Unpromised land: Eritrean refugees in Israel

P.J. Tobia writes: In 2006, 1,348 Eritreans who fled their government crossed the border from Egypt’s Sinai into Israel. By 2011, that number had grown to 17,175, with nearly a thousand crossing the Sinai to Israel every month, according to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Israeli government. Today, there are roughly 35,895 Eritreans living in Israel, as well as 15,210 Sudanese. Since 2006, some 60,000 African refugees from these countries and others have come to Israel in this way.

Rhuba arrived in Israel as many migrants do, after having fled Eritrea because of its despotic leadership, universal conscription and endemic poverty. The journey is a perilous gamble. Eritrean migrants travel hundreds of miles over land, some on foot. The threat of kidnap and torture at the hands of Bedouins who control the Sinai — which most refugees cross to get to Israel from Africa — is ever present.

According to the U.N., many do not survive the journey. Those who do are not always looking to reside permanently in the Jewish state, according to Israeli NGOs and the refugees themselves. But upon arrival in Israel, instead of refuge, many face antagonism, bitterness and a government policy that makes life closer to prison than the promised land.

They are rarely granted work permits. They have little access to health care, and few can afford decent housing. There are few schools for their children. And now, due to an immigration law effective on June 3, 2012, every migrant who crosses the border is imprisoned for a minimum of three years. Some may be held indefinitely.

Many of the migrants say they mistrust the police, while the lack of work visas forces residents such as Rhuba into unfortunate arrangements with landlords who gouge, and employers who sometimes take advantage.

“We are free,” one Eritrean in Tel Aviv told me, “but only to breathe.”

Those who arrived here before last summer believe that it is only a matter of time before they, too, are imprisoned under the new law. For a time, the government offered those who voluntarily turn themselves into immigration authorities 1,000 Euros and a plane ticket out of Israel.

Those who don’t want to leave, are worried.

“We don’t know what will happen tomorrow for us,” says Zebib Sultan, 30. “We are at risk. We are suspended like oil on the water.”

At a protest rally last May, Miri Regev, a member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, said that the immigrants were “a cancer” on Israeli society. Another parliament member called them “a plague.” Protesters waved signs reading “Tel Aviv — a Refugee camp,” while yelling “Blacks out!” [Continue reading…]

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Rouhani win could bring dividends in Syria

Barbara Slavin writes: Since the surprise election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s next president, most expert commentary has focused on the potential to improve US-Iran relations and resolve the long-running dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. However, the replacement of the abrasive Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by a veteran negotiator nicknamed the ‘diplomat sheikh’ could also provide an opportunity to ease growing sectarian tension in the region and to tamp down the civil war in Syria.

During the sixteen years (1989-2005) Rouhani served as secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s relations with Saudi Arabia improved from the low points of the 1979 revolution and the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. At his first news conference as president-elect on Monday, June 17, Rouhani noted that he had signed a security agreement with the Saudis in 1998 and suggested that repairing the breach with the House of Saud would be a major priority for his administration.

Iran intends to have “friendly and close relations” with neighboring states, especially Saudi Arabia, Rouhani said. In regard to Saudi Arabia–a principal backer of opposition forces battling the Iran-supported Assad regime–Rouhani added, “We are not only neighbors but brothers.”

In the past, both Saudi Arabia and the United States have rejected Iranian participation in Syria peace talks but that attitude may shift with Rouhani in the presidency. Saudi King Abdullah was quick to congratulate Rouhani on his victory.

France, which had vehemently opposed Iran’s presence at a proposed Geneva conference, also appears to have softened its view. “My position is that if he [Rouhani] can be useful, yes, he would be welcome” at the conference, French President Francois Hollande said Tuesday at the G-8 summit in Northern Ireland, Agence France Press reported.

Russia–Bashar al-Assad’s other principal backer–has insisted that Iran attend any new talks. President Barack Obama’s administration, after first opposing this, has waffled, noting that the invitations will come from the United Nations (UN), as though the United States had no say in the matter. [Continue reading…]

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In Syrian chemical weapons claim, criticism about lack of transparency

The Washington Post reports: Despite months of laboratory testing and scrutiny by top U.S. scientists, the Obama administration’s case for arming Syria’s rebels rests on unverifiable claims that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own people, according to diplomats and experts.

