Author Archives: Paul Woodward

ISIS beheads second American journalist — sends ‘second message to America’

NBC News reports: The Islamic militant group ISIS beheaded Steven Joel Sotloff, an American freelance journalist who was abducted a year ago in Syria, in a video made public Tuesday by a jihadist monitoring organization.

The monitoring organization, SITE Intel Group, announced on Twitter that Sotloff had been beheaded. It said that ISIS had also threatened to execute a British captive, David Cawthorne Haines.

The video, titled “A Second Message to America,” opens with a clip of President Barack Obama speaking after ISIS beheaded another American journalist, James Foley, last month. Obama vowed in those remarks to be “relentless” when Americans are harmed.

The video then shows Sotloff, wearing an orange jump suit and kneeling, in a sparse desert landscape, next to a black-clad ISIS fighter — a replica of the conditions in the video in which Foley was beheaded.

Speaking to the camera, Sotloff questions U.S. intervention in the Middle East and blames Obama for “marching us, the American people, into a blazing fire.”

The ISIS fighter then blames Obama for an “arrogant foreign policy towards Islamic State” and for refusing to heed ISIS’s warnings and end military strikes.

Those Middle-East watchers in the West who suffer from the affliction of seeing America at the center of all things, will be inclined to persist in their interpretation that ISIS is trying to goad the U.S. into stronger military intervention in Iraq.

This strikes me as a gross misreading of events — and it misrepresents the timeline.

U.S. airstrikes in Iraq started before James Foley was murdered. At that time, Foley’s killer — while holding Sotloff — warned: “The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision.”

The airstrikes continued and ISIS has now carried through on that threat.

And as ISIS now says that Obama is marching the American people into a blazing fire, the jihadists are again saying: back off.

Much as ISIS’s fighters and jihadists in general are widely perceived as being driven by a desire for martyrdom, it is ISIS’s success in laying the foundations for its own state and in the swift expansion of this state, that is the driving force behind the movement’s growth.

ISIS wants to be seen as an unstoppable force and the battles it loses and the retreats it is forced to make, will weaken that image.

If there’s a credible alternative to using military force against ISIS, I have yet to see it.

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The impatient jihadist

With ISIS being infamous for its brutality, one might assume that anyone joining such an extreme organization would first have to go through the ill-defined process called “radicalization.” Not so.

The story of a young Bahraini man, appearing in the latest issue of CTC Sentinel, is perhaps more representative of the path leading to violent jihad than we might imagine.

Having received a short pep talk in an ISIS office in Syria, this man signs up and then gets instruction on the cause he’s about to fight for and for which he’s ready to sacrifice his life (and the lives of others).

The jihadists grabbing the headlines these days are commonly described as living out a kind of medieval fantasy. I’m not so sure. I wonder whether on the contrary their behavior is symptomatic of a thoroughly modern affliction: the death of the interior life.

When the means through which an individual understands their identity is wholly defined by outward forms and the perceptions of others, they lose their capacity for self knowledge. An inner vacuity then has to be filled by something from outside. Most people can be satisfied with a steady supply of pleasurable distractions, whereas for others their discontent is strong enough to drive them to take up a cause.

In both cases they are running away from themselves. Some run away to Syria.

BahriniAbu Thar al-Bahrini, from Bahrain, began his story by discussing how he was “not religiously committed” in high school, although he knew that this was “wrong.” After he graduated high school with high grades, his family assumed he would go to medical school. Al-Bahrini, however, had different ideas, as he thought that this was his chance to “repent” and the best way to do that was by joining a Shari`a school in Saudi Arabia. He changed his mind, however, after deciding that the path of studying Shari`a was too long, so he made a decision to join jihad in Syria instead. At the start, al-Bahrini mentioned that he did not “differentiate between the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Jabhat al-Nusra (JN) or ISIL.” His main concern was finding a coordinator to show him the way to Syria, and collecting enough money to cover the expenses of his trip. He started to post photos of the FSA, JN and ISIL on his Instagram account, and during that time he was able to meet with a coordinator in Bahrain who linked recruits with the FSA. At this point, al-Bahrini had only 50 Bahraini dinar (about $130), and the coordinator told him that he needed at least 200 dinar (about $520) to cover his expenses. Al-Bahrini was able to convince only one of his friends to appeal to a wealthy individual on his behalf, and the affluent man agreed to cover all his expenses. For some unidentified reason, the agreement between the coordinator and al-Bahrini fell apart, so he decided to travel to Turkey alone.

“I didn’t know the route to take, didn’t have any recommendation letter, and didn’t know anything about my journey,” al-Bahrini said. “All what I knew is that I should fly to Istanbul airport, from there fly to one of the villages near the [Turkish-Syrian] borders, and then a car would take me from there to enter Syria.”

He flew to Istanbul as planned, purchased a ticket to a “bordering city,” and while he was waiting for the plane he saw “a man with a beard reading the Qur’an, and I knew that he was going to Syria.” Without hesitation, al-Bahrini approached the man, and said to him confidently: “you are going to Syria and I’m going with you.” After a short discussion, al-Bahrini convinced the man to help him. “The man was in touch with coordinators from the Free Syrian Army,” who were supposed to smuggle him into Syria to join JN. They went to a house used by the FSA as a clinic in Turkey, and on the second day a “brother from ISIL came to that house to visit his friends,” al-Bahrini explained. “We told him that we are going to join JN in Idlib, and he offered to take us to JN after we enter Syria.”

Two days after they entered Syria, the same person from ISIL came to them, explained the tensions between the two groups, and suggested they join ISIL instead of JN. They found the explanation complicated, as they knew little about the mujahidin, Usama bin Ladin or any basic jihadist issues, so he took them to one of ISIL’s headquarters so they could learn more about jihad in general and ISIL in particular. After a short interview with the group’s amir of that area, al-Bahrini was sent to a training camp and took military courses and a Shari`a class where he learned “the correct creed.”

