How Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages

The Guardian reports: Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users’ communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company’s own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.

The documents show that:

• Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;

• The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;

• The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;

• Microsoft also worked with the FBI’s Data Intercept Unit to “understand” potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;

• In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;

• Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a “team sport”. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The slaughter of migrating songbirds

If there was a league table of suffering, designed to remind us of the issues that deserve the greatest share of human concern, the plight of songbirds might not come high on the list.

Yet rather than attempting to adjudicate how concern should be sliced and apportioned, maybe we should instead reflect on the insidious effects of indifference.

Looking at the world often feels like staring at a raw wound — our instincts tell us to turn away. But this turning away, quickly becomes a habit and the desire to insulate ourselves from pain ends up as a way of shutting out life.

Jonathan Franzen writes: In a bird market in the Mediterranean tourist town of Marsa Matruh, Egypt, I was inspecting cages crowded with wild turtledoves and quail when one of the birdsellers saw the disapproval in my face and called out sarcastically, in Arabic: “You Americans feel bad about the birds, but you don’t feel bad about dropping bombs on someone’s homeland.”

I could have answered that it’s possible to feel bad about both birds and bombs, that two wrongs don’t make a right. But it seemed to me that the birdseller was saying something true about the problem of nature conservation in a world of human conflict, something not so easily refuted. He kissed his fingers to suggest how good the birds tasted, and I kept frowning at the cages.

To a visitor from North America, where bird hunting is well regulated and only naughty farm boys shoot songbirds, the situation in the Mediterranean is appalling: Every year, from one end of it to the other, hundreds of millions of songbirds and larger migrants are killed for food, profit, sport, and general amusement. The killing is substantially indiscriminate, with heavy impact on species already battered by destruction or fragmentation of their breeding habitat. Mediterraneans shoot cranes, storks, and large raptors for which governments to the north have multimillion-euro conservation projects. All across Europe bird populations are in steep decline, and the slaughter in the Mediterranean is one of the causes.

Italian hunters and poachers are the most notorious; for much of the year, the woods and wetlands of rural Italy crackle with gunfire and songbird traps. The food-loving French continue to eat ortolan buntings illegally, and France’s singularly long list of huntable birds includes many struggling species of shorebirds. Songbird trapping is still widespread in parts of Spain; Maltese hunters, frustrated by a lack of native quarry, blast migrating raptors out of the sky; Cypriots harvest warblers on an industrial scale and consume them by the plateful, in defiance of the law. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Hollywood’s collusion with Hitler

Alexander C. Kafka writes: A debate is raging over Hollywood’s alleged collusion with the Nazis. At stake: the moral culpability of Jewish studio heads during cinema’s golden age.

The catalyst is a forthcoming book from Harvard University Press, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler, by the 35-year-old historian Ben Urwand. The book is still several months from publication, but emotions are running high after an early review in the online magazine Tablet, followed by an exchange of rhetorical fire in The New York Times between Urwand and Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University who this spring published his own account of the era, Hollywood and Hitler: 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press). The clash comes during a period of heightened scholarly attention to Nazi infiltration and counterinfiltration in Depression-era Los Angeles, complicating the story of Hollywood’s stance toward fascism.

Urwand’s Hollywood-Hitler focus began in 2004, when, while pursuing his doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley, he saw an interview with Budd Schulberg in which the screenwriter mentioned that in the 1930s, the head of MGM would show movies to a German consular official in LA and they’d agree on cuts. Urwand knew that anti-Nazi pictures didn’t start appearing until 1939, and he suspected that indifference or passivity couldn’t fully explain that. He smelled a dissertation topic. “It was the spark,” he says, and he spent the next nine years traveling to dozens of archives, piecing the story together.

At Sandrine’s Bistro, off Harvard Square, Urwand, a slender junior fellow in Harvard University’s Society of Fellows, sits down to lunch in short sleeves on a hot, humid day. The Sydney, Australia, native’s accent sounds as though it has been gently sanded by a decade and a half in the States. He is affably intense, no less so after a two-espresso appetizer to his gazpacho and lobster salad. The lunch is a break from sorting out his book’s index while navigating a steady stream of press calls and e-mails in English and German, although The Collaboration is not due out until October. (In response to the controversy, the press bumped up the release from mid- to early October.)

