Author Archives: News Sources

New poll: Americans aren’t ready for another war

Emily Ekins writes: For those tuning into the myriad Republican presidential debates over the past few months, they may have been surprised to learn that many GOP candidates believe a military intervention in Iran could be likely.

Yet despite the cheers the candidates received for taking hawkish foreign policy stances with Iran, a recent Rasmussen poll finds that only 35 percent of Americans favor using military force if sanctions fail to prevent Iran from developing their nuclear capabilities.

This finding is especially interesting given that 81 percent of Americans think it is either somewhat or very likely that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon in the near future, and that 63 percent of Americans do not believe it is very or at all likely that stiff economic sanctions will effectively force Iran to disband its nuclear program.

Although 76 percent of Americans believe that Iran is a serious national security threat to the United States, only 35 percent are ready to favor military intervention. This means that even though most Americans believe it’s quite likely Iran will develop a nuclear weapon and that economic sanctions will fail to work, they aren’t willing for Americans to engage in another military intervention. This suggests that Americans may recognize there are other means to promote peace, prosperity, and American defense,
besides intervening militarily.

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Israel’s immigration plan for ‘ethnically pure’ bunker state

Jonathan Cook writes: The wheel is turning full circle. Last week the Israeli parliament updated a 59-year-old law originally intended to prevent hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from returning to the land from which they had been expelled as Israel was established.

The purpose of the draconian 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law was to lock up any Palestinian who managed to slip past the snipers guarding the new state’s borders. Israel believed only savage punishment and deterrence could ensure it maintained the overwhelming Jewish majority it had recently created through a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Fast-forward six decades and Israel is relying on the infiltration law again, this time to prevent a supposedly new threat to its existence: the arrival each year of several thousand desperate African asylum seekers.

As it did with the Palestinians many years ago, Israel has criminalised these new refugees – in their case, for fleeing persecution, war or economic collapse. Whole families can now be locked up, without a trial, for three years while a deportation order is sought and enforced, and Israelis who offer them assistance risk jail sentences of up to 15 years.

Israel’s intention is apparently to put as many of these refugees behind bars as possible, and dissuade others from following in their footsteps.

To cope, officials have approved the building of an enormous detention camp, operated by Israel’s prison service, to contain 10,000 of these unwelcome arrivals. That will make it the largest holding facility of its kind in the world – according to Amnesty International, it will be three times bigger than the next largest, in the much more populous Texas.

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Interdependence is not a slogan but an increasingly insistent reality

Zbigniew Brzezinski writes: If we wish to reflect on the common challenge inherent in the ongoing transformation of global politics, we would be wise to start by recognizing what I believe to be the three fundamental facts of the present era. First, global peace is threatened not by utopian fanaticism, as was the case during the 20th century, but by the turbulent complexity inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening. Second, comprehensive social progress is more enduringly attained by democratic participation than by authoritarian mobilization. Third, in our time global stability can be promoted only by larger-scale cooperation, not through the imperial domination prevalent in earlier historical epochs.

The 20th century was dominated by fanatical ideological efforts to recreate societies by brutal totalitarian methods on the basis of utopian blueprints. Europe knows best the human costs of such simplistic and arrogant ideological fanaticism. Fortunately, with the exception of some highly isolated cases such as North Korea, it is unlikely that new attempts at large-scale utopian social engineering will arise. That is largely so because in the 21st century, for the first time in human history, the entire world is now politically awakened. The peoples of the world are restless, they are interconnected, they are resentful of their relative social deprivations, and they increasingly reject authoritarian political mobilization.

It follows that democratic participation is in the longer-run the best guarantee both of social progress and political stability. In the global arena, however, rising populist aspirations and the difficulties inherent in shaping common global responses to political and economic crises combine to threaten international disorder to which no single country, no matter how powerful, wealthy or strategically located, can effectively respond. Indeed, potential global turmoil—coincidental with the appearance of novel threats to universal well-being and even to human survival—can be effectively addressed only within a larger cooperative framework based on more widely shared democratic values.

