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9. august 2005
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The Washington Post has a detailed article showing the importance of the Internet to the Salafists generally, and al-Zarqawi's group specifically.
Never before has a guerrilla organization so successfully intertwined its real-time war on the ground with its electronic jihad, making Zarqawi's group practitioners of what experts say will be the future of insurgent warfare, where no act goes unrecorded and atrocities seem to be committed in order to be filmed and distributed nearly instantaneously online.
Zarqawi has deployed a whole inventory of Internet operations beyond the shock video. He immortalizes his suicide bombers online, with video clips of the destruction they wreak and Web biographies that attest to their religious zeal. He taunts the U.S. military with an online news service of his exploits, releasing tactical details of operations multiple times a day. He publishes a monthly Internet magazine, Thurwat al-Sinam (literally "The Camel's Hump"), that offers religious justifications for jihad and military advice on how to conduct it.
As we remember, Zarqawi's fame was secured when the video of his murder of Nicholas Berg became an instant hit on the Net.
After Abu Musab Zarqawi swung the curved blade of his sword and decapitated Nicholas Berg, he picked up the bloodied head of his victim and screamed out praise to Allah. The camera lingered on the dead man's wild eyes.
The exact date of this atrocity is unclear. The date the world came to know about it is not.
On May 11, 2004, a posting with a link to the video appeared on the al-AnsarWeb forum. Soon, it had been downloaded millions of times, freezing up servers from Indonesia to the United States. A wave of copycat beheadings by other groups followed. Zarqawi became a household name.
It was, said Kohlmann, "the 9/11 of jihad on the Internet -- momentous for them and momentous for us. For years, people were saying how the Internet would be used by terrorists. And then all of a sudden somebody was beheaded on camera and it was, 'Holy smokes, we never thought about the Internet being used this way!' "
The same Kohlmann directed me to this article on his blog. He says it's one of the very best articles on the importance of the net for the terrorists.
9:32:00 PM 
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Bob Dylan was obviously right that you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Weatherman Roy W. Spencer, until now mostly known as a global warming skeptic, has decided to throw science to the four winds and take on evolution, using arguments and assertions you can read off the back of a typical creationist pamphlet. Such arguments no doubt play well to his religious lay audience, but anyone having a smattering of knowledge about biology will be infuriated at what Dr Spencer tries to pass off as science and facts.
Twenty years ago, as a PhD scientist, I intensely studied the evolution versus intelligent design controversy for about two years. And finally, despite my previous acceptance of evolutionary theory as "fact," I came to the realization that intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism.
I don't think anyone would be very convinced by a man claiming to have "intensely studied" meteorology, yet proved ignorant about even the most basic concepts ("what's a cold front?") of the science. So excuse me for being very skeptical to his claims of having studied evolution to any depth.
True evolution, in the macro-sense, has never been observed, only inferred. A population of moths that changes from light to dark based upon environmental pressures is not evolution -- they are still moths. A population of bacteria that become resistant to antibiotics does not illustrate evolution -- they are still bacteria. In the biological realm, natural selection (which is operating in these examples) is supposedly the mechanism by which evolution advances, and intelligent design theory certainly does not deny its existence. While natural selection can indeed preserve the stronger and more resilient members of a gene pool, intelligent design maintains that it cannot explain entirely new kinds of life -- and that is what evolution is.
A basic textbook in biology would have told Dr Spencer that evolution is defined pretty clearly.
"In fact, evolution can be precisely defined as any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next." (Helena Curtis and N. Sue Barnes, Biology, 5th ed. 1989 Worth Publishers, p. 974)
So, whatever he may think, real evolution is precisely what is being observed continuously, both in the wild and in laboratories. What Spencer means, is that "real" evolution is the part he doesn't like, and the part he asserts has not been observed. It speaks volumes about Spencer's ignorance of biology that he says "they are still bacteria," apparently oblivious that bacteria is not one species, not even a family, or a phylum, but an entire kingdom (with varying classifications) of life forms. That is equivalent to discounting evidence for evolution from reptiles to mammals by saying "they are still animals."
