Criminele invloed bij een op de acht amateursportclubs

Ondermijning Criminelen gebruiken amateursport-clubs om geld én hun imago wit te wassen. Soms worden clubs overrompeld door criminelen die invloed willen verwerven. Voor het eerst blijkt het een landelijk probleem dat speelt in alle sporten.

• Enzo van Steenbergen

20 november 2020 om 19:30

Criminele inmenging bij amateursportverenigingen is een groot, landelijk probleem waar politie en justitie desondanks nauwelijks tegen optreden. Bij een op de acht amateursportverenigingen waren in de laatste twee jaar signalen van criminele inmenging, maar clubs en bonden weten nauwelijks wat ze daarmee moeten doen. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek van Bureau Bruinsma, het Mulier Instituut en de Universiteit van Tilburg, dat is uitgevoerd in opdracht van het Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport.

Er zijn onder meer ruim 1.800 sportclubs ondervraagd en er is informatie verkregen bij politie- en justitiediensten die onderzoek doen naar de vermenging van de onder- en bovenwereld. Het is de eerste keer dat er landelijk onderzoek is gedaan naar de omvang van criminele inmenging bij amateursportclubs.

Ondermijning, de vermenging van de onder- en bovenwereld, was al een bekend probleem in de amateurvoetbalwereld, maar blijkt nu in vrijwel alle sporten aanwezig. Voor het onderzoek werden bonden en verenigingen van tien verschillende sporten geraadpleegd – allemaal herkenden ze het probleem. Het gaat bijvoorbeeld om mensen met een strafblad die bestuurslid worden bij een sportclub, het witwassen van crimineel geld via de clubs of het gebruiken van kantines of ander clubterrein voor criminele doeleinden. Vooral clubs met een eigen kantine of een businessclub voor sponsoren zijn kwetsbaar, net als verenigingen waarbij het bestuur vaak wisselt.

Bijvangst

Uit het onderzoek blijkt ook dat politie en justitie nauwelijks onderzoek doen naar criminele inmenging bij sportclubs. „In de meeste gevallen komt criminele betrokkenheid bij een sportvereniging pas aan het licht wanneer de persoon in kwestie onderwerp is geworden van een opsporingsonderzoek naar andere criminele activiteiten. Criminele inmenging in de sportwereld is, in andere woorden, eerder ‘bijvangst’ dan het startpunt van analyses en publieke interventies”, schrijven de onderzoekers.

Vorig jaar zomer bleek al dat zeker tien amateurvoetbalclubs in Brabant en Zeeland mogelijk onder invloed staan van criminelen. Er zouden dubieuze sponsors zijn, er waren vermoedens van witwassen en drugshandel. Het werd destijds onderzocht door de Taskforce Zeeland-Brabant, een samenwerking van verschillende overheidsdiensten die strijden tegen georganiseerde misdaad. Bij één amateurclub werden sponsoren in verband gebracht met drugshandel – spelers zouden tonnen aan zwart geld krijgen.

Voetbalbond KNVB reageerde destijds geschrokken. „Criminelen ondermijnen de sport en daarmee de maatschappelijk kracht van sport. Daar maken wij ons zorgen over”, schreef de bond in een verklaring. De KNVB moest die waarschuwing een paar maanden later, in november 2019, nog eens herhalen. Uit een rondgang van RTL Nieuws langs 386 amateurclubs was toen gebleken dat bij zeventig voetbalclubs „signalen” van ondermijning waren. Daarmee werd duidelijk dat criminelen invloed hebben verworven bij amateurclubs verspreid over het hele land. Nu is dus bekend geworden dat het probleem niet alleen in het voetbal speelt.

„We moeten alerter zijn op het willen zien van dit soort problematiek”, zegt Monique Bruinsma, een van de onderzoekers. „Een sportvereniging heeft een sociale functie. Een crimineel kan daar werken aan zijn imago door bijvoorbeeld rondjes te geven of de club te sponsoren. Dat kan omslaan in vervelende inmenging, zoals het witwassen van geld via de cashstromen bij de club. Als clubs, gemeenten of politiediensten dat niet op tijd zien, kan een club speelbal worden van criminelen. Dat is klassieke vermenging van de onder- en bovenwereld.”

