Ali Farzat founded in 2001 Syria’s first satirical weekly, Ad Domari. In August 2011, he was attacked by Bashar al-Assad’s militia who broke his hands. The incident prompted international condemnation of the Assad regime. Farzat was awarded the European parliament Sakharov prize for freedom of thought.
The Guardian reports: The US policy of using aerial drones to carry out targeted killings presents a major challenge to the system of international law that has endured since the second world war, a United Nations investigator has said.
Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, told a conference in Geneva that President Obama’s attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, carried out by the CIA, would encourage other states to flout long-established human rights standards.
In his strongest critique so far of drone strikes, Heyns suggested some may even constitute “war crimes”. His comments come amid rising international unease over the surge in killings by remotely piloted unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
Addressing the conference, which was organised by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a second UN rapporteur, Ben Emmerson QC, who monitors counter-terrorism, announced he would be prioritising inquiries into drone strikes.
The London-based barrister said the issue was moving rapidly up the international agenda after China and Russia this week jointly issued a statement at the UN Human Rights Council, backed by other countries, condemning drone attacks.
If the US or any other states responsible for attacks outside recognised war zones did not establish independent investigations into each killing, Emmerson emphasised, then “the UN itself should consider establishing an investigatory body”.
Kenneth N Waltz, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University, writes: Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly, which has proved remarkably durable for the past four decades, has long fueled instability in the Middle East. In no other region of the world does a lone, unchecked nuclear state exist. It is Israel’s nuclear arsenal, not Iran’s desire for one, that has contributed most to the current crisis. Power, after all, begs to be balanced. What is surprising about the Israeli case is that it has taken so long for a potential balancer to emerge.
Of course, it is easy to understand why Israel wants to remain the sole nuclear power in the region and why it is willing to use force to secure that status. In 1981, Israel bombed Iraq to prevent a challenge to its nuclear monopoly. It did the same to Syria in 2007 and is now considering similar action against Iran. But the very acts that have allowed Israel to maintain its nuclear edge in the short term have prolonged an imbalance that is unsustainable in the long term. Israel’s proven ability to strike potential nuclear rivals with impunity has inevitably made its enemies anxious to develop the means to prevent Israel from doing so again. In this way, the current tensions are best viewed not as the early stages of a relatively recent Iranian nuclear crisis but rather as the final stages of a decades-long Middle East nuclear crisis that will end only when a balance of military power is restored.
One reason the danger of a nuclear Iran has been grossly exaggerated is that the debate surrounding it has been distorted by misplaced worries and fundamental misunderstandings of how states generally behave in the international system. The first prominent concern, which undergirds many others, is that the Iranian regime is innately irrational. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, Iranian policy is made not by “mad mullahs” but by perfectly sane ayatollahs who want to survive just like any other leaders. Although Iran’s leaders indulge in inflammatory and hateful rhetoric, they show no propensity for self-destruction. It would be a grave error for policymakers in the United States and Israel to assume otherwise.
Yet that is precisely what many U.S. and Israeli officials and analysts have done. Portraying Iran as irrational has allowed them to argue that the logic of nuclear deterrence does not apply to the Islamic Republic. If Iran acquired a nuclear weapon, they warn, it would not hesitate to use it in a first strike against Israel, even though doing so would invite massive retaliation and risk destroying everything the Iranian regime holds dear.
Although it is impossible to be certain of Iranian intentions, it is far more likely that if Iran desires nuclear weapons, it is for the purpose of providing for its own security, not to improve its offensive capabilities (or destroy itself). Iran may be intransigent at the negotiating table and defiant in the face of sanctions, but it still acts to secure its own preservation. Iran’s leaders did not, for example, attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz despite issuing blustery warnings that they might do so after the EU announced its planned oil embargo in January. The Iranian regime clearly concluded that it did not want to provoke what would surely have been a swift and devastating American response to such a move.
