Guantanamo inmate sent to Algeria after almost 20 years

IMAGE SOURCE,REUTERS

Image caption,

The US says 37 detainees remain - including 18 eligible for transfer - at Guantanamo Bay

Guantanamo Bay inmate Sufiyan Barhoumi has been repatriated to Algeria, US officials say, after spending nearly 20 years at the detention facility.

He was captured at a safehouse in Pakistan with a top al-Qaeda member in 2002, and accused of taking part in a plan to bomb the US.

But the US Department of Defense said his detention was no longer considered necessary.

It said Algeria had given assurances that he would be treated humanely.

In a statement, the department added that US authorities recommended that Mr Barhoumi could be sent back to his native country "subject to security... assurance".

"The United States appreciates the willingness of Algeria, and other partners to support ongoing US efforts toward a deliberate and thorough process focused on responsibly reducing the detainee population and ultimately closing of the Guantanamo Bay facility," the statement said.

The department provided no further details about Mr Barhoumi.

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Algeria has not publicly commented on the issue.

With the latest release, 37 detainees remain - including 18 eligible for transfer - at Guantanamo Bay, which is part of a US naval base complex in south-eastern Cuba.

Since 2002, the detention facility has been used to hold what the US describes as captured unlawful combatants during America's war on terror.

Pakistan's Embattled PM Repeats Claim That U.S. Is Trying To Oust Him
April 02, 2022
By RFE/RL

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan (file photo)

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has repeated his claims that the United States is behind efforts to remove him from office and said he might not accept the results of a no-confidence vote in parliament.

"The move to oust me is a blatant interference in domestic politics by the United States," Khan told a select group of foreign journalists in Islamabad on April 2, a day before parliament is scheduled to debate a no-confidence motion against him.

"How can I accept the result when the entire process is discredited?" Khan said. "Democracy functions on moral authority -- what moral authority is left after this connivance?"

The comments came after Khan announced on April 1 that his government had handed an official protest to the U.S. Embassy.

Earlier in the week he said the alleged conspiracy against him was the result of disappointment over his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on February 25, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine.

While addressing the nation on March 31, Khan referred to an "official document" Pakistan had received that was evidence of a conspiracy to remove him from office. After initially mentioning the United States, he later said the document was "not from America” but from “a foreign country I can't name.”

The document, Khan said, "says we will forgive Pakistan if Imran Khan loses this no-confidence vote. But if it fails Pakistan will have to face tough time."

Khan's government later described the document as a formal letter from a "senior official of a foreign country to Pakistan's Ambassador in the said country in a formal meeting."

Local media have reported the message was in a briefing letter from Pakistan's ambassador to Washington recording a senior U.S. official telling him they felt relations would be better if Khan left office.

Addressing the allegations on March 31, U.S. State Department Ned Price said that "there is no truth to them," and that the United States supports "Pakistan's constitutional process and rule of law."

Opposition parties in Pakistan have said that allegations that their filing of a no-confidence motion against Khan are the result of foreign interference are "baseless."

Protesters rally in support of Imran Khan in Islamabad on March 27.

Supporters of Khan have staged protests against the United States in cities around the country amid the controversy, including one in Peshawar on April 1 led by members of the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. Khan has called for more protests on April 3.

The no-confidence debate in the 342-member National Assembly was originally due to start on March 31, but the deputy speaker suspended proceedings when legislators declined to first address other items on the agenda.

Khan is facing his biggest challenge since being elected in 2018. The PTI effectively lost its majority on March 30 when a coalition partner said it would vote with the opposition.

More than a dozen PTI lawmakers had already indicated they would support the no-confidence vote, but the PTI has been attempting to win them back.

The opposition accuses Khan of mismanaging the economy and foreign policy, and political analysts also say Khan has fallen out with Pakistan's powerful military, whose support is critical for any party to attain power.

On April 2, Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javad Bajwa expressed concern about Moscow's war against Ukraine, saying that "despite Russia's legitimate security concerns, its aggression against a smaller country cannot be condoned."

Bajwa also said Pakistan had enjoyed excellent defense and economic relations with Kyiv since Ukraine's independence, but that while some positive developments had taken place in its ties with Russia of late, its relations with Russia had been "cold" for a long time for numerous reasons.

He added that Pakistan sought to expand ties with both the United States and China, which has refused to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine and criticized the West's punitive sanctions against Moscow.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal, AFP, Dawn, and Reuters

Eyes on Islamabad

Editorial

DAWN.COM
Published April 3, 2022 -


A NEW chapter in the history of Pakistani democracy may be written by parliament today. Though a vote of no-confidence against the prime minister is not without precedent, today may mark the first time the National Assembly sends a government packing.