The United States, Britain and France have supplied the United Nations with a trove of evidence, including multiple blood, tissue and soil samples, that U.S. officials say proves that Syrian troops used the nerve agent sarin on the battlefield. But the nature of the physical evidence — as well as the secrecy over how it was collected and analyzed — has opened the administration to criticism by independent experts, who say there is no reliable way to assess its authenticity.

The technical data presented by the three Western powers is of limited value to U.N. inspectors trying to determine whether
Syria’s combatants used chemical weapons during the country’s 25-month-old conflict. Under the United Nations’ terms of reference, only evidence personally collected by its inspectors can be used to fashion a final judgment.

But no inspectors have been allowed inside Syria, so Western governments have relied on physical evidence smuggled out of the country by rebels or intelligence operatives. Precisely who acquired the evidence and what methods were used to guard against tampering may be unknowable, according to experts experienced at investigating chemical weapons claims. [Continue reading…]

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America on drugs

Language can only ever reflect reality imperfectly, but there often times when the discordance between words and some semblance of truth is so extreme that the words we use become the primary obstacle to accurately perceiving the way things are.

Take the word health. The first meaning in the dictionary is: “the condition of being sound in body, mind, or spirit; especially: freedom from physical disease or pain.”

So-called healthcare providers might say that they are dealing with health in the neutral sense, which is to say “the general condition of the body.” Yet health in this sense is possessed by anyone who is alive, so to provide health care must surely have the objective of restoring or maintaining good health.

The healthcare business does no such thing. How can I say this so emphatically? The numbers are unambiguous: nearly 70 percent of Americans take one prescription drug and more than 50 percent take two. Overwhelmingly, these are not drugs that restore health; their most common purpose is to control disease and suppress symptoms. As a consequence, America has become a chronically sick nation hooked on pharmaceuticals.

America’s appetite for prescription drugs is not far removed from its hunger for street drugs as each with equally inadequate effect strives to stem the same affliction: unhappiness. For instance, among women between the ages of 50 to 64, one in four take antidepressants.

A few years ago, Richard Rodriquez wrote:

Who in America is asking, “Why?” Why are Americans so sad?

We need drugs to escape loneliness. We need drugs to tolerate company. We need drugs to feel and drugs to keep from feeling. We need drugs to fall asleep and drugs to get out of bed. Why?

Corporate drug-pushers have little interest in posing the question and even less in finding the answer.

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How the meat industry mirrors Obama in its war on whistleblowers

Ted Genoways writes: Shawn Lyons was dead to rights — and he knew it. More than a month had passed since People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had released a video of savage mistreatment at the MowMar Farms hog confinement facility where he worked as an entry-level herdsman in the breeding room. The three enormous sow barns in rural Greene County, Iowa, were less than five years old and, until recently, had raised few concerns. They seemed well ventilated and well supplied with water from giant holding tanks. Their tightly tacked steel siding always gleamed white in the sun. But the PETA hidden-camera footage shot by two undercover activists over a period of months in the summer of 2008, following up on a tip from a former employee, showed a harsh reality concealed inside.

The recordings caught one senior worker beating a sow repeatedly on the back with a metal gate rod, a supervisor turning an electric prod on a sow too crippled to stand, another worker shoving a herding cane into a sow’s vagina. In one close-up, a distressed sow who’d been attacking her piglets was shown with her face royal blue from the Prima Tech marking dye sprayed into her nostrils “to get the animal high.” In perhaps the most disturbing sequence, a worker demonstrated the method for eutha­nizing underweight piglets: taking them by the hind legs and smashing their skulls against the concrete floor—a technique known as “thumping.” Their bloodied bodies were then tossed into a giant bin, where video showed them twitching and paddling until they died, sometimes long after. Though his actions were not nearly as vicious as those of some coworkers who’d been fired immediately, Lyons knew, as the video quickly became national news, that the consequences for him could be severe.

