SPIES, SCRIBES AND SQUEALERS

A few days ago the ubiquitous CIA, keeper of global secrets spilled the beans about that highly classified Area 51.

It was no big deal that sounded more like a damp squib.

Conspiracy theorists down the years may feel truly disappointed.

For, Area 51 was nothing more than a testing ground for Cold War surveillance systems like the U2 Spy program.

No hidden green aliens from Mars in the guarded terrain located in the proximity of the casino wonderland of Las Vegas.

The declassification of Area 51 came at a time when spies and whistleblowers, not to mention snooping scribes were on network headlines. But, for various other contentious reasons.

Wiki-leaks whistleblower   Private Bradley (turned Chelsea the other day) Manning was sent to 35 years in jail convicted under the provisions of the Espionage Act circa 1917.

Another American super-leaker of National Security Agency secrets, Edward Snowden continues to play a sort of bizarre Russian roulette in Moscow making various threats of disclosure despite dire consequences that may follow under the very same law.

Caught in the same cauldron of cloak and dagger are journalists who dared using their constitutional right to publish   secret information leaked by these whistleblowers thus igniting a multitude of controversy over who is right and what is wrong.

Only history will have the answers.

Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers that helped end the Vietnam War and Deep Throat a.k.a Mark Felt an ex-FBI agent who was instrumental in exposing the Watergate scandal are still fresh in our memory.

Espionage is nothing new to humankind. It is regarded as the second oldest profession in the world. It was a priceless weapon of choice during the cold war.

Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher and a great military strategist in his epic Art of War has said that all warfare is based on deception.

Its relevancy has hardly vanished.  Today cyber-hackers and other digital denizens have replaced cipher coders of a bygone era.

Moles and snitchers of today are unlike dapper 007 with a license to kill. They are geeks in Tees with pen-drives with self-imposed license to squeal.

Tools of cold-war spy craft are currently on show till October 4, at the prestigious Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

Titled  ‘ SPY – The Secret World of Espionage” provides a vivid cameo of the chilling deception and intrigue linked to the double lives of spies in the recent past.

The exhibits include the ice axe that was used to assassinate Leon Trotsky, Enigma the secret code machine disguised as a typewriter by the communists and the replica of the umbrella used as a ricin gun by a Soviet agent to kill BBC journalist George Markov. (See montage below)

The KGB and its rivals used deceptive weapons and secret eavesdropping devices extensively during the cold war that ended two decades ago  supposedly with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Interestingly one can see a piece of that infamous wall at the Spy exhibition.

Spies have often posed off as journalists, though some scribes have by their own volition worked as spies or double agents.

A classic example is Kim Philby , a highly placed British Intelligence officer who worked as a reporter but was found to be a double agent. He defected to Moscow when things got too hot for him after he was exposed.

Historical claims also point to Ernest Hemingway as a failed Soviet spy when he worked as a foreign correspondent.

Master spy story-teller John Le Carr whose latest thriller  ‘A Delicate Truth”. that also deals with deception and whistle-blowing  once reputedly said;  “ It is easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall. Here and there a scoop.”

Journalists sometimes get trapped in the web of deception, where the line between espionage and truth is rather blurred.

The people’s rights to know against authority’s right to conceal, tend to confound them in making editorial decisions.

Ironically the world of secret agents have proliferated a coterie of celluloid heroes in the ilk of James Bond. There seems to be kind of love hate relationship with spies, especially in the field of entertainment, death and destruction at the hands of real life spies notwithstanding.

The current outcry in India among certain sections of the community over the Bollywood movie  “Madras Café” brings into the forefront inherent political intrigue and deceptions that existed in Sri Lanka when Tamil Tiger rebels waged war for a separate state.

Though the filmmakers have denied any close resemblance to events depicted in this political spy thriller, the sequences are said to be too close for comfort.

Bond style spy Vikram Singh played by the producer actor John Abraham is a secret agent from Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India’s equivalent to CIA.