Before Prime Minister Imran Khan, Benazir Bhutto and Shaukat Aziz had, in 1989 and 2006, respectively, faced a test of their government’s resilience. Unlike those two, however, Mr Khan — unless he springs a last-minute surprise which he has promised to — seems positioned to lose the vote. There are similarities, too, between the past and the present. Reprehensible and damaging precedents have been set once again by both opposition and government parties. Elected leaders have again shown that they can shamelessly abandon both allies and principles in their pursuit of personal gains. Loyalties have again been bought and sold, greatly diminishing the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy in the eyes of the citizenry.

Editorial: The PM has made the most of his last days in office by playing a shrewd hand

As defeat looms, Mr Khan has made it clear he will not go gentle into the night. Determined to turn his ouster — if he remains unable to prevent it — into a moment of political martyrdom, Mr Khan has built up a combative narrative, melding religious beliefs with nationalistic fervour. He has framed his troubles as the result of an international conspiracy abetted by local actors, accusing PTI dissidents and opposition leaders of being ‘traitors’ for their alleged complicity in the plot.

This is a dangerous ploy, as it will provoke the sentiments of PTI’s charged up-supporters and may trigger violence in the streets. With the prime minister urging his electorate to turn out in large numbers before the vote to protest this ‘conspiracy’, matters can take a dangerous turn. There are fears that protesters may violently confront opposition and dissident MPs ahead of the vote. The opposition has already expressed concerns for the safety of those going to parliament today. One hopes sufficient preparations have been made to prevent matters from spiralling dangerously out of hand.

Meanwhile, the army chief seems to have chosen a questionable time to publicly break ranks with the PTI government. His statement at the Islamabad Security Dialogue on the Russia-Ukraine conflict is likely to rekindle civil-military tensions. His opinion reveals he stands considerably at odds with the PTI government on the matter. The army chief is entitled to his views, but it would have been better if they were expressed through policy formulated by the National Security Committee rather than before a public audience including foreign observers. This decision has only renewed doubts regarding the actual ‘neutrality’ of the establishment. With Pakistan on the verge of what may be a period of political turmoil, the public should not have been left feeling as if yet another public representative is being prematurely shown the door because they crossed the powers that be.

Published in Dawn, April 3rd, 2022

Voices: Behind Imran Khan’s downfall lies arrogance and incompetence

Murtaza Ali Shah
Sat, April 2, 2022

He promised he would change the fate of Pakistan in 90 days 

(Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan is in serious trouble. He lost his majority in parliament after key allies switched their support to the opposition alliance called the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM). He is now facing calls to resign or be ousted through a vote of no-confidence, which is due to take place on Sunday.

Both are humiliating scenarios for the former cricket star and celebrity who has desperately tried to stay in power. Even, in my view, at the cost of avowing all his promises and principles. Two words now define his legacy as PM: arrogance and incompetence.

It wasn’t like this when Imran Khan came to power in 2018. He was popular and a significant number of Pakistanis thought he deserved a chance to rid the country of chronic corruption and mis-governance.

There was hope in the air. He promised he would change the fate of Pakistan in 90 days; he would bring respect from other nations, attract unprecedented investment, create ten million jobs and root out corruption. He would bring back the billions looted from the country.

Nearly four years later, he has been unable to fulfil a single promise. And, until recently, Imran Khan enjoyed the full support of Pakistan’s military establishment in every manner possible. In fact, Khan’s most important ally, Pervaiz Elahi, said in a recent interview that for three-and-a-half years someone else changed his nappies and thus didn’t let him learn – a reference to the military’s support.

Instead, Imran Khan was widely criticised as spending his time cracking down on opponents. Dozens of journalists were taken off the air when they didn’t toe the line, or worse, were imprisoned. Mir Shakil-ur-Rehman, the editor in chief of Pakistan’s largest media group, the Jang Group, was locked up in a case that Human Rights Watch condemned as “politically motivated”. He was later acquitted by a court.

He would make long, threatening speeches dismissing his rivals as inferior beings who deserved no respect and no humanity. He would use airtime to abuse and issue threats against rivals. In 2022 HRW again lambasted the government for the crackdown on dissent by citizens, journalists and opposition politicians.

Meanwhile, it has become evident to me that Imran Khan didn’t actually have an economic development plan. He changed one finance minister after another, but the economy continued falling and the number of jobs kept dwindling. Today, inflation in Pakistan is amongst the highest in South Asia. For the ordinary people, living and surviving has become much harder.

Eventually his popularity sapped among his middle-class support base. Things took a different turn three months ago when General Nadeem Ahmed Anjum was appointed chief of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI. A thorough professional who spent three years studying in London, General Nadeem ordered the spy agency not to interfere in politics, to stay neutral and let politicians settle their matters among each other. That made it easier for his allies to start talking to the main opposition parties and plan for their independent future.

Imran Khan is not one to sit quietly.