As we sat recently in the tiny, tumbledown house he grew up in and now shares with his wife and two kids, Lyons acknowledged — as he did to the sheriff’s deputy back then — that he had prodded sows with clothespins, hit them with broad, wooden herding boards, and pulled them by their ears, but only in an effort, he said, to get pregnant sows that had spent the last 114 days immobilized in gestation crates up and moving to the farrowing crates where they would give birth. Lyons said he never intended to hurt the hogs, that he was just “scared to death” of the angry sows “who had spent their lives in a little pen” — and this was how he had been trained to deal with them. Lyons had watery blue eyes that seemed always on the verge of tears and spoke in a skittish mutter that would sometimes disappear all the way into silence as he rubbed his thin beard. “You do feel sorry for them, because they don’t have much room to move around,” he said, but if they get spooked coming out of their crates, “you’re in for a fight.”

Lyons had been trained in these methods of hog-handling (many of them, including thumping, legal and widely practiced), but a spokeswoman for Hormel — one of the largest food processors in the country and the dominant buyer of MowMar’s hogs — had already called the video “appalling” and “completely unacceptable,” and MowMar’s owners had responded by vowing that any additional workers found guilty of abuse as authorities pored over the tape would be terminated. Still, it came as a surprise when his boss informed him that he had been formally charged and immediately fired. “We don’t want to do it,” the supervisor told him, “but we got to — because Hor­mel will quit taking the sows.” He told Lyons to turn himself in at the courthouse.

While Lyons filled out paperwork and had his mug shot taken, his wife’s cellphone buzzed again and again: Her husband’s name was already on the evening news. Lyons hired a lawyer — but he was on video and he’d confessed to the deputy sheriff. “They got you, dude,” Lyons said his attorney told him. He accepted a plea agreement — six months’ probation and a $625 fine plus court fees—and signed an admission of guilt. It may seem like a slap on the wrist, but Lyons was the first person ever convicted of criminal livestock neglect on a Midwestern farm — and only the seventh person convicted of animal abuse in the history of the American meat industry. He wasn’t alone for long: Five of Lyons’ coworkers soon signed similar agreements.

It was a major PR win for PETA — which often appeals to local authorities to make arrests but rarely gets the kind of cooperation they got from the Greene County Sheriff’s Office — but it was also a hollow victory. “Who in their right mind would want to work in a dusty, ammonia-ridden pig shed for nine bucks an hour but somebody who, literally, had no other options?” asked Dan Paden, the senior researcher at PETA who helped run the investigation. “And at the end of a long, frustrating day, when you are trying to move a pig who hasn’t been out of its crate in [months], that’s when these beatings occur — and people do stupid, cruel, illegal things.” PETA was urging prosecutors to go beyond plea agreements for farmworkers; they wanted charges against farm owners and their corporate backers, to hold them responsible for crimes committed by undertrained, overburdened employees. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s neo-McCarthyist ‘Insider Threat Program’ promotes paranoia across government

McClatchy reports: Even before a former U.S. intelligence contractor exposed the secret collection of Americans’ phone records, the Obama administration was pressing a government-wide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions.

President Barack Obama’s unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of “insider threat” give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct.

Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized disclosures of any information, not just classified material. They also show how millions of federal employees and contractors must watch for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers and could face penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to report them. Leaks to the media are equated with espionage.

“Hammer this fact home . . . leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States,” says a June 1, 2012, Defense Department strategy for the program that was obtained by McClatchy.

The Obama administration is expected to hasten the program’s implementation as the government grapples with the fallout from the leaks of top secret documents by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who revealed the agency’s secret telephone data collection program. The case is only the latest in a series of what the government condemns as betrayals by “trusted insiders” who have harmed national security.

“Leaks related to national security can put people at risk,” Obama said on May 16 in defending criminal investigations into leaks. “They can put men and women in uniform that I’ve sent into the battlefield at risk. They can put some of our intelligence officers, who are in various, dangerous situations that are easily compromised, at risk. . . . So I make no apologies, and I don’t think the American people would expect me as commander in chief not to be concerned about information that might compromise their missions or might get them killed.”

As part of the initiative, Obama ordered greater protection for whistleblowers who use the proper internal channels to report official waste, fraud and abuse, but that’s hardly comforting to some national security experts and current and former U.S. officials. They worry that the Insider Threat Program won’t just discourage whistleblowing but will have other grave consequences for the public’s right to know and national security.

The program could make it easier for the government to stifle the flow of unclassified and potentially vital information to the public, while creating toxic work environments poisoned by unfounded suspicions and spurious investigations of loyal Americans, according to these current and former officials and experts. Some non-intelligence agencies already are urging employees to watch their co-workers for “indicators” that include stress, divorce and financial problems.

