Author Archives: News Sources

Counter-revolution — the next deadly chapter in the Arab Spring

Robert Fisk writes: It was my old Jordanian-Palestinian chum Rami Khouri who first spotted what is going on in the Middle East right now: it’s the counter-revolution. Bahrain is crushing dissent. Syria is crushing dissent. Mubarak’s former head of intelligence, the sinister Omar Suleiman, is standing for president in Egypt – the cancellation of his candidacy last week by a dodgy “electoral committee” may well be overturned. Libya is at war with itself. Yemen has got its former dictator’s sidekick back. Sixty-one dead in a battle between soldiers and al-Qa’ida last week – in a single day. All in all, a pretty mess.

But let me quote Khouri. “In Washington-speak, a ‘crisis’ is like love: you can define it any way you want, but you know when it happens to you. So a popular revolt in Bahrain for full civil rights is a crisis that must be crushed by force. But a revolt in Syria is a blessed event that deserves support. Similarly, this peculiar mindset warns against Iranian support to the Houthi rebels in Yemen, while accepting as perfectly logical and legitimate for the US and its allies to send arms and money to their favourite rebel groups around the region – not to mention attacking entire countries…”

And there you have it. As Khouri notes, there’s now a new group called the “Security Cooperation Forum” linking the US with the Gulf Cooperation Council. La Clinton turned up to assure the oil states of Washington’s “rock solid and unwavering commitment” to the GCC. Now where have we heard that before? Why, isn’t that what Obama is always saying to the Israelis? And weren’t Bibi Netanyahu of Israel and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia the two guys who called Obama to ask him to save Mubarak?

And in Syria – where the Qataris and the Saudis are all too keen to send weapons for the rebels – things are not going very well for the revolution. After claiming for weeks a year ago that “armed bands” were attacking government forces, the bands now exist and are well and truly attacking Assad’s legions. For many tens of thousands who were prepared to demonstrate peacefully – albeit at the cost of their lives – this has become a disaster. Syrian friends of mine call it a “tragedy”. They blame the Gulf states for encouraging the armed uprising. “Our revolution was pure and clean and now it’s a war,” one of them said to me last week. I believe them.

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Why we need more accountability in Afghanistan

Andrew J. Bacevich writes: For too long now, command accountability for our troops’ misconduct in wartime has been more theoretical than real. The latest scandal to erupt in Afghanistan — photographs of American soldiers amusing themselves with dismembered Taliban corpses — suggests that it’s past time to confront this problem.

On the question of accountability, the military’s ethic is clear: With authority comes responsibility. More specifically, commanders bear responsibility for everything that happens within their jurisdiction. This decree supposedly applies to high-ranking generals as much as lowly lieutenants.

Once upon a time, the standard for implementing this code was straightforward: Win, and you gain fame and fortune; fail to win, and you’re toast. As commander in chief during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln enforced this standard ruthlessly. As a result, Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman achieved a measure of immortality. Meanwhile, Irvin McDowell, George McClellan, John Pope, Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker and George Meade, among a host of other mediocrities, found themselves unemployed or consigned to lesser positions.

In the post-9/11 era, President George W. Bush abandoned this standard. In 2003, Gen. Tommy Franks presided over a campaign in Iraq that dispersed a pathetic local army even as Franks neglected to consider what might ensue. The answer was not long in coming: chaos and a far uglier and more costly conflict than Americans had bargained for.

Historians will probably place Franks in the company of Burnside and Hooker rather than Grant and Sherman. Yet, for whatever reason, Bush glossed over his field commander’s shortcomings, ordained him a great leader and awarded him the Medal of Freedom. Franks had neither won nor lost his war; he had merely mismanaged it and then moved on, washing his hands of the mess. Here was a troubling precedent.

War induces barbarism, and the Iraq war proved no exception. Soon enough, egregious transgressions by U.S. troops surfaced. Abu Ghraib provides one especially notorious example; the massacre at Haditha another. But there were others, now mostly forgotten, at least by Americans — among them the Iraq insurgency’s equivalent of the Boston Massacre. In Fallujah on April 28, 2003, with Franks still in command, U.S. troops opened fire on Iraqi demonstrators, killing more than a dozen and wounding several dozen more.

