Author Archives: News Sources

39 ways to limit free speech

David Cole writes: Google “39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad” and you’ll get over 590,000 hits. You’ll find full-text English language translations of this Arabic document on the Internet Archive, an Internet library; on 4Shared Desktop, a file-sharing site; and on numerous Islamic sites. You will find it cited and discussed in a US Senate Committee staff report and Congressional testimony. Feel free to read it. Just don’t try to make your own translation from the original, which was written in Arabic in Saudi Arabia in 2003. Because if you look a little further on Google you will find multiple news accounts reporting that on April 12, a 29-year old citizen from Sudbury, Massachusetts named Tarek Mehanna was sentenced to seventeen and a half years in prison for translating “39 Ways” and helping to distribute it online.

As Anthony Lewis was wont to ask in his New York Times columns, “Is this America?” Seventeen and a half years for translating a document? Granted, it’s an extremist text. Among the “39 ways” it advocates include “Truthfully Ask Allah for Martyrdom,” “Go for Jihad Yourself,” “Giving Shelter to the Mujahedin,” and “Have Enmity Towards the Disbelievers.” (Other “ways to serve,” however, include, “Learn to Swim and Ride Horses,” “Get Physically Fit,” “Stand in Opposition to the Disbelievers,” and “Expose the Hypocrites and Traitors.”) But surely we have not come to the point where we lock people up for nearly two decades for translating a widely available document? After all, news organizations and scholars routinely translate and publicize jihadist texts; think, for example, of the many reports about messages from Osama bin Laden.

In 2009, Tarek Mehanna, who has no prior criminal record, was arrested and placed in maximum security confinement on “terrorism” charges. The case against him rested on allegations that as a 21-year old he had traveled with friends to Yemen in 2004 in an unsuccessful search for a jihadist training camp in order to fight in Iraq, and that he had translated several jihadist tracts and videos into English for distribution on the Internet, allegedly to spur readers on to jihad. After a two-month trial, he was convicted of conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization. The jury did not specify whether it found him guilty for his aborted trip to Yemen—which resulted in no known contacts with jihadists—or for his translations, so under established law, the conviction cannot stand unless it’s permissible to penalize him for his speech. Mehanna is appealing.

Under traditional (read “pre-9/11”) First Amendment doctrine, Mehanna could not have been convicted even if he had written “39 Ways” himself, unless the government could shoulder the heavy burden of demonstrating that the document was “intended and likely to incite imminent lawless action,” a standard virtually impossible to meet for written texts. In 1969, in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court established that standard in ruling that the First Amendment protected a Ku Klux Klansman who made a speech to a Klan gathering advocating “revengeance” against “niggers” and “Jews.” It did so only after years of experience with federal and state governments using laws prohibiting advocacy of crime as a tool to target political dissidents (anarchists, anti-war protesters, and Communists, to name a few).

But in Mehanna’s case, the government never tried to satisfy that standard. It didn’t show that any violent act was caused by the document or its translation, much less that Mehanna intended to incite imminent criminal conduct and was likely, through the translation, to do so. In fact, it accused Mehanna of no violent act of any kind. Instead, the prosecutor successfully argued that Mehanna’s translation was intended to aid al-Qaeda, by inspiring readers to pursue jihad themselves, and therefore constituted “material support” to a “terrorist organization.” [Continue reading…]

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Barak adds to Israel’s mixed messages on Iran

The New York Times reports: One day after Israeli newspapers reported that the nation’s top general had said economic and diplomatic pressures against Iran were beginning to succeed, his superior, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, said Thursday that the chances “appear low” that the Iranian government would bow to international pressure and halt its nuclear program.

The remarks by Israel’s top defense officials added to uncertainty over the unity of the nation’s leadership in its approach to Iran’s nuclear program, which Israel fears is aimed at producing weapons. While Israeli officials insisted Thursday that there was no disagreement, the comments by Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz to Israeli journalists did not appear to line up completely either with the tone of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, or the assessment of Mr. Barak.

“The truth must be told: The chance that this level of pressures will make Iran respond to the international demand to halt the program in an irreversible manner — the chance of that appears low,” Mr. Barak said during an Independence Day celebration in Herzliya. “I will be happy to be proved wrong. But that is my best assessment, and it is based on years of tracking Iranian maneuvering and on historical precedents of North Korea and Pakistan.”

Mr. Barak’s remarks came even as top officials tried to erase the perception of disagreement over Iran. The day began with General Gantz’s telling reporters “there is really no distance” between his view and that of the prime minister, according to an aide who was with him. But it was unclear whether the general was being pressed to walk back from his comments, if he felt his message was misconstrued or if it was all part of a broader strategy of trying to offer dual messages for different audiences.

