Category Archives: Issues

The meritocracy and Jewish kinship network

The meritocracy and Jewish kinship network
By Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss, January 13, 2010

A lot of people are talking about David Brooks’s distastefully-smug column in the Times yesterday about Jewish achievement, in which he says that we are 2 percent of the U.S. population and 25 percent of this and that. And that we get all the patents in the Middle East while the Arabs smoke hookahs.

He asks how this can be, and talks about our incredible culture. I agree: it’s a helluva bookish culture. Though that same intellectual culture is going out the window now that the chief occupation of Jewish leadership is saying, Repeat after us, apartheid is democracy.

But I’d like to inject a realistic note here. How much of Jewish achievement reflects the fact that Jews look out for one another? When I had to get a partner on this website to keep it going, I was most comfortable getting another Jew. Years ago when I was at the Harvard Crimson newspaper, my Irish-Catholic friend Mary Ridge informed me that it was a “Jewish club”–we selected for our own kind; and the Crimson produced a lot of professional journalism talent. I have gotten most of my journalism work from Jewish bosses. [continued…]

Sharon’s real legacy – keeping the Arabs out of sight

Sharon’s real legacy – keeping the Arabs out of sight
By Aluf Benn, Haaretz, January 13, 2010

Let’s assume the optimistic forecast by special U.S. envoy George Mitchell comes true and in two years the establishment of an independent Palestine is declared at a ceremony. The event will be broadcast on prime time, but most Israelis will opt to view “Big Brother 6,” “Survivor 7” or whatever the next television hit is. Viewers will behave this way not because they oppose a Palestinian state but because they are indifferent. Palestine-shmalestine simply does not interest them.

Most Israelis today are cut off from the conflict with the Palestinians and do not interact with them. From their point of view, the Palestinians are blurry figures during TV newscasts: Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniyeh speak, women covered from head to toe mourn in a tent, men run with a stretcher after an ambulance, men concealing their faces fire Qassam rockets. Israelis have no interest in knowing anything further. Nablus and Ramallah are about 40 minutes by car from Tel Aviv, but in the eyes of Tel Avivians they are on a different planet. New York, London and Thailand are much closer.

The settlers beyond the separation fence are the only Israelis who see Palestinians, mostly through car windows on the roads they share. The settlers, like the Palestinians, are disconnected from the residents of the Tel Aviv region, Haifa or Be’er Sheva, who hardly ever cross the fence. They have no business in Elon Moreh, Yitzhar or Psagot. The big settlements like Ma’aleh Adumim and Ariel can be reached almost without having to see Palestinians. [continued…]

Brzezinski on Afghanistan

Brzezinski on Afghanistan
Real News, January 12, 2010

George W. Obama

George W. Obama
By Nat Hentoff, Village Voice, January 12, 2010

Before President Obama, it was grimly accurate to write, as I often did in the Voice, that George W. Bush came into the presidency with no discernible background in constitutional civil liberties or any acquaintance with the Constitution itself. Accordingly, he turned the “war on terror” over to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—ardent believers that the Constitution presents grave obstacles in a time of global jihad.

But now, Bush’s successor—who actually taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago—is continuing much of the Bush-Cheney parallel government and, in some cases, is going much further in disregarding our laws and the international treaties we’ve signed.

On January 22, 2009, the apostle of “change we can believe in” proclaimed: “Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of my presidency.” But four months into his first year in command, Obama instructed his attorney general, Eric Holder, to present in a case, Jewel v. National Security Agency, a claim of presidential “sovereign immunity” that not even Dick Cheney had the arrant chutzpah to propose. [continued…]

Poll: Most Americans would trim liberties to be safer
By Steven Thomma, McClatchy, January 12, 2010

After a recent attempted terrorist attack set off a debate about full-body X-rays at airports, a new McClatchy-Ipsos poll finds that Americans lean more toward giving up some of their liberty in exchange for more safety.

The survey found 51 percent of Americans agreeing that “it is necessary to give up some civil liberties in order to make the country safe from terrorism.”

At the same time, 36 percent agreed that “some of the government’s proposals will go too far in restricting the public’s civil liberties.” [continued…]

The U.S. military, al-Qaeda, and a war of futility
By Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse, TomDispatch, January 14, 2010

In his book on World War II in the Pacific, War Without Mercy, John Dower tells an extraordinary tale about the changing American image of the Japanese fighting man. In the period before the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, it was well accepted in military and political circles that the Japanese were inferior fighters on the land, in the air, and at sea — “little men,” in the phrase of the moment. It was a commonplace of “expert” opinion, for instance, that the Japanese had supposedly congenital nearsightedness and certain inner-ear defects, while lacking individualism, making it hard to show initiative. In battle, the result was poor pilots in Japanese-made (and so inferior) planes, who could not fly effectively at night or launch successful attacks.

