Author Archives: News Sources

The elevation of Jeffrey Feltman

Vijay Prashad writes: A blog visited mainly by UN insiders announces that US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman is up for a very important UN job. Former UN Assistant Secretary General for Public Information Samir Sanbar’s blog, UN Forum, notes that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is set to replace B. Lynn Pascoe with Feltman in the post of UN Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs. The office was created in 1992 to help identify and resolve political conflicts around the world. Pascoe ran at least a dozen missions in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, notably in Burundi, Somalia, Iraq, Lebanon and Libya. The longest running mission is in Somalia (since 1995) and the most recent is in Libya (since September 2011). With a budget of $250 million and funds for special political missions that amount, this year, to $1 billion, the post allows its leader to intervene in political crises around the world.

When Secretary General Ban began his second term in January, he promised to reshuffle some of his senior staff. Pascoe’s replacement is part of this process.

Of the proposed new appointment Sanbar writes, “Designating someone with varied field experience, though controversial, and from a substantially senior post, may mean that more issues could be referred to the Security Council.” The UN Security Council’s Secretariat is handled by the Department of Political Affairs, which would be able to have some sway on its agenda. The post is central to the UN bureaucracy.

News of Feltman’s resignation from the State Department next week simply confirmed all the rumors. Another rumor suggests that the UN will announce the appointment on Monday, May 28.

Is Jeffrey Feltman the best person to run such an influential office in the UN? Why did Sanbar believe that this appointment is “controversial.”

Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me that Feltman is “an accomplished and respected American diplomat.” He has been involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iran, Lebanon and Syria, and other hot spots. These bring up “inevitably controversial issues,” Telhami continued. “Feltman would have his share of detractors, including in the Middle East,” he said.

But why would Feltman have these “detractors” and how did he come off on the “controversial issues”?

On one issue Feltman is remarkably consistent. When it comes to the Middle East, Feltman has been outspoken about the threats posed by Iran in the region. Whether in Beirut or Manama, he has publically denounced Iranian “interference” outside its own boundaries. At the same time, Feltman has generously offered US assistance to these same regimes. In other words, US interference is quite acceptable, but Iranian interference is utterly unacceptable. This might be adequate behavior for the diplomat of a country, but it is hardly the temperament for a senior UN official. It raises doubts about Feltman’s ability to be even-handed in his deliberations as a steward of the world’s political dilemmas.

Feltman’s intemperate logic was not of the distant past. It was on display in March 2012 at a Lebanese American Organization’s meeting at the Cannon Office Building in Washington, DC (as Franklin Lamb reported on this site this week). At this meeting, the former US Ambassador to Lebanon, instructed the Lebanese people as to what they must do in their next election, “The Lebanese people must join together to tell Hezbollah and its allies that the Lebanese state will no longer be hijacked for an Iranian-Syrian agenda.” The people must “use the 2013 parliamentary elections to defeat the remnants of the Syrian occupation, the pillar of which is Hezbollah.” [Continue reading…]

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Mohammed Morsi doesn’t rely on charisma

Ian Black writes: Mohammed Morsi, presidential candidate for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party, is an uninspiring figure but he is backed by the best-organised political force in the country, now honing its strategy to secure what would be a historic victory in a second round of voting in June.

Morsi, 60, is an engineer who has taught in the US as well as at Egyptian universities. An expert on precision metal surfaces, he worked at Nasa on the development of space shuttle engines in the early 1980s.

Making a virtue out of his modesty, Brotherhood officials say he was reluctant to run but was persuaded to do so when the more charismatic businessman Khairat al-Shater was disqualified.

Inside the Brotherhood, Morsi has long been a backroom operator who dealt with security – often liaising discreetly with the Mubarak regime – and internal discipline.

Little-known to the wider public, Morsi is a famously boring speaker who reduces Egyptian journalists to teeth-gnashing frustration as he rarely says anything remotely quotable.

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Egyptian presidential election down to a choice between the Brotherhood and the military

The New York Times reports: The Islamist candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood appeared set to face former President Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister in a runoff to become Egypt’s first freely elected president, several independent vote counts concluded Friday morning.

A small portion of the ballots remained to be counted. But out of a broad field of more than a dozen candidates, the runoff appears almost certain to pit the two most polarizing figures against each other in a reversion to the decades-old power struggle between Egypt’s secular-minded military elite and its longstanding Islamist opposition.