Al-Bahrini’s parents were religiously committed, but in his opinion they “were not following the correct creed” because they believed that “jihad now is selective duty and not an individual duty.” Therefore, al-Bahrini decided not to inform them about his intentions to travel to Syria. Once he arrived at the Istanbul airport, al-Bahrini posted a scanned copy of his “ticket and passport on his Instagram account to inform his family about his real intentions to migrate to Syria.” Despite his family’s best efforts, they could not convince him to return to Bahrain. Al-Bahrini concluded his story by acknowledging that his mother and brother, who was a soldier in the Bahrain army, later visited him and were both convinced to join ISIL’s ranks in Syria.

Al-Bahrini appeared in the recently released ISIL video Salil al-Sawarim 4 (Sound of the Swords Clashing 4), in which he delivered a short and powerful speech followed by him ripping up his Bahraini passport and promising to “return to Bahrain not with this useless passport, but marching with ISIL army to liberate all Muslim lands.”

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Netanyahu shows why his claim — Hamas is ISIS — is BS

Eager to grasp a political opportunity that seemed to have been created by the murder of James Foley, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got busy on Twitter saying that “Hamas is ISIS.”

But Netanyahu seems to have changed his mind because he now says that it is the close proximity of the threat from ISIS — in the opposite direction from Gaza — that necessitated the ceasefire with Hamas. Otherwise Israel could have continued bombing Gaza for 500 days instead of stopping after 50 days.

In other words, even if Netanyahu won’t be tweeting this, Israel accepted a ceasefire with Hamas in part because Hamas is not ISIS.

AFP reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel agreed to a permanent truce in its 50-day Gaza war with Hamas in order to keep focused on the threat from regional militants.

“We fought for 50 days and we could have fought for 500 days, but we are in a situation where the Islamic State is at the gates of Jordan, Al-Qaeda is in the Golan and Hezbollah is at the border with Lebanon,” Netanyahu said in an address on public television.

He was referring to Islamic State jihadists in Syria and Iraq — both neighbours of Jordan — Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front Syria rebels on the Israeli-annexed Golan and Lebanon’s Shiite movement Hezbollah.

“We decided not to get bogged down in Gaza, and we could have, but we decided to limit our objective and restore calm to Israeli citizens,” Netanyahu added.

His remarks come as the United States, Israel’s chief ally, is calling for a global coalition to fight the jihadists who have set up an Islamic “caliphate” in areas they have overrun in Syria and Iraq.

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The truth about ISIS, 9/11 and JFK

You know… is a funny expression.

Someone leans forward slightly and confides, “You know…” on the assumption that the person he’s talking to doesn’t know. (I say “he” because men are much more inclined to share their presumed wisdom in this way.)

If I say you know what I really mean is I know and you probably don’t, but listen up because I’m going to share a privileged piece of information with you.

Conspiracy theories are favorites among those who like to trade in information in this way. They resolve much of the angst in a world weighed down by too many unanswered questions. For those who feel politically impotent, these narratives of intrigue secretly at play inside institutions which exercise unassailable power, provide a comforting vehicle for safely contained outrage. Knowing how the system works means knowing why you have no power to change it — so the mindset works.

Conspiracy theories spread as ad hoc clubs in which the storytellers — these are after all just stories — dole out offers of free membership to anyone who shows an interest.

With the creation of the internet we now live in the Golden Age of conspiracy theories where ill-formed ideas spread like invasive species.

These mind-weeds most easily grow where government is viewed with the deepest suspicion and the mainstream media is assumed to be inextricably bound in a servile relationship with concealed political and commercial powers.

An article of faith that seems to bind together most conspiracy theorists is a conviction that the root of all evil in the world is the U.S. government. Ultimately, everything comes back to Washington.

You know this terrorist group ISIS? Did you know it was created by the U.S. government?

Of course! How else could such a devilish organization have come into existence.

Robert Mackey has delved into the latest rendition of this familiar story.

According to the theory, which appears to have started in Egypt and spread rapidly across the region, ISIS was created by the United States as part of a plot orchestrated by the former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton to replace the region’s autocratic rulers with more pliant Islamist allies. The evidence cited to back up this claim sounds unimpeachable: passages from Mrs. Clinton’s new memoir in which she describes how a plan to bolster the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was foiled at the last moment when the Egyptian military seized power on July 5, 2013, and deployed submarines and fighter jets to block an American invasion.

If that plot sounds like the stuff of fiction, that’s because it is. The passages described by supporters of the Egyptian military on Facebook as quotes from Mrs. Clinton’s memoir were entirely fabricated and do not appear anywhere in the text of her book, “Hard Choices.”

The fictional plot was reported as fact by Egyptian, Tunisian, Palestinian, Jordanian and Lebanese news organizations. [Continue reading…]

But if the story that the U.S. created ISIS is a work of fiction, where did ISIS come from?

That’s a more complicated question than it sounds and at this point, I don’t think anyone can claim to have presented the definitive account. Even so, there has been wealth of strong reporting and analysis that fleshes out many of the key components of the picture — the role of Sunni disenfranchisement in Iraq; the cultivation of a nemesis that suited Bashar al-Assad’s narrative of his war on terrorism; and perhaps most importantly, ISIS’s focus on self-sufficiency.

