Author Archives: News Sources

Palestine vote showcases the decline of American power

Juan Cole writes:

The United States, castigated by its critics as recently as a decade ago as a “hyper-power,” is now so weak and isolated on the world stage that it may cast an embarrassing and self-defeating veto of Palestinian membership in the United Nations. Beset by debt, mired in economic doldrums provoked by the cupidity and corruption of its business classes, and on the verge of withdrawing from Iraq and ultimately Afghanistan in defeat, the U.S. needs all the friends it can get. If he were the visionary we thought we elected in 2008, President Obama would surprise everyone by rethinking the issue and coming out in favor of a U.N. membership for Palestine. In so doing, he would help the U.S. recover some of its tarnished prestige and avoid a further descent into global isolation and opprobrium.

It is often the little things that trip up empires and send them spiraling into geopolitical feebleness. France’s decision to react brutally to the Algerian independence movement from 1954 arguably helped send its West African subjects running for the exits, much to the surprise and dismay of a puzzled Gen. Charles de Gaulle. Empires are always constructed out of a combination of coercion and loyalty, and post-colonial historians often would prefer not to remember the loyalty of compradors and collaborators. But arguably it is the desertion of the latter that contributes most decisively to imperial collapse.

Thus, it is highly significant that an influential Saudi prince warned the United States that a veto of Palestine at the U.N. could well cost the latter its alliance with Saudi Arabia. The kingdom is the world’s swing petroleum producer and has done Washington many favors in the oil markets, and although such favors were seldom altogether altruistic, Riyadh’s good will has been a key element in U.S. predominance.

The House of Saud has other options, after all. It has been thinking hard about whether its ideological differences with the Chinese Communist Party are not outweighed by common interests. Among these mutual goals is the preservation of a model of authoritarian, top-down governance combined with rapid economic advance to forestall popular demands for participation, as an alternative to Western liberalism. For its part, China has invested $15 billion in the Arab world in recent years and is an increasingly appealing destination for Arab capital. Beijing is supporting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ initiative for recognition in the U.N.

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Israel set to approve 1,100 new Jerusalem homes beyond the Green Line

Haaretz reports:

The Jerusalem District Planning Committee is set to approve 1,100 new housing units in Jerusalem’s contested Gilo neighborhood on Tuesday, despite past U.S. objections concerning any construction that expanded Gilo further across the Green Line.

The plan was submitted by a subsidiary to the Jewish National Fund, and must pass 60 days in which the public may oppose it before being finally approved by Jerusalem’s planning authorities.

According to the proposal, 20 percent of the units in Jerusalem’s southern neighborhood would be allotted for young couples, in compliance with a directive by Interior Minister Eli Yishai. The plan also includes the construction of a boardwalk, public structures, and a commercial center.

The announcement of the possible approval of construction in Gilo comes amid U.S. attempts to push Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiations table following a Palestinian statehood bid at the United Nations. A key Palestinian condition ahead of resumed talks has been the complete freeze of all Israeli settlement construction.

In 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama, referring to a plan to expand construction in Gilo, said new Gilo homes could complicate efforts by his administration to relaunch peace talks and embitter the Palestinians.

Obama said at the time that additional settlement building doesn’t make Israel safer. He said such moves make it harder to achieve peace in the region, and embitters the Palestinians in a dangerous way.

“The situation in the Middle East is very difficult, and I’ve said repeatedly and I’ll say again, Israel’s security is a vital national interest to the United States, and we will make sure they are secure,” Obama said in the interview.

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Jewish settlers: ‘We will slaughter Arabs’

Ma’an News Agency reports:

Jewish settlers on Sunday hung posters displaying anti-Arab slogans on the main road between Hebron and Jerusalem, local officials said.

The mayor of al-Khader, near Bethlehem, Ramzi Salah told Ma’an that some of the slogans read: “This is the land of our fathers and grandfathers,” and “This is the land of Israel.”

The posters were displayed near settlements along route 60 between Hebron and Jerusalem, as well as near the village of Jaba and in the East Jerusalem towns of Eizariya and Abu Dis, Salah added.

