Good and bad terrorists in Syria

December 26, 2012

salami

Terrorism is terrorism and it cannot be defined otherwise unless the interests of one party tilt the scale in disfavor of another and the dichotomization of the terrorists in Syria into good and bad by the West casts doubt on its claim on democracy.

In a somber political tone, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lashed out as “absolutely unacceptable” the West's support for the terrorists in Syria in his exclusive interview with Russia Today.


Lavrov said the West has divided the terrorists into “bad” and “acceptable,” throwing its support behind the latter.

“It's absolutely unacceptable, and if we follow this logic it might lead us to a very dangerous situation not only in the Middle East but in other parts of the world, if our partners in the West would begin to qualify terrorists as bad terrorists and acceptable terrorists,” the Russian foreign minister said.


The dichotomization of such a grave issue by the West is almost nothing new. The delisting of MKO, a long-considered terrorists group, by Washington is in line with this process of redefining well-established concepts and terms by the West.

Paradoxically, the MKO has been supported by Washington even when it was on the terrorist list. They even received their training at the hands of the Bush administration.

In a rare article, Seymour Hersh revealed that US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) trained members of the Iranian Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MKO) at a secretive site in Nevada from 2005 to at least 2007. According to Hersh, MKO members “were trained in intercepting communications, cryptography, weaponry and small unit tactics at the Nevada site up until President Obama took office.”

In a separate interview, a retired four-star general said that he had been privately briefed in 2005 about the training of MKO members in Nevada by an American involved in the program. He said that they got “the standard training in commo, crypto [cryptography], small-unit tactics, and weaponry-that went on for six months. They were kept in little pods.” He also was told, he said, that the men doing the training were from JSOC, which, by 2005, had become a major instrument in the Bush Administration's global war on terror.

To the dismay and disappointment of many, US State Department decided in September to remove the MKO from the terror lists.


US State Department said its decision to delist the group was made because the group has not committed any terrorist acts for a decade and brashly whitewashed the fact that the group has been to all intents and purposes instrumental in carrying out nuclear assassinations in the last few years in Iran. Although the group has never officially assumed responsibility for the assassinations (which is quite natural), there is solid evidence suggesting that it has been complicit in these terrorist acts.

The terrorist group made unrelenting efforts for years to be removed from the terror list and enlisted a number of Republican and Democratic officials to lobby on its behalf. Instead of paying lobbying fees to them, “it offered honoraria ranging from $10,000-$50,000 per speech to excoriate the US government for its allegedly shabby treatment of the MEK.

Among those who joined the group's gravy train are former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, Rudy Giuliani, Alan Dershowitz, and former FBI director Louis Freeh. Many of them profess to have little interest in the money they have collected” (Richard Silverstein, The Guardian September 22, 2012).

MKO has long been engaging in a series of sabotage and terrorist activities against the Islamic Republic in league with Israeli intelligence agencies.

In January 2012, Benny Gantz, the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, told a parliamentary committee: "For Iran, 2012 is a critical year in combining the continuation of its nuclearisation, internal changes in the Iranian leadership, continuing and growing pressure from the international community and things which take place in an unnatural manner."
Just 24 hours after Israeli military chief warned of unnatural events for Iran, Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was assassinated in broad daylight. It soon transpired to be a joint Mossad-MKO operation.

The MKO has reportedly assassinated over 12,000 Iranian citizens, seven American citizens, and tens of thousands of Iraqi nationals.


Anyhow, to dichotomize 'terrorists' into good and bad is an ugly apartheid.

A comparatively similar story is being repeated in Syria. Washington has branded the Qatar-funded Al-Nusra Front as a terrorist organization. But why? They are fighting against the government of Bashar al-Assad together with other militants in Syria who are chiefly composed of foreign mercenaries. The former are considered terrorists simply because they to a large extent fly in the face of Washington's policies in Syria. So, it is Washington or the US-led West which decides who is a terrorist and who is not.

A most misinterpreted word, terrorism is defined and refined by the West according to the context where it proves deleterious or beneficial to those who define the term.



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News Network
April 17,2020

Paris, Apr 17: Even as virologists zero in on the virus that causes COVID-19, a very basic question remains unanswered: do those who recover from the disease have immunity?

There is no clear answer to this question, experts say, even if many have assumed that contracting the potentially deadly disease confers immunity, at least for a while.

"Being immunised means that you have developed an immune response against a virus such that you can repulse it," explained Eric Vivier, a professor of immunology in the public hospital system in Marseilles.

"Our immune systems remember, which normally prevents you from being infected by the same virus later on."

For some viral diseases such a measles, overcoming the sickness confers immunity for life.

But for RNA-based viruses such as Sars-Cov-2 -- the scientific name for the bug that causes the COVID-19 disease -- it takes about three weeks to build up a sufficient quantity of antibodies, and even then they may provide protection for only a few months, Vivier told AFP.

At least that is the theory. In reality, the new coronavirus has thrown up one surprise after another, to the point where virologists and epidemiologists are sure of very little.

"We do not have the answers to that -- it's an unknown," Michael Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization's Emergencies Programme said in a press conference this week when asked how long a recovered COVID-19 patient would have immunity.

"We would expect that to be a reasonable period of protection, but it is very difficult to say with a new virus -- we can only extrapolate from other coronaviruses, and even that data is quite limited."

For SARS, which killed about 800 people across the world in 2002 and 2003, recovered patients remained protected "for about three years, on average," Francois Balloux director of the Genetics Institute at University College London, said.

"One can certainly get reinfected, but after how much time? We'll only know retroactively."

A recent study from China that has not gone through peer review reported on rhesus monkeys that recovered from Sars-Cov-2 and did not get reinfected when exposed once again to the virus.

