Egypt’s rulers declare ‘one month’ state of emergency

Is this the sign that Egypt’s experiment with democracy is well and truly over?

Al Jazeera reports: A state of emergency has been declared across Egypt, as security forces and supporters of deposed president Mohamed Morsi continue to clash around the country.

The announcement on Wednesday came amid a deadly crackdown by security forces on two pro-Morsi protest camps in Cairo.

The health ministry said at least 149 people had been killed in clashes around the country, but some members of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood said the death toll was much higher.

Is the United States about to take any punitive measures against Egypt’s military rulers? Not likely. President Obama is “monitoring what’s happening” — translation: he has no intention of taking any action.

The Wall Street Journal reports: The White House once again called for “restraint” in Egypt and said the administration opposes the state-of-emergency law and continues to review U.S. aid to the country.

“The United States strongly condemns the use of violence against protesters in Egypt,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Wednesday. “The violence will only make it more difficult to move Egypt forward.”

Mr. Earnest said the U.S. will hold the interim government accountable for its promise to speed up the transition to a democratic government. Senior U.S. officials are in touch with their counterparts in Egypt, he said.

“The world is watching what’s happening in Cairo,” Mr. Earnest said, adding that U.S. officials are still trying to determine the specifics of events.

President Barack Obama, on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, was briefed Wednesday morning on developments by National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

“He is closely monitoring what’s happening,” Mr. Earnest said.

Facebooktwittermail

Egypt security forces launch deadly assault to crush Cairo protests


The Guardian: Egyptian security forces have launched a deadly assault on protest sites backing the ousted president Mohamed Morsi, clearing one and besieging another.

The crackdown on Wednesday has left scores of people dead and many more wounded, and has sparked clashes in other parts of the country.

The dawn raids in Cairo at the sites on either side of the Nile came after two weeks of ever more bellicose warnings from the military-led government that replaced Morsi after he was toppled almost six weeks ago.

Sky News cameraman Mick Deane has been shot and killed in Egypt this morning. Mick had worked for Sky for 15 years, based in Washington and then Jerusalem.

Facebooktwittermail

Egypt’s military will not get away with human rights abuses

Michael Mansfield and Tayab Ali write: Just over a year ago, Egypt threw off the shackles of its military dictatorship and took on the mantle of a civil democracy, becoming for a short period, the torchbearer of liberty and equality throughout the Arab world. On 24 June 2012, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party won the country’s first contested election. It was the first time that an Egyptian president had been freely elected from outside of the military establishment.

By 3 July 2013, President Morsi had been ousted in a coup d’etat. The uprising against the previous Mubarak regime resulted in the free and fair election of President Morsi – a new dawn of democracy and human rights for Egypt. The current spate of protests have seen the rapid destruction of that new promise and an excuse for the military to regain control.

The immediate aftermath of the July coup reminds us what Egypt is without its democracy and that cannot have been what the many who were angry at President Morsi’s government had in mind when they chose to (and were allowed to) vocalise their discontent in street protests.

Everyone in Egypt should now be concerned about the legality and consequences of the military overturning its first democratically elected government. Whatever the stated justification, disenchantment with a democratically elected leader cannot legitimise the use of force and should never be used to remove a democratically elected government.

We can see where Egypt has descended to in the aftermath of the coup. The new military-installed regime does not appear to be interested in safeguarding Egypt’s democracy. The hallmarks of a democratic state have vanished almost immediately. Morsi has been detained in a secret location along with much of his administration. Suddenly dubious and historic criminal charges have surfaced and been levelled against them. So far these detainees have not had access to their families or legal teams. How they are being treated is anyone’s guess. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

America’s global ‘stop and frisk’ operations

Stephen Walt writes: Here in the United States, federal judge Shira Scheindlin has ruled that New York City’s “stop and frisk” policy is in fact a form of racial profiling that violates basic constitutional rights. According to the New York Times editorial:

“Under the Fourth Amendment, police officers can legally stop and detain a person only when they have a reasonable suspicion that the person is committing, has committed or is about to commit a crime. Over the years, however, the Police Department has adopted a strategy that encourages cops to stop and question mainly minority citizens first and to come up with reasons for having done so later.”

I read this story and immediately thought about the similarities to certain aspects of U.S. foreign and national security policies. “Stop and frisk” is essentially an act of preemption or prevention: The suspect hasn’t committed a crime, but the police go after the person on the basis of the thinnest of suspicions, like a bulging pocket or the loosely defined “furtive gestures.”

