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory mission, or DSCOVR, in 2015. The British tabloids, in particular, outdid themselves. Even the genteel European Space Agency tut-tutted, noting that it takes care to preserve enough fuel to put spent rocket stages into stable orbits around the Sun.
However, it turns out we were all wrong. A Falcon 9 rocket is not going to, in fact, strike the Moon next month. Instead, it's probably a Chinese rocket.
( Human Rights Watch ) – The Syrian and Russian armed forces’ repeated attacks on civilian infrastructure in Idlib in northwest Syria were apparent war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Dozens of unlawful air and ground strikes on hospitals, schools, and markets from April 2019 to March 2020 killed hundreds of civilians. The attacks seriously impaired the rights to health, education, food, water, and shelter, triggering mass displacement.
Syrian and Russian Strikes on Civilian Infrastructure
The 167-page report, “‘Targeting Life in Idlib’: Syrian and Russian Strikes on Civilian Infrastructure,” details abuses by Syrian and Russian armed forces during the 11-month military campaign to retake Idlib governorate and surrounding areas, among the last held by anti-government armed groups. The report examines the abusive military strategy in which the Syrian-Russian alliance repeatedly violated the laws of war against the 3 million civilians there, many displaced by fighting elsewhere in the country. It names 10 senior Syrian and Russian civilian and military officials who may be implicated in war crimes as a matter of command responsibility: they knew or should have known about the abuses and took no effective steps to stop them or punish those responsible.
“The Syrian-Russian alliance strikes on Idlib’s hospitals, schools, and markets showed callous disregard for civilian life,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “The repeated unlawful attacks appear part of a deliberate military strategy to destroy civilian infrastructure and force out the population, making it easier for the Syrian government to retake control.”
Human Rights Watch documented 46 air and ground attacks, including the use of cluster munitions, that directly hit or damaged civilian objects and infrastructure in Idlib in violation of the laws of war. The strikes killed at least 224 civilians and wounded 561. These were only a fraction of the total attacks during that time in Idlib and surrounding areas. The offensive displaced 1.4 million people, most in the final months of the operation.
How five researchers exposed the abusive military strategy behind repeated attacks on civilians in northern Syria — without ever visiting the sites. Explore a new interactive feature and learn how we reached the truth.
Human Rights Watch interviewed over 100 victims and witnesses of the 46 attacks, as well as healthcare and rescue workers, teachers, local authorities, and experts on the Syrian and Russian militaries. Human Rights Watch also examined dozens of satellite images and over 550 photographs and videos taken at the attack sites, as well as logs of flight spotters. Human Rights Watch provided a summary of its findings and questions to the Syrian and Russian governments but has not received a response.
The documented strikes, most in and around four urban areas – Ariha, Idlib City, Jisr al-Shughour, and Maarat al-Nu’man – damaged 12 healthcare facilities and 10 schools, forcing them to shut down, in some cases permanently. The attacks also damaged at least 5 markets, 4 displaced people’s camps, 4 residential neighborhoods, 2 commercial areas, and a prison, church, stadium, and nongovernmental organization office.
Human Rights Watch found no evidence of military objectives, including personnel or materiel, in the vicinity at the time of any of the attacks, and no residents interviewed knew of any advance warning. The overwhelming majority of attacks were far from active fighting between Syrian government forces and anti-government armed groups.
The repeated attacks on civilian infrastructure in populated areas in which there was no apparent military objective suggests that these unlawful attacks were deliberate. The attacks appear intended to deprive civilians of the means to sustain themselves and to force them to flee, or to instill terror in the population, Human Rights Watch said.
A resident of Idlib City, Ayman Assad, described the impact of the airstrikes: “We are terrified. I don’t feel safe at my place of work, and at the same time I am constantly worried about my family, especially my two children who are going to school every day. Schools, markets, homes, hospitals, everything is a target. They are targeting life in Idlib.”
Most of the attacks documented appeared to involve explosive weapons with wide-area effects in populated areas. The use of such weapons in populated areas can indiscriminately kill and wound large numbers of civilians, and damage and destroy civilian objects and infrastructure. They also have reverberating effects – disrupting essential services, such as health care, education, and access to food and shelter. Long-term impacts include serious psychological harm to the people affected. Warring parties should avoid the use of these weapons in populated areas, Human Rights Watch said.
Prior to a ceasefire in March, government forces regained control of nearly half the territory in and around Idlib, including hundreds of depopulated towns and villages. Since then, some people have returned to areas still controlled by anti-government armed groups, where they found a decimated infrastructure and limited access to food, water, shelter, health care, and education. The Covid-19 pandemic has placed the area’s destroyed healthcare system under immense strain, further imperiling civilians.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron played a key role in getting Turkey, Russia, and Syria to agree to a ceasefire.
Any resumption of fighting would expose civilians to renewed attacks from explosive weapons and the added risk of Covid-19, possibly triggering mass displacement with catastrophic humanitarian consequences. Displaced people could seek to cross Syria’s northern border, where Turkish forces have previously pushed back, shot, and forcibly returned asylum seekers, Human Rights Watch said.
International humanitarian law, or the laws of war, requires all warring parties to direct attacks on military objectives, avoid harming civilians or civilian objects, and not carry out attacks that cause indiscriminate or disproportionate civilian harm. Populations also remain protected by international human rights law, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which protects the rights to health, education, and an adequate standard of living.
Given the deadlock within the United Nations Security Council, the General Assembly should adopt a resolution or statement calling on its member states to impose targeted sanctions on those civilian and military commanders credibly implicated in war crimes, crimes against humanity, or other serious violations committed. Concerned governments should pursue criminal cases under the principle of universal jurisdiction and impose unilateral targeted sanctions against commanders and officials implicated in war crimes, including as a matter of command responsibility.
To address the humanitarian situation, particularly in light of the pandemic, the Security Council should reauthorize cross-border aid deliveries across all three previously authorized border crossings in the northwest and northeast. If the Security Council proves unable to reauthorize cross-border deliveries due to the threat of veto by Russia, the General Assembly should pass a resolution to support the UN continuing cross-border deliveries to areas not under the Syrian government’s control.
“Concerted international efforts are needed to demonstrate that there are consequences for unlawful attacks, to deter future atrocities, and to show that no one can elude accountability for grave crimes because of their rank or position,” Roth said. “As long as impunity reigns, so too will the specter of renewed unlawful attacks and their devastating human toll.”
