Monthly Archives: June 2011

Syria’s broken spring: a Damascus report

At Open Democracy, Vicken Cheterian writes:

Syria is going through an uprising of socially marginalised regions, suffering from the absence of institutions and services, where the most obvious state presence has been the security agencies.

The context of this revolt is the weakness as well as the strength of the state. The Syrian regime portrays its major assets as opposition to great-power politics and support for anti-Israeli resistance. Its true chief resource is the fact that parts of the population still see it as a guarantee of stability and security. But this resource is fragile, and eroding under the pressure of the current violent confrontation.

The revolt that started in Deraa is, despite ferocious repression using live bullets, spreading rather than dying down. Several towns and cities remain under siege, with telecommunications shut down, highways blocked, and the country isolated from the outside world. A key question is how long such a situation can persist before the merchant class sees the regime as part of the problem rather than the solution; and whether, to avert this outcome, the Syrian authorities can learn how to use their most valuable (if now damaged) resource – the fact that they have come to represent stability and a defence against chaos?

“I do not care about who rules, or the type of regime” a Syrian friend who supports the status quo told me. “What I care about is that when my children go to school or university, I do not worry about their safety.” But today, he is worried about his family’s immediate safety.

Three months into the revolt, the regime seems at a loss. Bashar al-Assad’s third speech since it began, on 20 June 2011, offered little if anything new. “The authorities have fewer and fewer choices”, says a Damascus observer. “First, they tried to suffocate the incipient movement with heavy repression. That has clearly failed. Then the president announced reforms, the end to the state of emergency, but he said he would do reforms his way, according to his rhythm. This was taken very badly by the public, and the rebellion only spread further.”

Another analyst adds: “Neither repression nor the promise of reforms can calm the situation. Dialogue is declared, but dialogue with whom? We do not see it happening. How can it give any results?” When asked what the authorities can offer to the population to defuse the situation, the response is: “The only promise the president can give is to be the leader of a political transition”. But as Bashar’s latest speech confirms, the regime is managing the situation day by day – mixing repression here, the promise of dialogue there.

This is unsustainable over the long term. The security forces are over-stretched, and massive operations need resources. The state treasury cannot forever ensure such funding, especially as it has made costly economic concessions in other areas to appease popular anger: increased salaries and decreases in the price of diesel, even as Syria’s economy is in trouble and state revenues in free-fall. [Continue reading…]

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Eyes open in Gaza, June 2011

Helena Cobban writes:

The Gaza Strip is a heavily urbanized sliver of land, some 30 miles long, that nestles against the southeast corner of the Mediterranean and that for many reasons– including the fact that more than 75% of its 1.6 million are refugees from within what is now Israel– has always been a crucible for the Palestinian movement. In the 1950s, Yasser Arafat and his comrades founded the secular nationalist movement Fateh here. In the 1970s, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a local preacher, founded the network of Islamist organizations that later became Hamas, right here in Gaza. In 1987, Gaza was where the overwhelmingly nonviolent First Intifada was first ignited…

On a recent Wednesday morning, I sat in the neat, second-story office of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights with its deputy director, a grizzled veteran of the rights movement called Jaber Wishah. We were discussing the prospects for the reconciliation agreement that Fateh and Hamas concluded in Cairo on May 3. Wishah said he hoped that the agreement would result in the formation of a ‘national salvation government’ that could end and reverse the many kinds of assault that the Israeli government has sustained against the Palestinians of the occupied territories: primarily, the multi-year siege that suffocates the Gaza Strip’s 1.6 million residents and the continuing land expropriations and regime of deeply abusive control that Israel maintains over the 2.6 million Palestinians of the West Bank.

“We desperately need this salvation government, to halt the deterioration of our situation,” Wishah said.

Like all the politically connected Palestinians I talked with during my three-day visit to Gaza, Wishah stressed that the key factor that was now– however slowly– starting to ease the harsh, five-year rift between Hamas and Fateh was the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in neighboring Egypt.

Gaza’s longest land border is the one lined (by Israel) with high concrete walls, hi-tech sensors, and a series of watchtowers with machine-gun nests that can fire automatically if any Palestinian approaches any closer than 500 meters to the wall. Gaza’s shorter border is the one with Egypt that, since 2006, has been the only way that Gaza’s people– or rather, a carefully screened subset of them– can ever hope to travel outside the tiny Strip, whether for business, studies, or family reunions. So long as Mubarak and his widely loathed intel chief Omar Sulaiman were still in power in Cairo, they used their power over Egypt’s Rafah crossing point with Gaza to maintain tight control over the Strip and they worked with Israel, the United States, and their allies in Fateh to squeeze Gaza’ss Hamas rulers as hard as they could. Many Arab governments have long expressed support for intra-Palestinian reconciliation. But they (and the western powers) were always content to let Egypt take the lead in brokering all reconciliation efforts. To no-one’s surprise, so long as Mubarak and Sulaiman were in charge in Cairo, those efforts went nowhere. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world

Barrett Brown writes:

For at least two years, the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once. And with an upgrade scheduled for later this year, the top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr – the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients. The new revelation provides for a disturbing picture, particularly when viewed in a wider context. Unprecedented surveillance capabilities are being produced by an industry that works in secret on applications that are nonetheless funded by the American public – and which in some cases are used against that very same public. Their products are developed on demand for an intelligence community that is not subject to Congressional oversight and which has been repeatedly shown to have misused its existing powers in ways that violate U.S. law as well as American ideals. And with expanded intelligence capabilities by which to monitor Arab populations in ways that would have previously been impossible, those same intelligence agencies now have improved means by which to provide information on dissidents to those regional dictators viewed by the U.S. as strategic allies.

