Saudis overtaking Qatar in sponsoring Syrian rebels

Hassan Hassan writes: Last week, a 12-member delegation from the Syrian opposition visited Saudi Arabia, for an unprecedented two-day official meeting.

Saudi authorities had consistently declined to meet the opposition, despite repeated requests. This was partly because the kingdom has opposed Muslim Brotherhood dominance in the Syrian National Council and then the National Coalition, owing to the Brotherhood’s alliance with Qatar and Turkey and opposition to inclusivity.

But last week, surprisingly, the Saudi foreign minister, Saud Al Faisal, met Syrian Brotherhood deputy leader Mahmoud Farouq Tayfour, in one-to-one talks.

The Brotherhood had previously been confident in its alliance with Qatar and Turkey, and saw no need to offer concessions to engage other countries, including Saudi Arabia. So this meeting, which came after an “eager appeal” from the Brotherhood, suggests a shift in regional dynamics.

Two separate sources close to the opposition say Mr Tayfour assured the Saudi minister that “Syria’s Brotherhood will definitely not be like Egypt’s Brotherhood”.

He also “harshly” criticised Qatar’s role, even though Qatar had helped revive the Brotherhood in Syria after the Baathists massacred it out of existence in 1982. [Continue reading…]

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How the media and the public overlook threats to the freedom of others

Glenn Greenwald writes: For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined, threatened to criminalize WikiLeaks, and abused Bradley Manning to the point that a formal UN investigation denounced his treatment as “cruel and inhuman”.

But, with a few noble exceptions, most major media outlets said little about any of this, except in those cases when they supported it. It took a direct and blatant attack on them for them to really get worked up, denounce these assaults, and acknowledge this administration’s true character. That is redolent of how the general public reacted with rage over privacy invasions only when new TSA airport searches targeted not just Muslims but themselves: what they perceive as “regular Americans”. Or how former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman – once the most vocal defender of Bush’s vast warrantless eavesdropping programs – suddenly began sounding like a shrill and outraged privacy advocate once it was revealed that her own conversations with Aipac representatives were recorded by the government.

Leave to the side how morally grotesque it is to oppose rights assaults only when they affect you. The pragmatic point is that it is vital to oppose such assaults in the first instance no matter who is targeted because such assaults, when unopposed, become institutionalized. Once that happens, they are impossible to stop when – as inevitably occurs – they expand beyond the group originally targeted. We should have been seeing this type of media outrage over the last four years as the Obama administration targeted non-media groups with these kinds of abuses (to say nothing of the conduct of the Bush administration before that). It shouldn’t take an attack on media outlets for them to start caring this much.

Second, we yet again see one of the most significant aspects of the Obama legacy: the way in which it has transformed and degraded so many progressive precincts. [Continue reading…]

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Leak investigations are an assault on the press, and on democracy, too

Margaret Sullivan writes: The ability of the press to report freely on its government is a cornerstone of American democracy. That ability is, by any reasonable assessment, under siege.

Reporters get their information from sources. They need to be able to protect those sources and sometimes offer them confidentiality. If they can’t be sure about that – and it looks increasingly like they can’t – the sources will dry up. And so will the information.

Sad to say, that seems to be exactly what the Justice Department has in mind with its leak investigations, two of which involve Times journalists. One has to do with the chief Washington correspondent David Sanger’s book and articles about American cyberattacks against Iran, the other is Scott Shane and Jo Becker’s article from last May about Mr. Obama’s “kill list.”

The Times’s executive editor, Jill Abramson, put it simply when I asked her about it Tuesday: “The press is supposed to hold government accountable. These investigations intrude on that process.”

The Times stories that are the subject of leak investigations “were in the great tradition of Washington reporting, helping people understand how decisions were made,” The Times’s newsroom lawyer, David McCraw, told me Tuesday. “There was no compromising of national security involved.”

“The net effect is universal,” he said. “People are less willing to talk, and that’s a loss for everyone.”

The Times is one of the many news and press rights organizations that signed a strongly worded letter sent to the Justice Department leadership on Tuesday.

This isn’t just about press rights. It’s about the right of citizens to know what their government is doing. In an atmosphere of secrecy and punishment – despite the hollow promises of transparency — that’s getting harder every day.