Member of the local anti-wall committee in al-Khader Ahmad Salah told Ma’an that some of the posters along route 60 read “We will slaughter Arabs.” Posters were also displayed on the fence surrounding Efrat settlement south of Bethlehem, he added.

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Traders are more dangerous than psychopaths — and Goldman Sachs rules the world

Apparently, if provided with the right kind of parenting, children who might have grown up to become psychopaths can instead become successful stock market traders. What seems unclear is whether this would make society as a whole any safer.

Chris Barth writes:

The hubbub is just starting to pick up after NZZ Online’s report yesterday on a University of St. Gallen study that shows stock market traders display similarities to certified psychopaths. The study, authored by MBA students Pascal Scherrer and Thomas Noll, compares decisions made by 27 equity, derivative and forex traders in a computer simulation against an existing study of 24 psychopaths in high-security hospitals in Germany. Not only do the traders match their counterparts, but, as Der Speigel succinctly puts it, the “stockbrokers’ behavior is more reckless and manipulative than that of psychopaths.”

The traders, according to Noll, were fixated on gaining more than their competitors in the computer simulation – to the extent that they “spent a lot of energy trying to damage their opponents.” He compared the behavior to bashing a neighbor’s fancy car with a baseball bat in order to make your own car the nicest in the neighborhood.

This is fascinating stuff, but it’s not entirely new. In 2004, New Scientist compared ladder-climbing corporate employees to psychopaths for their shared characteristics of lacking empathy and compassion while thriving under stress. In 2005, Antoine Bechara, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Iowa, told the Wall Street Journal, “It’s possible that people who are high-risk takers or good investors may have what you call a functional psychopathy.” In 1996, Jason Bennetto, a crime correspondent for The Independent, noted that “stockbrokers share many of the same characteristics as criminal psychopaths.” That same year, a Scottish University found that “with the right parenting [psychopaths] can become successful stockbrokers instead of serial killers.”

In an interview on the BBC, Alessio Rastani, a stock market and forex trader in Europe, provided a glimpse inside the minds of those who see golden opportunities in the misfortune of others.

Rastani says the stock market is “toast” and to those who imagine that collective government action will prevent another recession he says: “the governments don’t rule the world. Goldman Sachs rules the world.”

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The decline of American client states

Max Fisher writes:

America’s love affair with client states began not long after it and the Soviet Union — another master in the art of client-building — pressured the UK and France to leave Egypt, which they had invaded in 1956 to reclaim control of the Suez canal. European colonialism, the U.S. and USSR argued at the United Nations that year, was outdated, destabilizing, and had to end. British and French forces withdrew from Egypt, and within about a decade most of the British and French empires collapsed. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Soviet Union had begun a different great geopolitical game — the search for client states — one that Washington is still playing today.

The ’56 Suez Crisis was a final act of the imperial age and one of the first in a new era, where the major powers don’t have colonies — they have clients. American and Soviet diplomats, spies, and generals spent the next four decades racing from one capital to another, trying to buy, cajole, or enforce the allegiance of smaller nations. Often, that meant tin-pot dictators that would do the master state’s bidding, either accelerating or stopping the spread of communism, depending on who was paying better that year. Egypt was one of dozens of countries that, not long after ending its centuries under colonial rule, became an often willing pawn in the Cold War’s client game, first aligning itself with the Soviet Union and then with the U.S., which offered it lots of money and military equipment as part of the 1979 Camp David Peace accords. The U.S. found less use for client states after the Soviet Union fell, but still maintains the practice today, developing (mostly) subservient allies in hot spots across the world.

