How the Obama administration is trying to criminalize investigative journalism

The Los Angeles Times reports: The FBI obtained a sealed search warrant to read a Fox News reporter’s personal emails from two days in 2010 after arguing there was probable cause he had violated espionage laws by soliciting classified information from a government official, court papers show.

In an affidavit, an FBI agent told a federal magistrate that the reporter had committed a crime when he asked a State Department security contractor, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, to share secret material about North Korea in June 2009.

The affidavit did not name the reporter, but Fox News identified him as its chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen. He was not charged, but Kim was indicted on espionage charges in August 2010 and is awaiting trial. He has denied leaking classified information.

The case marks the first time the government has gone to court to portray news gathering as espionage, and Fox News officials and 1st Amendment advocates reacted angrily Monday after the secret warrant was reported by the Washington Post.

“We are outraged to learn today that James Rosen was named a criminal co-conspirator for simply doing his job as a reporter,” said Michael Clemente, Fox News executive vice president of news. “In fact, it is downright chilling. We will unequivocally defend his right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press.” [Continue reading…]

Eugene Robinson writes: In both instances [with the AP and Fox News], prosecutors were trying to build criminal cases under the 1917 Espionage Act against federal employees suspected of leaking classified information. Before President Obama took office, the Espionage Act had been used to prosecute leakers a grand total of three times, including the 1971 case of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Obama’s Justice Department has used the act six times. And counting.

Obviously, the government has a duty to protect genuine secrets. But the problem is that every administration, without exception, tends to misuse the “top secret” stamp — sometimes from an overabundance of caution, sometimes to keep inconvenient or embarrassing information from coming to light.

That’s where journalists come in. Our job, simply, is to find out what the government doesn’t want you to know. [Continue reading…]

Glenn Greenwald writes: Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ — that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for “soliciting” the disclosure of classified information — is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.

That same “solicitation” theory, as the New York Times reported back in 2011, is the one the Obama DOJ has been using to justify its ongoing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange: that because Assange solicited or encouraged Manning to leak classified information, the US government can “charge [Assange] as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.” When that theory was first disclosed, I wrote that it would enable the criminalization of investigative journalism generally:

“Very rarely do investigative journalists merely act as passive recipients of classified information; secret government programs aren’t typically reported because leaks just suddenly show up one day in the email box of a passive reporter. Journalists virtually always take affirmative steps to encourage its dissemination. They try to cajole leakers to turn over documents to verify their claims and consent to their publication. They call other sources to obtain confirmation and elaboration in the form of further leaks and documents. Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau described how they granted anonymity to ‘nearly a dozen current and former officials’ to induce them to reveal information about Bush’s NSA eavesdropping program. Dana Priest contacted numerous ‘U.S. and foreign officials’ to reveal the details of the CIA’s ‘black site’ program. Both stories won Pulitzer Prizes and entailed numerous, active steps to cajole sources to reveal classified information for publication.

“In sum, investigative journalists routinely — really, by definition — do exactly that which the DOJ’s new theory would seek to prove WikiLeaks did. To indict someone as a criminal ‘conspirator’ in a leak on the ground that they took steps to encourage the disclosures would be to criminalize investigative journalism every bit as much as charging Assange with ‘espionage’ for publishing classified information.”

That’s what always made the establishment media’s silence (or even support) in the face of the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks so remarkable: it was so obvious from the start that the theories used there could easily be exploited to criminalize the acts of mainstream journalists. [Continue reading…]

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Foreign fantasies and Syria

“So many foreign fighters have joined the Syrian insurgency that one wonders if their [sic] is role left for any indigenous Syrian insurgent,” writes “Bernhard” at Moon of Alabama today. To back up this “observation”, he cites nine news reports each referring to the presence of several hundred (or less) foreigners fighting in Syria.

A report last month from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation based at King’s College London acknowledged that there was “no ‘true census’ of foreign fighters” but nevertheless attempted an empirical analysis “based on more than 450 sources in the Western and Arab media as well as the martyrdom notices that have been posted in jihadist online forums.”

The report stated:

The Syrian government has — at various times and for different reasons — claimed that many fighters that are involved in the current conflict are foreigners. Our numbers do not support this assertion.

Even when juxtaposing the most liberal estimate for the number of foreign fighters over the course of the entire conflict (5,500) with the most conservative estimate for the current size of rebel forces (60,000), foreigners would represent less than 10 per cent. The actual figure is likely to be lower.