Here is some essential reading:

Sarah Burke — “How al Qaeda changed the Syrian war” (December 27, 2013)

Peter Neumann — “Assad and the jihadists” (March 28, 2014)

Ziad Majed — “Fathers of ISIS” (June, 2014)

Victoria Fontan — “ISIS, the slow insurgency” (June 13, 2014)

Alex Rowell — “Blame Assad first for ISIS’ rise” (June 17, 2014)

Simon Speakman Cordall — “How Syria’s Assad helped forge ISIS” (June 21, 2014)

Rania Abouzeid — “The Syrian roots of Iraq’s newest civil war” (June 23, 2014)

Hannah Allam — “Records show how Iraqi extremists withstood U.S. anti-terror efforts” (June 23, 2014)

Bassam Barabandi and Tyler Jess Thompson — “Inside Assad’s playbook: time and terror” (July 23, 2014)

Gary Anderson — “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the theory and practice of jihad” (August 12, 2014)

Hassan Hassan — “ISIS: A portrait of the menace that is sweeping my homeland” (August 16, 2014)

Maria Abi-Habib — “Assad policies aided rise of ISIS” (August 22, 2014)

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Another American killed in Syria fighting for ISIS

Douglas-McCainDouglas McAuthur McCain was described by former classmates who knew him growing up in Minnesota as “a good guy,” “goofy,” “a fun guy,” and “a goofball” who was “always smiling.”

The New York Times reports that McCain was killed in a battle in recent days in Marea, a city in northern Syria near the Turkish border. He was fighting for ISIS.

At least 100 Americans have traveled to Syria to fight for rebel groups, according to senior American officials, but only a few are believed to have died there. In May, Moner Mohammad Abusalha, a 22-year-old Florida man who had traveled to Syria, killed himself in a suicide bomb attack. A year earlier, Nicole Lynn Mansfield, 33, of Flint, Mich., was killed with Syrian rebels in Idlib Province.

News of Americans fighting and dying in Syria renews concerns about the risk of some returning and bring their jihad home.

Frankly, for several reasons I think these fears are being overstated:

1. ISIS’s effort to recruit a few good men to fight in Syria and Iraq does not seem to be appealing to America’s best and brightest.

2. “We are coming for you, mark my words, listen to my words you big kuffār,” warned Moner Mohammad Abusalha, who grew up in Florida. But then, having burned his passport, he went on to blow himself up.

As things stand right now, foreign fighters from the U.S. or elsewhere in the West are most likely ISIS’s most expendable assets because what they lack in talent, they make up for in fervor and thus are the most suitable candidates for suicidal missions.

3. The skills these guys are acquiring are not necessarily ones they can transfer outside the battlefield. Look at the assembly of the truck bomb that Abusalha detonated. Having captured numerous Syrian military bases, ISIS doesn’t have any trouble filling a truck with artillery shells, but that’s not an exercise that would be instructive to the next would-be Timothy McVeigh.

4. Obviously, causing mayhem doesn’t require great skills. But neither does it require the motives driving a zealot.

The next time there’s a mass shooting in the U.S. the perpetrator might be a guy who acquired his blood lust under the tutelage of ISIS. But it’s even more likely that he will be some kind of misfit angry about his inability to find a girlfriend, or driven by whatever other personal demon that happens to haunt him.

The threat that ISIS poses is very real and broad in scope, but it’s not the lives of average Americans which are at stake.

The fears that the world needs to address are those that compel a young girl to carry an AK-47.

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To defeat ISIS we must understand that despotism is the disease, not the cure

On Sunday, Richard Clarke, a former top counterterrorism adviser in the Bush administration, said:

If we want to eliminate this ISIS we are going to have to deal with people we don’t like. The president said we wanted Assad out. Well, we are going to have to say something to the Syrian government if we are going to start bombing in Syria. And if we are going to get rid of ISIS, we are going to have to start bombing in Syria.

This is one of the latest examples of the movement inside Washington which views a working relationship with Assad as a practical necessity — a form of realism which implies there is no alternative.

It is also an expression of a typically American view of what it means to be practical, which is to say that practicality is often viewed as a way of dispensing with the need for analysis. Just do it — don’t think.

Ziad Majed, a Lebanese political researcher teaching Middle East studies at the American University of Paris, has a response to Clarke and those making similar arguments:

Those who think that they should be impartial toward or even support tyrants like Assad in the fight against ISISism fail to realize that his regime is in fact at the root of the problem.

Until this fact is recognized — that despotism is the disease and not the cure — we can only expect more deadly repercussions, from the Middle East to the distant corners of the globe.

Majed sees ISIS as the progeny of six fathers:

ISIS is first the child of despotism in the most heinous form that has plagued the region. Therefore, it is no coincidence that we see its base, its source of strength concentrated in Iraq and Syria, where Saddam Hussein and Hafez and Bashar Al-Assad reigned for decades, killing hundreds of thousands of people, destroying political life, and deepening sectarianism by transforming it into a mechanism of exclusion and polarization, to the point that injustices and crimes against humanity became commonplace.

ISIS is second the progeny of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, both the way in which it was initially conducted and the catastrophic mismanagement that followed. Specifically, it was the exclusion of a wide swath of Iraqis from post invasion political processes and the formation of a new authority that discriminated against them and held them collectively at fault for the guilt of Saddam and his party, which together enabled groups (such as those first established by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) whose activities have been resumed by ISIS to get in touch with some parts of Iraqi society and to establish itself among them.

ISIS is third the son of Iranian aggressive regional policies that have worsened in recent years — taking Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria as its backyard, feeding (directly or indirectly) confessional divisions and making these divides the backbone of ideological mobilization and a policy of revenge and retaliation that has constructed a destructive feedback loop. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS: Berks with MANPADS?

Mehdi Hasan writes: [R]ead the books of the forensic psychiatrist and former CIA officer Marc Sageman; the political scientist Robert Pape; the international relations scholar Rik Coolsaet; the Islamism expert Olivier Roy; the anthropologist Scott Atran. They have all studied the lives and backgrounds of hundreds of gun-toting, bomb-throwing jihadists and they all agree that Islam isn’t to blame for the behaviour of such men (and, yes, they usually are men).