If Egypt’s 1956 liberation from colonialism helped end the colonial era, the country may now once again be signalling a change in the global system. When protesters toppled Egyptian president and reliable U.S. client Hosni Mubarak this February, they changed the terms of the U.S.-Egypt relationship. Washington can send all the money and tanks it wants — it won’t be able to dictate to a democratic Cairo any more than it can to, say, Ankara or Paris. The fall of easily controlled dictators across the region (the U.S. has already given up on its man in Yemen) comes at the same time as U.S.-allied democracies and autocracies alike seem increasingly willing to buck Washington’s wishes. Last week alone, the U.S. clashed with some of its most important client states. Maybe that’s because of America’s habit of picking the most troubled states in the most troubled regions as clients (where they’re perceived as the most needed), maybe it’s because democratic movements are pressuring client states to follow popular domestic will rather than foreign guidance, and maybe it’s because the idea of clientalism was doomed from the start. Democracy is on the march, and democratic governments make bad clients: they’re fickle; prone to change foreign policy as their domestic policy shifts; and subject to the needs, desires, and whims of their voters.

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Robert Gates sees American political scene as dysfunctional and dangerous

The Washington Post reports:

Add former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to the list of retired top officials who see the current American political scene as dysfunctional and dangerous.

“As a result of several long-building, polarizing trends in American politics and culture, we have lost the ability to execute even the basic functions of government, much less solve the most difficult and divisive problems facing the country,” Gates said last week at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia where he received that group’s Liberty Medal.

He cited two causes worth considering.

The first was redistricting of congressional seats which, he said, created safe Republican and Democratic seats but led to party primaries “where candidates must cater to the most hard-core ideological elements of their base.” He wondered how this could be changed to “ensure that more candidates for Congress are forced to appeal to independents, centrists, and at least some members of the other political party to win election, just as presidential candidates must do?”

He also cited the role of an evolving news media. He looked longingly to decades past when three television networks and a handful of major newspapers dominated national coverage and “to a considerable degree, filtered extreme or vitriolic points of view.”

Today, he said, “hundreds of cable channels, blogs and other electronic media” have given wide dissemination to “every point of view, including the most extreme.” The result, according to Gates, though more democratic, “has fueled the coarsening and, I believe, the dumbing down of the national political dialogue.”

He described these two trends, along with some other factors, as polarizing the country at a time when the need is for “more bipartisanship, and more compromise to deal with our most serious problems.”

Citing his time working for eight presidents of both parties over more than 40 years, Gates said, none “had a monopoly on revealed truth.”

And without naming any of today’s leaders or presidential candidates, he warned: “Those who think that they alone have the right answers, those who demonize those who think differently, and those who refuse to listen and take other points of view into account—these leaders, in my view, are a danger to the American people and to the future of our republic.”

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In riddle of Mideast upheaval, Turkey offers itself as an answer

Anthony Shadid reports:

Not so long ago, the foreign policy of Turkey revolved around a single issue: the divided island of Cyprus. These days, its prime minister may be the most popular figure in the Middle East, its foreign minister envisions a new order there and its officials have managed to do what the Obama administration has so far failed to: position themselves firmly on the side of change in the Arab revolts and revolutions.

No one is ready to declare a Pax Turkana in the Middle East, and indeed, its foreign policy is strewn this year with missteps, crises and gains that feel largely rhetorical. It even lacks enough diplomats. But in an Arab world where the United States seems in retreat, Europe ineffectual and powers like Israel and Iran unsettled and unsure, officials of an assertive, occasionally brash Turkey have offered a vision for what may emerge from turmoil across two continents that has upended decades of assumptions.

Not unexpectedly, the vision’s center is Turkey.

“Turkey is the only country that has a sense of where things are going, and it has the wind blowing on its sails,” said Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Istanbul Bilgi University.

The country’s foreign policy seized the attention of many in the Middle East and beyond after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s tour this month of three Arab countries that have witnessed revolutions: Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Even Mr. Erdogan’s critics were impressed with the symbolism of the trip.

Though many criticize his streak of authoritarianism at home, the public abroad seemed taken by a prime minister who portrayed himself as the proudly Muslim leader of a democratic and prosperous country that has come out forcefully on the side of revolution and in defense of Palestinian rights.

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U.S.-Turkey agree on delivery schedule for Predators

If Israel imagined that Turkey’s reliance on Israeli-made unmanned aircraft might give them some leverage when attempting to mend the two countries frayed relations, the Obama administration is apparently willing to disabuse the Israelis of this hope. Turkey’s recent agreement to install a US-made NATO radar shield against a missile attack in Europe, has no doubt come into consideration as Turkey negotiates with the US over delivery of the UAVs.

