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	Controversy over "Iraq War Lies" undiminished by AFP / Guardian News   Archbishop Desmond Tutu wants Bush, Blair tried over Iraq Lies.   Archbishop Desmond Tutu says former British prime minister Tony Blair and former US president George W Bush should face trial in The Hague for their role in the Iraq war.   Writing in the UK"s Observer newspaper, the South African peace icon accused the former leaders of lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.   He said the Iraq invasion left the world more destabilised than "any other conflict in history", and said the military campaign there had brought about conditions for the civil war in Syria and a possible Middle East conflict involving Iran.   He said Mr Bush and Mr Blair "fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart".   "They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us."   Archbishop Tutu said the death toll during and after the Iraq conflict was sufficient for Mr Blair and Mr Bush to face trial.   "On these grounds alone, in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in The Hague," Archbishop Tutu wrote.   "But even greater costs have been exacted beyond the killing fields, in the hardened hearts and minds of members of the human family across the world."   Archbishop Tutu, a long-standing vocal critic of the Iraq war, had snubbed Mr Blair last week, pulling out of a South African conference on leadership because the ex-leader was attending. "As the date drew nearer, I felt an increasingly profound sense of discomfort about attending a summit on "leadership" with Mr Blair," the archbishop said.   "Leadership and morality are indivisible. Good leaders are the custodians of morality.   "The question is not whether Saddam Hussein was good or bad or how many of his people he massacred. The point is that Mr Bush and Mr Blair should not have allowed themselves to stoop to his immoral level.   "If it is acceptable for leaders to take drastic action on the basis of a lie, without an acknowledgement or an apology when they are found out, what should we teach our children?"   How the Bush Administration Sold the War - 10 long years since "Shock and Awe".   We knew WMD intelligence was flawed, but there was a larger failure of officials, media and public to halt the neocon juggernaut, by Joe Wlison and Valerie Plame Wilson.   It has been 10 long years since "Shock and Awe" – the opening bombardment of Baghdad – lit up the skies above the Tigris. A decade later, we know far more about the case the Bush administration made to the world to justify its war of choice to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Books like Hubris by David Corn and Michael Isikoff, and British commission and US Senate reports have catalogued the extent to which intelligence was misused to mislead the public.US Secretary of State Colin Powell holding up a vial that could be used to hold anthrax, in his presentation to the UN in February 2003, ahead of the Iraq invasion.   Yet, even as the intervening period has brought profound change for the United States and its role in the world, have we learned the lessons of that disastrous period? And what were those lessons?   For nearly a year prior to the invasion, President Bush and his administration peppered the airwaves with serious accusations against Saddam Hussein, including claims of aluminum tubes that could be used in centrifuges to enrich uranium, and of Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium yellowcake from Africa. The intelligence supporting the claims was either not believed or was highly disputed by the experts. But that did not stop senior government officials from repeating them incessantly; nor did it prevent the powerful neoconservative ideologues who were the war"s most fervent supporters from parroting them with menacingly jingoistic passion.   Who can forget the trademark line, delivered by Condoleezza Rice: "We don"t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud".   As a covert CIA operations officer working frantically in the months before the war to find and verify hard intelligence about Iraq"s presumed WMD program, Valerie was keenly interested in watching Secretary of State Colin Powell address the United Nations on 6 February 2003. His reputation and service to the United States was stellar, and he was viewed as the lone moderate inside what many others considered to be a hawkish cabinet.   As Valerie watched the speech unfold on TV from CIA headquarters that morning, she experienced what can only be described as "cognitive dissonance". It became clear, as Powell laid out the case for war (with CIA Director George Tenet sitting conspicuously just behind the secretary"s right shoulder), that his robust claims about the state of Iraqi WMD simply did not match the intelligence which she had worked on daily for months.   Powell"s claim from a discredited defector code-named "Curveball" on Iraq"s biological weapons capability was particularly alarming. Valerie knew that "Curveball" had been deemed a "fabricator" by the agency, meaning that none of his intelligence could be believed.   The implications suddenly become obvious: we were watching a kabuki play and the outcome was predetermined. The Bush administration was determined to go to war, however bad the intelligence, and not even Secretary of State Powell was going to stand in the way.   Joe, too, watched Powell"s speech, wondering whether the secretary would repeat the statement, first made by President Bush in his state of the union address several days earlier , that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."   At the request of the CIA, Joe had investigated that claim in February 2002, as it pertained to Niger and had reported back to the agency that there was no evidence to support the charge. Tellingly, Colin Powell made no mention at the UN of any Iraqi effort to seek uranium, either from Niger or anywhere else in Africa.   