| Le Monde |
The terror diaspora
The Gulf of Guinea. He said it without a hint of irony or embarrassment. This was one of U.S. Africa Command's big success stories. The Gulf... of Guinea.
Never mind that most Americans couldn't find it on a map and haven't heard of the nations on its shores like Gabon, Benin, and Togo. Never mind that just five days before I talked with AFRICOM's chief spokesman, the Economist had asked if the Gulf of Guinea was on the verge of becoming "another Somalia," because piracy there had jumped 41% (...)
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The making of a global security State
As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we've come in the building of a surveillance state have swept over us 24/7 - waves of leaks, videos, charges, claims, counterclaims, skullduggery, and government threats. When a flood sweeps you away, it's always hard to find a little dry land to survey the extent and nature of the damage. Here's my attempt to look beyond the daily drumbeat of this developing (...)
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The far North of experience
One summer some years ago, on a peninsula jutting off another peninsula off the west coast of Iceland, I lived among strangers and birds. The birds were mostly new species I got to know a little, the golden plovers plaintively dissembling in the grass to lead intruders away from their nests, the oystercatchers who flew overhead uttering unearthly oscillating cries, the coastal fulmars, skuas, and guillemots, and most particularly the arctic terns. The impeccable whiteness of their feathers, (...)
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How dystopian secrecy contributes to clueless wars
The prosecution of Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks' source inside the U.S. Army, will be pulling out all the stops when it calls to the stand a member of Navy SEAL Team 6, the unit that assassinated Osama bin Laden. The SEAL (in partial disguise, as his identity is secret) is expected to tell the military judge that classified documents leaked by Manning to WikiLeaks were found on bin Laden's laptop. That will, in turn, be offered as proof not that bin Laden had internet access like two billion (...)
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Guilty until proven innocent
A four-month hunger strike, mass force-feedings, and widespread media coverage have at last brought Guantanamo, the notorious offshore prison set up by the Bush administration early in 2002, back into American consciousness. Prominent voices are finally calling on President Obama to close it down and send home scores of prisoners who, years ago, were cleared of wrongdoing.
Still unnoticed and out of the news, however, is a comparable situation in the U.S. itself, involving a pattern of (...)
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Just begin
Here may be the most commonplace sentence anyone could write about graduation day in any year: when I think back to my own graduation in 1966, an eon, a lifetime, a world ago, I have no memory of who addressed us. None. I have a little packet of photos of the event: shots of my parents and me, my grandmother and me, my aunt and me, my former roommates and me, my friends and me. You can even see the chairs for the ceremony. But not the speaker. And yet it's odds on that he - and in 1966, it (...)
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What is happening to Rwandan refugees in Uganda?
Attacks are fuelling anxiety ahead of a global edict for Rwandan refugees to return home.
In the months leading up to his murder, Rwandan journalist Charles Ingabire lived in a state of constant fear. The outspoken critic of Rwanda fled to neighboring Uganda in 2007 but remained a target of death threats because of his dissident views. "He'd received so many warnings to stop writing about the Rwandan government," said Godwin Agaba, a Rwandan journalist who had dinner with Ingabire the night (...)
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Humanity imperiled
What is the future likely to bring? A reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside. So imagine that you're an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to figure out what's happening here or, for that matter, imagine you're an historian 100 years from now - assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious - and you're looking back at what's happening today. You'd see something quite remarkable.
For the first time in the history of the (...)
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The wandering Europeans
Next to U.S. support for Israel, the main reason why the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip continues is that the Europeans have reduced themselves to a subservient role in the Middle East Peace Process: one in which they underwrite the cost of Israel's occupation by artificially propping up the Palestinian Authority, which created from the Oslo Peace Accords but has no sovereign authority whatever.
Coming on the heels of a recently published open letter on the Middle East (...)
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The (less than) eternal sea
In heavy fog on the night of October 7, 1936, the SS Ohioan ran aground three miles south and west of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, and by noon on October 8th, I was among a crowd of spectators come to pay its respects to the no small terror of the sea. I was two years old, hoisted on the shoulders of my father, for whom the view to windward was neither openly nor latently sublime. The stranded vessel, an 8,046-ton freighter laden with a cargo valued at $450,000, was owned by the (...)
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