Author Archives: Paul Woodward

Bashar al-Assad steered 2013 Nobel Peace Prize selection

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2013 is to be awarded to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) for its extensive efforts to eliminate chemical weapons.

During World War One, chemical weapons were used to a considerable degree. The Geneva Convention of 1925 prohibited the use, but not the production or storage, of chemical weapons. During World War Two, chemical means were employed in Hitler’s mass exterminations. Chemical weapons have subsequently been put to use on numerous occasions by both states and terrorists. In 1992-93 a convention was drawn up prohibiting also the production and storage of such weapons. It came into force in 1997. Since then the OPCW has, through inspections, destruction and by other means, sought the implementation of the convention. 189 states have acceded to the convention to date.

The conventions and the work of the OPCW have defined the use of chemical weapons as a taboo under international law. Recent events in Syria, where chemical weapons have again been put to use, have underlined the need to enhance the efforts to do away with such weapons. Some states are still not members of the OPCW. Certain states have not observed the deadline, which was April 2012, for destroying their chemical weapons. This applies especially to the USA and Russia.

Disarmament figures prominently in Alfred Nobel’s will. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has through numerous prizes underlined the need to do away with nuclear weapons. By means of the present award to the OPCW, the Committee is seeking to contribute to the elimination of chemical weapons.

The committee offers no credit to Bashar al-Assad.

But suppose John Kerry had not unwittingly initiated the process leading towards Syria giving up its chemical weapons stockpile, and suppose Russia had not seized on the political opportunity the the U.S. provided for removing the threat of military action, and suppose the Syrian government had not quickly recognized that it would be strengthening its own grip on power by giving up CW. Would the OPCW have just received the Peace Prize? Almost certainly not.

The crucial decision in the process leading to that choice was made by Assad.

Just as George W Bush once honored another war criminal, Ariel Sharon, as a “man of peace,” it surely won’t be long before Nobel laureate Barack Obama offers the same praise to Syria’s president.

Facebooktwittermail

The Assad smokescreen

In an interview with Der Spiegel this week, Bashar al-Assad was questioned about the August 21 chemical weapons attack outside Damascus:

SPIEGEL: President Obama said after the investigation into this crime by the United Nations that there was “no doubt” that your regime used chemical weapons on Aug. 21 in an attack that killed more than 1,000 people.

Assad: Once again, I dare Obama to give a single piece of evidence, a single shred. The only thing he has is lies.

SPIEGEL: But the conclusions of the UN inspectors …

Assad: What conclusions? When the inspectors came to Syria, we asked them to continue the investigation. We are hoping for an explanation of who is responsible for this act.

SPIEGEL: Based on the trajectory of the rockets, it is possible to calculate where they were fired from — namely the positions of your Fourth Division.

Assad: That doesn’t prove anything, because the terrorists could be anywhere. You can find them in Damascus now. They could even launch a missile from near my house.

SPIEGEL: But your opponents are not capable of firing weapons containing Sarin. That requires military equipment, training and precision.

Assad: Who said that they are not capable? In the 1990s, terrorists used Sarin gas in an attack in Tokyo. They call it “kitchen gas” because it can be made anywhere.

SPIEGEL: But you really can’t compare these two Sarin attacks — they aren’t comparable. This was a military action.

Assad: No one can say with certainty that rockets were used — we do not have any evidence. The only thing certain is that Sarin was released. Perhaps that happened when one of our rockets struck one of the terrorists’ positions? Or perhaps they made an error while they were handling it and something happened.

“… some of the fighters handled the weapons improperly and set off the explosions” — remember that line?

It comes from the infamous Mint Press report that has since been disowned by Dale Gavlak, but whose name still appears in the byline.

So, here we have the Syrian president on the one hand asserting that there isn’t a “single piece of evidence” implicating his regime in the chemical attack, while on the other hand churning rumors about the attack first promulgated by a small website in Minnesota.

The Syrian state still retains significant power, yet apparently when it comes to the challenge of gathering evidence about the August attack it’s only tool of investigation is the internet.

Some observers might counter that in this case, since the location of the attack remains under rebel control, the regime can do no more than cite media reports, but this method of deflecting accusations by citing contrary claims from the media, long predates the revolution.

Back in 2007, after it was revealed in the Western media that on September 6, Israel had launched an attack on what was claimed to be a nuclear reactor under construction in the Deir ez-Zor region, the Syrian Vice-President Faruq Al Shara refuted the claim by asserting that the Arab Center for the Studies of Arid zones and Dry lands had in fact been the target. AFP quoted him:

“The images prove that the target that was attacked by air force jets in Syria was an academic research centre for the study of arid soil,” Shara told a news conference in Damascus.

“The last report appeared in European, American, and also a few Arab media outlets, and it noted that the attack was carried out at a research centre in Deir Ezzor.

“When I saw the photograph, it became evident that we were talking about the Desert Lands Research Center, a center that belongs to the Arab League. This is the picture, you can see it, and it proves that everything that was said about this attack was wrong.”

When the center itself denied that it had been attacked, Assad — in an interview with the BBC — claimed that the target had been an unused military building.

But if the Syrian government genuinely had nothing to hide, it had no need to rely on second-hand evidence or unsubstantiated claims — it could have swiftly invited international media to visit the site of the Israeli attack and also brought in UN inspectors to confirm that a nuclear reactor had not been under construction. After all, the IAEA strongly objected to Israel’s unilateral action, arguing that Israeli and U.S. concerns should have triggered IAEA inspections while the facility was still intact.

But instead of jumping on an opportunity to show the world that Syria had been the victim of unprovoked aggression, Assad sent in bulldozers to bury the evidence.

Facebooktwittermail

Banksy and Syria: The rebels who hide and the rebels who fight

No war has ever been captured on film more extensively than the war in Syria. Yet these images of war — mostly delivered by YouTube — seem to have done little to heighten awareness and trigger empathy among those who witness this war on the screen of a computer. On the contrary, the more we see, the less we feel; the image has become the analgesic.

Enter Banksy — the pseudonymous graffiti artist currently performing in New York City. He epitomizes the contradictions in the spirit of rebellion in the internet age — a craving to be seen, wrapped in a fear of being known.

The man whose public life began in the early 90s must by now be approaching middle age and yet he clings to his adolescent persona, convinced apparently that if his real name were to be known and his real face seen, the Banksy bubble would burst; the unmasked rebel would rebel be no more.

That Banksy would release a YouTube video mocking rebels in Syria probably says much more about the ways in which he finds his own rebel identity threatened than it says about the men fighting against the Assad regime.

That in two days, Banksy’s video would have been viewed more than four million times while an award-winning documentary film about Syria, Not Anymore: A Story of Revolution, directed by Matthew VanDyke, has only been viewed 61,000 times, shows how readily the internet caters to our insatiable appetite for mindless entertainment. In this era, the internet delivering YouTube, Twitter, endless apps and GIFs, is the opium of the people.

In VanDyke’s film, Omar Hattab (Mowya), standing next to a cat notes with irony that most Americans show more interest in cats than Syrians.

“I am sure that the animals have rights in America more than the people here. They don’t care about us… Maybe you filming three of four cats and putting it on YouTube — maybe one million will watch the video in one hour.”

It turns out that Syria animated by a Disney character is just as popular.

Syria is not short of satirists, as the residents of Kafranbel continue to demonstrate.

