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C4 accused of falsifying data in documentary on climate change

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

The makers of a Channel 4 documentary which claimed that global warming is a swindle have been accused of fabricating data by one of the scientists who participated in the film.

The Great Global Warming Swindle was broadcast on 8 March and has been criticised by leading scientists for errors, distortions and misrepresentations.

The film has also been referred to the regulatory watchdog Ofcom which is considering a complaint from 37 senior scientists that the programme breached the broadcasting code on the misrepresentation of views and facts.

Now even a climate sceptic whose dissenting views were used by the film- makers to bolster their claims about the “lies” and “swindles” of global warming has accused the documentary of promulgating falsehoods.

Eigil Friis-Christensen, director of the Danish National Space Centre, has issued a statement accusing the film-makers of fabricating data based on his work looking at the links between solar activity and global temperatures.

Dr Friiss-Christensen said that a graph he had produced some years ago showing the link between fluctuations in global temperatures and changes in solar activity - sunspot cycles - over the past 400 years had been doctored. The documentary used the graph to pour scorn on the idea that the global warming in recent decades is the result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide. Solar activity, the programme stated, is the cause of global warming in the late 20th century.

However, Dr Friiss-Christensen has issued a statement with Nathan Rive, a climate researcher at Imperial College London and the Centre for Climate Research in Oslo, distancing himself from the C4 graph. He said there was a gap in the historical record on solar cycles from about 1610 to 1710 but the film-makers made up this break with fabricated data that made it appear as if temperatures and solar cycles had followed one another very closely for the entire 400-year period.

“We have reason to believe that parts of the graph were made up of fabricated data that were presented as genuine. The inclusion of the artificial data is both misleading and pointless,” Dr Friis-Christensen said.

“Secondly, although the commentary during the presentation of the graph is consistent with the conclusions of the paper from which the figure originates, it incorrectly rules out a contribution by anthropogenic [man-made] greenhouse gases to 20th century global warming,” he said.

Dr Friis-Christensen, a physicist, believes that solar cycles play an important role in climate change and that not enough effort has gone into addressing the theory. The fabricated data did not, he said, make any difference to the overall view he takes but he is still critical of the way the film handled the scientific evidence. Asked by The Independent whether the documentary was scientifically accurate, Dr Friiss-Christensen said: “No, I think several points were not explained in the way that I, as a scientist, would have explained them … it is obvious it’s not accurate.”

The C4 programme also used out-of-date solar cycle data relating to the past 30 or 40 years which made it appear as if temperatures and solar activity were rising together when in fact solar activity has levelled off for the past few decades. “After 1985 we don’t see any rise or shortening of the solar cycles compared to what we saw in the temperature [record],” Dr Friiss-Christensen said.

Dr Friis-Christensen is the second scientist to appear on the programme who has criticised the way the film was made. Professor Carl Wunsch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that the way his interview was edited gave the misleading impression that he was not concerned about rising levels of carbon dioxide - a diametrically opposite view to his stated position.

Martin Durkin, who wrote and directed the programme, was unavailable for comment but admitted in an email to Mr Rive that the graph was wrong. “Thank you for highlighting the error on the 400-year graph. It is an annoying mistake which all of us missed and is being fixed for all future transmissions of the film. It doesn’t alter our argument,” Mr Durkin said.

However, the graph and its fabricated data will still be included in the DVD of the programme which went on sale yesterday. The advertising for the DVD says: “Everything you’ve ever been told about global warming is probably untrue. This film blows the whistle on the biggest swindle in modern history.”

Mr Durkin has already apologised for an error in another graph used in the film which had to be corrected before the film’s second transmission on the digital channel More 4.

The scientists who have written to Ofcom include Sir John Houghton, the former chief executive of the Met Office, Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist and past-president of the Royal Society, and Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. In a letter to Mr Durkin they call for changes to the programme before the DVD version is released, even though DVDs are not covered by the Ofcom Broadcasting Code.

“So serious and fundamental are the misrepresentations that the distribution of the DVD without their removal amounts to nothing more than an exercise in misleading the public,” they say.

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‘War is peace’

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

Orwellian theories are being acted out in Israel - as persecution against Palestinians begins to echo 1984.

Nimer Sultany

It is one thing to read George Orwell and Franz Kafka, it is quite another to live their texts. For us - Palestinians - Orwell and Kafka are not works of fiction but concrete reality.

Israel’s persecution of Azmi Bishara, the prominent Palestinian scholar, head of the National Democratic Assembly and - until recently - member of the Israeli Knesset, is only the recent articulation of this reality. After all, this is not the first Israeli attempt to criminalise Bishara or other Palestinian political leaders. The state hopes that by reframing his political agenda as treason, incitement to violence and support of terrorism, his ideas will lose legitimacy, his community will be intimidated and the establishment will not need to deal with the challenge that the Palestinian citizens of Israel present to the ideology of the state through their demands for equality.