Now think about the United States’ use of drones or special operations forces to conduct “targeted assassinations” of suspected terrorists. In many cases, U.S. officials have some reason to think somebody might be planning a terrorist operation, but the person isn’t actually doing it when officials decide to take the individual out. Notice that this policy goes way beyond mere “stop and frisk”: If the United States can’t apprehend someone it thinks might be dangerous, these days it just blows the person away and calls the individual a “suspected terrorist” afterward. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Hiroshima, Nagasaki and ‘bomb Iran’

Marsha B Cohen writes: Last week marked the 68th anniversary of the WWII destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (Aug. 6) and Nagasaki (Aug. 9) — the first and only deployment of nuclear weapons in human history. Within moments of the nuclear explosions that destroyed these cities, at least 200,000 people lost their lives. Tens of thousands subsequently died from radiation poisoning within the next two weeks. The effects linger to this day.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has implied that this would the be fate of Israel if Iran was allowed to obtain nuclear weapon-making capabilities, including the ability to enrich high-grade uranium. To prevent this from happening, the economy of Iran must be crippled by sanctions and the fourth largest oil reserves in the world must be barred from global markets, as the oil fields in which they are situated deteriorate. Israel — the only state in the region that actually possesses nuclear weapons and has blocked all efforts to create a Middle East Nuclear Weapon Free Zone – should thus be armed with cutting-edge American weaponry. Finally, the US must not only stand behind its sole reliable Middle East ally, which could strike Iran at will, it should ideally also lead — not merely condone — a military assault against Iranian nuclear facilities.

Netanyahu invariably frames the threat posed by Iranian nuclear capability (a term that blurs distinctions between civilian and potential military applications of nuclear technology) as “Auschwitz” rather than “Hiroshima and Nagasaki”, even though the latter might be a more apt analogy. The potential for another Auschwitz is predicated on the image of an Israel that is unable — or unwilling to — defend itself, resulting in six million Jews going “like sheep to the slaughter.” But if Israel and/or the US were to attack Iran instead of the other way around, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki” would be the analogy to apply to Iran. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Obama’s vision of good governance: that which warrants no scrutiny

In recent days Barack Obama has made it clear how he views his job — and that of the whole United States government. It’s effectiveness hinges on public trust, which is to say, if government is doing its job, ordinary Americans can forget about it and get on with their lives, confident that those who have been entrusted to govern can do so even if we don’t know what they are doing. Transparency is necessary only in so far as it serves to dissipate mistrust.

The information leaked by Edward Snowden has had the effect of diminishing trust in government and so the solution to that problem is anything that will elevate trust. Obama however can’t even acknowledge that trust has been severely undermined — most notably by the habit that he and his top officials have of lying — and so he now talks about the need to “maintain the public trust.”

In Obama’s memorandum initiating a review of U.S. surveillance programs and in DNI Clapper’s follow-up, not a single word is mentioned on the issues of civil liberties and the right to privacy.

Obama might as well have said: “We’re going to do whatever it takes for you folks to stop worrying yourselves and let us carry on with our work, uninterrupted. After all, it’s summertime. Shouldn’t you be out enjoying the sun?”

Facebooktwittermail

What NSA reforms?

Eugene Robinson writes: President Obama’s message about the government’s massive electronic surveillance programs came through loud and clear: Get over it.

The president used more soothing words in his pre-vacation news conference Friday, but that was the gist. With perhaps the application of a fig leaf here and a sheen of legalistic mumbo jumbo there, the snooping will continue.

Unless, of course, we demand that it end.

The modest reforms Obama proposed do not begin to address the fundamental question of whether we want the National Security Agency to log all of our phone calls and read at least some of our e-mails, relying on secret judicial orders from a secret court for permission. The president indicated he is willing to discuss how all this is done — but not whether.

“It’s not enough for me, as president, to have confidence in these programs. The American people need to have confidence in them as well,” Obama said. But if this is truly what he believes, he should have kicked off this confidence-building debate years ago, long before former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden blew the whistle.

Snowden’s disclosures do look increasingly like whistle-blowing, by the way, rather than espionage or treason. If administration officials really welcome the discussion we are now having, shouldn’t they thank Snowden rather than label him an enemy of the state? [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How much data the NSA really gets

Jeff Jarvis writes: Fear not, says the NSA, we “touch” only 1.6% of daily internet traffic. If, as they say, the net carries 1,826 petabytes of information per day, then the NSA “touches” about 29 petabytes a day. They don’t say what “touch” means. Ingest? Store? Analyze?

For context, Google in 2010 said it had indexed only 0.004% of the data on the net. So, by inference from the percentages, does that mean that the NSA is equal to 400 Googles?

Seven petabytes of photos are added to Facebook each month. That’s .23 petabytes per day. So that means the NSA is 126 Facebooks. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Greenwald ditches plan for Snowden interview — ‘it would be used just as crass entertainment’

The Washington Post reports: Glenn Greenwald, one of two reporters to disclose the existence of a massive National Security Agency surveillance program, has held preliminary talks with American TV networks to conduct an interview with his chief source, fugitive leaker Edward Snowden.

Greenwald said Monday night that he decided not to do the interview, despite discussing a licensing fee of up to $50,000 for landing an interview with Snowden.

An interview with Snowden would be a major coup for any news outlet, but few journalists have access to the 30-year-old former government contractor, who fled the United States and has been granted asylum in Russia.

Greenwald, who works for the Guardian newspaper, is one of the few journalists who conceivably could land such an interview. Snowden contacted him anonymously earlier this year, and they built a relationship that led him to disclose details of the NSA’s massive and secret data-collection program known as PRISM.

Snowden also contacted Barton Gellman, who reported on the PRISM program for The Washington Post. Gellman’s Post story was published a few minutes before Greenwald and the Guardian released their own.

Greenwald said via e-mail that he spoke with NBC, and “very preliminarily” with ABC, about a Snowden interview.

He wrote: “The reason we didn’t do it is three-fold: 1) I don’t want to distract attention away from NSA spying and the substance of the disclosures by re-focusing attention on Snowden; 2) Snowden agreed with my suggestion that doing an interview at this time was not productive for the same reason: he wants media attention on NSA spying, not on himself; and 3) I saw no real value in the interview — it would be used just as crass entertainment — and so didn’t want to be involved right now.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Military rule advances throughout Egypt

Reuters reports: Egypt’s interim president named at least 18 new provincial governors on Tuesday, half of them retired generals, in a shake-up that restored the influence of men from army and police backgrounds and flushed out Muslim Brotherhood members.

Deposed President Mohamed Mursi had appointed a number of civilians as provincial governors during his one year in office. Many of them were members of the Brotherhood. That marked a break with the Hosni Mubarak era, when the posts typically went to retired army and police officers.

The new appointees were sworn in by interim President Adli Mansour, head of the army-backed government which replaced the Mursi administration that was removed from power last month after mass protests against Brotherhood rule.

Critics said the line-up announced on Tuesday was a step backwards.

“It is Mubarak’s days,” prominent blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah wrote on his Twitter feed. “Down down with every Mubarak. Sisi is Mubarak,” he added, referring to General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the army chief who deposed Mursi.

Facebooktwittermail

Israel builds new settlement to host Palestinian peace talks

As part of their continuing efforts to bring peace to the conflict-stricken region, Israeli government officials announced today the construction of a new settlement on Palestinian lands where future peace talks can be held. “After years of failed diplomacy, it has become clear that we need to make a fresh start, and what better way to do so than by appropriating a small amount of Palestinian territory where Israeli citizens can live and negotiators from both sides can talk about a peaceful way forward?” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, referring to the civilian Jewish community that will be constructed in place of multiple razed city blocks in the West Bank. “With this new settlement in place, I believe that our prospects of peace and unity will be brighter than ever. In fact, we should build more settlements so there can be even more places to negotiate.” Netanyahu noted that any individuals currently living on the future site of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have exactly 36 hours to leave before they are forcibly removed.

OK. In case you hadn’t already guessed: this comes from The Onion. But is the real news any less farcical?

Facebooktwittermail

Not anymore: A story of Syria’s revolution

Business Insider: One key thing has been lost amidst reports of foreign fighters and al-Qaeda-affiliated rebels fighting in the Syrian civil war: the revolution began with an Arab Spring “Day of Rage” on March 15, 2011, when a group of 200 mostly young protesters gathered in the Syrian capital of Damascus to demand democratic reforms and the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad.

American Matthew Van Dyke, a self-described “freedom fighter” who gives a new definition to the term “combat journalist,” has not forgotten that fact.

The 34-year-old documentary filmmaker, who arrived in Aleppo in October after helping Libyan rebels topple ruler Muammar Qaddafi, has produced a mini-documentary titled “Not Anymore: A Story Of Revolution.”

The 14-minute short — which will be screened at film festivals this summer — details Syria’s struggle for freedom as experienced by a 32-year-old rebel fighter and a 24-year-old female journalist in Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city.

Facebooktwittermail

Majid Rafizadeh interviewed on Syria

PolicyMic: Sarah Browne (SB): What does the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt mean to Syria and why is Asaad in celebration?

Majid Rafizadeh (MR): From Assad’s perspective, he is fighting radical Islamic and fundamentalist groups associated with the Muslim brotherhood and Al-Qaeda. Assad’s regime claims that it struggles to defeat these Islamist groups which want to take over the country and the region. In addition, Assad and his people repeatedly point out that political Islam and the Islamists can not govern a country efficiently. As a result, the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood was viewed as strong evidence and proof for Assad’s claims. In other words, from Assad’s perspective, the fall of Morsi and his party buttressed his long-held opinion that political Islam is a failure.

Furthermore, we should not forget that Assad’s regime has been at odds with the Muslim Brotherhood since 1970, when Hafez Al-Assad, father of Bashar Al-Assad, came to power. The 1982 massacre in Hama which was committed by the Assad regime obliterated the Muslim Brotherhood operation in Syria. However, they came back since the uprising erupted. Secondly, the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt has been siding with Gulf states (including Saudi Arabia and Qatar) to support the rebels. Morsi harshly criticized the Alawite sect of Assad. The Muslim Brotherhood backs the rebels and anti-Assad groups. Therefore, the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi was also viewed as another victory for Assad’s regime.

SB: Does it seem likely that Syrian terror groups could obtain chemical weapons and if so, how will that affect the rest of the world?

MR: At this point, it is difficult to argue that the rebels or other Islamist groups who are fighting Assad will have access to chemical weapon anytime soon. The regime has been moving around the chemical weapons and they have been obscuring their places. In addition, the rebels and Islamists groups do not possess the technological capabilities of creating chemical weapons at this point. However, if chemical weapons fall in the hands of anti-Assad groups, including the rebels, Free Syrian Army, and Al Qaeda-linked groups such as Jubhat Alnusra, we might see immediate international intervention to neutralize the chemical weapons, or the region will face a larger conflagration.

SB: What will become of Syrian refugees?

MR: The refugees situation is tragic and the scope and the servity of the crisis is unprecedented since the Rwandan genocide. Even António Guterres, the head of the United Nations refugee agency, who expressed growing alarm, told the Security Council that the pace at which the Syrians’ are fleeing their country is the worst since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The United Nations has estimated that there are approximaetly 2.5 million Syrian refugees registered and there could be as many as three million refugees by the end of the year. In addition, around one fourth of the population has been internally dispalced. More than five million of Syria’s 23 million citizens have been forced from their homes. Aid groups estimate that there are 1.6 million school-age children among the refugees from Syria’s civil war. Sixty percent of the camp’s population is under 17, and they are in need of basic education and food. One in three Syrians are in “desperate” need for basic needs such water, food, blanket and shetlter. I think as the war continues, the situtaion of the Syrian refugees will deteriorate and the United Nations will find it harder and harder to address the basic needs of millions of refugees. This can have tremendous negative consequences on the physical and psychological health of not only millions of children but the global health, as well as on the the education, of millions of children and security of the region. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

After Guantánamo, another injustice

John Grisham writes: About two months ago I learned that some of my books had been banned at Guantánamo Bay. Apparently detainees were requesting them, and their lawyers were delivering them to the prison, but they were not being allowed in because of “impermissible content.”

I became curious and tracked down a detainee who enjoys my books. His name is Nabil Hadjarab, and he is a 34-year-old Algerian who grew up in France. He learned to speak French before he learned to speak Arabic. He has close family and friends in France, but not in Algeria. As a kid growing up near Lyon, he was a gifted soccer player and dreamed of playing for Paris St.-Germain, or another top French club.

Tragically for Nabil, he has spent the past 11 years as a prisoner at Guantánamo, much of the time in solitary confinement. Starting in February, he participated in a hunger strike, which led to his being force-fed.

For reasons that had nothing to do with terror, war or criminal behavior, Nabil was living peacefully in an Algerian guesthouse in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Sept. 11, 2001. Following the United States invasion, word spread among the Arab communities that the Afghan Northern Alliance was rounding up and killing foreign Arabs. Nabil and many others headed for Pakistan in a desperate effort to escape the danger. En route, he said, he was wounded in a bombing raid and woke up in a hospital in Jalalabad.

At that time, the United States was throwing money at anyone who could deliver an out-of-town Arab found in the region. Nabil was sold to the United States for a bounty of $5,000 and taken to an underground prison in Kabul. There he experienced torture for the first time. To house the prisoners of its war on terror, the United States military put up a makeshift prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Bagram would quickly become notorious, and make Guantánamo look like a church camp. When Nabil arrived there in January 2002, as one of the first prisoners, there were no walls, only razor-wire cages. In the bitter cold, Nabil was forced to sleep on concrete floors without cover. Food and water were scarce. To and from his frequent interrogations, Nabil was beaten by United States soldiers and dragged up and down concrete stairs. Other prisoners died. After a month in Bagram, Nabil was transferred to a prison at Kandahar, where the abuse continued. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Surge of brain activity may explain near-death experience, study says

The Washington Post reports: It’s called a near-death experience, but the emphasis is on “near.” The heart stops, you feel yourself float up and out of your body. You glide toward the entrance of a tunnel, and a searing bright light envelops your field of vision.

It could be the afterlife, as many people who have come close to dying have asserted. But a new study says it might well be a show created by the brain, which is still very much alive. When the heart stops, neurons in the brain appeared to communicate at an even higher level than normal, perhaps setting off the last picture show, packed with special effects.

“A lot of people believed that what they saw was heaven,” said lead researcher and neurologist Jimo Borjigin. “Science hadn’t given them a convincing alternative.”

Scientists from the University of Michigan recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) signals in nine anesthetized rats after inducing cardiac arrest. Within the first 30 seconds after the heart had stopped, all the mammals displayed a surge of highly synchronized brain activity that had features associated with consciousness and visual activation. The burst of electrical patterns even exceeded levels seen during a normal, awake state.

In other words, they may have been having the rodent version of a near-death experience. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Loser in Mali presidential race vows to create opposition

Reuters reports: Soumaila Cisse, loser in Mali’s presidential elections, vowed on Tuesday that he would build the country’s first proper opposition in years, as Malians applauded his concession to Ibrahim Boubacar Keita which dispelled fears of fresh conflict.

Cisse conceded defeat late on Monday as it became clear that former prime minister Keita had swept Sunday’s second round vote. Keita has promised to restore the pride of a nation riven by a military coup and an Islamist revolt last year.

On the streets of the riverside capital Bamako, residents heaped praise on Cisse’s gesture, which avoided a potentially lengthy and acrimonious battle in a country already weary of turmoil.

Television showed Cisse going in person with his wife and children to congratulate Keita and his family at their home.

“Soumaila’s conduct was truly impeccable,” said Aissata Camara, a pharmacy lab technician. “It was very impressive and very democratic as well. It was a relief for all of us.”

Facebooktwittermail

Obama tries to restore people’s trust by appointing a liar to review surveillance programs

TechDirt: Well, this is rather incredible. Remember on Friday how one of President Obama’s efforts to get people to trust the government more concerning the NSA’s surveillance efforts was to create an “outside” and “independent” board to review it all? Specifically, he said:

Fourth, we’re forming a high-level group of outside experts to review our entire intelligence and communications technologies. We need new thinking for a new era. We now have to unravel terrorist plots by finding a needle in the haystack of global telecommunications. And meanwhile, technology has given governments — including our own — unprecedented capability to monitor communications.

So I am tasking this independent group to step back and review our capabilities — particularly our surveillance technologies. And they’ll consider how we can maintain the trust of the people, how we can make sure that there absolutely is no abuse in terms of how these surveillance technologies are used, ask how surveillance impacts our foreign policy — particularly in an age when more and more information is becoming public. And they will provide an interim report in 60 days and a final report by the end of this year, so that we can move forward with a better understanding of how these programs impact our security, our privacy, and our foreign policy.

Okay. Outside, independent. Sure, that might help. Except, that was Friday. Today is Monday. And, on Monday we learn that “outside” and “independent” actually means setup by Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper — the same guy who has already admitted to lying to Congress about the program, and has received no punishment for doing so. This is independent? From this we’re supposed to expect real oversight?!? [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail