Monthly Archives: November 2013

Five reasons Israel won’t attack Iran

Zachary Keck writes: Although not a member of the P5+1 itself, Israel has always loomed large over the negotiations concerning Iran’s nuclear program. For example, in explaining French opposition to a possible nuclear deal earlier this month, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius stated: “The security concerns of Israel and all the countries of the region have to be taken into account.”

Part of Fabius’ concern derives from the long-held fear that Israel will launch a preventive strike against Iran to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons. For some, this possibility remains all too real despite the important interim agreement the P5+1 and Iran reached this weekend. For example, when asked on ABC’s This Week whether Israel would attack Iran while the interim deal is in place, William Kristol responded: “I don’t think the prime minister will think he is constrained by the U.S. deciding to have a six-month deal. […] six months, one year, I mean, if they’re going to break out, they’re going to break out.”

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done little to dispel this notion. Besides blasting the deal as a “historic mistake,” Netanyahu said Israel “is not obliged to the agreement” and warned “the regime in Iran is dedicated to destroying Israel and Israel has the right and obligation to defend itself with its own forces against every threat.”

Many dismiss this talk as bluster, however. Over at Bloomberg View, for instance, Jeffrey Goldberg argues that the nuclear deal has “boxed-in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu so comprehensively that it’s unimaginable Israel will strike Iran in the foreseeable future.” Eurasia Group’s Cliff Kupchan similarly argued: “The chance of Israeli strikes during the period of the interim agreement drops to virtually zero.”

Although the interim deal does further reduce Israel’s propensity to attack, the truth is that the likelihood of an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities has always been greatly exaggerated. There are at least five reasons why Israel isn’t likely to attack Iran. [Continue reading…]

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Americans give thanks — for television

Jason Lynch writes: Thanksgiving is a day when more than 100 million Americans will observe the most honored of traditions: gathering with family and friends to watch as many as 15 hours straight of TV.

More than any other major American holiday, Thanksgiving has become a TV-centric day, where people seem to spend far more time in front of the television than they do at the dinner table. And the broadcast networks are taking advantage of that rapt audience through marquee programs that last year attracted more than 114 million viewers.

The TV turkey day festivities kick off at 9am with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC, which averaged 22.4 million viewers last year, its largest audience since 2001. NBC Research estimates that 43.2 million people watched at least a portion of the parade. An additional 7.5 million CBS viewers watched that network’s unofficial coverage of the New York City event, billed as The Thanksgiving Day Parade on CBS. The parade concludes at 12pm, and segues into NBC’s coverage of The National Dog Show, which drew 9.2 million viewers in 2012. NBC Research estimates that 19.3 million viewers took in at least part of the Dog Show. [Continue reading…]

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Iran invites inspectors to nuclear site

The New York Times reports: Five days after Iran struck a landmark accord with world powers on its nuclear program, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced on Thursday that Tehran had invited its inspectors to visit a heavy water production plant linked to the deal — the first tangible step since the agreement was concluded.

In a speech in Vienna, the director general of the agency, Yukiya Amano, said the invitation was for inspectors to travel to the plant in Arak, in central Iran, on Dec. 8. Mr. Amano told reporters that it was “for sure” that inspectors would accept the offer.

The invitation was limited to the heavy water production facility on the same site as a reactor under construction to which international inspectors have had some access, Mr. Amano said. The facility producing heavy water, used in some types of reactors to control nuclear activity, has been off limits to inspectors for more than two years.

Part of the deal in Geneva specifically provided for Iran not to produce fuel for the Arak plant, install additional reactor components there or put the plant into operation. If it became fully operational, the reactor would produce plutonium that could be used in a nuclear weapon.

In return for that and other curbs on Tehran’s nuclear program, the powers promised a limited easing of the international economic sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy.

The speed with which Tehran offered access to Arak was taken by some analysts as a sign that Iran’s leaders wanted to press ahead with the deal, which is intended as an interim accord lasting six months during which negotiators are to discuss a comprehensive settlement. [Continue reading…]

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How Congress could derail a nuclear deal with Iran

Cameron Abadi writes: When Secretary of State John Kerry joined the nuclear negotiations at the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva last Saturday, he employed the oldest negotiating trick in the book, evoking Congress as the bad cop to the Obama administration’s good cop. Kerry told Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif that if they failed to reach an agreement that day, the Obama administration would be unable to prevent Congress from passing additional sanctions against Iran. Less than 24 hours later, Kerry and Zarif walked into the hotel lobby to announce that they had struck a deal to freeze Iran’s nuclear program temporarily.