Nevertheless, even some observers and policymakers who accept that the Iranian regime is rational still worry that a nuclear weapon would embolden it, providing Tehran with a shield that would allow it to act more aggressively and increase its support for terrorism. Some analysts even fear that Iran would directly provide terrorists with nuclear arms. The problem with these concerns is that they contradict the record of every other nuclear weapons state going back to 1945. History shows that when countries acquire the bomb, they feel increasingly vulnerable and become acutely aware that their nuclear weapons make them a potential target in the eyes of major powers. This awareness discourages nuclear states from bold and aggressive action. Maoist China, for example, became much less bellicose after acquiring nuclear weapons in 1964, and India and Pakistan have both become more cautious since going nuclear. There is little reason to believe Iran would break this mold.
As for the risk of a handoff to terrorists, no country could transfer nuclear weapons without running a high risk of being found out. U.S. surveillance capabilities would pose a serious obstacle, as would the United States’ impressive and growing ability to identify the source of fissile material. Moreover, countries can never entirely control or even predict the behavior of the terrorist groups they sponsor. Once a country such as Iran acquires a nuclear capability, it will have every reason to maintain full control over its arsenal. After all, building a bomb is costly and dangerous. It would make little sense to transfer the product of that investment to parties that cannot be trusted or managed.
Another oft-touted worry is that if Iran obtains the bomb, other states in the region will follow suit, leading to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. But the nuclear age is now almost 70 years old, and so far, fears of proliferation have proved to be unfounded. Properly defined, the term “proliferation” means a rapid and uncontrolled spread. Nothing like that has occurred; in fact, since 1970, there has been a marked slowdown in the emergence of nuclear states. There is no reason to expect that this pattern will change now. Should Iran become the second Middle Eastern nuclear power since 1945, it would hardly signal the start of a landslide. When Israel acquired the bomb in the 1960s, it was at war with many of its neighbors. Its nuclear arms were a much bigger threat to the Arab world than Iran’s program is today. If an atomic Israel did not trigger an arms race then, there is no reason a nuclear Iran should now. [Continue reading…]
M.J. Rosenberg writes: I have a prediction about how the United States will respond if the Egyptian revolution is ultimately utterly crushed by the military, which certainly seems to be happening.
My prediction is that we say how terrible it is that the Egyptian people lost their struggle for democracy (at least, temporarily) but will take no actions that really punish the generals. Specifically, we will not halt $1.3 billion in United States military assistance – at least, not for longer than a symbolic suspension to indicate displeasure with the generals.
Of course, stopping the military aid is the best possible way to get the generals to go back to the barracks and let the revolution continue. After all, military aid does not benefit the Egyptian people in any way (in contrast to the humanitarian assistance we provide through USAID). Those tanks, fighter aircraft and the rest only benefit the army and the U.S. contractors who produce them, of course. They only add to the power the military can use against its prime enemy: the popular forces for democracy that launched the Egyptian revolution last year.
It seems counter-intuitive that we would support a military junta that crushed a revolution we supported. After all, the United States government is usually quick to stick it to Arabs who defy us in any way unless they happen to be floating on a sea of oil, which Saudi Arabia is and Egypt isn’t.
So why would we continue supplying the Egyptian military with aid, after they upturned the revolution, especially given the provisions of the law that require a cutoff of military aid if Egypt does not move toward democracy (the law contains a waiver which Secretary of State Clinton invoked as recently as March, a sign of more waivers to come).
The reason is simple. The Netanyahu government wants the aid to continue and, a point I need not belabor, it gets what it wants from both the president and Congress. [Continue reading…]
Al-Akhbar reports: Israel has broken a deal reached last month with the Palestinian prisoners’ committee that ended a mass hunger strike by renewing the detention of Hassan Safadi for another six months, an NGO said on Thursday.
Over 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails went on a mass hunger strike earlier this year to protest Israel’s draconian administrative detention policy, as well as harsh conditions imposed on them during imprisonment.
“Hassan, who launched his hunger strike on 5 March, was one of the five long-term hunger strikers in administrative detention who were promised release upon the expiration of their current orders in the agreement that ended the Palestinian prisoners’ mass hunger strike on 14 May,” Addameer, an NGO for Palestinian prisoners, said in a statement on Thursday.
