Monthly Archives: July 2009

Israel weighs confiscation of more Palestinian land

Israel weighs confiscation of more Palestinian land
By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz, July 21, 2009

The government is considering confiscating privately-owned Palestinian land near the West Bank settlement of Ofra, contrary to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledge during his Bar-Ilan speech not to take such actions.

This announcement was made by the state prosecutor, in response to a High Court petition filed by a resident of the West Bank town Ein Yabrud and the human rights association Yesh Din. [continued…]

Settlers: Haredi struggle proves only violence works
By Efrat Weiss, Ynet, July 21, 2009

Settlers cut down and torched some 15 trees near the West Bank Palestinian village of Burin on Tuesday, in what IDF forces believe was part of the extreme Right’s “price tag” policy, which seeks to make the Palestinian civilian population pay for the evacuation of outposts.

Meanwhile, rightists distributed a leaflet in the West Bank signed by “the residents of Judea and Samaria” with the title “Learn from the haredim, win the battle,” claiming that “only those who upturn tables win.”

The leaflet’s authors claimed that force must be used in order to achieve their objectives. “This is what the Arabs did in the intifada, and they received their Terror Authoirty on a silver platter. This is what the Druze did in Pekiin, and no one bothers them.

“This is what the haredim in Mea Shearim did, and the police folded. The time has come for us to internalize and understand this. You don’t win with love. A battle fought with hugs doesn’t achieve anything. Only with force will we prevail.” [continued…]

Most Arabs can’t buy most homes in West Jerusalem
By Nir Hasson, Haaretz, July 21, 2009

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed this week that Jerusalem is an “open city” that permits all its inhabitants, Jewish and Palestinian, to purchase homes in both its eastern and western parts.

“Our policy is that Jerusalem residents can purchase apartments anywhere in the city. There is no ban on Arabs buying apartments in the west of the city, and there is no ban on Jews building or buying in the city’s east,” Netanyahu said in response to the U.S. request to halt a Jewish construction project in East Jerusalem.

An examination by Haaretz, however, presented a rather different situation on the ground. According to Israel Lands Administration rules, residents of East Jerusalem cannot take ownership of the vast majority of Jerusalem homes. When an Israeli citizen purchases an apartment or house, ownership of the land remains with the ILA, which leases it to the purchaser for a period of 49 years, enabling the registration of the home (“tabu”). Article 19 of the ILA lease specifies that a foreign national cannot lease – much less own – ILA land. [continued…]

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The “swiftboating” of Human Rights Watch

The “swiftboating” of Human Rights Watch
By Daniel Levy, Huffington Post, July 20, 2009

Last week witnessed a concerted attack against the credibility of the NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW), seeking to link supposed fundraising activities in Saudi Arabia with that organization’s criticism (“bias”, according to its detractors) of Israeli practices in the occupied territories, also claiming HRW is soft peddling on Saudi violations. It started in a Wall Street Journal piece, the Israeli prime minister’s office and spokespeople weighed in, and then AIPAC and the rightwing blogosphere got onboard. The attack on HRW has now been ratcheted up according to last week’s Jerusalem Post.

The former right-wing Israeli Government Minister, Natan Sharansky (also an ex-refusenik, President George W. Bush’s favorite author and occupation apologist) claims that HRW “has become a tool in the hands of dictatorial regimes to fight against democracies.” Ron Dermer, director of policy planning in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office adds: “We are going to dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups; we are not going to be sitting ducks in a pond for the human rights groups to shoot at us with impunity”.

The apparent trigger for this assault on a group that represents the global gold standard in human rights monitoring, analysis, and advocacy, was a visit by HRW’s Middle East-North Africa director, Sarah Lee Whitson, to the Saudi kingdom. I happened to find myself on a panel at The Century Foundation discussing the Middle East with Whitson just days before this storm broke — I went back and watched tapes of that panel discussion. To accuse Whitson of being soft on the Saudis or somehow singling out Israel for criticism is quite astonishing as I’m sure you’ll agree if you take ten minutes to listen to her presentation — of that, more in a moment. [continued…]

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Obama’s Gitmo task force blows its deadline

Obama’s Gitmo task force blows its deadline
By Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, July 20, 2009

An Obama administration task force set up to develop a plan for the closure of the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay will miss its first deadline this week—and put off a key report—amid continued divisions over how to resolve one of the president’s thorniest policy dilemmas.

The task force, set up on Obama’s second day in office, was charged with preparing a report to the president by Tuesday, July 21, outlining a long-term detention plan for detainees captured in counterterrorism operations after Sept. 11. But continued debate within the task force over the legal basis for holding detainees who are not charged with any crimes—and where to house them once they are moved from Guantánamo—has forced the task force to postpone its report by a “few months,” a senior administration official told Newsweek.