The Pentagon declared each of these an aberration. In each instance, extensive investigation singled out a handful of minions for punishment. In each, senior commanders escaped unscathed. (Abu Ghraib is the partial exception that proves the rule: In the scandal’s aftermath, a female Army Reserve brigadier general — not quite a member of the club — lost her star, a fate thus far shared with no male counterpart and no regular officer.)

In an earlier day, this misconduct might not have mattered. When Sherman’s troops marched to the sea in 1864, few cared about any atrocities they might commit. The object of the exercise, after all, was not to win Confederate hearts and minds but, as Sherman succinctly put it, to “make Georgia howl.” Similarly, although the desecration of remains by U.S. troops today pales in comparison with the treatment visited upon Japanese dead during World War II, ensuring that Marines at Peleliu or Okinawa complied with the Hague Conventions did not figure as a priority. Their job was to kill.

Yet, like it or not, our wars differ from those wars. The attenuated definition of command responsibility that prevailed after Sept. 11, 2001, not only let senior commanders off the hook; in wars where killing is not enough, it also compromised overall military effectiveness.

Much to his credit, when Robert Gates became secretary of defense in 2006, he sought to reverse this erosion of senior officer accountability. When the Air Force demonstrated a cavalier attitude toward managing its nuclear inventory, Gates fired the service’s chief of staff. When The Washington Post broke a story about wounded warriors warehoused in substandard conditions at Walter Reed, Gates handed both the two-star hospital commander and the three-star Army surgeon general their walking papers.

When Gen. Stanley McChrystal, chosen by President Obama to run the Afghanistan war, sat idly by as members of his staff expressed their contempt for administration officials, he too lost his job. McChrystal himself hadn’t said anything all that objectionable. His offense lay in failing to school his loud-mouthed subordinates in the principle of civilian control of the military.

Yet when it comes to misdeeds on or near the battlefield — troops urinating on Taliban corpses, burning Korans, allegedly wandering away from base to murder civilians in cold blood — the pre-Gates norms stubbornly persist. If fault is found, it invariably fixes responsibility and imposes penalties at echelons well below those occupied by the people said to be in charge. The fall guy ends up being the little guy. [Continue reading…]

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Bahrain protester found dead on eve of grand prix

The Guardian reports: An investigation has been launched in Bahrain after an anti-government protester was found dead following clashes with riot police on the eve of the controversial Formula One grand prix.

Bahraini authorities confirmed on Saturday that the dead man was Salah Abbas Habib. It said in a statement that the 36-year-old had suffered a wound to his left side and the case was being treated as a homicide.

The public security chief, Major General Tariq al-Hassan, said: “”We are pressing ahead with our investigations with every resource available. I would ask that people await the results of the autopsy and further updates rather than relying on speculation, including rumours spread through social media. The government condemns all acts of violence and will ensure the perpetrators of this crime, whoever they may be, will be brought to justice.”

The opposition group al-Wefaq said Habib’s body was found on the roof of a building after he and other protesters were beaten by riot police who suppressed a demonstration in the village of Shakhura late on Friday night. They released a photograph of Habib’s blood-covered body on a corrugated iron roof. He was apparently found wearing a teargas mask. Reports suggested he had been shot.

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Slavery still reigns in U.S. prisons

The Guardian reports: “I can make about four steps forward before I touch the door,” Herman Wallace says as he describes the cell in which he has lived for the past 40 years. “If I turn an about-face, I’m going to bump into something. I’m used to it, and that’s one of the bad things about it.”

On Tuesday, Wallace and his friend Albert Woodfox will mark one of the more unusual, and shameful, anniversaries in American penal history. Forty years ago to the day, they were put into solitary confinement in Louisiana’s notorious Angola jail. They have been there ever since.

They have spent 23 hours of every one of the past 14,610 days locked in their single-occupancy 9ft-by-6ft cells. Each cell, Amnesty International records, has a toilet, a mattress, sheets, a blanket, pillow and a small bench attached to the wall. Their contact with the world outside the windowless room is limited to the occasional visit and telephone call, “exercise” three times a week in a caged concrete yard, and letters that are opened and read by prison guards.

A new documentary film takes us into that cell, providing rare insight into the personal psychological impact of such prolonged isolation. Herman’s House tracks the experiences and thoughts of Wallace as he reflects on four decades banged away in a box.

