Monthly Archives: September 2011

U.S.-Turkey agree on delivery schedule for Predators

If Israel imagined that Turkey’s reliance on Israeli-made unmanned aircraft might give them some leverage when attempting to mend the two countries frayed relations, the Obama administration is apparently willing to disabuse the Israelis of this hope. Turkey’s recent agreement to install a US-made NATO radar shield against a missile attack in Europe, has no doubt come into consideration as Turkey negotiates with the US over delivery of the UAVs.

Today’s Zaman reports:

Turkey is expecting the delivery of Predators in June 2012, the Turkish defense minister said a day after the country’s prime minister announced that Turkey has agreed with the US on a deal involving the transfer of US-engineered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could prove crucial in combating terrorism.

“We have agreed in principle [on the delivery of Predators]. Negotiations will continue,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was quoted as saying by the Cihan news agency on Saturday in New York, where the Turkish leader was visiting on the occasion of the 66th session of the UN General Assembly. Erdoğan also noted that Turkey had offered to either purchase or lease the drones and that the two countries were still settling the details regarding the delivery of the Predators.

Following up on the agreement, Turkish Defense Minister İsmet Yılmaz told reporters on Saturday that the drones to be received from the US would be delivered to the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) in June of next year, reported the Anatolia news agency.

“These [Predators] are UAVs with better qualities and features than the Herons,” Yılmaz said, and added that the Turkish-made Anka would also be ready for the TSK around the same time, as an alternative to Israeli-made Herons.

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Pakistanis tied to 2007 border ambush on Americans

The New York Times reports:

A group of American military officers and Afghan officials had just finished a five-hour meeting with their Pakistani hosts in a village schoolhouse settling a border dispute when they were ambushed — by the Pakistanis.

An American major was killed and three American officers were wounded, along with their Afghan interpreter, in what fresh accounts from the Afghan and American officers who were there reveal was a complex, calculated assault by a nominal ally. The Pakistanis opened fire on the Americans, who returned fire before escaping in a blood-soaked Black Hawk helicopter.

The attack, in Teri Mangal on May 14, 2007, was kept quiet by Washington, which for much of a decade has seemed to play down or ignore signals that Pakistan would pursue its own interests, or even sometimes behave as an enemy.

The reconstruction of the attack, which several officials suggested was revenge for Afghan or Pakistani deaths at American hands, takes on new relevance given the worsening rupture in relations between Washington and Islamabad, which has often been restrained by Pakistan’s strategic importance.

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Books, lectures, websites: fresh evidence for FBI’s anti-Islam training

Danger Room reports:

Following months of denials, the FBI is now promising a “comprehensive review of all training and reference materials” after Danger Room revealed a series of Bureau presentations that tarred average Muslims as “radical” and “violent.”

But untangling the Islamophobic thread woven into the FBI’s counterterrorism training culture won’t be easy. In addition to inflammatory seminars which likened Islam to the Death Star and Mohammed to a “cult leader,” Danger Room has obtained more material showing just how wide the anti-Islam meme has spread throughout the Bureau.

The FBI library at Quantico currently stacks books from authors who claim that “Islam and democracy are totally incompatible.” The Bureau’s private intranet recently featured presentations that claimed to demonstrate the “inherently violent nature of Islam,” according to multiple sources. Earlier this year, the Bureau’s Washington Field Office welcomed a speaker who claimed Islamic law prevents Muslims from being truly loyal Americans. And as recently as last week, the online orientation material for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces included claims that Sunni Islam seeks “domination of the world,” according to a law enforcement source.

“I don’t think anyone with half a brain would paint 1.2 billion people of any ethnic or religious persuasion with a single brushstroke,” Mike Rolince, an FBI counterterrorism veteran who started Boston’s JTTF, tells Danger Room. “Who did they run that curriculum by — either an internal or outside expert — to get some balance?”

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After September 11: our state of exception

Mark Danner writes:

We are living in the State of Exception. We don’t know when it will end, as we don’t know when the War on Terror will end. But we all know when it began. We can no longer quite “remember” that moment, for the images have long since been refitted into a present-day fable of innocence and apocalypse: the perfect blue of that late summer sky stained by acrid black smoke. The jetliner appearing, tilting, then disappearing into the skin of the second tower, to emerge on the other side as a great eruption of red and yellow flame. The showers of debris, the falling bodies, and then that great blossoming flower of white dust, roiling and churning upward, enveloping and consuming the mighty skyscraper as it collapses into the whirlwind.

To Americans, those terrible moments stand as a brightly lit portal through which we were all compelled to step, together, into a different world. Since that day ten years ago we have lived in a subtly different country, and though we have grown accustomed to these changes and think little of them now, certain words still appear often enough in the news—Guantánamo, indefinite detention, torture—to remind us that ours remains a strange America. The contours of this strangeness are not unknown in our history—the country has lived through broadly similar periods, at least half a dozen or so, depending on how you count; but we have no proper name for them. State of siege? Martial law? State of emergency? None of these expressions, familiar as they may be to other peoples, falls naturally from American lips.

