Category Archives: Analysis

Internet freedom declines in the U.S.

US News & World Report: The U.S. government created the Internet but has fallen behind as a steward of online freedom and privacy, according to an annual study that tracks international digital rights.

Government surveillance of phone and Internet data, government pressure against journalists and lack of protections for privacy have eroded America’s standing on digital rights in recent years, according to an annual study from Freedom House advocacy group.

The U.S. dropped to sixth place out of the 65 countries assessed by Freedom House, down from fourth place in 2013 and second place in 2012.

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At the gates of power: How Marine Le Pen is unnerving the French establishment

Charles Bremner writes: On a rainy November morning, dockers from Calais are firing flares in protest against port job losses outside the regional council in Lille, the capital of France’s old industrial north. Inside the plush chamber, a tall, solidly built blonde woman in jeans and boots crooks a leg over her knee and flicks through a news magazine. Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, which has 18 council seats, has dropped in from a day at the European Parliament in nearby Brussels, where the party has 23 MEPs. Le Pen looks bored as the councillors drone on about allocating €1.1bn of EU money to help revive the bleak economy of Nord-Pas-de-Calais.

When her moment comes, she launches into a riff on the evils of the Union. EU funds just reinforce the dictatorship of Brussels and impoverish the downtrodden rural and small-town folk of the region, she says. “I have to remind people ad nauseam that this is not European money. It’s part of French taxpayers’ money that transits through Brussels with the rest going to pay for central and eastern Europe.” With that, the terror of the French political establishment picks up her papers, closes her beige wool jacket and slips out to a car for the drive back to Paris, missing the council’s splendid lunch. So it goes for Le Pen as she tills the fertile electoral soil of the north as the prelude to a run at the Élysée Palace in two years’ time.

France has been frightening itself with visions of a President Le Pen since 2002 when Jean-Marie, Marine’s father and the founder of the far-right Front, landed in the run-off for the presidency. He was roundly defeated by Jacques Chirac when voters rallied in a “republican front” to block the leader of a pariah party. Now, with his pugnacious daughter in charge of the family firm, the prospects of an anti-Front reflex are dimmer and Marine’s prospects look bright. [Continue reading…]

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Jabhat al-Nusra gains in Syria undermine U.S. strategy

The Washington Post reports: The main al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria is extending its control over a swath of territory that was until recently held by the collapsing moderate opposition, jeopardizing U.S. plans to form a new rebel force to fight extremists.

Since routing two of the biggest Western-backed rebel movements last month from the province of Idlib, Jabhat al-Nusra has been steadily consolidating its position as the single most powerful military force in northwestern Syria.

The group has overrun towns and villages throughout the province, secured supply routes into neighboring Turkey and potentially paved the way for the establishment of an Islamic “emirate” — a competing entity to the “caliphate” declared last summer by the Islamic State in northeastern Syria and western Iraq.

The al-Qaeda affiliate’s expanding footprint risks further complicating the U.S.-led effort to contain and destroy the far more powerful Islamic State, a fierce rival to Jabhat al-Nusra that ejected the al-Qaeda loyalists from its territories last summer. [Continue reading…]

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China overtakes the United States as the world’s largest economy

Joseph E. Stiglitz writes: When the history of 2014 is written, it will take note of a large fact that has received little attention: 2014 was the last year in which the United States could claim to be the world’s largest economic power. China enters 2015 in the top position, where it will likely remain for a very long time, if not forever. In doing so, it returns to the position it held through most of human history.

Comparing the gross domestic product of different economies is very difficult. Technical committees come up with estimates, based on the best judgments possible, of what are called “purchasing-power parities,” which enable the comparison of incomes in various countries. These shouldn’t be taken as precise numbers, but they do provide a good basis for assessing the relative size of different economies. Early in 2014, the body that conducts these international assessments — the World Bank’s International Comparison Program — came out with new numbers. (The complexity of the task is such that there have been only three reports in 20 years.) The latest assessment, released last spring, was more contentious and, in some ways, more momentous than those in previous years. It was more contentious precisely because it was more momentous: the new numbers showed that China would become the world’s largest economy far sooner than anyone had expected — it was on track to do so before the end of 2014.