Creationists are very happy to draw a distinction between macro- and micro-evolution, accepting the latter but denying the former. Accepting that a few generations of evolution can produce distinct variation within species while discounting that thousands of generations can create wholly new species is equivalent to a continental drift skeptic accepting that the Atlantic Ocean widens by, say, ten centimeters in a year, while denying that this means it could widen by 100 km in a million years.
You hear this assertion all the time from creationists, but it is simply false that speciation has not been observed. Anyone familiar with the literature, and the debate, will be aware of abundant and compelling evidence of speciation that has been observed by scientists in modern times.
Yet, it is simply dishonest to pretend that we can't know what is not directly observed. Nobody has observed the ancient city of Carthage, but I don't think any sane and educated person will deny that it did exist. Nobody has seen a live dinosaur, obviously, but not even creationists pretend they never existed, as that would be too much a leap of faith, given that anyone can observe their fossils in museums.
Obviously, we can know many things about the past based on analysis of evidence. Indirect evidence based on sound scientific methods is no less reliable than human observation; after all, you are far more likely to accept the existence of the atom than believe UFO sightings.
Outlining the hard and overwhelming evidence for what Spencer calls macroevolution is quite beyond a blog posting, but anyone interested should read Dr Douglas Theobald's 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution. It contains the sordid secrets of science that creationists, including the modern intelligent design sect, consistently pretend not exists.
Still, allow me to point out just one very strong argument showing that macroevolution, or more specifically common descent, is a fact that is no longer subject to serious scientific debate. I grew up a creationist, and while I found it increasingly difficult to maintain that position in face of the evidence, it was throwbacks, or atavisms, that ultimately convinced me that evolution is an undeniable fact.
According to evolutionary theory, the ancestors of modern whales were terrestrial animals walking on dry land. Thus, they had hindlegs. Modern whales, swimming in oceans, do not. Since evolution doesn't erase the traces of our past genetic history, but simply makes it inoperable, we could expect some mutations to turn on these now useless limbs again, and there is abundant documentation that whales with hind legs have been seen, caught, photographed and exhibited. Dr Theobald explains (and see the link for pictures):
For example, Figure 2.2.1 shows the bones from the atavistic legs of a humpback whale. These bones are the remnants of one of two symmetrical hind-limbs found protruding from the ventral side of a female humpback whale, captured by a whaling ship from the Kyuquot Station near the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in July 1919. Two officials of the Consolidated Whaling Company were understandably impressed by this discovery, and they removed one of the legs and presented the skeletal remains to the Provincial Museum in Victoria, B.C. (The other leg was evidently taken as a "souvenir" by crew members of the whaling ship).
For anyone, like Dr Spencer, claiming that all species were uniquely created (sorry, "designed"), this evidence is not only troubling, it is completely destroying their entire argument. The only reasonable explanation for atavistic legs in whales is that whales are descendants of species that walked. If that isn't macroevolution, what is? If a creationist should unwisely suggest this was a spontaneous mutation (something no biologist would believe), that would of course be no less disastrous to his faith.
Dr Spencer and, he hopes, his readers, are totally ignorant of such evidence, and much more like it. When scientists say that evolution is a fact, it is certainly not based on faith, but on sound scientific reasoning founded on observed fact. Keep this in mind as we keep quoting Spencer's article.
Possibly the most critical distinction between the two theories (or better, "models") of origins is this: While similarities between different but "related" species have been attributed by evolutionism to common ancestry, intelligent design explains the similarities based upon common design. An Audi and a Ford each have four wheels, a transmission, an engine, a gas tank, fuel injection systems … but no one would claim that they both naturally evolved from a common ancestor.
As we have seen, evolution is based on far, far more than simply looking at morphological similarities between species. The quite silly car analogy breaks down for a number of reasons. For one, we know how cars are designed and manufactured by people. We have no non-mythical knowledge of organisms being designed by deities or little green men. Second, we probably agree that cars don't procreate, and procreation is the prerequisite of evolution.