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/11/20/criminele-invloed-bij-een-op-de-acht-amateursportclubs-a4020901

Coronavirus is evolving. Whether it gets deadlier or not may depend on us

 

Coronavirus is evolving. Whether it gets deadlier or not may depend on us

Laura Spinney

There’s now evidence that ignoring social distancing rules could help more lethal strains of Covid-19 to win out

Thu 19 Nov 2020 14.00 GMT

‘We put roadblocks in the virus’s way – in the form of containment measures, vaccines and, eventually, herd immunity.’ Illustration: Thomas Pullin/The Guardian

L

etting the virus that causes Covid-19 circulate more-or-less freely is dangerous not only because it risks overwhelming hospitals and so endangering lives unnecessarily, but also because it could delay the evolution of the virus to a more benign form and potentially even make it more lethal.

Though the data is still sketchy and the measures crude, this effect may already be influencing the difference in death rates between Sweden – which took a relaxed approach to containment until recently – and Norway, whose measures have been much stricter. Sweden has more than three times as many deaths per 100 cases as its neighbour.

The explanation for this startling gap may lie partly in natural selection, and the biological arms race between a pathogen and its host. Within any population, there is genetic variation. Viruses are no different. Some versions of the virus will be very slightly more dangerous to human health – more virulent – others less so. If the conditions are right, the slightly more virulent ones will begin to predominate and cause more damage.

According to this interpretation of the Sweden-Norway discrepancy, it’s not that Sweden has one version of the virus, and Norway another. It’s just that in Sweden conditions have allowed those slightly more virulent variants that already exist in the virus population to flourish. If you want a truly spectacular – if extreme – example of the same mechanism at work, look at the 1918 flu pandemic.

That pandemic killed at least 50 million people, the vast majority of whom died in the second wave – in a mere 13 weeks between September and December 1918 – and though data was even sketchier then, it is considered to have been at least 25 times more lethal than any other flu pandemic in history. The fact that it was so exceptional demands an explanation, and evolutionary biologists have furnished one in the exceptional conditions that prevailed on the western front that summer.

Before I get to that, though, let me take a step back. A pathogen, or disease-causing organism, does not “want” to kill its host. Its only evolutionary goal is to survive and reproduce, and if it has to kill to achieve that aim, then so be it. It causes harm because it needs its host’s cellular machinery to replicate and transmit to a new host. We feel sick because it’s siphoning off our bodily resources, and because of our own immune response.

When a novel pathogen emerges in humans, having jumped from an animal reservoir, it is not adapted to us. If it is too virulent, it risks immobilising its host through illness or death before it can spread to a new one; not virulent enough, and it’s a weak transmitter – another evolutionary dead end. Scientists have recently demonstrated that a successful pathogen is one that evolves to an intermediate level of virulence, so that it can spread without causing too much damage.

Humans shape that process, because we also adapt to the pathogen. We put roadblocks in its way – in the form of containment measures, vaccines and, eventually, herd immunity. Though host and pathogen are endlessly adjusting to each other, a highly virulent, novel virus that encounters these roadblocks will evolve to become less virulent faster, so that it doesn’t die out before it finds susceptible new hosts.

Back to 1918. The first wave of the pandemic, in the northern hemisphere spring of that year, resembled an ordinary seasonal flu, but when the second wave erupted in August the disease was hardly recognisable. Now its victims were turning blue and suffocating as their lungs filled with fluid. What happened to make that flu virus so much more virulent?

Evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald, of the University of Louisville in Kentucky, has pointed to the close proximity of the men in the trenches, and to the fact that – far from being immobilised – the sick were transported into successive pools of susceptible hosts, from trench to tent to train, and onwards through a series of hospitals.

Mask-wearing women hold stretchers during the Spanish flu pandemic in St Louis, Missouri, US, in October 1918. Photograph: Handout ./Reuters

The tragedy of that situation, in other words, is that humans did the virus’s work for it. It had no need to dial down its virulence to keep spreading – in fact it was in its evolutionary interests to dial it up and transmit even faster, since there was no cost to doing so. From the trenches of Flanders, largely through troop movements, the lethal bug was transported all over the world, where it did the shocking damage it did before eventually finding its equilibrium with humanity – much later than it would otherwise have done. That pandemic strain circulated in the world, in modified, milder forms, until 1957 – when it was ousted by the one that caused the next flu pandemic, the so-called Asian flu.