"But that doesn't really reveal anything," said Pasteur Institute researcher Frederic Tangy, noting that the experiment unfolded over only a month.

Indeed,several cases from South Korea -- one of the first countries hit by the new coronavirus -- found that patients who recovered from COVID-19 later tested positive for the virus.

But there are several ways to explain that outcome, scientists cautioned.

While it is not impossible that these individuals became infected a second time, there is little evidence this is what happened.

More likely, said Balloux, is that the virus never completely disappeared in the first place and remains -- dormant and asymptomatic -- as a "chronic infection", like herpes.

As tests for live virus and antibodies have not yet been perfected, it is also possible that these patients at some point tested "false negative" when in fact they had not rid themselves of the pathogen.

"That suggests that people remain infected for a long time -- several weeks," Balloux added. "That is not ideal."

Another pre-publication study that looked at 175 recovered patients in Shanghai showed different concentrations of protective antibodies 10 to 15 days after the onset of symptoms.

"But whether that antibody response actually means immunity is a separate question," commented Maria Van Kerhove, Technical Lead of the WHO Emergencies Programme.

"That's something we really need to better understand -- what does that antibody response look like in terms of immunity."

Indeed, a host of questions remain.

"We are at the stage of asking whether someone who has overcome COVID-19 is really that protected," said Jean-Francois Delfraissy, president of France's official science advisory board.

For Tangy, an even grimmer reality cannot be excluded.

"It is possible that the antibodies that someone develops against the virus could actually increase the risk of the disease becoming worse," he said, noting that the most serious symptoms come later, after the patient had formed antibodies.

For the moment, it is also unclear whose antibodies are more potent in beating back the disease: someone who nearly died, or someone with only light symptoms or even no symptoms at all. And does age make a difference?

Faced with all these uncertainties, some experts have doubts about the wisdom of persuing a "herd immunity" strategy such that the virus -- unable to find new victims -- peters out by itself when a majority of the population is immune.

"The only real solution for now is a vaccine," Archie Clements, a professor at Curtin University in Perth Australia, told AFP.

At the same time, laboratories are developing a slew of antibody tests to see what proportion of the population in different countries and regions have been contaminated.

Such an approach has been favoured in Britain and Finland, while in Germany some experts have floated the idea of an "immunity passport" that would allow people to go back to work.

"It's too premature at this point," said Saad Omer, a professor of infectious diseases at the Yale School of Medicine.

"We should be able to get clearer data very quickly -- in a couple of months -- when there will be reliable antibody tests with sensitivity and specificity."

One concern is "false positives" caused by the tests detecting antibodies unrelated to COVID-19.

The idea of immunity passports or certificates also raises ethical questions, researchers say.

"People who absolutely need to work -- to feed their families, for example -- could try to get infected," Balloux.

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Agencies
July 9,2020

Twitter has hinted that it is planning a paid subscription platform that can be reused by other teams in the future.

The news that the micro-blogging platform is building a subscription platform with a team codenamed "Gryphon" resulted in Twitter stock rising over 8% on Wednesday.

Twitter revealed its plan via a job listing that seeks a full-stack senior software engineer in New York to join "Gryphon".

Interestingly, Twitter "edited" the job listing once the news broke, removing the part about "Gryphon" and any mention of their internal team or their subscription feature. The listing said the company is looking for an Android engineer to "work on a bevy of backend engineering teams to build components that allow for experimentation to deliver the best experience possible to all of our users".

Later, Twitter users noticed that the company restored the earlier job listing that mentioned the upcoming subscription platform and "Gryphon".

A spokesperson for Twitter told CNN on Wednesday that it's only a job posting, not a product announcement.

This is not the first time Twitter has thought of a paid product. 

In 2017, it sent out a survey to users and a preview of what a premium offering of its TweetDeck app might look like, including breaking news alerts and more analytics, according to The Verge.

"We're conducting this survey to assess the interest in a new, more enhanced version of Tweetdeck. We regularly conduct user research to gather feedback about people's Twitter experience and to better inform our product investment decisions, and we're exploring several ways to make TweetDeck even more valuable for professionals," a Twitter spokesperson had said at that time.

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Agencies
July 4,2020

Twitter has joined efforts to do away with racially loaded terms such as master, slave and blacklist from its coding language in the wake of the death of African-American George Floyd and ensuing Black Lives Matter protests.

The project started even before the current movement for racial justice escalated following the death of 46-year-old George Floyd in police custody in May.

The use of terms such as "master" and "slave" in programming language originated decades ago. While "master" is used to refer to the primary version of a code, "slave" refers to the replicas. Similarly, the term "Blacklist" is used to refer to items which are meant to be automatically denied.

The efforts to change these terms in favour of more inclusive language at Twitter were initiated by Regynald Augustin and Kevin Oliver and the microblogging platform is now backing their efforts.

"Inclusive language plays a critical role in fostering an environment where everyone belongs. At Twitter, the language we have been using in our code does not reflect our values as a company or represent the people we serve. We want to change that. #WordsMatter," Twitter's engineering team said in a post on Thursday.

As per the recommendations from the team, the term "whitelist" could be replaced by "allowlist" and "blacklist" by "denylist".

Similarly, "master/slave" could be replaced by "leader/follower", "primary/replica" or "primary/standby".

Twitter, however, is not the first to start a project to bring inclusivity in programming language.

According to a report in CNET, the team behind the Drupal online publishing software started using "primary/replica" in place of "master/slave" as early as in 2014.

The use of the terms "master/slave" was also dropped by developers of the Python programming language in 2018.

Now similar efforts are underway at Microsoft's Github and LinkedIn divisions as well, said the report.

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