Author Archives: News Sources

Iranian newspaper shut down for showing solidarity with Charlie Hebdo

The Guardian: Iranian authorities have shut down a newspaper and suspended its licence after it published a front page depicting George Clooney at the Golden Globes alongside the headline “I am Charlie, too”.

A media court in Tehran ordered the reformist daily Mardom-e-Emrooz, which was in its first month of publication, to be closed down at the weekend because it had shown solidarity with the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo following the deadly shootings at its offices.

Iran’s press watchdog, which operates under the country’s culture ministry and Islamic guidance, also suspended the newspaper’s licence on Monday, confirming its closure was due to the publication of the headline as well as Clooney’s picture showing him wearing a “Je Suis Charlie” badge, according to the state news agency Irna.

North Korean defectors are crucial — but sometimes unreliable — witnesses

Anna Fifield writes: Always get a second source. It’s one of the fundamental rules of journalism.

But what do you do if the first source is an escapee from one of the most brutal prison camps on the planet, a camp so brutal that only one person is known to have escaped from it?

That was the conundrum facing Blaine Harden, the former Washington Post journalist who wrote Escape from Camp 14 about Shin Dong-hyuk, who said he was born in the North Korean total control camp, forced to watch his mother and brother be executed there, tortured there, and eventually escaped.

Now, Shin has admitted that he left out some key parts of the story – like the fact that he spent most of his childhood across the Taedong river in Camp 18, a less draconian prison (although in North Korea, that’s a matter of degree). But, he says, the torture he described to Harden all happened, just in a different place and at a different time. [Continue reading…]

From Gitmo to an American supermax, the horrors of solitary confinement

Ted Conover writes: I first visited the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay in April 2003. The “war on terror” prisoners, most of them captured in Afghanistan, had begun to arrive 15 months earlier. They were first locked up in Camp X-Ray, an outdoor prison that looked like a kennel complex for very large dogs. (The police dogs at Camp X-Ray, in fact, had their own cages—the ones without a funnel in the corner for urine.) By the time I arrived, Camp X-Ray had been replaced by Camp Delta; the wire cages had given way to what looked like a heavy-duty, high-security trailer park. The prison cells at Camp Delta were made of shipping containers, sliced in half the long way so that a corridor could be added down the middle, then re-assembled into a kind of grim double-wide. Windows were cut out and fitted with heavy mesh; bugs could penetrate, but not the ubiquitous banana rats, and at least the prisoners didn’t get soaked when it rained.

The prison population peaked that year at 684. But even as the count began to decline, a feeling of permanence took hold. By 2006, Camps 5 and 6 had been built. These were the real thing, copies of high-security facilities in Indiana and Michigan, with electronically controlled gates, central video monitoring of each cell, one-way glass everywhere, and cramped exercise pens. Camps 5 and 6 are where almost all of the remaining prisoners are now kept.

Throughout modern history, governments have used islands for imprisonment or exile. South Africa had Robben Island. Russia had Sakhalin Island. France had Devil’s Island. Guantánamo’s location does not set it apart—nor does the use of physical torture, or the prevalence of hunger strikes, or the nefarious reputation. What is new about Guantánamo has become clear only recently. Rear Admiral Richard W. Butler, who headed up the prison camp until last July, unwittingly alluded to it during my most recent visit earlier in the year. “Twelve years ago,” he said, gesturing to his desk chair, “none of us thought that anybody would still be sitting here today.”

The Bush Doctrine redefined war as something that might go on forever. It created a permanent state of exception, in which extraordinary means were permitted to pursue terrorists (wherever they may be) and to detain suspects (for any length of time). What this has meant for prisoners at Guantánamo is, on one level, well known: without prospect of trial or tribunal, their sentences are effectively open-ended. On another level, what this has meant has never been fully acknowledged. Many of the Guantánamo prisoners are being held in solitary confinement, a difficult condition under the best of circumstances, and psychologically excruciating when no concluding point is specified. Two centuries ago, America was a pioneer in the use of punitive isolation. Now it is pioneering a refinement: the use of solitary without end. [Continue reading…]

Did physics get sucked down a wormhole?

Bryan Appleyard writes: The greatest story of our time may also be the greatest mistake. This is the story of our universe from the Big Bang to now with its bizarre, Dickensian cast of characters – black holes, tiny vibrating strings, the warped space-time continuum, trillions of companion universes and particles that wink in and out of existence.

It is the story told by a long list of officially accredited geniuses from Isaac Newton to Stephen Hawking. It is also the story that is retold daily in popular science fiction from Star Trek to the latest Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster Interstellar. Thanks to the movies, the physicist standing in front of a vast blackboard covered in equations became our age’s symbol of genius. The universe is weird, the TV shows and films tell us, and almost anything can happen.

But it is a story that many now believe is pointless, wrong and riddled with wishful thinking and superstition.

“Stephen Hawking,” says philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, “is not part of the solution, he is part of the problem.”

The equations on the blackboard may be the problem. Mathematics, the language of science, may have misled the scientists.

“The idea,” says physicist Lee Smolin, “that the truth about nature can be wrestled from pure thought through mathematics is overdone… The idea that mathematics is prophetic and that mathematical structure and beauty are a clue to how nature ultimately works is just wrong.”

And in an explosive essay published last week in the science journal Nature astrophysicists George Ellis and Joe Silk say that the wild claims of theoretical physicists are threatening the authority of science itself.

“This battle for the heart and soul of physics,” they write, “is opening up at a time when scientific results — in topics from climate change to the theory of evolution — are being questioned by some politicians and religious fundamentalists. Potential damage to public confidence in science and to the nature of fundamental physics needs to be contained by deeper dialogue between scientists and philosophers….The imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is testable. Only then can we defend science from attack.”

Unger and Smolin have also just gone into print with a monumental book – The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time – which systematically takes apart contemporary physics and exposes much of it as, in Unger’s words, “an inferno of allegorical fabrication.” The book says it is time to return to real science which is tested against nature rather than constructed out of mathematics. Physics should no longer be seen as the ultimate science, underwriting all others. The true queen of the sciences should be history – the biography of the cosmos. [Continue reading…]

Before any physicists stop by to question whether I really understand what a wormhole is, I will without hesitation make it clear: I have no idea. It just seems like a suitable metaphor — better, say, than rabbit hole.

Richest 1% soon to own 50% of global wealth

The New York Times reports: The richest 1 percent are likely to control more than half of the globe’s total wealth by next year, the charity Oxfam reported in a study released on Monday. The warning about deepening global inequality comes just as the world’s business elite prepare to meet this week at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The 80 wealthiest people in the world altogether own $1.9 trillion, the report found, nearly the same amount shared by the 3.5 billion people who occupy the bottom half of the world’s income scale. (Last year, it took 85 billionaires to equal that figure.) And the richest 1 percent of the population, who number in the millions, control nearly half of the world’s total wealth, a share that is also increasing.

The type of inequality that currently characterizes the world’s economies is unlike anything seen in recent years, the report explained. “Between 2002 and 2010 the total wealth of the poorest half of the world in current U.S. dollars had been increasing more or less at the same rate as that of billionaires,” it said. “However since 2010, it has been decreasing over that time.”

Winnie Byanyima, the charity’s executive director, noted in a statement that more than a billion people lived on less than $1.25 a day.

“Do we really want to live in a world where the 1 percent own more than the rest of us combined?” Ms. Byanyima said. “The scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering.” [Continue reading…]

Syrian Kurds battling ISIS capture strategic Kobane hilltop

AFP: Kurdish fighters battling the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) jihadist group in Syria’s Kobane have captured a strategic hilltop, giving them line of fire over the town, a monitor said Monday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Kurdish People’s People Units (YPG) had seized the Mishtenur hilltop after fierce clashes overnight.

“The military operation led to the deaths of at least 11 Islamic State fighters, and the seizure of large quantities of weapons and ammunition,” the Observatory said.

Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said the advance was a key strategic victory for the YPG, putting ISIS resupply lines to Aleppo in the west and Raqa in the east within their line of fire.

ISIS has now ruled Fallujah for a year

The Associated Press reports: Nearly every night for a year, mortar and sniper fire from Islamic State group militants has pinned down outgunned Iraqi troops on the edge of Fallujah.

The city, the first to fall to the Sunni extremists a year ago this month, exemplifies the lack of progress in Iraq’s war against the Islamic State group, which holds a third of the country. U.S.-led airstrikes and Iranian aid have helped Iraqi troops, militiamen and Kurdish fighters take back bits around Islamic State-held territory, but recapturing it all remains far out of reach.

“We are constantly on alert and don’t sleep very much,” said Saad al-Sudani, an Iraqi soldier among the beleaguered troops outside of Fallujah. “We are waiting for any kind of support.”

