Category Archives: Lands

Syria: ‘Brutal beyond belief’ Assad better than insurgents — former U.S. ambassador

Scott Lucas writes: In early December, Ryan Crocker — former US Ambassador to Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan — provided a dramatic sound-bite for a New York Times article pointing to a possible re-think in Washington about the Syrian conflict:

We need to start talking to the Assad regime again….It will have to be done very, very quietly. But bad as Assad is, he is not as bad as the jihadis who would take over in his absence.

Crocker did not stop there. Last weekend, he wrote in the Times, “We need to come to terms with a future that includes Assad — and consider that as bad as he is, there is something worse.”

And on Tuesday, his interview with Robert Siegel of US National Public Radio drove home the point, “The simple fact is Assad is not going….We need to come to terms with it.”

Never mind that Crocker’s basic facts are wrong: “Al Qa’eda” did not carry out a raid on Free Syrian Army warehouses earlier this month. It is his dramatic call to accept Assad rather than the insurgents that will resonate. [Continue reading…]

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UK anti-Muslim hate crime soars, police figures show

The Press Association reports: Hate crimes against Muslims have soared in the UK this year, figures show.

Hundreds of anti-Muslim offences were carried out across the country in 2013, with Britain’s biggest force, the Metropolitan police, recording 500 Islamophobic crimes.

Many forces reported a surge in the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes after the murder of soldier Lee Rigby by two Islamic extremists in Woolwich, south-east London, in May.

But the figures could be much higher as nearly half of the 43 forces in England and Wales did not reveal how many hate crimes had targeted Muslims. Some forces admitted they did not always record the faith of a religious hate-crime victim.

Freedom of Information requests were sent by the Press Association to every police force in England and Wales. Of the 43 forces, 24 provided figures on the number of anti-Muslim crimes and incidents recorded.

Tell Mama, a group which monitors anti-Muslim incidents, said it had dealt with 840 cases since April, with the number expected to rise to more than 1,000 by the end of March. This compared with 582 anti-Muslim cases it dealt with from March 2012 to March 2013. [Continue reading…]

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There’s an alarming number of deaths in U.S. jails

Cara Tabachnick writes: Kyam Livingston begged for help. After seven hours of lying on the floor of a jail cell, the 38-year-old mother of two died, her calls unheeded by the correction officers providing security for the approximately 15 female inmates at Brooklyn “central booking” jail this past summer, according to witnesses and court documents.

Witnesses told the family that she had died in the cell among fetid conditions before she was taken to Brooklyn Hospital Health Center on 21 July 2013 where Livingston was pronounced dead at 6:58am, according to police reports. A witness, registered nurse Aleah Holland, told The Daily News, that police at Central Booking ignored her complaints of stomach pains and diarrhea. She said that when she and other inmates banged on the bars calling for help, officers told them Livingston was an alcoholic.

No one knows what happened, and no one wants to say. The NYPD told the family that she died of a seizure, but her family says she never suffered from seizures. This October the family sued the city, the NYPD, and the Department of Corrections in an effort to force systemic change and “responsibility” for her death.

Livingston was one of the few hundred jail deaths that happen across the country. In 2011, (the latest available numbers) 885 inmates died (pdf) in the custody of local jails, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics reported. Notice I said jails. These are different from prisons. Prisons are for people who have been convicted of a crime and sentenced. There are roughly 3,000 jails nationwide and each facility is set up to process people that have been arrested before they are arraigned or go to trial. Some will serve a misdemeanor sentence (of under a year). The majority will be let go because the charges against them won’t stick as they move through the legal system. Others will remain in jails while waiting to go to trial too poor to make bail – yet to be convicted of anything. Regardless, they will be treated as criminals. [Continue reading…]

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Warren Weinstein appeals to Obama and Kerry to negotiate his release

Warren Weinstein, a U.S. government contractor kidnapped by al-Qaeda militants in Pakistan in 2011 has called on President Obama to negotiate with his captors and says he feels “totally abandoned and forgotten.” In a letter to the media, Weinstein wrote:

“I have appealed several times to President Obama to help me but to no avail. I am therefore writing now to the Media to ask that you help me to gain my release and rejoin my family – my wife, two daughters, two grandchildren and my son-in-law. I am hoping that you will take up my case on a human interest and humanitarian basis, and that you can help my family and me to convince President Obama to take action to negotiate my release.”

