Category Archives: Politics

Why are only some faiths sacrosanct?

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I’ve always agreed with H.L. Mencken that “you should respect the other guy’s religion, but only to the extent that you respect his view that his wife is beautiful and his children smart”. (“I believe”, he wrote somewhere, “that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind – that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking”. Amen.)

So the plight of believers who get all worked up because someone has offended their religious sensibilities leaves me cold. I expect the police to prosecute, in due course, the fanatics who were waving placards about beheading their fellow-citizens (though I think the police were wise not to arrest them on the spot that day), and I will be very pissed off if they don’t. But Nick Cohen makes an interesting point in his column today — which deals with the way our mass media blithely offend Catholic and Jewish sensibilities but back off when it comes to our Muslim brethren. “You can’t be a little bit free”, he observes. “If you are not willing to offend Islamists who may kill you, what excuse do you have for offending Catholics, the families of murdered children and British troops who won’t?” Precisely. No wonder people conclude that violence — or the threat of it — is the only thing that really works. That’s not to say that fear of being murdered is not a rational sentiment. But it does rather expose the contemporary cant about the importance of a ‘free’ press — it’s free only when there’s little real danger.

I haven’t seen the offending Danish cartoons, btw (because they weren’t published in the British media, as far as I can tell), but the current issue of Private Eye prints a useful textual description of each. (Only in the print edition, alas.)

Update: Lots of helpful emails, pointing to locations on the Web where the cartoons, or accounts of them, are posted. There’s a good Wikipedia page on the whole business. Many thanks to Werner, Ben and others for the leads.

Why Salon published the new Abu Ghraib photos

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Salon has published the new set of Abu Ghraib prison photographs (in contrast with most of the US media). Here’s an excerpt from the editors’ explanation of their decision:

Abu Ghraib cannot be allowed to fade away like some half-forgotten domestic political controversy, which may have prompted newsmagazine covers at the time, but now seems as irrelevant as the 2002 elections. Abu Ghraib is not an issue of partisan sound bites or refighting the decision to invade Iraq. Grotesque violations of every value that America proclaims occurred within the walls of that prison. These abuses were carried out by soldiers who wore our flag on their uniforms and apparently believed that Americans here at home would approve of their conduct. Rather than hiding what they did out of shame, they commemorated their sadism with a visual record.

That is why Salon is willing to publish these troubling photographs, even as we are ashamed to live in a country that somehow came to accept that torture and prisoner abuse were simply business as usual — something that occurs while a sergeant catches up on his paperwork.

Chinese chickens — contd.

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There’s a wonderfully ironic blast in Good Morning Silicon Valley today about the Chinese censorship issue. Here’s a sample:

Given a choice, representatives of four big tech companies probably wouldn’t be spending the day sitting in front of a congressional panel getting their eyebrows singed by accusations that they consort with torturers. But there they sat today — the crash-test dummies sent by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco to take the hit for their employers’ concessions to repression as the price of doing business in China — as Rep. Tom Lantos, ranking Democrat on the International Relations Committee, unloaded on them: “Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace. I simply don’t understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night.” And Republican Rep. Chris Smith, chairman of the House subcommittee on global human rights, produced a quote that should be engraved on the entrance of every stock exchange: “Cooperation with tyranny should not be embraced for the sake of profits.”

The responses from the witnesses was [sic] familiar: The “lesser evil” argument (Google’s Elliot Schrage: “The requirements of doing business in China include self-censorship — something that runs counter to Google’s most basic values and commitments as a company. … [but Google entered the market believing it] will make a meaningful, though imperfect, contribution to the overall expansion of access to information in China.”) and the “little us” argument (Yahoo’s Michael Callahan: “These issues are larger than any one company, or any one industry.’ … We appeal to the U.S. government to do all it can to help us provide beneficial services to Chinese citizens lawfully and in a way consistent with our shared values.”).

For Rep. Smith, that just doesn’t cut it. “It’s an active partnership with both the disinformation campaign and the secret police, and the secret police in China are among the most brutal on the planet,” he said. “I don’t know if these companies understand that or they’re naive about it, whether they’re witting or unwitting. But it’s been a tragic collaboration. There are people in China being tortured courtesy of these corporations.”

