Monthly Archives: June 2012

Syrian regime tanks amass near Turkish border, says FSA general

Reuters reports: A general in the rebel Free Syria Army said on Friday that Syrian government forces had amassed around 170 tanks north of the city Aleppo, near the Turkish border, but there was no independent confirmation of the report.

General Mustafa al-Sheikh, head of the Higher Military Council, an association of senior officers who defected from President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, said the tanks had assembled at the Infantry School near the village of Musalmieh northeast of the city of Aleppo, 30 kms (19 miles) from the Turkish border.

“The tanks are now at the Infantry School. They’re either preparing to move to the border to counter the Turkish deployment or attack the rebellious (Syrian) towns and villages in and around the border zone north of Aleppo,” Sheikh told Reuters by telephone from the border.

He said the tanks were mostly from the 17th Mechanized Division.

Turkey deployed air defense weaponry along its border with Syria on Thursday, following Syria’s downing of a Turkish warlplane over the Mediterranean on Friday.

“I can confirm there are troops being deployed along the border in Hatay province. Turkey is taking precautions after its jet was shot down,” the official told Reuters news agency condition of anonymity.

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Russia attacks ‘meddling’ on eve of Syrian crisis talks in Geneva

The Guardian reports: Hopes of a political solution to the Syrian crisis suffered a fresh blow on Thursday when Russia insisted it would not endorse an internationally backed plan for a political transition that would require President Bashar al-Assad to surrender power.

Syrian opposition groups warned that Assad would have to step down and leave the country before they would negotiate future political arrangements.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said in Moscow: “We will not support and cannot support any meddling from outside or any imposition of recipes. This also concerns the fate of the president of the country, Bashar al-Assad.”

Lavrov was due to meet Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, to discuss Saturday’s Geneva conference, called in an attempt to agree broad support for a transitional national unity government in Damascus that could include anti-Assad forces.

But the Syrian National Council, the most coherent anti-Assad grouping, said it would reject any plan that did not include the unconditional departure of the president, his family and close allies. The SNC position was “firm and clear,” insisted spokesman George Sabra. Elements of the Syria-based internal opposition who once advocated dialogue with the regime also now say it is too late.

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Why Washington and Moscow want a backroom deal over Syria

Simon Tisdall writes: Months of futile diplomatic tussling, UN deadlock and finger-pointing over Syria have boiled down to a dramatic, last-ditch effort this weekend to cut a deal between the US and Russia that eases President Bashar al-Assad from office and replaces him with an inclusive, transitional government that can halt the spiral towards all-out civil war.

Barack Obama’s administration first floated the idea of ditching Assad while simultaneously guaranteeing Russia’s interests in Syria more than a month ago. Despite Moscow’s rebuffs, the White House has kept at it. Obama spent two hours discussing Syria with a sceptical Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, at this month’s G20 summit in Mexico.

US officials did not pretend Putin was won over. But they did claim headway in identifying areas where US and Russian interests coincide, principally preventing a chaotic implosion and a regional war. “We agreed that we need to see a cessation of violence, that a political process has to be created to prevent civil war,” Obama said. “We have found many common points on this issue,” said Putin.

After follow-up meetings, Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, and Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s foreign minister, have agreed to attend an international summit on expediting Syria’s political transition to be convened in Geneva on Saturday by the UN envoy, Kofi Annan. Clinton and Lavrov will meet privately beforehand in St Petersburg on Friday.

US-Russian agreement on the way forward in Syria is crucial. Russia is the Syrian regime’s most powerful ally and protector, its main arms supplier, and a veto-wielding member of the UN security council. Its influence within the regime is unmatched. For its part, the US is the world’s foremost military and economic power with extensive Middle East interests, including guaranteeing Israel’s security and safeguarding its energy supply.

For the past 18 months they have been at loggerheads. Now, despite hardline statements ahead of the meeting, they appear to be trying to work together.