The basic fact, therefore, is that interdependence is not a slogan but a description of an increasingly insistent reality. America realizes that it needs Europe as a global ally; that its cooperation with Russia is of mutual and expanding benefit; that its economic and financial interdependence with a rapidly rising China has a special political sensitivity; and that its ties with Japan are important not only mutually but to the well-being of the Pacific region. Germany is committed to a more united Europe within the European Union and to close links across the Atlantic with America, and in that context it can more safely nurture mutually beneficial economic and political cooperation with Russia. Turkey, which almost a century ago launched its social and national modernization with Europe largely as its model, is assuming a greater regional role as an economically dynamic and politically democratic state, as well as a member of the Atlantic alliance and Russia’s good neighbor. And Russia, recognizing that its modernization and democratization are mutually reinforcing and vital to its important world role, also aspires to a broader collaboration with Europe, with America and, quite naturally, with its dynamic neighbor to the east, China.

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Iran’s nuclear program has yet to violate international law

Yousaf Butt writes: Olli Heinonen is alarmed that Iran has begun producing 20 percent enriched uranium at a new, deeply buried site, and calculates that Iranian scientists could further purify the material to the 90 percent enrichment needed for a bomb in about six months’ time. This prediction, however, is based on unsubstantiated assumptions regarding Iranian intentions, and only serves to provide ammunition for hawks in Washington that would rush the United States into another destructive war in the Middle East.

If Tehran enriched uranium to 90 percent, it would be forced to break its four decade-long adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — a momentous step that would likely prompt swift military action from the United States or Israel. Furthermore, Heinonen fails to mention that, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, “All nuclear material in the facility remains under the Agency’s containment and surveillance.” The IAEA considers 20 percent enriched uranium to be low-enriched uranium and “a fully adequate isotopic barrier” to weaponization.

This isn’t the first time that hawks have raised the alarm about Iran’s nuclear program, claiming that the sky is falling. Breathless, hypothetical timelines to an Iranian bomb have continued almost unabated since the time of the shah. For instance, in 1992, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said that Iran would have nuclear warheads by 1999. By casting the worst-case scenario as a realistic possibility, such timelines invite overly tough policies that may, in turn, actually provoke a hard-line Iranian response — creating a self-fulfilling cycle of escalation.

In reality, however, Iran is not doing anything that violates its legal right to develop nuclear technology. Under the NPT, it is not illegal for a member state to have a nuclear weapons capability — or a “nuclear option.” If a nation has a fully developed civilian nuclear sector — which the NPT actually encourages — it, by default, already has a fairly solid nuclear weapons capability. For example, like Iran, Argentina, Brazil, and Japan also maintain a “nuclear option” — they, too, could break out of the NPT and make a nuclear device in a few months, if not less. And like Iran, Argentina and Brazil also do not permit full “Additional Protocol” IAEA inspections.

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Pakistan prime minister Gilani refuses to give in to court order

The Guardian reports: Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, has appeared before judges in a battle of wills between the government and the judiciary, and refused to accept court orders targeting the president.

The supreme court had called Gilani before it on contempt of court proceedings after the Islamabad government persistently ignored court orders to write to Swiss authorities and ask for a dormant money laundering case to be reopened against President Asif Ali Zardari.

It had been suggested that Gilani might apologise to the court, or even offer his resignation, but he came out fighting on behalf of the president.

“He has complete immunity inside and outside the country,” Gilani told the court on Thursday, making clear he would not write the letter.

“In the constitution, there is complete immunity for the president. There is no doubt about it.”

Gilani’s tone was characteristically soft and polite as he said he could “never think of ridiculing or defaming the court”, but the message was uncompromising.

The stakes are high. Gilani risks being convicted of contempt of court, which could mean jail and disqualification from office. Zardari, leader of the ruling Pakistan Peoples party, would also be barred from office if convicted of a crime.

Standing before the judges in a dark suit, Gilani pointed to other leaders of his coalition government, sitting in a row behind him, and said they were all present to show respect to the court.

In a move seemingly designed to show he was appearing humbly before the judges, Gilani drove the short distance from his official residence to the court with his lawyer, the legal heavyweight Aitzaz Ahsan, in the passenger seat.

In court, however, he reminded the judiciary they were proceeding against an elected leader. “I’m the longest serving democratically elected prime minister in the history of Pakistan,” he said.

