Monthly Archives: December 2012

Palestinian-Israeli Knesset member appeals election ban

Al Jazeera reports: A Palestinian-Israeli politician is appealing a court ruling barring her from running in Israel’s general elections next month.

Last week, Knesset member Haneen Zoabi was disqualified for “undermining” Israel because she was on board the Mavi Marmara ship in May 2010 as part of an international flotilla challenging Israel’s blockade on the Gaza Strip.

The Turkish ship was boarded by Israeli special forces as it approached waters off Gaza. In the violence that followed, nine activists were shot dead by the commando’s.

Israel’s Supreme Court now has four days to decide whether to revoke Zoabi’s election ban.

Speaking to Al Jazeera on Thursday, Zoabi said the ban was the culmination of a long process of persecution.

“Threats, I would say [I received] hundreds of threats, by letters, by email, by phonecall … They have disqualified me, stripped me from some Parliamentarian rights, such as my diplomatic passport,” Zoabi said.

“The Israeli Knesset is trying not just to disqualify me, but also to disqualify the Arab citizens in Israel. Because I represent those who vote for me, and the right wing in the Knesset – which is the majority within the Knesset – is trying to delegitimise the Arab voice within the Knesset,” she said.

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Obama Administration seeks to strengthen Rupert Murdoch

Matt Stoller writes: Earlier this year, Obama Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed relaxing media ownership rules to allow Rupert Murdoch to buy the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. It’s not something you’ll see discussed much, because Republicans like the fact that Murdoch is going to get more power, while Democrats don’t want to admit that Obama is helping the person framed as their arch-nemesis. This is part of a larger pattern – media consolidation is one of the many structural problems that Obama promised to deal with. And indeed, this is the real arena where the battle over free speech is being fought. Corporate control over our communications infrastructure is the free speech question of our time.

Backed by tech billionaires and consumer advocates in 2008, Obama argued for a dramatic restructuring of communications policy (versus Hillary Clinton, whose advisors were traditional telecom lobbyists). Candidate Obama made the right noises, from a strong stance on net neutrality to opposition to media consolidation to expanded broadband access. In this case, there were billionaires who valued the right policies, not just do gooders. For instance, here’s a little noted part of Democratic Party platform from 2008.

We will encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast media, promote the development of new media outlets for expression of diverse viewpoints, and clarify the public interest obligations of broadcasters who occupy the nation’s spectrum.

Of course, as is consistent with Obama’s main policy arc, after winning, Obama neutralized the reform groups and quickly reverted to a model of policymaking that is slightly more pro-corporate than Bush’s. He appointed Genachowski, a law school classmate known as an intellectual and moral lightweight, to run the FCC, and ensured that Larry Summers in the White House would sideline any attempts to fight against media and telecom barons. [Continue reading…]

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Yes, it’s the Jewish Lobby and it consists of one percent of American Jews

M.J. Rosenberg writes: The neoconservatives’ battle to sink the potential nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel has again raised the issue of the power of the Israel lobby. And it should. Hagel, as a respected former senator would be sailing to an easy confirmation, if not for the power of the Israel lobby which considers him insufficiently loyal to the policies of the Israeli government.

The assault on Hagel is truly ugly and opposing a highly respected ex-senator and decorated war hero out of fear he won’t defer to Netanyahu is also stupid. Unlike John McCain whose war record is ambiguous, Hagel’s record was indisputably heroic. He and his brother Tom served side by side in Vietnam as infantry squad leaders and earned military decorations and honors, including two Purple Hearts. To put it bluntly, how does it look to be opposing this American war hero for being insufficiently devoted to a foreign country?

The most maddening thing is that the lobby does not speak for most Jews, not even close. The best proof of that was this year’s election results in which 70% of Jews voted for President Obama although Netanyahu and his cutouts here made clear that they preferred Romney. And, as the definitive American Jewish Committee survey demonstrated, not even the Jewish Republican vote had much, if anything, to do with Israel. Only 5% of Jews consider Israel their most important issue. Republican Jews are Republican for the same reasons other Republicans are (the economy, and other domestic issues). Overwhelmingly, Jews choose domestic issues as most important to them. Additionally the Jews who do care about Israel (a strong majority at least) support neither Netanyahu nor the occupation. The last Israeli prime minister they admired was Yitzhak Rabin.

