Author Archives: News Sources

A stinging rebuke of the DOJ on access to counsel at Gitmo

Scott Horton writes: The Bush Administration originally created special-detention facilities at Guantánamo on the theory that—given the unique historical provenance of the base, which was secured under a lease at the end of the war with Spain on terms Havana no longer recognizes—no court anywhere in the world would have jurisdiction to deal with the complaints of prisoners held there. Consequently, it would be easier to subject the prisoners to torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment the likes of which America’s prisoners in wartime had never before experienced. The Supreme Court soon put an end to this exercise, and a series of court rulings ensured that indeed there would be a form of court review and that prisoners would have access to counsel.

While Barack Obama campaigned on a promise to end torture and to humanize and then close Guantánamo, this promise has been left unfulfilled, in part because of Obama’s lack of resolve and in part because of the obstructionist games practiced by Republicans. Obama has chosen to disengage from the Guantánamo issue, and in doing so has essentially placed operations there on autopilot. And that has produced a remarkable degree of backsliding to the practices of the Bush era.

A clear-cut example recently emerged when lawyers serving as defense counsel at Guantánamo discovered that they were arbitrarily being denied access to their clients on the orders of a military commandant, despite a series of court orders dating back to 2004 that had guaranteed them access. The Obama Administration had put in place new rules under which only those prisoners who are actively challenging their detention are guaranteed the right to talk to counsel; otherwise the commandant has the right to deny access. Moreover, to have any access to clients at all, the lawyers were being pressed to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” with the Department of Defense under which they consented to these new rules. [Continue reading…]

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The ‘only in America’ myth

Nima Shirazi writes: “Only in America” is a refrain heard time and again in this country’s political discourse. According to both Democrats and Republicans, the United States is a singular nation: one in which anyone can achieve anything if you have a dream and the will to work hard; a place wherein upward mobility is assumed and someone born into crushing poverty and brutal socioeconomic conditions can reach the highest levels of wealth, success and power by sheer grit and determination.

Obviously the reality in this exceptional nation of ours is quite different.

Nevertheless, an MSNBC montage perfectly illustrates the ubiquity of this mythologized narrative of American up-by-your-bootstrapism at this past week’s Republican National Convention. Watch here:

Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan, who is worth millions due to investments and inheritance from his wife’s trust fund, spoke of menial labor as a stepping stone for greatness:

When I was waiting tables, washing dishes, or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life. I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happiness for myself. That’s what we do in this country. That’s the American Dream.

Only in America. [Continue reading…]

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Designating Haqqanis as terrorists will undermine peace talks, group says

Reuters reports: The United States’ decision to designate the Haqqani network as a terrorist organization shows it is not sincere about peace efforts in Afghanistan, senior commanders of the group said on Friday.

The move will also bring hardship for U.S. Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who is being held by the militants, the commanders told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.

The United States is designating the Pakistan-based Haqqani network, accused of high-profile attacks in Afghanistan, as a terrorist organization, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Friday, in a move that would trigger sanctions against the group and turn up the heat on Pakistan’s government.

US officials have long accused Pakistan of supporting the network, an allegation Islamabad denies.

The Haqqanis, who are allied with the Afghan Taliban, are some of the most experienced fighters in Afghanistan and have carried out several high-profile attacks on Western targets.

Senior commanders from the network said the decision to designate the group as terrorists could endanger efforts to reach a peaceful settlement to the Afghan conflict before most NATO combat troops withdraw by the end of 2014.

“It means the United States is not sincere in their talks. They are on the one hand claiming to look for a political solution to the Afghan issue while on the other they are declaring us terrorists,” said one of the commanders.

“So how can peace talks succeed in bringing peace to Afghanistan?”

Whether or not to brand the group a terrorist organization has been the subject of intense debate within the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama, with some officials arguing it would have little real impact, but would risk setting back Afghan reconciliation efforts.

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A looming nuclear arms race between Pakistan and India

Tom Hundley writes: One of the more tenacious conspiracy theories that have taken root in the hothouse of Pakistan’s capital is that Osama bin Laden was not killed in the May 2, 2011, Navy SEAL raid on his compound in Abbottabad — that, in fact, he had already been dead for years, killed in the caves of Tora Bora.

