Monthly Archives: April 2014

Egyptian court sentences top Muslim Brotherhood leader to death

Reuters reports: An Egyptian court sentenced the leader of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and 682 supporters to death on Monday, intensifying a crackdown on the movement that could trigger protests and political violence ahead of an election next month.

The Brotherhood, in a statement issued in London, described the ruling as chilling and said it would “continue to use all peaceful means to end military rule”.

In another case signaling growing intolerance of dissent by military-backed authorities, a pro-democracy movement that helped ignite the uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011 was banned by court order, judicial sources said.

The death sentence passed on Mohamed Badie, the Brotherhood’s general guide, will infuriate members of the group which has been the target of raids, arrests and bans since the army forced President Mohamed Mursi from power in July.

Some Brotherhood members fear pressure from security forces and the courts could drive some young members to violence against the movement’s old enemy, the Egyptian state. [Continue reading…]

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Hamas and the tyranny of labels

Paul Pillar writes: The Israeli prime minister says Hamas is “dedicated to the destruction of Israel.” Actually, Hamas leaders have repeatedly made clear a much different posture, one that involves indefinite peaceful coexistence with Israel even if they officially term it only a hudna or truce. It would be more accurate to say that Israel is dedicated to the destruction of Hamas, an objective that Israel has demonstrated with not just its words but its deeds, including prolonged collective punishment of the population of the Gaza Strip in an effort to strangle the group. Such efforts have included large-scale violence that—although carried out overtly by military forces and thus not termed terrorism—has been every bit as lethal to innocent civilians. In such circumstances, why should Hamas be expected to be the first to go beyond the vocabulary of hudna and mouth some alternative words about the status of its adversary?

The Israeli and U.S. reactions do not seem to take account of the fact that the terms of the announced Hamas-PLO reconciliation are undetermined and still under negotiation. The agreement can involve Hamas moving much more toward the posture of Abbas and the PLO than the other way around. Palestinian Authority representatives already have indicated that there will not be a change in its fundamental stance of recognizing Israel and seeking to resolve the conflict with it peacefully through negotiations. Hamas representatives have pointed out that support for a governing coalition with an established set of policies does not require each party that is part of that government to express identical policies on its own behalf. In fact, that is true of coalition governments everywhere. The coalition government in Britain does things that you won’t find in the Liberal Democrats’ platform. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. senators remove requirement for disclosure over drone strike victims

The Guardian reports: At the behest of the director of national intelligence, US senators have removed a provision from a major intelligence bill that would require the president to publicly disclose information about drone strikes and their victims.

The bill authorizing intelligence operations in fiscal 2014 passed out of the Senate intelligence committee in November, and it originally required the president to issue an annual public report clarifying the total number of “combatants” and “noncombatant civilians” killed or injured by drone strikes in the previous year. It did not require the White House to disclose the total number of strikes worldwide.

But the Guardian has confirmed that Senate leaders have removed the language as they prepare to bring the bill to the floor for a vote, after the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, assured them in a recent letter that the Obama administration was looking for its own ways to disclose more about its highly controversial drone strikes. [Continue reading…]

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Kerry warns Israel could become ‘an apartheid state’

John Kerry echoes former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak. The Daily Beast reports: If there’s no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state,” Secretary of State John Kerry told a room of influential world leaders in a closed-door meeting Friday.

Senior American officials have rarely, if ever, used the term “apartheid” in reference to Israel, and President Obama has previously rejected the idea that the word should apply to Jewish State. Kerry’s use of the loaded term is already rankling Jewish leaders in America—and it could attract unwanted attention in Israel, as well.

It wasn’t the only controversial comment on the Middle East that Kerry made during his remarks to the Trilateral Commission, a recording of which was obtained by The Daily Beast. Kerry also repeated his warning that a failure of Middle East peace talks could lead to a resumption of Palestinian violence against Israeli citizens. He suggested that a change in either the Israeli or Palestinian leadership could make achieving a peace deal more feasible. He lashed out against Israeli settlement-building. And Kerry said that both Israeli and Palestinian leaders share the blame for the current impasse in the talks.

Kerry also said that at some point, he might unveil his own peace deal and tell both sides to “take it or leave it.”

“A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state,” Kerry told the group of senior officials and experts from the U.S., Western Europe, Russia, and Japan. “Once you put that frame in your mind, that reality, which is the bottom line, you understand how imperative it is to get to the two state solution, which both leaders, even yesterday, said they remain deeply committed to.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama announces new U.S. sanctions on Russia over Ukraine

Reuters reports: U.S. President Barack Obama announced new sanctions against some Russians on Monday to stop President Vladimir Putin from fomenting the rebellion in eastern Ukraine, but said he was holding broader measures against Russia’s economy “in reserve.”

On the ground, pro-Moscow rebels showed no sign of curbing their uprising, seizing public buildings in another town in the east. Interfax news agency reported that the mayor of a further major eastern city, Kharkiv, had been shot and was undergoing an operation. It gave no details of the shooting.

Germany demanded Russia act to help secure the release of seven unarmed European military monitors, including four Germans, who have been held by the rebels since Friday.

The new U.S. sanctions, to be outlined in detail later on Monday, will add more people and firms to a list announced last month of figures whose assets are frozen and who are denied visas to travel to the United States. [Continue reading…]

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Mayor of Ukraine’s second-largest city is shot

The New York Times reports: Unidentified gunmen opened fire on the mayor of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, on Monday, seriously wounding him while he was riding a bicycle near a major highway, municipal officials said, potentially shifting the crisis in the east of the country onto new and perilous ground.

The mayor, Gennady A. Kernes, had been regarded as seeking to steer a middle course as pro-Russian militants conduct a campaign of occupations of key facilities in eastern cities that is widely believed to be aimed at drawing the region closer into Moscow’s orbit or prompting a Russian intervention similar to the events that led to the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea.

Municipal officials said that the gunmen shot Mr. Kernes in the back around 12 p.m. local time and that he was undergoing surgery for life-threatening injuries.

No arrests were reported.

The mayor’s death would be the first assassination of a major politician in the east and present a new challenge to the interim authorities in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, who have seemed largely powerless to dislodge pro-Russian militants and regain control of the east.

Mr. Kernes has said he supports a united Ukraine and opposes Russian intervention. [Continue reading…]

The Telegraph reports: Pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine show the media three Ukrainian intelligence officers they say they detained in the town of Gorlivka.

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Post-Soviet states cannot maintain their borders if they defy Moscow, Dugin says

Paul Goble writes: Aleksandr Dugin, the Eurasianist leader who enjoys enormous influence in the Kremlin, says that countries adjoining the Russian Federation “can preserve their territorial integrity only by maintaining good relations with Russia” and that those who cross Moscow can have no such expectations.

In an interview published in Yerkramas, a newspaper directed at the Armenian community in the Russian Federation, Dugin reiterated and then extended comments he made after Azerbaijan voted at the United Nations in the support of Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

Dugin recalled to the Armenian publication that he had said that “Russia is the guarantor of the territorial integrity of each post-Soviet country. Russia is also the guarantor of the territorial integrity of Armenia and Azerbaijan, and it is also the guarantor of Karabakh as well.”

Were Russia to give up these functions, something it is not about to do, Dugin continued, “then the territorial integrity of Armenia and Karabakh will not be guaranteed to the extent that Russia is a proportional power and naturally countries in the zone adjacent to Russia can preserve their territorial integrity exclusively by maintaining good relations with Russia.”

That means that these states “must be either neutral or have close ties,” he said. If they adopt “an anti-Russian policy,” then doubts will arise about the maintenance of their current borders. [Continue reading…]

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What are Russia’s real motivations in Ukraine?