A separate task-force report on interrogations—also due this week—is being put off as well, said the official, who, like others quoted in this article, asked not to be named talking about private deliberations. [continued…]

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US-Israeli tensions

‘No difference to U.S. between outpost, East Jerusalem construction’
By Akiva Eldar, Barak Ravid and Jack Khoury, Haaretz, July 20, 2009

The United States views East Jerusalem as no different than an illegal West Bank outpost with regard to its demand for a freeze on settlement construction, American sources have informed both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

This clarification came in the context of a growing crisis in U.S.-Israel relations over the planned construction of some 20 apartments for Jews in the Shepherd Hotel, in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. The U.S. has demanded that the project be halted, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the cabinet meeting Sunday that “Israel will not agree to edicts of this kind in East Jerusalem.” [continued…]

Netanyahu-Mitchell meeting postponed again
By Roni Sofer, Ynet, July 19, 2009

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scheduled meeting with US Mideast envoy George Mitchell has been postponed at least until the end of the month.

Another meeting between the two, which was set to take place in Paris last month, was also cancelled.

Mitchell was originally scheduled to arrive in Israel on Sunday and later hold meetings with senior Palestinian officials in Ramallah. Jerusalem did not state the official reason for the delay, but some officials suspect it relates to the fact that the Netanyahu and Obama administrations have yet to resolve their differences on the issue of settlement expansion in the West Bank, among other things. [continued…]

What Netanyahu wants from Obama’s ‘self-hating Jews’
By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz, July 20, 2009

Who is to blame for the latest dispute with the United States over the new neighborhood going up in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah area? Mayor Nir Barkat? Certainly not. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who stood behind him? Ridiculous. Any child knows that everything is the fault of other Jews: Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, two American administration officials who are inciting President Barack Obama against their own people.

This is not the first time that “self-hating Jews” have given us trouble. In negotiations over the separation of forces agreement in the 1970s, U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger, the scion of a family of Jewish refugees who had escaped from Nazi Germany, earned the anti-Semitic epithet “Jewboy” in Israel. At the end of the 1980s, when president George H.W. Bush dared to argue that the peace process does not jibe with settlement expansion, the Shamir government instigated a campaign against “the ‘Jewboy’ trio”: Dennis Ross, Aaron Miller and Dan Kurtzer. Now it is the turn of Obama’s Jewish confidantes to be the scapegoats.

It is easy to imagine what an uproar there would be in Jerusalem if an Arab leader or newspaper dared to claim that an American president was favorable to Israel because of the influence of a Jewish adviser. Netanyahu, who spent many years in the United States, knows very well the extent to which Jewish administration officials in key positions are sensitive to the slightest hint of dual loyalty – to their birthplace and their historic homeland. It turns out that for him, politics bends the iron-clad rule that “all Jews are responsible for one another.” [continued…]

Israeli settlers versus the Palestinians
By Nina Burleigh, Time, July 27, 2009

In a hilltop suburb South of Jerusalem called Efrat, Sharon Katz serves a neat plate of sliced cake inside her five-bedroom house, surrounded by pomegranate, olive and citrus trees that she planted herself. She glances out the window at the hills where, she believes, David and Abraham once walked. “We are living in the biblical heartland,” she sighs.

It is a heartland the prophets would not recognize, replete as it is with pizza parlor, jazz nights at the coffee shop, grocery store and yellow electronic gate with machine-gun-wielding guards. Efrat is one of 17 settlements that make up a bloc called Gush Etzion, located not in Israel but in the occupied West Bank. The Katzes (Sharon, husband Israel and five children) consider themselves law-abiding citizens. They publish a small community magazine and take part in civic projects. Sharon raises money for charity by putting on tap-dancing and theater shows. And yet to much of the outside world, the Katzes are participating in an illegal land grab forbidden by the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit an occupying power from settling its own civilians on militarily controlled land. Some Israelis have admitted as much. While Benjamin Netanyahu, then as now Prime Minister, was negotiating with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1998, Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon got on Israeli radio and urged Israelis to settle more land fast. “Grab the hilltops, and stake your claim,” he said. “Everything we don’t grab will go to them.” [continued…]

Vatican teaching Hezbollah how to kill Jews, says pamphlet for IDF troops
By Ofri Ilani, Haaretz, July 20, 2009

The Pope and the cardinals of the Vatican help organize tours of Auschwitz for Hezbollah members to teach them how to wipe out Jews, according to a booklet being distributed to Israel Defense Forces soldiers.