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Interview with Kalle Lasn, publisher, Adbusters magazine

Canadian Business: Do you think the movement will gather momentum or fizzle out in 2012?
Kalle Lasn: After Mayor Bloomberg, in his military-style operation, took out Zuccotti Park [protesters], a lot of pundits pronounced the end of the movement. But I think it has just begun. Last month, we saw the young people of Russia suddenly rise up in a totally unexpected way. You’d think Putin had the game sewn up there, yet all of a sudden we have tens of thousands of people showing the same kind of fervour that we saw in Greece and Spain and, of course, in Tunisia and Egypt. To me, the core impulse behind this movement is the feeling among young people all over the world that the future doesn’t compute, that their lives will be full of ecological, political and financial crises, and that they will never have a life like their parents did. And unless they stand up and fight for a different kind of a future, they’re not going to have a future. When I see even the Russians rising up, then I have the feeling this movement—especially if the global economy keeps on tanking—could well morph into a full-fledged global revolution.

CB: Does this movement have the chance of making real change?
KL: This revolution is the revolution of the Internet. People are talking to each other intensely, all the time. Whenever anybody does anything interesting in Spain or Italy or Greece or Russia, the word goes out immediately and globally, so this truly is a global phenomenon. That’s why I think the possibility of a global uprising against the current status quo is possible. I think we will be able to influence the way the global economy works and implement things like Robin Hood taxes [on financial market transactions] and ban high-frequency flash trading and dismantle this global casino. I think this Internet generation can have a huge influence on how business is done in the future.

CB: What does success mean for the Occupy movement?
KL: Basically to keep on going. The political left has had a long history of fizzling out. In 1968, it fizzled out. The Battle of Seattle and all those global marches fizzled out. And the political left has been kind of a loony left—an ineffective, whiny political force—for a long, long time. There’s still a danger that the Occupy movement will meet that same kind of fate. So our biggest success will be keeping our spirits high and occupying campuses and coming out next spring and starting myriad projects. The big challenge is to just keep the movement together.

CB: What might the movement look like in 2012?
KL: I think the first phase that was all done in this beautiful, horizontal, magical way is over. There will be occupations in 2012, but I think the focus of the movement will move into surprise occupations of banks and corporate headquarters and economics departments of universities. Here in B.C., we’re planning a major occupation of the economics department of the University of British Columbia for early this year. [We’ll do] things like moving your money from big banks into credit unions. Surprise moves. The slogan that seems to be catching the imagination is something we put out in a tactical briefing recently: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” I think that’s a beautiful way to describe the future of the movement, because it’s going to be swarms of occupiers.

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A new tipping point on climate change

It’s widely assumed that the lack of will from governments and industry to take the radical steps required to tackle climate change result from the difficulties the non-scientific community has in grasping the science behind the dire warnings we have all been hearing for decades. But maybe the most significant shift in attitudes is about to happen and it won’t be because of a burgeoning wider understanding of the scientific data. Instead it will be because financial markets are becoming worried that fossil fuels are destined to turn into toxic assets — toxic not because their combustion is poisoning the planet but because they are going to plummet in value.

The Guardian reports: The huge reserves of coal, oil and gas held by companies listed in the City of London are “sub-prime” assets posing a systemic risk to economic stability, a high-profile coalition of investors, politicians and scientists has warned Bank of England’s governor, Sir Mervyn King.

In an open letter on Thursday, they tell King that the global drive to reduce carbon emissions could mean billions of pounds of fossil fuel reserves will rapidly lose value and cause a “major problem” for institutional investors and pension funds.

At the most recent UN climate change summit in December, 194 of the world’s nations agreed to enact legally binding curbs on greenhouse gas emissions within three years to limit global warming to 2C. But meeting this limit would mean just 20% of existing fossil fuel reserves could be burned, according to recent research.

“These high-carbon assets pose significant strategic challenges for the future prosperity of Britain that just can’t be ignored,” said investment manager James Cameron, who is a member of the prime minister’s business advisory group. “Investors continue to pour cash into unsustainable assets without understanding the risks associated with these investments, such as climate change, local pollution, fossil fuel price volatility, political risk and catastrophes such as Deepwater Horizon.”

The letter is also signed by the government’s former chief scientific adviser Sir David King, Zac Goldsmith MP, former environment minister John Gummer and 17 others. It urges action to investigate the risk of the “carbon bubble”.

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The Middle East didn’t really get any freer in 2011

Max Fisher reports: The societies of the Middle East and North Africa are not much freer than they were one year ago, according to the new annual report by Freedom House on global trends in freedom. The 2012 Freedom in the World report, out today, finds that political rights and civil liberties in the region were pulled back almost as much as they were advanced. It seems that, although the popular democracy movements of the Arab Spring ejected three dictators and altered the region, perhaps forever, Middle Eastern autocrats and monarchs are fighting back, nearly to a draw.