The film is based on recorded telephone conversations between Wallace and the documentary’s director Angad Bhalla. Wallace, a New Orleans native now aged 70, speaks with powerful understatement about his time in solitary.

“Being in a cage for such an extended period of time, it has its downfalls. You may not feel it, you may not know it, you may think you’re OK, and you’re just perfunctory about it.”

In recordings that are not included in the film but have been made available to the Guardian, Wallace gives more detail about his cell: “Every time I stand up from the bed I could hit my hips on the table, it’s that close. As far as moving about – there is no movement. I suffer from arthritis that has come about because of being in the cell.”

Wallace was first imprisoned in 1967 after he committed a bank robbery. The late sixties were a heady time inside Angola, reputed to be the worst jail in America, whose 5,000 inmates were still racially segregated and where violence and sexual slavery were rampant.

Wallace, Woodfox and a third black man, Robert King, came together to form a chapter of the Black Panther movement inside the prison, hoping to organise African American inmates against the brutal treatment they endured. Then on April 17, 1972, a prison guard called Brent Miller was murdered during an arrest on one of the wings.

The Angola 3 were immediately accused of the murder, and placed that same day in solitary. They have insisted ever since on their innocence, pointing to the lack of any physical evidence linking them to Miller’s death and suggestions that the main eyewitness against them was bribed by prison officials.

They say that the murder charge was trumped up to punish them for their political activities.

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Why BDS doesn’t come with a map

Yousef Munayyer wites: In recent reactions to the BDS movement, writers like Peter Beinart, Daniel Levy and Thomas Friedman have offered criticism. This criticism, however, which views the question of Palestine through the prism of Zionism, is incapable of grappling with a movement that views the same question through a humanist perspective of rights.

In a lengthier article for the Atlantic, Daniel Levy expands on a point Beinart makes in his New York Times op-ed and one that is more or less reflected in Friedman’s column demanding boycott activists carry a map of a two-state solution with them at all times.

“I cannot support or accept the call of the BDS movement,” Levy writes, because “it has nothing to say about Jewish collective, communal or national Jewish interests. And, the refusal to proscribe a political result — to explain the end goal of BDS — is not a minor thing.”

Let’s unpack this. What is BDS? The BDS movement is a global movement called for by Palestinian civil society that aims to pressure Israel to meet three requirements: 1) self-determination for Palestinians in the occupied territories, 2) a Right of Return for Palestinian refugees and 3) full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel.

BDS is not a political movement; it is, and I think by design, a rights-based movement. It does not aim to draw borders. This is not because of a philosophy about one state or two, but rather because a person’s location on one side of a border or the other has no bearing on their inalienable human rights.

The question of Palestine has always been one of rights — rights to vote, rights to return to and live on your land, rights to equality among others — and not simply one of identity. Palestinians are not in search of a national-state identity; we know who we are, and we are the people of Yaffa, Haifa, Nablus, Ramallah, Gaza, Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine.

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The Crisis of Zionism: Undeterred by unavoidable realities

Joseph Dana writes: Expanding on his landmark manifesto in the New York Review of Books called, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment”, Peter Beinart sets out to address American Jewish silence on Israel in a new book, The Crisis of Zionism. For Beinart, a generation of young American Jews can no longer identify with Israel as an occupying country. Reconciling their upbringing, soaked in victimhood and Holocaust memory, with the colonial actions of the Israeli government in the West Bank and Gaza is near impossible in the age of new media. Without honest engagement, American Jewish support for Israel risks its own liberal values.

Evidently not strong enough for him to emigrate from New York to Jerusalem, Beinart has a deeply emotional relationship with Zionism. His book is a personal chronicle of his development as a Zionist, which began, of all places, in South Africa. He presents raw reflections about his personal process of awareness of Israel’s immoral treatment of Palestinians, but is careful not to denounce them by always providing an Israel caveat.

Beinart’s arguments are not new or even particularly original, let alone based in reporting from Israel. His analysis draws on a variety of books and reports which don’t capture the entire dialogue taking shape in cafes in Tel Aviv, let alone Ramallah, but allow him to present a slightly new analysis of why the two-state solution has failed. Even those he holds responsible for Israel’s present ills – chief among them revisionist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – are the traditional enemies of American Zionists who start to feel uncomfortable when racism towards Palestinians is clearly articulated, as opposed to quietly carried out.