Common ancestry requires transitional forms of life to have existed through the millions of years of supposed biological evolution. Yet the fossil record, our only source of the history of life on Earth, is almost (if not totally) devoid of transitional forms of life that would connect the supposed evolution of amphibians to reptiles, reptiles to birds, etc.
Creationists undoubtedly hope that by repeating the above assertion often enough, people will accept it as true. It is a fact, maybe convenient for creationists, that fossilisation is relatively rare. Even rarer, obviously, are fossils of ancient species found and investigated by modern scientists. But if it is problematic for biologists that intermediates are rare, it is totally disastrous for creationists that they exist at all. And make no mistake about it, there are a lot of intermediate forms that are documented by scientists. Spencer specifically mentioned amphibians to reptiles and reptiles to birds, and such intermediates are well-documented, especially the latter. I doubt Spencer has never heard about Archaeopteryx.
This is why Stephen Jay Gould, possibly the leading evolutionist of our time, advanced his "punctuated equilibria" theory. In this theory, evolution leading to new kinds of organisms occurs over such brief periods of time that it was not captured in the fossil record. Upon reflection, one cannot help but notice that this is not arguing based upon the evidence -- but instead from the lack of evidence.
A memo must have gone out to the world's creationist writers that no article is complete without misrepresenting Stephen Jay Gould and "punctuated equilibria." First, it probably says a lot about Spencer that he thinks Dr Gould is "the leading evolutionist of our time." No offense to the late Dr Gould, but he was a leading populariser of evolutionary biology, and certainly not the leader in the field. His massively over-hyped punctuated equilibria theory (with Dr Eldregde) may well say something trivial but true about the speed and direction of evolution, but it was certainly not developed as an answer to the alleged lack of transitional fossils, as creationists gleefully try to portray it. Gould may deserve a lot of flak for providing statements that easily lend themselves to dishonest quote-mining, but this just shows that creationism, and intelligent design, are about debating people's opinions and how they express them, not the actual underlying evidence. The evidence, you see, clearly demonstrates evolution.
As we have seen, creationists like Spencer would rather pretend this evidence doesn't exist.
One finally comes to the conclusion that, despite vigorous protests, belief in evolution and intelligent design are matters of faith.
"One" comes to such a conclusion only by being totally ignorant of the evidence, or willfully ignoring all the facts of the case. The above sentence is essentially Spencer's conclusion, though he drones on for several paragraphs along the same vein, and also speculates a bit about who this "intelligent designer" may be (nudge nudge, wink wink).
Theists may like it differently, but there is no evidence for design in nature. Still, I have no objection to people believing in an intelligent designer. But it isn't science. Evolution certainly is, and the modern synthesis of Darwin's theory of natural selection and genetics is one of the best-founded and prolific branches of science. Propaganda that ignores the huge body of evidence and scientific research doesn't change that fact.
Update: More creationist nonsense.
A few weeks ago I did a fisking of Sharon Hughes' "Intelligent Design" propaganda.
7:08:54 PM
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The anthrax spores that became the seed to a major part of Saddam Hussein's WMD programme originally came from the ear of a cow that died in Oxford, England, in 1937. The strain found its way to the United States' ATCC (American Type Culture Collection), a private non-profit, that happily provided samples when Saddam's scientists, using the cover of Baghdad University's microbiology researchers, requested them sometime between 1986 and 1988, in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war. It has been known for a long time that the US (as well as France) was the source for Saddam's biological weapons.
Export controls? What export controls? Apparently nobody thought about that in the mid-80s, and the official order went through the US Department of Commerce without a hitch.
It's the Times that today reveals the British bovine origin of Saddam's anthrax.
“Iraq declared researching different strains of B. anthracis, but settled on the American Type Culture Collection strain 14578 as the exclusive strain for use as a BW,” Mr Duelfer said.
A congressional investigation into Gulf War syndrome by Don Riegle had already uncovered invoices showing that this batch was shipped from the United States between 1986 and 1988.