What are we to call this subtly altered America? Clinton Rossiter, the great American scholar of “crisis government,” writing in the shadow of World War II, called such times “constitutional dictatorship.” Others, more recently, have spoken of a “9/11 Constitution” or an “Emergency Constitution.” Vivid terms all; and yet perhaps too narrowly drawn, placing as they do the definitional weight entirely on law when this state of ours seems to have as much, or more, to do with politics—with how we live now and who we are as a polity. This is in part why I prefer “the state of exception,” an umbrella term that gathers beneath it those emergency categories while emphasizing that this state has as its defining characteristic that it transcends the borders of the strictly legal—that it occupies, in the words of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “a position at the limit between politics and law…an ambiguous, uncertain, borderline fringe, at the intersection of the legal and the political.”

Call it, then, the state of exception: these years during which, in the name of security, some of our accustomed rights and freedoms are circumscribed or set aside, the years during which we live in a different time. This different time of ours has now extended ten years—the longest by far in American history—with little sense of an ending. Indeed, the very endlessness of this state of exception—a quality emphasized even as it was imposed—and the broad acceptance of that endlessness, the state of exception’s increasing normalization, are among its distinguishing marks.

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The end of Oslo

Judith Butler writes:

Among the many astonishing claims that Barack Obama made in his recent speech opposing the Palestinian bid for statehood was that ‘peace will not come through statements and resolutions.’ This is, at best, an odd thing to say for a president whose ascendancy to power itself depended on the compelling use of rhetoric. Indeed, his argument against the power of statements and resolutions at the United Nations to achieve peace was a rhetorical ploy that sought to minimise the power of rhetorical ploys. More important, it was an effort to make sure that the United States government remains the custodian and broker of any peace negotiation, so his speech was effectively a way of trying to reassert that position of custodial power in response to the greatest challenge it has received in decades. And most important, his speech was an effort to counter and drain the rhetorical force of the very public statements that are seeking to expose the sham of the peace negotiations, to break with the Oslo framework, and to internationalise the political process to facilitate Palestinian statehood.

There are reasons to question whether the Palestinian bid for statehood at this time and on these terms is the right thing to do, but they are not the ones that Netanyahu put forward in his blustery and arrogant remarks. Within the Palestinian debates, many have questioned whether the present bid for statehood effectively abandons the right of return for diasporic Palestinians, leaves unaddressed the structural discrimination against Palestinians within the current borders of Israel, potentially abandons Gaza, delegitimises the Palestinian Liberation Organisation by elevating the Palestinian Authority into a state structure, takes off the table the one-state solution, and mistakenly relies on the UN as an arbiter rather than insisting that Palestinian self-determination form the basis of any future state. Critics like Ali Abunimah, the editor of the Electronic Intifada, argue that the UN has proven itself time and again to be a venue for paralysis, given the veto rules that govern the Security Council and secure the hegemony of major powers, making it likely that the present bid for statehood will be defeated by a US veto.

And yet, one effect that is already felt as a consequence of these ‘resolutions and statements’ is that the 1993 Oslo Accords can no longer be presumed to be the framework for future negotiations – indeed, we may see that framework crumble definitively in the coming days. Oslo not only gave the US a privileged position as broker of all ‘peace’ negotiations, but effectively sponsored the massive growth of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land by refusing to recognise their illegal status according to international law. In fact, the Oslo years have seen the number of settlers grow from 241,500 in 1992 to 490,000 in 2010 (including East Jerusalem), and the indefinite deferral of all ‘permanent status issues’ – effectively establishing the occupation as a regime without foreseeable end. The Oslo Accords also implemented the principle that any change of status of Occupied Palestine would depend on the ‘consent’ of Israel. Thus, the power of Israel to decide the future of Palestine pre-empted the international right of Palestinians to self-determination.

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Libya: the losers

Max Rodenbeck writes:

Compared to the office of his intelligence counterpart in Cairo, a luxury suite featuring plasma screens, crystal vases, and a jacuzzi, Tuhami Khaled’s was modest. For protection from aerial bombing, the head of Colonel Qaddafi’s internal security service did his business on the ground floor of its headquarters, an ungainly, antenna-studded tower on busy Sikka Street in central Tripoli. But like the chief of Egypt’s Mukhabarat, Khaled enjoyed a separate entrance and an attached bedroom where he was reputed to cavort with women seeking favors from the regime.

The bedroom’s occupants one day recently were two elderly men shuffling about in slippers and house robes, taking their meals seated on the tiled floor. Hadi Mbairish and Muhammad Abdu were being kept in custody here by revolutionary Libya’s new rulers. The captives were both generals, comrades of Qaddafi since before the 1969 coup that brought him to power. As members of a six-man operations control room for state security, they ranked among the top commanders of the fallen regime, responsible for seeing the Brother Leader’s orders executed on the ground.

