Monthly Archives: May 2011

Apparent torture of boy reinvigorates Syria’s protest movement

The Washington Post reports:

The boy’s head was swollen, purple and disfigured. His body was a mess of welts, cigarette burns and wounds from bullets fired to injure, not kill. His kneecaps had been smashed, his neck broken, his jaw shattered and his penis cut off.

What finally killed him was not clear, but it appeared painfully, shockingly clear that he had suffered terribly during the month he spent in Syrian custody.

Hamza Ali al-Khateeb was 13 years old.

And since a video portraying the torture inflicted upon him was broadcast on the al-Jazeera television network Friday, he has rapidly emerged as the new symbol of the protest movement in Syria. His childish features have put a face to the largely faceless and leaderless opposition to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime that has roiled the country for nine weeks, reinvigorating a movement that had seemed in danger of drifting.

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Dreaming spooks in search of digital metaphors

Michael Rosen writes:

News that a US government intelligence body is going to start analysing the metaphors used in various languages will have brought wry smiles to the faces of writers and critics. Presumably, “Metaphor Program” agents won’t restrict themselves to metaphors as that particular word is often used metonymically for the whole of figurative language – similes, symbols or indeed any use of language that appears to be standing in for something else or representing something else. That in itself is no simple matter, as we shall see, but let it stand for the moment.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud …” to which we are entitled to ask, “What’s lonely about a cloud?” It’s a pretty rare Lake District sky that gives us one cloud on its own. But who says a lonely cloud would have to be on its own to be lonely? Maybe clouds are just lonely things – full of a sense of their isolation in an alienated world. If we find ourselves grasping at straws here, Wordsworth gives us help: “… that floats on high o’er vales and hills”, which suggests that he’s talking about the cloud’s detachment from the earth. It’s the higher-than-hills-ness, floatiness of the cloud that is important.

This is the kind of speculation that metaphor-divining specialises in and it’s fun to think of US spooks chewing over such matters – though presumably they will hire patriotic literature graduates to do the job.

Such servants to the US cause will be able to take their masters on a trip through a forest of suggestion, resonance and ambiguity in their quest to find the hidden value-systems in speakers’ and writers’ use of metaphor. We now know that Wordsworth’s idea of a writer being detached from the world, wrapped up in thoughts about nature and the imagination, was indeed ideological – as he warned us:

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Little we see in Nature that is ours.”

So, straight away, our US allies can label early Wordsworth an anti-bourgeois subversive – someone who will need to be watched.

But what of Shakespeare? He poses the problem that we can never know for certain that this is Shakespeare talking or one of his many characters through whom he speaks: “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune …” This is dense stuff: a cast of thought has to compress our interactions and outcome into one notion: “fortune”, which then has to be personified into a form that can “behave” or have appurtenances, as in this case “slings and arrows”. Aha, militaristic metaphor! Fortune is armed and aggressive. Clearly, Hamlet is a potential terrorist. And indeed he was. Or tried rather ineffectually to be. But the writer who conjured him up? Probably not.

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Gaddafi snatch squads took hundreds of men and boys from Misrata

The Independent reports:

The lifting of the siege of the embattled Libyan city of Misrata has revealed the disappearance of hundreds of people with many of them suspected victims of snatch squads loyal to the Gaddafi regime, relatives and rights workers said yesterday.

A desperate search has begun for “the disappeared”, many of whom were reported to have been taken away to regime prisons or killed during some of the fiercest fighting of a three-month rebel uprising that has reduced parts of the city to rubble.

Witness accounts gathered by The Independent and rights groups indicate that there was a systematic attempt to kidnap men from parts of the city.

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Hundreds of women report rapes by Gaddafi forces

The Associated Press reports:

At first, the responses to the questionnaire about the trauma of the war in Libya were predictable, if tragic: 10,000 people suffering post-traumatic stress, 4,000 children with psychological problems. Then came the unexpected: 259 women said they had been raped by militiamen loyal to Moammar Gadhafi.

Dr. Seham Sergewa had been working with children traumatized by the fighting in Libya but soon found herself being approached by troubled mothers who felt they could trust her with their dark secret.