Rumors of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal had first surfaced in Rome in 2001, as documents purporting to be related to the sale of 500 metric tonnes of yellowcake (a lightly refined uranium ore) circulated in intelligence circles and among journalists.   Those documents were later found to be forgeries, but by the time the charge made its way into the president"s speech, it had already been largely discounted by both the State Department and the CIA. The agency"s director told the White House three times not to use the claim because the CIA believed it to be false.   The now infamous 16 words made it into the state of the union speech only by agreement between the White House and the CIA to attribute the charge to the British government, which had published such a claim in its "White Paper" on Iraq, in September 2002. Unfortunately, as then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw testified to the House of Commons foreign affairs select committee in June 2003, the British claim had been based on separate intelligence from the forged documents, and that the British had not shared their intelligence with the US government.   In sum, we are left to believe that a significant part of President Bush"s case for war was based on intelligence that neither he nor his intelligence officials had even seen. The declassification of several documents in recent years, and a US Senate investigation report published in 2008 conclude that there was far closer collusion between the Bush and Blair administrations than the Straw testimony suggests. Yet, the British government to this day continues to stand behind its "separate intelligence" – which it has yet to make public.   The Powell address to the UN and the Niger-Iraq saga are but two examples of the efforts of the Bush administration to manipulate intelligence to support its political objectives and the lengths to which it went to secure support for its war. As former White House press secretary Scott McClellan put it:   "Bush and his White House were engaging in a carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval to our advantage."   That it was so successful is an indictment of a corrupt administration. But it is also emblematic of the failure of the checks and balances that are the hallmark of our democracy. As Obama appointees John Kerry and Chuck Hagel can attest, the US Congress was ineffective, to say the least, in the exercise of its oversight responsibilities. (The same applies to the UK Parliament.) The Washington press corps was dilatory in its investigative reporting – valuing access and cozy relationships with senior officials above the search for truth; ultimately, the media served as lapdogs rather than watchdogs.   And the public, still reeling from 911 and whipped up by the fear-mongering since, instinctively trusted its leaders. Given the full force and power of the administration"s efforts to sell the war, it is no wonder that nearly 60% of Americans were in favor of the invasion in the early part of 2003.   Not surprisingly, that figure has flipped, with nearly 60% of Americans now saying that the Iraq war was a mistake; more than 70% of the British public agree. We owe it to ourselves and to our partners in the "coalition of the willing" to confront the fact that, when it mattered a decade ago, our Congress, our press, and we as citizens were not vigilant enough in holding our government to account for its statements and actions.   We did not do nearly enough to prevent this tragedy perpetrated on Iraq, on the world, and on ourselves.   * Joe Wlison served as a United States diplomat and political advisor in Africa and Iraq. He is the author of a memoir, The Politics of Truth. See also "The Spies who fooled the World", by BBC Panorama; external link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOsHLA1CMPI Visit the related web page
	Middle Eastern web technology for social change by Siobhan Chan SciDev.Net, Crowd Voice Bahrain   An open-source site, CrowdVoice, aims to make governments more transparent and accountable, its co-creator, Esra"a Al Shafei, tells SciDev.Net.   Internet-based technology and tools are becoming vital elements in the movement towards open government. But with so much information available, and so many different social media platforms, it can be hard to find relevant, reliable information.   The Middle East-based website CrowdVoice.org — run by Mideast Youth — was set up to overcome this obstacle. Users can view, add and curate information on various social justice movements around the world, from the Arab Spring that began in December 2010 to recent allegations of electoral fraud in Mexico. Images, videos, tweets and blog posts are collated on the website to create a story — or "voice" — around each protest.   But several Middle Eastern countries have censored the site.   SciDev.Net spoke to Esra"a Al Shafei, a Bahraini civil rights activist and Mideast Youth"s founder and director, about how CrowdVoice uses technology to generate social change; its relevance to communities; and how the project is evolving.   What is Mideast Youth and what does it aim to do?   I founded Mideast Youth in 2006 with the aim of building online platforms that amplify dissenting voices. It"s an umbrella organisation for all of our projects and services, such as advocacy campaigns for Kurdish rights; a discussion tool for (LGBT) youth in the Middle East; and Mideast Tunes, a platform for underground musicians in the Middle East and North Africa who use music as a tool for social change. But our primary focus right now is on CrowdVoice.   How did the idea for CrowdVoice come about?   We had various tools and campaigns, and were looking for services that helped us to organise all of this information, from all these sources. We couldn"t find one, so we built CrowdVoice.   