“Hassan has been held in administrative detention since 29 June 2011 and this renewal of his detention is a blatant violation of the agreement between the prisoners’ hunger strike committee and Israeli officials,” it added.
The policy dates back to the British mandate era of historic Palestine and allows Israel to detain Palestinians without charge for renewable six month periods.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have previously condemned the policy as a violation of international humanitarian law.
Safadi’s health seriously deteriorated during his 71-day hunger strike, and the latest decision to renew his detention has raised fears he may restart his hunger strike, despite his fragile state.
Addameer said that Israel also has yet to fulfill its other obligations as part of the deal, including allowing family visits and ending solitary confinement.
The New York Times reports: A small number of CIA officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers.
The weapons, including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons, are being funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the officials said.
The C.I.A. officers have been in southern Turkey for several weeks, in part to help keep weapons out of the hands of fighters allied with Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups, one senior American official said. The Obama administration has said it is not providing arms to the rebels, but it has also acknowledged that Syria’s neighbors would do so.
The clandestine intelligence-gathering effort is the most detailed known instance of the limited American support for the military campaign against the Syrian government. It is also part of Washington’s attempt to increase the pressure on President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who has recently escalated his government’s deadly crackdown on civilians and the militias battling his rule. With Russia blocking more aggressive steps against the Assad government, the United States and its allies have instead turned to diplomacy and aiding allied efforts to arm the rebels to force Mr. Assad from power.
By helping to vet rebel groups, American intelligence operatives in Turkey hope to learn more about a growing, changing opposition network inside of Syria and to establish new ties. “CIA officers are there and they are trying to make new sources and recruit people,” said one Arab intelligence official who is briefed regularly by American counterparts.
American officials and retired CIA officials said the administration was also weighing additional assistance to rebels, like providing satellite imagery and other detailed intelligence on Syrian troop locations and movements. The administration is also considering whether to help the opposition set up a rudimentary intelligence service. But no decisions have been made on those measures or even more aggressive steps, like sending CIA officers into Syria itself, they said.
It’s not hard to imagine how this story is currently “evolving” in those quarters that regard the civil war in Syria as the product of Western imperial machinations. In the blink of an eye it will become CIA arming Syrian rebels.
At some point in the not too distant future that may indeed be the case, but right now the CIA is most likely focused on restricting the flow of weapons to allies of the Saudis and beyond that they want to know who is controlling the supply lines. In other words, gathering intelligence.
The Christian Science Monitor reports: Even as the Pentagon draws down US troops in Afghanistan, it plans to base a sizable contingent of forces in nearby Kuwait – with the clear purpose of sending a signal to Iran.
The signal – that the United States plan to maintain a credible force in the region – comes at a vital time for the US military, says Michael Singh, a former senior adviser for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council.
“The Middle East is very turbulent right now – it’s hard to even imagine all of the different types of conflicts that will challenge our interests,” adds Mr. Singh.
A Senate Foreign Relations Committee report released Tuesday stresses the “myriad” political and security challenges in the region, “from the Iranian nuclear program to the threat of terrorism.”
But at the top of the list is the ongoing friction with Iran, analysts tend to agree.
“Clearly the day where we had massive US troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan are coming to a close,” Singh says. When coupled with what Singh describes as a US response to the Arab Spring that “has in many ways been aloof,” he adds, “I think there’s a perception in the region that the US is pulling back.”
Singh says it’s a perception that Iran is seeking to disseminate for its own purposes – “that America is leaving the region because they have driven US forces out.” And, he adds, it’s in the Pentagon’s best interests “to show this narrative is false.”
At the same time, “there are still lingering questions over our military posture in the region” in the wake of looming defense budget cuts and the Pentagon’s strategic pivot toward Asia and the Pacific, notes Singh, now managing director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee report estimated that the number of US forces in Kuwait is likely to be some 13,500 following the US drawdown in Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said that he ultimately envisions some 40,000 US troops stationed in the Middle East region.