So who and what is the lobby?

The first thing to know about it is that it is about delivering money not votes. It is irrelevant that most Jews are liberals and not Netanyahu devotees. The people with the money (i.e., the lobby) are right-wing on Israel. And it is those people (think Democrat Haim Saban and Republican Sheldon Adelson and the like) who have the clout. Not the dentist or lawyer down the street or the local Hadassah chapter.

I worked on Capitol Hill for 20 years, for five Members of Congress, and had hundreds of dealings with the lobby. Despite claims that the lobby includes Christians, that is simply not true — at least not in terms of influencing U.S. policies.

First, so-called “Christian Zionists” do not give heavily to campaigns so their support for Likud policies is both amorphous and insignificant. Second, “Christian Zionists” are Republicans who will never support the party of GLBT rights, choice, regulations and higher taxes. Unlike the AIPAC-directed donors, they are not in play. They are just Republicans. (Even when “Christian Zionists” do contribute to campaigns, their issues are the social issues like blocking marriage equality, not supporting Israel).

Bottom line: the Israel Lobby is the Jewish Lobby. One would be hard-pressed to find a single legislator who kisses up to Netanyahu and AIPAC to please Christians. Not a single constituent organization that composes the lobby is anything but Jewish, starting with AIPAC. The others all have the word “Jewish” in their names. Who are they kidding? [Continue reading…]

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The CIA’s secret army

The Washington Post reports: The rapid collapse of a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya exposed the vulnerabilities of State Department facilities overseas. But the CIA’s ability to fend off a second attack that same night provided a glimpse of a key element in the agency’s defensive arsenal: a secret security force created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Two of the Americans killed in Benghazi were members of the CIA’s Global Response Staff, an innocuously named organization that has recruited hundreds of former U.S. Special Forces operatives to serve as armed guards for the agency’s spies.

The GRS, as it is known, is designed to stay in the shadows, training teams to work undercover and provide an unobtrusive layer of security for CIA officers in high-risk outposts.

But a series of deadly scrapes over the past four years has illuminated the GRS’s expanding role, as well as its emerging status as one of the CIA’s most dangerous assignments.

Of the 14 CIA employees killed since 2009, five worked for the GRS, all as contractors. They include two killed at Benghazi, as well as three others who were within the blast radius on Dec. 31, 2009, when a Jordanian double agent detonated a suicide bomb at a CIA compound in Khost, Afghanistan.

GRS contractors have also been involved in shootouts in which only foreign nationals were killed, including one that triggered a diplomatic crisis. While working for the CIA, Raymond Davis was jailed for weeks in Pakistan last year after killing two men in what he said was an armed robbery attempt in Lahore.

The increasingly conspicuous role of the GRS is part of a broader expansion of the CIA’s paramilitary capabilities over the past 10 years. Beyond hiring former U.S. military commandos, the agency has collaborated with U.S. Special Operations teams on missions including the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and has killed thousands of Islamist militants and civilians with its fleet of armed drones. [Continue reading…]

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How India is turning into China — and not in a good way

Pankaj Mishra writes: China is shakily authoritarian while India is a stable democracy—indeed, the world’s largest. So goes the cliché, and it is true, up to a point. But there is a growing resemblance between the two countries. A decade after we were told that China and India were “flattening” the world, expediting a historically inevitable shift of power from West to East, their political institutions and original nation-building ideologies face a profound crisis of legitimacy. Both countries, encumbered with dynastic elites and crony capitalists, are struggling to persuasively reaffirm their founding commitments to mass welfare. Protests against corruption and widening inequality rage across their vast territories, while their economies slow dramatically.