In the face of criticism from members of Congress and U.S. allies in the Middle East, administration officials have insisted that the Geneva agreement is just the first step toward a more far-reaching disarmament deal. But such a deal will require that the Obama administration promise not just to forestall the imposition of new sanctions, but also to reduce dramatically the sanctions already in place. And that depends on the cooperation of a Congress that has been singularly uninterested in assuming the role of good cop in the showdown with Iran.

The White House has some discretion to rescind the Iran sanctions without Congress’s approval. The method for removing any given set of sanctions depends on how those sanctions were passed in the first place. If they’re the product of an executive order, as many of the existing sanctions against Iran are, removing them requires only that the White House decide to stop enforcing them. That’s exactly how Obama will be making good on its promise to Iran, as part of last week’s interim agreement, to restore access to $7 billion held in foreign bank accounts.

Removing sanctions that have been passed into law by Congress, however, is a much more difficult challenge. Despite the partisan gridlock in Washington over the past several years, bipartisan majorities have managed to cooperate on three separate rounds of sanctions since 2010, including measures targeting Iran’s central bank, which Iran will undoubtedly want rescinded. Removing those laws from the books will force the White House to go through Congress all over again. That will require overcoming the partisanship and procedural hurdles that have consumed Congress in recent years. [Continue reading…]

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Iran allowed some construction at key nuclear site under interim deal, U.S. says

The Associated Press and JTA report: The U.S. said Wednesday that Iran can undertake some construction work at a key nuclear facility as long as fuel isn’t produced and advances aren’t made on a planned heavy water reactor.

The Arak site was among the thorniest issues negotiators sought to resolve in last weekend’s nuclear agreement in Geneva.

The White House said afterward Iran wouldn’t advance its “activities” at Arak or progress toward plutonium production. It spelled out several more constraints.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Wednesday while his country was honoring the deal, construction on building projects would continue.

Iran opens contacts with major Western oil companies (Financial Times)

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‘No military solution’ in Syria, admit both sides

The New York Times: The Syrian government announced on Wednesday that it will participate in talks scheduled for January to try to end the country’s civil war but added that its official delegation will attend with the blessing of President Bashar al-Assad and that it does not intend “to hand over power to anyone.”

The Associated Press reports: Syrian state TV says government forces have captured a western town near the border with Lebanon, a week after opposition fighters seized it.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirms troops are almost in full control of Deir Attiyeh, whose population is nearly a third Christian.

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Egyptian women jailed for 11 years for peaceful protests

Al Jazeera reports: A group of women have been jailed for 11 years for a peaceful protest in Alexandria, as Egypt’s interim prime minister gave a strong defence of a law further restricting public demonstrations.

The women, supporters of the deposed president Mohamed Morsi, received 11-year jail sentences on Wednesday for forming a human chain and passing out flyers earlier this month. Seven minors among the group were remanded to juvenile detention until they reach legal age. The youngest in the group is 15 years old.

Six men, described by prosecutors as Muslim Brotherhood leaders, were sentenced to 15-year terms, accused of being members of a “terrorist organisation”.

In a news conference also on Wednesday, Hazem el-Beblawi, the interim prime minister, defended a new law requires which citizens to apply for permission before marching as a “necessary step”.

“The cabinet confirms that it will apply the law fully to show its support for the police in the face of terrorism. The law is subject to change, but through the proper channels.” [Continue reading…]

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Rumsfeld’s war and its consequences now

Mark Danner writes: A bare two weeks after the attacks of September 11, at the end of a long and emotional day at the White House, a sixty-nine-year-old politician and businessman—a midwesterner, born of modest means but grown wealthy and prominent and powerful—returned to his enormous suite of offices on the seventh floor of the flood-lit and wounded Pentagon and, as was his habit, scrawled out a memorandum on his calendar:

Interesting day—
NSC mtg. with President—
As [it] ended he asked to see me alone…
After the meeting ended I went to Oval Office—He was alone
He was at his desk—
He talked about the meet
Then he said I want you to develop a plan to invade Ir[aq]. Do it outside the normal channels. Do it creatively so we don’t have to take so much cover [?]

Then he said Dick [Cheney] told me about your son—I broke down and cried. I couldn’t speak—
said I love him so much
He said I can’t imagine the burden you are carrying for the country and your son—
He said much more.
Stood and hugged me
An amazing day—
He is a fine human being—
I am so grateful he is President.
I am proud to be working for him.