The people of the Middle East and North Africa are still the least free in the world, according to Freedom House’s authoritative data. Their annual report characterizes 85 percent of Middle Easterners as “not free,” 13 percent as “partly free,” and only 2 percent as “free.” (By comparison, 39 percent of Sub-Saharan Africans — half the rate of the Middle East — are considered “not free.”) That didn’t really change this year. Middle Easterners may be organizing, protesting, fighting, and often dying for freedom, but they have by and large still not gotten it.

Freedom House describes a country’s freedom on a one-to-seven scale, with seven as the least free, for political rights and for civil liberties. For example, the U.S. receives a “one” for both political rights and civil liberties, while North Korea has a “seven” for each. According to this metric, political rights changed in only one of the region’s 21 countries and territories: Tunisia, where peaceful revolution brought the score down from a Stalinist seven to an Eastern European-style three. Civil liberties actually got worse in the aggregate. Revolution and reform brought one-point drops in Tunisia, Libya, and Lebanon; but fearful dictators and bloody crackdowns saw the scores rise by a point each in six countries: Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and the Western Sahara.

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PIPA support collapses, with 18 new Senators opposed

Ars Technica reports: Members of the Senate are rushing for the exits in the wake of the Internet’s unprecedented protest of the Protect IP Act (PIPA). At least 13 members of the upper chamber announced their opposition on Wednesday. In a particularly severe blow for Hollywood, at least five of the newly-opposed Senators were previously co-sponsors of the Protect IP Act. (Update: since we ran this story, the tally is up to 18 Senators, of which seven are former co-sponsors. See below.)

The newly-opposed Senators are skewed strongly to the Republican side of the aisle. An Ars Technica survey of Senators’ positions on PIPA turned up only two Democrats, Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who announced their opposition on Wednesday. The other 11 Senators who announced their opposition on Wednesday were all Republicans. These 13 join a handful of others, including Jerry Moran (R-KS), Rand Paul (R-KY), Mark Warner (D-VA), and Ron Wyden (D-OR), who have already announced their opposition.
[…]
The partisan slant of the defections is surprising because copyright has not traditionally been considered a partisan issue. Before Wednesday’s protests, PIPA had 16 Republican co-sponsors and 23 Democratic ones. The bill lost a quarter of its Republican co-sponsors on Wednesday, while we know of only one Democrat, Ben Cardin (D-MD), who dropped his support.

Those who dropped their support were most likely bolstered by strong opposition from conservative think tanks and blogs. On Tuesday, the influential Heritage Foundation announced that it would include SOPA and PIPA as a key issue on its voter scorecard. And the popular conservative blog redstate.com, whose founder threatened to mount primary challengers to SOPA supporters last month, has been hailing Senators who come out in opposition.

Neither side is close to having a majority. A whip count by OpenCongress found 35 supporters (including 34 co-sponsors), 18 opponents, and 12 more Senators leaning toward opposition. About 35 Senators have not committed to a position, perhaps reluctant to do so for fear of angering either deep-pocketed Hollywood campaign contributors or their constituents back home.

The Los Angeles Times reports: When Google speaks, the world listens.

And today, when Google asked its users to sign a petition protesting two anti-piracy laws circulating in Congress, millions responded.

A spokeswoman for Google confirmed that 4.5 million people added their names to the company’s anti-SOPA petition today.

When he was about to leave the Senate, Chris Dodd predicted he would not pass through Washington’s revolving door and become a lobbyist. Earlier, in an interview with Glenn Greenwald in 2007, he had scoffed at the idea that anyone would want to become president of a trade association. He’s now “Hollywood’s chief lobbyist“.

Apparently, the person Chris Dodd scorned back then as someone “who wants to be president of a trade association” was . . . Chris Dodd, who is now President of Hollywood’s trade association. Back then, Dodd was running around inducing large numbers of people (including me) to cheer on his presidential campaign by venerating Constitutional freedoms as the supreme value. Now, a mere three years later, he is peddling his influence in Washington — assembled during his 35 years in Congress — on behalf of a bill that, as several law professors in The Stanford Law Review recently wrote, “not only violates basic principles of due process by depriving persons of property without a fair hearing and a reasonable opportunity to be heard, it also constitutes an unconstitutional abridgment of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment” (Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe has argued the same).