If anything, public anger against India’s political class appears more intense, and disaffection there assumes more militant forms, as in the civil war in the center of the country, where indigenous, Maoist militants in commodities-rich forests are battling security forces. India, where political dynasties have been the rule for decades, also has many more “princelings” than China—nearly 30 percent of the members of parliament come from political families. As the country intensifies its crackdown on intellectual dissent and falls behind on global health goals, it is mimicking China’s authoritarian tendencies and corruption without making comparable strides in relieving the hardships faced by its citizens. The “New India” risks becoming an ersatz China.

To those in the West who reflexively counterpose India to China, or yoke them together, equally tritely, as “rising” powers, the solutions to their internal crises seem very clear: Democratic India needs more economic reforms—in other words, greater openness to foreign capital. Meanwhile, authoritarian China, now endowed with a cyber-empowered and increasingly assertive middle class, must expose its anachronistic political system to the fresh air of democracy. [Continue reading…]

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As fighting rages in Aleppo, Syrians face hunger, disease and little hope of aid

The Washington Post reports: In Aleppo, Syria — Darkness comes early to the streets of this ancient city, once a symbol of Syria’s richly storied past and now at the heart of the deepening nightmare that the country’s revolution has become.

By 5 p.m., people are scurrying home, down streets potholed by artillery, past piles of rubble and mountains of garbage that hasn’t been collected in months, to spend the evenings huddled in the cold without heat, light or, increasingly, food.

“We just lie under blankets because it is so cold. We have no work, no money and no life,” said Omar Abu Mohammed, 55, one of the few remaining residents of his badly bombed neighborhood, as he prepared to head indoors for the night.

“It is time to go now because soon there will be snipers,” he added, as a shell boomed softly in the distance.

Shells are exploding somewhere in Aleppo most of the time, but after five months of fighting, people have become inured to the ever-present threat. Rain and cloudy skies have deterred warplanes, providing some relief from the airstrikes that can wipe out whole apartment buildings, along with their inhabitants, in an instant.

But the onset of this second winter since Syrians rose up against their government 22 months ago is bringing new calamity to a people already ground down by violence and war. Hunger, cold and disease are emerging as equally profound challenges in the desperate daily struggle that life has become for millions, not only in Aleppo but across Syria, where the quest for greater freedoms sparked by the Arab Spring has gone badly, horribly wrong. [Continue reading…]

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The new Egyptian constitution: an initial assessment of its merits and flaws

At Open Democracy, Zaid Al-Ali writes: Following the results of the referendum, in which 63.8% of voters appear to have approved the text, the new Egyptian constitution is now the law of the land. The turnout was far lower than anyone expected, with just over 32.9% of the population making their way to the polls, which means that the constitution has been approved by a mere 21% of eligible voters, clearly not a resounding victory for its proponents.

The poor showing will have a number of consequences, including the prospect that the new constitution’s popular legitimacy may be challenged for some time to come, which in turn will detract from the effort to resolve many of the more pressing problems that Egypt is facing today.

The debate surrounding the new constitution has been acrimonious to say the least. Many of the constitution’s most ardent critics have been scouring the text for evidence that the country’s Islamist movements are preparing to create a morality police or that the legal age of marriage is about to be lowered to 9. Many of these accusations are either baseless or merely leftover provisions from the 1971 constitution and were never applied in any meaningful sense, which will likely to continue being the case under the new constitution. The reality is that, when measured against Egyptian constitutional tradition, the new text brings a number of improvements to the protection of certain rights and to the system of government and is not the catastrophe that many have been so determined to identify.

However, if the measure is changed, there are perfectly valid reasons to be opposed to the new constitution. For example, considering recent developments internationally in the field of constitutional law, particularly in many African and Latin American countries, or considering even the aspirations that were expressed through the Egyptian revolution, the text leaves the reader disappointed.

Apart from the fact that much of the drafting is vague, a number of important rights are also lacking, which has driven many activists to ardently oppose the text. It also does not present a convincing vision in many areas, including decentralization, the role of independent agencies and civil/military relations. [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports: An Egyptian official says the country’s top prosecutor has ordered an investigation into accusations against opposition leaders of incitement to overthrow the regime.