Andy Kroll writes: Bill Liedtke was racing against time. His deadline was a little more than a day away. He’d prepared everything—suitcase stuffed with cash, jet fueled up, pilot standing by. Everything but the Mexican money.
The date was April 5, 1972. Warm afternoon light bathed the windows at Pennzoil Company headquarters in downtown Houston. Liedtke, a former Texas wildcatter who’d risen to be Pennzoil’s president, and Roy Winchester, the firm’s PR man, waited anxiously for $100,000 due to be hand-delivered by a Mexican businessman named José Díaz de León. When it arrived, Liedtke (pronounced LIT-key) would stuff it into the suitcase with the rest of the cash and checks, bringing the total to $700,000. The Nixon campaign wanted the money before Friday, when a new law kicked in requiring that federal campaigns disclose their donors. Maurice Stans, finance chair of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, or CREEP, had told fundraisers they needed to beat that deadline. Liedtke said he’d deliver.
Díaz de León finally arrived later that afternoon, emptying a large pouch containing $89,000 in checks and $11,000 in cash onto Liedtke’s desk. The donation was from Robert Allen, president of Gulf Resources and Chemical Company. Allen—fearing his shareholders would discover that he’d given six figures to Nixon—had funneled it through a Mexico City bank to Díaz de León, head of Gulf Resources’ Mexican subsidiary, who carried the loot over the border.
Winchester and another Pennzoil man rushed the suitcase to the Houston airport, where a company jet was waiting on the tarmac. The two men climbed aboard, bound for Washington. They touched down in DC hours later and sped directly to CREEP’s office at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, across the street from the White House. They arrived at 10 p.m.
It was the last gasp of a two-month fund-raising blitz during which CREEP raked in some $20 million before the new disclosure law took effect. A handful of wealthy donors accounted for nearly half of that haul; insurance tycoon W. Clement Stone alone gave $2.1 million, or $11.4 million in today’s dollars. Hugh Sloan, CREEP’s treasurer, later described an "avalanche" of cash pouring into the group’s coffers—all of it secret.
At least it was secret until some of that Mexican money ended up in the bank account of a one-time CIA operative named Bernard Barker, one of the five men whose bungled burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex lit the fuse on the biggest political scandal in modern American history.
Over the next two years, prosecutors, congressional investigators, and journalists untangled a conspiracy involving a clandestine sabotage campaign against Democrats, hush-hush cash drops for CREEP surrogates in phone booths, and millions in illegal corporate contributions. As the slow drip of revelations continued, public outrage boiled over. Nixon’s approval rating sunk below 25 percent, worse than Lyndon Johnson’s during the darkest depths of the Vietnam War. Picketers marched on the White House demanding his impeachment. College campuses erupted in protest over the Watergate abuses.
Almost 40 years later, that outrage is back. Mass movements like the tea party and Occupy have channeled popular anger at a political system widely seen as backward and corrupt. In the age of the super-PAC, Americans commonly say there’s too much money in politics, that lobbyists have too much power, and that the system is stacked against the average citizen. "Our government," as one Occupy DC protester put it, "has allowed policy, laws, and justice to be for sale to the highest bidder."
For many political observers, it feels like a return to the pre-Watergate years. Rich bankrollers—W. Clement Stone then, Sheldon Adelson now —cut jaw-dropping checks backing their favorite candidates. Political operatives devise ways to hide tens of millions in campaign donations. And protesters have taken to the streets over what they see as a broken system. "We’re back to the Nixon era," says Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, "the era of undisclosed money, of big cash amounts and huge interests that are small in number dominating American politics." This is the story of how we got here.
[Continue reading…]
Walter Pinkus writes: At last, after 11 years of the United States at war, a few minutes of public discussion of a tax to pay for the fighting. But that would be for the next war.
“What would be the impact of going to war again without committing to pay for that war with up-front taxes, something we did not do in either Iraq or Afghanistan, for the first time in the history of the country?” Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) asked Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta at a Senate Defense Appropriation subcommittee hearing on June 13.
That’s a question that should be asked before any president sends U.S. forces into a fight overseas or members of Congress propose legislation that authorizes some sort of military action abroad.