I particularly liked the headline on the piece: “But we’re only giant, powerful tech companies … how could we possibly make a difference?” And the phrase “crash-test dummies”. Must make a note of it. Might come in useful sometime.

Chinese chickens coming home to roost in Washington

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The NYT has an interesting report on the fallout in Washington of the capitulation of Yahoo, Google, Cisco and Microsoft to the requirements of the Chinese regime.

Now the companies are being pressed in Washington for fuller answers about their business practices in China and the implications for human rights. That pressure will escalate today when the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations questions officials of the four technology companies, along with other witnesses critical of their activities.

The subcommittee’s chairman, Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, plans to introduce legislation by week’s end that would restrict an Internet company’s ability to censor or filter basic political or religious terms — even if that puts the company at odds with local laws in the countries where it now operates.

Mr. Smith’s legislation, called the Global Online Freedom Act, however, would render much of what the Internet companies are currently doing in China illegal.

Among the act’s provisions is the establishment of an Office of Global Internet Freedom, which would establish standards for Internet companies operating abroad. In addition to prohibiting companies from filtering out certain political or religious terms, it would require them to disclose to users any sort of filtering they undertake.

Separately, the State Department announced the formation of a new Global Internet Freedom Task Force yesterday, charged with examining efforts by foreign governments “to restrict access to political content and the impact of such censorship efforts on U.S. companies.”

I bet those pesky Chinese are quaking in their boots.

The NYT report also has some interesting further information about the extent to which Yahoo has compromised itself:

The company, which has been providing Web services in China since 1999, has been criticized for filtering the results of its China-based search engine. But its bigger problems began last fall when human rights advocates revealed that in 2004, a Chinese division of the company had turned over to Chinese authorities information on a journalist, Shi Tao, using an anonymous Yahoo e-mail account. Mr. Shi, who had sent a government missive on Tiananmen Square anniversary rites to foreign colleagues, was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Last week, Reporters Without Borders, a group based in Paris, revealed that a Chinese division of Yahoo had provided information to authorities that contributed to the conviction in 2003 of Li Zhi, a former civil servant who had criticized local officials online. Mr. Li is serving eight years in prison.

Brown study

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As regular readers will recall, I’ve thought from the outset that David Cameron’s ascendancy spelled big trouble for New Labour if they continue with the plan of anointing Gordon Brown as Tony Blair’s successor. Last week’s catastrophic by-election defeat in Dunfermline has really underlined that. Andrew Rawnsley writes about the fallout in today’s Observer…

The difference on this occasion is that bad news for Blair is not good news for Brown. It has been repeatedly said that the byelection was in the Chancellor’s backyard. Actually, it is more like his living room. The Chancellor’s Scottish home is in the seat. If he ever has a problem which needs the attention of his constituency MP, he will now have to ring a Lib Dem to help sort it out. The Chancellor regards himself as the king of Scottish politics. His repeated interventions in the byelection were an investment of his personal political capital.

It is going too far to say that this was a referendum on Gordon Brown, but it has to be wounding. Worse, it raises the question that he most dreads: if he cannot secure a Labour victory in his native fiefdom, how attractive will Prime Minister Brown be to the rest of the United Kingdom? If he can’t woo them in Fife, what are his prospects of swinging it in southern England?

As I said, boredom is the problem. The British electorate has a longish attention span, but Labour are reaching the end of it. If they plump for Brown, they are doomed. Must see if I can put some money on this hunch.

Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him

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The only surprise would be if anyone were surprised by this NYT story.

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. “They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public,” he said.

Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. “That’s not the way we operate here at NASA,” Mr. Acosta said. “We promote openness and we speak with the facts.”

He said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen.

Mr. Acosta said other reasons for requiring press officers to review interview requests were to have an orderly flow of information out of a sprawling agency and to avoid surprises. “This is not about any individual or any issue like global warming,” he said. “It’s about coordination.”