It was clear as early as Thursday night that a plurality of votes went to Mohamed Morsi, the American-educated engineer nominated by the Brotherhood, the secretive 84-year-old revival group that became the wellspring of political Islam around the world and already dominates the Parliament.

But only Friday morning did it appear that second place would go to Ahmed Shafik, a former Air Force general who briefly served as Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister. A late entry into the race, he was a dark horse campaigning on promises to use a firm hand against the protests and lawlessness that have prevailed since Mr. Mubarak’s ouster. He presented himself as a strong check on the rise of the Islamists. Of all the candidates in the race, Mr. Shafik came closest to promising a restoration of the old order and aroused both vocal support and threats of a “second revolution” if he should win.

Mr. Shafik’s law and order message resonated with voters, helping him to overtake the two candidates previously considered, along with Mr. Mursi, to be the front-runners. One was Amr Moussa, a former foreign minister under Mr. Mubarak and former head of the Arab League, who had offered a softer but similar message. In the final weeks of the race, Mr. Moussa’s support appears to have all but collapsed in favor of Mr. Shafik.

Ahmad Sarhan, a spokesman for Mr. Shafik, said voters had rallied to the candidate because he promised to “save Egypt from the dark forces,” referring to the Muslim Brotherhood and more militant Islamists.

Mr. Shafik would bring back security, Mr. Sarhan said. “The revolution has ended,” he said. “It is one and a half years.” The other former front-runner who fell behind Mr. Shafik was Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a dissident former Brotherhood leader campaigning as both an Islamist and a liberal. He explicitly challenged the Brotherhood’s authority to speak as the voice of political Islam. His iconoclastic campaign promised to upend the old culture-war dichotomies of Egyptian and Arab politics, and it caught fire among an unlikely alliance of Brotherhood youth, ultraconservative Islamists known as salafis, and more secular minded leftists and liberals.

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‘I prefer Sudanese refugees to proud Jews. I feel safer with them’

Yossi Gurvitz writes: I went to a demonstration led by MK Michael Ben-Ari two days ago (Tuesday), and was joined by my girlfriend, Galina. Ben-Ari, a Kahanist, was inciting the crowd against the African refugees in a distinctly anti-Semitic manner, peppering his talk with incessant references to excrement and urine. At some point, Galina couldn’t take it any longer, and shouted something back.

Within minutes we were surrounded by an angry mob of about 20 people, composed mostly of women, who hurled curses at her. Someone pulled out a tear gas canister and waved it at her face.

Racist and sexual slurs filled the air repeatedly. Time and time again, people expressed the wish she would be raped by Sudanese, and asked her if she was bedding them. A boy, between 10 and 11 years old, screamed at her point blank that what she needs is a “nigger’s cock.” David Sheen videotaped much of it.

For my part, I was busy trying to pull her out of there, and pushing away the hands in her way – there were plenty of them. There was also spitting. At a certain stage, when Ben-Ari and his travelling circus went on their way, a cop wended his way to Galina, and whispered to her that the police were pulling away, and she should, too.

We tried to get out of the market. The mob was screaming with glee that she was being arrested. More spitting and curses. A woman aimed a kick at Galina’s head from behind her, I blocked the kick with a snarl. She was smiling. On the way to the train station we were attacked, physically, by a hoodlum, and as I was trying to get in between him and Galina after he hit me in the back, I decided that if he attacks me again, I’d take the metal part of the camera and smash it into his jaw, and take my chances with the police later.

Luckily he pulled away, and we continued on fast towards the train station, with people swearing at Galina every few meters. A gang of teenagers waited for us near the train station. Plenty of sexual affront. One of them tried to knock David’s camera away. We fled to the security of the station.

So that’s what a proud Jewish mob looks like. Galina thought she could reason with them, and made a decent effort, but you can’t debate with 20 people screaming at you incessantly. When the demonstration began, there was a nutjub who, whenever she saw a refugee, would scream, “Here they are, here they are, why do you let them go?”

This was my first angry mob since the elections of 1988, and then I was young, stupid and unafraid. It is frightening, very much so. Argument is pointless with minds seeping with racism. With one exception, no one came to our aid. We were in the Hatikva Market, a public place, and no one came to our aid. I would like to think they wanted to but couldn’t overcome their fear.

Later, I thought we were lucky none of us stumbled. This may have served as a signal for an assault, and I’m not sure we would have been able to get up on our own. Let’s put it this way: after Tuesday, I prefer Sudanese refugees to proud Jews. I feel safer with them.