“We basically ran that war [Iraq] on a credit card,” Leahy told Panetta, who was there to discus the fiscal 2013 Defense Appropriations bill. “Now we find people who are calling for more military action in other parts of the world; at the same time, they do not want to consider any way of paying for it.”
No details were mentioned, but Leahy obviously was thinking about the drumbeat to provide air cover and arms to the Syrian opposition to President Bashar al-Assad coming from Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), as well as from the presumptive GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his advisers. And who is ready to pay for whatever it may take if the United States has to resort to military action to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? The Libyan effort cost more than $1 billion.
Leahy could also have been thinking about Congress authorizing President Obama’s sending of 100 Special Forces into Central Africa in October. They are providing support to Ugandan, Congolese and Central African Republic units searching for the ruthless Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army.
Panetta gave the answer you would expect from a former House Budget Committee chairman, Office of Management and Budget director and chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. As Clinton’s chief of staff in 1996, he helped negotiate a budget compromise with Republican congressional leaders.
“Obviously,” Panetta told the senators, “if we repeated the mistake of not paying for the war that we decide to engage in, whatever that might be, the results would be that you would simply add more to the deficit and to the debt of this country for the future. You just put that burden on our kids for the future.”
He added, “All of us bear some responsibility to pay those costs if we’re willing to engage in war.”
How quickly would Congress have voted in October 2002, on the eve of a congressional election, to give President George W. Bush authority to use force in Iraq if the resolution also contained a provision to raise taxes?
The Washington Post reports: The near-collapse of nuclear talks with Iran has ushered in what experts on Wednesday described as a dangerous new phase in the decade-long standoff over Tehran’s nuclear program.
A new round of sanctions is scheduled to take effect July 1, increasing the pressure on Iran’s faltering economy. At the same time, prominent Israeli and U.S. politicians are renewing calls for preparations for a military strike to halt Iran’s nuclear progress.
Iranian officials sounded fresh notes of defiance a day after talks concluded in Moscow, blaming Western countries for the lack of progress and insisting that no amount of pressure would persuade Iran to give up its right to a civilian nuclear energy program. The negotiations between Iran and the bloc of countries known as the P5-plus-1 ended late Tuesday with no agreement and no further substantive talks scheduled, other than technical consultations.
“There is not a one of us who is not aware how serious this is,” said a senior Obama administration official, reflecting on the failure to achieve any meaningful agreement with Tehran after three rounds of direct negotiations with Iranian officials since April.
While insisting that diplomatic efforts would continue, the official said the White House was “sober” in assessing the outcome of the Moscow talks, in which Iran was said to have balked at demands for freezing production of a type of enriched uranium that can be easily converted to fuel for nuclear weapons. The United States and its allies contend that Iran is using civilian facilities as a cover for developing a nuclear weapons capability, an assertion Iran denies.
The counterproposals from the Iranian side were “far from where the rest of us are,” leading to the decision to hold low-level technical consultations next month in Turkey so the sides can clarify their positions, said the official, who insisted on anonymity in describing the diplomatically sensitive negotiations.
The United States and other members of the six-nation bloc (the U.N. Security Council’s five permanent members and Germany) pushed hard in the final hours of the Moscow meeting to preserve at least an appearance of continuing negotiations, fearing that a complete failure would increase the likelihood of a military strike. But U.S. officials said they would not agree to open-ended talks that allow Iran to continue adding to its uranium stockpile. “This is not indefinite,” the administration official said.
Iran had sought relief from potentially crippling sanctions as a condition for any concessions on curbs to its nuclear program.
With diplomacy in tatters, Tehran faces the full brunt of a European Union oil embargo on July 1 and new U.S. sanctions targeting the country’s central bank.
Danger Room reports: The surveillance experts at the National Security Agency won’t tell two powerful United States Senators how many Americans have had their communications picked up by the agency as part of its sweeping new counterterrorism powers. The reason: it would violate your privacy to say so.