Banksy’s latest stunt is just that: a stunt which calls for attention yet speaks of little more than the universal desire to be noticed. It is a shout to be heard made by someone who has nothing to say — not a sharp piece of political commentary.

In Syria, teenagers have been thrust into adulthood by war, while in the West pseudo-rebels performing their acts of digital defiance turn out to be adults who lack the courage to leave their adolescence behind.

Facebooktwittermail

Debunking the radicalization narrative in Syria

Bashar al-Assad has played an instrumental role in the deaths of over 100,000 Syrians and in making close to a third of the country’s population homeless, but despite this and despite his lack of charisma, in many Western eyes he seems to retain a stubborn charm.

In his well-tailored suits, the fair-skinned, green-eyed Syrian leader, has a regal manner polished by British culture. He is, in a word, far too respectable to be effectively tarnished by the caricatures of a tyrant and butcher.

Thus the ease with which he is afforded the status of a statesman — a role after all which derives as much from style as anything else.

How easy it is for the West to project dignity on a man for no better reason than his willingness to wear a necktie and a suit. Add to that Assad’s fluent English and it sometimes seems that he might be able to get away with anything.

And then there is the fact that he has paid close attention to the ease with which the American mindset can be manipulated and it’s no wonder that his regime has been so willing to abandon chemical weapons.

It retains the unfettered use of a much more effective weapon which it deploys with minimal effort, since that weapon is nothing more than a word — a word that can render the average American brain-dead from a range of 10,000 miles. The word of course is terrorism.

From day one, Assad has insisted his opponents are terrorists. At first it was a claim dismissed as cynical propaganda and yet as the months have passed and the scale of destruction become massive, the terrorism meme has spread in the war-weary West. Here, any narrative will be given consideration if it leads to this conclusion: don’t venture there.

In this context, Scott Lucas offers a reality check on the latest developments in Syria.

Facebooktwittermail

Kerry praises Assad while Assad continues bombing Syria

Remember the refrain that used to come from all quarters of the Obama administration? Assad must go!

This was Secretary of State John Kerry speaking in London on February 25:

Less than two months after chemical attacks outside Damascus killed hundreds of Syrians, not only have U.S. officials stopped insisting Assad must go, but today Kerry praised the Syrian president. Kerry praised Assad even as his air force continued its daily bombing of Syrian cities. Of course none of those bombs were armed with chemical warheads.

Kerry is “very pleased” at progress in the chemical weapons disarmament plan which he called “a terrific example of global cooperation.” He added, “I think it is also credit to the Assad regime for complying rapidly as they are supposed to.”

Even among those observers who remain skeptical about the Assad regime’s responsibility for the August 21 chemical attacks, there should nevertheless be little debate about who has benefited, diplomatically, politically, and strategically: Bashar al-Assad.

The following videos of air attacks on several cities were uploaded to YouTube today and appeared on the Facebook page of the Local Coordination Committees of Syria.

Barrel bombs dropped on Kafr-Zeita, Hama:

An air strike on Dael, Daraa

An air strike on Hrak, Daraa

An air strike on Tafas, Daraa

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports: Syrian government forces have reopened a key road leading to the embattled northern city of Aleppo after heavy fighting with rebels that left casualties on both sides, state media and activists said Monday.

The state news agency and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said regime troops wrested control of the road Sunday night. It had been closed since rebels captured villages along the road in August.

President Bashar Assad’s regime built the desert road to bypass contested areas after rebels took the town of Maaret al-Numan late last year, cutting the main highway between the capital, Damascus, and Aleppo, Syria’s largest city.

“This road was a matter of life or death to the regime,” said Observatory director Rami Abdul-Rahman. He added that government troops now can send supplies to the north although the road remains “very dangerous.”

Facebooktwittermail

Syria beyond the binaries

Jaish al-Islam commanders from 50 insurgent groups who merged on Sunday.

Jaish al-Islam commanders from 50 insurgent groups who merged on Sunday.

I suspect that for quite a few observers there’s something vaguely comforting about the spectacle of the rise of extremism in Syria. Why comforting? Because it reinforces the idea that however bad the Assad regime might be, the alternative seems destined to be worse. On that basis one can take comfort in the belief that the best course of action for those outside Syria is no action at all.

Indeed, the Assad regime itself seems willing to cater to those who want to balance both humanitarian and non-interventionist concerns through facilitating a symbolic intervention by destroying Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal. If the Syrian government is sufficiently cooperative in this undertaking it will no doubt earn qualified praise for doing so.

Which brings me to a headline in yesterday’s Washington Post: “Foreign extremists dominate Syria fight“. As if carried away by the sentiment in those words, the security analyst Matthew Aid then reposted the article on Tumblr with an even more sensational headline: “Most Fighting in Syria Being Done by AQ-Linked Militants, Not Free Syrian Army“.

The problem is, neither headline actually reflected the details of the report. No doubt Liz Sly, reporting from Beirut, wanted to convey some sense of Syria being taken over by foreign jihadists, yet the second sentence in her report acknowledges: “The number of Syrians battling to overthrow the regime led by President Bashar al-Assad outstrips by a large margin the thousands of Arabs and other non-Syrian Muslims who have streamed into Syria over the past two years to join in the fight.”

Further in to the report she says that conservative estimates put the number of foreign fighters at between 6,000 to 10,000 — though she fails to put that in context by referring to the estimated size of the fighting opposition: 100,000.

Supposedly, what is happening in Syria can only be comprehended in binary terms: Syrian vs foreign; moderate vs extremist; secular vs Islamist; Sunni vs Allawite. But the overarching effect of the imposition of these simplistic labels is to reinforce the sentiment that Syria is bad news and the less we hear about it the better.

On the other hand, for those who retain an interest in being provided with a more nuanced picture of what’s happening on the ground, there are commentators like Hassan Hassan who are capable of explaining some of the complexity in an ever-changing landscape while underlining the fact that whatever fissures do indeed exist inside the opposition, this remains a fight to topple the Assad regime.

Hassan notes that in the liberated areas of Syria, Salafi-leaning fighters are now dominant and among these the newly formed Jaish al-Islam (“the Army of Islam”) composed of at least 50 groups operating mainly around Damascus, has now displaced the FSA as the strongest rebel force.

The emerging trend, far from that of Syria being taken over by foreign fighters, may actually be going in the opposite direction:

Significant grassroots hostility is building in liberated Syrian areas against foreign-funded extremists and al Qaeda affiliates. These tensions do not always develop into sustained clashes — for almost all rebel groups, toppling the regime is the priority, not fighting extremist forces, which have proved indispensable in the battlefield.

According to an activist based in the northern city of Raqqa, when clashes erupted between the al Qaeda-affiliated ISIS and Ahfad al-Rasoul in August, local residents threw their support behind one or the other side — but the strongest condemnation was for the infighting itself. “When they see the regime’s warplanes shelling the city without a single shot in their direction, they get angry at the fighters who could do something,” the activist explained.

The size of extremist groups is not an accurate indicator of the support for their ideology within Syrian society. Fighting groups are also not ideologically homogenous, as many fighters join groups for their effectiveness on the battlefield and disciple — not their religious beliefs. Ahrar al-Sham members in Daraa, for example, can be remarkably different in terms of religiosity from members in more conservative northern areas such as Idlib or the Aleppo countryside.