Instead they point to other drivers of radicalisation: moral outrage, disaffection, peer pressure, the search for a new identity, for a sense of belonging and purpose. As Atran pointed out in testimony to the US Senate in March 2010: “… what inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Quran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world.” He described wannabe jihadists as “bored, under­employed, overqualified and underwhelmed” young men for whom “jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer … thrilling, glorious and cool.”

Or, as Chris Morris, the writer and director of the 2010 black comedy Four Lions — which satirised the ignorance, incompetence and sheer banality of British Muslim jihadists — once put it: “Terrorism is about ideology, but it’s also about berks.”

Berks, not martyrs. “Pathetic figures,” to quote the former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove, not holy warriors. If we want to tackle jihadism, we need to stop exaggerating the threat these young men pose and giving them the oxygen of publicity they crave, and start highlighting how so many of them lead decidedly un-Islamic lives.

Just to be clear — since berk is a British expression some Americans may have never heard — berks tend to be harmless. They typically draw scorn from others because they have a habit of becoming the victims of their own foolishness.

I haven’t seen Four Lions yet but these clips and Chris Morris’s description of his own research make it clear that he took his subject seriously. Even though he chose a comedic form, he endeavored to give the issue an honest representation.

Accurate as Four Lions might be in its characterization of some of the individuals who might have been inspired to travel to Syria to join ISIS, this doesn’t really make the current picture less disturbing.

The capacity of ISIS to recruit berks doesn’t diminish the threat it poses; on the contrary, it means that ISIS commanders have a plentiful supply of cannon fodder.

It’s reported that in the battle to capture the Tabqa air base, 346 ISIS fighters were killed — twice as many casualties as there were among government forces.

For Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an abundance of berks in the lowest ranks of ISIS probably looks like one of his army’s greatest strengths.

But ISIS also has lots of other strengths — its successes can’t all be attributed to its ability to intimidate its adversaries through sheer brutality.

One of the photographs that showed up on Twitter soon after ISIS took control of Tabqa showed a fighter carrying what looks like an SA-24 MANPAD — one of the most sophisticated Russian-made antiaircraft missile launchers available.

Even if none of these berks know how to use it, it’s reasonable to assume that their commanders are currently interrogating prisoners with the promise that a would-be trainer can be assured that he won’t be decapitated — just yet.

Whether a guy wielding a MANPAD happens to be a berk is of less consequence than the fact that the weapon he is holding can strike an aircraft at 20,000 feet.

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Teenager describes being used as a human shield by Israeli soldiers

The New York Times reports: A Palestinian teenager says that Israeli soldiers detained him for five days last month, forcing him to sleep blindfolded and handcuffed in his underwear and to search and dig for tunnels in Khuza’a, his village near Gaza’s eastern border, which was all but destroyed in the fighting.

The teenager, Ahmed Jamal Abu Raida, said the soldiers assumed he was connected to Hamas, the militant Islamist group that dominates Gaza, insulted him and Allah and threatened to sic a dog on him.

“My life was in danger,” Ahmed, 17, said in one of two lengthy interviews on Thursday and Friday. As soldiers made him walk in front of them through the neighborhood and check houses for tunnels, he added, “In every second, I was going to the unknown.”

His assertions, of actions that would violate both international law and a 2005 Israeli Supreme Court ruling, could not be independently corroborated; Ahmed’s father, Jamal Abu Raida, who held a senior position in Gaza’s Tourism Ministry under the Hamas-controlled government, said the family forgot to take photographs documenting any abuse in its happiness over the youth’s return, and disposed of the clothing he was given upon his release. The case was publicized Thursday by Defense for Children International-Palestine, an organization whose reports on abuses of Palestinian youths in West Bank military jails have been challenged by the Israeli authorities.

The Israeli military confirmed that troops had suspected Ahmed of being a militant and detained him during their ground operation in Gaza, noting his father’s affiliation with Hamas. A military spokesman promised several times to provide more details, but ultimately did not deal with the substance of the allegations, saying they had “been referred to the appropriate authorities for examination.”

A military statement also challenged the credibility of D.C.I.-Palestine, which accused the Israeli military of using Ahmed as a human shield by coercing him to engage in military actions. Throughout the current conflict, Israel has argued that Hamas uses Gaza residents as human shields by conducting militant activity in crowded public places.

“D.C.I.-Palestine’s report represents a perverse inversion of a truth in which Hamas persistently engages in the use of human shields, while the I.D.F.’s code of conduct rejects, in absolute terms, such behavior,” the military statement said, using the abbreviation for the Israel Defense Forces.

Israeli soldiers could not have used human shields because they are all good boys who follow the rules.

What kind of imbecile in the IDF sees fit to present this line of reasoning? Israeli arrogance, in its contempt for the intelligence of others, is itself a form of idiocy.

In 2010, Haaretz reported:

The southern command military court convicted two Israeli soldiers on Sunday of using human shields during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip, in the winter of 2008-2009.

The soldiers were convicted of offenses including inappropriate behavior and overstepping authority for ordering an 11-year-old Palestinian to search bags suspected to have been booby trapped.

The conviction is the first such conviction for what is termed in the Israel Defense Forces “neighbor procedure” – the use of human shields during searches and pursuits, which has been outlawed.

Note: this was the first conviction — not the first occurrence.

Moreover, when the report notes that the use of human shields has been outlawed, this alludes to two facts:

1. That the use of human shields was standard practice in the IDF, and
2. that even after Israel’s high court ruled that the use of human shields was illegal, the IDF tried to get the ruling overturned.

The fact that the IDF failed in that effort, does not infer that individual soldiers stopped viewing the use of human shields as serving their interests — merely that those engaging in this practice would understand that they would need to take greater effort to avoid getting caught.

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U.S. considers military action against ISIS in Syria

The New York Times reports: The Obama administration is debating a more robust intervention in Syria, including possible American airstrikes, in a significant escalation of its weeks-long military assault on the Islamic extremist group that has destabilized neighboring Iraq and killed an American journalist, officials said Friday.

While President Obama has long resisted being drawn into Syria’s bloody civil war, officials said recent advances by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria had made clear that it represents a threat to the interests of the United States and its allies. The beheading of James Foley, the American journalist, has contributed to what officials called a “new context” for a challenge that has long divided the president’s team.

Officials said the options include speeding up and intensifying limited American efforts to train and arm moderate Syrian rebel forces that have been fighting both ISIS as well as the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Another option would be to bolster other partners on the ground to take on ISIS, including the Syrian Kurds.

But American officials said they would also take a look at airstrikes by fighter jets and bombers as well as potentially sending Special Operations forces into Syria, like those who tried to rescue Mr. Foley and other hostages on a mission in July. One possibility officials have discussed for Iraq that could be translated to Syria would be a series of unmanned drone strikes targeting ISIS leaders, much like those conducted in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

Whether Mr. Obama would actually authorize a new strategy remained unclear and aides said he has not yet been presented with recommendations. The president has long expressed skepticism that more assertive action by the United States, including arming Syrian rebels as urged in 2011 by Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state, would change the course of the civil war there. But he sent out a top adviser on Friday to publicly hint at the possibility a day after the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said ISIS could not be defeated without going after it in Syria.

“If you come after Americans, we’re going to come after you, wherever you are,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, the president’s deputy national security adviser, told reporters in Martha’s Vineyard, where Mr. Obama is on a much-interrupted vacation. “We’re actively considering what’s going to be necessary to deal with that threat and we’re not going to be restricted by borders.” [Continue reading…]

This report quotes Stephen Miles, advocacy director of Win Without War, saying: “We’ve seen this movie before and we know how it ends.”

Is that right?

Let’s refresh everyone’s memory: the last time a militant group seized control of large portions of two states and created a de facto state of its own… the last time would be?

Oh! It’s never happened before.

Whatever movie Miles is referring to was a work of fiction because despite the fact that we have witnessed 13 years of uninterrupted war, the current situation in the Middle East bears little resemblance to the chapters of air war, invasions, occupations, and insurgencies that came before.

No doubt ISIS has its own strategic thinkers and they study history carefully, gleaning whatever useful lessons they can find from Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Mali. But when the Pentagon says that we are witnessing something new, this isn’t just fear-mongering hype — this really is something new and the government officials who are now trying to come up with a response seem to be struggling more to catch up with the present than to be guilty of their much more common practice: overstating the magnitude of whatever happens to have been dubbed the global threat du jour.

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Why Obama and Assad prefer to see ISIS contained but not defeated

Ever since the Obama administration started back-peddling on its desire to see the Assad regime fall, the rationale for that reversal and for an unstated but obvious willingness to see Assad remain in power has been the fear that the collapse of the Syrian government would allow ISIS to gain control of most of the Syria. The U.S. and most Western governments have implicitly come to accept the argument that Bashar deployed from day one: it’s me or the terrorists.

But suppose ISIS came under attack from all sides — by the U.S., the Iraqis (including tribal Sunnis), the Kurds, Iran, Turkey, Syria’s rebels, and Assad’s air force — are we to imagine that it would fend off all its opponents?

U.S. Defense Secretary Hagel might describe ISIS as “beyond anything that we’ve seen,” but having constituted itself as an army controlling territory, ISIS is just as susceptible as any other army to facing defeat. Moreover, its success in establishing a de facto Islamic state might ironically become its undoing.

However Russia and others might want to argue against international intervention in Syria, the argument that Syria’s sovereignty must be respected no longer holds any water. Indeed, this would be an intervention one of whose principal goals would be the restoration of the territorial sovereignty of both Syria and Iraq.

The real interventionists are ISIS — they are the ones who decided to erase national boundaries and like the neoconservatives of yesteryear, attempt to redraw the map of the Middle East.

But here’s the problem: If ISIS is defeated and not just contained, Assad loses the one thing that can justify his continuation in power.

Likewise, Obama’s fear of deeper involvement in Syria is predicated on the fear of ISIS’s growing power. Paradoxically, it appears he views a contained ISIS serves as a greater source of stability than a defeated ISIS, if ISIS’s defeat is then a prelude to Assad’s defeat.

In other words, Obama might believe that a contained Islamic state is currently preferable to another Libya.

Or to put in another way: better the living hell of Syria that the world has got used to and can thus ignore, than a new form of chaos that becomes the closing chapter of Obama’s presidency.

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James Foley, Assad, and ISIS

Philip Balboni, GlobalPost CEO:

“Although GlobalPost’s investigation at one point led us to believe that James was being held by the Syrian government, we later were given strong reason to believe he was being held by Islamic militants in Syria,” Balboni said. “We withheld this information at the request of the family and on the advice of authorities cooperating in the effort to protect Jim. GlobalPost, working with a private security company, has amassed an enormous amount of information that has not been made public.”

In May 2013, GlobalPost reported:

After a five-month investigation inside Syria and the wider Middle East, GlobalPost and the family of missing American journalist James Foley now believe the Syrian government is holding him in a detention center near Damascus.

“With a very high degree of confidence, we now believe that Jim was most likely abducted by a pro-regime militia group and subsequently turned over to Syrian government forces,” GlobalPost CEO and President Philip Balboni said during a speech marking World Press Freedom Day.

“We have obtained multiple independent reports from very credible confidential sources who have both indirect and direct access that confirm our assessment that Jim is now being held by the Syrian government in a prison or detention facility in the Damascus area. We further believe that this facility is under the control of the Syrian Air Force Intelligence service. Based on what we have learned, it is likely Jim is being held with one or more Western journalists, including most likely at least one other American.”

Balboni said that GlobalPost representatives were now meeting with the Syrian ambassador to Lebanon in Beirut to secure his support. The ambassador has delivered letters to the Syrian ministries of defense, interior, information and foreign affairs.

The Syrian government, however, has so far not acknowledged knowing of Foley’s whereabouts.

Note that Balboni did not call into question the accuracy of GlobalPost’s earlier assessment about Foley’s whereabouts.

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Fighters in Al Qassam Brigade, the armed wing of Hamas

Among the reader comments that appear here, a fairly common one is a rebuke on my choice of sources and my willingness to regurgitate “the lies of the mainstream media” — or something along those lines.

I don’t find “mainstream media” a particularly useful concept because all too often it’s employed as the bluntest possible tool for media analysis.

To view a particular piece of reporting as credible or lacking in credibility simply on the basis of the commercial niche occupied by its publisher, is plain dumb. The following report illustrates my point.

An article focusing on two fighters in Hamas appears in today’s Wall Street Journal.

How can a right-wing newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch with editorial writers like Bret Stephens, former editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, provide solid reporting on Hamas? Surprisingly it can.

The report notes that Hamas is a “guerrilla army” thereby drawing a distinction between its objective nature and the politically charged designation — “terrorist” — which is applied by the U.S. and Israeli governments.

The report notes Hamas’ military accomplishments (and alludes to its recent use of drones for battlefield surveillance) and that its fighters are uniformed.

It notes that the choice to engage in armed resistance has been made by and supported by those have witnessed the futility of a peace process pursued through negotiations.

All in all, it’s a report that could profitably be read by many an Israeli who still accepts the propaganda that Israel faces a fanatical foe who values death more than life.

When the shrapnel-torn body of Ahmed Abu Thoraya returned to this city in the Gaza Strip, only one member of his family knew for sure he had been a fighter in Al Qassam Brigade, the armed wing of Hamas.

Mr. Abu Thoraya had given his brother, Mohammed, a short will before he left town on July 19. “He said ‘I’m going somewhere,'” his brother recalled recently. “I knew that he may not come back.”

The conflict in the Gaza Strip has brought the secretive guerrilla army of Hamas out of the shadows and into battle against Israel’s military for only the second time. When the brigade’s fighters are killed, Hamas street organizers eulogize them as heroes, posting images of them in fatigues and toting rockets. And families in the Gaza Strip are coming to terms with never-before-discussed identities of sons and neighbors.

The fighting has given Israel its first good look at Hamas’s street-fighting abilities since 2009—the only other time the Israeli Defense Forces have taken on large numbers of the Qassam fighters at close quarters. The Hamas militia has inflicted the heaviest death toll on Israel’s military in a decade, some 64 soldiers so far. Israel and the U.S. regard Hamas, which also has a political wing and delivers social services, as a terrorist enterprise.

On Tuesday, the latest cease-fire broke down when a salvo of rockets from the Gaza Strip landed in southern Israel, and Israel retaliated against militant targets in Gaza. Truce talks in Cairo were suspended.

“Hamas has advanced on all fronts,” said a senior official in the Israel Defense Forces. “This time when we meet them on the battlefield, they are better trained, better organized, better disciplined.”

That wasn’t the Hamas that Israel encountered in its 2009 ground invasion of Gaza. When Israel’s military entered the strip back then, Hamas fighters, for the most part, quickly melted away.

This time, Hamas surprised Israeli soldiers by using a network of tunnels under the walls and fences enclosing the Gaza Strip to emerge inside Israel. Hamas commando units that Israel believes took shape mostly in the last year carried out complex ambushes inside and outside Gaza.

Hamas’s internal communications proved more difficult for Israel to track, and Hamas exhibited a new capacity for aerial observation of Israeli troop movements. Hamas rockets, though mostly intercepted above Israel, managed to shut down Israel’s main airport for a time. [Continue reading…]

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Why did #ISIS kill James Foley?

Intimidation or provocation?

Since the U.S. has already launched at least 68 air strikes against ISIS, we’re already well past the point at which the U.S. needs drawing into the conflict — the enemy has already been engaged.

It thus seems more likely that the message from ISIS is not “bring it on” — it’s “back off.” More air strikes risk precipitating more executions.

The journalist Steven Joel Soltoff appeared in the same video showing Foley’s execution with the executioner making this threat: “The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision.”

Foley was kidnapped in November 2012 yet ISIS wasn’t formed until April 2013.

GlobalPost, the publication Foley was working for at that time, spared no effort in trying to locate him. In May 2013, AFP reported:

The co-founder and CEO of the online news network, Phil Balboni, said his company had hired the international security firm Kroll to investigate.

“With a high degree of confidence, we now believe that Jim was most likely abducted by a pro-regime militia group, commonly referred to as the Shabiha, and subsequently turned over to Syrian government forces,” Balboni said.

“We have obtained multiple independent reports from very credible confidential sources who have both indirect and direct access that confirm our assessment that Jim is now being held by the Syrian government.”

Balboni said the detention facility where Foley is reportedly being held is near the Syrian capital Damascus in an area still controlled by forces loyal to Assad’s regime, which is battling an armed revolt.

“We further believe that this facility is under the control of the Syrian Air Force Intelligence service,” he said, promising that GlobalPost would continue to press through private and diplomatic channels for Foley’s release.

Balboni said that GlobalPost knows the name and location of the detention center, and believes that other international journalists are also being held there, but said he could not go into details for security reasons.

This strongly suggests that the Assad regime handed Foley and the other hostages over to ISIS. Both the Syrian government and ISIS view journalists as a threat.

