Author Archives: News Sources

Syrian official declares ‘victory,’ thanks Russia

CNN reports: A Syrian minister declared “victory” for his country on Sunday, thanking Russia for orchestrating a chemical weapons deal to avert U.S. military action, Russia’s state-run news agency RIA Novosti reported.

“We welcome these agreements. On the one hand, they will help Syrians come out of the crisis, and on the other hand, they prevented the war against Syria by having removed a pretext for those who wanted to unleash it,” National Reconciliation Minister Ali Haidar was quoted as saying.

He called the deal an achievement of Russian diplomacy, and “a victory for Syria won thanks to our Russian friends,” RIA Novosti reported.

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Obama has exchanged letters with Iranian president Rouhani

ABC News reports: Obama confirmed publicly for the first time on “This Week” that he has exchanged letters with new Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, who has vowed to act forcefully to prevent any Western military intervention in Syria, using “all efforts to prevent it.”

Obama said he believes his threat to use U.S. military force in Syria, and subsequent pause to pursue diplomacy, sends a signal to the Iranian regime in the ongoing dispute over its contested nuclear program.

“What they should draw from this lesson is that there is the potential of resolving these issues diplomatically,” Obama said.

“I think this new president is not going to suddenly make it easy,” he added. “But you know, my view is that if you have both a credible threat of force, combined with a rigorous diplomatic effort, that, in fact … you can strike a deal.”

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Framework for Elimination of Syrian Chemical Weapons

U.S. State Department: Taking into account the decision of the Syrian Arab Republic to accede to the Chemical Weapons Convention and the commitment of the Syrian authorities to provisionally apply the Convention prior to its entry into force, the United States and the Russian Federation express their joint determination to ensure the destruction of the Syrian chemical weapons program (CW) in the soonest and safest manner.

For this purpose, the United States and the Russian Federation have committed to prepare and submit in the next few days to the Executive Council of the OPCW a draft decision setting down special procedures for expeditious destruction of the Syrian chemical weapons program and stringent verification thereof. The principles on which this decision should be based, in the view of both sides, are set forth in Annex A. The United States and the Russian Federation believe that these extraordinary procedures are necessitated by the prior use of these weapons in Syria and the volatility of the Syrian civil war.

The United States and the Russian Federation commit to work together towards prompt adoption of a UN Security Council resolution that reinforces the decision of the OPCW Executive Council. This resolution will also contain steps to ensure its verification and effective implementation and will request that the UN Secretary-General, in consultation with the OPCW, submit recommendations to the UN Security Council on an expedited basis regarding the UN’s role in eliminating the Syrian chemical weapons program. [Continue reading…]

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Qaeda tells Syria fighters to shun secularists in sign of deeper rebel rift

Reuters reports: Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri has told the Islamist militants who are some of Syria’s toughest opposition forces to avoid alliances with other rebel fighters backed by Gulf Arab states and the West.

His comment reflects a deepening rift between groups of the Western- and Arab-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) and guerrillas sympathetic to Zawahri’s ultra hardline network, which seeks to wage a transnational armed campaign against the West.

Division among rebel fighters, as well as the influence of hardline Islamists, is one reason Western powers have hesitated to intervene in Syria’s two-and-a-half-year-old conflict, in which more than 100,000 people have been killed.

In an audio speech released a day after the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 strikes, Zawahri said the United States would try to push opposition fighters to link up with “secular parties that are allied to the West”, the SITE monitoring service said. [Continue reading…]

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The climate denial machine vs. climate science

Greenpeace has just released a new report, Dealing in Doubt — the complete report can be read here. This is the introduction:

This report describes organized attacks on climate science, scientists and scientific institutions like the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC), that have gone on for more than 20 years. It sets out some of the key moments in this campaign of climate denial started by the fossil fuel industry, and traces them to their sources.

The tobacco industry’s misinformation and PR campaign in the US against regulation reached a peak just as laws controlling tobacco were about to be introduced. Similarly, the campaign against climate change science – and scientists – has intensified as global policy on climate change has become more likely. This time though there is a difference. The corporate PR campaign has gone viral, spawning a denial movement that is distributed, decentralised and largely immune to reasoned response.