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Khamenei’s plan to prevent the revival of Iran’s Green Movement

Mohsen Milani writes: In normal presidential elections, it is only the candidates and their platforms that matter. Not so in Iran. There, the key player in the upcoming presidential elections is the septuagenarian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is constitutionally barred from running for the office. He recognizes that the election result will have a profound impact on his own rule and on the stability of the Islamic Republic. So behind the scenes, he has been doing everything in his power to make sure that the election serves his interests. But the eleventh-hour declarations of candidacy by Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran’s president between 1989 and 1997, and by Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff and close confidant, have made his task more difficult.

The first part of Khamenei’s four-pronged strategy is to conduct an orderly election. The nightmare scenario for Khamenei is a repeat of the June 2009 presidential election, in which allegations that Ahmadinejad had stolen victory from his challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, led to massive demonstrations and the birth of the popular reformist Green Movement.

Khamenei could have stayed above the fray, as elites expected him to do. Instead, he lost credibility as a neutral arbiter when he sided with Ahmadinejad, rejected all allegations of fraud, and blamed Ahmadinejad’s opponents for inciting violence. His offer of public support for the president opened a fissure among the elites that has never quite healed. It also preceded a massive crackdown on activists who were castigated as American stooges and arrested. Even more, the disputed election alienated millions who felt truly robbed of their voices.

Given that history, Khamenei has made a concerted effort this time around to discredit potential protesters before they take to the streets. The Revolutionary Guards and security forces have launched a propaganda campaign to link any interruption on election day or after to the United States and its purported plans to destabilize the regime. For example, Yadollah Javani, the head of the political bureau of the Revolutionary Guards, has warned that the slogan “free and fair election” is a U.S. code word for sedition.

All this comes at a time when the Revolutionary Guards and security forces have enjoyed even more impunity than usual as they arrest activists and bloggers and shutter hostile websites and newspapers. In March 2013, the government claimed that it discovered and shut down a network of some 600 anti-government journalists who were planning to disrupt the presidential election. In reality, they were placed under surveillance in order to cut off their links to journalists and activists outside of Iran. And although there has not yet been any increase of forces on the streets, one can be sure that in June, the police will be ready for action. [Continue reading…]

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Why sanctions on Iran are not working

Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi write: As EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Iran’s lead envoy Saeed Jalili meet in Istanbul on May 15, the six global powers negotiating with Tehran face an increasingly inconvenient truth: while sanctions are having a devastating effect on Iran’s economy, they have not changed Tehran’s nuclear calculus. Although some policymakers and pundits privately concede this point, there is no consensus as to why. Hardliners tend to argue that sanctions are not tough enough and must be intensified. Elements on the left argue that sanctions must be given time to make an impact.

In reality, both sides miss the real reasons that have rendered sanctions unsuccessful – by failing to offer a credible exit from the sanctions pain, neither the Iranian government nor stakeholders in the Iranian system believe that a change in nuclear policy will lead to the alleviation of their economic suffering.

The current sanctions policy is based on a shaky assumption – the belief that economic pain and dissatisfaction among political elites automatically will result in pressure on the Iranian regime to change its nuclear course. This assumption does not hold. The economic pain imposed on Iran is intense – but directionless.

Instead, stakeholders in the Iranian system favouring a change are stuck between a dominant narrative that portrays the West as a brutal group out to “get” Iran and keep it dependent on foreign powers, and Western pressure that has failed to offer a convincing exit from the sanctions pain. The two have proven mutually reinforcing and have weakened those elements that the West hoped would push for a nuclear course correction. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq is unraveling

Michael Knights writes: As American troops were pulling out of Iraq in 2010, the U.S. effort to stabilize the country resembled the task of an exhausted man who had just pushed a huge boulder up a steep hill. Momentum had been painstakingly built up and the crest approached. Was it safe to stop pushing and hope that the momentum would take the boulder over the top? Or would the boulder grind to a halt and then slowly, frighteningly roll back toward us?

Now we know — and to be honest, the answer is hardly a surprise. Iraq is a basket case these days, and none of its problems came out of the blue. In the latest bout of sectarian and ethnic bloodletting, coordinated bomb attacks ripped through Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad and also northern Iraq, killing more than 30 people. The spasm of violence followed clashes between the Iraqi army and Sunni protesters and insurgents last month, where the federal government temporarily lost control of some town centers and urban neighborhoods in Kirkuk, Nineveh, and Diyala provinces.