Viruses have another trick up their sleeve. Some of them can survive temporarily outside a living host – on surfaces and in the air, for example. This alters the rules of engagement in the arms race, by making them less dependent on their hosts to spread, and it helps determine the level of virulence to which the virus eventually gravitates. The virus that causes Covid-19, Sars-CoV-2, is about as durable as the flu virus outside a living host, which leads Ewald to suspect that it’s heading for a level of virulence comparable to that of seasonal flu. Seasonal flu causes one death per 1,000 infected people, on average. Sars-CoV-2 is killing at roughly 10 times that rate at the moment.

It’s too early to interpret the data on Covid-19, in part because nobody knows how many people have been infected – and there are many other factors in the mix, such as the changing age profile of the patient population and improvements in care – but we may already be seeing viral evolution in tumbling death rates. As epidemiologist Andrew Noymer of the University of California, Irvine, has pointed out, this would happen anyway, in time. But here’s the thing: we can accelerate it, if we choose to. We probably already are, in some parts of the world.

“If we invest in measures like quarantine then we are favouring viral strains that are so mild people don’t know they’re sick,” says Ewald. His colleague at the University of Louisville, biologist Holly Swain Ewald, has argued that such measures are key drivers of the reduction in virulence. If so, then they have probably contributed to the different death rates in Norway and Sweden. Protecting people through public health measures also buys us time, putting off the moment when many people catch the disease until it is much milder. That could make a huge difference to all those people in the world who don’t have access to adequate healthcare.

The ball is in our court, to a large extent. We have a say in how long this pandemic lasts, and how many people die. That’s been said before, but here’s the evolutionary argument for it. The key thing to understand is that we are not passive bystanders; we form the virus just as it forms us. Eventually, Covid-19 will be no worse than flu, or perhaps even the common cold that is caused by one of its relatives. Let’s get there as fast as we can.

• Laura Spinney is a science journalist and author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/19/coronavirus-evolving-deadlier-evidence-social-distancing-covid-19

Australian special forces involved in murder of 39 Afghan civilians, war crimes report alleges

Australian special forces involved in murder of 39 Afghan civilians, war crimes report alleges

Brereton report finds prisoners were executed to ‘blood’ junior soldiers and unlawful killings were deliberately covered up

• Warning: this article contains disturbing content

Play Video

2:22

 Australian SAS soldiers allegedly killed Afghan civilians – video report

Christopher Knaus

Thu 19 Nov 2020 06.33 GMT

Australian special forces were allegedly involved in the murder of 39 Afghan civilians, in some cases executing prisoners to “blood” junior soldiers before inventing cover stories and planting weapons on corpses, a major report has found.

For more than four years, the Maj Gen Justice Paul Brereton has investigated allegations that a small group within the elite Special Air Services and commandos regiments killed and brutalised Afghan civilians, in some cases allegedly slitting throats, gloating about their actions, keeping kill counts, and photographing bodies with planted phones and weapons to justify their actions.

The findings of Brereton’s report, released on Thursday, are confronting and damning.

Brereton describes the special forces’ actions as “disgraceful and a profound betrayal” of the Australian Defence Force.

The report found:

• Special forces were responsible for dozens of unlawful killings, the vast majority of which involved prisoners, and were deliberately covered up.

• Thirty-nine Afghans were unlawfully killed in 23 incidents, either by special forces or at the instruction of special forces.

• None of the killings took place in the heat of battle, and they all occurred in circumstances which, if accepted by a jury, would constitute the war crime of murder.

• All the victims were either non-combatants or were no longer combatants.

• A total of 25 perpetrators have been identified either as principals or accessories. Some are still serving in the ADF.

In all cases, the report finds it “was or should have been plain that the person killed was a non-combatant”. The vast majority of victims had been captured and were under control, giving them the protection under international law.

