Does Ahmadinejad pose an existential threat to the Islamic Republic?

Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar writes: Four months before the next presidential election, Iran’s conservative establishment is facing a security threat: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Four years ago, a controversial election that reinstated President Ahmadinejad brought millions of Iranians into a face-to-face confrontation with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now, it is Ahmadinejad who is coming face-to-face with the very man who lifted him out of obscurity and granted him worldwide fame and unparalleled support against all pillars of the Islamic Republic.

During an unprecedented debate at the parliament, which ended in mayhem and the dismissal of the labor minister, Ahmadinejad played a video that implicated the powerful Larijani brothers, two of whom head the judiciary and legislative bodies, of corruption and nepotism. Sunday’s impeachment put Ahmadinejad’s remaining presidency in danger since many of his allies in the cabinet have had similar fates. At this fiery session that was being broadcast live on state radio, he threatened and eventually played the video to prove a backroom deal that involved the Larijani family. In response, the speaker of the parliament accused Ahmadinejad of mafia type activities and did not allow him to continue. Ahmadinejad angrily left the parliament and moments later 192 out of 272 members of parliament voted in favor of the impeachment.

With the next election just around the corner, the supreme leader fears that these public exchanges may once again dangerously polarize the polity and the country. During a meeting to resolve the tensions between the president and the speaker of the parliament just a few weeks ago, Khamenei frustratingly asked them not to publicize their differences. In October 2012, he even warned: “From today until the election day, whoever uses people’s emotions to create conflicts, has definitely betrayed the country.” In a country where political campaigns have turned into massive social movements, normal elections are seen by the government as unusual security threats. Khamenei recalls the 1997 and 2005 presidential elections that gave rise to the Reform and Green Movements, respectively. Looking at the increasing intensity of the past upheavals, he has good reason to worry that the next election could lead to turmoil and obliterate his office. [Continue reading…]

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British PM invites Taliban to talks over Afghanistan’s future

The Guardian reports: David Cameron issued a direct appeal to the Taliban to enter peaceful talks on the future of Afghanistan after hosting talks at Chequers with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari.

The prime minister said the two leaders had agreed “an unprecedented level of co-operation”.

He said they had agreed to sign up to a strategic partnership between their two countries in the autumn.

At the same time, they also agreed to the opening of an office in the Qatari capital, Doha, for negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan high peace council.

Cameron said the agreement should send a clear message to the Taliban. “Now is the time for everyone to participate in a peaceful, political process in Afghanistan,” he said.

He added: “This should lead to a future where all Afghans can participate peacefully in that country’s political process.”

Karzai said that they had had a “very frank and open discussion” and echoed Cameron’s appeal to the Taliban to join peace talks. [Continue reading…]

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Israel, Palestine and the mapping of power

Tristram Hunt writes: ‘It’s almost comical. The idea of maps is to represent reality; here it represents fantasy.” So Professor Bruce Wexler of Yale University comments on how the vast majority of maps in Palestinian and Israeli schoolbooks omit the existence of the other entity. As a result, children on either side of the Green Line are growing up with “an internal representation of their homeland, in which one does not include the other”.

But since when have maps been about objective representation of space? They are about the expression and fulfilment of power. From the age of Ptolemy, all those lofty claims to comprehensiveness have usually succumbed to the promotion of political agendas. As the cartography scholar Jerry Brotton rightly remarks: “A map always manages the reality it tries to show.”

Nowhere more so than with the British empire. For in Israel/Palestine, just as in Kashmir and Sudan, postcolonial nations are still wrestling with imperialism’s mixed legacy and its arbitrary lines in the sand. As the colonial unravelling continues, and as rising powers seek to exert their own dominion, the historic confusions of British map-making are fostering all manner of geopolitical tensions.

From the outset, cartography and colonialism went hand in hand. The assertion of political control over supposed terra incognita was most effectively realised by drawing up plans and plots. Maps allowed for the expropriation of existing land rights (since indigenous communities often lacked accurate measuring instruments) and an explanation of a colony’s significance.

Take Bryan Edwards’s mid-18th century Map of the Island of Barbadoes, with its delineation of the Caribbean landscape into Anglican parishes and sugar plantations. What mattered was Barbados’s role in the imperial project, rather than any realistic representation of its geography or population.

Or perhaps the most famous propagation of British colonial power, John Colomb’s 1886 map, Imperial Federation. It placed Britain centre stage, coloured our colonies a distinctive red, inflated the land mass of Canada, left swaths of unconquered terrain simply blank, and at its base posited a serene Britannia surrounded by icons of her Indian, Australian, and African colonies. [Continue reading…]

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CIA rendition: more than a quarter of countries ‘offered covert support’

The Guardian reports: The full extent of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme has been laid bare with the publication of a report showing there is evidence that more than a quarter of the world’s governments covertly offered support.

A 213-page report compiled by the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), a New York-based human rights organisation, says that at least 54 countries co-operated with the global kidnap, detention and torture operation that was mounted after 9/11, many of them in Europe.

So widespread and extensive was the participation of governments across the world that it is now clear the CIA could not have operated its programme without their support, according to the OSJI.

“There is no doubt that high-ranking Bush administration officials bear responsibility for authorising human rights violations associated with secret detention and extraordinary rendition, and the impunity that they have enjoyed to date remains a matter of significant concern,” the report says.

“But responsibility for these violations does not end with the United States. Secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations, designed to be conducted outside the United States under cover of secrecy, could not have been implemented without the active participation of foreign governments. These governments too must be held accountable.” [Continue reading…]

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The Obama doctrine of unlimited power

Lawyers have much more interest in constructing lines of reasoning than they do in clear communication. For that reason, the Justice Department’s white paper on the targeted killing of Americans was written not so much to articulate the policies of the U.S. government but rather as part of a legal process designed to ensure that President Obama and other U.S. officials can avoid being prosecuted for murder.

Stripped to its bare bones, the argument runs like this:

I can kill you if I think that you want to kill me. And I can kill you now or whenever I choose if I have no way of knowing when you might try to kill me.

This isn’t a basis for self-defense; it’s a justification for premeditated murder.

Spencer Ackerman writes: “Imminence” used to mean something in military terms: namely, that an adversary had begun preparations for an assault. In order to justify his drone strikes on American citizens, President Obama redefined that concept to exclude any actual adversary attack.

That’s the heart of the Justice Department’s newly-leaked white paper, first reported by NBC News, explaining why a “broader concept of imminence” (.PDF) trumps traditional Constitutional protections American citizens enjoy from being killed by their government without due process. It’s an especially striking claim when considering that the actual number of American citizens who are “senior operational leader[s] of al-Qaida or its associated forces” is vanishingly small. As much as Obama talks about rejecting the concept of “perpetual war” he’s providing, and institutionalizing, a blueprint for it. [Continue reading…]

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Did Obama order killing of Americans then seek legal cover?

A white paper written by the Justice Department and leaked to NBC News, lays out the reasoning that supposedly provides grounds for the U.S. government to legally kill U.S. citizens — legal grounds that would explain how President Obama had the authority to order the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen on September 30, 2011.

Obama placed Awlaki on a CIA kill list in April 2010. The white paper was written, however, some time after September 16, 2011.

Although the memo is undated, it cites a speech given by John O Brennan at Harvard Law School on that date, so must have been written later, quite likely after Awlaki had been killed. This legal argument was being laid out long after Obama had ordered Awlaki’s killing, strongly suggesting that he first ordered the killing but only later asked the Justice Department to construct a legal justification for an action he had already set in motion.

NBC News reports: A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be “senior operational leaders” of al-Qaida or “an associated force” — even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.

The 16-page memo, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News, provides new details about the legal reasoning behind one of the Obama administration’s most secretive and controversial polices: its dramatically increased use of drone strikes against al-Qaida suspects abroad, including those aimed at American citizens, such as the September 2011 strike in Yemen that killed alleged al-Qaida operatives Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Both were U.S. citizens who had never been indicted by the U.S. government nor charged with any crimes.

The secrecy surrounding such strikes is fast emerging as a central issue in this week’s hearing of White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, a key architect of the drone campaign, to be CIA director. Brennan was the first administration official to publicly acknowledge drone strikes in a speech last year, calling them “consistent with the inherent right of self-defense.” In a separate talk at the Northwestern University Law School in March, Attorney General Eric Holder specifically endorsed the constitutionality of targeted killings of Americans, saying they could be justified if government officials determine the target poses “an imminent threat of violent attack.”

But the confidential Justice Department “white paper” introduces a more expansive definition of self-defense or imminent attack than described by Brennan or Holder in their public speeches. It refers, for example, to what it calls a “broader concept of imminence” than actual intelligence about any ongoing plot against the U.S. homeland.

Michael Isikoff, national investigative correspondent for NBC News, talks with Rachel Maddow about a newly obtained, confidential Department of Justice white paper that hints at the details of a secret White House memo that explains the legal justifications for targeted drone strikes that kill Americans without trial in the name of national security.

“The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the memo states.

Instead, it says, an “informed, high-level” official of the U.S. government may determine that the targeted American has been “recently” involved in “activities” posing a threat of a violent attack and “there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities.” The memo does not define “recently” or “activities.”

As in Holder’s speech, the confidential memo lays out a three-part test that would make targeted killings of American lawful: In addition to the suspect being an imminent threat, capture of the target must be “infeasible, and the strike must be conducted according to “law of war principles.” But the memo elaborates on some of these factors in ways that go beyond what the attorney general said publicly. For example, it states that U.S. officials may consider whether an attempted capture of a suspect would pose an “undue risk” to U.S. personnel involved in such an operation. If so, U.S. officials could determine that the capture operation of the targeted American would not be feasible, making it lawful for the U.S. government to order a killing instead, the memo concludes.

The undated memo is entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force.” It was provided to members of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees in June by administration officials on the condition that it be kept confidential and not discussed publicly.

Although not an official legal memo, the white paper was represented by administration officials as a policy document that closely mirrors the arguments of classified memos on targeted killings by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which provides authoritative legal advice to the president and all executive branch agencies. The administration has refused to turn over to Congress or release those memos publicly — or even publicly confirm their existence. A source with access to the white paper, which is not classified, provided a copy to NBC News.

“This is a chilling document,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, which is suing to obtain administration memos about the targeted killing of Americans. “Basically, it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen. … It recognizes some limits on the authority it sets out, but the limits are elastic and vaguely defined, and it’s easy to see how they could be manipulated.”

In particular, Jaffer said, the memo “redefines the word imminence in a way that deprives the word of its ordinary meaning.”

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the white paper. The spokeswoman, Tracy Schmaler, instead pointed to public speeches by what she called a “parade” of administration officials, including Brennan, Holder, former State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh and former Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson that she said outlined the “legal framework” for such operations.

Pressure for turning over the Justice Department memos on targeted killings of Americans appears to be building on Capitol Hill amid signs that Brennan will be grilled on the subject at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday.

On Monday, a bipartisan group of 11 senators — led by Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon — wrote a letter to President Barack Obama asking him to release all Justice Department memos on the subject. While accepting that “there will clearly be circumstances in which the president has the authority to use lethal force” against Americans who take up arms against the country, it said, “It is vitally important … for Congress and the American public to have a full understanding of how the executive branch interprets the limits and boundaries of this authority.” [Continue reading…]

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Egypt at risk of complete breakdown of law and order

The Associated Press reports: An Egyptian opposition party on Monday claimed police tortured one of its members to death, electrocuting him and beating him repeatedly on the head — the latest case alleging police brutality in a crackdown on anti-government protesters.

Mohammed el-Gindy, a 28-year-old activist, died of his wounds early Monday at a Cairo hospital after he was “tortured to death,” the Egyptian Popular Current party said in a statement.

The Interior Ministry had no immediate comment.

El-Gindy went missing for several days after protesting on Jan. 27 in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The protesters are opposed to Egypt’s Islamist President Mohammed Morsi’s policies and are pressing him to amend the constitution, which was drafted by a panel dominated by Islamists and approved in a public referendum last year.

Party spokeswoman Mona Amer said she saw el-Gindy’s body and that it carried marks of torture. She said he was electrocuted, had broken ribs and a “cord appeared to have been wrapped around his neck.” A medical report cited brain hemorrhage as cause of death.

Amnesty International: Almost every girl and woman – regardless of age, social status or choice of attire – who has walked the streets or taken public transport in Cairo, has experienced some form of verbal or physical sexual harassment.

This isn’t new. For years, Egyptian women’s rights activists and others have called on the authorities to recognize the seriousness of the problem.

There needs to be a fundamental shift in institutionalized attitudes that discriminate against women.

The Egyptian authorities must introduce legal reforms, prosecute perpetrators and address root causes, because the plight of women who have experienced sexual violence has been ignored.

Blame is placed on the victims for being dressed “indecently,” or for daring to be present in “male” public spaces.

The horrific testimonies emerging following protests commemorating the second anniversary of the “25 January Revolution” have brought to light how violent mob sexual attacks against women have happened, but have rarely been brought to public attention.

International Crisis Group: It is difficult to know which is most dangerous: the serious uptick in street violence; President Morsi’s and the Muslim Brotherhood’s serial inability to reach out to the rest of the political class inclusively; or the opposition clinging to the hope of some extraneous event (demonstrations, foreign pressure, judicial rulings or military intervention) allowing it to gain power while bypassing arduous compromise and politics. They are tied of course: the president’s cavalier treatment of the constitution-writing process and the judiciary and the opposition’s lethargic approach to politics and rejection of Islamist legitimacy alike have eroded the authority of state institutions. This encourages in turn unrest and contributes to the economic slide. Together, these heighten risks of a complete breakdown of law and order. For two years, political factions repeatedly have failed to reach consensus on basic rules of the game, producing a transition persistently threatening to veer off the road. It is past time for the president and opposition to reach an accommodation to restore and preserve the state’s integrity.

Since President Mubarak’s ouster, the level of violence has ebbed and flowed, yet each new wave brings the country closer to tipping point. Already, some police officers, beleaguered by attacks on their headquarters, are considering removing their uniforms and going home; there is talk of brewing discontent among Central Security Forces, the riot control police; and criminal gangs along with looters profit from the chaos. There are new shocking images of police brutality. Many young Egyptians increasingly appear disillusioned with electoral politics, and some are drawn to anarchical violence.

The situation is made worse by deteriorating economic conditions. As foreign currency reserves decline, the government finds it ever more difficult to prop up the Egypt’s pound or maintain fuel and food subsidies. One should not be surprised to see larger segments of the population joining in socio-economic riots. By current trends, Egypt could find itself in a vicious cycle of economic under-performance and political instability, the one fuelling the other.

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The illusory promise of negotiations in Syria

“Better to jaw-jaw than to war-war,” everyone likes to repeat, affirming Winston Churchill’s truism that negotiation is preferable to fighting.

But the debate should never be about whether negotiation is desirable — it always is. The question is whether negotiation is possible.

Many observers outside Syria assert that negotiation offers the only path to end the war and either say or imply that the primary obstacle to negotiation is the intransigence of Assad’s opponents.

Poor Assad, hamstrung like so many an Israeli government, simply can’t find the right partners for peace.