This report updates our March 2010 report, ahead of the forthcoming 2013 release of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment report.

The 2010 report was published just after the hysteria that greeted the release of climate scientists’ personal email hacked or stolen from the University of East Anglia on the eve of the Copenhagen Climate Summit in late 2009. This scandal showed the depth and sophistication of the climate denial movement and the willingness of the media to amplify their message, despite its lack of evidence or scientific support – and to be distracted from the urgency of the issue by unfounded attacks on leading research scientists.

Since 2009, there have been nine separate investigations into this so-called “scandal,” each of which have exonerated the scientists at the centre of the accusations. Yet that hasn’t stopped the continued hysteria around the scandals. There have been two more attempts at a “climategate” type scandal, releasing more emails, with very little effect. Unfortunately, traditional media outlets failed to properly correct the misinformation they were so culpable in helping to spread.

With this new edition of Dealing In Doubt we:

  • Detail the ongoing attempts to attack the integrity of individual climate scientists and their work.
  • Look beyond the strategic parallels between the tobacco industry’s campaign for “Sound Science” (where they labeled mainstream science as “junk”) to the current climate denial campaign, to new research that has come to light revealing the deeper connections: the funding, personnel and institutions between the two policy fights.
  • Detail how some scientists are now fighting back and taking legal action.
  • Showcase the Heartland Institute as an example of how tobacco-friendly free market think tanks use a wide range of tactics to wage a campaign against the climate science.
  • Reveal the range of tricks used by the denier campaign, from “pal review” instead of peer review, to personal attacks on scientists through Freedom of Information requests, self-publishing books, and the general conspiratorial noise from the denial machine in the blogosphere.

The majority of the front groups or free market think tanks running campaigns against climate science continue to receive funding from big oil and energy interests.

Since our first report, the massive campaign against climate science – and action on climate, funded by oil barons the Koch Brothers has come to light. And while fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, whose very products are causing global warming, continue to fund think tanks driving the campaigns, much of the foundation funding has now been driven underground, masked by a funding front-group called the Donors Trust – and its associate Donors Capital Fund, two “donor-advised” funds created to hide the real givers and thus shield them from negative exposure of their support for these campaigns.

Funding to the organizations that comprise the denial machine has risen during the Obama presidency, just as the urgency of climate solutions and promise of policy advances also rose.

“The side that has been issuing these attacks are extremely well-funded, well-organized. They have had an attack infrastructure of this sort for decades, developed it during the tobacco wars, they honed it further … in further efforts to attack science that industry or other sceptical interests find inconvenient. So they have a very well honed, well-funded organized machine that they are bringing to bear in their attack now against climate science.

“It’s literally like a marine in battle against a cub scout when it comes to the scientists defending themselves… We’re not PR experts like they are, we’re not lawyers and lobbyists like they are. We’re scientists, trained to do science.”

– Climate scientist Michael Mann: February 2010

Meanwhile the consensus – and evidence – continues to grow

None of the climate denial machine’s counter attack has changed the harsh reality, the scientific consensus, that climate change is underway and it is caused by humanity’s pollution and other insults to the planet..

If there wasn’t already enough proof in the years of replicated scientific evidence, a May 2013 peer reviewed study examined more than 11,000 climate change papers, and of the 4,000 papers that discussed whether climate change was caused by humans, 97 percent agreed. On the other hand, the percentage of papers challenging this consensus didn’t move – it had flatlined. This corroborated a similar finding in 2010 from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The IPCC scientific assessment is a rigorous and robust process, one of the biggest organized scientific endeavours in the world, involving thousands of scientists in hundreds of research institutes around the world, who assess and compile the findings of thousands of published and peer reviewed papers across a wide range of topics, from the measurement of shrinking ice caps to oceans, clouds, temperature records and observed impacts. It is also a human endeavour and therefore not perfect.

The very purpose of the IPCC itself, and its periodic assessments and reports, is to inform governments participating in the UNFCCC process of the latest science in order to evaluate policy measures. Science is indeed the engine that drives the policy train. Certainty adds urgency and should spur action. The coal, oil and gas industries have always recognized this and have therefore strived for uncertainty to slow policy advances.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the IPCC is that the work is done entirely voluntarily. For many of the scientists involved, it’s the equivalent of having a second job, where you spend as much, if not more time on it as your primary job, unpaid.

Greenpeace has, and continues to have, confidence in the IPCC. There is no more reliable guide to – and summary of – the world’s climate science than the IPCC reports. If anything, due to the long lead-in time for the IPCC reports, they err on the side of conservatism. In late 2012, studies that compared the IPCC’s predictions over 22 years of weather data showed that the organisation has consistently underplayed the intensity of global warming in its reports. The denier campaigns against the IPCC consistently accuse it of overplaying the science, but, if anything, it has underplayed it.

Dealing in Doubt, the complete report, can be read here.

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Some credible scientists believe humanity is irreparably close to destruction

Nathan Curry writes: If you were to zoom out and take a comparative look back at our planet during the 1950s from some sort of cosmic time-travelling orbiter cube, you would probably first notice that millions of pieces of space trash had disappeared from orbit.

The moon would appear six and a half feet closer to Earth, and the continents of Europe and North America would be four feet closer together. Zooming in, you would be able to spot some of the industrial clambering of the Golden Age of Capitalism in the West and some of the stilted attempts at the Great Leap Forward in the East. Lasers, bar codes, contraceptives, hydrogen bombs, microchips, credit cards, synthesizers, superglue, Barbie dolls, pharmaceuticals, factory farming, and distortion pedals would just be coming into existence.

There would be two thirds fewer humans on the planet than there are now. Over a million different species of plants and animals would exist that have since gone extinct. There would be 90 percent more fish, a billion less tons of plastic, and 40 percent more phytoplankton (producers of half the planet’s oxygen) in the oceans. There would be twice as many trees covering the land and about three times more drinking water available from ancient aquifers. There would be about 80 percent more ice covering the northern pole during the summer season and 30 percent less carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. The list goes on…

Most educated and semi-concerned people know that these sorts of sordid details make up the backdrop of our retina-screened, ethylene-ripened story of progress, but what happens when you start stringing them all together?

If Doomsday Preppers, the highest rated show on the National Geographic Channel is any indication, the general public seems to be getting ready for some sort of societal collapse. There have always been doomsday prophets and cults around and everyone has their own personal view of how the apocalypse will probably go down (ascension of pure souls, zombie crows), but in the midst of all of the Mayan Calendar/Timewave Zero/Rapture babble, there are some clarion calls coming from a crowd that’s less into bugout bags and eschatology: well-respected scientists and journalists who have come to some scarily-sane sounding conclusions about the threat of human-induced climate change on the survival of the human species.

Recent data seems to suggest that we may have already tripped several irrevocable, non-linear, positive feedback loops (melting of permafrost, methane hydrates, and arctic sea ice) that make an average global temperature increase of only 2°C by 2100 seem like a fairy tale. Instead, we’re talking 4°C, 6°C, 10°C, 16°C (????????) here.

The link between rapid climate change and human extinction is basically this: the planet becomes uninhabitable by humans if the average temperature goes up by 4-6°C. It doesn’t sound like a lot because we’re used to the temperature changing 15°C overnight, but the thing that is not mentioned enough is that even a 2-3°C average increase would give us temperatures that regularly surpass 40°C (104°F) in North America and Europe, and soar even higher near the equator. Human bodies start to break down after six hours at a wet-bulb (100% humidity) temperature of 35°C (95°F). This makes the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed over 70,000 people seem like not a very big deal.

Factoring in the increase we’re already seeing in heat waves, droughts, wildfires, massive storms, food and water shortages, deforestation, ocean acidification, and sea level rise some are seeing the writing on the wall: [Continue reading…]

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‘Follow the Money’: NSA spies on international payments

Der Spiegel reports: The United States’ NSA intelligence agency is interested in international payments processed by companies including Visa, SPIEGEL has learned. It has even set up its own financial database to track money flows through a “tailored access operations” division.

