Category Archives: Arab Spring

#NoGas4Israel – The case against Egypt selling gas to Israel

Issandr El Amrani writes:

For what must be the third or fourth time since the Egyptian revolution began on January 25, the Sinai gas pipeline that takes Egyptian gas to Israel has been attacked. These attacks are not particularly dramatic, but are enough of a bother that it takes several weeks to restore the flow of gas to Israel — and often Jordan, which is affected by the pipeline. The people behind the attacks are thought to be Sinai-based Islamists who oppose the sale of gas to Israel, but we don’t really know for sure. The attack took place only 60km east of the Suez Canal, and it could very well be people from the Nile Valley carrying out the attacks — and they don’t have to be Islamists, either, since plenty of other people oppose the gas deal.

Since the revolution, the interim government has reviewed gas prices but thus far everything indicates that the sale of gas will continue. From what I’ve been able to gather (and I’d like to write something longer on this one day), Egypt was selling the gas to Eastern Mediterranean Gas (EMG), the private firm that then sold the gas to the Israeli National Electricity Company, at around $3 per mbtu (that’s million British thermal units — the standard measurement for these things). EMG then sold it to the Israelis for around $4.5 per mbtu, pocketing a 50% profit margin for no more than the transaction costs and some of the infrastructure between the two countries. The market price for gas (which is not as fungible as oil since it tends to rely on pipeline infrastructure unless shipped as LNG) is currently around $4.40 for futures in North America, but spot markets in recent years passed the $10 per mbtu mark. Either way, there is no doubt that the price of the gas sold by Egypt to EMG was well below market prices, and that the company made an easy profit without investment of its own (I’ll leave the issue of whether EMG sold the gas to Israel at a fair price aside.)

EMG is owned in large part by an Egyptian business, Hussein Salem, who has long been known to be a frontman for the Mubarak family (and is a former security official), and Yossi Meiman, an Israeli businessman close to the Sharon clan in Israeli politics (he owns the Israeli energy company Merhav), as well as some additional minority investors from South East Asia. Incidentally, although this was not widely known until after the revolution, Salem (who has been arrested in Madrid recently and is wanted by the Egyptian authorities) also had a similar deal set up with Jordan, involving the same kind of markup, and this deal (it’s not clear with who on the Jordanian side, but I’d look at the royal family or the security services) is also being reviewed by the Egyptian authorities.

In the last few years, when lawsuits were filed in Egypt against the sale of gas to Israel, the government often claimed that it was only selling gas to EMG, and has no transactional relationship with Israel. This is the ideal time to turn the argument on its head. If EMG was involved in high-level corruption under the previous regime, it is perfectly understandable if the Egyptian government, which controls the sale of natural gas, were to decide to terminate its relationship with EMG. This does not mean that EMG can’t sell gas to Israel: it would just have to meet its commitment from elsewhere than Egypt. Legally, this procedure may be dicey. EMG is free to resort to international arbitration, or even sue (which would provide an opportunity to look into its accounts). But my feeling talking to energy people in Cairo from multinationals (many operate in Egypt — huge ones like BP, BG or Statoil and independents like Apache) is that they don’t care if the Israeli gas contract is not honored. They want to cover their bacon first, and have assurances that their own substantial investments in Egypt will be untouched. They don’t care about the Israelis and understand if the deal is cancelled, it will be an understandable political exception.

Now, it’s likely that there were personal commitments from Mubarak to successive Israeli governments that the gas would continue. If these exists on paper, let the government make them public. If they don’t — well, an oral contract is as good as the paper it’s written on and we fall back to a relationship between Egypt and EMG. And then let’s see that contract and get the details of how this massive fraud was conducted.

A retired general speaking to the Los Angeles Times had little doubt that whoever is responsible for blowing up the gas pipeline has a patriotic motivation for doing so.

“Whether these attacks are carried out by large groups or individuals, many Egyptians are against supplying Israel with gas,” retired Gen. Mohamed Ali Belal told Babylon and Beyond. “Those who’ve been bombing the pipeline believe that they are fulfilling their national responsibility and playing a part in stopping gas exports to Israel.”

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Tahrir’s journey to Palestine

Helena Cobban writes:

The moment that Hosni Mubarak stood down from the Egyptian presidency and it was apparent that his hastily appointed vice-president, the long-time intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, would not be succeeding him, it was clear that much would be changing in Middle Eastern politics — including for Palestinians.

Easily the most populous Arab state, and one with a central location abutting Israel/Palestine, Egypt has always had the potential to play a huge role on the Palestinian issue. That role was lessened after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat split with the PLO leaders after the 1978 Camp David accords. But in recent years, Mubarak had become a linchpin in U.S. and Israeli efforts to steer Palestinian politics in a direction amenable to them.

Mubarak and Suleiman had two major ways to exert direct influence over Palestinian politics. First, Egypt has the only land border with the Gaza Strip other than the Strip’s much longer border with Israel. The sole legal crossing point on that border, at Rafah, years ago became the only way that most Gaza Palestinians could ever hope to travel between the Strip and the outside world. (Goods, by contrast, are not allowed through Rafah. Under the 1994 Paris Agreement between Israel and the PLO, all goods going into or out of Gaza must go through crossings that go to Israel.) Cairo’s control over Rafah has given it a huge ability to put pressure on Gaza’s 1.6 million people and the elected Hamas mini-government that administers the Strip.

In addition, in recent years, Egypt got the full backing of the United States and Israel to play the role of primary interlocutor in all efforts to heal the rift between Hamas and its main rivals in Mahmoud Abbas’s Fateh. But as Suleiman and Mubarak had long been firmly in Abbas’s camp, it surprised no one to see the reconciliation efforts that Suleiman periodically launched come to nothing — and Fateh and Hamas remained deeply divided.

So the departure of Mubarak and Suleiman from power in Cairo was huge for the Palestinians — especially those trapped for many years inside Gaza, which has been described by many as an open-air prison.