A number of feverish allegations have since emerged that he is the victim of an international conspiracy engineered by the US because he was pursuing an independent foreign policy with Russia. One of his aides claimed he faced an assassination threat from the same western forces who have hatched the conspiracy to oust him from power. It then turned out there was no threatening letter written by the US, but a cable written by a Pakistani diplomat based in Washington – a routine matter.

In front of thousands of his supporters on Sunday, at one point he started sobbing.

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The Pakistani military – who supported him throughout – has reportedly become increasingly concerned about the manner in which Khan has run the economy and done little to improve governance. He named Pakistan’s army chief in public rallies and replied to the army’s decision to stay neutral by saying that “only animals are neutral”. But the army is in no mood to take blame for the administrative and political failures of someone they supported for many years.

My feeling is that Imran Khan knows there is no conspiracy against him and no western power wants to throw him out. But he needs to fuel his support base into believing he has fallen out of favour due to a plot against him. The fact remains he is under threat from his own party and own allies because he promised the moon but delivered nothing. It’s the sheer frustration with his arrogance and misgovernance that is tearing apart his coalition.

But no more. It’s now just a matter of time before Imran Khan is out of power. His fate is sealed.

The writer is a London-based journalist for Pakistan’s largest media house Geo TV Network & The News International

US ‘clearly distanced’ itself from Pakistan, says former military chief Mike Mullen

Anwar Iqbal

DAWN.COM

Published April 2, 2022 

MICHAEL Mullen


WASHINGTON: The United States has ‘clearly distanced’ itself from Pakistan, former US military chief Mike Mullen said as the White House and the State Department publicly reject claims of their involvement in Pakistan’s domestic politics.

“It is difficult, difficult to say,” said Admiral Mullen when asked to describe Washington’s relations with Pakistan, which was once a close US ally in the war against terror and during the cold war.

“I think we have clearly distanced ourselves from Pakistan over the last decade and Pakistan has more and more fallen under the umbrella of China,” he told VOA Urdu Service in Washington this week.

Admiral Mullen, who was chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff from October 2007 to September 2011, was also named in the so-called Memogate controversy, which revolved around a memorandum, ostensibly seeking US support for preventing a feared military takeover in Pakistan that never happened.

He noted that China was not only Pakistan’s neighbour but it “has been supportive of Pakistan” as well.

This closeness, he said, “suits China’s global ambition” because Beijing would prefer to have a neighbor “closer to them and not close to the US”.

For these reasons, the US-Pakistan relationship “is going to… be tense for quite some time,” he added.

Asked if he believed Pakistan helped the Taliban take over Kabul in August last year, Admiral Mullen said: “They did not do much to stop it for sure.”

He recalled that as the US army chief he had told a congressional hearing that Pakistani intelligence agencies were active in Afghanistan “and I still believe … that connectivity is there. It sort of cuts both ways.”

The former US military chief reiterated a complaint that’s often heard in Washington that Pakistan “played on both sides (the US and the Taliban)” in Afghanistan.

On Thursday afternoon, the White House and the US State Department publicly addressed Prime Minister Imran Khan’s claim that foreign powers were supporting the attempt to unseat him.

During a regular press briefing, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield, however, rejected this claim as incorrect.

“Absolutely no truth to that allegation,” she said, responding to a question.

At the State Department, spokesperson Ned Price also responded to a question about the alleged US involvement in Pakistan’s domestic politics.

“We are closely following developments in Pakistan, we respect and support Pakistan’s constitutional process and rule of law,” Mr Price said. “However, when it comes to that allegation, there is no truth to it.”

Published in Dawn, April 2nd, 2022

Unpicking of Trump-era asylum curbs primes partisan powder keg

Biden administration belatedly reversed a hard-right assault but humanitarian concerns risk being swamped by politics

A family seeking asylum in the US give their documents to US border patrol after crossing from Mexico in Yuma, Arizona, on 22 February. 

Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Oliver Laughland

THE GUARDIAN
@oliverlaughland

Sun 3 Apr 2022 

As the Biden administration announced on Friday plans to end Covid-related restrictions for undocumented people arriving at the southern border, it guaranteed that irregular immigration will return as even more of a polarizing, point-scoring, policy debate.


Biden ends Trump-era asylum curbs amid border-region Democrat backlash

And as the US hurtles toward midterm elections, another prescient anniversary looms this week.

April 6 marks four years since the Trump administration announced its “zero tolerance” policy, the mechanism through which it separated almost 4,000 children from their families in what was widely condemned as an inhumane deterrence effort. Since the practice ended a few months after it was rolled out amid outcry, border policy has lurched from one extreme strategy to another.

From “Remain in Mexico”, which pushes asylum seekers back across the border while their cases are processed, to Title 42, the public health order that has allowed border officials to rapidly expel migrants due to the Covid-19 pandemic, before they could claim asylum.