On the American side, the need for a deal is more pressing. Obama, facing a tough re-election battle this autumn and with his domestic record assailed from all sides, could use a big international win. His handling of the Arab spring was not impressive. Last week, as rightwingers see it, he “lost” Egypt, Washington’s main Arab ally, to the Muslim Brotherhood. Mitt Romney, his Republican challenger, is describing Russia as America’s biggest strategic threat. Thus the meaningfulness of Obama’s attempt to reset relations with Moscow is also in the balance.

A transition deal in Syria would suit Obama for a host of other reasons. It would defuse criticism from American interventionists about US inaction. It would also help secure the stability of Iraq, on which so much American blood and treasure was spent in the past decade. It would prevent the spooked, volatile leaders of Turkey, a valued Nato ally, sliding into some kind of regional conflict.

Most of all, by stabilising Syria under a potentially more amenable regime with less allegiance to Iran, Obama might hope to lessen pressure from and on Israel to attack Tehran’s nuclear facilities this autumn. [Continue reading…]

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The distorted lenses through which the U.S. views the Arab world

Rami G Khouri writes: I was in the United States 16 months ago when an Egyptian national popular uprising forced Hosni Mubarak to quit the presidency. And I was in the United States again this week when Mohammed Mursi was elected as the new Egyptian president. Then and now, Americans remain unsure about how to react to the popular revolutions that felled their longtime autocratic Arab allies, who in most cases were replaced by more legitimate, Islamist-led governments.

At the same time, though, Americans – who helped to define the modern revolutionary and democratic era in the 18th century – instinctively tend to support national populist revolutions that create government systems based on the consent of the governed and democratic electoral pluralism. When Arabs carry out these revolutionary and democratic endeavors, however, American society reacts with obvious hesitancy alongside the flashes of enthusiasm.

It is important for Americans and Arabs alike to understand this phenomenon, because it reflects much deeper perceptions, sentiments or biases that will continue to haunt relations between Arabs and Americans and prevent them from ever fully embracing one another, or simply developing normal relations.

My own sense is that two main underlying problems are to blame: the intrusion of the Arab-Israeli conflict and Washington’s deep pro-Israel bias into American-Arab relations, and the lingering consequences of several unpleasant encounters between the United States and various Arab, Iranian or South Asian parties that defined themselves in Islamist terms (Iran, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda and others).

This was evident this week when I was reading through some “quality” American press coverage of the Mursi election victory (The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The San Francisco Chronicle). One story in The Wall Street Journal’s coverage on June 25 was a textbook case of the recurring bias and confusion in American reactions to the transformational events in the Arab world; and one sentence in a front-page story captured this phenomenon succinctly: “Many secular Egyptians watched uneasily, wondering what Islamist rule will mean for a country that has long been a bulwark of secular, moderate and pro-American governance,” the newspaper observed. [Continue reading…]

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The rebranding of Barack Obama

Louis Proyect writes: After a brief period of relative optimism tied to the “green shoots” of recovery, the woes of the Great Recession continued into 2012 and forced the hucksters running Obama’s re-election campaign to hoist a new message up the flagpole and see if anyone would salute.

That new message amounted to undraping a 60 foot tall bronze statue of Obama as muscular Commander-in-Chief after the fashion of Reagan chopping wood or George W. Bush in a flight suit. If those precious swing voters, perceived as white and centrist, could not be assuaged by a non-existent recovery, then maybe they would vote for Obama since he was able to deliver on at least another element of Teddy Roosevelt’s record, namely his willingness to use the “big stick” against weaker nations.

The campaign kicked into high gear with a speech that the president gave on Memorial Day a couple of weeks ago. It is filled with what the great Edmund Wilson called “patriotic gore”. This paragraph, in particular, sounds like it could have been lifted from the preview to a Rambo movie:

You persevered though some of the most brutal conditions ever faced by Americans in war. The suffocating heat. The drenching monsoon rains. An enemy that could come out of nowhere and vanish just as quickly. Some of the most intense urban combat in history, and battles for a single hill that could rage for weeks. Let it be said — in those hellholes like Briarpatch, and the Zoo and the Hanoi Hilton — our Vietnam POWs didn’t simply endure; you wrote one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of military history.