In the wake of their precision assault on Pearl Harbor, their wiping out of U.S. air power in the Philippines in the first moments of the war, and a sweeping set of other victories, the Japanese suddenly went from “little men” to supermen in the American imagination (without ever passing through a human phase). They became “invincible” — natural-born jungle- and night-fighters, as well as “utterly ruthless, utterly cruel and utterly blind to any of the values which make up our civilization.”

Sound familiar? It should. Following September 11, 2001, news headlines screamed “A NEW DAY OF INFAMY,” and the attacks were instantly labeled “the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century.” Soon enough, al-Qaeda, like the Japanese in 1941, went from a distant threat — the Bush administration, on coming into office, paid next to no attention to al-Qaeda’s possible plans — to a team of arch-villains with little short of superpowers. After all, they had already destroyed some of the mightiest buildings on the planet, were known to be on the verge of seizing weapons of mass destruction, and, if nothing was done, might soon enough turn the Muslim world into their “caliphate.” [continued…]

Israel’s hopeless quest for respect

Israel’s hopeless quest for respect
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 13, 2010

As Israeli-Turkish relations hit a new low with the threat that Turkey might withdraw its ambassador, Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman said he expects Israel to be treated with “dignity and respect” by Turkey.

The sign of respect Lieberman is looking for would be for the Turkish government to censor Turkish media by banning a TV show that depicts Israeli soldiers as war criminals. Israel’s war on free speech continues on many fronts without much success — other than in America.

The slide in relations between the two major regional powers began with Israel’s war on Gaza. In Davos, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stood up for Turkish dignity by refusing to be silenced after Israeli president Shimon Peres launched a bombastic tirade in defense of Israel’s right to wage war.

Though in the eyes of the Western media the Davos incident was seen as a “spat”, much more importantly in Turkey and across the Middle East, Erdogan was seen as a national leader unwilling to countenance disrespect from an Israeli leader — however much the latter might act out, used as he is to being coddled by the West.

Now we have Lieberman, whose diplomatic talent has been shaped by his experience working as a nightclub bouncer, endorsing a plan that was designed to teach Turkey a lesson. Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon seemed to think that if the Turkish ambassador was forced to look up to him — literally — humiliation would deliver in its wake, respect.

This is how the meeting unfolded where the Israeli minister conveyed to Turkey’s ambassador Oguz Celikkol how offensive Israel finds “Valley of the Wolves”.

During the photo-op at the start of the meeting, Ayalon reportedly told the photographers in Hebrew: “Pay attention that he is sitting in a lower chair and we are in the higher ones, that there is only an Israeli flag on the table and that we are not smiling.” Celikkol’s associates told Israeli Army Radio on Tuesday that the meeting with Ayalon was the most humiliating event he had experienced in 35 years as a diplomat.

Those in Israel who understand something about the way diplomacy works know that Ayalon made a huge blunder. He now faces criticism even from inside his own party, Israel Beiteinu.

“He is finished politically,” an Israel Beiteinu official told The Jerusalem Post. “This ruins his reputation as a diplomat. It is a stain that cannot be erased. He damaged Lieberman and first and foremost himself.”

Minister of Industry, Trade and Labor Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said: “The respect for Israel is not judged by how you humiliate an ambassador; humiliation doesn’t help, it only harms.”

While Ben-Eliezer and others indicate that political realism still exists in Israel, Ayalon’s mistake was less that of pure error of judgment than that of representing an Israeli mentality too faithfully.

Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to Turkey, facetiously told Israeli Army Radio that “a new sort of diplomacy” had been invented, and that Lieberman had “made up a new way of reprimanding.”

“This time, they made him sit on a low chair, next time maybe they’ll make him crawl, and who knows, maybe the time after that they’ll beat him up at the entrance,” Liel said.

The former Israeli ambassador’s intention might have been to mock Lieberman, but the idea that contempt generates respect serves as a foundation stone for Zionism. Israel’s struggle to pacify its opponents has since 1948 been a relentless effort to demonstrate who stands above and who must crouch below.

Israel has placed all its bets on the effectiveness of coercion — an investment from which it is difficult to move away. There is no easy road that leads from contempt to mutual respect. Indeed, in those whose nature it is to treat others with contempt there is an underlying assumption that respect is something which will never be freely conferred.