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Racist mob violence in Tel Aviv

Ilan Lior, a reporter for Haaretz, describes how he found himself a target of mob violence incited by members of the Knesset in Tel Aviv last night. The hatred of the mob was primarily directed at African refugees, but MK Michael Ben Ari and others also pointed the finger at left-wingers. (The venom directed at anyone willing to stand up for the refugees can be seen in the video below Lior’s account.)

Just moments after Ben Ari’s speech, I found myself in a surreal situation. “You’re a left-winger that throws rocks at soldiers at checkpoints,” one protester called at me. “You’re a traitor, we’ll finish you,” threatened another. I tried to explain that I was a journalist, and not a left-wing activist, that I’ve never protested at checkpoints, nor thrown a rock at anyone. I told them that I came to give a voice to the residents’ calls, to their struggles, and to pass the message on to those who make decisions. No one listened.

The situation started to deteriorate very quickly. The threats became more intense, hands were thrown in the air, one of the protesters pushed me, another snatched my notepad and threw it in the air. “You’re making a mistake,” I said, desperately trying to stop the carnage. Border Patrol officers saved me, escorting me off to the side. “I recognize you. I’m a bus driver. I saw you throw rocks at soldiers at a checkpoint last week,” said one woman, running amok. “You’re mistaken, they’re deceiving you,” I answered. “I’ll get you,” she threatened, in front of the uniformed officers.

A short time after, she was joined by another protester, then another, then another. The officers decided they needed to get me out of there, and fast. They began to push me down Hahagana street. “Faster, they’ll murder you,” the frightened officers told me. I looked behind me. Hundreds of people had begun to chase me. It was clear to me that the small police presence would not be able to deal with the masses. Some of them caught up. One grabbed my shirt, and ripped it, while threatening to murder me. For the first time, I saw true hatred in the eyes of another person.

The officers pushed me into a patrol car, in an attempt to protect me. The patrol car became the center of the chaos. The masses surrounded it, protesters banged on the doors and windows, rocked the car from side to side. “Traitor,” they yelled.

The hardship of south Tel Aviv residents is real. No one denies that. These are weak neighborhoods, forced to take on a population with nothing, engaged in a daily struggle for survival. But that’s only part of the story. On Wednesday, everyone with black skin was labeled an enemy. These Knesset members are largely responsible for turning the words into acts. They cannot shake off that responsibility. The harsh violence against passersby that happened to have black skin is a direct result of their wild incitements. The incitements on Wednesday are the start of a slippery slope. It is best to stop it as early as possible. If the public leaders and neighborhood officials won’t take responsibility, someone could pay with their life. The writing is on the wall, in black and white.

In another report, a neighborhood resident told Haaretz: “In my opinion, what happened here [Wednesday night] was still minor. I hear what kind of mood people are in. It won’t end with this; it will get worse.”

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Fear and loathing of all non-Jews

Israeli political lobby group “Fence For Life” chairman Ilan Tsion, speaking at the Ramle Conference on April 15, 2012. To Tsion’s right sits MK Michael Ben-Ari who helped incite mob violence attacking African refugees in Tel Aviv last night.

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Warrantless spying fight

Glenn Greenwald writes: In 2006, The New York Times‘ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau won the Pulitzer Prize for their December, 2005 article revealing that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on the electronic communications of Americans without the warrants required by the FISA law (headline: “Officials Say U.S. Wiretaps Exceeded Law”). Even though multiple federal judges eventually ruled the program illegal, that scandal generated no accountability of any kind for two reasons: (1) federal courts ultimately accepted the arguments of the Bush and Obama DOJs that the legality of Bush’s domestic spying program should not be judicially reviewed; and (2) the Democratic-led Congress, in 2008, enacted the Bush-designed FISA Amendments Act, which not only retroactively immunized the nation’s telecom giants for their illegal participation in that spying program and thus terminated pending lawsuits, but worse, also legalized the vast bulk of the Bush spying program by vesting vast new powers in the U.S. Government to eavesdrop without warrants (in his memoir, President Bush gleefully recounted that the 2008 eavesdropping bill supported by the Democrats gave him more than he ever expected).