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced the policy will finally end on 23 May.

It had been sanctioned by Donald Trump, amid lobbying from senior adviser Stephen Miller, but continued into the Biden era, with the majority of the 1.7 million expulsions under Title 42 occurring under the current president. Joe Biden only recently moved to exclude unaccompanied minors from the sweeping program.

Child separation. Remain in Mexico. The use of Title 42. All separate policies born of the same administration and indicative of a profound, hard-right assault on the right to claim asylum in the US.

“The end of the cruel and anti-immigrant policy of using Title 42 to expel vulnerable asylum seekers under public health provisions is long overdue,” said Allen Orr, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association in a statement. “The thousands upon thousands of migrants, from babies to grandmothers, who were illegally expelled before being allowed to have a meaningful chance to claim protection under our laws merit an acknowledgment that the US got it wrong.”

Before the announcement to end use of Title 42 was made by the Biden administration this week, the White House acknowledged that winding down the provisions would probably lead to an increase in arrivals at the southern border.

Migrants and border activists marched at the San Ysidro port of entry to protest against Title 42 in Tijuana, Mexico, last month. 

Photograph: Carlos A Moreno/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

“We are planning for multiple contingencies, and we have every expectation that when the CDC ultimately decides it’s appropriate to lift Title 42, there will be an influx of people to the border,” said the White House communications director, Kate Bedingfield, at a press briefing on Wednesday.

The Department of Homeland Security has said it is preparing to manage as many as 18,000 encounters on the border a day and is preparing to surge staff to the region to assist with enforcement and detention.

But, say advocates and lawyers operating in the region, such a rise in numbers is probably a direct consequence of the outgoing policy itself.

They point to the fact that many of those expected arrivals will be from people seeking asylum who were previously barred from doing so over the past two years.

“A post-Title 42 world at the border is simply a return to lawful processing under the asylum system that was set up by Congress decades ago,” said Shaw Drake, a staff attorney at the ACLU Texas, speaking to the Guardian shortly before the CDC announcement on Friday.

“When you spend the first year or more of your administration expelling over a million people then you are setting yourself up for an increase in people arriving to the border once that policy is lifted,” Drake, who is based in El Paso, added. “Because … you expelled people who otherwise may have had protection claims that they need to continue in the US to protect themselves from ongoing persecution and danger.”

Many of those expelled under the policy have returned to camps along the border where extortion, kidnapping and violence are routinely reported, according to lawyers.

“In any given border city [in Mexico] there are thousands of migrants some of whom have been there for over a year, already returned under Title 42,” said immigration attorney Jodi Goodwin, who is based in Harlingen, Texas.

She added: “I think the reality is that [Title 42] did nothing to help public health. There was still international movement into the US. I think it was a very thinly – veiled cover for racism, specifically targeted at Central Americans and Haitians.”

Elvia, ninr, Sarai, 10, and Yadira, 8eight, asylum seekers from Central America, at a migrant camp at the border in Reynosa, Mexico, on Friday.

 Photograph: Veronica Cardenas/Reuters

Goodwin said she had recently spoken to one of her clients at a camp in the border city of Matamoros who informed her that her young daughter had recently been sexually assaulted there.

“Where’s the justice? It’s not going to happen. And there are just … a lot of cases like that.”

But the humanitarian consequences of Title 42 and policies such as Remain in Mexico, which Biden initially lifted but was reinstated by court order, along with the nuances around projected increases in crossings, appear to have already been lost in partisan rhetoric.

As soon as the decision on Title 42 was announced on Friday, Republicans condemned the move, as the party gears up to force the issue as a wedge throughout the midterm election season.

The Texas senator Ted Cruz argued the decision would “open the flood gates to more illegal crossings”. Florida Republican senator Rick Scott described it as an “unconscionable plan”.

Centrist Democrats too, had begun publicly urging the president not to revoke the directive. On Friday, the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin described the announcement as a “frightening decision”. He described the Trump-era policy as “an essential tool in combatting the spread of Covid-19 and controlling the influx of migrants at our southern border”.

Those on the ground, too, say there is, as yet, no clear guidance for how exactly the processing of asylum claims might change when the order is lifted.

Last week, the Biden administration finalized plans to streamline the asylum application process, meaning applicants could have their claims of credible fear of returning to their countries of origin assessed by customs and border officials rather than immigration judges, due to chronic and growing backlogs in the immigration courts.


US immigration courts struggle amid understaffing and backlog of cases

But a continued rise in border arrivals will require greater humanitarian assistance in the region too.

“Humanitarian, on-the-ground NGOs have been preparing for this for two years,” said Karla Vargas, a senior attorney with the Texas Civil Rights project, “but whenever DHS talks about preparation [for a rise in border arrivals] there tends to be a focus on enforcement only. But there really does need to be more focus on the processing of these individuals.