What Danny Ayalon and those Israelis who are cast in the same mold repeatedly and unwittingly display is their own lack of dignity. They have no idea how profound a difference there is between demanding respect and being worthy of respect.

Iranian scientist killed by bomb had opposition links

Iranian scientist killed by bomb had opposition links
By Richard Spencer, The Telegraph, January 12, 2010

An Iranian nuclear physicist with ties to the reformist movement led by the opposition leader, Mir Hossein Moussavi, has been killed by a bomb near his home.

Dr Moussad Ali-Mohammadi was leaving his house on his way to work at Tehran University when the bomb, attached to a motorbike, went off, killing him instantly.

The Iranian authorities said they suspected the hand of exiled opposition movements working on behalf of America and Israel, a charge denied by Washington.

They drew parallels with the disappearance of a scientist attached to the country’s nuclear programme while on a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, who the authorities say was kidnapped and handed over to the Americans.

But Dr Ali-Mohammadi’s academic work was highly theoretical and the body responsible for the country’s nuclear research programme, which has brought Iran into conflict with the West, said he had no connection with it.

Opposition movement supporters also said he was on a list of 240 academic backers of Mr Moussavi published before last year’s disputed election. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — It comes as little surprise that the Iranian government would be quick to accuse Israel and the US of being behind this assassination. The US is currently operating a far from covert assassination program in Pakistan and less than a year ago it was reported that Israel had launched a program specifically targeting Iran’s top nuclear scientists.

Last February, The Telegraph reported:

Israel has launched a covert war against Iran as an alternative to direct military strikes against Tehran’s nuclear programme, US intelligence sources have revealed.

It is using hitmen, sabotage, front companies and double agents to disrupt the regime’s illicit weapons project, the experts say.

The most dramatic element of the “decapitation” programme is the planned assassination of top figures involved in Iran’s atomic operations.

Israel is also widely assumed to have been behind the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, a leading member of Hezbollah, in Damascus two years ago.

Governments that sanction or instigate assassinations have a hard time pleading innocence.

So, does this mean that Mossad is the prime suspect in this case? Probably not. More likely this was instigated by the regime itself. The killing would send multiple messages:

1. The official line – foreign enemies of the state are on the lose and Iranians must stand together to face this threat.
2. Those who support the opposition are risking their lives by doing so.
3. Any Iranian nuclear scientists who might consider defection have been served notice that they might meet the same fate.

UPDATED: Report: Iran slows down nuclear program in gesture to West

UPDATED: Report: Iran slows down nuclear program in gesture to West
By Yossi Melman, Haaretz, January 11, 2010

Iran has suspended its uranium enrichment program for two months, Iranian media sources reported on Monday, saying the move was meant as a gesture of good will toward Western powers.

The report has not been confirmed by any other sources.

Meanwhile, with or without connection to these reports, U.S. government officials have said that there was still a chance of striking a deal with Iran over its nuclear program.

The possible deal, according to the Washington based newspaper Politico, would be based on the proposal formed late last September and early October in talks in Geneva and Vienna, between Iran and Western powers. The agreement may still go through, even though the deadline which U.S. President Barack Obama set for nuclear talks with Iran, the end of 2009, has expired. [continued…]

UPDATE: Iran denies report on uranium enrichment suspension
Al Bawaba, January 11, 2010

Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast on Monday dismissed an Israeli newspaper report on the suspension of Iran’s uranium enrichment activities as “unfounded” and “baseless”, stressing that Tehran will continue its unabated nuclear activities.

“From our viewpoint, these newspapers and information-dissemination sources are not creditable and there is no audience for such fabrication of news and purposeful mistakes in Iran,” Mehman-Parast told FNA. Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper reported earlier that Iran has suspended its nuclear enrichment program in gesture of goodwill towards the West. [continued…]

Israeli robots remake battlefield

Israeli robots remake battlefield
By Charles Levinson, Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2010

Israel is developing an army of robotic fighting machines that offers a window onto the potential future of warfare.

Sixty years of near-constant war, a low tolerance for enduring casualties in conflict, and its high-tech industry have long made Israel one of the world’s leading innovators of military robotics.

“We’re trying to get to unmanned vehicles everywhere on the battlefield for each platoon in the field,” says Lt. Col. Oren Berebbi, head of the Israel Defense Forces’ technology branch. “We can do more and more missions without putting a soldier at risk.”

