Category Archives: Issues

How the Inquisition ignited the modern police state

Cullen Murphy writes: On a hot autumn day in Rome not long ago, I crossed the vast expanse of St Peter’s Square, paused momentarily in the shade beneath a curving flank of Bernini’s colonnade and continued a little way beyond to a Swiss Guard standing impassively at a wrought-iron gate. He examined my credentials, handed them back and saluted smartly. I hadn’t expected the gesture and almost returned the salute instinctively, but then realised it was intended for a cardinal waddling into the Vatican from behind me.

Just inside the gate, at Piazza del Sant’Uffizio 11, stands a Renaissance palazzo with a ruddy ochre-and-cream complexion. This is the headquarters of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, whose job, in the words of the Apostolic Constitution Pastor bonus, promulgated in 1988 by Pope John Paul II, is “to promote and safeguard the doctrine on faith and morals throughout the Catholic world”. Pastor bonus goes on: “For this reason, everything which in any way touches such matter falls within its competence.” It is an expansive charge. Every significant document or decision emanating from anywhere inside the Vatican must get a sign-off from the CDF. The Congregation has been around for a very long time, although until the Second Vatican Council it was called something else: the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. From the lips of old Vatican hands, one still hears shorthand references to “the Holy Office”, much as one hears “Whitehall”, “Foggy Bottom” or “the Kremlin”.

But before the Congregation became the Holy Office, it went by yet another name: as late as 1908, it was known as the Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition. Lenny Bruce once joked that there was only one “the Church”. The Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition was the headquarters of the Inquisition – the centuries-long effort by the Church to deal with its perceived enemies, within and without, by whatever means necessary, including the most brutal ones available.

The palazzo that today houses the Congregation was originally built to lodge the Inquisition when the papacy, in 1542, amid the onslaught of Protestantism and other noxious ideas, decided that the Church’s intermittent and far-flung inquisitorial investigations needed to be brought under some sort of centralised control – a spiritual Department of Homeland Security, as it were. The Inquisition had begun in the Middle Ages, to deal with Christian heresies, and been revived in Iberia, under state control, to deal with Jews and Moors. Pope Paul III considered the task of his new papal Inquisition so urgent that construction on the basilica of St. Peter’s was suspended and the labourers diverted so that work could be completed on its headquarters. At one time the palazzo held not only clerical offices but also prison cells.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith inherited more than the Inquisition’s DNA and its place on the organisational charts. It also inherited much of the paper trail. The Inquisition records are kept mainly in the palazzo itself, and for four and a half centuries that archive was closed to outsiders. Then, in 1998, to the surprise of many, the Vatican decided to make the archive available to scholars.

Any archive is a repository of what some sliver of civilisation has wrought, for good or ill. This one is no exception. The archive may owe its existence to the Inquisition, but it helps explain the world that exists today. In our imaginations, we offhandedly associate the term “inquisition” with the term “Dark Ages”. But consider what an inquisition – any inquisition – really is: a set of disciplinary procedures targeting specific groups, codified in law, organised systematically, enforced by surveillance, exemplified by severity, sustained over time, backed by institutional power and justified by a vision of the one true path. Considered that way, the Inquisition is more accurately seen not as a relic but as a harbinger. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Iran oil halt ‘would raise price 30 per cent’

Al Jazeera reports: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that global crude prices could rise as much as 30 per cent if Iran halted oil exports as a result of US and European Union sanctions.

If Iran halts exports to countries without offsets from other sources, it would likely trigger an “initial” oil price jump of 20 to 30 per cent, or about $20 to $30 per barrel, the IMF said in its first public comment on a possible Iranian oil supply disruption.

The IMF highlighted the risks of rising tensions over Iran sanctions in a note on Wednesday sent to deputies from G20 countries who met in Mexico City last week.

The price impact caused by a cut in Iranian exports could be exacerbated by below average oil stocks in many countries, the result of tight oil market conditions through much of last year, the IMF said.

Facebooktwittermail

Can Israel suspend the law of unintended consequences?

Exceptionalism takes many forms but perhaps its most universal expression can be found among politicians and petty criminals. When contemplating doing something really stupid, they have an unusual capacity to become convinced that nothing can go wrong.

When it comes to Israel’s view of Iran, the contradictions seem boundless. The Islamic republic is the modern equivalent of Nazi Germany, Netanyahu and others like to say. But as for the risks involved in attacking Iran, the same fear-mongers claim that these risks have all been wildly overstated.

The lesson of the Holocaust, Netanyahu says, is: “We can only rely on ourselves.” So why does Israel still accept massive amounts of U.S. military aid and the support of such a powerful lobby in Washington?

The New York Times reports: Israeli intelligence estimates, backed by academic studies, have cast doubt on the widespread assumption that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would set off a catastrophic set of events like a regional conflagration, widespread acts of terrorism and sky-high oil prices.

The estimates, which have been largely adopted by the country’s most senior officials, conclude that the threat of Iranian retaliation is partly bluff. They are playing an important role in Israel’s calculation of whether ultimately to strike Iran, or to try to persuade the United States to do so, even as Tehran faces tough new economic sanctions from the West.

“A war is no picnic,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio in November. But if Israel feels itself forced into action, the retaliation would be bearable, he said. “There will not be 100,000 dead or 10,000 dead or 1,000 dead. The state of Israel will not be destroyed.”

The Iranian government, which says its nuclear program is for civilian purposes, has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz — through which 90 percent of gulf oil passes — and if attacked, to retaliate with all its military might.

But Israeli assessments reject the threats as overblown. Mr. Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have embraced those analyses as they focus on how to stop what they view as Iran’s determination to obtain nuclear weapons.

Facebooktwittermail

How Israel’s defenders leave Israel defenseless

The Israel-firster grumble rumbles on. I have no idea what round we’re in but here’s a snippet from Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest attack on Glenn Greenwald. Some of Goldberg’s readers are apparently upset with him for not attacking Greenwald with enough vigor and for that reason suggest that Goldberg himself is at risk of defining himself as a self-hating Jew. His response to one such challenge:

Self-hatred is a deeply-inexact description of the people this reader is trying to describe. In my experience, those Jews who consciously set themselves apart from the Jewish majority in the disgust they display for Israel, or for the principles of their faith, are often narcissists, and therefore seem to suffer from an excess of self-regard, rather than self-loathing.

Which is to say, if someone is Jewish and lacks the fondness for Israel that Goldberg and others would expect from a Jew, then this person must suffer from a character flaw.

The smear always conforms to the same structure: attack the person instead of the idea.

There is a transparent intellectual cowardice in this approach. If Israel’s defenders can only mount a defense by suggesting that Israel’s critics are all flawed human beings, what does this say about Israel?

It should be possible, for instance, to have an argument about Israeli democracy — for one person to say why they believe that Israel fails to uphold democratic values and another to say why they believe it succeeds in doing so. But what is much more likely to happen is that the defender of Israeli democracy will start demonizing, marginalizing, and belittling Israel’s critics.

Is this simply a sad commentary on Zionism, or does it reflect a form of realism — an implicit acknowledgment that the best the Zionists can do at this point is to close their ranks since long ago they gave up on the idea of winning anyone over to their side?

Facebooktwittermail

Twitter commits social suicide

What does Twitter call restrictions on free speech? They are “different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.”

And what about censorship? It’s “the ability to reactively withhold content.”

Although I imagine George Orwell would have been adept at using this character-restricted medium, I also imagine he would have viewed it with contempt — and now even more so, as Twitter like every other corporate entity puts its commercial interests in front of everything else.

Mark Gibbs writes: In what can only have been a fit corporate insanity, Twitter announced that they have the ability to filter tweets to conform to the demands of various countries.

Thus, in France and Germany it is illegal to broadcast pro-Nazi sentiments and Twitter will presumably be able to block such content and inform the poster why it was blocked.

Quite obviously, Twitter’s management believe that there’s some kind of value in being able to filter in this way but given that over the course of 2011 the number of tweets per second (tps) ranged from a high of almost 9,000 tps down to just under 4,000 tps, any filtering has got to be computer-driven.

So, consider this tweet:

@FactsorDie Nazi Germany led the first public anti-smoking campaign.

Could that be considered to be pro-Nazi? How will a program accurately make that determination?

What concerns me is that if the algorithm Twitter uses registers a false positive (i.e. determines that the tweet is pro-Nazi when it isn’t) and the tweet has any time sensitivity to it then that attribute will be completely nullified by the time the tweet makes it out of tweet-jail if it ever does.

On the other hand if the software makes a false negative (i.e. determines that the tweet is NOT pro-Nazi when it is) then the filtering is useless and Twitter will be held accountable by every political group with an axe to grind.

Facebooktwittermail

The Arab Spring, U.S. foreign policy, the Status-Quo Lobby and the Dream Palace of the Zionists

Issandr El Amrani writes: I’d like to touch upon America and Egypt, because I’ve seen a lot of hand-wringing in American newspapers about the future of that relationship and a sense of misplaced buyers’ remorse about the Egyptian revolution – misplaced because the US had little to do with the revolution, and because it is wrong-headed thinking about an unstoppable, irreversible event.

Generally speaking, the American foreign policy establishment is stuck on Egypt. It is having a hard time imagining a different Middle East. Its path of least resistance is banking on their financial and political relationship with the generals now in charge and maintaining the ability to project power in the region that it has had since 1945 to some extent and since 1990 in particular. If it continues on this path, which is unfortunately likely, because of the dearth of imagination in a foreign policy elite that has grown lazy in its imperial thinking, and because of the dire state of American politics, it will fail.

The most important thing you can do about Egypt right now is be patient and not try to force things or maintain a system that Egyptians clearly want to change. This is what worries me the most: that the US will choose to encourage the perpetuation of military rule in Egypt, as people like Jon Alterman have already subtly advocated and many others in Washington are discreetly but more vigorously doing in games of “armchair generals”. They are the Status Quo Lobby.

America is a country that has grown complacent in its assumptions about the Middle East and its politics, and too wedded to the idea of having an imperial role in the region (of which CENTCOM is the embodiment) and the world more generally. For several years I have advocated an American withdrawal from the Arab world. The Arab uprisings have made this all the more urgent, although it is a delicate, difficult, and potentially dangerous matter. But that’s a debate for another day.

Let me focus now on a few pieces by people who have written very unwise things, and who are the other bigpart of the problem with American foreign policy in the region: those who primarily see US Middle East policy through the lens of Israel.

Robert Satloff, a leading hack of the Israel lobby think tank WINEP, and Eric Trager have a piece in the WSJ you can read here. A few years ago Satloff was all into pressuring Egypt on democracy issues, but now has buyer’s remorse – confirming my long-held suspicion that people like him and Elliott Abrams (and many others) were only tactically interested in democracy promotion as a manner to wield greater influence over the Mubarak regime. Now that Islamists have won a majority in Egypt’s parliament, they are shitting their proverbial pants.

Facebooktwittermail

The Adelson axis of influence

Neocon Zionist casino boss, Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, are the money behind Newt Gingrich — and a prime force in the colonization of Greater Israel.

Muckety has created a useful graphic to show the many strands of the Adelson empire.


Facebooktwittermail

Sopa and Pipa: they’ll be back

Bill McGeveran writes: At the end of a Hollywood blockbuster, when the vanquished villain declares that he should have won and that we haven’t seen the last of him, we all know what it means: the sequel is coming.

So, Hollywood’s top lobbyist, former Senator Chris Dodd, followed a familiar script last week after sweeping online protests derailed the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and Protect IP Act (Pipa), a pair of legislative proposals backed by movie and music distributors. Dodd snarled that his opponents had misled the public and vowed to continue pressing for new laws to combat unauthorized copying of intellectual property. Coming soon to a congressional hearing room near you, it’s Sopa II: Revenge of the Content Industries.

While the US Senate and House of Representatives deferred immediate action on the bills, few doubt that Congress will debate some form of legislation aimed at overseas web sites engaged in intellectual property (IP) infringement, probably later this year. Even Dodd’s enemies acknowledge that these sites pose a problem, though many question industry estimates about its scope.

Those of us who opposed the excesses of Sopa and Pipa need to prepare for the next round. Sponsors have already abandoned the bills’ most objectionable feature, which interfered with the domain name addressing system in an attempt to cut off access to “pirate” sites – a measure critics charged would “break the internet”. At a minimum, Congress must address three other problems as well.

Facebooktwittermail

Castro’s take on the U.S. presidential race

In his regular op-ed, Fidel Castro writes:

I must note that, going by what everyone is saying, that the selection of a Republican candidate to aspire to the presidency of this globalized and far-reaching empire is, in its turn – I am serious – the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that I have ever heard. As I have things to do, I cannot devote any time to the subject. I already knew it would be like that.

Earlier this month Castro lamented that there isn’t a “robot capable of governing the United States and preventing a war which would put an end to human life.” Were the situation otherwise, he wrote:

I am sure that 90% of U.S. citizens registered, especially Latinos, Blacks and a growing number of those in the middle class, the impoverished, would vote for the robot.

Facebooktwittermail

How the NYPD trains its officers to fear Islam

The New York Times reports: Ominous music plays as images appear on the screen: Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets and a doctored photograph shows an Islamic flag flying over the White House.

“This is the true agenda of much of Islam in America,” a narrator intones. “A strategy to infiltrate and dominate America. … This is the war you don’t know about.”

This is the feature-length film titled “The Third Jihad,” paid for by a nonprofit group, which was shown to more than a thousand officers as part of training in the New York Police Department.

In January 2011, when news broke that the department had used the film in training, a top police official denied it, then said it had been mistakenly screened “a couple of times” for a few officers.

A year later, police documents obtained under the state’s Freedom of Information Law reveal a different reality: “The Third Jihad,” which includes an interview with Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, was shown, according to internal police reports, “on a continuous loop” for between three months and one year of training.

During that time, at least 1,489 police officers, from lieutenants to detectives to patrol officers, saw the film.

News that police trainers showed this film so extensively comes as the department wrestles with its relationship with the city’s large Muslim community. The Police Department offers no apology for aggressively spying on Muslim groups and says it has ferreted out terror plots.

But members of the City Council, civil rights advocates and Muslim leaders say the department, in its zeal, has trampled on civil rights, blurred lines between foreign and domestic spying and sown fear among Muslims.

“The department’s response was to deny it and to fight our request for information,” said Faiza Patel, a director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, which obtained the release of the documents through a Freedom of Information request. “The police have shown an explosive documentary to its officers and simply stonewalled us.”

Facebooktwittermail

How to start a war with Iran

In May 1967, Israel was itching to launch a preemptive attack on Egypt. The director of Mossad at that time, Meir Amit, had a meeting with John Hadden, the CIA chief in Tel Aviv. Hadden warned Amit that if Israel attacked Egypt, the United States would send in troops to defend Egypt. Hadden advised his counterpart that if Israel wanted the U.S. on its side, it would need a suitable pretext.

“Help us by giving us a good reason to come in on your side. Get them to fire at something, a ship, for example,” Hadden told Amit.

This exchange is revealed by the Israeli journalist, Ronen Bergman, in the cover story for this weekend’s New York Times magazine.

Bergman writes: “Since 1967, the unspoken understanding that America should agree, at least tacitly, to Israeli military actions has been at the center of relations between the two countries.”

The telling of the Amit-Hadden exchange, seems like a way of signalling that as far as Israel is concerned, come the time that it decides to launch an attack on Iran, the United States has no choice but to “agree.” Indeed, Israel is happy to point to the history of U.S. complicity in Israel’s acts of war, including the willingness of an American official to invite an Israeli instigated attack on a U.S. ship in order to fabricate a justification for entering a war.

In other words, transposing the 1967 incident to the current context, the Israelis want to insinuate that if the U.S. Fifth Fleet is attacked by “Iran” in the coming months and Israel covertly has a hand in this attack, then in truth Israel will merely be “helping” the United States to do what it wants to do at a time when domestic political considerations prevent Washington from being open about its intentions.

The irony about Hadden’s invitation in 1967 is that in some sense the Israelis did pick it up two weeks later. But rather than engineer an “Egyptian” attack on a U.S. ship, the Israelis attacked the U.S.S. Liberty claiming they thought it was an Egyptian ship.

Was Israel punishing the U.S. for its neutrality in the Six-Day War — knowing that it could do so with impunity because the U.S. could not suffer the embarrassment that would have been caused by revealing the CIA’s willingness to sacrifice Americans?

Bergman writes:

In June 2007, I met with a former director of the Mossad, Meir Amit, who handed me a document stamped, “Top secret, for your eyes only.” Amit wanted to demonstrate the complexity of the relations between the United States and Israel, especially when it comes to Israeli military operations in the Middle East that could significantly impact American interests in the region.

Almost 45 years ago, on May 25, 1967, in the midst of the international crisis that precipitated the Six-Day War, Amit, then head of the Mossad, summoned John Hadden, the C.I.A. chief in Tel Aviv, to an urgent meeting at his home. The meeting took place against the background of the mounting tensions in the Middle East, the concentration of a massive Egyptian force in the Sinai Peninsula, the closing of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and the threats by President Gamal Abdel Nasser to destroy the State of Israel.

In what he later described as “the most difficult meeting I have ever had with a representative of a foreign intelligence service,” Amit laid out Israel’s arguments for attacking Egypt. The conversation between them, which was transcribed in the document Amit passed on to me, went as follows:

Amit: “We are approaching a turning point that is more important for you than it is for us. After all, you people know everything. We are in a grave situation, and I believe we have reached it, because we have not acted yet. . . . Personally, I am sorry that we did not react immediately. It is possible that we may have broken some rules if we had, but the outcome would have been to your benefit. I was in favor of acting. We should have struck before the build-up.”

Hadden: “That would have brought Russia and the United States against you.”

Amit: “You are wrong. . . . We have now reached a new stage, after the expulsion of the U.N. inspectors. You should know that it’s your problem, not ours.”

Hadden: “Help us by giving us a good reason to come in on your side. Get them to fire at something, a ship, for example.”

Amit: “That is not the point.”

Hadden: “If you attack, the United States will land forces to help the attacked state protect itself.”

Amit: “I can’t believe what I am hearing.”

Hadden: “Do not surprise us.”

Amit: “Surprise is one of the secrets of success.”

Hadden: “I don’t know what the significance of American aid is for you.”

Amit: “It isn’t aid for us, it is for yourselves.”

That ill-tempered meeting, and Hadden’s threats, encouraged the Israeli security cabinet to ban the military from carrying out an immediate assault against the Egyptian troops in the Sinai, although they were perceived as a grave threat to the existence of Israel. Amit did not accept Hadden’s response as final, however, and flew to the United States to meet with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Upon his return, he reported to the Israeli cabinet that when he told McNamara that Israel could not reconcile itself to Egypt’s military actions, the secretary replied, “I read you very clearly.” When Amit then asked McNamara if he should remain in Washington for another week, to see how matters developed, McNamara responded, “Young man, go home, that is where you are needed now.”

From this exchange, Amit concluded that the United States was giving Israel “a flickering green light” to attack Egypt. He told the cabinet that if the Americans were given one more week to exhaust their diplomatic efforts, “they will hesitate to act against us.” The next day, the cabinet decided to begin the Six-Day War, which changed the course of Middle Eastern history.

Amit handed me the minutes of that conversation from the same armchair that he sat in during his meeting with Hadden. It is striking how that dialogue anticipated the one now under way between Israel and the United States. Substitute “Tehran” for “Cairo” and “Strait of Hormuz” for “Straits of Tiran,” and it could have taken place this past week. Since 1967, the unspoken understanding that America should agree, at least tacitly, to Israeli military actions has been at the center of relations between the two countries.

During my lengthy conversation with Barak, I pulled out the transcript of the Amit-Hadden meeting. Amit was his commander when Barak was a young officer, in a unit that carried out commando raids deep inside enemy territory. Barak, a history buff, smiled at the comparison, and then he completely rejected it. “Relations with the United States are far closer today,” he said. “There are no threats, no recriminations, only cooperation and mutual respect for each other’s sovereignty.”

That characterization of U.S.-Israeli relations certainly jives with President Obama’s description of an unbreakable bond between the two nations. At the same time, Mark Perry’s recent report on an Israeli false flag operation in which Mossad agents posed as CIA officers suggests that those who think they are protecting a nation facing an existential threat tend to believe that anything goes.

Facebooktwittermail

At Davos, a big issue is the have-lots vs. the have-nots

The New York Times reports: A year ago at the World Economic Forum here, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, lashed out at what he saw as unfair criticism of the world’s financial wizards.

“I just think this constant refrain, ‘bankers, bankers, bankers’ — it’s just a really unproductive and unfair way of treating people,” he said. “People should just stop doing that.”

After several years of financial crisis, during which the word banker had become a catchall epithet for the undeserving rich, the global economy appeared to be on the mend. Perhaps the bankers, and the other millionaires and billionaires, could wear their pinstripes with pride again and get back to business as usual.

Yet even as Mr. Dimon was speaking, a new wave of anger was welling up, one that, over the last year, would shake up old assumptions about the ultrarich, the middle class and the growing gulf that separates them.

Today, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is no longer just a rallying cry to incite anticapitalist advocates. It has become a mainstream issue, debated openly in arenas where the primacy of laissez-faire capitalism used to be taken for granted and where talk of inequality used to be derided as class warfare.

In the United States, the issue surfaced when protesters proclaimed they were the “99 percent” of the population who were paying for the sins of the wealthy “1 percent,” taking their grievances directly to the epicenter of capitalism. The Occupy Wall Street protests, which began in New York, spread to other cities around the United States and across the world.

In Spain, thousands of “indignados” converged on Madrid and other cities to vent their frustration over mass unemployment and government austerity measures. In the Arab world, a wave of unrest that toppled governments began with a protest over a lack of economic opportunities in Tunisia.

And now, as the Republican Party chooses a nominee for the United States presidential election, rivals of one candidate, Mitt Romney, are rounding on him over his wealth and his background in the private equity business.

Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum, in a recent report, named the growing income divide as one of the biggest risks facing the world in the years to come.

Facebooktwittermail

The West Bank: Whose Promised Land?

“The West Bank: Whose Promised Land?”

Esti Marpet made this film about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank almost 30 years ago. The settlement project was already gaining pace even though at that time there was only a fraction of the population that now numbers over 700,000.

What strikes me about the people represented in this film is this: the two sides do not simply reflect an imbalance in power.

I don’t hear the Palestinians denying the humanity of the Israelis. They are angry but not filled with contempt.

The settlers on the other hand express the purest contempt, denying the Palestinians’ rights, their history, and their existence as human beings. This contempt is so deeply embedded in their outlook that it buries the Palestinians alive.

Anyone who dehumanizes their adversary in this way, cannot do so without sacrificing their own humanity.

Facebooktwittermail

Plea deal for Haditha killings sparks outrage in Iraq

The Los Angeles Times reports: The teacher still keeps family photos of the dead, visual mementos of lives cut short in an unremitting hail of gunfire.

“The Americans killed children who were hiding inside the cupboards or under the beds,” said Rafid Abdul Majeed Hadithi, 43, a teacher in the city of Haditha who says he witnessed the 2005 assault by U.S. Marines that took the lives of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians. “Was this Marine charged with dereliction of duty because he didn’t kill more? Is Iraqi blood so cheap?”

In the United States, the brutal saga of Haditha — among the dead were seven children, including a toddler, three women, and a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair — may have concluded Monday with Marine Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich’s guilty plea to negligent dereliction of duty. A military judge said Tuesday that Wuterich will serve no time in the brig under the terms of his plea bargain.

Charges were previously dropped against six others involved in the Euphrates Valley incident; a seventh Marine was acquitted. The plea closed the books on a politically charged case that sparked debate about the manner in which U.S. troops react amid the “fog of war” and the tension of combat.

For many Iraqis, however, Haditha remains a visceral reminder of the most troubling aspects of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and subsequent occupation of their homeland.

Along with the Abu Ghraib prison where Iraqi prisoners were abused by U.S. military police, and Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis were allegedly shot dead in 2007 by employees of American private contractor Blackwater, Haditha stands out as an inglorious icon.

Facebooktwittermail

The deal the West could strike with Iran

Peter Jenkins, Britain’s permanent representative to the IAEA, 2001–06, argues that the West has dangerously over-reached by insisting that Iran abandon nuclear enrichment instead of merely insisting that it complies with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which permits enrichment.

For years, the Western assessment has been that Iran seeks the capability to build nuclear weapons, but has not taken a decision to produce them.

Imposing sanctions or even going to war could be a proportionate – and therefore a just – reaction to any Iranian decision to break the NPT and acquire nuclear weapons. But these measures are a disproportionate response to a state acting on its right to enrich uranium. The correct way to handle enrichment is the NPT way, namely that the process can go ahead, but only under the strictest safeguards. This embodies a principle dear to President Reagan in his later years: “trust but verify”. If ever Iran goes for nuclear weapons, the world will be united in condemning such a betrayal of trust. The West could be confident the Security Council would approve whatever steps were necessary to counter a violation of one of the most valuable global treaties.

At the moment, however, we are locked into a process of imposing ever tighter sanctions on Iran. This economic warfare has many drawbacks. It requires an exaggeration of the Iranian “threat” that fuels the scare-mongering of those who want this pressure to be a mere step on the way to war. It risks provoking retaliation, while hurting ordinary Iranians. And it risks higher oil prices that the West can ill afford. Moreover, even if Iran were unexpectedly to give way, coercion rarely delivers durable solutions. Its effect on motives is unpredictable. It can breed resentment, while restrictions can be circumvented in time.

It may be asking a lot of our leaders that they swallow their words, lower their sights and focus on a realistic target. They could do it, though, and the talks due to take place shortly in Turkey could be the setting for a change of course. What is much more likely, unhappily, is that we will continue to see a variant on the devil having the best tunes. Far too many American politicians see advantage in whipping up fear of Iran. I can almost hear them sneering that the NPT is for wimps. The odds must be that they will continue to propel the West toward yet another Gulf war. Still, nothing is inevitable.

Facebooktwittermail

Egypt: The revolution that shame built

Mark LeVine writes: They were two “new media” events that changed history, unalterably shifting its course into uncharted waters – not merely in the Arab world, but globally as well. And yet their very impact points to two of the most important weaknesses underlying the past year’s worth of revolutionary protests across the region.

The first, an image shot by a cell phone camera, is heartrending to view, as it shows a young man completely on fire, like a still from some bad horror film. Today the world knows the pain behind the grainy image of 26-year-old fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation, which lit the Arab world on fire. A young man, struggling to survive in an economy that had made him and so many young Arabs expendable, suffers one too many indignities, and is driven – or inspired – to stage a death that would give life to the hopes of his generation.

Today, revolutionaries across the Arab world circulate his supposed final words on Facebook: “Maybe by setting myself on fire, life can change”.

Bouazizi’s last Facebook entry was a plea for forgiveness from his mother: “Blame the times and not me.”

“Living in a land of treachery,” he explained, had driven him out of his mind. It was a mental state that was shared by so many of his friends – indeed, for the past decade it has been impossible for me to count how many young Arabs have told me they feel schizophrenic or mentally ill, just from living their daily lives in a system that only crushes them down and offers little hope for the future. And so several young men from Sidi Bouzid told me that, when they heard the news about what he’d done, their first reaction was: “Why wasn’t I brave enough to have been the one to do it?”

Across North Africa, in Egypt, pro-democracy activist Asmaa Mahfouz, also 26 years old, watched the unfolding revolution in Tunisia with great anticipation. Bouazizi’s hometown of Sidi Bouzid was a relative backwater, without much of a robust or well-developed public sphere or civil society network to channel his frustrations into more positive action. Mahfouz, however, was a founding member of the April 6 movement, which itself emerged out of the struggle for jobs and dignity by Egyptian workers in the previous half decade.

She well understood the despair and the circumstances that drove Bouazizi to take his own life; but, crucially, she also had the training, vision and networks to take the energy unleashed by Bouazizi in Tunisia and attempt to translate it into concrete political action – not merely one time, but multiple times, until her words broke through the wall of fear that had long kept most Egyptians, such as their counterparts in Tunisia, away from political protest. If Bouazizi acted alone and in desperation, her actions were the product of years of preparation, even if the speech on the video was ad-libbed.

And so, if on December 17, 2010, Bouazizi addressed his final Facebook posting only to his mother, almost one month later to the day, on January 18, 2011, Mahfouz put up a video on Facebook addressed to the entire Egyptian nation. “Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire to protest humiliation and hunger and poverty and degradation they had to live with for 30 years,” she declared, setting the context for her call to Tahrir.

“[They were] thinking maybe we can have a revolution like Tunisia, maybe we can have freedom, justice, honour and human dignity. Today, one of these four has died, and I saw people commenting and saying: ‘May God forgive him. He committed a sin and killed himself for nothing.'”

And then she uttered the words that would bring her generation into the streets: “People, have some shame!” (“Ya gama’, haram ‘aleyku!”)

The idea of shame is crucial in the history of the Arab Spring, and not, as the Bush administration’s torture masters would have had us believe, because Arab culture and Arab men especially are uniquely preoccupied with shame. Rather, because Mahfouz understood that she had to shame her compatriots out of their passivity in order to awaken a level of political consciousness, and through it agency, necessary to create a powerful, mass-based protest movement against the Mubarak regime.

In simple, yet elegant words, she described how only days before she’d posted another video calling on people to join her in Tahrir, only to wind up joined by “only three guys, and three armoured cars filled with police”, who violently pushed them out of the square, before trying to convince them that those who had set themselves on fire were “psychopaths”. She refused to accept such a characterisation – even though the term evoked precisely the feeling of being “out of one’s mind” that Bouazizi described in his final Facebook posting. But she also understood that while self-martyrdom could launch a revolution in Tunisia, it wouldn’t be enough to do the same in Egypt. Instead, a much more sophisticated discourse and strategy would have to be deployed. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The caging of America: Why do we lock up so many people?

Adam Gopnik writes: Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today — perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system — in prison, on probation, or on parole — than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America — more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men — a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic — more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape — like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows — will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country. [Continue reading…]

Torture: America’s Brutal Prisons, produced by Britain’s Channel 4 in 2005, shows that abuses like those documented in Abu Ghraib are commonplace in the U.S. prison system. Prisoners are shackled and hooded ‘for their own protection’; pepper spray is used as an alternative to physical force, but in sufficient quantities to cause second-degree burns; beatings are frequent and sometimes fatal. The documentary suggests that the cause is not a few ‘bad apples’, but a pervasive culture of dehumanisation and brutality.

Facebooktwittermail

Iran is not an existential threat

Bruce Riedel writes: The danger of war is growing again over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Iran is rattling its sabers, the Republican presidential candidates and others are rattling theirs. But even if Tehran gets the bomb, Israel will have overwhelming military superiority over Iran, a fact that should not be lost in all the heated rhetoric.

The former head of Israel’s Mossad, Meir Dagan, says Iran won’t get the bomb until at least 2015. In contrast, Israel has had nuclear weapons since the late 1960s and has jealously guarded its monopoly on them in the region. The Israelis have used force in the past against developing nuclear threats. Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007 were the targets of highly effective Israeli airstrikes against developing nuclear weapons programs. Israel has seriously considered conducting such a strike against Iran and may do so, especially now that it has special bunker-busting bombs from the United States.

Estimates of the size of the Israeli arsenal by international think tanks generally concur that Israel has about 100 nuclear weapons, possibly 200. Even under a crash program, Iran won’t achieve an arsenal that size for many years – perhaps decades.

Israel also has multiple delivery systems. It has intermediate range ballistic missiles, the Jericho, that are capable of reaching any target in Iran. Its fleet of F-15 long-range strike aircraft can also deliver nuclear payloads. Some analysts have suggested that it can also deliver nuclear weapons from its German-made Dolphin submarines using cruise missiles.

Israel will also continue to have conventional military superiority over Iran and the rest of the region. The Israeli military has a demonstrated qualitative edge over all of its potential regional adversaries, including Iran. The Israeli air force has the capability to penetrate air defense systems with virtual impunity, as it demonstrated in 2007 when it destroyed Syria’s nascent nuclear capability. The Israeli armed forces’ intelligence and electronic warfare capabilities are vastly superior to those of its potential rivals. The 2006 Lebanon war and the 2009 Gaza war demonstrated that there are limits to Israel’s conventional capabilities, but those limits should not obscure the underlying reality of Israel’s conventional military superiority over its enemies.

Iran, on the other hand, has never fully rebuilt its conventional military from the damage suffered in the Iran-Iraq war. It still relies heavily for air and sea power on equipment purchased by the shah 40 years ago, much of which is antique today.

Facebooktwittermail