“Most of the folks who are waiting that we have spoken to are just regular people, wanting to ask for asylum. To access that right.”

In the Shadow of Vladimir Putin’s Mother

The Russians are subjecting Ukrainians to the same hell the Nazis subjected to Leningraders—including the Russian president's family.


David Wood
COMMON SENSE

Maria Shelomova Putin and her son, Vladimir Vladimirovich, in 1958.

The images are eerily familiar.

Elderly women huddled against bitter cold picking their way through rubble spilling from the smoking ruins of a blackened apartment building. Stiffened bodies lying grotesquely askew on broken pavement. Household belongings strewn on the ground, backlit by roaring flames. Hollow-eyed children struggling from bomb shelters to line up for food, water.

This is not Ukraine today, but Leningrad under siege by the Wehrmacht during World War II. For 872 days, from 1941 to early 1944, Hitler’s Nazi forces sought to pummel into submission the city now known as St. Petersburg. But against the brutal German campaign to force them to their knees, the people of Leningrad held. Under vicious attack by aggressors to whom they had done no wrong, Leningraders were empowered by moral certainty. They were in the right, and they knew it.

The cost of their defiance is almost inconceivable. Buildings and homes, hospitals, schools and museums were smashed beyond recognition. Pleas to allow humanitarian relief to reach the city were rebuffed. Refugees fleeing along the one escape route were gunned down. During the first winter when the outside temperature fell to 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, 100,000 people a month died of hunger, disease and cold. Daily rations were three thin slices of bread adulterated with sawdust, if you could get them. When the siege was lifted, only 700,000 Leningraders of the city’s prewar population of 3.5 million remained there alive.

One of the survivors was the woman who would become Vladimir Putin’s mother.

Like thousands of other parents, Maria Shelomova Putin had sent her young son Viktor—the older brother Vladimir Putin would never know—to live in a children’s shelter while she scavenged for food. Viktor died there of diphtheria. Maria, weakened by lack of food, fainted near a pile of corpses and awakened just in time to avoid being dragged off to a mass grave.

Towards the end, Maria was too weak to walk. Her husband, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, was badly wounded at the front by a German grenade. But they endured. Seven years after the war ended, Maria and Vladimir had another son, Vladimir Vladimirovich. He grew up to be the president of Russia.

If Vladimir Putin didn’t experience the siege directly, he surely absorbed the gritty persona of the bare-knuckle survivor. Though much of his life is obscure, what he has allowed to emerge “is very much the mythology of a child of post-siege Leningrad, a mean, hungry, impoverished place that bred mean, hungry, voracious children,” writes author Masha Gessen. 

Indeed, Putin likes to portray himself as a thug. “I was a hooligan,” he proudly told officially sanctioned biographers in 2000. Referring to the Chechen guerillas Russia was then at war with, Putin said, in September 1999, three months before Boris Yeltsin made him president of Russia, “If we catch them in the toilet, we will rub them out in the outhouse.”




A guest post by
David Wood
Journalist and author covering war for 35 years, Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for a series on the Americans grievously wounded in war. Website: davidwood-journalist.com

Op-Ed: Climate research funded by fossil fuel profits discredits universities and hurts the planet

PICTURING ECOCIDE

A flare burns natural gas at an oil well on Aug. 26, 2021, in Watford City, N.D.
(Matthew Brown / Associated Press)

BY ILANA COHEN AND MICHAEL E. MANN

APRIL 3, 2022 

Last month, more than 500 leading academics, climate experts and university affiliates called for an end to the fossil fuel industry funding university climate research. The reason: Faced with the climate crisis, the academic community must play a leading role in developing a renewable-energy future. Brokering financial partnerships with polluters prevents universities from fulfilling that goal and conducting conflict-free research.

The movement to get large institutions to divest from fossil fuel companies has gained enormous steam. Harvard — the world’s richest university — major philanthropic organization the Ford Foundation and the European Union’s biggest pension fund, ABP, all made divestment commitments since last fall. Universities in the U.S. and the United Kingdom should build on that momentum and once again take a firm stand against oil and gas companies, which are blocking the transition to clean energy to protect their profits.

To do so, the schools should ban funding from the fossil fuel industry for research in areas where it has a clear financial stake and history of spreading misinformation: climate change as well as environmental and energy science and policy.


OPINION
Editorial: What’s better than a ban on Russian oil imports? Ending our dependence on fossil fuels
March 9, 2022

Despite the wealth of evidence showing that oil and gas drilling is responsible for most of the world’s destructive warming, the fossil fuel industry is ferociously fighting to keep its business model alive. It is lobbying against science-backed climate policy that would reduce the use of oil and gas; spreading misinformation, including climate science denial; and launching marketing campaigns — greenwashing — to suggest its business is based on sustainability even though it isn’t meaningfully reducing planet-warming emissions.