Frail and ashen in complexion, General Mbairish chaired the group. During Libya’s revolution he is known to have issued handwritten instructions to “burn the vermin,” meaning the rebels. General Abdu, his ebony face chinless and spectrally gaunt like an African mask, headed Qaddafi’s military police. This was the force formally in charge of Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison, notorious for the 1996 massacre by machine gun of some 1,200 inmates, and more recently a holding pen for thousands of Tripoli’s ordinary citizens suspected of rebel sympathies. The massacre was covered up for years; members of the victims’ families traveled monthly to the prison from the far corners of the country in order to deposit gifts they assumed would reach the men inside. The arrest of the Benghazi lawyer who bravely championed these families proved the immediate spark for the revolution.

The generals insist that their captors have treated them kindly, and think they will be vindicated in court. “They will understand that we only followed orders,” says Mbairish hopefully. “This is just a summer cloud.” His colleague mumbles that whenever any prisoner in his charge was sick, it was he who made sure they went to the hospital. The generals give no sign of contrition or even awareness of the magnitude of the crimes for which they certainly bear some responsibility. They tried to resign, they say, but were refused. They could have slipped away abroad, as some others did to escape capture. But why should they, as Libyan patriots?

The generals complain that for the final months of fighting they never saw their families, since the operations room moved from one site to another to escape NATO bombs, ending on the twenty-sixth floor of Tripoli’s plush new Marriott Hotel.

As for Qaddafi himself, the generals say they rarely met with him in recent years. Their instructions were delivered by phone. Seif al-Islam, the second of Qaddafi’s seven sons and the most media-hungry, did make an appearance at the Marriott HQ in the last weeks before Tripoli’s fall on August 21. Overriding the generals’ warnings, he assured them that Libya’s masses would defend the Brother Leader to the end.

General Mbairish turns stone-faced when asked what Qaddafi’s intentions are today. “My opinion is that Qaddafi will never stop. He will accept that thousands die. He will fire rockets on cities if he gets any chance.” The general pauses and toys with his Rolex watch before adding softly, “He’s gotten used to killing.”

The contrast between the sallow, whispering prisoners and their ebullient captors could scarcely be more striking. Behind the desk in Tuhami Khaled’s former office, with a trim black beard and a pistol holstered over desert combat fatigues, sits thirty-six-year-old Khaled Garabulli. The fellow revolutionaries who saunter nonchalantly in and out, sporting motley bandanas, shades, and firearms, treat him with jovial deference. When the call to prayer sounds it is Garabulli who leads the fighters who choose to pray. No one seems to mind that some of them don’t.

Garabulli is one of Libya’s new heroes. He joined the revolution soon after it began on February 17, returning from Morocco, where he had moved to get away from Qaddafi, back to his family seat in a fishing village east of Tripoli. From there he and his brothers smuggled thousands of guns and rocket-propelled grenades to rebels in the capital, sending divers to locate where they had been dropped offshore by NATO planes, then lifting the crates by pumping air into flotation parachutes.

Just two weeks before Tripoli’s fall, only minutes after loading and dispatching a truck with a final consignment of two thousand FAL rifles, Garabulli himself was arrested by Qaddafi’s police. The three satellite phones and thirty SIM cards he was carrying made it clear what he was up to, and the purple crisscross of welts that still marks his back leaves no doubt what Qaddafi’s men thought of it. Garabulli was freed from Abu Salim prison on August 21 to find that his was one of a thousand names on a list of prisoners scheduled to be executed on the first of September, the anniversary of Qaddafi’s coup.

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The Palestinians already knew about Obama’s hypocrisy

Robert Fisk writes:

So there I was, on the Via Dolorosa of course, chatting to a middle-aged guy in a red T-shirt and just a wisp of a beard with a prayer rug under his left arm.

And I asked him, of course, what he thought about Barack Obama’s speech. He grinned at me like he knew I had already guessed what he was going to say. “What did you expect?” he asked. Correct guess. After all, Haaretz had already referred this week to “President Barack Netanyahu” while the racist Israeli foreign minister said he would sign the speech with both hands. Maybe, I reflected in Jerusalem yesterday, Obama really is seeking election – to the Israeli Knesset.

But what was so striking about the streets of Jerusalem yesterday was the sense of resignation, of weary acceptance. The Israeli papers had warned of mass violence, but the crowds who turned up for morning prayers at Al-Aqsa simply laid out their prayer rugs on the highway outside the Damascus Gate or in the laneways behind the mosque and showed scarcely any interest in talking about Obama. Maybe America’s UN veto will rouse them to passion, but I have my doubts.