Negative indicators abound: Armed civilian militias are reactivating, tit-for-tat bombings are targeting Sunni and Shiite mosques, and some Iraqi military forces are breaking down into ethnic-sectarian components or suffering from chronic absenteeism. Numerous segments of Iraq’s body politic — Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and Shia — are exasperated over the government’s inability to address political or economic inequities, and are talking seriously about partition. [Continue reading…]

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The community within

Michael Pollan writes: I can tell you the exact date that I began to think of myself in the first-person plural — as a superorganism, that is, rather than a plain old individual human being. It happened on March 7. That’s when I opened my e-mail to find a huge, processor-choking file of charts and raw data from a laboratory located at the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder. As part of a new citizen-science initiative called the American Gut project, the lab sequenced my microbiome — that is, the genes not of “me,” exactly, but of the several hundred microbial species with whom I share this body. These bacteria, which number around 100 trillion, are living (and dying) right now on the surface of my skin, on my tongue and deep in the coils of my intestines, where the largest contingent of them will be found, a pound or two of microbes together forming a vast, largely uncharted interior wilderness that scientists are just beginning to map.

I clicked open a file called Taxa Tables, and a colorful bar chart popped up on my screen. Each bar represented a sample taken (with a swab) from my skin, mouth and feces. For purposes of comparison, these were juxtaposed with bars representing the microbiomes of about 100 “average” Americans previously sequenced.

Here were the names of the hundreds of bacterial species that call me home. In sheer numbers, these microbes and their genes dwarf us. It turns out that we are only 10 percent human: for every human cell that is intrinsic to our body, there are about 10 resident microbes — including commensals (generally harmless freeloaders) and mutualists (favor traders) and, in only a tiny number of cases, pathogens. To the extent that we are bearers of genetic information, more than 99 percent of it is microbial. And it appears increasingly likely that this “second genome,” as it is sometimes called, exerts an influence on our health as great and possibly even greater than the genes we inherit from our parents. But while your inherited genes are more or less fixed, it may be possible to reshape, even cultivate, your second genome. [Continue reading…]

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How the Obama administration is strangling press freedom

Whether or not this has been formulated in written policy, it seems clear that the way the Obama administration attempts to control the release of classified information is by trying to exert as much control over those who receive such information as those who disseminate it. The leaker and the recipient are treated as sharing equal responsibility — even though in reality both the power and the responsibility lies in the hands of those government officials who possess security clearances.

The administration draws no distinction between the publication of leaked information and the leak itself — as though classified information is being leaked by the press, when in fact it is being leaked to the press.

The New York Times reports: Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday defended the Justice Department’s sweeping seizure of telephone records of Associated Press journalists, describing the article by The A.P. that prompted a criminal investigation as among “the top two or three most serious leaks that I’ve ever seen” in a 35-year career.

“It put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole,” he said in an apparent reference to an article on May 7, 2012, that disclosed the foiling of a terrorist plot by Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen to bomb an airliner. “And trying to determine who was responsible for that, I think, required very aggressive action.”

In a statement in response, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, Gary Pruitt, disputed that the publication of the article endangered security.

“We held that story until the government assured us that the national security concerns had passed,” he said. “Indeed, the White House was preparing to publicly announce that the bomb plot had been foiled.” Mr. Pruitt said the article was important in part because it refuted White House claims that there had been no Qaeda plots around the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. [Continue reading…]

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The law behind the A.P. phone-record scandal

Lynn Oberlander writes: The cowardly move by the Justice Department to subpoena two months of the A.P.’s phone records, both of its office lines and of the home phones of individual reporters, is potentially a breach of the Justice Department’s own guidelines. Even more important, it prevented the A.P. from seeking a judicial review of the action. Some months ago, apparently, the government sent a subpoena (or subpoenas) for the records to the phone companies that serve those offices and individuals, and the companies provided the records without any notice to the A.P. If subpoenas had been served directly on the A.P. or its individual reporters, they would have had an opportunity to go to court to file a motion to quash the subpoenas. What would have happened in court is anybody’s guess — there is no federal shield law that would protect reporters from having to testify before a criminal grand jury — but the Justice Department avoided the issue altogether by not notifying the A.P. that it even wanted this information. Even beyond the outrageous and overreaching action against the journalists, this is a blatant attempt to avoid the oversight function of the courts.