The situation inside the country is more fluid and nuanced than many groups’ hard-line slogans would suggest. Moderates can be members of hard-line groups and vice versa. Some groups, such as Suqour al-Sham, include both secular members and Islamist veterans of the insurgency against the U.S. occupation of Iraq. For example, a former judge at Aleppo’s cassation court, a secular Syrian who does not pray, nevertheless supports an Islamic identity to the state.

For this reason, many moderate fighters are more concerned with the foreign networks and leaders than the rank-and-file members of hard-line groups. “We are not too worried about Jabhat al-Nusra,” said one FSA-affiliated officer in the eastern governorate of Deir Ezzor who said he worked in intelligence operations. “Once the fighting ends, we’ll bring them back. We know them. They’re our brothers, cousins, and neighbors — they’re the sons of our tribes. Our true struggle will be against [ISIS] and the Nusra leaders.”

Facebooktwittermail

Israel’s increasing sense of isolation

Joanna Paraszczuk reports: A sense of isolation prevails in Israel’s media on Wednesday — reflected in both news reporting and opinion pieces — following Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Tuesday speech to the UN General Assembly.

Populist outlet Ynet and Channel 2 focus on comments made by Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon on Wednesday morning. Ya’alon spoke out in support of Netanyahu’s stance on Iran, saying that the Prime Minister had “drawn an accurate picture” of Israel’s stance on Iran and President Hassan Rouhani.

“In the UN, the Prime Minister described an accurate reality about how we see the Iranian threat, which is ongoing, even though President Rouhani spoke sweetly and Western officials prefer not to face reality with open eyes,” Ya’alon told reporters during a tour of the Golan Heights.

The Defense Minister echoed Netanyahu’s words, saying that Iran posed a terror threat in the region and beyond, “Iran carries out terror in Afghanistan, it trains and arms Hezbollah, it tries to smuggle weapons into Gaza, it is investing in infrastructure of terrorism in South America and Asia and its centrifuges continue to turn. That is why we say you have to stop the Iranian nuclear program by all means.”

Channel 2 also carries comments from Security Cabinet member and Minister Silvan Shalom, who warned that Israel stands alone.

“We are quite alone in facing the Iranian threat to destroy us,” Shalom said, adding that Rouhani is no different from his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

“Israel is trying to remove the mask from Rouhani’s face, he speaks sweetly and in a different way from Ahmadinejad, but he did not really no different from him. His aim is to gain more time to build a nuclear bomb, which would be an eternal insurance certificate for the ayatollahs’ regime,” Shalom added. [Continue reading…]

Setting aside for now the fact that Iran’s leaders persist in denying that the Islamic republic’s nuclear program is geared towards weapons production, Shalom’s characterization of the implications of a nuclear-armed Iran is quite revealing.

Having referred to “the Iranian threat to destroy us,” he then suggests that nuclear weapons would serve as an “eternal insurance certificate for the ayatollahs’ regime” — acknowledging that such weapons would serve Iran in exactly the same way that they serve all other nuclear powers: as the ultimate deterrent. Shalom clearly doesn’t share the view promoted by Alan Dershowitz and other members of the rabid wing of the Israel lobby: that Iran is a “suicide nation” willing to see itself destroyed by a retaliatory nuclear strike from Israel.

Moreover, to suggest that Iran’s rulers would want or need nuclear insurance is to acknowledge that an ad hoc coalition of regional powers — preeminently Israel and Saudi Arabia — remain reluctant to abandon their dreams of bringing about regime change in Tehran.

At the same time as engaging in last week’s whirlwind of diplomatic outreach, Hassan Rouhani made it very clear that he has a relatively small window of opportunity to make real progress as he faces pressure from a new axis of extremism revealing the common interests of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, and the Assad regime, all of whom for their own reasons feel deeply threatened by the possibility of Iranian-U.S. rapprochement.

Facebooktwittermail

Israel puts ‘Iranian spy’ on display but has yet to charge him after 20 days of detention

Ali Mansouri, an Iranian-born Belgian citizen also known as Alex Mans, was arrested by Israel’s internal security services Shin Bet on September 11. His possession of a couple of nondescript photographs in which the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv can be seen, has been presented as evidence that he was engaged in espionage. (Anyone who wants to find better photos of the embassy just has to use Google.)

The fact that after 20 days in detention (during the first nine of which Mansouri was prevented from consulting a lawyer) investigators don’t appear to have found sufficient evidence to put him on trial, might explain why he has yet to be charged.

At the same time, Israeli authorities were shameless in trying to exploit the political value of holding an Iranian in handcuffs as he was put on display for the press today.

Reuters reports: A man arrested on suspicion of being an Iranian spy appeared in an Israeli court on Monday and some Israeli analysts questioned the timing of the affair, suggesting it was being showcased as part of efforts to discredit Tehran’s new opening to Washington.

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew on Sunday to the United States for a visit focused on Iran’s nuclear program, Israel’s Shin Bet security service announced that Ali Mansouri had been arrested on September 11 on suspicion of spying for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

It said Mansouri, a 55-year-old Iranian-Belgian national, had photographed the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and intended to establish business ties in Israel as a cover for espionage.

An Israeli official told reporters on Netanyahu’s flight that Mansouri’s picture-taking outside the embassy – whose exterior can be seen in numerous images on the Internet – was an attempt “to collect intelligence for a possible terror attack”.

That allegation was challenged by Mansouri’s lawyer, Michal Okabi, after a hearing on Monday in a court in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petah Tikva in which the suspect, who did not speak, was ordered held for eight more days.

“The apocalyptic picture that the Shin Bet is painting is a lot more complicated and the attempt to claim that our client came here in order to carry out attacks in Israel is far from reality and without foundation,” Okabi told reporters.

Some Israeli media commentators questioned the timing of the news, released in a Shin Bet statement that included photographs it said he had taken outside the beachfront mission and at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion airport. No formal charges have been filed.

Asked by Reuters whether the decision to publicize Mansouri’s arrest was influenced by Netanyahu’s U.S. trip, the Shin Bet declined to comment.

Facebooktwittermail

Israel releases ‘Iranian spy’ story as Netanyahu heads to Washington

netanyahu-rouhaniOn September 11, Israel’s secret police (Shin Bet) arrested a Belgian windows and roofing salesman who is alleged to be an “Iranian agent … sent to Israel to set up a base for Iranian intelligence and terrorism networks”.

The Israeli government delayed releasing information about the arrest until Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set off for Washington on his mission to counter the “the onslaught of smiles” that Americans have been subjected to over the last few days.

Reasons the Israelis give for regarding Ali Mansouri with suspicion, include:

  • The fact that when he became a Belgium citizen in 2006, he changed his name to Alex Mans. Were it not for the fact that the father of Israel’s prime minister shed his Polish identity when he migrated to Palestine, Bibi might now be generally known as Benjamin Mileikowsky. As millions of Americans can attest, the adoption of a new name in a new homeland is far from unusual.
  • Mans was found in possession of photos of the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. Much more detailed photos can be found on Google Maps.
  • “Iran offered him a million dollars in exchange for his activities.” But did he take a dime?

Mans left Iran the year after the revolution and has spent most of his adult life living in Turkey and Belgium.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

Public defense lawyers representing Mansouri said that their client is a Belgian businessman who is not motivated by any pro-Iranian agenda.