The National Security Agency (NSA) widely monitors international payments, banking and credit card transactions, according to documents seen by SPIEGEL.

The information from the American foreign intelligence agency, acquired by former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, show that the spying is conducted by a branch called “Follow the Money” (FTM). The collected information then flows into the NSA’s own financial databank, called “Tracfin,” which in 2011 contained 180 million records. Some 84 percent of the data is from credit card transactions.

Further NSA documents from 2010 show that the NSA also targets the transactions of customers of large credit card companies like VISA for surveillance. NSA analysts at an internal conference that year described in detail how they had apparently successfully searched through the US company’s complex transaction network for tapping possibilities.

Their aim was to gain access to transactions by VISA customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to one presentation. The goal was to “collect, parse and ingest transactional data for priority credit card associations, focusing on priority geographic regions.” In response to a SPIEGEL inquiry, however, a VISA spokeswoman ruled out the possibility that data could be taken from company-run networks.

The NSA’s Tracfin data bank also contained data from the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a network used by thousands of banks to send transaction information securely. SWIFT was named as a “target,” according to the documents, which also show that the NSA spied on the organization on several levels, involving, among others, the agency’s “tailored access operations” division. One of the ways the agency accessed the data included reading “SWIFT printer traffic from numerous banks,” the documents show. [Continue reading…]

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Time to tame the NSA behemoth trampling our rights

Yochai Benkler writes: The spate of new NSA disclosures substantially raises the stakes of this debate. We now know that the intelligence establishment systematically undermines oversight by lying to both Congress and the courts. We know that the NSA infiltrates internet standard-setting processes to security protocols that make surveillance harder. We know that the NSA uses persuasion, subterfuge, and legal coercion to distort software and hardware product design by commercial companies.

We have learned that in pursuit of its bureaucratic mission to obtain signals intelligence in a pervasively networked world, the NSA has mounted a systematic campaign against the foundations of American power: constitutional checks and balances, technological leadership, and market entrepreneurship. The NSA scandal is no longer about privacy, or a particular violation of constitutional or legislative obligations. The American body politic is suffering a severe case of auto-immune disease: our defense system is attacking other critical systems of our body.

First, the lying. The National Intelligence University, based in Washington, DC, offers a certificate program called the denial and deception advanced studies program. That’s not a farcical sci-fi dystopia; it’s a real program about countering denial and deception by other countries. The repeated misrepresentations suggest that the intelligence establishment has come to see its civilian bosses as adversaries to be managed through denial and deception. [Continue reading…]

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Snowden unlikely to have passed documents to Russians or Chinese

TechDirt: Wednesday’s Fresh Air on NPR was devoted entirely to a wonderful interview with Barton Gellman, one of the three reporters (along with Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald) who Edward Snowden initially gave his complete set of documents to. The whole interview is interesting, though if you’ve been following this story for the last few months, you’ll have heard much of it before. Perhaps the two most interesting sections, however, are his discussions on Edward Snowden’s intentions with all of this. Many have ascribed comically nefarious intent. Gellman has a fairly compelling explanation for why that’s unlikely. First, he explains that Snowden could have easily just dumped all of these documents somewhere public:

“[Snowden] gave these documents, ultimately, to only three journalists. What he said he wanted was for us to use our own judgment and to make sure that his bias was kept out of it so that we could make our own judgment about what was newsworthy and important for the public to know. And he said we should also consider how to avoid harm.

“Now, in case anyone doubts his intentions, let’s consider what he could’ve done. If Chelsea [aka Bradley] Manning was able to exfiltrate and send to WikiLeaks and publish in whole half a million U.S. government documents, Edward Snowden — who is far, far more capable [and] had far greater access, certainly knows how to transmit documents — he could’ve sent them to WikiLeaks. He could’ve set up and mirrored around the Internet in a way that could not have been taken down. All of the documents could be public right now and they’re not. … He told us not to do it.”

Elsewhere in the discussion, he goes further:

Writing an editorial about the risk that Snowden… or that implies that Snowden is about to or may already have handed over all of his information to Wikileaks or to the Russians is entirely without evidence. It is pure speculation. There is strong evidence, now three months after his first disclosures, and more than three months after he started giving information to journalists, that he does not intend to make the whole pile public. He could have done it on the first day. He could have done it months before I ever heard of him.

He then goes on to explain why it’s incredibly unlikely that Snowden gave the documents to the Russians or the Chinese, despite many assuming that to be the case. [Continue reading…]

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Fisa judge: Snowden’s NSA disclosures triggered important spying debate

The Guardian reports: The court that oversees US surveillance has ordered the government to review for declassification a set of secret rulings about the National Security Agency’s bulk trawls of Americans’ phone records, acknowledging that disclosures by the whistleblower Edward Snowden had triggered an important public debate.

The Fisa court ordered the Justice Department to identify the court’s own rulings after May 2011 that concern a section of the Patriot Act used by the NSA to justify its mass database of American phone data. The ruling was a significant step towards their publication.

It is the second time in a week that a US court has ordered the disclosure of secret intelligence rulings. On Tuesday, a federal court in New York compelled the government to declassify numerous documents that revealed substantial tension between federal authorities and the surveillance court over the years.

On Thursday, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, conceded that the NSA is likely to lose at least some of its broad powers to collect data on Americans.

He acknowledged that Snowden’s disclosures had prompted a necessary debate: “As loath as I am to give any credit to what’s happened here, I think it’s clear that some of the conversations this has generated, some of the debate, actually needed to happen.

“If there’s a good side to this, maybe that’s it.” [Continue reading…]

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Deal reached to destroy chemical weapons in Syria

The New York Times reports: The United States and Russia reached a sweeping agreement on Saturday that called for Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons to be removed or destroyed by the middle of 2014 and indefinitely stalled the prospect of American airstrikes.

However, the joint announcement, on the third day of intensive talks in Geneva, also set the stage for one of the most challenging undertakings in the history of arms control.

“This situation has no precedent,” said Amy E. Smithson, an expert on chemical weapons at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “They are cramming what would probably be five or six years’ worth of work into a period of several months, and they are undertaking this in an extremely difficult security environment due to the ongoing civil war.”

Although the agreement for the first time explicitly includes the United Nations Security Council in determining possible international action in Syria, Russia has maintained its opposition to any military action.

But George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, emphasized that the possibility of unilateral American military force was still on the table. “We haven’t made any changes to our force posture to this point,” Mr. Little said. “The credible threat of military force has been key to driving diplomatic progress, and it’s important that the Assad regime lives up to its obligations under the framework agreement.”

In Syria, the state news agency, SANA, voiced cautious approval of the Russian and American deal, calling it “a starting point.” But there was no immediate explicit statement about the government’s willingness to implement it as detailed on Saturday.

In any case, the deal represented at least a temporary reprieve for Mr. Assad’s government — a reality that was bitterly seized on by the fractured Syrian rebel forces, most of which have pleaded for American airstrikes. General Salim Idris, the head of the Western-backed rebels’ nominal military command, the Supreme Military Council, denounced the initiative.

“All of this initiative does not interest us. Russia is a partner with the regime in killing the Syrian people,” he told reporters in Istanbul. “ A crime against humanity has been committed, and there is not any mention of accountability.” [Continue reading…]

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President’s brother key to Syria regime survival

The Associated Press reports: He is rarely photographed or even quoted in Syria’s media. Wrapped in that blanket of secrecy, President Bashar Assad’s younger brother has been vital to the family’s survival in power.

Maher Assad commands the elite troops that protect the Syrian capital from rebels on its outskirts and is widely believed to have helped orchestrate the regime’s fierce campaign to put down the uprising, now well into its third year. He has also gained a reputation for brutality among opposition activists.