Officials encouraging the booklet’s distribution include senior officers, such as Lt. Col. Tamir Shalom, the commander of the Nahshon Battalion of the Kfir Brigade. [continued…]

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Iran – 7/20

Khatami seeks referendum
By Robert F Worth, New York Times, July 19, 2009

Iran’s reformist former president Mohammad Khatami called Sunday for a referendum on the legitimacy of the government in the wake of last month’s disputed presidential election, Iranian Web sites reported.

Mr. Khatami’s comments amounted to a bold challenge to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has dismissed the opposition’s claims that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory on June 12 was rigged, and has ordered protesters to accept it.

It is unlikely that Iran’s hard-line leaders will accept the referendum proposal. But the fact that Mr. Khatami proposed it at all suggests a renewed confidence within the opposition movement. [continued…]

Mousavi wants Iran protesters freed
Al Jazeera, July 20, 2009

Mir Hossein Mousavi, the defeated reformist candidate in Iran’s presidential election, has demanded the release of scores of protesters detained following the poll, which he insists was rigged.

Speaking to the families of some of the activists and protesters held since the June 12 poll, Mousavi said that detaining people would not resolve the dispute over its outcome, reformist websites reported on Monday.

“Who believes these people, many of them prominent figures, would work with the foreigners and to endanger their country’s interests?” he was quoted as saying. [continued…]

Iran supreme leader warns opposition to back down
AP, July 20, 2009

Iran’s supreme leader told politicians Monday not to disturb the country’s security in a strong warning to the opposition to back down after one of its top figures called for a referendum on the government.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei addressed “Iran’s elite” and warned them to be cautious in the positions they take on the turmoil that has shaken the country since the disputed presidential election on June 12.

He said that hurting Iran’s security was “the biggest vice,” adding that “anybody who drives the society toward insecurity and disorder is a hated person in the view of the Iranian nation, whoever he is.” [continued…]

Iran’s ‘friend of Israel’ VP denies reports of his resignation
DPA, July 20, 2009

An entry on the website of Iran’s newly appointed vice-president Monday denied a local television report about his resignation.

Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaie’s website categorically denied Sunday’s resignation reports as a lie by enemies aimed at tarnishing the new government’s image.

He was appointed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last Thursday as first vice- and de facto acting president. [continued…]

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Pentagon seeks to overhaul prisons in Afghanistan

Pentagon seeks to overhaul prisons in Afghanistan
By Eric Scmitt, New York Times, July 20, 2009

A sweeping United States military review calls for overhauling the troubled American-run prison here as well as the entire Afghan jail and judicial systems, a reaction to worries that abuses and militant recruiting within the prisons are helping to strengthen the Taliban.

In a further sign of high-level concern over detention practices, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent a confidential message last week to all of the military service chiefs and senior field commanders asking them to redouble their efforts to alert troops to the importance of treating detainees properly.

The prison at this air base north of Kabul has become an ominous symbol for Afghans — a place where harsh interrogation methods and sleep deprivation were used routinely in its early years, and where two Afghan detainees died in 2002 after being beaten by American soldiers and hung by their arms from the ceiling of isolation cells. [continued…]

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Obama and the Bush years

Obama and the Bush years
By Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2009

Whenever he’s asked about the scandals of America’s war on terror — the torture, the wrongful detentions, the legal corners cut — President Obama has responded with some version of this statement: “We have to focus on getting things right in the future as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past.”

But that approach can’t work. The unanswered questions are too many, the lawsuits too numerous, the fundamental questions of accountability too nagging. We need a public reckoning — and, much as they might like to avoid the distraction, Obama and his people must know it.

The latest controversy was the disclosure last week that the CIA had launched a program to track down and kill Al Qaeda leaders without informing Congress. The CIA withheld the information, according to Director Leon Panetta, on orders from then-Vice President Dick Cheney. [continued…]

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Iran – 7/19

Rafsanjani is seeking the mantle of Khomeini
By Elaine Sciolino, New York Times, July 19, 2009

During his decades in Iranian politics, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has been praised as a pragmatist, criticized as spineless, accused of corruption and dismissed as a has-been.

Now, in assailing the government’s handling of last month’s disputed presidential election, Mr. Rafsanjani, a 75-year-old cleric and former president, has cast himself in a new light: as a player with the authority to interpret the ideals of Iran’s 30-year-old Islamic republic.

Using his perch as a designated prayer leader on Friday to deliver the speech of a lifetime, Mr. Rafsanjani abandoned his customary caution to demand that the government release those arrested in recent weeks, ease restrictions on the media and eradicate the “doubt” the Iranian people have about the election result. And he implicitly challenged the authority of the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to make decisions without seeking consensus. [continued…]

Ahmadinejad gets on wrong side of allies with VP pick
Press TV, July 18, 2009

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s choice of vice president has met with a hail of criticism, provoking calls from his Principlist supporters for the resignation of the newly appointed veep.

