Author Archives: News Sources

The struggle to succeed Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani

Paul McGeough writes: Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is rarely seen. The most revered spiritual leader for the world’s 170 million Shiite Muslims, he hardly ever speaks in public. Some 90 miles south of Baghdad, in Najaf, the seat of Shiite religious power, people say that in the last few years the 82-year-old Sistani has grown frail and relies increasingly on one of his sons to carry out his duties. “He’s a weak old man; soon he might have to go to London for more treatment,” a local student of religious politics says. (Like most who were interviewed for this report, the student wished to remain anonymous.)

As Sistani ages, a struggle to succeed him has begun, putting the spiritual leadership of one of the world’s foremost faiths in play. But with neighboring Iran moving to install its preferred candidate in the position, the secular political foundations of Iraq’s fledgling democracy are at risk. Consequently, what amounts to a spiritual showdown could pose a challenge to Washington’s hope for postwar Iraq to serve as a Western-allied, moderate, secular state in the heart of the Middle East.

Shia doctrine requires that an incumbent die before jockeying can begin in a succession process that is as opaque as it is informal. But Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, the 64-year-old cleric who is widely seen as Tehran’s preferred choice, has jumped the gun by sending an advance party to open an office in Najaf. This cohort works from a dust-coated building, painted in banded tones of white and salmon, just a couple of blocks from Sistani’s office and home. On a recent visit, a scattering of shoes and sandals at the entrance suggested a gathering within, but a man who came to the door makes it clear: “We apologize, but we can’t meet any journalists.”

Without so much as setting foot in Najaf, Shahroudi is rolling out a sophisticated and expensive campaign — reputedly bankrolled by Tehran. Key to Shahroudi’s strategy has been luring Sistani and his followers into a costly bidding war for clerical loyalty. Clerics and seminarians are being offered an assortment of stipends, housing, and health services in the hope that they can be swayed.

A Najafi by birth, Shahroudi has lived much of his adult life in Iran. Under the patronage of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he rose to the top tiers of Iran’s religious and political establishment. And in recent months Shahroudi has had several meetings with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, most recently in Tehran in April. According to sources close to the religious and political leadership in Baghdad, Shahroudi has already informed some key Iraqi officials that he is positioning himself to take the spiritual helm of Shia Islam.

“Without Khamenei’s support, he could not dream of doing this,” a diplomat from the region who is based in Baghdad, and who spoke on condition of anonymity, says. Because of Shahroudi’s stature in Iran, the diplomat says, he will always be seen as Tehran’s candidate: “It is [Iranian] money and authority that’ll make him Grand Ayatollah.”

Shahroudi’s challenge sets in conflict two opposing views of politics in Shiism. Iraqi Shiites have long held to the so-called quietist school of thought, a doctrine known more expansively as irshad wa tawjeeh, which translates as “guidance and direction” and is rooted in a sixteenth-century deal with the Persian monarchy by which the clerics of the day opted to remain above the political fray. Sistani’s interventions in the early days of the U.S. occupation of Iraq were arguably a glaring exception to quietest thinking, but the ayatollah’s singular objective at the time was to bend the will of the Americans in shaping a political process from which he and the clergy would ultimately step back. Now, Iraqis have had nearly a decade to judge contemporary application of Najaf’s quietist theory.

In Iran, however, the 1979 revolution gave holy men full control of the political process. Although more than three messy decades of Islamic rule have stripped the varnish from wilayat al-faqih, “guardianship of the Islamic jurists,” the revolutionary Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s constitutionally enshrined theory that God’s authority is vested in the supreme leader and senior religious scholars, Tehran continues to insist that politics be guided by faith. [Continue reading…]

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We are sleepwalking into the Drone Age, unaware of the consequences

Clive Stafford Smith writes: Last October I was at a jirga in Islamabad where 80 people from Waziristan had assembled to talk about the US Predator drones that buzz around overhead, periodically delivering death by Hellfire missile. A jirga is the traditional forum for discussing and resolving disputes, part parliament, part court of law. The turbaned tribal elders were joined by their young sons on a rare foray out of their region to meet outsiders and discuss the killing. The isolation of the Waziris is almost total – no western journalist has been to Miranshah for several years.

At our meeting I spoke as the representative westerner. I reported the CIA claim that not one single innocent civilian had been killed in over a year. I did not need to understand Pashtu to translate the snorts of derision when this claim was translated.