It was then-Sen. Obama’s vote in favor of the FISA Amendments Act that caused the first serious Election Year rift between him and his own supporters. Obama’s vote in favor of the bill was so controversial for two independent reasons: (1) when he was seeking the Democratic nomination only a few months earlier and needed the support of the progressive base, Obama unequivocally vowed to filibuster “any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies,” only to turn around once he had secured the nomination and not only vote against a filibuster of that bill but then vote in favor of the bill itself; and (2) the bill itself legalized vast new powers of warrantless eavesdropping: powers which the Democratic Party (and Obama) had spent years denouncing (as Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin put it at the time: “Through the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, Congress has legitimated many of the same things people are now complaining about”). When Obama announced his reversal, his defenders insisted he was only doing it so that he could win the election and then use his power as President to stop warrantless eavesdropping abuses, while Obama himself claimed he voted for the FISA bill “with the firm intention — once I’m sworn in as President — to have my Attorney General conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs, and to make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future.”

The only positive aspect of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 was that Congress imposed a four-year sunset provision on the new warrantless eavesdropping powers it authorized. That sunset provision is set to expire and — surprise, surprise — the Obama administration, just like it did for the Patriot Act, is demanding its full-scale renewal without a single change or reform: [Continue reading…]

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Breakdown or breakthrough? Iran nuclear talks hit a snag

Tony Karon writes: Nobody was expecting a breakthrough at Wednesday’s nuclear talks in Baghdad, but most weren’t expecting a breakdown, either. Indeed, predictions were that Iran and the P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China) would engage on more detailed proposals for concrete, reciprocal confidence building measures, and then adjourn by day’s end having scheduled a new round of talks in a few weeks. But in what may be an exercise in brinkmanship, or a sign of an impending crisis, Iranian officials balked at the offer from the Western powers. ”The points of agreement are not yet sufficient for another round,” an anonymous Iranian official at the talks told AFP.

Iran’s state media, whose upbeat spin on the talks in recent weeks had many analysts concluding that Tehran was preparing its public for a deal, slammed what it called the “outdated” and “unbalanced” proposals by the Western powers in Baghdad. At Iranian insistence, Thursday will see a second day of talks in Baghdad, and the parties remained locked in negotiations until midnight. That looked like a tactic to create a mini crisis on the key sticking point in the talks: the question of whether Iran will be granted any relief from escalating Western sanctions if it agrees to the immediate confidence-building steps demanded by the P5+1. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon revealed secrets to Hollywood on bin Laden raid

The name of a SEAL Team 6 operator and commander “who was involved from the beginning as a planner” of the raid to kill Osama bin Laden was revealed to a Hollywood director and a screenwriter to assist them in making a feature film about the assassination, but this name cannot now be revealed to the press or public.

Transcripts of conversations between administration officials and the filmmakers, released because of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, contain redactions even though there’s no reason to believe the filmmakers had security clearances.

Politico reports: Just weeks after Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency officials warned publicly of the dangers posed by leaks about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, top officials at both agencies and at the White House granted Hollywood filmmakers unusual access to those involved in planning the raid and some of the methods they used to do it, newly released government records show.

At a briefing in July 2011, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike Vickers told filmmakers Michael Boal and Katherine Bigelow that the leaders of the the Special Operations Command couldn’t speak to them for appearances’ sake. However, Vickers said that the Pentagon would make available a Navy SEAL who was involved in planning the raid from its earliest stages.

“On the operators side, Adm. McRaven and Adm. Olson do not want to talk directly, because it’s just a bad, their [sic] just concerned as commanders of the force and they’re telling them all the time—don’t you dare talk to anybody, that it’s just a bad example if it gets out—even with all sorts of restrictions and everything,” Vickers said, according to a transcript of the meeting released Friday to Judicial Watch. The conservative watchdog group filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit demanding the documents (posted here).

“The basic idea is they’ll make a guy available who was involved from the beginning as a planner, a SEAL Team 6 Operator and Commander,” McRaven said.

“That’s dynamite,” Boal replied, according to the transcript.

Bigelow, best known for “The Hurt Locker,” also chimed in. “That’s incredible,” she said, gratefully.

“He’ll speak for operators and he’ll speak for senior military commanders,” Vickers continued, adding that the designated SEAL would essentially be a mouthpiece for McRaven and Olson. “The only thing we ask is that you not reveal his name in any way as a consultant because again it’s the same thing, he shouldn’t be talking out of school, this at least gives him one step removed and he knows what he can and can’t say,” Vickers added, vouching that the SEAL cleared to meet with the filmmakers would be able to provide “lots of color.”

