In Wake of Deadly U.S. Airstrike, Jeremy Scahill Questions Dems on Obama's Afghanistan Policy

Alternet.org
August 28, 2008

The mood inside the Pepsi Center on night two of the Democratic National Convention was jubilant. Hillary Clinton brought people to thunderous applause as she called for a unified party to defeat John McCain.

But while the Democrats celebrated, a half a world away grief and sorrow continue to plague a village in western Afghanistan that was victim to a stunningly lethal air strike by U.S. forces last Thursday. This week, a United Nations team released the findings of its on-the-ground investigation. And what they found was horrifying.

Some ninety Afghan civilians were killed. Among the dead, as many as sixty children between the ages of three months and sixteen years. It’s believed to be the single deadliest US strike against Afghan civilians since the US first attacked the country in 2001.

Here in Denver, the horror of this story could not be further from the hallway discussions of those inside the Pepsi Center ... But Afghanistan will play a major role in the general election, where Barack Obama will make his plan to increase the US military deployment in Afghanistan by several thousand troops a centerpiece of his foreign policy vision. The Obama campaign is painting Afghanistan as the good war.

Read the rest of the transcript here.

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Google This: Algorithmic Oppression

Imagine you've forgotten once again the difference between a gorilla and a chimpanzee, so you do a quick Google image search of “gorilla." But instead of finding images of adorable animals, photos of a Black couple pop up.

Is this just a glitch in the algorithm? Or, is Google an ad company, not an information company, that's replicating the discrimination of the world it operates in? How can this discrimination be addressed and who is accountable for it?

“These platforms are encoded with racism," says UCLA professor and best-selling author of Algorithms of Oppression, Dr. Safiya Noble. “The logic is racist and sexist because it would allow for these kinds of false, misleading, kinds of results to come to the fore…There are unfortunately thousands of examples now of harm that comes from algorithmic discrimination."

On At Liberty this week, Dr. Noble joined us to discuss what she calls “algorithmic oppression," and what needs to be done to end this kind of bias and dismantle systemic racism in software, predictive analytics, search platforms, surveillance systems, and other technologies.

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