It is a touching and fateful scene, this trading of confidences between the recovering alcoholic president and the defense secretary whose son is struggling with drug addiction, and shows the intimacy that can be forged amid danger and turmoil and stress. Trust brings trust, confidence builds on confidence: the young inexperienced president, days before American bombs begin falling on Afghanistan, wants a “creative” plan to invade Iraq, developed “outside the normal channels”; the old veteran defense secretary, in a rare moment of weakness, craves human comfort and understanding.

And yet they’d hardly known one another, these two, before George W. Bush chose him for his secretary of defense nine months before. To George W., Donald Henry Rumsfeld had been little more than a political enemy of the Bush family. It was Rumsfeld, as President Gerald Ford’s ambitious young chief of staff, who had been instrumental in the so-called “Halloween Massacre” in 1975 that—so the legend goes—had helped clear the way for his own presidential ambitions by shunting George H.W. Bush, the wealthy eastern born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth preppie who was the scrappy Illinois-born wrestler’s main rival, off to be CIA director. This was a job for which Bush could gain Senate confirmation only by agreeing not to accept the vice-presidential nomination in 1976—even as Rumsfeld, as he tells us in his memoir, “for the third time in three years,…found myself being discussed for the vice presidential nomination.” As Bush family consigliere James A. Baker III cautioned George W. a quarter-century later, when Rumsfeld’s name was bruited for secretary of defense, “You know what he did to your daddy.”

Certainly he knew, and one can be forgiven for suspecting that this knowledge might have been a strong part of the attraction, perhaps for both men. When Errol Morris asks Rumsfeld whether his former aide Dick Cheney had brought him into the Bush administration, Rumsfeld replies, “I assume that’s the case. I don’t think George W. Bush’s father recommended it,” and then beams with self-congratulatory mischievousness. [Continue reading…]

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Fear rises of return to sectarian violence in Iraq

The New York Times reports: A family of five killed in their home. A group of men shot dead in a field. Eight bodies, tied up in cable, discovered on a farm, each with a bullet in the head.

More than 300 Iraqis have been killed this month in bombings and shootings in markets, along roadsides, near schools and mosques, and in bakeries. On Tuesday, the United Nations Security Council condemned the recent spike in violence in Iraq and the deliberate targeting of places where civilians congregate.

But on Wednesday, the daily tally of violence took on an air of pinpoint deliberation with the execution-style killings of several groups of civilians, a grim reminder of the worst days of sectarian warfare in the country. While major bombings have become common, the killings reintroduced the prospect of a resurgence in the type of violence that rattled Iraq in 2006 and 2007.

The bodies of the eight young men tied in cable were found on a farm in Jubor, a Sunni city south of Baghdad, the same place other bodies had been dumped during the sectarian turmoil seven years ago.

The bodies of five men shot in the head and chest were found in an open field in Shula, a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad, the authorities said.

The five family members, including two boys and a girl, were killed by gunshot in their house in Hurriya, a Shiite-majority neighborhood of Baghdad, the police said. They were identified as Sunni, but no further information about them was immediately released.

The 18 dead were among at least 40 people, including security forces, who were killed in attacks across Iraq on Wednesday. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. nears decision to split leadership of NSA, Cyber Command

Reuters reports: The White House is nearing a decision on splitting up the eavesdropping National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, which conducts cyber warfare, a proposed reform prompted in part by revelations of NSA’s widespread snooping, individuals briefed on the matter said on Wednesday.

As part of the emerging plan, the NSA likely would get a civilian director for the first time in its 61-year history, the individuals said.

Both agencies are now headed by the same person, Army General Keith Alexander, who is retiring in March as NSA’s longest-serving director.

While Alexander is highly regarded in the intelligence community, critics have questioned the current arrangement. They say it concentrates too much power in one individual and that the two agencies have different missions. [Continue reading…]

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Pakistan’s PTI party names CIA station chief

Firedoglake: A political party in Pakistan has named the CIA station chief in the country and accused the chief and CIA director John Brennan of murder for their role in a recent drone strike in Hangu, where an Islamic school was targeted.

The drone strike on November 21 killed six and, injured a “large number of those present including children,” according to a letter submitted to police by Dr. Shireen M. Mazari, the central information secretary for Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI).

Following the strike in the Khyber Pakhtunkwa province, a settled urban area, a First Information Report (FIR) was submitted to a nearby police station asking them to investigate crimes committed by those who were behind the strike.

Firedoglake is not revealing the alleged station chief’s name. The identity of the alleged CIA station chief in Pakistan has already been exposed by PTI, and his alleged name is circulating in the country.

The letter nominates Brennan and alleged CIA station chief Craig Osth for “committing the gross offenses of committing murder and waging war against Pakistan.” [Continue reading…]

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Penny Lane: Gitmo’s other secret CIA facility

The Associated Press reports: A few hundred yards from the administrative offices of the Guantánamo Bay prison, hidden behind a ridge covered in thick scrub and cactus, sits a closely held secret.

A dirt road winds its way to a clearing where eight small cottages sit in two rows of four. They have long been abandoned. The special detachment of Marines that once provided security is gone.

But in the early years after 9/11, these cottages were part of a covert CIA program. Its secrecy has outlasted black prisons, waterboarding and rendition.

In these buildings, CIA officers turned terrorists into double agents and sent them home.

It was a risky gamble. If it worked, their agents might help the CIA find terrorist leaders to kill with drones. But officials knew there was a chance that some prisoners might quickly spurn their deal and kill Americans.

For the CIA, that was an acceptable risk in a dangerous business. For the American public, which was never told, it was one of the many secret trade-offs the government made on its behalf. At the same time the government used the threat of terrorism to justify imprisoning people indefinitely, it was releasing dangerous people from prison to work for the CIA.

Nearly a dozen current and former U.S. officials described aspects of the program to The Associated Press. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the secret program, even though it ended in about 2006. [Continue reading…]

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Iran deal exposes the limits of the Israel lobby’s power

Mohammed Ayoob writes: The impact of the Iran nuclear deal is unlikely to be limited to the nuclear proliferation arena. While the question whether the deal has prevented Iran from ever developing nuclear weapons capability or has merely postponed the inevitable by a few months or years will continue to be debated, one should not ignore the wider strategic consequences of the agreement for several reasons.

First, it has the potential of introducing a sea change in the relationship of the United States that could unfetter Iranian diplomatic capabilities that can be used in pursuit of its broader regional goals. This is the reason why Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies have reacted so harshly and negatively to the agreement. If things proceed down the path of an Iranian-U.S. rapprochement in the context of a war weary American public opinion, Riyadh can no longer automatically depend upon U.S. diplomatic and military support against Iran in its competition for power and influence in the Persian Gulf.

Second, it has demonstrated unequivocally that on vital strategic issues in which U.S. and Israeli interests diverge Washington does possess the residual political will to make hard decisions in the teeth of Israeli opposition, something that analysts of all hues had doubted for a long time. This may signal the beginning of the unraveling of the prevailing myth that U.S. policy toward the Middle East is shaped in Tel Aviv and not in Washington. It also explodes the myth that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is an all-powerful force when it comes to fashioning U.S. policy toward the Middle East. Its consequences, therefore, go beyond the Iranian nuclear issue and are likely to impact public perceptions in the United States and abroad regarding the deadlock over the Palestinian issue and the likely direction of U.S. policy on the unending Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This explains Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s uncompromising hostility toward the Geneva agreement even at the expense of doing grave damage to Israeli-U.S. relations. [Continue reading…]

One of the paradoxes of the practice of railing against power — be that the power of the Israel lobby, or government, or corporations — is that those who persistently issue such warnings can be reluctant to acknowledge that such power has limits.

Thus in the current situation there are those who will insist that sooner or later Congress, on the command of AIPAC, will impose new sanctions and destroy the agreement Iran. Or, that due to pressure from Israel and Saudi Arabia the current agreement will expire without a permanent agreement being reached.

Both of those scenarios are certainly possibilities but my sense is that what this weekend’s agreement reveals is that the opponents of U.S.-Iranian rapprochement are manifestly swimming against the international tide.

The neocon trolls, beguiled by their own apocalyptic rhetoric, are convinced that the evil Islamic republic, hellbent on its pursuit of nuclear weapons, can pursue no other course. Yet what all the evidence makes clear is that Iran’s leaders — like those of any other state — are acting in accordance with what they perceive as their own interests and currently they see those interests best served by improved international relations.

The lesson here is about flexibility. Those with the skill to hold on to power are often more pragmatic than their opponents.