In 10 to 15 years, one-third of Israel’s military machines will be unmanned, predicts Giora Katz, vice president of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., one of Israel’s leading weapons manufacturers.

“We are moving into the robotic era,” says Mr. Katz.

Over 40 countries have military-robotics programs today. The U.S. and much of the rest of the world is betting big on the role of aerial drones: Even Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite guerrilla force in Lebanon, flew four Iranian-made drones against Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War. [continued…]

War’s fury no longer pauses for Afghan winter

War’s fury no longer pauses for Afghan winter
By Rod Nordland, New York Times, January 12, 2010

Afghanistan’s high mountains and harsh weather once meant that winter was a respite from much of the war’s violence, but as the deaths of six Western soldiers in three separate attacks on Monday show, this winter is proving to be different.

American military leaders and Taliban commanders are vowing to carry the fight to each other and skip the traditional winter vacation, and there is every sign that they are doing just that.

Though the trend has been building, in past years, the Taliban generally slipped off to sanctuaries in Pakistan, or just stayed home, while NATO forces enjoyed a drop in attacks and a steep decline in the body count from December through March.

A combination of factors has changed that. American troop levels nearly doubled in 2009, meaning more missions against the Taliban — and more potential targets for them. Military crackdowns by Pakistan along the border have in some places made it harder for insurgents to flee there. [continued…]

An insurgent’s paradise
By Adnan R. Khan, Macleans, January 11, 2010

It’s an odd object to come across in this part of Pakistan, on the edge of Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province bordering the Tribal Areas. In the madness of Karkhano, one of Pakistan’s best-known smuggler bazaars, among a jumble of domestic products for sale outside a nondescript storefront, is a black plastic trunk emblazoned with the name Lt. Stoddard, 2611, 62nd ECB(H). Inside are personal items belonging to the U.S. soldier: T-shirts and sweatshirts, socks and gloves, even a few pairs of underwear. An identical trunk next to it, its lid similarly flung open, is teeming with books and DVDs, all in English, all well-worn, all incongruous here.

That’s only the beginning; digging deeper, things start to take a turn for the surreal. Hidden behind a torn and faded copy of All Quiet on the Western Front is a stack of letters from a woman in the U.S. to her lesbian lover deployed with the U.S. Corps of Engineers in Afghanistan. “We’ll make greatness out of what shall be once we overcome the obstacles standing in our way,” one letter says. Beneath pirated copies of Rambo: First Blood and Full Metal Jacket is a notebook belonging to a budding U.S. military rap artist: “To carry out the mission, complete the objective,” he writes in acrid verse. “u move I shoot, f–k being selective.” And then another letter, this time from a woman to her soldier son, dated July 3, 2008, revealing in intimate detail the regrets of a mother about the soldier’s sister: “I feel like I have missed out raising B—- in some way I can’t explain,” she confesses. “Maybe because E—- was drinkin’ and I was the shield to save my kids from abuse by his actions and I’m sure that hurt her growing up.”

How did such things, windows into American lives, get here?

The answer lies on the Grand Trunk Road, which runs by Karkhano. It once carried hippies from Afghanistan through Pakistan to the land of enlightenment in India during the 1960s. It now ferries Afghan refugees brave enough to go back to Kabul across the historic Khyber Pass. Vans and gaudily painted buses stuffed to overflowing ooze black exhaust fumes as they inch over the remaining hundred metres to the last police checkpoint in the “settled areas” of Peshawar. Beyond that, past the sign reading “Entry of Foreigners Prohibited,” is tribal country, with its gun shops, its hashish dispensaries, and its anarchy. Past that is Afghanistan. [continued…]

How the US military is betraying its own wounded

How the US military is betraying its own wounded
By Amanda Carpenter, Washington Times, January 12, 2010

In 2007, a high-ranking Navy doctor sent a sobering warning to colleagues: The service may be discharging soldiers for misconduct when in fact they are merely displaying symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

By doing so, the anonymous doctor noted in a memo to other medical administrators, the service may be denying those troops their rights to Veterans Affairs benefits — including treatment for medical conditions they incurred while serving on the battlefield.

