To The New York Times , Palestinian Torture Is Just an Afterthought

Last week, the warbloggers were all up in arms when the Aksa Martyrs Brigades — a Palestinian extremist group associated with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement — executed 35 year-old Ikhklas Khouli for collaborating with Israel.

Such extrajudicial murders are bad enough, but in this case Ms. Khouli’s son, Bakir, said that he was tortured into providing incriminating evidence against his mother. Photos posted on news sites such as at Yahoo! of Bakir Khouli showed his back covered in welts just as if he had been repeatedly hit with an electrical cable just as he claimed. Khouli said in interviews that by the time the Aksa Martyrs Brigades torturers were done with him, he would have said anything to stop the interrogation. And what he did say — falsely he claims — was that his mother was a collaborator.

And so, being the sort of upstanding movement concerned about human rights, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades gave her a show trial and then took Ms. Khoui outside and shot her dead.

What is interesting is how The New York Times chose to cover the story. Serge Schmemann has a 1,453 word article about Ms. Khouli’s execution and the execution of another female “collaborator.” But rather than a story about horrific torture of alleged suspects by Palestinian groups, the article largely offers the Aksa Martyrs Brigades the opportunity to defend its actions. The Aksa Martyrs Brigades don’t want to torture and murder people, but the Israelis force them into it, you see (a nutty Israeli peace group actually took this absurdity to its logical conclusion by saying Israel was to blame when Palestinians terrorists torture and murder suspected Palestinian collaborators).

In fact, it is not until the reader has trudged through more than 1,300 words of Schmemann’s dry prose that the possibility of torture is even introduced. Even then with three pitiful paragraphs at the end to cover a major part of the story, Schmemann can’t bring himself to actually use the word “torture”. Instead Schmemann frames the story by noting that the Aksa Martyrs Brigades claimed that Bakri Khouli testified against his mother voluntarily, but that the details of Bakri’s own account “tell a different story.”

Can you imagine, even for a moment, what would happen if a photo of a prisoner at Guantanamo was released showing the prisoner’s back covered in welts? Do you think The New York Times would relegate that fact to the final three paragraphs of a long story dominated by comments from Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft about just how guilty they are certain the prisoner really was and that this was the only way to deal with such witnesses? Hell, if Bakri Khouli had been tortured by the Israeli’s rather than by fellow Palestinians, this would be front page news for weeks and by now the United Nations would be calling for at least three international investigative teams to be put together to examine the crime.

It is odd that the Times and the rest of the world seem to think that when the Israeli’s accidentally kill civilians while trying to eliminate terrorists who are illegally placing themselves in civilian populations, that this is worthy of front page news for days on end. When Palestinian terrorists close to the president of the Palestinian Authority decide to torture children and execute women,however, even The New York Times can’t use the “t” word and the story is apparently of little interest around the world since it doesn’t fit the dominant media paradigm of Israeli oppressors vs. Palestinian victims.

Disgusting.

Source:

For Arab Informers, Death; For the Executioners, Justice. Serge Schmemann, The New York Times, September 1, 2002.

The Utter Stupidity of Copy Protection

Via CoolTool.Com comes this story illustrating the utter stupidity of digital rights management schemes that some companies are starting to build into MP3 players.

In this case ZDNet’s Josh Taylor reviewed Toshiba’s MobilPhile MP3 player. The MobilPhile is Toshiba’s answer to the iPod and features a 5 gig. hard drive and a USB 2.0 connection which can theoretically pump MP3s onto the player at up to 480mbs per second.

But Toshiba decided to cripple the MobilPhile with DRM management. Rather than just copying MP3s from your home machine or laptop to the MobilPhile, first you have to run the MP3s through a program that encrypts them and makes it impossible to transfer the MP3s back to a different machine.

And in Taylor’s test, completely eliminated the advantage of using USB 2.0 rather than USB 1.1. Taylor copied an album to the MobilPhile using USB 1.1 — it took 53 seconds. Switching to USB 2.0 still took 48 seconds for the same operation. Wow, a 40-fold theoretical advantage in throughput yields an astounding 5 second advantage in performance.

You can drag and drop files to the MobilPhile, but the catch is you can’t listen to MP3 files on the device if they are moved in this straightforward way. But dragging and dropping the album took under 5 seconds over a USB 2.0 connection.

Thanks Toshiba!

Low Cost Water Filter Could Save Millions of Lives

A Bangladeshi professor has developed a cheap water filter that could save the lives of millions of people in the developing world who currently drink water filled with dangerously high levels of arsenic.

Arsenic occurs naturally in groundwater in many parts of the world, with the World Health Organization estimating that as many as 80 million people could be affected by arsenic poisoning. But water filtering systems used in the developed world are often out of reach of developing country’s budgets and expertise.

Enter Prof. Fakhrul Islam who invented a water filter that costs only $3 and can effectively filter arsenic out of water. The filter is a mixture of crushed bricks and ferrous sulphate that are heated. In tests by the United Nations, the filter led to a 20-fold decrease in the amount of arsenic in water.