Ho, ho. Like hell it is. The main co-ordination going on there is NASA’a top brass trying to keep on the right side of the White House.

The latest efforts to muzzle Hansen, according to the Times, came after a speech he gave on December 6, 2004, at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth “a different planet.”

The administration’s policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.

After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be “dire consequences” if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.

More… And while we’re on the subject of the Bushies’ views on climate change, an eagle-eyed reader sends a link to a report in today’s Guardian which opens:

A Nasa public affairs officer who worked on George Bush’s re-election campaign and was linked to a campaign to stifle discussion by space agency scientists on global warming, has resigned. George Deutsch, 24, was given a job in the Nasa press office last year after working on Mr Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign. He resigned after it emerged he had not been awarded the journalism degree he claimed on his CV, the New York Times reported.

Apple-pie protest

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Nice, properly barbed, piece by Tom Zeller in the New York Times about the way US technology companies are caving in to the Chinese government’s repressive demands.

Western technology companies have only themselves to blame if users in the free world quickly ask when Shi Tao, the journalist whose name Yahoo gave to Chinese authorities and who subsequently was sentenced to a 10-year prison term, will be released. Or that people use what-ifs to ponder the moral limits of saying that local law is local law.

That’s partly because it is only recently that any of the players have made any genuine efforts at transparency in their dealings with China.

Two weeks ago, Google took the bold step of plainly admitting that it was entering the Chinese market with a censored search product, tweaked according to government specifications. Then last week, Microsoft announced new policies that would enable it to honor a government’s demand to shut down a citizen’s blog (as happened five weeks ago with a popular MSN blogger in Beijing) while still keeping the blog visible outside of China.

But these are small victories, said Julien Pain of the group Reporters Without Borders, which tracks Internet censorship in China, not least because the companies “seem now to accept censorship as a given, and have simply decided to be transparent about it.”

Still, to many, it signaled progress.

And yet all four American companies with P.R. baggage in China — Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft and now Google — were no-shows at a hearing last Wednesday of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. At least three of the companies submitted written statements defending their activities in China, but their absence only added to their image problem, as headlines like “Tech Firms Snub Feds” and “Google Stiffs Congressional Caucus” bounced around the blogosphere.

Later in the piece, Zeller ponders the question of whether Google in particular might pay a price (in the West) for its capitulation.

IceRocket is one of several search alternatives listed at NoLuv4Google.org, which is run by a group called Students for a Free Tibet. Clusty.com, a search site developed by several Carnegie Mellon computer scientists, is another. Clusty proudly states that it “never censors search results” or excludes material “that would be objectionable to governments or would be unlawful in unelected, nondemocratic regimes.”

In an e-mail message, Mark Cuban, IceRocket’s founder, put it more bluntly: “IceRocket doesn’t and won’t censor. We index more than one million Chinese-language blogs. No chance we censor or block anything in this lifetime.”

Even David Pinto, who owns the popular — and wholly apolitical — site BaseballMusings.com, has ceased taking income from Google ads. “I was no longer comfortable taking money from them,” he said. That’s the sort of apple-pie protest that American companies can’t ignore.

The House of Representatives Subcommittee on Global Human Rights is going to hold hearings on this interesting topic on February 15. Google & Co will have to show up for this because the commitee has the power to subpoena them.

Some grown-up questions for Google

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Terrific piece by Becky Hogge on openDemocracy.net

Since going public in August 2004, [Google] has released over a dozen products, including Google Maps, Google Web Accelerator, Google Homepage, Google Sitemaps, Google Earth, Google Talk, Google Desktop, Google Base, Google Book Search, Google Video and Google Pack. So what has Google been up to in China during those eighteen months?

One clue might lie in the feature of google.cn that sets it apart from the other global search providers, like MSN and Yahoo!, operating inside China. This feature – much lauded in the official statements given by Google on the day of the launch – is that google.cn tells its customers when their search results have been “filtered”. How Google got that concession from the Chinese authorities might go some way to explaining why it took so long to release google.cn. But the question then has to be, what did Google offer in return?