Today’s Zaman reports:

Turkey is expecting the delivery of Predators in June 2012, the Turkish defense minister said a day after the country’s prime minister announced that Turkey has agreed with the US on a deal involving the transfer of US-engineered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could prove crucial in combating terrorism.

“We have agreed in principle [on the delivery of Predators]. Negotiations will continue,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was quoted as saying by the Cihan news agency on Saturday in New York, where the Turkish leader was visiting on the occasion of the 66th session of the UN General Assembly. Erdoğan also noted that Turkey had offered to either purchase or lease the drones and that the two countries were still settling the details regarding the delivery of the Predators.

Following up on the agreement, Turkish Defense Minister İsmet Yılmaz told reporters on Saturday that the drones to be received from the US would be delivered to the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) in June of next year, reported the Anatolia news agency.

“These [Predators] are UAVs with better qualities and features than the Herons,” Yılmaz said, and added that the Turkish-made Anka would also be ready for the TSK around the same time, as an alternative to Israeli-made Herons.

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Pakistanis tied to 2007 border ambush on Americans

The New York Times reports:

A group of American military officers and Afghan officials had just finished a five-hour meeting with their Pakistani hosts in a village schoolhouse settling a border dispute when they were ambushed — by the Pakistanis.

An American major was killed and three American officers were wounded, along with their Afghan interpreter, in what fresh accounts from the Afghan and American officers who were there reveal was a complex, calculated assault by a nominal ally. The Pakistanis opened fire on the Americans, who returned fire before escaping in a blood-soaked Black Hawk helicopter.

The attack, in Teri Mangal on May 14, 2007, was kept quiet by Washington, which for much of a decade has seemed to play down or ignore signals that Pakistan would pursue its own interests, or even sometimes behave as an enemy.

The reconstruction of the attack, which several officials suggested was revenge for Afghan or Pakistani deaths at American hands, takes on new relevance given the worsening rupture in relations between Washington and Islamabad, which has often been restrained by Pakistan’s strategic importance.

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Books, lectures, websites: fresh evidence for FBI’s anti-Islam training

Danger Room reports:

Following months of denials, the FBI is now promising a “comprehensive review of all training and reference materials” after Danger Room revealed a series of Bureau presentations that tarred average Muslims as “radical” and “violent.”

But untangling the Islamophobic thread woven into the FBI’s counterterrorism training culture won’t be easy. In addition to inflammatory seminars which likened Islam to the Death Star and Mohammed to a “cult leader,” Danger Room has obtained more material showing just how wide the anti-Islam meme has spread throughout the Bureau.

The FBI library at Quantico currently stacks books from authors who claim that “Islam and democracy are totally incompatible.” The Bureau’s private intranet recently featured presentations that claimed to demonstrate the “inherently violent nature of Islam,” according to multiple sources. Earlier this year, the Bureau’s Washington Field Office welcomed a speaker who claimed Islamic law prevents Muslims from being truly loyal Americans. And as recently as last week, the online orientation material for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces included claims that Sunni Islam seeks “domination of the world,” according to a law enforcement source.

“I don’t think anyone with half a brain would paint 1.2 billion people of any ethnic or religious persuasion with a single brushstroke,” Mike Rolince, an FBI counterterrorism veteran who started Boston’s JTTF, tells Danger Room. “Who did they run that curriculum by — either an internal or outside expert — to get some balance?”

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After September 11: our state of exception

Mark Danner writes:

We are living in the State of Exception. We don’t know when it will end, as we don’t know when the War on Terror will end. But we all know when it began. We can no longer quite “remember” that moment, for the images have long since been refitted into a present-day fable of innocence and apocalypse: the perfect blue of that late summer sky stained by acrid black smoke. The jetliner appearing, tilting, then disappearing into the skin of the second tower, to emerge on the other side as a great eruption of red and yellow flame. The showers of debris, the falling bodies, and then that great blossoming flower of white dust, roiling and churning upward, enveloping and consuming the mighty skyscraper as it collapses into the whirlwind.