Activist Jack A. Smith, an editor at the radical newsweekly The Guardian in the 1960s who soldiers on for the cause of peace in upstate N.Y., commented on Vietnam war revisionism in the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter:

The Pentagon has just launched a multi-year national public relations campaign to justify, glorify and honor Washington’s catastrophic, aggressive and losing war against Vietnam — America’s most controversial and unpopular military conflict.

President Barack Obama opened the militarist event, which was overwhelmingly approved by Congress four years ago, during a speech at the Vietnam Wall on Memorial Day, May 28. The entire campaign, which will consist of tens of thousands of events over the next 13 years, is ostensibly intended to “finally honor” the U.S. troops who fought in Vietnam. The last troops were evacuated nearly 40 years ago.

One of the more disgusting passages in this altogether disgusting speech had to do with the peace movement’s alleged abuse of returning GI’s:

You were sometimes blamed for misdeeds of a few, when the honorable service of the many should have been praised. You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated. It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened. And that’s why here today we resolve that it will not happen again.

David Sirota, one of the nation’s more principled liberals and hence a trenchant critic of Obama, told Salon.com readers:

It’s undeniable that chronic underfunding of the Veterans Administration unduly harmed Vietnam-era soldiers. However, that lamentable failure was not what Obama was referring to. As the president who escalated the Vietnam-esque war in Afghanistan, he was making a larger argument. Deliberately parroting Rambo’s claim about “a quiet war against all the soldiers returning,” he was asserting that America, as a whole, spat on soldiers when they came home — even though there’s no proof that this happened on any mass scale.

In his exhaustive book titled “The Spitting Image,” Vietnam vet and Holy Cross professor Jerry Lembcke documents veterans who claim they were spat on by antiwar protestors, but he found no physical evidence (photographs, news reports, etc.) that these transgressions actually occurred. His findings are supported by surveys of his fellow Vietnam veterans as they came home.

Keep in mind that Obama’s speech sounds exactly like the kind of thing that John McCain would have written–a product of his captivity in Vietnam and his yahoo Republican Party politics. That this Ivy League “liberal” could spew out the same kind of rightwing bullshit, while in all likelihood knowing that it is bullshit, epitomizes the political impasse facing voters. You vote for someone enlightened and you end up with a Chuck Norris wannabe. It really doesn’t matter what you voted for, after all. The people who run the country have their own agenda and it doesn’t include you. [Continue reading…]

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A president we can’t believe in

David Bromwich writes: I went to see Barack Obama speak in New York, in spring 2007, at a preliminary ‘sounding’ for donors and assorted others. This was a few weeks after he announced his candidacy, and the audience of a hundred or so, in a spacious Upper West Side apartment, were brought in close enough to let everyone have a glimpse. Impartial curiosity was the mood about Obama then. There was no fuss at his entrance; he shook a few hands, chatted with the friendly strangers, and stayed within himself. He talked for something under half an hour, and what we heard was an attitude more than a programme.

It was a bad time, he said. We had to get the country going in the right direction. The wars were taking a heavy toll and drawing us away from our responsibilities towards each other. He spoke fluently and agreeably, without passion. George W. Bush had lately ignored the advice of the Baker Commission to withdraw from Iraq, and had ordered the ‘surge’ of additional troops headed by General Petraeus; there was a feeling close to despair among the arts and media crowd in the room, but Obama mentioned none of that: you might have thought the year was 1992 and his opponent George H.W. Bush. What struck me was his proficiency at blending in. Yet his sense of crisis was impersonal and oddly minimal. A woman with a worried look said afterwards: ‘I’m not sure he’s what we need.’

The glamorous Obama who emerged in 2008 – the greetings to whole cities with a celebrity shout, ‘Hello, Miami!’, the faithful cry of ‘Fired up, ready to go!’: none of this seemed to fit the man we heard, though his 2004 convention address had given hints of another side that accounted for the loyalty of his warmer enthusiasts. But as it has fallen out, most of his presidency has been conducted in the style of that living-room talk. Ceremonial speeches like the State of the Union or the occasional solemn bulletins from the Oval Office or orations such as he offered after the Tucson shootings in 2011 have marked episodic returns to the grand style, but when you hear those speeches you wonder what office he thinks he occupies, and in what country. The dignified and commanding presentation suits a theatrical impulse that lies deep in Obama’s idea of his proper powers – an impulse he has always recognised, which, at most times in his life, he has taken great care to repress.

One reward of David Maraniss’s biography of Obama’s first 27 years is that it confirms a hunch about Obama’s self-invention. His vagabond life with a bohemian intellectual mother, and the charismatic and reckless father who went back to Africa, belong to an early childhood that the Maraniss book recalls in detail and others have explored too, but those years explain less than has been supposed. Young Barack was always cared for, and from the age of ten, his education saw a passage with apparent ease through elite institutions. The Punahou school in Hawaii is one of the top preparatory schools in the United States, Occidental College in Southern California is a small liberal arts school of high quality, and for his last two years Obama transferred to Columbia. By the age of 22 his ambition encompassed the presidency – a hope that emerged with matter-of-fact seriousness in a conversation with a New York friend. During his last year at Columbia, and at a low-level corporate job that followed, Obama brooded over his need to acquire a black identity – a sign was the copy of Ellison’s Invisible Man which he took with him everywhere. He had never thought of himself as black before. The two girlfriends of those years whom Maraniss has traced, and an unnamed third in his first year in Chicago, were white, and so were many of his friends.

Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father condensed several partners into one, and offered a scene of mutual alienation between the hero and his girlfriend over divided reactions to a play about black Americans. Here, Maraniss indicates, an incident from another time and place, with another person, was transferred for the sake of narrative economy. It went down more easily to have his temporary estrangement from white society follow a single arc with a single romantic foil. More generally, the data of Obama’s early years, Maraniss has found, are so stretched and tweaked in his memoir, the incidents and characters so altered and transposed that Dreams from My Father is best thought of as a ‘work of literature’ rather than personal history. [Continue reading…]

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Top CIA spy accused of being a mafia hitman

Danger Room reports: Enrique “Ricky” Prado’s resume reads like the ultimate CIA officer: veteran of the Central American wars, running the CIA’s operations in Korea, a top spy in America’s espionage programs against China, and deputy to counter-terrorist chief Cofer Black — and then a stint at Blackwater. But he’s also alleged to have started out a career as a hitman for a notorious Miami mobster, and kept working for the mob even after joining the CIA. Finally, he went on to serve as the head of the CIA’s secret assassination squad against Al-Qaida.

That’s according to journalist Evan Wright’s blockbuster story How to Get Away With Murder in America, distributed by Byliner. In it, Wright — who authored Generation Kill, the seminal story of the Iraq invasion — compiles lengthy, years-long investigations by state and federal police into a sector of Miami’s criminal underworld that ended nowhere, were sidelined by higher-ups, or cut short by light sentences. It tracks the history of Prado’s alleged Miami patron and notorious cocaine trafficker, Alberto San Pedro, and suspicions that Prado moved a secret death squad from the CIA to Blackwater.

“In protecting Prado, the CIA arguably allowed a new type of mole — an agent not of a foreign government but of American criminal interests — to penetrate command,” Wright writes.

In this sense, there are two stories that blur into each other: Prado the CIA officer, and Prado the alleged killer. The latter begins when Prado met his alleged future mob patron, Alberto San Pedro, as a high school student in Miami after their families had fled Cuba following the revolution. Prado would later join the Air Force, though he never saw service in Vietnam, and returned to Miami to work as a firefighter. But he kept moonlighting as a hitman for San Pedro, who had emerged into one of Miami’s most formidable cocaine traffickers, according to Wright. [Continue reading…]

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Can the U.S. and Russia agree on how to end Syria’s war?

Tony Karon writes: Beleaguered U.N. peace envoy Kofi Annan will host an international conference to address Syria‘s rapidly escalating civil war, but the meeting in Geneva on Saturday appears to have only lukewarm backing from the U.S. — and then only after Washington put the kibosh on the attendance of Iran, whose participation had been deemed vital by Annan. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton indicated Wednesday that the U.S. would join representatives from Russia, China, Britain, France, Turkey, the EU and the Arab League in Geneva. The purpose of the meeting, per Annan, is to forge a consensus on the terms for a political solution among international players with stakes and influence in the Syrian conflict over terms for a political solution. The U.N. envoy believes that the best hope of pressing the combatants on the ground to observe his peace plan to which they signed up in April but have not implemented, is for the foreign powers on whose support they variously depend to agree on terms.