The Pentagon is now withholding from the public and the press the same name DoD gave the filmmakers. The response sent to Judicial Watch explains the deletion by citing privacy concerns as well as a statute allowing the Secretary of Defense to protect the names of members of “routinely deployable” and “sensitive” units. It is unclear whether the court will uphold such a withholding given that the name was already disclosed to a member of the public by a senior official, apparently with some forethought.

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Israeli politicians incite mob violence targeting African refugees in Tel Aviv

Noam Sheizaf reports: More than 1,000 Israelis protested this evening (Wednesday) against the African refugees and asylum seekers who have settled in South Tel Aviv in recent years. According to eyewitnesses reports, the crowd grew angry and ultimately violent, following speeches from Knesset Members, including members of the government coalition.

It was one of the most violent protests Tel Aviv has known in recent years. Confrontations were continuing between police and Jewish citizens at around 10:30 p.m. local time.

Dozens of protesters tried to move from the Hatikva neighborhood, where the rally was held, towards Tel Aviv’s Shapira neighborhood, where most African refugees live. They were stopped by police. Protesters attacked a car passing by carrying African immigrants, smashing its windows. Shops associated with the African community were vandalized. [UPDATE: As of midnight, activists in Hatikva are still reporting looting and occasional attacks on Africans.]

In light of increasing violence and harassment in recent days, activists walked refugee children in Tel Aviv home from school on Wednesday in order to prevent them from potential attacks.

According to Maariv’s website, the mob chased a man from Eritrea, who took shelter in a storefront and was rescued by police. At least two journalists were attacked. One fled the area and the other, whose notepad was snatched by protesters, was sheltered by the cops.

Earlier, Knesset members spoke at the event. Some blamed government inaction for the “infiltration problem,” while others heaped attacks on human rights organizations helping the refugees. Knesset Member Miri Regev called the refugees “a cancer.” Regev, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, said that “leftists” are preventing the state from deporting the refugees back to Africa. Knesset Member Danny Danon (Likud), who also spoke at the event, wrote in a Facebook status tonight that “Israel is at war. An enemy state of infiltrators was established in Israel, and its capital is south Tel Aviv.”

Earlier this week, Haaretz reported: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that the “phenomenon of illegal infiltrators from Africa is extremely serious and threatens Israel’s social fabric and national security. He made the comments at a cabinet meeting, adding that “if we don’t stop the problem, 60,000 infiltrators are liable to become 600,000, and cause the negation of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”

Netanyahu also praised the border fence that is being built in the south as a means of preventing infiltrations, but added that it is also important “to physically remove the infiltrators. We must crack down and mete out tougher punishments.”

Five groups that aid African migrants sent a letter to Netanyahu on Sunday, asking that he “immediately order the granting of work permits to asylum-seekers in Israel.” The letter stated that the current situation is forcing migrants to seek shelter in poorer neighborhoods, exacerbating the problems there. “The situation has become intolerable,” they wrote.

Interior Minister Eli Yishai echoed the sentiment expressed by the prime minister, and reiterated his own message last week, when he said that most African migrants are criminals and that all, “without exception,” should be arrested and deported.

On Sunday, Yishai said he is not responsible for asylum-seekers from war-torn countries whose lives might be at risk if deported back to those countries, because “as it is, there are millions more who might be murdered.

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Manal al-Sharif: fighting against gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia


Guy Adams interviews Manal al-Sharif, the Saudi Arabian woman who became famous around the world last year after posting on YouTube an eight-minute video of her steering a car through the streets of the city of Khobar, railing as she went against the misogyny of laws that make it illegal for women in Saudi Arabia to drive.

We meet in Norway, where she has just given a barnstorming speech to the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual gathering of global human rights activists. A film of her extraordinarily moving presentation, which received an ovation, hit YouTube last week. A quarter of a million people have already watched.

“After I was invited to speak here in Oslo, I asked for four days off and my company refused,” she says of her sacking. “My boss called me and said, ‘If you are going to talk at another conference, you could lose your job. You are not allowed to go. We don’t want our name to be associated with you’.”

Ms Sharif went anyway and, at 33, now finds herself jobless and homeless (her flat was owned by Aramco). A lesser woman might feel ground down by that pressure but, looking impressive and poised in her very un-Saudi business attire, she seems energised instead. In a hotel lobby, she angrily rattles through the daily indignities of life in a country which, despite her university education and high-flying CV, forces her to live according to a set of ultra-conservative Islamic protocols which hark back to the Dark Ages.