To Americans, those terrible moments stand as a brightly lit portal through which we were all compelled to step, together, into a different world. Since that day ten years ago we have lived in a subtly different country, and though we have grown accustomed to these changes and think little of them now, certain words still appear often enough in the news—Guantánamo, indefinite detention, torture—to remind us that ours remains a strange America. The contours of this strangeness are not unknown in our history—the country has lived through broadly similar periods, at least half a dozen or so, depending on how you count; but we have no proper name for them. State of siege? Martial law? State of emergency? None of these expressions, familiar as they may be to other peoples, falls naturally from American lips.

What are we to call this subtly altered America? Clinton Rossiter, the great American scholar of “crisis government,” writing in the shadow of World War II, called such times “constitutional dictatorship.” Others, more recently, have spoken of a “9/11 Constitution” or an “Emergency Constitution.” Vivid terms all; and yet perhaps too narrowly drawn, placing as they do the definitional weight entirely on law when this state of ours seems to have as much, or more, to do with politics—with how we live now and who we are as a polity. This is in part why I prefer “the state of exception,” an umbrella term that gathers beneath it those emergency categories while emphasizing that this state has as its defining characteristic that it transcends the borders of the strictly legal—that it occupies, in the words of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “a position at the limit between politics and law…an ambiguous, uncertain, borderline fringe, at the intersection of the legal and the political.”

Call it, then, the state of exception: these years during which, in the name of security, some of our accustomed rights and freedoms are circumscribed or set aside, the years during which we live in a different time. This different time of ours has now extended ten years—the longest by far in American history—with little sense of an ending. Indeed, the very endlessness of this state of exception—a quality emphasized even as it was imposed—and the broad acceptance of that endlessness, the state of exception’s increasing normalization, are among its distinguishing marks.

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The end of Oslo

Judith Butler writes:

Among the many astonishing claims that Barack Obama made in his recent speech opposing the Palestinian bid for statehood was that ‘peace will not come through statements and resolutions.’ This is, at best, an odd thing to say for a president whose ascendancy to power itself depended on the compelling use of rhetoric. Indeed, his argument against the power of statements and resolutions at the United Nations to achieve peace was a rhetorical ploy that sought to minimise the power of rhetorical ploys. More important, it was an effort to make sure that the United States government remains the custodian and broker of any peace negotiation, so his speech was effectively a way of trying to reassert that position of custodial power in response to the greatest challenge it has received in decades. And most important, his speech was an effort to counter and drain the rhetorical force of the very public statements that are seeking to expose the sham of the peace negotiations, to break with the Oslo framework, and to internationalise the political process to facilitate Palestinian statehood.

There are reasons to question whether the Palestinian bid for statehood at this time and on these terms is the right thing to do, but they are not the ones that Netanyahu put forward in his blustery and arrogant remarks. Within the Palestinian debates, many have questioned whether the present bid for statehood effectively abandons the right of return for diasporic Palestinians, leaves unaddressed the structural discrimination against Palestinians within the current borders of Israel, potentially abandons Gaza, delegitimises the Palestinian Liberation Organisation by elevating the Palestinian Authority into a state structure, takes off the table the one-state solution, and mistakenly relies on the UN as an arbiter rather than insisting that Palestinian self-determination form the basis of any future state. Critics like Ali Abunimah, the editor of the Electronic Intifada, argue that the UN has proven itself time and again to be a venue for paralysis, given the veto rules that govern the Security Council and secure the hegemony of major powers, making it likely that the present bid for statehood will be defeated by a US veto.

And yet, one effect that is already felt as a consequence of these ‘resolutions and statements’ is that the 1993 Oslo Accords can no longer be presumed to be the framework for future negotiations – indeed, we may see that framework crumble definitively in the coming days. Oslo not only gave the US a privileged position as broker of all ‘peace’ negotiations, but effectively sponsored the massive growth of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land by refusing to recognise their illegal status according to international law. In fact, the Oslo years have seen the number of settlers grow from 241,500 in 1992 to 490,000 in 2010 (including East Jerusalem), and the indefinite deferral of all ‘permanent status issues’ – effectively establishing the occupation as a regime without foreseeable end. The Oslo Accords also implemented the principle that any change of status of Occupied Palestine would depend on the ‘consent’ of Israel. Thus, the power of Israel to decide the future of Palestine pre-empted the international right of Palestinians to self-determination.

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Libya: the losers

Max Rodenbeck writes:

Compared to the office of his intelligence counterpart in Cairo, a luxury suite featuring plasma screens, crystal vases, and a jacuzzi, Tuhami Khaled’s was modest. For protection from aerial bombing, the head of Colonel Qaddafi’s internal security service did his business on the ground floor of its headquarters, an ungainly, antenna-studded tower on busy Sikka Street in central Tripoli. But like the chief of Egypt’s Mukhabarat, Khaled enjoyed a separate entrance and an attached bedroom where he was reputed to cavort with women seeking favors from the regime.

The bedroom’s occupants one day recently were two elderly men shuffling about in slippers and house robes, taking their meals seated on the tiled floor. Hadi Mbairish and Muhammad Abdu were being kept in custody here by revolutionary Libya’s new rulers. The captives were both generals, comrades of Qaddafi since before the 1969 coup that brought him to power. As members of a six-man operations control room for state security, they ranked among the top commanders of the fallen regime, responsible for seeing the Brother Leader’s orders executed on the ground.

Frail and ashen in complexion, General Mbairish chaired the group. During Libya’s revolution he is known to have issued handwritten instructions to “burn the vermin,” meaning the rebels. General Abdu, his ebony face chinless and spectrally gaunt like an African mask, headed Qaddafi’s military police. This was the force formally in charge of Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison, notorious for the 1996 massacre by machine gun of some 1,200 inmates, and more recently a holding pen for thousands of Tripoli’s ordinary citizens suspected of rebel sympathies. The massacre was covered up for years; members of the victims’ families traveled monthly to the prison from the far corners of the country in order to deposit gifts they assumed would reach the men inside. The arrest of the Benghazi lawyer who bravely championed these families proved the immediate spark for the revolution.

The generals insist that their captors have treated them kindly, and think they will be vindicated in court. “They will understand that we only followed orders,” says Mbairish hopefully. “This is just a summer cloud.” His colleague mumbles that whenever any prisoner in his charge was sick, it was he who made sure they went to the hospital. The generals give no sign of contrition or even awareness of the magnitude of the crimes for which they certainly bear some responsibility. They tried to resign, they say, but were refused. They could have slipped away abroad, as some others did to escape capture. But why should they, as Libyan patriots?

The generals complain that for the final months of fighting they never saw their families, since the operations room moved from one site to another to escape NATO bombs, ending on the twenty-sixth floor of Tripoli’s plush new Marriott Hotel.

As for Qaddafi himself, the generals say they rarely met with him in recent years. Their instructions were delivered by phone. Seif al-Islam, the second of Qaddafi’s seven sons and the most media-hungry, did make an appearance at the Marriott HQ in the last weeks before Tripoli’s fall on August 21. Overriding the generals’ warnings, he assured them that Libya’s masses would defend the Brother Leader to the end.

General Mbairish turns stone-faced when asked what Qaddafi’s intentions are today. “My opinion is that Qaddafi will never stop. He will accept that thousands die. He will fire rockets on cities if he gets any chance.” The general pauses and toys with his Rolex watch before adding softly, “He’s gotten used to killing.”

The contrast between the sallow, whispering prisoners and their ebullient captors could scarcely be more striking. Behind the desk in Tuhami Khaled’s former office, with a trim black beard and a pistol holstered over desert combat fatigues, sits thirty-six-year-old Khaled Garabulli. The fellow revolutionaries who saunter nonchalantly in and out, sporting motley bandanas, shades, and firearms, treat him with jovial deference. When the call to prayer sounds it is Garabulli who leads the fighters who choose to pray. No one seems to mind that some of them don’t.

Garabulli is one of Libya’s new heroes. He joined the revolution soon after it began on February 17, returning from Morocco, where he had moved to get away from Qaddafi, back to his family seat in a fishing village east of Tripoli. From there he and his brothers smuggled thousands of guns and rocket-propelled grenades to rebels in the capital, sending divers to locate where they had been dropped offshore by NATO planes, then lifting the crates by pumping air into flotation parachutes.

Just two weeks before Tripoli’s fall, only minutes after loading and dispatching a truck with a final consignment of two thousand FAL rifles, Garabulli himself was arrested by Qaddafi’s police. The three satellite phones and thirty SIM cards he was carrying made it clear what he was up to, and the purple crisscross of welts that still marks his back leaves no doubt what Qaddafi’s men thought of it. Garabulli was freed from Abu Salim prison on August 21 to find that his was one of a thousand names on a list of prisoners scheduled to be executed on the first of September, the anniversary of Qaddafi’s coup.

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The Palestinians already knew about Obama’s hypocrisy

Robert Fisk writes:

So there I was, on the Via Dolorosa of course, chatting to a middle-aged guy in a red T-shirt and just a wisp of a beard with a prayer rug under his left arm.

And I asked him, of course, what he thought about Barack Obama’s speech. He grinned at me like he knew I had already guessed what he was going to say. “What did you expect?” he asked. Correct guess. After all, Haaretz had already referred this week to “President Barack Netanyahu” while the racist Israeli foreign minister said he would sign the speech with both hands. Maybe, I reflected in Jerusalem yesterday, Obama really is seeking election – to the Israeli Knesset.

But what was so striking about the streets of Jerusalem yesterday was the sense of resignation, of weary acceptance. The Israeli papers had warned of mass violence, but the crowds who turned up for morning prayers at Al-Aqsa simply laid out their prayer rugs on the highway outside the Damascus Gate or in the laneways behind the mosque and showed scarcely any interest in talking about Obama. Maybe America’s UN veto will rouse them to passion, but I have my doubts.

It’s a bit like the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib torture pictures, when the Americans restricted the number of photos to be released because they feared the pictures would enrage Iraqis. But I was in Baghdad that day and no one expressed any particular rage. What did I expect? After all, the Iraqis knew all about Abu Ghraib already – they were the ones who had been tortured there. So, too, Jerusalem yesterday. The Palestinians have watched America’s uncritical acceptance of Israeli occupation – the longest in the world – for 44 years. They knew all about it. It is only we Westerners who are horrified by torture pictures and by Obama’s hypocrisy.

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Tony Blair faces calls for greater transparency over Middle East role

The Guardian reports:

Tony Blair is facing calls for greater transparency in his role as Middle East peace envoy after it emerged that he visited Muammar Gaddafi in 2009 while JP Morgan, the investment bank that employs Blair as a £2m-a-year adviser, sought to negotiate a multibillion-pound loan from Libya.

Blair also championed two large business deals in the West Bank and Gaza involving telecoms and gas extraction which stood to benefit corporate clients of JP Morgan, according to a Dispatches investigation to be broadcast on Monday night [on Channel 4 in the UK].

Blair, who represents the diplomatic Quartet on the Middle East – the US, European Union, Russia and the United Nations – flew to see the former Libyan leader in January 2009 as JP Morgan tried to finalise a deal for the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) to loan a multibillion-pound sum to Rusal, the aluminium company run by Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska.

LIA was set up by Gaddafi to manage the country’s wealth and was estimated to be worth $64bn (£41bn) last September.

Emails obtained by anti-corruption campaign group Global Witness and seen by the Guardian reveal JP Morgan’s vice chairman, Lord Renwick, invited the then vice chairman of LIA, Mustafa Zarti, to “finalise the terms of the mandate concerning Rusal before Mr Blair’s visit to Tripoli which is scheduled to take place on around 22 January”.

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Saudi women without right to drive get right to vote in undemocratic elections

The New York Times reports:

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia on Sunday granted women the right to vote and run in future municipal elections, the biggest change in a decade for women in a puritanical kingdom that practices strict separation of the sexes, including banning women from driving.