The United Nations plans to give away the filter in villages across Bangladesh, and it could find applications in other countries with groundwater arsenic problems.

Sources:

Water filter set to save lives. Alistair Lawson, The BBC, July 14, 2002.

New water filter to combat arsenic and lead poisoning. Navakal.Com, July 14, 2002.

Life saving water filter good news for millions of Bangladeshi. Scientic News, August 2002.

Ethiopia Facing Ongoing Crisis

While other parts of Africa have received more attention, Ethiopia is experiencing an ongoing food crisis that threatens up to half a million people in the northeastern part of the country, and millions of others throughout the country.

Populated by a nomadic people called the Afar, this area has been hit by drought for most of this year, leaving the pastoralist nomads with many dead livestock.

Ethiopia is one of the least developed countries in the world and leads the world in levels of malnutrition. At the end of July, Ethiopia’s government warned that as many as 8 million people were facing food shortages and would require aid.

Sources:

Ethiopia: Over 8 Million In Need Of Food Aid. United Nations, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Press Release, August 1, 2002.

Study Finds No Increased Risk of Breast Cancer from the Pill

A study of more than 9,000 U.S. women ranging from 35 to 65 has found no evidence that oral contraceptive use increases the risk of developing breast cancer.

A 1996 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine had claimed that there was indeed such an increased risk, but that was a meta-analysis of 54 different epidemiological studies.

In the current study about 4,500 women with breast cancer and 4,500 without breast cancer were questioned in detail about their use of oral contraceptives, including older contraceptive pills which some researchers have suggested might be more likely to contribute to cancer because of their much larger levels of hormones.

But, in fact, the study found no increased risk of breast cancer for women who had taken such pills.

Source:

Pill does not increase risk of breast cancer. Gaia Vince, NewScientist.Com, June 26, 2002.

Ronald Bailey on the Long Island Cancer Cluster

Writing in Reason, Ronald Bailey has a nice look at the so-called Long Island Cancer Cluster and a recent study designed to find out why so many women in and around Long Island have breast cancer. After spending several years and $8 million, the National Cancer Institute study concluded that whatever might be contributing to the cancer cluster, it isn’t exposure to chemicals and pesticides in the Long Island area.

Research into breast cancer in Nassau and Suffolk counties in Long Island found that women there had rates of breast cancer that were roughly 3 percent higher than the rest of the nation. Some breast cancer advocates were convinced that the only possible explanation for the higher rate was due to chemicals in the area.

But a study of blood and urine from 3,000 women in the Long Island area found no evidence for this hypothesis. The study looked at levels of DDT, PCBs, chlordanes and chemicals indicative of cigarette smoking. The bottom line — women exposed to such chemicals were no more likely to develop breast cancer than women not exposed to such chemicals. This result was consistent with other studies such as an almost 33,000 patient study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997 that found no evidence that exposure to DDT or PCB increased the risk of a woman developing breast cancer.

Why would advocates focus on DDT, PCBs, chlordanes and other chemicals? In part because those chemicals have all been found to be carcinogenic in mice, rats and other laboratory animals. Now animal tests are helpful in identifying substances that are potentially harmful to human beings, but they are not the last word. Some substances that are harmful to laboratory animals are perfectly safe in human beings, while some substances that do not harm mice or rats are nonetheless very harmful in human beings. Merely because animal tests indicate that a substance is likely to be carcinogenic does not mean that it actually is in human beings.

But that seems to be the message that some people are taking away from media reports on such research. The New York Times, for example, quotes Geri Barish, president of 1 in 9: The Long Island Breast Cancer Action Coalition, as wondering how, if these chemicals are carcinogenic in animal tests,

How could they absolutely say that a known carcinogen is not absolutely involved in the cause of cancer? . . . I refuse to accept the fact that they didn’t find anything. They didn’t find anything conclusive because in the scientific world it has to be exact.

Barish wants further studies to be done, but Dr. Barbara Hulka, a professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina, told The Times that so many studies have already been done looking for a link between DDT, PCBs and breast cancer that there may be nothing more to learn there. Hulka told The Times

I think it is important that these studies have been done. . . [but] There comes a point after so many studies are done that it becomes less productive to continue that line of work.

There have been so many epidemiological studies of DDT and PCBs, for example, that if they really caused or contributed to breast cancer one would think that at some point this would show up clearly in such studies. But in fact, all of the large studies of these chemicals have so far found no statistically significant connection between chemicals and cancer.

Perhaps it is time to recognize that cancer clusters are always going to occur largely because cancer is never going to be evenly distributed throughout a population, and begin taking the millions of dollars that have been devoted to looking at cancer clusters and spending it on more fruitful avenues of research.

Sources:

Looking for the link. Gina Kolata, The New York Times, August 11, 2002.

Cluster bomb. Ronald Bailey, Reason, August 14, 2002.