Ruth Deyermond writes: Interpretations of the Ukrainian crisis as engineered by Russia to enable a neo-imperialist land-grab, though understandable in places with a long and unhappy history in relation to Russia such as Poland and Georgia, are mistaken. Russia has never seemed keen to bear the political or economic costs of reacquiring other ex-Soviet states when it can achieve its regional objectives through other instruments.

Russia’s role in the origins of the crisis was differently motivated – attempting to prevent the irrecoverable loss of its most important neighbour to western institutions, it appears to have persuaded the Yanukovych government to pull back from closer ties to the EU. In doing so, it triggered the protests which brought down the Ukrainian government and presented a far more immediate and severe threat to its interests in Ukraine – a radically pro-western, anti-Russian government. Russian actions in Ukraine have been, and continue to be, an attempt to salvage its position in a crisis it helped to create but did not want.

For those in the US and Europe who fear an escalation of the crisis, this should be both positive and negative. The positive aspect is that far from being driven by a crazed, Hitler-like quest for European domination, the objectives of the Putin government appear to be both limited and rational: the protection of its regional security interests and great power status. Escalation of the crisis is precisely what needs to be avoided for this to succeed, which is why Russia appears open to a negotiated resolution. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt sentences 683 to death in latest mass trial of dissidents

The Washington Post reports: An Egyptian court in the southern city of Minya sentenced 683 people to death Monday in the most recent of a series of mass trials that have alarmed the international community, nine months after a military coup ousted Egypt’s first democratically elected president.

The ruling came one month after 529 people were sentenced to death in a similar mass trial in the same courtroom, and it coincided with Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy’s visit to Washington to meet with Secretary of State John F. Kerry in an effort to smooth relations between the United States and one of its most significant Middle East allies.

The defendants, all alleged supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi, included Mohammed Badie, the “supreme guide” of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, which captured the lion’s share of votes in the country’s first democratic parliamentary and presidential elections in 2012. If the sentence is upheld, Badie would be the first Brotherhood leader to face execution in nearly 50 years. [Continue reading…]

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Karen Greenberg: Abu Ghraib never left us

In mid-April, Abu Ghraib was closed down.  It was a grim end for the Iraqi prison where the Bush administration gave autocrat Saddam Hussein a run for his money. The Iraqi government feared it might be overrun by an al-Qaeda offshoot that calls itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. By then, the city of Fallujah for which American troops had fought two bitter, pitched battles back in 2004 had been in the hands of those black-flag-flying insurgents for months.  Needless to say, the American project in Iraq, begun so gloriously — remember Iraqi exiles assuring Vice President Cheney that the invaders would be greeted with “sweets and flowers” — was truly in ruins.  By then, hundreds of thousands had died in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, the insurgencies that followed, and the grimmest of sectarian civil wars.  And the temperature was rising anew in that divided land, where only the Kurdish north was relatively peaceful.  Iraq was once again threatening to fracture, with suicide bombers and car bombs daily occurrences, especially in Shiite areas of the country, and the body count rising rapidly.

The legacy of America’s Iraq is essentially an oil-producing wreck of a state with another autocrat in power, a Shiite government allied to Iran in Baghdad, and a Sunni population in revolt.  That, in short, is the upshot of Washington’s multi-trillion-dollar war.  It might be worth a painting by George W. Bush.  Or maybe the former president should reserve his next round of oils not for the world leaders he met (and Googled), but for those iconic photos from the prison that might have closed in Iraq, but will never close in the American mind.  From the torture troves of Abu Ghraib, there are so many scenes that the former president could focus on in his days of tranquil retirement.

Those photos from hell were, at the time, so run-of-the-mill for the new American Iraq (“as common as cornflakes”) that they were used as screen-savers by U.S. military guards at that prison.  The images then returned to the United States as computer “wallpaper” before making it onto “60 Minutes II” and into our collective brains.  They revealed to this country for the first time that, post-9/11, Washington had taken a cue from the Marquis de Sade and any other set of sadists you cared to invoke.  Of course, the photos and the systematic torture and abuse that went with them at Abu Ghraib were quickly blamed on the usual “few bad apples” and “some hillbilly kids out of control.”