An empirical analysis based on hundreds of news reports along with other sources has its limitations, but it should carry a bit more weight than the anti-imperialist posturing of a blogger who is doing nothing more than cherry-picking news snippets that appear to reinforce his longstanding opinions.

As has long been clear however, there is a sector of the blogosphere in which statements like the one I cited at the top are regarded as authoritative — an illustration perhaps of the strange melding of skepticism and naivety that leads some people to disbelieve virtually any piece of information that emanates from Western official or mainstream sources, yet discard any semblance of critical analysis when appraising statements coming from alternative sources. Self-appointed “truth-tellers” have an uncanny ability to acquire devoted followers.

In an interview published in the Argentine daily Clarin, Bashar al-Assad reiterates his government’s longstanding claim that Syria is under attack from terrorists and foreigners.

Multiple internal and external elements have contributed to the crisis, outside intervention being the most important factor. At the same time, the calculations made by the countries that have wanted to intervene were erroneous. Those states thought that the plan could end in weeks or months, but this did not take place. Instead, the Syrian people have resisted and we continue to do so. For us, it is about defending our homeland.

Do you know that, according to the UN, this war has already caused more than 70,000 deaths?

You would have to ask those who raise these figures about the credibility of their sources. Every death is horrible, but many of the dead they speak of are foreigners who came here to kill the Syrian people. We cannot omit that there are also many Syrians who have gone missing. What is the number of Syrian deaths and what is the number of foreign ones? How many missing persons are there? We cannot give a precise figure. Of course, this constantly changes since the terrorists kill and sometimes bury their victims in mass graves.

Do you dismiss the possibility that your troops may have used excessive, disproportionate force in the repression?

How could one determine whether or not there has been excessive force? What is the formula? It is not very objective to speak of that. One reacts according to the type of terrorism one faces. At the beginning, the terrorism was local and then it came from the outside, which led to the sophistication of the weapons they brought. The debate here is not about the amount of force employed or the type of weaponry. It is about the amount of terrorism that we suffer and the resulting duty to respond.

This is the legacy of the war on terrorism. On one side we find tyrants and authoritarian governments who gladly redeploy the American narrative on the necessity of combating terrorism. And in parallel among some of the opponents of war and imperialism, the preferred way of tarring Assad’s critics is to suggest that they are fostering terrorism. “Terrorism” as an ill-defined phenomenon has become an all-purpose tool that can be used to further political agendas on both the right and the left.

The effect of ideas that bounce around unquestioned inside an echo chamber is that they simply reinforce beliefs within a community of faith. The sense of solidarity this engenders then serves as a substitute for individual critical analysis. The word of those promoting the gospel (whatever that gospel might be) is treated as authoritative not because it stands up against challenges, but because it’s easier to rely on a trusted source than it is to think, do research, and refine ones own critical faculties.

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Syria, Israel exchange fire on Golan Heights

Reuters reports: Syria said its troops destroyed an Israeli vehicle that crossed into its territory from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Tuesday and warned that any attempt to violate its sovereignty would meet “immediate and firm retaliation”.

Israel said the incident took place on its side of the Golan ceasefire line, that the vehicle was damaged but not destroyed, none of its soldiers were hurt and they returned fire.

The clash highlighted the potential for renewed conflict along a frontline that has become increasingly fraught after nearly four decades of calm overseen by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his father.

It also followed Israeli airstrikes near Damascus against suspected missile stockpiles two weeks ago, after which Syria threatened to retaliate.

Assad is battling a two-year-old uprising in which rebel forces, including radical Islamists, have taken swathes of rural territory and attacked army posts near the Golan frontier.

There are frequent reports of cross-border gunfire from Syria during clashes between army and rebel forces but Tuesday’s incident was the first time since the start of the crisis that Syria’s armed forces said they targeted Israel’s military.

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Why China’s riches won’t bring it freedom

Pankaj Mishra writes: Modern history is the story of how liberal democracy, originating in the U.K. and America, spread around the world. This may sound like an absurd fantasy. In actuality, this Whiggish narrative of progress underpins most newspaper editorials, political commentary and speeches in the West, and frames larger views of political developments in the non-West.

It accounts for the gloomy undertone to Freedom House’s latest report, which records the shrinking of liberal democracy worldwide. Even countries with regular elections, such as India, are far from upholding the notion of liberalism, which advocates the maximizing of individual rights for the fullest realization of human potential.