The fall of Fallujah in January 2014 started the Islamic State group’s dramatic blitz across Iraq. In June, the extremists captured Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, then swept south toward Baghdad in a march that put almost all the Sunni-majority regions of northern and western Iraq into its hands. The Iraqi military crumbled, with troops often dropping their weapons and fleeing. [Continue reading…]

The CIA officer who got jailed for blowing the whistle on torture while the torturers remain free

The Intercept: You don’t have access to the internet in prison, so have you been able to see just one page of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report?

John Kiriakou: Well, my cousin ended up printing the entire thing and sent it to me. Yeah, he sent it to me in five different envelopes.

So was there anything in the report that surprised you? Did you feel even more despair at being the only CIA officer jailed since the program came into existence?

One thing that I think most everybody has missed is, we knew about the waterboarding, we knew about the cold cells, we knew about the loud music and the sleep deprivation. We knew about all the things that have been ‘approved’ by the Justice Department. But what we didn’t know was what individual CIA officers were doing on their own without any authorization. And I would like to know why those officers aren’t being prosecuted when clearly they’ve committed crimes and those crimes were well documented by both the CIA and the Senate Committee of Intelligence. [Continue reading…]

Did Iran murder Argentina’s crusading prosecutor Alberto Nisman?

Christopher Dickey reports: Since 2005 Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman has been crusading for his vision of justice in the horrific 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and injured hundreds more. He claimed that Iran was behind it and, more recently, that the Argentine government was trying to block his efforts to prove that.

On Sunday night, Nisman was found dead in his apartment, only hours before he was set to testify before an Argentine parliamentary commission about his allegations.

The circumstances revealed thus far by the police suggest a suicide. The history of Iran’s operations overseas inevitably suggest otherwise. And there are disturbing echoes of the world 20 or 30 years ago when Tehran, often in league with its clients in Hezbollah, waged a global war on the enemies of the Islamic Republic, deploying hit teams second only to the Israelis in their skill at assassination. [Continue reading…]

Yemen truce after Shiite rebels battle troops, seize media

The Associated Press reports: A cease-fire halted intense clashes near the presidential palace in Yemen’s capital Sanaa on Monday after Shiite rebels seized control of state-run media in a move that one official called “a step toward a coup.”

The fighting, centered on the palace and a military area south of it, marked the biggest challenge yet to President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi by the rebels, known as Houthis, who swept down from their northern strongholds last year and captured the capital in September.

The violence has plunged the Arab world’s poorest country further into chaos and could complicate U.S. efforts to battle al-Qaida’s Yemeni affiliate, which claimed responsibility for the attack on a Paris satirical magazine this month and which Washington has long viewed as the global network’s most dangerous branch.

The Houthis are seen by their critics as a proxy of Shiite Iran — charges they deny — and are believed to be allied with former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, ousted in a 2012 deal after Arab Spring protests. They have vowed to eradicate al-Qaida, but are also hostile to the U.S. Their slogan is “Death to Israel. Death to America.” [Continue reading…]

Patriot Act idea rises in France, and is ridiculed

The New York Times reports: The arrests came quickly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. There was the Muslim man suspected of making anti-American statements. The Middle Eastern grocer, whose shop, a tipster said, had more clerks than it needed. Soon hundreds of men, mostly Muslims, were in American jails on immigration charges, suspected of being involved in the attacks.

They were not.

After shootings last week at a satirical newspaper and a kosher market in Paris, France finds itself grappling anew with a question the United States is still confronting: how to fight terrorism while protecting civil liberties. The answer is acute in a country that is sharply critical of American counterterrorism policies, which many see as a fearful overreaction to 9/11. Already in Europe, counterterrorism officials have arrested dozens of people, and France is mulling tough new antiterrorism laws.

Many European countries, and France in particular, already have robust counterterrorism laws, some of which American authorities have studied as possible models. But the terrorist rampage at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices and the Hyper Cacher market prompted calls to go even further. Valérie Pécresse, a minister under former President Nicolas Sarkozy, said France needed its own version of the USA Patriot Act, which gave the United States more authority to collect intelligence and pointed America’s surveillance apparatus at its citizens.

Politicians and civil rights advocates on both sides of the Atlantic bristled at that suggestion, and at a string of arrests in which French officials used a new antiterrorism law to crack down on what previously would have been considered free speech. One man was sentenced to six months in prison for shouting support for the Charlie Hebdo attackers. Up to 100 others are under investigation for remarks that support or tried to justify terrorism, authorities said.

Dominique de Villepin, the former French prime minister, warned against the urge for “exceptional” measures. “The spiral of suspicion created in the United States by the Patriot Act and the enduring legitimization of torture or illegal detention has today caused that country to lose its moral compass,” he wrote in Le Monde, the French newspaper. [Continue reading…]

Europe’s ‘Minority Report’ raids on future terrorists

Christopher Dickey reports: In a stunning wave of arrests, the security forces of France, Belgium, and Germany are rounding up suspected jihadis all over the map, especially those who have returned from the Syrian and Iraqi war zones.

In one case, in the small Belgian town of Verviers near the German border, two alleged jihadis were shot dead and one was wounded in a Thursday night firefight.

A spokesperson for the Belgian prosecutor’s office, Eric van der Sypt, said Friday that the Verviers suspects were believed to be on the verge of launching an attack. Four Kalashnikov automatic rifles were found in their possession along with bomb-making materials. Tellingly, they also had police uniforms. Phone taps of conversations among the suspects reportedly indicated the assault was only hours away.

“They had the intention to kill police, targeting them in the streets and at their offices,” van der Sypt said in Brussels on Friday. “We had been following the cell for a while but decided to intervene because the threat seemed imminent.”

He said this was a strictly Belgian cell, but all of this is taking place in the aftermath of the terror attacks in Paris last week, when known jihadis who had been under surveillance in the past somehow slipped the attention of law enforcement, acquired weapons of war (reportedly in Belgium), and launched a killing spree that took the lives of 17 victims, including journalists at the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, police, and Jewish shoppers at a kosher grocery.

What is clear is that the authorities in Europe now believe it is too dangerous to let potential terrorists who have fought and trained abroad continue to roam the streets. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, in the aftermath of last week’s attacks, said flatly that his nation is in a state of war. [Continue reading…]

It’s not about whether you represent the Prophet, but how

Sajjad Rizvi writes: After the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris last week, much of our discussion has focused on whether anyone has the freedom to depict Mohamed. But this is misguided in my opinion.

Back in 2006, many Muslims were angered when a right-wing Danish newspaper published a series of cartoons that portrayed the Prophet Mohamed in a negative light. At the same time, many other Muslims were rather taken by a portrait of Mohamed as a young man that was making the rounds in the markets.

That image was understood to be an old image of Mohamed on one of his early trading journeys up to Syria. It had been sketched by the Christian monk Bahira, the legendary figure of early Islam, who confirmed the prophetic status of the young man.

The contrasting responses to these two sets of images suggest that the issue is not whether one represents Muhammad, but how.

A study of the scriptures does not confirm any prohibition on images. The Quranic proscription of idolatry, the story of Abraham as a idol-breaker, and the condemnation of the Golden Calf, are all specific elements of the prohibition of images as objects of worship. But they do not prevent anyone from producing images of men — even sacred ones. [Continue reading…]

Are more Arabs becoming extremists or are extremists becoming more extreme?

Koert Debeuf writes: With the humiliating defeat of the Arabs in the 1967 War against Israel, most non-Islamist ideologies died. Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabism, socialism and secularism died on the battlefield, as well as the liberalism of his predecessors. The Arab world fell into an identity crisis, opening the way for the only remaining ideology: Islamism or conservative political Islam.

Saudi Arabia used this momentum and its newly gained petrodollars after the oil crisis in 1973 to spread Salafism or Islam without modernity. The Muslim Brotherhood too regained ground. It was founded in 1928, four years after Turkey’s Atatürk abolished the Caliphate. Its main goal was (and continues to be) reinstalling this Caliphate. This could only be achieved by getting rid of the Western-backed Arab dictators.

The Arab revolutions of 2011 were a golden opportunity for the Islamists. Knowing that the young revolutionaries were too unorganized and idealistic, Islamists took the power. The entire Arab World looked to Egypt, where for the first time, the Muslim Brotherhood had the leverage to execute their plan and organize an Islamist society. They miserably failed.

The psychological effect on the Arab World cannot be underestimated. With the exception of Ennahda in Tunisia that moderated its course, but still lost the elections, it turned many Islamists in other Arab Awakening countries more extreme. The failure of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt convinced them that democracy and Islamism are not the way forward. The Arab World fell into a new identity crisis.

The Islamic State offered one answer to this crisis by going further, reinstalling the Caliphate and abolishing this other European decision, the national borders of the Middle East. It is an appealing project to disillusioned Islamists and adventurers trying to escape from their own personal identity crisis. But after all, the numbers of foreign fighters and supporters are rather small.

Much more important is what is happening to the silent majority in the Arab World. And here the opposite trend slowly starts becoming clear. Fewer taxi drivers place a copy of the Koran visibly in their car. More women are taking off their veil. The young revolutionary generation is also attending prayers at the mosque less often. Most of them only denounce the political Islam preached at many mosques. Others go further and flirt with atheism. The Egyptian government doesn’t like this trend and in Alexandria even a special police taskforce has been created to arrest atheists. [Continue reading…]

Four years after the Egyptian revolution

Thanassis Cambanis writes: In the four years that I’ve been reporting closely on Egypt’s transition from revolution to restoration, I’ve seen young activists go from stunned to euphoric to traumatized and sometimes defeated. I’ve seen stalwarts of the old regime go from arrogant and complacent to frightened and unsure to bullying and triumphalist. And yet, so far, the core grievances that drew frustrated Egyptians to Tahrir Square in the first place remain unaddressed. Police operate with complete impunity and disrespect for citizens, routinely using torture. Courts are whimsical, uneven, at times absurdly unjust and capricious. The military controls a state within a state, removed from any oversight or scrutiny, with authority over a vast portion of the national economy and Egypt’s public land. Poverty and unemployment continue to rise, while crises in housing, education, and health care have grown even worse than the most dire predictions of development experts. Corruption has largely gone unpunished, and [President Abdel Fattah el-]Sisi has begun to roll back an initial wave of prosecutions against Mubarak, his sons, and his oligarchs.

[Basem] Kamel [one of the leaders of the revolution] has abandoned his revolutionary rhetoric of 2011 for a more modest platform of reform, working within the system. He was one of just four revolutionary youth who made it into the short-lived revolutionary parliament of 2012, and he helped found the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, one of the most promising new political parties after the fall of Mubarak.

He expects to run for parliament again with his party, but the odds are longer and the stakes lower. The parliament will have hardly any power under Sisi’s setup. Most of the seats are slated for “independents,” which in practice means well-funded establishment candidates run by the former ruling party network. The Muslim Brotherhood, the nation’s largest opposition group, is now illegal. Existing political parties can only compete for 20 percent of the seats, and most of them, like Kamel’s have dramatically tamed their criticisms.

“I think Sisi is in control of everything,” Kamel said. “Of course I am not with Sisi, but I am not against the state.”

That’s why he’s devoting his efforts to a training program for Social Democratic cadres, a sort of political science-and-organizing academy for activists and operatives that will take years to bear fruit. “It’s long-term work,” he said.

Still, something fundamental changed in January 2011, and no amount of state brutality can reverse it. Many people who before 2011 cowered or kept their ideas to themselves now feel unafraid. [Continue reading…]

3,000 in Turkey linked to ISIS, police intelligence report says

Hurriyet Daily News: There are around 3,000 people linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group in Turkey, a police intelligence report has alleged, raising a red alert over the possible future actions of “sleeping cells” of the jihadist group, sources have told Hürriyet.

The number is in addition between 700 and 1,000 Turkish fighters in the group, whose potential return has concerned Turkey, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said earlier this week.

Turkey has so far deported 1,165 people and placed an entry ban on 7,250 more, Çavuşoğlu also said.

ICC opens examination of Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Reuters: The International Criminal Court has launched an inquiry into possible war crimes in the Palestinian territories, opening a path to possible charges against Israelis or Palestinians.

In a statement on Friday, prosecutors said they would examine “in full independence and impartiality” crimes that may have occurred since June 13 last year. This allows the court to delve into the war between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza in July-August 2014 during which more than 2,100 Palestinians and 73 Israelis were killed.

The U.S. State Department said it strongly disagreed with the move. The United States has argued that Palestine is not a state and therefore not eligible to join the ICC.

War in Context

… with attention to the unseen

Author Archives: News Sources

Iranian newspaper shut down for showing solidarity with Charlie Hebdo

North Korean defectors are crucial — but sometimes unreliable — witnesses

From Gitmo to an American supermax, the horrors of solitary confinement

Did physics get sucked down a wormhole?

Richest 1% soon to own 50% of global wealth

Syrian Kurds battling ISIS capture strategic Kobane hilltop

ISIS has now ruled Fallujah for a year

The CIA officer who got jailed for blowing the whistle on torture while the torturers remain free

Did Iran murder Argentina’s crusading prosecutor Alberto Nisman?

Yemen truce after Shiite rebels battle troops, seize media

Patriot Act idea rises in France, and is ridiculed

Europe’s ‘Minority Report’ raids on future terrorists

It’s not about whether you represent the Prophet, but how

Are more Arabs becoming extremists or are extremists becoming more extreme?

Four years after the Egyptian revolution

3,000 in Turkey linked to ISIS, police intelligence report says

ICC opens examination of Israeli-Palestinian conflict