The ATCC is a private, non-profit-making collection of cultures of living micro-organisms, viruses, plants and human and animal cells, stored in Virginia.
Its catalogue shows that batch 14578 consists of “bovine anthrax”, isolated by R. L. Vollum, a professor of bacteriology at Oxford University during the 1930s. It is named after him.
Martin Hugh-Jones, who co-ordinates the World Health Organisation’s Working Group on Anthrax Research and Control, said: “We have traced it back and it would have come in on some contaminated bones from Southern Rhodesia.
“England was importing sun-dried bones from dead animals in the colonies. They would be shipped to London and used to make soap. When they got the fat out, (the bones) were meant to be sterilised and ground as bone meal and fed to cattle. The sterilisation was not always complete. It was the major cause of anthrax for almost 100 years.”
The Vollum anthrax was used in biological weapons tests on the Scottish island of Gruinard in 1942, which had to be quarantined for 48 years. “It killed any number of sheep in Gruinard,” Professor Hugh-Jones said.
“(Saddam) obviously at one point had a programme because he was buying the laboratory’s cultures to underwrite a programme. Why would he want peaceful research with Vollum? Come on!”
What exactly happened to the anthrax in Iraq? Well, that is still one of the world's great mysteries. The Duelfer report outlines evidence that the BW stores were secretly destroyed after an IAEA inspection in June 1991 caused panic in the Iraqi government. However, the documentation is somewhat self-contradictory on exactly how much was produced, and how much of that was destroyed. The Iraqis also kept the know-how, the scientists and concealed the documents essential to restart the BW programme.
 But what about the potentially dangerous anthrax strain? We have only Dr. "Germ" Rihab Rashid Taha Al Azzawi's word that these were completely destroyed.
ISG, however, continues to harbor doubts regarding Iraq’s destruction of bacterial reference strains and isolates. According to Dr. Rihab, she destroyed these materials in early 1992, but ISG can verify neither that the materials were destroyed nor the other details of Dr. Rihab’s account. She maintains that she gave a small box containing no more than 25 vials of lyophilized bacterial pathogens, including those obtained from the American Type Culture Collection to the IIS in mid-1991 for safekeeping. Allegedly, Husam Muhammad Amin Al Yasin, who would eventually become the director of the National Monitoring Directorate (NMD), returned the box to her in early 1992. She also claimed that she asked former TRC head Ahmad Murtada what to do with the vials. Murtada took the matter to Husayn Kamil, who ordered the vials destroyed. Dr. Rihab claims she did this by injecting the vials with Dettol™ and then autoclaving the vials. According to UNSCOM data, all ATCC ampules were accounted for and there should have been no remaining unopened vials from ATCC after the first UNSCOM BW inspection.
There you have it. Don't blame the cow.
5:58:46 PM
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 The Space Shuttle Discovery landed in California Thursday morning. Stormy weather at the Florida coast made NASA decide to land the craft at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
Weather conditions at Edwards included clear skies and light winds, "excellent conditions for a space shuttle landing," NASA said.
"How do you feel about a beautiful clear night with a breeze down the runway in the high desert of California?" mission control radioed Collins.
"We are ready for whatever we need to do," Collins said.
Discovery's path to Edwards began with the spacecraft firing its engines over the Indian Ocean to slow it enough to re-enter Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific.
Shuttle pilot James Kelly steered Discovery on a trajectory leading it near Los Angeles and Oxnard, California, before touch down.
A sigh of relief over a successful flight - despite some early scares - but it's not very unlikely that this will be the last one for the ageing machines.
PS: Somehow disturbingly I called the shuttle "Columbia" above. Oops. Thanks for correction in comments.
4:03:19 PM
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Christopher Hitchens asks, somewhat rhetorically, if the left really wants us to lose the Iraq war.