During the day I shook the hand of a 16-year-old kid from Waziristan named Tariq Aziz. One of his cousins had died in a missile strike, and he wanted to know what he could do to bring the truth to the west. At the Reprieve charity, we have a transparency project: importing cameras to the region to try to export the truth back out. Tariq wanted to take part, but I thought him too young.

Then, three days later, the CIA announced that it had eliminated “four militants”. In truth there were only two victims: Tariq had been driving his 12-year-old cousin to their aunt’s house when the Hellfire missile killed them both. This came just 24 hours after the CIA boasted of eliminating six other “militants” – actually, four chromite workers driving home from work. In both cases a local informant apparently tagged the car with a GPS monitor and lied to earn his fee. [Continue reading…]

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Mutually assured cyberdestruction?

David Sanger writes: In March the White House invited all the members of the Senate to a classified simulation on Capitol Hill demonstrating what might happen if a dedicated hacker — or an enemy state — decided to turn off the lights in New York City. In the simulation, a worker for the power company clicked on what he thought was an e-mail from a friend; that “spear phishing” attack started a cascade of calamities in which the cyberinvader made his way into the computer systems that run New York’s electric grid. The city was plunged into darkness; no one could find the problem, much less fix it. Chaos, and deaths, followed.

The administration ran the demonstration — which was far more watered-down than the Pentagon’s own cyberwar games — to press Congress to pass a bill that would allow a degree of federal control over protecting the computer networks that run America’s most vulnerable infrastructure. The real lesson of the simulation was never discussed: cyberoffense has outpaced the search for a deterrent, something roughly equivalent to the cold-war-era concept of mutually assured destruction. There was something simple to that concept: If you take out New York, I take out Moscow.

But there is nothing so simple about cyberattacks. Usually it is unclear where they come from. That makes deterrence extraordinarily difficult. Moreover, a good deterrence “has to be credible,” said Joseph S. Nye, the Harvard strategist who has written the deepest analysis yet of what lessons from the atomic age apply to cyberwar. “If an attack from China gets inside the American government’s computer systems, we’re not likely to turn off the lights in Beijing.” Professor Nye calls for creating “a high cost” for an attacker, perhaps by naming and shaming.

Deterrence may also depend on how America chooses to use its cyberweapons in the future. Will it be more like the Predator, a tool the president has embraced? That would send a clear warning that the United States was ready and willing to act. But as President Obama warned his own aides during the secret debates over Olympic Games [the Stuxnet operation], it also invites retaliatory strikes, with cyberweapons that are already proliferating. In fact, one country recently announced that it was creating a new elite “Cybercorps” as part of its military. The announcement came from Tehran.

Since cyberdeterrence looks like a non-starter, the U.S. should perhaps focus instead on a home truth: those who live in cyber houses shouldn’t throw cyber stones.

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Egypt: Protests grow in Tahrir after Mubarak verdict

Al Jazeera reports: Thousands of people descended on Tahrir Square to protest on Saturday night, a spontaneous outpouring of anger after a Cairo court sentenced former president Hosni Mubarak to life in prison but acquitted a number of other former regime officials.

The verdict was initially met with euphoria: Egyptians celebrated upon hearing that Mubarak was convicted of complicity in the murder of more than 800 protesters during the Egyptian revolution in January of 2011. It was the first time an Arab head of state had been convicted, and a major accomplishment for the revolution which toppled Mubarak nearly 18 months ago.

But the joy was short-lived. Mubarak’s two sons, Gamal and Alaa, were acquitted of corruption charges, and several senior security officials were found not guilty of murder. Some had wanted Mubarak to face the death penalty; others appreciated the verdict, but expected it would be overturned on appeal.

So they flocked to Tahrir Square, the heart of last year’s revolution, to voice their frustration, not just with the verdict but with Egypt’s post-revolution military leadership.

“It’s garbage,” Najdi Mohamed el-Din said of the verdict. “And it has made us realize something. The revolution of January 2011? We need to do it again, and we need to do it until everyone who was with Mubarak is gone.”

More than 5,000 people had gathered in Tahrir before midnight, and some planned to spend the night. The atmosphere felt almost nostalgic, as if protesters were reliving their roles from last year’s revolution. Many vowed not to leave the square until their demands were met.

Yet they struggled to articulate what, exactly, those demands were, and there were moments of disunity inside the square. At one point, the April 6 youth movement tried to hoist its flag; other protesters demanded they lower it. An hour later, a heated argument among another group ended with several men beating each other with folding chairs.