Perhaps we should discard the ideological prejudice that assumes the universalization of liberal democracy. We might then be able to see dispassionately the true multiplicity of political forms, how they came into being and what they portend.

The specific socioeconomic conditions that enabled both liberalism and democracy, such as the Reformation’s stress on individual responsibility or industrial capitalism, were particular to Western Europe and America.

They couldn’t be recreated elsewhere easily, especially among countries trying to catch up to the West. Japan, the first non-Western country to try to become modern, became an economic and military power without enshrining liberal concerns for individual rights.

Before Japan, there was Germany, another society that embarked on industrialization relatively late compared with the rest of Western Europe, and was modernized by a strong centralized state.

Neither Germany nor Japan embraced the traditions of Anglo-American liberalism, which encouraged individualism, laissez-faire economics and a fundamental distrust of state power. Individual rights were subordinated to the economic and military imperatives of countries lurching late into the modern world. [Continue reading…]

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Decline of the empire

In State of the Union: Nation Essays 1958-2005, Gore Vidal writes: On September 16, 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died. The empire was seventy-one years old and had been in ill health since 1968. Like most modern empires, ours rested not so much on military prowess as on economic power.

After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London’s primacy in the money markets. Then, in 1914, New York replaced London as the world’s financial capital. Before 1914, the United States had been a developing country, dependent on outside investment. But with the shift of the money power from Old World to New, what had been a debtor nation became a creditor nation and central motor to the world’s economy. All in all, the English were well pleased to have us take their place. They were too few in number for so big a task. As early as the turn of the century, they were eager for us not only to help them out financially but to continue, in their behalf, the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race: to bear with courage the white man’s burden, as Rudyard Kipling not so tactfully put it. Were we not—English and Americans—all Anglo-Saxons, united by common blood, laws, language? Well, not, we were not. But our differences were not so apparent then. In any case, we took on the job. We would supervise and civilize the lesser breeds. We would make money.

By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America’s hegemony lasted exactly five years. Then the cold and hot wars began. Our masters would have us believe that all our problems are the fault of the Evil Empire of the East, with its Satanic and atheistic religion, ever ready to destroy us in the night. This nonsense began at a time when we had atomic weapons and the Russians did not. They had lost 20 million of their people in the war, and 8 million of them before the war, thanks to their neoconservative Mongolian political system. Most important, there was never any chance, then or now, of the money power (all that matters) shifting from New York to Moscow. What was—and is—the reason for the big scare? Well, World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years; and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic, with many a wink, in the people’s name. In order to maintain a general prosperity (and enormous wealth for the few) they decided that we would become the world’s policeman, perennial shield against the Mongol hordes. We shall have an arms race, said one of the high priests, John Foster Dulles, and we shall win it because the Russians will go broke first. We were then put on a permanent wartime economy, which is why a third or so of the government’s revenues is constantly being siphoned off to pay for what is euphemistically called defense. [Continue reading…]

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The failure to face climate change

Thomas Jones writes: The greenhouse effect was first hypothesised in 1824 by Joseph Fourier – though his analogy was the bell jar rather than the greenhouse – and proved experimentally by John Tyndall in 1859. In the 19th century it could be seen as unambiguously a good thing: if carbon dioxide and other trace gases didn’t trap heat in the atmosphere, the earth wouldn’t be warm enough to support life as we know it. But there is now far more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been at any point in the last 800,000 years (we know this because researchers have analysed air bubbles trapped in the ice in Greenland and Antarctica: the deeper you go, the older the bubbles). The concentration has increased from nearly 320 parts per million (high, but not unprecedented) in 1960 to more than 390 ppm today, 30 per cent higher than any previous peak, largely as a result of human activity. Not even the most fervent climate change denier can argue with the fact that burning carbon produces carbon dioxide: before the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were 280 ppm. Since 1850, more than 360 billion tonnes of fossil fuels have gone up in smoke. Average global temperatures have risen accordingly, for the last quarter century pretty much in line with the predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its first assessment report (1990). Almost every year since 1988, when the IPCC was established, has been the hottest ever recorded. The most optimistic projection, which governments are nominally committed to (that’s to say, the signatories of the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 agreed it would be nice), is that the average global temperature will rise no more than 2ºC by the end of the century. Sea level has risen 6 cm since 1990. The IPCC’s fourth assessment report (2007) projected that it would rise between 18 and 59 cm by 2100. According to a more recent study, it could be anything from 33 to 132 cm.

