Author Archives: News Sources

Assad’s combative speech: A method to the tyranny?

Time reports: It was a fiercely combative and confident Syrian President Bashar al-Assad who took to the podium of Damascus University on Tuesday to deliver his fourth speech since unrest erupted in his troubled land last March. His manner and his words made one thing clear: he’s not going anywhere.

In many ways, he has reason to exude confidence. The rickety Arab League monitoring mission, now in its third week of a month-long mission, has been widely criticized for perceived ineptitude and for providing the regime with a veneer of cooperation while Damascus continues to kill its way out of a crisis that has already claimed well over 5,000 lives. The Syrian opposition remains bitterly divided, and has struggled to present itself as a viable alternative to the current regime. Assad’s formidable military and security apparatus remains largely intact, despite low-level defections. Internationally, Russia and China continue to shield the regime from meaningful international censure.

The truth is, Assad’s almost two-hour long speech — full of conspiratorial claims of foreign intervention, a vast media plot against the country, a useless Arab League implementing a Western-Zionist agenda, and destruction caused by terrorists who want to unravel the country’s ethnic-religious harmony — will resonate with a significant portion of frightened, concerned Syrians.

The Syrian opposition, in all of its varied forms, has yet to win over those Syrians — and they were the primary target of Assad’s speech today. The region is rife with examples of what may befall Syria if Assad should fall: Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, newly freed of their own dictators, have demonstrated an ascendant Islamism (although it varies in intensity from country to country) that has worried minorities, particularly Christians. Syria has a sizable Christian minority, as Iraq once did. More than a million Iraqi refugees of various religious backgrounds, fled to Syria in the years following Saddam Hussein’s ouster. The sectarian wars in Iraq and Lebanon are a recent memory to Syrians who remember the floods of refugees and the instability lapping at their borders. Assad appealed not only to Syrians who fear the sectarian pandemonium some of their neighbors have recently experienced (Iraq, Lebanon), and the Islamist tilt shifting political orientations throughout the region, but also those who want a strong leader, whatever his faults, rather than a political vacuum and an untested opposition. “Who is the opposition?” Assad said at one point in his speech. “Anyone now can call themselves ‘opposition’ When I meet them I ask, who do you represent?” It’s a question Assad knows many Syrians are asking — and that is the constituency that he wants to keep on his side.

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Israel prepares for fall of Assad, Syria refugees

Reuters reports: Israel is making preparations for the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and a flood of refugees from his minority Alawite sect into the Golan Heights, Israel’s military chief told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday.

“Assad cannot continue to hold onto power,” a committee spokesman quoted Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz as saying.

“On the day that the regime falls, it is expected to result in a blow to the Alawite sect. We are preparing to take in Alawite refugees on the Golan Heights.”

Israel should also prepare for the possibility that cornered authorities in Damascus could “as a lifesaver … act against us”, the general said.

Assad has faced 10 months of popular revolt in which more than 5,000 people have been killed, according to U.N. figures.

Israeli officials have said they do not expect his government to last more than a few months but Gantz’s remarks were the first indication that Israel is already making contingency plans for the end of the rule.

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Israel breaking settlement records, says Peace Now

Reuters reports: Israel’s government broke all its settlement-building records in 2011, diminishing prospects for establishing a viable Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank, Israel’s anti-settlement activist group “Peace Now” said Tuesday.

The group’s annual report on building in Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank – land the Palestinians want for a future state along with the Gaza Strip – showed that despite international calls to halt construction, thousands of new homes were being built.

“In 2011 (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu broke his government’s building records and turned it into a very fruitful year for the settlers and a very sad one for the citizens of Israel,” Peace Now director Yariv Oppenheimer said.

“At the current rate of building we will lose the chance for a two-state solution.

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Israel prepares for nuclear-armed Iran

The Times reports: Israel has begun thinking the unthinkable: that it will have to deal with a nuclear-armed Iran within a year.

In documents seen by The Times, Israeli officials have begun preparing scenarios for the day after a nuclear weapons test.

The move is a tacit recognition that Israel is backing away from its long-held position that it would do everything in its power – including mounting a military strike – to stop Iran acquiring nuclear capabilities.