As for Israel itself, in the last few days it moved from anxious bystander to occasional combatant — a role ostensibly necessitated by the risk that Hezbollah’s missile arsenal, already claimed to contain tens of thousands of rockets, might be enlarged by a few dozen more with questionable specifications.

The damage done by the attack to the Assad regime appears to have been minimal. Indeed, with Saudi Arabia — no friend of Assad — piping up to condemn Israel’s “flagrant violation” of Syria’s sovereignty, the net result may be that Israel is contributing to the extension of the regime’s tenure and not hastening its downfall. Moreover, this could well describe Israel’s hopes: that they would rather see the devil they know hang on for as long as possible, than witness a new devil emerge.

Robin Yassin-Kassab writes: On January 19, the Syrian foreign minister Walid Al Moallem gave an apparently conciliatory interview to state TV. “I tell the young men who carried arms to change and reform, take part in the dialogue for a new Syria and you will be a partner in building it. Why carry arms?” In the southern and eastern suburbs of Damascus, his voice was drowned out by the continuing roar of the regime’s rocket, artillery and air strikes.

The UN and parts of the media have also called for negotiations. Until late last month, however, the Syria’s National Coalition – the widely recognised opposition umbrella group – opposed the notion absolutely. But then NC leader Moaz Al Khatib announced that he would talk directly to regime representatives (not President Bashar Al Assad himself) on condition that the regime released 160,000 detainees and renew the expired passports of exiled Syrians.

In the context of Mr Al Moallem’s media offensive (and in the absence of concerted international financial or military support for either the NC or the revolutionary militias) Mr Al Khatib’s announcement calls the regime’s bluff. It doesn’t, of course, mean that negotiations are about to be launched. For a start, the regime only intends to negotiate with, as it puts it, those “who have not betrayed Syria”. Like successive Israeli regimes, it will only talk with the “opponents” it chooses to recognise. As well as pro-regime people posing as oppositionists, this includes Haytham Manaa’s National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, a group that has no influence whatsoever on the revolutionary fighters setting the agenda. The NC – which does have some influence on the ground, and would have far more if it were sufficiently funded – is definitely not invited.

And negotiations won’t happen, secondly, because the regime won’t release the detainees, at least not yet. If it did release all 160,000, it would indeed be a sign that it had understood that it could no longer torture, imprison and kill Syrians. It would be a reasonable starting point for negotiating the transition.

Why has the NC been so reluctant to negotiate thus far? First there is the obvious moral point, that a regime loses its legitimacy when it prosecutes war against its own people. As a criminal regime, it forfeits its right to engage in national dialogue.

The point is correct, but in the face of such vast tragedy the moral point is not sufficient. It may be a stubborn and ultimately irresponsible idealism that clings to moral principle while a land, a people and their future are burning. A much more intelligent motive for opposing negotiations is hard-nosed realism. [Continue reading…]

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‘The god of Algiers’

Bruce Riedel writes: While [Algeria’s President Abdelaziz] Bouteflika is the public face of the government, real power still resides with the generals. They avoid the public limelight and are known in Algiers as “le pouvoir,” the power behind the scenes. In the shadowy world of “le pouvoir,” the most powerful man is probably the head of the secret police or mukhabarat. The head of Algerian intelligence, the DRS, Mohammad Mediene, has a long track record of eradicating terrorist groups using extreme methods. KGB-trained and rarely photographed, the 73-year-old Mediene has run Algerian intelligence since 1990 and is known for his professionalism and determination. He is also known by his nickname, ‘the god of Algiers,’ because his power is so pervasive and unaccountable. Born in 1939, he served in the French colonial army before defecting to the nationalist revolt when it began in the 1950s. Mediene is now the longest serving head of intelligence in the world. And probably the most ruthless.

His deputy, Bashir Tartag, commanded the actual assault on the terrorists in the desert facility. His nickname is “le bombardier” and he is also known for his support for the so called eradicationist school of counter-terrorism. But the DRS is also known for its tactic of infiltrating terrorist groups, creating “false flag” terrorists and trying to control them. Rumors have associated the DRS in the past with the Malian warlord Iyad Ag Ghali, head of Ansar al Dine AQIM’s ally in Mali, and even with Mukhtar Belmukhtar, the al-Qaeda terrorist who engineered the attack on the natural gas plant. The Algerians hope is that they can influence these groups to stay away from Algerian targets. The tactic originates with KGB and was developed by the DRS in the 1990s. It had success in dividing the jihadists then. This year is failed disastrously in Mali when the terrorists took events into their hands. [Continue reading…]

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New old Libya

Robert Draper writes: The bronze likeness of Muammar Qaddafi’s nemesis was lying on his back in a wooden crate shrouded in the darkness of a museum warehouse. His name was Septimius Severus. Like Qaddafi, he was from what is now Libya, and for 18 years bridging the second and third centuries A.D. he ruled the Roman Empire. His birthplace, Leptis Magna—a commercial city 80 miles east of what the Phoenicians once called Oea, or present-day Tripoli—became, in every meaningful way, a second Rome. More than 1,700 years after the emperor’s death, Libya’s Italian colonizers honored him by erecting a statue of the imposing, bearded leader with a torch aloft in his right hand. They installed the statue in Tripoli’s main square (now Martyrs’ Square) in 1933—where it remained for a half century, until another Libyan ruler took umbrage.