Furthermore, one of the bill’s chief Senate sponsors is a liberal Democrat from Vermont, Pat Leahy, who during the Bush years flamboyantly depicted himself as a stalwart defender of Constitutional liberties — and whose “top 3 campaign contribution sources [are] lawyers, entertainment industry, lobbyists.” Those industries are, of course, also major donors to Leahy’s House GOP counterpart. It’s all redolent of how Howard Dean quickly converted himself from a righteous presidential candidate who inspired large numbers of young Americans into little more than a paid shill who exploits his political celebrity by reciting the script of whichever political interests are paying him the most.

In the face of pervasive, sleazy conduct like this, it’s not only tempting to be jaded about partisan activism: it’s rational. Watching Chris Dodd and Pat Leahy join equally compromised Republicans in crusading for an Internet censorship bill — not even out of sincerely held authoritarian impulses but just base, corrupted subservience to industry — reveals most of what one needs to know about how the political class functions and who owns and controls it.

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Dear Andrew Sullivan: Why focus on Obama’s dumbest critics?

Conor Friedersdorf writes: After reading Andrew Sullivan’s Newsweek essay about President Obama, his critics, and his re-election bid, I implore him to ponder just one question. How would you have reacted in 2008 if any Republican ran promising to do the following?

(1) Codify indefinite detention into law; (2) draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process; (3) proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens; (4) prosecute Bush-era whistleblowers for violating state secrets; (5) reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible; (6) enter and prosecute such a war; (7) institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports; (8) oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots; (9) wage an undeclared drone war on numerous Muslim countries that delegates to the CIA the final call about some strikes that put civilians in jeopardy; (10) invoke the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits brought by civil-liberties organizations on dubious technicalities rather than litigating them on the merits; (11) preside over federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries; (12) attempt to negotiate an extension of American troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (an effort that thankfully failed); (14) reauthorize the Patriot Act; (13) and select an economic team mostly made up of former and future financial executives from Wall Street firms that played major roles in the financial crisis.

I submit that had Palin or Cheney or Rumsfeld or Rice or Jeb Bush or John Bolton or Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney proposed doing even half of those things in 2008, you’d have declared them unfit for the presidency and expressed alarm at the prospect of America doubling down on the excesses of the post-September 11 era. You’d have championed an alternative candidate who avowed that America doesn’t have to choose between our values and our safety.

Yet President Obama has done all of the aforementioned things.

Pretend that you knew, circa 2008, that President Cheney or Palin or Rice or Rumsfeld or Giuliani would do all those things — but that, on the bright side, they’d refrain from torturing anyone else, end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, sign a bank bailout, and pass a health-care bill that you regard as improving on the status quo starting in 2014. Would you vote for them on that basis?

I submit that you would not. And if they were elected, and four years later were running for re-election, would you focus on the stupidity of the least persuasive attacks on their tenure? Or would you laud their most incisive critics? I believe that you’d be among their most incisive critics.

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Can Iraq survive its own politics?

Reuters reports: Iraq’s political crisis shows no sign of easing a month after the Shi’ite-led government sought the arrest of a Sunni vice president, triggering fears that Iraq, without the buffer of U.S. troops, could return to sectarian conflict.

Accused of running death squads, Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi is holed up in Iraqi Kurdistan as a guest of Iraq’s Kurdish president. The government of the semi-autonomous region has not responded to requests from Baghdad to hand him over.

The move against Hashemi, and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s attempt to fire his Sunni deputy, Saleh al-Mutlaq, prompted a boycott of parliament and cabinet by the Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc.

This has put stress on the fragile coalition of Shi’ite, Sunni and Kurdish parties forming Maliki’s power-sharing government.

Some of the worst militant attacks against Shi’ites in the past year followed quickly on the heels of the political crisis, which threatens to unravel Iraq’s hard-won coalition government and to worsen the country’s sectarian divide.

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Keystone XL decision is a big win — for now

Bill McKibben writes: Last spring, almost no one outside of Nebraska had heard of the Keystone XL pipeline. As late as October, when the National Journal surveyed 300 “energy insiders” in D.C., 91 percent predicted that the Obama administration would approve the permit for the pipeline. TransCanada stacked 1,700 miles of pipe along the proposed route, so confident was the company of victory.

Today, the State Department and the president denied the permit for the pipeline. It’s one of the rare days in the 20-year climate fight when scientists can smile and Big Oil has to frown. Because citizen activists around the country were willing to put their bodies on the line, and because the environmental movement worked with rare unity and coordination, a done deal has come spectacularly undone.

There are no permanent environmental victories, certainly not this one. TransCanada (or any other company) is free to reapply for a new permit, though I imagine this time the State Department process will be conducted with more transparency and less favoritism. And of course the biggest caveat of all: Even if every drop of tar-sands oil remained safely in the ground, we’ve still got more than enough coal and gas and oil to crash the climate system.

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Israel: Iran still mulling whether to build nuclear bomb

Haaretz reports: Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb, according to the intelligence assessment Israeli officials will present later this week to Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Dempsey will be arriving on his first visit here since being appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in September. He will meet with various senior defense officials, including Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz.

The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon – or, more specifically, a nuclear warhead mounted atop a missile. Nor is it clear when Iran might make such a decision.

Israel also believes the Iranian regime now faces an unprecedented threat to its stability, which for the first time combines both external and internal pressure: from abroad, increasingly harsh sanctions and threats of military action, and at home, economic distress and worries about the results of the parliamentary election scheduled for March.

Israeli intelligence sees signs that the regime in Tehran is genuinely worried about the possibility of an opposition victory in March. Should that happen, the regime will have to choose between conceding the loss or falsifying results – as it apparently did in the 2009 presidential election – which could incite anti-regime protests thanks to the tailwind provided by the Arab Spring, which toppled the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.

Moreover, the country’s economic woes are already hitting ordinary Iranians in their pockets. Tighter sanctions have caused the Iranian currency to depreciate by dozens of percent; the regime is having trouble amassing as much foreign currency as it needs; and now, it faces the prospect of new sanctions by the United States and the European Union against its central bank and its oil industry.

The regime is also being confronted by two distinct ideological challenges. On one hand, a growing camp that includes supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is challenging the authority of the ruling clerics, and especially that of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. On the other, the Iranian model of a strict Islamic regime run by clerics is being called into question by Islamist ruling parties in Turkey, Tunisia and perhaps also Egypt, which either are or will soon be offering more democratic, modern and moderate models of Islamic governance.

Lastly, Tehran’s chief ally, Syrian President Bashar Assad, is in real danger of being toppled as well.

Altogether, therefore, “2011 was a very bad year for the regime in Tehran,” a senior defense official told Haaretz. Israeli analysts believe 2012 will promise more of the same: more pressure, including the tougher public line now being taken by U.S. President Barack Obama, and also more uncertainty and instability, in both the region as a whole and Iran in particular.

All this makes it increasingly hard to predict what Iran will do.

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Guantánamo: An oral history

On the 10th anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees, Vanity Fair set out to compile an oral history of Guantánamo.

Pierre-Richard Prosper: On Thanksgiving weekend, I received a phone call informing me that we had just captured approximately 300 al-Qaeda and Taliban. I asked all our assistant secretaries and regional bureaus to canvass literally the world to begin to look at what options we had as to where a detention facility could be established. We began to eliminate places for different reasons. One day, in one of our meetings, we sat there puzzled as places continued to be eliminated. An individual from the Department of Justice effectively blurted out, What about Guantánamo? The individual then began to make clear that Guantánamo now is an empty facility, that there’s a basic structure there, that it’s a place that had been used to hold Haitian and Cuban migrants, and that U.S. courts in the past have given the executive branch great deference in what it did in Guantánamo.

William Howard Taft IV: At the time we selected Guantánamo we were adhering to the Geneva Conventions, and no decision had been made not to. I can’t say as to everyone, but on our side [the State Department] we were expecting and certainly quite comfortable with the use of the Geneva Conventions. It was the normal way our military had operated for 50 years.

December 27, 2001: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announces that War on Terror prisoners will indeed be sent to Guantánamo. Guantánamo, he will later say, is to be the place of confinement for “the worst of the worst.” A Red Cross presence at U.S. detention facilities has long been routine. It is not what the administration has in mind for Guantánamo, however. Manuel Supervielle was the chief military lawyer—the staff judge advocate—at Southern Command, in Miami.

Manuel Supervielle: I called Geneva, and I said, I need to speak with head of operations. I introduced myself, and I said, You may have heard the news that they’re going to be receiving some detainees in Guantánamo in the not too distant future. Would you all be interested in sending a team down there to observe?

There’s a really long pause, and the guy says, Well, yes, thank you, that’s very kind of you. He sounded quite startled. I don’t think he was expecting a phone call from U.S. jag [Judge Advocate General] at SouthCom.