“It was just a matter of time before the Department of Agriculture or the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) started implementing, ‘Hey, let’s get people to snitch on their friends.’ The only thing they haven’t done here is reward it,” said Kel McClanahan, a Washington lawyer who specializes in national security law. “I’m waiting for the time when you turn in a friend and you get a $50 reward.”

The Defense Department anti-leak strategy obtained by McClatchy spells out a zero-tolerance policy. Security managers, it says, “must” reprimand or revoke the security clearances – a career-killing penalty – of workers who commit a single severe infraction or multiple lesser breaches “as an unavoidable negative personnel action.”

Employees must turn themselves and others in for failing to report breaches. “Penalize clearly identifiable failures to report security infractions and violations, including any lack of self-reporting,” the strategic plan says.

The Obama administration already was pursuing an unprecedented number of leak prosecutions, and some in Congress – long one of the most prolific spillers of secrets – favor tightening restrictions on reporters’ access to federal agencies, making many U.S. officials reluctant to even disclose unclassified matters to the public.

The policy, which partly relies on behavior profiles, also could discourage creative thinking and fuel conformist “group think” of the kind that was blamed for the CIA’s erroneous assessment that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction, a judgment that underpinned the 2003 U.S. invasion.

“The real danger is that you get a bland common denominator working in the government,” warned Ilana Greenstein, a former CIA case officer who says she quit the agency after being falsely accused of being a security risk. “You don’t get people speaking up when there’s wrongdoing. You don’t get people who look at things in a different way and who are willing to stand up for things. What you get are people who toe the party line, and that’s really dangerous for national security.” [Continue reading…]

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The top secret rules that allow NSA to use U.S. data without a warrant

The Guardian reports: Top secret documents submitted to the court that oversees surveillance by US intelligence agencies show the judges have signed off on broad orders which allow the NSA to make use of information “inadvertently” collected from domestic US communications without a warrant.

The Guardian is publishing in full two documents submitted to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (known as the Fisa court), signed by Attorney General Eric Holder and stamped 29 July 2009. They detail the procedures the NSA is required to follow to target “non-US persons” under its foreign intelligence powers and what the agency does to minimize data collected on US citizens and residents in the course of that surveillance.

The documents show that even under authorities governing the collection of foreign intelligence from foreign targets, US communications can still be collected, retained and used.

The procedures cover only part of the NSA’s surveillance of domestic US communications. The bulk collection of domestic call records, as first revealed by the Guardian earlier this month, takes place under rolling court orders issued on the basis of a legal interpretation of a different authority, section 215 of the Patriot Act.

The Fisa court’s oversight role has been referenced many times by Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials as they have sought to reassure the public about surveillance, but the procedures approved by the court have never before been publicly disclosed. [Continue reading…]

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Justice Dept’s seizure of journalist records has had chilling effect on U.S. press

AFP reports: The US government’s secret seizure of Associated Press phone records had a “chilling effect” on newsgathering by the agency and other news organizations, AP’s top executive said Wednesday.

“Some longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking with us,” AP president and chief executive Gary Pruitt said in a speech to the National Press Club.

“In some cases, government employees we once checked in with regularly will no longer speak to us by phone. Others are reluctant to meet in person … This chilling effect on newsgathering is not just limited to AP.

“Journalists from other news organizations have personally told me that it has intimidated both official and nonofficial sources from speaking to them as well.”

Pruitt spoke one month after the US news agency revealed that it had been notified after the fact that the US Justice Department had secret subpoenas of two months of phone records from its news operations.

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The secret history of the Bill of Rights

Michael Lind writes: Is the Bill of Rights — made up by the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution — the foundation of American liberty? So we are told by civil libertarians on the left alarmed by government surveillance programs, and by opponents of gun control on the right. The truth about the Founders and the Bill of Rights, however, is quite at odds with modern civil libertarian mythology.

The term “Founders” is ambiguous. It usually refers to the delegates who drafted today’s federal Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787, but it might as well apply to the members of the state ratifying conventions, who voted to enact it into law. In this case, it doesn’t matter, because a majority of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention rejected proposals by Virginia’s George Mason and others to include a bill of rights in the federal Constitution. The new federal Constitution was then ratified by a majority of the states, even though no bill of rights was included. Neither the drafters nor the ratifiers of the Constitution thought a bill of rights was necessary to protect American liberties.