“The statue became the mouthpiece of the opposition, because he was the only thing Qaddafi couldn’t punish,” says Hafed Walda, a native Libyan and professor of archaeology at King’s College London. “Every day people would ask, ‘What did Septimius Severus say today?’ He became a figure of annoyance to the regime. So Qaddafi banished him to a rubbish heap. The people of Leptis Magna rescued him and brought him back home.” And that is where I found him, reposing in a wooden box amid gardening tools and discarded window frames, awaiting whatever destination the new Libya might have in store for him.

Qaddafi correctly viewed the statue as a threat. For Septimius Severus stood as a wistful reminder of what Libya had once been: a Mediterranean region of immense cultural and economic wealth, anything but isolated from the world beyond the sea. Spreading over 1,100 miles of coastline, bracketed by highlands that recede into semiarid wadis and finally into the copper vacuum of the desert, Libya had long been a corridor for commerce and art and irrepressible social aspiration. The tri-city region of Tripolitania—Leptis Magna, Sabratah, and Oea—had once provided wheat and olives to the Romans.

Yet Qaddafi squandered the country’s advantages: its location just south of Italy and Greece, which made it one of Africa’s gateways to Europe; its manageable population (fewer than seven million inhabiting a landmass six times the size of Italy); its vast oil reserves. He quashed innovation and free expression. To schoolchildren, who memorized Qaddafi’s tangled philosophy as inscribed in his Green Book, the story of their country consisted of two chapters: the dark days under the West’s imperialist bootheel, and then the glory days of the Brother Leader.

Today the dictator and his warped vision for Libya are dead, and the nation is undergoing the spasmlike throes of reinvention. As Walda says, “The journey of discovery has just begun. In many ways this moment is more dangerous than wartime.” Temporary prisons are overstuffed with thousands of Qaddafi loyalists awaiting their fate as laws and court procedures are reformed. Militias control whole swaths of the country. Guns are less visible than they were during the war, but that only means the hundreds of thousands who possess them have learned to keep them out of sight. Highways in rural areas remain thoroughly unpoliced (not counting the checkpoints manned by former rebels, or thuwwar). Immigrants pour into Libya from its western and southern borders. Key Qaddafi associates, as well as his wife and some of his children, remain at large. Several new ministers are already on the take. [Continue reading…]

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Narrative on Israeli air strike on Syria starts to unravel

In the aftermath of an Israeli air strike on Syria on Wednesday, numerous reports claimed that the target of the strike was a convoy carrying SA-17 missiles approaching the Lebanese border. The Syrian government, however, claimed that the target was a research facility north west of Damascus.

Russian SA-17

The New York Times reported:

American officials said Israel hit a convoy before dawn on Wednesday that was ferrying sophisticated SA-17 antiaircraft missiles to Lebanon. The Syrians and their allies said the target was a research facility in the Damascus suburb of Jamraya.

Haaretz even published a map showing the two locations:

As I noted at the time, whether Israel was trying to destroy a moving or a stationary target was significant because if the target turned out to be stationary, then the timing of the strike was most likely determined as much by the Israelis as by the circumstances.

The idea that highly sophisticated Russian-made missile systems were just about to slip across the Lebanese border and into the hands of Hezbollah, was clearly intended to convey Israel’s sense of urgency.

But now Syrian TV has broadcast footage of what is claimed to be the aftermath of the strike: damage to the research facility at Jamraya outside Damascus.

The Times of Israel reports:

The video also shows what appears to be a destroyed mobile carrier for an SA-17 anti-aircraft missile battery.

But on the contrary, what the video shows is the remains of an SA-8 missile battery, an air defense system that has been in service for over 40 years.

Syrian SA-8 missile launcher apparently destroyed in Israeli air strike.

SA-8 missile launcher.

The New York Times now reports:

A senior United States military official, asked about reports that the research center had been damaged, said, “My sense is that the buildings were destroyed due to the bombs which targeted the vehicles” carrying the antiaircraft weapons, and from “the secondary explosions from the missiles.”

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss intelligence reports, said that “the Israelis had a small strike package,” meaning that a relatively few fighter aircraft slipped past Syria’s air defenses and that targeting both the missiles and the research center “would risk doing just a little damage to either.”

“They clearly went after the air defense weapons on the transport trucks,” the official said.

Based on the evidence available at this time, the claim that SA-17s were targeted, appears to be baseless. Neither is there any evidence that the SA-8s that were destroyed were heading for Lebanon. Indeed, as the New York Times report suggests — perhaps unintentionally — the SA-8s may well have not been going anywhere. They may have been intended to defend the facility next to which they were positioned*:

By hitting the research center, part of a military complex that is supposed to be protected by Russian-made antiaircraft defenses, Israel made it clear it was willing to risk direct intervention to keep weapons and missiles out of Hezbollah’s hands.