The prosecution official said Thursday a judge will investigate the report filed last month accusing Mohammed ElBaradei, Nobel Prize laureate and former head of the U.N. nuclear agency, along with Amr Moussa, former foreign minister and Hamdeen Sabahi, a former presidential candidate, of inciting the overthrow of Egypt’s first elected president, Mohammed Morsi.

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The settlement that broke the two-state solution

Larry Derfner writes: When you drive out on the highway to the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim from Jerusalem, you’re driving through big sky country. After passing Jerusalem’s new Jewish neighborhoods and old Arab villages, all you’ve got on either side of you are the soft hills of the Judean desert. Emptiness, except for the unseen Bedouins. But very soon, you see a long, long line of beige houses and apartment buildings on the ridge of a steep hill, stretching nearly from one end of your field of vision to the other. Welcome to Ma’aleh Adumim.

The population is 40,000 — but if someone told me it was 400,000, I’d believe it. It is huge, monumental: Long, sweeping roads lead up the hill to its entrances, and wide avenues course up and down beautifully landscaped neighborhoods built from Jerusalem stone. Ma’aleh Adumim, founded in 1975, does not look like anybody’s idea of a settlement. It is truly an Israeli city, and it looks invulnerable to U.N. resolutions.

Ma’aleh Adumim is a stick in the eye of Palestinian attempts to build a state in the West Bank. And its very presence is spurring further Israeli construction: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent threat to build a sprawling, 3,500-unit housing project linking the settlement with Jerusalem has provoked expressions of outrage and distrust from Brussels and, in much more restrained tones, from Washington. The latest diplomatic skirmish was set off after European foreign ministers, in no uncertain terms, warned of the disastrous effects of the so-called “E-1 plan” on the prospects for a two-state solution.

Western diplomats fret that E-1 construction will drive a stone wedge through the heart of the would-be Palestinian state — cutting off Palestinians’ access to East Jerusalem, their hoped-for capital. But this misses the point: The presence of Ma’aleh Adumim makes E-1, or something like it, inevitable. Israel has no intention of letting this city go in any sort of peace agreement, and it’s not going to let it remain as an isolated Jewish enclave linked to the capital by a thin, three-mile stretch of highway with nothing but Palestine on either side. The world has remained on the sidelines these last 37 years during the construction of Ma’aleh Adumim. It’s a little late in the game to go complaining about E-1.

Besides, who says this settlement, the third most populous in the West Bank, isn’t already a stake in the heart of a prospective Palestinian state, even without E-1? “Ma’aleh Adumim was established to break Palestinian contiguity,” Benny Kashriel, the town’s mayor since 1992, told the Jerusalem Report in 2004. “It is Jerusalem’s connection to the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley [on the other side of the West Bank from Jerusalem]; if we weren’t here, Palestinians could connect their villages and close off the roads.” [Continue reading…]

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Blogger’s death stirs political hornet’s nest in Iran

Reuters reports: There was little about Sattar Beheshti that made him stand out in a working-class suburb south of Tehran called Robat Karim.

Like many of his peers, the 35-year-old laborer was devout and lived at home with his mother. But his life changed when he started a blog called “My Life for Iran” last year.

His entries often focused on the struggles of the working class as well as the political restrictions in Iran, sometimes mixed with personal anecdotes from Beheshti’s daily life.

As months passed, the tone on the blog became sharper and more political, with unveiled criticism of the establishment and even the Supreme Leader, a red line in the Islamic Republic.

In one recent post, Beheshti criticized a speech made by the leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran with the title “You presented a bunch of lies instead of a speech” superimposed over a picture of the cleric.

Other posts faulted Iran’s unwavering support for Hezbollah in Lebanon or highlighted the plight of human rights activists.

Retaliation quickly followed.

“Yesterday they threatened me and told me your mother will soon be wearing black,” Beheshti wrote in a post on October 29.