Saudi women, who are legally subject to male chaperones for almost any public activity, hailed the royal decree as an important, if limited, step toward making them equal to their male counterparts. They said the uprisings sweeping the Arab world for the past nine months — along with sustained domestic pressure for women’s rights and a more representative form of government — prompted the change.

“There is the element of the Arab Spring, there is the element of the strength of Saudi social media, and there is the element of Saudi women themselves, who are not silent,” said Hatoon al-Fassi, a history professor and one of the women who organized a campaign demanding the right to vote this spring. “Plus, the fact that the issue of women has turned Saudi Arabia into an international joke is another thing that brought the decision now.”

Although political activists celebrated the change, they also cautioned how deep it would go and how fast, given that the king referred to the next election cycle, which would not be until 2015. Some women wondered aloud how they would be able to campaign for office when they were not even allowed to drive. And there is a long history of royal decrees stalling, as weak enactment collides with the bulwark of traditions ordained by the Wahhabi sect of Islam and its fierce resistance to change.

In his announcement, the king said that women would also be appointed to the Majlis Al-Shura, a consultative council that advises the monarchy on matters of public policy. But it is a toothless body that avoids matters of royal prerogative, like where the nation’s oil revenue goes.

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Gunman kills American at Kabul CIA office

The Wall Street Journal reports:

An Afghan gunman late Sunday killed one American citizen and wounded another at what is reported to be the Central Intelligence Agency’s offices in Kabul.

The two American citizens came under fire by a “lone Afghan employee” in an “annex of the U.S. Embassy” in Kabul, said Embassy spokesman Gavin Sundwall. Mr. Sundwall wouldn’t comment on whether the shootout involved CIA employees or occurred at the CIA’s Kabul offices.

A western security official in Kabul said the Afghan attacker “had the trust” of the CIA employees in the compound, and was possibly an informant, which is why he was allowed into the annex and had access to a gun. It wasn’t clear if he was searched before entering the building.

The western security official said the gunman late Sunday may have gotten on the roof of the CIA building, where he fired on the nearby U.S. Embassy.

Sunday night’s attack comes less than two weeks after Afghan insurgents occupied a building under construction and fired rocket-propelled grenades at the U.S. Embassy. About a half-dozen rockets penetrated the Embassy’s fortified walls and several more hit within the U.S.-led military coalition’s headquarters in Kabul. The attack lasted for about 20 hours.

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Israel has rendered its closest ally impotent

Larry Derfner writes:

“Tafasta meruba, lo tafasta,” is a Hebrew saying that means, “If you get too greedy, you end up with nothing,” and it fits well to the arm-twisting job Israel just did on Obama at the UN. By leaning on him too single-handedly to block the Palestinian statehood bid, to pressure countries like Gabon and Bosnia-Herzegovina to go along, and to give a speech that Avigdor Lieberman said he would “sign with both hands,” Israel bent Obama too far, until he just broke. In the eyes of Palestinians, Muslims of the Middle East and probably everybody else in the world, the U.S. president has now assumed the identity of the ultimate Israel lobbyist, of Mr.Hasbara. “He’s not the president of the United States, he’s the president of Israel,” a man in Ramallah said to me the day after the speech, and that’s what Palestinians think today: They flat-out hate Obama. They may hate him more than any other U.S. president in history, including George W. Bush. They thought Obama was on their side, and in the moment of truth he sold them out to the LIkud, to the settlers, to the Republican wackos. Palestinians, and presumably all Muslims, feel toward Obama today how the settlers felt toward Ariel Sharon after he decided to withdraw from Gaza: betrayed.

With Obama’s America now having zero credibility in the Middle East, where does this leave Israel? Alone and vulnerable to an extent that’s unfamiliar to Israelis. Until now, the U.S. held sway with the Palestinians; it doesn’t anymore. It held sway with Egypt, Jordan and Turkey; I wonder how much it has left now. In highly dramatic fashion, the U.S. stood up for the occupation and against Palestinian independence, and the result of this disgrace is that outside of Israel and America, the occupation is more unpopular and Palestinian independence more popular than ever. It’s the Palestinians who have the wind at their back now, and Israel that’s pissing in the wind. And America can’t help us anymore because America has become a spent force around here.

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