By funding academic research, especially around climate change, the fossil fuel industry diverts attention from these activities and their devastating consequences. University research partnerships allow these companies to misrepresent themselves as supporting the energy transition while actually doing what they can to slow it down.

Fossil fuel money also threatens academic independence. When funding comes from corporations with a fundamental conflict of interest, skewed research outcomes follow. That has been well documented in other industries including pharmaceuticals and tobacco. Common safeguards, such as having researchers self-report funding sources or having research institutions and publications publicly disclose their funding sources, often fail to mitigate the problem.

Yet such research partnerships funded by major oil companies abound. Take Stanford’s Global Climate & Energy Project, sponsored by Exxon Mobil and the world’s largest oil-field services company, Schlumberger; and MIT’s Energy Initiative, whose sponsors include Exxon, Chevron, Shell, Eni and ConocoPhillips. Cambridge University meanwhile hosts a Schlumberger research center.

Encore Theater at Wynn Las Vegas is a world-class entertainment venue that is home to legendary resident headliners.

Just as with divestment, it would be up to universities to decide what form the ban on fossil fuel funding would take. At a minimum, the ban should include funding for climate change, environmental and energy policy research from the world’s top 200 publicly traded coal, oil and gas companies and their subsidiaries. It should also include companies exploring for further fossil fuel reserves and investing in new fossil fuel supply projects, which ignore the International Energy Agency’s conclusion that we need to wean off fossil fuels to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

And universities should additionally reject climate-related research funding from organizations, such as Koch Industries and the Sarah Scaife Foundation, that have funded or otherwise supported climate change denial.


OPINION
Second Opinion: Anti-apartheid divestment built a movement of people. That’s what the climate crisis needs
Feb. 13, 2022

It’s more crucial than ever that universities produce objective climate research and end the conflicts of interest posed by fossil fuel money.

The latest report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that a failure to take rapid climate action globally will lead to catastrophic climate breakdown. This failure will undermine the possibility of a livable future and disproportionately harm the communities of color and poor communities most vulnerable to and least responsible for the climate crisis. Russia’s war on Ukraine has shaken the energy market by disrupting oil and gas imports, showing the instability of fossil fuels. It’s clear we need rapid, massive investment in renewable energy, and academic research has a vital role in informing this shift.

University administrations must also understand the grave disservice they do to the public by taking money that undermines academic independence. Even the mere perception of this independence being compromised is enough to threaten the credibility that universities bring to climate discourse. It limits their capacity for institutional climate action.

The funding ban we’re calling for is not unprecedented. Numerous public health and research institutions have rejected tobacco money because of the public health consequences of the industry’s products and its record of spreading disinformation about those effects. The fossil fuel industry is using the same disinformation tactics. How long will it take universities to reject the industry’s attack on higher education’s core values of rigorous research in the public interest?

Defenders of industry-academic partnerships might counter that at least some research proposals from fossil fuel companies are offered in good faith, and cash-strapped academia needs whatever funding it can get. But the industry cannot claim good faith in funding green research at schools while putting just a fraction of its own investments into renewable energy. And compromised research programs that prop up climate delay and denial are worse for the credibility of universities, and the security of our planet, than no programs at all.

Our universities can’t responsibly tackle the climate crisis unless and until they stop taking fossil fuel money for climate and energy-related research. Universities need to lead. This is their moment to choose between a just and sustainable world, or profit-driven fossil-fueled devastation.

Ilana Cohen is an organizer with Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard and Cambridge Climate Justice and a coordinator of the Fossil Free Research campaign. 

Michael E. Mann is a professor of atmospheric sciences and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. His latest book is “The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet.”

UN Seabed-Mining Watchdog Doing Business “Behind Closed Doors”

Conservationists consider deep-sea extraction a “scientific and political minefield.”


MICHAEL MECHANIC

Senior Editor

Mother Jones

A deep sea mining ship docked in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Charles M. Vella/SOPA Images via ZUMA Press

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The UN-affiliated organization that oversees deep-sea mining, a controversial new industry, has been accused of failings of transparency after an independent body responsible for reporting on negotiations was kicked out.

The International Seabed Authority is meeting this week at its council headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica, to develop regulations for the fledgling industry. But it emerged this week that Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB), a division of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), which has covered previous ISA negotiations, had not had its contract renewed.

While the ISA negotiations are filmed live via webcam, the absence of ENB—which would have created a permanent independent record of proceedings—was described as a “huge loss” for stakeholders.

Some states, including Germany, are also concerned that the ISA is developing its mining standards and guidelines behind closed doors, and that current knowledge of deep-sea ecosystems and the potential effects of mining on the marine environment are insufficient to allow it to go ahead.Scientists warn the damage from mining various metals from the sea floor would be “dangerous,” “reckless,” and “irreversible.”