Bishara rightly claims that he will not have a fair trial. Indeed, we know from the history of the General Security Service (GSS) of a culture of lies and fabricated files (even against their own men as in the Bus 300 affair, which was hijacked by Palestinian militants in 1984). We also know that even in cases unrelated to “security”, the Arab citizen is twice as likely to be indicted, convicted and imprisoned compared to his fellow Jewish citizen. Professors Aryeh Rattner and Gideon Fishman of Haifa University write: “Being an Arab may lead to a presumption of guilt without facts and the rules of evidence.”

We also know that security is the sacred cow to which Israeli judges bow. Security has always been an important tool for the maintenance of the Jewish and Zionist character of the Israeli state. It was a major pretext for the confiscation of Palestinian citizens’ lands. Israel’s persecution of Bishara is part and parcel of this security mindset of the Israeli state vis-á-vis its Palestinian citizens. Those citizens were denied their basic rights and were subjected to a military administration for 18 years (1948-1966). Since then, the GSS has been the main state organ in charge of viewing us as a “fifth column.” Bishara has already had his trial(s) without knowing. The justices of the Israeli Supreme Court have authorised more than once the wiretapping of his private conversations. “parliamentary immunity”, “freedom of expression” and “democracy” are all tricks through which Big Brother comes to haunt you in the end.

Not only does the GSS closely monitor and control the Arab education system inside Israel, but it has publicly declared that the Palestinian citizens of Israel are a “strategic and demographic threat” to the state. In fact, it can be said that Big Brother is not only patrolling “thoughtcrimes” but has “telescreens” in the bedrooms of the Palestinian citizens, penetrating our private realms and controlling some of the most intimate aspects of our family and love lives. The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law forbids family unification and effectively prohibits Arab citizens from marrying citizens of more than half of the countries in the Middle East. In this dehumanising context, the law declares that marriage and children are not humanitarian affairs.

Had Israel been a democratic state, one would have expected the legal apparatus to criminalise and outlaw anti-democratic movements. Israel, however, persecutes Bishara for his democratic agenda. “State of all its citizens” and “universal equality” would be considered a trivial and possibly conservative agenda in any normal democratic state. Strangely, in Israel, such an agenda has been labelled as dangerous, subversive and extremist. The Knesset rejected several times an “equal protection” clause that Bishara had proposed. Equality remains outside Israeli legislation.

After all, these are unorthodox ideas in Israel. The Zionist “Newspeak” is supposed to turn them into unthinkable ideas. The fact that three groups of Palestinian elites inside Israel - National Committee of the Heads of the Arab Local Municipalities, Adalah and Mada al-Carmel - have recently issued “vision documents” articulating our demands for equality, expressing our grievances and presenting an alternative historical narrative meant that Bishara had risen in prominence and influence.

On the other hand, anti-democrats and racists who openly propagate violence against as well as the expulsion of Palestinians (including those who are citizens) serve in the Knesset and the government, and cabinet ministers who routinely issue racist statements against the Palestinian citizens are not held accountable. In fact, they become more popular in the Jewish community after such statements.

It is thus hard to escape understanding the Israeli irony without the Orwellian backdrop. Bishara, vocal in his opposition to Israel’s brutal assault on Lebanon last summer, is accused by the Thought Police (the GSS) of helping the enemy in times of war through contact with a foreign agent. The “enemy” here stands for the Arab world to which the Palestinian citizens belong and the “foreign agent” is defined retroactively as such by the Thought Police. These alleged crimes are punishable according to Israeli law by life imprisonment or death penalty. “Thoughtcrime is death.”

On the contrary, cabinet ministers who urged the Israeli military - still ironically called the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) - to wipe out dozens of Lebanese villages and not feel morally restricted during the war were heralded as patriots. Those who perpetrate war crimes are considered “men of peace”. The Big Brother is persecuting Bishara because “war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.”

What might be bewildering in recent developments is Israel’s disregard for the impact that these policies might have on its future. Israel has always discriminated against the Palestinian minority, isolated it from its larger Arab milieu and employed a multi-layered control system. Since October 2000, however, Israel has been moving rapidly towards a collision by continuously pushing this minority further into the corner. Most of the minority’s leaders were incessantly interrogated and at times physically assaulted by the police; Ra’ed Salah, a prominent religious and political leader, was imprisoned; several laws further restricted political speech and participation; Bishara faced two political trials; and more Arab houses have been demolished. More persecution of Bishara and his party will take Israel one step closer toward collision with its Palestinian citizens.