At its core, The Crisis of Zionism is an ode to liberal Zionism – that confusing ideology which rallies behind the idea Israel can exist as a Jewish and Democratic state – a place where liberalism coexists with tribalism.

Yet, Beinart’s liberal Zionism is a paradox. Zionism, as an ideology and practice, privileges one ethnic group over others. Ignoring this and other bothersome aspects of Israel’s liberal democracy, like the absence of a constitution or the existence of discriminatory laws directed at Israel’s Palestinian citizens, Beinart diverts attention to Israel’s occupation as the root of the country’s problems. West Bank settlers and their allies are portrayed as fanatics, blinded by religious zealotry, which have hijacked Israel’s liberal democracy for their own messianic purposes.

Beinart takes the argument to the extreme in The Crisis of Zionism and a subsequent opinion piece in the New York Times, where he argues that there exists a “democratic Israel”, namely the liberal democracy that exists within the 1948 boundaries of the State of Israel and an “undemocratic Israel”, the West Bank, where Israel controls Palestinians without giving them citizenship and deprives them of basic rights. Not only does this absolve Israelis living in Tel Aviv of responsibility for the entrenchment of the occupation, his separation of the West Bank from Israel safeguards the liberal foundations of Zionism.

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Formula Zero: The world’s most craven sport crashes the Arab Spring

Alex Massie writes: Until recently, sports fans had little cause to pay attention to Bahrain. The tiny Arab state, unlike its neighbors Dubai, Abu Dhabi, or Qatar, with their mega-purchases of British soccer clubs or extravagant plans for hosting the 2022 World Cup, rarely featured on the international sporting calendar. But Formula One (F1) changed all that. In 2004 Bahrain, a Shiite majority kingdom ruled by the Sunni Al Khalifa family, won — or paid for, frankly — the right to become the first Arab country to host an F1 Grand Prix race, an event in the world’s pinnacle motorsport series, watched annually by over 600 million people.

For the first time, Bahrain had a place on the sporting map. The race was a publicity coup for the country and a boost to the ruling family’s prestige. Then came the Arab Spring.

Last season’s race was, eventually and reluctantly, cancelled in a storm of controversy as teams pondered the ethics of racing in a country wracked by protests and a violent government crackdown that left dozens of protestors dead. Damon Hill, a former F1 world champion, observed that racing in the “blood-soaked” kingdom would be akin to racing in South Africa at the height of the apartheid regime.

How quickly we forget. A year later, F1 has returned to Bahrain — kicking off a gaudy three-day extravaganza that begins on Friday, April 20 — though the political situation in the country is as fraught as it was in 2011.

According to Amnesty International, “Despite the authorities’ claims to the contrary, state violence against those who oppose the Al Khalifa family rule continues, and in practice, not much has changed in the country since the brutal crackdown on anti-government protesters in February and March 2011.”

Amnesty’s concerns are widely shared. This week, the hackers collective Anonymous attacked the official F1 website to highlight the regime’s crackdown on dissent and F1’s complicity in pretending all is well in Bahrain. As the hackers put it, “the regime persists to deny any meaningful reform and continues to use brutal and violent tactics to oppress the popular calls for reformation. Not only is the Human Rights situation in Bahrain tragic, it becomes more drastic with each passing day. For these reasons the F1 Grand Prix in Bahrain should be strongly opposed.”

The hackers’ solidarity with the protesters may be a useful gesture, but the reform movement remains under the cosh of the government. And though there is less overt violence now than there was a year ago, it’s a difference of degree, not of kind. So why the F1 flip-flop? Why will they race on Sunday in Bahrain when they would not a year ago?

The answer is simple: money. [Continue reading…]

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Can Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood overcome the disqualification of its popular candidate for president?

Ashraf Khalil writes: Last week, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading light, Khairat al-Shater, looked like a confident front-runner in Egypt’s presidential race. On the night of April 12, more than 5,000 men — and another 1,000 or so women, in their own section — packed into a huge canvas-walled enclosure in the working-class district of Shubra al-Kheima, a Brotherhood stronghold, to hear what their candidate would do upon capturing the Egyptian presidency.