In any case, the discrepancies, however slight, were self-evident.

In an interview published Wednesday in the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, General Gantz described the Iranian government as “very rational.” Mr. Netanyahu had told CNN on Tuesday that he would not count “on Iran’s rational behavior.”

General Gantz said Thursday morning that he thought Iran would ultimately decide against building a weapon because of sanctions and the threat of a military strike from multiple nations; hours later, Mr. Barak said he thought it unlikely that the sanctions would succeed and that he did not see Iran as “rational in the Western sense of the word, meaning people seeking a status quo and the outlines of a solution to problems in a peaceful manner.”

Mr. Barak’s extensive foreign policy comments were quite unusual, given that they were offered during what was billed as a holiday toast, but hewed closely to the positions he has long stated regarding Iran and its nuclear program. He also warned of “a nuclear arms race” with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and “even the new Egypt,” calling Iran “a challenge for all the world.”

General Gantz, meanwhile, hinted Thursday that Israel had international backing for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, saying: “The military force is ready. Not only our forces, but other forces as well.”

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The other America, 2012: confronting the poverty epidemic

Sasha Abramsky writes: Clarksdale, Mississippi, might seem an unlikely starting point for a meditation on twenty-first-century American inequality. After all, the music the town’s fame rests on is born of the sorrow and racial exploitations of another century. Clarksdale proudly markets itself as the home of the blues: the world’s best blues musicians still come to jam in the little Delta town where W.C. Handy once lived, where Bessie Smith died and where Robert Johnson supposedly made his infamous pact with the devil at a crossroads on the edge of town.

But Clarksdale is also the site of a very different crossroads, one in many ways emblematic of what America is becoming: a place of stunning divides and dramatically disparate life expectations between rich and poor. The side streets of central Clarksdale are lined with tiny, dilapidated wooden homes. Most residents here make do without basic services and amenities, including anything beyond a bare-bones education, and many lack access to the broader cash economy. In contrast, the stately old townhouses in the historic district—places where several Mississippi governors grew up, where the young Tennessee Williams ran around while staying with his grandparents—look like the scenic backdrop to a romantic film set in the antebellum South. And the newer, more palatial mansions in the suburbs ringing the town could serve as staging grounds for a reality TV show on the nouveau riche.

In the poorer section of Clarksdale, in a subsidized housing unit about the size of a small boat’s cabin, lives 88-year-old Amos Harper, a jack-of-all-trades who grew up in a sharecropping family. Harper spent decades doing everything from farmwork to interstate tractor-trailer transport. These days, he gets up early to supplement his $765 monthly Social Security check, collecting cans from the gutters and trading them in for 49 cents per pound. When he isn’t doing that, he’s mowing lawns and running errands for several of the town’s richer residents, including Bill Luckett.

Luckett and his wife live in a huge house designed by architect E. Fay Jones, a Frank Lloyd Wright mentee. Every detail, from the high ceilings to the sunken rooms, has been carefully planned. The larger-than-life home complements the larger-than-life persona of Luckett, a burly 64-year-old attorney and real estate developer with a shock of gray hair who is “president of everything from a country club to a hunting club,” as he puts it. Luckett serves on a state legal aid board and various educational advisory boards, and he counts among his acquaintances some of the country’s top politicians and entertainers.

He also considers Harper a friend, although, as Luckett would be the first to acknowledge, the friendship is deeply unequal. Until age slowed him down, Harper would routinely show up at the Ground Zero blues club, a raucous place Luckett owns with actor Morgan Freeman, showing off dance moves that Luckett says are some of the best in town.

For Luckett, Clarksdale’s imbalances are indicative of broader fissures and inequities in Mississippi—and, he believes, across America. Angry at the way the political system is ignoring poverty, Luckett ran for governor last year on an anti-poverty and invest-in-education platform. He came in a strong second in the Democratic primary, though in a state as heavily Republican as Mississippi, that didn’t necessarily count for much. “I’d never intended to get into politics,” he explains over a glass of red wine in one of his living rooms. But, he says, lack of investment in public education, an increasingly regressive tax system and other challenges pushed him into the fray. “America has never had as greedy a top 1 percent as we have now. The inequality has reached dangerous proportions.”

Unfortunately, Luckett is a rare exception in Mississippi politics. The state’s leadership is exemplified by ex-governor Haley Barbour and current governor Phil Bryant, who both won election by forging alliances between country club denizens and the culturally conservative white working class, which both preach the virtues of shrinking government, rolling back regulations and cutting social services. “When you get a white guy walking out of his rusty trailer into his pickup truck and he’s got a Vote Republican placard in his yard, then you’ve reached the height of stupidity,” Luckett says.

Sadly, this too is reflective of the nation. [Continue reading…]

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Protesting against mobiles is damaging the environmental movement

George Monbiot writes: One of the central tenets of environmentalism is that resources should be used as carefully and sparingly as possible. By and large we try to stick to this rule in our own lives, with varying degrees of success. But there is one resource whose use by this movement is sometimes astonishingly profligate: the time and energy deployed by campaigners.

This is a rare commodity. There are few enough people who are prepared to devote their free time to trying to make the world a happier place. There are fewer still who know how to run an effective campaign, and have the grit to stick with it. We should use this rare blessing as intelligently as possible, campaigning against the most pressing threats, ensuring that we are not distracted by issues that are either trivial or imaginary.

There is no shortage of large, demonstrable and urgent hazards to the environment and public health. Among them, to name just a few, are climate change, biodiversity and habitat loss, overfishing, overuse of water, air pollution, dangerous roads and the obesity crisis. None of these attracts a sufficient number of dedicated campaigners; none of them, as a result, has the political attention it deserves. Faced with such issues, we cannot afford to squander precious time and energy chasing phantoms.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that if I were running a campaign highlighting the health effects of mobile phones and phone masts, I would see this as a good time to wind it up. [Continue reading…]

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Enemies of the internet

Wired looks at recent reports on government restrictions on the internet around the world including Enemies of the Internet Report 2012 from Reporters without Borders (RWB), which has raised Bahrain from the category “under surveillance” to “enemy”.

The report states: “Bahrain offers an example of an effective news blackout based on a remarkable array of repressive measures: keeping the international media away, harassing human rights activists, arresting bloggers and netizens (one of whom died in detention), smearing and prosecuting free speech activists, and disrupting communications, especially during the major demonstrations.”

As Computer World reported, internet traffic to and from the country dropped as much as 20 percent after 14th February 2011 — the day that the “rebellion” in the country started. High-speed web access was slowed down; access to YouTube and Facebook references to protests were blocked; and, a year later, says the RWB report, the live973.info website, which was streaming footage of a demonstration by the government opposition party, was blocked. However, most worrying are the arrests, which the RWB report says have “soared”.

In August 2011, Bloomberg published an article stating that the spy gear had been sold to the Bahrain government by Siemens AG and that this was being used to monitor phone calls and text messages. RWB adds: “Companies specialising in online surveillance are becoming the new mercenaries in an online arms race. Hacktivists are providing technical expertise to netizens trapped by a repressive regime’s apparatus. Diplomats are getting involved. More than ever before, online freedom of expression is now a major foreign and domestic policy issue.”

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Heavy casualties reported in Syria explosion

The New York Times reports: A large number of Syrian civilians died in a poor neighborhood of Hama after their houses crashed down on them, but the government and the opposition offered widely different accounts on Thursday of the cause of the episode.

The opposition activists called it a massacre, saying intensive government shelling collapsed a row of cinder-block shanties, killing around 70 people. State media, however, said 16 people died when a bomb-making operation by government opponents went awry, with a series of blasts leveling the houses in the Mashaa al-Tayar neighborhood.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in London, had a similar lower toll, but said the cause of the deaths was as yet undetermined.

The episode was certain to deepen the skepticism that a shaky cease-fire negotiated by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, would hold.

A new pattern has also developed in recent days of the government rushing to blame the opposition, which it uniformly labels “terrorists,” for deaths in episodes of violence. On Tuesday, Mohamed Khadra, a volunteer for the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, was killed in a hail of gunfire that hit an ambulance ferrying the wounded from the Damascus suburb of Douma. The opposition has accused government forces of repeatedly preventing the evacuation of wounded from neighborhoods that staged antigovernment protests, while the state-run media blamed an “armed terrorist group” for the attack.

In Istanbul on Thursday, the Syrian National Council, the main opposition group in exile, issued a statement describing the deaths in embattled Hama as a blatant violation of the cease-fire. It called on the United Nations Security Council to meet to do something more to protect Syrian civilians. The government of President Bashar al-Assad had committed a series of “crimes” against Hama residents, including heavy shelling, summary executions, raids and arrests, it said.

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Israeli military chief: Iran will not build nuclear bomb

The Washington Post reports: Israel’s military chief said in an interview published Wednesday that he believes Iran will choose not to build a nuclear bomb, an assessment that contrasted with the gloomier statements of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and pointed to differences over the Iran issue at the top levels of Israeli leadership.

The comments by Lt. Gen Benny Gantz, who said international sanctions have begun to show results, could relieve pressure on the Obama administration and undercut efforts by Israeli political leaders to urge the United States to get as tough as possible on Iran.

Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have repeatedly stressed that they do not think sanctions and diplomacy will persuade Iran to halt a nuclear program they describe as a military one, and they warn that the time to stop it is quickly shrinking.

But the Israeli security establishment is believed to be far less convinced about the urgency of military action. Gantz made his own reservations clear in a handful of rare interviews with Israeli newspapers, offering comments that analysts said seemed intended to inject nuance into a debate that has reached frenzied heights this spring. Speaking to the newspaper Haaretz, he said that the Israeli military would be ready to act if ordered, but that he did not think that this year would be “necessarily go, no-go.”

Gantz described Iranian leaders as “very rational people” who are still mulling whether to “go the extra mile” and produce nuclear weapons.

“I believe he would be making an enormous mistake, and I don’t think he will want to go the extra mile,” Gantz said of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. While Gantz cautioned that Khamenei could still change his mind, the supreme leader has said repeatedly that Iran does not intend to build a nuclear weapon, and that its uranium enrichment program is for peaceful purposes.

Although striking in its bluntness, Gantz’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear intentions did not differ dramatically from comments made publicly and privately by other current and former Israeli officials in recent months. Others have also concluded, for example, that Iran intends to achieve nuclear weapons capability but would stop short of assembling and testing a bomb, steps that would almost certainly incur a military response from Israel and perhaps the United States.

But Gantz’s comments differed starkly in tone from those made recently by Netanyahu about the diplomatic efforts of the United States and other world powers.

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Veterans and brain disease

Nicholas Kristof writes: He was a 27-year-old former Marine, struggling to adjust to civilian life after two tours in Iraq. Once an A student, he now found himself unable to remember conversations, dates and routine bits of daily life. He became irritable, snapped at his children and withdrew from his family. He and his wife began divorce proceedings.

This young man took to alcohol, and a drunken car crash cost him his driver’s license. The Department of Veterans Affairs diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D. When his parents hadn’t heard from him in two days, they asked the police to check on him. The officers found his body; he had hanged himself with a belt.

That story is devastatingly common, but the autopsy of this young man’s brain may have been historic. It revealed something startling that may shed light on the epidemic of suicides and other troubles experienced by veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His brain had been physically changed by a disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E. That’s a degenerative condition best-known for affecting boxers, football players and other athletes who endure repeated blows to the head.

In people with C.T.E., an abnormal form of a protein accumulates and eventually destroys cells throughout the brain, including the frontal and temporal lobes. Those are areas that regulate impulse control, judgment, multitasking, memory and emotions.

That Marine was the first Iraq veteran found to have C.T.E., but experts have since autopsied a dozen or more other veterans’ brains and have repeatedly found C.T.E. The findings raise a critical question: Could blasts from bombs or grenades have a catastrophic impact similar to those of repeated concussions in sports, and could the rash of suicides among young veterans be a result? [Continue reading…]

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Rare inside view of Syria’s rebels finds a force vowing to fight on

McClatchy reports: After more than six months of fighting, Syria’s largest rebel group appears to have developed into a resilient guerrilla force, unable perhaps to hold large swaths of territory for very long but still capable of inflicting heavy casualties on the Syrian military and operating fluidly within supportive populations.

The story of the Katiba Farouq, or the Farouq Brigade, has been eclipsed over the past year by news coverage that’s remained focused on the Syrian government’s shelling of urban neighborhoods. But in the months since they took up arms in August, Farouq fighters have discovered the Syrian military’s weaknesses, and despite some reversals, still appear capable of inflicting heavy casualties whenever the Syrian army attempts to enter rebel-held areas.

The rebels plan only to gain strength. “Now we are reorganizing ourselves and creating a military council,” said Mohamed Idris, who was the leader of Farouq’s branch in Baba Amr, the Homs neighborhood that was heavily damaged by Syrian rockets and heavy artillery before the rebels there finally withdrew at the end of February as they ran short of ammunition.

Idris said he and Farouq’s overall commander, Abdel Rizaq Tlass, were wounded in the Homs shelling and escaped together by swimming the Orontes River. Tlass stayed in Homs, while Idris moved south with his men to this all but abandoned city that once was home to 35,000 people near the border with Lebanon.

Tlass appeared in a short video posted on YouTube by Syrian anti-government activists on Sunday, offering to protect U.N. observers if they would stay in rebel-held areas of Homs.