As it happened, those photos that first entered public consciousness 10 years ago this week exposed a genuine American nightmare that led right to the top in Washington and has never ended.  Included in the debacle were Justice Department lawyers who, at the bidding of the highest officials in the land, redefined torture in remarkable ways.  They made it clear, for instance, that the only person who could affirm whether torture had actually taken place was the torturer himself.  (If he didn’t think he had tortured, he hadn’t, or so the reasoning then went.)

No one has followed this endlessly grim tale more assiduously than TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg, the chronicler of the creation of the prison at Guantanamo Bay and the editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib.  Today, she explores the shameful tale of why, a decade later, the Abu Ghraib affair remains without an end. Tom Engelhardt 

The road from Abu Ghraib
A torture story without a hero or an ending
By Karen J. Greenberg

It’s mind-boggling. Torture is still up for grabs in America. No one questions anymore whether the CIA waterboarded one individual 83 times or another 186 times. The basic facts are no longer in dispute either by those who champion torture or those who, like myself, despise the very idea of it. No one questions whether some individuals died being tortured in American custody.  (They did.) No one questions that it was a national policy devised by those at the very highest levels of government. (It was.) But many, it seems, still believe that the torture policy, politely renamed in its heyday “the enhanced interrogation program,” was a good thing for the country.

Now, the nation awaits the newest chapter in the torture debate without having any idea whether it will close the book on American torture or open a path of pain and shame into the distant future. No one yet knows whether we will be allowed to awake from the nightmarish and unacceptable world of illegality and obfuscation into which torture and the network of offshore prisons, or “black sites,” plunged us all.

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Low-level federal judges balking at law enforcement requests for electronic evidence

The Washington Post reports: Judges at the lowest levels of the federal judiciary are balking at sweeping requests by law enforcement officials for cellphone and other sensitive personal data, declaring the demands overly broad and at odds with basic constitutional rights.

This rising assertiveness by magistrate judges — the worker bees of the federal court system — has produced rulings that elate civil libertarians and frustrate investigators, forcing them to meet or challenge tighter rules for collecting electronic evidence.

Among the most aggressive opinions have come from D.C. Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola, a bow-tied court veteran who in recent months has blocked wide-ranging access to the Facebook page of Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis and the iPhone of the Georgetown University student accused of making ricin in his dorm room. In another case, he deemed a law enforcement request for the entire contents of an e-mail account “repugnant” to the U.S. Constitution. [Continue reading…]

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How the world failed on climate change

Brad Plumer writes: It was the early 1990s. Climate scientists had long known that humans were warming up the planet. But politicians were just beginning to grasp that it would take a huge coordinated effort to get nations to burn fewer fossil fuels and avoid sharp temperature increases in the decades ahead.

Those policymakers needed a common goal — a way to say, Here’s how bad things will get and This is what we need to do to stop it. And that posed a dilemma. No one could really agree on how much global warming was unacceptable. How high did the seas need to rise before we had a serious problem? How much heat was too much?

Around this time, an advisory council of scientists in Germany proposed a stunningly simple way to think about climate change. Look, they reasoned, human civilization hasn’t been around all that long. And for the last 13,000 years, Earth’s climate has fluctuated within a narrow band. So, to be on the safe side, we should prevent global average temperatures from rising more than 2° Celsius (or 3.6° Fahrenheit) above what they were just before the dawn of industrialization.

Critics grumbled that the 2°C limit seemed arbitrary or overly simplistic. But scientists were already compiling evidence that the risks of global warming became especially daunting somewhere above the 2°C threshold: rapid sea-level rise, the risk of crop failure, the collapse of coral reefs. And policymakers loved the idea of a simple, easily digestible target. So it stuck.