The first victim came forward two months ago, followed by two more. All were mothers of children the London-trained child psychologist was treating, and all described how they were raped by militiamen fighting to keep Gadhafi in power.

Sergewa decided to add a question about rape to the survey she was distributing to Libyans living in refugee camps after being driven from their homes. The main purpose was to try to determine how children were faring in the war; she suspected many were suffering from PTSD.

To her surprise, 259 women came forward with accounts of rape. They all said the same thing.

“I was really surprised when I started visiting these areas, first by the number of people suffering from PTSD, including the large number of children among them, and then by the number of women who had been raped from both the east and west of the country,” Sergewa said in an interview with The Associated Press.

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Remember Srebrenica? The west’s intervention in Libya is a no-brainer

Peter Preston at The Guardian writes:

It’s fashionable already to cluck apprehensively over Libya. Another botched adventure, another unwanted war. Look how much it’s costing – at this rate, more or less your standard Ministry of Defence project overrun before 2011’s out. Why isn’t it over long since? Why, for all his soaring rhetoric, has Barack Obama decided to rest on his oars? David Cameron broods over sending in four Apache helicopters while the BBC lugubriously reminds us that helicopters can get shot down. If you want to confect a stew of gloom, then any old ingredients will do.

But mix a pinch of foresight with your hindsight, and sprinkle lightly with added realism. Libya isn’t Afghanistan or Iraq. It isn’t even a proper war, more a series of skirmishes strung out along a long coastal strip. Oh! TV reporters talk excitedly as though this was some mighty contest between opposing armies, but they don’t even seem to look at their own pictures. In fact, it’s rag-tag stuff on both sides. There are casualties, of course; but the numbers involved seem relatively small. The colonel’s mercenary regiments are brutal, but militarily feeble. Take away air cover and they’re going nowhere. Will four British Apaches – count them again, yes just four! – make a big difference this week? Merely posing the question helps define this mini-conflict. Its costs and its risks aren’t worth so much rumbling angst.

Recent history tells us Muammar Gaddafi is a menace (especially if you’re in a jumbo jet over Scotland). When he vowed to take revenge on the insurgents, these were no idle threats. His first reaction when the citizens of his second city marched for change was to shoot them down. The chief prosecutor in The Hague already thinks that, just like Ratko Mladic, Gaddafi has a case to answer. On 18 March, as the allies finally prepared to move, his troops were driving into the outer suburbs of Benghazi. No hindsight necessary: it was five minutes to midnight. And no shucking off our own leaders’ responsibility, either.

After Tunisia, after Egypt, the word was the same from Obama to Nicolas Sarkozy to Cameron. The US Senate, the European parliament, the Arab League and the UN security council all knew what had to be done. So did Gaddafi’s man at the UN. There was massacre pending. All the usual recourses had been duly employed: sanctions, seizing overseas assets and the rest. But it wasn’t enough. Hundreds – probably thousands – of Libyan protesters we’d directly encouraged were about to get shot. Do nothing? Then or now, with or without hindsight, it’s a no-brainer.

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How America screws its soldiers

Andrew J. Bacevich writes:

Riders on Boston subways and trolleys are accustomed to seeing placards that advertise research being conducted at the city’s many teaching hospitals. One that recently caught my eye, announcing an experimental “behavioral treatment,” posed this question to potential subjects: “Are you in the U.S. military or a veteran disturbed by terrible things you have experienced?”

Just below the question, someone had scrawled this riposte in blue ink: “Thank God for these Men and Women. USA all the way.”

Here on a 30 x 36 inch piece of cardboard was the distilled essence of the present-day relationship between the American people and their military. In the eyes of citizens, the American soldier has a dual identity: as hero but also as victim. As victims—Wounded Warriors —soldiers deserve the best care money can buy; hence, the emphasis being paid to issues like PTSD. As heroes, those who serve and sacrifice embody the virtues that underwrite American greatness. They therefore merit unstinting admiration.

Whatever practical meaning the slogan “support the troops” may possess, it lays here: in praise expressed for those choosing to wear the uniform, and in assistance made available to those who suffer as a consequence of that choice.