Israel is in effect presenting Azmi Bishara with two similar “options”: to end up as either a Kafkaesque or an Orwellian protagonist. The former was executed, the latter was brainwashed and forced to betray his world waiting for an impending execution.

Meanwhile Bishara, as a genuine civil rights leader, is resisting the attempt to drag him into Kafka’s Trial by Big Brother and his Thought Police. He courageously holds his ground: “We will not be intimidated. We will not bow to permanent servitude in the land of our ancestors or to being severed from our natural connections to the Arab world.”

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Israel accused of prisoner abuse

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

Tim Franks

Human rights groups in Israel have accused the security services of routinely mistreating Palestinian detainees.

The two groups said detainees were held in appalling conditions, and were sometimes tortured.

They said the maltreatment was intended to “break the spirit” of those who were being interrogated.

Israel’s justice ministry rejected the report - which was published on Sunday - as unrepresentative and inaccurate.

The report lists a number of techniques the two groups, B’Tselem and the HaMoked Centre for the Defence of the Individual, say are deployed by the Israeli Security Agency.

They range from preventing detainees from contacting their lawyers, to painful shackling to a chair, threats and intimidation, beating and sleep deprivation.

The groups drew on the testimony of 73 Palestinians detained over a six-month period.

International law

International law is clear in prohibiting ill-treatment or torture, and it allows for no extenuating circumstances.

However, the human rights groups point to a more ambiguous ruling from the Israeli High Court.

It decreed that members of the security service who abused detainees may be exempted from criminal liability, if they believed that the people they were interrogating had information about an imminent terrorist act.

The human rights campaigners also say that of more than 500 complaints about the behaviour of security service agents, not one criminal investigation has been opened.

The Ministry of Justice said the report was “fraught with mistakes, groundless claims and inaccuracies”.

In a statement, the ministry also said that over the past few years, information obtained by security service agents - sometimes through interrogation - had saved the lives of many civilians.

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Management shortcomings seen at NSA

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

Siobhan Gorman

In a sharp rebuke to the National Security Agency’s leadership, an internal task force has concluded that the country’s largest intelligence agency lacks vision and is unable to set objectives and meet them.

NSA employees also do not trust one another, which has left the agency fragmented and in search of a “unity of purpose,” according to a task force report released to employees late last month.

“What we need is fundamental change in the way we manage NSA and what we expect of management and ourselves,” concluded the study, which was led by George “Dennis” Bartko, the NSA’s deputy chief of cryptanalysis. The Sun obtained unclassified portions of the report and eight related documents.

Management problems have been blamed for repeated setbacks as the agency tries to upgrade its ability to analyze the millions of snippets of conversations and other communications collected worldwide every day. In recent years, several major programs have been hampered by delays, technology breakdowns or cost overruns.

Yet the report’s blunt conclusions are strikingly similar to those in a pair of 1999 NSA studies, raising questions about how much progress the Maryland-based agency has made since then.

NSA Director Lt. Gen Keith B. Alexander commissioned the latest report as part of his campaign to improve the management and spying capability of the agency, which, according to one task force planning document, is facing an “identity crisis.”

Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, a Maryland Democrat who chairs the House Intelligence subcommittee that oversees the NSA, said he did not know about the report. Told of some of its conclusions, he said, “What you’re reading to me is troubling.”

Aggressive oversight and more money are needed to make sure that the NSA has sufficient spying capabilities, he said. “Failure, as it relates to NSA, is not an option.”

The report’s conclusions are a chief reason Alexander announced last month that he would consolidate technology programs under a senior officer, NSA spokeswoman Andrea Martino said in e-mailed responses to questions.

“We agree that these issues are important as we move into the future, and the team’s conclusions and recommendations are a key starting point for doing so,” she said.

Reaffirming the problem, the task force report was released about the same time the agency decided to overhaul part of the “Turbulence” program designed to enable the NSA to process digital information at high speeds in cyberspace, according to a senior intelligence official.

According to the task force, the NSA must “decide upon a common purpose, develop plans and strategies aligned with that purpose, manage all of our resources, and tie rewards to successful execution of our plans.”

The NSA eavesdrops on communications worldwide, and its budget has doubled to about $8 billion since the Sept. 11 attacks.

But mismanagement has been a continuing problem, driving into the ground a six-year, multibillion-dollar “Trailblazer” program to adapt the NSA’s collection and analysis capability to the age of digital communications. More recently, the initiative launched in its stead, “Turbulence,” has run into significant problems, exemplified by the recent decision to overhaul a critical piece of the project. Poor planning has also left the agency short of electricity.

That management problems persist more than five years after “the worst terrorist attack in American history” is “really discouraging,” said Amy Zegart, a University of California, Los Angeles public policy professor whose research focuses on intelligence agencies.