That claim comes in a short letter sent Monday to civil libertarian Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. The two members of the Senate’s intelligence oversight committee asked the NSA a simple question last month: under the broad powers granted in 2008′s expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, how many persons inside the United States have been spied upon by the NSA?
The query bounced around the intelligence bureaucracy until it reached I. Charles McCullough, the Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the nominal head of the 16 U.S. spy agencies. In a letter acquired by Danger Room, McCullough told the senators that the NSA inspector general “and NSA leadership agreed that an IG review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons,” McCullough wrote.
“All that Senator Udall and I are asking for is a ballpark estimate of how many Americans have been monitored under this law, and it is disappointing that the Inspectors General cannot provide it,” Wyden told Danger Room on Monday. “If no one will even estimate how many Americans have had their communications collected under this law then it is all the more important that Congress act to close the ‘back door searches’ loophole, to keep the government from searching for Americans’ phone calls and emails without a warrant.”
What’s more, McCullough argued, giving such a figure of how many Americans were spied on was “beyond the capacity” of the NSA’s in-house watchdog — and to rectify it would require “imped[ing]” the very spy missions that concern Wyden and Udall. “I defer to [the NSA inspector general’s] conclusion that obtaining such an estimate was beyond the capacity of his office and dedicating sufficient additional resources would likely impede the NSA’s mission,” McCullough wrote. [Continue reading…]
Here’s why Obama’s campaign to kill as many al Qaeda suspects as possible is ill-conceived: with every “success” the opportunities for gathering vital intelligence diminish.
Obama’s biggest trophy — the death of Osama bin Laden — might have been the biggest failure of all. News of the capture of Naamen Meziche demonstrates why suspected terrorists are worth vastly more alive rather than dead.
BBC News reports: A French man who is suspected of being a key militant working for al-Qaeda has been arrested close to the border with Iran, officials say.
Naamen Meziche was detained during a security operation in the area.
He is described as being an associate of senior al-Qaeda leader Younis al-Mauritani, who was detained in 2011 accused of planning attacks on Europe.
Born in 1970 and of Algerian descent, Meziche is an “important” al-Qaeda member in Europe, experts say.
He is believed to have belonged to the Hamburg cell that the US says masterminded the 9/11 attacks.
Meziche reportedly recruited jihadists at a radical mosque in the northern German city, which authorities closed in 2010 because they said it was encouraging fanaticism.
Three of the 9/11 hijackers, including ringleader Mohammed Atta – who piloted the first plane into New York’s World Trade Centre – met regularly at the mosque before moving to the US.
A Pakistani official told the AFP news agency that Meziche was “among the very close associates” of Mauritani who was himself arrested on 5 September 2011 by Pakistani agents – believed to have been co-operating with the CIA – in the city of Quetta.
Mauritani was believed to have been ordered by Osama Bin Laden – before his death last year – to plan attacks on Australia, Europe and the United States.
Correspondents say that Meziche’s arrest highlights the key role played by the Pakistani security forces in the anti al-Qaeda campaign of the US, even though Washington and Islamabad are going through one of the rockiest stages in their relationship since the 9/11 attacks.
Tensions are also high because of continuing Pakistani resentment over the US decision to kill Bin Laden in May 2011 without telling Pakistan.
They have become further strained over US drone strikes on Pakistani soil and Islamabad’s refusal to re-open a Nato supply route to Afghanistan which it closed down in November after 24 of its soldiers were killed on the border in a Nato air strike.
Neither Meziche nor Mauritani feature on the US FBI list of most wanted terrorists.
McClatchy reports: Hosni Mubarak, the imprisoned former president of Egypt, was either near death or recovering well from minor injuries he suffered when he slipped in the bathroom, according to two of the many accounts of his health that swirled through Cairo Wednesday as the country’s election commission inched toward an official announcement of who would succeed him as president.
The commission warned that its official pronouncement of the results of last weekend’s voting might be delayed as it tries to sort through more than 400 appeals of irregularities filed by the two candidates, Muslim Brotherhood standard-bearer Mohammed Morsi and former Mubarak prime minister Ahmed Shafiq. But it was uncertain whether the results, due to be released Thursday, would be delayed only by hours or pushed back to Friday – a postponement that would be sure to raise suspicions about the validity of the result.