From the perspective of the American people, the principal attribute of this relationship is that it entails no real obligations or responsibilities. Face it: It costs us nothing yet enables us to feel good about ourselves. In an unmerited act of self-forgiveness, we thereby expunge the sin of the Vietnam era when opposition to an unpopular war found at least some Americans venting their unhappiness on the soldiers sent to fight it. The homeward-bound G.I. spat upon by spoiled and impudent student activists may be an urban legend, but the fiction persists and has long since trumped reality.

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Turkey’s Great Leap Forward risks cultural and environmental bankruptcy

The Guardian reports:

Every springtime Pervin Çoban Savran takes her camels and sheep up into the Taurus mountains of southern Turkey, following the same routes along the Goksu river that Yoruk people like her have taken for more than 1,000 years. To many Turks these last nomadic tribes are symbols of the soul of their nation.

Their way of life – and that of millions of small farmers – is being threatened by Turkey’s Great Leap Forward, one of the most dramatic and potentially devastating rushes for economic development and prosperity Europe has seen in decades.

Thousands of dam and hydropower schemes are being built on almost all of the main rivers in a pharaonic push to make Turkey a world economic power by the centenary of the republic in 2023.

The ruling AK party, expected to win a record third term in next month’s elections, is forcing through a series of gigantic public works projects that include three nuclear power plants – despite Turkey being one of the most seismically active nations on earth.

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Israel braces for border clashes in coming days

The Associated Press reports:

The Israeli military is preparing for the possibility of violent protests along its borders in the coming days, aiming to avoid a repeat of deadly unrest that erupted earlier this month, a senior military official told The Associated Press on Sunday.

Facebook-organized activists have called for demonstrations next weekend in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan to mark the anniversary of the 1967 Mideast war, in which Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip east Jerusalem and Golan Heights.

The official said the army also is planning to counter possible unrest in the West Bank in September after an expected U.N. vote to recognize Palestinian independence.

The official said the army hopes to avoid civilian casualties but would set “red lines” for the demonstrations. That means Israel will not allow demonstrators to burst across the borders during the coming week’s protests — as they did on the Syria-Israel border on May 15 — or to enter Jewish settlements in the West Bank in September.

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Police detain 7-year-old Palestinian boy and accost relatives, family members say

Haaretz reports:

Jerusalem policemen arrested a Palestinian seven-year-old child, relatives said on Sunday, claiming that the boy was battered by police officers during his arrest.

The boy’s parents, residents of the East Jerusalem village of Silwan, said they searched for their son for two hours at several police stations, without the police providing any information as to his whereabouts.

According to family members, the second grader was arrested during play. His father, who noticed policemen arresting his son, attempted to intervene, and in the ensuing scuffle was sprayed in his face with pepper spray and was evacuated to receive medical care.

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Thousands protest against Mladic arrest

Al Jazeera reports:

At least 10,000 Serbian nationalists are estimated to have gathered in central Belgrade to protest against the arrest of Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb general accused of war crimes.

Sporadic clashes erupted at the rally on Sunday, with several dozen protesters throwing stones at riot police wielding batons.

Supporters of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party and other similar organisations had been brought by bus from across the country for the evening rally in the Serbian capital.

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Where Egypt is at

Issandr El Amrani writes:

The #May 27 “Second Revolution” came and went this weekend without the drama that many had expected. Turnout was pretty good — good enough to show that the ranks of those unsatisfied with the current state of affairs is plenty big, and big enough to show that the Muslim Brothers’ participation is not essential to getting a decent number of people protesting. Impressive also was that the protests took place across the country, as Zeinobia points out with her gallery of videos. Get more videos and an account at Jadaliyya. It may not be a second revolution but it’s enough to keep the SCAF [Supreme Council of the Armed Forces] on its toes and give media traction to multiple grievances: high-ranking corruption, insecurity, slow justice, heavy-handedness of the military, etc.

