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Now Glencore’s gone public, will its ties to dictators and spies stand up to scrutiny?
Ken Silverstein reports: When Glencore, the world’s biggest commodities brokerage firm, went public in May 2011, the initial public offering (IPO) on the London and Hong Kong stock exchanges made headlines for weeks in the Financial Times and the trade-industry press, which devoted endless columns to the company’s astonishing valuation of nearly $60 billion — higher than Boeing or Ford Motor Co. The massive new wealth turned nearly 500 employees into overnight multimillionaires and made billionaires of at least five senior executives, including CEO Ivan Glasenberg. "We are not going to change the way we operate," vowed Glasenberg, who had started as a lowly coal trader for the Swiss firm nearly three decades earlier and, with the IPO, immediately became one of Europe’s richest men. "Being public will have absolutely no effect on the business."
And what a business it is. The firm was forced to pull back the curtain on its famously secretive doings to go public, and what it revealed shocked even seasoned commodities traders. Glencore, which Reuters once called "the biggest company you never heard of," turned out to be far more globally dominant than analysts had realized. According to its 1,637-page IPO prospectus, the company controlled more than half the international tradable market in zinc and copper and about a third of the world’s seaborne coal; was one of the world’s largest grain exporters, with about 9 percent of the global market; and handled 3 percent of daily global oil consumption for customers ranging from state-owned energy companies in Brazil and India to American multinationals like ExxonMobil and Chevron. All of which, the prospectus said, helped the firm post revenues of $186 billion in 2011 and employ some 55,000 people in at least 40 countries, generating an average return on equity of 38 percent, about three times higher than that of the gold-standard investment bank Goldman Sachs in 2010. Since then, the company has only gotten vaster in scale. It recently announced a $90 billion takeover of Xstrata, a global mining giant in which it already holds a 34 percent stake; if the deal goes through, Glencore will rule over an "empire stretching from the Sahara to South Africa," as the Africa Confidential newsletter put it. As it is, Glencore already trades, manufactures, refines, ships, or stores at least 90 commodities in some three dozen countries. "Glencore is at the center of the raw material world," said Peter Brandt, a longtime commodities trader. "Within this world there are giants, and Glencore is becoming a giant among giants."
What the IPO filing did not make clear was just how Glencore, founded four decades ago by Marc Rich, a defiant friend of dictators and spies who later became one of the world’s richest fugitives, achieved this kind of global dominance. The answer — pieced together for this article over a year of reporting that included numerous interviews with past and current Glencore employees and a review of leaked corporate records, dossiers prepared by private investigative firms, court documents, and various international investigations — is at once simpler and far more complicated than it appears. Like all traders, Glencore makes its money at the margins, but Glencore, even more so than its competitors, profits by working in the globe’s most marginal business regions and often, investigators have found, at the margins of what is legal. [Continue reading…]
Video: NSA whistleblower interview — part two
(See part one here.)
Nuclear weapons are not instruments of peace
Richard Falk writes: A few days ago I was a participant in a well-attended academic panel on ‘the decline of violence and warfare’ at the International Studies Association’s Annual Meeting held this year in San Diego, California. The two-part panel featured appraisal of the common argument of two prominent recent publications: Steven Pinker’s best-selling The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Joshua Goldstein’s well-researched, informative, and provocative Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide. Both books are disposed to rely upon quantitative data to back up their optimistic assessments of international and domestic political behavior, which, if persuasive, offer humanity important reasons to be hopeful about the future. Much of their argument depends on an acceptance of their interpretation of battlefield deaths worldwide, which according to their assessments have declined dramatically in recent decades. But do battlefield deaths tell the whole story, or even the real story, about the role and dangers of political violence and war in our collective lives?
My role was to be a member of the Goldstein half of the panel. Although I had never previously met Joshua Goldstein I was familiar with his work and reputation as a well-regarded scholar in the field of international relations. To offer my response in the few minutes available to me I relied on a metaphor that drew a distinction between a ‘picture’ and its ‘frame.’ I found the picture of war and warfare presented by Goldstein as both persuasive and illuminating, conveying in authoritative detail information about the good work being doing by UN peacekeeping forces in a variety of conflict settings around the world, as well as a careful crediting of peace movements with a variety of contributions to conflict resolution and war avoidance. Perhaps, the most enduringly valuable part of the book is its critical debunking of prevalent myths about the supposedly rising proportion of civilian casualties in recent wars and inflated reports of casualties and sexual violence in the Congo Wars of 1998-2003. These distortions, corrected by Goldstein, have led to a false public perception that wars and warfare are growing more indiscriminate and brutal in recent years, while the most reliable evidence points in the opposite direction.
Goldstein is convincing in correcting such common mistakes about political violence and war in the contemporary world, but less so when it comes to the frame and framing of this picture that is conveyed by his title ‘winning the war on war’ and the arguments to this effect that is the centerpiece of his book, and accounts for the interest that it is arousing. For one thing the quantitative measures relied upon do not come to terms with the heightened qualitative risks of catastrophic warfare or the continued willingness of leading societies to anchor their security on credible threats to annihilate tens of millions of innocent persons, which if taking the form of a moderate scale nuclear exchange (less than 1 percent of the world’s stockpile of weapons) is likely to cause, according to reliable scientific analysis, what has been called ‘a nuclear famine’ resulting in a sharp drop in agricultural output that could last as long as ten years and could be brought about by the release of dense clouds of smoke blocking incoming sunlight.
Also on the panel were such influential international relations scholars as John Mearsheimer who shared with me the view that the evidence in Goldstein’s book did not establish that, as Mearsheimer put it, ‘war had been burned out of the system,’ or that even such a trend meaningfully could be inferred from recent experience. Mearsheimer widely known for his powerful realist critique of the Israeli Lobby (in collaboration with Stephen Walt) did make the important point that the United States suffers from ‘an addiction to war.’ Mearsheimer did not seem responsive to my insistence on the panel that part of this American addiction to war arose from the role being played by entrenched domestic militarism, a byproduct of the permanent war economy that disposed policy makers and politicians in Washington to treat most security issues as worthy of resolution only by considering the options offered by thinking within militarist box of violence and sanctions, a viewpoint utterly resistant to learning from past militarist failures (as in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran). In my view the war addiction is real, but can only be treated significantly if understood to be a consequence of this blinkering of policy choice by a militarized bureaucracy in nation’s capital that is daily reinforced by a compliant media and a misguided hard power realist worldview sustained by high paid private sector lobbyists and the lure of corporate profits, and continuously rationalized by well funded subsidized think tanks such as The Hoover Institution, The Heritage Foundation, and The American Enterprise Institute. Dwight Eisenhower in his presidential farewell speech famously drew attention to the problem that has grown far worse through the years when he warned the country about ‘the military-industrial complex’ back in 1961.
What to me was most shocking about the panel was not its overstated claims that political violence was declining and war on the brink of disappearing, but the unqualified endorsement of nuclear weapons as deserving credit for keeping the peace during Cold War and beyond. Nuclear weapons were portrayed as if generally positive contributors to establishing a peaceful and just world, provided only that they do not fall into unwanted hands (which means ‘adversaries of the West,’ or more colorfully phrased by George W. Bush as ‘the axis of evil’) as a result of proliferation. In this sense, although not made explicit in the conversation, Obama’s vision of a world without nuclear weapons set forth at Prague on April 5, 2009 seems irresponsible from the perspective of achieving a less war-prone world. I had been previously aware of Mearsheimer’s support for this position in his hyper-realist account of how World War III was avoided in the period between 1945-1989, but I was not prepared for Goldstein and the well regarded peace researcher, Andrew Mack, blandly to endorse such a conclusion without taking note of the drawbacks of such ‘a nuclear peace.’ [Continue reading…]
Video: Beat the Press with Dean Baker
Facing cyberattack, Iranian officials disconnect some oil terminals from internet
The New York Times reports: Iran disconnected several of its main Persian Gulf oil terminals from the Internet on Monday, local news media reported, as technicians were struggling to contain what they said were intensifying cyberattacks on the Oil Ministry and its affiliates.
Iranian officials said the virus attack, which began in earnest on Sunday afternoon, had not affected oil production or exports, because the industry is still primarily mechanical and does not rely on the Internet. Officials said they were disconnecting the oil terminals and possibly some other installations in an effort to combat the virus.
“Fortunately our international oil selling division has not been affected,” said a high-level manager at the Oil Ministry who asked not to be mentioned for security reasons. “There is no panic, but this shows we have shortcomings in our security systems.”
There were some reports that the virus had forced widespread Internet shutdowns. “The ministry has disconnected all oil facilities, operations and even oil rigs from the Internet to prevent this virus from spreading,” said another Oil Ministry official who asked to remain anonymous, because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the attack. “Everybody at the ministry is working overtime to prevent this.” His assertion about the extent of the shutdowns could not be independently verified.
The Iranian Students’ News Agency said that the virus, called “wiper” by its creator, had successfully erased information on hard disks at the Oil Ministry’s headquarters, a hulking black glass skyscraper on Taleghani Street in central Tehran. The ministry appears to have been the initial target of the virus, which the Iranian authorities say they first noticed in March but apparently were unable to dismantle.
The Web sites of several oil related institutions, like the National Iranian Oil Company, which handles most oil sales in the country, were down on Sunday and Monday. It was unclear whether the virus took the sites down or if they were switched off by the Oil Ministry.
Meanwhile, Reuters reports: Iran has been forced to deploy more than half its fleet of supertankers to store oil at anchorage in the Gulf as buyers of its crude cut back because of sanctions, two Iran-based shipping sources said.
The sources, who are familiar with operations at Iran’s main export terminal Kharg Island in the north of the Gulf, said 14 of National Iranian Tanker Company’s (NITC) fleet of 25 very large crude carriers, each loaded with about 2 million barrels of oil, are now at anchor acting as floating storage.
A further five of Iran’s nine Suezmax tankers, with capacity of one million barrels, are also parked offshore with oil aboard.
Video: Satellite images show Idlib ‘surrounded’
The globalization of hollow politics
Chris Hedges writes: I went to Lille in northern France a few days before the first round of the French presidential election to attend a rally held by the socialist candidate François Holland. It was a depressing experience. Thunderous music pulsated through the ugly and poorly heated Zenith convention hall a few blocks from the city center. The rhetoric was as empty and cliché-driven as an American campaign event. Words like “destiny,” “progress” and “change” were thrown about by Holland, who looks like an accountant and made oratorical flourishes and frenetic arm gestures that seemed calculated to evoke the last socialist French president, François Mitterrand. There was the singing of “La Marseillaise” when it was over. There was a lot of red, white and blue, the colors of the French flag. There was the final shout of “Vive la France.” I could, with a few alterations, have been at a football rally in Amarillo, Texas. I had hoped for a little more gravitas. But as the French cultural critic Guy Debord astutely grasped, politics, even allegedly radical politics, has become a hollow spectacle. Quel dommage.
The emptying of content in political discourse in an age as precarious and volatile as ours will have very dangerous consequences. The longer the political elite—whether in Washington or Paris, whether socialist or right-wing, whether Democrat or Republican—ignore the breakdown of globalization, refuse to respond rationally to the climate crisis and continue to serve the iron tyranny of global finance, the more it will shred the possibility of political consensus, erode the effectiveness of our political institutions and empower right-wing extremists. The discontent sweeping the planet is born out of the paralysis of traditional political institutions.
The signs of this mounting polarization were apparent in incomplete returns Sunday with the far-right National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, winning a staggering vote of roughly 20 percent. This will make the National Front the primary opposition party in France if Holland wins, as expected, the presidency in the second round May 6. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s leftist coalition, the Front de Gauche, was pulling a disappointing 11 percent of the vote. But at least France has a Mélenchon. He was the sole candidate to attack the racist and nationalist diatribes of Le Pen. Mélenchon called for a rolling back of austerity measures, preached the politics “of love, of brotherhood, of poetry” and vowed to fight what he termed the “parasitical vermin” who run global markets. His campaign rallies ended with the singing of the leftist anthem “The Internationale.”
“Long live the Republic, long live the working class, long live France!” he shouted before a crowd of supporters Saturday night.
Every election cycle, our self-identified left dutifully lines up like sheep to vote for the corporate wolves who control the Democratic Party. It bleats the tired, false mantra about Ralph Nader being responsible for the 2000 election of George W. Bush and warns us that the corporate technocrat Mitt Romney is, in fact, an extremist.
The extremists, of course, are already in power. [Continue reading…]
Bahrain’s epic fail
Marc Lynch writes: Nine days ago, the courageous Bahraini activist Alaa Shehabi wrote for Foreign Policy about the then sixty-four day hunger strike by Abd al-Hadi al-Khawajai. His death, she warned, “could mark a significant breaking point for the regime’s efforts to rehabilitate its tarnished reputation — and could accelerate the disturbing trend toward militant radicalization in the opposition.” As of today, Khawaja remains thankfully alive. But Bahrain’s ill-conceived Formula One race event has nevertheless already turned a harsh international spotlight onto the regime’s ongoing repression. And Shehabi, an academic with dual Bahrain-British citizenship whose husband was only recently released after nine months in prison, has been arrested.
Shehabi’s detention might seem a minor footnote given the ongoing protests, the numbers of activists and journalists arrested and pressured, Khawaja’s hunger strike, and the Formula One controversy. She hopefully will soon be released. But her detention while assisting journalists seems particularly symbolic at a time when Bahrain’s regime has sought to burnish its international reputation and suppress critical media coverage without engaging in serious reforms at home.
This week’s Formula One-driven media scrutiny has ripped away Bahrain’s carefully constructed external facade. It has exposed the failure of Bahrain’s regime to take advantage of the breathing space it bought through last year’s crackdown or the lifeline thrown to it by the Bahrain Independent Commission of Iniquiry. That failure to engage in serious reform will likely further radicalize its opponents and undermine hopes for its future political stability.
Egypt terminates gas deal with Israel
Al Jazeera reports: The head of the Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company has said it has terminated its contract to ship gas to Israel because of violations of contractual obligations, a decision Israel said overshadows the peace agreement between the two countries.
Mohamed Shoeb, the gas company’s top official, said Sunday’s decision was not political. This has nothing to do with anything outside of the commercial relations,” Shoeb said.
He said Israel has not paid for its gas in four months. Yigal Palmor, Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, denied the claim of not paying.
The 2005 Egypt-Israel gas deal has come under strident criticism from leaders of the popular uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak, the longtime Egyptian president, last year.
Critics charge that Israel got bargain prices, and Mubarak cronies skimmed millions of dollars off the proceeds.
Senator Russ Feingold takes on Islamophobia
Nayantara Mukherji reports: Former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold is known for taking on monumental challenges. In 2001 he was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act. These days, Feingold has turned his attention to another cause — US foreign policy. At a talk in Madison, Wisconsin, about his new book, While America Sleeps, Feingold argued for increased American engagement with the rest of the world. He said 9/11 highlighted the importance of engaging and understanding the rest of the world, and criticized Democrats and Republicans alike for failing to heed the message.
In making his case, Feingold, a Jewish-American, did not lose sight of domestic issues, pointing out the impact 9/11 had on the lives of Muslim Americans. He likened the situation to Japanese internment during World War II.
In the last couple of years, there have been a number of incidents where people have used the issue of alleged Muslim extremism in this country to justify things like outlawing a mosque in Southern Manhattan, the burning of Qur’ans and most despicably, hearings held by Peter King in Washington specifically focusing on so-called Muslim terrorism, as opposed to the terrorism phenomenon in general.
Feingold bemoaned the fact that the post-9/11 era has made Muslims feel like second-class citizens in their own country. [H/t Loonwatch]
Israeli minister agrees Ahmadinejad never said Israel ‘must be wiped off the map’
Robert Mackey writes: In a reminder that Persian rhetoric is not always easy for English-speakers to interpret, a senior Israeli official has acknowledged that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, never actually said that Israel “must be wiped off the map.”
Those words were attributed to Mr. Ahmadinejad in 2005, in English translations of his speech to a “World Without Zionism” conference that October. As my colleague Ethan Bronner reported the next year, one problem was translating a metaphorical turn of phrase in Persian that has no exact English equivalent — there was, for instance, no mention of a map — and there was a heated debate about whether the original statement was a threat or a prediction.