But even such key players as the U.S. and Russia can’t agree on a mechanism to resolve the conflict, and the exclusion of Iran and Saudi Arabia after the Obama Administration blocked Tehran’s participation suggests that Saturday’s meeting will simply restate the diplomatic stalemate.

“I have made it quite clear that I believe Iran should be part of the solution,” Annan said in Geneva last Friday. “If we continue the way we are going and competing with each other, it could lead to destructive competition and everyone will pay the price.”

The Obama Administration cited Iran’s role in backing up Syria’s bloody crackdown to declare Tehran’s involvement a “red line” for participating in the Geneva talks, and Annan presumably left out Saudi Arabia as a compensatory gesture to Russia which insists that those countries arming and funding Syria’s rebels share major responsibility for escalating the conflict. But it’s precisely because Iran and Saudi Arabia are playing out their preexisting regional and sectarian rivalries in the Syrian civil war that Annan wanted them at the table if there was to be any hope of achieving a solution without further bloodshed. Many in Washington, however, see the Syrian conflict through the same prism as Saudi Arabia does, seeking the ouster of Assad — Iran’s most important Arab ally — precisely in order to weaken Tehran.

Reuters reports: Turkish troops and military vehicles deployed towards the border with Syria on Thursday as a precaution after Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan gave orders to react to any Syrian threat approaching the frontier.

Erdogan, who has given shelter in the border area to rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, announced the new rules of engagement for Turkish troops on the border after Syrian air defenses shot down a Turkish warplane last Friday.

“I can confirm there are troops being deployed along the border in Hatay province. Turkey is taking precautions after its jet was shot down,” a Turkish official said on condition of anonymity.

He said he did not know how many troops or vehicles were being moved but said they were being stationed in the Yayladagi, Altinozu and Reyhanli border areas of Turkey’s southern Hatay province. He said anti-aircraft guns were also being stationed along the border.

The Associated Press reports: A strong explosion rocked the Syrian capital Thursday, sending black smoke billowing into the sky.

The state TV said the explosion was in the parking lot of the Palace of Justice, a compound that houses several courts. The nature of Thursday’s blast was not immediately clear.

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Hamas says member killed in Damascus home

Reuters reports: Hamas said on Thursday that one of its members, Kamal Husni Ghanaja, had been killed in his home in Damascus and that it was trying to find who was behind what the Palestinian Islamist group described as a “cowardly murder”.

Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, said in a statement that it was trying “to identify the party behind the deplorable crime”, but did not immediately accuse Israel, its long-time enemy, of involvement in the killing.

A Palestinian source with ties to Hamas said Ghanaja’s charred body was found in a cupboard above the ceiling of his ransacked apartment in the Qudsia neighborhood of Damascus. A Hamas source said there were marks of torture on his body.

“The charred, scarred, body was concealed in a ceiling closet and a fire had engulfed the house which apparently the assassins had started,” said the source. The body was found on Wednesday, but most indications suggested Ghanaja was killed a day earlier, the source said.

Hamas’ political bureau abandoned Damascus some time ago and the organization has aligned itself with the uprising. It’s not too hard to guess who is the most likely culprit behind this murder. No, not Israel.

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In a Syrian souk, support for the regime falters

Deborah Amos reports: In Syria’s capital, Damascus, the Hamidiyah souk is a landmark — a centuries-old covered market linked to a maze of alleyways in the heart of the capital. Over the 15-month uprising, Syria’s merchants have supported the regime of President Bashar Assad. But that support is crumbling.

Shops selling everything from cold drinks, ice cream and spices to wedding dresses and electric guitars line Hamidiyah’s cobblestone streets.

Everyone in the traditional market is keen to sell something, so when these merchants closed their shops in May to protest a massacre of more than 100 people in Houla, a remote village far from Damascus, it was unprecedented.