As part of anticipated changes in the structure of his new government, President Ahmadinejad appointed his close confidant Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei to the post of vice president Thursday night.

Rahim-Mashaei, who has served as the head of the Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization, will replace the incumbent first vice president Parviz Davoudi.

New first vice president Rahim-Mashaie stirred up fierce controversy after saying earlier in 2008 that despite the conflict between governments, Iranians are friends with the Israeli people. [continued…]

West must close Iran nuclear file: new atomic chief
AFP, July 18, 2009

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Friday announced the appointment of Salehi, Iran’s former envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, replacing the former chief of 12 years, Gholam Reza Aghazadeh.

Salehi is known as an open minded administrator and he was the one who signed the protocol with the IAEA in December 2003 which gave the UN agency a freer hand in inspecting Iran’s nuclear sites.

Ahmadinejad’s present government stopped applying that protocol, linked to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, in February 2006 shortly after Iran’s nuclear programme was referred to the UN Security Council. [continued…]

Iran daily slams Rafsanjani querying poll result
AFP, July 18, 2009

… a prominent cleric who is a member of the electoral watchdog, the Guardians Council, which upheld the poll result, rebuked Rafsanjani for his focus on popular legitimacy.

“The legitimacy of the government is given by God,” the ISNA news agency quoted Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi as saying.

“Acceptance by the people doesn’t bring legitimacy to (an Islamic) government. Mr Hashemi Rafsanjani ignored this important Islamic point and talked in both parts of his sermon yesterday as if governments are assigned only by the people.” [continued…]

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Jerusalem – 7/19

Netanyahu: Israel rule over Jerusalem not up for discussion
By Barak Ravid, Haaretz, July 19, 2009

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem was not a matter up for discussion. The prime minister’s comments came after the U.S. State Department told Israeli envoy Michael Oren that Israel must halt a construction project in East Jerusalem.

Netanyahu told ministers at the weekly cabinet meeting that Jerusalem is the united capital of Israel and that all citizens are allowed to purchase property in any part of the city they choose. [continued…]

‘U.S. tells Israel to halt East Jerusalem building’
By Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz, July 19, 2009

The United States has told Israel it must halt an East Jerusalem construction project in accordance with the Obama administration’s demands for a complete freeze on settlement building, Israeli radio stations reported on Sunday.

The State Department summoned Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren over the weekend to advise him that the project developed by American millionaire Irving Moskowitz should not go ahead, according to both Israel Radio and Army Radio.

Moskowitz, an influential supporter of Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem, purchased the Shepherd Hotel in 1985 and plans to tear it down and build housing units in its place. The hotel is located near a government compound that includes several government ministries and the national police headquarters. [continued…]

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The counter-terrorists – 7/19

Internal rifts on road to torment
By Joby Warrick and Peter Finn, Washington Post, July 19, 2009

In April 2002, as the terrorism suspect known as Abu Zubaida lay in a Bangkok hospital bed, top U.S. counterterrorism officials gathered at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., for a series of meetings on an urgent problem: how to get him to talk.

Put him in a cell filled with cadavers, was one suggestion, according to a former U.S. official with knowledge of the brainstorming sessions. Surround him with naked women, was another. Jolt him with electric shocks to the teeth, was a third.

One man’s certitude lanced through the debate, according to a participant in one of the meetings. James E. Mitchell, a retired clinical psychologist for the Air Force, had studied al-Qaeda resistance techniques.

“The thing that will make him talk,” the participant recalled Mitchell saying, “is fear.” [continued…]

A response to General Dostum
By Sam Zarifi, RFE/RL, July 17, 2009

Dostum asserts that “it is impossible that Taliban or Al-Qaeda prisoners could have been abused.” In fact, preliminary investigations carried out shortly after the alleged killings by highly experienced and respected forensic analysts from Physicians for Human Rights established the presence of recently deceased human remains at Dasht-e Leili and suggested that they were the victims of homicide.

I was a human rights investigator in northwestern Afghanistan in February 2002. At the time, numerous witnesses spoke of seeing several trucks dumping what appeared to be human remains in Dasht-e Leili, while others told of detainees being held for days in overcrowded shipping containers without food, water, or medical care, and, in some instances, being shot while inside the containers. [continued…]

Afghan massacre: the convoy of death (video)

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Afghanistan – 7/19

Americans won’t accept ‘long slog’ in Afghanistan war, Gates says
By Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times, July 19, 2009

After eight years, U.S.-led forces must show progress in Afghanistan by next summer to avoid the public perception that the conflict has become unwinnable, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in a sharp critique of the war effort.

Gates said that victory was a “long-term prospect” under any scenario and that the U.S. would not win the war in a year’s time. However, U.S. forces must begin to turn the situation around in a year, he said, or face the likely loss of public support. [continued…]

Taliban release video of captured US soldier
By Declan Walsh, The Guardian, July 19, 2009

The Taliban have released a video of a US soldier kidnapped outside a US base in Afghanistan almost three weeks ago.

Shaven-headed and emotional, the soldier, named by the Pentagon today as Private Bowe Bergdahl, 23, of Idaho, pleads for American troops to return home.

A US military spokesman in Kabul condemned the video as propaganda and a breach of the rules of war.

In the 28-minute video, which the militants released via the internet yesterday, Bergdahl is shown with a razed head, a light beard and wearing a grey shalwar kameez. [continued…]

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Iran – 7/18

Iranian protesters galvanized by sermon
By Borzou Daragahi and Ramin Mostaghim, Los Angeles Times, July 18, 2009

A sermon by powerful cleric and opposition supporter Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani reignited Iran’s simmering protest movement Friday, heartening thousands of supporters who braved tear gas and club-wielding militiamen to march and chant slogans across Tehran.

In a highly anticipated speech, Rafsanjani slammed the hard-line camp supporting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, criticized the June 12 election results and promoted several key opposition demands. Analysts said his description of the unrest as an ongoing “crisis” was a signal to keep the pressure on Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

His speech, as well as the ensuing pitched clashes between security forces and supporters of opposition figure Mir-Hossein Mousavi, suggested that the political firestorm surrounding the marred vote would continue and that the movement it had inspired remained strong. [continued…]

Berlusconi in Tehran
By Slavoj Žižek, London Review of Books, July 23, 2009

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, but before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture often takes place. All of a sudden, people know the game is up: they simply cease to be afraid. It isn’t just that the regime loses its legitimacy: its exercise of power is now perceived as a panic reaction, a gesture of impotence. Ryszard Kapuściński, in Shah of Shahs, his account of the Khomeini revolution, located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew. Within a couple of hours, all Tehran had heard about the incident, and although the streetfighting carried on for weeks, everyone somehow knew it was all over. Is something similar happening now?

There are many versions of last month’s events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western ‘reform movement’, something along the lines of the colour-coded revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. They support the protests as a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution, as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic Iran freed from Muslim fundamentalism. They are countered by sceptics who think that Ahmadinejad actually won, that he is the voice of the majority, while Mousavi’s support comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. Let’s face facts, they say: in Ahmadinejad, Iran has the president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the clerical establishment whose differences from Ahmadinejad are merely cosmetic. He too wants to continue with the atomic energy programme, is against recognising Israel, and when he was prime minister in the repressive years of the war with Iraq enjoyed the full support of Khomeini.

Finally, and saddest of all, are the leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad. What is at stake for them is Iranian freedom from imperialism. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed corruption among the elite and used Iran’s oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority. This, we are told, is the true Ahmadinejad: the Holocaust-denying fanatic is a creation of the Western media. In this view, what’s been happening in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a coup, financed by the West, against the legitimate premier. This not only ignores the facts (the high electoral turnout, up from the usual 55 to 85 per cent, can be explained only as a protest vote), it also assumes, patronisingly, that Ahmadinejad is good enough for the backward Iranians: they aren’t yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular left. [continued…]

Iran’s tide of history: counter-revolution and after
By Fred Halliday, Open Democracy, July 17, 2009

The open defiance by thousands of opposition supporters around Friday prayers at Tehran University on 17 July 2009 is but a surface indication of the heaving anger below. The gathering heard a call by the former president and influential figure Hashemi Rafsanjani for those arrested in the protests to be released. It is a significant intervention in a delicate phase, when factions within the regime as well as millions of disaffected Iranian citizens are positioning for the even more decisive confrontations ahead.

If past performance is anything to go, the exertion of state violence since the election is only the beginning. In a pattern familiar from earlier phases of the Islamic Republic – as also occurred during the Shah’s regime – opposition members will continue to be brutalised in prison and then forced to engage in televised “confessions”: acts of deliberately preposterous humiliation designed not to reveal the truth (about “foreign conspiracies” or whatever), but to terrorise and break the will of the regime’s opponents.