Among the conclusions from the 1999 studies were that the NSA had a “poorly communicated mission and lack of vision” and had ignored “excellent recommendations” in the past. The 1999 reports called for a reorganization of the NSA, which was largely carried out.

But it failed to produce a “fundamental management culture change,” the new report concludes.

Bartko, who led the 24-person task force of NSA employees, acknowledged “concerns” that its conclusions were similar to those in previous studies. “If these recommendations were made before, what’s different this time?” he wrote in a recent column for the agency’s work force.

“Now is the time” for change, he continued. “It has to be. The Nation is depending on us not only today, but tomorrow as well.”

In 2004, Congress, frustrated over the NSA’s inability to manage its own expensive programs, stripped the agency of its authority to launch new ones without approval from the Pentagon. That authority has yet to be restored.

More http://www.baltimoresun.com/services/site/premium/access-registered.intercept

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World Bank Panel Finds Wolfowitz at Fault; Aide Resigns

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

STEVEN R. WEISMAN

A committee of World Bank directors has formally notified Paul D. Wolfowitz that they found him to be guilty of a conflict of interest in arranging for a pay raise and promotion for Shaha Ali Riza, his companion, in 2005. The findings stepped up the pressure on Mr. Wolfowitz to resign.

The contents of the panel’s findings were not made public. People who are familiar with the panel’s report said that it reviewed extensive documents and testimony before concluding that Mr. Wolfowitz breached his obligations in arranging for Ms. Riza’s reassignment from the bank to the State Department.

The report, as transmitted to Mr. Wolfowitz, did not recommend a punishment for Mr. Wolfowitz. Bank officials, speaking anonymously because the proceedings are supposed to be confidential, said that the special committee was still working today on what to recommend.

It was not clear whether the committee, consisting of 7 of the bank’s 24 board members, would remove Mr. Wolfowitz from his post or, more likely, express a loss of confidence in his leadership in a manner that might persuade him to resign. Bank officials say that a majority of the bank board has concluded that he should go.

In another sign of Mr. Wolfowitz’s difficulties, his top communications aide, Kevin Kellems, resigned today, saying that “the current environment surrounding the leadership” at the bank made it “very difficult to be effective in helping to advance the mission of the institution.”

Mr. Kellems said in a written statement that he had “tremendous respect and admiration” for the bank’s staff. He made no mention of Mr. Wolfowitz, with whom he had a close association when the bank president was deputy secretary of defense.

European officials at the bank said that if Mr. Wolfowitz resigns, either now or some time in the future, Europeans may be willing to let the United States continue to exercise its customary prerogative of choosing the next bank president.

Since the bank was established as part of the post-World War II global economic architecture in a conference at Bretton Woods, N.H., the United States has always chosen the bank’s president, in part because it has always had the largest single share of voting rights at the bank, currently 16.4 percent.

A senior European official said that Europeans have informally told Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. that many of their governments, some of whom asked for the custom to be discarded in 2005, would now renew their demand, especially if Mr. Wolfowitz is forced out by a vote of the bank board.

This official said that the overwhelming sentiment in Europe, as expressed in editorials, political commentaries and even web logs, was that European governments should never again let the United States pick the president of the World Bank all by itself.

In addition, the Europeans say that they have begun signaling their intention of aiding African countries and other poor nations through their own development agencies, rather than through the World Bank or its principal vehicle for aid to the poorest countries, known as the International Development Agency.

The bank estimates that there are now about 230 separate government and non-government organizations that channel aid to the poorest countries, resulting in a splintering of aid programs that have created duplications and contradictions.

Some officials at the bank said that despite the antipathy toward Mr. Wolfowitz among members of the bank board, they will probably take their cue from the finance and development ministries in their home countries. These ministries, in turn, may be guided by the wishes of the political leadership of their nations.

Technically, it is the bank’s 24-member board of executive directors that has the power to choose, remove or reprimand a bank president. Each director represents either a single country or a “constituency” of countries that vote as a bloc after polling their home governments.

Bank officials say that as of now, only the United States, Japan and Canada would vote in favor of Mr. Wolfowitz. They represent less than 30 percent of the voting shares. Most other directors are reported to be willing to vote against Mr. Wolfowitz, though some countries, mainly in Africa, are said to be wavering.

Mr. Kellems’s departure leaves another top aide to Mr. Wolfowitz, Robin Cleveland, still in place. Both Mr. Kellems and Ms. Cleveland have been the focus of complaints from the bank’s staff over their unusually high salaries — about $250,000 each — and unusual level of control at the bank.

Ms. Cleveland remains at the bank, but officials said that she moved out of her office just outside Mr. Wolfowitz’s last week, and into a smaller office elsewhere at the bank headquarters.

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