A merchant who participated in the strike — who is too afraid to give his name — is still angry enough to say he was part of the strike the security police tried to end by force.

These merchants are mostly Sunni Muslims, who form the core of Syria’s business community. For decades, they were regime loyalists — the backbone of Assad’s Alawite-dominated regime — but no longer, says another merchant, who also wouldn’t give his name.

“The strike, of course, it is unusual. It is something very new in the Syrian society, because it’s a police regime here,” he says. “You cannot express yourself. You cannot speak up.”

So, for the businessmen to strike was a big statement, he says.

“Yes … it’s a message to the regime that merchants are not with him anymore,” he says.

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Egyptian activists meet Morsi, discuss goals of revolution

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports: A number of activists met with President-elect Mohamed Morsy on Wednesday to work toward implementing the partnership document that was launched at the National Front conference as a platform for achieving the goals of the revolution.

Activist Wael Ghonim said the meeting discussed transparency with the people in all decisions made by the government, while activist Wael Khalil said the meeting was to express support for Morsy.

Activist Asmaa Mahfouz said Morsy’s promises are calculated but he seems to mean well for Egypt.

The National Front issued a statement after the meeting, saying that it was agreed power should be handed over on 30 June and that the president should be sworn in before the Egyptian people and not behind closed doors.

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Egypt to sue Iran news agency over ‘fabricated’ Morsi interview

Al Ahram reports: Egypt plans to sue an Iranian news agency for having allegedly fabricated an interview with President-elect Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s official MENA news agency reported on Wednesday.

MENA quoted the Islamist leader’s spokesman, Yassir Ali, as saying that Iran’s Fars news agency had “made up” a widely quoted interview in which Morsi said he planned to improve ties with Iran and revise Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel.

“Legal action will be taken against the Iranian Fars news agency, which fabricated the interview,” Ali said.

The Egyptian presidency on Monday denied that Morsi had given an interview to Iran’s Fars news agency, in which he reportedly pledged to strengthen ties with the Islamic republic.

“Mr. Morsi did not give any interview to Fars; everything that this agency has published is without foundation,” a spokesman for the Egyptian presidency told MENA.

Earlier this week, Fars published what it said was an interview with Morsi in which Egypt’s first democratically-elected civilian president said he wanted to build ties with Iran, severed in 1980.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone at Fars or any of their friends in the Revolutionary Guards thought they could fake an interview and get away with it. My guess is that Fars was itself duped into believing they were conducting a phone interview with Morsi while in fact they were speaking to someone else. Note that it was the state-controlled Islamic Republic News Agency which was swift to report a denial of the authenticity of the interview. So, if Fars was led into a trap, the question is: who set the trap?

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Israel subjecting Palestinian children to ‘spiral of injustice’

The Guardian reports: A belief that every Palestinian child is a potential terrorist may be leading to a “spiral of injustice” and breaches of international law in Israel’s treatment of child detainees in military custody, a delegation of eminent British lawyers has concluded in an independent report backed by the Foreign Office.

The nine-strong delegation, led by the former high court judge Sir Stephen Sedley and including the UK’s former attorney-general Lady Scotland, found that “undisputed facts” pointed to at least six violations of the UN convention on the rights of the child, to which Israel is a signatory. It was also in breach of the fourth Geneva convention in transferring child detainees from the West Bank to Israeli prisons, the delegation said.

Its report, Children in Military Custody, released on Tuesday, was based on a visit to Israel and the West Bank last September funded and facilitated by the Foreign Office and the British consulate in Jerusalem.

It makes 40 specific recommendations concerning the treatment of Palestinian child detainees.

The issue has come under increasing scrutiny by human rights organisations and visiting delegations over the past year. In January the Guardian highlighted the use of solitary confinement in a report on the experiences of children under the military justice system.

The Independent adds: Last night the Foreign Office, which backed the report, said it would be taking up the claims with the Israeli authorities:

“The UK government has had long-standing concerns about the treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli detention, and as a result decided to fund this independent report. While recognising that some positive recent steps have been made by the Israeli authorities, we share many of the report’s concerns, and will continue to lobby for further improvements.”