In the future, any military personnel facing dismissal for misconduct after a deployment should be screened first for PTSD, the memo said. The recommendation was never implemented. [continued…]

Don’t panic. Fear is al-Qaeda’s real goal

Don’t panic. Fear is al-Qaeda’s real goal
By Fareed Zacharia, Washington Post, January 11, 2010

O shadows n Christmas an al-Qaeda affiliate launched an operation using one person, with no special target, and a failed technique tried eight years ago by “shoe bomber” Richard Reid. The plot seems to have been an opportunity that the group seized rather than the result of a well-considered strategic plan. A Nigerian fanatic with (what appeared to be) a clean background volunteered for service; he was wired up with a makeshift explosive and put on a plane. His mission failed entirely, killing not a single person. The suicide bomber was not even able to commit suicide. But al-Qaeda succeeded in its real aim, which was to throw the American system into turmoil. That’s why the terror group proudly boasted about the success of its mission.

Is there some sensible reaction between panic and passivity? [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — We have a saccharine view of life where normal is supposed to mean safe and destiny stretches towards a happy ending. In reality, life is like a minefield where success means you make it all the way to the far side — and then step on a mine. To sanely accommodate this fact within consciousness requires acquiring a certain amount of comfort in the face of danger. There’s a difference between not feeling afraid and feeling safe.

An appropriate response to terrorism on an individual and national level has more to do with cultivating the right attitude than in perfecting security procedures. The procedures are necessary but they should not be portrayed as the core response.

Until America demonstrates that it cannot be easily terrorized, the attacks will keep on coming. The attackers are not lured by security loopholes, they are drawn by our own fear.

The looming war in Gaza: Can Obama stop it before it starts?

The looming war in Gaza: Can Obama stop it before it starts?
By Bradley Burston, Haaretz, January 11, 2010

Next week, or the week after, Barack Obama may well see intelligence reports of tank battalions moving south and west along Israeli highways, and whole infantry brigades setting up camp in the western Negev.

The countdown to the Second Gaza War has begun in earnest. Date it, if you like, to Sunday, and a coolly terrifying analysis by Yom Tov Samia, former overall Israeli military commander of the Gaza Strip and the adjacent Negev.

Or date it, if you prefer, according to axiom of contemporary Israeli history which reads: A future war becomes practically inevitable the moment a key IDF reserve major-general declares it so.

Alternatively, date it from the moment that selective amnesia allows Israeli political figures to court the illusion that Hamas can be invaded to death.

All this and more was to be had from an interview Samia gave Army Radio this week, which should give pause not only to the Palestinians and Israelis who may fall victim to a Second Gaza War, but to Washington as well. [continued…]

Israel’s crisis
By Phil Weiss, Mondoweiss, January 11, 2010

Just back from Israel/Palestine, the overwhelming sense I carry away is that the present state cannot last. Just how it goes down I have no idea. But conditions are so obviously discriminatory, and the knowledge of these conditions now so widespread– among the Christian pilgrims in my Jerusalem guesthouse, among European leaders, and now too among the Israeli elite and American left–that the situation is reminiscent of the delegitimizing of communism in the 70s and 80s. The period of apartheid struggle that Ehud Olmert warned of two years ago is upon us. So too his warning of possible “national suicide.”

The surprise for me is that the indifference of American Jews to this injustice is more than matched by that of the mass of Israelis: They live inside the bubble of their opinion that Israeli society is fair. So this trip has left me pretty depressed, even as it has renewed my sense of ethnocentric purpose: I will do what I can to bring the American Jewish community into the world conversation about the reality of Israel/Palestine.

This will happen. A few weeks back Israeli activist Micha Kurz said that a war had begun between one part of Israeli society and another; and I come home knowing that that war is about to erupt inside American Jewish life. You might say that it has already erupted: J Street’s emergence and all the liberal Zionists in the New York Review of Books attacking the occupation are signs. But we ain’t seen nothing yet. We are on the verge of a Jewish intifada, and about time too. [continued…]

Cracks in the jihad

Cracks in the jihad
By Thomas Rid, The Wilson Quarterly, Winter, 2010

“Get ready for all Muslims to join the holy war against you,” the jihadi leader Abd el-Kader warned his Western enemies. The year was 1839, and nine years into France’s occupation of Algeria the resistance had grown self-confident. Only weeks earlier, Arab fighters had wiped out a convoy of 30 French soldiers en route from Boufarik to Oued-el-Alèg. Insurgent attacks on the slow-moving French columns were steadily increasing, and the army’s fortified blockhouses in the Atlas Mountains were under frequent assault.

Paris pinned its hopes on an energetic general who had already served a successful tour in Algeria, Thomas-Robert Bugeaud. In January 1840, shortly before leaving to take command in Algiers, he addressed the French Chamber of Deputies: “In Europe, gentlemen, we don’t just make war against armies; we make war against interests.” The key to victory in European wars, he explained, was to penetrate the enemy country’s interior. Seize the centers of population, commerce, and industry, “and soon the interests are forced to capitulate.” Not so at the foot of the Atlas, he conceded. Instead, he would focus the army’s effort on the tribal population.