Some of the incidents described in the report are deeply troubling. Evidence suggests junior soldiers were instructed by their superiors to execute prisoners in cold blood as part of a “blooding” process to give them their first kill.

“Typically, the patrol commander would take a person under control and the junior member … would then be directed to kill the person under control,” the report found. “‘Throwdowns’ would be placed with the body and a ‘cover story’ was created for the purposes of operational reporting and to deflect scrutiny.”

The chief of the ADF, General Angus Campbell, promised to act on the Brereton report’s “shameful”, “deeply disturbing” and “appalling” findings about the conduct of Australian special forces.

Campbell said he accepted all 143 recommendations, including referring individuals to the office of the special investigator to consider potential criminal cases, because it was his duty “to set things right”.

He also foreshadowed changes to the army’s organisational structure and a review into honours and awards. In the meantime, the meritorious unit citation awarded to Special Operations Task Group rotations serving in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2013 will be revoked.

“To the people of Afghanistan, on behalf of the Australian Defence Force, I sincerely and unreservedly apologise for any wrongdoing by Australian soldiers,” Campbell said during a press conference in Canberra on Thursday.

“And to the people of Australia, I am sincerely sorry for any wrongdoing by members of the Australian Defence Force,” he said, adding that the majority of special forces “did not choose to take this unlawful path”.

The Brereton report, to a large degree, absolves senior command of having any knowledge that war crimes were being committed.

Instead, it says the criminality was committed and covered up by patrol commanders, usually lower-ranking sergeants or corporals, and involved a “small number of patrol commanders and their protegees”.

“While it would have been much easier to report that it was poor command and leadership that was primarily to blame for the events disclosed in this report, that would be a gross distortion,” the report said.

Patrol commanders, the report found, were viewed by troopers as “demigods”, which made it impossible to speak out about their actions.

“They are hero-worshipped and unstoppable,” one anonymous soldier explained.

The Brereton report canvasses failures in oversight, the problems of a “warrior culture”, and the use of a small pool of SAS soldiers in repeated deployments over a prolonged period.

The SAS were above question, particularly by outsiders, and a culture of secrecy within each patrol kept their actions from others. A separate review conducted by the inspector general of the Australian Defence Force (IGADF) describes a kind of “organisational blindness” to the special forces’ actions.

The collective sacrifices of the special forces in some way “justified certain excesses”, the review said, and more minor deviances from expected behaviour, like drinking heavily on base, were tolerated.

Complaints from locals and human rights groups were dismissed as “Taliban propaganda” or attempts to obtain compensation, the report said.

“It is clear that there were warning signs out there, but nothing happened,” David Wetham, the assistant IGADF wrote.

The prime minister, Scott Morrison, called his counterpart in Afghanistan, President Ashraf Ghani, to apologise before the report’s release on Thursday.

Ghani’s office said, via Twitter, that Morrison had “expressed his deepest sorrow over the misconduct by some Australian troops in Afghanistan and assured the President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan of the investigations and to ensuring justice”.

The foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, separately wrote to Ghani to apologise and assured him that the Australian government was examining the inquiry’s findings and would “make public statements subsequently”.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd, in office for at least two years of the relevant period, issued a statement saying he was “utterly disgusted” and calling for the perpetrators to be “brought to justice”.

Australia’s governor-general David Hurley, a former defence force chief during the period, offered condolences to the Afghan victims’ families and described the allegations as “unforgivable atrocities” that were committed by “a small number of individuals and deliberately concealed from immediate chains of command”.

“As chief of defence force between July 2011 and June 2014, I am deeply disappointed that the ADF inquiry and investigative processes I commissioned into civilian casualties did not reveal the existence of the alleged offences, a large number of which were hidden as combat casualties in operational reports,” he said.

Brereton has been investigating shocking allegations against elite Australian troops since 2016, when he was tasked with examining dozens of incidents in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016.

His work involved reviewing 20,000 documents and 25,000 images. His team interviewed 423 witnesses.

“We embarked on this inquiry with the hope that we would be able to report that the rumours of war crimes were without substance. None of us desired the outcome to which we have come,” he said. “We are all diminished by it.”

The inquiry was triggered by work by military sociologist Samantha Crompvoets, who was tasked with examining special forces culture and began to hear disturbing allegations of war crimes.

One soldier told her: “Guys just had this blood lust. Psychos. Absolute psychos. And we bred them.”

She heard one alleged incident in which two 14-year-old boys were stopped by SAS, who decided they might be Taliban sympathisers. Their throats were slit.

“The rest of the troop then had to ‘clean up the mess’ by finding others to help dispose of the bodies,” Crompvoets reported. “In the end, the bodies were bagged and thrown in a nearby river.”

Crompvoets told the Guardian she expected the findings of the Brereton report would force a fundamental rethink of special forces culture.

“They have no choice but to learn from this and to make sure that the reasons it manifested in the first place never occur again,” she said.

Much of the evidence had already been canvassed publicly, through extensive media reporting. The ABC has revealed footage of one SAS member standing over an unarmed civilian, asking his superior “you want me to drop this cunt”, before executing the man as he cowered in a wheat field.

A US marine who worked with Australian troops also alleged a civilian was shot dead because there was not enough room for him on a helicopter.

In a separate alleged incident, an Afghan man was used as “target practice” after running from an SAS patrol, throwing a phone away and then putting his hands up. A signals intelligence officer accompanying the patrol, Braden Chapman, told the ABC he was then shot in cold blood.

“He put his hands up just like that,” Chapman said earlier this year. “And then just stood there. As we got closer to him the soldier then just fired, and hit him twice in the chest and then shot him through the head as he walked past him. And then from there he just moved on.

“I was only five to 10 metres behind him at the time. And at the time I was just like, OK, the visual image to me was the guy had his hands up and then it was almost like target practice for that soldier.”

Prior leaks of internal reviews have suggested that special forces were, prior to 2015 operating with a sense of entitlement, arrogance and elitism, governed only through a weak command culture.

A briefing in 2016 on the culture of special forces found soldiers were motivated by “blood lust” during the torture and execution of Afghan prisoners, according to the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age.

Defence has only released a redacted version of Brereton’s findings, blacking out some sections and suppressing names and identities.

The government has, however, committed to criminal investigations. It is establishing an office of the special investigator, staffed by the Australian federal police and state and territory police forces, which will build briefs of evidence and make referrals to the commonwealth director of public prosecutions.

Brereton has recommended referring 36 matters to the AFP for criminal investigation, which involve 19 individuals.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/19/australian-special-forces-involved-in-of-39-afghan-civilians-war-crimes-report-alleges

 

Cummings has left behind a No 10 deluded that Britain could be the next Silicon Valley

David Edgerton

Talk of ‘moonshots’ is typical of the belief that the UK is an innovative state – but it’s far from it

The Science Museum, London. Photograph: Luke Peters/Alamy

Wed 18 Nov 2020 10.00 GMT

T

hough many have speculated on what Dominic Cummings’s “legacy” might be, one of the more significant contributions he made to No 10 was his thinking about science and technology. Prime ministerial speeches have been peppered with passé futuristic slogans about how Britain leads the world in quantum computing, genomics and AI, and promises that the country can be a “science superpower” – notions that Cummings made a central part of the Brexit project.

Like many a macho innovation guru, Cummings is an amateur not a professional, an artless nerd and not an expert. That his policies and prescriptions have been taken seriously is a measure of our collective credulity about Britain’s place in the world of innovation. But whether this foolishness will leave with the fool is another matter.

We have known for some months that the UK is to have a new research agency. As so often, this government’s policies are not set out in a green or white paper but are rather suggested to selected journalists. The basic idea is to replicate something called Darpa (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which was supposedly at the forefront of successful innovation in the US. The British “Arpa” (“defense” is dropped) is very much Cummings’ baby, and it is a measure of his former power that its proposed budget is some £800m. The essence of this idea is that a new non-bureaucratic body with visionary leadership will help launch the UK on its new course as a creator of the industries of the future.

It is easy to make fun of this grandiose plan, but a milder version of the same idea has dominated innovation policy for decades, animated by the belief that British strength in research can be turned into economic growth if it is given sufficient backing. Indeed, at a recent select committee hearing, former science minister Jo Johnson and former chief scientific adviser Sir Mark Walport argued that the recently formed UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) already fulfils many of these responsibilities.