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Iran deal could reconfigure the Mideast

Rami G. Khouri writes: The most striking implication of the agreement signed in Geneva last weekend to ensure that Iran’s nuclear industry does not develop nuclear weapons while gradually removing the sanctions on the country is more about Iran than it is about Iran’s nuclear industry. The important new dynamic that has been set in motion is likely to profoundly impact almost every significant political situation around the Middle East and the world, including both domestic conditions within countries and diplomatic relations among countries.This agreement breaks the long spell of estrangement and hostility between the U.S. and Iran, and signals important new diplomatic behavior by both countries, which augurs well for the entire region. It is also likely to trigger the resumption of the suspended domestic political and cultural evolution of Iran, which also will spur new developments across the Middle East.

Perhaps we can see the changes starting to occur in Iran as similar to the developments in Poland in the early 1980s, when the bold political thrust of the Solidarity movement that enjoyed popular support broke the Soviet Union’s hold on Polish political life, and a decade later led to the collapse of the entire Soviet Empire. The resumption of political evolution inside Iran will probably move rapidly in the years ahead, as renewed economic growth, more personal freedoms, and more satisfying interactions with the region and the world expand and strengthen the relatively “liberal” forces around Rouhani, Rafsanjani, Khatami and others; this should slowly temper, then redefine and reposition, the Islamic revolutionary autocrats who have controlled the power structure for decades but whose hard-line controls are increasingly alien to the sentiments of ordinary Iranians.

These domestic and regional reconfigurations will occur slowly, comprising the situations in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Gulf Cooperation Council states led by Saudi Arabia. The critical link remains a healthy, normal, nonhostile relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which I suspect will start to come about in the months ahead, as both grasp the exaggerated nature of their competition for influence in the region and learn to behave like normal countries. They will learn to compete on the basis of their soft power among a region of half a billion people who increasingly feel and behave like citizens who have the right to choose how they live, rather than to be dictated to and herded like cattle. [Continue reading…]

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Americans back Iran deal by 2-to-1 margin

Reuters reports: Americans back a newly brokered nuclear deal with Iran by a 2-to-1 margin and are very wary of the United States resorting to military action against Tehran even if the historic diplomatic effort falls through, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Tuesday.

The findings were rare good news in the polls for President Barack Obama, whose approval ratings have dropped in recent weeks because of the botched rollout of his signature healthcare reform law.

According to the Reuters/Ipsos survey, 44 percent of Americans support the interim deal reached between Iran and six world powers in Geneva last weekend, and 22 percent oppose it.

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Fallout from NSA surveillance threatens ‘the existence of the World Wide Web’ says agency’s former director

The Wall Street Journal reports: Revelations about the NSA’s surveillance operations are fueling international efforts to divide up the Internet by country, [Michael Hayden, former director of both the NSA and the CIA] said, which is a movement the U.S. government — and U.S. tech companies — have worked hard to prevent.

“This is threatening the existence of the World Wide Web,” Mr. Hayden said, adding that a Balkanization of the Internet is “a no-fooling danger.”

In the near term, Germany wants a “no-spy” agreement and has sought to insert tough data-privacy measures into a long-sought U.S.-European trade pact. Ms. Merkel told parliament last Monday the NSA affair was “putting to the test” Germany’s relationship with the U.S., and the trade pact negotiations in particular.

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Microsoft boosts effort to encrypt its Internet traffic to avoid NSA spying

The Washington Post reports: Microsoft is moving toward a major new effort to encrypt its Internet traffic amid fears that the National Security Agency may have broken into its global communications links, said people familiar with the emerging plans.

Suspicions at Microsoft, while building for several months, sharpened in October when it was reported that the NSA was intercepting traffic inside the private networks of Google and Yahoo, two industry rivals with similar global infrastructures, said people with direct knowledge of the company’s deliberations. They said top Microsoft executives are meeting this week to decide what encryption initiatives to deploy and how quickly.

Documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden suggest — but do not prove — that the company is right to be concerned. Two previously unreleased slides that describe operations against Google and Yahoo include references to Microsoft’s Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger services. A separate NSA e-mail mentions Microsoft Passport, a Web-based service formerly offered by Microsoft, as a possible target of that same surveillance project, called MUSCULAR, which was first disclosed by The Washington Post last month.

Though Microsoft officials said they had no independent verification of the NSA targeting the company in this way, general counsel Brad Smith said Tuesday that it would be “very disturbing” and a possible constitutional breach if true. [Continue reading…]

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