The question of how to prevent climate change – we’re way past that point now – has morphed into the question of how to slow it down. There’s no shortage of theoretical answers about the best way to pump fewer greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, or suck more of them out, or lower the temperature by other means. (Another week, another book about climate change: the mood optative, the structure evangelical; threats of doom followed by promises of salvation, punctuated by warnings against false prophets.) And yet carbon emissions, temperatures, sea level and the frequency of extreme weather events just keep on going up. Which leads to another, perhaps even more urgent question: if climate change is not only inevitable but already underway, how are we to live with it? The shift in emphasis towards adaptation will be reflected in the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, due next year.

The aim of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, negotiated at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, was to ‘stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’. So much for that. Twenty years on, after many more rounds of inconclusive talks, declarations of good intentions and accusations of bad faith, the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol has expired, with next to nothing to show for it, despite its excessively modest demands. Of the world’s eight biggest national emitters of carbon dioxide, which between them account for more than 66 per cent of global emissions, only Germany (2.4 per cent) has agreed to legally binding reductions in the second commitment period (2013-20). Canada (1.7 per cent) has withdrawn from the protocol; the United States (16 per cent) never ratified it; China (29 per cent), India (5.9 per cent), Russia (5.4 per cent), Japan (3.7 per cent) and South Korea (1.8 per cent) are still signatories but don’t have binding targets. Even the apparent successes of the first commitment period turn out to be not only modest but illusory: as Dieter Helm points out in The Carbon Crunch, Western Europe’s 10 per cent reduction in emissions since 1990 is largely attributable to a decline in manufacturing. A lot of the energy generated in China’s coal-fired power stations, which burn nearly as much of the black stuff as the rest of the world put together, is used to manufacture things for export to the West. We haven’t really cut our emissions; we’ve just outsourced them. [Continue reading…]

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Australia’s Aboriginals

Before visiting Matamata, a lost-in-the-bush village of 25 or so people in Australia’s Northern Territory, Michael Finkel needed permission from the village’s matriarch, Phyllis Batumbil. She agreed and asked him to bring dinner for everyone:

I unloaded two duffels of personal effects and a dozen bags of groceries. Dinner for 25, I mentioned, is quite a load. Batumbil nodded. Take a look at all that food, she said. Could you imagine catching that much in one day using only a spear? And then again the next day and the day after that? I said it would be just about impossible. Aboriginal people, she said, have been doing it every day for at least 50,000 years.

For 49,800 of those years they had the continent to themselves. There were once about 250 distinct Aboriginal languages, hundreds more dialects, and many more clans and subgroups. But there is deep spiritual and cultural overlap among them, and indigenous Australians I spoke with said it was not insulting to combine everyone together under the general title of Aboriginal. They call themselves Aboriginals. They lived for a couple of thousand generations in small, nomadic bands, as befits a hunter-gatherer existence, moving in their own rhythms about the vast expanse of Australia. Then on April 29, 1770, British explorer James Cook landed his ship, the Endeavour, on the southeastern shore. The next two centuries were a horror show of cultural obliteration — massacres, disease, alcoholism, forced integration, surrender.

More than a half million Aboriginals currently live in Australia, less than 3 percent of the population. Few have learned to perform an Aboriginal dance or hunt with a spear. Many anthropologists credit Aboriginals with possessing the world’s longest enduring religion as well as the longest continuing art forms — the cross-hatched and dot-patterned painting styles once inscribed in caves and rock shelters. They are one of the most durable societies the planet has ever known. But the traditional Aboriginal way of life is now, by any real measure, almost extinct.

Almost. There remain a few places. Foremost is a region known as Arnhem Land, where Matamata is located, along with a couple dozen other communities, all connected by rough dirt roads passable only in dry weather. [Continue reading…]

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Forests and insects feed much of the world

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: Forests, trees on farms and agroforestry are critical in the fight against hunger and should be better integrated into food security and land use policies, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said today at the International Conference on Forests for Food Security and Nutrition in Rome (13-15 May).

“Forests contribute to the livelihoods of more than a billion people, including many of the world’s neediest. Forests provide food, fuel for cooking, fodder for animals and income to buy food,” Graziano da Silva said.

“Wild animals and insects are often the main protein source for people in forest areas, while leaves, seeds, mushrooms, honey and fruits provide minerals and vitamins, thus ensuring a nutritious diet.”