During that first week of January I had a conversation with Jane Dalton [counsel to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs]. I remember saying to her, By the way, I called the I.C.R.C. a few days ago, and asked them if they wanted to come to Guantánamo. She said, You did what? In a much more excited way than that. She said, Manny, what were you thinking? I said, Look, you all have given us guidance to follow the principles of the Geneva Conventions. Would you not agree that the most important principle is transparency? The discussion mostly turned on her anticipating a very negative reaction from D.O.D., from general counsel [Jim Haynes].

January 9, 2002: Getting Guantánamo ready for an influx of detainees requires a crash effort by the military. Meanwhile, the administration lays the groundwork to abandon the Geneva Conventions. Over the next decade, Carol Rosenberg, of The Miami Herald, will spend more time at Guantánamo than any other reporter. She is there when it opens.

Carol Rosenberg: There were 40 cells made from chain-link fencing sitting on a cement slab and next to a dump, and inside it there were Seabees—Navy engineers—slamming new cages into the ground and building them as fast as they could in one corner. And Marines in another corner were rehearsing how to handle potentially fanatical, suicidal, dangerous terrorists, with one Marine playing the role of the prisoner being shackled and manacled and pushed up against the fence and handled the way a Marine would handle someone who’s the enemy, and other Marines practicing the roles of guards.

William Howard Taft IV: In early January we got a draft memorandum from the Department of Justice, which was arguing that it was not necessary for the military to comply with the Geneva Conventions in this particular conflict. It was quite a lengthy memo, and was sent to us for comment. We disagreed with it and wrote a fairly lengthy memo back.

January 11, 2002: A group of 20 prisoners arrives at Guantánamo from Afghanistan. They are housed in open-air cages—hence the name Camp X-Ray. The International Committee of the Red Cross makes its first visit six days later. The number of detainees will grow into the several hundreds during the next several years. Army Private Brandon Neely witnessed the arrival of the first detainees.

Brandon Neely: The main gate to Camp X-Ray opened, and the bus pulls up. I’m standing 20 feet away. You could hear the Marines on the bus yelling at the detainees. You know, shut up. Look down. You’re now property of the United States of America. [Continue reading…]

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Julian Assange: The United States betrayed Madison and Jefferson

Michael Hastings writes: It’s a few days before Christmas, and Julian Assange has just finished moving to a new hide-out deep in the English countryside. The two-bedroom house, on loan from a WikiLeaks supporter, is comfortable enough, with a big stone fireplace and a porch out back, but it’s not as grand as the country estate where he spent the past 363 days under house arrest, waiting for a British court to decide whether he will be extradited to Sweden to face allegations that he sexually molested two women he was briefly involved with in August 2010.

Assange sits on a tattered couch, wearing a wool sweater, dark pants and an electronic manacle around his right ankle, visible only when he crosses his legs. At 40, the WikiLeaks founder comes across more like an embattled rebel commander than a hacker or journalist. He’s become better at handling the media – more willing to answer questions than he used to be, less likely to storm off during interviews – but the protracted legal battle has left him isolated, broke and vulnerable. Assange recently spoke to someone he calls a Western “intelligence source,” and he asked the official about his fate. Will he ever be a free man again, allowed to return to his native Australia, to come and go as he pleases? “He told me I was fucked,” Assange says.

“Are you fucked?” I ask.

Assange pauses and looks out the window. The house is surrounded by rolling fields and quiet woods, but they offer him little in the way of escape. The British Supreme Court will hear his extradition appeal on February 1st – but even if he wins, he will likely still remain a wanted man. Interpol has issued a so-called “red notice” for his arrest on behalf of Swedish authorities for questioning in “connection with a number of sexual offenses” – Qaddafi, accused of war crimes, earned only an “orange notice” – and the U.S. government has branded him a “high-tech terrorist,” unleashing a massive and unprecedented investigation designed to depict Assange’s journalism as a form of international espionage. Ever since November 2010, when WikiLeaks embarrassed and infuriated the world’s governments with the release of what became known as Cablegate, some 250,000 classified diplomatic cables from more than 150 countries, the group’s supporters have found themselves detained at airports, subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury, and ordered to turn over their Twitter accounts and e-mails to authorities.