Brexiteers have turbocharged the idea that Britain’s innovative genius is a source of national strength. As the prime minister presiding over Brexit negotiations, Theresa May went as far as to say that this country would lead the world into the fourth industrial revolution, as it had led it into the first. Similar references to world-beating British systems have mostly turned out to be braggadocio.

But there is more to this than mere bombast. The argument that no-deal Brexit is a price worth paying for the freedom to violate EU state aid rules relies on the notion that massive subsidies to new technology will yield new firms and groundbreaking innovations. According to this fantastical vision, given the freedom to regulate itself, the UK will set new global standards. Again that is the story dripped out in the press, reinforced by prime ministerial references to digital electrictaxis, zero-carbon aeroplanes and hydrogen-powered trains.

The essential problem with the UK’s existing science and innovation policies and the ramped-up Arpa version is that both assume that the UK is a technological frontier whose brilliant innovations could be harnessed to determine the world’s technological future. That it has not done so yet is blamed on failures of policy and culture, hence this government’s focus on administrative innovations such as Arpa and the reform of the civil service. This is analogous to the idea that the UK will become a global power again, its sails puffed up with entrepreneurial energy.

Yet believing the UK will succeed in innovation if it tries hard enough is like believing the UK will be more powerful after freeing itself from the EU. Both ignore the reality that there are other, better-equipped players in the game. For all its bluster, the UK will continue to be a customer of others’ innovations, not an inventor of its own.

Copying administrative models without paying attention to the brute realities of innovation is a poor model for research policy. The United States that created Darpa was at the peak of its relative industrial and military power. It spent huge amounts on research and development, through multiple agencies, not least the Department of Defense. Darpa (then called Arpa) was tasked with finding radical solutions to particular defence problems. And, not surprisingly, since the defence department was the largest purchaser of such innovations anywhere in the world, Arpa made significant contributions to technology; in 1969 it launched Arpanet, the packet-switching network that would become the technical foundation for the modern internet.

By contrast, the UK’s total expenditure on research ranks it behind countries such as India, South Korea and Germany. Britain uses many more important technologies made elsewhere than it provides to the world. Its defence budget is a tiny fraction of that of the Pentagon. From a low position in the innovation power ranking, the UK is pursuing a top-dog policy. In an interconnected, nearly free-trading world, it is much less shaping the future than having its future shaped by others.

Listening to the advocates of an entrepreneurial state, you would be forgiven for assuming the UK had never been one in the past. In fact, the country was a significant innovative power in the years after the second world war, and invested massively in jet engines, nuclear power, antibiotics and hydrogen fuel cells. It nurtured not only these innovations, but entire industries and visionary British boffins, who were supported to an extraordinary degree. Yet even though the UK was a greater player than it could hope to be today, these programmes had very mixed results. Great national programmes such as Concorde and the British nuclear reactors hardly conquered the world. This was a difficult lesson that many still refuse to accept, preferring the comforting notion that, in the past, the old timers never really tried.

The delusions of Brexiteer revivalists have helped sustain a fundamentally misconceived innovation policy, now visible in retro-futurist talk of “moonshots”. It is a telling indicator of the declining capacities of the British state that while Cummings was lodged at the centre of power, his great antecedent CP Snow, the author of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), was a mere junior minister of technology in Harold Wilson’s 1964 government, as well as being treated with deserved contempt by the experts in his own corridors of power. In the classic British way, both are amateurs complaining about the amateurism of others. The mystery is why their gross misunderstandings were ever taken seriously and allowed to shape public discourse.

It is time to have a grown-up conversation about innovation that fits within a workable national industrial and social strategy. Though Arpa’s champion has now left office, our Brexiteer government will likely still continue to pursue this fantasy vision. The first and vitally necessary step towards innovation policies that work, and make our lives better, is to dump these delusions of grandeur.

• David Edgerton is Hans Rausing professor of the history of science and technology and professor of modern British history at King’s College London. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: a Twentieth Century History

• This article was amended on 18 November 2020. Arpa launched a packet-switching network, not a package-switching network, in 1969.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/18/cummings-no-10-britain-silicon-valley-moonshot