By 2009, nearly every government in the world had endorsed the 2°C limit — global warming beyond that level was deemed “dangerous.” And so, every year, the world’s leaders meet at UN climate conferences to discuss policies and emissions cuts that they hope will keep us below 2°C. Climate experts churn out endless papers on how we can adapt to 2°C of warming (or less).

Two decades later, there’s just one major problem with this picture. The idea that the world can stay below 2°C looks increasingly delusional. [Continue reading…]

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Pro-Russian commander in eastern Ukraine sheds light on origin of militants

The Wall Street Journal reports: The elusive commander of the pro-Russia militants who have seized the east Ukrainian city of Slovyansk has revealed himself for the first time since the crisis began, saying in a taped interview that his armed crew arrived in Ukraine’s east from Crimea.

Igor Strelkov, the commander whom officials in Kiev have described as a Russian intelligence officer, gave a picture of the fighters he brought to Slovyansk, who since early April have transformed the city into the epicenter of eastern Ukraine’s pro-Russia unrest. The new government in Kiev has described Slovyansk as the “most dangerous city in Ukraine.”

“The unit that I came to Slovyansk with was put together in Crimea. I’m not going to hide that,” Mr. Strelkov told the Moscow-based Komosomolskaya Pravda tabloid in a video interview released Saturday. “It was formed by volunteers—I would say half or two-thirds of them citizens of Ukraine.”

The unit includes people from western and central Ukraine, as well as local fighters from the region itself, according to the commander. “Strictly speaking, it was by their invitation that the unit arrived in Slovyansk,” he said.

Ukraine’s State Security Agency had earlier described Mr. Strelkov as an active-duty officer of Russia’s elite Main Intelligence Department. Mr. Strelkov didn’t directly address the Russian reporter’s question about possible Russian military-intelligence involvement in his mission. The commander also didn’t speak about himself or his background. Moscow has denied its involvement in the unrest in eastern Ukraine.

Most of the men in the command possess war experience, including former service in the Russian or Ukrainian militaries and tours in Chechnya, Central Asia, the former Yugoslavia and Iraq, according to Mr. Strelkov. He said some “even managed to visit” Syria. [Continue reading…]

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Rap News: Israel vs. Palestine

Decades of failed peace talks have led nowhere; but do not lose hope just yet. Join Robert Foster as he attempts to host the first ever Middle East Peace Raps, using rhyme and reason to bring together Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, and a representative of Hamas. We investigate the key arguments, counter-arguments and ad-hominems from both sides. But the picture would not be complete without a thorough discussion of “America’s last taboo”, as Edward Said once referred to it: the USA’s role as Israel’s best (and only) buddy in the world (Ok, together with Australia).

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Holocaust ‘most heinous crime’ of modern history, says Mahmoud Abbas

The Associated Press reports: The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has called the Holocaust “the most heinous crime” of modern history and expressed his sympathy for the victims – a rare acknowledgment by an Arab leader of Jewish suffering during the Nazi genocide.

Abbas’s comments appeared, in part, aimed at reaching out to Israeli public opinion at a time of deep crisis in Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. The remarks were published by the Palestinian official news agency WAFA hours before the start of Israel’s annual Holocaust commemoration.

The decades-old conflict has been accompanied by mutual mistrust among Israelis and Palestinians. Many Israelis fear that Palestinians are not truly ready to accept a Jewish presence in the Holy Land, and that widespread ignorance or even denial of the Holocaust among Palestinians is an expression of that attitude.

Denials of or attempts to minimise the scale of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed during the second world war, are widespread in the Arab world.

Many Palestinians fear that if they acknowledge the Holocaust they will diminish their own claims based on years of suffering, including their uprooting during Israel’s creation in 1948 and decades under Israeli occupation.

Abbas’s office said he discussed the Holocaust in a meeting with an American rabbi, Marc Schneier, who visited Abbas’s headquarters in Ramallah last week. [Continue reading…]

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