Details of the war game, which was enacted by former ambassadors, intelligence officials and ex-military chiefs, emerged as the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog confirmed yesterday that Iran has begun producing enriched uranium in an underground bunker designed to withstand airstrikes.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said that it was monitoring the work at the Fordow facility, which is concealed in a mountain near the holy city of Qom.

The simulation exercise was conducted in Tel Aviv last week by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), a think-tank. Its conclusions suggest that a nuclear test would radically shift the whole power balance of the Middle East.

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U.S. citizen’s death sentence heightens tensions with Iran

The New York Times reports: Iran’s judiciary yesterday sentenced to death an imprisoned American convicted of espionage for the CIA, a punishment that shocked his family and was imposed against a backdrop of increasingly bellicose relations with the United States over the disputed Iranian nuclear program.

The sentence against the American, Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, 28, a retired Marine, was likely to become a new point of contention, and possible bargaining leverage, in Iran’s struggle against the West over its nuclear program. A tightening vise of sanctions, which threaten vital oil sales and with them Iran’s economy, has left Tehran feeling besieged and has pushed relations with the United States and its allies to the lowest ebb since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

In retaliation, Tehran announced on Sunday that it had begun to enrich uranium at a second site, after having threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz to shipping, a measure that would severely curtail oil shipments.

The details of the case against Hekmati have been cloaked in secrecy since he was detained in August in Iran, to which his family said he had traveled to visit his grandparents. Official confirmation that he was even in Iranian custody was not provided until last month. The White House and the State Department, noting that Iranian prosecutors have a history of coercing confessions, denied that Hekmati was a spy and called for his immediate release. The CIA declined to comment.

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Too many victims of the war on terror remain imprisoned across the world

Mary Fitzgerald writes: It didn’t take long before one of the incentives offered to coax the Taliban to the negotiating table came to light: last week the Guardian carried reports of American plans to release several high-ranking Taliban leaders from Guantánamo Bay. They include Mullah Khair Khowa, a former interior minister, Noorullah Noori, a former governor in northern Afghanistan and maybe, just maybe, the former army commander Mullah Fazl Akhund – if a third country, perhaps Qatar, will accept custody of him.

It’s an inevitable step in the right direction, reminiscent of the tentative early moves in the Northern Ireland peace process. It also offers a convenient, if partial, solution to the status of the 171 legal headaches still languishing in America’s brutal Caribbean prison.

But it forces into light other shaming questions about the conduct of the so-called war on terror; and in particular about those thousands of men, women and children, many innocent of any crime even by the US authorities’ own admission, who were “rendered” and remain trapped in prisons across the world.

Hamidullah Khan was just 13 when he disappeared from South Waziristan, in Pakistan. I met his father, Wakeel Khan, on a recent trip to Islamabad. He told me with pride that Hamidullah was a “very good-looking boy” and showed me pictures. He said his son could be quite absent-minded, but worked very hard at school: his dream was to become a doctor.

During the summer holidays in 2008, Wakeel sent Hamidullah to the family home in South Waziristan to collect some of their possessions, as Wakeel could not get the time off work to go himself. Hamidullah never returned.

Wakeel, an ex-solider, tried to retrace his son’s steps. He caught the bus up to the province, and asked everyone about his son: his relatives, his old army contacts, the local Taliban. No one knew anything. He thought of going to the police, but given that they charge a 300 rupee bribe to replace an ID card, he asked himself, “how much would they charge to find a person?”

After a year, the Red Cross finally tracked down Hamidullah and passed a letter to his family saying he was being held in Bagram prison in Afghanistan. Despite American assurances that the prisoners there are treated well, fresh allegations of abuse surfaced this weekend.

No explanation has ever been offered for why a boy so young was picked up and taken hundreds of miles away, why he has never been charged, and why he has still not been released.

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Syria’s Bashar Assad says he won’t step aside

Atlantic Wire: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad delivered a defiant televised address on Tuesday saying that he will not step down and will not institute new democratic reforms, insisting that unrest in his country is the work of a foreign conspiracy. According to Al-Jazeera’s translations, Assad said that there are no real revolutionaries in his country, just terrorists carrying out a plan that was devised “tens of years ago” to divide Arab countries. Assad also claimed that he still had the support of Syrians and he will only leave office when it is “by the will of the people.”