During the height of ethnic battles in Sri Lanka, the media reported extensively on the involvement of RAW in covert operations.

Reports suggestive of RAW assisting Tigers in guerrilla training have appeared in the local and foreign media.

Just as much as the denials were made about such reports, there were whistle blowers who made credible assertions to journalists.

The RAW connections in Sri Lanka are well documented in international terrorism expert Professor Rohan Gunaratna’s book “Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka”.

Some of the old artifacts on show at the SPY exhibition

Entrance of Franklin Institute Philadelphia the venue of SPY exhibit

John Abraham as RAW secret agent in Madras Cafe with Nargis Fakri as war correspondent

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BETTER LATE THAN NEVER…

Do Not Mess with Nature

Twenty years ago Erin Brokovich an ordinary yet courageous woman with no formal law education fought a relentless legal battle to bring down a powerful California power company accused of polluting the water supply.

It was an epic victory honored later by a series of books and a blockbuster movie.

Fifty years ago Rachel Carson, another valiant woman who grew up in rural Springdale, Pennsylvania opened the eyes of the world to the dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides in her best seller classic ‘Silent Spring”.

Her veritable voice in the wilderness about the death of songbirds by DDT sprouted  the global environment movement, as we know today.

Moved by her thoughts President John F Kennedy set up a presidential committee to study the adverse effects of DDT. It was later banned.

Taking an obvious cue President Richard Nixon set up the highly prestigious and effective Environment Protection Agency (EPA).

The global green movement, led by its advocates and activists is making headway in saving planet earth from an impending doom.

Many are winners in the North, though some not that lucky in the South, mostly in the developing world where the green message seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

With rather faulty fast-forward politically charged goals on food security and craving for export dollars, the cost by way of death and destruction that follows chemical contamination gets sadly overlooked.

The so called rice belt in North Central Sri Lanka, where the use of agro chemicals have been the order of the day down several decades bears testimony to a calamity needing urgent remedy.

Published data indicates that during the past 20 years, there have been 22,000 fatalities in the farming community with another 400,000 critically ill.

A mysterious Chronic Kidney Disease of uncertain aetiology (CKDu) has been linked to indiscriminate use of pesticides and agro-chemicals.

Denials and rebuttals from the highly exploitative industry, its recalcitrant lobbyists, commercial promoters and hidden persuaders continue to echo supportive hosannas while the toll rises almost overnight.

Political will to deal with chemical evils has been rather lackadaisical in the past.

Last week however one saw the emergence of a silver lining when the current   Sri Lankan Agriculture Minister planned to ban the use of some letha agrochemicals as well as prohibit their promotion through advertisements. Plans are also afoot to take legal action against violations.

As reported in the Sunday Times, Sri Lanka intends to set up a Technological Council to promote environment-friendly agriculture.

This is a laudable effort in its very essence.

Better late than never.

Hopefully these robust plans will see the light of day soonest with the rest of the lawmakers approving them.

A panel of Sri Lankan experts who studied the syndrome afflicting the farm workers has officially linked the CKD to excessive and indiscriminate use of agro-chemicals.

Independent observers claimed that two lives on the average are lost on a daily basis to CKDu in the affected areas where inadequate medical attention compounds the crisis. Insufficient dialysis systems and overcrowding in hospitals have been cited.

The incidence of disease is quite high in one farming area in Ampara that village folk reportedly nicknamed a street there as ‘ Wakugadu Mawatha’ or Kidney Lane.

The World Health Organization  (WHO) is doing its best to combat this disease that afflicts many countries in the Third Word, notably India, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

The world body has identified multiple causes for the malady. Among these are exposure to arsenic and cadmium and water with heavy metal toxins.

One of the most popular and potent agro-chemicals to eliminate weeds is said to contain Glyphosate salt.