There are many rebel factions fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, but Farouq now is considered the largest of the groups claiming to fight under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, the name adopted by the loosely organized army of defectors and volunteers who make up the armed wing of the anti-Assad uprising. [Continue reading…]

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Pakistan’s prime minister found guilty of contempt

The New York Times reports: Pakistan’s top court convicted Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani of contempt on Thursday, imposing a token sentence that deflated some of the political pressure around the case, but which could result in Mr. Gilani’s ouster.

Facing a courtroom packed with lawyers, cabinet ministers and journalists, Justice Nasir-ul-Mulk issued a strongly worded verdict that found Mr. Gilani guilty of “disobedience” toward the Supreme Court and bringing “ridicule” on its judges.

But instead of jailing the prime minister for six months, as the law provides, the judge imprisoned him only until the court adjourned — an event that occurred seconds later when Mr. Gilani, by then smiling toward his supporters, was still seated.

The courtroom drama brought an immediate sense of relief that a feared institutional clash had at least temporarily abated. But it also signaled that the drama was moving from the judicial into the political arena.

After the hearing, Mr. Gilani, dressed in a traditional long coat, left the court amid a scrum of cheering supporters before speeding off to a cabinet meeting about the crisis. Political rivals, declaring that his moral authority had collapsed, called for his immediate resignation.

“Prime minister should immediately resign,” the opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, told the private television station Geo. “He should step down without causing further crisis.”

But at a news conference hours later, the information minister, Qamar Zaman Kaira, said the cabinet had decided there were no grounds for resignation.

The lenient sentence was a victory for Mr. Gilani and the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party, which has been locked in legal battle with the Supreme Court since January. At issue is a letter that the court has ordered Mr. Gilani to write to prosecutors in Switzerland, effectively urging them to revive a dormant corruption case against his boss, President Asif Ali Zardari.

Mr. Gilani has flatly refused the order, citing Mr. Zardari’s immunity from prosecution, drawing the ire of senior judges who viewed his stance as a brazen challenge to their authority.

But some analysts said that, after months of high-profile hearings that drew uncompromising rhetoric from both sides, Thursday’s verdict signaled a retreat for the court in legal terms.

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Thank you to 60 Minutes

Jewish Voice for Peace says: “On April 22, Bob Simon and the US news show 60 Minutes shared the painful truth with 13 million viewers — the primary cause for the exodus of Palestinian Christians from the Holy Land is the nearly 45 year-old illegal Israeli occupation. Now 60 Minutes is being attacked for telling the truth. A range of Israel-first partisan groups have gone on the attack against CBS, and they have received over 29,000 emails of complaint. If 60 Minutes backs down, then other media outlets will do the same.”

Click here to sign JVP’s petition which has already gathered over 5,000 signatures in a couple of hours. (JVP is a national grassroots organization dedicated to promoting equality, democracy and self-determination for both Israelis and Palestinians.)

Churches for Middle East Peace also have a petition for the same purpose. (CMEP is a coalition of 24 national Church denominations and organizations in Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant traditions.)

And if you missed Bob Simon’s report, here it is:

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Occupy Wall Street: what is to be done next?

Slavoj Žižek writes: What to do in the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street movement, when the protests that started far away – in the Middle East, Greece, Spain, UK – reached the centre, and are now reinforced and rolling out all around the world?

In a San Francisco echo of the OWS movement on 16 October 2011, a guy addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate in it as if it were a happening in the hippy style of the 1960s:

“They are asking us what is our program. We have no program. We are here to have a good time.”

Such statements display one of the great dangers the protesters are facing: the danger that they will fall in love with themselves, with the nice time they are having in the “occupied” places. Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called “class struggle essentialism” for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist etc struggles, “capitalism” is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem.

The first two things one should prohibit are therefore the critique of corruption and the critique of financial capitalism. First, let us not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is neither Main Street nor Wall Street, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street. Public figures from the pope downward bombard us with injunctions to fight the culture of excessive greed and consummation – this disgusting spectacle of cheap moralization is an ideological operation, if there ever was one: the compulsion (to expand) inscribed into the system itself is translated into personal sin, into a private psychological propensity, or, as one of the theologians close to the pope put it:

“The present crisis is not crisis of capitalism but the crisis of morality.”

Let us recall the famous joke from Ernst Lubitch’s Ninotchka: the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies:

“Sorry, but we have run out of cream, we only have milk. Can I bring you coffee without milk?”

Was not a similar trick at work in the dissolution of the eastern european Communist regimes in 1990? The people who protested wanted freedom and democracy without corruption and exploitation, and what they got was freedom and democracy without solidarity and justice. Likewise, the Catholic theologian close to pope is carefully emphasizing that the protesters should target moral injustice, greed, consumerism etc, without capitalism. The self-propelling circulation of Capital remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by definition cannot be controlled. [Continue reading…]

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