The rally, one of Shater’s first since announcing his candidacy, managed to be both tightly organized and raucous — Muslim Brotherhood cadres of all ages drowned out the noise from the neighboring multi-lane roadway. Supporters brought dozens of rolled white flags declaring a coming “Egyptian renaissance,” which they joyfully unfurled on cue. Meanwhile, senior officials at the head table drank from coffee mugs emblazoned with Shater’s rather imposing headshot.

Shater’s last name means “clever” in Arabic — a fitting moniker for the self-made millionaire — and one handmade sign carried by a young woman declared, “Egypt needs someone clever!”

A tall broad-chested man who spent years in prison under the Mubarak regime, Shater commanded the room without even rising from his seat. He barely talked religion, instead focusing on rebuilding the economy, the country, and Egyptian pride. “My brothers, we need to feel like we’re at the beginning of a true renaissance,” he said. “We want to build our country. We’re coming out of a period of looting.”

As befits a frontrunner, Shater generally avoided attacking his political rivals. However, he made one notable exception: He repeatedly called out Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s longtime intelligence chief and Hosni Mubarak consigliere, who had recently thrown his hat in the political race.

“Omar Suleiman and Hosni Mubarak’s intelligence men are trying to drag us backwards,” he half-shouted. They want to “steal the revolution and forge the elections.”

Just over 48 hours later, Suleiman was out of the race. But so was Shater — and the landscape of Egypt’s post-revolutionary transition had morphed yet again. [Continue reading…]

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Syria selling gold reserves as sanctions bite

Reuters reports: Syria is trying to sell gold reserves to raise revenue as Western and Arab sanctions targeting its central bank and oil exports begin to bite, diplomats and traders said.

Western sanctions have halved Syria’s foreign exchange reserves from about $17 billion, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Tuesday after a meeting with about 60 nations aimed at coordinating measures against President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

“Syria is selling its gold at rock bottom prices,” said a Western diplomatic source, declining to say where it was being sold.

A second diplomatic source confirmed the information, adding that Damascus was looking to offload everything it could to raise cash, including currency reserves.

On Feb. 27, the European Union agreed more sanctions including prohibiting trade in gold and other precious metals with Syrian state institutions, including the central bank.

Two gold traders in the United Arab Emirates said the Syrian government had been offering gold at a discount, with one saying it was making offers at about 15 percent below the market price.

The trader said Damascus was selling small volumes of around 20-30 kilos which were easier to offload, with offers being made through private accounts set up with free email providers.

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Videos: Obama’s state surveillance system

National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney reveals he believes domestic surveillance has become more expansive under President Obama than President George W. Bush. He estimates the NSA has assembled 20 trillion “transactions” — phone calls, emails and other forms of data — from Americans.

Jacob Appelbaum, a computer researcher who has faced a stream of interrogations and electronic surveillance since he volunteered with the whistleblowing website, WikiLeaks, describes being detained more than a dozen times at the airport and interrogated by federal agents who asked about his political views and confiscated his cell phone and laptop.

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He’s not alone: Breivik and the rising sea of radical Islamophobia in Europe

Paul Hockenos writes: The biggest mistake that Europeans could make while watching the ongoing trial of Anders Behring Breivik in Norway is to discount his rambling tirades against Islam and multiculturism as the ravings of a crackpot. Whether clinically sane or not — the Norwegian psychiatrists at the pretrial flip-flopped on this — Breivik’s thousand-page manifesto and his convictions in general are not the bizarre product of a “delusional thought universe,” as the first psychiatric report concluded. On the contrary, Breivik’s “thought universe” bears all the staples of a political ideology that accurately reflects a potent Islamophobic discourse that has taken hold across the continent and beyond since the 9/11 attacks. Breivik’s monstrous crimes must serve as a shrill wake-up call for Europeans — and not just Europeans — to acknowledge the very real potential for violence inherent in this movement and take action to stem it, at its source.

Breivik is not a Norwegian novelty but, rather, symptomatic of a growing culture of politically motivated violence across the continent (just check out the London-based Islamophobia Watch, which chronicles anti-Muslim violence). Muslims have been assaulted and killed, their mosques and institutions smeared with graffiti and bombed. Rampages that copycat Breivik’s, say experts, aren’t out of the question. Indeed, security services have been far too lax about the threat of the far right, especially its most radical, Islam-obsessed currents.

Yet the source of the discrimination, hate speech, and violence increasingly directed at Europe’s Muslim communities lies much closer to home: Islamophobia has won an accepted presence in mainstream discourses and politics from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. Political parties that espouse a somewhat milder version of Breivik’s thoughts sit in parliaments across Northern Europe, including in the European Parliament, and even participate in ruling coalitions. In some countries, like once proudly multikulti Denmark, these politicos have had a pronounced impact on migration, asylum, and cultural, social, and anti-terrorism policies, as well as on the entrenchment of a growing popular animus against Muslims.

Even proper democrats have capitulated to Islamophobia, unable to field the complex issues of Islam and Europe’s Muslims constructively. Last year, Denmark’s opposition Social Democrats, for example, though fiercely split, backed a landmark tightening of immigration requirements for non-Westerners, a bill the anti-Islam Danish People’s Party co-wrote and pushed. The burqa bans in France and Belgium had similar support. Acts like these stigmatize Muslims further and play straight into the hands of this new generation of Europe’s right, which includes extremists like Breivik who are inspired by its arguments. An international network of “counter-jihad” groups are expanding in reach and influence, according to a report released by the British group Hope Not Hate on the eve of Breivik’s trial. Far-right organizations are forging new alliances throughout Europe and the United States, according to the group, which documented 190 groups promoting an Islamophobic agenda. [Continue reading…]

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How the FBI spent a decade hunting white supremacists and missed Timothy McVeigh

J.M. Berger writes: In 1990, the FBI began picking up on rumors about an effort to reconstitute a notorious terrorist-criminal gang known as The Order.

The group’s name was taken from the infamous racist 1978 novel The Turner Diaries, which told the story of a fictional cabal carrying out acts of terrorism and eventually overthrowing the U.S. government in a bloody, nihilistic racial purge. The book was an inspiration to a generation of white nationalists, including Timothy McVeigh, whose path to radicalization climaxed in the Oklahoma City bombing 17 years ago Thursday.

During the 1980s, extremists inspired by the book began robbing banks and armored cars, stealing and counterfeiting millions of dollars and distributing some of the money to racist extremist causes. Members of The Order assassinated Jewish talk radio host Alan Berg in 1984, before most of its members were arrested and its leader killed in a standoff. Less than 10 percent of the money stolen by The Order was ever recovered, and investigators feared members of the group who were still at large would use it to further a campaign of terrorism.

To prevent the rise of a “Second Order,” FBI undercover agents would become it.

Starting in April 1991, three FBI agents posed as members of an invented racist militia group called the Veterans Aryan Movement. According to their cover story, VAM members robbed armored cars, using the proceeds to buy weapons and support racist extremism. The lead agent was a Vietnam veteran with a background in narcotics, using the alias Dave Rossi.

Code-named PATCON, for “Patriot-conspiracy,” the investigation would last more than two years, crossing state and organizational lines in search of intelligence on the so-called Patriot movement, the label applied to a wildly diverse collection of racist, ultra-libertarian, right-wing and/or pro-gun activists and extremists who, over the years, have found common cause in their suspicion and fear of the federal government.

The undercover agents met some of the most infamous names in the movement, but their work never led to a single arrest. When McVeigh walked through the middle of the investigation in 1993, he went unnoticed.

PATCON is history, but it holds lessons for today. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a series of arrests for homegrown terrorism has put a spotlight on the secretive world of government infiltration, especially in the Muslim community. Some critics have charged that these investigations, in which suspected jihadists are provided with the means and encouragement to carry out terrorist attacks before being arrested, constitute entrapment and set plots in motion that would never have emerged on their own. But these controversial tactics were around long before the FBI was restructured to prioritize terrorism. And Muslims aren’t the only targets.