“But forests and agroforestry systems are rarely considered in food security and land use policies. Often, rural people do not have secure access rights to forests and trees, putting their food security in danger. The important contributions forests can make to the food security and nutrition of rural people should be better recognized,” Graziano da Silva said.

One major and readily available source of nutritious and protein-rich food that comes from forests are insects, according to a new study FAO launched at the forests for food security and nutrition conference. It is estimated that insects form part of the traditional diets of at least 2 billion people. Insect gathering and farming can offer employment and cash income, for now mostly at the household level but also potentially in industrial operations.

With about 1 million known species, insects account for more than half of all living organisms classified so far on the planet.

According to FAO’s research, done in partnership with Wageningen University in the Netherlands, more than 1900 insect species are consumed by humans worldwide. Globally, the most consumed insects are: beetles (31 percent); caterpillars (18 percent); bees, wasps and ants (14 percent); and grasshoppers, locusts and crickets (13 percent). Many insects are rich in protein and good fats and high in calcium, iron and zinc. [Continue reading…]

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Fishing for memories

Riken: In our interaction with our environment we constantly refer to past experiences stored as memories to guide behavioral decisions. But how memories are formed, stored and then retrieved to assist decision-making remains a mystery. By observing whole-brain activity in live zebrafish, researchers from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute have visualized for the first time how information stored as long-term memory in the cerebral cortex is processed to guide behavioral choices.

The study, published today in the journal Neuron, was carried out by Dr. Tazu Aoki and Dr. Hitoshi Okamoto from the Laboratory for Developmental Gene Regulation, a pioneer in the study of how the brain controls behavior in zebrafish.

The mammalian brain is too large to observe the whole neural circuit in action. But using a technique called calcium imaging, Aoki et al. were able to visualize for the first time the activity of the whole zebrafish brain during memory retrieval.

Calcium imaging takes advantage of the fact that calcium ions enter neurons upon neural activation. By introducing a calcium sensitive fluorescent substance in the neural tissue, it becomes possible to trace the calcium influx in neurons and thus visualize neural activity.

The researchers trained transgenic zebrafish expressing a calcium sensitive protein to avoid a mild electric shock using a red LED as cue. By observing the zebrafish brain activity upon presentation of the red LED they were able to visualize the process of remembering the learned avoidance behavior.

They observe spot-like neural activity in the dorsal part of the fish telencephalon, which corresponds to the human cortex, upon presentation of the red LED 24 hours after the training session. No activity is observed when the cue is presented 30 minutes after training.

In another experiment, Aoki et al. show that if this region of the brain is removed, the fish are able to learn the avoidance behavior, remember it short-term, but cannot form any long-term memory of it.

“This indicates that short-term and long-term memories are formed and stored in different parts of the brain. We think that short-term memories must be transferred to the cortical region to be consolidated into long-term memories,” explains Dr. Aoki.

The team then tested whether memories for the best behavioral choices can be modified by new learning. The fish were trained to learn two opposite avoidance behaviors, each associated with a different LED color, blue or red, as a cue. They find that presentation of the different cues leads to the activation of different groups of neurons in the telencephalon, which indicates that different behavioral programs are stored and retrieved by different populations of neurons.

“Using calcium imaging on zebrafish, we were able to visualize an on-going process of memory consolidation for the first time. This approach opens new avenues for research into memory using zebrafish as model organism,” concludes Dr. Okamoto.

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Bach to the blues, our emotions match music to colors

>UC Berkeley: Whether we’re listening to Bach or the blues, our brains are wired to make music-color connections depending on how the melodies make us feel, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley. For instance, Mozart’s jaunty Flute Concerto No. 1 in G major is most often associated with bright yellow and orange, whereas his dour Requiem in D minor is more likely to be linked to dark, bluish gray.

Moreover, people in both the United States and Mexico linked the same pieces of classical orchestral music with the same colors. This suggests that humans share a common emotional palette – when it comes to music and color – that appears to be intuitive and can cross cultural barriers, UC Berkeley researchers said.

“The results were remarkably strong and consistent across individuals and cultures and clearly pointed to the powerful role that emotions play in how the human brain maps from hearing music to seeing colors,” said UC Berkeley vision scientist Stephen Palmer, lead author of a paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Continue reading…]

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Fears grow of clash between Israel and Syria

The Los Angeles Times reports: Fears about a possible escalation of violence between Israel and Syria grew Sunday amid renewed Israeli threats to destroy Syrian weapons caches and Syria’s warnings of retaliation.