During the rare 90 minute address, his first speech to the nation in more than six months, Assad also criticized other Arab League governments, which suspended Syria from the League and sent a team of monitors to attempt to oversee a peace plan. Assad says that Arab monarchies telling Syria how to institute democracy is “like a doctor who smokes and recommends to his patient to give up smoking while he, the doctor, has a cigarette in his mouth.”

Assad continued to insist that demonstrations taking place in Syria are merely the work of “terrorists” and “thieves” and that he will continue to hit them with “an iron fist.” However, he claims that “there are no orders for anyone to open fire on any citizen,” despite reports by the U.N. and opposition leaders that well over 5,000 Syrians have been killed by the military since the unrest began last March.

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The billionaire who wants to help Newt Gingrich destroy Mitt Romney

The Atlantic Wire provides a well-rounded briefing on Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate whose support for Newt Gingrich might not help him win the GOP nomination but “could be enough to burn down the Republican front runner in the process.”

“When Mitt Romney Came To Town”: Part One and Part Two

Atlantic Wire: Adelson grew up in the working class neighborhoods outside Boston and got started in business selling toiletries to hotels. He later dropped out of college, became a mortgage broker and ran a tour business. According to this profile from The New Yorker in 2008 (which is an excellent primer on Adeleson's rise to power), he made and lost more than one fortune, but then in 1979, he started a computer trade show in Las Vegas. (Comdex, an ancient ancestor of this week's CES.) Within a decade, his success with the show led him to purchase the old Las Vegas Sands Hotel. That was when he started his climb from "merely rich" to becoming a billionaire. He built a massive convention center next door, turning the city into a huge business gathering destination, then tore down the aging casino itself and built The Venetian, a massive hotel complex with high-end shopping, restaurants, spacious rooms, indoor canals, and of course, a glittery casino that exemplified the "new" opulent Las Vegas.

It was around the time that he bought the Sands that Adelson, who grew up as a Massachusetts Democrat, had a conversion to Republicanism, after befriending William Bush, the brother of George H. W. Bush. A relative newcomer to the world of the super rich, Adelson had the same proverbial epiphany that most newly wealthy people make when they see their 1040, arguing: “Why is it fair that I should be paying a higher percentage of taxes than anyone else?” The rest is obvious history.

As Adelson gained influence in Vegas, he began to spread his reach around the globe. In 2004, he made a deal with the Chinese government to open the first American-owned casino in Macao, a move that multiplied his wealth fourteen times in the last decade. (As a demonstration of his closeness China, he allegedly helped kill a Congressional bill denouncing Beijing's 2008 Olympic bid.) He has also been a major player in Israel-American politics, donating millions to AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, until abandoning the group after they supported an increase in aid to the Palestinians, who he considers an "invented people." He met with President George W. Bush in the White House to lobby against peace negotiations and worked to oust former Israeli Prime Minister (and former friend) Ehud Olmert after he declared a willingness to negotiate a two-state solution. In 2007, he opened in his own free daily newspaper in Israel that has been called a mouthpiece for current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In America, the 78-year-old billionaire has aligned himself with Gingrich who shares similar views on Israel. He was the biggest supporter of American Solutions for Winning the Future, a different PAC that Gingrich personally ran before he was a candidate, and was replaced with the "independent" Winning Our Future. Legally, Winning Our Future and the Gingrich campaign must remain separate, but this latest move only underscores how flimsy those rules are and how massive an influence super PACs are having on the primary. When essentially one person can keep an entire ad campaign alive, even after the candidate it means to support ceases to be viable, that's a discouraging fact of American politics.  It's also one that won't quell any fears about the power of the 1%.

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Crime pays for prison operators

James Kilgore writes: Private corrections company The GEO Group celebrated the holiday season by opening a new 1,500 bed prison in Milledgeville, Georgia on December 12th. The $80 million facility is expected to generate approximately $28.0 million in annual revenues.

Though GEO (formerly Wackenhut) is hardly a household name, they are a major player in the private corrections sector, combining a self righteous amorality in profiting from human misery with a ruthless sense of just how to make a buck in this business. The GEO Group is so notorious that they were the target of an Occupy Washington D.C. action in early December. In addition, the United Methodist Church sold off more than $200,000 in stock in GEO Group over the holiday season, judging that holding these shares was “incompatible with Bible teaching.”

While such actions may irritate a few within the company’s rank, the GEO Group is thick-skinned. Over the years journalists have exposed a long history of violence, abuse and corruption in the company’s facilities. Such scandals would have driven most firms out of business, but GEO has always managed to find the way back to prosperity. While the U.S. economy has plummeted in the past eighteen months, GEO has been positioning itself for the future.

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Syria’s protesters are on their own

Brian Whitaker writes: The Arab League’s much-heralded meeting to review the “progress” of its monitoring operation in Syria came and went on Sunday with barely a whimper. A few more monitors will be sent but unless Syria agrees to an extension, which seems unlikely, the mission will end on 19 January with the presentation of a report.

It’s difficult to see where the league can go from there, except by admitting failure and passing its files to the United Nations.

When the Assad regime accepted the league’s peace plan last month, after weeks of prevarication, it agreed to end the violence against peaceful protests, withdraw the army from towns, release political prisoners and start a dialogue with the opposition. The ill-prepared monitors were then sent in to assess its compliance.

The regime’s insincerity about this was never in much doubt. Apart from some token gestures it has made no real effort to comply, and the killings and arrests have continued. At the same time, though, the presence of monitors does seem to have emboldened the protesters and helped to keep Syria in the headlines.

Despite all that, the failure of the Arab League’s initiative may be preferable to its success. Had there been more progress, the result would have been protracted talks about political “reform”.

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Torture doesn’t reduce crime

The proponents of a harsh penal system argue that being tough on criminals is the most effective way of tackling crime. A comparison between Virginia and the Netherlands makes it clear that this is a baseless argument. The Netherlands has twice the population of Virgina, twice the population density, lower per capita income, and yet Virginia incarcerates 40,000 of its population and tortures some of those — 1800 are held in solitary confinement — while the Netherlands has just 12,000 detainees — with about 20 prisoners in solitary confinement — and has in recent years closed prisons because there were too many empty cells.

The Washington Post reports: At Red Onion State Prison, built on a mountaintop in a remote pocket of southwest Virginia, more than two-thirds of the inmates live in solitary confinement.

In a state where about 1 in 20 prisoners are held in solitary, Red Onion, a so-called supermax prison, isolates more inmates than any other facility, keeping more than 500 of its nearly 750 charges alone for 23 hours a day in cells the size of a doctor’s exam room.

Virginia, one of 44 states that use solitary confinement, has 1,800 people in isolation, a sizable share of the estimated 25,000 people in solitary in the nation’s state and federal prisons.

As more becomes known about the effects of isolation — on inmate health, public safety and prison budgets — some states have begun to reconsider the practice, among them Texas, which, like Virginia, is known as a law-and-order state.

Mississippi, New York and Texas have begun to scale back the use of solitary confinement under pressure from prison watchdogs.

Now critics have set their sights on Virginia, where lawyers and inmates say some of the state’s 40,000 prisoners, including some with mental-health issues, have been kept in isolation for years, in one case for 14 years.

Nrc.nl reported: The Dutch justice ministry has announced it will close eight prisons and cut 1,200 jobs in the prison system. A decline in crime has left many cells empty.

During the 1990s the Netherlands faced a shortage of prison cells, but a decline in crime has since led to overcapacity in the prison system. The country now has capacity for 14,000 prisoners but only 12,000 detainees.

Deputy justice minister Nebahat Albayrak announced on Tuesday that eight prisons will be closed, resulting in the loss of 1,200 jobs. Natural redundancy and other measures should prevent any forced lay-offs, the minister said.

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Israeli democracy should be replaced by Jewish law, settler leader says

Haaretz reports: Israeli democracy must be dismantled and in its place a halakhic state, based on Jewish law, should be established, says settler leader Benny Katzover in an interview to a a messianic journal of Chabad.

In an interview with Beit Mashiach, the journal of the messianic faction of the Chabad Movement with ties to settlers, Katzover says that “the main role of Israeli democracy now is to disappear. Israeli democracy has finished its role, and it must disassemble and give way to Judaism. All leads toward recognition that there is no other way but to place Judaism at the center, above all else, and this is the answer to every situation.”

Earlier in the interview Katzover commented on the campaign against the exclusion of women, saying that his group had information of the pending campaign.

“Our activists are linked to all the networks of the left, and we knew they were planning an incitement campaign. This is just another wave of incitement, targeting the hilltop youth and the Haredi community. The leftist activists prepare well-timed campaigns against anything which smells of holiness, and their aim is twofold: political, to undermine the government and score points among the public, and to strike at all the fundamentals of Jewish faith.

“In Jewish faith, the Land of Israel is central… The media campaigns over insignificant issues in order to undermine Jewish identity. I think there can be cooperation between the Haredim and the religious [national] communities. Incitement against us stems from the same anti-Jewish root which seeks to uproot everything,” Katzover said in the interview.

Since 2008 Katzover has headed the Committee of Samaria Settlers, an NGO which has fought against the freeze of settlement construction and the razing of outposts. Katzover believes that Jews should stay in the territories even after they are evacuated. He is well respected among the hilltop youth because of his views. His ideological line has been gaining popularity among settlers since the evacuation of Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip.

Katzover was one of the first leaders of the settler movement, joining Gush Emunim, and then the nucleus of Elon Moreh, which was established in Samaria in 1979.

“I think that Israeli democracy, under its current structure, is in constant conflict with its Jewish identity, and in recent years, every time it bends its Jewish identity backwards. This structure of democracy has only one mission: to dismantle,” he told Haaretz.

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Iran starts uranium enrichment at Fordo mountain facility, Kayhan reports

Bloomberg reports: Iran has started to enrich uranium at its Fordo production facility, the official Kayhan newspaper reported without saying where it got the information.

Iran will soon have a ceremony to open the site officially, the newspaper reported, citing the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, Fereydoun Abbasi. The Iranian nuclear chief was cited yesterday by Mehr News as saying that the underground facility “will start operating in the near future.”

The existence of the Fordo plant, built into the side of a mountain near the Muslim holy city of Qom, south of Tehran, was disclosed in September 2009, heightening concern among the U.S. and its allies who say Iran’s activities may be a cover for the development of atomic weapons. The Persian Gulf country has rejected the allegation, saying it needs nuclear technology to secure energy for its growing population.

The Associated Press reports: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says Iran is laying the groundwork for making nuclear weapons someday, but is not yet building a bomb and called for continued diplomatic and economic pressure to persuade Tehran not to take that step.

As he has previously, Panetta cautioned against a unilateral strike by Israel against Iran’s nuclear facilities, saying the action could trigger Iranian retaliation against U.S. forces in the region.

“We have common cause here” with Israel, he said. “And the better approach is for us to work together.”

Panetta’s remarks on CBS’ Face the Nation, which were taped Friday and aired Sunday, reflect the long-held view of the Obama administration that Iran is not yet committed to building a nuclear arsenal, only to creating the industrial and scientific capacity to allow one if its leaders to decide to take that final step.

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Blair Inc’s ‘baffling’ increase in earnings

The Guardian reports: Unemployment is rising and companies are going to the wall as the economic turmoil continues to inflict damage across the globe. But one organisation is thriving. Records recently filed at Companies House show Tony Blair Inc is going from strength to strength. They reveal that income channelled through a complex network of firms and partnerships controlled by Blair rose more than 40% last year to more than £12m. Of this, almost £10m was paid for “management services”. The money was transferred via a network of firms and financial vehicles.

Accountancy experts are questioning the arcane nature of the network’s finances, which makes it difficult to trace where its money is coming from, or where it is being spent.

Accounts for Windrush Ventures, an obscure company that operates under the trading name “the Office of Tony Blair”, suggest 2011 has been a successful year for the former prime minister. Windrush saw its turnover rise to just over £12m, up from £8.5m in 2010. Pre-tax profits rose from £729,000 to £1.1m.

The accounts reveal that the company received “remuneration of £9,837,000 in connection with management services” from a limited liability partnership ultimately controlled by Blair. In the previous year Windrush Ventures Limited received £5.2m in remuneration for providing management services. Exactly what sort of management services are provided, and how the company derives its income, are impossible to determine as the accounts do not go into detail. Blair is legitimately taking advantage of laws allowing him to limit what his companies and partnerships must disclose. “It is baffling; these accounts make remarkably little sense,” said accountancy expert Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK, a firm that scrutinises company finances. “This limited disclosure is not within the spirit of the law.”

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