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Obama sends drones to Iraq

The New York Times reports: The United States is quietly rushing dozens of Hellfire missiles and low-tech surveillance drones to Iraq to help government forces combat an explosion of violence by a Qaeda-backed insurgency that is gaining territory in both western Iraq and neighboring Syria.

The move follows an appeal for help in battling the extremist group by the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who met with President Obama in Washington last month.

But some military experts question whether the patchwork response will be sufficient to reverse the sharp downturn in security that already led to the deaths of more than 8,000 Iraqis this year, 952 of them Iraqi security force members, according to the United Nations, the highest level of violence since 2008.

Al Qaeda’s regional affiliate, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, has become a potent force in northern and western Iraq. Riding in armed convoys, the group has intimidated towns, assassinated local officials, and in an episode last week, used suicide bombers and hidden explosives to kill the commander of the Iraqi Army’s Seventh Division and more than a dozen of his officers and soldiers as they raided a Qaeda training camp near Rutbah.

Bombings on Christmas in Christian areas of Baghdad, which killed more than two dozen people, bore the hallmarks of a Qaeda operation.

The surge in violence stands in sharp contrast to earlier assurances from senior Obama administration officials that Iraq was on the right path, despite the failure of American and Iraqi officials in 2011 to negotiate an agreement for a limited number of United States forces to remain in Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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Departing minister calls for Erdogan’s resignation as crisis in Turkey deepens

The New York Times reports: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said in comments reported Thursday that he believes he is the ultimate target of a bribery and corruption investigation that has plunged his government into one of its worst crises since he came to power a decade ago.

In remarks published in Hurriyet, a Turkish daily newspaper, Mr. Erdogan said that those who tried to embroil him in the investigation would be “left empty-handed.” He made the comments to reporters on a plane as he returned from a visit to Pakistan on Tuesday.

Mr. Erdogan reshuffled his cabinet late Wednesday, replacing 10 ministers, after three top ministers whose sons had been detained as part of the investigation abruptly resigned. One of the departing ministers shook the Turkish political establishment by calling for Mr. Erdogan to step down, a defiant move that underlined the growing fissures in Mr. Erdogan’s governing Justice and Development Party.

Turkey’s opposition on Thursday accused Mr. Erdogan of trying to rule via a secretive “deep state,” following the cabinet reshuffle in which he moved to cement his control over the police by installing a key ally at the powerful Interior Ministry. The term “deep state” has a sinister connotation in Turkey, and alludes to a murky group of operatives linked to the military who operate outside democratic structures.

The government has dismissed more than a dozen high-ranking police officials as part of a purge of those it believes are driving the investigation, prompting criticism of Mr. Erdogan from people both within and outside his party who accuse him of interfering in judicial affairs.

Mr. Erdogan “is trying to put together a cabinet that will not show any opposition to him,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of the biggest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, or C.H.P., said in remarks reported by Turkish media. “Erdogan has a deep state.”

The resignations on Wednesday, coming only hours after the ministers welcomed Mr. Erdogan at the Ankara airport as he returned from Pakistan, were enough to inspire new talk of a deepening crisis, which Mr. Erdogan has repeatedly denounced as a foreign plot.

But the call for Mr. Erdogan’s resignation by one of the departing ministers was considered stunning, coming from within a political party known for silencing dissent. That instantly raised the significance of the entire inquiry and left members of the Turkish public wondering if they were witnessing the collapse of their Islamist-rooted government of the last decade. [Continue reading…]

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Stop starvation in Syria — end the blockades

Pulse Media: Syrians are slowly dying of malnutrition – but not for lack of food. A military blockade surrounds dozens of Syrian towns. This starvation siege prevents 1.5 million Syrians from receiving food or medicine.