After decades of relative calm along the two nations’ borders, some Israeli officials say tensions with Syria have reached one of the highest points since the 1973 Yom Kippur war.

During a Cabinet meeting Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would continue to act to prevent Syria’s advanced weapons from falling into the hands of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah or other organizations deemed to be terrorists.

“The Middle East is in one of its most sensitive periods in decades with the escalating upheaval in Syria,’’ Netanyahu said. “We are monitoring the changes there closely and are prepared for any scenario.” [Continue reading…]

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Jihadists’ control of Syrian oilfields signals a decisive moment in conflict

Julian Borger writes: The stranglehold that Jabhat al-Nusra and its allies have achieved over Syria’s oilfields signals a decisive moment in the conflict that will shape the rapidly and violently evolving map of the new Middle East.

The impact is immediately visible. With a new independent source of funding, the jihadists holding the oilfields between al-Raqqa and Deir Ezzor are much better equipped than their Sunni rivals, reinforcing the advantage originally provided by Qatari backing. They have been able to provide bread and other essentials to the people in the areas under their control, securing an enduring popular base.

This serves to marginalise the western-backed rebels, the National Coalition and the Supreme Military Council (SMC), even further. The blustering claim by the SMC commander, Salim Idriss, that he was going to muster a 30,000 force to retake the oilfields served only to undermine his credibility.

More importantly, as so often in history, control over hydrocarbons has solidified new lines on the map. The fact that the Syrian army has withdrawn from the heart of the country and that the victorious Salafist groups have not pressed their attack, but instead entered into a revenue-sharing agreement with Damascus over the oil, show that both sides are satisfied with the dividing lines. [Continue reading…]

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Hezbollah steps up Syria battle, Israel threatens more strikes

Reuters reports: Lebanese Hezbollah militants attacked a Syrian rebel-held town alongside Syrian troops on Sunday and Israel threatened more attacks on Syria to rein the militia in, highlighting the risks of a wider regional conflict if planned peace talks fail.

Activists said it was the fiercest fighting in Syria’s two year-old civil war involving Hezbollah, a Shi’ite group backed by Iran which they said appeared to be helping President Bashar al-Assad secure a vital corridor in case Syria fragments.

Speaking from Qusair near the border with Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, activist Hadi Abdallah said Syrian warplanes bombed the town in the morning and shells were hitting the town at a rate of up to 50 a minute. At least 32 people were killed.

“The army is hitting Qusair with tanks and artillery from the north and east while Hezbollah is firing mortar rounds and multiple rocket launchers from the south and west,” he said.

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Can a deal be made with Iran?

Roger Cohen writes: Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett are unusual among former staffers of the CIA, the State Department, and the National Security Council in their deep affection for the Islamic Republic of Iran. This attraction, which knows few bounds, finds its apotheosis in Going to Tehran. Their stated goal is “the most objective analysis of Iranian politics.” Yet they find that Iran embraces, “more fully and openly than Turkey, the project of building a state that is simultaneously Islamic and democratic.” (The greater openness of Tehran than Istanbul should, they seem to think, be apparent to any objective analyst.) Iran’s government “of the Shi’a, by the Shi’a, and for the Shi’a,” they suggest, may well produce “a wider range of choice for Iranian voters than the United States’ two-party system offers American voters.”

To say the Leveretts are contrarians would be a gross understatement. The brutal crackdown on millions of protesters who took to the streets after the 2009 presidential election was, they argue, “relatively restrained” — despite the beatings, killings, mass arrests, and institutionalized sodomy that characterized it. I witnessed a good deal of this brutality. (The Leveretts do allow that the government’s response included “criminal acts.”) As for the uprising, it was in their view no more than the self-indulgent acts of pampered younger people from affluent north Tehran homes, a pretext for more “analysis by wishful thinking” — a favorite phrase — of deluded Westerners who inflated the Green Movement’s significance. The authors, who were not in Iran at the time of the post-election upheaval, seem perturbed that the world press covered these momentous events at all: “Notwithstanding their relatively narrow social base, the initial demonstrations received worldwide media coverage.”

This dogged pair of investigators prefers to point out that the Islamic Republic has the “largest stock of industrial robots in West Asia.” Even the much-mocked Iranian auto industry — known to locals for its cars’ failing brakes, galloping pollution, and boxy (and discontinued) Paykan line — earns the authors’ admiration. [Continue reading…]

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