The report goes on to say:

The strike also appeared to be a signal to the Iranians that Israel would be willing to conduct a similar attack on aboveground nuclear facilities if it seemed that Iran was near achieving nuclear weapons capability. But Iran would be a far harder target — much farther away from Israel, much better defended, and with facilities much more difficult to damage. The nuclear enrichment center that worries Israel and Western governments the most is nearly 300 feet under a mountain outside Qum, largely invulnerable to the weapons that Israel is seemed to have used in last week’s raid.

The decision of the Syrian government to reveal the results of the Israeli attack was no doubt intended to serve multiple purposes, but it’s hard to imagine that what looks like an ill-conceived operation will have provoked much fear in Iran.

Was Netanyahu sending a message to Tehran to demonstrate Israel’s strong will, or was he sending a message to Washington about Israel’s limited capabilities?

* In the final paragraph of today’s New York Times report, it does refer to the fact that the missile launchers in the video are SA-8s, but then quotes an Israeli journalist, Amir Rapaport, claiming that the SA-8s were planted at the scene. “Maybe it’s sort of a trick of the Syrians,” Rapaport said. Maybe. But frankly, neither the Americans nor Israelis have a lot of credibility at this point. The existence and destruction of SA-17s in this story is mere hearsay.

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Obama: “I want to do something on climate, but I don’t know what.”

Our present course leads towards certain catastrophe.

Jeff Goodell writes: Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change. After promising in 2008 that his presidency would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” President Obama went silent on the most crucial issue of our time. He failed to talk openly with Americans about the risks of continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, failed to put political muscle behind legislation to cap carbon pollution, failed to meaningfully engage in international climate negotiations, failed to use the power of his office to end the fake “debate” about the reality of global warming and failed to prepare Americans – and the world – for life on a rapidly­ warming planet. It was as if the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced became a political inconvenience for the president once he was elected.

Now Obama gets another shot at it. “The politics of global warming are changing fast,” says Kevin Knobloch, the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Thanks to a year of extreme weather and Hurricane Sandy, a large majority of Americans – nearly 90 percent – favor action on global warming, even if there are economic costs. The U.S. economy is on the road to recovery and no longer offers an excuse for inaction. Big Coal, traditionally the loudest voice against climate action, has been weakened by a glut of cheap natural gas and the economic viability of solar and wind power. China has new political leadership that appears open to discussing a global agreement to cut carbon. And Obama himself has nothing left to lose. “The president has a big opportunity here,” says former Vice President Al Gore. “This is a moment when he can expand the ideas of what’s possible.”

Obama’s record on climate issues is not all bad. In his first term, Gore points out, the president made significant strides in promoting clean energy. “He accomplished more than any president before him,” says Gore. Obama’s biggest move was to dramatically boost fuel standards for cars and trucks, which will cut climate-warming pollution by 6 billion metric tons in the course of the program. Thanks in part to billions of dollars in federal stimulus, wind energy doubled in the last four years, while solar installations increased sixfold. By the end of the decade, in fact, America is on track to cut its carbon pollution by as much as 17 percent, meeting the long-term goal Obama pledged at the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009.

The trouble is, Obama’s accomplishments are small-bore when weighed against the immense scale of the climate crisis. 2012 was the hottest year on record in the continental U.S. The polar ice caps are melting faster than scientists predicted; wildfires torched the American West; extreme drought parched 60 percent of the country’s farms, jacking up food prices. Then came Hurricane Sandy, which devastated New York and New Jersey. “Climate change has gone from something that happens in a computer model to something that people can see in their own backyards,” says Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It is a global crisis playing out before our very eyes. And it’s not happening in slow motion.”

Obama isn’t blind to the threat. “He understands this is the central problem his administration has to deal with in the second term,” says John Po­desta, who headed up Obama’s transition team in 2008. “He knows the judgment of history is riding on this.” At a press conference shortly after his re­election, Obama admitted that “we hadn’t done as much as we need to” to address climate change, and promised a “wide-ranging conversation with scientists, engineers and elected officials” to make sure that global warming is “not a problem we’re passing on to future generations that’s going to be very expensive and very painful to deal with.”

But if the president is planning any bold action during his second term to combat global warming, there’s little evidence of it. “I want to do something on climate,” he told a friend and former White House staffer after the election, “but I don’t know what.” Before his 2008 inauguration, Obama solicited ideas for combating climate change from top environmentalists and energy executives. This time around, there have been no such meetings, and the president has not telegraphed any ideas on climate change to Congress. “If he has a larger strategy on this, I haven’t seen it,” says the chief of staff to a leading Democratic senator. One Democratic donor and climate activist who visited the White House in December was told point-blank by Heather Zichal, the White House adviser on energy and climate, that the president has no plans to propose any climate legislation to Congress, knowing that House Republicans would shoot it down.

“I think the president understands the climate crisis intellectually, but he has not had the ‘holy shit’ moment you arrive at when you think about this deeply enough,” says a leading climate advocate who has had private conversations with Obama about global warming. Instead of talking about the risks of climate change during the campaign, Obama touted an “all of the above” energy plan that was a soft-porn version of “drill, baby, drill.” Under Obama, in fact, oil and gas production have soared: Last year, U.S. oil production grew by 766,000 barrels a day, the largest jump ever, and domestic oil production is at its highest level in 15 years. [Continue reading…]

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What happens when drones return to America?

Mockup of a mosquito drone that could be used for gathering DNA samples from unwitting targets.

Lev Grossman writes: Drones don’t care who they work for. They’ll spy for anyone, and as they get cheaper and more powerful and easier to use, access to military-grade surveillance technology will get easier too. Voracious as they are for information, drones could take a serious chunk out of Americans’ already dwindling stock of personal privacy. It’s certainly not legal to fly a drone up 10 stories to peer through the curtains into somebody’s bedroom, but it’s just as certain that somebody’s going to do it, if they haven’t already. Last February an animal-rights group in South Carolina launched a drone to watch a group of hunters on a pigeon shoot on private property. The hunters promptly shot it down. It might be America’s first case of human-on-drone violence, but it won’t be the last.

Whatever happens on the civilian front, the ongoing dronification of the U.S. military is barreling ahead. The Predator has already been superseded by the larger, faster, more powerful Reaper, which is in turn looking nervously over its shoulder at the even larger, jet-powered Avenger, currently in the testing phase.

The U.S.’s skunkworks are disgorging drones in a bizarre profusion — like Darwin’s finches, they’re evolving furiously to fill more and more operational niches and creating new ones as they go. Already soldiers carry hand-launchable Raven surveillance drones and kamikaze Switchblade drones for targeting snipers. The K-MAX unmanned helicopter ferries cargo around Afghanistan for the Marines. The Navy’s SeaFox, a single-use underwater drone, is hunting for Iranian mines in the Persian Gulf. The Army is testing a Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, essentially a 300-ft.-long unmanned blimp designed to squat over a battlefield at high altitude for weeks at a time. (Its manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, promises “more than 21 days of unblinking stare.”) DARPA has fielded a tiny drone that mimics the flight of a hummingbird, and it’s mulling a network of deepwater drones that would dwell on the seafloor but — like Godzilla — rise to the surface in times of need.

Drones are learning to think for themselves. Those University of Pennsylvania drones are already semiautonomous: you can toss a hoop in the air and they’ll plot a trajectory and fly right through it. (Whether or not you count Google’s self-driving cars as people-carrying, highway-borne drones seems like a question of semantics.) They’re also gaining endurance. In June, Boeing tested a liquid-hydrogen-powered drone called the Phantom Eye that’s designed to cruise at 65,000 ft. for four days at a time. Boeing’s Solar Eagle, which has a 400-ft. wingspan, is scheduled for testing in 2014. Its flights will last for five years.

This technology will inevitably flow from the military sphere into the civilian, and it’s very hard to say what the consequences will be, except that they’ll be unexpected. Drones will carry pizzas across towns and drugs across borders. They’ll spot criminals on the run and naked celebrities in their homes. They’ll get cheaper to buy and easier to use. What will the country look like when anybody with $50 and an iPhone can run a surveillance drone? Last fall the law schools at Stanford and NYU issued a report, “Life Under Drones,” which was based on 130 interviews with Pakistanis. It makes for unsettling reading. “Drones are always on my mind,” said a man from Islamabad. “It makes it difficult to sleep. They are like a mosquito. Even when you don’t see them, you can hear them. You know they are there.”

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JSoc: Obama’s secret assassins

Naomi Wolf writes: The film Secret Wars [sic — the actual title is Dirty Wars], which premiered at Sundance, can be viewed, as Amy Goodman sees it, as an important narrative of excesses in the global “war on terror”. It is also a record of something scary for those of us at home – and uncovers the biggest story, I would say, in our nation’s contemporary history.

Though they wisely refrain from drawing inferences, Scahill and Rowley have uncovered the facts of a new unaccountable power in America and the world that has the potential to shape domestic and international events in an unprecedented way. The film tracks the Joint Special Operations Command (JSoc), a network of highly-trained, completely unaccountable US assassins, armed with ever-expanding “kill lists”. It was JSoc that ran the operation behind the Navy Seal team six that killed bin Laden.

Scahill and Rowley track this new model of US warfare that strikes at civilians and insurgents alike – in 70 countries. They interview former JSoc assassins, who are shell-shocked at how the “kill lists” they are given keep expanding, even as they eliminate more and more people.

Our conventional forces are subject to international laws of war: they are accountable for crimes in courts martial; and they run according to a clear chain of command. As much as the US military may fall short of these standards at times, it is a model of lawfulness compared with JSoc, which has far greater scope to undertake the commission of extra-legal operations – and unimaginable crimes. [Continue reading…]

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Barak says reported Syria strike shows Israel is serious

Reuters reports: Defense Minister Ehud Barak said on Sunday an attack on a Syrian arms complex showed Israel was serious about preventing the flow of heavy weapons into Lebanon, appearing to acknowledge for the first time that Israel carried out the strike.

Israel has maintained official silence over Wednesday’s raid, which Syria said targeted a military research center north-west of Damascus.

“I cannot add anything to what you have read in the newspapers about what happened in Syria several days ago,” Barak told a security conference in Munich on Sunday.

