Author Archives: News Sources

Brothers in arms: the 10 brothers fighting for the Syrian uprising

Martin Chulov reports: One evening in January 2011, Mohammed Rias, a hulking taxi driver and head of a family clan, called his close male relatives to a meeting in their village home in northern Syria. There were 13 men in all, sitting on thin cushions on the floor of a cold and frugal living room. Nine were his brothers, the other three his cousins. The loyalty of the men, tested through more than a decade of underground dissent towards the Syrian government, was about to be called on again.

Rias, 37, who is known by his siblings and cousins as Sheikh Nayimi, remembers the moment well. “I told them that the Arab Spring marked a moment for us,” he says. “It was not yet time to go public, we had to then remain private. But we could sense that something was coming. Everything we had waited for might soon be upon us.”

By the time of that first gathering, revolution was rumbling through North Africa. Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunis had fallen and Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt was teetering. The stirrings of popular revolt had also begun to unsettle Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Yemen’s leader, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Something remarkable was happening; the incontestable strength of the region’s one-man autocracies was crumbling. The might of the street had exposed the fragility of absolute rule. Such a powerful new reality electrified societies long conditioned to think otherwise. And though it was yet to get there, the shift was fast dawning on communities throughout the most uncompromising of the Middle East’s police states, Syria.

“We talked about it among ourselves and we knew that it would also get to Syria,” Sheikh Nayimi says, two years after the fall of Cairo. Coals spark from a rusting tin drum in the centre of a row of plastic chairs on the road outside his makeshift office in Aleppo, Syria’s second city, and he leans forward to warm his hands. January is frigid and powerless here this year. Keeping warm is as much of a challenge as staying alive for the Sheikh and his nine brothers near one of the many frontlines of Syria’s civil war.

“We weren’t sure what would start things,” he recalls of the tense seven weeks it took for the arc of revolution to reach from Cairo to Damascus. “We couldn’t move before then.” The brothers did not have to wait long. The spray-painting of anti-regime slogans outside a mosque in the southern city of Daraa, and the withering response from the military, was Syria’s Tahrir Square moment. On March 15, several young men and boys from the southern town of Daraa were arrested for leaving the graffiti and then tortured in prison. The increasing protests – unarmed in the early months – were met with ever-escalating violence by a regime that had never brooked dissent and wasn’t about to do so now.

The Nayimi brothers knew their moment had arrived. “We didn’t have to hide any more,” Sheikh Nayimi says. Within days, he had been joined by his siblings and their elderly father, all of whom had left jobs in Aleppo or in their home village of Sarmada in the countryside near Idlib. Their transformation from peasant sons of the northern plains to revolutionaries at the heart of the war for Syria’s future has been honed ever since. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. considers direct aid to Syrian rebels

The Washington Post reports: The Obama administration is moving toward a major policy shift on Syria that could provide the rebels with equipment such as body armor, armored vehicles and possible military training and could send humanitarian assistance directly to Syria’s opposition political coalition, according to U.S. and European officials.

The administration has not provided direct aid to either the military or political side of the opposition throughout the two-year old Syrian conflict, and U.S. officials remain opposed to providing weapons to the rebels.

Elements of the proposed policy, which officials cautioned have not yet been finalized, are being discussed by Secretary of State John F. Kerry in meetings this week and next with allies in Europe and the Middle East as part of a coordinated effort to end the bloody stalemate that has claimed 70,000 lives.

The outcome of those talks, and a nearly two-hour meeting in Berlin on Tuesday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and a Thursday conference with allies and leaders of the Syrian Opposition Coalition in Rome, is expected to weigh heavily in administration deliberations.

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The militarization of the internet

Katherine Maher writes: Governments around the world are sounding alarms about the existential threat posed by cyberwar. From hostile foreign regimes to lawless nonstate actors, the threat of attacks on critical infrastructure to the theft of state secrets, the danger of economic warfare to corporate espionage, not a day goes by when cybersecurity is not in the news.

In response, governments around the world are devoting significant financial, military, and personnel resources to developing frameworks for cybersecurity and cyberconflict. Cyberspace is no longer the independent space of the cyberlibertarians; it is now a military domain. And when a freewheeling place like the Internet militarizes, the Internet’s laissez-faire culture of privacy, anonymity, and free expression inevitably comes into conflict with military priorities of security and protocol.

In the United States, the Pentagon has been tasked with the development of rules of engagement for cyberconflict. Just last week on Feb. 12, President Barack Obama issued a long-awaited executive order on cybersecurity and used his State of the Union address to call for new bipartisan legislation on the issue, emphasizing the need to protect U.S. critical infrastructure. The very next day, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) reintroduced CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act — a bill reviled by the privacy and civil liberties community for its lack of credible privacy protections and provisions for warrantless information-sharing.

Make no mistake, cyberhostilities are on the increase. Every day around the world, critical systems come under attack, whether from petty cybercriminals or coordinated state efforts. From Stuxnet, which set back Iran’s nuclear efforts, to Shamoon, which destroyed the control systems of oil giant Saudi Aramco, to the recent compromise of the Washington Post, New York Times, Twitter, and Facebook, we’re witnessing large-scale attempts to penetrate and interfere with both private and public systems.

Many cybersecurity experts, however, disagree on how to best tackle the threats at hand. Many dismiss proposals such as public-private data exchanges, arguing that such solutions erode civil liberties while failing to address critical problems. Others argue that reducing cyberconflict is best achieved through embracing the values of an open Internet: creating transparent norms, such as establishing clear red lines, common terminology, and mutual confidence-building measures. But the most influential voices remain those arguing for greater militarization: investing in the development of strategic exploits or offensive capacity that double down on the idea of the Internet as a domain subject to dominance by state actors.

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Hagel clears filibuster hurdle, is set for confirmation

The Washington Post reports: Chuck Hagel’s bid to become the next defense secretary cleared a major hurdle Tuesday, beating back a Republican effort to block his nomination almost two weeks after GOP senators launched a filibuster.

On a 71 to 27 vote, easily clearing the 60-vote threshold, the former Republican senator is poised for confirmation later Tuesday afternoon, overcoming Republican objections to his views on Middle East security.

Eighteen Republicans supported moving to a final vote, joining 53 Democrats. Some of the Republicans who supported ending the Hagel filibuster — including his chief opponents, Sens. John S. McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — are expected to oppose him on the final vote, which will only require a simple majority for his confirmation.

The vote marked a foreign policy victory for President Obama, who pushed the nomination of his old friend from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee despite warnings of a rough confirmation process. Hagel, an Army infantryman who was awarded two Purple Hearts during the Vietnam War, will become the first enlisted man to ever go on to lead the Pentagon.

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Even if Iran gets the Bomb, it won’t be worth going to war

Former British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, writes: ‘All options remain on the table”, goes the mantra. This is code for saying that the West retains the choice of using military force to stop Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon. We’ll hear it repeated this week, as negotiations between Iran and the “P5 +1” (the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and Germany) resume in Kazakhstan. On occasions, I’ve used the phrase myself. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve become convinced that it is a hindrance to negotiations, rather than a help.

If Iran were to attack Israel, or, say, one of its Arab neighbours, international law is clear: the victim has the right to retaliate. But such an attack is highly improbable. Under Article 42 of the UN Charter, the Security Council can authorise military action where there’s a “threat to international peace and security”. Such resolutions were the legal basis for the actions against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, and Libya in 2011. But there are no such Article 42 resolutions against Iran; and there won’t be – China and Russia would veto them.

There are Security Council resolutions against Iran under Article 41, but this Article explicitly excludes measures involving the use of force. These resolutions have progressively tightened international sanctions against Iran, because of its lack of full co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). With even tougher measures imposed by the US and the EU, sanctions have severely restricted Iran’s international trade, and led to the collapse of its currency, and high inflation.

The negotiations which restart today are the latest round of a 10-year effort by the international community to satisfy itself that Iran is not embarked on a nuclear weapons programme. This initiative was begun in 2003 by me and the then foreign ministers of France and Germany, Dominic de Villepin and Joschka Fischer, when it became clear that Iran had failed to disclose much of its activities to the IAEA, in breach of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to which it adheres. I visited Tehran five times as foreign secretary. The Iranians are tough negotiators, more difficult to deal with because of the opacity of their governmental system. (When I complained to Kamal Kharrazi, the Iranian foreign minister, about this, he replied: “Don’t complain to me about negotiating with the Iranian government, Jack. Imagine what it’s like negotiating within the Iranian government”). They have not helped themselves by their obduracy.

Resolving the current impasse will require statesmanship of a high order from both sides. From the West, there has to be a better understanding of the Iranian psyche. Transcending their political divisions, Iranians have a strong and shared sense of national identity, and a yearning to be treated with respect, after decades in which they feel (with justification) that they have been systematically humiliated, not least by the UK.

“Kar Inglise” – that “the hand of England” is behind whatever befalls the Iranians – is a popular Persian saying. Few in the UK have the remotest idea of our active interference in Iran’s internal affairs from the 19th century on, but the Iranians can recite every detail. From an oppressive British tobacco monopoly in 1890, through truly extortionate terms for the extraction of oil by the D’Arcy petroleum company (later BP), to putting Reza Shah on the throne in the 1920s; from jointly occupying the country, with the Soviet Union, from 1941-46, organising (with the CIA) the coup to remove the elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, then propping up the increasingly brutal regime of the Shah until its collapse in 1979, our role has not been a pretty one. Think how we’d feel if it had been the other way round. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s indifference to the way Africa’s leaders treat their own people

Helen Epstein writes: America’s new drone base in the West African city of Niamey, Niger, announced by the White House on Friday, further expands our counter-terrorism activity in Africa. It’s also consistent with the militaristic emphasis of the Obama administration’s engagement with the continent. This may help contain the spread of jihadist violence in specific cases, but by failing to address persistent abuses of human rights by our African military allies, America is also undermining its own development investments that are intended to lift millions of people out of poverty and ensure the continent’s peace, stability, and economic growth.

The administration’s neglect of human rights in Africa is a great disappointment, since the president began his first term by laying out ambitious new goals for the continent. In July 2009, when his presidency was only six months old, Barack Obama delivered a powerful speech at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, the point from which millions of African slaves were shipped across the Atlantic. He called on African countries to end the tyranny of corruption that affects so many of their populations, and to build strong institutions that serve the people and hold leaders accountable. The speech seemed to extend the message of his much-discussed Cairo address a month earlier, in which he called for a new beginning for Muslim relations with the West, based on non-violence and mutual respect. Many thought that the policies of the new president, himself of Kenyan descent, would depart from those of the Bush administration, which provided a great deal of development aid to Africa, but paid scant attention to human rights.

After more than four years in office, however, Obama has done little to advance the idealistic goals of his Ghana speech. The US finally suspended military aid to Rwanda last year, after it was forced to accept evidence of Rwandan support for the brutal Congolese rebel group M23, but has otherwise ignored the highly problematic human rights situation in that country. In Uganda, the US looked on for years as President Yoweri Museveni’s cabinet ministers gorged themselves on American and other foreign aid intended for impoverished farmers, war victims, roads, and health care. US diplomats have recently begun expressing support for Uganda’s many oppressed civil society groups, but one wonders what took them so long. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Uganda is a vital US military ally in Somalia, where Ugandan troops helped oust the Islamic militant group al-Shabbab from Mogadishu last year.

Meanwhile, Kenya, another important US ally in Somalia that is soon to be receiving drones from the Pentagon, is preparing for national elections on March 4. But some observers say the country is more violent now than it was in 2007, when post-election ethnic clashes left 1000 people dead and caused economic chaos across East Africa. Presidential candidate Uhuru Kenyatta and his running mate William Ruto have both been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes connected with those events. It’s not clear what the US will do if Kenyatta wins, but it often seems as if Obama will work with any African leader who furthers America’s military aims, regardless of how that leader treats his own people. [Continue reading…]

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In Syria, new influx of weapons to rebels tilts the battle against Assad

The Washington Post reports: A surge of rebel advances in Syria is being fueled at least in part by an influx of heavy weaponry in a renewed effort by outside powers to arm moderates in the Free Syrian Army, according to Arab and rebel officials.

The new armaments, including anti-tank weapons and recoilless rifles, have been sent across the Jordanian border into the province of Daraa in recent weeks to counter the growing influence of Islamist extremist groups in the north of Syria by boosting more moderate groups fighting in the south, the officials say.

The arms are the first heavy weapons known to have been supplied by outside powers to the rebels battling to topple President Bashar al-Assad and his family’s four-decade-old regime since the Syrian uprising began two years ago.

The officials declined to identify the source of the newly provided weapons, but they noted that the countries most closely involved in supporting the rebels’ campaign to oust Assad have grown increasingly alarmed at the soaring influence of Islamists over the fragmented rebel movement. They include the United States and its major European allies, along with Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the two countries most directly involved in supplying the rebels. Security officials from those nations have formed a security coordination committee that consults regularly on events in Syria, they said.

Although the Obama administration continues to refuse to directly arm the rebels, the administration has provided intelligence assistance to those who are involved in the supplies, and it also helps vet opposition forces. U.S. officials declined to comment on the new armaments.

The goal of these renewed deliveries, Arab and rebel officials said, is to reverse the unintended effect of an effort last summer to supply small arms and ammunition to rebel forces in the north, which was halted after it became clear that radical Islamists were emerging as the chief beneficiaries.

“The idea was to get heavier stuff, intensify supply and make sure it goes to the good guys,” said an Arab official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operation. “If you want to weaken al-Nusra, you do it not by withholding [weapons] but by boosting the other groups.”

Louay al-Mokdad, the political and media coordinator for the Free Syrian Army, confirmed that the rebels have procured new weapons donated from outside Syria, rather than bought on the black market or seized during the capture of government facilities, the source of the vast majority of the arms that are in the hands of the rebels. But he declined to say who was behind the effort. [Continue reading…]

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Reflections by an Arab Jew

Ella Habiba Shohat writes: I am an Arab Jew. Or, more specifically, an Iraqi Israeli woman living, writing and teaching in the U.S. Most members of my family were born and raised in Baghdad, and now live in Iraq, Israel, the U.S., England, and Holland. When my grandmother first encountered Israeli society in the ’50s, she was convinced that the people who looked, spoke and ate so differently–the European Jews–were actually European Christians. Jewishness for her generation was inextricably associated with Middle Easterness. My grandmother, who still lives in Israel and still communicates largely in Arabic, had to be taught to speak of “us” as Jews and “them” as Arabs. For Middle Easterners, the operating distinction had always been “Muslim,” “Jew,” and “Christian,” not Arab versus Jew. The assumption was that “Arabness” referred to a common shared culture and language, albeit with religious differences.

Americans are often amazed to discover the existentially nauseating or charmingly exotic possibilities of such a syncretic identity. I recall a well-established colleague who despite my elaborate lessons on the history of Arab Jews, still had trouble understanding that I was not a tragic anomaly–for instance, the daughter of an Arab (Palestinian) and an Israeli (European Jew). Living in North America makes it even more difficult to communicate that we are Jews and yet entitled to our Middle Eastern difference. And that we are Arabs and yet entitled to our religious difference, like Arab Christians and Arab Muslims.

It was precisely the policing of cultural borders in Israel that led some of us to escape into the metropolises of syncretic identities. Yet, in an American context, we face again a hegemony that allows us to narrate a single Jewish memory, i.e., a European one. For those of us who don’t hide our Middle Easterness under one Jewish “we,” it becomes tougher and tougher to exist in an American context hostile to the very notion of Easterness.

As an Arab Jew, I am often obliged to explain the “mysteries” of this oxymoronic entity. That we have spoken Arabic, not Yiddish; that for millennia our cultural creativity, secular and religious, had been largely articulated in Arabic (Maimonides being one of the few intellectuals to “make it” into the consciousness of the West); and that even the most religious of our communities in the Middle East and North Africa never expressed themselves in Yiddish-accented Hebrew prayers, nor did they practice liturgical-gestural norms and sartorial codes favoring the dark colors of centuries-ago Poland. Middle Eastern women similarly never wore wigs; their hair covers, if worn, consisted of different variations on regional clothing (and in the wake of British and French imperialism, many wore Western-style clothes). If you go to our synagogues, even in New York, Montreal, Paris or London, you’ll be amazed to hear the winding quarter tones of our music which the uninitiated might imagine to be coming from a mosque. [Continue reading…]

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Global support grows for legalizing drugs

Der Spiegel reports: The global war on drugs has cost billions and taken countless lives — but achieved little. The scant results finally have politicians and experts joining calls for legalization. Following the journey of cocaine from a farm in Colombia to a user in Berlin sheds light on why.

“Pablo Escobar said to me: ‘One shot to the head isn’t enough. It has to be two shots, just above the eyes.'”

Jhon Velásquez, nicknamed “Popeye,” is sitting on a white plastic chair in the prison yard. “You can survive one shot, but never two. I cut up the bodies and threw them in the river. Or I just left them there. I often drove through Medellín, where I kidnapped and raped women. Then I shot them and threw them in the trash.”

Three guards are standing next to him. He is the only prisoner in the giant building. The watchtower, the security door systems, the surveillance cameras — it’s all for him. The warden of the Cómbita maximum-security prison, a three-hour drive northeast of the Colombian capital Bogotá, has given Popeye one hour to tell his story.

The experience is like opening a door into hell.

Popeye was the right-hand man of Pablo Escobar, head of Colombia’s Medellín cartel. Until his death in 1993, Escobar was the most powerful drug lord in the world. He industrialized cocaine production, controlled 80 percent of the global cocaine trade and became one of the richest people on the planet. The cartel ordered the killings of 30 judges, about 450 police officers and many more civilians. As Escobar’s head of security, Popeye was an expert at kidnapping, torture and murder.

Velásquez acquired the nickname Popeye while working as a cabin boy in the Colombian navy. He kidnapped Andrés Pastrana, the then-candidate for mayor of Bogotá and later president. He obtained the weapon that was used to fatally shoot Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán in 1989. He was involved in a bombing attack that was intended to kill former Colombian President César Gaviria. Popeye, acting on the orders of Escobar, El Patrón, even had his beauty-queen girlfriend Wendy murdered.

“I’ve killed about 250 people, and I cut many of them into pieces. But I don’t know exactly how many,” Popeye says. “Only psychopaths count their kills.”

Popeye is a pale, 50-year-old man with a shrill voice — a psychopath who doesn’t count his kills.

The longer Popeye talks — about his murders, the drug war and the havoc he and Escobar wreaked and that is currently being repeated in Mexico — the less important my prepared questions about this war become. I realize that I might as well throw away my notepad, because it all boils down to one question: How can we stop people like you, Popeye?

He pauses for a moment before saying: “People like me can’t be stopped. It’s a war. They lose men, and we lose men. They lose their scruples, and we never had any. In the end, you’ll even blow up an aircraft because you believe the Colombian president is on board. I don’t know what you have to do. Maybe sell cocaine in pharmacies. I’ve been in prison for 20 years, but you will never win this war when there is so much money to me made. Never.”

I’m sitting face to face with a killer: Popeye, an evil product of hell. And I’m afraid that the killer could be right.

The drug war is the longest war in recent history, underway for more than 40 years. It is a never-ending struggle against a $500 billion (€378 billion) industry. [Continue reading…]

See infographic on the U.S. failed war on drugs. Continue reading →

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Understanding Mali’s ‘Tuareg problem’

Bruce Whitehouse writes: Last week I took part in a “teach-in” organized by Michigan State University devoted to the ongoing crisis in Mali. A half-dozen Africanist scholars joined a pair of retired U.S. ambassadors to discuss the origins and consequences of that country’s state collapse, ethnic tensions, the rebel takeover and French military intervention. The audience, mostly MSU students and faculty, included several Malians. One recurring subject was the Tuareg people and their place in the Malian nation. Various non-Malian participants spoke of the need to grant the Tuareg some kind of autonomy, while Malians in the room rejected such an arrangement. At one point a Malian graduate student in attendance stated flatly, “There is no ‘Tuareg problem’ in Mali.”

This remark reminded me that listening to Tuareg and non-Tuareg Malians talk about their intertwined history can be like listening to Israelis and Palestinians talk about theirs: the two groups’ respective visions of the past they share are fundamentally divergent, with each group casting itself as victim.

Plenty of analyses by Western officials and journalists these days are structured around simple binaries dividing Mali’s population into north and south, white and black, North African and sub-Saharan, good guys and bad guys. Such crude dualisms need to be dispensed with. Below are a few facts about northern Mali generally, and the Tuareg specifically, that can help in this regard. [Continue reading… and don’t miss a useful exchange in the comment thread between Bruce and Andy Morgan who offers a more Tuareg ‘aligned’ perspective.]

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A photographer’s return to Afghanistan after losing three limbs

A year ago, Giles Duley gave this TED talk:

In a magazine feature article for the New York Times published last May, Luke Mogelson described the medical care provided by Emergency, an Italian-based nonprofit that opened its first surgical center in Afghanistan in 1999. He also described the ‘criminal’ discharge policies being applied to Afghans who get treated at NATO hospitals.

In April, I traveled to Sayad, a town in Kapisa Province, to meet a 14-year-old boy named Zobair, who had recently been discharged from a hospital at Bagram Air Base, one of the largest American military installations in Afghanistan. Zobair’s uncle Nasir had taken him to Sayad in a borrowed Toyota hatchback, its rear seats folded forward to accommodate the green U.S. Army litter on which Zobair reclined. We were parked on the bank of a wide river with small wooden platforms extending over the water’s edge, where you could order lunch from local fishmongers. My interpreter and I arrived early and bought food for Zobair and Nasir — a gesture that felt ridiculous now, in light of Zobair’s condition.

Both of his legs were gone, and wounds covered his hands, arms and back. He was nauseated and fevered; every movement elicited a grimace. “Most of the pain is in my stomach,” Zobair told me as soon as we met. His eyes were half-shut, heavy with fatigue, and he spoke so softly that I had to lean close to catch his words. Without a wheelchair, Zobair had no way to reach the landing where we had set up the meal. When Nasir climbed into the back of the Toyota and raised Zobair’s shalwar kameez, he revealed a pouching system attached to a stoma and four pink tubes sticking out of Zobair’s sides. Fifty-two metal staples held together an incision running the length of his abdomen.

Zobair and Nasir were from Tagab District, where French troops have struggled for years to dislodge a deeply entrenched insurgency, without much success. In February, a French airstrike, mistaking them for insurgents, killed seven boys while they were herding sheep not far from Tagab. A few weeks later, according to Zobair and his family, Zobair was sitting outside his house with four cousins, watching the sun go down, when two low-flying helicopters approached from the distance. Helicopters have long been a daily occurrence in Tagab, but something about the way this pair hovered near the house made Zobair nervous. He said as much to his cousins, who mocked him for being overanxious.

Zobair stood up and began to walk away. He does not know what kind of ordnance or ammunition the helicopter fired. Given the damage, it was likely a Hellfire missile. Two cousins — ages 14 and 18 — were killed immediately. Zobair, who had taken about four steps before the explosion, was thrown into an irrigation ditch. Villagers rushed the survivors to the French military base in Tagab, where another of Zobair’s cousins soon died. In response to my questions about the helicopter strike, a representative for the French military told me that they had conducted an investigation, the conclusions of which were “full positive”: “On that day, after having checked there were no civilians in the area, one helicopter fired at a group of five insurgents with hostile intentions.”

The last thing Zobair remembers before losing consciousness was a foreigner sticking him with a needle. He woke up “in a white room with white walls,” he told me. “They wouldn’t tell us where we were.” Back in Tagab, no one from the base would inform Nasir where Zobair had been taken; it was generally known, however, that casualties from Kapisa were often airlifted to Bagram. “We came to Bagram several times to write our names and give them to the interpreter at the gate,” Nasir said. “Sometimes the interpreter told us, ‘Yes, he is here.’ Sometimes he told us, ‘No, he is not here.’ Zobair called us one time. He told us: ‘I am in a hospital, but I don’t know where. I’m not allowed to tell.’ ” When I asked NATO why Zobair was not allowed to speak with his family, a representative replied, “We know there is a policy on this and are seeking more information at this time.” I was later told that he should have been allowed to call home.

After 23 days, Nasir received a call from an interpreter at Bagram, who told him to come pick up his nephew. At the airfield, Zobair was carried out from the hospital and put into the ambulance, accompanied by an Afghan interpreter. The interpreter told Nasir that they should go to the Red Cross in Kabul so that Zobair’s amputated legs could be fitted for prostheses. She then handed Nasir some papers detailing, in English, the treatment that Zobair received.

If Nasir had been able to read the papers, he would have learned that American surgeons at Craig Joint Theater Hospital saved Zobair’s life with a battery of sophisticated procedures. The incision on Zobair’s abdomen was from a laparotomy that enabled the doctors to repair his lacerated spleen, colon and kidney; the pouching system was to collect feces from an ileostomy, where a section of damaged intestine had been removed; and the four tubes sticking out of his sides were internal compression sutures helping to hold his abdomen together. Curiously, the only future treatment recommended for Zobair was to “follow up with a surgeon in six months to have the ileostomy takedown” — that is, to have the intestine reattached and the temporary pouching system removed. According to Nasir, he was not given any guidance about what to do for the internal sutures and 52 metal staples, though both were meant to remain in place no longer than a week or two, after which they posed a risk of becoming infected. Continue reading →

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Afghanistan accuses U.S. Special Operations troops of murder, abduction, and torture

The New York Times reports: The Afghan government barred elite American forces from operating in a strategic province adjoining Kabul on Sunday, citing complaints that Afghans working for American Special Operations forces had tortured and killed villagers in the area.

The ban was scheduled to take effect in two weeks in the province, Maidan Wardak, which is seen as a crucial area in defending the capital against the Taliban. If enforced, it would effectively exclude the American military’s main source of offensive firepower from the area, which lies southwest of Kabul and is used by the Taliban as a staging ground for attacks on the city.

By announcing the ban, the government signaled its willingness to take a far harder line against abuses linked to foreign troops than it has in the past. The action also reflected a deep distrust of international forces that is now widespread in Afghanistan, and the view held by many Afghans, President Hamid Karzai among them, that the coalition shares responsibility with the Taliban for the violence that continues to afflict the country.

Coalition officials said they were talking to their Afghan counterparts to clarify the ban and the allegations that prompted it. They declined to comment further.

Afghan officials said the measure was taken as a last resort. They said they had tried for weeks to get the coalition to cooperate with an investigation into claims that civilians had been killed, abducted or tortured by Afghans working for American Special Operations forces in Maidan Wardak. But the coalition was not responsive, they said. [Continue reading…]

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Michael Goldfarb: A McCarthyite liar who serves Netanyahu’s Israel

M.J. Rosenberg writes: Sunday’s New York Times features an important piece that will serve to alert progressives and Democrats to the latest brand of right-wing provocateur: young zealots who are not “movement” conservatives but who move from pro-Israel activism to the right at large.

Although they ally themselves with more traditional right-wingers, their central concern is Israel, and not so much Israel per se as supporting Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli right. Although they stridently adopt traditional right-wing stands on the usual litmus issues, those are just window dressing. Their driving issue is Israel.

The Times piece was occasioned by Goldfarb’s central role in promoting the line that Chuck Hagel is hostile to Israel. [Continue reading…]

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After being accused of torturing prisoner to death, Israel demands PA restore calm in West Bank

Reuters reports: Palestinian officials said on Sunday a Palestinian detainee who died in an Israeli prison was tortured before his death, but Israel said autopsy findings were preliminary and inconclusive.

The death of 30-year-old Arafat Jaradat in an Israeli jail on Saturday and a hunger strike by four inmates have flared tension across the occupied West Bank, where stone-throwing protesters clashed with Israeli soldiers on Sunday.

The Palestinian autopsy findings could further fuel unrest that has surged in the Palestinian Territories weeks before U.S. President Barack Obama is due to visit the region. Israel demanded the Palestinian Authority restore calm to the area.

Palestinian Minister of Prisoners Issa Qaraqea said Jaradat died as result of torture. The Palestinian Authority state pathologist was present at the autopsy on Jaradat’s body, which was carried out in Israel.

“There were marks of torture on the back, marks of torture on the chest, a deep wound on the upper side of the shoulder, wounds alongside the spine and marks of torture underneath the skin,” Qaraqea said, based on the Palestinian doctor’s basic findings.

But Israel’s Health Ministry said the injuries found in the autopsy could have been caused by the medical emergency team’s efforts to resuscitate Jaradat.

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Liberal racial hypocrisy

Falguni A. Sheth writes: Since the reelection of President Obama, liberals have made some bold admissions. Commentators like Touré Neblett of MSNBC’s The Cycle have enthusiastically and repeatedly defended the president’s authority to launch drones against anyone, including American citizens, if he suspects that they are “trying to kill us.”

At no point in his several defenses did Touré reconcile his position with once-popular Constitutional precepts that every person should be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and know the charges and evidence against him, and have the right to a fair trial. Neither did he explain why ordinary Americans should suspend their longstanding skepticism of politicians in power or withdraw the demand that the president and Congress be accountable for their actions, especially the taking of someone’s life.

Sadly, Touré isn’t alone in trusting the president’s complete discretion to decide which individuals are threats to American safety. Other liberals, from Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, to Touré’s MSNBC colleague Krystal Ball, to liberal bloggers also admit to a higher level of comfort with President Obama’s overseeing of otherwise troubling policies such as secret kill lists, targeted killings, and preemptive detentions of suspected terrorists. They are joined by 54% of Americans, who agree that the Obama Administration should have the discretion to kill anyone alleged to be senior al-Qaeda members.

The hoopla has been described by other pundits, liberal and conservative, as hypocrisy or, more accurately, shameless political double standards. Why exculpate a Democratic president for the same troubling, and extrajudicial, policies once engaged in by a Republican president? They’re right, of course. But there’s another double standard to worry about: one that assumes brown/black foreigners shouldn’t receive the same benefit of the doubt about their guilt that is regularly given to other Americans. It can only be ascribed to a racial double standard, one consistent with an aggressive jingoism. [Continue reading…]

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