It’s a bit like the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib torture pictures, when the Americans restricted the number of photos to be released because they feared the pictures would enrage Iraqis. But I was in Baghdad that day and no one expressed any particular rage. What did I expect? After all, the Iraqis knew all about Abu Ghraib already – they were the ones who had been tortured there. So, too, Jerusalem yesterday. The Palestinians have watched America’s uncritical acceptance of Israeli occupation – the longest in the world – for 44 years. They knew all about it. It is only we Westerners who are horrified by torture pictures and by Obama’s hypocrisy.

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Tony Blair faces calls for greater transparency over Middle East role

The Guardian reports:

Tony Blair is facing calls for greater transparency in his role as Middle East peace envoy after it emerged that he visited Muammar Gaddafi in 2009 while JP Morgan, the investment bank that employs Blair as a £2m-a-year adviser, sought to negotiate a multibillion-pound loan from Libya.

Blair also championed two large business deals in the West Bank and Gaza involving telecoms and gas extraction which stood to benefit corporate clients of JP Morgan, according to a Dispatches investigation to be broadcast on Monday night [on Channel 4 in the UK].

Blair, who represents the diplomatic Quartet on the Middle East – the US, European Union, Russia and the United Nations – flew to see the former Libyan leader in January 2009 as JP Morgan tried to finalise a deal for the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) to loan a multibillion-pound sum to Rusal, the aluminium company run by Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska.

LIA was set up by Gaddafi to manage the country’s wealth and was estimated to be worth $64bn (£41bn) last September.

Emails obtained by anti-corruption campaign group Global Witness and seen by the Guardian reveal JP Morgan’s vice chairman, Lord Renwick, invited the then vice chairman of LIA, Mustafa Zarti, to “finalise the terms of the mandate concerning Rusal before Mr Blair’s visit to Tripoli which is scheduled to take place on around 22 January”.

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Saudi women without right to drive get right to vote in undemocratic elections

The New York Times reports:

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia on Sunday granted women the right to vote and run in future municipal elections, the biggest change in a decade for women in a puritanical kingdom that practices strict separation of the sexes, including banning women from driving.

Saudi women, who are legally subject to male chaperones for almost any public activity, hailed the royal decree as an important, if limited, step toward making them equal to their male counterparts. They said the uprisings sweeping the Arab world for the past nine months — along with sustained domestic pressure for women’s rights and a more representative form of government — prompted the change.

“There is the element of the Arab Spring, there is the element of the strength of Saudi social media, and there is the element of Saudi women themselves, who are not silent,” said Hatoon al-Fassi, a history professor and one of the women who organized a campaign demanding the right to vote this spring. “Plus, the fact that the issue of women has turned Saudi Arabia into an international joke is another thing that brought the decision now.”

Although political activists celebrated the change, they also cautioned how deep it would go and how fast, given that the king referred to the next election cycle, which would not be until 2015. Some women wondered aloud how they would be able to campaign for office when they were not even allowed to drive. And there is a long history of royal decrees stalling, as weak enactment collides with the bulwark of traditions ordained by the Wahhabi sect of Islam and its fierce resistance to change.

In his announcement, the king said that women would also be appointed to the Majlis Al-Shura, a consultative council that advises the monarchy on matters of public policy. But it is a toothless body that avoids matters of royal prerogative, like where the nation’s oil revenue goes.

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Gunman kills American at Kabul CIA office

The Wall Street Journal reports:

An Afghan gunman late Sunday killed one American citizen and wounded another at what is reported to be the Central Intelligence Agency’s offices in Kabul.

The two American citizens came under fire by a “lone Afghan employee” in an “annex of the U.S. Embassy” in Kabul, said Embassy spokesman Gavin Sundwall. Mr. Sundwall wouldn’t comment on whether the shootout involved CIA employees or occurred at the CIA’s Kabul offices.

A western security official in Kabul said the Afghan attacker “had the trust” of the CIA employees in the compound, and was possibly an informant, which is why he was allowed into the annex and had access to a gun. It wasn’t clear if he was searched before entering the building.

The western security official said the gunman late Sunday may have gotten on the roof of the CIA building, where he fired on the nearby U.S. Embassy.

Sunday night’s attack comes less than two weeks after Afghan insurgents occupied a building under construction and fired rocket-propelled grenades at the U.S. Embassy. About a half-dozen rockets penetrated the Embassy’s fortified walls and several more hit within the U.S.-led military coalition’s headquarters in Kabul. The attack lasted for about 20 hours.

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Israel has rendered its closest ally impotent

Larry Derfner writes:

“Tafasta meruba, lo tafasta,” is a Hebrew saying that means, “If you get too greedy, you end up with nothing,” and it fits well to the arm-twisting job Israel just did on Obama at the UN. By leaning on him too single-handedly to block the Palestinian statehood bid, to pressure countries like Gabon and Bosnia-Herzegovina to go along, and to give a speech that Avigdor Lieberman said he would “sign with both hands,” Israel bent Obama too far, until he just broke. In the eyes of Palestinians, Muslims of the Middle East and probably everybody else in the world, the U.S. president has now assumed the identity of the ultimate Israel lobbyist, of Mr.Hasbara. “He’s not the president of the United States, he’s the president of Israel,” a man in Ramallah said to me the day after the speech, and that’s what Palestinians think today: They flat-out hate Obama. They may hate him more than any other U.S. president in history, including George W. Bush. They thought Obama was on their side, and in the moment of truth he sold them out to the LIkud, to the settlers, to the Republican wackos. Palestinians, and presumably all Muslims, feel toward Obama today how the settlers felt toward Ariel Sharon after he decided to withdraw from Gaza: betrayed.

With Obama’s America now having zero credibility in the Middle East, where does this leave Israel? Alone and vulnerable to an extent that’s unfamiliar to Israelis. Until now, the U.S. held sway with the Palestinians; it doesn’t anymore. It held sway with Egypt, Jordan and Turkey; I wonder how much it has left now. In highly dramatic fashion, the U.S. stood up for the occupation and against Palestinian independence, and the result of this disgrace is that outside of Israel and America, the occupation is more unpopular and Palestinian independence more popular than ever. It’s the Palestinians who have the wind at their back now, and Israel that’s pissing in the wind. And America can’t help us anymore because America has become a spent force around here.

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This economic collapse is a ‘crisis of bigness’

Paul Kingsnorth writes:

Living through a collapse is a curious experience. Perhaps the most curious part is that nobody wants to admit it’s a collapse. The results of half a century of debt-fuelled “growth” are becoming impossible to convincingly deny, but even as economies and certainties crumble, our appointed leaders bravely hold the line. No one wants to be the first to say the dam is cracked beyond repair.

To listen to a political leader at this moment in history is like sitting through a sermon by a priest who has lost his faith but is desperately trying not to admit it, even to himself. Watch Nick Clegg, David Cameron or Ed Miliband mouthing tough-guy platitudes to the party faithful. Listen to Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy or George Papandreou pretending that all will be well in the eurozone. Study the expressions on the faces of Barack Obama or Ben Bernanke talking about “growth” as if it were a heathen god to be appeased by tipping another cauldron’s worth of fictional money into the mouth of a volcano.

In times like these, people look elsewhere for answers. A time of crisis is also a time of opening-up, when thinking that was consigned to the fringes moves to centre stage. When things fall apart, the appetite for new ways of seeing is palpable, and there are always plenty of people willing to feed it by coming forward with their pet big ideas.

But here’s a thought: what if big ideas are part of the problem? What if, in fact, the problem is bigness itself?

The crisis currently playing out on the world stage is a crisis of growth. Not, as we are regularly told, a crisis caused by too little growth, but by too much of it. Banks grew so big that their collapse would have brought down the entire global economy. To prevent this, they were bailed out with huge tranches of public money, which in turn is precipitating social crises on the streets of western nations. The European Union has grown so big, and so unaccountable, that it threatens to collapse in on itself. Corporations have grown so big that they are overwhelming democracies and building a global plutocracy to serve their own interests. The human economy as a whole has grown so big that it has been able to change the atmospheric composition of the planet and precipitate a mass extinction event.

One man who would not have been surprised by this crisis of bigness, had he lived to see it, was Leopold Kohr. Kohr has a good claim to be the most important political thinker that you have never heard of. Unlike Marx, he did not found a global movement or inspire revolutions. Unlike Hayek, he did not rewrite the economic rules of the modern world. Kohr was a modest, self-deprecating man, but this was not the reason his ideas have been ignored by movers and shakers in the half century since they were produced. They have been ignored because they do not flatter the egos of the power-hungry, be they revolutionaries or plutocrats. In fact, Kohr’s message is a direct challenge to them. “Wherever something is wrong,” he insisted, “something is too big.”

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Haqqani network will outlast the U.S. in Afghanistan

The New York Times reports:

They are the Sopranos of the Afghanistan war, a ruthless crime family that built an empire out of kidnapping, extortion, smuggling, even trucking. They have trafficked in precious gems, stolen lumber and demanded protection money from businesses building roads and schools with American reconstruction funds.

They safeguard their mountainous turf by planting deadly roadside bombs and shelling remote American military bases. And they are accused by American officials of being guns for hire: a proxy force used by the Pakistani intelligence service to carry out grisly, high-profile attacks in Kabul and throughout the country.

Today, American intelligence and military officials call the crime clan known as the Haqqani network — led by a wizened militant named Jalaluddin Haqqani who has allied himself over the years with the C.I.A., Saudi Arabia’s spy service and Osama bin Laden — the most deadly insurgent group in Afghanistan. In the latest of a series of ever bolder strikes, the group staged a daylong assault on the United States Embassy in Kabul, an attack Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged Thursday was aided by Pakistan’s military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. According to two American officials, cellphones used by the attackers made calls to suspected ISI operatives before the attack, although top Pakistani officials deny their government played any role.

But even as the Americans pledge revenge against the Haqqanis, and even amid a new debate in the Obama administration about how to blunt the group’s power, there is a growing belief that it could be too late. To many frustrated officials, they represent a missed opportunity with haunting consequences. Responsible for hundreds of American deaths, the Haqqanis probably will outlast the United States troops in Afghanistan and command large swaths of territory there once the shooting stops.

American military officers, who have spent years urging Washington to take action against the Haqqanis, express anger that the Obama administration has still not put the group on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations out of concern that such a move would scuttle any chances that the group might make peace with Afghanistan’s government.

“Whoever is in power in Kabul will have to make a deal with the Haqqanis,” said Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. officer who served in Pakistan during the Soviet-Afghan war. “It won’t be us. We’re going to leave, and those guys know it.”

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Pakistani officials warned Friday that they could jettison the United States as an ally if American officials continued to accuse Islamabad’s intelligence agency of assisting a leading Afghan Taliban group in recent attacks in Afghanistan.

Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar cautioned the U.S. against airing allegations such as the blunt charge of collusion between Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, known as ISI, and the militant Haqqani network made Thursday by Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“You cannot afford to alienate Pakistan; you cannot afford to alienate the Pakistani people,” Khar said in New York, speaking to a Pakistani television channel. She was in the U.S. for the U.N. General Assembly session.

Pakistani army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani in a statement called Mullen’s remarks “very unfortunate and not based on facts.”

Pakistani officials continued to tersely reject the allegations and challenged the U.S. to furnish evidence of ties between the country’s intelligence community and the Haqqani group.

Mullen called the Haqqani network “a veritable arm” of the ISI and said the intelligence agency helped Haqqani militants during attacks Sept. 13 on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul as well as a truck bomb blast in Wardak province three days earlier that injured 77 American troops.

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Palestinians give ‘two weeks’ for UNSC action

Al Jazeera reports:

The Palestinians want the United Nations Security Council to decide on their bid for full membership of the world body within a fortnight, a leading Fatah official has said as difficult questions about the move’s consequences and the future of their statehood remained.

“Palestinians will wait two weeks for Security Council to consider application for membership,” Azzam al-Ahmad, was quoted telling the Maan news agency on Saturday.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas also said on Saturday he expected the council to finish debating within weeks, not months.

Lebanon’s UN ambassador said the Security Council would convene on Monday to discuss the application after Abbas presented it to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Friday.

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The New York Times’ conflicts of interest

The New York Times has a “public editor” — currently Arthur S. Brisbane — who is described as “the readers’ representative.” His job is to respond to complaints and comments from the public and to monitor the paper’s journalistic practices.

Readers’ representative? Is he selected by the paper’s readers? No. Is he employed by the paper? Yes. So, let’s be clear then: the public editor represents the newspaper — not its readers.

The existence of a public editor is an exercise in self-policing and like most other forms of self-policing, the function of the public editor is to create the appearance of institutional integrity in order to improve the newspaper’s image. In other words, the public editor is regarded as having commercial value as a component in the New York Times’ brand management.

Having said that, I have no doubt Brisbane is a decent guy but he’s as tough as the newspaper wants him to be — which isn’t much.

Of his predecessor, Byron Calame, Jack Shafer at Slate once wrote:

Calame possesses a mandate that would allow him to boil the journalistic ocean if he so desired, but he usually elects to merely warm a teapot for his readers and pour out thimblefuls of weak chamomile.

If the executives at the New York Times actually wanted a public editor intent on boiling the journalistic ocean, they wouldn’t appoint characters like Calame and Brisbane.

Which brings us to today’s column in which Jerusalem bureau chief, Ethan Bronner, gets a slap on the wrists for his own conflicts of interest. Bronner comes out badly not because he gets rough treatment from Brisbane but because he’s a serial offender who’s working on borrowed time.

What both Brisbane and Bronner supposedly don’t understand is that there is no real difference between an “actual” conflict of interest and the appearance of a conflict of interest — conflicts of interest are by their very nature all about appearance.

Here’s the column:

CONFLICT of interest, or the appearance of it, is poisonous in journalism. This is particularly so when it relates to reporting on Israel and the Palestinians, a subject that draws a steady stream of skepticism about New York Times coverage from readers and partisans on all sides.

So it is troubling that, just before the Palestinians brought their case for statehood to the United Nations last week, an American writing for The Columbia Journalism Review accused The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief of appearing to give favorable treatment to his speaking agent’s other clients.

The article by Max Blumenthal on Sept. 14 set off a chain of follow-up pieces by others and by Mr. Blumenthal himself, hammering away at the allegation that Ethan Bronner, the Times bureau chief, was compromised by his relationship with a public relations firm that arranged paid speaking engagements for him.

A close examination of the facts leads me to conclude that the case for an actual conflict of interest is slender. But the appearance of a conflict clearly exists, and that is a problem in and of itself. The Times’s “Ethical Journalism” (PDF) guidelines state that staff members “may not accept anything that could be construed as a payment for favorable coverage or as an inducement to alter or forgo unfavorable coverage.”

