On sleeper cells, smell test, and big numbers
States would be one of the ways in which Iran would retaliate for such attacks.
2. Failing the smell test, again
In 1988, Col. Gaddafi contributed $10 million to a Swiss foundation to create and administer — hang on to your seat — the al-Qaddafi International Prize for Human Rights.
The first reaction of most people would be that it is oxymoronic to name a human rights prize after Col. Gaddafi. Looking at the list of the recipients of the prize, however, would show that attaching the name Gaddafi to it is appropriate. Among the recipients we find Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, Louis Farrakhan — and French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy.
Now, dozens of human rights and watchdog groups are calling on the UN to expel from its ranks a Swiss official who helped create the al-Qaddafi prize.
UN Watch, a United Nations watchdog group, was among forty-five organizations that sent an appeal to UN leaders earlier this week urging them to oust Jean Ziegler, along with a Libyan official, from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Further, they urged the Human Rights Council to apologize to victims of Qaddafi’s regime for electing Ziegler in the first place, and the Swiss government to do the same for nominating him.
The appeal referred to Ziegler as “a long-time apologist and propagandist for Col. Gaddafi and his regime.”
Ziegler serves on the UNHRC Advisory Committee.
Moral rectitude is not the UN’s strong suit. From 1972 to 1981 the organization was led by Kurt Waldheim, an Austrian who, from 1942 to 1945, served with the Wehrmacht in occupied Yugoslavia. The units he was attached to murdered thousands of civilians in reprisals for anti-Nazi attacks by partisans. In his autobiography, published in 1985, he lied about this chapter in his life, claiming that from 1942 to 1945 he was studying law in Vienna.
Old habits die hard, though. On 4 July 1976, Israeli special forces staged a daring raid on the airport of Entebbe, Uganda, where Palestinian terrorists and their European supporters — with the help of the Idi Amin government —were holding 248 Israeli and Jewish hostages. The commander of the Israeli forces was Lt. Col. Yonathan Netanyahu, the older brother of the current Israeli prime minister. He was killed, along with the terrorists. The hostages were freed and flown to Israel
Waldheim’s reaction to the raid? He criticized Israel for violating Uganda’s sovereignty.
Will the UN expel Ziegler for being Gaddafi right-hand? We doubt it.
3. Big numbers
When we launched the Homeland Security NewsWire, we said that for a busy business person or investor, the only thing worse than having too little information was having too much of it. In the Internet age this is a real problem. If you Google, say, “homeland security,” you will find thousands of items every day, and no one has the time to read a thousand news stories in order to find out which of them were the ten important ones he or she should have focused on to begin with. We created HSNW for the purpose of selecting those dozen important news stories for our readers.
Now, three scientists at UC San Diego (UCSD) proved that our hunch was correct (about the abundance of business information, that is; our readers will decide whether or not we do a good job at HSNW in selecting the important and telling news stories every day). These scientists have estimated — rigorously estimated — the annual amount of business-related information processed by the world’s computer servers in terms that Guttenberg and Galileo would have appreciated: the digital equivalent of a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about twenty times a year.
The calculated that the world’s roughly twenty-seven million computer servers processed 9.57 zettabytes of information in 2008, according to a paper — Chaitan Baru, Roger Bohn, and James Short, “User Case Study: How Much Information? ‘Big Data’ Research Findings for Enterprise and Consumer Information” —
presented yesterday (7 April) at Storage Networking World’s (SNW’s) annual meeting in Santa Clara, California (one zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power, or a million million gigabytes).
The study estimated that enterprise server workloads are doubling about every two years, which means that by 2024 the world’s enterprise servers will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star system in the Milky Way Galaxy (each book is assumed to be 4.8 centimeters thick and contain 2.5 megabytes of information).
At the risk of sounding self-serving, we could say that with that much business information engulfing us, the case for subscribing to the Homeland Security NewsWire is now even more compelling.
Ben Frankel is editor of the Homeland Security NewsWire