Although many of these grievances are indeed worthwhile, this opposition movement should start coalescing over one or two core demands with regards to the transition. It has already been a tragedy of Egypt’s revolution that the revolutionaries did not have a clear aim beyond the removal of Mubarak and that the post-Mubarak transition has been handled poorly, to say the least, by a SCAF that is guilty of bumbling incompetence perhaps more than malice. In particular, the transition process could have been more along the lines of Tunisia’s, with an elected constituent assembly rather than one appointed by parliament and independent commissions to investigate corruption as well as violence. The real drama, it seems to me, is that right now transitional justice consists of immediately going after certain persons (those close to Gamal Mubarak) yet only going after older apparatchiks (NDP apparatchiks, etc.) after popular pressure forced the SCAF to. And, most of all, a piecemeal approach to trying former officials: consider that Hosni Mubarak has just been fined for cutting off the internet, and may only be tried for the violence during the revolution, while not being held accountable for 30 years of autocracy.

To me, this should be the focus of the opposition: obtaining a real truth and reconciliation process that holds the regime, as a system, accountable and features the televised testimony of both its victims and participants. If Egyptians try to gloss over the Mubarak era as a question of a few bad apples and then quickly move on, they risk losing a more important understanding of what was the Mubarak regime (and institutions like State Security) and lose the chance of making a clean break. The other demand may be about postponement of elections, but then it has to make on sound grounds (as I discussed a few days ago) with concrete proposals on who will rule in the meantime — including explaining what would make a transitional presidential council more legitimate than the SCAF.

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Libya: Britain prepares ‘bunker buster’ bombs for assaults

The Guardian reports:

Britain has ratcheted up the pressure on Colonel Muammar Gaddafi by preparing to load heavy “bunker buster” bombs on RAF jets ready to attack his compounds in and around Tripoli.

Paveway bombs, weighing 2,000lbs, the largest in the RAF’s arsenal, have been dispatched to Gioia del Colle in southern Italy where RAF Tornado and Typhoon jets are based. While the Apache’s cannon and Hellfire missiles are used against small or moving targets, the Paveway bombs are expected to be used against bunkers underneath the Gaddafi regime’s Bab al-Azizia compound in Tripoli and elsewhere.

The MoD said on Sunday the enhanced Paveway III bombs, are designed “to punch through the roof or wall of a hardened building”. The bombs join smaller laser or satellite-guided Paveway bombs, Brimstone missiles and Tomahawk submarine-launched cruise missiles, with which the army and navy have been attacking targets in Libya for more than two months.

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In Benghazi, shouts of thanks to America and the West

Rod Nordland reports:

Frustrated by the gridlocked traffic, the young man in fatigues was leaning on the horn of his old Chevrolet Impala, the one with the front and rear windshields shot out. The shrillness of the pointless noise made a foreigner in the car next to him wince.

Then came one of those Free Libya moments.

“Sorry, sorry,” the horn-blower called apologetically, in English. The young man riding shotgun, also in fatigues and carrying a Kalashnikov, grinned sheepishly and apologized as well. Then he saluted, bringing his wounded right hand into view, a giant mitten of a bandage on it, blood soaking through in places.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said. “America No. 1.”

Americans and, for that matter, all Westerners are treated hereabouts with a warmth and gratitude rarely seen in any Muslim country — even those with 100,000 American troops — in probably half a century or more. People smile and go out of their way to say hello to them, and are almost shockingly courteous. It is that oddest of oddities, an Arab war zone where foreign joggers are regarded, not with hostility or even that sympathetic puzzlement reserved for the insane, but with a friendly wave or a toot on the horn.

Here, even taxi drivers do not rip off foreign visitors, and when a taxi cannot be found, some passing driver will soon volunteer a ride, and will be likely to refuse any offer of payment. A big problem for non-Arabic speaking journalists who visit is trying to find a translator who will accept payment for his or her services. The rebels’ press office has signed up all the English translators it could find, and ordered them to work for free.

In some restaurants, they seem almost reluctant to accept a foreigner’s money. It is a society chronically short of change, so a lot of the coffee bars will just say skip it, and serve up an espresso for whatever loose change is handy, if any. Espresso is one of the welcome surprises of Libya, and while no one would confuse it with Tre Scalini, it is pretty good for a region where the standard stuff is either instant Nescafe or Turkish coffee so thick that a toothpick is needed afterwards.