Why did the authors of the Constitution reject proposals for a bill of rights? The Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay to promote ratification of the new Constitution, defends the decision of the framers of the U.S. Constitution to exclude any bill of rights.

In Federalist 84, Hamilton observes that a bill of rights, as a bargain between the people and a separate ruler, is irrelevant in a republic in which the people themselves are the collective sovereign.

It has been several times truly remarked, that bills of rights are in their origin, stipulations between kings and their subjects, abridgments of prerogative in favor of privilege, reservations of rights not surrendered to the prince. …It is evident, therefore, that according to their primitive signification, they [i.e. bills of rights] have no application to constitutions professedly founded upon the power of the people, and executed by their immediate representatives and servants. Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain every thing, they have no need of particular reservations.

Hamilton also argues that listing some rights in the Constitution might inadvertently endanger other rights, which would be assumed to be unprotected because they were not mentioned:

I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colourable pretext to claim more than were granted.

Hamilton, the founder of the New York Post, did not agree that a bill of rights was necessary to protect freedom of the press:

What signifies a declaration that “the liberty of the press shall be inviolably preserved?” What is the liberty of the press? Who can give it any definition which would not leave the utmost latitude for evasion? I hold it to be impracticable; and from this, I infer, that its security, whatever fine declarations may be inserted in any constitution respecting it, must altogether depend on public opinion, and on the general spirit of the people and of the government.

Hamilton concluded that the regulation of power by the federal Constitution itself, not a laundry list of specific rights, was the best protection of liberty in the new country:

The truth is, after all the declamation we have heard, that the constitution is itself in every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, a bill of rights.

James Madison, the “father of the Constitution,” shared the skepticism of the majority of the Founders about bills of rights. However, the Anti-Federalists, the opponents of a stronger federal government, were particularly influential in slave states like Madison’s Virginia, where they were inspired by some of his fellow slave owners like Thomas Jefferson, George Mason and Patrick Henry. These men were hardly precursors of the ACLU. Mason and Henry in particular objected to the federal Constitution because it did not sufficiently prevent the federal government from intervening in Southern slavery. Unlike George Washington, the only slave-holding president who freed his own slaves at his death, and a supporter of a strong federal government, Mason and Henry were hypocrites who denounced slavery in the abstract while opposing any government power that might infringe upon their despotic personal power over their own slave “property.” [Continue reading…]

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Senators say NSA phone records played little role in stopping terror plots

Senators Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, who serve on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, issued the following statement responding to comments made by members of the Intelligence Community about the value of certain NSA surveillance programs:

“Over the past few days the Intelligence Community has made new assertions about the value of recently declassified NSA surveillance programs. In addition to the concerns that we have about the impact of large-scale collection on the civil liberties of ordinary Americans, we are also concerned that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702 collection program (which allows collection of phone or internet communications, and involves the PRISM computer system) and the bulk phone records collection program operating under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT ACT are being conflated in a way that exaggerates the value and usefulness of the bulk phone records collection program.

“Based on the evidence that we have seen, it appears that multiple terrorist plots have been disrupted at least in part because of information obtained under section 702 of FISA. However, it appears that the bulk phone records collection program under section 215 of the USA Patriot Act played little or no role in most of these disruptions. Saying that ‘these programs’ have disrupted ‘dozens of potential terrorist plots’ is misleading if the bulk phone records collection program is actually providing little or no unique value.

“The Intelligence Community notes that the massive collection of phone records under Section 215 has provided some relevant information in a few terrorism cases, but it is still unclear to us why agencies investigating terrorism do not simply obtain this information directly from phone companies using a regular court order. If the NSA is only reviewing those records that meet a ‘reasonable suspicion’ standard, then there is no reason it shouldn’t be able to get court orders for the records it actually needs. Making a few hundred of these requests per year would clearly not overwhelm the FISA Court. And the law already allows the government to issue emergency authorizations to get these records quickly in urgent circumstances. The NSA’s five-year retention period for phone records is longer than the retention period used by some phone companies, but the NSA still has not provided us with any examples of instances where it relied on its bulk collection authority to review records that the relevant phone company no longer possessed.