Although the majority of Americans currently support the air strikes the U.S. has launched in Iraq, that support is fairly weak:

Even as they approve of the airstrikes, Americans are more concerned about going too far in Iraq than they are about not going far enough to interdict Islamist militants who have swept through the country in recent months. Fifty-one percent say they are more worried about U.S. military action going too far; 32 percent say they are more concerned about not going far enough to stop the militants.

ISIS may now have as many as 80,000 fighters and it controls a third of Syria and a third of Iraq. At what point will its growth start to seriously worry most Americans?

Last week, while arguing against Western intervention against ISIS in Iraq, Seumas Milne wrote: “The likelihood is that [ISIS] can only be overcome by a functioning state in both Iraq and Syria.”

Let’s be clear: “overcome” doesn’t mean being thwarted in vigorous debate; it means military action. What was an antiwar movement is nowadays simply a not-our-war movement.

If Milne is correct in saying that functioning states in both Iraq and Syria are a precondition for overcoming ISIS, then before that happens it looks like it will grow from strength to strength.

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Worse the Israel? Why these comparisons are odious

The huge loss of life and massive destruction in Gaza over the last month has triggered an outpouring of humanitarian concern from many of Israel’s most loyal defenders — concern directed towards anywhere but Gaza.

It’s a bit like responding to the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, by saying that it’s nowhere near as bad as Aleppo — which it isn’t, but so what?

Following the release of a Human Rights Watch report which says Egypt’s leaders should be investigated for committing possible crimes against humanity, the editorial board of the Washington Post says:

the massacre staged by Egyptian security forces on Aug. 14, 2013, in Cairo’s Rabaa Square far exceeds, in its wanton use of force and calculated slaughter of women and children, any action by Israel during the recent fighting in Gaza.

That’s debatable, but the Post’s concern is that this illustrates the unfairness with which Israel has been singled out as a target of international criticism.

The editorial’s headline says “Egypt should be a pariah state for its bloody crackdown on dissent” — the implication being that it is Egypt, not Israel, which is more deserving of being branded as a pariah state. And while the piece rebukes the Obama administration for cynically maintaining its ties to the Sisi regime, it makes no mention of Israel’s close ties to Egypt.

No doubt Egypt is deserving of pariah status — but so is Israel.

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How the NSA shut down the internet in Syria — by accident

As I have written here before, as much as we should fear the immense power of intelligence agencies such as the NSA, it’s important to recognize that secrecy does not merely function as an instrument of power — just as importantly it functions to conceal incompetence.

The agencies want to sustain their mystique as the valiant and stealthy defenders of national security. What they dread is being seen as over-funded bunglers.

On November 29, 2012, the internet went down in Syria. The following day, the Washington Post reported:

Though the rebels and the Syrian government blamed each other for the prolonged outage, most technology experts believe Syrian authorities caused the blackout to try to impede the rebels’ interactions and online broadcasts of the fighting.

More honest reporting might have said, it’s anyone’s guess what happened, but for what it’s worth here’s some speculation from some so-called experts.

It turns out, apparently, that the experts were wrong and the cause of the outage was a bungled NSA operation.

James Bamford has just done an extended interview with Edward Snowden which includes this:

By the time he went to work for Booz Allen in the spring of 2013, Snowden was thoroughly disillusioned, yet he had not lost his capacity for shock. One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO — a division of NSA hackers — had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)

Inside the TAO operations center, the panicked government hackers had what Snowden calls an “oh shit” moment. They raced to remotely repair the router, desperate to cover their tracks and prevent the Syrians from discovering the sophisticated infiltration software used to access the network. But because the router was bricked, they were powerless to fix the problem.

Fortunately for the NSA, the Syrians were apparently more focused on restoring the nation’s Internet than on tracking down the cause of the outage. Back at TAO’s operations center, the tension was broken with a joke that contained more than a little truth: “If we get caught, we can always point the finger at Israel.”

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A death too certain, too soon

As death kept coming like summer rain, day after day, uncountable, nameless, in Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Africa and all places between, suddenly one death counted above all the others as America lost an imaginary friend.

It stalked abroad, snuck close as two American aid workers caught Ebola and then death swiftly came home — yet only because millions of people felt like they knew one person who in truth was just as much a stranger as all the rest.

How is it that death can seem so removed from our daily lives when it is just as omnipresent now as it always has been?

However much humans may have advanced since we first recognized our mortality, in that recognition itself it seems we have regressed and now understand death less than did our earliest ancestors.

Never has death seemed so foreign, so removed from life, so lacking in inevitability.

And yet, even though we have become adept at postponing death and sheltering ourselves from its appearance, it is no less inevitable for us as it was for those who first considered its meaning.

The most striking difference between us and our ancestors is that we pursue life as though death was an aberration — something that always happens too soon and never seems certain.

Those individuals who not only abandon their effort to outrun death, but instead turn towards it and choose death in preference to life, appear to have betrayed the living. But that’s only because for most of us it’s hard to imagine such all-consuming pain.

This is how the writer, William Styron, described his own descent into hell:

That fall, as the disorder gradually took full possession of my system, I began to conceive that my mind itself was like one of those outmoded small-town telephone exchanges, being gradually inundated by floodwaters: one by one, the normal circuits began to drown, causing some of the functions of the body and nearly all of those of instinct and intellect to slowly disconnect.

There is a well-known checklist of some of these functions and their failures. Mine conked out fairly close to schedule, many of them following the pattern of depressive seizures. I particularly remember the lamentable near disappearance of my voice. It underwent a strange transformation, becoming at times quite faint, wheezy, and spasmodic — a friend observed later that it was the voice of a ninety-year-old. The libido also made an early exit, as it does in most major illnesses — it is the superfluous need of a body in beleaguered emergency. Many people lose all appetite; mine was relatively normal, but I found myself eating only for subsistence: food, like everything else within the scope of sensation, was utterly without savor. Most distressing of all the instinctual disruptions was that of sleep, along with a complete absence of dreams.

Exhaustion combined with sleeplessness is a rare torture. The two or three hours of sleep I was able to get at night were always at the behest of the minor tranquilizer Halcion — a matter which deserves particular notice. For some time now many experts in psychopharmacology have warned that the benzodiazepine family of tranquilizers, of which Halcion is one (Valium and Ativan are others), is capable of depressing mood and even precipitating a major depression. Over two years before my siege, an insouciant doctor had prescribed Avitan as a bedtime aid, telling me airily that I could take it as casually as aspirin. The Physician’s Desk Reference manual, the pharmacological bible, reveals that the medicine I had been ingesting was (a) three times the normally prescribed strength, (b) not advisable as a medication for more than a month or so, and (c) to be used with special caution by people of my age. At the time of which I am speaking, I had become addicted to Halcion as a sleeping aid, and was consuming large doses. It seems reasonable to think that this was still another contributory factor to the trouble that had come upon me. Certainly, it should be a caution to others.

At any rate, my few hours of sleep were usually terminated at three or four in the morning, when I stared up into yawning darkness, wondering and writhing at the devastation taking place in my mind, and awaiting the dawn, which usually permitted me a feverish, dreamless nap. I’m fairly certain that it was during one of these insomniac trances that there came over me the knowledge — a weird and shocking revelation, like that of some long-beshrouded metaphysical truth — that this condition would cost me my life if it continued on such a course.

What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this caldron, because there is no escape from this smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.

But if those in despair appear at risk of abandoning the living, in a death-denying society it is we in our own refusal to look into oblivion, recognizing its draw and its inevitability, who thereby reinforce the isolation of those who find themselves on the edge of this abyss.

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Fighters abandoning al Qaeda affiliates to join #ISIS, U.S. officials say

The Washington Post reports: Even before its assault on Kurdish territories in northern Iraq this month, analysts said the Islamic State had shown an almost impulsive character in its pursuit of territory and recruits, with little patience for the elaborate and often time-consuming terror plots favored by al-Qaeda.

Counterterrorism analysts at the CIA and other agencies have so far seen no indication that an entire al-Qaeda node or any of its senior leaders are prepared to switch sides. But officials said they have begun watching for signs of such a development.

The launching of U.S. airstrikes has raised new questions, including whether the bombings will hurt the Islamic State’s ability to draw recruits or elevate its status among jihadists. “Does that increase the spigot or close it?” said a senior U.S. counterterrorism official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity and noted that U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere have crippled al-Qaeda but also served as rallying cries against the United States.

Longer-term, U.S. officials expressed concern that the Islamic State, which so far has been focused predominantly on its goal of reestablishing an Islamic caliphate, may now place greater emphasis on carrying out attacks against the United States and its allies. [Continue reading…]

Hillary Clinton:

“One of the reasons why I worry about what’s happening in the Middle East right now is because of the breakout capacity of jihadist groups that can affect Europe, can affect the United States,” she said. “Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand. Their raison d’etre is to be against the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank—and we all fit into one of these categories. How do we try to contain that? I’m thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat.”

The breakout capacity of jihadist groups? I strongly suspect that phrase was a gift from GOP strategist Frank Luntz. It offers a subliminal connection between terrorism and Iran’s nuclear program without having to make any substantive assertion to that effect. Instead, it conjures up jihadist groups as metaphorical weapons of mass destruction. Is this how a President Clinton would frame her iteration of the War on Terrorism?

More importantly, Clinton is echoing the U.S.-centric narcissistic view of terrorism that still prevails in this country: that extremists of every description have no greater desire than to find ways of killing Americans.

No doubt, ISIS has issued blood-curdling warnings, saying that the U.S. will be severely punished if it tries to obstruct the growth of the Islamic State, but the very fact that it has made these warnings is an indication that the group has vastly more interest in its caliphate project than it has in waging war with the U.S..

ISIS is not at war with America — it’s enemy is the Shia.

That’s not to imply that the rest of the world has any justification for being complacent about the level of mayhem ISIS can and already has created. It’s simply a suggestion that “American lives are at stake” should not be the only rationale guiding U.S. foreign affairs.

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‘I just want people to pay’

Even though I spend too many of my waking hours on the internet, like a hamster on an endlessly spinning wheel, I have some sympathy for John R. MacArthur’s disdain for online publishing. Indeed, it’s probably because of this sense that the internet has an unlimited capacity to eat time that I see some appeal in the idea that we might return to a pre-digital age of print.

But the passionate defense of print media that the publisher of Harper’s magazine makes, falls apart when we learn this:

On several occasions during a recent interview, he could not quite remember a fact that supported a point. His version of searching for it on Google was yelling to a staff member, who hurried to deliver the information.

Who needs Google when they have staff?

But perhaps the more relevent question would be: who needs to use Google when they have staff who can use Google?

MacArthur’s argument against online publishing is that the web isn’t “much more than a gigantic Xerox machine” that prevents publishers and writers getting paid.

Even so, when he somewhat dismissively refers to the internet as a place where people go to blow off steam, I wonder whether he is oblivious of the degree to which he indirectly relies on it — like a man who says he doesn’t need to know how to cook because all his meals get delivered by caterers.

MacArthur might believe his argument is against those who promote online media and thereby undermine the economic viability of publishing, but maybe he should imagine how he would make his case with Gutenburg.

Whereas Gutenburg came up with the means of making the written word accessible to the masses and thereby democratized human expression, the revivalists of print seem more interested in restricting access of their publications to their well-heeled subscribers.

MacArthur might believe that everyone who is cultivated enough to appreciate a quality literary magazine will also be able to afford paying for it, but in making that assumption he represents the American liberal elite with its over-sized sense of being liberal and its downplayed status as an elite.

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