His role underlines the family core of the Assad regime, though he is a stark contrast to his brothers. His eldest brother, Basil, was the family prince, publicly groomed by their father, Hafez, to succeed him as president — until Basil died in a 1994 car crash. That vaulted Bashar, then an eye doctor in London with no military or political experience, into the role of heir, rising to the presidency after his father’s death in 2000. The two brothers — the “martyr” and the president — often appear together in posters.

The 45-year-old Maher Assad, however, has resolutely stayed out of the limelight. Friends, military colleagues and even his enemies describe him as a strict military man to the core. [Continue reading…]

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Ex-CIA officer seeks Italian pardon for role in abduction operation

IntelNews (via Matthew Aid) reports: A former officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who has been convicted in absentia in Italy for his role in an abduction operation, has contacted the Italian president seeking a formal pardon.

Robert Seldon Lady was the CIA station chief in Milan in February 2003, when a team of 23 Americans, most of them CIA operatives, abducted Mustafa Osama Nasr. The CIA suspected the Egyptian-born Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, of working as a recruiter for a host of radical Islamist groups, including al-Qaeda.

In 2005, Italian authorities, which had not authorized Nasr’s kidnapping, convicted Lady, along with 22 other Americans, of abduction. The convictions were delivered in absentia, as the Americans had earlier left the country. Washington has refused to extradite them to Rome.

If a CIA officer guilty of kidnapping can get pardoned, there’s no question that Edward Snowden — who DNI James Clapper this week credited with having initiated a necessary national debate on surveillance — should be granted immunity from prosecution. It’s not going to happen, but it should.

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U.S., Russia agree to deal on Syria chemical weapons

Reuters reports: The United States and Russia have agreed on a proposal to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal, Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday after nearly three days of talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Kerry said that, under the pact, Syria must submit a “comprehensive listing” of its chemical weapons stockpiles within one week.

Kerry, at a press conference with Lavrov, said that under the agreement, U.N. weapons inspectors must be on the ground in Syria no later than November. The goal, he said, is the complete destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons by the middle of 2014.

Kerry and Lavrov said that if Syria does not comply with the agreement, which must be finalized by the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, it would face consequences under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, the part that covers sanctions and military action.

Kerry said there was no agreement on what those measures would be. U.S. President Barack Obama, he said, reserves the right to use military force in Syria.

“There’s no diminution of options,” he said.

Lavrov said of the agreement, “There (is) nothing said about the use of force and not about any automatic sanctions.”

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Syrian refugees: ‘Just hit Assad and leave us to take care of ourselves!’

Max Blumenthal reports: I sat inside a dimly lit, ramshackle trailer functioning as a general store for the residents of the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, while a wiry, sad-eyed man named Adbel told me about the massacres that drove him from his hometown. Dragging deeply on a cigarette, Abdel described how army forces rained shells down on his neighborhood in Deir Ba’alba, a district in Homs, over five months ago, pounding the town over and over. Then he told me how government thugs barged into homes at 6am, methodically slashing his neighbors to death with long knives, leaving fields irrigated with the blood of corpses, a nightmarish scene that looked much like this. Like nearly everyone I interviewed in the camp, he described his experience in clinical detail, with a flat tone and a blank expression, masking continuous trauma behind stoicism.

As Abdel mashed his cigarette into a tin ashtray and reached to light another, a woman appeared at the shop window with three young children. She said she had no money and had not been able to purchase baby formula for three days. She had trudged to hospitals across the camp seeking help and was turned away at each stop. Without hesitation, the shop owner, a burly middle-aged man also from Homs, pulled a can of formula off a shelf and handed it over to the woman. She made no promise to pay him back, and he did not ask for one. Like so many in the camp, she left Syria with nothing and now depends on the charity of others for her survival. In a human warehouse of 120,000, the fourth largest population center in Jordan and the second largest refugee camp in the world, where few can leave and even fewer are able to enter, the woman’s desperate existence was not an exception, but the rule.

“We’re in a prison right now,” Abdel told me. “We can’t do anything. And the minute we try to have a small demonstration, even peacefully, [Jordanian soldiers] throw teargas at us.”

“Guantanamo!” the shop owner bellows.

None of the dozens of adults I interviewed in the camp would allow me to report their full names or photograph their faces. If they return to Syria with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad still intact, they fear brutal recriminations. Many have already survived torture, escaped from prisons, or defected from Assad’s army. “With all the bloodshed, the killing of people who did not even join the resistance, Bashar only wanted to teach us one lesson: That we are completely weak and he is our god,” a woman from Dara’a in her early sixties told me. “His goal is to demolish our spirit so we will never rise up again.” The woman’s sons had spent four months under sustained torture for defecting to the Free Syrian Army. She does not know where they are now, only that they are back in the field, battling Assad’s forces in a grinding stalemate that has taken somewhere around 100,000 lives.

When news of the August 21 chemical attacks that left hundreds dead in the Ghouta region east of Damascus reached Zaatari, terror and dread spiked to unprecedented levels. Many residents repeated to me the rumors spreading through the camp that Bashar would douse them in sarin gas as soon as he crushed the last vestiges of internal resistance—a kind of genocidal victory celebration. When President Barack Obama announced his intention to launch punitive missile strikes on Syria, however, a momentary sense of hope began to surge through the camp. Indeed, there was not one person I spoke to in Zaatari who did not demand US military intervention at the earliest possible moment. [Continue reading…]

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Al Jazeera misrepresents video of Iranian troops in Syria

A few days ago I posted the video below which recently appeared on Al Jazeera English. EA Worldview now provides additional background on the source of the footage and points out a number of inaccuracies in AJE’s reporting. EAW says: “To date, there has been no confirmed evidence of Iranian commanders overseeing Syrian military operations or of Iranian ground troops fighting on the battlefield.”

This is the Al Jazeera report based on film made by an Iranian documentary maker, Esmail Heydari, who is not identified correctly in the report:

The broadcasts by Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English exaggerated and distorted the videos when they claimed, “The Iranians are the ones calling the shots in [the] war…giving orders where to fight and when….”

Notably, Al Jazeera English does not say that Heydari is a documentary maker, and it wrongly identifies him as a “fighter”, mis-translating at least one of his statements in the raw footage. It uses him, incorrectly, in the highly exaggerated claim, “The video shows just how in control the Iranian fighters are….It is clear once again that Assad’s army has little say about what goes on.”

Later, Al Jazeera English almost certainly makes a further mistake by portraying Heydari as a “Syrian fighter”, asking Iranian officers for a holiday to boost his morale.

Al Jazeera English says a “rebel group posted this video”, but does not identify the faction to indicate why the brigade might have an interest in exaggerating the story of the Iranian presence or to give any context for the brigade’s battles with Shia fighters around Aleppo, or to report that Liwa Dawood overran the military facility where Heydari was on August 22. Al Jazeera also do not report that the group inside the facility overran by Liwa Dawood was not the Syrian Arab Army but a pro-regime Shia faction.

The original videos have been posted on YouTube by Brown Moses: video 1, video 2, video 3, video 4, video 5, and video 6.

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Ex-MI6 deputy chief plays down damage caused by Snowden leaks

The Guardian reports: A former senior British secret intelligence officer on Thursday played down any potential damage done by the leaks to the Guardian of the spying activities of GCHQ and America’s National Security Agency, apparently contradicting claims made by UK security chiefs.

The leaks, by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were “very embarrassing, uncomfortable, and unfortunate”, Nigel Inkster, former deputy chief of MI6, said.

While Inkster said it was too early to draw any definite conclusions about the impact of the leaks, he added:

“I sense that those most interested in the activities of the NSA and GCHQ have not been told very much they didn’t know already or could have inferred.”

Al-Qaida leaders in the tribal areas of Pakistan had been “in the dark” for some time – in the sense that they had not used any form of electronic media that would “illuminate” their whereabouts, Inkster said. He was referring to counter measures they had taken to avoid detection by western intelligence agencies.

Other “serious actors” were equally aware of the risks to their own security from NSA and GCHQ eavesdroppers, he said. [Continue reading…]

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