“In fact, we have yet to see any evidence that the bulk phone records collection program has provided any otherwise unobtainable intelligence. It may be more convenient for the NSA to collect this data in bulk, rather than directing specific queries to the various phone companies, but in our judgment convenience alone does not justify the collection of the personal information of huge numbers of ordinary Americans if the same or more information can be obtained using less intrusive methods.

“If there is additional evidence for the usefulness of the bulk phone records collection program that we have not yet seen, we would welcome the opportunity to review it.”

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Guantánamo prosecutors say arguments on waterboarding should be in secret session

The Miami Herald reports: The prosecution in the Sept. 11 conspiracy trial put the judge on notice Wednesday that it wants to hold secret pretrial motions in the death-penalty case — and exclude both the public and five alleged terrorists during discussion of their years in CIA custody.

Exclusion must be handled on a case by case basis, said Department of Justice attorney Joanna Baltes. But, she argued, the accused don’t have an absolute right to hear legal arguments that discuss classified information before a military jury starts hearing evidence.

Defense lawyers disagreed. At issue, noted attorney David Nevin for alleged mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, is the Bush administration’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program, in which his client was waterboarded 183 times.

“Mr. Mohammad has a right to be present when we’re talking about matters that deal with his torture,” he said. Nevin invoked the 8th Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment, and said Mohammed has a right to see evidence the against him. [Continue reading…]

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Secrets piling up faster than government can declassify some

McClatchy reports: In the darkened stacks of a nondescript building in the suburbs outside Washington, dozens of federal employees wearing protective gloves spend day after day sifting through millions of pages of secret documents, some of them nearly a century old.

The 70 staffers of the National Declassification Center are charged with deciding – anonymously and quietly – which of the nation’s old secrets can be laid bare for the world to see.

They have a backlog of hundreds of millions of pages marked for possible declassification, and they’re able to release those that don’t reveal information about weapons of mass destruction, harm diplomatic relations or threaten the safety of the president of the United States. But no one believes they’ll be able to make a year-end deadline set by President Barack Obama. And in the meantime, the government is classifying even more secrets.

After three and half years, just 70 million pages have been released, including the Pentagon Papers and a World War I-era recipe for secret ink. Another 45 million pages have been kept classified. The rest have yet to be fully processed. (Because the material is more than 25 years old, it’s paper and not the disks, microfilm and emails that came later.)

“It’s not going to happen,” said Steven Aftergood, who directs the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, and is an expert on – and prominent critic of – government secrecy. “That should be a signal to everyone that the system is broken. Not even the president can make it work.”

Meanwhile, the government can’t keep up with the ever-escalating onslaught of classified documents, which are accumulating faster than ever before because of the growing bureaucracy, switch to electronic data and a prevailing culture of secrecy.

Each day, federal agencies spend more time, money and effort classifying documents than declassifying them.

In fiscal year 2011, about 2,400 employees classified documents and only hundreds declassified them, according to the most recent statistics available – which exclude the backlog – from the Information Security Oversight Office. They classified information 92 million times and declassified it only 27 million times. They spent more than $11 billion to classify documents at 41 agencies – more than double the amount a decade ago – and only $53 million on declassification. (The entire tab for classification is unknown because the cost at certain intelligence agencies is, in fact, classified.) [Continue reading…]

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Rouhani: A survivor in the snake pit of Tehran

David Patrikarakos writes: Iran’s new president-elect Hassan Rohani is being praised as a “moderate” who might bring change to Iran and transform Tehran’s international relationships. ”What does he want?” is the question most analysts now ask, and, critically, “What can he achieve?”

The answer may be: a great deal. If he is given the right support — domestically and internationally.

For Rohani possesses the single most important qualification for any president in Tehran: He knows how to negotiate the pit of vipers that is Iranian politics.

Rohani has survived for more than 30 years in Tehran. He is the Beria of the Islamic Republic – as able as Laventy Beria to skillfully negotiate the whims of his autocratic masters to safeguard his position at all times.

As a cleric of the Islamic Republic, who followed its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini into exile in Paris, Rohani is a true child of the Islamic Revolution. Yet he is also, comparatively speaking, a “moderate.”

His first post-election promises to improve Iran’s image are positive — contrasting starkly to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2005 arrival to the world stage with an offensively defiant speech at the United Nations.