“But I keep telling frankly that we said, and that is another proof that when we say something we mean it. We say that we don’t think it should be allowable to bring advanced weapons systems into Lebanon.”

Diplomats, Syrian rebels and security sources said Israeli jets bombed a convoy near the Lebanese border on Wednesday, apparently hitting weapons destined for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which fought a 34-day war with Israel in 2006.

Syria denied the assertions, saying the target was the Jamraya complex on the northwestern fringes of Damascus and 8 miles from the border.

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As self-immolations near 100, Tibetans question the effect

The New York Times reports: A crowd of Tibetans came here to India’s capital last week, bearing flags and political banners and a bittersweet mixture of hope and despair. A grim countdown was under way: The number of Tibetans who have set themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule in Tibet had reached 99, one short of an anguished milestone.

Yet as that milestone hung over the estimated 5,000 Tibetans who gathered in a small stadium, so did an uncertainty about whether the rest of the world was paying attention at all. In speeches, Tibetan leaders described the self-immolations as the desperate acts of a people left with no other way to draw global attention to Chinese policies in Tibet.

“What is forcing these self-immolations?” Lobsang Sangay, prime minister of the Tibetan government in exile, asked in an interview. “There is no freedom of speech. There is no form of political protest allowed in Tibet.”

Billed as the Tibetan People’s Solidarity Campaign, the four-day gathering featured protests, marches, Buddhist prayer sessions and political speeches in an attempt to push Tibet back onto a crowded international agenda. If the Arab Spring has inspired hope among some Tibetans that political change is always possible, it has also offered a sobering reminder that no two situations are the same, nor will the international community respond in the same fashion.

“The world is paying attention, but not enough,” Mr. Sangay added. “There was a self-immolation in Tunisia which was labeled the catalyst for the Arab Spring. We’ve been committed to nonviolence for many decades. And how come we have been given less support than what we witnessed in the Arab world?” [Continue reading…]

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France’s next move: With Mali’s Islamists on the run, time to talk to the Tuaregs

Bruce Crumley writes: Though long hostile to allied Islamist groups across the Sahel region, Tuareg nationalists have struggled for decades for more freedom and autonomy. Boosted by an influx of weapons from the looted arsenals of slain Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, they accepted the help of Islamist militias when wresting control of half of Mali last year—only to then see the radicals unilaterally impose their own brand of brutal Sharia rule over stretches of the breakaway region. But with those extremists now scattered and in retreat, calls are now arising for the central government and Tuareg leaders to link up against the common jihadi foe.

“We understand the resistance in Bamako to dealing with Tuareg forces that participated in the recent southern offensive, but the long-term stability of Mali relies on the central government and the Tuaregs negotiating and coming to certain agreements,” says a French government official who declines to be quoted by name. “The Tuaregs made a terrible decision in banding with the Islamists, and Malian anger over the consequences is understandable. But our view is all Tuareg leaders who renounce violence and accept the territorial integrity of Mali should be considered legitimate interlocutors in the political rebuilding process.”

That thinking may take some time to sell—particularly among southern Malians resentful of the Tuaregs separatist insurgency that enabled the Islamists’ rise in the power gap that followed a March 2012 military coup in Bamako. Now, there are already accusations of summary executions and rights violations by Malian forces during France’s anti-Islamist counter-offensive. Following the liberation of northern cities like Gao and Timbuktu, meanwhile, reports circulated that armed forces and locals had begun attacking other residents suspected of having supported or prospered under Islamist rule. As a result, once French forces freed the Tuareg-held town of Kidal Wednesday, military officials called in support of 1,400 Chadian troops—not Malian soldiers—to police the areato avert any vengeance killing.

That precautionary move is doubly significant in Kidal, given the complex Tuareg situation there. The Islamist group Ansar Dine had claimed to control Kidal—though there were no signs of any Islamist fighters when the French arrived there. The previous week, meantime, an influential Ansar Dine leader, Alghabass Ag Intalla, announced he’d bolted the al Qaeda-allied group to found the Islamic Movement for Azawad (IMA)—a nationalist Tuareg force renouncing “extremism and terrorism.” Shortly after, the secular Tuareg National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) offered to assist French troops continue the battle against jihadi militias.

Both the IMA and MNLA also say they’re ready to partake in talks towards a north-south political settlement capable of restoring peace and stability to Mali. Traoré and other central Malian leaders say they may accept negotiating with the MNLA, but have ruled out any cooperation with the IMA and any other Tuareg with past or present ties to extremists. That’s a position Paris is hoping to shift.

AFP reports: France said it carried out major air strikes Sunday near Kidal, the last bastion of armed extremists chased from Mali’s desert north in a lightning French-led offensive, after a whirlwind visit by President Francois Hollande.

An army spokesman said 30 warplanes had bombed training and logistics centres run by Islamist extremists overnight in the Tessalit area north of Kidal, where French troops took the airport Wednesday and have been working to secure the town itself.

Residents said French and Chadian soldiers had patrolled the town for the first time Saturday as the rest of the country feted Hollande on his tour, a victory lap that came three weeks into a so far successful intervention to oust the Islamists who occupied northern Mali for 10 months.

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