It is not, again, as if the government didn’t have options. The D.C. Circuit (in a 2005 opinion upholding a finding of contempt against the Times’s Judith Miller and Time’s Matt Cooper for refusing to testify about who had disclosed Valerie Plame’s identity as a C.I.A. operative) has held that there isn’t a First Amendment privilege for journalists to refuse to testify before a criminal grand jury, as has the Second Circuit (in a 2006 case in which the government was trying to find out who told the Times about a planned raid on two foundations suspected of providing aid to terrorists). In the wake of the decisions, there was a renewed effort to pass a federal shield law—though the proposed law would not have provided absolute protection in cases of national security — but, with the rise of WikiLeaks, that discussion died.

The Times’s case provides the facts most similar to the A.P.’s. The prosecutor had asked the Times to provide phone records; when the Times refused, he threatened to get the records directly from the phone companies. The Times then went to court and sought a declaratory judgment that its records were protected by reporter’s privilege. The Second Circuit ruled that phone records — even those held by a third party, such as a phone company—were subject to the same common-law privilege that would apply to the journalists’ own records. However, the court noted that there wasn’t a constitutional privilege to refuse to disclose such records to a criminal grand jury, and that any common-law privilege would be not absolute but “qualified” — meaning that it could be overcome by a compelling government interest. The Circuit, however, declined to define the privilege, other than to say that it wouldn’t stand up in the case before it.

Crucially, though the Times lost that case, 2–1, all of the judges agreed that government could not act unilaterally, without judicial review. [Continue reading…]

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In AP surveillance case, the real scandal is what’s legal

Timothy Lee writes: On Monday the Associated Press reported that the Justice Department “secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press.” But here’s what’s really scary: The Justice Department’s actions are likely perfectly legal.

U.S. law allows the government to engage in this type of surveillance—on media organizations or anyone else — without meaningful judicial oversight.

The key here is a legal principle known as the “third party doctrine,” which says that users don’t have Fourth Amendment rights protecting information they voluntarily turn over to someone else. Courts have said that when you dial a phone number, you are voluntarily providing information to your phone company, which is then free to share it with the government.

This all dates back to a 1979 Supreme Court decision. Police had asked the phone company for information about the numbers dialed from a robbery suspect’s phone. The suspect objected, pointing to a famous 1967 ruling holding that the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant to record the audio of a phone call. He argued that the same principle ought to apply when the government records information about the numbers a suspect dials.

The Supreme Court rejected this argument. “We doubt that people in general entertain any actual expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial,” Justice Harry Blackmun wrote for the court. He pointed out that telephone customers are used to seeing numbers they’ve dialed on their monthly telephone bill.

Blackmun’s reasoning may have turned on the fact that automatic dialing was a relatively new development in 1979. Previously, telephone users had to tell a human operator which number they wished to reach, making it plausible to regard the phone company as an active participant in the phone-dialing process, but a mere passive conduit in transmitting the phone call itself.

Technological progress has rendered this distinction increasingly dubious. For example, cell phone companies now keep records about the locations of their customers’ phones. The government has argued that this “non-content” information should be available without a warrant. Yet such records amount to a detailed record of everywhere the phone’s owner has been in the past month; a much more intrusive form of surveillance than a list of the phone numbers a customer has dialed. [Continue reading…]

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Rape culture in the U.S. military

Belen Fernandez writes: Last weekend, the US Air Force’s sexual assault prevention chief was arrested on charges of sexual battery – a fitting prelude, no doubt, to the Pentagon’s just-released report on soaring sex crimes in the military.

According to the report, an estimated 26,000 sex crimes took place in 2012. This beats the previous year’s estimate by 7,000.

A 2010 Time magazine article paints a bleak picture of a military advertised by upbeat patriot-pundits as the epitome of noble altruism and teamwork:

What does it tell us that female soldiers deployed overseas stop drinking water after 7 pm to reduce the odds of being raped if they have to use the bathroom at night? Or that a soldier who was assaulted when she went out for a cigarette was afraid to report it for fear she would be demoted – for having gone out without her weapon? Or that, as Representative Jane Harman puts it, “a female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire.”

Of course, females are not the only victims of military sex crimes; 13,900 of last year’s cases were reported by men. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Lawmakers say they’re outraged that for the second time this month a member of the armed forces assigned to help prevent sexual assaults in the military is under investigation for alleged sexual misconduct.

The back-to-back Army and Air Force cases highlight a problem that is drawing increased scrutiny in Congress and expressions of frustration from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. Lawmakers said it was time for Hagel to get tough with the military brass.

“This is sickening. Twice now, in a matter of as many weeks, we’ve seen the very people charged with protecting victims of sexual assault being charged as perpetrators,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said. “It’s an astonishing reminder that the Pentagon has both a major problem on its hands and a tremendous amount of work to do to assure victims — who already only report a small fraction of sexual assaults — that they are changing the culture around these heinous crimes.

“Secretary Hagel needs to act swiftly to re-examine sexual assault services across the department to ensure that these disturbing betrayals of trust are ended,” Murray said.

Hagel said he was directing all the services to retrain, re-credential and rescreen all sexual assault prevention and response personnel and military recruiters, his spokesman, George Little, said after Tuesday’s announcement that a sergeant first class at Fort Hood, Texas, was accused of pandering, abusive sexual contact, assault and maltreatment of subordinates.

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New study examines how individuality develops

EurekAlert! reports: The adult brain continues to grow with the challenges that it faces; its changes are linked to the development of personality and behavior. But what is the link between individual experience and brain structure? Why do identical twins not resemble each other perfectly even when they grew up together? To shed light on these questions, the scientists observed forty genetically identical mice that were kept in an enclosure offering a large variety of activity and exploration options.

“The animals were not only genetically identical, they were also living in the same environment,” explains principal investigator Gerd Kempermann, Professor for Genomics of Regeneration, CRTD, and Site Speaker of the DZNE in Dresden. “However, this environment was so rich that each mouse gathered its own individual experiences in it. Over time, the animals therefore increasingly differed in their realm of experience and behavior.”

Each of the mice was equipped with a special micro-chip emitting electromagnetic signals. This allowed the scientists to construct the mice’s movement profiles and to quantify their exploratory behavior. The result: Despite a common environment and identical genes the mice showed highly individualized behavioral patterns. They reacted to their environment differently. In the course of the three-month experiment these differences increased in size.

“Though the animals shared the same life space, they increasingly differed in their activity levels. These differences were associated with differences in the generation of new neurons in the hippocampus, a region of the brain that supports learning and memory,” says Kempermann. “Animals that explored the environment to a greater degree also grew more new neurons than animals that were more passive.”

Adult neurogenesis, that is, the generation of new neurons in the hippocampus, allows the brain to react to new information flexibly. With this study, the authors show for the first time that personal experiences and ensuing behavior contribute to the “individualization of the brain.” The individualization they observed cannot be reduced to differences in environment or genetic makeup.

“Adult neurogenesis also occurs in the hippocampus of humans,” says Kempermann. “Hence we assume that we have tracked down a neurobiological foundation for individuality that also applies to humans.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama is worse than Nixon, says Pentagon Papers lawyer

New York Observer: James C. Goodale, the so-called “father of reporters’ privilege” and the author of a new book called Fighting for the Press (CUNY Journalism Press, 255 pp., $20), was in his office at the Debevoise & Plimpton law firm, where he’s a partner, comparing Barack Obama to Richard M. Nixon.

“Nixon and Agnew were like listening to a Fox News program all day long, every day,” he said. “In their eyes, the Eastern establishment press were against them and they were against it and they were going to destroy it as best they can.” But, he said, “Obama has all these things that he’s done to the press on national security matters that Nixon never did.”

Mr. Goodale, 79, was the general counsel of The New York Times during the 1971 Pentagon Papers case, when President Nixon ordered the old grey lady to cease publication of excerpts from a 7,000-page document, which detailed America’s involvement in Vietnam over the course of three decades. The Times published the first excerpt on June 13, 1971. By June 26, the case had reached the Supreme Court. Over the course of a few days, the justices ruled in a 6-3 decision that the U.S. government could not censor the Times. Nixon then convened a grand jury to indict the Times for conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act – “which really doesn’t mean anything,” Mr. Goodale said, rubbing his forehead in distress — but the case quickly fell apart. Fighting for the Press reads like a political thriller, with Nixon providing some dark comic relief. The guy was not exactly subtle: “As far as the Times is concerned,” he said to John Mitchell, the U.S. Attorney General, “hell they’re our enemies.”

Now, the man who successfully fought Nixon says President Obama has an even more troubling record. [Continue reading…]

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