The attorneys, Michael Orkavi and Anat Yaari, said their client had been denied access to a lawyer for nine days. They added that a more complex picture exists than the one being presented by security forces, and that the full details would emerge in court after Mansouri is charged.

Mans’ cover as a ‘salesman’ seems quite convincing. But maybe that’s because he’s just a salesman. The only thing he’s definitely ‘guilty’ of is having been born in Iran.

Facebooktwittermail

Syrian rebel groups reject exiled National Coalition

islamic-alliance

The formation of a coalition of rebel groups under an “Islamic framework” that rejects the authority and legitimacy of the Western-backed and Istanbul-based National Coalition, is going to be widely seen as further evidence of the “Islamisation” of the Syrian opposition. On that basis, it will also generally be viewed as reflecting a trend towards greater extremism, but that judgement might be premature.

The group which has not officially been named yet but is being referred to by some of its members as the “Islamic Alliance” appears to have coalesced around some core principles that seem to be more strategic than ideological, namely, that it rejects the authority and legitimacy of an exiled group that has assumed the role of a kind of government-in-waiting but whose members are safely removed from the fighting; that those who are fighting “own” the revolution; and that their success will depend on solidarity.

An indication that this new coalition might not signal further radicalization of the opposition is the fact that it does not include the most radical group in Syria: the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) which is most closely affiliated with al Qaeda. Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri recently called on Syria’s Islamist fighters to shun secularists, but this new coalition might have more to do with shunning outsiders.

By raising expectations that a U.S. intervention might decisively tip the balance of power in the rebels’ favor, only to then see President Obama sign on to a chemical weapons disarmament plan whose most likely effect will be to ensure the continuation of Bashar al-Assad’s rule, the lesson that gets repeatedly driven home to Syrians is that there is no one they can rely upon but themselves.

Aron Lund writes for Syria Comment: Abdelaziz Salame, the highest political leader of the Tawhid Brigade in Aleppo, has issued a statement online where he claims to speak for 13 different rebel factions. You can see the video or read it in Arabic here. The statement is titled “communiqué number one” – making it slightly ominous right off the bat – and what it purports to do is to gut Western strategy on Syria and put an end to the exiled opposition.

The statements has four points, some of them a little rambling. My summary:

  • All military and civilian forces should unify their ranks in an “Islamic framwork” which is based on “the rule of sharia and making it the sole source of legislation”.
  • The undersigned feel that they can only be represented by those who lived and sacrificed for the revolution.
  • Therefore, they say, they are not represented by the exile groups. They go on to specify that this applies to the National Coalition and the planned exile government of Ahmed Touma, stressing that these groups “do not represent them” and they “do not recognize them”.
  • In closing, the undersigned call on everyone to unite and avoid conflict, and so on, and so on.

The following groups are listed as signatories to the statement.

  1. Jabhat al-Nosra
  2. Islamic Ahrar al-Sham Movement
  3. Tawhid Brigade
  4. Islam Brigade
  5. Suqour al-Sham Brigades
  6. Islamic Dawn Movement
  7. Islamic Light Movement
  8. Noureddin al-Zengi Battalions
  9. Haqq Brigade – Homs
  10. Furqan Brigade – Quneitra
  11. Fa-staqim Kama Ummirat Gathering – Aleppo
  12. 19th Division
  13. Ansar Brigade

Who are these people?

The alleged signatories make up a major part of the northern rebel force, plus big chunks also of the Homs and Damascus rebel scene, as well as a bit of it elsewhere. Some of them are among the biggest armed groups in the country, and I’m thinking now mostly of numbers one through five. All together, they control at least a few tens of thousand fighters, and if you trust their own estimates (don’t) it must be way above 50,000 fighters.

Most of the major insurgent alliances are included. Liwa al-Tawhid, Liwa al-Islam and Suqour al-Sham are in both the Western- and Gulf-backed Supreme Military Council (SMC a.k.a. FSA) and the SILF, sort-of-moderate Islamists. Ahrar al-Sham and Haqq are in the SIF, very hardline Islamists. Jabhat al-Nosra, of course, is an al-Qaida faction. Noureddin al-Zengi are in the Asala wa-Tanmiya alliance (which is led by quietist salafis, more or less) as well as in the SMC. And so on. More groups may join, but already at this stage, it looks – on paper, at least – like the most powerful insurgent alliance in Syria.

What does this mean?

Is this a big deal? Yes, if the statement proves to accurately represent the groups mentioned and they do not immediately fall apart again, it is a very big deal. It represents the rebellion of a large part of the “mainstream FSA” against its purported political leadership, and openly aligns these factions with more hardline Islamist forces.

That means that all of these groups now formally state that they do not recognize the opposition leadership that has been molded and promoted by the USA, Turkey, France, Great Britain, other EU countries, Qatar, and – especially, as of late – Saudi Arabia.

That they also formally commit themselves to sharia as the “sole source of legislation” is not as a big a deal as it may seem. Most of these factions already were on record as saying that, and for most of the others, it’s more like a slight tweak of language. Bottom line, they were all Islamist anyway. And, of course, they can still mean different things when they talk about sharia.

Why now? According to a Tawhid Brigade spokesperson, it is because of the “conspiracies and compromises that are being forced on the Syrian people by way of the [National] Coalition”. So there.

Mohammed Alloush of the Islam Brigade (led by his relative, Mohammed Zahran Alloush), who is also a leading figure in the SILF alliance, was up late tweeting tonight. He had a laundry list of complaints against the National Coalition, including the fact that its members are all, he says, “appointed”, i.e. by foreign powers. He also opposed its planned negotiations with the regime. This may have been in reference to a (widely misinterpreted) recent statement by the Coalition president Ahmed Jerba. Alloush also referred to the recent deal between the National Coalition and the Kurdish National Council, and was upset that this will (he thinks) splinter Syria and change its name from the Syrian Arab Republic to the Syrian Republic.

Is this a one-off thing?

The fellow from the Tawhid Brigade informed me that more statements are in the making. According to him, this is not just an ad hoc formation set up to make a single point about the National Coalition. He hinted that it’s the beginning of a more structured group, but when I asked, he said it has no name yet. On the other hand, Abdulqader Saleh – Tawhid’s powerful military chief – referred to it on Twitter as al-Tahaluf al-Islami or the Islamic Alliance, but that may have been just descriptive, rather than a formal name.

Mohammed Alloush also wrote on Twitter, somewhat ambiguously, that the member groups have their own offices and political bureaus, and there’s a political program different from the National Coalition. He, too, hinted that there’s more coming: “wait for the announcement of the new army”.

Who’s missing?

These are of course not all the rebels; far from it. Dozens or hundreds of small and local groups are missing from this alliance, just like they’ve been missing from every other alliance before it. Some really big groups are also not in there, like the Farouq Battalions or the Ahfad al-Rasoul Brigades, both of them quite closely aligned with the SMC and the National Coalition.

Most notably, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham – Syria’s most querulous al-Qaida faction – is absent from the list. Given the recent surge in tension between the Islamic State and other factions, that seems significant. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

A handshake postponed

Having celebrated the value of making credible military threats, asserted the United State’s self-declared right to conduct military action without the sanction of the UN Security Council, and reasserted America’s commitment to use all necessary means including military force to ensure the free flow of oil out of the Middle East, President Obama offered to shake hands with the president of the country that has most often been threatened by U.S. strikes: Iran.