More ominous is what may follow this phase of detention, mistreatment, and humiliation. Many precedents, including the repression of the liberal and left opposition in 1979-81 in particular, suggest that once foreign correspondents have been expelled from Iran and international attention has moved on, the actual killing in prison of opposition members can proceed. In the past, such killings followed fake trials where executions were justified under the catchall charge of “waging war on God”, or in supposed attempts to escape. [continued…]

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US intelligence – 7/18

House launches investigation into CIA program
By Tabassum Zakaria, Reuters, July 17, 2009

The House Intelligence Committee said on Friday it was launching a formal investigation into the concealment of a secret CIA program from Congress that one senator said was withheld on orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Immediately after the Democrats announced the investigation, Republicans cried foul and called it a partisan effort to protect the Democratic leader, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. [continued…]

U.S. weighs special team of terrorism interrogators
By Siobhan Gorman, Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2009

The Obama administration is considering overhauling the way terror suspects are interrogated by creating a small team of professionals drawn from across the government, according to people familiar with a proposal that will be submitted to the White House.

The new unit, comprising members of spy services and law-enforcement agencies, would be used for so-called high-value detainees, they said. In a switch from Bush-era efforts, it wouldn’t be run by the Central Intelligence Agency, though who might be in charge isn’t specified.

One of the team’s tasks would likely be to devise a new set of interrogation methods, according to one person familiar with the proposal. Those techniques could be drawn from sources ranging from scientific studies to the psychology behind television ads. [continued…]

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US-Middle East – 7/18

New Hope for Peace: What America Must Do to End the Israel-Palestine Conflict part 1

New Hope for Peace: What America Must Do to End the Israel-Palestine Conflict part 2

Revisiting Obama’s Riyadh meeting
By Laura Rozen, Foreign Policy, July 17, 2009

US relations with Saudi Arabia are always something of a proverbial black box. And President Barack Obama’s meeting with Saudi King Abdullah last month was no exception. A late add-on to Obama’s planned June itinerary to Egypt, Germany, and France and conducted at King Abdullah’s horse ranch outside of Riyadh, the June 3 meeting was quickly overtaken by coverage of Obama’s high-profile June 4 speech to the Muslim world from Cairo.

But two sources, one a former U.S. official who recently traveled there and one a current official speaking anonymously, say the meeting did not go well from Obama’s perspective. What’s more, the former official says that Dennis Ross has told associates that part of what prompted Obama to bring him on as his special assistant and NSC senior director for the “Central Region” last month was the president’s feeling that the preparation for the trip was insufficient. The White House vigorously disputes all of that, some of which was previously reported by the New York Times.

Sources say Obama was hoping to persuade the king to be ready to show reciprocal gestures to Israel, which Washington has been pushing to halt settlements with the goal of advancing regional peace and the creation of a Palestinian state.

“The more time goes by, the more the Saudi meeting was a watershed event,” said the former U.S. official who recently traveled to Riyadh. “It was the first time that President Obama as a senator, candidate, or president was not able to get almost anything or any movement using his personal power of persuasion.” [continued…]

Report urges continued U.S. diplomatic push
By Daniel Luban, IPS, July 18, 2009

The U.S. should proceed cautiously in its engagement strategy with Iran, while moving quickly toward final-status negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, according to a new report by a team of veteran diplomats and Middle East policymakers.

The policy paper, released Wednesday by the Israel Policy Forum (IPF), an organisation that promotes U.S. diplomatic engagement in the Middle East, expresses support for President Barack Obama’s ambitious Middle East strategy.

Entitled “After Cairo and Iran: Next Steps for U.S. Diplomacy in the Middle East“, it recommends continuing attempts to engage Iran, but shifting primarily to back-channel rather than public talks in response to the recent political turmoil following June’s disputed presidential elections. [continued…]

Israel to drop Arabic names
By Jonathan Cook, The National, July 17, 2009

Thousands of road signs are the latest front in Israel’s battle to erase the Arab heritage from much of the Holy Land, according to critics in both Israel and the wider Arab world.

Israel Katz, the transport minister, announced this week that signs on all major roads in Israel, East Jerusalem and possibly parts of the West Bank would be “standardised”, converting English and Arabic place names into straight transliterations of the Hebrew name.

Currently, road signs include the place name as it is traditionally rendered in all three languages.

Under the new scheme, the Arab identity of important Palestinian communities will be obscured: Jerusalem, or “al Quds” in Arabic, will be Hebraised to “Yerushalayim”; Nazareth, or “al Nasra” in Arabic, the city of Jesus’s childhood, will become “Natzrat”; and Jaffa, the port city after which Palestine’s oranges were named, will be “Yafo”. [continued…]

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Afghanistan-Pakistan – 7/18

Obama’s war
By Tariq Ali, London Review of Books, July 23, 2009

June is never a good month on the plains. It was 46ºC in Fortress Islamabad a fortnight ago. The hundreds of security guards manning roadblocks and barriers were wilting, sweat pouring down their faces as they waved cars and motorbikes through. The evening breeze brought no respite. It, too, was unpleasantly warm, and it was difficult not to sympathise with those who, defying the law, jumped into the Rawal Lake, the city’s main reservoir, in an attempt to cool down. Further south in Lahore it was even hotter, and there were demonstrations when the generator at Mangla that sporadically supplies the city with electricity collapsed completely.