Assange was always deeply engaged with the world – and always getting into trouble. Born in a small town in Queensland, he spent much of his youth traveling around Australia with his mother and stepfather, who ran a theater company. As a teenager, he discovered computers – his first was a Commodore 64 – and became one of the world’s foremost hackers, going by the name Mendax, Latin for “nobly untruthful.” After breaking into systems at NASA and the Pentagon when he was 16, he was busted on 25 counts of hacking, which prodded him to go straight. But as he traveled the world, working as a tech consultant through much of the 1990s, he continued putting his computer skills to use ensuring freedom of information – a necessary condition, he believes, for democratic self-rule.

“From the glory days of American radicalism, which was the American Revolution, I think that Madison’s view on government is still unequaled,” he tells me during the three days I spend with him as he settles into his new location in England. “That people determined to be in a democracy, to be their own governments, must have the power that knowledge will bring – because knowledge will always rule ignorance. You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you. The question is, where has the United States betrayed Madison and Jefferson, betrayed these basic values on how you keep a democracy? I think that the U.S. military-industrial complex and the majority of politicians in Congress have betrayed those values.” [Continue reading…]

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Web protests piracy bills, and senators change course

The New York Times reports: Online protests on Wednesday quickly cut into Congressional support for online antipiracy measures as lawmakers abandoned and rethought their backing for legislation that pitted new media interests against some of the most powerful old-line commercial interests in Washington.

A freshman senator, Marco Rubio of Florida, a rising Republican star, was first out of the starting gate Wednesday morning with his announcement that he would no longer back antipiracy legislation he had co-sponsored. Senator John Cornyn, the Texas Republican who heads the campaign operation for his party, quickly followed suit and urged Congress take more time to study the measure, which had been set for a test vote next week.

By Wednesday afternoon, Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah and one of the Senate bill’s original co-sponsors, called it “simply not ready for prime time” and withdrew his support.

Their decisions came after some Web pages were shut down Wednesday to protest two separate bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, written by Representative Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, drafted by Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Protests organized in the real world drew far less attention. A rally convened in Midtown Manhattan outside the offices of Senators Charles E. Schumer and Kirsten E. Gillibrand, who co-sponsored some of the proposed legislation, drew a few hundred protesters.

Members of Congress, many of whom are grappling with the issues posed by the explosion in new media and social Web sites, appeared caught off guard by the enmity toward what had been a relatively obscure piece of legislation to many of them. The Internet sensibility of the Senate was represented a few years ago in remarks by the late Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, who called the Internet “not a big truck” but a “series of tubes” — an observation enshrined in the Net Hall of Shame.

In reaction to the pending legislation, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia went dark. Google’s home page had a black banner across its home page that led to pointed information blasting the bills.

Such new-media lobbying was having an impact.

“As a senator from Florida, a state with a large presence of artists, creators and businesses connected to the creation of intellectual property, I have a strong interest in stopping online piracy that costs Florida jobs,” Mr. Rubio wrote on his Facebook page. “However, we must do this while simultaneously promoting an open, dynamic Internet environment that is ripe for innovation and promotes new technologies.”

James Allworth and Maxwell Wessel write: SOPA and PIPA are prime examples of big companies trying to do everything they can to stop new competitors from innovating. They’re also examples of how lobbying in the United States has become one of the most effective ways of limiting this sort of competition.

The argument over this legislation has essentially been characterized in the press as having two sides. The first side, which is generally represented by big content, is that piracy (and any new technology that facilitates it) is an existential threat to any business based on intellectual property. That’s actually a line that has been used a few times before — most famously by Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, when he testified in front of congress that the VCR was to the movie industry what the Boston Strangler was to women.

And on the other side of the argument? Well, they have been mostly characterized as the “technology industries.” They’ve been making the case that SOPA and PIPA will chill innovation and threaten free speech.

But “content” vs “technology” doesn’t do justice to describing the two sides. Tim O’Reilly, the CEO of O’Reilly Media — a very well-known publishing and media company that derives a large portion of its revenue from the sale of books — has been one of the most ardent critics of SOPA and PIPA. On the other hand, GoDaddy.com, the largest of the web’s domain name registrars, was very much in favor of SOPA — at least until a boycott caused them to back down. Similarly, there are plenty of other technology firms that have supported SOPA.

So if “content” vs “technology” doesn’t capture what’s going on in this fight, what does? Well, SOPA makes much more sense if you look at the debate as big companies unwilling to accept change versus the innovative companies and startups that embrace change. And if we accept that startups are created to find new ways to create value for consumers, the debate is actually between the financial interests of “big content” shareholders versus consumer interests at large.

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