The next day security agents from Iran’s cyber police, known by the acronym FATA, arrested him. His bruised and battered body was handed to his family a week later, his death the result of torture, according to a smuggled letter from fellow prisoners.

The backlash was swift and furious, especially from other bloggers, even pro-government ones, disturbed at the fate of a pious young man with no known history of political activism.

Their most pointed criticism was directed at the cyber police and their campaign to stop any attempt at a “velvet revolution” in the Islamic Republic through the Internet.

Government officials have not denied the abuse.

“This individual was beaten but this beating was not in a manner that would result in his death,” Attorney-General Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejehi told a news conference on December 3.

Within a month of Beheshti’s death, seven policemen were arrested and the head of the cyber police was ousted, a dramatic turn of events in a divisive scandal that has shocked Iran.

As international pressure mounts over Iran’s disputed nuclear program and harsh economic sanctions bite, the leadership is wary of domestic turmoil, especially with a potentially turbulent presidential election due in June.

Beheshti’s death exposed Iran’s political fissures as a handful of lawmakers badgered President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government and the judiciary into ordering an inquiry.

But the most effective tool in publicizing Beheshti’s unusual death was the one he had chosen – the Internet.

“I really do believe this is one of the great examples of the impact of the Internet in Iran,” said Mahmood Enayat, director of the Iran Media program at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder of Small Media, a non-profit group that focuses on improving information flows in closed societies.

The Internet had become a watchdog, forcing the government to react to anything gathering enough attention, he argued.

“They can’t just ignore it anymore.”

Although many of the details of Beheshti’s detention and death are murky, some are no longer in dispute. On the night of October 30, he was arrested at his home in Robat Karim and transferred to section 350 of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison.

Fellow prisoners there said he was hung from the ceiling of a cell and beaten. His arms and legs were then tied to a chair and he was beaten again. At times, his interrogators threw him on the ground and kicked him in the head and neck. [Continue reading…]

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New cyber attacks on Iran — retaliation for attacks on Saudi and U.S. companies?

The New York Times reports: Iran reported a number of new cyberattacks on Tuesday, saying foreign enemy hackers tried in recent months to disrupt computer systems at a power plant and other industries in a strategically important southern coastal province as well as at a Culture Ministry information center.

Accounts of the attacks in the official press did not specify who was responsible, when they were carried out or how they were thwarted. But they strongly suggested that the attacks had originated in the United States and Israel, which have been engaged in a shadowy struggle of computer sabotage with Iran in a broader dispute over whether Iran’s nuclear energy program is for peaceful or military use.

Iran has been on heightened alert against such sabotage since a computer worm known as Stuxnet was used to attack its uranium enrichment centrifuges more than two years ago, which American intelligence officials believe caused many of the machines to spin out of control and self-destruct, slowing the Iranian program’s progress.

Stuxnet and other forms of computer malware have also been used in attacks on Iran’s oil industry and Science Ministry under a covert United States effort, first revealed in January 2009, that was meant to subvert Iran’s nuclear program because of suspicions that the Iranians were using it to develop the ability to make atomic bombs. Iran has repeatedly denied these suspicions.

The latest Iranian sabotage reports raised the possibility that the attacks had been carried out in retaliation for others that crippled computers in the Saudi Arabian oil industry and some financial institutions in the United States a few months ago. American intelligence officials have said they believe that Iranian specialists in cybersabotage were responsible for those attacks, which erased thousands of Saudi files and temporarily prevented some American banking customers from gaining access to their accounts.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta cited those attacks in an Oct. 11 speech in which he warned of America’s vulnerability to a coordinated computer warfare attack, calling such a possibility a “cyber-Pearl Harbor.” [Continue reading…]

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Israel approves another 1,200 settlement units around Jerusalem

The Guardian reports: Israel has given the green light for the fast-track development of a further 1,200 settlement units around Jerusalem. It brings the total number of new approvals to 5,500 in just over a week, the largest wave of proposed expansion in recent memory.