The idea behind it is that there are voices of dissent echoing across all these channels on the Internet: blogs, videos, images, tweets and news articles. All this information was so difficult to find and even more difficult to sort by timeframe and media type. With CrowdVoice, you can do all that. It"s been used a lot by journalists, filmmakers and academics for research.   What role did CrowdVoice play in the Arab Spring?   It was used most prominently in Tunisia, when the protests kicked off. Site users created a topic, curated information and shared it on Twitter. People started re-tweeting it back and forth until we just saw the servers "blow up".   Before the Arab Spring, we had a couple of hundred visitors a day, but suddenly we had 3,000 to 4,000 a day.   How can CrowdVoice help governments become more open?   CrowdVoice helps to expose injustices, so that governments can"t hide them — the straightforward approach. We show how many people are talking about an injustice, put it in one place and make it undeniable.   It"s difficult for governments to hide police brutality or violence against unarmed civilians when you expose a multitude of sources proving that they happened.   Unfortunately, we started getting censored in February 2011 in Bahrain, Iran and Yemen. I"m based in Bahrain myself and have to use a virtual private network to bypass the censorship.   Sometimes when a site gets censored, people get curious about what"s on it. When it happened to us, our traffic went up. Between June and December 2010, we were averaging about 10,000 unique visitors a month. We"re now at about 80,000 visitors a month.   The censorship in all these places makes us aware that governments know the potential impact of CrowdVoice. They"ve censored it because it"s a powerful tool that could expose the injustices they try so hard to hide.   How has CrowdVoice had an impact on technology?   We believe in the open-source movement. We are taking advantage of open-source technology: any developer can contribute to the platform and repurpose it. So it makes sense for us to contribute back to the open-source community by offering adaptable tools and features as well as learning from it.   The Internet is a fantastic educational resource for everybody: there"s a wealth of information for developers to learn from.   When you build a tool like this, you will be surprised by the great things people use it for. Whatever is open source ends up being innovative naturally, because everyone gets to take it, break it apart and improve it. Open source is the way forward for technology.   What CrowdVoice protests have there been that are related to science?   CrowdVoice has helped to document an anti-nuclear project in Japan and a protest in the Czech Republic against illegal logging. We"ve also had a case in Peru against gold mining. It"s not just a place for political dissent, but a place for all kinds of movements.   How does CrowdVoice help minority voices?   We have specific topics about these groups: for example, voices opposing violence against women and female genital mutilation or in favour of migrant worker rights.   This becomes important when people are made aware of them because they see them on CrowdVoice. Maybe they come to CrowdVoice to check out the protests in Egypt, but when they are on the site, they get exposed to other issues, like Kurdish rights in Turkey, or information about Kuwait"s stateless community, and so on. Or they might type "Egypt" into the search box and find that there"s also a voice about sexual harassment in Egypt.   I feel like it"s an educational tool for people to find out what"s happening around the world. It doesn"t just focus on the causes that mainstream media look at, but it also raises awareness of other causes that don"t get as much attention.   Does it create a sense of community?   Absolutely. CrowdVoice can be really useful for uniting a community that wants to get the word out about an issue and collect images and videos in one place. People don"t always want to take part in the protests but they want to know about them, and the curation/moderation process can bring likeminded people together.   If you live in a country, such as Libya, that journalists had a hard time getting into when the protests first broke out, it"s especially useful in circulating eyewitness sources or videos.   You see people coming together in a community and helping each other put the right information on the site. There are conversations between activists on blogs and Twitter, and you see the collaboration play out in front of you.   How is CrowdVoice funded?   In 2010, we were entirely bootstrapped: we built and funded it ourselves. Now, we have two main sources of funding: the philanthropic organisations Omidyar Network and the Shuttleworth Foundation.   We"re trying to monetise the tool somehow — not right now, because we don"t feel we"re capable and we don"t have the traction — but there"s a lot of room for exploration in that field so that we"re entirely financially sustainable in the future.   CrowdVoice is based online: can you see it expanding to include people without Internet access?   We"ve considered it, but we have few resources to expand into mobile phones. We"d have to bring someone on board with the right expertise and it"s not feasible for us. We would love to create a way for those without the Internet to access us easily on phones, but that"s not our target audience at the moment: we are aimed at bloggers, online activists, people who want to be discovered.   We"re aiming to double the number of unique visitors to our site. We"ve been working hard on getting a new features on the site.   Our service can work well worldwide and not just in one particular geographical area. We may have started out in the Middle East, but now we"re branching out globally. Visit the link below to access Crowd Voice.   Original source: http://www.scidev.net/en/new-technologies/icts/features/q-a-middle-eastern-web-technology-for-social-change-with-esra-a-al-shafei-1.html Visit the related web page
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