Several prominent politicians visited the square on Saturday night. Hamdeen Sabahi, the defeated leftist presidential candidate, was the first to appear, to an energetic welcome. “You are the president in our hearts,” some protesters chanted. Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, the moderate Islamist candidate who placed fourth in last month’s presidential election, also made an appearance.

So did Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate and one of two contenders in the runoff election later this month. In a press conference before his visit, he tried to present himself as the revolutionary candidate. “There will be no fair elections, no fair trials, unless the revolution continues,” he said.

Yet his newfound praise for the revolution – the Brotherhood has historically kept its distance from the protests in Tahrir – failed to win him much support from the crowd in Tahrir. “The Brotherhood is coming?” one man asked sarcastically. “Where have they been?”

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Libya’s restive revolutionaries

Nicolas Pelham writes: Beneath a golden canopy lined with frilly red tassels and vaulted with chandeliers, hundreds of militiamen from across Libya gathered at a security base in Benghazi, the launch pad of their anti-Qaddafi revolution, at the end of April and called for another uprising. After a lunch of mutton and macaroni, a nod to their former Italian masters, one belligerent revolutionary after another took to the podium to lambast Libya’s would-be governors, the National Transitional Council (NTC). “Thuwwar (revolutionaries) of Libya unite!” cried the chairman, beseeching his fellows to reclaim the country from those who had stolen the revolution. These are no idle threats. My lunch companion from Jufra, one of Col. Muammar Qaddafi’s former garrison towns in central Libya, claimed to have 600 tanks under his command. If push came to shove, the militias could overpower the fledgling forces the NTC have at their disposal.

While the militiamen flaunt their might, they seem less confident of public support. No one at the swashbucklers’ Congress mentioned the upcoming elections, scheduled for June 19, as the means of being catapulted to power. Rather, for many the new assembly threatens to transfer authority away from those who “paid the price of the revolution” to elected representatives. “They are afraid that an elected government will limit their voice,” says Milad al-Hawti, a recruit to the Benghazi branch of the Supreme Security Commission. If the thuwwar are to make a bid for power, their window of opportunity is now, while the NTC — with its less than solid legitimacy — still holds the constitutional reins.

Friction between the civilian and military arms of the revolution has been brewing since the first days of the February 2011 uprising, when a nascent civilian leadership, the NTC, struggled to establish a semblance of governance over liberated territories. To stand up its authority in the face of a plethora of anarchic rival groups of thuwwar under its wing, and prepare for a smooth transition, the NTC reached out to defecting old regime commanders and their forces. But what the NTC viewed as a professional corps, able to stabilize a post-Qaddafi era, the thuwwar saw as a fifth column riddled with Qaddafi loyalists bent on denying them ownership of the revolution for which they had risked their lives. In July 2011, militiamen killed Maj. Gen. ‘Abd al-Fattah Younis, Qaddafi’s former interior minister, whom the NTC had appointed commander-in-chief of rebel forces.

As relations spiraled downward, the thuwwar began to tar the NTC with the same brush. Spokesmen and leaders were denounced as pretenders and holdovers from jama‘at Sayf, Sayf’s gang, a reference to the coterie of apparatchiks who surrounded Sayf al-Islam, the late colonel’s favored son, and filled the ranks of the last Qaddafi-era governments. Determined to thwart the resurrection of the old order that had hobbled them, the thuwwar posed increasing challenges to the NTC’s self-appointed role as the revolution’s moral arbiters. For its part, the NTC viewed the militiamen less as liberators than as looters and hooligans, whose celebrations traumatized Tripolitanians for weeks with their firing of heavy weapons throughout the night. When the thuwwar finally conquered Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte, the NTC stymied their plans for a triumphal march through Tripoli with the promise of a heroes’ welcome in Benghazi. The welcome never materialized, leaving the militias aggrieved and determined to settle the score. [Continue reading…]

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How Islam saved Judaism

David J Wasserstein writes: Islam saved Jewry. This is an unpopular, discomforting claim in the modern world. But it is a historical truth. The argument for it is double. First, in 570 CE, when the Prophet Mohammad was born, the Jews and Judaism were on the way to oblivion. And second, the coming of Islam saved them, providing a new context in which they not only survived, but flourished, laying foundations for subsequent Jewish cultural prosperity – also in Christendom – through the medieval period into the modern world.