Qusai Zakarya is one of them. He is 28 years old. Qusai declared a hunger strike on November 26, to demand food and medicine be allowed to reach civilians across military lines in Syria. “We are all hungry here in my hometown anyway. Let me be hungry for a purpose,” Qusai says.

We are starting the first phase of a “rolling” solidarity hunger strike onFriday, December 20, where someone will do a hunger strike every day in support of the hunger strikers in Syria through the rest of December.

We are also working on putting together a list of supporters for launching a larger campaign leading up to the Geneva Conference in January. We are asking that you commit to one day of a symbolic hunger strike and that you give us permission to put your name on the materials to publicize the hunger strikes more widely. We also ask, if you are able, to send in a photo of yourself or group to stopthesiege@gmail.com, maybe with a sign illustrating your participation.

Our goals:

  • To call for food and medicine now to all besieged towns in Syria.
  • To call for a binding resolution from the UN Security Council requiring the regime in Syria and all armed parties to allow humanitarian organizations immediate unfettered access to aid the civilian population without discrimination, including cross-border access and cross-line access (from regime-controlled areas into rebel-controlled areas).
  • To alert media and political representatives to this situation.
  • To support this act of civil resistance in Syria.

Can you join us this holiday season in standing in solidarity with Syrians? People of conscience everywhere must act to break the siege that is affecting over a million people.
In Solidarity and Hope,

  • Gilbert Achcar, Professor, SOAS, University of London
  • Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy, The New School (New York)
  • Jürgen Habermas, German philosopher
  • Adam Shatz, Senior Editor, London Review of Books
  • Keith Ellison, U.S. Representative for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District
  • Razan Ghazzawi, Syrian blogger-activist & former political prisoner
  • Rola Hallam, Syrian Doctor and Humanitarian Worker
  • Norman Finkelstein, political scientist, professor, and author, US
  • Bill Fletcher Jr, Writer/Activist
  • Slavoj Žižek, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia)

(and others…)

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Al Nusra leader targeting UN workers in Syria

If this is indeed the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, presumably it is not a recent photograph.

If this is indeed the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, presumably it is not a recent photograph.

The Associated Press reports: The shadowy leader of a powerful al-Qaida group fighting in Syria sought to kidnap United Nations workers and scrawled out plans for his aides to take over in the event of his death, according to excerpts of letters obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press.

Iraqi intelligence officials offered the AP the letters, as well as the first known photograph of the Nusra Front leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, the head of one of the most powerful bands of radicals fighting the Syrian government in the country’s civil war.

The officials said they obtained the information about al-Golani after they captured members of another al-Qaida group in September. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to journalists.

“I was told by a soldier that he observed some of the workers of the U.N. and he will kidnap them. I ask God for his success,” read an excerpt of a letter given by officials from Iraq’s Falcon Intelligence Cell, an anti-terrorism unit that works under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The officials said other letters planned the kidnapping and killing of other foreigners, and Syrian and Iraqi civilians.

One U.N. worker was kidnapped for eight months in Syria and was released in October. Another two dozen U.N. peacekeepers were briefly held this year. It’s not clear if those abductions had any relation to al-Golani’s letters. [Continue reading…]

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Israel tracks Syria’s Western jihadis, worried about their return

Reuters reports: Israel is working with allies abroad to track Westerners fighting in Syria, concerned that such militants could attack Israeli or Jewish targets once back home, a senior Israeli official said on Tuesday.

Of an estimated 10,000 foreign combatants among rebels battling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, around 20 percent are from the West and that number is rising, the official said.

“Think of a scenario, even one of them returning and getting instructions from someone he worked with, someone he fought beside, someone like (the al Qaeda-linked) Nusra Front, to carry out an attack,” said the official, who is privy to intelligence assessments. “This has been keeping us very, very busy lately.”

The official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, said Israel was coordinating monitoring efforts with Western countries, whose legal options against fighters returning home were limited.

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Russia says Arafat died of natural causes

Reuters reports: Russia said on Thursday former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died of natural causes, not radiation poisoning, but a Palestinian official called the finding “politicized” and said an investigation would continue.

Samples were taken from Arafat’s body last year by Swiss, French and Russian forensics experts after an al Jazeera documentary said his clothes showed high amounts of deadly polonium 210.

The Swiss said last month their tests were consistent with polonium poisoning but not absolute proof of the cause of death. The Russian finding was in line with that of French scientists who said earlier this month that Arafat had not been killed with polonium.

“Yasser Arafat died not from the effects of radiation but of natural causes,” Vladimir Uiba, head of Russia’s state forensics body, the Federal Medico-Biological Agency, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

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In harshest move yet, Egypt declares Muslim Brotherhood a ‘terrorist’ group

The New York Times reports: Egypt’s military-backed leaders on Wednesday designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, outlawing the country’s most successful political movement and vowing to treat anyone who belongs to it — or even takes part in its activities — as a terrorist.

The country’s leaders have been locked in conflict with the movement since July, when the military deposed Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president and a former Brotherhood leader. The state’s security forces have killed hundreds of the movement’s supporters during protests against Mr. Morsi’s removal. Most of the Brotherhood’s leaders and thousands of its members have been imprisoned.

Now, with Wednesday’s decision, the government signaled its determination to cut off any air to the more than 80-year-old Islamist organization.

Analysts said the designation opened the door to the most severe crackdown on the movement in decades, requiring hundreds of thousands of Brotherhood members to abandon the group or face prison, and granting the military and the police new authority to violently suppress protests. The decision makes it a crime to promote the Brotherhood and could also outlaw hundreds of welfare and charitable organizations affiliated with the movement that help Egyptians who have little access to government services.

The move came a day after officials blamed the Brotherhood for a suicide bombing at a police headquarters north of Cairo that killed 16 people, though on Wednesday a separate group — Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, which has derided the Brotherhood for its lack of militancy — claimed responsibility for that bombing. [Continue reading…]

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Syria: barrel bombs ‘kill 87 children’ in Aleppo

Reuters reports: More than 300 people, 87 of them children, have been killed in a week of air raids on the northern Syrian city of Aleppo and nearby towns by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, a monitoring group said on Monday.

Many were killed by so-called barrel bombs dropped from helicopters, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Syrian authorities say they are battling rebels who have controlled parts of Syria’s biggest city and most of the surrounding countryside for the past 18 months.

But human rights groups have condemned the use of the improvised bombs – oil drums packed with explosives and metal fragments, and rolled out of the aircraft cargo bay – as indiscriminate bombardment. [Continue reading…]

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Foreign fighters in Syria still remain a small fraction of the opposition

The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation: We estimate that – from late 2011 to 10 December 2013 – between 3,300 and 11,000 individuals have gone to Syria to fight against the Assad government. These figures include those who are currently present as well as those who have since returned home, been arrested or killed.

Based on the credibility of various sources, our own judgement, and the feedback we have received since publishing our April estimate, we believe the “true” figure to be above 8,500. This would mean that the numbers have nearly doubled since April, with a particularly steep increase among non-Arabs, especially Westerners.

While Arabs and Europeans continue to represent the bulk of foreign fighters (up to 80 per cent), we have identified individuals from Southeast Asia, North America, Australia, and (non-Arab) Africa. Overall, we believe that residents and citizens from at least 74 countries have joined militant opposition groups in Syria. [Continue reading…]

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Americans uneasy about surveillance but often use snooping tools

The Washington Post reports: Julie Beliveau’s 16-year-old daughter, a new driver, was heading from her home in Ashburn toward a job interview the other night when she found herself in Leesburg — the wrong direction entirely. Upset and fearing that she’d blow the interview, she called her mother, who instantly launched her tracking program.