During the Vietnam war it was one of the active ingredients used as a defoliant in the infamous Agent Orange which killed and maimed nearly half a million people.

A similar number of children were born with birth defects in that country.

During the past couple of decades weedicides containing Glyphosate were widely used in Sri Lanka thus leading to the current tragedy.

Under supposedly safe brand names aided with subsidies, transnational companies and their cohorts made a kill with the largesse they were able to make.

The projected ban is a step in the right direction.

Agent Orange was a weapon of mass destruction in the same way the pesticide Malathion was, used by Nazis as a nerve gas.

How they came to be used for the greater good of humankind sounds ironic if not outrageous.

Currently hitting the breaking news hotspots, political fora and citizen demos in Sri Lanka is the Weliweriya fiasco over alleged water contamination.

Political and military ramifications of the crisis aside, the core issue seems to be the cry for clean water.

Whatever the outcome of the official investigation would be, the crisis is a wake-up call about pollution in general terms.

Safety precautions and ecological disciplines are foremost.

Horrific tragedies in Bopal and Chernobyl are still fresh in our memory.

One particular area that we should be mindful is about our booming textile industry.

Every precaution should be in place regarding possible groundwater contamination.

According to the World Bank the global textile industry is one of the largest polluters.

More than 20 percent of world’s water pollution is attributable to treatment and dying of textiles.

With stringent regulatory enforcement and supervision, mainly by the Board of Investment (BOI) Sri Lanka’s textile industry seems to be doing well and remaining environmentally clean.

Yet we need to be vigilant against any lapses that could poison the earth.

For, Water is one of Mother Nature’s most valuable gifts to humankind.

FUTILITY OF CAPTIVITY

WildLife behind bars

A thirteen foot long  African Rock Python escapes from its enclosure at a pet-store in New Brunswick Canada, slithers along a ventilator shaft, enters a  bedroom upstairs and strangles to death two little boys who were spending a sleep-over at their friend’s home.

A 12,000 pound Killer Whale plunges into the deep inextricably shoving a highly acclaimed trainer and killing her in a horrific act at a world renowned theme park in USA.

The two bizarre incidents are not connected, though one would not fail to see a perceptible common streak.

That is the catastrophe which follows the despair or vendetta of captive wildlife.

These are not isolated incidents.  Captive Wild animals have killed before. And the toll keeps rising.

Just to recall, a few years ago a woman was mauled by a Polar Bear at the Berlin zoo, while early this year at the Bronx Zoo in the US  a man who wanted  to ‘be one with  a tiger’ inside its enclosure was severely mauled. But in Singapore a zoo cleaner was not that lucky when a Bengal Tiger attacked him in 2008. In the previous year a Siberian Tiger escaped from a zoo in San Francisco and mauled three children killing one of them. Last year at a zoo in Copenhagen an Afghan who was in the proximity of a Siberian tiger was fatally injured.

The list of casualties down the years is formidable.

Inadequate security or safety precautions could not be the only reasons.

The age old theory based on cause and effect is one possible way to reason out this horrendous fait accompli.

Wildlife should be left in the wild. That is the message that is been heard loud and clear these days.

Environmental warriors like the Born Free Foundation, RSPCA, and People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) as well as the UNEP are relentless in pursuit of this objective.

But the multibillion dollar captive animal industry seems to remain conveniently deaf.

The protagonists seem to think it is the done thing to keep wildlife in captivity for reasons best known to them. Just like it was acceptable to have human slaves less than two centuries ago.

Making an eye-opening and cogent case against captive animals is the chilling advocacy documentary “Blackfish” currently making waves on the global film circuits.

It highlights the effects of captive Orcas based on Tilicum the killer whale.

It not only underscores the dangers of keeping Orcas in captivity but also shows how intelligent and sensitive these cetaceans are.

One cannot tame nature with cages or enclosures.

It would be inherently cruel if not morally unethical.

Animals have feelings too.