The lot of Saudi women is shaped by Wahhabism, the most unbending form of the Muslim faith, she explains. The Koran is effectively her nation’s constitution and gender apartheid is a cultural obsession. Shops, restaurants, schools and workplaces are sexually segregated, while strict rules, enforced by shadowy religious police, govern every aspect of a woman’s existence.

“I’m a single mother and I’m 33 but it’s hard to even rent my own apartment without getting my father to sign a piece of paper saying he gives permission,” she says. “I went to renew my passport the other day and they told me to come back with my male guardian. That is life, for a Saudi woman; wherever we go, whatever we achieve, we are the property of a man.”

A Saudi woman who is beaten or raped by her husband and goes to the police must bring that husband along to formally “identify” her, she adds. Saudi women are forbidden from playing competitive sports and are not due to get the vote until 2015.

The irony of Ms Sharif’s life is that she has a deeply conservative background. Born in 1979, she grew up in Mecca, the holiest of holy cities. Her working-class home had separate entrances for men and women. As a child, she remembers burning her brother’s pop cassettes in the oven after mullahs told her music came from “Satan’s flute”.

Later, at university in Jeddah, her class of 60 women was taught computer science in a segregated campus, by professors lecturing from remote locations via closed-circuit television. In keeping with convention, she wore a vast black niqab and long gloves.

Her life changed, almost overnight, on 9/11, orchestrated by her countryman Osama bin Laden. “The extremists told us it was God’s punishment to America,” she recalls. But on the news that evening, she was sickened by footage of office workers jumping from the twin towers. “I said to myself, ‘something is wrong. There is no religion on earth that can accept such mercilessness, such cruelty.'”

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In Spain ‘there is no future’

El País reports: Con la que está cayendo…” This expression – which literally means “With this downpour,” but metaphorically is used as “With things as bad as they are” – keeps cropping up in conversation, as Spaniards spend their days with one eye on the stock market and the other on the risk premium – “which seems like a member of the family right now,” according to the sociologist Daniel Kaplún, an expert on public opinion.

It’s been like this for many months, and nobody knows when it will end. The economic and financial crisis has brought with it a cloud of social pessimism; a mantle of gloom; a lack of expectations that is cutting deep into the average citizen’s state of mind. There truly seems to be no way out.

“There is no future, and therefore no present either,” says sociology professor Enrique Gil Calvo, from Madrid’s Complutense University.

“We’ve gone from concern to anguish,” adds his colleague José Juan Toharia, from the capital’s Autónoma University. La que está cayendo reflects a collective feeling and individual emotions, as well. The triple whammy of anxiety-anger-depression can easily shoot out of control, warns the psychologist Antonio Cano. General practitioners have already noticed it.

Is there a way out, given the lack of ways out?

“We’re experiencing a situation of generalized fear, and rarely were there so many reasons for it: the economy is in free-fall, and jobless claims have grown from 1.8 million to 5.6 million in just four years. Besides, just when we thought we were getting out of a V-shaped crisis, it got worse, and it turns out that it was actually a W,” says Gil Calvo.

This has created a “nightmare” feeling ever since the spending cuts were first introduced in 2010. The bad dream comes with a sense of helplessness that feeds a “general despondency.”

“There is no cure and nobody there to provide a cure. The Socialist Party failed. The Popular Party [PP] is failing too, and there are no firefighters left,” adds Gil Calvo.

And then there is “the Friday syndrome,” says the psychiatrist Julio Bobes. As in, let’s see what cuts the government makes this time at Friday’s weekly Cabinet meeting.

The main victim is the middle class, essentially “those who have lost their job or their source of income, such as small business owners and the self-employed, including those who are unable to collect the money they’re owed. Many of them are on the verge of social exclusion, or already there,” says Kaplún, who calculates that these individuals make up “over a third of the population.” [Continue reading…]

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FBI quietly forms secretive Net-surveillance unit

CNET reports: The FBI has recently formed a secretive surveillance unit with an ambitious goal: to invent technology that will let police more readily eavesdrop on Internet and wireless communications.

The establishment of the Quantico, Va.-based unit, which is also staffed by agents from the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency, is a response to technological developments that FBI officials believe outpace law enforcement’s ability to listen in on private communications.