Later that year, a well-known military thinker from Prussia traveled to Algeria to observe Bugeaud’s new approach. Major General Carl von Decker, who had taught under the famed Carl von Clausewitz at the War Academy in Berlin, was more forthright than his French counterpart. The fight against fanatical tribal warriors, he foresaw, “will throw all European theory of war into the trash heap.”

One hundred and seventy years later, jihad is again a major threat—and Decker’s dire analysis more relevant than ever. War, in Clausewitz’s eminent theory, was a clash of collective wills, “a continuation of politics by other means.” When states went to war, the adversary was a political entity with the ability to act as one body, able to end hostilities by declaring victory or admitting defeat. Even Abd el-Kader eventually capitulated. But jihad in the 21st century, especially during the past few years, has fundamentally changed its anatomy: Al Qaeda is no longer a collective political actor. It is no longer an adversary that can articulate a will, capitulate, and be defeated. But the jihad’s new weakness is also its new strength: Because of its transformation, Islamist militancy is politically impaired yet fitter to survive its present crisis. [continued…]

Yemen offers to strike a deal with al-Qaeda fighters
By James Hider, The Times, January 11, 2010

The President of Yemen said yesterday that he was willing to strike a deal with al-Qaeda if militants laid down their weapons, amid warnings that dozens of foreign fighters were streaming into the country.

Ali Abdullah Saleh’s offer to negotiate with members of the terror network came as officials said that several al-Qaeda operatives, including Saudis and Egyptians, were travelling from Afghanistan to join fighters in the lawless tribal lands in central and southern Yemen.

Among those said to be in hiding in the area is Anwar al-Awlaki, the influential Yemeni preacher. The US-born imam preached to two of the 9/11 bombers in California and had links to the US army psychiatrist charged with the Fort Hood shootings and the Nigerian man who allegedly tried to blow up a Christmas Day flight to Detroit. [continued…]

Making sense of the new CIA battlefield in Afghanistan

Making sense of the new CIA battlefield in Afghanistan
By Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse, TomDispatch, January 10, 2010

It was a Christmas and New Year’s from hell for American intelligence, that $75 billion labyrinth of at least 16 major agencies and a handful of minor ones. As the old year was preparing to be rung out, so were our intelligence agencies, which managed not to connect every obvious clue to a (literally) seat-of-the-pants al-Qaeda operation. It hardly mattered that the underwear bomber’s case — except for the placement of the bomb material — almost exactly, even outrageously, replicated the infamous, and equally inept, “shoe bomber” plot of eight years ago.

That would have been bad enough, but the New Year brought worse. Army Major General Michael Flynn, U.S. and NATO forces deputy chief of staff for intelligence in Afghanistan, released a report in which he labeled military intelligence in the war zone — but by implication U.S. intelligence operatives generally — “clueless.” They were, he wrote, “ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced… and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers… Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy.”

As if to prove the general’s point, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor with a penchant for writing inspirational essays on jihadi websites and an “unproven asset” for the CIA, somehow entered a key Agency forward operating base in Afghanistan unsearched, supposedly with information on al-Qaeda’s leadership so crucial that a high-level CIA team was assembled to hear it and Washington was alerted. He proved to be either a double or a triple agent and killed seven CIA operatives, one of whom was the base chief, by detonating a suicide vest bomb, while wounding yet more, including the Agency’s number-two operative in the country. The first suicide bomber to penetrate a U.S. base in Afghanistan, he blew a hole in the CIA’s relatively small cadre of agents knowledgeable on al-Qaeda and the Taliban. [continued…]

Iran offers nuke fuel deal

Iran offers nuke fuel deal
By Laura Rozen, Politico, January 10, 2010

There are signs that negotiations with Iran over a nuclear fuel swap have resumed despite the expiration of the end-of-year deadline for a deal set by President Barack Obama.

While the Obama administration has stepped up talk of expanding sanctions on the regime’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, Iranian news reports and U.S. official sources say that Iran has recently returned a formal counter offer to swap low enriched uranium, or LEU, in exchange for nuclear fuel cells produced in the West.

The proposal comes as Iranian news reports say the foreign ministry has announced the halting of uranium enrichment for two months as a good-will gesture. Outside observers have not confirmed that claim. [continued…]

U.S. shifts Iran focus to support opposition
By Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, January 9, 2010

The Obama administration is increasingly questioning the long-term stability of Tehran’s government and moving to find ways to support Iran’s opposition “Green Movement,” said senior U.S. officials.

The White House is crafting new financial sanctions specifically designed to punish the Iranian entities and individuals most directly involved in the crackdown on Iran’s dissident forces, said the U.S. officials, rather than just those involved in Iran’s nuclear program.

U.S. Treasury Department strategists already have been focusing on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has emerged as the economic and military power behind Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. [continued…]

The state of the opposition is strong
By Abbas Milani, The New Republic, January 8, 2010

A couple of days after June’s stolen election in Iran, Flynt Leverett and I were both guests on “The Charlie Rose Show.” Mr. Leverett was waxing eloquent about how Ahmadinejad could have actually won the election. His supposed evidence was a May poll, conducted by phone from Turkey, before the presidential campaign had even begun. Apparently he did not read the entire report of the poll, merely a summary, published in a Washington Post editorial. Much of the full report contradicted his conclusions. Moreover, anyone who believes that Iranians today will reveal their real electoral preferences to a pollster calling from Turkey probably responds to emails from Nigerian princes. [continued…]

Steady drip of leaks corrodes the core of the Iranian regime
By Michael Slackman, New York Times, January 7, 2010

Beatings, arrests, show trials and even killings have failed to discourage Iranians from taking to the streets in protest. But those same tactics may be taking a toll on the government itself, eating away at its legitimacy even among its core of insiders, Iran experts are saying. The evidence? Leaks.

They began in December. Leaks about private meetings of the intelligence services and Revolutionary Guards; an embarrassing memo from state-owned television on how to cover the protests; a note about how the security services have been using petty criminals to fill out the ranks of pro-government demonstrations.

There is no way to verify the accuracy of these leaks. But the government appears to have grown so angry and frustrated with what it calls a “soft war” to overthrow the state that it recently made it a crime to be affiliated with many foreign news outlets, dozens of nongovernmental organizations and opposition Web sites deemed “antirevolutionary.” [continued…]

Iran’s parliament exposes abuse of opposition prisoners at Tehran jail
By Robert Tait, The Guardian, January 10, 2010

Iranian MPs lifted a blanket of official denial on the country’s post-election upheaval today by blaming a senior regime insider for abuses that led to the deaths of at least three prisoners in a detention centre.

In the first publicly documented admission that abuses occurred in the weeks after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election, the majlis, Iran’s parliament, identified Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran’s former chief prosecutor, as the main culprit in the scandal over the Kahrizak facility.

A report read out to MPs said 147 prisoners had been held in a 70-square-metre room for four days without proper ventilation, heating and food on Mortazavi’s orders. The prisoners were sent to Kahrizak after being arrested at a demonstration on 9 July, less than a month after Ahmadinejad’s victory. [continued…]

Iran’s opposition spreads to heartland
By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times, January 10, 2010

Mohammad knew he had to be careful in approaching his old classmate Hamed, the one from the conservative Iranian family. They come from a small city, after all, and word gets around.

When they ran into each other last summer in their eastern Iranian hometown of Birjand, the pair hadn’t seen each other for nine years. As they caught up on old times, the conversation turned to the country’s disputed election in which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defeated challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

“He believed Ahmadinejad’s victory was not fraudulent, and that Mousavi was angry because Iranians didn’t vote for him,” said Mohammad, a 23-year-old engineering student in Birjand, a provincial capital of 160,000 near the border with Afghanistan. “He also thought that the people who protest are some gangsters and not civilized people.” [continued…]

Rafsanjani so silent because he gets no respect, brother says
By Ramin Mostaghim and Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times, January 10, 2010

For months Iran watchers have wondered what was up with Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the head of Iran’s powerful Assembly of Experts and the Expediency Council, as well as a pillar of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Once considered the second-most powerful man in the country and the primary backer of Iran’s burgeoning opposition movement, he has grown uncharacteristically quiet in the last couple of months.

In an interview published this weekend by the Mehr news agency (in Persian), his younger brother, Mohammad, says he’s grown so silent “because no one listens to him.” [continued…]

Iraqis say they were forced to take Blackwater settlement

Iraqis say they were forced to take Blackwater settlement
By Liz Sly, Los Angeles Times, January 11, 2010

Several victims of a 2007 shooting involving American private security guards employed by the firm formerly known as Blackwater alleged Sunday that they were coerced into reaching settlements, and they demanded that the Iraqi government intervene to have the agreements nullified.

