Category Archives: Analysis

How Iran and world powers finally got to yes on a nuclear deal

Barbara Slavin reports: Bargaining into the early hours of Sunday morning in Geneva, the representatives of the world’s major powers and Iran reached a milestone on what remains a long road to resolving the decade-old nuclear crisis, and potentially also marking a turning point in three decades of hostility between Tehran and Washington.

Under the deal hammered out between Iran and the U.S., France, Britain, Germany, China and Russia, Tehran agreed to what President Barack Obama called “substantial limitations” on its nuclear program in return for “modest relief” of sanctions that have harshly impacted the Iranian economy. The agreement covers a six-month period, during which the parties hope to establish momentum for a more far-reaching deal.

While skeptics on all sides are expected to try and pick apart the agreement, few can doubt its historical significance. Had the parties failed again this weekend – only two weeks after Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterparts last rushed to Geneva but came up short – it would have been extremely difficult to maintain the momentum of negotiations in the face of mounting pressure from more hawkish voices on all sides. President Obama’s efforts to restrain Congress from an escalation of U.S. sanctions in order to give diplomacy a chance would have been dealt a severe blow. While some in Congress will almost certainly still try to pass further sanctions, the deal reached in Geneva will have helped the White House make its case.

Indeed, Obama, speaking from the Oval Office late Saturday in Washington, said “now is not the time to move forward on new sanctions” and the agreement promises no new nuclear-related sanctions for six months if Iran abides by its commitments. [Continue reading…]

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As Syrian chemical attack loomed, missteps doomed civilians

The Wall Street Journal reports: As Syrian troops battled rebel forces in the Damascus suburbs Aug. 18, U.S. eavesdropping equipment began picking up ominous signals.

A special Syrian unit that handles chemical weapons was ordered closer to the front lines, officials briefed on the intelligence say, and started mixing poisons. For two days, warning signs mounted until coded messages went out for the elite team to bring in the “big ones” and put on gas masks.

U.S. intelligence agencies didn’t translate the intercepts into English right away, so White House officials didn’t know what the Syrian regime was planning until the assault began. Just before 2:30 a.m. on Aug. 21, the first salvo of poison-filled rockets streaked through the clear night sky and crashed into rebel strongholds.

Sarin gas, which kills almost instantly by attacking the nervous system, spread across sleeping farms. Pushed down by falling temperatures, the poison settled in low-lying areas and penetrated homes.

Men, women and children began coughing and gagging, with little more than wet handkerchiefs and T-shirts to hold over their mouths. Neighborhood doctors quickly ran out of antitoxins, and, in a desperate effort to wash away the poison, flooded clinic floors and dragged unconscious victims through the water. More than 1,400 people died, according to U.S. estimates, making it the worst chemical-weapons strike in a quarter century.

A final report is due soon from the United Nations. The Wall Street Journal has pieced together a reconstruction of that fateful day from battlefield reports and dozens of interviews with eyewitnesses, rebels, medics, activists and Western intelligence officials. It reveals both the horror of the attack and the months of miscalculations by the Syrian regime, opposition groups and U.S. government that left them all unprepared for what happened.

U.S. and Israeli communications intercepts reveal chaos inside the Syrian regime that night. When the reports of mass casualties filtered back from the field, according to the officials briefed on the intelligence, panicked Syrian commanders shot messages to the front line: Stop using the chemicals!

Calls came in to the presidential palace from Syrian allies Russia and Iran, as well as from Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group whose fighters were inadvertently caught up in the gassing, according to previously undisclosed intelligence gathered by U.S., European and Middle Eastern spy agencies. The callers told the Syrians that the attack was a blunder that could have profound international repercussions, U.S. officials say.

The Obama administration had been closely monitoring Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpile since the conflict began in 2011, and had watched the regime carry out about a dozen small-scale chemical attacks before the big one, U.S. officials say. Even if they had translated the intercepts before the Aug. 21 strike, these officials say, they likely wouldn’t have acted because there were no indications it would be out of the ordinary.

Top policy makers had little appetite for getting more deeply involved in the conflict, and questions loomed large about the legality of providing support to the rebels and the best strategy for managing the chemical-weapons threat, these officials say. Rebel leaders and their allies in the U.S. government say the White House failed to act on requests for gas masks, antidote injectors and other protective gear until it was too late.

All told, the events of Aug. 21 changed the Middle East and U.S. policy in ways likely to reverberate for years. It prompted the U.S. to consider and then pull back from military action. The eventual deal to avert a strike, in which Syria agreed to destroy its chemical-weapons stockpiles, elevated Russia, for now, to a leadership position in the region.

President Bashar al-Assad has tightened his hold on power. His regime has denied using chemical weapons, blaming the attacks on the rebels. In exchange for giving up his chemical arsenal, he avoided an American military intervention and likely will get even more support from Russia and Iran. Mr. Assad has pressed ahead with his offensive using conventional arms. U.S. intercepts show a Russian official later boasting to a Syrian counterpart about how easy it had been to get the U.S. to back off strike plans, officials briefed on the intelligence say.

Syrian opposition leaders made their first formal appeal to the U.S. for protection from chemical weapons back in June 2012. At a meeting in Washington, opposition representatives handed administration officials a request for various nonlethal supplies, including 2,500 gas masks, say people who attended.

Samantha Power, then the White House’s top human-rights official and now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was receptive, these people say. But other White House advisers, they say, questioned whether the masks would make much of a difference. Some worried that if Islamic extremists in the opposition got their hands on them they might try to seize poison gas from the regime. Administrative lawyers worried about potentially running afoul of domestic and international law.

“It was never ‘no.'” says one opposition representative about what would become a series of requests. “But it would never happen.”

A senior administration official says, “Decisions that were made on assistance to the opposition were made in consultation with them as to what their priorities were.”

That July, American and Israeli spy agencies for the first time intercepted fragmentary intelligence about regime forces using chemical weapons on a small scale. The evidence wasn’t conclusive—there were no physical traces—but some top military officials say they found it persuasive and wanted to make it clear right away to Syria the U.S. wouldn’t tolerate even small attacks.

Then-White House Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough and other officials told their agency counterparts that the top-secret information shouldn’t be made public, but congressional committees were briefed, according to officials. Mr. McDonough also decided to restrict the distribution of such “raw” intelligence inside the government because of its sensitivity, these people say. White House officials didn’t want to set off a chain reaction that would restrict their ability to decide how active a role to play, senior U.S. officials say.

The following month, on Aug. 20, President Barack Obama said the regime would cross the U.S.’s “red line” if it started moving or using “a whole bunch of chemical weapons.”

Last December, the U.S. intercepted an unusually complete communication in which Syrian officials spoke about a potentially larger-scale chemical attack involving aircraft. The White House sent private messages to the Russian government, which in turn asked Iran to lean on the Syrians to scrap the plan, according to current and former U.S. officials involved in the matter. Iran did just that, the officials say. A spokesperson for Iran’s U.N. mission said Iran had made it clear it opposed the use of chemical weapons. [Continue reading…]

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How the government can discover your health problems, political beliefs, and religious practices using just your metadata

Dahlia Lithwick and Steve Vladeck write: This week brought a new round of revelations about yet another National Security Agency surveillance program, this one created to hoover up details about how individual Americans use the Internet. The new disclosures were met by most observers with a fatalistic shrug. After all, we’ve quickly grown accustomed — or at least desensitized — to the fact that the government is looking at much of the information we voluntarily provide to others. And the material being collected in this case was only “metadata”: the details of when, where, and how we used the Internet — not what we actually read or wrote.

Should NSA sweeps of our “to” and “from” lines be fair game? How much can the government really learn about us without knowing what we’re saying in the text?

The legality of the “telephony metadata” program — the initiative revealed by Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian in June that showed the government collecting telephone records of Americans on a mass scale — will be considered by a federal district judge in Manhattan on Friday. According to the now disclosed orders of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, such “metadata” includes “the originating and terminating telephone number and the time and duration of any call.” It also includes information about the location of both parties to the call and the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) and international mobile station equipment identity (IMEI) numbers, which allow Uncle Sam to “identify the user or device that is making or receiving a call.” But because it doesn’t include the content of the phone calls, the story goes, there’s no invasion of our privacy. Nothing, therefore, to worry about?

As Professor Edward Felten, director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, explains in a declaration filed in that phone records case, our metadata in fact tells the government a lot more about us than we might realize, especially when different types of metadata are aggregated together. Consider calls to single-purpose hotlines: NSA collection of our metadata means the government knows when we’ve called a rape hotline, a domestic violence hotline, an addiction hotline, or a support line for gay teens. Hotlines for whistleblowers in every agency are fair game, as are police hotlines for “anonymous” reports of crimes. Charities that make it possible to text a donation to a particular cause (say, Planned Parenthood) or political candidate or super PAC could reveal an enormous amount about our political activities. And calling patterns can reveal our religious beliefs (no calls on Sabbath? Heaps of calls on Christmas?) or new medical conditions. If, for instance, the government knows that, within an hour, we called an HIV testing service, then our doctor, and then our health insurance company, they may not “know” what was discussed, but anyone with common sense — even a government official — could probably figure it out. [Continue reading…]

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Imagining the post-antibiotics future

Maryn McKenna writes: A few years ago, I started looking online to fill in chapters of my family history that no one had ever spoken of. I registered on Ancestry.com, plugged in the little I knew, and soon was found by a cousin whom I had not known existed, the granddaughter of my grandfather’s older sister. We started exchanging documents: a copy of a birth certificate, a photo from an old wedding album. After a few months, she sent me something disturbing.

It was a black-and-white scan of an article clipped from the long-gone Argus of Rockaway Beach, New York. In the scan, the type was faded and there were ragged gaps where the soft newsprint had worn through. The clipping must have been folded and carried around a long time before it was pasted back together and put away.

The article was about my great-uncle Joe, the youngest brother of my cousin’s grandmother and my grandfather. In a family that never talked much about the past, he had been discussed even less than the rest. I knew he had been a fireman in New York City and died young, and that his death scarred his family with a grief they never recovered from. I knew that my father, a small child when his uncle died, was thought to resemble him. I also knew that when my father made his Catholic confirmation a few years afterward, he chose as his spiritual guardian the saint that his uncle had been named for: St. Joseph, the patron of a good death.

I had always heard Joe had been injured at work: not burned, but bruised and cut when a heavy brass hose nozzle fell on him. The article revealed what happened next. Through one of the scrapes, an infection set in. After a few days, he developed an ache in one shoulder; two days later, a fever. His wife and the neighborhood doctor struggled for two weeks to take care of him, then flagged down a taxi and drove him fifteen miles to the hospital in my grandparents’ town. He was there one more week, shaking with chills and muttering through hallucinations, and then sinking into a coma as his organs failed. Desperate to save his life, the men from his firehouse lined up to give blood. Nothing worked. He was thirty when he died, in March 1938.

The date is important. Five years after my great-uncle’s death, penicillin changed medicine forever. Infections that had been death sentences—from battlefield wounds, industrial accidents, childbirth—suddenly could be cured in a few days. So when I first read the story of his death, it lit up for me what life must have been like before antibiotics started saving us.

Lately, though, I read it differently. In Joe’s story, I see what life might become if we did not have antibiotics any more. [Continue reading…]

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Meet the spies doing the NSA’s dirty work

Shane Harris writes: With every fresh leak, the world learns more about the U.S. National Security Agency’s massive and controversial surveillance apparatus. Lost in the commotion has been the story of the NSA’s indispensable partner in its global spying operations: an obscure, clandestine unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that, even for a surveillance agency, keeps a low profile.

When the media and members of Congress say the NSA spies on Americans, what they really mean is that the FBI helps the NSA do it, providing a technical and legal infrastructure that permits the NSA, which by law collects foreign intelligence, to operate on U.S. soil. It’s the FBI, a domestic U.S. law enforcement agency, that collects digital information from at least nine American technology companies as part of the NSA’s Prism system. It was the FBI that petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order Verizon Business Network Services, one of the United States’ biggest telecom carriers for corporations, to hand over the call records of millions of its customers to the NSA.

But the FBI is no mere errand boy for the United States’ biggest intelligence agency. It carries out its own signals intelligence operations and is trying to collect huge amounts of email and Internet data from U.S. companies — an operation that the NSA once conducted, was reprimanded for, and says it abandoned.

The heart of the FBI’s signals intelligence activities is an obscure organization called the Data Intercept Technology Unit, or DITU (pronounced DEE-too). The handful of news articles that mentioned it prior to revelations of NSA surveillance this summer did so mostly in passing. It has barely been discussed in congressional testimony. An NSA PowerPoint presentation given to journalists by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden hints at DITU’s pivotal role in the NSA’s Prism system — it appears as a nondescript box on a flowchart showing how the NSA “task[s]” information to be collected, which is then gathered and delivered by the DITU. [Continue reading…]

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Why the Obama administration is giving a free pass to Egypt’s military regime

Marc Lynch writes: Secretary of State John Kerry can’t seem to find enough ways these days to express his acceptance of Egypt’s military coup regime. In a visit to Cairo, he waved away the hard-fought suspension of some U.S. aid as “not a punishment” and declined to raise the issue of the trial of former President Mohamed Morsy. He seems keen to pretend that Egypt is on the road to democracy, and even appears to believe that the fiercely anti-democratic United Arab Emirates is going to support a democratic transition. Most recently, he endorsed the regime’s narrative by claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood “stole” the revolution — by winning free and fair elections, which Washington strongly supported.

Why is Kerry making such a production of supporting Egypt’s military regime? Most likely, President Barack Obama’s administration simply has much bigger regional issues with which to grapple, and has decided that it can accomplish little in a hopelessly fractured Egypt. It (correctly) calculates that there is little it can do to influence the course of events in Cairo due to the pervasive hostility to Washington across the Egyptian political spectrum and the willingness of Gulf states to offset any American attempts to exercise leverage.

It may be galling to many Egypt watchers and Egyptians who consider Cairo the center of the Middle East universe, but right now events there are barely a sideshow for Washington. Cairo has made it quite clear that it has little interest in American advice, and Washington has far more important issues on its plate.

Both Iran’s nuclear program and the horrific war in Syria continue to take priority over Egypt on America’s regional agenda. Closing a deal with Iran would arguably be the single most impressive and important geostrategic accomplishment in the Middle East since the Camp David Accords. Meanwhile, Syria’s civil war continues to inflict crushing human costs and has reverberated around the region, and few of the external players are keen on U.S.-orchestrated attempts to organize a peace conference.

Given those momentous challenges, the Obama administration is likely calculating that if happy talk on Egypt can slightly appease America’s anxious Gulf allies as Washington pushes policies in Iran and Syria that they dislike, then so be it.

That may be dispiriting, but at least it makes sense — as long as nobody is really fooled that Egypt is actually on a path toward a democratic future. But I doubt anyone in the administration is buying their own rhetoric. It may seem strange now, but there was once a controversy over whether Egypt’s July 3 coup should be called a coup. Even though it met the textbook definition of a coup — the military stepping in, suspending the constitution, and arresting the elected political leadership — many Egyptians protested that the masses in the streets demanding change and the perfidy of the Brotherhood leadership made it something different. It didn’t, of course.

Lest we forget, everything that has happened since July 3, without exception, has confirmed the coupness of Egypt’s coup. Army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s military regime has done everything by the book — rounding up and brutalizing supporters of the old regime, cultivating a cult of personality around the coup leader, tightly controlling the media, stage-managing a constitutional process designed to protect the military’s power and privileges, and even promising an eventual return to democracy.

The more obvious the nature of Egypt’s coup has become, the faster Washington has tried to run away from the legal and political implications of acknowledging it. [Continue reading…]

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Inequality is (literally) killing America

Zoë Carpenter writes: Only a few miles separate the Baltimore neighborhoods of Roland Park and Upton Druid Heights. But residents of the two areas can measure the distance between them in years — twenty years, to be exact. That’s the difference in life expectancy between Roland Park, where people live to be 83 on average, and Upton Druid Heights, where they can expect to die at 63.

Underlying these gaps in life expectancy are vast economic disparities. Roland Park is an affluent neighborhood with an unemployment rate of 3.4 percent, and a median household income above $90,000. More than 17 percent of people in Upton Druid Heights are unemployed, and the median household income is just $13,388.

It’s no secret that this sort of economic inequality is increasing nationwide; the disparity between America’s richest and poorest is the widest it’s been since the Roaring Twenties. Less discussed are the gaps in life expectancy that have widened over the past twenty-five years between America’s counties, cities and neighborhoods. While the country as a whole has gotten richer and healthier, the poor have gotten poorer, the middle class has shrunk and Americans without high school diplomas have seen their life expectancy slide back to what it was in the 1950s. Economic inequalities manifest not in numbers, but in sick and dying bodies. [Continue reading…]

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The Western European roots of Native Americans

The New York Times reports: The genome of a young boy buried at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia some 24,000 years ago has turned out to hold two surprises for anthropologists.

The first is that the boy’s DNA matches that of Western Europeans, showing that during the last Ice Age people from Europe had reached farther east across Eurasia than previously supposed. Though none of the Mal’ta boy’s skin or hair survives, his genes suggest he would have had brown hair, brown eyes and freckled skin.

The second surprise is that his DNA also matches a large proportion — about 25 percent — of the DNA of living Native Americans. The first people to arrive in the Americas have long been assumed to have descended from Siberian populations related to East Asians. It now seems that they may be a mixture between the Western Europeans who had reached Siberia and an East Asian population.

The Mal’ta boy was 3 to 4 years old and was buried under a stone slab wearing an ivory diadem, a bead necklace and a bird-shaped pendant. Elsewhere at the same site about 30 Venus figurines were found of the kind produced by the Upper Paleolithic cultures of Europe. The remains were excavated by Russian archaeologists over a 20-year period ending in 1958 and stored in museums in St. Petersburg.

There they lay for some 50 years until they were examined by a team led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen. Dr. Willerslev, an expert in analyzing ancient DNA, was seeking to understand the peopling of the Americas by searching for possible source populations in Siberia. He extracted DNA from bone taken from the child’s upper arm, hoping to find ancestry in the East Asian peoples from whom Native Americans are known to be descended.

But the first results were disappointing. The boy’s mitochondrial DNA belonged to the lineage known as U, which is commonly found among the modern humans who first entered Europe about 44,000 years ago. The lineages found among Native Americans are those designated A, B, C, D and X, so the U lineage pointed to contamination of the bone by the archaeologists or museum curators who had handled it, a common problem with ancient DNA projects. “The study was put on low speed for about a year because I thought it was all contamination,” Dr. Willerslev said.

His team proceeded anyway to analyze the nuclear genome, which contains the major part of human inheritance. They were amazed when the nuclear genome also turned out to have partly European ancestry. Examining the genome from a second Siberian grave site, that of an adult who died 17,000 years ago, they found the same markers of European origin. Together, the two genomes indicate that descendants of the modern humans who entered Europe had spread much farther east across Eurasia than had previously been assumed and occupied Siberia during an extremely cold period starting 20,000 years ago that is known as the Last Glacial Maximum.

The other surprise from the Mal’ta boy’s genome was that it matched to both Europeans and Native Americans but not to East Asians. Dr. Willerslev’s interpretation was that the ancestors of Native Americans had already separated from the East Asian population when they interbred with the people of the Mal’ta culture, and that this admixed population then crossed over the Beringian land bridge that then lay between Siberia and Alaska to become a founding population of Native Americans. [Continue reading…]

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Video: ‘November 22, 1963’

Errol Morris writes: Josiah “Tink” Thompson, the subject of this Op-Doc, graduated from Yale in 1957, became a demolitions expert and frogman for the Navy, and then returned to Yale to get his Ph.D. on the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.

The Kennedy assassination changed Tink’s life. In 1967, he was an assistant professor of philosophy at Haverford, when he published “Six Seconds in Dallas.” Short, simple and quietly convincing, it is still one of the best books written about the assassination.

Ten years later, Tink left academia and became a private detective in Northern California. Now he has returned to what has haunted him for 50 years: Frame #313 of the Zapruder film, and our inability to come up with a definitive account of what happened in Dallas.

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Go south young Jew to a land you’ve never seen

Nefesh B’Nefesh’s appeal to young American Jews to “go south” involves a cultural mashup, mixing the promise of an open frontier ready to be settled by adventuresome pioneers, along with the idea that the Negev desert is part of their ancestral homeland.

A would-be recruit says that as a Jew in America he’s “living in exile.”

What apparently hasn’t dawned on him or any others who swallow Nefesh B’Nefesh’s bait, is that this sense of exile might have more to do with being American than being Jewish.

The American fascination with roots springs precisely from the fact that nearly everyone comes from elsewhere, yet from exactly where is for so many very hard to trace. What distinguishes the Zionist hucksters is that they can easily trade with a ready-made answer to this question: where do I come from?

Alex Kane writes: On the 17th floor of a Manhattan conference building, young Jews from the New York area listened intently to two Israeli-Americans speak of the wonders of the Jewish state. They were going through the finer points of emigrating to Israel, talking up the varied benefits those who become citizens receive. Outside, it was a dreary and overcast Sunday. But the atmosphere inside was sunny: the banter light-hearted, the jokes from the speakers free-flowing, and all happy to be at the “Think Israel” conference (held on November 17th).

There was a serious task at hand, though: deciding how to choose a community in Israel where they would feel at home, which is part of Nefesh B’Nefesh’s core mission of encouraging aliyah to the Jewish state.

Ravit Greenberg, an Israeli citizen from upstate New York now working for Nefesh B’Nefesh, had just the right answer for them. They should move to the Negev in the south of Israel. It’s an area the government is encouraging Jews to move to with a variety of incentives. Greenberg was asked why the Negev was attractive by a boisterous and overeager pony-tailed man named Aaron.

“They want to encourage development,” Greenberg told him, talking about the Israeli government. And to help the Israeli government, Nefesh B’Nefesh seeks to enlist young North American Jews in the a key state project: populating the Negev with more Israeli Jews. [Continue reading…]

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How is Hamid Karzai still standing?

William Dalrymple writes: The Karzai family graveyard lies a few miles outside Kandahar, on the edge of the village of Karz. On the day I drove there, burned-out cars stood rusting by the sides of the road, children splashed through open drains and bullet holes riddled the mud walls opposite checkpoints. Amid all this, the graveyard stood out — gleaming, immaculate. Straggling bougainvillea and mulberry trees blossomed over the calligraphic tiles topping the cream-colored walls. Through the double gates were lines of cypresses. In the middle stood a domed enclosure containing the graves of the clan elders.

Hamid Karzai was entering the final lap of his presidency, and I had traveled to Karz with Mahmood, one of the president’s elder brothers, accompanied by a phalanx of his bodyguards. Afghanistan’s presidential election is set for April, and as the deadline for registering candidates approached, the country’s future seemed to hang in part on the fraught internal family politics of the Karzais. Hamid is ineligible to run for a third term, and it had been long rumored in Kabul that he would anoint his brother Qayum as his successor. Mahmood had made it clear that he wanted the presidency to stay in the family; he had even begun to raise campaign funds for Qayum, just as he once had for Hamid.

So far, however, the president had been publicly silent on the subject, and Qayum had yet to tip his hand. Mahmood’s business dealings — banking scandals and supposedly dodgy real estate deals — had long been perceived as Hamid’s Achilles’ heel, and it remained unclear whether family loyalty would trump the president’s growing preoccupation with his own legacy. All this, along with Karzai’s angry rhetoric against the alleged misdeeds of his American backers, had caused some tensions around the family table. “I don’t feel comfortable talking to Hamid these days,” Mahmood said as we rode in his armored Land Cruiser, sandwiched between pickup trucks full of troops. “These ridiculous conspiracy theories. And his cynical view of the West. These ideas aren’t helping Afghanistan. I don’t think he understands the importance of a good economic policy.”

On arrival, however, the sight of the massed Karzai dead quickly brought back Mahmood’s sense of dynastic solidarity. “See over there — the grave with the old carved headstone?” he said. “That was my grandfather, the real leader of the family. He migrated to Karz from the west of the province and bought this land.”

He then pointed to a poster of a mustached man on the guardhouse: “That’s my uncle, Khalil.” Khalil was killed in the 1980s. Some say he was murdered in a family dispute, but Mahmood told me he was assassinated during the war with the Soviets. “And over there,” he continued, “another uncle. Also assassinated.”

We walked into the domed mausoleum where two recumbent gravestones were covered with pink plastic flowers: “My father’s grave,” he said, lowering his voice to a whisper. “He was shot dead leaving a mosque. And that, by his side, is Ahmed Wali, my half brother.”

He didn’t bother saying what we both knew, that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of Kandahar’s provincial council, effectively governor of Kandahar and the man suspected by the West of controlling part of the Afghan heroin trade, but who also helped the C.I.A. operate an anti-Taliban paramilitary group, was himself killed by a trusted member of his inner circle. The shooting took place not far from where we were standing, two years earlier, almost to the day. I asked if anyone else in the family died violently. “Many!” Mahmood replied. He pointed to the different grave plots: “One, two, three . . . altogether about eight. Maybe more.”

From the graveyard, we headed on into Karz, where the brothers spent their childhood. Low mud-brick houses flanked the road. “Imagine having to live in these conditions!” Mahmood said. “If I had my way, I’d demolish the entire village, rehouse everyone in apartments and turn this space over to agriculture.” After decades in the United States, where he started an Afghan restaurant chain, it all seemed a bit of a surprise to him: “Imagine hanging up goat meat in the sun in this heat! So unhygienic. . . . And all these people just sitting there. Do they have nothing to do, for crying out loud? Just look how weak the retail community is here. Call these shops? What era are we in — the Roman Empire?”

I had asked to see the house where the brothers grew up, but after several false turns, we still couldn’t find the place. None of them had been back for years, not least because the village is now in the hands of a rival leader of the clan, their cousin Hashmat Karzai, and relations between the two factions of the family are not cordial.

“It’s changed beyond all recognition,” Mahmood said. “This mosque I remember: I used to play with Hamid over there. But the vineyards! Where have they gone?” Eventually his driver came to a stop. “This is it?” Mahmood asked. “It can’t be.” We got out in a field of dried mud, surrounded by mud houses with egg-carton domes. Mahmood summoned an old man in a turban wandering past and after conferring with him, announced: “The driver’s right. This is our home.” He gestured at the empty space around us.

“What happened?” I asked.

“The Russians.” He paused. “Any clan who were known to be prominent in the mujahedeen had their property seized or demolished.”

For the first time, Mahmood looked deflated: “Qayum and I were in the U.S., but Hamid and my father were prominent in the jihad. These houses here,” he said, pointing at the mud houses, “this was where my cousins lived. The same night the Soviet governor sent troops to demolish our house, they were all called out and lined up. Then they were shot. Every last one of them.” [Continue reading…]

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Did Stuxnet become America’s cyberwarfare Manhattan Project?

Cyberdefense consultant, Ralph Langner, following a three-year investigation on Stuxnet, suggests that what was originally conceived as a stealth weapon designed to cause chronic instability in Iran’s nuclear enrichment process, may have undergone a strategic reconfiguration. The project took on an objective much wider in scope than its physical target: demonstrating the United State’s preeminent position in engaging in cyberwarfare.

Looking at the two major versions of Stuxnet in context leaves a final clue — a suggestion that during the operation, something big was going on behind the scenes. Operation Olympic Games — the multiyear online espionage and sabotage campaign against the Iranian nuclear program — obviously involved much more than developing and deploying a piece of malware, however sophisticated that malware was. It was a campaign rather than an attack, and it appears that the priorities of that campaign shifted significantly during its execution.

When my colleagues and I first analyzed both attacks in 2010, we first assumed that they were executed simultaneously, maybe with the idea to disable the cascade protection system during the rotor-speed attack. That turned out to be wrong; no coordination between the two attacks can be found in the code. Then we assumed that the attack against the centrifuge drive system was the simple and basic predecessor after which the big one was launched, the attack against the cascade protection system. The cascade protection system attack is a display of absolute cyberpower. It appeared logical to assume a development from simple to complex. Several years later, it turned out that the opposite was the case. Why would the attackers go back to basics?

The dramatic differences between both versions point to changing priorities that most likely were accompanied by a change in stakeholders. Technical analysis shows that the risk of discovery no longer was the attackers’ primary concern when starting to experiment with new ways to mess up operations at Natanz. The shift of attention may have been fueled by a simple insight: Nuclear proliferators come and go, but cyberwarfare is here to stay. Operation Olympic Games started as an experiment with an unpredictable outcome. Along the road, one result became clear: Digital weapons work. And different from their analog counterparts, they don’t put military forces in harm’s way, they produce less collateral damage, they can be deployed stealthily, and they are dirt cheap. The contents of this Pandora’s box have implications much beyond Iran; they have made analog warfare look low-tech, brutal, and so 20th century.

In other words, blowing the cover of this online sabotage campaign came with benefits. Uncovering Stuxnet was the end of the operation, but not necessarily the end of its utility. Unlike traditional Pentagon hardware, one cannot display USB drives at a military parade. The Stuxnet revelation showed the world what cyberweapons could do in the hands of a superpower. It also saved America from embarrassment. If another country — maybe even an adversary — had been first in demonstrating proficiency in the digital domain, it would have been nothing short of another Sputnik moment in U.S. history.

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The psychology of conspiracy theories

William Saletan writes: To believe that the U.S. government planned or deliberately allowed the 9/11 attacks, you’d have to posit that President Bush intentionally sacrificed 3,000 Americans. To believe that explosives, not planes, brought down the buildings, you’d have to imagine an operation large enough to plant the devices without anyone getting caught. To insist that the truth remains hidden, you’d have to assume that everyone who has reviewed the attacks and the events leading up to them — the CIA, the Justice Department, the Federal Aviation Administration, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, scientific organizations, peer-reviewed journals, news organizations, the airlines, and local law enforcement agencies in three states — was incompetent, deceived, or part of the cover-up.

And yet, as Slate’s Jeremy Stahl points out, millions of Americans hold these beliefs. In a Zogby poll taken six years ago, only 64 percent of U.S. adults agreed that the attacks “caught US intelligence and military forces off guard.” More than 30 percent chose a different conclusion: that “certain elements in the US government knew the attacks were coming but consciously let them proceed for various political, military, and economic motives,” or that these government elements “actively planned or assisted some aspects of the attacks.”

How can this be? How can so many people, in the name of skepticism, promote so many absurdities?

The answer is that people who suspect conspiracies aren’t really skeptics. Like the rest of us, they’re selective doubters. They favor a worldview, which they uncritically defend. But their worldview isn’t about God, values, freedom, or equality. It’s about the omnipotence of elites. [Continue reading…]

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‘Syria is not a revolution any more — this is civil war’

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports: For three men in northern Syria, the second civil war started shortly after the first staggered into a quagmire of sectarian violence. The goals of the first war – freedom, Islam, social equality of some sort – were replaced by betrayal, defeat and anger towards rival militias, jihadis and foreign powers fighting in Syria.

Like many others, the three men are bewildered at what has become of their war. Their alliances – and their goals – are shifting. The regime is far away, the jihadis are near – and seem unstoppable. Their resources are dwindling; their families are shattered. Their villages and farm lands are lost to regime militias. Their allies are at best unreliable, and at worst actively conspiring against them.

They are a businessman, a smuggler and an army defector who became respectively the political officer, treasurer and military commander of a once-formidable battalion in northern Syria.

The businessman is the shrewdest: a tall, wide-shouldered man with a square head and thinning hair. A devout Salafi, he was once a rich man in Homs, but after two and half years of war, most of his fortune has been spent on arms and ammunition. What remains of his wealth is being slowly drained by the families of his dead, injured and missing relatives, many of them languishing in refugee camps.

On a cold autumn evening he sat in the courtyard of a newly built concrete house on the Turkish side of the Syrian border – the latest in a string of temporary homes since his house was razed by the Syrian government in the early days of the revolution.

“I need Bashar [al-Assad] to last for two more years,” said the businessman. “It would be a disaster if the regime fell now: we would split into mini-states that would fight among each other. We’ll be massacring each other – tribes, Islamists and battalions.

“Maybe if the regime lasts for a few more years we can agree on the shape of the new Syria. At least then we might end up with three states rather than 10,” he said. Meanwhile, the killings and massacres will continue, until sectarian cleansing has been carried out in all of Syria’s cities and regions, he added. “There will be either Alawites or Sunnis. Either them or us. Maybe in 10 years we will all be bored with fighting and learn how to coexist.” He paused, then added: “In 10 years maybe, not now.”

The battalion that the three men were part of was once the darling of the rebels’ foreign backers: Qatari royalty, Saudi preachers and Kuwaiti MPs all donated money and funnelled weapons to them. The businessman regularly met Turkish military intelligence officers on the border who safeguarded his arms shipments from Mediterranean ports.

But as jihadi influence grew among the opposition forces, the battalion’s position came under threat. A clash – as much about resources as it was about ideology – was inevitable. A jihadi leader was assassinated and the battalion was forced from its footholds in the oil-rich east. Further divisions within the battalion followed and some of its men left to join other factions or set up their own.

Gulf dignitaries accused the three men of sowing dissent in the Muslim community and financial backers switched their support to other battalions with a stricter Islamic outlook.