By the fourth century, Christianity had become the dominant religion in the Roman empire. One aspect of this success was opposition to rival faiths, including Judaism, along with massive conversion of members of such faiths, sometimes by force, to Christianity. Much of our testimony about Jewish existence in the Roman empire from this time on consists of accounts of conversions.

Great and permanent reductions in numbers through conversion, between the fourth and the seventh centuries, brought with them a gradual but relentless whittling away of the status, rights, social and economic existence, and religious and cultural life of Jews all over the Roman empire.

A long series of enactments deprived Jewish people of their rights as citizens, prevented them from fulfilling their religious obligations, and excluded them from the society of their fellows.

This went along with the centuries-long military and political struggle with Persia. As a tiny element in the Christian world, the Jews should not have been affected much by this broad, political issue. Yet it affected them critically, because the Persian empire at this time included Babylon – now Iraq – at the time home to the world’s greatest concentration of Jews.

Here also were the greatest centres of Jewish intellectual life. The most important single work of Jewish cultural creativity in over 3,000 years, apart from the Bible itself – the Talmud – came into being in Babylon. The struggle between Persia and Byzantium, in our period, led increasingly to a separation between Jews under Byzantine, Christian rule and Jews under Persian rule.

Beyond all this, the Jews who lived under Christian rule seemed to have lost the knowledge of their own culturally specific languages – Hebrew and Aramaic – and to have taken on the use of Latin or Greek or other non-Jewish, local, languages. This in turn must have meant that they also lost access to the central literary works of Jewish culture – the Torah, Mishnah, poetry, midrash, even liturgy.

The loss of the unifying force represented by language – and of the associated literature – was a major step towards assimilation and disappearance. In these circumstances, with contact with the one place where Jewish cultural life continued to prosper – Babylon – cut off by conflict with Persia, Jewish life in the Christian world of late antiquity was not simply a pale shadow of what it had been three or four centuries earlier. It was doomed. [Continue reading…]

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Egyptian court sentences Mubarak to life in prison

The New York Times reports: An Egyptian judge on Saturday sentenced former President Hosni Mubarak to life in prison for the killing of unarmed demonstrators during the first six days of protests that ended his rule.

It was the first verdict against an Arab ruler brought before the law by a popular revolt, and for many Egyptians it may be the greatest achievement so far of the uprising that began 16 months ago. With the nation still awaiting the ratification of a new constitution, the election of a new president and the hand-over of power by its military rulers, the decision is Egypt’s most significant step yet toward establishing the principle that no leader is above the law.

Yet lawyers critical of Mr. Mubarak immediately warned that the verdict may not survive an appeal. The judge acquitted several lower-ranking security officials of responsibility for the same deaths, raising questions about the chain of command. He also dismissed corruption charges against Mr. Mubarak and his sons on technical grounds, and by early afternoon protesters angry at the flimsiness of the decision were pouring into Tahrir Square, the symbolic heart of the revolt.

Egyptian state television reported that within hours of the decision, Mr. Mubarak, 84, had suffered a “health crisis” as he was being flown by helicopter to a Cairo prison from the military hospital where he had awaited the verdict. He was being treated inside the helicopter which he refused to leave, the state network reported.

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Afghanistan: Charges amended for soldier accused in civilian deaths

The New York Times reports: The Army has amended its charges against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the soldier accused of murdering civilians in southern Afghanistan in March, reducing the murder count by one, to 16, and adding charges of illegal steroid use and alcohol consumption.

In its statement accompanying the amended charges, the Army did not explain why it had eliminated one of the murder counts, though it initially reported 16 dead shortly after the killings.

The added charge of alcohol consumption was expected, as military officials had previously said that soldiers on Sergeant Bales’s combat outpost in Kandahar Province reported seeing him drinking the night of the killings.

But the report of steroid use is new. The Army’s new charging sheet said that Sergeant Bales had illegally possessed and used stanozolol, an anabolic steroid commonly used by athletes to build muscle mass.

While anabolic steroids can promote rapid muscle growth, they carry an array of risks, including for higher blood pressure and cancer, and have been linked to psychological changes.