While the legal team said it was in no position to prove the truth of the claims of cruelty made repeatedly by Palestinian children, but denied by the Israeli authorities – which offered unprecedented access to the delegation – it pointed to the disparity in the law.

Israeli children must have access to a lawyer within 48 hours and cannot be imprisoned under the age of 14. But Palestinian children as young as 12 are jailed and can be kept for three months without legal representation. Between 500 and 700 are jailed each year.

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‘No war over my son,’ father of missing Turkish pilot says

Hurriyet Daily News reports: It would not be right for a country to go to war over a pilot, the father of missing pilot Capt. Gökhan Ertan said in regards to the crisis over Syria’s downing of a Turkish jet.

Ertan’s father Ali Erton (Ertan changed his surname from Erton) spoke to broadcaster Samanyolu at his residence in the southeastern province of Malatya yesterday.

Turkey is not a country that would go to war because another country killed one of their pilots, according to Erton. “It is not appropriate for a country to go to war over a pilot, an airplane or 50 airplanes,” Erton said. The missing pilot’s father said he was aware of the possibility that his son could have been killed when the plane he was in was shot down by Syria.

“What matters is that my son serves his country,” Erton said. “I am a man of faith and do not believe martyrs ever die.”

Osman Aksoy, the father of the second missing pilot Lt. Hüseyin Aksoy, said he talked to his son on June 19, three days before the incident. “We are following the developments on television, and [Hüseyin Aksoy’s] brother is keeping us informed from Malatya. We are holding our hopes high,” Aksoy told reporters at his home in Istanbul’s Bağcılar district.

“Such reconnaissance flights were done before too, [and now] our state has given that duty to my son,” Aksoy said

All options for action against Syria were on the table, including the right to military retaliation, the Turkish government said yesterday. The government has vowed to keep its rights stemming from international law reserved.

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Syrian violence escalates as UN prepares for conference

The Guardian reports: Evidence gathered by UN investigators in Syria shows human rights violations, including executions “on an alarming scale”, according to a new report on a conflict that is spiralling into “deeper and more destructive violence” and in which sectarian motives now predominate.

Against a background of escalating bloodshed and global concern, with gunmen killing seven on Wednesday at a pro-regime TV station near Damascus, the foreign ministers of the world’s leading powers have been invited to meet in Geneva on Saturday in a desperate attempt to agree a political exit from the impasse.

On Tuesday, president Bashar al-Assad ratcheted up his own language by describing the crisis as “a real war” and pledged to do everything necessary to prevail. Assad had previously always blamed the uprising on “armed terrorist gangs” backed by the west and Arab countries.

Underlining the gravity of the situation, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights described the last week as the bloodiest yet in the 16-month uprising. Observatory director Rami Abdul-Rahman said 916 people had been killed from 20 to 26 June. On Tuesday alone the reported death toll was 113, though these figures cannot be independently verified. Tank fire was reported from al-Qusair near Homs. Other attacks by government forces were reported on Wednesday in Deraa and Zamalka.

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Leading experts call on Obama to focus on aid instead of drone attacks on Yemen

Atlantic Council: Twenty-seven leading foreign policy experts have sent a letter to President Obama, calling for a broader approach on US policy towards Yemen that “expands beyond the narrow lens of counterterrorism.” As US intelligence agencies point to the rise of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) activity making Yemen the next front in counterterrorism, the letter, signed by diplomats, security specialists, scholars, and US policy experts, argues that current US policy is short-sighted. It strongly urges for better policy that still serves America’s national interests by decreasing extremism and combating security threats in the region, but through a comprehensive, long-term approach that addresses Yemen’s social, economic, and political challenges.

The five-page letter, signed by, among others, former US Ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine, argues that current US counterterrorism policy toward Yemen “does not address the underlying causes that have propelled such [militant] forces to find fertile ground in Yemen” and that US public diplomacy only reinforces such perceptions: “Although the Department of State, USAID, and others have invested millions in development and governance projects, the perception both in the US and in Yemen is that we are singularly focused on AQAP. Yemenis need to know that their country is more than a proxy battleground and that our long-term commitment to the stability, development, and legitimacy of the country matches our more immediate and urgent commitment to the defeat of AQAP.”