As far as the political temperature goes there is never a good month in Pakistan. This is a country whose fate is no longer in its own hands. I have never known things so bad. The chief problems are the United States and its requirements, the religious extremists, the military high command, and corruption, not just on the part of President Zardari and his main rivals, but spreading well beyond them.

This is now Obama’s war. He campaigned to send more troops into Afghanistan and to extend the war, if necessary, into Pakistan. These pledges are now being fulfilled. On the day he publicly expressed his sadness at the death of a young Iranian woman caught up in the repression in Tehran, US drones killed 60 people in Pakistan. The dead included women and children, whom even the BBC would find it difficult to describe as ‘militants’. Their names mean nothing to the world; their images will not be seen on TV networks. Their deaths are in a ‘good cause’. [continued…]

Afghanistan’s lost decade
By Paul Rogers, Open Democracy, July 16, 2009

The war in Afghanistan will move into its ninth year in under three months’ time, with the anniversary of the start of the United States bombing on 7 October 2001. This war is now beginning to approach the duration of the Soviet occupation. That started with the invasion by the Red Army on 24 December 1979 and ended with the United Nations-brokered ceasefire of 15 May 1988 and the final withdrawal of Soviet troops a year later.

That earlier conflict, which killed over a million Afghans and caused millions more refugees, was devastating. It was followed by a bitter and complex civil war in the early 1990s that led to a Taliban takeover of Kabul in 1996 and of most of the country by the end of the decade. For sheer civilian suffering, the Soviet occupation far exceeds the conflict of 2001-09 – but this ongoing war may still be in its early stages. Most military analysts believe that if present-day levels of western military involvement are maintained, then – whoever is in the White House – the war has at least a decade to go. [continued…]

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Iraq – 7/18

Iraq government faces claims of prisoner abuse
AP, July 17, 2009

Iraqi officials outraged by the abuse of prisoners at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison are trying to contain a scandal of their own as allegations continue to surface of mistreatment inside Iraqi jails.

Accounts of Iraqis being beaten with clubs, blindfolded and coerced into signing false confessions are attracting increased attention partly because the United States is getting out of the prison business in Iraq. Since a security agreement took effect Jan. 1, the U.S. has transferred 841 detainees into Iraq’s crowded prison system and more are on the way.

Allegations of mistreatment have persisted since 2005, when U.S. troops raided an Interior Ministry lockup in a predominantly Shiite area of southeastern Baghdad and found scores of emaciated prisoners. The matter returned to the spotlight after the June 12 assassination of Sunni lawmaker Harith al-Obeidi, an outspoken advocate of prisoner rights.

The issue is a test of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s commitment to the rule of law and to reconcile with the Sunni minority, who account for most of the prisoners held in security cases. Sunnis claim they are being unfairly targeted by security forces run by al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government. [continued…]

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Iran – 7/17

Rafsanjani backs tolerance, dialogue
By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times, July 17, 2009

Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran’s premier power broker and a force behind opposition figurehead Mir-Hossein Mousavi, took the podium for Friday prayers today for the first time in eight weeks, urging tolerance and dialogue but acknowledging that the disputed election results had “created bitter conditions” for the country.

Tens of thousands of supporters of Mousavi crammed into downtown Tehran early this afternoon, some with emblematic green ribbons wrapped around their fingers, to attend the sermon by Rafsanjani that could herald a new stage in the political drama that has followed the marred June 12 reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“We could have taken our best step in the history of the Islamic revolution had the election not faced problems,” he told worshipers. “We are in doubt today. Today, we are living bitter conditions due to what happened after the announcement of the election result. All of us have suffered. We need unity more than anytime else.” [continued…]

Something profound has changed. Iranians are losing their fear and mock the official line
By “Dadbeh Gudarzi”, The Independent, July 17, 2009

Until recently, it was almost unheard of to utter criticism and the name of the Supreme Leader in the same breath. But now, even Ayatollah Ali Khamenei does not escape, and I don’t mean just in conversations between trusted friends. My own father, seriously mistrustful of talking about anything meaningful on the telephone, has given up observing his own cautious rules after almost three decades.