According to this theory, the CIA had been keeping bin Laden’s corpse on ice, literally, ready to be resurrected at a moment when his “death” could better serve U.S. interests. That moment came when the SEALs decided to conduct a dry run of their long-planned operation to snatch Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Bin Laden’s thawing corpse was brought along as cover in case the exercise blew up — and as a devious bit of political theater to besmirch Pakistan’s reputation if all went well.

What keep conspiracy theories like this alive are bits and pieces of half-baked evidence that could be construed to support a deeply held belief. In this case, it is the belief — accepted across the board in Pakistan, from the top brass of its military down to the dusty gaggle of taxi drivers who awaited me each morning outside my Islamabad hotel — that the United States has a not-so-secret plan to snatch Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

The United States, which is duly concerned that Pakistan’s nukes could fall into the wrong hands, almost certainly does have a plan to neutralize those weapons in the event of a coup or total state collapse. When the question was put to Condoleezza Rice during her 2005 confirmation hearings to become secretary of state, she replied, “We have noted this problem, and we are prepared to try to deal with it.”

“Try” is the key word. Military experts — American, Pakistani, and Indian — agree that grabbing or disarming all of Pakistan’s nukes at this stage would be something close to mission impossible. As one senior Pakistani general told me, “We look at the stories in the U.S. media about taking away our nuclear weapons and this definitely concerns us, so countermeasures have been developed accordingly.” Such steps have included building more warheads and spreading them out over a larger number of heavily guarded locations. This, of course, also makes the logistics of securing them against theft by homegrown terrorists that much more complicated.

Fears of that terrifying possibility were heightened in August, when a group of militants assaulted a Pakistani base that some believe houses nuclear weapons components. Nine militants and one soldier were killed in a two-hour firefight at the Kamra air force base. The local media immediately floated the theory that this, too, was part of the American plot to steal Pakistan’s nukes. But more disturbing than any conspiracy theory is the reality that this was the fourth attack in five years on the Kamra base, just 20 miles from the capital. At least five other sensitive military installations have also come under attack by militants since 2007.

Yet, though the danger of a loose Pakistani nuke certainly deserves scrupulous attention, it may not be the severest nuclear threat emanating from South Asia, as I came to realize after interviewing more than a dozen experts in Pakistan, India, and the United States this summer. Since the 9/11 attacks, preventing the world’s most dangerous weapons from falling into the hands of the world’s most dangerous actors — whether al Qaeda terrorists or Iranian mullahs — has understandably been America’s stated priority. Yet the gravest danger — not only for the region, but for the United States itself — may be the South Asian incarnation of a Cold War phenomenon: a nuclear arms race.

Pakistan, with an estimated 90 to 120 warheads, is now believed to be churning out more plutonium than any other country on the planet — thanks to two Chinese-built reactors that are now online, a third that is undergoing trials, and a fourth that is scheduled to become operational by 2016. It has already passed India in total number of warheads and is on course to overtake Britain as the world’s No. 5 nuclear power. Pakistan could end up in third place, behind Russia and the United States, within a decade. [Continue reading…]

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The formation of Alawite militias in the Kassab region in Syria

At Syria Comment, Mohammad D. writes: There are important new developments in Lattakia and its surrounding recently. The violence that started a few months back in the East and North of the city itself has not subsided. Yesterday a rumor spread that the FSA had shelled al-Qurdaha, something its leaders have been wishing to do from day one. I think it is just a rumor, but, the big news is that the Alawis have started to form armed groups in some of the villages which are in direct contact with the Sunni villages.

The Alawis in areas that are not near the front lines have also begun amassing small arms. They have also begun to form similar groups. One of these groups appeared in the area of Jabal al-Turkman (North of Lattakia). These new fighters are known locally as al-Lijan al-Sha’biyah (اللجان الشعبية). So far they have light arms only. The Assad regular troops are doing the heavy bombing and own the heavy arms. Here is a link to their facebook page, which lists them as al-Muqawamah al-Suriyah (The Syrian Resistance).

In this Facebook page, one can see that the newly formed group has been engaging in military action against the Sunnis from that area. The Sunnis (Turkmen) had formed their own brigade, which is fighting under the banner of the Free Syria Army (FSA). The FSA has attacked the nearby Alawi villages on many occasions. One Alawi village; al-Sarayah, has been emptied of its inhabitants, except the men who are armed and fighting along side others in al-Lijan al-Sha’biyah. The Sunnis have also left their villages and gone to either Turkey or Lattakia city. Lattakia is now overflowing with refugees and villagers escaping violence. There are lots of people from Allepo there also. The sports complex is packed with the poor refugees, The rich ones are renting apartments or rooms. Also, to the East of Lattakia in al-Haffe region, fighting is still raging on. The sound of artillery and explosions can be heard in Lattakia. The situation on the coast is explosive and growing more dangerous every week. [Continue reading…]

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Are Chinese banks hiding ‘the mother of all debt bombs’?

Minxin Pei writes: Financial collapses may have different immediate triggers, but they all originate from the same cause: an explosion of credit. This iron law of financial calamity should make us very worried about the consequences of easy credit in China in recent years. From the beginning of 2009 to the end of June this year, Chinese banks have issued roughly 35 trillion yuan ($5.4 trillion) in new loans, equal to 73 percent of China’s GDP in 2011. About two-thirds of these loans were made in 2009 and 2010, as part of Beijing’s stimulus package. Unlike deficit-financed stimulus packages in the West, China’s colossal stimulus package of 2009 was funded mainly by bank credit (at least 60 percent, to be exact), not government borrowing.

Flooding the economy with trillions of yuan in new loans did accomplish the principal objective of the Chinese government — maintaining high economic growth in the midst of a global recession. While Beijing earned plaudits around the world for its decisiveness and economic success, excessive loose credit was fueling a property bubble, funding the profligacy of state-owned enterprises, and underwriting ill-conceived infrastructure investments by local governments. The result was predictable: years of painstaking efforts to strengthen the Chinese banking system were undone by a spate of careless lending as new bad loans began to build up inside the financial sector.

When the Chinese Central Bank (the People’s Bank of China) and banking regulators sounded the alarm in late 2010, it was already too late. By that time, local governments had taken advantage of loose credit to amass a mountain of debt, most of it squandered on prestige projects or economically wasteful investments. The National Audit Office of China acknowledged in June 2011 that local government debt totaled 10.7 trillion yuan (U.S. $1.7 trillion) at the end of 2010. However, Professor Victor Shih of Northwestern University has estimated that the real amount of local government debt was between 15.4 and 20.1 trillion yuan, or between 40 and 50% of China’s GDP. Of this amount, he further estimated, the local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), which are financial entities established by local governments to invest in infrastructure and other projects, owed between 9.7 and 14.4 trillion yuan at the end of 2010.

Anybody with some knowledge of the state of health of LGFVs would shudder at these numbers. If anything, Chinese LGFVs are known mainly for their unique ability to sink perfectly good money into bottomless holes in the ground. So taking on such a huge mountain of debt can mean only one thing — a future wave of default when the projects into which LGFVs have piled funds fail to yield viable returns to service the debt. If 10 percent of these loans turn bad, a very conservative estimate, we are talking about total bad loans in the range of 1 to 1.4 trillion yuan. If the share of dud loans should reach 20 percent, a far more likely scenario, Chinese banks would have to write down 2 to 2.8 trillion yuan, a move sure to destroy their balance sheets. [Continue reading…]

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How Google builds its maps — and what it means for the future of everything

Alexis Madrigal writes: Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that’s the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you’re drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B — and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built. It’s the first time the company has let anyone watch how the project it calls GT, or “Ground Truth,” actually works.

The company opened up at a key moment in its evolution. The company began as an online search company that made money almost exclusively from selling ads based on what you were querying for. But then the mobile world exploded. Where you’re searching has become almost important as what you’re searching. Google responded by creating an operating system, brand, and ecosystem in Android that has become the only significant rival to Apple’s iOS.

And for good reason. If Google’s mission is to organize all the world’s information, the most important challenge — far larger than indexing the web — is to take the world’s physical information and make it accessible and useful.

“If you look at the offline world, the real world in which we live, that information is not entirely online,” Manik Gupta, the senior product manager for Google Maps, told me. “Increasingly as we go about our lives, we are trying to bridge that gap between what we see in the real world and [the online world], and Maps really plays that part.”

This is not just a theoretical concern. Mapping systems matter on phones precisely because they are the interface between the offline and online worlds. If you’re at all like me, you use mapping more than any other application except for the communications suite (phone, email, social networks, and text messaging).

Google is locked in a battle with the world’s largest company, Apple, about who will control the future of mobile phones. Whereas Apple’s strengths are in product design, supply chain management, and retail marketing, Google’s most obvious realm of competitive advantage is in information. Geo data — and the apps built to use it — are where Google can win just by being Google. That didn’t matter on previous generations of iPhones because they used Google Maps, but now Apple’s created its own service. How the two operating systems incorporate geo data and present it to users could become a key battleground in the phone wars.

But that would entail actually building a better map. [Continue reading…]

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Unspoken Israeli-Saudi alliance targets Iran

Chris Zambelis writes: The machinations surrounding Iran’s nuclear program continue to dominate international headlines. A closer look at the atmospherics in play indicates the presence of a web of competing narratives that seek to delineate the threats Iran allegedly poses to its neighbors and global security.

The boilerplate rhetoric out of Washington and US media regarding Iran is well known. But sorting through the cacophony of public threats of war, psychological operations, and propaganda broadcast by Israel and Saudi Arabia – Iran’s primary regional adversaries – is equally crucial toward understanding the geopolitics surrounding the Iranian nuclear question and, in a broader sense, Iran’s place in the region.

Alongside the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia have taken the lead in articulating a litany of purported threats emanating from the Islamic Republic. On May 21, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated the long-standing position held by Israel that views Iran as an existential threat: “Iran wants to destroy Israel and it is developing nuclear weapons to fulfill that goal.”

Relying on a sectarian discourse, Saudi Arabia has also defined its fears of Iran in existential terms. A special series published by the Saudi daily Al-Jazirah just days before the Kingdom dispatched its security forces to Bahrain to suppress democratic opposition protests led largely by Bahrain’s oppressed Shi’ite majority reflects Riyadh’s deep-seated antipathy for the Iran. The inflammatory title of the series, “Safavid Iran’s plans for the destruction of the Gulf States”, is of particular importance. The reference to Iran’s Safavid legacy draws attention to the Persian Empire’s adoption of Shi’ite Islam as its official religion. By highlighting Iran’s Shi’ite character, Saudi Arabia is able to define the perceived threat from the republic in territorial as well as ideological and theological terms.

Paradoxically, Israel and Saudi Arabia are officially enemies. Yet they appear to be acting in lockstep – almost in a perfect symbiosis – when it comes to undermining and attacking Iran and painting it as a threat to regional and world peace. A sampling of the collective responses of both countries to matters related to Iran and other areas of mutual concern, such as the course of the uprisings in the Arab world, suggests that the Israeli-Saudi interface represents more than a temporary pact of convenience. Indeed, the convergence of their interests over Iran constitutes an unspoken strategic alliance that runs deeper than either side cares to admit. [Continue reading…]

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Insiders suspected in Saudi cyber attack

Reuters reports: One or more insiders with high-level access are suspected of assisting the hackers who damaged some 30,000 computers at Saudi Arabia’s national oil company last month, sources familiar with the company’s investigation say.

The attack using a computer virus known as Shamoon against Saudi Aramco – the world’s biggest oil company – is one of the most destructive cyber strikes conducted against a single business.

Shamoon spread through the company’s network and wiped computers’ hard drives clean. Saudi Aramco says damage was limited to office computers and did not affect systems software that might hurt technical operations.

The hackers’ apparent access to a mole, willing to take personal risk to help, is an extraordinary development in a country where open dissent is banned.

“It was someone who had inside knowledge and inside privileges within the company,” said a source familiar with the ongoing forensic examination.

Hackers from a group called “The Cutting Sword of Justice” claimed responsibility for the attack. They say the computer virus gave them access to documents from Aramco’s computers, and have threatened to release secrets. No documents have so far been published.

Reports of similar attacks on other oil and gas firms in the Middle East, including in neighboring Qatar, suggest there may be similar activity elsewhere in the region, although the attacks have not been linked.

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Many children among 61 dead as boat carrying migrants sinks off Turkey

Reuters reports: At least 61 migrants, most of them Palestinian and more than half of them children, died after their overcrowded boat sank less than a hundred metres off Turkey’s western Aegean coast on Thursday, a district official has said.

Tahsin Kurtbeyoglu, governor of the coastal district of Menderes in Izmir province, said an initial investigation showed the small vessel sank around dawn as a result of overcrowding. Its destination was unclear but the small Turkish town of Ahmetbeyli, from which it had left, is only a few kilometres from the Greek island of Samos, and Greece is a common entry point for migrants trying to get into the European Union.

“The latest death toll we have is 61 people, including 12 men, 18 women and 31 children, including three babies,” Kurtbeyoglu said. Turkish media said the reason the death toll was so high was that women and children were in a locked compartment in the lower section of the vessel, although there was no official confirmation of this.

Hürriyet Daily News adds: The survivors, who were Iraqi, Palestinian and Syrian citizens, were interrogated with the help of Kurdish-speaking security personnel. They said they stayed in hotels in İzmir’s Basmane district for a while and then contacted human traffickers to go to the United Kingdom. The traffickers then leased the boat from Istanbul and sailed to İzmir.

Menderes District Gov. Tahsin Kurtbeyoğlu said, “We have determined that the boat sank after sailing at 5:20 a.m. this morning. There are occasional illegal immigrants in this region. But we did not have a tip off about this incident. The investigation is ongoing.”

The İzmir-based Immigrant Solidarity Association president, Taner Kılıç, told CNNTürk the attempts of Syrian immigrants to pass to Greek islands had increased in the past two months. The camps that were set up in Turkey’s border regions in 2011 for Syrian immigrants were in good condition compared to other camps but still inadequate, Kılıç said, adding, “People are staying in those camps for one year. We can’t just say the circumstances are good compared to other camps because they cannot have any education; they cannot be involved in social life.”

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The triumph and tragedy of Greater Israel

Henry Siegman writes: The Middle East peace process is dead. More precisely, the two-state solution is dead; the peace process may well go on indefinitely if this Israeli government has its way.

The two-state solution did not die a natural death. It was strangulated as Jewish settlements in the West Bank were expanded and deepened by successive Israeli governments in order to prevent the emergence of a viable Palestinian state. The settlement project has achieved its intended irreversibility, not only because of its breadth and depth but also because of the political clout of the settlers and their supporters within Israel who have both ideological and economic stakes in the settlements’ permanence.

The question can no longer be whether the current impasse may lead to a one-state outcome; it has already done so. There is also no longer any question whether this government’s policies will lead to what can legitimately be called apartheid, as former prime minister Ehud Olmert and other Israeli leaders predicted they would. Palestinians live in a one-state reality, deprived of all rights, and enclosed in enclaves surrounded by military checkpoints, separation walls, roadblocks, barbed-wire barriers and a network of “for-Jews-only” highways.

Until now, Israel’s colonial project has been successfully disguised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pretense that he is pursuing a resumption of talks for a two-state solution with President Mahmoud Abbas. It has also been strengthened by the pretense of President Obama and EU leaders that they believe a resumed peace process can still produce a Palestinian state. But these pretenses cannot be sustained for long, if only because of the inability of settlers to restrain triumphalist pronouncements of their achievement of Greater Israel and their defeat of the Palestinians’ hopes for statehood—as Dani Dayan did recently in the op-ed pages of the New York Times and Haaretz, in which he proclaimed that because of the settlements’ irreversibility there will be only one sovereignty west of the Jordan River.

But paradoxically, the triumph of the settlement project contains the seeds of its own reversal—or of the demise of the Zionist project. [Continue reading…]

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The Islamophobic bigotry sweeping across America

CNN reports: A tide of anti-Islam sentiment has been swelling across America in recent months, strong enough to prompt one imam to wish for the days immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks when President George W. Bush declared that Muslims were not our enemies; that the war on terror was against a select few who acted upon their hate for America.

“In the 11 years since, we have retreated,” says Abdullah Antepli, the Muslim chaplain at Duke University who likes to call himself the Blue Devil Imam.

Muslims make up less than 1% of the U.S. population. Yet, say Muslim advocates, they are a community besieged.

Hate crimes against Muslims spiked 50% in 2010, the last year for which FBI statistics are available. That was in a year marked by Muslim-bashing speech over the Islamic center near ground zero in Manhattan and Florida Pastor Terry Jones’ threats to burn Qurans.

Antepli likens the current climate to McCarthyism. Left unchecked, he says, anti-Muslim fervor, like racism and anti-Semitism, has the potential to evolve into something dangerous.

This year’s holy month of Ramadan, which ended August 19, was marred by a spate of violence at U.S. Islamic centers that included a fire, a homemade bomb and pig parts. The incidents were unprecedented in scale and scope, says the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

At least seven mosques and one cemetery were attacked in the United States during Ramadan, according to the council and other groups that track such incidents.

Particularly visible on the anti-Muslim radar has been the state of Tennessee, where a mosque opened during Ramadan after two years of controversy. The new Islamic center in Murfreesboro opened a few weeks ago after delays caused by legal wrangling, community protests and vandalism.

Also in Tennessee, incumbent congresswoman Diane Black found herself publicly opposing Sharia after her opponent Lou Ann Zelenik made it a campaign issue.

State senatorial candidate Woody Degan’s website also mentions Sharia:

“VOTE CONSERVATIVE! VOTE Anti-Sharia, VOTE Against Internet Taxes, Vote FOR Gun Carry Rights! VOTE for your PERSONAL RIGHTS!”

And Gov. Bill Haslam recently came under fire for hiring lawyer Samar Ali, a Muslim woman from Tennessee, to work in the international division of the state’s economic development department.

Ali’s critics called her Sharia-compliant and a website called Bill H(Islam) attacked the governor for pursuing “a policy that promotes the interest of Islamist (sic) and their radical ideology.”

The website links to another that discusses, among other things, Islamic infiltration of public schools.

“I cannot stress enough the seriousness of their push to spread their religion to all non-Muslims throughout our country,” says website author Cathy Hinners, another speaker at next Tuesday’s 9/11 event in Franklin.

“Why? Why are Muslims so adamant that we accept their religion? The answer is simple. The answer is in black and white. The answer is in the Muslim brotherhoods “Strategic Goal for North America.” It’s called a global caliphate. One religion, one government, one law… called Sharia.”

In November 2010, more than 70% of voters in Oklahoma approved a ballot initiative to amend the state’s constitution that banned courts from looking at “legal precepts of other nations or cultures. Specifically, the courts shall not consider international law or Sharia law.”

The amendment died after a federal court ruled it discriminatory.

“That was very explicitly anti-Islamic,” says Glenn Hendrix, an Atlanta lawyer who specializes in international law. “It specifically referenced Sharia.”

This year, 33 anti-Sharia or international law bills were introduced in 20 states, making it a key issue. Six states – Louisiana, South Dakota, Kansas, Arizona, Louisiana and Tennessee – adopted such laws prior to 2012.

Two Tennessee lawmakers attempted to pass a bill this year that would have made it a felony to practice Sharia, but it failed.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations says the anti-Sharia bills are based on draft legislation promoted by David Yerushalmi, an anti-Islamic lawyer from New York. [Continue reading…]

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Who is held to account for deaths by drone in Yemen?

Chris Woods writes: When news flashed of an air strike on a vehicle in the Yemeni city of Radaa on Sunday afternoon, early claims that al-Qaida militants had died soon gave way to a more grisly reality.

At least 10 civilians had been killed, among them women and children. It was the worst loss of civilian life in Yemen’s brutal internal war since May 2012. Somebody had messed up badly. But was the United States or Yemen responsible?

Local officials and eyewitnesses were clear enough. The Radaa attack was the work of a US drone – a common enough event. Since May 2011, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has recorded up to 116 US drone strikes in Yemen, part of a broader covert war aimed at crushing Islamist militants. But of those attacks, only 39 have been confirmed by officials as the work of the US.

The attribution of dozens of further possible drone attacks – and others reportedly involving US ships and conventional aircraft – remains unclear. Both the CIA and Pentagon are fighting dirty wars in Yemen, each with a separate arsenal and kill list. Little wonder that hundreds of deaths remain in a limbo of accountability.

With anger rising at the death of civilians in Radaa, Yemen’s government stepped forward to take the blame. It claimed that its own air force had carried out the strike on moving vehicles after receiving “faulty intelligence“. Yet the Yemeni air force is barely fit for purpose.

And why believe the Yemeni defence ministry anyway? Just 48 hours earlier it had made similar claims. But when it emerged that alleged al-Qaida bomber Khaled Musalem Batis had died in a strike, anonymous officials soon admitted that a US drone had carried out that killing. [Continue reading…]

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Obama goes on record to lie about drone warfare

Noah Shachtman writes: President Obama doesn’t like to talk about how he uses drones to kill suspected militants — including American citizens. Explanations about who gets picked for remote-control death and who does the picking are left to underlings and aides. Just a few days ago, for example, Obama blew off a local Cincinnati television reporter who asked the president about his “kill list.”

On Wednesday, however, CNN’s Jessica Yellin managed to get Obama to open up, just a little, about his criteria for approving drone attacks. His comments may have been the president’s most extensive so far on robot warfare. They were also total baloney, outside experts say.

As the Bureau of Investigative Journalism notes, Obama told CNN that a terror suspect had to pass five tests before the administration would allow him to be taken out by a drone. “Drones are one tool that we use, and our criteria for using them is very tight and very strict,” the president said.

  1. “It has to be a target that is authorised by our laws.”
  2. “It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative.”
  3. “It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.”
  4. “We’ve got to make sure that in whatever operations we conduct, we are very careful about avoiding civilian casualties.”
  5. “That while there is a legal justification for us to try and stop [American citizens] from carrying out plots … they are subject to the protections of the Constitution and due process.”

At least two of those five points appear to be half-truths at best. In both Yemen and Pakistan, the CIA is allowed to launch a strike based on the target’s “signature” — that is, whether he appears to look and act like a terrorist. As senior U.S. officials have repeatedly confirmed, intelligence analysts don’t even have to know the target’s name, let alone whether he’s planning to attack the U.S. In some cases, merely being a military-aged male at the wrong place at the wrong time is enough to justify your death.

“What I found most striking was his claim that legitimate targets are a ‘threat that is serious and not speculative,’ and engaged in ‘some operational plot against the United States,’ That is simply not true,” emails the Council on Foreign Relations’ Micah Zenko, who has tracked the drone war as closely as any outside analyst. [Continue reading…]

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Greece is being blown away by the Brussels and Berlin blunderbuss

Costas Lapavitsas writes: Last week I was in Athens and took the metro to Syntagma Square. Like many northern Greeks, I have mixed feelings towards the capital. Northerners do not like to admit it, but we secretly enjoy the smell of jasmine – the true scent of Athens. But this time the air smelt of cordite.

Syntagma was abnormally quiet: shops shut, people halfheartedly shopping, riot police everywhere. The atmosphere crackled with the expectation of something sinister about to happen. And lo, in Monastiraki Square, afew hundred yards away, agroup of young men attacked a shop owner; just another violent episode in a city resembling a tinderbox.

The prime culprit for the disintegrating social order is the economic policy emanating from Brussels and Berlin. In 2009-10 the troika – the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank – judged that Greece had a problem of public deficits and debts due to profligacy, corruption and tax avoidance. They offered bailout loans in exchange for cuts to public spending, higher taxes, and reduced wages. Successive Greek governments have imposed austerity with alacrity, delivering a vast contraction of the deficit – perhaps even 8% of GDP by the end of 2012.

The trouble was that austerity could not have its usual accompaniment of currency devaluation, since the country remained a member of the European monetary union. The pressure of adjustment thus turned inward, causing an unprecedented depression – GDP has contracted by 4.5% in 2010, 7% in 2011 and probably 7% in 2012. Unemployment has rocketed, and a humanitarian crisis has emerged in urban centres. The NGO Médecins du Monde estimates that for the past several months the majority of its clients have been destitute Greeks rather than immigrants. Its medicine stockpile is currently running very low, and its managers have no idea how they will cope this winter.

But cope they must, because the troika is now demanding a further bout of austerity – cuts of nearly €12bn to create a large primary budget surplus and to start reducing Greek public debt by 2014. Desperate to remain in the EMU, the Greek government has agreed to slash pensions, retirement lump sums, public sector wages, social expenditure and military spending. The ensuing reduction in aggregate demand means recession will continue next year, with official unemployment perhaps even reaching 30%. In 2013 there will be people in Athens who will not have enough to eat. The tragedy is that the pain will be for nothing as the fresh austerity will probably fail. The troika is yet again underestimating the depth of the oncoming recession, and thus the loss of revenue and the higher unemployment expenditure. Greek public debt, meanwhile, remains completely unsustainable. It is very likely that further austerity measures will be demanded in 2013 and beyond. [Continue reading…]

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Is Pakistan’s hard line on blasphemy softening?

The New York Times reports: A Pakistani judge on Friday granted bail to a teenage Christian girl accused of burning a religious textbook, offering a potential breakthrough in a prominent case that has renewed scrutiny of the country’s blasphemy laws.

After a lengthy court hearing that saw heated arguments, Justice Muhammad Azam Khan ordered that 14-year-old Rimsha Masih be released on bail of one million rupees, or $10,500.

William Dalrymple writes: It is rare these days to read any good news coming out of Pakistan. It is rarer still to read good news concerning matters of religion. However, in one week two stories seem to show that Pakistan is for once bringing the force of law to bear on those who abuse religion to provoke violence against minorities.

Last Sunday Mohammed Khalid Chisti, the mullah who had accused a 14-year-old Christian girl, Rimsha Masih, of blasphemy, was himself arrested and charged with the same law. The turnaround took place after the muezzin of his mosque gave evidence that he had framed the girl and falsified evidence. More remarkable still, the far-from- moderate All Pakistan Ulema Council came to Rimsha’s defence, calling her “a daughter of the nation” and denouncing Chisthi: “Our heads are bowed with shame for what he did.”

On Tuesday an even more unexpected event took place. Malik Ishaq, the leader of the banned Sunni terrorist group Lashkar–e-Jhangvi, which is accused of killing hundreds of Shias, was arrested on his return from a fund-raising trip to Saudi Arabia. Lashkar operates quite openly in Lahore despite being officially banned; yet on this occasion Ishaq was immediately brought to court. There he was accused of involvement in more than 40 cases in which 70 people have been killed. He now resides in Kot Lakhpat jail on 14-day judicial remand.

When Pakistan was created in 1947 as a homeland for Indian Muslims, its clean-shaven, tweed-jacketed, spats-wearing and pork-eating founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, made sure the constitution of his new country provided the right for all its citizens to profess, practise and propagate their religion: “You may belong to any religion, caste or creed,” he said in his first address to the constituent assembly of Pakistan on August 11 1947. “That has nothing to do with the business of the state. In due course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims – not in a religious sense, for that is the personal faith of an individual – but in the political sense as citizens of one state.”

It was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who started the rot. In 1974 he bowed to pressure from the religious right and had the country’s small Ahmedi minority declared non-Muslim. The situation became worse still in the 1980s with the military coup of General Zia. Zia was responsible for initiating the fatal alliance between the conservative military and the equally reactionary mullahs that led to the use of Islamic radicals as part of state policy. At the same time Zia started tinkering with the law. He introduced the Islamic punishment of amputation for theft, and established the Hudood ordinances of sharia law, which asserted that the evidence of one man was equal to that of two women, and made any sex outside marriage a punishable offence for women. Rape was to be punished with the public flogging of the female victim as well as the perpetrator. [Continue reading…]

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