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The sharp, sudden decline of America’s middle class

Jeff Tietz writes: Every night around nine, Janis Adkins falls asleep in the back of her Toyota Sienna van in a church parking lot at the edge of Santa Barbara, California. On the van’s roof is a black Yakima SpaceBooster, full of previous-life belongings like a snorkel and fins and camping gear. Adkins, who is 56 years old, parks the van at the lot’s remotest corner, aligning its side with a row of dense, shading avocado trees. The trees provide privacy, but they are also useful because she can pick their fallen fruit, and she doesn’t always­ have enough to eat. Despite a continuous, two-year job search, she remains without dependable work. She says she doesn’t need to eat much – if she gets a decent hot meal in the morning, she can get by for the rest of the day on a piece of fruit or bulk-purchased almonds – but food stamps supply only a fraction of her nutritional needs, so foraging opportunities are welcome.

Prior to the Great Recession, Adkins owned and ran a successful plant nursery in Moab, Utah. At its peak, it was grossing $300,000 a year. She had never before been unemployed – she’d worked for 40 years, through three major recessions. During her first year of unemployment, in 2010, she wrote three or four cover letters a day, five days a week. Now, to keep her mind occupied when she’s not looking for work or doing odd jobs, she volunteers at an animal shelter called the Santa Barbara­ Wildlife Care Network. (“I always ask for the most physically hard jobs just to get out my frustration,” she says.) She has permission to pick fruit directly from the branches of the shelter’s orange and avocado trees. Another benefit is that when she scrambles eggs to hand-feed wounded seabirds, she can surreptitiously make a dish for herself.

By the time Adkins goes to bed – early, because she has to get up soon after sunrise, before parishioners or church employees arrive – the four other people who overnight in the lot have usually settled in: a single mother who lives in a van with her two teenage children and keeps assiduously to herself, and a wrathful, mentally unstable woman in an old Mercedes sedan whom Adkins avoids. By mutual unspoken agreement, the three women park in the same spots every night, keeping a minimum distance from each other. When you live in your car in a parking lot, you value any reliable area of enclosing stillness. “You get very territorial,” Adkins says.

Each evening, 150 people in 113 vehicles spend the night in 23 parking lots in Santa Barbara. The lots are part of Safe Parking, a program that offers overnight permits to people living in their vehicles. The nonprofit that runs the program, New Beginnings Counseling Center, requires participants to have a valid driver’s license and current registration and insurance. The number of vehicles per lot ranges from one to 15, and lot hours are generally from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. Fraternization among those who sleep in the lots is implicitly discouraged – the fainter the program’s presence, the less likely it will provoke complaints from neighboring homes and churches and businesses.

The Safe Parking program is not the product of a benevolent government. Santa Barbara’s mild climate and sheltered beachfront have long attracted the homeless, and the city has sometimes responded with punitive measures. (An appeals court compared one city ordinance forbidding overnight RV parking to anti-Okie laws in the 1930s.) To aid Santa Barbara’s large homeless population, local activists launched the Safe Parking program in 2003. But since the Great Recession began, the number of lots and participants in the program has doubled. By 2009, formerly middle-class people like Janis Adkins had begun turning up – teachers and computer repairmen and yoga instructors seeking refuge in the city’s parking­ lots. Safe-parking programs in other cities have experienced a similar influx of middle-class exiles, and their numbers are not expected to decrease anytime soon. It can take years for unemployed workers from the middle class to burn through their resources – savings, credit, salable belongings, home equity, loans from family and friends. Some 5.4 million Americans have been without work for at least six months, and an estimated 750,000 of them are completely broke or heading inexorably toward destitution. In California, where unemployment remains at 11 percent, middle-class refugees like Janis Adkins are only the earliest arrivals. “She’s the tip of the iceberg,” says Nancy Kapp, the coordinator of the Safe Parking program. “There are many people out there who haven’t hit bottom yet, but they’re on their way – they’re on their way.” [Continue reading…]

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