Author Archives: News Sources

Boston bombing will boost U.S. support for Israel

Haaretz reports: Ron Dermer, a diplomatic advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and candidate for the post of Israeli ambassador to Washington, told a closed meeting of U.S. Jewish leaders in New York last week that the Boston marathon bombings would increase American support for Israel – just as that support increased following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Dermer made his remarks last Wednesday, two days after explosions rocked the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding nearly 200 more. Dermer, considered one of Netanyahu’s closest associates, is currently on vacation, after having finished his stint as a senior adviser at the Prime Minister’s Bureau.

“The bulk of the American people stand firmly with Israel and identify with Israel,” Dermer said, in a video filmed by blogger Jacob Kornbluh. “If you can look, historically, there was a big change after 9/11, and I am sure that after the tragic bombing in Boston, people will identify more with Israel and its struggle against terrorism and we can maintain that support.”

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Over half of Guantanamo Bay prisoners on hunger strike as number increases to 84

The Independent reports: Over half of all detainees at the US-run Guantanamo Bay military prison are now taking part in a hunger strike, with many being force-fed, a US military spokesman confirmed today.

The number of prisoners on hunger strike has risen to 84, an increase of 32 since last Wednesday, with 16 now receiving “enteral feedings,” a process involving being force-fed via tubes.

Inmates at the facility, which houses 166 detainees, have been refusing food since 6 February, when they claim prison officials searched their Korans for contraband, an act they considered to be religious desecration. Officials denied mishandling the Islamic holy book. Some prisoners, including Shaker Aamer, the last British inmate being held there, have since said they are continuing the strike in protest against their incarceration at Guantanamo for 11 years without charge or trial.

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Egypt’s growing black market a sign of economic woes

The Washington Post reports: The yellow horse-drawn gasoline tank is out in the open, on a busy highway that snakes along a poor slum in eastern Cairo. Trucks and cars stop to fill up. Pedestrians come by, too, with plastic containers to fill.

The yellow tank isn’t alone. Mini-tankers and canisters of illegal diesel fuel have become ubiquitous in Egypt. Vendors hawk the fuel in crowded neighborhoods, next to shops and idle police officers who do little to stop the sales.

Egypt’s rapidly expanding black market for fuel — and for foodstuffs, other commodities and U.S. dollars — may be the most tangible illustration of just how badly the economy of this vast Arab nation is failing, two years after the fall of Hosni Mubarak.

The prices of most basic goods, like fuel and flour, have been fixed for decades, with Egypt pouring roughly a quarter of its GDP into a bloated and deeply inefficient national subsidy system each year.

But after two years of political turmoil, weak governance, a devastated tourism industry and sapped investments, the government is quickly running out of money to foot the bill.

Egyptian economists say the government, confronted with reduced purchasing power, is buying less wheat and diesel from abroad. But they said it is unclear whether that is the main cause of the shortages, or whether the scarcity is driven mostly by the growing black market and the hoarding of goods by ordinary Egyptians who are anxious about the unstable economy.

One way or another, the supply of subsidized goods is drying up, breaking down the long-standing subsidy system and pushing those who can afford it to the black market. [Continue reading…]

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Ian Henderson and repression in Bahrain: a forty-year legacy

IPS reports: Ian Henderson’s death announcement Apr. 15 in Bahrain brings to an end the life of a British expatriate who was the architect and supervisor of the harsh internal security policies of the al-Khalifa ruling family since the early days of independence over 40 years ago.

Henderson’s life’s work intertwined intimately with al-Khalifa, especially with the family’s all-powerful perennial Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman, the ruler’s brother.

The policies of discrimination, exclusion, and intolerance practiced by the Sunni minority ruling family against the Shia majority were designed and executed by Henderson and his subordinates and blessed by the prime minister. They have been grounded in fear, repression, systematic violations of human rights, and in some cases torture.

This is the legacy that Ian Henderson has bequeathed to the people of Bahrain.

Henderson was a British national and a colonial officer who was renowned for using violent tactics to subdue the anti-British Mau Mau movement in Kenya. After independence, the British government in 1968 removed him from Kenya and installed him in Bahrain as a security adviser to Al-Khalifa.

Three years later, when Bahrain acquired its independence from Britain, the Bahraini prime minister retained Henderson as his security adviser and head of Bahrain’s Security and Intelligence Service.

His department employed British, Bahrainis, Omanis, Jordanians, Sudanese, Pakistanis, and others. He was responsible directly to the prime minister and acted in his name. The main mission of Henderson’s BSIS was to penetrate dissident and pro-democracy groups – Sunni and Shia – and defeat them.

The Security Service under Henderson’s supervision and control commonly practiced fear, intimidation, and “enhanced interrogation methods”. Like the prime minister, in the early 1970s Henderson perceived all human rights advocates and proponents of the constitution and an elected parliament as “radicals”, “extremists”, and “terrorists”. Many were arrested without due process or clear charges and often beaten and tortured. [Continue reading…]

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Half of Syrian population ‘will need aid by end of year’

The Guardian reports: More than half the population of Syria is likely to be in need of aid by the end of the year, the UN high commissioner for refugees has warned, while labelling the ever-worsening crisis as the most serious the global body has dealt with.

António Guterres, who has led the UNHCR through the worst of the refugee crises in Afghanistan and Iraq, said the Syrian civil war was more brutal and destructive than both and was already the worst humanitarian disaster since the end of the cold war.

His assessment came as the UN released new data on the numbers of refugees, which revealed that 6.8 million Syrians need aid. That figure is likely to reach at least 10 million, more than half the pre-war population of the country.

Another UN body, Unicef, says half of those in need are children.

“I don’t remember any other crisis where we are having 8,000 per day [fleeing across borders], every day since February,” Guterres said in an interview with the Guardian. “There will very likely be 3.5 million by the end of the year. We will have half the population of Syria in dire need of assistance and this is incomprehensible.” [Continue reading…]

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Last British resident in Guantánamo ‘may never be allowed home’

The Observer reports: The last British resident being held in Guantánamo Bay may never be allowed to return to his family in London because of an alleged “secret deal” between US authorities, Saudi Arabia and the British security services.

Shaker Aamer, 46, has been in the Cuban detention centre for more than 11 years without charge or trial, and has been cleared for release since 2007.

This month, two Metropolitan police detectives interviewed Aamer, gathering an estimated 150 pages of testimony and allegations that MI5 and MI6 were complicit in his torture. These included claims that a British officer was present while US soldiers tortured him and that MI6 officers made allegations to the CIA they knew to be false, including that Aamer was a member of al-Qaida. His legal team alleges that the US, Saudi Arabia – where Aamer was born – and the UK security services are trying to ensure that he never goes home.

Were he to return, he would almost certainly become a key witness in Scotland Yard’s investigation into allegations of British complicity in torture in the post 9/11 era. [Continue reading…]

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The people who fled the terror in Chechnya

Joshua Foust writes: Early reports suggest that the two suspected Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, are ethnically Chechen. Media reports suggest their family lived in Chechnya in the 1990s and later moved to neighboring Dagestan and then Kyrgyzstan. The Tsarnaevs moved to the United States about a decade ago, and the younger brother, Dzhokhar, became an American citizen last year. The connection between Chechen expatriates and the former Soviet Union might prove critical to understanding why these two men allegedly turned to terrorism.

Russia and Chechnya do not get along, to put it lightly. Chechnya is a tiny, autonomous republic in the southwest of Russia — part of the Caucasus region between Europe and Asia between the Black and Caspian Seas. In 1944, Josef Stalin deported the entire population of the North Caucasus — about 600,000 people in the republics of Ingushetia, Chechnya, and North Ossetia — across the Caspian Sea to the Soviet republics of Central Asia on the suspicion they were collaborating with Nazi Germany.

The mass deportation was catastrophic: Crowded, poorly ventilated trains dumped people in the middle of the steppe between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, stranding them in the vast wastelands with no supplies. Although Nikita Khrushchev eventually returned the displaced Chechens to the Caucasus in 1957, the scars of that dislocation never went away. In many ways, the Caucasian displacement led to the militancy and separatism that still haunt the region.

After the fall of the U.S.S.R., some Soviet republics gained their independence. The “stans” of Central Asia — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan — all became independent countries. So, too, did the countries of the South Caucasus — Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The North Caucasus, however, never gained independence from Moscow, though many wanted it. In the years after independence, the South Caucasus was ravaged by brutal ethnic wars in Georgia and between Armenia and Azerbaijan. By 1994, Chechnya had declared its own independence, and the Russian military surged into the country.

The first Chechen war killed thousands of people, mostly civilians, and thousands more fled the republic looking for refuge. A lot of them settled in Central Asia because a sizable Chechen population had remained there since Stalin’s forced relocation, particularly in Kazakhstan. But, over the subsequent two decades, they had trouble integrating and settling down. Refugees living in the former capital of Almaty reported being harassed by the police after the 9/11 attacks on the assumption they were terrorists. Chechens who settled in the northern part of the country faced arbitrary arrest and deportation back to Russia. In 2007, Refugees International wrote a scathing assessment of Kazakhstan’s treatment of Chechen refugees, noting that the Kazakhstan government prioritized its relations with Russia over treating refugees fairly. [Continue reading…]

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Could a nuclear-armed Iran be contained?

Kingston Reif writes: On September 4, 1962, President John F. Kennedy released a statement in response to intelligence reports of a Soviet arms buildup in Cuba. Kennedy said the United States did not have evidence “of the presence of offensive ground-to-ground missiles; or of other significant offensive capability either in Cuban hands or under Soviet direction and guidance.” However, he warned, “Were it to be otherwise, the gravest issues would arise.”

Of course, the next month Kennedy found out that the Soviet Union was in fact deploying offensive missiles and nuclear warheads in Cuba, prompting a deep crisis that brought the planet within a hair’s breadth of nuclear catastrophe. Historian Michael Dobbs writes that Kennedy later regretted making his September statement, as “[h]e was compelled to take action, not because Soviet missiles on Cuba appreciably changed the balance of military power, but because he feared looking weak.”

Fast forward 50 years to March 4, 2012. In a high-profile speech to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), President Obama declared: “Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” Obama reiterated this position last month to Israeli students in Jerusalem: “Iran must not get a nuclear weapon. This is not a danger that can be contained, and as President, I’ve said all options are on the table for achieving our objectives.”

Might Obama, like Kennedy, later regret issuing such an ultimatum? [Continue reading…]

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The Middle East’s kings of cowardice

Marc Lynch writes: Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef rocketed to global celebrity last month after being charged for insulting President Mohamed Morsy. The escalation against Youssef was rooted in the intense polarization of local Egyptian politics and the prickly, insecure nature of the Muslim Brotherhood-led government.

The move badly backfired on the Egyptian government: It inspired widespread global contempt for Morsy, global fame and celebrity for Youssef, a minor diplomatic crisis, and much-feared mockery by Jon Stewart. Youssef was even selected as one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in the wake of the incident. But while Youssef’s prosecution drew massive media attention, a wave of increasingly disproportionate crackdowns for “insulting” leaders across the Gulf might actually be more significant.

For an area that most people still believe remains unaffected by the Arab uprisings, the Gulf has been awfully tough on public critics of late. Kuwait plunged into days of intense protests and political turmoil this week after leading opposition figure Musallam al-Barrak was sentenced to five years in prison for publicly challenging the emir to avoid autocratic rule. The attempt to arrest Barrak — which itself turned into something of a farce when he eluded the police for days — was only the latest in an escalating campaign of Kuwaiti repression. [Continue reading…]

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Obama administration obstructs Senate investigation of drone war’s legality

McClatchy reports: The Obama administration does not intend to send a witness to testify at a Senate hearing next week on the legality of the U.S. targeted killing program, the White House said Wednesday.

The decision illustrates the limits of President Barack Obama’s pledge in his State of the Union speech on Feb. 12 to provide greater transparency into top-secret drone operations that have killed thousands of suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Constitution subcommittee was to have held a hearing Tuesday on the legality of targeted killings, those who can be targeted and the creation of a “transparent legal framework for the use of drones.” The session, however, was postponed until April 23 to allow more time for the White House to agree to send a witness.

That effort, however, appeared to have fallen through.

“We do not currently plan to send a witness to this hearing and have remained in close contact with the committee about how we can best provide them the information they require,” Caitlin Hayden, a National Security Council spokeswoman, wrote in an email to McClatchy.

She added that the White House would continue working with lawmakers “to ensure not only that our targeting, detention and prosecution of terrorists remains consistent with our laws and system of checks and balances, but that our efforts are even more transparent to the American people and the world.”

Hayden declined to say why the administration doesn’t plan to provide a witness for the hearing. [Continue reading…]

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Syria’s conflict is rich fodder for anti-Islamist propaganda

Hassan Hassan writes: Tunisia has recently required Syrians to obtain visas before they travel to Tunis. The reason for this change of policy has not been made public.

But according to Tunisian officials, the reason is related to Tunisian jihadis in Syria. Sources say that Damascus has refused to hand over the bodies of Tunisian fighters who died in battles against the Syrian regime. Damascus wants Tunis, in exchange for handing over the bodies, to reopen diplomatic channels with Syria, including the Syrian embassy there which was shut down by Tunisian authorities in February. Earlier this month, foreign ministry officials in Tunis publicly said they intend to hand over the closed embassy to the Syrian opposition’s National Coalition, clearly to pressure Damascus.

There are of course deeper issues involved. No country has dedicated more media coverage to the issue of jihadis flowing out of their region than Tunisia, where television channels host jihadi returnees almost on a weekly basis. Live on television they engage in intense discussions and interactions with the public. This has given the impression that Tunisians make up a majority of Syria’s foreign fighters.

There have also been media reports claiming that religious clerics from Tunisia had issued a fatwa permitting Muslim women to perform “sex jihad” in Syria. It claims that Muslim fighters in Syria could engage in sexual acts with consenting Muslim women to raise morale.

This fatwa turned out to be bogus; media first attributed it to the celebrity cleric Mohammed Al Arefe from Saudi Arabia, but he denied that. Reports then claimed the clerics who issued the fatwas were anonymous but “they are among those who are influenced by Saudi clerics”.

Yet even after the fatwa was disavowed, people still believed in it. At least 13 Tunisian female teenagers were reported to have travelled to Syria to perform religious duties. One television channel reported that a man divorced his wife after he decided to fight in Syria to enable her to perform her own jihad there.

It is understandable if media outlets loyal to the Syrian regime would try to portray the fight against it as driven by fanaticism and lust. But why would Tunisian media carry such clearly fabricated reports?

As elsewhere in the region, the opposition in Tunisia is increasingly using the Syrian uprising to settle scores at home. Reviewing the media reports that carried the fatwa shows that there is a clear focus on Tunisian Islamists who play a role in radicalising young people.

Aaron Zelin, an expert on jihadi groups at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says the maximum number of foreign fighters to have fought in Syria over the course of the entire conflict is estimated to be 5,500 – but the numbers are probably lower.

Tunisian media, meanwhile, has reported that over 3,500 fighters from Tunisia have gone to Syria, driven by fatwas by Tunisian extremists. Clearly this figure is exaggerated. But the media focus on Tunisian radicals in Syria is meant to undermine the Islamist government at home more than anything else. [Continue reading…]

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The tragedies of other places

Rafia Zakaria writes: As a weekly columnist for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, I’ve become adept at writing about bombings. Pakistan suffered 652 of these last year; terrorist attacks took down everything from girls’ schools to apartment buildings and felled members of Parliament, singers, and school children—each person sentenced by coincidence to be at a given location in the moment it became a bomber’s target. Through my columns, I have offered up fumbled expressions of grief and comfort to Pakistani readers whose stores of empathy are bled daily without any promise of replenishment. I believe that these rituals of caring, made so repetitious in Pakistan by the sheer frequency of terror attacks, are crucial; in preventing the normalization of violence and senseless evil, they keep a society human.

The bombings in Boston on April 15, 2013 pose their own conundrum to those like me who are in the habit of writing about bloodier conflicts with more frequent conflagrations. There is an inherent cruelty in every terror attack — an undeniable reverberation of evil in the destruction of an ordinary moment and the forced marriage of that moment to sudden violence. Boston is no different, no more or less tragic than the bombings that have razed the marketplaces of Karachi, the school in Khost, the mosque in Karbala.

And yet it seems so. Attacks in America are far more indelible in the world’s memory than attacks in any other country. There may be fewer victims and less blood, but American tragedies somehow seem to occur in a more poignant version of reality, in a way that evokes a more sympathetic response. Within minutes American victims are lifted from the nameless to the remembered; their individual tragedies and the ugly unfairness of their ends are presented in a way that cannot but cause the watching world to cry, to consider them intimates, and to stand in their bloody shoes. Death is always unexpected in America and death by a terrorist attack more so than in any other place. [Continue reading…]

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The Saudi Marathon man

Amy Davidson writes: A twenty-year-old man who had been watching the Boston Marathon had his body torn into by the force of a bomb. He wasn’t alone; a hundred and seventy-six people were injured and three were killed. But he was the only one who, while in the hospital being treated for his wounds, had his apartment searched in “a startling show of force,” as his fellow-tenants described it to the Boston Herald, with a “phalanx” of officers and agents and two K9 units. He was the one whose belongings were carried out in paper bags as his neighbors watched; whose roommate, also a student, was questioned for five hours (“I was scared”) before coming out to say that he didn’t think his friend was someone who’d plant a bomb — that he was a nice guy who liked sports. “Let me go to school, dude,” the roommate said later in the day, covering his face with his hands and almost crying, as a Fox News producer followed him and asked him, again and again, if he was sure he hadn’t been living with a killer.

Why the search, the interrogation, the dogs, the bomb squad, and the injured man’s name tweeted out, attached to the word “suspect”? After the bombs went off, people were running in every direction — so was the young man. Many, like him, were hurt badly; many of them were saved by the unflinching kindness of strangers, who carried them or stopped the bleeding with their own hands and improvised tourniquets. “Exhausted runners who kept running to the nearest hospital to give blood,” President Obama said. “They helped one another, consoled one another,” Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, said. In the midst of that, according to a CBS News report, a bystander saw the young man running, badly hurt, rushed to him, and then “tackled” him, bringing him down. People thought he looked suspicious.

What made them suspect him? He was running — so was everyone. The police reportedly thought he smelled like explosives; his wounds might have suggested why. He said something about thinking there would be a second bomb—as there was, and often is, to target responders. If that was the reason he gave for running, it was a sensible one. He asked if anyone was dead — a question people were screaming. And he was from Saudi Arabia, which is around where the logic stops. Was it just the way he looked, or did he, in the chaos, maybe call for God with a name that someone found strange?

What happened next didn’t take long. [Continue reading…]

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How the gun lobby has already blocked Boston’s bombing investigators

MSNBC: One avenue of investigation is already closed off to forensic officials working the Boston Marathon bombing case due to efforts dating back decades by the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers.

The FBI said Tuesday that gunpowder, along with pieces of metal and ball bearings, were packed into at least one pressure cooker and another device to make the crude bombs that killed three people—including an 8-year-old boy—and wounded more than 170 more during the Boston Marathon Monday.

But a crucial piece of evidence called a taggant that could be used to trace the gunpowder used in the bombs to a buyer at a point of sale is not available to investigators.

“If you had a good taggant this would be a good thing for this kind of crime. It could help identify the point of manufacturer, and chain of custody,” Bob Morhard, an explosives consultant and chief executive officer of Zukovich, Morhard & Wade, LLC., in Pennsylvania, who has traced explosives and detonators in use in the United States and Saudi Arabia, told MSNBC.com. “The problem is nobody wants to know what the material is.”

Explosives manufacturers are required to place tracing elements known as identification taggants only in plastic explosives but not in gunpowder, thanks to lobbying efforts by the NRA and large gun manufacturing groups.

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As a Bostonian and Muslim, I wept Monday — and worried

Rabail Baig writes: “Shave your stubble before you come to bed, Haider,” I told my husband Monday night. He looked up at me from the computer chair without the slightest hint of protest and smiled, “of course”. A couple of hours into the night, with him sound asleep right next to me – asleep like nothing had happened – I shivered from post-traumatic stress. Cold sweat trickled down the side of my forehead meeting warm tears at the corner of my eye and disappearing into a big, wet circle on the pillow. It was my second Patriot’s Day Boston Marathon, my husband’s third. I recalled spending all evening answering calls from back home in Pakistan, saying often, “Allah nay bachaya,” (Allah saved us). But did he?

Earlier on Monday, I was sitting with Haider and three other friends around small tables at the Prudential Center food court when we heard, and felt, the loud thud. If we were around a table somewhere in Karachi, Pakistan, my hometown, we would have said a little prayer in our hearts and continued eating, hoping that by the time we were done, the roads would re-open and life would resume. Such is our threshold for bomb-like noises and actual life-consuming explosions.

But in the heart of Boston, on a day of celebration, it could only be Godzilla, or some other giant lizard, someone joked. Within 20 seconds, though, buried under a horde of people and after the ensuing stampede, we ended up on the terrace looking over Boylston Street – a stone’s throw away from where the second blast had just occurred. Soon, a distraught mob pushed us right back into the food court. Unfinished bites and sentences, deserted strollers and upturned chairs – the large mall appeared ghastly.

As we rushed out on to Huntington Avenue, unable to wipe that dreadful sight from our heads, my phone rang. A call from Pakistan. Just then, in those very few seconds, our lives, our identities, made me want to not answer it. Our future – my husband’s career in medicine and mine in journalism, our plans of having a baby, of buying a home of our own, living the American dream someday – ran through my head. I had and have never been more afraid. But I had to answer it. It was Haider’s sister calling to say hello, completely unaware of what had taken place. I quickly hung up after telling her we were safe. Were we? [Continue reading…]

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