They also suffer trauma and may become violent in desperation especially when confined to prison like conditions in the zoos, not to mention some of the abusive training methods.

Studies have shown that inevitable stress, boredom and loneliness in cramped up and impoverished confinements fuel psychological damage on captive fauna.

Bill Travers, an ardent conservationist and a star in the epic movie Born Free, coined the word “Zoochosis” to describe the psychosis of artificial environments encountered by captive animals.

A good example to be cited is the plight of Mali a Sri Lankan elephant leading a lonely and depressive life for three decades at a zoo in Manila, Philippines.

She was a gift from Sri Lanka to former first lady Imelda Marcos.

Despite protests, some PETA women who even went naked to drive a strong message and several calls by celebrities including the famous Beatle Sir Paul McCartney that Mali be trans-located to a sanctuary, she continues to suffer in silence at the zoo.

Down the ages humans have held wild animals in captivity. According to available data the captive animal trade that includes animals for zoos, entertainment, medicine, costumes, jewelry and as pets among others nets in a whopping $ 10-20 billion annually.

This figure is considered modest when one looks intensely at the illegal trafficking of wildlife.

Wild species are not only kept for show at zoos, but also in private homes.

According to estimates there are some 10,000 tigers or lions kept as pets in USA.

Things could go awfully wrong too, as it happened in Zainesville Ohio just two years ago.

A man who kept around 50 wild animals including tigers, lions, wolves and bears in a private menagerie set them free into his neighborhood and shot himself to death.  His body was partly eaten by a tiger. The police were compelled to kill 48 roaming animals before they could exacerbate the tragedy, and for no fault of their own.

People love their wild pets; some overlook the inherent harms and risks. They hardly wish to part with them.

One nightclub dancer in Colombo braved the law courts to get her king cobra back from confiscation. She also made an incredible claim that her mother was once a snake. It shows one’s level of reverent dedication to a poisonous reptile.

Many especially in South Asia make a livelihood as snake charmers, living dangerously by choice and need.

Yet exploiting wildlife for amusement and entertainment purposes is understandably generating negativism among ethical thinkers the world over.

This invariably is a refreshingly positive paradigm shift.

Few weeks ago PETA protested against plans in Colorado to set up a pseudo-sanctuary to breed wildlife in captivity.

Recently India banned dolphins to be kept in captivity and their use in amusement parks.

Most significantly Costa Rica has decided to close down its main zoos in 2014 and liberate the wild animals to their natural habitat.

That simply is a great example worthy of emulation.

Those who want wildlife in captivity will always cite education and entertainment as probable defenses.

How credible the spin is plain to see when one visits a zoo. Besides the oohs and the aahs, does anyone spend more than ten minutes studying a caged animal during an educational tour to a zoo?

Spinmeisters also argue that if not for zoos the future generation may not know about these animals as natural habitats are being destroyed.

Perhaps they may have a point. But then one wonders how we have come to know about Dinosaurs like T. Rex and other prehistoric species?

As long as there is demand for legal and illegal wildlife, traffickers in quest of filthy lucre will continue to have a field day with supplies.

Reports from Colombo claims smugglers have made Sri Lanka a veritable hot spot of reptile and amphibian trafficking.

International efforts are getting fortified these days against the marauding wildlife traffickers.

Last month US President Barack Obama signed an Executive Order to set up a Presidential Task Force against Wildlife poaching and trafficking to curb transnational organized crime. Few days ago the Task force convened its first meeting thus kicking off a new regime to combat trafficking and poaching of wild life.

Sri Lanka along with seven South Asian nations has set up SAWEN (South Asian Wildlife Enforcement Network) mainly to share information on combating wildlife crime. All that is good news.

But what is paramount is a change in our mindset about leaving wildlife where it belongs- in the wilds and to refrain from resorting to unethical captive habits either in our zoos or in our homes.

Orcas need no enclosures

Don’t fence me in!

Charmers in harm’s way