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The One Percent’s problem

Joseph E. Stiglitz writes: Let’s start by laying down the baseline premise: inequality in America has been widening for dec­ades. We’re all aware of the fact. Yes, there are some on the right who deny this reality, but serious analysts across the political spectrum take it for granted. I won’t run through all the evidence here, except to say that the gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent is vast when looked at in terms of annual income, and even vaster when looked at in terms of wealth—that is, in terms of accumulated capital and other assets. Consider the Walton family: the six heirs to the Walmart empire possess a combined wealth of some $90 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of U.S. society. (Many at the bottom have zero or negative net worth, especially after the housing debacle.) Warren Buffett put the matter correctly when he said, “There’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years and my class has won.”

So, no: there’s little debate over the basic fact of widening inequality. The debate is over its meaning. From the right, you sometimes hear the argument made that inequality is basically a good thing: as the rich increasingly benefit, so does everyone else. This argument is false: while the rich have been growing richer, most Americans (and not just those at the bottom) have been unable to maintain their standard of living, let alone to keep pace. A typical full-time male worker receives the same income today he did a third of a century ago.

From the left, meanwhile, the widening inequality often elicits an appeal for simple justice: why should so few have so much when so many have so little? It’s not hard to see why, in a market-driven age where justice itself is a commodity to be bought and sold, some would dismiss that argument as the stuff of pious sentiment.

Put sentiment aside. There are good reasons why plutocrats should care about inequality anyway—even if they’re thinking only about themselves. The rich do not exist in a vacuum. They need a functioning society around them to sustain their position. Widely unequal societies do not function efficiently and their economies are neither stable nor sustainable. The evidence from history and from around the modern world is unequivocal: there comes a point when inequality spirals into economic dysfunction for the whole society, and when it does, even the rich pay a steep price. [Continue reading…]

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Egyptian elections: Choose none of the above

Al-Akhbar English reports: A day after the results of the first round of the presidential election were announced, the ground floor of the Journalists’ Syndicate was buzzing. Unlike the arguments blaring through the capital, the crowd wasn’t concerned with comparing the two candidates that made it to the runoffs. The keyword that evening was “boycott.”

“If you are here, it means you chose to boycott. We are here to discuss suggestions on how to do so,” journalist Rasha Azab told the crowd as the final snippets of sunlight filtered through the glass panels of the syndicate lobby on Tuesday.

Stickers blazoned with the campaign’s title, “Muqateoun” (Boycotters), were passed around. It wasn’t a place to discuss the pros and cons of the boycott; it was time for action.

A day earlier, the Presidential Election Committee (PEC) declared the winners of the first round: The Muslim Brotherhood (MB)’s Mohammed Mursi with 5.7 million votes, 25 percent, and ex-Air Force general Ahmed Shafik with 5.5 million, 24 percent.

Having the two most polarizing candidates as winners left voters grimacing at having to choose between an Islamist or military state. The campaign that materialized later on Tuesday aims to present a third option.

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Imprisoned in America

In a review of The Collapse of American Criminal Justice by William J Stuntz, David Garland writes: The scandal of criminal justice in the United States is by now a familiar one, its facts are well known, its causes extensively canvassed. So what can another book tell us that we don’t already know? A surprising amount, as it turns out. The existing analyses are mostly conducted by sociologists and political scientists. William J. Stuntz brings the perspective of a law professor – focused on substantive law, procedural rules, and the evolution of legal doctrine. He reminds us that, whatever its underlying social, political and cultural causes, the build-up of racialized mass imprisonment was the product of legal actors – police, prosecutors and judges – and the legal rules and organizational incentives that governed their actions. And if America’s astonishing levels of imprisonment, its harsh sentencing, and its racial disparities are tolerated, it is because the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that they comply with constitutional law.

The book also offers a different political perspective. Most critiques of American criminal justice are by liberals and progressives, but Bill Stuntz – who died, aged fifty-two, shortly before this book was published – was a registered Republican, an evangelical Christian, and a revisionist thinker with a fondness for “law and economic” perspectives. His viewpoint is refreshingly unpredictable and runs against the grain of conventional wisdom. It is a devastatingly critical account nevertheless. American criminal justice is, he writes, devoid of the rule of law, “wildly unjust” and the “harshest in the history of democratic government”.

The core problem, Stuntz says, is the massive and unrestrained power of police and prosecutors. Over the past forty years, criminal law in the US has become all-encompassing. There are now 40,000 federal criminal offences – above and beyond the state crimes that constitute the vast majority of offences (and which also grow apace). Many of these new offences, above all, drug and gun legislation, require little evidence, no proof of criminal intent, admit of little mitigation, and carry harsh penalties. Instead of restraining officials, criminal law provides them with an extensive battery of weapons which they can use as they see fit. [Continue reading…]

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Israeli journalist Uri Blau to stand trial for holding leaked documents

Dimi Reider writes: Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein announced on Wednesday his intention to indict Uri Blau, one of Israel’s top investigative reporters, for possession of classified materials without permission. The materials in question are documents given to Blau by whistleblower Anat Kamm; Kamm, then a conscript clerk in the office of GOC Central Command, copied them from the GOC’s computer, believing they constituted evidence of war crimes carried out in defiance of international law and Israel’s own Supreme Court, including summary executions of terrorism suspects who could have been detained.

Kamm is presently serving a four and a half-year prison sentence following a plea bargain in which she admitted to possession and transfer of classified documents.

The decision today marks a crucial milestone in a process that has been dragging on for more than two years, as prosecutors considered the implications of indicting a journalist for doing something well established in his trade. Almost every journalist with claims to be anything but a stenographer for the army spokesman has held onto classified information – written or otherwise – that was received outside official channels, without authorisation.

Although Blau, in the early days of the investigation into the leak, had already given over to the state all the documents he used to publish the story on summary executions, the state demanded the rest of the cache. During the investigation, Blau spent time in political exile in London, waiting while his lawyers negotiated with the state the terms of a deal under which he would not be prosecuted. Once the deal was struck and Blau did his part, however, the state got greedy, and demanded full access his entire archive, amassed over a decade of investigative work. Then it said it might prosecute him anyway. Blau remained in limbo, his ability to work severely curtailed: few sources would go out on a limb for a journalist likely to be tightly monitored by the security agencies. He only began writing regularly a few months ago, publishing a few stories on the behind the scenes workings of the Israeli right, mostly through deft use of freedom of information requests.

Obtaining and retaining classified information is the bread-and-butter of a civilian journalists monitoring the country’s most powerful and insulated institution – the military. Although Israel has no laws to protect journalists, in most cases (barring one prosecution concerning the revelation of cooperation between the Israeli and Morrocan intelligence agencies half a century ago, and an attempt to prosecute a senior military correspondent after the Gulf War for revealing the regrettable fact the much-lauded “Patriot” missiles failed to intercept a single SCUD), the state has not gone after journalists for doing something so essential to their work – until now. [Continue reading…]

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Gaddafi’s torture centers continue

Jamie Dettmer writes: Najat Taweel’s jet-black eyes fill with tears as she describes seeing her jailed brother, Abdul Taweel, shortly after his arrest. The Libyan mother of three had managed to talk her way into Tripoli’s notorious Ain Zara prison where 29-year-old Abdul was being held, charged with killing a fellow revolutionary this past February. Najat, 41, holds up photographs she says a fellow prisoner took of her brother, using a smuggled mobile phone. The pictures show a man whose back is covered with deep bruises and ugly wounds. Najat, 41, says Abdul told her he had signed a confession, but only because he couldn’t take the beatings anymore—and because his interrogators had threatened to rape and kill his family.

Libyan revolutionaries captured and killed Muammar Gaddafi more than seven months ago, but the dictator’s brutal tactics and antidemocratic ways live after him. Human-rights workers say that’s true not only within the high walls of the dictator’s former Ain Zara torture center but at other jails and penitentiaries across the country. Abdul is among at least 20 Ain Zara inmates whose relatives accuse guards of subjecting detainees to severe and regular beatings with everything from fists to sticks, metal rods, and chains. Family members say some of the prisoners have been repeatedly beaten on their genitalia, a form of punishment that—in addition to being excruciatingly painful—could leave its victims infertile. Others, according to relatives, have been tortured with Taser-style electroshock weapons.

Part of the problem may be that the country’s transitional government is only gradually managing to assert its authority over the patchwork of rival militias that overthrew the Gaddafi regime. Ain Zara remained under the control of one of those militias until less than four months ago. At the Feb. 2 handover ceremony, the facility’s new director—himself a former political prisoner at Ain Zara under the dictatorship—promised that the prison would break from its dark past and shake off its grisly reputation. “We no longer hit the detainees,” Burawi al-Guebaili declared, and he boasted of improvements such as hot meals and stalls with doors being added in the restrooms. Since then, journalists and human-rights investigators have visited the prison, but they have not been given the opportunity to speak alone with the 50 or so accused Gaddafi loyalists held there or any of the other inmates. [Continue reading…]

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