Reads: Iraq, Tyler Clementi & More
[A wrap up of some of the interesting reads from across the Web.]
Iraq war: make it impossible to inflict such barbarism again - The Guardian
Ten years have flown by since the erstwhile Bush administration entered into a war on terror against Iraq based on intelligence that the Saddam Hussein regime had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Not only the onslaught was a false pretext, the raging war now has also unleashed a sectarian crisis that threatens to destabilize the Middle-East. Seumas Milne's hard-hitting comment on the US-UK bloodbath in Iraq is a disquieting read:
Tony Blair – treated with media reverence but regarded by between 22% and 37% of Britons as a war criminal – accepts the cost of invasion was "very high". But the former prime minister claims justification in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, while insisting that a popular uprising against his regime would have triggered a worse death toll than in Syria. That avoids the fact that the US and Britain controlled Iraq's airspace from 1991 and could have prevented aerial attacks on rebels. It also blithely ignores the scale of the bloodbath for which George Bush and he are directly responsible. >>
Iraq: The spies who fooled the world - BBC
That Saddam Hussein had WMD was enough for the US and British troops to launch a large scale attack eventually leaving the nation in ruins. But BBC has learned of the intelligence failures, the fabrications and lies that went into the whole operation despite the respective governments becoming cognizant of the fact stating otherwise.
There appeared to be corroborative intelligence from another spy who fooled the world. He was an Iraqi former intelligence officer, called Maj Muhammad Harith, who said it had been his idea to develop mobile biological laboratories and claimed he had ordered seven Renault trucks to put them on. He made his way to Jordan and then talked to the Americans. Muhammad Harith apparently made up his story because he wanted a new home. His intelligence was dismissed as fabrication 10 months before the war. >>
The Story of a Suicide - The New Yorker
After having witnessed his roommate Tyler Clementi locked in an embrace with another young man in Rutgers University dorm through a secretly installed webcam, Indian-American Dharun Ravi took to Twitter to gossip about what transpired and tried to set up a second viewing. Days later Tyler took his phone, installed the Facebook app and updated his status - “Jumping off the gw [George Washington] bridge sorry.” before committing suicide. Ian Parker explores the whole episode:
On the night Jane Clementi learned that Tyler was gay, she said, “I told him not to hurt himself.” Not long before, a girl from his school had committed suicide. “We had talked about it briefly that summer, and for some reason that thought came to mind. And all I said was ‘Don’t hurt yourself,’ and he looked me right in the eye and he laughed, and said, ‘I would never do anything like that.’ ” >>
Bringing Them Back to Life - National Geographic
Many species of flora and fauna have gone extinct at various stages of evolution, both of our planet and the life it alone seems to harbor at the moment, but is it possible to resurrect them back to life? National Geographic's April issue centers around this 'de-extinction' and asks a pertinent question as to whether humans should be playing God in reviving lost lifeforms:
“If we’re talking about species we drove extinct, then I think we have an obligation to try to do this,” says Michael Archer, a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales who has championed de-extinction for years. Some people protest that reviving a species that no longer exists amounts to playing God. Archer scoffs at the notion. “I think we played God when we exterminated these animals.” >>
Jaron Lanier: the digital pioneer who became a web rebel – interview - The Guardian
You are not a Gadget was one book that explored the side-effects of technology, of how the advances have changed us, the way we interact and so on. Interestingly the person who wrote it is considered one the pioneers of Virtual Reality. Jaron Lanier is now back with his next book Who Owns the Future? and in this interview with John Naughton, he talks about what made him rebel against an institution that he helped create:
The thing to remember about HTML, though, is that Tim [Berners-Lee] was not trying to redesign the world. He was trying to do a quick thing for a very particular context – a physics lab. The beauty of HTML was that one-way linking made it very simple to spread because you could put something up and take no responsibility whatsoever. And that creates a society in which people display no responsibility whatsoever. That's the problem. >>
Iraq war: make it impossible to inflict such barbarism again - The Guardian
Ten years have flown by since the erstwhile Bush administration entered into a war on terror against Iraq based on intelligence that the Saddam Hussein regime had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Not only the onslaught was a false pretext, the raging war now has also unleashed a sectarian crisis that threatens to destabilize the Middle-East. Seumas Milne's hard-hitting comment on the US-UK bloodbath in Iraq is a disquieting read:
Tony Blair – treated with media reverence but regarded by between 22% and 37% of Britons as a war criminal – accepts the cost of invasion was "very high". But the former prime minister claims justification in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, while insisting that a popular uprising against his regime would have triggered a worse death toll than in Syria. That avoids the fact that the US and Britain controlled Iraq's airspace from 1991 and could have prevented aerial attacks on rebels. It also blithely ignores the scale of the bloodbath for which George Bush and he are directly responsible. >>
Iraq: The spies who fooled the world - BBC
That Saddam Hussein had WMD was enough for the US and British troops to launch a large scale attack eventually leaving the nation in ruins. But BBC has learned of the intelligence failures, the fabrications and lies that went into the whole operation despite the respective governments becoming cognizant of the fact stating otherwise.
There appeared to be corroborative intelligence from another spy who fooled the world. He was an Iraqi former intelligence officer, called Maj Muhammad Harith, who said it had been his idea to develop mobile biological laboratories and claimed he had ordered seven Renault trucks to put them on. He made his way to Jordan and then talked to the Americans. Muhammad Harith apparently made up his story because he wanted a new home. His intelligence was dismissed as fabrication 10 months before the war. >>
The Story of a Suicide - The New Yorker
After having witnessed his roommate Tyler Clementi locked in an embrace with another young man in Rutgers University dorm through a secretly installed webcam, Indian-American Dharun Ravi took to Twitter to gossip about what transpired and tried to set up a second viewing. Days later Tyler took his phone, installed the Facebook app and updated his status - “Jumping off the gw [George Washington] bridge sorry.” before committing suicide. Ian Parker explores the whole episode:
On the night Jane Clementi learned that Tyler was gay, she said, “I told him not to hurt himself.” Not long before, a girl from his school had committed suicide. “We had talked about it briefly that summer, and for some reason that thought came to mind. And all I said was ‘Don’t hurt yourself,’ and he looked me right in the eye and he laughed, and said, ‘I would never do anything like that.’ ” >>
Bringing Them Back to Life - National Geographic
Many species of flora and fauna have gone extinct at various stages of evolution, both of our planet and the life it alone seems to harbor at the moment, but is it possible to resurrect them back to life? National Geographic's April issue centers around this 'de-extinction' and asks a pertinent question as to whether humans should be playing God in reviving lost lifeforms:
“If we’re talking about species we drove extinct, then I think we have an obligation to try to do this,” says Michael Archer, a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales who has championed de-extinction for years. Some people protest that reviving a species that no longer exists amounts to playing God. Archer scoffs at the notion. “I think we played God when we exterminated these animals.” >>
Jaron Lanier: the digital pioneer who became a web rebel – interview - The Guardian
You are not a Gadget was one book that explored the side-effects of technology, of how the advances have changed us, the way we interact and so on. Interestingly the person who wrote it is considered one the pioneers of Virtual Reality. Jaron Lanier is now back with his next book Who Owns the Future? and in this interview with John Naughton, he talks about what made him rebel against an institution that he helped create:
The thing to remember about HTML, though, is that Tim [Berners-Lee] was not trying to redesign the world. He was trying to do a quick thing for a very particular context – a physics lab. The beauty of HTML was that one-way linking made it very simple to spread because you could put something up and take no responsibility whatsoever. And that creates a society in which people display no responsibility whatsoever. That's the problem. >>
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