“I just opened my phone, and I could see where she was,” Beliveau said. Mother guided daughter to the interview, where she got the job. Score one for surveillance.

Yet Beliveau says she would never use the program just casually to check her daughter’s whereabouts. “That’s going over the line,” she said.

Amid this year’s revelations about the federal government’s vast apparatus for tracking the movements and communications of people worldwide, Americans are uneasy with the extent of surveillance yet often use snooping tools in their own lives, a Washington Post poll has found.

The sweet spot between liberty and security has been hard to pinpoint ever since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. Remarkable advances in information technology have enabled counterterrorism tactics far more sweeping and intrusive — and powerful — than the United States had ever deployed. At the same time, the relationship between consumers and businesses was elementally altered as mobile phones, GPS, Google and Facebook gave corporations a new capacity to track their customers’ behavior. [Continue reading…]

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How U.S. spying cost Boeing multibillion-dollar jet contract

Reuters reports: Dilma Rousseff was thoroughly charmed.

Brazil had been struggling for years to decide which company to choose for a $4 billion-plus fighter jet contract, one of the world’s most sought-after defense deals and one that would help define the country’s strategic alliances for decades to come.

But Rousseff, the leftist president known for being sometimes gruff and even standoffish with foreign leaders, was thrilled after a 90-minute meeting in Brasilia on May 31 with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.

After Biden’s reassurances that the United States would not block crucial transfers of technological know-how to Brazil if it bought the jets, she was closer than ever to selecting Chicago-based Boeing to supply its fighter, the F/A-18 Super Hornet.

“She’s ready to sign on the dotted line,” one of her senior aides told Reuters at the time. “This is going to happen soon.”

And then along came Edward Snowden.

Documents leaked by the former National Security Agency contractor, released in the weeks after Biden’s visit, ended up enraging Rousseff and completely changing her plans, several Brazilian officials told Reuters. [Continue reading…]

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Israel condemns U.S. spying revelations

The Associated Press reports: Senior Israeli officials have called on the US to stop spying on Israel, following revelations that the National Security Agency intercepted emails from the offices of the country’s former leaders.

It was the first time Israeli officials have expressed anger since details of US spying on Israel began to trickle out in documents leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The scandal also spurred renewed calls for the release of Jonathan Pollard, a former American intelligence analyst who has been imprisoned in the US for nearly three decades for spying for Israel.

“This thing is not legitimate,” the Israeli intelligence minister, Yuval Steinitz, told Israel Radio. He called for both countries to enter an agreement regarding espionage.

“It’s quite embarrassing between countries who are allies,” the tourism minister, Uzi Landau, said. “It’s this moment more than any other moment that Jonathan Pollard [should] be released.” [Continue reading…]

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Mandela received weapons training from Mossad agents in Ethiopia

Haaretz reports: Nelson Mandela, the former South African leader who died earlier this month, was trained in weaponry and sabotage by Mossad operatives in 1962, a few months before he was arrested in South Africa. During his training, Mandela expressed interest in the methods of the Haganah pre-state underground and was viewed by the Mossad as leaning toward communism.

These revelations are from a document in the Israel State Archives labeled “Top Secret.” The existence of the document is revealed here for the first time.

It also emerges that the Mossad operatives attempted to encourage Zionist sympathies in Mandela.

Mandela, the father of the new South Africa and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, led the struggle against apartheid in his country from the 1950s. He was arrested, tried and released a number of times before going underground in the early 1960s. In January 1962, he secretly and illegally fled South Africa and visited various African countries, including Ethiopia, Algeria, Egypt and Ghana. His goal was to meet with the leaders of African countries and garner financial and military support for the armed wing of the underground African National Congress.

A letter sent from the Mossad to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem reveals that Mandela underwent military training by Mossad operatives in Ethiopia during this period. These operatives were unaware of Mandela’s true identity. The letter, classified top secret, was dated October 11, 1962 – about two months after Mandela was arrested in South Africa, shortly after his return to the country. [Continue reading…]

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