The nature and extent of the operation, which was known as Romas/COIN and which is scheduled for replacement sometime this year by a similar program known as Odyssey, may be determined in part by a close reading of hundreds of e-mails among the 70,000 that were stolen in February from the contracting firm HBGary Federal and its parent company HBGary. Other details may be gleaned by an examination of the various other firms and individuals that are discussed as being potential partners.

Of course, there are many in the U.S. that would prefer that such details not be revealed at all; such people tend to cite the amorphous and much-abused concept of “national security” as sufficient reason for the citizenry to stand idly by as an ever-expanding coalition of government agencies and semi-private corporations gain greater influence over U.S. foreign policy. That the last decade of foreign policy as practiced by such individuals has been an absolute disaster even by the admission of many of those who put it into place will not phase those who nonetheless believe that the citizenry should be prevented from knowing what is being done in its name and with its tax dollars.

To the extent that the actions of a government are divorced from the informed consent of those who pay for such actions, such a government is illegitimate. To the extent that power is concentrated in the hands of small groups of men who wield such power behind the scenes, there is no assurance that such power will be used in a manner that is compatible with the actual interests of that citizenry, or populations elsewhere. The known history of the U.S. intelligence community is comprised in large part of murder, assassinations, disinformation, the topping of democratic governments, the abuse of the rights of U.S. citizens, and a great number of other things that cannot even be defended on “national security” grounds insomuch as that many such actions have quite correctly turned entire populations against the U.S. government. This is not only my opinion, but also the opinion of countless individuals who once served in the intelligence community and have since come to criticize it and even unveil many of its secrets in an effort to alert the citizenry to what has been unleashed against the world in the name of “security.”

Likewise, I will here provide as much information as I can on Romas/COIN and its upcoming replacement.

Although the relatively well-known military contractor Northrop Grumman had long held the contract for Romas/COIN, such contracts are subject to regular recompetes by which other companies, or several working in tandem, can apply to take over. In early February, HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr wrote the following e-mail to Al Pisani, an executive at the much larger federal contractor TASC, a company which until recently had been owned by Northrop and which was now looking to compete with it for lucrative contracts:

“I met with [[[Mantech]] CEO] Bob Frisbie the other day to catch up. He is looking to expand a capability in IO related to the COIN re-compete but more for DoD. He told me he has a few acquisitions in the works that will increase his capability in this area. So just a thought that it might be worth a phone call to see if there is any synergy and strength between TASC and ManTech in this area. I think forming a team and response to compete against SAIC will be tough but doable.” IO in this context stands for “information operations,” while COIN itself, as noted in an NDA attached to one of the e-mails, stands for “counter intelligence.” SAIC is a larger intelligence contractor that was expected to pursue the recompete as well.

Pisani agreed to the idea, and in conjunction with Barr and fellow TASC exec John Lovegrove, the growing party spent much of the next year working to create a partnership of firms capable of providing the “client” – a U.S. agency that is never specified in the hundreds of e-mails that follow – with capabilities that would outmatch those being provided by Northrop, SAIC, or other competitors.

Several e-mails in particular provide a great deal of material by which to determine the scope and intent of Romas/COIN. One that Barr wrote to his own e-mail account, likely for the purpose of adding to other documents later, is entitled “Notes on COIN.” It begins with a list of entries for various facets of the program, all of which are blank and were presumably filled out later: “ISP, Operations, Language/Culture, Media Development, Marketing and Advertising, Security, MOE.” Afterwards, another list consists of the following: “Capabilities, Mobile Development, Challenges, MOE, Infrastructure, Security.” Finally, a list of the following websites is composed, many of which represent various small companies that provide niche marketing services pursuant to mobile phones.

More helpful is a later e-mail from Lovegrove to Barr and some of his colleagues at TASC in which he announces the following:

Our team consists of:

– TASC (PMO, creative services)

– HB Gary (Strategy, planning, PMO)

– Akamai (infrastructure)

– Archimedes Global (Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning)

– Acclaim Technical Services (specialized linguistics)

– Mission Essential Personnel (linguistic services)

– Cipher (strategy, planning operations)

– PointAbout (rapid mobile application development, list of strategic
partners)

– Google (strategy, mobile application and platform development – long
list of strategic partners)

– Apple (mobile and desktop platform, application assistance -long list of strategic partners)

We are trying to schedule an interview with ATT plus some other small app developers.

From these and dozens of other clues and references, the following may be determined about the nature of Romas/COIN:

1. Mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the program.

2. There’s discussion of bringing in a “gaming developer,” apparently at the behest of Barr, who mentions that the team could make good use of “a social gaming company maybe like zynga, gameloft, etc.” Lovegrove elsewhere notes: “I know a couple of small gaming companies at MIT that might fit the bill.”

3. Apple and Google were active team partners, and AT&T may have been as well. The latter is known to have provided the NSA free reign over customer communications (and was in turn protected by a bill granting them retroactive immunity from lawsuits). Google itself is the only company to have received a “Hostile to Privacy” rating from Privacy International. Apple is currently being investigated by Congress after the iPhone was revealed to compile user location data in a way that differs from other mobile phones; the company has claimed this to have been a “bug.”

4. The program makes use of several providers of “linguistic services.” At one point, the team discusses hiring a military-trained Arabic linguist. Elsewhere, Barr writes: “I feel confident I can get you a ringer for Farsi if they are still interested in Farsi (we need to find that out). These linguists are not only going to be developing new content but also meeting with folks, so they have to have native or near native proficiency and have to have the cultural relevance as well.”

5. Alterion and SocialEyez are listed as “businesses to contact.” The former specializes in “social media monitoring tools.” The latter uses “sophisticated natural language processing methodology” in order to “process tens of millions of multi-lingual conversations daily” while also employing “researchers and media analysts on the ground;” its website also notes that “Millions of people around the globe are now networked as never before – exchanging information and ideas, forming opinions, and speaking their minds about everything from politics to products.”

6. At one point, TASC exec Chris Clair asks Aaron and others, “Can we name COIN Saif? Saif is the sword an Arab executioner uses when they decapitate criminals. I can think of a few cool brands for this.”

7. A diagram attached to one of Barr’s e-mails to the group (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/7/pmo.png/) depicts Magpii as interacting in some unspecified manner with “Foreign Mobile” and “Foreign Web.” Magpii is a project of Barr’s own creation which stands for “Magnify Personal Identifying Information,” involves social networking, and is designed for the purpose of storing personal information on users. Although details are difficult to determine from references in Barr’s e-mails, he discusses the project almost exclusively with members of military intelligence to which he was pitching the idea.

8. There are sporadic references such things as “semantic analysis,” “Latent Semantic Indexing,” “specialized linguistics,” and OPS, a programming language designed for solving problems using expert systems.

9. Barr asks the team’s partner at Apple, Andy Kemp (whose signature lists him as being from the company’s Homeland Defense/National Programs division), to provide him “a contact at Pixar/Disney.”

Altogether, then, a successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms – capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence. All this is merely in addition to whichever additional capabilities are not evident from the limited description available, with the program as a whole presumably being operated in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners.

Whatever the exact nature and scope of COIN, the firms that had been assembled for the purpose by Barr and TASC never got a chance to bid on the program’s recompete. In late September, Lovegrove noted to Barr and others that he’d spoken to the “CO [contracting officer] for COIN.” “The current procurement approach is cancelled [sic], she cited changed requirements,” he reported. “They will be coming out with some documents in a month or two, most likely an updated RFI [request for information]. There will be a procurement following soon after. We are on the list to receive all information.” On January 18th of next year, Lovegrove provided an update: “I just spoke to the group chief on the contracts side (Doug K). COIN has been replaced by a procurement called Odyssey. He says that it is in the formative stages and that something should be released this year. The contracting officer is Kim R. He believes that Jason is the COTR [contracting officer’s technical representative].” Another clue is provided in the ensuing discussion when a TASC executive asks, “Does Odyssey combine the Technology and Content pieces of the work?”

The unexpected change-up didn’t seem to phase the corporate partnership, which was still a top contender to compete for the upcoming Odyssey procurement. Later e-mails indicate a meeting between key members of the group and the contracting officer for Odyssey at a location noted as “HQ,” apparently for a briefing on requirements for the new program, on February 3rd of 2011. But two days after that meeting, the servers of HBGary and HBGary Federal were hacked by a small team of Anonymous operatives in retaliation for Barr’s boasts to Financial Times that he had identified the movement’s “leadership;” 70,000 e-mails were thereafter released onto the internet. Barr resigned a few weeks later.

Along with clues as to the nature of COIN and its scheduled replacement, a close study of the HBGary e-mails also provide reasons to be concerned with the fact that such things are being developed and deployed in the way that they are. In addition to being the driving force behind the COIN recompete, Barr was also at the center of a series of conspiracies by which his own company and two others hired out their collective capabilities for use by corporations that sought to destroy their political enemies by clandestine and dishonest means, some of which appear to be illegal. None of the companies involved have been investigated; a proposed Congressional inquiry was denied by the committee chair, noting that it was the Justice Department’s decision as to whether to investigate, even though it was the Justice Department itself that made the initial introductions. Those in the intelligence contracting industry who believe themselves above the law are entirely correct.

That such firms will continue to target the public with advanced information warfare capabilities on behalf of major corporations is by itself an extraordinary danger to mankind as a whole, particularly insomuch as that such capabilities are becoming more effective while remaining largely unknown outside of the intelligence industry. But a far greater danger is posed by the practice of arming small and unaccountable groups of state and military personnel with a set of tools by which to achieve better and better “situational awareness” on entire populations while also being able to manipulate the information flow in such a way as to deceive those same populations. The idea that such power can be wielded without being misused is contradicted by even a brief review of history.

History also demonstrates that the state will claim such powers as a necessity in fighting some considerable threat; the U.S. has defended its recent expansion of powers by claiming they will only be deployed to fight terrorism and will never be used against American civilians. This is cold comfort for those in the Arab world who are aware of the long history of U.S. material support for regimes they find convenient, including those of Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and the House of Saud. Nor should Americans be comforted by such promises from a government that has no way of ensuring that they will be kept; it was just a few months ago that a U.S. general in Afghanistan ordered a military intelligence unit to use pysops on visiting senators in an effort to secure increased funding for the war, an illegal act; only a few days prior, CENTCOM spokesmen were confidently telling the public that such other psychological capabilities as persona management would never be used on Americans as that would be illegal. The fact is that such laws have been routinely broken by the military and intelligence community, who are now been joined in this practice by segments of the federal contracting industry.

It is inevitable, then, that such capabilities as form the backbone of Romas/COIN and its replacement Odyssey will be deployed against a growing segment of the world’s population. The powerful institutions that wield them will grow all the more powerful as they are provided better and better methods by which to monitor, deceive, and manipulate. The informed electorate upon which liberty depends will be increasingly misinformed. No tactical advantage conferred by the use of these programs can outweigh the damage that will be done to mankind in the process of creating them.

Barrett Brown

Project PM

Barrett Brown is a contributor to Vanity Fair, the Huffington Post and Skeptical Inquirer, and is author of Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny, as well as an upcoming book on the deficits of the America media. He is the founder of the distributed thinktank Project PM. Barrett can be contacted at barriticus at gmail.

For more on Aaron Barr, read “How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price.”

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The Arab Spring exposes the identical hypocrisy of both the US and Hassan Nasrallah

Hamid Dabashi writes:

Hassan Nasrallah is in trouble. This time the troubles of the Secretary General of Hezbollah, which were hitherto the source of his strength, are not coming from Israel, or from the sectarian politics of Lebanon. Seyyed Hassan’s troubles, which this time around are the harbingers of his undoing as an outdated fighter, are coming from, of all places, the Arab Spring.

The Arab Spring, the transnational uprising of masses of millions of people from Morocco to Oman, from Syria to Yemen, is making the aging warrior redundant – his habitually eloquent tongue now stuttering for words. Two years ago, he thought he got away with rejecting the democratic uprising in Iran (whose brutal ruling regime is his principle patron and financier), as a plot by the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. And he did – aided and abetted by the moral and intellectual sclerosis of a segment of Arab intellectuals who thought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Islamic theocracy were the vanguard of “resistance” to US/Israel imperialism in the region and thus should be spared from criticism. And then Tunisia happened, and Egypt, and Libya, and Bahrain, and Yemen – and then, Hassan Nasrallah and Ali Khamenei’s nightmare, Syria happened. It is a sad scene to see a once mighty warrior being bypassed by the force of history, and all he can do is to fumble clumsily to reveal he has not learned the art of aging gracefully.

When Hasan Nasrallah came to the defence of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria, signs of frailty were all over the old fighter’s countenance. He asked Syrians for patience. He admitted mistakes had been made by Syrians in Lebanon. He promised Assad would do reforms. He pleaded for time. Deja vu: For an uncanny moment the Hezbollah fighter sounded and looked like the late Shah of Iran days before his final demise early in 1979: desperate, confused, baffled by the unfolding drama, worriedly out of touch with what was happening around him.

“Hassan Nasrallah,” according to an Al Jazeera report on 25 May 2011,”has called on Syrians to support president Bashar al-Assad and enter into dialogue with the government to end weeks of ongoing protests across Syria.”

This is a far different cry than when the democratic uprising in Iran started in June 2009 and Nasrallah readily dismissed and ridiculed it as an American plot. These were Arabs up against their corrupt and cruel leaders, not “them Persians” whose money was good but their historic struggles for their civil liberties a plot by the Saudis, the Israelis, and the US.

“Bashar is serious about carrying out reforms,” he was now pleading with his audience, “but he has to do them gradually and in a responsible way; he should be given the chance to implement those reforms.” When Nasrallah made these remarks more than 1000 Syrian civilians had been gunned down by Bashar Assad’s army and security forces, serving the Assad dynasty for about forty years.

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Partial troop withdrawal from Afghanistan

CBS News reports:

President Obama on Wednesday night informed the nation of his plans to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by fall of next year, marking the beginning of the end of an increasingly unpopular war.

“The tide of war is receding,” Mr. Obama said from the White House, promising that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will both come to a “responsible end.”

Ten thousand troops will leave Afghanistan by the end of this year, the president announced, with another 23,000 leaving no later than September 2012. That would leave roughly 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan to continue the decade-long war.

The New York Times reports:

[T]here are two reasons American planners hope to negotiate with the government of President Hamid Karzai an agreement to keep upward of 25,000 American forces in Afghanistan, even after the 30,000 “surge” troops are withdrawn over the next 14 months, and tens of thousands of more by the end of 2014.

Their first is to assure that Afghanistan never again becomes a base for attacks on the United States. But the more urgent reason is Pakistan. In his speech, Mr. Obama invited Pakistan to expand its peaceful cooperation in the region, but he also noted that Pakistan must live up to its commitments and that “the U.S. will never tolerate a safe haven for those who would destroy us.”

Pakistan has already made it clear, however, that it will never allow American forces to be based there. As relations have turned more hostile with the United States in recent months, it has refused to issue visas to large numbers of C.I.A. officers and seems to be moving quickly to close the American drone base in Shamsi, Pakistan.

For their part, administration officials make it clearer than ever that they view Pakistan’s harboring of terrorist groups as the more urgent problem. “We don’t see a transnational threat coming out of Afghanistan,” a senior administration official said Wednesday in briefing reporters before the president’s speech. Later he added, “The threat has come from Pakistan.”

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Furore over Indonesian’s beheading in Saudi Arabia

BBC News reports:

Indonesian MPs have called for a ban on workers being sent to the Middle East, after Saudi Arabia executed a maid without informing Jakarta.

Indonesia has recalled its ambassador to Riyadh to express its anger.

A crowd of protesters gathered outside the Saudi embassy in Jakarta displaying banners and T-shirts in support of the executed worker.

The maid, Ruyati binti Sapubi, was beheaded with a sword on Saturday after confessing to murdering her boss.

Indonesian media reports said she attacked her boss with a meat cleaver after being denied permission to return home.

About 1.5 million Indonesians work in Saudi Arabia – many of them as domestic maids.

Anger has been growing in recent years over the treatment of migrant workers – particularly maids, who often complain of mistreatment.

The Jakarta Post reports:

After nationwide outcry and heavy criticism of the execution by beheading of Indonesian maid Ruyati binti Satubi in Saudi Arabia, the Indonesian government on Tuesday moved swiftly to pay Rp 4.7 billion [US$ 550,000] to save another citizen from beheading.

Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa debriefed Indonesian ambassador to Saudi Arabia Gatot Abdullah Mansyur, who was recalled from his post, about why the embassy in Riyadh was not informed about Ruyati’s execution.

There was no immediate information if Gatot was released from his duties or whether he was instructed to remain in Jakarta, with Foreign Ministry spokesman Michael Tene only confirming that “the point of the meeting was the consultation related to Ruyati’s case”.

Michael, however, confirmed that the ministry had paid the family of a Saudi man killed by Indonesian maid Darsem.

Darsem, a migrant worker from Subang, West Java, said at her trial in a Saudi court that she killed her employer in self defense after he tried to rape her. The victim’s family agreed to spare her if she paid Rp 4.7 billion in compensation, also called blood money.

The US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report for 2010 states:

Saudi Arabia is a destination country for men and women subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced labor. Men and women from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, and many other countries voluntarily travel to Saudi Arabia as domestic servants or other low-skilled laborers, but some subsequently face conditions indicative of involuntary servitude, including restrictions on movement and communication, the withholding of passports and other travel documents, threats, physical or sexual abuse, and non-payment of wages. In some cases, arriving migrant workers have found the terms of employment in Saudi Arabia are wholly different from those they agreed to in their home countries. The Indian government no longer permits its female nationals under age 40 to take jobs as domestic workers in Saudi homes due to the high incidence of physical abuse by employers. Women, primarily from Asian and African countries, were believed to have been forced into prostitution in Saudi Arabia; others were reportedly kidnapped and forced into prostitution after running away from abusive employers.

Yemeni, Nigerian, Pakistani, Afghan, Chadian, and Sudanese children were subjected to forced labor as beggars and street vendors in Saudi Arabia, facilitated by criminal gangs. Unconfirmed reports indicated fewer Yemeni children may have been forced to work in Saudi Arabia during the reporting period. A 2009 doctoral study submitted to Naif Arab University for Security Sciences concluded Jeddah may be a hub for an international child trafficking network exploiting the Hajj and Umrah visas (visas for religious pilgrimages to Mecca).

Some Saudi nationals travel to destinations including Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh to solicit prostitution. Some Saudi men used legally contracted “temporary marriages” in countries such as Mauritania, Yemen, and Indonesia as a means by which to sexually exploit migrant workers.

The Government of Saudi Arabia does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so. In a positive development, the government enacted anti-trafficking legislation during the reporting period, and published a National Plan for Combating Trafficking in Persons. However, the new law did not provide criminal sanctions for the prohibited but still common practice of withholding passports and denying exit visas, and did not provide provisions for trafficking victims to remain in Saudi Arabia during investigations and court proceedings. There was no confirmation the government criminally prosecuted or punished trafficking offenders under the new or existing laws.

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Attack on Yemen prison frees dozens of militants

The New York Times reports:

Gunmen attacked the main prison in Yemen’s southern port city of Mukalla on Wednesday in a coordinated strike that freed at least 40 prisoners, according to security and ruling party officials.

The attack underscored the country’s worsening security situation, and came as State Department envoy, Jeffrey D. Feltman, began two days of meetings in the capital, Sana, with Yemen’s vice president and top ruling party officials. They were to discuss the political crisis here, which deepened earlier this month when President Ali Abdullah Saleh was forced to seek medical treatment in Saudi Arabia after an attack on his presidential compound.

Ahmed Sofan, a prominent ruling party official, said the jailbreak provided “another sign of what happens when a country is collapsing.”

He said many of the escaped prisoners were Islamic militants but that it was unclear whether they were members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the local branch of the terrorist network. News agencies, citing anonymous Yemeni security sources, reported that many of the prisoners belonged to the group.

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NYT reporter seeks to quash subpoena; says gov’t tried to intimidate him

TPMMuckraker reports:

James Risen, the award-winning national security reporter for the New York Times who has been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors to testify in a case against a CIA whistleblower, accused the government of attempting to intimidate him and his sources in an affidavit he filed to quash the subpoena.

“I take very seriously my obligations as a journalist when reporting about matters that may be classified or may implicate national security concerns,” Risen wrote. “I do not always publish all information that I have, even if it is newsworthy and true. If I believe that the publication of the information would cause real harm to our national security, I will not publish a piece.”

Risen has been called to testify against Jeffrey Sterling, who the government says gave Risen classified information that he used in his book “State of War.” The government has argued that Risen could testify about his previous relationship with Sterling without violating any confidentiality agreement with the former CIA agent.

But he wrote that he had found that the government “all too frequently” claims disclosure of certain information would harm national security, “when in reality, the government’s real concern is about covering up its own wrongdoing or avoiding embarrassment.”

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Guardian journalist badly beaten for the second time in Pakistan

The Guardian reports:

Five days after he published an account of abduction and torture by suspected Pakistani intelligence agents, a journalist working for the Guardian has been badly beaten by uniformed men who said they wished to “make an example” of him.

The assault revived concerns about media freedom in Pakistan, one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists. Three weeks ago, another reporter, Saleem Shahzad, was beaten to death after disappearing from the capital.

Men wearing police uniforms stopped Waqar Kiani, a 32-year-old local journalist who has worked for the Guardian, as he drove through Islamabad on Saturday night, and ordered him to get out of his car. As he stepped out, four men landed a flurry of blows with fists, wooden batons and a rubber whip. Two others watched from inside the jeep. “They said ‘You want to be a hero? We’ll make you a hero’,” said Kiani, who was recovering from his injuries . “Then they said: ‘We’re going to make an example of you’.”

It was the second time Kiani had been targeted. Last Monday the Guardian revealed he had been abducted from central Islamabad in July 2008, blindfolded and taken to a safe house where interrogators beat him viciously and burned him with cigarettes.

The ordeal ended 15 hours later when his abductors dumped him 120 miles from Islamabad, warning they would rape his wife “and post the video on YouTube” if he told anyone.

Kiani had been working on a story about the illegal detention and torture of Islamist militants by Pakistani intelligence in collaboration with MI5. His research led him to an office of the Intelligence Bureau, the main civilian spy agency.

Although his abductors did not identify themselves they displayed detailed knowledge of Kiani’s bank account, movements and contacts with Guardian journalists, leading him to conclude they worked for the government.The Guardian withheld Kiani’s story for three years until last Monday. Kiani later gave a detailed interview about his experience to a local television channel. He believes the coverage triggered Saturday’s vicious assault, which occurred after he went out to buy milk. “There is zero tolerance among our government and military establishment,” he said. “They don’t want us to speak the truth.”

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Obama opts for faster Afghan pullout

The New York Times reports:

President Obama plans to announce Wednesday evening that he will order the withdrawal of 10,000 American troops from Afghanistan this year, and another 20,000 troops, the remainder of the 2009 “surge,” by the end of next summer, according to administration officials and diplomats briefed on the decision. These troop reductions are both deeper and faster than the recommendations made by Mr. Obama’s military commanders, and they reflect mounting political and economic pressures at home, as the president faces relentless budget pressures and an increasingly restive Congress and American public.

The president is scheduled to speak about the Afghanistan war from the White House at 8 p.m. Eastern time.

Mr. Obama’s decision is a victory for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has long argued for curtailing the American military engagement in Afghanistan. But it is a setback for his top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who helped write the Army’s field book on counterinsurgency policy, and who is returning to Washington to head the Central Intelligence Agency.

Two administration officials said General Petraeus did not endorse the decision, though both Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who is retiring, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reluctantly accepted it. General Petraeus had recommended limiting initial withdrawals and leaving in place as many combat forces for as long as possible, to hold on to fragile gains made in recent combat.

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Life sentences for Bahrain activists

Al Jazeera reports:

Eight prominent activists accused of plotting a coup in Bahrain during protests earlier this year have been sentenced to life in prison, according to the country’s state news agency.

The court on Wednesday also sentenced other defendants, from among the 21 suspects on trial, to between two and 15 years in jail.

The Bahrain News Agency said the life sentences were issued against a prominent Shia political leader, Hassan Mushaima; activists Abdulhady al-Khawaja, Abduljalil al-Singace and five others.

Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, told Al Jazeera that many people were unhappy about the sentences.

“Abdulhady al-Khawaja is one of the most respected human rights activist in the whole Arab region, so people are very angry,” Rajab said.

“Hundreds of people have been brought up for charges in the past few days, and hundreds more are waiting to be tried.”

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The end of Arab monarchical exceptionalism

Jillian Schwedler writes:

The idea that Arab monarchies enjoy greater legitimacy and stability than their republican neighbours should finally be put to rest. Protests in Jordan, Morocco, and Bahrain may not have yet reached the scale of those in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and Syria, but the weekly gatherings have persisted for months and promise to not go away any time soon. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman have also seen protests and are likely to see more in the coming months.

The notion of monarchical exceptionalism rests on two premises, only one of which has any basis in reality. The first premise is that monarchies that allow for some degree of political participation – notably Morocco, Jordan, and Kuwait – can tolerate a much broader space for legal political dissent than can the authoritarian republics precisely because they do not have to pretend that their authority to rule stems from electoral victories.

The failed regimes of Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Saleh, like the floundering one of Assad, were forced to go to extraordinary lengths to “win” elections that reaffirmed their popular support. Of course no citizen of these repressive regimes believed that these victories were real. But the electoral farce was needed to maintain the pretence of popular support, and that required that opposition groups – whether legalised as parties or operating independently – were consistently repressed through tactics ranging from electoral engineering and ballot-box stuffing, to massive arrests and imprisonment, to the assassination of the leaders of competing parties (notably the assassination attempts on hundreds of Yemeni Socialist Party leaders in the early 1990s).

Monarchies, by comparison, can allow opposition groups to flourish as long as elections can be engineered to produce pro-regime assemblies (even though those parliaments have little real power to legislate). Indeed, promoting pluralist political spheres has worked as a means for monarchs to monitor as well as channel opposition forces.

While far from meaningful democratic spaces, the spheres of political opposition were significantly more tolerated in Morocco, Jordan, and Kuwait than they were in any of the republics.

The second and false premise is that monarchies enjoy a greater degree of legitimacy than did the single-party republican regimes, particularly when they claim their authority to rule on religious grounds (direct blood descent from the family of the Prophet Muhammad) rather than on spurious electoral victories. As a result, Muslims must necessarily accept the legitimacy of their rule.

This argument has found renewed life among pundits and some academics, and is a favourite of the Obama administration, which is eager to find reasons to defend its support of the Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the other monarchies. But how do we know legitimacy when we see it?

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Hillary Clinton adviser compares internet to Che Guevara

“There was no person more feared by the company [the CIA] than Che Guevara because he had the capacity and charisma necessary to direct the struggle against the political repression of the traditional hierarchies in power in the countries of Latin America.” Philip Agee

“On October 9th, 1967, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was put to death by Bolivian soldiers, trained, equipped and guided by U.S. Green Beret and CIA operatives.” Peter Kornbluh

The Guardian reports:

Hillary Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation at the US state department has lauded the way the internet has become “the Che Guevara of the 21st century” in the Arab Spring uprisings.

Speaking at the Guardian’s Activate summit in London on Wednesday, Alec Ross said “dictatorships are now more vulnerable than ever” as disaffected citizens organise influential protest movements on Facebook and Twitter.

The US has pledged to back the pro-democracy movements that have swept the Middle East and north Africa since January. Ross welcomed the “redistribution of power” from autocratic regimes to individuals, describing the internet as “wildly disruptive” during the protests in Egypt and Tunisia.

“Dictatorships are now more vulnerable than they have ever been before, in part – but not entirely – because of the devolution of power from the nation state to the individual,” he said.

“One thesis statement I want to emphasise is how networks disrupt the exercise of power. They devolve power from the nation state – from governments and large institutions – to individuals and small institutions. The overarching pattern is the redistribution of power from governments and large institutions to people and small institutions.”

Ross said that the internet had “acted as an accelerant” in the Arab spring uprisings, pointing to the dislodging of former Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in little over a month. The internet had facilitated leaderless movements, Ross added, describing it as the “Che Guevara of the 21st century”.

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U.S. Libya mission exposes divisions in Congress and within GOP

The New York Times reports:

It is a familiar pattern in a government of checks and balances: members of Congress almost instinctively criticize the foreign adventures of a president from the opposite party.

But the current imbroglio in Congress over the American involvement in Libya exposes a deep and unusual foreign policy schism within the Republican Party, driven in large part by a Tea Party-infused House whose members are more fiscally conservative, particularly constitutionalist, less internationalist and, in many cases, too young to have been politically influenced by the cold war that informed the more established members of the party.

The divisions came to the fore on Tuesday when Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, introduced a measure with Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, to offer President Obama official Congressional authorization for the Libyan operation.

The legislation is an effort to blunt a series of House measures expected to seek to cut off financing for the operations in Libya as early as Thursday.

In introducing it, Mr. McCain chastised House Republicans for seeking to end the Libya mission. “Is this the time for Americans to tell all of these different audiences that our heart is not in this,” Mr. McCain said, “that we have neither the will nor the capability to see this mission through, that we will abandon our closest friends and allies on a whim? These are questions every member of Congress needs to think about long and hard, especially my Republican colleagues.”

House members of both parties and various political stripes seemed undaunted. Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, a Democrat of Ohio, will offer an amendment to a Pentagon spending bill to deny money for operations in Libya, as will Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, a Republican freshman.

Meanwhile, AFP reports:

Italy on Wednesday called for an immediate halt to hostilities in Libya to allow humanitarian aid to reach the population in the strife-torn country, while NATO defended the credibility of its air war after a bomb misfired killing civilians.

On the diplomatic front, China said it recognises Libya’s opposition National Transitional Council (NTC) as an “important dialogue partner.”

Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini warned on Tuesday that NATO’s credibility was “at risk” following the civilian casualties, and urged it to ensure it was not providing ammunition to Kadhafi’s propaganda war.

Frattini followed up his comments in a speech on Wednesday to the lower house of parliament in Rome.

“With regard to NATO, it is fair to ask for increasingly detailed information on results as well as precise guidelines on the dramatic errors involving civilians,” he said.

The comments came after NATO admitted a bomb misfired in Tripoli at the weekend, killing nine people according to Moamer Kadhafi’s regime.

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The Gaza cruise

Jesse Rosenfeld reports:

“Oh my god Jesse, you’ve got to come, it’s a Mediterranean cruise to Gaza,” filmmaker and social justice activist John Greyson said to me, tongue partly in cheek, a while back.

He was trying to convince me that I should get on board a boat of Canadian activists and report on their voyage to Gaza as part of a flotilla of ships running bringing supplies and running Israel’s blockade.

Ten days later I find myself on a cramped flight to Athens, sandwiched between Toronto’s contingent on the Canadian boat. After watching the latest rendition of Gullivers Travels starring Jack Black, Greyson chats with me about how his involvement in the struggle against South African apartheid, desire to tackle tough issues in the Queer community and the influence of his progressive Jewish friends has put him on a collision course with Israel’s siege.

He, along with the other Toronto activists flying out had received a less than warm send off by members of the far right nationalist, Jewish Defense League (JDL), who protested their planned voyage at the airport, accusing them of supporting terrorism.

Michael Archer, at Guernica, interviews Alice Walker:

Guernica: You just returned from a trip to Palestine a few weeks ago. What’s changed since your last visit to the West Bank? You worked a lot with Palestinian children there. What were your impressions of that experience? What did you leave knowing that you didn’t know before?

Alice Walker: My first trip to Palestine was to Gaza, in 2009, shortly after “Operation Cast Lead,” during which the Gaza strip was bombed for twenty-two days and nights, with airstrikes every twenty-seven minutes. There was enormous devastation: Over 1400 people killed, including over 300 children, and countless people, many of them children, injured and of course terrorized for the rest of their lives. I tried to get into Gaza a second time to help deliver aid but was denied entry through Egypt. This most recent visit was to the West Bank (for a TED inspired event and a few days with the Palestine Literary Festival) which friends had told us was quite different than Gaza. They were right. There was the feeling of a more intact people, though frazzled and suffering every day from racist oppression which includes witnessing the theft of their land by construction of Israel’s apartheid wall, which is amazingly huge and oppressive: simply gobbling up all the good land to be had, with the wall built right in people’s faces in many instances.

I discovered that artists everywhere are a frisky lot, that we will raise our voices and our songs and our dances and our poems in the face of any oppression, and that we will maintain apparently to our dying breath a sense of humor about the craziness of other people’s actions. This is brilliantly demonstrated in the talk by the writer Suad Amiry, (available on Youtube) who closed out the TEDxRamallah evening by talking about her experience of being put under curfew by the Israelis at the same time that she was being visited by her mother-in-law. She had everyone rolling in the aisles with this story of how important it is to see one’s dilemma, whatever it is, with humor and grit.

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Fayyad to stay on as Palestinian prime minister

DPA reports:

Salam Fayyad on Tuesday dismissed reports that he was thinking of stepping down as Palestinian prime minister after the Islamist Hamas movement rejected him as a candidate to run the new government.

The Fatah movement of President Mahmoud Abbas had insisted on Fayyad staying as prime minister. Abbas told a Lebanese television station on Monday that since he would name the new government, his only choice would be Fayyad, regardless of Hamas’s position.

The move caused concern that the national reconciliation agreement that Fatah and Hamas concluded on May 4, and which was supposed to result in a government of consensus, may not work because of strong differences over Fayyad.

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