The latest plan, which would see almost 1,000 new apartments built over Jerusalem’s green line in Gilo, comes as the Israeli media is reporting mounting pressure on the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to drop his commitment to a two-state solution from his platform for re-election in January.

The agreement for the Gilo development is only the latest in wave of settlement approvals in Jerusalem agreed by the country’s interior ministry and Jerusalem municipality’s planning committees before Christmas.

That included proposals, which attracted international criticism, to develop the controversial E1 block to the east of Jerusalem.

Although Netanyahu, who leads a coalition with the ultra-nationalist Avigdor Lieberman, is still expected to win the most seats in the 22 January vote, a new poll suggests he has been losing ground since Lieberman was indicted on anti-trust charges this month and forced to step down as foreign minister.

A poll conducted by Dialog gives 35 of parliament’s 120 seats to Netanyahu’s Likud-Beiteinu list, down from 39 in the previous Dialog survey. The centrist Labor party polled second, with 17 seats.

The poll shows a continued surge by the rightwing Jewish Home party. Its leader, Naftali Bennett, stirred up a storm last week by saying he would resist evacuating settlements if ordered to do so as a reserves soldier.

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Bahrain, a brutal ally

Zainab al-Khawaja writes: Earlier this month, Aqeel Abdul Mohsen, 19, was shot in the face for protesting against Bahrain’s government. He was covered in blood, with the lower side of his face blown open, his jaw shattered, and a broken hand hanging awkwardly from his wrist. It’s one of those images that you wish you had never seen, and can never forget.

After more than 10 hours of surgery, and before Mr. Abdul Mohsen regained consciousness, his hospital room was already under guard by the police. Had he been able to speak, he might even have been interrogated before going into surgery. Others have lain bleeding without medical attention while government security agents asked questions like: “Were you participating in a protest? Who else was with you?”

Bahrain, a small island nation off the coast of Saudi Arabia, has been ruled by the Khalifa family for more than 200 years. It is also home to the headquarters of the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which patrols regional shipping lanes, assists with missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and monitors Iran as tensions in the region mount.

The oppressed people of Bahrain joined the Arab Spring soon after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. With newfound hope, Bahrainis took to the streets on Feb. 14, 2011. Rich and poor, Shiite and Sunni, liberal and religious, they felt what it was like to speak freely for the first time in the capital, Manama, at a traffic circle with a pearl monument at its center. The Pearl Roundabout came to symbolize the Bahraini revolution.

But this newfound freedom didn’t last long. The government’s security forces attacked the peaceful protesters, then tore down the Pearl monument. And in March 2011, troops from neighboring Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates intervened to suppress our pro-democracy protests.

Going out on the streets, carrying nothing but a flag and calling for democracy could cost you your life here. Chanting “down with the dictator” could lead to your being subjected to electric shocks. Giving a speech about human rights and democracy can lead to life imprisonment. Infants have died after suffocating from toxic gases used by riot police. And teenage protesters have been shot and killed. [Continue reading…]

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Syria: interview with a Jabhat al-Nusra official

Abu Adnan, a 35-year-old religious scholar and Shari’a law official in Jabhat al-Nusra’s leadership in the Aleppo area, gave an interview with Rania Abouzeid for Time magazine.

The interview took place in a town in northern Syria, in the countryside outside Aleppo. I was not blindfolded nor subjected to a physical security check. I was picked up at a northern Syria border post, driven for about 15 minutes inside the country before the vehicle stopped in front of a black pickup truck waiting in the middle of an otherwise empty stretch of road. There were three men in the vehicle, including Abu Adnan, who silently approached the car I was in, and sat in the backseat. He did not introduce himself until I asked who he was later.

We drove to a small cold concrete room with a tiny window that barely let in any light from an already overcast sky. We sat among boxes of long-life milk and bags of blankets and winter clothes waiting to be distributed. Our host, the driver, tried to start a portable gas heater, but there was no gas.

“America has called us terrorists because it says that some of our tactics bear the fingerprints of al-Qaeda in Iraq, like our explosives and the car bombs,” Abu Adnan said, his breath condensing as he spoke. “We are not like al-Qaeda in Iraq, we are not of them.”

Jabhat al-Nusra does count Syrian veterans of the Iraq war among its numbers, men who bring expertise — especially the manufacture of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) — to the front in Syria. Still, Jabhat al-Nusra is not the only rebel outfit to use IEDs and other groups — some so-called moderates operating under the loose umbrella of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have also allegedly used suicide bombers who were either willing or unwilling (i.e prisoners). Like Jabhat al-Nusra, a number of other Islamist groups also want to install an Islamic state in Syria, while even secular rebel units increasingly speak in ugly sectarian terms that demonize minorities, particularly members of Assad’s Alawite sect. Yet only Jabhat al-Nusra’s tactics were designated as “terrorist” by a U.S. administration that admits it is still trying to understand the various armed elements in the Syrian conflict, fueling all manner of theories about why Jabhat al-Nusra was slapped with the description. Also why time the announcement just as rebels as a whole seem to have gained a renewed momentum? The key, it seems, is the alleged links to al-Qaeda in Iraq.

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Syrian military police chief al-Shalal defects

BBC News reports: The commander of Syria’s military police has defected from President Bashar-al Assad’s government and reportedly fled to Turkey.

Lt Gen Abulaziz al-Shalal is one of the highest-ranking officials to join the uprising against the Syrian regime.

The army had failed to protect Syrians and turned into “gangs of murder”, the general said in a video statement.

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What turned Jaron Lanier against the Web?

Ron Rosenbaum writes: I couldn’t help thinking of John Le Carré’s spy novels as I awaited my rendezvous with Jaron Lanier in a corner of the lobby of the stylish W Hotel just off Union Square in Manhattan. Le Carré’s espionage tales, such as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, are haunted by the spectre of the mole, the defector, the double agent, who, from a position deep inside, turns against the ideology he once professed fealty to.

And so it is with Jaron Lanier and the ideology he helped create, Web 2.0 futurism, digital utopianism, which he now calls “digital Maoism,” indicting “internet intellectuals,” accusing giants like Facebook and Google of being “spy agencies.” Lanier was one of the creators of our current digital reality and now he wants to subvert the “hive mind,” as the web world’s been called, before it engulfs us all, destroys political discourse, economic stability, the dignity of personhood and leads to “social catastrophe.” Jaron Lanier is the spy who came in from the cold 2.0.

To understand what an important defector Lanier is, you have to know his dossier. As a pioneer and publicizer of virtual-reality technology (computer-simulated experiences) in the ’80s, he became a Silicon Valley digital-guru rock star, later renowned for his giant bushel-basket-size headful of dreadlocks and Falstaffian belly, his obsession with exotic Asian musical instruments, and even a big-label recording contract for his modernist classical music. (As he later told me, he once “opened for Dylan.” )

The colorful, prodigy-like persona of Jaron Lanier—he was in his early 20s when he helped make virtual reality a reality—was born among a small circle of first-generation Silicon Valley utopians and artificial-intelligence visionaries. Many of them gathered in, as Lanier recalls, “some run-down bungalows [I rented] by a stream in Palo Alto” in the mid-’80s, where, using capital he made from inventing the early video game hit Moondust, he’d started building virtual-reality machines. In his often provocative and astute dissenting book You Are Not a Gadget, he recalls one of the participants in those early mind-melds describing it as like being “in the most interesting room in the world.” Together, these digital futurists helped develop the intellectual concepts that would shape what is now known as Web 2.0—“information wants to be free,” “the wisdom of the crowd” and the like.

And then, shortly after the turn of the century, just when the rest of the world was turning on to Web 2.0, Lanier turned against it. With a broadside in Wired called “One-Half of a Manifesto,” he attacked the idea that “the wisdom of the crowd” would result in ever-upward enlightenment. It was just as likely, he argued, that the crowd would devolve into an online lynch mob. [Continue reading…]

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