Urwand’s forthright, deadpan expression bursts intermittently into an engaging smile. Should you wish to see that smile vanish, mention Doherty. You’ll get a somber look, a mild shake of the head. Urwand won’t discuss Hollywood and Hitler specifically, only the more general “mythology,” as he puts it, of the studios’ staunch antifascism.

Yes, after the Anschluss, in March, 1938, the Munich Agreement, in September, and Kristallnacht, in November, Hollywood’s stance toward the Nazis changed, though even then, the films strangely ellipted explicitly Jewish characters. But why did it take so long for the studios to cross cinematic swords with the Führer?

For Urwand, the answer is in the archival evidence: bald complicity with the Nazis. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

As Bush was the Guantánamo president, so Obama is the drone president

Stephen Holmes writes: ‘It is not a function of not trying to take people to Guantánamo,’ the US attorney general, Eric Holder, told a Senate subcommittee on 6 June as he struggled to defend President Obama’s targeted killing programme. His ungainly syntax betrayed his acute embarrassment. He is not the only government spokesman who finds it difficult to answer questions about America’s loosing of drones onto the world.

A central thesis of Mark Mazzetti’s book is that the CIA and the Pentagon have opted to hunt and kill suspected enemies in order to avoid the extra-legal tactics of capture and interrogation adopted under Obama’s predecessor. Mazzetti returns to this charge numerous times, in a characteristically understated way: ‘With few options for detaining terror suspects, and little appetite for extensive ground operations in Somalia, killing sometimes was a far more appealing option than capturing.’ Or: ‘Killing was the preferred course of action in Somalia, and as one person involved in the mission planning put it, “We didn’t capture him because it would have been hard to find a place to put him.”’ In other words, the administration doubled-down on what look suspiciously like extrajudicial executions, faute de mieux, after shuttering Bush’s black sites and deciding not to send anyone else to Guantánamo, where approximately a third of the hundred detainees on hunger strike are receiving a macabre form of Obamacare through tubes in their noses.

Mazzetti adds, as a second unspoken and perhaps unspeakable explanation for Obama’s escalation of drone warfare, that the members of the intelligence establishment were afraid they could be held legally responsible for engaging in torture, a felony under American law. If we follow this account, Obama’s controversial ramping up of drone killings was driven in part by rumblings of rebellion at the CIA, where fear of being hung out to dry by bait-and-switch politicians is legendary. By the time Obama stepped smartly into office, the agency was apparently preoccupied by the possibility that ‘covert officers working at the CIA prisons could be prosecuted for their work.’ This dampened the interrogators’ enthusiasm for extracting information by physically and psychologically abusing their prisoners: ‘each hit the CIA took for its detention-and-interrogation programme pushed CIA leaders further to one side of a morbid calculation that the agency would be far better off killing, rather than jailing, terror suspects.’ According to John Rizzo, a career CIA lawyer, Obama officials ‘never came out and said they would start killing people because they couldn’t interrogate them, but the implication was unmistakable … Once the interrogation was gone, all that was left was the killing.’ Summarising his interviews with Rizzo and other insiders, Mazzetti concludes: ‘Armed drones, and targeted killing in general, offered a new direction for a spy agency that had begun to feel burned by its years in the detention-and-interrogation business.’

The inflammatory implication of this charge is that ‘liberal criticism’ of an unnecessarily harsh and negligently supervised but only sporadically lethal national security policy bears some responsibility for Obama’s swing towards sudden death by drones. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Obama sells ambassadorships for $1.8m per post

The Guardian reports: Barack Obama has rewarded some of his most active campaign donors with plum jobs in foreign embassies, with the average amount raised by recent or imminent appointees soaring to $1.8m per post, according to a Guardian analysis.

The practice is hardly a new feature of US politics, but career diplomats in Washington are increasingly alarmed at how it has grown. One former ambassador described it as the selling of public office.