The Iranians tactfully declined providing Obama with his photo opportunity, satisfied that an opportunity for substantive contact has already been arranged through a meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif scheduled to take place on Thursday.

A handshake can be historic if it actually means something — which is to say, means something more than simply a willingness to shake hands. In and of itself, a handshake with Obama is worth precisely nothing.

If anything, perhaps the most significant thing about the-handshake-that-didn’t-happen is the way the White House has mishandled the event. Having reached out to the Iranians and found that they aren’t ready, the artful diplomatic course would have been to say nothing and deflect questions about whether such a meeting would take place. Instead, by essentially saying we reached out to them but they didn’t reciprocate, Washington puts Tehran on the defense and the Americans end up looking like they were just trying to score points.

In his speech at the UN, Obama expressed the hope that the United States and Iran can develop a new relationship — “one based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” At the very same time, he asserted America’s status as a superpower and demanded that Iran bow to external pressure.

Neither individuals nor states can lay claim to coercive power and simultaneously claim they have an interest in developing a respectful relationship with those who they are currently trying to push around.

Facebooktwittermail

Egyptian court bans Muslim Brotherhood in ongoing campaign to eradicate the million-strong movement

Egypt's Foreign Minister Fahmy meets with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in New York, September 22, 2013

Egypt's Foreign Minister Fahmy meets with U.S. Secretary of State Kerry in New York, September 22, 2013

“Things are moving forward in Egypt,” is the message officials are taking to the UN this week. Egypt’s rulers following the military coup in July want to placate Washington’s nominal concerns about democracy with this assurance:

Events for the most part are on the right track in Egypt, despite inevitable hiccups; the state is committed to a transitional process that will result in a referendum on an amended – and hopefully less controversial – constitution, and a full democratic process will be pursued.

Having ousted President Mohamed Morsi, killed hundreds of members of the Muslim Brotherhood and imprisoned thousands more, the effort to destroy the movement shows few signs of restraint.

“The plan is to drain the sources of funding, break the joints of the group, and the dismantle podiums from which they deliver their message,” a senior Egyptian security official tells Associated Press, using language reminiscent of then defense minister Yitzhak Rabin’s “broken bones” campaign as Israel attempted to crush the first Palestinian intifada.

Reuters reports: Murad Ali says he was put in a foul-smelling cell on death row, sleeping on a concrete floor, and denied light and human contact after his arrest in Egypt’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood. “It was as dark as a grave,” he wrote in a letter addressed to friends and family and seen by Reuters.

The army-backed authorities deny claims Brotherhood leaders have been mistreated, and there is no way to independently verify such accounts; but people who have spoken to them in jail say some have been kept in similar conditions for days on end.

Their relatives describe it as a bid to break their spirit – a measure of the severity of the campaign against the group that was swept from power by the military on July 3, when Mohamed Mursi, a Brotherhood member, was deposed.

Analysts say it points to a state effort to weaken the Brotherhood by decapitating it. The movement says it has up to one million members and it is one of the most influential Islamist groups in the Middle East.

The New York Times reports: An Egyptian court on Monday issued an injunction dissolving the Muslim Brotherhood and confiscating its assets, escalating a broad crackdown on the group less than three months since the military ousted its ally, President Mohamed Morsi.

The ruling, by the Cairo Court for Urgent Matters, amounts to a preliminary injunction shutting down the Brotherhood until a higher court renders a more permanent verdict. The leftist party Tagammu had sought the immediate action, accusing the Brotherhood of “terrorism” and of exploiting religion for political gain. The court ordered the Brotherhood’s assets to be held in trust until a final decision.

If confirmed, the ban on the Brotherhood — Egypt’s mainstream Islamist group — would further diminish hopes of the new government’s fulfilling its promise to restart a democratic political process that would include Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters. For now, though, it effectively formalizes the suppression of the Brotherhood that is already well under way.

Since Mr. Morsi’s ouster, the new government appointed by Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi has killed more than 1,000 Brotherhood members in mass shootings at protests against the takeover and arrested thousands more, including almost all of the group’s leaders. Security services have closed offices of the group and its political party in cities around the country. Members are now sometimes afraid to speak publicly by name for fear of reprisals.

Abdullah Al-Arian writes: The military’s intervention reflects a longstanding desire among elements of the former regime to rid Egypt of its revolutionary movement and destroy any progress toward the establishment of democratic institutions.

If those intentions were not obvious in their posturing before July 3, they have certainly become clear since then. In the six-week long crisis that followed, there was no genuine attempt by the military-appointed interim government to resolve the situation in a manner that would allow Egypt to remain on the revolutionary track or even to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. The total war strategy employed against the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters was meant to emulate the repression of prior eras, but on an even wider scale, due to the perception of widespread public support for this move.

Staying true to form as a movement with strong internal discipline and the capacity to mobilize, the Muslim Brotherhood employed the only means at its disposal, a non-violent mass protest, to oppose the clear attempts to overturn its democratic gains and destroy its presence in society for the foreseeable future. In fact, the Rabaa protests took the group’s leadership back to a place with which it is all too intimately familiar, the perpetual victimhood upon which it has built its eight-decade legacy. Far from the challenges of governance, the anti-coup protests recalled the common theme of standing up to tyranny and repression that marked the Muslim Brotherhood’s experiences under successive authoritarian rulers.

The military’s disproportionate response to the protests, unprecedented in Egypt’s modern history, reflects an attempt to establish a new political and social order that would not only marginalize the Muslim Brotherhood, but would destroy it altogether. The wholesale adoption of the “war on terror” discourse by the state and its media arm is not only intended to make the alarmingly high number of casualties seem justifiable. As with the Bush era policy of the same name, this paradigm is meant to convince those watching from the sidelines that the Islamic activist impulse that has been part and parcel of Egyptian society for a century could conceivably be eradicated.

The muted response from the liberal, leftist, and progressive currents within society suggest that this tactic has worked, with most groups hoping that the wave of violent repression is not indicative of a wider trend aimed at rolling back the gains of the revolution. Beyond wishful thinking, however, there is little to challenge the notion that the counter-revolution is in full swing.

Wishful thinking is in evidence today with the creation of a new anti-Brotherhood and anti-military group called the The Way of the Revolution Front (Facebook).

Facebooktwittermail

Mint Press and Dale Gavlak under threat from mysterious ‘third parties’?

No one is safe — not even in Minnesota — from the long arm of Saudi intelligence.

Publish something that offends Prince Bandar bin Sultan and your career might be destroyed, perhaps even your life will be in danger — at least that’s the picture currently be conjured up by Mnar Muhawesh, executive director and editor at large for MintPress News. No doubt these fears resonate with all those lonely individuals who have taken it upon themselves to challenge the political establishment in the United States and the Middle East.

However, whether Mint Press and one of its reporters, Dale Gavlak, have indeed provoked Prince Bandar’s wrath by alleging his involvement in the August chemical attacks outside Damascus, he probably doesn’t need to take any action since the publication and journalist are doing a very effective job at destroying each other.

But let’s backtrack a bit and let Clay Claiborne, in colorful style, sum up how we reached this point:

For three days after the sarin gas attack that murdered over a thousand Syrians, a third of them children, in suburban Damascus on 21 August 2013, the Assad Regime denied that any such attack had even happened. As the videos and eyewitness reports began to come out, that position became untenable, so the Assad Regime started saying “Well then, the rebels must have done it.”

The Left and the Peace and Just Us* movement in the United States is so thoroughly infiltrated with Assad apologists, and other opportunists more comfortable in blindfolds, that many readily jumped on this “blame the victims, let Assad off the hook” bandwagon.

I find what these people have been doing, marching under the flag of the fascist dictator and embellishing his trash, despicable.

One of the more popular theories of how the opposition gassed its own people was a story published by Mint Press. This story, in addition to absolving Assad of any responsibility for the attack and putting the blame squarely with the rebels, had many elements in common with the sort of racist saga were the bungling, stupid [sand] niggers, acting at the behest of some rich white Jew, in this case played by the Saudi Prince Bandar, ends up doing themselves in by a stupid accident.

Dale Gavlak’s name appeared in the byline for that story, but she is currently engaged in a legal fight to have her name removed. She tells the New York Times, that MintPress has “refused ‘repeated demands’ to remove her byline from the article and that she has now retained a lawyer to press her case.”

Earlier, Gavlak issued a statement saying:

I did not travel to Syria, have any discussions with Syrian rebels, or do any other reporting on which the article is based. The article is not based on my personal observations and should not be given credence based on my journalistic reputation.

But now Muhawesh has responded:

Gavlak pitched this story to MintPress on August 28th and informed her editors and myself that her colleague Yahya Ababneh [whose name appears after Gavlak’s on the byline] was on the ground in Syria. She said Ababneh conducted interviews with rebels, their family members, Ghouta residents and doctors that informed him through various interviews that the Saudis had supplied the rebels with chemical weapons and that rebel fighters handled the weapons improperly setting off the explosions.

When Yahya had returned and shared the information with her, she stated that she confirmed with several colleagues and Jordanian government officials that the Saudis have been supplying rebels with chemical weapons, but as her email states, she says they refused to go on the record.

Gavlak wrote the article in it’s entirety as well as conducted the research. She filed her article on August 29th and was published on the same day.

Dale is under mounting pressure for writing this article by third parties. She notified MintPress editors and myself on August 30th and 31st via email and phone call, that third parties were placing immense amounts of pressure on her over the article and were threatening to end her career over it. She went on to tell us that she believes this third party was under pressure from the head of the Saudi Intelligence Prince Bandar himself, who is alleged in the article of supplying the rebels with chemical weapons.

One of the principle websites which helped bring widespread attention to the original MintPress story was Antiwar.com. They have now issued a “Retraction and Apology to Our Readers for Mint Press Article on Syria Gas Attack.”

The staff of Antiwar.com sincerely and deeply apologizes for being a part of spreading this article. We also apologize to Dale Gavlak.

Gavlak’s disavowal of the story is somewhat undermined by an email she sent to MintPress on August 29 and which she shared with Brown Moses Blog:

Pls find the Syria story I mentioned uploaded on Google Docs. This should go under Yahya Ababneh’s byline. I helped him write up his story but he should get all the credit for this.

The New York Times adds:

The dispute over the article has caused even some contributors to MintPress to ask questions about its mission and how it is financed. Steve Horn, an investigative reporter based in Madison, Wis., said in an e-mail that he has decided to cut ties to the news site as a result of Ms. Gavlak’s objections to how her name was used. “I departed because I feel I was misled about the credibility of the article — which I trusted largely because Dale’s name was on it — and because of that, I no longer feel it’s a credible outlet. Frankly, I’m not sure it ever was.”

The thing to not lose sight of here, is that the MintPress story at the center of this fight contained nothing more than rumors.

Rumors can turn out to be true if they lead to an investigation that reveals substantive facts. But this has been the feature of the rebel-instigated-chemical-attack narrative from beginning to end — it has been propelled and propagated without any credible supporting evidence. Moreover, those pushing the narrative have shown an unconscionable lack of interest in evidence, allowing themselves to become enslaved to their own ideological convictions.

Facebooktwittermail

The philosophy of Pope Francis

pope-francis2You don’t have to be a Jesuit, or a Catholic, or a Christian, or even religious, to appreciate the new pope. Quite simply, Pope Francis exudes a great deal of humanity and for that reason alone is likely to be of immense influence both inside and outside the Catholic church.

While sharing the sense, widely noted, that Francis is a man of genuine humility, just as importantly he strikes me as a real philosopher. But what do I mean by real philosopher?

When I went to university, I went to study philosophy, but I had a very naive view about what that meant and quickly became disenchanted. What I learned was that in an academic environment hardly anyone practices philosophy. It is a purely intellectual pursuit and it focuses largely on the philosophical work of others. Least of all is it a pursuit whose primary purpose is that it should provide the tools of life. There are in academic philosophy very few real philosophers. The life of the mind is sequestered as though the intellect might usefully function without having any real bearing on the social and material world.

Most people who focus on the question, how should I live?, will likely turn sooner or later to religion. Yet religion, even in an era where religious choices are no longer narrowly circumscribed by culture, can be frustrating for those who are philosophically inclined and believe in the importance of independent thinking. Religion too often comes burdened by dogma and the anti-intellectual orientation of faith.

For the non-religious, it’s easy to dismiss an individual who has been invested with the institutional authority of a pope, because such a figure is assumed to function as the preeminent and most powerful defender of dogma. This is why it’s so interesting to listen to Francis — a man who is not only defying a lot of the stereotypes about the papacy, but who is demonstrating what it means to be a real philosopher.

Here’s an example that comes from a penetrating interview conducted by a fellow Jesuit (the religious order founded by Ignatius of Loyola), Antonio Spadaro, and published in America, the weekly Catholic magazine:

I ask Pope Francis about the fact that he is the first Jesuit to be elected bishop of Rome: “How do you understand the role of service to the universal church that you have been called to play in the light of Ignatian spirituality? What does it mean for a Jesuit to be elected pope? What element of Ignatian spirituality helps you live your ministry?”

“Discernment,” he replies. “Discernment is one of the things that worked inside St. Ignatius. For him it is an instrument of struggle in order to know the Lord and follow him more closely. I was always struck by a saying that describes the vision of Ignatius: non coerceri a maximo, sed contineri a minimo divinum est (“not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be contained in the tiniest — this is the divine”). I thought a lot about this phrase in connection with the issue of different roles in the government of the church, about becoming the superior of somebody else: it is important not to be restricted by a larger space, and it is important to be able to stay in restricted spaces. This virtue of the large and small is magnanimity. Thanks to magnanimity, we can always look at the horizon from the position where we are. That means being able to do the little things of every day with a big heart open to God and to others. That means being able to appreciate the small things inside large horizons, those of the kingdom of God.

“This motto,” the pope continues, “offers parameters to assume a correct position for discernment, in order to hear the things of God from God’s ‘point of view.’ According to St. Ignatius, great principles must be embodied in the circumstances of place, time and people. In his own way, John XXIII adopted this attitude with regard to the government of the church, when he repeated the motto, ‘See everything; turn a blind eye to much; correct a little.’ John XXIII saw all things, the maximum dimension, but he chose to correct a few, the minimum dimension. You can have large projects and implement them by means of a few of the smallest things. Or you can use weak means that are more effective than strong ones, as Paul also said in his First Letter to the Corinthians.

“This discernment takes time. For example, many think that changes and reforms can take place in a short time. I believe that we always need time to lay the foundations for real, effective change. And this is the time of discernment. Sometimes discernment instead urges us to do precisely what you had at first thought you would do later. And that is what has happened to me in recent months. Discernment is always done in the presence of the Lord, looking at the signs, listening to the things that happen, the feeling of the people, especially the poor. My choices, including those related to the day-to-day aspects of life, like the use of a modest car, are related to a spiritual discernment that responds to a need that arises from looking at things, at people and from reading the signs of the times. Discernment in the Lord guides me in my way of governing.

“But I am always wary of decisions made hastily. I am always wary of the first decision, that is, the first thing that comes to my mind if I have to make a decision. This is usually the wrong thing. I have to wait and assess, looking deep into myself, taking the necessary time. The wisdom of discernment redeems the necessary ambiguity of life and helps us find the most appropriate means, which do not always coincide with what looks great and strong.”

Facebooktwittermail

Nuclear madness

An obsession that has shaped much of foreign policy formulation in Washington over the last decade has been the drive to prevent a nuclear ‘catastrophe’ — that being the world-destablizing effect of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.

What makes this obsession farcical, disingenuous, and dangerous is that the individuals at the vanguard of this effort possess large arsenals of nuclear weapons. We are being told that we should worry much more about a nuclear threat than a nuclear reality.

There is a certain parallel with the gun lovers’ argument that guns don’t kill people — people kill people. Similarly, there is a far greater fear of who might control nuclear weapons than the weapons themselves.

One of several indications that we continue to live in the nuclear age with a large measure of comfort is the frequency with which these weapons of massive destruction are referred to as nukes. Like all nicknames, nuke evokes a sense of familiarity; a notion that the danger such weapons pose is so remote that they should provoke little fear — unless, that is, they were to fall into the wrong hands.

There are currently 10,000 nuclear weapons scattered around the globe and of these, around 1,800 are ready to be launched in between 5 to 15 minutes. The fact that none of these have been intentionally or accidentally detonated fosters the illusion that we have little to worry about — that an issue that few people concern themselves with need be of little concern because the people who are in charge of these weapons have created fool-proof systems of command and control, making accidents impossible.

The writer Eric Schlosser points out, however: “The people for whom this is still a threat, the people who are most anti-nuclear, the people who are most afraid about this, are the ones who know most about it.”

Schlosser is author of the newly released Command and Control, whose publication coincides with yesterday’s “exclusive” in The Guardian on a secret document, revealing how close America came to a catastrophic nuclear accident in 1961 when a Mark 39 hydrogen bomb almost exploded in North Carolina on January 23, 1961.

Ed Pilkington writes: When he started on his nuclear researches, Schlosser conceived the book as something contained and compact. It would be the tale of one of the most serious accidents in the nuclear age, when, in September 1980, a Titan II missile, similar to the one he had witnessed taking off from Vandenberg [in 1999], exploded in its silo in Arkansas following routine repair work that turned bad. The missile was carrying a thermonuclear warheadwith a yield 600 times that of “Little Boy”, the bomb dropped over Hiroshima. The warhead was blasted hundreds of meters into a ditch, but failed to detonate.

As he started digging his way down into the rabbit hole, he began stumbling on other examples of mistakes and near-misses. One led to another until he found himself sitting on a mushroom cloud of disturbing nuclear accidents. When he requested under the Freedom of Information Act the release of an official record of all the incidents that had befallen the American nuclear arsenal in the 10 years to 1967, he was astounded to find it extending to 245 pages.

The stories he came across suggest that nothing but a miracle has prevented an accidental Hiroshima or Nagasaki taking place on US soil. In 1958 a Mark 6 atom bomb was accidentally dropped into the backyard of the Gregg family in Mars Bluff, South Carolina. Three years later, two hydrogen bombs, with a combined power of more than 500 Hiroshimas, were accidentally dropped over North Carolina after a B-52 broke up in mid air. Neither bomb detonated when they landed in a meadow, but a later secret investigation concluded that in the case of one of the devices only a single low-voltage switch stood between the US and catastrophe. In 1966 a hydrogen bomb was dropped inadvertently over the coast of Spain, also from a stricken B-52; it took six weeks of intensive searching before it was found and retrieved from the ocean bed.

As the mass of detail piles up, an important lesson emerges from the book. The way Schlosser explains it to me is that “our ability to create dangerous things exceeds our ability to control them. We are talking about hubris – our lack of understanding of our own flaws and lack of humility in the way we approach technology.”

Facebooktwittermail

Mint Press, Dale Gavlak, and alternative narratives around the August 21 chemical weapons attacks

For some people, antipathy for and suspicion of the U.S. government is so visceral that their immediate inclination is to believe the opposite of anything a U.S. official might claim.

Since the U.S. was quick to assert that the Assad regime must have been responsible for the August 21 chemical attacks, a knee-jerk reaction was to counter that the attack must have been carried out by rebels in an effort to trigger Western intervention.

This theory still has life even as it becomes increasingly evident that by happenstance or design, Bashar al Assad has been the preeminent beneficiary of the latest turn of events in Syria.

From the outset, this was a theory desperately in need of supporting facts and thus an August 29 report published by Mint Press News was quickly seized upon, among other reasons because included in the byline was the name Dale Gavlak, who has freelanced for the Associated Press.

A few days after the report appeared, the following note was added at the top of the report:

Dale Gavlak assisted in the research and writing process of this article, but was not on the ground in Syria. Reporter Yahya Ababneh, with whom the report was written in collaboration, was the correspondent on the ground in Ghouta who spoke directly with the rebels, their family members, victims of the chemical weapons attacks and local residents.

Gavlak is a MintPress News Middle East correspondent who has been freelancing for the AP as a Amman, Jordan correspondent for nearly a decade. This report is not an Associated Press article; rather it is exclusive to MintPress News.

She has now made it known that on August 29 when she filed the report she also wrote an email which said: “Pls find the Syria story I mentioned uploaded on Google Docs. This should go under Yahya Ababneh’s byline. I helped him write up his story but he should get all the credit for this.”

She didn’t want the byline but she did believe the report deserved credit.

She has now issued the following statement which appears at Brown Moses Blog:

Mint Press News incorrectly used my byline for an article it published on August 29, 2013 alleging chemical weapons usage by Syrian rebels. Despite my repeated requests, made directly and through legal counsel, they have not been willing to issue a retraction stating that I was not the author. Yahya Ababneh is the sole reporter and author of the Mint Press News piece. To date, Mint Press News has refused to act professionally or honestly in regards to disclosing the actual authorship and sources for this story.

I did not travel to Syria, have any discussions with Syrian rebels, or do any other reporting on which the article is based. The article is not based on my personal observations and should not be given credence based on my journalistic reputation. Also, it is false and misleading to attribute comments made in the story as if they were my own statements.

In a word, Gavlak wants to have nothing to do with the story.

It’s not hard to figure out why she now finds this an embarrassment. What’s harder to explain is why she filed the story in the first place.

Facebooktwittermail

The American psyche can be easily manipulated

The “American psyche can be easily manipulated” Sheherazad Jaafari – a press attache at Syria’s mission to the UN – advised an aide to the Syrian president prior to Barbara Walters’ interview with Bashar al-Assad in late 2011. That observation remains just as true now as it was then.