The pizza, too, is respectable, especially at Pisa Pizza in Benghazi, where the pies are about a yard in diameter. Proof that Italian colonialism accomplished something after all.

In other parts of the Mideast, one refrains from advertising American nationality, if only just in case. This is a part of the world where, other than outside American embassies, the Stars and Stripes are most often spotted ablaze and stomped upon.

Here, crowds of chanting youth fly it proudly, alongside their own new flag, a tricolor with red, black and green horizontal stripes and a crescent and star in the center. (It was widely and quickly adopted by the rebels to replace the Qaddafi government’s hated green flag, an unadorned panel so plain that it has been derided as a putting green.) What popular Arab street movement has ever flown the flags of not only the United States, but the European Union, NATO, Italy, France and Qatar, all at once?

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Libyan tribal leaders call for united front

Al Jazeera reports:

More than 100 community and tribal leaders from Libya have met with members of the opposition National Transitional Council at a conference in Turkey, in a bid to show a united front against Muammar Gaddafi.

Most of the tribal leaders who gathered in Istanbul on Saturday and Sunday, were from the powerful Warfalla clan based in Baniwalid, a city in western Libya.

The delegates were calling for an end to the violence in Libya and the departure of Libyan leader Gaddafi and his sons.

An organiser of the conference told Al Jazeera that Gaddafi and his forces became aware of the conference yesterday and then moved in to seize control of Baniwalid.

“Fierce clashes broke out between Gaddafi’s forces and Warfalla members in Baniwalid, and at least 11 people died, including the brother of a conference delegate,” the source said.

Al Jazeera’s Anita McNaught, reporting from Istanbul, said that the delegates were mostly senior professionals from both inside Libya as well as those who have been in exile for the last few years.

“They all stood up together and presented their declaration and sang the old Libyan national anthem – I watched grown men break down in tears and sob all their way through this,” our correspondent said.

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The psychology of dictatorship: Why Gaddafi clings to power

John Cloud writes:

Muammar Gaddafi continues to hold tightly to power even as NATO bombs rain down on Tripoli. Syrian autocrat Bashar al-Assad has killed more than 1,000 of his own people in an effort to quash protests. In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh has refused to step down despite months of unrest that has intensified into near civil war this week. The question is, why do all these guys fight so hard to keep power? Why not decamp to Saudi Arabia or Venezuela and live out their lives in luxury before being killed or held for trial like Hosni Mubarak?

Any attempt to diagnose a defining psychological feature of dictatorship would be facile. But in the public record available on many of them — Stalin and Mao, Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi himself — one can begin to see patterns that shape a dictatorial personality. At least since the Office of Strategic Services (now known as the Central Intelligence Agency) commissioned a secret profile called “A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler,” which was issued in 1943, psychologists have sought an explanation for the authoritarian mind. New research has brought us closer than ever to understanding how leaders become despots.

There are at least three explanations for dictatorial behavior:

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Why blindfolded people can’t walk straight and Gaddafi dresses funny

It is well-documented that when blindfolded, people find it impossible to walk (or drive) in a straight line.

Robert Krulwich explains:

It is also well-documented that as cult leaders amass larger followings they often cultivate an increasingly bizarre and grandiose persona, evident in their own unique attire — a blend of the imperial, exotic or even extra-terrestrial.

So how did Gaddafi go from being a dapper young army officer to a would-be pan-African emperor?

By wearing a blindfold, so to speak.

The self-tied blindfold that sends cult leaders along a spiral path of deviation is adulation and uncritical attention from their followers. There are no countervailing forces which might temper the leader’s expanding grandiosity. There are no independent voices to warn the emperor that his sense of style has drifted towards wild eccentricity. The mutually reinforcing power of group-think places both leader and followers in a bubble sealed off from reality.

Now here’s the interesting thing: this human inclination to physically or figuratively deviate from a straight course when the individual is deprived of corrective input from external and independent sources is an adaptive tendency.

How so? Unlike aircraft that can safely employ an autopilot in the relatively predictable environment of high altitude, we operate in highly unpredictable, rapidly changing surroundings. We need autopilots that have a built-in need to be overridden. The more comfortable we become in a blindfold, the more certain we will run into trouble.

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