On Tuesday, Obama’s chief money-raiser Matthew Barzun became the latest major donor to be nominated as an ambassador, when the White House put him forward as the next representative to the Court of St James’s, a sought-after posting whose plush residence comes with a garden second only in size to that of Buckingham Palace.

As campaign finance chairman, Barzun helped raise $700m to fund President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. More than $2.3m of this was raised personally by Barzun, pictured, according to party records leaked to the New York Times, even though he had only just finished a posting as ambassador to Sweden after contributing to Obama’s first campaign. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

When is a coup not a coup? When Washington says so

Jean MacKenzie writes: It hardly pays to be the head of the most powerful nation on Earth any more — just ask President Barack Obama, whose semantic tightrope-walking over Egypt is gaining him new and powerful critics, even within his own party.

His government has signaled it will carry on delivering F-16 jets and other assistance to Egypt even after the North African country’s military ousted elected President Mohamed Morsi following mass protest against the Islamist leader.

Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood supporters call this a flat out military “coup.” The Obama administration does not.

“It’s clear that the Egyptian people have spoken,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters when asked whether Washington still considered Morsi the legitimate president.

But that’s not what some US legislators are saying.

On Tuesday, Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) joined the growing chorus of lawmakers calling for Washington to restrict aid to Egypt in the wake of last week’s ouster of Morsi.

Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, was not hesitant to use the “c” word in discussing Egypt.

“It’s certainly a takeover. It’s certainly the removal of office from a sitting president, democratically elected,” Feinstein said. “It is a form of a coup. If it walks like a duck … it is.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How the deep state conspired to oust Morsi

Images of millions of Egyptians taking to the streets helped solidify the notion that June 30 triggered a democratic coup, but now it’s not just the Muslim Brotherhood which claims the remnants of the Mubarak regime engineered the uprising.

The New York Times reports: The streets seethe with protests and government ministers are on the run or in jail, but since the military ousted President Mohamed Morsi, life has somehow gotten better for many people across Egypt: Gas lines have disappeared, power cuts have stopped and the police have returned to the street.

The apparently miraculous end to the crippling energy shortages, and the re-emergence of the police, seems to show that the legions of personnel left in place after former President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011 played a significant role — intentionally or not — in undermining the overall quality of life under the Islamist administration of Mr. Morsi.

And as the interim government struggles to unite a divided nation, the Muslim Brotherhood and Mr. Morsi’s supporters say the sudden turnaround proves that their opponents conspired to make Mr. Morsi fail. Not only did police officers seem to disappear, but the state agencies responsible for providing electricity and ensuring gas supplies failed so fundamentally that gas lines and rolling blackouts fed widespread anger and frustration.

“This was preparing for the coup,” said Naser el-Farash, who served as the spokesman for the Ministry of Supply and Internal Trade under Mr. Morsi. “Different circles in the state, from the storage facilities to the cars that transport petrol products to the gas stations, all participated in creating the crisis.”

Working behind the scenes, members of the old establishment, some of them close to Mr. Mubarak and the country’s top generals, also helped finance, advise and organize those determined to topple the Islamist leadership, including Naguib Sawiris, a billionaire and an outspoken foe of the Brotherhood; Tahani El-Gebali, a former judge on the Supreme Constitutional Court who is close to the ruling generals; and Shawki al-Sayed, a legal adviser to Ahmed Shafik, Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister, who lost the presidential race to Mr. Morsi.

But it is the police returning to the streets that offers the most blatant sign that the institutions once loyal to Mr. Mubarak held back while Mr. Morsi was in power. Throughout his one-year tenure, Mr. Morsi struggled to appease the police, even alienating his own supporters rather than trying to overhaul the Interior Ministry. But as crime increased and traffic clogged roads — undermining not only the quality of life, but the economy — the police refused to deploy fully. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

A week after the coup, Egyptians ask: ‘Where’s Morsi?’

The Washington Post reports: It has been one week, and nobody knows where the former president of Egypt is. Mohamed Morsi is being detained, along with at least seven of his top aides, held incommunicado. The authorities promise, “He is in a safe place.” But safe where? They refuse to say. He has not been charged with any crime.