Most undercover operations remain secret, especially if they do not result in prosecutions. PATCON stayed under wraps for nearly 15 years, until it was discovered in Freedom of Information Act requests by the author. The account that follows is based on thousands of pages of FBI records on PATCON and the groups it targeted, as well as interviews with FBI agents who worked on the case, former FBI informants, and members of the targeted groups. The documents and interviews reveal important lessons for the modern use of undercover agents and informants. [Continue reading…]

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Personalizing civil liberties abuses

Glenn Greenwald writes: It’s sometimes easy — too easy — to think, talk or write about the assault on civil liberties in the United States, and related injustices, and conceive of them as abstractions. Two weeks ago, the Editorial Page Editor of The New York Times, Andrew Rosenthal, wrote that ever since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has created “what’s essentially a separate justice system for Muslims.” That should be an extraordinary observation: creating a radically different — and more oppressive — set of rules, laws and punishments for a class of people in the United States based on their religious affiliation is a disgrace of historic proportion. Yet here we have someone occupying one of the most establishment media positions in the country matter-of-factly observing that this is exactly the state of affairs that exists on American soil, and it prompts little notice, let alone protest.

There are many factors accounting for the willingness to tolerate, or even approve of, this systematic persecution, most of which I’ve written about before. But one important reason I want to highlight here is that — as is true of America’s related posture of endless wars — its victims, by design, are so rarely heard from. As is true for most groups of humans who remain hidden, they are therefore easily demonized. This invisibility also means that even those who object in principle to what is being done have difficulty apprehending in a visceral way the devastation that is wreaked in the lives of these human beings who have done nothing wrong. Their absence from our discourse can confine one’s understanding of these issues to the theoretical realm, and thus limit one’s ability to truly care.

I spent the last week traveling to several cities where, without planning to do so, I met dozens of people whose lives have been seriously impeded or fully wrecked by the abuses carried out in the name of the War on Terror. This happens whenever I travel to speak at events, and it’s one of the reasons I do it. Meeting such people isn’t the reason for my travel. These meetings usually are unplanned. But the decade-long abuses carried out in the post-9/11 era are so pervasive, so systematized, that no matter what city I visit, it’s very common for me to end up meeting people — usually though not always Muslims — whose lives have been unjustly and severely harmed by these state actions. And it’s not only the targeted individuals themselves, but entire communities of people, whose lives are substantially damaged. Being able to meet and speak with people directly affected personalizes the issues for me that are most frequently written about here, and so I want to describe several of those encounters I had just in the last week. [Continue reading…]

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Would any modern American president ever risk getting this close to the people?

The video below shows Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a face to face encounter with a young Iranian woman in Bandar Abbas on April 10. Whatever she had to say to him, he seemed pretty unfazed by the situation.

Saeed Kamali Dehghan writes: When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office in 2005, he pledged to visit all 31 Iranian provinces at least twice during his presidential term. The plan drew criticism from the beginning; the opposition accused him of populism by trying to promote his own profile, and said he was wasting money and time.

But many people loved it. Pictures of thousands of people in provinces waiting for the presidential motorcade, desperately running after his car to catch a glimpse or shake a hand and, as it became popular later, to hand him a letter of request, became familiar in state TV’s rolling coverage of his visits.

When it became apparent that Ahmadinejad’s office actually responded to many of the letters – often requests for grants or loans – more and more people turned out to greet him. Agency pictures showed a hardworking Ahmadinejad taking a nap on the floor on tour and a documentary was even made called Letters to the President.

But as his popularity dwindled, especially in the aftermath of the 2009 disputed presidential elections, his provincial visits became less triumphant: pictures (such as this image from the western city of Tabriz) showed humiliatingly small crowds turning out to greet him.

This week, a dramatic video was posted on YouTube showing a young woman jumping on to Ahmadinejad’s car. The footage drew a great deal of attention, with the Times describing the woman as a “motorcade heroine”. Elsewhere, the Telegraph said Ahmadinejad had been mobbed by “hungry protesters”.

Watching the video, it’s impossible to make out what the woman is actually saying to the president, but there is nothing to suggest the incident was any different from previous occasions in which petitioners have mobbed Ahmadinejad. A similar incident happened earlier this year in Hormozgan province, in which another woman sat on his car.

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For Israel, the problem with Iran diplomacy is the prospect of nuclear compromise

Tony Karon writes: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amplified his skepticism of President Obama’s Iran strategy on Wednesday, when he used a Holocaust remembrance speech to warn that Iran was building nuclear weapons in order to destroy Israel. “The Iranian regime is acting openly and decisively toward our destruction, and it is acting feverishly to develop a nuclear weapon to achieve this goal,” Netanyahu said, two days after accusing the Administration and its partners of giving Iran a “freebie” in last weekend’s nuclear talks in Istanbul. The combination of those statements creates an impression that the Israelis see the current diplomacy with Iran as prevarication in the face of a mortal threat to Israel — a message calculated to raise the domestic political heat on President Obama.

Of course, the U.S. and Israeli intelligence assessment is that Iran is not in fact currently embarked on a feverish dash to build nuclear weapons; it has not yet taken the strategic decision to build such weapons even as it steadily accumulates the capability to do so. And even Netanyahu’s Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, has suggested that a nuclear-armed Iran would be unlikely to launch a nuclear attack on Israel, given Israel’s own capability to “lay waste” to Iran. Administration officials believe that because Iran has not yet opted to build nuclear weapons and the pressure of steadily escalating sanctions has made Tehran more amenable to compromise, it remains possible to seek a deal to limit Iran’s nuclear work — and that if it could be achieved, such a solution represents the best and most durable solution. Still, it should come as no surprise that Israel’s leaders are agitated and openly skeptical over the U.S. entering a new process of diplomatic engagement on Iran’s nuclear program. They know that even the best-case diplomatic outcome would fall short of Israel’s demands but might do enough to de-escalate the conflict and push the issue off the international community’s crisis agenda.

The principles guiding the ongoing talks between negotiators from Iran and the P5+1 group, as laid out by chief Western negotiator and EU Foreign Policy chief Catherine Ashton on Saturday, are compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a sustained process of step-by-step concrete actions undertaken on a basis of reciprocity. That framework alone is cause for disquiet in Israel, which is not a signatory to the NPT and which insists that Iran cannot be allowed to maintain any uranium-enrichment capability. Although the NPT obliges Iran to account for all its nuclear work to the satisfaction of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — which Iran has yet to do — it also guarantees Iran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. A diplomatic solution based on the NPT, therefore, would be one that strengthens the safeguards against Iran using its nuclear capability to build weapons but would not dismantle and remove Iran’s enrichment capability as Israel — as well as France and more hawkish elements in Washington — has demanded. The Obama Administration’s position on the issue has been ambiguous, having initially inherited the Bush Administration’s zero-enrichment stance but more recently spoken of Iran’s having the right to a peaceful nuclear program in line with the NPT.

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In Breivik, troubling echoes of West’s view of Islam

Timothy Stanley writes: The trial of mass murderer Anders Breivik has confirmed one thing so far: He seems quite mad. Looking plump and dumb, with a slightly receding hairline, the Norwegian gave a right-wing salute as he entered the courtroom and smirked his way through CCTV footage of his handiwork.

Breivik claims that he killed 77 people as an act of self-defense against the Islamification of Norway, that he is a member of the Knights Templar and part of an “anticommunist” resistance to multiculturalism. Reading his insane manifesto, it is tempting to dismiss him as a nut with a gun.

Nevertheless, there’s no denying the political context to what Breivik did. Since 9/11, fringe and mainstream politicians in Europe and America have spoken of Islam as incompatible with Western values. Breivik quoted many of them in his manifesto. This is not to say that he took direct inspiration from those public figures, or that they bear personal responsibility for his crimes. But Breivik’s paranoia does conform to a popular — wholly negative — view of the twin problems of Islam and multiculturalism. Tragically, it is a view that few mainstream politicians have been willing to challenge.

Breivik makes two false claims. The first is that Islam is ethically inferior to Christianity and cannot exist peacefully within the secular democracies of the post-Enlightenment West. That is the open view of the Dutch Party for Freedom, the French National Front, the English Defense League and the Finnish True Finns. It was implicit in Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s aversion to the building of mosques. We might also infer it from much of the testimony presented at Rep. Peter King’s congressional hearings into the radicalization of American Muslim youth. King has opined that there are “too many mosques” in the United States and that roughly 80% of American Muslims are radical.

The mistake being made by all these people is to conflate a tiny minority of political Islamists — whose precise ideology has only really emerged in the last 30 years — with the entire global and historical community of Muslims. [Continue reading…]

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