While the FBI has been tight-lipped about the creation of its Domestic Communications Assistance Center, or DCAC — it declined to respond to requests made two days ago about who’s running it, for instance — CNET has pieced together information about its operations through interviews and a review of internal government documents.

DCAC’s mandate is broad, covering everything from trying to intercept and decode Skype conversations to building custom wiretap hardware or analyzing the gigabytes of data that a wireless provider or social network might turn over in response to a court order. It’s also designed to serve as a kind of surveillance help desk for state, local, and other federal police. [Continue reading…]

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Long-term uncertainty remains in nuclear talks with Iran

Tony Karon writes: Anyone banking on a big-win breakthrough in Wednesday’s nuclear talks with Iran will likely find themselves in the same boat as investors who bet on an instant surge in the Facebook stock price last week. If there’s value to be found in nuclear negotiations with Iran, then — like an investment in Facebook — it’s likely to emerge over time. And in both cases, even the long-term outcome remains uncertain.

After weeks of upbeat assessments, Western officials seemed to tamp down expectations ahead of the meeting that got underway in Baghdad on Wednesday. “If we talk substantively on elements of a deal and agree to meet again in three weeks, Baghdad will have been a success,” a senior U.S. official told al-Monitor on Monday. The spin ahead of the talks in recent weeks has been positive — almost too positive for diplomats, who naturally prefer diminished expectations. At home, Iran’s leaders are proclaiming a great victory in the willingness of Western powers to negotiate while Iran continues to enrich uranium, suggesting that they’re preparing their public for a compromised deal that will be sold as a great victory. The Western narrative paints Iran’s willingness to negotiate as a consequence of ever tightening economic sanctions, implying that such pressure must be maintained to curb its nuclear ambitions.

There are some positive signs: Sunday’s talks in Tehran between IAEA chief Yukiya Amano and Iran’s nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili appear to have yielded an in-principle agreement, not yet inked or finalized, to expand the nuclear-watchdog agency’s access to sensitive sites in Iran. Amano, who has taken a tough line in dealing with Iran, was upbeat, expecting a signed agreement “quite soon.” But the IAEA talks are the undercard to the negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 (the U.S., France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China). Even if they improve the atmosphere for the Baghdad meeting, a breakdown between Iran and the P5+1 would likely imperil any progress made by the IAEA.

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Why nuclear weapons programs often fail on their own — and why Iran’s might, too

It is widely assumed that the only things standing in the way of Iran developing nuclear weapons are either external pressures (sanctions, sabotage, assassinations, the threat of military strikes, and the constraints imposed by the NPT), or that Iran has yet to decide to apply its nuclear know-how to the creation of weapons.

Jacques E.C. Hymans suggests a third obstacle which is an authoritarian political culture that undermines the pursuit of such a goal.

Nuclear research and development organizations depend heavily on intense commitment, creative thinking, and a shared spirit of cooperation among large numbers of highly educated scientific and technical workers. To elicit this positive behavior, management needs to respect their professional autonomy and facilitate their efforts, and not simply order them around. Respect for professional autonomy was instrumental to the brilliant successes of the earliest nuclear weapons projects. Even in Stalin’s Soviet Union, as the historian David Holloway has written, “it is striking how the apparatus of the police state fused with the physics community to build the bomb. . . . [The physics community’s] autonomy was not destroyed by the creation of the nuclear project. It continued to exist within the administrative system that was set up to manage the project.”

By contrast, most rulers of recent would-be nuclear states have tended to rely on a coercive, authoritarian management approach to advance their quest for the bomb, using appeals to scientists’ greed and fear as the primary motivators. That coercive approach is a major mistake, because it produces a sense of alienation in the workers by removing their sense of professionalism. As a result, nuclear programs lose their way. Moreover, underneath these bad management choices lie bad management cultures. In developing states with inadequate civil service protections, every decision tends to become politicized, and state bureaucrats quickly learn to keep their heads down. Not even the highly technical matters faced by nuclear scientific and technical workers are safe from meddling politicians. The result is precisely the reverse of what the politicians intend: not heightened efficiency but rather a mixture of bureaucratic sloth, corruption, and endless blame shifting.

Although it is difficult to measure the quality of state institutions precisely, the historical record strongly indicates that the more a state has conformed to the professional management culture generally found in developed states, the less time it has needed to get its first bomb and the lower its chances of failure. Conversely, the more a state has conformed to the authoritarian management culture typically found in developing states, the more time it has needed to get its first bomb and the higher its chances of failure.

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