Authorities have issued arrest warrants for hundreds of other Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters, including the group’s spiritual leader, known as the “supreme guide.” He and nine other senior Islamist officials were accused Wednesday of provoking the violence that led Egyptian security forces to fatally shoot more than 50 pro-Morsi demonstrators Monday.

The warrants come as authorities continue to round up the top leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and its political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, which saw its hold on the presidency and several top ministries end after 368 days when Morsi’s government was ousted last week in a military coup backed by millions of Egyptians who had taken to the streets.

The mass arrests and the continued detention of Morsi and his aides are exactly the type of behavior that the Obama administration has warned Egypt’s military leadership against. But the crackdown shows how little influence Washington has been able to exert here since the generals proved they remain the nation’s preeminent force.

Morsi himself was accused of selectively using the judicial system to prosecute opponents, as was his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted in early 2011. Now human rights advocates say that Egypt’s new rulers may be doing the same. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Snowden: I never gave any information to Chinese or Russian governments

Glenn Greenwald writes: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, in an interview on Saturday and then again Tuesday afternoon, vehemently denied media claims that he gave classified information to the governments of China or Russia. He also denied assertions that one or both governments had succeeded in “draining the contents of his laptops”. “I never gave any information to either government, and they never took anything from my laptops,” he said.

The extraordinary claim that China had drained the contents of Snowden’s laptops first appeared in the New York Times in a June 24 article. The paper published the claim with no evidence and without any attribution to any identified sources.

In lieu of any evidence, the NYT circulated this obviously significant assertion by quoting what it called “two Western intelligence experts” who “worked for major government spy agencies”. Those “experts” were not identified. The article then stated that these experts “said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong” (emphasis added).

So that’s how this “China-drained-his-laptops” claim was created: by the New York Times citing two anonymous sources saying they “believed” this happened. From there, it predictably spread everywhere as truth. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Lawmakers disappointed that administration officials are habitual liers

The Washington Post reports: Lawmakers tasked with overseeing national security policy say a pattern of misleading testimony by senior Obama administration officials has weakened Congress’s ability to rein in government surveillance.

Members of Congress say officials have either denied the existence of a broad program that collects data on millions of Americans or, more commonly, made statements that left some lawmakers with the impression that the government was conducting only narrow, targeted surveillance operations.

The most recent example came on March 12, when James R. Clapper, director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the government was not collecting information about millions of Americans. He later acknowledged that the statement was “erroneous” and apologized, citing a misunderstanding.

On three occasions since 2009, top Justice Department officials said the government’s ability to collect business records in terrorism cases is generally similar to that of law enforcement officials during a grand jury investigation. That comparison, some lawmakers now say, signaled to them that data was being gathered on a case-by-case basis, rather than the records of millions of Americans’ daily communications being vacuumed up in bulk.

In addition, two Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee say that even in top-secret briefings, officials “significantly exaggerated” the effectiveness of at least one program that collected data on Americans’ e-mail usage.

The administration’s claims are being reexamined in light of disclosures by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, reported by The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, of broad government surveillance of Americans’ Internet and phone use authorized under secret interpretations of law.

At least two Republican lawmakers have called for the removal of Clapper, who denied the widespread surveillance of Americans while under questioning by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and issued his apology after the surveillance programs became public two months later.

A letter to Clapper sent two weeks ago from 26 senators from both parties complained about a series of statements from senior officials that “had the effect of misleading the public” and that will “undermine trust in government more broadly.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

What am I missing in the Snowden affair?

Richard Falk writes: I would have thought that there was a clear set of principles that make the American diplomatic pursuit of Edward Snowden as a fugitive from justice a rather empty and futile gesture. As far as I can tell, there is not even a need for asylum as governments should have been prepared to grant Snowden residence status because his alleged criminal acts in the United States were without question political crimes , without violence or monetary motivation.

I had thought it was as clear as law can be that any person who has committed a political crime should be exempted from mandatory extradition even if a treaty existed imposed a duty on its parties to hand over individuals accused of serious criminal activity. To be sure, from the perspective of the United States government, Snowden’s exposure of the PRISM surveillance program was a flagrant violation of the Espionage Act. But it was also as clearly a political crime as almost any undertaking can be. There was no violence involved or threatened, and no person can be harmed by the disclosures.