As his brother spread out blankets on the porch, the businessman stared up at the night sky, and smoked his last cigarette of the day. “This is not a revolution against a regime any more, this is a civil war,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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Why has the UN given Assad a free pass on mass murder?

Colum Lynch reports: During the past year, the United Nations’ chief relief agency has routinely withheld from the public vital details of the Bashar al-Assad regime’s systematic campaign to block humanitarian assistance to Syrian civilians. This silence has infuriated human rights advocates, who believe that greater public exposure of Assad’s actions would increase political pressure on the Syrian government to allow the international community to help hundreds of thousands of ordinary Syrians who are trapped in the line of fire.

Instead, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) — which oversees international relief efforts in Syria — has relied on low-key, behind-the-scenes diplomacy to quietly persuade the Syrian regime to open the aid floodgates. So far, critics say, the strategy has been ineffective. Worse, it provides a measure of political cover to the Assad regime as it carries out mass starvation and slaughter, these critics contend.

The U.N. “should be much more willing to point the finger at the Syrian government when they are responsible for vast blockages of aid. They haven’t said enough about who is responsible for violations and the character of those violations,” said Peggy Hicks, the head of advocacy for Human Rights Watch. “There is always a balancing act, but we have been concerned that the U.N. has been reluctant to recognize the limits of working behind the scenes.” [Continue reading…]

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Iranian human rights activists blast Congress’s sanctions push

Ali Gharib writes: Many Iran hawks in Washington claim the mantle of human rights advocacy in their push for ever harsher measures against the Islamic Republic, up to and sometimes including the use of military force against Iran’s nuclear facilities. But there’s a disconnect: While D.C.’s Iran hawks never relent in their push for more sanctions, human rights activists working inside and outside Iran feel that sanctions are impinging on their work. That’s the backdrop for the push by the Obama administration to get Congress to hold off on more sanctions. But Members of Congress, especially from the Republican right, appear poised to press on in their quest to further cripple the Iranian economy.

“Adding more sanctions at this stage in the negotiations, when there is a lot of hope about the fate of nuclear talks with Iran, is tantamount to sabotage,” said Hadi Ghaemi, the head of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, in a statement released by the group today. “The idea of adding more sanctions at this crucial point in the negotiations disappoints millions of Iranians who are hopeful these talks will lead to a compromise and help lift the sanctions, and sounds like a drumbeat leading to war.”

The release singled out a statement by Sen. Mark Kirk, one of Congress’s most avid Iran hawks, to reporters: “How do you define an Iranian moderate? An Iranian who is out of bullets and out of money.” The line refers to Iran’s moderate President Hassan Rouhani. While Iran’s elections are deeply flawed—only regime-approved candidates can run—it’s worth noting that Rouhani was not Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s choice for president. “The 18 million Iranians who defied the odds and voted for change in this year’s presidential elections might take issue with Senator Kirk’s insulting characterization,” noted Jamal Abdi, of the National Iranian American Council, a U.S.-based group that opposes new sanctions, in a press release.

Laying bare Kirk’s cynical attack on Iranian moderates requires only remembering his plea for Iran to free the Green movement leaders under house arrest; both Mir Hossien Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, while reformers, were also stalwarts of the Islamic Republic. And Kirk has made impolitic statements before: In 2011, he said, “It’s okay to take the food out of the mouths” of ordinary Iranians to punish them for the acts of their government. [Continue reading…]

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Why Iran’s military won’t spoil détente with the U.S.

Akbar Ganji writes: It is fair to assume that any deal between Iran and the United States to freeze Iran’s nuclear program will be greeted by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps with cries of “Death to America!” Hassan Rouhani was elected president earlier this year with a mandate to seek just such a deal. But he still has to reckon with the fact that Iran’s most powerful military force has traditionally been a bastion for ideological hard-liners uninterested in building closer relations with the United States.

At the same time, any hope that the Revolutionary Guards have of playing the spoiler in a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement will be undermined by the fact that the force is implacably divided against itself, between those who are dead set against closer relations with the United States and those who are likely to support a deal.

This is not to suggest that the Revolutionary Guards don’t pose a threat to détente; its most hard-line factions certainly do. And those tend to be the most vocal — or at least the most visible. On September 30, just a few days after Rouhani’s breakthrough telephone conversation with U.S. President Barack Obama, the chief of the Guards, Mohammad Ali Jafari, labeled the move a “tactical error,” adding that his forces would be monitoring the issue in the future so that it could issue “necessary warnings.” Two weeks later, on October 13, Jafari declared that “the people have figured out what [the reformists] are up to and will not be duped by their provocations in the interests of the enemy.” That same day, Yahya Rahim Safavi, a general in the Guards, expressed the Islamic Republic’s standard ideological line against relations with Washington when he said that the United States had proved repeatedly that it could not be trusted.

Around the same time, however, other prominent Guardsmen were offering a strikingly different message, by way of a revisionist interpretation of recent Iranian history. [Continue reading…]

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