All posts by Davi Ottenheimer

Security

Monkeys Know When They Don’t Know

1 Comment

It seems a team of scientists have set out to determine why animals hesitate in the face of risk.

Dogs and cats, even birds, hesitate and I was certain this had to do with uncertainty. A presentation yesterday gives new data on the matter and apparently proves, without a doubt, that at least monkeys and dolphins can have doubts.

Humans have feelings of doubt and confidence, and of certainty and uncertainty. You know if you do not know or remember — a perfect example of this is when something is on the tip of your tongue. This ability to evaluate and predict one’s own mental performance is known as metacognition. It is one of our most sophisticated cognitive capacities and has even been thought to be uniquely human. Metacognition rivals language and tool use in its potential to reveal similarities and differences between human and animal minds. This session presents this rapidly developing area and is convened by the European Science Foundation. It will explore how newly devised experimental paradigms, testing metacognition in dolphins and monkeys, show that it is not a uniquely human talent.

Macaque of the Year
Are you sure I can trust you not to eat me?

History, Security

Libyans Flee to Egypt, Release Evidence of Crimes

Leave a comment

Al Masry Al Youm has posted an update from Libya delivered via Egypt, since Libya’s Internet access has been cut.

Suleiman Saghir, a Libyan who made it to Egypt’s Marsa Matrouh through Salloum, described the current events back home as “atrocious and unimaginable.” He said hunderds of Libyans have sought refuge in Egypt since the violence erupted.

Saghir added that some eyewitnesses of the developments in Libya fled to Egypt so their voices can reach Arab and world media outlets. Some photographs and video clips brought across the border show Libyan authorities committing crimes against unarmed women and the elderly, he said.

Several news outlets are reporting hundreds of Libyans dead from fighting with the government and hundreds more fleeing through Egypt’s Salloum border terminal, which recently was destabilized by violent protests.

On 28 January, now known as the “Day of Anger,” bloody clashes took place in the city that resulted in the burning of all police stations, the state security headquarters, and three buses.

The clashes led to the injury of 13 police officers.

Salloum is the north-west corner of Egypt, bordered by Libya and the Mediterranean coast, only 150 miles west of Marsa Matrouh on a modern highway. I suppose there is a touch of irony to these developments. Libya used to criticize Egypt for restriction of trade and movement from Egypt through Salloum and demanded the border be more open. Now that the government has lost its grip over the border post the Libyans not only can more easily escape to Marsa Matrouh and bring goods home but Egypt can increase its export of revolution to Libya.

In related news, the Libyan military seems to be making emergency flights to Malta, about 600 miles northwest.

Two Libyan fighter jets with four military personnel on board who said they had escaped Benghazi air base after it was taken over by protesters landed in Malta on Monday, military sources told AFP.

Two civilian helicopters also landed on the Mediterranean island around the same time, carrying seven people who said they were French nationals working on oil rigs near Benghazi, although only one had a passport, the sources said.

The helicopters were given permission to land in Malta but had not been given clearance to leave Libya, indicating that they had escaped, they added.

Malta has had friendly intelligence relations with Libya, so it is little surprise military pilots would head there. It reminds me that Maltese Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici (given prior notice by Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi) in 1986 sent advance warning to Libya to try and foil Ronald Reagan’s plan to assassinate Qaddafi. He sounded the alarm when some of the 100 US military aircraft used in Operation El Dorado Canyon flew over water towards Libya (France, Spain and Italy had refused airspace).

The warnings were of little help to stop the attack due to incompetence in the Libyan military and technology like the F-111F’s terrain-mapping radar and laser-guided weapons (Pave Tack) that allowed for high-speed low level standoff attacks even at night. However, Qaddafi was able to run and hide to survive, which is probably what he is doing again now.

Updated to add: Reuters and the BBC say the Libyan jet pilots, both colonels, defected after they were ordered to bomb civilians.

Security

Security and the Politics of Humanitarian Aid

Leave a comment

My undergraduate honors thesis was on the ethics of US humanitarian assistance to Somalia in 1992. It tried to examine the political influences that determined who to assist and how much in a conflict zone. I just noticed a warning by Oxfam about this exact issue in terms of today’s American international security interests:

If you look at allocations in the course of this past decade to Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s much higher on a per capita basis than the aid given to the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is one of the worst places to live on Earth, and has been for a couple of decades. I think aid per capita at one point in Iraq was 18 times higher than the aid per capita in Congo, even though Iraq – despite the violence at the time – was considerably less badly off than the Congo.

The Deutsche Welle uses some highly charged language as an introduction to the issues:

Billions of dollars are being used for “unsustainable, expensive and sometimes dangerous aid projects” supporting short-term foreign policy and security objectives, while countries in desperate need are being overlooked, according to Oxfam.

Oxfam argues two points against letting security policy be tied to aid.

  1. Military-related assistance can be perceived as tainted and a target of resistance
  2. The military does a poor job identifying and managing assistance areas

They give an area just to the south of Somalia as an example:

If you look at the assistance that the US has given in northern Kenya, which is an area of security interest for the Americans, the US Army has built schools there and then forgotten about them or not ensured that there are teachers and materials for that school to be sustainable. We’ve seen that happen in many parts of Afghanistan as well. The assistance is badly done.

I recently wrote about a little-known US military project in a small African country, very likely to be related to security but portrayed as entirely humanitarian.