What puzzles me is why the refusal to hand Snowden over by expelling him to the United States, which is what Washington has asked Russia to do, raises any kind of serious question beyond wondering how the US government officials arrogantly made the request in the first place. As it was put to Moscow by the US government: “We expect the Russian government to look at all options available to expel Snowden to the United States to face justice for the crimes with which he is charged.”

It is also puzzling is why foreign governments do not make this simple point in response that international criminal law enforcement does not extend to political crimes even in the relation of governments friendly with one another, and there are good public policy and humanitarian reasons why such “criminals” should not be treated internationally as fugitives from justice. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The Syrian war is about politics, not theology

Robin Yassin-Kassab writes: As in Iraq, Palestine-Israel, or Northern Ireland, the conflict in Syria is not about theology but about group fears and resentments. Ultimately, it’s about power. Communal tensions are the result not of ancient enmities but of contemporary political machinations. And nothing is fixed in time. Syria’s supposedly ‘Sunni rebellion’ (which contains activists and fighters of all sects) becomes more or less Islamist in response to rapidly-changing political realities. A few months ago, for example, Islamist black flags dominated demonstrations in Raqqa, in the east of the country; now Raqqa’s demonstrations are as likely to protest Jabhat an-Nusra, the extremist militia which nominally controls the city, as the regime. This isn’t an Islamist rebellion but a popular revolution. As in Egypt, if the Islamists oppress the people or fail to deliver, they too will be revolted against.

Yet much of the rightist, leftist and liberal media choose to understand the revolution in the terms of 19th Century orientalism, as if Syrians are fated by culture or race to follow ancient, unchanging patterns. Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian of May 28th, illustrates the approach perfectly.

First he expresses the weird, counter-factual belief that Britain destroyed “secular politics” in Libya (where Islamists lost a democratic election, somewhat unexpectedly, after Qaddafi’s tyranny had given ‘secularism’ such a bad name). Then he fits Syria neatly into the Sunni-Shia box, and tells us, “these disputes are intractable… For Sunni to accept Shia and vice versa is for each to deny the faith.” His sweeping generalisation fails to account for the fact that a third of Iraqi marriages before 2003 were mixed-sect, or that non-Sunnis and secularists are fighting al-Assad, or that al-Assad’s Alawi sect was traditionally considered heretical by Shia as well as Sunni authorities.

Or take the case of Patrick Cockburn, a journalist who rightly questioned Bush-era propaganda that the War on Terror was a war for Western freedom, but who takes at face value (in the London Review of Books, June 6th) Hassan Nasrallah’s ‘conviction’ that the Syrian war is an existential one for Shia survival. The ‘existential’ excuse is at least the third justification for Hizbullah’s invasion of Syria: first it was because Syria’s was a “resistant” regime; then to defend “Lebanese citizens living in Syria”. Now comes fear of Salafist extremists, who Nasrallah pretends represent the majority of revolutionary forces. Yet Nasrallah cooperated with Jabhat an-Nusra’s Iraqi base during the American occupation. He’s worked with them before and could so again, if politics would allow him. Obviously, an easier way to solve the Salafist threat would be to support the Syrian people against their tyrant and thereby win back their devotion (because Syrian Sunnis loved Hizbullah when it was fighting an Israeli occupation). [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Edward Snowden’s leaks have caused a ‘massive shift’ In the public’s views of government surveillance

Business Insider reports: National Security Agency leak source Edward Snowden is viewed as a “whistleblower” by most Americans, and his leaks have caused a “massive shift” in public opinion against government surveillance, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll.

Snowden — who is currently seeking political asylum while holed up in Russia — is viewed as a “whistleblower” by 55% of poll respondents. Only 34% view him as a “traitor.”

But the most significant change came in the public’s view of the NSA’s surveillance programs, which Snowden exposed in a series of leaks to the Washington Post and The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.

By a 45-40 margin, voters now say that the government goes too far in restricting civil liberties in the name of anti-terrorism efforts. That’s a huge reversal from January 2010, when the public said by a 63-25 margin that the government didn’t go far enough.

“The massive swing in public opinion about civil liberties and governmental anti-terrorism efforts, and the public view that Edward Snowden is more whistle-blower than traitor are the public reaction and apparent shock at the extent to which the government has gone in trying to prevent future terrorist incidents,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac polling institute. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The slow NSA slide show

The Washington Post calls it “The NSA slide you haven’t seen” when it should have simply said “Another NSA slide you haven’t seen.”

At the current rate, the thirty-some remaining slides that Edward Snowden leaked to the Post and The Guardian will all have been published sometime towards the end of this decade.

The new report says, “A classified NSA slide obtained by The Washington Post and published here for the first time,” insinuating that this might not have come from Snowden, but if it wasn’t part of the 41-slide collection he leaked, then I would surmise this was an authorized leak. The only difference from a similar slide previously published by The Guardian is in the background image. It earlier showed the world, but now shows North America.

Perhaps the NSA feels that the revised slide will better evoke a sense that its surveillance operations target foreign communications entering the U.S. rather than functioning as a global drag net. Perhaps the NSA’s concern is that circles on each slide which could be taken to identify data collection points, should not point to locations in South America, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean, but instead to the Eastern and Western United States.

Either way, I suspect the Post published this slide at the behest of the NSA.

Facebooktwittermail

Egypt orders arrest of top Muslim Brotherhood officials

The Washington Post reports: Egypt’s top prosecutor has ordered the arrest of the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader and nine other top Islamist officials for allegedly instigating violence that led to the killing of more than 50 demonstrators Monday.

The arrest warrants issued Wednesday for Brotherhood supreme guide Mohammed Badie and the others came a day after interim President Adly Mansour appointed a prime minister and vice president, moves designed to lend an air of normalcy to the country even as indications mounted that the president is little more than a civilian face for military rule. Mansour also has outlined a path to quick elections and a return to democracy after the July 3 coup that overthrew Egypt’s first freely elected president, Mohamed Morsi.

Mansour’s plan was quickly condemned by Morsi’s supporters in the Brotherhood. It elicited a lukewarm response, at best, from key players in the loose alliance of politicians and activists who had lobbied for Morsi’s ouster.

The National Salvation Front, an umbrella group representing Morsi’s political opponents, said Wednesday that it did not agree with all of the road map’s plans — but stopped short of outright rejection.

The Tamarod, or “rebel,” group, also central to the anti-Morsi movement, said it had not been consulted on the plan but was proposing changes for Mansour to consider. The decree provides for few independent checks on the president’s power until a constitutional referendum and elections, which it calls for within six months. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Egypt showered with Gulf billions in show of support for army

Reuters reports: Gulf states showered Cairo with $8 billion in aid on Tuesday, showing their support for the Egyptian army’s move to push the Muslim Brotherhood from power, a day after troops killed dozens of the movement’s supporters.

Military-backed interim head of state Adli Mansour named a liberal economist as acting prime minister and announced a faster-than-expected timetable for elections in six months.

Mansour’s army backers are under pressure to plot a path back to democracy less than a week after they overthrew Egypt’s first freely elected president, the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Mursi.

The country is now more divided than ever in its modern history after 55 people were killed when troops opened fire on Brotherhood supporters in the capital. The movement says the victims were praying in peace; the government blames the Islamists for provoking the violence by attacking the soldiers.

Mansour, a judge installed as acting president when the military removed Mursi, named Hazem el-Beblawi as interim prime minister. He served briefly as finance minister in 2011. Former U.N. diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei, now a liberal party leader, is to be deputy president responsible for foreign affairs.

Importantly, the choice of Beblawi won the acceptance of the ultra-orthodox Islamist Nour Party – sometime ally of Mursi and the Brotherhood. Nour leaders have been courted by the interim authorities to show that Islamists need not be marginalized. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

A brand-new U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan. And nobody to use it

The Washington Post reports: The U.S. military has erected a 64,000-square-foot headquarters building on the dusty moonscape of southwestern Afghanistan that comes with all the tools to wage a modern war. A vast operations center with tiered seating. A briefing theater. Spacious offices. Fancy chairs. Powerful air conditioning.