The source of contention would surprise many Americans, and it says a lot about the differences between China and the U.S. — and about the dangers of projecting onto the Chinese some of our own attitudes. Americans want very much to be No. 1—we enjoy having that status. In contrast, China is not so eager. According to some reports, the Chinese participants even threatened to walk out of the technical discussions. For one thing, China did not want to stick its head above the parapet — being No. 1 comes with a cost. It means paying more to support international bodies such as the United Nations. It could bring pressure to take an enlightened leadership role on issues such as climate change. It might very well prompt ordinary Chinese to wonder if more of the country’s wealth should be spent on them. (The news about China’s change in status was in fact blacked out at home.) There was one more concern, and it was a big one: China understands full well America’s psychological preoccupation with being No. 1 — and was deeply worried about what our reaction would be when we no longer were. [Continue reading…]

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UN: climate change costs to poor countries will be much higher than previously estimated

The Associated Press reports: The cost to poor countries of adjusting to ever-hotter temperatures will be twice or even three times higher than previously thought, the U.N.’s environment agency said Friday—and that assumes a best-case scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions are dramatically reduced.

“If you don’t cut emissions, we’re just going to have to ask for more money because the damage is going to be worse,” Ronald Jumeau of the Seychelles said at U.N. climate talks.

The report was bound to sharpen disputes in Lima over who pays the bills for the impacts of global warming, whose primary cause is the burning of coal, oil and gas but which also includes deforestation. It has long been the thorniest issue at the U.N. negotiations, now in their 20th round.

Rich countries have pledged to help the developing world convert to clean energy and adapt to shifts in global weather that are already adversely affecting crops, human health and economies. But poor countries say they’re not seeing enough cash.

Projecting the annual costs that poor countries will face by 2050 just to adapt, the United Nations Environment Program report deemed the previous estimate of $70 billion to $100 billion “a significant underestimate.” It had been based on 2010 World Bank numbers.

The report says new studies indicate the costs will likely be “two to three times higher,” possibly even as high as $500 billion. [Continue reading…]

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Family wealth endures for centuries

Live Science: Rich families stay rich and poor families stay poor, according to a new study that finds that English people whose ancestors were elite in the 1100s are still likely part of the upper crust today.

The study echoes work in other countries that has found that social status budges little over generations, even in the face of massive social changes, said study researcher Gregory Clark, an economist at the University of California, Davis.

Clark began his research on social mobility expecting that families would generally tend toward the average — a particular surname might stand out among the elite for a generation or two, but their descendants would probably regress in notability.

“To our surprise, when we started getting the data, we found this surprising persistence,” Clark told Live Science. Names retain their status (low or high) for 500 years or more in some cases, he said. [Continue reading…]

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It’s not top-secret if you can Google it

Michael Richter writes: Former Navy SEAL Matthew Bissonnette recently filed a federal malpractice suit against an attorney for telling him that the manuscript of his book, “No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden, ” didn’t need to undergo prepublication review by the Pentagon. Mr. Bissonnette claims that not letting Defense Department censors vet the book before its 2012 release has left him vulnerable to a criminal investigation and the likely confiscation of nearly all income earned from his best seller.

Mr. Bissonnette has acknowledged that his secrecy agreement with the Pentagon required him to submit the manuscript for prepublication review. But in a broader sense Mr. Bissonnette’s case has brought renewed attention to a dilemma facing every government employee who has ever been issued a security clearance. It seems these employees have in effect agreed to whatever limits on their First Amendment rights the Pentagon decides to impose. For instance, the government is now using its power to restrain speech regarding material that is already in the public domain.

I have firsthand experience of this First Amendment abridgment. After resigning from the U.S. intelligence community in 2011 to enter private practice as an attorney in Manhattan, I traveled to Cuba as a nongovernmental observer to the pretrial proceedings against the alleged mastermind of the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in 2000. I later prepared an article on the proceedings for a professional journal.

After submitting it for prepublication review to my former employers at the Defense Department, they ordered me to delete a paragraph citing a classified document that had likely been leaked by former Army Pfc. Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden , although the source is not revealed. The document is on the New York Times website — and perhaps elsewhere — and it concerns information I never saw or had anything to do with while in government.

Courts have ruled that the government cannot do this sort of thing, but the Pentagon isn’t listening. [Continue reading…]

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The world’s pitiful response to Syria’s refugee crisis

World leaders are failing to offer protection to Syria’s most vulnerable refugees with catastrophic consequences, Amnesty International has warned in a new briefing ahead of a UN pledging conference in Geneva on 9 December.

Left Out in the Cold: Syrian refugees abandoned by the international community highlights the pitiful numbers of resettlement places offered by the international community. Around 3.8 million refugees from are being hosted in five main countries within the region: Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. Only 1.7 per cent of this number have been offered sanctuary by the rest of the world since the crisis began more than three years ago.

The Gulf states– which include some of the world’s wealthiest countries – have not offered to take a single refugee from Syria so far. Russia and China have similarly failed to pledge a single resettlement place. Excluding Germany, the rest of the European Union (EU) has pledged to resettle a paltry 0.17 per cent of refugees in the main host countries.

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How ISIS governs its caliphate

Newsweek reports: This year has seen the map of the Middle East redrawn. The West has acquired a new public enemy number one: remorseless, faceless and vicious. The Islamic State, or ISIS, has expanded from a relatively obscure terrorist group at the start of the year, to one that wields near absolute control over anywhere between 12,000 square miles (according to the Wall Street Journal) and 35,000 square miles (according to The New Yorker) of formerly Syrian and Iraqi territory. Within the region, around 56 million people must navigate between the armies of the rival militias, warlords and national armies that are barely distinguishable from one another.

But while Western forces attempt to counter the ISIS surge with its sustained bombing strategy, little attention is paid to an unpalatable reality within the borders of the so-called new Islamic State, or caliphate. In the midst of the chaos, ISIS is deliberately and methodically establishing clear areas of definable civil governance, breathing new life into the memory of a series of caliphates that united a succession of Muslim empires until 1924.

Scott Atran, an anthropologist and senior research fellow at Oxford University, recently submitted a report to the U.S. Department of Defense and Congress on the difficulty of fighting the ideology of such a state.

“The caliphate as an idea has never gone away,” Atran says, “And now that it is here again after a hiatus of nearly 100 years, as a concrete matter of fact, it will focus the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of people. The critical question is not, ‘How can we thwart or destroy the caliphate?’ because attempts to do that will likely backfire. Rather the question is, ‘How can we live with and transform the idea and reality of a caliphate – and one that will be nuclear-capable probably sooner rather than later – into something that does not threaten other peoples’ ways of life?’ That is a question for everyone, but it is not even on our political radar.” [Continue reading…]

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How al Qaeda operates like the Boy Scouts of America

The Washington Post reports: Matthew Atkins was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, on his way to full colonel, with 20 years of intelligence and counter-terrorism experience. He was frustrated. Time and again, he had watched the U.S. military take out leaders of al-Qaeda and other terror cells. And time and again, he had watched those cells regroup.

Atkins thought there might be a better way. He wanted to, in his words, “achieve truly disruptive effects on terror cells.” There is one place in America, above all others, where would-be disruptors flock. Atkins went there, to Silicon Valley, to study for a year on a fellowship at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He set up interviews with dozens of CEOs and venture capitalists. He read up on how successful terror groups organize themselves. He developed a theory on how to truly disrupt terrorists, and he published a research paper on it.

His breakthrough insight was that the best terror cells work a lot like a big nonprofit group. Like the Boy Scouts of America.

From studying the scouts, he determined the best way to stop terrorists is to target their bureaucrats – not top leaders.

“The reason I like the Boy Scouts,” Atkins said in an interview, “is they face a lot of the same management challenges that al-Qaeda does.” [Continue reading…]

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The case against dividing Iraq

Nicholas Sambanis and Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl write: At this point, partition might sound preferable to persistent sectarian conflict. U.S. policymakers were tempted by the idea at the height of Iraq’s sectarian war in 2006, when Joseph Biden, who was a senator at the time, and Leslie Gelb, the President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, advanced a plan for the “soft partition” of Iraq. In a 2006 Foreign Affairs roundtable focused on policy options for Iraq, Chaim Kaufmann, a well-known scholar of international relations, argued that only through separating the population would the violence end. This summer’s bloodshed seemed to revive the idea. Writing in the Washington Post, columnist Fareed Zakaria advocated that the United States adapt to the reality of sectarian enclaves. Others, like the Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven A. Cook, hinted that the United States might need to come to terms with a full partition of Iraq, however “bloody and protracted” the process would be.

Events in Syria, meanwhile, have further revived the partition debate. ISIS has kept a firm grip on its Syrian territory in the face of a U.S.-led air campaign, and forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have proved unwilling to back down. Appearing on Zakaria’s CNN show, GPS, in November, Syria expert Joshua Landis promoted a partition plan for Syria. Landis argued that partition would “accept [the] reality” of a Sunni state spanning Syria and Iraq. Partition would be more stable, and, as Zakaria added, would “reflec[t] the realities of sectarianism.”

The usual argument for partition is that, once ethnic or sectarian fighting gets too bloody, nobody can put Humpty Dumpty back together again. War reveals the fault lines in a country’s social terrain, the thinking goes, and redrawing official borders along those lines is the only way out of a perpetual cycle of identity-based bloodletting.

The argument seems intuitive, but it rests on a flawed premise. It treats social identities as givens and ignores the fact that it was politics — not identities in and of themselves — that brought Sunnis and Shias to blows in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Far from resolving disputes, partitions can actually activate dormant fault lines. [Continue reading…]

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Raed Fares: Voice of the Syrian revolution

Eliza Griswold writes: The overhead light in the blue Mazda 626 wasn’t working. Raed Fares, a Syrian activist whose video protests skewer ISIS and President Bashar al-Assad alike, reached up to fiddle with the light bulb before squeezing himself out of the driver’s side door. The street was in darkness. In the last few years, the Assad government cut most of the electricity (along with running water and mobile-phone service) to Kafranbel, the town in northwestern Syria where Fares lives. The only light came from an LED strip in his neighbor’s front doorway that was hooked up to a car battery. It was 12:45 a.m. on Jan. 29, 2014, and Fares, who often works until 4 a.m., had left the office early. As he fumbled to fit his key into the car’s lock, he heard the slap-slap of feet running toward him.

Here they come, he thought.

The feet stopped just in front of his car. The Czech pistol he usually carries was in his house, 15 feet away. In the watery glow of the light behind him, Fares could make out two ISIS soldiers. One, clad in a woolen mask, ammunition vest, windbreaker and unlaced boots, opened fire, spraying the car, the mud wall and Fares with bullets. Fares felt their heat sear through his canvas jacket and jean shirt and into the right side of his chest and shoulder. When he collapsed to the ground, a childhood nightmare returned: three black dogs, chasing him.

“There is no God but God, and Mohammad is his prophet,” he said as loudly as he could. He hoped this statement of faith would send him to heaven.

As a pool of his own blood spread around him, Fares lay in the road. He tried to stifle his groans, in fear that his attackers would return. Minutes later, his elder brother, who heard the shots from his home nearby, dragged Fares out of the street and into a car to race to the hospital.

“Who shot him?” a friend in the car asked his brother.

Raed struggled to repeat what he had seen.

“Stop talking,” his brother said.

“I’m dying,” he said. Then he slipped from consciousness.

Eight months later, Fares, 42, was in the back seat of a pewter-colored Kia, driving through southern Turkey and chain-smoking Lebanese cigarettes. In all, the would-be assassins fired at Fares 46 times. Twenty-seven bullets struck the wall behind him; 17 hit his car. Only two struck him. They shattered seven bones in his shoulder and ribs and punctured his right lung. From his hospital bed, he continued to orchestrate protests, posting them on Facebook and YouTube. Many used the block-lettered banners for which he’s known, broadcasting messages like: “OBAMA! YOUR ROLE IN SYRIA WILL NEVER BE ACCEPTED AS A MISTAKE LIKE CLINTON’S IN RWANDA, BUT IT WILL BE A PREMEDITATED CRIME.” Others relied on cartoons, like one of a Trojan horse with ISIS inside and “Made in U.S.A.” on its side.

“I still have trouble breathing,” Fares said. “My doctor says my lungs should be no problem because of the size of my nose.” (Fares does have a big nose.) The two Americans in the front seat laughed. One, a 57-year-old named Jim Hake, is the founder and chief executive of Spirit of America, a nongovernmental organization with the explicit mission to support U.S. military and diplomatic efforts. (He relentlessly asks “What do you need?” The first time he asked it of Fares, Fares answered with withering dryness, “A new country.”) [Continue reading…]

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There is no language instinct. Chomsky was wrong

Vyvyan Evans writes: Imagine you’re a traveller in a strange land. A local approaches you and starts jabbering away in an unfamiliar language. He seems earnest, and is pointing off somewhere. But you can’t decipher the words, no matter how hard you try.

That’s pretty much the position of a young child when she first encounters language. In fact, she would seem to be in an even more challenging position. Not only is her world full of ceaseless gobbledygook; unlike our hypothetical traveller, she isn’t even aware that these people are attempting to communicate. And yet, by the age of four, every cognitively normal child on the planet has been transformed into a linguistic genius: this before formal schooling, before they can ride bicycles, tie their own shoelaces or do rudimentary addition and subtraction. It seems like a miracle. The task of explaining this miracle has been, arguably, the central concern of the scientific study of language for more than 50 years.

In the 1960s, the US linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky offered what looked like a solution. He argued that children don’t in fact learn their mother tongue – or at least, not right down to the grammatical building blocks (the whole process was far too quick and painless for that). He concluded that they must be born with a rudimentary body of grammatical knowledge – a ‘Universal Grammar’ – written into the human DNA. With this hard-wired predisposition for language, it should be a relatively trivial matter to pick up the superficial differences between, say, English and French. The process works because infants have an instinct for language: a grammatical toolkit that works on all languages the world over.

At a stroke, this device removes the pain of learning one’s mother tongue, and explains how a child can pick up a native language in such a short time. It’s brilliant. Chomsky’s idea dominated the science of language for four decades. And yet it turns out to be a myth. A welter of new evidence has emerged over the past few years, demonstrating that Chomsky is plain wrong. [Continue reading…]

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Cuba’s extraordinary global medical record shames the U.S. blockade

Seumas Milne writes: Four months into the internationally declared Ebola emergency that has devastated west Africa, Cuba leads the world in direct medical support to fight the epidemic. The US and Britain have sent thousands of troops and, along with other countries, promised aid – most of which has yet to materialise. But, as the World Health Organisation has insisted, what’s most urgently needed are health workers. The Caribbean island, with a population of just 11m and official per capita income of $6,000 (£3,824), answered that call before it was made. It was first on the Ebola frontline and has sent the largest contingent of doctors and nurses – 256 are already in the field, with another 200 volunteers on their way.