Scientists have warned that the damage to ecosystems from mining nickel, cobalt and other metals on the deep-seabed would be “dangerous,” “reckless,” and “irreversible.” One estimate suggests that 90 percent of the deep-sea species that researchers encounter are new to science.

As opposition to deep-sea mining grows, the ISA is facing resistance over its rush to develop a roadmap to be adopted before July 9, 2023. The plan was prompted in June last year, when the island of Nauru informed the ISA of its intention to start mining the seabed in two years’ time, via a subsidiary of a Canadian firm, The Metals Company (TMC, until recently known as DeepGreen Metals). This invoked an obscure clause of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which said the ISA must finalize regulations within two years of such an announcement.

Google, BMW, Volvo, and Samsung SDI, a battery subsidiary of the electronics firm, have joined a World Wildlife Fund call for a moratorium on mining the deep sea, which will affect the potential market for deep-sea minerals used for car and smartphone batteries.

The ISA said ENB’s contract was not renewed due to budget cuts. The IISD, meanwhile, said it was now fundraising to be able to cover the next round of negotiations in July. “Transparency of the talks are important, especially for small islands and developing countries who can’t always attend,” said the IISD’s Matthew TenBruggencate.

Germany and environmentalists also expressed concern over a lack of transparency by the ISA’s legal and technical commission (LTC), a body charged with developing standards and guidelines for the mining code, which meets behind closed doors.

The LTC comprises 30 members. A fifth of them work for contractors for deep-sea mining companies.

Germany said the mining code “still lacked binding and measurable normative requirements” for marine protection.

In its opening remarks on the ISA’s website, Germany highlighted the absence of stakeholders’ comments, or marked-up changes in the LTC’s draft standards and guidelines document. “In order to be transparent and allow for a proper debate, a mark-up document as provided by the facilitator regarding the draft regulation would be very helpful for our negotiations,” it said. “Therefore, we suggest that the council request such a document.”

Germany also said the mining code “still lacked binding and measurable normative requirements” for marine protection. It argued that, because the current standards, guidelines and regulations do not yet contain “specific environmental minimal requirements” for measurable pollution, sediment plumes, biodiversity, and noise and light impacts, the code as it stands would not regulate future mining effectively.

“The current state of knowledge is, in our view, insufficient to proceed to exploiting mineral resources,” it said.

It supported the EU’s formal position that marine minerals “cannot be exploited before the effects of deep-sea mining on the marine environment, biodiversity and human activities have been sufficiently researched, the risks are understood and technologies and operational practices are able to demonstrate that the environment is not seriously harmed, in line with the precautionary principle.”

Other states, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Costa Rica and Chile, adopted similarly precautionary approaches, highlighting the gulf in scientific knowledge of the deep sea. On the other hand the UK, which is no longer part of the EU, has been pushing ahead for rapid development of regulations, according to observers.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said the UK government was engaging in ISA negotiations to ensure that high environmental standards were adopted in deep-sea mining regulations. “Any ongoing conversations in support of this should not be interpreted as support for deep-sea mining,” a spokesperson said.

Duncan Currie, an international lawyer with the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, which is tracking the negotiations, said he was “very concerned” by the various failures of transparency. “There is no transparency of the LTC, who meet behind closed doors. It sounds like an innocuous body, but it is in essence the decision-making body within the ISA.”

Currie wants to see a moratorium on deep-sea mining, akin to that set up by the Antarctic protocol. “The whole area of deep-sea mining is a scientific and political minefield. There should be a moratorium put in place.”

Also missing from the proposed standards and guidelines was the possibility not to continue with mining.

Greenpeace, an observer at the talks, called for reform of the ISA’s secretariat, which it accused of bias towards allowing mining to take place, to the detriment of the environment.

“There are a herd of elephants in the room,” said Arlo Hemphill, an oceans campaigner for Greenpeace USA. “There’s not enough time to get it right, and there is not the science to get it right.”

The ISA secretariat was approached for comment but did not respond.

SOMALIA VS SOMALILAND

Why is the American right waging a stealth neocolonial assault on Somalia?

In the 19th century, my homeland was carved up by imperialists. Now that's in danger of happening all over again

COMMENTARY
By MOHAMOUD GAILDON

SALON
PUBLISHED APRIL 3, 2022 

Muse Bihi Abdi, presidential candidate for the ruling Kulmiye Party, after casting his vote during the 2017 presidential election in the self-proclaimed state of Somaliland. (AFP via Getty Images)

On March 14, the conservative Heritage Foundation played host to the president of Somaliland, a breakaway region of Somalia "whose self-declared independence ... is not internationally recognized," in the words of a Freedom House report. Three days later, three U.S. senators, Jim Risch, R-Idaho, Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., introduced a bill titled the Somaliland Partnership Act. Their bill paints a rosy picture of Somaliland and calls for much closer U.S. engagement with it. This bill relies on a combination of faulty and incomplete information. (The Freedom House report cited above says that Somaliland "has seen a consistent erosion of political rights and civic space," with minority clans subject to "political and economic marginalization" and a serious social problem of violence against women.) More concerning, however, is that if this bill is passed it will take Somalia, a poor country already mired in much turmoil, down an even more perilous path.

In a nutshell, a partnership with the U.S., as envisioned in this legislation, would provide Somaliland with the financial and military wherewithal it needs to make separation from Somalia a fait accompli. It would also lend Somaliland a mantle of legitimacy. The persistent claim by the leaders of Somaliland that it is a de facto country in full control of its "territory" is not true: The two communities through whose territory the presumed border of separation runs are staunchly against Somaliland's secession. Without the consent of these two communities (the Warsengeli and Dhulbahante tribes), Somaliland's secession cannot be a reality on the ground, as Risch's bill claims it already is. And since no consent is forthcoming from these two communities, violence and conquest are Somaliland's only option. Why would the U.S. involve itself in such a combustible mix?

The answer is given here: "Recognizing Somaliland's independence would enable the U.S. to hedge against further deterioration of its position in Djibouti, which is under Chinese sway," writes Joshua Meservey of the Heritage Foundation. Similarly, Risch's rationale for his bill stresses the importance of Somaliland's "geographic location in the Horn of Africa and next to the Gulf of Aden." So the Heritage Foundation and several U.S. senators have decided to bypass Somalia's legal authority and deal with a secessionist entity, without regard to what might follow, for what they perceive as America's strategic interests.

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To me, this seems a flashback to a series of decades-long events related to me, as a child, by my father and other elders of my family. I grew up in a house steeped in the history of the conflict with Britain as it barged into our land and ruled our people. I am a great-grandson of Sultan Muhammad Mahmud Ali (nicknamed Awl), the sultan of the Warsangeli tribe, who in 1886 entered into a "protection treaty" with the British government, one of six such treaties with Somali tribes that formed what was called the Somaliland British Protectorate, which existed until 1960.

In colonial days, foreign men drew lines on paper to divide the Somali people without their knowledge. Thanks to conservatives in Washington, today it's happening again.

Back then, foreign men drew lines on paper to divide Somalis without their knowledge. Today, men in Washington — and they are once again almost all men — are working to decide the fate of Somalis as one aspect of global competition with China. Those like Risch and the Heritage Foundation are throwbacks to colonial times, hellbent on reordering Africa as they see fit. For them, Somalia is fair game, a guinea pig, something to be altered with the stroke of a pen. If their intentions were sincere, they would be interested in talking to all sides of this particular conflict and they would not have so smugly ignored the government of the Federal Republic of Somalia. It is no secret that government is frail and unstable, but that is not a good reason for undermining it still further.

In American right-wingers eager to exert power in the Horn of Africa, President Muse Bihi Abdi of Somaliland has finally found dancing partners in his quest to open a wound that healed long ago. The border he wants to revive in order to secede from Somalia carries a history of humiliation and pain, not suffered by him or his tribe but rather by the tribes in the east of what he now likes to call Somaliland.

When the original Somaliland protectorate voluntarily united with Somalia in 1960 and the colonial border between them was erased, it was a great moment. Communities torn apart for decades were finally free to move and mix in the vast land of our ancestors. It is that very border that Bihi and his allies now want to revive, with the comforting knowledge that neither they nor their tribesmen will feel the knife's edge of separation if things go their way. Neither Risch nor the Heritage Foundation has ever spoken to those whose lives or families would once again be torn asunder. In the tradition of long-ago colonial administrators, they are scribbling words on paper in cozy offices thousands of miles away from the people whose fate they are deciding.

Somaliland's narrative of independence is based on a deceptive mix of truths, half-truths and outright lies that it has been unable to sell to the Somali people, the African Union or anyone else in the world except — again, for political reasons — the would-be independent island of Taiwan. It's no wonder that Bihi has found a receptive ear and a helping hand in the Heritage Foundation, known for climate-change denialism, efforts to suppress the votes of minorities in the U.S., and fueling the moral panic over "critical race theory." It is deeply unfortunate to see the self-described leaders of Somaliland seeking validation from forces in the United States aligned with a racist and neocolonialist agenda. But there's not much room for pity when the fate of so many poor Somalis hangs in the balance. There's only room for good people to stand up and tell the American right: Hands off Somalia.

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MOHAMOUD GAILDON
Mohamoud Gaildon is a Somali-American medical physicist. He has worked in a number of major hospitals including Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Beth Israel and Mount Sinai in New York City. He is now a senior medical physicist at St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria, Illinois, and is also the author of a novel, "The Yibir of Las Burgabo."MORE FROM MOHAMOUD GAILDON