There was no easy explanation for the various versions of Mubarak’s health – and much speculation that the varying reports were simply intended to confuse a public already on edge about the military’s reassertion of authority after the Supreme Constitutional Court last week ordered the Islamist-dominated Parliament dissolved.
“Such rumors are nothing but a cheap attempt to destabilize the political scene and ruin the democratic transformation and the transfer of power to the elected president,” said Khairat el-Shater, the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief strategist and financier who was the group’s first choice for president, but was declared ineligible to run because of Mubarak-era criminal convictions.
Glenn Greenwald writes: If one asks current or former WikiLeaks associates what their greatest fear is, almost none cites prosecution by their own country. Most trust their own nation’s justice system to recognize that they have committed no crime. The primary fear is being turned over to the US. That is the crucial context for understanding Julian Assange‘s 16-month fight to avoid extradition to Sweden, a fight that led him to seek asylum, Tuesday, in the London Embassy of Ecuador.
The evidence that the US seeks to prosecute and extradite Assange is substantial. There is no question that the Obama justice department has convened an active grand jury to investigate whether WikiLeaks violated the draconian Espionage Act of 1917. Key senators from President Obama’s party, including Senate intelligence committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, have publicly called for his prosecution under that statute. A leaked email from the security firm Stratfor – hardly a dispositive source, but still probative – indicated that a sealed indictment has already been obtained against him. Prominent American figures in both parties have demanded Assange’s lifelong imprisonment, called him a terrorist, and even advocated his assassination.
For several reasons, Assange has long feared that the US would be able to coerce Sweden into handing him over far more easily than if he were in Britain. For one, smaller countries such as Sweden are generally more susceptible to American pressure and bullying.
For another, that country has a disturbing history of lawlessly handing over suspects to the US. A 2006 UN ruling found Sweden in violation of the global ban on torture for helping the CIA render two suspected terrorists to Egypt, where they were brutally tortured (both individuals, asylum-seekers in Sweden, were ultimately found to be innocent of any connection to terrorism and received a monetary settlement from the Swedish government).
Perhaps most disturbingly of all, Swedish law permits extreme levels of secrecy in judicial proceedings and oppressive pre-trial conditions, enabling any Swedish-US transactions concerning Assange to be conducted beyond public scrutiny. Ironically, even the US State Department condemned Sweden’s “restrictive conditions for prisoners held in pretrial custody”, including severe restrictions on their communications with the outside world. [Continue reading…]
Matt Stoller writes: Recently, Barack Obama announced a laudable new policy position on immigration. His administration will no longer deport undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country as children by their parents, as long as they don’t get in trouble with the law. These are people who are essentially Americans without citizenship, and the risk of deportation to a country they don’t really know is a terrifying and unfair. Aside from this serving the cause of justice and human decency, this is a long overdue move to reward a constituency group, happening in an election year. It’s worth understanding how this policy change came about, so that one can get a sense of the incentives that animate the White House policy shop.
Here’s White House advisor David Plouffe on CNN describing the change.
Senior White House adviser David Plouffe insisted Sunday that President Obama’s decision to defer deportation of certain illegal immigrants who came to the country as children was “fully within” the president’s authority and not made with the 2012 election in mind.
“This is not a political move. This builds on a lot of steps that we have already taken,” Plouffe said on the CNN program “State of the Union.”
So it’s not a political move. Ok. I find that hard to believe, since it’s an election year. And indeed, this was published in the New Yorker a few days ago.
The White House is so convinced of the centrality of Hispanics to the current election and its aftermath that Plouffe told me he has been preparing for months for an onslaught of advertisements from a pro-Romney group attacking Obama from the left on immigration, arguing that Obama’s deportation and border-security policies have been too Draconian.