The Iraqis said they were pressured by their own attorneys into accepting what they now believe are inadequate settlements because they were told the company was about to file for bankruptcy, that its chairman was going to be arrested and that the U.S. government was about to confiscate all of the firm’s assets. This would be their last chance to get any compensation, the victims said they were told.

When criminal charges against the guards were dismissed by a U.S. federal judge on Dec. 31, the Iraqis concluded that they had been duped and that Blackwater, now called Xe, was not in the kind of legal and financial trouble they had been led to believe. [continued…]

How this suicide bomber opened a new front in Al-Qaeda’s war

How this suicide bomber opened a new front in Al-Qaeda’s war
By Christina Lamb and Miles Amoore, The Sunday Times, January 10, 2010

According to the guard, Balawi had been to the base before. He claimed that before the doctor reached the first gate, the Afghan security guards in charge of the perimeter security were instructed by US soldiers to go into their rooms.

“They did not want any Afghans to see Balawi,” he said. A US army vehicle then led the car through the next two gates, reaching the inside of the base before stopping outside a block of buildings used by the CIA and military intelligence to debrief their sources.

As Balawi stepped out of the car, seven CIA officers and a handful of soldiers gathered around. According to the guard, it was then that Balawi detonated his bomb, killing eight and injuring six.

Arghawan, still sitting in the driver’s seat, survived the initial blast but a US soldier shot him in the head with his pistol, assuming that he was part of the bomb plot.

“There were lots of body parts,” said the guard. “The suicide bomber’s legs were all that was left of him. He had hidden the bomb beneath his pattu.”

According to one US intelligence official, the explosive was so powerful that it killed agency operatives who were as far as 50ft away. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Arghawan, the Afghan army commander who drove Balawi into the base, “clearly knew” Balawi, Arghawan’s driver told The Sunday Times. So, given that as the Washington Post says, “Virtually everyone within sight of the suicide blast died,” Arghawan would have been the crucial witness who could describe what happened — were it not for the fact that he got executed by an American soldier.

Pakistan’s volatile tribal areas draw foreign militants
By Nasir Khan, The National, January 8, 2010

As Pakistan’s army pushes ever deeper into the country’s mountainous tribal regions in a bid to flush out extremists, they are making a startling discovery – the majority of fighters are foreigners, and not just from Afghanistan.

Uzbeks, Europeans, Afghans, Russians and even a few Caucasian Americans all have been arrested along the rugged border with Afghanistan as the military presses its operation in North and South Waziristan.

Col Nadeem Mirza, the military commander, told The National on an exclusive trip to the region: “Our intelligence had informed us that al Qa’eda followers were hiding in the tribal agencies but no one was expecting to find so many foreigners and al Qa’eda members here. It seemed like these areas had become a fortress for al Qa’eda.” [continued…]

The terrorist mind: an update
By Sarah Kershaw, New York Times, January 10, 2010

Despite the lack of a single terrorist profile, researchers have largely agreed on the risk factors for involvement. They include what Jerrold M. Post, a professor of psychiatry, political psychology and international affairs at George Washington University, calls “generational transmission” of extremist beliefs, which begins early in life; a strong sense of victimization and alienation; the belief that moral violations by the enemy justify violence in pursuit of a “higher moral condition;” the belief that the terrorists’ ethnic, religious or nationalist group is special and in danger of extinction, and that they lack the political power to effect change without violence. [continued…]

We’re keeping detainees in the camp because we’re afraid of things they haven’t done yet?

We’re keeping detainees in the camp because we’re afraid of things they haven’t done yet?
By Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, January 6, 2010

When it comes to being detained indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay, it’s not so much what you know as whom you know. Or whom you are alleged to know. Or whom you may know. Someday.

That was the case back in 2002—when the government’s own best evidence showed that most of the detainees had been picked up for “associating” with the Taliban or al-Qaida (and that most were turned in for bounties rather than captured by U.S. forces). And it’s still the case this week, as the Obama administration announces that about 30 Yemeni prisoners—already cleared for release from the camp—will not be freed after all, merely because they’re from Yemen. The clearance they’ve received is now meaningless: Men poised to begin their ninth year of incarceration at the camp will remain there, not because of anything they have done, but in fear of whom they may meet on the streets back home in Yemen. The new twist, then, is that prisoners can now be held indefinitely not just because they once knew a terrorist, but because they may meet one someday in the future. [continued…]