Whether Rohani will deliver, however, is another matter.

But he has already vowed to release Mir Hussein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, the two reformist leaders held under house arrest since 2011. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is likely loathe to free the men he blames for the unrest that so badly shook the regime in 2009. So this will be Rohani’s first test — of his sincerity and, more importantly, his ability to get things done. [Continue reading…]

Trivial editorial point, but I hope that by the day he takes office, a winner will have emerged between Rohani, Ruhani, Rowhani, and Rouhani. Maybe the deciding factor will be URLs. That of the new president is rouhani.ir, whereas rohani.ir belongs to Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammad Sadeq Hussaini Rohani.

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Erdogan: The strong man now at his weakest

Steven Cook writes: “Re-cep Tay-yip Er-do-gan! Re-cep Tay-yip Er-do-gan!” chanted supporters of the Turkish prime minister, as a friend and I made our way through the absolutely mammoth crowd that descended on the Kazlicesme area of Istanbul last Sunday to hear their leader speak. As with Erdogan’s rally in the capital, Ankara, the day before, the people who turned out here, many of whom were decked out in scarves, T-shirts, and masks supporting the prime minister, vastly outnumbered the Gezi Park protesters who have captured global headlines. Young, old, well-to-do, decidedly modest, religious, and secular all declared their devotion to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Erdogan. When the prime minister surveyed the 295,000 souls who had come to express their devotion and thundered, “Taksim Square is not Turkey!” it was a vindication of his vision, his economic policies, and the strength of his leadership. Yet the irony was that at Kazlicesme, Erdogan’s demonstration of strength revealed his profound weakness and political vulnerability.

Anyone with even a passing interest in Turkey knows something about the Erdogan mystique. He’s the tough guy from the Kasimpasa neighborhood — literally and figuratively down a steep slope from Taksim Square — who has remade Turkey over the last decade. For the media personalities parachuted into a maelstrom of tear gas, water cannons, and pepper spray, Turkey under Erdogan is best described as an economic and political success story, a “model” of a “Muslim democracy and prosperity” for the Arab world. But Erdogan’s reservoir of support is based on a much more tangible set of factors. The fact that he presides over the 17th-largest economy in the world — it was the 16th in the 1990s — is less important than the fact that more people are participating in it than ever before. There are still fabulously wealthy and terribly poor people in Turkey, but the overall gap between the two has narrowed. That is no small accomplishment. In other high-growth countries like Brazil, China, and Russia, for example, that gap has grown.

Consistent with the kind of grassroots work that the AKP’s precursor, the Welfare Party, perfected in the 1980s and 1990s, Erdogan — the guy who used to sell the Turkish version of the bagel, called simit, from a cart on the street — has focused much of his time in office on improving the lives of ordinary Turks. In places where transportation was thin, health care was basic, and government services were non-existent, the prime minister has paved roads, built airports, established “Erdogan-care,” and forced local governments to be responsive to their constituents. As a result, Kasimpasa is not so rough-and-tumble anymore and the people there love him for it. [Continue reading…]

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Arctic terns threatened by climate change

The Washington Post reports: At the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge, the tiny bodies of Arctic tern chicks have piled up. Over the past few years, biologists have counted thousands that starved to death because the herring their parents feed them have vanished.

Puffins are also having trouble feeding their chicks, which weigh less than previous broods. When the parents leave the chicks to fend for themselves, the young birds are failing to find food, and hundreds are washing up dead on the Atlantic coast.

What’s happening to migratory seabirds? Biologists are worried about a twofold problem: Commercial fishing is reducing their food source, and climate change is causing fish to seek colder waters, according to a bulletin released Tuesday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“We’ve seen a 40 percent decline of Arctic terns in the last 10 years,” said Linda Welch, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist at the refuge. Arctic tern pairs in Maine have fallen from 4,224 pairs in 2008 to 2,467 pairs last year, the Fish and Wildlife Service said.

Biologists at the Maine refuge are not sure whether herring sought colder waters elsewhere or went deeper, but they are no longer on the surface, from which Arctic terns pluck them. While other birds can dive deep for food, Arctic terns cannot.

“They’re not getting herring, so they bring butterfish that the chicks can’t swallow,” Welch said. “So they starve to death. You have thousands and thousands of chicks dying. It’s very sad.” [Continue reading…]

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