Mr. Bronner has now severed his ties to the public relations firm. “In my view, it is all about appearances,” he told me. “I am not denying they matter. There is nothing of an actual conflict.”

The matter revolves around Mr. Bronner’s engagement, beginning in 2009, with Lone Star Communications, a firm operated by Charley Levine, a prominent public relations executive in Israel. Mr. Levine added a speakers bureau to his firm that year, and Mr. Bronner signed on to be represented by him.

The core of Mr. Blumenthal’s critique was that Mr. Levine is a figure of the Israeli right, who counsels prominent Zionists and serves as a reservist in the Israeli Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit. Mr. Blumenthal, a writing fellow at the Nation Institute, said it was improper of Mr. Bronner to have a business relationship with Mr. Levine while covering stories that Lone Star promoted.

In The Columbia Journalism Review article, Mr. Blumenthal never explicitly accused Mr. Bronner of providing favorable coverage as a quid pro quo for receiving speaking engagements from Mr. Levine’s firm. He objected that Mr. Bronner “takes paid speaking engagements from a firm that also pitches him stories.” Elsewhere in the article, he wrote: “On the one hand, it might be hard to cover Israel without stumbling across Lone Star’s many clients. On the other, however, that might be a good reason not to have a business relationship with the firm.”

In an interview, Mr. Blumenthal said, “It is a question of appearances and his ability to be taken seriously because he says he is an objective reporter.”

Mr. Blumenthal’s article enumerated six cases in which Mr. Bronner had written about, or at least mentioned, Lone Star clients. Mr. Bronner walked me through those cases. Of the six, he said, only one involved an instance in which he had received a pitch from Lone Star and, on that basis, decided to write about it. The article concerned the Jewish National Fund and was about a fortified play area for children in the Israeli border town of Sderot.

In the rest of the cases except one, he said, he did not receive a pitch from Lone Star and was unaware that the story involved a Lone Star client. The exception involved Danny Danon, a conservative member of the Israeli Parliament. Mr. Bronner said he has covered Mr. Danon but the coverage decisions were influenced not by Lone Star but by the prominence of Mr. Danon, who is deputy speaker of Parliament and chairman of World Likud.

The Blumenthal piece creates the implication of a corrupt arrangement. In my view, the arrangement was ill-advised and created an appearance that could be construed by some as corrupt, but was not in actuality.

I consulted two journalism ethics experts on this, who reached the same conclusion. Stephen Ward, who heads the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, said: “Has there been an actual conflict of interest? I don’t find it in this case. What about the perception of a conflict? That is where I think some might see the relationship between him and the public relations firm and have some reason to doubt.”

Ed Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, said Mr. Bronner’s decision to sever ties to Lone Star was the “appropriate” action.

For his part, Mr. Bronner is kicking himself over the episode. “I allowed myself to be in a situation where someone could come after me this way,” he said. “I feel pretty bad about it.”

He said Lone Star had booked only a half dozen speeches for him, out of 75 that he had given since he became bureau chief three and a half years ago. He speaks only to nonprofit organizations and, in Israel, typically receives fees of less than a thousand dollars, he added.

He did not tell his editors about his relationship with Lone Star, he told me, because he did not think joining a speakers bureau had to be disclosed. Indeed, the ethics guidelines do not specifically require it. But the guidelines do require Times staff members to provide an accounting to editors if they earn more than $5,000 of speaking fees in a year. Mr. Bronner acknowledged he was “delinquent” in failing to do this, saying he believed he was obligated to account only for any single speech for which he was paid more than $5,000, another requirement of the policy.

(Mr. Bronner faced criticism previously when his son joined the Israeli military, prompting The Times’s public editor then, Clark Hoyt, to recommend that Mr. Bronner be reassigned because of the appearance of a conflict. Bill Keller, the executive editor at the time, supported Mr. Bronner, and he remained in his post. Mr. Bronner’s son has since completed his service and returned to the United States.)

Mr. Bronner was pointed in arguing that the attack by Mr. Blumenthal, who writes critically of Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians, was ideologically motivated and designed to discredit Mr. Bronner.

Mr. Blumenthal’s piece may well have been influenced by an animus toward Mr. Bronner’s reportage for The Times. But the fact remains that the Lone Star engagement created a problem and stands as a reminder that The Times must be fastidiously independent, in reality and in appearance, or face attacks like this one.

Here’s the irony: if the New York Times was to have a public editor worthy of the name, he’d do nothing to insinuate that criticism of the kind delivered by Max Blumenthal was in some way unfair, but on contrary acknowledge the fact that the most rigorous criticism of the paper’s practice of journalism is most often going to come from those who take the deepest interest in the issues — not those who practice the mealy-mouthed art of balanced impartiality.

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French Jewish fighters move in to defend Israeli settlements in West Bank

Armed French citizens in a West Bank settlement -- Photo: Jewish Defense League

While Israeli authorities are making it increasingly difficult for non-violent international activists to visit the West Bank, suspected Jewish terrorists — members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) — coming from France in recent days apparently had no difficulty reaching the illegal settlements which they claim they want to defend.

The FBI has described the JDL as a “right-wing terrorist group“. One of its most infamous charter members was Baruch Goldstein who attack unarmed Palestinian Muslim worshipers at a mosque in Hebron in 1994, killing 29 and wounding 125 others. On its website, the JDL says “We do not consider his assault to qualify under the label of terrorism,” in reference to Goldstein’s Hebron attack — they also describe him as “a brilliant surgeon, a mild-mannered Yeshiva-educated man.”

Al Jazeera reports on an operation organized by the French chapter of the JDL.

Two weeks ago, an announcement appeared on a French website, calling for “militants with military experience” to participate in a solidarity trip to Israel between September 19 and 25. “The aim of this expedition is to lend a hand to our brothers facing aggression from the Palestinian occupiers, and to enhance the security of Jewish towns in Judea and Samaria,” it explained. The dates of the trip coincide with the Palestinian statehood bid at the United Nations.

As of yesterday, in response to this call, there were 55 French citizens, both men and women, with military experience, stationed inside the illegal Israeli settlements up and down the West Bank. Organised into five separate groups of 11, their mandate is to “defend the settlements against any attack from Palestinians”, and to “aid” in areas where they feel there is a lack of Israeli army personnel or police forces.

The website belongs to the French chapter of the Jewish Defence League (JDL), a far-right Jewish group founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane in the United States in 1968. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has refered to the JDL as a “violent extremist organisation”.

“In France, it is a movement made up of French citizens who defend the Jewish community when faced with aggression, and also defends Israel in a more general manner,” said Amnon Cohen, a spokesperson for the group. “In terms of ideology, we are Zionists, pro-Israeli, and we share similar ideologies to that of the Ichud Leumi [“National Union”] party in Israel.” The National Union advocates the settlement of Jewish people in the entirety of the occupied West Bank, which it calls by its biblical name of Judea and Samaria.

“People say we are extreme because we believe in Judea and Samaria, and that this belongs to the Israelis, the Jews, but I don’t consider this to be extreme,” he told Al Jazeera. [Continue reading…]

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The lies Netanyahu told at the UN

The Institute for Middle East Understanding fact-checked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the UN General Assembly on Friday.

NETANYAHU: “Ladies and gentlemen, Israel has extended its hand in peace from the moment it was established 63 years ago.”

REALITY: The establishment of Israel in 1948 was accompanied by the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes – over two-thirds of the population. It is estimated that more than 50 percent fled under direct military assault. Others fled in panic as news of massacres of hundreds of civilians in the villages of Deir Yassin and Tantura spread. Their exodus, or Nakba, was already nearly half-complete by May 1948, when Israel declared its independence and the Arab states entered the fray. Zionist forces depopulated more than 450 Palestinian towns and villages, most of which were demolished to prevent the return of the refugees. Although Jews owned only about seven percent of the land in Palestine in 1947 and constituted about 33 percent of the population, Israel was established the next year on 78 percent of Palestine.


In 1967, Israel launched a surprise attack on Egypt, leading to the 1967 war, where it militarily occupied the remaining 22 percent of historic Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza Strip) as well as the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai. Of all this territory, Israel has to this day returned only the Sinai.

NETANYAHU: “And it’s here [at the United Nations], year after year that Israel is unjustly singled out for condemnation. It’s singled out for condemnation more often than all the nations of the world combined.”

REALITY: Israel is not above the law. International law is based on the notion that all human beings are worthy of the same rights and of being treated equally. These laws apply equally to all nations. The UN was instrumental in the creation of Israel through UN General Assembly resolution 181. Because of this, the UN, and the international community in general, bears a responsibility to help resolve the situation, guided by the standards of international law.

NETANYAHU: “Twenty-one out of the 27 General Assembly resolutions condemn Israel – the one true democracy in the Middle East.”

REALITY: For more than 43 years, Israel has militarily occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, a population now numbering 4.36 million people. Except for a few thousand Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, this population has no voice in Israeli national policy despite being subjected to long-term Israeli occupation. Additionally, 1.2 million Palestinians are citizens of Israel and subject to more than 30 laws which discriminate against them solely based on their ethnicity, rendering them second or third-class citizens in their own homeland. From 1948 to 1966, those Palestinians who remained in what became Israel after the ethnic cleansing of the vast majority of the Palestinians from their homeland were governed by Israeli military rule (not unlike what exists in the Occupied Territories today). Thus for the entirety of its 63-year existence, there has been a period of only about one year, between the lifting of martial law in 1966 and the occupation which began in 1967, that Israel did not rule over large numbers of Palestinians to whom it granted no political or human rights. [Continue reading…]

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