If America’s war on terrorism has turned out to be an abysmal failure in terms of eradicating terrorism, it has nevertheless been extraordinarily successful as an exercise in brainwashing a whole nation. Americans believe in terrorism with close to the same conviction that they believe in God.

“Terrorism” and “terrorist” are absolute terms. There might be small-time crooks but there are no small-time terrorists. The terrorist has become the archetype of evil whose power is treated as almost metaphysical — a threat to whole nations and to a way of life.

Whatever PR advice Assad received early on, it was sound, he took it to heart, and he has remained “on message” even while his international political opponents have become increasingly incoherent.

Assad’s fight is the good fight; the fight that virtually no American dare question: the fight against terrorism.

In Assad’s interview with Fox News which aired last night he said that “80 to 90% of the rebels or terrorists on the ground are Al Qaeda and their offshoots.”

A statement from Michael Clemente, executive vice president of news at Fox News, said that the interview “was conducted with no restrictions on the questions that could be asked,” yet neither Fox contributor Dennis Kucinich nor Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent Greg Palkot, made any serious attempt to question Assad’s assertion.

They could for instance have pointed out that in a conflict that now involves an estimated 1,000 armed groups, the expressions “rebels,” “terrorists,” and “al Qaeda and their offshoots” grossly over-simplify a complex environment. Moreover, within that array of 100,000 fighters only 10% are believed to be linked to al Qaeada.

Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), with its historical ties to the infamous Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and Jabhat al-Nusra have both been branded terrorist organizations and al Qaeda affiliates yet in Syria are operating as rivals. Furthermore, the complexity of that rivalry is open to differing interpretations even by close observers.

Mohammed Al Attar writes:

Some tend to the view that there is no great difference between the two, with both functioning as two extremist arms of a main body that is Al Qaeda. Others believe that open confrontation between the two is on its way, driven by a dispute over approach and vision and, moreover, over legitimacy of representation. People tell the story of an Al Raqqa-born Front commander called Abu Saad who joined ISIS in the wake of the dispute between the two groups, after Al Nusra leader Abu Mohammed Al Jolani refused to swear an oath of loyalty to Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi. Within months, Abu Saad and a group of mujahideen split from ISIS and re-joined the Al Nusra Front in Al Tabaqa. We heard a number of similar stories in the countryside around Idlib and Aleppo of this reverse migration of fighters from ISIS to the Al Nusra Front. Some attribute this to the predominantly Syrian make-up of Al Nusra as opposed to ISIS, while others talk of the revulsion felt by certain mujahideen towards the excessively extreme and uncompromising practices of ISIS. None of this equips us to make a precise measurement of the numbers and strength of the two groups, but it points to a constant movement between them.

Is there any chance that this kind of analysis might be incorporated into an interview with Assad on Fox News? No way!

Assad knows without doubt that with American journalists and in front of an American audience, the terrorism narrative works. Use the label terrorist and supposedly few other details are necessary.

The terrorism narrative also works in the sense that it has effectively shut down intelligent political discourse on the issue inside the United States.

I don’t think that Dennis Kucinich is stupid or utterly naive and he is surely in no doubt that Assad uses the term terrorist as a label of political convenience to vilify his opponents, yet would the former Congressman be bold enough to challenge Assad by referring to “so-called” terrorists? Not likely. Why? Because if anyone on the left talks about “so-called” terrorists, they will swiftly get jumped on for being soft on terrorism. At the same time, someone like Charles Krauthammer, a bona fide neoconservative and general-purpose supporter of American wars, can freely scoff at Assad’s assertions and refer to “so-called” terrorists confident that he is not going to be accused of being soft on terrorism. The American right, having taken full ownership of the terrorism discourse can speak freely, while the left needs to perpetually monitor itself and polish its national security credibility.

Meanwhile, as Assad takes advantage of easy access to a U.S. media short on analysis, witness the contrast between the deferential treatment being offered to a president who has sanctioned mass killing, versus the zealous denouncing of a 26-year old Syria analyst who is guilty of having padded out her résumé and been less than forthright about some of her affiliations.

I refer to Elizabeth O’Bagy, the analyst cited by Secretary of State John Kerry when he asserted in Congress that the majority of Syria’s rebels are “moderates” — an analyst who it turns out does not possess a doctorate. Alongside working for Washington’s Institute for the Study of War, she also worked for the Syrian Emergency Task Force, “which both lobbies in Washington for the moderate Syrian opposition and does humanitarian work inside Syria,” reports Time.

Those vilifying O’Bagy see her as an easy target because the actions she has been faulted for cannot be easily defended, yet these attacks also, and not incidentally, sidestep the issue of the credibility of her analysis of the Syrian opposition.

It’s as though her lack of a PhD reveals much more about her knowledge of Syria than her six trips to rebel-controlled territory taught her. The fact that she can speak Arabic apparently matters much less than that she was hired by the Syrian Emergency Task Force. And to cap it all, she’s 26 — as though we can overlook the fact that plenty of similarly youthful reporters do not have their journalism dismissed on the basis of their age.

O’Bagy’s critics expose their superficiality and hypocrisy by glossing over the precise basis of her expertise which derived from neither academic credentials nor institutional affiliations but the very thing that hardly anyone in Washington possesses when it comes to Syria: on-the-ground experience.

Facebooktwittermail

Iran frees political prisoners ahead of new president’s UN visit

The Guardian reports: Iran’s most prominent human rights activist was released from jail on Wednesday along with several other political prisoners in what appears to be the most tangible sign of change yet under the new Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani.

Ahead of Rouhani’s eagerly awaited visit to the UN general assembly in New York next week, Nasrin Sotoudeh, who has been likened to Aung San Suu Kyi, was driven from Evin prison in Tehran to her house in another part of the Iranian capital and told she did not need to return to jail.

“They were quite certain this time that I’m freed and I don’t need to go back,” the 50-year-old women’s rights activist told the Guardian by phone from her home.

Opposition website Kaleme reported on Wednesday that seven other women political prisoners had also been released in the previous 24 hours, including the dissident journalist Mahsa Amrabadi, and at least four men, including reformist politicians Feizollah Arabsorkhi, Mirtaher Mousavi and former deputy foreign minister Mohsen Aminzadeh.

“In the past, when I was granted prison leave they used to give me a document, this time they gave me nothing,” said Sotoudeh, who last October was awarded the European parliament’s most prestigious human rights award, the Sakharov prize for freedom of thought, which has previously been won by Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela.

“My goals and mentality are the same as before, I haven’t changed,” Sotoudeh insisted, adding that like other lawyers she would still work “to restore justice and defend the rights of protesters”.

The prisoner releases have come amid increasing signs of a political opening-up in the Islamic republic following Rouhani’s inauguration last month and as he prepares for his UN visit, which many have suggested may be the scene for a historic meeting between the Iranian president and Barack Obama. [Continue reading…]

The question is, can Obama muster the heroic flexibility to defy the Israel lobby and talk to Rouhani? They are going to be in the same building at the same time. Can the U.S. really afford to squander such an opportunity? If nothing else, a friendly greeting to a noteworthy visitor really should be a matter of common courtesy. A handshake should be a bare minimum and since — as the media now credits Rouhani as a bona fide “moderate” because he’s had a Western education and speaks fluent English — can’t they at least have a conversation?

Facebooktwittermail