Category Archives: News

Assad fires an intel chief

The Daily Beast reports: The sacking of yet another Syrian intelligence chief has raised suspicions that President Bashar al-Assad’s inner circle is fraying under the pressure of recent battlefield losses to the rebels. Disputes over the out-sized role Iran is playing to prop up the beleaguered Damascus regime are thought to be central to these internal disputes.

Ali Mamlouk, the head of the country’s National Security Bureau, and considered a trusted security adviser to the Assad family since the 1970s, has been accused of plotting a coup and placed under house arrest, according to a report today in Britain’s Daily Telegraph. In the past few weeks two other spy chiefs have been removed or killed.

In April, Rustum Ghazaleh, head of the Political Security Directorate, died in hospital after he was beaten up on the orders of General Rafiq Shehadeh, his counterpart in military intelligence, who was in turn sacked. The two argued ]over the increasing power of Iranian advisers in Damascus. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi forces and Houthis trade heavy fire along border

Al Jazeera reports: Yemen’s Houthi fighters and Saudi Arabian forces have traded heavy artillery and rocket fire in border areas, residents say, a day before a proposed ceasefire.

The Houthis said they fired Katyusha rockets and mortars on the Saudi cities of Jizan and Najran on Monday, after the Saudis hit Saada and Hajjah provinces with more than 150 rockets, the Reuters news agency reported.

Saudi Arabia’s civil defence department said that one Saudi person was killed in the shelling in Najran, which it said targeted a school and residence adjacent to a military post. [Continue reading…]

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Sea level rise accelerated over the past two decades, research finds

The Guardian reports: Sea level rise sped up over the last two decades rather than slowing down as previously thought, according to new research.

Records from tide gauges and satellites have shown sea level rise slowing slightly over the past 20 years. But as the ice sheets of West Antarctica and Greenland shed ever more water into the ocean, climate models show it should be doing the opposite.

“The thing that was really puzzling us was that the last decade of sea level rise was marginally slower, ever so subtly slower, than the decade before it,” said Dr Christopher Watson from the University of Tasmania who led the new study.

Watson’s team found that the record of sea level rise during the early 1990s was too high. The error gave the illusion of the rate of sea level rise decreasing by 0.058 mm/year 2 between 1993 and 2014 , when in reality it accelerated by between 0.041 and 0.058 mm/year 2 . This brings the records into line with the modelling of the UN’s climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). [Continue reading…]

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Seymour Hersh: Osama bin Laden was held hostage by Pakistan’s intelligence services from 2006 until he was killed

Seymour Hersh writes: It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false. [Continue reading…]

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Houthi rebels agree to 5-day cease-fire in Yemen

The New York Times: Yemen’s Houthi rebels said on Sunday that they had agreed to a five-day cease-fire proposed by Saudi Arabia that would allow desperately needed humanitarian relief supplies to be delivered to the country, according to a Houthi-controlled news service.

The Houthis’ acceptance of the cease-fire came as a Saudi-led military coalition bombed the private residence of Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s former president and the Houthis’ most important ally in the war. Mr. Saleh apparently survived the attack on his residence, in Sana, the Yemeni capital.

In its statement accepting the cease-fire, the Houthis said the group would “respond” to any violation of the truce by “Al Qaeda or those who stand with them.” The Houthis frequently assert that their opponents, who include southern separatists; supporters of Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, Yemen’s exiled president; moderate Islamists; and more hard-line groups, all belong to Al Qaeda.

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Russian soldiers quit over Ukraine

Reuters reports: Some Russian soldiers are quitting the army because of the conflict in Ukraine, several soldiers and human rights activists have told Reuters. Their accounts call into question the Kremlin’s continued assertions that no Russian soldiers have been sent to Ukraine, and that any Russians fighting alongside rebels there are volunteers.

Evidence for Russians fighting in Ukraine – Russian army equipment found in the country, testimony from soldiers’ families and from Ukrainians who say they were captured by Russian paratroopers – is abundant. Associates of Boris Nemtsov, a prominent Kremlin critic killed in February, will soon publish a report which they say will contain new evidence of the Russian military presence in Ukraine.

Until now, however, it has been extremely rare to find Russian soldiers who have fought there and are willing to talk. It is even rarer to find soldiers who have quit the army. Five soldiers who recently quit, including two who said they left rather than serve in Ukraine, have told Reuters of their experiences.

One of the five, from Moscow, said he was sent on exercises in southern Russia last year but ended up going into Ukraine in an armored convoy.

“After we crossed the border, a lieutenant colonel said we could be sent to jail if we didn’t fulfil orders. Some soldiers refused to stay there,” said the soldier, who served with the elite Russian Kantemirovskaya tank division. He gave Reuters his full name but spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he feared reprisals. [Continue reading…]

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Why the ruling against the NSA’s phone records program could have huge implications

The Washington Post reports: A federal appeals court ruling that the National Security Agency’s collection of millions of Americans’ phone records is illegal could undercut more than just that program.

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that the phone records program violated the law used to authorize it, the USA Patriot Act. The program had been approved by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, but it was not disclosed publicly until revealed by documents from former government contractor Edward Snowden.

The government argued that the huge volume of phone records were relevant to counterterrorism investigations because searching through them later might help discern links to terrorism suspects. But the court didn’t buy it, ruling that such an interpretation of “relevance” was “unprecedented and unwarranted.” The government’s argument, the judges said, boiled down to “the proposition that essentially all telephone records are relevant to essentially all international terrorism investigations.”

Knocking down that interpretation could have consequences that go beyond the program and even the part of the USA Patriot Act used to authorized it, Section 215. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi Arabia announces cease-fire in Yemen

The New York Times reports: Saudi Arabia announced on Friday that it would halt its bombing campaign in Yemen for five days beginning on Tuesday, in a sign that it was bowing to international pressure to ease a worsening humanitarian crisis in a country battered by weeks of war.

Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir of Saudi Arabia said the cease-fire would begin at 11 p.m. Tuesday. Mr. Jubeir, who spoke at a news conference in Paris with Secretary of State John Kerry, said the success of the cease-fire was contingent on cooperation by the Houthis, the Yemeni rebel group that has been the target of a Saudi-led military offensive that began in late March.

“It is our hope and our desire that the Houthis will come to their senses,” Mr. Jubeir said. The Houthis did not react to the cease-fire proposal later on Friday. [Continue reading…]

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The new face of Israeli extremism: Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked

Ayelet Shaked -- "Angel of Death"

Ayelet Shaked — “Angel of Death”

Foreign Policy reports: Last summer, thousands of Israelis shared a Facebook post published in Hebrew by little-known right-wing lawmaker Ayelet Shaked.

An excerpt from an unpublished article written by pro-settler Uri Elitzur, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s onetime chief of staff, who passed away in May 2014, the post was published in English translation on a blog on the anti-Zionist website ElectronicIntifada.com. The author of the blog post claimed that the 631-word excerpt called Palestinian children “little snakes” and accused Palestinian mothers of raising their kids to become violent martyrs. And, the blog post said, it read as “a call for genocide” of the Palestinian people.

Shaked, at the time a junior member of the right-wing, nationalist Jewish Home party, quickly defended the post and argued that the translation was unfair, though she later removed the post from her Facebook page.

But the damage was already done. The story was soon picked up by American news outlets, and Turkey’s then prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, even used the incident as an occasion to describe her politics as no different from the Nazi Party. “What is the difference between this mentality and Hitler’s?” he said.

The episode didn’t end Shaked’s political career. Instead, it immediately raised her public profile — and her popularity among voters who share her skepticism about the intentions of the Palestinians and who fiercely oppose ceding the land necessary to create a Palestinian state.

Her rapid ascent to the highest reaches of the Israeli political system hit a new peak Wednesday, less than a year after that controversy, when the 39-year-old computer engineer and mother of two was given control of Israel’s Justice Ministry. Shaked got the post as part of a desperate last-minute deal that saved Netanyahu from a looming deadline that could have lost him his seat. [Continue reading…]

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The biggest and most embarrassing failure British polling organizations have ever had

John Lanchester writes: Hands up if you saw that one coming. I confess that I didn’t. The first line of the BBC announcement, ‘Conservatives largest party’, was no shock. Then there was a pause a few seconds long, and the projection of 316 Tory seats came up. I nearly fell off my chair. From that point on, the surprises only got bigger.

Why was it so surprising, though? If you’d asked me six weeks ago what was going to happen, I’d have said, a little reluctantly, that the likeliest outcome was a Tory minority government. From that point to an outright majority is a step, but not a gigantic one. If I’d been granted a glimpse ahead to the result, I’d have said the Tories did better and Labour worse than expected, but not amazingly, bizarrely, unforeseeably so. The thing which turned this into such a blindsiding shock was the fact that the election campaign was so flat and eventless. For six weeks, nothing happened. The numbers refused to move. Then everything happened at once. The talk in politics these days is all about ‘narrative’ and ‘momentum’, but there was almost no sign of that in this election. There was little evidence that the electorate were paying any attention. The Tory campaign worked spectacularly, but did so in a new and peculiar way: it was like a pill that the patient refuses to swallow, and holds off swallowing, and then downs all at once.

First-past-the-post is not especially fair, but it is supposed to deliver clear outcomes. In 2010, it didn’t. This time, against all expectations, it did. Lots more detail will come in over the next weeks as the data are analysed and the political scientists do their thing, but for me, a couple of things really stand out. If Labour had retained all of their 41 Scottish seats, the Tories would still be the majority government. So that must mean Labour got creamed in England, yes? Actually, no. Labour’s share of the vote in England went up by 3.6 per cent. That’s more than the Tories: their share of the English vote only went up by 1.4 per cent. Labour could even claim that they won the English campaign, in the same sense that the British army could claim it won the Charge of the Light Brigade. [Continue reading…]

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George Galloway loses his seat in Bradford West to Labour’s Naz Shah

News Statesman reports: George Galloway, the Respect party’s only MP, has lost his seat in Bradford West. He was trounced by Labour candidate Naz Shah, selected for the seat after the original candidate, Amina Ali, stood down after four days. Shah won by a majority of over 11,000, more than doubling Galloway’s result and bettering his majority in the constituency’s 2012 by-election.

Shah gained notoriety early in the campaign for an open letter explaining her motivations for standing. Shah’s mother was a victim of domestic violence who was imprisoned for murder after killing her husband, and in the letter the Labour candidate explained that her selection was “not really about me, it’s the dream of my mother”.

Shah also wrote about her own forecd marriage at age 15, which Galloway then called into question during his campaign. As Aisha Gill explained in a piece for us earlier this week:

Despite George Galloway’s success in courting female Muslim voters in Bradford in the 2012 election, he has failed to grasp the context and complexities of forced marriage, and has proven insensitive to Shah’s own history of abuse….

In many ways, the stories of Naz and Zoora Shah are reflected in the experiences of Muslim women in Britain, especially in terms of domestic violence and castigation of the victim rather than the perpetrator. I hope that the people of Bradford, including the women, will challenge the patriarchal structures deeply embedded in Bradford West and come out in droves to vote on 7 May.

Galloway is also accused of tweeting out his party’s exit poll before voting ended yesterday, which is against electoral laws, and was reported to police by Bradford Council’s returning officer. West Yorkshire Police is reviewing the incident.

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A record 38 million internally displaced worldwide as 30,000 people fled their homes each day in 2014

Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre: A record-breaking 38 million people have been displaced within their own country by conflict or violence. This is the equivalent of the total populations of London, New York and Beijing combined. “These are the worst figures for forced displacement in a generation, signalling our complete failure to protect innocent civilians” said Jan Egeland, secretary general at the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

Today, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), part of NRC, launched its Global Overview 2015: People internally displaced by conflict and violence at the United Nations in Geneva. With internal displacement figures reaching a record high for the third year in a row, the report also documents how 11 million people were newly displaced by violent events in 2014 alone.

“Global diplomats, UN resolutions, peace talks and ceasefire agreements have lost the battle against ruthless armed men who are driven by political or religious interests rather than human imperatives,” said Egeland. “This report should be a tremendous wake-up call. We must break this trend where millions of men, women and children are becoming trapped in conflict zones around the world.”

Volker Türk, UNHCR’s Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, said that the staggering number of internally displaced people because of conflict and violence is a harbinger of movements to come. “We know that more and more internally displaced have been forced to move within their country multiple times. The longer a conflict lasts, the more insecure they feel and when hopelessness sets in, many will cross borders and become refugees,” he said.

“As we have seen in the recent past, for example in the Mediterranean, despair drives people to take their chances and even risk dangerous boat journeys. The obvious solution lies in an all-out effort to bring about peace in war-ravaged countries,” Mr Türk added.

The report also highlights how long-lasting, or protracted displacement, contributes to this alarmingly high global total. In 2014, there were people living in displacement for ten years or more in nearly 90% of the 60 countries and territories IDMC monitored.

“As new or renewed crises emerge in countries such as Ukraine or Iraq, new caseloads of internally displaced people join an already massive global displaced population who seem blocked from finding ways of ending their displacement” said Alfredo Zamudio, director of IDMC.

The IDMC report also describes how displacement often reveals underlying structural challenges within a country, and how it can be prolonged by a government’s deliberate politicisation of the issue or its refusal to enter into a formal resolution of a crisis.

“38 million human beings are suffering – often in horrendous conditions where they have no hope and no future—and unless we challenge ourselves to change our approach, the shockwaves of these conflicts will continue to haunt us for decades to come,” said Egeland.

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Imbeciles in U.S. Congress threaten Earth science

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: During last fall’s midterm election campaign, “I’m not a scientist” became a standard Republican answer to questions about climate change. The line seemed to invite parody, and Stephen Colbert (among others) obliged. He played clips of House Speaker John Boehner, then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Florida Governor Rick Scott all offering, more or less word for word, the same refrain. “Everyone who denies climate change has the same stirring message,” Colbert observed. “‘We don’t know what the fuck we’re talking about.’”

The line worked — or, at least, didn’t not work — and Republicans won both houses of Congress. Now, it seems, they are trying to go one better. They are trying to prevent even scientists from being scientists.

Last week, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, headed by Texas Republican Lamar Smith, approved a bill that would slash at least three hundred million dollars from NASA’s earth-science budget. “Earth science, of course, includes climate science,” Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat who is also on the committee, noted. (Smith said that the White House’s NASA budget request favored the earth sciences “at the expense of the other science divisions and human and robotic space exploration.”) Johnson tried to get the cuts eliminated from the bill, but her proposed amendment was rejected. Defunding NASA’s earth-science program takes willed ignorance one giant leap further. It means that not only will climate studies be ignored; some potentially useful data won’t even be collected.

The vote brought howls of protest from NASA itself and from wider earth-science circles. The agency’s administrator, Charles Bolden, issued a statement saying that the bill “guts our Earth science program and threatens to set back generations worth of progress in better understanding our changing climate.” In an opinion piece for the Washington Post, Marshall Shepherd, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Georgia and the former president of the American Meteorological Association, said that he could not sleep after hearing about the vote. “None of us has a ‘vacation planet’ we can go to for the weekend, so I argue that NASA’s mission to study planet Earth should be a ‘no-brainer,’ ” he wrote. [Continue reading…]

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NSA phone records program illegal, court rules

The Guardian reports: The US court of appeals has ruled that the bulk collection of telephone metadata is unlawful, in a landmark decision that clears that way for a full legal challenge against the National Security Agency.

A panel of three federal judges for the second circuit overturned an earlier ruling that the controversial surveillance practice first revealed to the US public by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 could not be subject to judicial review.

But the judges also waded into the charged and ongoing debate over the reauthorization of a key Patriot Act provision currently before US legislators. That provision, which the appeals court ruled the NSA program surpassed, will expire on June 1 amidst gridlock in Washington on what to do about it.

The judges opted not to end the domestic bulk collection while Congress decides its fate, calling judicial inaction “a lesser intrusion” on privacy than at the time the case was initially argued. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu forms an Israeli government, with minutes to spare

The New York Times reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel barely met the legal deadline to form a new government on Wednesday night, and will start his fourth term with the slimmest of parliamentary majorities, made up of right-leaning and religious parties.

Mr. Netanyahu and his Likud Party celebrated a surprisingly strong victory in the March 17 elections after a divisive campaign, but ended up scrambling to scrape together 61 of Parliament’s 120 members into a coalition — and hold on to his premiership. He was forced to make major concessions to the more conservative Jewish Home party, and emerged weakened to lead a government that Israeli experts said was unlikely to last long or do much.

“Netanyahu simply miscalculated,” said Eytan Gilboa, a professor at Bar-Ilan University who specializes in politics and communications. “What you see here is a big political mess that, I think, shows Netanyahu has been too confident.” Of the new coalition, he added, “Nobody in his right mind believes that this will hold for even a short time.” [Continue reading…]

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After nine months of bombing ISIS targets, Pentagon admits killing two civilians

The Daily Beast reports: An internal military investigation has concluded that two civilians were killed in a U.S.-led coalition airstrike against the self-proclaimed Islamic State, two defense officials confirmed to The Daily Beast, marking the first time the U.S. military has acknowledged killing a civilian since the air campaign began nine months ago.

In that time, the U.S.-led coalition has conducted more than 3,500 strikes and either destroyed or damaged more than 6,000 targets, according to the Defense Department. Previously, the U.S. military had said it had no evidence that a civilian had ever been killed in the air campaign against ISIS, a claim that even military officials privately acknowledged was hard to believe, given the high odds of unintended mistakes.

Indeed, with no U.S. soldiers on the ground to assess the damage inflicted by airstrikes, the coalition’s air campaign is built on U.S. intelligence collected from drones, satellites, and reconnaissance aircraft, as well as information from local troops.

The findings of two civilian deaths come as one human rights group has alleged that coalition airstrikes on April 30 in the Syrian village of Bir Mahli killed as many as 64 civilians. Bir Mahli sits in Aleppo Province, east of the Euphrates River, and about 30 miles south of the northern city of Kobani. The allegation, which the U.S. military said it has no evidence to corroborate, is the highest civilian death toll accusation leveled at the coalition.

The U.S. military’s claim of no civilian casualties in its campaign against ISIS, coupled with the lack of detailed accounting of what effect the strikes are having, has only underscored the opaque nature of the battle, fought largely from the air with uncertain outcomes. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. officials say key Iraqi refinery isn’t actually all that key

Foreign Policy reports: Despite the recent focus by Iraqi and American officials on the importance of defending and holding the Iraqi oil refinery at Baiji, the Defense Department made a sharp reversal on Wednesday, claiming that the site doesn’t actually matter as they used to say.

The refinery is “not strategically any more significant than any other piece of ground” in Iraq, Defense Department spokesman Col. Steve Warren told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday.

In recent days, Islamic State fighters have breached the perimeter of the facility and established a foothold inside the refinery, though Warren declined to estimate how much ground they now hold or if the Iraqi forces inside were being reinforced or resupplied in any way.

“At this point it’s impossible to predict how this is going to turn out,” Warren said. “It’s been a tough, fluid fight [and] right now it’s flowing in the wrong direction.”

His comments represent a stark change in attitude over the fate of the facility than had been put forth by top U.S. and Iraqi officials as recently as mid-April, when Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi visited Washington.

Speaking to reporters on April 16, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey called Baiji “a more strategic target” than places like Ramadi because of the centrality of oil to the Iraqi economy. “That’s why the focus right now is in fact on Baiji,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey holds prosecutors over spy agency’s Syria-bound truck

Reuters: Turkey on Wednesday arrested four prosecutors and a gendarme officer for trying to carry out a search of Syria-bound trucks belonging to the state intelligence agency that they suspected of illegally carrying arms for rebels fighting Syria’s government.

Local media said the arrests were part of a crackdown by President Tayyip Erdogan on followers, within the judiciary and police, of a U.S.-based Islamic cleric he accuses of trying to oust him. Seventeen army officers were held last month in the same case.

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