David Plouffe thinks nothing of outright lying on CNN about why the administration changed its policy, in one forum describing it as a useful policy change and denying any political incentives and in another more insider-friendly publication making it clear that it was a reelection gambit. It doesn’t matter whether the politics or the policy were the driving force, it’s a good change. That Plouffe feels that he can so cavalierly lie shows how dishonestly this administration operates.
There are more political lessons to be drawn, other than the fact that this administration is full of liars and that Obama usually only helps non-wealthy constituency groups when he is scrambling for his own electoral survival. The political lesson is that pressure matters, but so does leverage. The overall atmosphere on this particular problem – undocumented immigrants who arrived as kids – came to a boiling point through the actions of an entire activism eco-system. There were nationwide marches for immigration reform a few years ago, and undocumented college students bravely marched openly to bring this issue to light. These kids embarrassed the administration, and it must have shown in the polls in terms of dampening enthusiasm to vote in 2012 among Latinos. But even this was not enough.
It was only fear of the Republicans outflanking Obama to the left that got the administration to move. When the issue came to a head, and Obama feared that he would pay a political price from the Republicans, all of the excuses – the terrible Republican opposition, a divided country, an intractable Congress with a 60 vote threshold – suddenly evaporated. Faced with losing his own hide, Obama governed. [Continue reading…]
Larry Derfner writes: I never went along with the argument that the Israel lobby, taking its directions from Jerusalem, pushed the United States to invade Iraq in 2003. Israel wanted the U.S. to knock over Saddam, of course, but it didn’t make a lot of noise about it, and neither did its Washington lobbyists because Israel and AIPAC knew they didn’t have to push against an open door. The Bush administration wanted to go to war against Saddam as soon as 9/11 happened, and while I’m sure the administration saw the benefit to Israel as one more reason to invade, that was never the main reason. The Bush team fought that war because of its misbegotten notion of America’s national security, and they would have fought it even if there had been no Israel lobby – even if there had been no Israel.
But Iran is different. Israel and AIPAC have been leading the charge on this one for years, and they’re hardly hiding it – the Israeli campaign for America to get tough, tougher, toughest on Iran has been as bombastic as could possibly be. If America ends up bombing Iran first (unlikely), or being drawn into a war as a result of Israel’s bombing Iran first (much more likely), that American war will be stamped “Made In Israel” – not by Walt and Mearsheimer, but by everyone with eyes and ears in his or her head.
This is new. For all the Israel lobby’s power over U.S. policy in the Middle East, it has never led the U.S. into a war the White House and Pentagon clearly did not want to fight. And that’s what’s happening, that’s what’s been happening for nearly four years – the Obama administration and U.S. military establishment don’t want to fight in Iran, and Israel and AIPAC have been dragging them toward it with all their might.
Again, this is unprecedented. And it is quite a responsibility for Israel and the American Jewish leadership to assume – one they don’t want to face, though, because if they did, they might have to restrain their war-mongering, and for the AIPAC crowd, war-mongering on Israel’s behalf is just too much fun. But here’s the deal: If Israel hits Iran and Iran hits back at American targets and draws the U.S. into a war, and that war doesn’t go well for the U.S. – if American troops start getting killed, if the U.S. economy suffers, if the U.S. finds itself stuck in a war it doesn’t want and doesn’t know how to get out of – then not only Israel, but American Jews, too, are likely to be blamed by the U.S. public at large.
And for the first time in history, blaming the Jews for getting America into a war would not be anti-Semitic lunacy, it would be a logical reaction. I want to stress here that blaming American Jews in general for “wagging the dog” would be totally wrong and unfair – most of them are liberal doves. However, blaming AIPAC, the rest of the Israel lobby and, above all, Israel for wagging the dog would be like adding two and two.
For some Israelis, the risk of American Jews ending up getting blamed for a war against Iran might look less like a risk than potentially part of the upside. From this vantage point a backlash against Jews would not demonstrate the recklessness of the Israel lobby; it would demonstrate the recklessness of belonging to the diaspora and the necessity of “returning” to Israel. The irony is that the ranks of the lobby are filled with Jews whose choice is to love Israel from afar. For those for whom home is really New York or Miami, such a return would in truth be a form of exile.