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Turkey recognizes Libya rebels, promises more aid

The Associated Press reports:

Turkey’s foreign minister recognized Libya’s rebel leaders as the country’s legitimate representatives and promised them an additional $200 million in aid during a visit Sunday.

The visit by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu marked Turkey’s strongest show of support yet for the opposition forces trying to out Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

Turkey, a regional power, initially balked at the idea of military action in Libya and Turkish companies were involved in Libyan construction projects worth billions of dollars before the outbreak of an anti-Gadhafi uprising in February.

The revolt has turned into a protracted, largely deadlocked armed conflict, in which the rebels control Libya’s eastern third, while Gadhafi clings to power in the west, but has been unable to crush pockets of resistance there. As a NATO member, Turkey is now supporting the alliance’s airstrikes against targets linked to the Gadhafi regime.

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Tens of thousands of Syrians protest in central city of Hama

The New York Times reports:

Tens of thousands of protesters poured Friday into the streets of Hama, a Syrian city abandoned by the military and security forces, gathering in the country’s biggest demonstration in nearly four months of unrest and staking a festive claim to a region that bore the brunt of a ferocious government crackdown a generation ago.

The scenes of residents rallying in a central square there, captured by activists on video and circulated on the Internet, seemed to signal a new stage in an uprising that has so far only aspired to rival the mass protests in Egypt and Tunisia, where authoritarian leaders were eventually forced to step down. Protesters exploited at least a temporary vacuum in the official security presence in Hama to stage a panorama of dissent as celebratory as it was angry.

“Leave! Leave!” protesters chanted to a hip-hop beat.

The military and security forces withdrew last month from Hama for reasons that remain unclear. But the move seemed to reflect a compelling, if ambiguous, turn in an uprising that until recently was marked by repeated clashes between protesters and armed troops.

After weeks of stalemate, a new dynamic has emerged recently in Syria. The opposition gathered Monday in a rare meeting in Damascus, government officials are promising reform in coming weeks and protesters have shown a resilience that seems more and more difficult for the government to suppress.

The most visible shift has occurred in Hama, where a government crackdown in 1982 made the city synonymous with the brutality of Syria’s leadership. Since the withdrawal last month, protests have gathered momentum. Each night, youths have converged on Aasi Square, which they have renamed Freedom Square. On successive Fridays, crowds have grown bigger, surpassing 10,000 last week, diplomats say.

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Bahrain to citizens living abroad: Spy on countrymen, no protests permitted

MSNBC reports:

Bahrainis living abroad have been ordered to spy on their countrymen in the wake of a deadly crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.

Documents containing “loyalty pledges” — which also require expats to promise they will not protest against the tiny Gulf state’s government — have been sent to students attending university in the U.K.

Some Bahrainis told msnbc.com that they feel abandoned by Western leaders in the face of an alleged campaign of intimidation that extends far beyond the country’s borders.

Alaa Shehabi writes:

For the first time in its history, Bahrain has embarked on mass military trials of hundreds of civilians on fatuous charges of crimes against the state. While more than 1,000 remain in detention, the opposition estimates that 400 are going through the process of military trials and 100 have been convicted so far. The swift summary justice churned out in these tribunals are a throwback to early 20th century Stalin show trials, designed to punish and humiliate dissenters. One of those being tried is my husband, Ghazi Farhan. On June 21, he was sentenced to three years imprisonment.

Having been born and educated in the UK, I moved to Bahrain in 2009 to marry Ghazi Farhan, a 31-year-old energetic businessman, leaving a respectable job in Cambridge to start a new family life in the land of my ancestors. Little did I imagine that in 2011, when the Arab Spring hit the shores of this island, it would be swiftly nipped in the bud, and would sweep my blossoming family along with it.

On April 12, on his way back from his lunch break, my husband was abducted from his office car park. Blindfolded, handcuffed and taken away by unknown plain-clothed men. Some 48 days later, he was summoned before the Orwellian-named “National Safety Court”, a military tribunal. He was charged with participating in an illegal assembly of more than five persons (having visited the Pearl Roundabout) and spreading false information on the internet (referring to a single Facebook comment). Therein began an extraordinary ordeal of Ghazi’s military trial and his sentencing.

Joseph Stalin introduced “the show trial” – secretive military tribunals that bypass the judiciary – during the Great Purge of the 1930s. It appears that Bahrain has taken a chapter straight out of Stalin’s textbook, in which verdicts are predetermined and then justified through the use of coerced confessions, obtained through torture and threats against defendents’ families. The only new addition to this chapter is that the government of Bahrain has insisted, since the 1980s, on airing these filmed confessions on state TV – often with the defendant apologising to the king. Ayat al Qurmuzi, a poet sentenced to one year’s imprisonment for reading a poem critical of the king, had one such confession aired, possibly to pave the way for some kind of royal pardon.

Credible reports from now-free detainees who were held with Ayat have said how a toilet brush was forced into her mouth. All those on trial are “traitors to the state”, says the relentless propaganda of hate speech, spewed on state media – a chapter in the Arab Tyrant’s manual that could have been written by Goebbels. The media has described protestors as “termites” and Shia as “the evil group”; they have dehumanised “the other”, who deserve treatment worse than animals.

Since March, hundreds have shared a similar experience to mine. There are several stages to the ordeal that are particularly distressing for all involved. The first stage is the sudden arrest, in a dawn raid or at a checkpoint, or in some cases, at work, and then they are taken away to an unknown location by unknown forces and for long periods of time. In Ghazi’s case, 48 days.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports:

As the summer heat sets in, most university students in Bahrain are eagerly looking forward to getting out of class. But 19 year-old Mohammed and his friends are struggling to get back in.

Local rights groups say over 400 mostly Shi’ite students have been expelled from Bahraini universities in recent months, charged with participating in the “unauthorized protests” which shook the Gulf island kingdom earlier this year.

Mohammed, a second year student at Bahrain University, described a string of student dismissals since March, in which officials used protesters’ own Facebook postings and YouTube videos against them to identify students who joined demonstrations or criticized the government online.