Last week, Teymoor Nabili of Al Jazeera suggested during an interview with Dan Meridor, Israel’s minister of intelligence and atomic energy, that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s rhetorical flourish had been misinterpreted. “This idea that Iran wants to wipe Israel out,” Mr. Nabili said, “now that’s a common trope that is put about by a lot of people in Israel, a lot of people in the United States, but as we know Ahmadinejad didn’t say that he plans to exterminate Israel, nor did he say that Iran’s policy is to exterminate Israel.”
In response, Mr. Meridor said that Mr. Ahmadinejad and Iran’s ruling cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had said repeatedly “that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say, ‘We’ll wipe it out,’ you’re right, but, ‘It will not survive.’ ”
Mr. Meridor also pointed out that Iran’s leaders have continued to deny Israel’s right to exist and used highly inflammatory terms to describe the state. After Ayatollah Khamenei compared Israel to a cancerous tumor in February — adding, it “should be cut off” — Mr. Meridor noted those remarks were echoed by the president just last month. “Israel is unnatural, it will not exist, it’s on the verge of collapse,” Mr. Meridor said. “When you hear this from these people, you need to take it seriously.”
As the Guardian columnist Jonathan Steele explained in 2006, a more direct translation of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s remarks would be: “this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,” echoing a statement once made by the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. [Continue reading…]
In nothing we trust
National Journal reports: Johnny Whitmire shuts off his lawn mower and takes a long draw from a water bottle. He sloshes the liquid from cheek to cheek and squirts it between his work boots. He is sweating through his white T-shirt. His jeans are dirty. His middle-aged back hurts like hell. But the calf-high grass is cut, and the weeds are tamed at 1900 W. 10th St., a house that Whitmire and his family once called home. “I’ve decided to keep the place up,” he says, “because I hope to buy it back from the bank.”
Whitmire tells a familiar story of how public and private institutions derailed an American’s dream: In 2000, he bought the $40,000 house with no money down and a $620 monthly mortgage. He made every payment. Then, in the fall of 2010, his partially disabled wife lost her state job. “Governor [Mitch] Daniels slashed the budget, and they looked for any excuse to squeeze people out,” Whitmire says. “We got lost in that shuffle—cut adrift.” The Whitmires couldn’t make their payments anymore.
They applied for a trial loan-modification through an Obama administration program, and when it was granted, their monthly bill fell to $473.87. But, like nearly a million others, the modification was canceled. After charging the lower rate for three months, their mortgage lender reinstated the higher fee and billed the family $1,878.88 in back payments. Whitmire didn’t have that kind of cash and couldn’t get it, so he and his wife filed for bankruptcy. His attorney advised him to live in the house until the bank foreclosed, but “I don’t believe in a free lunch,” Whitmire says. He moved out, leaving the keys on the kitchen table. “I thought the bank should have them.”
A year later, City Hall sent him salt for his wounds: a $300 citation for tall grass at 1900 W. 10th St. Telling the story, he swipes dried grass from his jeans and shakes his head. “The city dinged me for tall weeds at my bank’s house.” After another pull from the water bottle, Whitmire kicks a steel-toed boot into the ground he once owned. “You can’t trust anybody or anything anymore.”
Whitmire is an angry man. He is among a group of voters most skeptical of President Obama: noncollege-educated white males. He feels betrayed—not just by Obama, who won his vote in 2008, but by the institutions that were supposed to protect him: his state, which laid off his wife; his government in Washington, which couldn’t rescue homeowners who had played by the rules; his bank, which failed to walk him through the correct paperwork or warn him about a potential mortgage hike; his city, which penalized him for somebody else’s error; and even his employer, a construction company he likes even though he got laid off. “I was middle class for 10 years, but it’s done,” Whitmire says. “I’ve lost my home. I live in a trailer now because of a mortgage company and an incompetent government.” [Continue reading…]
Hamas is not against Jews or Judaism
Larry Cohler-Esses from The Forward went to Cairo to interview Mousa Abu Marzook, Hamas’s second-highest-ranking official, in the first such interview a senior Hamas leader has conducted with a Jewish publication.
“Why am I here?”
This was not an existential plea to the cosmos. It was, rather, the first question I put to Abu Marzook at the start of the interview: Why had he agreed to a request by a Jewish news organization to talk with him in-depth in a lengthy and probing exchange?
“We don’t have originally something against the Jew as a religion or against the Jew as a human being,” he said. “The problem is that the Israelis kicked out my family. They have occupied my land and injured thousands of Palestinians…. I have to differentiate between the Jew who did this problem to my people and [American] Jews like you, who never did anything bad to my people.”
Abu Marzook waved away the contention that, in fact, most American Jews strongly support Israel as a Jewish state — in many cases, quite actively — and sympathize with their fellow Jews there. Speaking of Americans in general, he said, “Those people who have sympathy for the Jews [in Israel], it’s because of their history with the Jews. If you look carefully at what happened to the Jews in Moscow or Madrid, in Spain or in Germany or Poland, that’s very bad…. Anyone who historically his father or grandfather did something like that [to the Jews], he should be ashamed.”
This made Abu Marzook’s comments the next day in defense of the Hamas Charter all the more surprising. The charter, a lengthy, multi-part founding document composed in 1988, contains several sections that have been widely condemned as anti-Semitic.
The first such section cites a hadith, or saying of the Prophet Muhammad:
“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”
The second section cites passages from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” an early 20th-century forgery now widely attributed to the czar of Russia’s secret police, that depict world Jewry as a nefarious international force through Western history. The passages cited hold “world Zionism” as responsible for, among other things, the French and communist revolutions, the control of media and finance worldwide, and the machinations of “secret societies,” including the “Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions in different parts of the world” that have been formed “for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests.”
Abu Marzook said that the charter does not govern his organization.
“We have many, many policies that are not going with the charter,” he said. “But when you talk about ‘change the charter,’ there are many Hamas people talking about changing the charter. That’s a debate inside Hamas, because there are many, many policies against what’s written in the charter.”
Asked specifically about changing the passages on Jews, Abu Marzook acknowledged no such amendments existed. But he defended the hadith as being taken out of context. The passage, he said, did not apply to all Jews — just those in Palestine.
As for the Protocols, “The Zionists wrote it, and they said, ‘No, we didn’t.‘ [It’s] linked to Zionists,” he said.
Informed that the document was, in fact, a forgery, Abu Marzook appeared nonplussed. “Really? This is the first time I know [about this],” he said.
For a Hamas leader who had lived and studied in the West to respond in such a manner seemed a stunning reflection of a movement that remains deeply insular and parochial, even as it now seeks wider legitimacy.
Abu Marzook spoke hopefully of the influence of the Arab Spring as a boon to his movement. The rise of fellow Islamist groups in Egypt and elsewhere could help bring the issue of the Palestinians to the fore, he said, even if, in the short term, Muslim Brotherhood groups, now responsible for governing, emphasized domestic concerns.
He alluded to the debate that the Arab Spring has sparked within Hamas itself, including discussion of converting the group fully into a political party that eschewed its own separate militia or guerilla arm, as has occurred with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. “There are some people in Hamas thinking [that] way,” he said. “But personally, I’m against any kind of political party, because Hamas is a political party and a resistance. You can’t divide this.”
But asked how the Arab Spring’s themes of civil resistance and demands for openness, transparency and democracy might influence Hamas, Abu Marzook looked puzzled. His group operates in areas, such as the occupied West Bank, in which it remains an illegal organization, he noted. And its status in several Arab countries also makes open operations impractical. He declined even to offer a dollar figure for its operating budget.
Might Hamas, for example, consider opening a window on debate within the secretive Shura Council, a body that will soon select a new leader even though no one, including its purported constituents, knows who its members are and how they will vote?
“This is not the interest of people in any way,” Abu Marzook replied.
Away from unrest, Bahrain Grand Prix plays to empty stands
Reuters reports: When Formula One drivers performed their usual parade around the circuit on the back of a flatbed truck ahead of Sunday’s Bahrain Grand Prix, the seats they were waving at were empty.
Few inside the Formula One bubble had any contact with the demonstrations in villages around the capital, which saw nightly clashes between demonstrators hurling Molotov cocktails and police firing teargas and birdshot.
Demonstrators denounced the Grand Prix as a lavish publicity stunt for a government that crushed Arab Spring protests. Their banners depicted race car drivers as riot police. Bahrainis mostly just stayed away.
Formula One earns its money from TV rights and corporate sponsors, not from selling tickets. But a government that wants to show that life is returning to normal had spared no expense to attract punters.
There was a rock music stage. Kids could enjoy tents for circus performers, arts and crafts, and musical theatre.
“It’s like Disneyland,” said one foreigner working in the stalls. “This is the best entertainment village I’ve seen in a long time. They’ve really pushed the boat out for obvious reasons.”
Still, the TV cameras on the front of the cars beamed to the world the unmistakable images of empty bleachers as the racers roared past the grandstands.
Iran claims to have reverse-engineered U.S. spy drone
The Associated Press reports: Iran claims it has reverse-engineered a US spy drone captured by its armed forces last year and has begun building a copy.
General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, chief of the aerospace division of the Revolutionary Guards, related what he said were details of the aircraft’s operational history to prove his claim that Tehran’s military experts had extracted data from the US RQ-170 Sentinel captured in December in eastern Iran, state television reported .
Tehran has flaunted the capture of the Sentinel, a top-secret surveillance drone with stealth technology, as a victory for Iran and a defeat for the US in a complicated intelligence and technological battle.
US officials have acknowledged losing the drone. They have said Iran will find it hard to exploit any data and technology aboard it because of measures taken to limit the intelligence value of drones operating over hostile territory.
Hajizadeh told state television that the captured surveillance drone was a “national asset” for Iran and said he could not reveal full technical details. But he did provide some samples of the data that he claimed Iranian experts had recovered.
“This drone was in California in October 2010 for some technical work and was taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan in November 2010. It conducted flights there but apparently faced problems and [US experts] were unable to fix it,” he said.
Hajizadeh said the drone was taken to Los Angeles in December 2010 where sensors of the aircraft underwent testing. He claimed that the drone was in use in Pakistan two weeks before Osama bin Laden was killed by US navy Seals in the country’s north-west.
In uprooting of Kurds, Iraq tests a fragile national unity
The New York Times reports: In January, the dismembered body of Wisam Jumai, a Kurdish intelligence officer, was discovered in a field in Sadiyah, a small town in northeastern Iraq. Soon his family and friends, one after another, received text messages offering a choice: leave or be killed.
“Wisam has been killed,” read one message sent to a cousin. “Wait for your turn. If you want your life, leave Sadiyah.”
After Mr. Jumai’s killing, nearly three dozen Kurdish families fled their homes and moved here, according to local officials, to the sanctuary of a city that is claimed by the government in Baghdad but patrolled by Kurdish forces. Other Kurds from the area have come here after being pushed out over property disputes that can be traced to Saddam Hussein’s policy in the 1970s of expelling Kurds and resettling Arabs.
Whether by terrorism or judicial order, the continuing displacement of Iraq’s Kurdish minority lays bare the unfinished business of reconciliation in the wake of the American military’s withdrawal, and it is a symptom of the rapidly deteriorating relationship between the semiautonomous Kurdish government based in Erbil and the central government in Baghdad.
The schism, which is most immediately over sharing oil wealth but is more deeply about historical grievances and Kurdish aspirations for independence, raises serious questions about the future of a unified Iraq. The crisis, American officials say, is far more grave than the political tensions between the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and the country’s Sunni Arab minority set off by an arrest warrant on terrorism charges issued in December for Tariq al-Hashimi, the Sunni vice president.
The Kurds, unlike the Sunnis, have their own security forces, oil reserves, ports of entry and even their own de facto foreign policy, with envoys operating in other countries. This could eventually lead them to seek more independence from Baghdad.
“Fearing a resurgence of a strong central state, Kurdish leaders want to leave Iraq, and they appear to believe their moment to do so may soon arrive,” wrote Joost Hiltermann, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, in a recent report.
Video: Syria’s shaky truce