While western media interest has faded with the receding threat of global infection, hundreds of British health service workers have volunteered to join them. The first 30 arrived in Sierra Leone last week, while troops have been building clinics. But the Cuban doctors have been on the ground in force since October and are there for the long haul.

The need could not be greater. More than 6,000 people have already died. So shaming has the Cuban operation been that British and US politicians have felt obliged to offer congratulations. John Kerry described the contribution of the state the US has been trying to overthrow for half a century “impressive”. The first Cuban doctor to contract Ebola has been treated by British medics, and US officials promised they would “collaborate” with Cuba to fight Ebola.

But it’s not the first time that Cuba has provided the lion’s share of medical relief following a humanitarian disaster. Four years ago, after the devastating earthquake in impoverished Haiti, Cuba sent the largest medical contingent and cared for 40% of the victims. In the aftermath of the Kashmir earthquake of 2005, Cuba sent 2,400 medical workers to Pakistan and treated more than 70% of those affected; they also left behind 32 field hospitals and donated a thousand medical scholarships. [Continue reading…]

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Inside the battle over the CIA torture report

Josh Rogin and Eli Lake write: After months of internal wrangling, the Senate Intelligence Committee is finally set to release its report on President George W. Bush-era CIA practices, which among other details will contain information about foreign countries that aided in the secret detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists.

Several U.S. officials told us that the negotiations are nearly complete between the Central Intelligence Agency and the committee’s Democratic staff, which prepared the classified 6,300-page report and its 600-page, soon-to-be-released declassified executive summary. Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s chairman, is set to release the summary early next week. Her staff members had objected vigorously to hundreds of redactions the CIA had proposed in the executive summary. After an often-contentious process to resolve the disputes, managed by top White House officials, Feinstein was able to roll back the majority of the disputed CIA redactions.

Among the most significant of Feinstein’s victories, the report will retain information on countries that aided the CIA program by hosting black sites or otherwise participating in the secret rendition of suspected terrorists. The countries will not be identified by name, but in other ways, such as code names like “Country A.” This falls short of Feinstein’s original desire, which was to name the countries explicitly, but represents a big victory for the committee nonetheless. [Continue reading…]

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How the NSA hacks cellphone networks worldwide

Ryan Gallagher reports: In March 2011, two weeks before the Western intervention in Libya, a secret message was delivered to the National Security Agency. An intelligence unit within the U.S. military’s Africa Command needed help to hack into Libya’s cellphone networks and monitor text messages.

For the NSA, the task was easy. The agency had already obtained technical information about the cellphone carriers’ internal systems by spying on documents sent among company employees, and these details would provide the perfect blueprint to help the military break into the networks.

The NSA’s assistance in the Libya operation, however, was not an isolated case. It was part of a much larger surveillance program—global in its scope and ramifications—targeted not just at hostile countries. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. and Iran both attack ISIS, but try not to look like allies

The New York Times reports: Iranian fighter jets struck extremist targets in Iraq recently, Iranian and American officials have confirmed, in the latest display of Tehran’s new willingness to conduct military operations openly on foreign battlefields rather than covertly and through proxies.

The shift stems in part from Iran’s deepening military role in Iraq in the war against the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State. But it also reflects a profound change in Iran’s strategy, stepping from the shadows into a more overt use of hard power as it promotes Shiite influence around the region.

Iranian and Pentagon officials acknowledged that Iran had stepped up its military operations in Iraq last week, using 1970s-era fighter jets to bomb targets in a buffer zone that extends 25 miles into Iraq.

The new military approach highlights an unusual confluence of interests in both Iraq and Syria, where Tehran and Washington find themselves fighting the same enemy in an increasingly public fashion. While there is no direct coordination between Iran and the United States, there is a de facto nonaggression pact that neither side is eager to acknowledge. [Continue reading…]

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