Author Archives: News Sources

What John Brennan’s support for CIA torture meant for Sami al-Hajj

Amy Goodman writes: It takes courage to enter a warzone willingly, armed with a microphone and a camera as a journalist. That is what al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj was doing in December 2001, as he was entering Afghanistan from Pakistan to cover the US military operations there.

While his colleague was allowed in, al-Hajj was arrested, in what was to be a harrowing, nightmarish odyssey that lasted close to seven years, most of it spent as prisoner 345, the only journalist imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay – without charge. Al-Hajj is out now, back at work at al-Jazeera and reunited with his family. His recollections of the horror of detention by the United States should be front and center in the forthcoming confirmation hearings for President Barack Obama’s choice to lead the CIA, John Brennan.

It has been 11 years since the Guantánamo prison was opened, and four years since President Obama promised to close it within a year.

“He speaks very eloquently [about] what many hundreds of other detainees suffered, who cannot tell their story,” Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told me:

“The brutality he suffered in Afghanistan, the fact that he was turned over for political reasons or for a bounty, the arbitrariness of his detention in Guantanamo and the brutality of his treatment there.”

I sat down with Sami al-Hajj last month at al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar. [Continue reading…]

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Forming a Syrian opposition government: the time is now

Frederic C. Hof writes: The Syrian Opposition Council (SOC) formed in November 2012 faces no shortage of dire challenges as it tries to organize itself and give desperately needed political leadership to a heterogeneous hodgepodge of armed and unarmed opponents of the dying yet lethally venomous regime of Bashar al-Assad. How to uphold the primacy of citizenship in an increasingly sectarian struggle? How to maintain credibility with those who are fighting and dying? How to reach out to minorities and other fence sitters inside Syria? How to prepare for the practicalities of transition and governance? How to shape and influence international support for Syria’s revolution rather than being shaped and influenced by outsiders? How to eclipse internal rivalries and policy differences with selflessness and a unifying sense of mission encompassing a broadly acceptable vision of what the new Syria will be and how it will function?

In a just world, Syrians emerging from an induced political coma of some 50 years would not be faced with such daunting tasks. Starting with the 1958-1961 Egyptian-run United Arab Republic, Syrians have become accustomed to the heavy hand of intelligence services on political discourse. Over the years, frank political discussions even within families became guarded and circumscribed, a condition not significantly altered by the “Damascus Spring” experiment over a decade ago. Now it is all out there for discussion and decision. Syrians who, not long ago, could only choose among silence, torture, and departure are now being asked to practice teamwork, transparency, and compromise. There is nothing fair or just about this situation.

Yet fair or not, ready or not, Syria requires a government. For more than 40 years the Syrian Arab Republic Government (SARG) was the transmission belt for the desires of a narrow, family-based clique. That government is now neutered—the geographical scope of its assigned writ having shrunken dramatically over the past 21 months. Yet a functioning bureaucracy will be central to any transition plan due to the need for continuity of government. Ministries, departments, and agencies—including the security services—employ people and provide services, albeit often ineffectively and corruptly. The preservation of these organs, as imperfect as they are, can facilitate the rapid dispersal of international assistance post-Assad and reassure millions of Syrians who fear the chaos of revolutionary rule. Reform will come in time. It is important to distinguish government and its associated bureaucracy from the ruling clique, which has become a militia, willing and even eager to risk destroying Syria to try to save itself.

As I have written previously the old expression, you can’t beat something with nothing, applies in spades to Syria. No one—not even Bashar al-Assad himself—doubts the corruption, incompetence, and brutality of what remains of the old system. Yet millions of Syrians grudgingly adhere to “the Doctor.” They do so partly because they fear his jailers and torturers, but largely because they know not what comes next. This is the obstacle that a provisional government formed by the SOC can address and overcome. [Continue reading…]

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Pull back the curtain on drones

Micah Zenko writes: This week, President Obama nominated his homeland security adviser and deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism, John Brennan, to become the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In the coming weeks, a Senate committee will hold hearings, followed by a full Senate vote, that will likely confirm the appointment. The Senate must seize this narrow window of opportunity to publicly discuss, for the first time, the Obama administration’s policy of targeted killings by drones.

Though many ordinary Americans are understandably uneasy with these secret attacks, the politicians we elect have so far subjected the program to almost no official scrutiny.

There have been more than 400 drone strikes killing more than 3,000 people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia over the past decade. Yet Congress has refused to assess or even question the effectiveness, legality and sustainability of this lethal tactic, which has increasingly come to define U.S. foreign policy.

Brennan, more than any other single official, represents the program. [Continue reading…]

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The CIA’s double standards

Ted Gup writes: In the last week, the American public has been reminded of the Central Intelligence Agency’s contradictory attitude toward secrecy. In a critique of “Zero Dark Thirty,” published last Thursday in The Washington Post, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., defended the use of waterboarding and said that operatives used small plastic bottles, not buckets as depicted in the film, to carry out this interrogation method on three notable terrorists. On Sunday, The New York Times reported on the Justice Department’s case against a former C.I.A. officer, John C. Kiriakou, a critic of waterboarding who faces 30 months in prison for sharing the name of a covert operative with a reporter, who never used the name in print.

The contrast points to the real threat to secrecy, which comes not from the likes of Mr. Kiriakou but from the agency itself. The C.I.A. invokes secrecy to serve its interests but abandons it to burnish its image and discredit critics.

Over the years, I have interviewed many active and retired C.I.A. personnel who were not authorized to speak with me; they included heads of the agency’s clandestine service, analysts and well over 100 case officers, including station chiefs. Five former directors of central intelligence have spoken to me, mostly “on background.” Not one of these interviewees, to my knowledge, was taken to the woodshed, though our discussions invariably touched on classified territory.

Somewhere along the way, the agency that clung to “neither confirm nor deny” had morphed into one that selectively enforces its edicts on secrecy, using different standards depending on rank, message, internal politics and whim. [Continue reading…]

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Maliki’s dangerous game is increasing sectarian dangers

Ranj Alaaldin writes: In 1964, the Shia population of Iraq’s south gathered in the holy city of Karbala to protest against the sectarian, predominantly Sunni, government of Abdul Salam Al Arif.

Witness accounts, as well as US and UK diplomatic cables, say that tens of thousands, perhaps over 100,000, rallied against the regime, which had come to power in Iraq through a military coup the previous year.

Through the rest of the 1960s tensions continued to increase between the authoritarian, Sunni-dominated government and the Shia community, marginalised by a range of government policies that made life harder for them.

In the decades that followed, the Shia were increasingly and violently oppressed under Iraq’s Baath regime and its dictatorial leader, Saddam Hussein.

Now, almost 50 years later, the tables have turned, and Iraq’s Sunni population is complaining – peacefully and violently – of being excluded and discriminated against.

About 60,000 were in the streets of the Anbar city of Fallujah on Friday. Recent weeks have seen many such protests, in Anbar and across the primarily Sunni provinces of the north, the region that formed the heart of the Sunni insurgency after Hussein was deposed.

These people are protesting against a lack of political recognition, failure of basic services and alleged indiscriminate anti-terror raids and arrests.

The demonstrations started after the controversial arrest of the bodyguards of the country’s finance minister Rafi Issawi, a Sunni.

Those arrests came just a year after the equally controversial arrest warrant for the country’s vice-president, Tariq Al Hashimi, who is now living in Turkey.

All of this reflects the dysfunctional politics in Baghdad. Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki has failed to lead anything even remotely resembling a serious, efficient and effective government. [Continue reading…]

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Cairo’s new normal: Protests spawn a world of walls and barricades

Jared Malsin reports: Ramadan Romih, the heavyset manager of the White House Net, an Internet café up the street from the U.S. embassy in Cairo, sat on a chair on the sidewalk outside his shop, smoking a large tobacco water pipe. He hasn’t had many customers recently, he says, because of the high concrete wall blocking the street next to his shop. The wall was built by the Egyptian government this past November to ward off demonstrators from nearby Tahrir Square away from the embassy.

Romih, 41, commutes downtown from a working-class neighborhood near the pyramids. His shop ordinarily depends on foot traffic from the bustling business districts surrounding Tahrir Square, but now because of an elaborate system of walls and barbed-wire roadblocks built by the authorities, the area near the embassy has been cut off from the core of the downtown.

As a result, he said, his business is “at zero.” By late afternoon that day his revenue was only 20 Egyptian pounds, or a little over $3. “People should dig tunnels like they do in Gaza,” he said, waving his water-pipe hose at the unsightly wall.

Two of the storefronts adjacent to White House Net were gutted, Romih said, during recent clashes between demonstrators and police. The burned-out shell of a car still lies upside down in the road in front of the shop. Across the street, men in business suits were hoisting themselves over a tall iron fence in order to get home from work, handing briefcases to one another over the top of the barrier. Armed security men stationed at a checkpoint leading to the embassy looked on.

Because of the government’s walls, scenes like this one are the new normal in the upscale neighborhood of Garden City and other areas south of Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the winter 2011 uprising that ended the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. [Continue reading…]

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Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?

On the Midway Islands, near the heart of the Pacific Trash Gyre, thousands of birds die after consuming the detritus of modern civilization. Photo: Chris Jordan

Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich write: Virtually every past civilization has eventually undergone collapse, a loss of socio-political-economic complexity usually accompanied by a dramatic decline in population size. Some, such as those of Egypt and China, have recovered from collapses at various stages; others, such as that of Easter Island or the Classic Maya, were apparently permanent. All those previous collapses were local or regional; elsewhere, other societies and civilizations persisted unaffected. Sometimes, as in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, new civilizations rose in succession. In many, if not most, cases, overexploitation of the environment was one proximate or an ultimate cause.

But today, for the first time, humanity’s global civilization – the worldwide, increasingly interconnected, highly technological society in which we all are to one degree or another, embedded — is threatened with collapse by an array of environmental problems. Humankind finds itself engaged in what Prince Charles described as ‘an act of suicide on a grand scale’, facing what the UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor John Beddington called a ‘perfect storm’ of environmental problems. The most serious of these problems show signs of rapidly escalating severity, especially climate disruption. But other elements could potentially also contribute to a collapse: an accelerating extinction of animal and plant populations and species, which could lead to a loss of ecosystem services essential for human survival; land degradation and land-use change; a pole-to-pole spread of toxic compounds; ocean acidification and eutrophication (dead zones); worsening of some aspects of the epidemiological environment (factors that make human populations susceptible to infectious diseases); depletion of increasingly scarce resources, including especially groundwater, which is being overexploited in many key agricultural areas; and resource wars. These are not separate problems; rather they interact in two gigantic complex adaptive systems: the biosphere system and the human socio-economic system. The negative manifestations of these interactions are often referred to as ‘the human predicament’, and determining how to prevent it from generating a global collapse is perhaps the foremost challenge confronting humanity.

The human predicament is driven by overpopulation, overconsumption of natural resources and the use of unnecessarily environmentally damaging technologies and socio-economic-political arrangements to service Homo sapiens’ aggregate consumption. How far the human population size now is above the planet’s long-term carrying capacity is suggested (conservatively) by ecological footprint analysis. It shows that to support today’s population of seven billion sustainably (i.e. with business as usual, including current technologies and standards of living) would require roughly half an additional planet; to do so, if all citizens of Earth consumed resources at the US level would take four to five more Earths. Adding the projected 2.5 billion more people by 2050 would make the human assault on civilization’s life-support systems disproportionately worse, because almost everywhere people face systems with nonlinear responses, in which environmental damage increases at a rate that becomes faster with each additional person. Of course, the claim is often made that humanity will expand Earth’s carrying capacity dramatically with technological innovation, but it is widely recognized that technologies can both add and subtract from carrying capacity. The plough evidently first expanded it and now appears to be reducing it. Overall, careful analysis of the prospects does not provide much confidence that technology will save us or that gross domestic product can be disengaged from resource use. [Continue reading…]

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New questions over CIA nominee Brennan’s denial of civilian drone deaths

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports: Claims by the Central Intelligence Agency’s new director-designate that the US intelligence services received ‘no information’ about any civilians killed by US drones in the year prior to June 2011 do not appear to bear scrutiny.

John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to take over the CIA, had claimed in a major speech in summer 2011 that there had not been ‘a single collateral death’ in a covert US strike in the past year due to the precision of drones. He later qualified his statement, saying that at the time of his comments he had ‘no information’ to the contrary.

Yet just three months beforehand, a major US drone strike had killed 42 Pakistanis, most of them civilians. As well as being widely reported by the media at the time, Islamabad’s concerns regarding those deaths were also directly conveyed to the ‘highest levels of the Administration’ by Washington’s then-ambassador to Pakistan, it has been confirmed to the Bureau.

This confirmation suggests that senior US officials were aware of dozens of civilian deaths just weeks before Brennan’s claims to the contrary.

The CIA drone strike in Pakistan on March 17, which bombed the town of Datta Khel in North Waziristan and killed an estimated 42 people, has always seemed a contradiction of Brennan’s official statement.

The attack was later justified by an anonymous US official as a so-called ‘signature strike’ where the identities of those killed was unknown. They insisted that ‘a large group of heavily armed men, some of whom were clearly connected to al Qaeda and all of whom acted in a manner consistent with AQ-linked militants, were killed.’

In fact the gathering was a jirga, or tribal meeting, called to resolve a local mining dispute. Dozens of tribal elders and local policemen died, along with a small number of Taliban. [Continue reading…]

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Japan and China step up drone race as tension builds over disputed islands

The Guardian reports: Drones have taken centre stage in an escalating arms race between China and Japan as they struggle to assert their dominance over disputed islands in the East China Sea.

China is rapidly expanding its nascent drone programme, while Japan has begun preparations to purchase an advanced model from the US. Both sides claim the drones will be used for surveillance, but experts warn the possibility of future drone skirmishes in the region’s airspace is “very high”.

Tensions over the islands – called the Diaoyu by China and the Senkaku by Japan – have ratcheted up in past weeks. Chinese surveillance planes flew near the islands four times in the second half of December, according to Chinese state media, but were chased away each time by Japanese F-15 fighter jets. Neither side has shown any signs of backing down.

Japan’s new conservative administration of Shinzo Abe has placed a priority on countering the perceived Chinese threat to the Senkakus since it won a landslide victory in last month’s general election. Soon after becoming prime minister, Abe ordered a review of Japan’s 2011-16 mid-term defence programme, apparently to speed up the acquisition of between one and three US drones.

Under Abe, a nationalist who wants a bigger international role for the armed forces, Japan is expected to increase defence spending for the first time in 11 years in 2013. The extra cash will be used to increase the number of military personnel and upgrade equipment. The country’s deputy foreign minister, Akitaka Saiki, summoned the Chinese ambassador to Japan on Tuesday to discuss recent “incursions” of Chinese ships into the disputed territory.

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Hagel and the neo-McCarthyite Israel lobby

The Emergency Committee for Israel launched a website to attack Hagel's nomination.

Bernard Avishai writes: I think it is time to acknowledge, bluntly, that certain major Jewish organizations, indeed, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations — also, the ADL, AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee, political groups like the Republican Jewish Coalition, along with their various columnists, pundits, and list-serves — are among the most consistent purveyors of McCarthyite-style outrages in America today. Are there greater serial defamers of public officials in fake campaigns against defamation? Starting with Andrew Young and the late Charles Percy, and on to Chas Freeman and (now) Chuck Hagel, the game has been to keep Congresspeople and civil servants who might be skeptical of Israel’s occupation and apologetics in a posture that can only be called exaggerated tact.

Fault Israel and you are accused of faulting Jews in our collective state, or, the same thing, overlooking the venality of our enemies — things only an anti-Semite would do and, of all times, in the wake of the Holocaust. This is not a charge anyone in public life wants to suffer or try to deny. My Israeli friends love that old Borsch-belt joke, that anti-Semitism means disliking Jews more than necessary. For American Jewish organizations, the very idea that dislike is ever warranted is proof of bigotry, like Philip Roth’s early novels were proof of “self-hatred.”

AIPAC et al know that if American politicians — and especially those fighting routinely for Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio — are not cowed by the fear of being branded as anti-Semitic they may not be embarrassed into backing Israeli actions ritualistically. Where is the shame and who is our Murrow?

I won’t presume to go through the credentials that make Chuck Hagel fit for appointment as Defense Secretary; I saw and heard him in person only once. I also won’t repeat, or defend him against, all the fatuous charges leveled against him. Others have done this better than I could. (If you want a comprehensive list of the AIPAC-inspired letters Hagel refused to sign, you can find it here.)

Suffice it to say that Hagel is a man of independent judgment whose views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict track pretty much exactly with those of Haaretz. He was distinguished guest at J Street’s first national conference. Nothing he’s said has not been said by leaders like Ehud Olmert and intelligence chief Ephraim Halevy. Hagel is also a man, like George McGovern, who having served with distinction in the military knows the unknown dangers of resorting to military force without a clear diplomatic strategy and except as a last resort. So he refuses to speak glibly about using force against Iran the same way he refused to endorse war with Iraq. A Vietnam purple heart, he would in retrospect have engaged with the Viet Cong. Should he not now endorse engagement with the Taliban or Hamas, for that matter?

Why should this stance be thought anathema to Jewish organizations? Let’s get real. The latter throw their weight around, presumably on behalf of us Israelis, but really on behalf of the Israeli right, whose orthodoxy and pathos they relate to more readily than to Israeli peace advocates. The weight they have derives from their being able to hold American politicians to endorsing a “special relationship” with Israel, where special means unconditional, so that (as James Baker and Howard Dean discovered) even the desire for “even-handedness” is treachery. [Continue reading…]

Yousef Munayyer notes: What the debate on Hagel is sorely missing is a loud public voice akin to Colin Powell’s on Obama’s faith in 2008, who would respond to allegations that Hagel isn’t pro-Israel by simple stating, So what if he’s not? Hagel is, after all, an American nominated for the role of U.S. Defense Secretary and shouldn’t be pro-Israel or pro-any-country-other-than-the-United-States. If he was, that should lead to controversy.

This debate, however, has it the other way around because it is grounded in the notion that American support for Israel is as American as our Constitution. It isn’t, and it can’t and should never be.

Yet, this type of debate, framed around “pro-Israel” interests, dominates mainstream discussions about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and specifically as it relates to Israel/Palestine. For as long as that is the case, Washington is only kidding itself if it thinks it can ever successfully mediate Israeli-Palestinian peace.

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Hagel’s uncommon honesty

It is widely reported that President Obama will nominate former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense today.

Peter Beinart writes: Hagel says in public what others only say in private. In his 2005 book, The Much Too Promised Land, former Clinton administration Middle East hand Aaron Miller notes that “of all my conversations [about the Israel debate in Congress], the one with Hagel stands apart for its honesty and clarity.” That’s because when Hagel told Miller that “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here,” he was saying the same thing that people who work in Congress and the executive branch say all the time. As Thomas Friedman has noted, “I am certain that the vast majority of U.S. senators and policy makers quietly believe exactly what Hagel believes on Israel.” But the operative word is quietly. I’ve also heard many government officials, some of them Jewish, say things similar to what Hagel is now being flayed for having told Miller. The difference is that those other officials first confirmed that they were speaking off the record. One even lowered his voice and closed the door.

Hagel’s uncommon honesty isn’t restricted to Israel. Among the statements that critics now decry is Hagel’s 2007 declaration that “People say we’re not fighting for oil [in Iraq]. Of course we are.” In The Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol calls Hagel’s statement “vulgar and disgusting.” What Kristol doesn’t note is that the same article that quotes Hagel also quotes noted radical Alan Greenspan saying virtually the same thing. The difference: Greenspan said it in his memoir, published once he was safely retired from government service.

As John Judis notes, Hagel was considered a plausible Republican presidential candidate in 2008 until his blunt criticism of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies ended his career in the GOP. He is, therefore, one of the very few public figures in recent memory — Joe Lieberman, whose blunt support for the Bush administration’s Iraq policies ended his career in the Democratic Party, is another — to have forfeited a national role in his political party because of his policy views. In the process, Hagel has incurred the wrath of the same hawkish “pro-Israel” forces whose influence he was rash enough to acknowledge. He has done, in short, exactly what people who aspire to jobs like secretary of defense in Democratic administrations learn not to do.

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Brennan to become Central Assassination Agency chief

It looks like the CIA’s decade-long shift from being an intelligence agency to becoming an assassination agency is soon to become irreversible as President Obama’s chief assassin takes over.

The New York Times reports: President Obama will announce on Monday that John O. Brennan, his counterterrorism adviser and a career Central Intelligence Agency officer, is his choice to head the agency, two months after David H. Petraeus stepped down after admitting an extramarital affair, a spokesman for the National Security Council said.

Mr. Brennan’s nomination will be announced at 1 p.m. along with that of Chuck Hagel, the former maverick Republican senator from Nebraska, whom the president has chosen for secretary of defense, said the spokesman, Thomas Vietor.

In Mr. Obama’s first term, Mr. Brennan, 57, has played a central role in the oversight of Mr. Obama’s use of targeted killing of suspected terrorists using drones in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. He has become one of the president’s most trusted advisers, and administration officials had said that the C.I.A. job was his for the asking.

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Assad offers only more of the same — mukhabarat brutality

Hassan Hassan writes: The world still blinks every time that Bashar Al Assad speaks, as if it has not learnt anything from 21 months of violence.

In his speech yesterday – his ninth since the uprising began – the dictator offered a plan that would include a lengthy, complicated process of gradual change and “truth and reconciliation”. That would, in theory, lead to a new coalition government and a new constitution.

The speech was preceded by an aggressive two-week diplomatic campaign by the regime’s allies and the UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. That renewed push for diplomacy followed 140 countries’ recognition of the National Coalition as the sole representative of the Syrian people, Nato Patriot missiles and military personnel that were dispatched to Turkey’s border, and pledges of increased support for the opposition.

The diplomatic overture by the regime is part of a Russian-backed plan that would keep Al Assad in power until presidential elections in the summer of 2014. And the diplomacy appears to have succeeded in slowing down aid to the rebels, with reports that arms supplies are drying up. But the speech yesterday should remind the world that this dictator has no place in a future Syria and that support for the rebels is the only way forward.

Russia probably pressured on Al Assad to announce a plan of reconciliation. But the speech sounded more vindictive, dismissive and exclusivist than even his previous bombast. For example, he said the plan was directed at only segments of the opposition, and that “those who reject the offer, I say to them: why would you reject an offer that was not meant for you in the first place?” In other points, he emphasised vengeance rather than reconciliation. He also blamed the rebels for the destruction of infrastructure and for cutting off electricity and communications.

“Syria accepts advice but never accepts orders,” he said. “All of what you heard in the past in terms of plans and initiatives were soap bubbles, just like the [Arab] Spring.” [Continue reading…]

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Are the Arab monarchies next?

Hicham Ben Abdallah El Alaoui writes: The Arab Spring is not an outcome, it is a process. For those countries at the forefront of regional transformation, the fundamental question is can democracy become institutionalised? Though progress has been uneven and the outcomes of many state-society struggles have yet to be resolved, the answer is a cautious yes. In at least a few countries, we are witnessing the onset of democratic institutionalisation: whether the process of reform and transformation spreads to other parts of the Middle East depends on many factors — religious tensions, political mobilisation, regime adaptations, geopolitics. Meanwhile North Africa provides the most promising preview of the future.

Democratic institutionalisation means the healthy convergence of politics around three arenas of competition: elections, parliaments and constitutions. When these institutions are robust and durable, then the democratic governments they engender are relatively safe from radical groups, reactionary forces and authoritarian backsliding (due to alternation: democracies that uphold the rule of law and hold regular elections require that power alternates between competing parties).

In Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, this process is unfolding, if at an unsteady pace. All three have had founding legislative elections that were far more competitive and pluralistic than those held in their authoritarian past. In Tunisia, the project to re-craft the national constitution nears completion by the Constituent Assembly, which itself was the product of electoral competition. The crisis there has two dimensions: the new government’s passivity in response to Salafist violence (which came to an end after the attack on the US embassy in Tunis) and the delay in getting economic reform under way, especially in the poorest regions. In spite of often acute tensions and conflicts between different political interest groups, all but the tiniest minority have accepted that democracy is now the name of the game. [Continue reading…]

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British fascist leader gets jailed in the U.K. after illegally sneaking into the U.S.

What happens when someone tries to enter the U.S. using someone else’s passport? That’s what the leader of the neo-fascist English Defense League did and he got caught because his fingerprints didn’t match those associated with the passport he was using — a passport lent to him by a similar-looking friend. But then comes the strange part of the story: having been caught he then walked out of JFK airport, entering the U.S. illegally. How does that work?

The leader of the English Defence League has been jailed for 10 months for using someone else’s passport to travel to the United States.

Stephen Lennon, 30, pleaded guilty to possession of a false identity document with improper intention, contrary to the Identity Documents Act 2010, at Southwark crown court in London.

The court heard Lennon, who had previously been refused entry to the US, used his friend Andrew McMaster’s passport to travel to New York in September. He used a self-check-in kiosk to board the flight at Heathrow, and was allowed through when the document was checked in the bag-drop area.

But when he arrived at JFK, customs officials who took his fingerprints realised he was not McMaster. Lennon was asked to attend a second interview but left the airport, entering the US illegally.

He stayed one night and travelled back to the UK using his own passport, which bears the name Paul Harris. The EDL leader uses several aliases.

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The torturers roam free while the whistleblower goes to jail

Scott Shane reports: Looking back, John C. Kiriakou admits he should have known better. But when the F.B.I. called him a year ago and invited him to stop by and “help us with a case,” he did not hesitate.

In his years as a C.I.A. operative, after all, Mr. Kiriakou had worked closely with F.B.I. agents overseas. Just months earlier, he had reported to the bureau a recruiting attempt by someone he believed to be an Asian spy.

“Anything for the F.B.I.,” Mr. Kiriakou replied.

Only an hour into what began as a relaxed chat with the two agents — the younger one who traded Pittsburgh Steelers talk with him and the senior investigator with the droopy eye — did he begin to realize just who was the target of their investigation.

Finally, the older agent leaned in close and said, by Mr. Kiriakou’s recollection, “In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that right now we’re executing a search warrant at your house and seizing your electronic devices.”

On Jan. 25, Mr. Kiriakou is scheduled to be sentenced to 30 months in prison as part of a plea deal in which he admitted violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by e-mailing the name of a covert C.I.A. officer to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. The law was passed in 1982, aimed at radical publications that deliberately sought to out undercover agents, exposing their secret work and endangering their lives.

In more than six decades of fraught interaction between the agency and the news media, John Kiriakou is the first current or former C.I.A. officer to be convicted of disclosing classified information to a reporter.

Mr. Kiriakou, 48, earned numerous commendations in nearly 15 years at the C.I.A., some of which were spent undercover overseas chasing Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. He led the team in 2002 that found Abu Zubaydah, a terrorist logistics specialist for Al Qaeda, and other militants whose capture in Pakistan was hailed as a notable victory after the Sept. 11 attacks.

He got mixed reviews at the agency, which he left in 2004 for a consulting job. Some praised his skills, first as an analyst and then as an overseas operative; others considered him a loose cannon.

Mr. Kiriakou first stumbled into the public limelight by speaking out about waterboarding on television in 2007, quickly becoming a source for national security journalists, including this reporter, who turned up in Mr. Kiriakou’s indictment last year as Journalist B. When he gave the covert officer’s name to the freelancer, he said, he was simply trying to help a writer find a potential source and had no intention or expectation that the name would ever become public. In fact, it did not surface publicly until long after Mr. Kiriakou was charged.

He is remorseful, up to a point. “I should never have provided the name,” he said on Friday in the latest of a series of interviews. “I regret doing it, and I never will do it again.”

At the same time, he argues, with the backing of some former agency colleagues, that the case — one of an unprecedented string of six prosecutions under President Obama for leaking information to the news media — was unfair and ill-advised as public policy.

His supporters are an unlikely collection of old friends, former spies, left-leaning critics of the government and conservative Christian opponents of torture. Oliver Stone sent a message of encouragement, as did several professors at Liberty University, where Mr. Kiriakou has taught. They view the case as an outrage against a man who risked his life to defend the country.

Whatever his loquaciousness with journalists, they say, he neither intended to damage national security nor did so. Some see a particular injustice in the impending imprisonment of Mr. Kiriakou, who in his first 2007 appearance on ABC News defended the agency’s resort to desperate measures but also said that he had come to believe that waterboarding was torture and should no longer be used in American interrogations.

Bruce Riedel, a retired veteran C.I.A. officer who led an Afghan war review for Mr. Obama and turned down an offer to be considered for C.I.A. director in 2009, said Mr. Kiriakou, who worked for him in the 1990s, was “an exceptionally good intelligence officer” who did not deserve to go to prison.

“To me, the irony of this whole thing is, very simply, that he’s going to be the only C.I.A. officer to go to jail over torture,” even though he publicly denounced torture, Mr. Riedel said. “It’s deeply ironic under the Democratic president who ended torture.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama to nominate Hagel for defense secretary

Reuters reports: President Barack Obama will nominate former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel to be his defense secretary and an announcement could come on Monday, a Democratic congressional aide said.

The choice will likely set up a confirmation battle in the Senate over whether the former Nebraska senator and Vietnam veteran is a strong enough supporter of key U.S. ally Israel and over his past calls for military cuts.

The Obama administration backed down from a tough Senate confirmation battle over Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, who was Obama’s first pick to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. Rice withdrew her name from consideration after drawing heavy fire from Republicans for remarks she made in the aftermath of a September 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

“The administration has a lot of work to do on Hagel,” a Democratic Senate aide said.

“He is in a weaker position now than Rice ever was because Rice would have rallied Democrats behind her. The administration floated Hagel’s name, then neglected to defend him effectively when his critics started taking shots,” the aide said.

However, the White House is confident it can weather criticism of Hagel’s record and garner enough votes from both sides of the political aisle to get his nomination through committee and win confirmation in the Democratic-led Senate.

“The president wants him, because he trusts him and he’s an independent voice,” a source close to the situation said.

The source said Hagel had received high-level messages of reassurance in recent days that his nomination was on track despite a campaign by his critics aimed at derailing it.

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