“There is an aggressive with-us-or-against-us mentality,” he said, declining to give his full name for fear of further government reprisals. “If you went out to the streets to ask for your rights, now you must be punished.”

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Saudi Arabia worries about stability, security and Iran

Jason Burke reports:

It was a very discreet meeting deep in the English countryside. The main speaker was Prince Turki al-Faisal, one of Saudi Arabia’s best-known and best-connected royals. The audience was composed of senior American and British military officials. The location was RAF Molesworth, one of three bases used by American forces in the UK since the second world war. Now a Nato intelligence centre focused on the Mediterranean and the Middle East, the sprawling compound amid green fields was an ideal venue for the sensitive topics that Turki, former head of Saudi Arabian intelligence, wanted to raise.

After an anecdote about how Franklin D Roosevelt was told by a naked Winston Churchill that nothing between them or their countries should be hidden, Turki warmed to his theme: “A Saudi national security doctrine for the next decade.”

For the next half an hour, the veteran diplomat, a former ambassador to Washington and tipped to be the next foreign minister in Riyadh, entertained his audience to a sweeping survey of his country’s concerns in a region seized by momentous changes. Like Churchill, Turki said, the kingdom “had nothing to hide”.

Even if they wanted to, the leaders of the desert kingdom would have difficulty concealing their concern at the stunning developments across the Arab world. Few – excepting the vast revenues pouring in from oil selling at around $100 a barrel for much of the year – have brought much relief to Riyadh.

Chief among the challenges, from the perspective of the Saudi royal rulers, are the difficulties of preserving stability in the region when local autocracies that have lasted for decades are falling one after another; of preserving security when the resultant chaos provides opportunities to all kinds of groups deemed enemies; of maintaining good relations with the west; and, perhaps most importantly of all, of ensuring that Iran, the bigger but poorer historic regional and religious rival just across the Gulf from Saudi Arabia’s eastern provinces, does not emerge as the winner as the upheavals of the Arab spring continue into the summer.

In the second part of his report, Burke writes:

The Bridges bookshop and cafe, on Arafat Street in an upmarket residential area of the southern Saudi port city of Jeddah, is quiet this weekend afternoon. Three young women sit on the floor working on a 13,000-piece jigsaw. Among the well-thumbed books for browsing on the artfully slanted shelves, next to works on Islamic calligraphy and architecture, are biographies of Mahatma Gandhi, Che Guevara and Nelson Mandela.

Yet Asma, Amna and Dina, all 23, are no revolutionaries. As educated, English-speaking, iPod and iPad-carrying young Arabs, they are very much in the same demographic as those who organised the mass demonstrationprotests that ended the rule of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt this year, but the three women are separated from their counterparts in Cairo by more than the Red Sea.

Images of the Arab spring streaming into Saudi Arabia on the ubiquitous satellite TV channels may have meant that “people are realising the importance of being politically aware”, Amna, a human resources management student, says. But, in the kingdom, “we don’t actually do anything”.

Such feelings explain, at least in part, why, while the rest of the Arab world is in ferment, Saudis, of whom 70% are under 30 and 35% are under 16, have remained largely quiet. Despite overseas attention focused on a few incidents of protest, scores of interviews over two weeks in deeply conservative areas, the capital, Riyadh, and relatively liberal Jeddah have revealed a country in which a growing desire for reform is a very long way from anything approaching mass dissent.

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Clashes ease in Cairo, but underline Egypts fragile condition

The New York Times reports:

Clashes between the police and protesters that began Tuesday night and carried into Wednesday morning left more than 1,000 people injured in the worst violence to grip the capital since President Hosni Mubarak was forced from power in February.

The turmoil, which seemed to take almost everyone by surprise, demonstrated the fragile state of Egyptian society since the revolution, where almost any spark can ignite simmering tensions.

As the sun rose Wednesday over Tahrir Square, a now familiar tableau was revealed: sidewalks smashed to bits by protesters who hurled the pieces at the police, metal barricades dragged into the street, rubber bullets scattered around, and clusters of protesters declaring a sit-in in opposition to the heavy-handed tactics of the police.

“I am here today because I am appalled at how the police have treated protesters,” said Salma Samer, a 23-year-old student. “This is not what we called for when we took to the streets on January 25th. This is not the revolution we imagined.”

Meanwhile, McClatchy reports:

Egyptians largely reject U.S. involvement in Egypt and appear split on whether to extend the longstanding peace treaty with neighboring Israel. They overwhelmingly support the revolution and are eager to vote without delay, but haven’t yet identified a trusted party or politician to steer the nation toward their vision of an Islam-compatible democracy.

That’s the portrait emerging of Egypt’s millions-strong electorate as the country prepares for the first vote since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, according to survey results released in recent weeks by U.S. polling firms. With no single group garnering more than 15 percent of public support and the majority of voters still undecided, the poll results augur a closely contested parliamentary election this fall.

Until this year, such detailed polling was unheard of here — the government strictly controlled what questions outside pollsters could ask. Anything that might have exposed Mubarak’s deep unpopularity and Egyptians’ pent-up rage over rampant corruption, police brutality and poverty was strictly off limits.

Now, however, polling firms have a mostly free hand to ask what they will — though they apparently still aren’t allowed to probe whether the Egyptian military, which runs the country, should continue receiving billions of dollars in aid from the United States. Surveyors have rushed in to take advantage, some even setting up permanent offices in Cairo. Poll workers are crisscrossing the country, popping up in urban slums and rural villages with questions on once-taboo topics.

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Bahrain: PR mercenaries, their dictator masters, and the human rights stain

Thor Halvorssen writes:

Maryam al-Khawaja took the stage at the Oslo Freedom Forum last Tuesday and stunned the audience with her experiences of government violence in the Kingdom of Bahrain. She described the killing of student protestors, the torture of democracy advocates, and how human rights defenders are “disappeared.” Maryam also detailed how troops from a neighboring dictatorship, Saudi Arabia, rushed into Bahrain to prop up the crown prince’s regime.

Ali Abdulemam, a renowned Bahraini blogger, was also invited to the Oslo Freedom Forum. Ali was imprisoned by his government in September 2010 for “spreading false information.” After being released on February 23, he enthusiastically accepted his speaking invitation and plans were made for his travel. And then he disappeared. No one has seen or heard from him since March 18.

Beyond disappearing bloggers and rights activists, Bahrain also tries to disappear criticism. The government has been aided by a coterie of “reputation management” experts, including professionals from the Washington, D.C., offices of Qorvis Communications and the Potomac Square Group, in addition to Bell Pottinger out of their offices in London and Bahrain.

Within minutes of Maryam’s speech (streamed live online) the global Bahraini PR machine went into dramatic overdrive. A tightly organized ring of Twitter accounts began to unleash hundreds of tweets accusing Maryam of being an extremist, a liar, and a servant of Iran. Simultaneously, the Oslo Freedom Forum’s email account was bombarded with messages, all crudely made from a simple template, arguing that Maryam al-Khawaja is an enemy of the Bahraini people and a “traitor.” Most of the U.S.-based fake tweeting, fake blogging (flogging), and online manipulation is carried out from inside Qorvis Communication’s “Geo-Political Solutions” division.

Rupert Wingfield Hayes writes:

Ask anybody who has experienced torture and they will tell you that almost everybody breaks in the end.

And one of the most effective ways of making someone sign a confession is to stop them sleeping.

In China, I once met a man who had confessed to killing his own wife after being kept awake by police for 10 days and nights.

His wife was alive.

So what the wife of one of the doctors in Bahrain told me was all the more disturbing.

In a brief meeting outside the court, her husband had told her he had been blindfolded and handcuffed, and forced to stand up for three weeks.

Forcing someone to stand does not sound like torture, but that is exactly why it is so effective.

Back in my hotel room, I trawled the internet and BBC archive for video of the men I had seen in the dock that morning.

It did not take long. There they were on the BBC and al-Jazeera speaking out passionately, as wounded protesters were rushed into the emergency room behind them.

One of the doctors, a softly spoken man called Ali Al Akri, struggled to hold back tears as he pleaded with the government to stop the killing, to stop shooting the protesters.

In court, the prosecutor had called Ali Al Akri the main ringleader of the doctors’ conspiracy.

He did not look like a ringleader to me. Passionate, angry, distraught, yes. The leader of an anti-government coup? No.

His real crime was to have spoken out to us, the foreign media. To have told the outside world what was going on inside his hospital. Of the effects of buckshot and tear gas. To show X-rays of high-velocity bullets embedded in protesters’ bodies.

They were images that brought shame and international opprobrium upon friendly, liberal, sophisticated Bahrain.

And it is for that, that the Bahrain doctors are now being punished.

As the world now turns its attention to more pressing stories – in Libya, Syria and beyond – there is a real danger that the Bahrain doctors will be forgotten and that the Bahrain authorities will be quietly allowed to get on with persecuting those who dared to stand up and to speak out.

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Syrians pour into Lebanon after Friday protest killings

The Guardian reports:

Hundreds of Syrians have fled to Lebanon after 20 people were killed in the biggest day of protests against President Bashar al-Assad.

Up to 1,000 Syrians escaped through the al-Qusair crossing in the region of Akkar near Wadi Khaled in northern Lebanon, according to a Lebanese security official.

At least six of those who crossed the border had gunshot wounds and were admitted to hospital in Akkar, the official said.

Teargas and live bullets were fired at demonstrators leaving Friday prayers in several areas of the capital Damascus and elsewhere. Syrian state TV blamed unidentified gunmen for some deaths.

Thousands of people are reported to have turned out in the Damascus suburb of Irbin, the central city of Homs, and, more unusually, in Aleppo, Syria’s second city, which has been largely peaceful so far.

The renewed protests came after President Assad offered dialogue and reform on Monday.

Meanwhile, Anthony Shadid reports:

Hotels that catered to sandal-wearing backpackers in the storied Syrian city of Aleppo stand empty. Capital from the Persian Gulf that underpinned Syrian ambitions of modernization has begun to dry up. The Syrian pound has faltered, exports have fallen and the government has promised respite with money it will not have for long.

In his first address to Syrians in two months, President Bashar al-Assad warned this week of “the collapse of the Syrian economy.” The words might have been hyperbole, aimed at rallying support for a leadership staggering from a three-month uprising. But the sentiments underlined the danger the economy there poses for a government that long promised its people better lives, even as it refused to surrender any real political power.

As the crisis deepens, Syrians face the prospect of achieving neither.

“We as businessmen want a solution, and we can’t wait forever,” said Muhammad Zaion, a garment dealer in Aleppo. “The president should find a way out of this crisis, or he should leave it to others. We need a solution, whatever that solution might be.”

For much of the world, Syria’s revolt has been viewed, through its politics, as a reaction to the ferocious crackdown deployed by one of the region’s most authoritarian governments.

But an economy long hailed for its potential — though its stewards have been criticized for its mismanagement — has played no less a role in the upheaval. Market reforms that cut subsidies on food and fuel over the past seven years stoked frustration, worsened by a devastating drought that began in 2006 and drove 1.5 million people from the countryside to cities without enough jobs.

With economists predicting that conditions will worsen over the summer, the health of the economy also may determine how the unrest evolves.

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U.S. ‘concerned’ at Syria border move

Al Jazeera reports:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that her country is concerned by reports that Syria is massing troops near the border with Turkey, which could escalate the crisis in the region, and is discussing the issue with Turkish officials.

Clinton said the reported move by Syria to surround and target the town of Khirbet al-Jouz just 500 metres from the Turkish border marked a worrying new phase of Syria’s attempt to quash anti-government protests.

“If true, that aggressive action will only exacerbate the already unstable refugee situation in Syria,” Clinton said late on Thursday.

“Unless the Syrian forces immediately end their attacks and their provocations that are not only now affecting their own citizens but (raising) the potential of border clashes, then we’re going to see an escalation of conflict in the area.”

Clinton said she had discussed the situation with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and that President Barack Obama had also talked to Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.

Meanwhile, the European Union is preparing a draft statement questioning the legitimacy of Syria’s leaders, expected to be released on Friday.

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U.S. says Gaddafi might flee Tripoli

The Wall Street Journal reports:

New U.S. intelligence shows Col. Moammar Gadhafi is “seriously considering” fleeing Tripoli for a more secure location outside the capital, according to U.S. officials, raising the prospect that the Libyan leader’s hold on power is increasingly fragile.

The intelligence depicts a Libyan leader who “doesn’t feel safe anymore” in Tripoli because of stepped-up strikes by North Atlantic Treaty Organization aircraft and by battlefield gains by rebel forces, according to a senior U.S. national-security official briefed on the recent reports that the intelligence community has shared with the White House and other agencies.

The timing behind any possible move isn’t known and doesn’t appear to be imminent, a U.S. official said. Such intelligence has been seen before, although with less intensity. U.S. intelligence agencies have seen no indications that Col. Gadhafi intends to leave the country, the officials said.

Nonetheless, U.S. officials believe military pressure on Tripoli in recent days has prompted Col. Gadhafi to seek safer ground, after more than three months of allied attacks. Col. Gadhafi has several residences and other facilities outside Tripoli to which he could relocate, said a senior U.S. defense official.

Ali Al-Isawi, the vice president of the executive office of Libya’s Transitional National Council in Benghazi, writes:

The world knows there is no future for democracy in Libya while Kadafi remains in power. The Libyan opposition’s Transitional National Council, recognized by more than a dozen European nations, is generally considered the only legitimate ruling interim authority in Libya until stability can be restored and full, free elections can be held.

Despite some assistance from many countries, the council is finding it increasingly difficult to provide essential services as the conflict drags on. The council must provide for residents and displaced people in the eastern half of the country, where it is in authority, and it must coordinate humanitarian aid and medical supplies for besieged areas, such as Misurata, and in refugee camps along Libya’s borders.

The council was unable to pay the May salaries for employees in the public sector. We have purchased fuel on credit. Medical supplies are at a critically low level. We have no drugs available for cancer, heart and kidney patients or for those suffering from psychological ailments. Anesthesia supplies are running low as the conflict creates major casualties in need of immediate treatment and care.

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A five-star retirement home for dictators

Ellen Knickmeyer writes:

Where once there were gilded gates and sweeping views, now there are parking lots, hospital ceilings, and object lessons for the Arab Spring’s new dictators-in-exile to contemplate.

For the routed presidents of Tunisia and Yemen, the latest additions to Saudi Arabia’s guest list of leaders no longer wanted by unappreciative homelands, exile after their people pulled the plugs on their presidencies-for-life is appearing gloomy and isolated. Their Saudi hosts are forbearing but not especially thrilled, either.

From King Abdul Aziz, the founder of the modern Saudi state, on down, the ruling al-Sauds have followed Arab tradition by offering asylum even to some toppled leaders they haven’t particularly liked, Prince Turki bin Mohammed bin Saud al-Kabeer, undersecretary of the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told me in Riyadh this week.

In the case of Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the Saudis offered refuge to a leader who wasn’t even an ally; who had failed, like Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, to support the U.S.- and Saudi-backed Gulf War after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Prince Turki said.

“This man asked for our protection. This custom is part of our life,” Prince Turki, who is the Foreign Ministry’s official in charge of multilateral relations, said. “You can’t refuse if someone comes and asks for your assistance and protection.”

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Syria’s broken spring: a Damascus report

At Open Democracy, Vicken Cheterian writes:

Syria is going through an uprising of socially marginalised regions, suffering from the absence of institutions and services, where the most obvious state presence has been the security agencies.

The context of this revolt is the weakness as well as the strength of the state. The Syrian regime portrays its major assets as opposition to great-power politics and support for anti-Israeli resistance. Its true chief resource is the fact that parts of the population still see it as a guarantee of stability and security. But this resource is fragile, and eroding under the pressure of the current violent confrontation.

The revolt that started in Deraa is, despite ferocious repression using live bullets, spreading rather than dying down. Several towns and cities remain under siege, with telecommunications shut down, highways blocked, and the country isolated from the outside world. A key question is how long such a situation can persist before the merchant class sees the regime as part of the problem rather than the solution; and whether, to avert this outcome, the Syrian authorities can learn how to use their most valuable (if now damaged) resource – the fact that they have come to represent stability and a defence against chaos?

“I do not care about who rules, or the type of regime” a Syrian friend who supports the status quo told me. “What I care about is that when my children go to school or university, I do not worry about their safety.” But today, he is worried about his family’s immediate safety.

Three months into the revolt, the regime seems at a loss. Bashar al-Assad’s third speech since it began, on 20 June 2011, offered little if anything new. “The authorities have fewer and fewer choices”, says a Damascus observer. “First, they tried to suffocate the incipient movement with heavy repression. That has clearly failed. Then the president announced reforms, the end to the state of emergency, but he said he would do reforms his way, according to his rhythm. This was taken very badly by the public, and the rebellion only spread further.”

Another analyst adds: “Neither repression nor the promise of reforms can calm the situation. Dialogue is declared, but dialogue with whom? We do not see it happening. How can it give any results?” When asked what the authorities can offer to the population to defuse the situation, the response is: “The only promise the president can give is to be the leader of a political transition”. But as Bashar’s latest speech confirms, the regime is managing the situation day by day – mixing repression here, the promise of dialogue there.

This is unsustainable over the long term. The security forces are over-stretched, and massive operations need resources. The state treasury cannot forever ensure such funding, especially as it has made costly economic concessions in other areas to appease popular anger: increased salaries and decreases in the price of diesel, even as Syria’s economy is in trouble and state revenues in free-fall. [Continue reading…]

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Eyes open in Gaza, June 2011

Helena Cobban writes:

The Gaza Strip is a heavily urbanized sliver of land, some 30 miles long, that nestles against the southeast corner of the Mediterranean and that for many reasons– including the fact that more than 75% of its 1.6 million are refugees from within what is now Israel– has always been a crucible for the Palestinian movement. In the 1950s, Yasser Arafat and his comrades founded the secular nationalist movement Fateh here. In the 1970s, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a local preacher, founded the network of Islamist organizations that later became Hamas, right here in Gaza. In 1987, Gaza was where the overwhelmingly nonviolent First Intifada was first ignited…

On a recent Wednesday morning, I sat in the neat, second-story office of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights with its deputy director, a grizzled veteran of the rights movement called Jaber Wishah. We were discussing the prospects for the reconciliation agreement that Fateh and Hamas concluded in Cairo on May 3. Wishah said he hoped that the agreement would result in the formation of a ‘national salvation government’ that could end and reverse the many kinds of assault that the Israeli government has sustained against the Palestinians of the occupied territories: primarily, the multi-year siege that suffocates the Gaza Strip’s 1.6 million residents and the continuing land expropriations and regime of deeply abusive control that Israel maintains over the 2.6 million Palestinians of the West Bank.

“We desperately need this salvation government, to halt the deterioration of our situation,” Wishah said.

Like all the politically connected Palestinians I talked with during my three-day visit to Gaza, Wishah stressed that the key factor that was now– however slowly– starting to ease the harsh, five-year rift between Hamas and Fateh was the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in neighboring Egypt.

Gaza’s longest land border is the one lined (by Israel) with high concrete walls, hi-tech sensors, and a series of watchtowers with machine-gun nests that can fire automatically if any Palestinian approaches any closer than 500 meters to the wall. Gaza’s shorter border is the one with Egypt that, since 2006, has been the only way that Gaza’s people– or rather, a carefully screened subset of them– can ever hope to travel outside the tiny Strip, whether for business, studies, or family reunions. So long as Mubarak and his widely loathed intel chief Omar Sulaiman were still in power in Cairo, they used their power over Egypt’s Rafah crossing point with Gaza to maintain tight control over the Strip and they worked with Israel, the United States, and their allies in Fateh to squeeze Gaza’ss Hamas rulers as hard as they could. Many Arab governments have long expressed support for intra-Palestinian reconciliation. But they (and the western powers) were always content to let Egypt take the lead in brokering all reconciliation efforts. To no-one’s surprise, so long as Mubarak and Sulaiman were in charge in Cairo, those efforts went nowhere. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world

Barrett Brown writes:

For at least two years, the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once. And with an upgrade scheduled for later this year, the top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr – the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients. The new revelation provides for a disturbing picture, particularly when viewed in a wider context. Unprecedented surveillance capabilities are being produced by an industry that works in secret on applications that are nonetheless funded by the American public – and which in some cases are used against that very same public. Their products are developed on demand for an intelligence community that is not subject to Congressional oversight and which has been repeatedly shown to have misused its existing powers in ways that violate U.S. law as well as American ideals. And with expanded intelligence capabilities by which to monitor Arab populations in ways that would have previously been impossible, those same intelligence agencies now have improved means by which to provide information on dissidents to those regional dictators viewed by the U.S. as strategic allies.

The nature and extent of the operation, which was known as Romas/COIN and which is scheduled for replacement sometime this year by a similar program known as Odyssey, may be determined in part by a close reading of hundreds of e-mails among the 70,000 that were stolen in February from the contracting firm HBGary Federal and its parent company HBGary. Other details may be gleaned by an examination of the various other firms and individuals that are discussed as being potential partners.

Of course, there are many in the U.S. that would prefer that such details not be revealed at all; such people tend to cite the amorphous and much-abused concept of “national security” as sufficient reason for the citizenry to stand idly by as an ever-expanding coalition of government agencies and semi-private corporations gain greater influence over U.S. foreign policy. That the last decade of foreign policy as practiced by such individuals has been an absolute disaster even by the admission of many of those who put it into place will not phase those who nonetheless believe that the citizenry should be prevented from knowing what is being done in its name and with its tax dollars.

To the extent that the actions of a government are divorced from the informed consent of those who pay for such actions, such a government is illegitimate. To the extent that power is concentrated in the hands of small groups of men who wield such power behind the scenes, there is no assurance that such power will be used in a manner that is compatible with the actual interests of that citizenry, or populations elsewhere. The known history of the U.S. intelligence community is comprised in large part of murder, assassinations, disinformation, the topping of democratic governments, the abuse of the rights of U.S. citizens, and a great number of other things that cannot even be defended on “national security” grounds insomuch as that many such actions have quite correctly turned entire populations against the U.S. government. This is not only my opinion, but also the opinion of countless individuals who once served in the intelligence community and have since come to criticize it and even unveil many of its secrets in an effort to alert the citizenry to what has been unleashed against the world in the name of “security.”

Likewise, I will here provide as much information as I can on Romas/COIN and its upcoming replacement.

Although the relatively well-known military contractor Northrop Grumman had long held the contract for Romas/COIN, such contracts are subject to regular recompetes by which other companies, or several working in tandem, can apply to take over. In early February, HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr wrote the following e-mail to Al Pisani, an executive at the much larger federal contractor TASC, a company which until recently had been owned by Northrop and which was now looking to compete with it for lucrative contracts:

“I met with [[[Mantech]] CEO] Bob Frisbie the other day to catch up. He is looking to expand a capability in IO related to the COIN re-compete but more for DoD. He told me he has a few acquisitions in the works that will increase his capability in this area. So just a thought that it might be worth a phone call to see if there is any synergy and strength between TASC and ManTech in this area. I think forming a team and response to compete against SAIC will be tough but doable.” IO in this context stands for “information operations,” while COIN itself, as noted in an NDA attached to one of the e-mails, stands for “counter intelligence.” SAIC is a larger intelligence contractor that was expected to pursue the recompete as well.

Pisani agreed to the idea, and in conjunction with Barr and fellow TASC exec John Lovegrove, the growing party spent much of the next year working to create a partnership of firms capable of providing the “client” – a U.S. agency that is never specified in the hundreds of e-mails that follow – with capabilities that would outmatch those being provided by Northrop, SAIC, or other competitors.

Several e-mails in particular provide a great deal of material by which to determine the scope and intent of Romas/COIN. One that Barr wrote to his own e-mail account, likely for the purpose of adding to other documents later, is entitled “Notes on COIN.” It begins with a list of entries for various facets of the program, all of which are blank and were presumably filled out later: “ISP, Operations, Language/Culture, Media Development, Marketing and Advertising, Security, MOE.” Afterwards, another list consists of the following: “Capabilities, Mobile Development, Challenges, MOE, Infrastructure, Security.” Finally, a list of the following websites is composed, many of which represent various small companies that provide niche marketing services pursuant to mobile phones.

More helpful is a later e-mail from Lovegrove to Barr and some of his colleagues at TASC in which he announces the following:

Our team consists of:

– TASC (PMO, creative services)

– HB Gary (Strategy, planning, PMO)

– Akamai (infrastructure)

– Archimedes Global (Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning)

– Acclaim Technical Services (specialized linguistics)

– Mission Essential Personnel (linguistic services)

– Cipher (strategy, planning operations)

– PointAbout (rapid mobile application development, list of strategic
partners)

– Google (strategy, mobile application and platform development – long
list of strategic partners)

– Apple (mobile and desktop platform, application assistance -long list of strategic partners)

We are trying to schedule an interview with ATT plus some other small app developers.

From these and dozens of other clues and references, the following may be determined about the nature of Romas/COIN:

1. Mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the program.

2. There’s discussion of bringing in a “gaming developer,” apparently at the behest of Barr, who mentions that the team could make good use of “a social gaming company maybe like zynga, gameloft, etc.” Lovegrove elsewhere notes: “I know a couple of small gaming companies at MIT that might fit the bill.”

3. Apple and Google were active team partners, and AT&T may have been as well. The latter is known to have provided the NSA free reign over customer communications (and was in turn protected by a bill granting them retroactive immunity from lawsuits). Google itself is the only company to have received a “Hostile to Privacy” rating from Privacy International. Apple is currently being investigated by Congress after the iPhone was revealed to compile user location data in a way that differs from other mobile phones; the company has claimed this to have been a “bug.”

4. The program makes use of several providers of “linguistic services.” At one point, the team discusses hiring a military-trained Arabic linguist. Elsewhere, Barr writes: “I feel confident I can get you a ringer for Farsi if they are still interested in Farsi (we need to find that out). These linguists are not only going to be developing new content but also meeting with folks, so they have to have native or near native proficiency and have to have the cultural relevance as well.”

5. Alterion and SocialEyez are listed as “businesses to contact.” The former specializes in “social media monitoring tools.” The latter uses “sophisticated natural language processing methodology” in order to “process tens of millions of multi-lingual conversations daily” while also employing “researchers and media analysts on the ground;” its website also notes that “Millions of people around the globe are now networked as never before – exchanging information and ideas, forming opinions, and speaking their minds about everything from politics to products.”

6. At one point, TASC exec Chris Clair asks Aaron and others, “Can we name COIN Saif? Saif is the sword an Arab executioner uses when they decapitate criminals. I can think of a few cool brands for this.”

7. A diagram attached to one of Barr’s e-mails to the group (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/7/pmo.png/) depicts Magpii as interacting in some unspecified manner with “Foreign Mobile” and “Foreign Web.” Magpii is a project of Barr’s own creation which stands for “Magnify Personal Identifying Information,” involves social networking, and is designed for the purpose of storing personal information on users. Although details are difficult to determine from references in Barr’s e-mails, he discusses the project almost exclusively with members of military intelligence to which he was pitching the idea.

8. There are sporadic references such things as “semantic analysis,” “Latent Semantic Indexing,” “specialized linguistics,” and OPS, a programming language designed for solving problems using expert systems.

9. Barr asks the team’s partner at Apple, Andy Kemp (whose signature lists him as being from the company’s Homeland Defense/National Programs division), to provide him “a contact at Pixar/Disney.”

Altogether, then, a successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms – capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence. All this is merely in addition to whichever additional capabilities are not evident from the limited description available, with the program as a whole presumably being operated in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners.

Whatever the exact nature and scope of COIN, the firms that had been assembled for the purpose by Barr and TASC never got a chance to bid on the program’s recompete. In late September, Lovegrove noted to Barr and others that he’d spoken to the “CO [contracting officer] for COIN.” “The current procurement approach is cancelled [sic], she cited changed requirements,” he reported. “They will be coming out with some documents in a month or two, most likely an updated RFI [request for information]. There will be a procurement following soon after. We are on the list to receive all information.” On January 18th of next year, Lovegrove provided an update: “I just spoke to the group chief on the contracts side (Doug K). COIN has been replaced by a procurement called Odyssey. He says that it is in the formative stages and that something should be released this year. The contracting officer is Kim R. He believes that Jason is the COTR [contracting officer’s technical representative].” Another clue is provided in the ensuing discussion when a TASC executive asks, “Does Odyssey combine the Technology and Content pieces of the work?”

The unexpected change-up didn’t seem to phase the corporate partnership, which was still a top contender to compete for the upcoming Odyssey procurement. Later e-mails indicate a meeting between key members of the group and the contracting officer for Odyssey at a location noted as “HQ,” apparently for a briefing on requirements for the new program, on February 3rd of 2011. But two days after that meeting, the servers of HBGary and HBGary Federal were hacked by a small team of Anonymous operatives in retaliation for Barr’s boasts to Financial Times that he had identified the movement’s “leadership;” 70,000 e-mails were thereafter released onto the internet. Barr resigned a few weeks later.

Along with clues as to the nature of COIN and its scheduled replacement, a close study of the HBGary e-mails also provide reasons to be concerned with the fact that such things are being developed and deployed in the way that they are. In addition to being the driving force behind the COIN recompete, Barr was also at the center of a series of conspiracies by which his own company and two others hired out their collective capabilities for use by corporations that sought to destroy their political enemies by clandestine and dishonest means, some of which appear to be illegal. None of the companies involved have been investigated; a proposed Congressional inquiry was denied by the committee chair, noting that it was the Justice Department’s decision as to whether to investigate, even though it was the Justice Department itself that made the initial introductions. Those in the intelligence contracting industry who believe themselves above the law are entirely correct.

That such firms will continue to target the public with advanced information warfare capabilities on behalf of major corporations is by itself an extraordinary danger to mankind as a whole, particularly insomuch as that such capabilities are becoming more effective while remaining largely unknown outside of the intelligence industry. But a far greater danger is posed by the practice of arming small and unaccountable groups of state and military personnel with a set of tools by which to achieve better and better “situational awareness” on entire populations while also being able to manipulate the information flow in such a way as to deceive those same populations. The idea that such power can be wielded without being misused is contradicted by even a brief review of history.

History also demonstrates that the state will claim such powers as a necessity in fighting some considerable threat; the U.S. has defended its recent expansion of powers by claiming they will only be deployed to fight terrorism and will never be used against American civilians. This is cold comfort for those in the Arab world who are aware of the long history of U.S. material support for regimes they find convenient, including those of Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and the House of Saud. Nor should Americans be comforted by such promises from a government that has no way of ensuring that they will be kept; it was just a few months ago that a U.S. general in Afghanistan ordered a military intelligence unit to use pysops on visiting senators in an effort to secure increased funding for the war, an illegal act; only a few days prior, CENTCOM spokesmen were confidently telling the public that such other psychological capabilities as persona management would never be used on Americans as that would be illegal. The fact is that such laws have been routinely broken by the military and intelligence community, who are now been joined in this practice by segments of the federal contracting industry.

It is inevitable, then, that such capabilities as form the backbone of Romas/COIN and its replacement Odyssey will be deployed against a growing segment of the world’s population. The powerful institutions that wield them will grow all the more powerful as they are provided better and better methods by which to monitor, deceive, and manipulate. The informed electorate upon which liberty depends will be increasingly misinformed. No tactical advantage conferred by the use of these programs can outweigh the damage that will be done to mankind in the process of creating them.

Barrett Brown

Project PM

Barrett Brown is a contributor to Vanity Fair, the Huffington Post and Skeptical Inquirer, and is author of Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny, as well as an upcoming book on the deficits of the America media. He is the founder of the distributed thinktank Project PM. Barrett can be contacted at barriticus at gmail.

For more on Aaron Barr, read “How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price.”

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The Arab Spring exposes the identical hypocrisy of both the US and Hassan Nasrallah

Hamid Dabashi writes:

Hassan Nasrallah is in trouble. This time the troubles of the Secretary General of Hezbollah, which were hitherto the source of his strength, are not coming from Israel, or from the sectarian politics of Lebanon. Seyyed Hassan’s troubles, which this time around are the harbingers of his undoing as an outdated fighter, are coming from, of all places, the Arab Spring.

The Arab Spring, the transnational uprising of masses of millions of people from Morocco to Oman, from Syria to Yemen, is making the aging warrior redundant – his habitually eloquent tongue now stuttering for words. Two years ago, he thought he got away with rejecting the democratic uprising in Iran (whose brutal ruling regime is his principle patron and financier), as a plot by the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. And he did – aided and abetted by the moral and intellectual sclerosis of a segment of Arab intellectuals who thought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Islamic theocracy were the vanguard of “resistance” to US/Israel imperialism in the region and thus should be spared from criticism. And then Tunisia happened, and Egypt, and Libya, and Bahrain, and Yemen – and then, Hassan Nasrallah and Ali Khamenei’s nightmare, Syria happened. It is a sad scene to see a once mighty warrior being bypassed by the force of history, and all he can do is to fumble clumsily to reveal he has not learned the art of aging gracefully.

When Hasan Nasrallah came to the defence of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria, signs of frailty were all over the old fighter’s countenance. He asked Syrians for patience. He admitted mistakes had been made by Syrians in Lebanon. He promised Assad would do reforms. He pleaded for time. Deja vu: For an uncanny moment the Hezbollah fighter sounded and looked like the late Shah of Iran days before his final demise early in 1979: desperate, confused, baffled by the unfolding drama, worriedly out of touch with what was happening around him.

“Hassan Nasrallah,” according to an Al Jazeera report on 25 May 2011,”has called on Syrians to support president Bashar al-Assad and enter into dialogue with the government to end weeks of ongoing protests across Syria.”

This is a far different cry than when the democratic uprising in Iran started in June 2009 and Nasrallah readily dismissed and ridiculed it as an American plot. These were Arabs up against their corrupt and cruel leaders, not “them Persians” whose money was good but their historic struggles for their civil liberties a plot by the Saudis, the Israelis, and the US.

“Bashar is serious about carrying out reforms,” he was now pleading with his audience, “but he has to do them gradually and in a responsible way; he should be given the chance to implement those reforms.” When Nasrallah made these remarks more than 1000 Syrian civilians had been gunned down by Bashar Assad’s army and security forces, serving the Assad dynasty for about forty years.

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Attack on Yemen prison frees dozens of militants

The New York Times reports:

Gunmen attacked the main prison in Yemen’s southern port city of Mukalla on Wednesday in a coordinated strike that freed at least 40 prisoners, according to security and ruling party officials.

The attack underscored the country’s worsening security situation, and came as State Department envoy, Jeffrey D. Feltman, began two days of meetings in the capital, Sana, with Yemen’s vice president and top ruling party officials. They were to discuss the political crisis here, which deepened earlier this month when President Ali Abdullah Saleh was forced to seek medical treatment in Saudi Arabia after an attack on his presidential compound.

Ahmed Sofan, a prominent ruling party official, said the jailbreak provided “another sign of what happens when a country is collapsing.”

He said many of the escaped prisoners were Islamic militants but that it was unclear whether they were members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the local branch of the terrorist network. News agencies, citing anonymous Yemeni security sources, reported that many of the prisoners belonged to the group.

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