The people who are now daring to speak out like my father are not all intellectuals from north Tehran. Nor are they organised resistance. They are fed up with their salaries being eaten by inflation, or that their university-educated children have no prospect of a job. And they seethe at the unimaginable gap between them and loyal members of the Revolutionary Guard who have recently enjoyed salary rises. [continued…]

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US-Middle East – 7/17

Obama, Foxman and Israel’s purpose
By Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, July 16, 2009

Abe Foxman, President of the Anti-Defamation League and a stalwart cheerleader for Israel in Washington, has been worried about President Barack Obama ever since the new Administration took office. When Obama named Senator George Mitchell as his Mideast envoy, Foxman actually complained that the problem with Mitchell was “meticulously fair and even handed,” which he insisted was not a desirable approach for the U.S. to take to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ever since Obama’s Cairo speech, Foxman’s concerns have become more pronounced. It’s not that the Anti Defamation League president didn’t take heart from Obama’s insistence that Israel’s security is sacrosanct; or that “he made strong statements against anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.” No, his concern — among others — was that Obama should have “made clear that Israel’s right to statehood is not a result of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.”

He’s not the only one who argues this, of course; many on the Zionist right have long insisted that the movement claimed sovereignty in Palestine not on the basis of the Holocauast, but claiming to represent the continuity of the Hebrews of Judea thousands of years ago. [continued…]

Obama meets the Lobby
By Stephan Walt, Foreign Policy, July 16, 2009

This past Monday, President Obama met with the heads of a number of prominent Jewish groups, to talk about the state of U.S.-Israeli relations and the future direction of U.S. Middle East policy. Virtually all the news reports I’ve seen suggest that the attendees had a cordial and candid discussion. After reading through various accounts, I have three comments.

First, although a few individuals in the Israel lobby continue to downplay its influence, the very fact that this meeting was held is additional testimony to its important role in shaping U.S. Middle East policy. Why was Barack Obama taking time from his busy schedule to meet with the heads of groups like AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, J Street, Hadassah, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (among others)? Simple: he knows that these groups have a lot of political power. He also knows that the success of his Middle East policy depends in large part on getting significant support from them. In a political system like ours, where well-organized interest groups routinely wield disproportionate influence over the issues they care about, holding a White House sit-down with these key leaders was smart politics.

Second, the meeting also makes it clear that there have been significant changes within the lobby over the past several years, and that there is an evident rift between those who think the United States should continue to the same “special relationship” with Israel, and those who believe that it would be in Israel and America’s interest if Washington adopted a more candid and nuanced policy toward the Jewish state. It is noteworthy that the invitees included representatives from both J Street and Americans for Peace Now — groups that openly favor a two-state solution and have been backing Obama’s campaign to halt all construction in the settlements. Maybe even more noteworthy, the more hard-line groups were remarkably restrained in defending the settlement enterprise. [continued…]

Israeli author’s Zionist novel creates controversy
By Howard Schneider and Samuel Sockol, Washington Post, July 15, 2009

The idea for Israeli author Alon Hilu’s latest novel, “The House of Dajani,” came to him one day in a Tel Aviv cafe when he began mentally stripping the city to its roots.

Where he ended was with an Arab boy in the 1890s, at his family farm near what would become the Jewish metropolis, hallucinating about a future in which an army invades and builds skyscrapers over the land.

The novel based on Hilu’s ruminations has now embroiled him in an intense discussion of Israeli letters and the identity of the Jewish state. Critics have labeled the book anti-Semitic, lambasted what they call its loose use of historical details and branded Hilu’s unflattering portrayal of early Zionist immigrants as an effort to undermine the state. Admirers awarded the book Israel’s richest literary prize, only to have their decision reversed over conflict-of-interest allegations. [continued…]

Palestinian Authority closes down Al Jazeera offices
By Marc Lynch, Foreign Policy, July 16, 2009

The other day I mentioned the explosive allegations made by PLO political section head Farouq Qaddoumi that Mahmoud Abbas and Mohammed Dahlan had conspired with Israel and the U.S. to have Yasir Arafat killed. Abbas has called Qaddoumi’s statement “lies” and threatened punishment, and rumors are that Qaddoumi will soon be expelled from his position in the PLO; Qaddoumi has presented documents that he claims prove his contention. His comments to a group of Jordanian journalists have led to a minor diplomatic crisis between the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. That will pass. But they have also led a defensive Mahmoud Abbas to order the closure of the Al Jazeera offices in the West Bank.

That’s a major mistake, and all too typical of the way the Palestinian Authority and most other Arab governments have approached critical media over the years. Shutting down critical media outlets represents the bad habit of the official Arab order, which has never adjusted to the contentious new media (whether Al Jazeera or political blogs). [continued…]

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