It never seemed to me that there was any alternative to confronting the reality of Iraq, which was already on the verge of implosion and might, if left to rot and crash, have become to the region what the Congo is to Central Africa: a vortex of chaos and misery that would draw in opportunistic interventions from Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Bad as Iraq may look now, it is nothing to what it would have become without the steadying influence of coalition forces. None of the many blunders in postwar planning make any essential difference to that conclusion. Indeed, by drawing attention to the ruined condition of the Iraqi society and its infrastructure, they serve to reinforce the point.
How can so many people watch this as if they were spectators, handicapping and rating the successes and failures from some imagined position of neutrality? Do they suppose that a defeat in Iraq would be a defeat only for the Bush administration?
Good question.
1:11:34 PM
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It didn't take former UN procurement officer Alexander Yakovlev long to confess after he lost his immunity.
Alexander Yakovlev, a Russian procurement officer, was the first U.N. official to be charged in the scandal. He was also accused of wire fraud and money laundering for allegedly accepting nearly $1 million in bribes from U.N. contractors in his work outside the program.
Yakovlev pleaded guilty Monday to the charges and surrendered to FBI agents in Manhattan but was later released on $400,000 bail. He could face up to 20 years in prison for each of the three counts.
Benon Sevan is also under investigation, of course, and may face similar charges. He denies all the accusations.
Two of former UN secretary general Boutros-Ghali's close associates are also in the spotlight. And then there is Kofi Annan himself and his som Kojo, but the Volcker committee seems very insistant on leaving them alone. I wonder if that may change...
The investigators also asked Annan to assist in the possible prosecution of Fred Nadler, a brother-in-law of Boutros-Ghali who is a director of African Middle East Petroleum Co. Ltd. Inc., and Fakhry Abdelnour, the Swiss company's president and a cousin of the former secretary-general.
The inquiry committee found Yakovlev secretly tried to bribe a company called Societe Generale de Surveillance S.A., which was seeking an oil inspection contract under oil-for-food. But they also came across more explosive evidence of wrongdoing — that Yakovlev took at least $950,000 in kickbacks from companies that had won some $79 million in U.N. contracts unrelated to oil-for-food.
Volcker said his investigators were still looking into Yakovlev's participation in the selection of the Swiss company Cotecna Inspection S.A. in 1998 to inspect goods entering Iraq under the oil-for-food program.
The results will be included in a final report in early September that will examine the U.N. management of the oil-for-food program. The report will also cover Boutros-Ghali's role and new evidence suggesting Annan knew more about the contract awarded to Cotecna, which employed his son, Kojo. Both have denied any wrongdoing, Volcker said.
The UN, with its nepotism and friends-of-friends dealings, is looking more and more like a mafia.
Link: I covered the third Volcker interim report yesterday.
Update: Roger follows this story closely as well.
12:17:36 PM
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The liberal Independent wants to be no worse than its rightist rivals these days, and publishes a very sensationalised warning against a British 'home-grown insurgency.'
As police and the security services work to prevent another cell murdering civilians, attention is focusing on the pool of migrants to this country from the Horn of Africa and central Asia. MI5 is working to an estimate that more than 10,000 young men from these regions have had at least basic training in light weapons and military explosives.
A well-connected source said there were more than 100,000 people in Britain from "completely militarised" regions, including Somalia and its neighbours in the Horn of Africa, and Afghanistan and territories bordering the country. "Every one of them knows how to use an AK-47," said the source. "About 10 per cent can strip and reassemble such a weapon blindfolded, and probably a similar proportion have some knowledge of how to use military explosives. That adds up to tens of thousands of men."
Even though the vast majority had come to Britain to escape the lawlessness of their homelands, the source added, there remained an alarmingly large pool of trained men who could be lured into violent action here.
Excuse me for not panicking. Many European countries have conscript armies, meaning a majority of adult men have gone through a year or more of military training. They can certainly use weapons and explosives. I just don't think military capability is the issue here, it is the extremist mindset. It doesn't take much technical know-how to press a button and blow yourself up on a train.
I just don't see a civil war in Britain anytime soon.
12:26:45 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 26.08.2005; 13:08:02.
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