Everything, that is, except troops.

The windowless, two-story structure, which is larger than a football field, was completed this year at a cost of $34 million. But the military has no plans to ever use it. Commanders in the area, who insisted three years ago that they did not need the building, now are in the process of withdrawing forces and see no reason to move into the new facility.

For many senior officers, the unused headquarters has come to symbolize the staggering cost of Pentagon mismanagement: As American troops pack up to return home, U.S.-funded contractors are placing the finishing touches on projects that are no longer required or pulling the plug after investing millions of dollars.

In Kandahar province, the U.S. military recently completed a $45 million facility to repair armored vehicles and other complex pieces of equipment. The space is now being used as a staging ground to sort through equipment that is being shipped out of the country.

In northern Afghanistan, the State Department last year abandoned plans to occupy a large building it had intended to use as a consulate. After spending more than $80 million and signing a 10-year lease, officials determined the facility was too vulnerable to attacks. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Washington Post still acting out. Time to seek counselling?

Ever since the Edward Snowden story slipped out of Barton Gellman’s grasp and The Guardian started running with it for every dollar its worth, the Washington Post has struggled to contain its rage.

Last week under the churlish headline, “The Guardian: Small British paper makes big impact with NSA stories,” Paul Farhi set the tone by referring to the Post’s competitor as “a newspaper that’s small and underweight even by British standards”.

Now, veteran reporter Walter Pincus joins the fray in a column that presents a string of supposedly challenging questions directed at The Guardian and more specifically at Glenn Greenwald.

The only question Pincus fails to ask is: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?”

What both Pincus’ and Farhi’s pieces seem to reveal is ferment inside the newsroom — as though in each case reporters and editors fooled each other into believing that their unrestrained contempt for The Guardian would shine light on the dubious nature of their British counterpart. Instead, all they reveal is the American newspaper’s desperate and unseemly effort to reclaim lost status.

For a paper that views itself as a pillar of the Washington political establishment, its reporters need to compose themselves a bit better and perhaps do a few breathing exercises before they write.

Glenn Greenwald, on the other hand, can be relied on to continue with his breathing exercises as he writes:

On Monday night – roughly 36 hours ago from this moment – the Washington Post published an article by its long-time reporter Walter Pincus. The article concocted a frenzied and inane conspiracy theory: that it was WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, working in secret with myself and Laura Poitras, who masterminded the Snowden leaks ahead of time and directed Snowden’s behavior, and then Assange, rather than have WikiLeaks publish the documents itself, generously directed them to the Guardian.

To peddle this tale, Pincus, in lieu of any evidence, spouted all sorts of accusatory innuendo masquerading as questions (“Did Edward Snowden decide on his own to seek out journalists and then a job at Booz Allen Hamilton’s Hawaii facility?” – “Did Assange and WikiLeaks personnel help or direct Snowden to those journalists?” – “Was he encouraged or directed by WikiLeaks personnel or others to take the job as part of a broader plan to expose NSA operations to selected journalists?”) and invoked classic guilt-by association techniques (“Poitras and Greenwald are well-known free-speech activists, with many prior connections, including as founding members in December of the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation” – “Poitras and Greenwald have had close connections with Assange and WikiLeaks”).

Apparently, the Washington Post has decided to weigh in on the ongoing debate over “what is journalism?” with this answer: you fill up articles on topics you don’t know the first thing about with nothing but idle speculation, rank innuendo, and evidence-free accusations, all under the guise of “just asking questions”. You then strongly imply that other journalists who have actually broken a big story are involved in a rampant criminal conspiracy without bothering even to ask them about it first, all while hiding from your readers the fact that they have repeatedly and in great detail addressed the very “questions” you’re posing.

But shoddy journalism from the Washington Post is far too common to be worth noting. What was far worse was that Pincus’ wild conspiracy theorizing was accomplished only by asserting blatant, easily demonstrated falsehoods. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail