In Afghan war, enter Sir Mortimer Durand

Myra MacDonald writes: When the British decided to define the outer limits of their Indian empire, they fudged the question. After two disastrous wars in Afghanistan, they sent the Foreign Secretary of India, Sir Mortimer Durand, to Kabul in 1893 to agree the limits of British and Afghan influence. The result was the Durand Line which Pakistan considers today as its border and Afghanistan refuses to recognise. Then, rather than extend the rule of the Raj out to the Durand Line, the British baulked at pacifying the tribes in what is now Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Instead, they used the still-extant Frontier Crimes Regulation of 1901 to keep them at bay, if necessary through collective punishment. The Pashtun tribes living on either side of the Durand Line continued to move back and forth, resenting outside interference and rejecting an arbitrary division of their lands by a foreign power.

The situation remains as nebulous to this day. Pakistan, like the British Raj before it, wants a secure western frontier and has been ready to back Islamist militants in Afghanistan to obtain it. Indeed, its emphasis on Islam has been used as a means of countering ethnic Pashtun nationalism, lest the Pashtun lay claim to a Pashtunistan covering both sides of the Durand Line. Meanwhile, remembering the days when Peshawar was a fabled Afghan city, some Afghans hanker after a Greater Afghanistan, incorporating the lands of all Pashtun (or Afghan) tribes as far as the Indus river. (Historically, the identification of Afghanistan with the Pashtun was such that the words “Afghan” and “Pashtun” were treated as synonyms.) And even those Afghans who recognise how unrealistic it would be to claim a sizeable chunk of modern-day Pakistan retain a proprietary sense over the Pashtun living on the other side of the Durand Line. Meanwhile the Pashtun themselves resent their arbitrary separation between two countries, which has reduced their capacity to exercise political power.

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Chas Freeman on al Qaeda

In a keynote address delivered this morning at the National Council on U.S. Arab Relations in Washington DC, Ambassador Chas W. Freeman Jr. (USFS, ret.) said:

The fanatics who carried out the atrocities of 9/11 went out of their way to describe their motivations and outlined their objectives to anyone who would listen. America turned off its hearing aid. It’s still off. The grievances that catalyzed 9/11 remain not simply unaddressed but ignored or denied by Americans.

Al Qaeda saw 9/11 as a counterattack against American policies that had directly or indirectly killed and maimed large numbers of Muslims. Some of those enraged by our policies were prepared to die to achieve revenge. Still, there were few in the Muslim world in 2001 who sympathized with al Qaeda’s attack on us. There are many more now. It is not our values that they hate. It’s what we have done and continue to do. We won’t stop terrorists by trying to impose our narrative on them while ignoring theirs, however politically expedient it may be to do so. We can’t fight anti-American extremists effectively or otherwise fend off the menace they present if we refuse to consider why they attacked us and why they still want to do so.

The chief planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, testified under oath that a primary purpose of al Qaeda’s criminal assault on the United States was to focus “the American people . . . on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people . . . .” In so-called “fatwas” in 1996 and 1998, Osama Bin Ladin justified al Qaeda’s declaration of war against the United States by reference to the same issue, while levying other charges against America. Specifically, he accused Americans of directly murdering one million Muslims, including 400,000 children, through the U.S. siege and sanctions against Iraq, while “occupying” the Muslim heartland of Saudi Arabia.

Al Qaeda members have described the war strategy they ultimately adopted as having five stages. Through these, they projected, the Islamic world could rid itself of all forms of aggression against it.

In stage one, al Qaeda would produce massive American civilian casualties with a spectacular attack on U.S. soil in order to provoke American retaliation in the form of the invasion of one or more Muslim countries. In stage two, al Qaeda would use the American reaction to its attack to incite, energize, and organize expanding resistance to the American and Western presence in Muslim lands. In stage three, the U.S. and its allies would be drawn into a long war of attrition as conflict spread throughout the Muslim world.

By stage four, the struggle would transform itself into a self-sustaining ideology and set of operating principles that could inspire continuing, spontaneously organized attacks against the U.S. and its allies, impose ever-expanding demands on the U.S. military, and divide America’s allies from it. In the final stage, the U.S. economy would, like that of the Soviet Union before it, collapse under the strain of unsustainable military spending, taking the dollar-dominated global economy down with it. In the ensuing disorder, al Qaeda thought, an Islamic Caliphate could seize control of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the rest of the Middle East.

This fantastic, perverted vision reflected al Qaeda’s belief that if, against all the odds, faith-based struggle could bring down the Soviet Union, it could also break the power of the United States, its Western allies, and Israel. This strategy seemed ridiculous when al Qaeda first proclaimed it. It is still implausible but, frankly, has come to sound a bit less preposterous than it once did.

The immediate objective of the 9/11 attacks was explicitly to provoke the United States into military overreactions that would enrage and arouse the world’s Muslims, estrange Americans from Arabs, stimulate a war of religion between Islam and the West, undermine the close ties between Washington and Riyadh, curtail the commanding influence of the United States in the Middle East, and overthrow the Saudi monarchy. The aftershocks of Al Qaeda’s 9/11 terrorist operation against the United States have so far failed to shake the Saudi monarchy but – to one degree or another – it has realized all its other immediate goals. Among other things, it has burdened future generations of Americans with about $5 trillion in debt from the Afghan and Iraq wars, helping to thrust the United States into fiscal crisis.

Mao Zedong observed that “a single spark can start a prairie fire.” His point was that, when conditions arise that can be exploited to favor a cause, it can spread with frightening speed and ferocity. The U.S. response to 9/11 has inflamed Islamist anti-Americanism in a widening swath of the Muslim world. By the time he died, Osama Bin Ladin surely felt entitled to pronounce the first stages of his mission accomplished. Islamist terrorism did not die with him. It lives on. One cannot decapitate a network. Nor can one shrivel an ideology by military means alone.

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John O. Brennan: Architect of Obama’s plans for permanent war

The Washington Post reports: In his windowless White House office, presidential counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan is compiling the rules for a war the Obama administration believes will far outlast its own time in office, whether that is just a few more months or four more years.

The “playbook,” as Brennan calls it, will lay out the administration’s evolving procedures for the targeted killings that have come to define its fight against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. It will cover the selection and approval of targets from the “disposition matrix,” the designation of who should pull the trigger when a killing is warranted, and the legal authorities the administration thinks sanction its actions in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond.

“What we’re trying to do right now is to have a set of standards, a set of criteria, and have a decision-making process that will govern our counterterrorism actions — we’re talking about direct action, lethal action — so that irrespective of the venue where they’re taking place, we have a high confidence that they’re being done for the right reasons in the right way,” Brennan said in a lengthy interview at the end of August.

A burly 25-year CIA veteran with a stern public demeanor, Brennan is the principal architect of a policy that has transformed counterterrorism from a conventional fight centered in Afghanistan to a high-tech global effort to track down and eliminate perceived enemies one by one.

What was once a disparate collection of tactics — drone strikes by the CIA and the military, overhead surveillance, deployment of small Special Forces ground units at far-flung bases, and distribution of military and economic aid to threatened governments — has become a White House-centered strategy with Brennan at its core.

Four years ago, Brennan felt compelled to withdraw from consideration as President Obama’s first CIA director because of what he regarded as unfair criticism of his role in counterterrorism practices as an intelligence official during the George W. Bush administration. Instead, he stepped into a job in the Obama administration with greater responsibility and influence.

Brennan is leading efforts to curtail the CIA’s primary responsibility for targeted killings. Over opposition from the agency, he has argued that it should focus on intelligence activities and leave lethal action to its more traditional home in the military, where the law requires greater transparency. Still, during Brennan’s tenure, the CIA has carried out hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan and opened a new base for armed drones in the Arabian Peninsula.

Although he insists that all agencies have the opportunity to weigh in on decisions, making differing perspectives available to the Oval Office, Brennan wields enormous power in shaping decisions on “kill” lists and the allocation of armed drones, the war’s signature weapon.

When operations are proposed in Yemen, Somalia or elsewhere, it is Brennan alone who takes the recommendations to Obama for a final sign-off.

As the war against al-Qaeda and related groups moves to new locations and new threats, Brennan and other senior officials describe the playbook as an effort to constrain the deployment of drones by future administrations as much as it provides a framework for their expanded use in what has become the United States’ permanent war. [Continue reading…]

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Rethinking open checkbook for America’s security colossus

The New York Times reports: Last week, a Bangladeshi student was charged in an F.B.I. sting operation with plotting to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. A Somali-American man was convicted of sending young recruits from Minneapolis to a terrorist group in Somalia. In Libya, extremists responsible for the killing of four Americans last month in Benghazi remained at large.

The drumbeat of terrorism news never quite stops. And as a result, for 11 years since the Sept. 11 attacks, the security colossus constructed to protect the nation from Al Qaeda and its ilk has continued to grow, propelled by public anxiety, stunning advances in surveillance technology and lavish spending — about $690 billion over a decade, by one estimate, not including the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now that may be changing. The looming federal budget crunch, a sense that major attacks on the United States are unlikely and new bipartisan criticism of the sprawling counterterrorism bureaucracy may mean that the open checkbook era is nearing an end.

While the presidential candidates have clashed over security for American diplomats in Libya, their campaigns have barely mentioned domestic security. That is for a reason: fewer than one-half of 1 percent of Americans, in a Gallup poll in September, said that terrorism was the country’s most important problem.

But the next administration may face a decision: Has the time come to scale back security spending, eliminating the least productive programs? Or, with tumult in the Arab world and America still a prime target, would that be dangerous?

Many security experts believe that a retrenchment is inevitable and justified. [Continue reading…]

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The Benghazi attack and what the White House knew

Reuters reports: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday a Facebook post in which an Islamic militant group claimed credit for a recent attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya did not constitute hard evidence of who was responsible.

“Posting something on Facebook is not in and of itself evidence. I think it just underscores how fluid the reporting was at the time and continued for some time to be,” Clinton said during an appearance with the Brazilian foreign minister at the State Department.

The report also reveals that the White House was informed by email about the attack while it was occurring — though this isn’t quite a smoking gun from a cover-up. Forty-nine minutes after first reporting the attack and that Ambassador Stevens and other staff were in the compound safe haven, a follow-up report said that “the firing at the U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi had stopped and the compound had been cleared.”

Michael Hirsh writes: It was, from the start, about as hard an intelligence problem as you can find. The date was September 11, and the CIA was stretched thin, monitoring anti-American protests in no fewer than 54 countries that day, according to Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper. Post-Gaddafi Libya itself was still chaotic, caught up in the fog of war, and indeed Ambassador Chris Stevens, at great personal risk, had journeyed to his old Arab Spring-era stomping ground in Benghazi to assess the situation himself. Still, Clapper recently told an annual conference of intelligence professionals that there was no warning to Stevens or anyone else that he was about to be targeted by an organized extremist attack.

So in the ensuing days, the fog lifted only very gradually. The intelligence community did not see a clear way to explain the deaths of Stevens and three other Americans. And as the probe advanced they began shifting their assessment dramatically. Four days after the attacks, on September 15, intel briefers sent U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice off to tape the Sunday talk shows with talking points that suggested Stevens’ death was the result of “spontaneous” protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo against a short film made in California lampooning the Prophet Mohammad. And that’s what Rice said on CBS’s Face the Nation “based on the best information we have to date,” as she put it. Rice added, however, that “soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that — in that effort with heavy weapons.”

“It was clear from the outset that a group of people gathered that evening. A key question early on was whether extremists took over a crowd or if the guys who showed up were all militants,” says an intelligence official involved in the Benghazi assessment. “It took time — until that next week — to sort through varied and sometimes conflicting accounts to understand the group’s overall composition.”

By the following week, however, the DNI came to believe that there had been no protest at all. “That was genuine fog of war issue,” said one intelligence professional involved in the Benghazi assessments. “Press reports at the time indicated there had been. It took about a week or so to iron that out.” On September 28, Shawn Turner, spokesman for Clapper’s office, said in a statement that as U.S. intelligence learned more about the attack, “we revised our initial assessment to reflect new information indicating that it was a deliberate and organized terrorist attack carried out by extremists.”

To supporters of Mitt Romney in the chattering classes and in the House of Representatives, where an investigative committee has been hard at work probing the attacks and, apparently, leaking information, there is a lot more going on here. They see a deliberate effort by the Obama Administration to play down evidence that new al Qaeda-linked terrorist groups were at work killing Americans. After all, one of the president’s big talking points in a tough election race is that he’s killed Osama bin Laden and decimated al Qaeda.

It sounds very plausible. There’s only one problem with that view: No evidence has surfaced so far to support the idea that the Obama Administration deceived the public deliberately.

CBS News reports: A Tunisian man who was arrested in Turkey this month with reported links to the attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya is facing terrorism charges, his lawyer said Wednesday, as an Egyptian official said a militant suspected of involvement was killed in clashes in Cairo.

An Egyptian interior ministry source told CBS News’ Alex Ortiz the suspect in Egypt, known only by his first name, Hazem, was killed after neighbors summoned police for a suspicious resident. The police came in and exchanged fire with the target. The man blew himself up in his apartment during the engagement with security forces.

It is unclear whether Hazem was Egyptian, or just living in Cairo.

An Egyptian official told the Associated Press the man recently returned from Libya and kept weapons in his hideout. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters, said an investigation into the man’s possible involvement in the consulate attack is under way.

In Tunisia, suspect Ali Harzi was repatriated on Oct. 11 by authorities in Turkey, and a judge issued his arrest warrant, lawyer Ouled Ali Anwar told The Associated Press. He said his client was told by a judge Tuesday that he has been charged with “membership of a terrorist organization in a time of peace in another country.”

U.S. officials told CBS News’ David Martin Wednesday that Harzi is not considered to be one of the ring leaders of the Benghazi attack; So far the FBI has not been allowed to question him

A person who saw Harzi’s court dossier told The Associated Press that the file links him to the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that left Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans dead.

He said Harzi is one of two Tunisians reportedly arrested Oct. 3 in Turkey when they tried to enter the country with false passports. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information. Harzi’s alleged role in the attack is not clear.

Anwar denied there was any evidence that Ali was implicated in the attacks. He added his client was not using a fake passport, saying he was a “scapegoat to satisfy the Americans.”

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Humans have no monopoly on moral behaviour

Mark Rowlands writes: When I became a father for the first time, at the ripe old age of 44, various historical contingencies saw to it that my nascent son would be sharing his home with two senescent canines. There was Nina, an endearing though occasionally ferocious German shepherd/Malamute cross. And there was Tess, a wolf-dog mix who, though gentle, had some rather highly developed predatory instincts. So, I was a little concerned about how the co-sharing arrangements were going to work. As things turned out, I needn’t have worried.

During the year or so that their old lives overlapped with that of my son, I was alternately touched, shocked, amazed, and dumbfounded by the kindness and patience they exhibited towards him. They would follow him from room to room, everywhere he went in the house, and lie down next to him while he slept. Crawled on, dribbled on, kicked, elbowed and kneed: these occurrences were all treated with a resigned fatalism. The fingers in the eye they received on a daily basis would be shrugged off with an almost Zen-like calm. In many respects, they were better parents than me. If my son so much as squeaked during the night, I would instantly feel two cold noses pressed in my face: get up, you negligent father — your son needs you.

Kindness and patience seem to have a clear moral dimension. They are forms of what we might call ‘concern’ — emotional states that have as their focus the wellbeing of another — and concern for the welfare of others lies at the heart of morality. If Nina and Tess were concerned for the welfare of my son then, perhaps, they were acting morally: their behaviour had, at least in part, a moral motivation. And so, in those foggy, sleepless nights of early fatherhood, a puzzle was born inside of me, one that has been gnawing away at me ever since. If there is one thing on which most philosophers and scientists have always been in agreement it is the subject of human moral exceptionalism: humans, and humans alone, are capable of acting morally. Yet, this didn’t seem to tally with the way I came to think of Nina and Tess.

The first question is whether I was correct to describe the behaviour of Nina and Tess in this way, as moral behaviour. ‘Anthropomorphism’ is the misguided attribution of human-like qualities to animals. Perhaps describing Nina and Tess’s behaviour in moral terms was simply an anthropomorphic delusion. Of course, if I’m guilty of anthropomorphism, then so too are myriad other animal owners. Such an owner might describe their dog as ‘friendly’, ‘playful’, ‘gentle’, ‘trustworthy’, or ‘loyal’ — a ‘good’ dog. On the other hand, the ‘bad’ dog — the one they try to avoid at the park — is bad because he is ‘mean’, ‘aggressive’, ‘vicious’, ‘unpredictable’, a ‘bully’, and so on. Nor are these seemingly moral descriptions entirely useless. On the contrary, it is a valuable skill to be able to assess these descriptions when an unfamiliar dog is bearing down on you in the street. If I’m guilty of anthropomorphism, so too, it seems, are many others.

Many scientists (and more than a few philosophers) would have no hesitation in accusing perhaps several billion people of such delusional anthropomorphism. A growing number of animal scientists, however, are going over to the dark side, and at least flirting with the idea that animals can act morally. In his book Primates and Philosophers (2006), the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal has argued that animals are at least capable of proto-moral behaviour: they possess the rudiments of morality even if they are not moral beings in precisely the way that we are. This was, in fact, Charles Darwin’s view, as developed in The Descent of Man. In a similar vein, the American biologist Marc Bekoff has being arguing for years that animals can act morally, and his book Wild Justice (2009) provides a useful summary of the evidence for this claim. Perhaps scientists such as Darwin, de Waal and Bekoff are also guilty of anthropomorphism? The evidence, however, would suggest otherwise. [Continue reading…]

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Lebanon’s troubles don’t include civil war

Rami G Khouri writes: Following events in Lebanon from the United States, as I have done during the past week, leaves one with the impression that most media in the U.S. are eager to see a resumption of the devastating and wasteful civil war that ravaged Lebanon for 15 years until 1990. Virtually every story on Lebanon is framed in the lens of the possible return to sectarian civil strife as a result of the spillover of the Syrian conflict.

The reality seems rather different to me, despite the many weaknesses and dysfunctional aspects of Lebanese governance. The international press corps and many in the political classes should wise up and see the country as something more than a bomb waiting to explode repeatedly.

The political tensions and a handful of local clashes following the assassination last Friday of Internal Security Forces Intelligence Bureau head Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hasan reflected a tragic but rather routine sequence of sentiments and events, in this country where political assassinations have occurred regularly for half a century.

Millions of Lebanese instantly feared a recurrence of the serial political killings that followed the assassination of the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in early 2005. Some took to the streets to express themselves in the time-tested manner of burning tires and blocking a few streets.

At the Hasan funeral Sunday, the weaknesses and amateurism of some Lebanese politicians surfaced. Understandably angry members of the March 14 coalition in opposition fired up the crowd by demanding the resignation of the government of Prime Minister Najib Mikati.

Former Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, normally a rational man who shouldered the responsibility of power with great dignity and resolve in the difficult years following the Hariri assassination, succumbed to a moment of reckless silliness when he said Sunday that Mikati’s Cabinet was a “government of assassination,” given the numerous assassinations that occurred during the years when March 14 and Siniora ran the government.

His and other fiery statements prompted a small crowd of excited youth to try and storm the government headquarters in central Beirut, and they were quickly dispersed by some forceful work by the internal security forces.

After this incident, senior March 14 leaders, including former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, called for calm, insisting that their desire to topple the government should be achieved through peaceful and democratic means. So they are now boycotting all contacts with the government, which is most unimpressive.

While most media coverage of Lebanon that I have seen in the U.S. tends to fall into narrative and hysterical categories that describe clashes and see them in the context of possibly returning to civil war, my sense is that the historian’s perspective of identifying new trends and political factors is much more useful today to grasp what is going on in Lebanon. [Continue reading…]

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Libya: Bani Walid falls

The Libya Herald reports: Forces from the national army together with allied brigades have taken control of Bani Walid, the last pro-Qaddafi stronghold in Libya.

The announcement was made today by Chief of Staff General Yusuf Mangoush, following reports that the army and allied brigades had succeeded in entering and holding the centre of the town early this morning.

Sporadic fighting was reported between the opposing forces today, but only in certain small pockets of the hilltop town.

“The army is controlling Bani Walid and I can announce that military operations have now concluded”, Mangoush said this afternoon. “But that does not mean we don’t have follow-up operations and some resistance here and there.”

Well over 25,000 civilians are said to have been displaced, with scores killed and wounded on both sides, in a conflict that first began on 2 October.

Mangoush failed to respond to allegations that he had lost control of his forces at several points over the course of the conflict, but said that reports of a breached 48-hour ceasefire declared last week to enable the evacuation of civilians were incorrect. “We didn’t announce it was a ceasefire”, he said. “We said it was the end of the main military operation.”

The general also defended the use of heavy weapons, including Grad rockets, in civilian areas, saying that the force deployed against Bani Walid was necessary and proportionate. “They [the armed forces] used the appropriate weapons to fight. When some fighters use certain weapons, we have to use the same weapons to stop the fight. It is a practical point.”

In the past few days, the military succeeded in taking control of the populated districts surrounding Bani Walid but had hitherto failed to achieve more than temporary raids into the centre.

Both sides have deployed light and heavy weapons against one another, resulting in large numbers of civilian as well as military casualties.

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PLO briefs Europe on U.N. upgrade plans

The Ma’an news agency reports: The PLO began distributing a position paper to European governments on Wednesday, detailing plans to seek an upgrade of Palestine’s status at the United Nations in November.

In the document, obtained by Ma’an, the PLO emphasizes that membership in the UN is no substitute for negotiations with Israel. But it says Palestine’s right to self-determination does not require Israeli approval.

The text underscores concerns about how the United States and Israel will respond if the UN bid succeeds, and it asks European countries not to go along with possible sanctions against the Palestinian Authority.

“Palestine asks the world to reaffirm that the Palestinians are not the exception to the international rule; that they will not be punished for pursuing a peaceful, political and diplomatic initiative on the basis of international law,” the document says.

The message followed a private US memo sent to European diplomats in early October warning that any UN upgrade of Palestine’s status “would be extremely counterproductive” for the Palestinians and threatening “significant negative consequences”.

If the UN bid succeeds, Palestine’s “observer entity” status would change to “observer state”, granting access to bodies such as the International Criminal Court.

The PLO has sought to reassure Europe and the US, key financiers of the Palestinian Authority, that it does not seek to isolate Israel, which has threatened to respond with sanctions.

“The Palestinian initiative intends to protect the prospects of peace and accelerate its realization. This step reaffirms and protects the internationally-endorsed two-state solution,” the document says. [Continue reading…]

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For Sheldon Adelson ‘Israel is at the core of everything he does’

The Washington Post reports: When casino magnate Sheldon Adelson switched his support from Newt Gingrich to Mitt Romney during the spring primaries, the billionaire and the candidate were eager to shed their skepticism of each other. If Adelson was going to give a political campaign more money than anyone ever had, he wanted to be certain Romney would join him in steadfast support of Israel. And Romney, according to friends of both, sought assurance that Adelson wouldn’t embarrass him.

Since then, Adelson has joined Romney during the candidate’s visit to Israel this summer, attended presidential debates and gotten together with Romney so often that their wives have become friends, according to confidants of the two men.

Although Adelson, 79, has said he will give $100 million to help Romney and quash President Obama’s “socialist-style” approach to the economy, he remains skeptical, believing that politicians don’t deliver on promises and can’t be trusted.

“Many people who give very significant donations to political campaigns come to me afterwards very frustrated that they don’t get what they wanted once the person is elected,” says Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, which Adelson has supported for years. “Sheldon doesn’t expect people to change. He’s very realistic about politics.”

Adelson — whose gambling operations span the globe from Las Vegas to casinos open or planned in Macau, Singapore and Spain — tells friends he finds the way U.S. elections are funded to be abhorrent, putting too much power in the hands of a wealthy few. So as one of those wealthy few, why would he pour more money into a campaign than 65 average Americans will earn in their combined lifetimes?

Adelson would not agree to an interview unless he could screen all questions in advance, a condition The Washington Post declined to meet. But more than 20 friends, critics, colleagues and beneficiaries portray a man with several motives for his massive donations to political, religious and medical causes.

He’s a scrappy fighter who defends what is his, a self-made man who held more than 50 jobs before striking gold with his Venetian casino on the Vegas Strip, and he has developed a powerful aversion to taxes and unions. He is the 12th-richest person in the nation, according to Forbes magazine, with a fortune valued at $21 billion. ­Under Obama, Adelson has achieved a larger increase in his wealth than anyone else in the country. In the past two decades, he has also undergone a political conversion, from a Massachusetts Democrat who considered Republicans to be the establishment that resisted newcomers like him, to a Nevada Republican who believes that his former party coddles the idle and has fallen captive to identity politics.

Adelson is driven by the idea of Israel as a muscular riposte to the Holocaust. Based on his experience as a Jewish kid who would get insulted and roughed up in a tough Boston neighborhood, Adelson believes Jewish Americans should back an Israel that puts security first and resists compromise with Arabs who do not accept its existence.

“Israel is at the core of everything he does,” says Fred Zeidman, a friend of Adelson, fellow Romney backer and former chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. creates database mapping where and when it can kill its enemies

The Obama administration clearly doesn’t like the name “kill list” applied to the individuals it has targeted for remote-control execution. It has instead crafted an Orwellian alternative: “disposition matrix.”

A Washington Post report on this “blueprint for pursuing terrorists” doesn’t explain how it works until paragraph 25.

The database is meant to map out contingencies, creating an operational menu that spells out each agency’s role in case a suspect surfaces in an unexpected spot. “If he’s in Saudi Arabia, pick up with the Saudis,” the former official said. “If traveling overseas to al-Shabaab [in Somalia] we can pick him up by ship. If in Yemen, kill or have the Yemenis pick him up.”

The report says:

For an administration that is the first to embrace targeted killing on a wide scale, officials seem confident that they have devised an approach that is so bureaucratically, legally and morally sound that future administrations will follow suit.
[…]
In focusing on bureaucratic refinements, the administration has largely avoided confronting more fundamental questions about the lists. Internal doubts about the effectiveness of the drone campaign are almost nonexistent. So are apparent alternatives.

And the report says nothing about the most fundamental issue: how does the U.S. government determine “guilt” and issue death sentences without any legal process? Multi-agency processes of review and approval in which the accused has no defense are not means through which it can be determined that someone deserves to die; they are no more than legal cover designed to protect the executioners from legal culpability.

If government officials are ever seriously questioned about the principles on which they operate this policy, I expect they will employ the same logic that Israelis have used: that no one is targeted because of actions they have already committed; it will always be on the basis of the threat that they supposedly pose. That logic is meant remove the motive of revenge which would clearly entail disregard for legal process. Instead, execution is turned into a form of risk management. In other words, people are being killed because they are judged as likely to commit crimes at some point in the future.

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U.S. on track to become ‘the new Middle East’

The Associated Press reports: U.S. oil output is surging so fast that the United States could soon overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest producer.

Driven by high prices and new drilling methods, U.S. production of crude and other liquid hydrocarbons is on track to rise 7% this year to an average of 10.9 million barrels per day. This will be the fourth straight year of crude increases and the biggest single-year gain since 1951.

The boom has surprised even the experts.

“Five years ago, if I or anyone had predicted today’s production growth, people would have thought we were crazy,” says Jim Burkhard, head of oil markets research at IHS CERA, an energy consulting firm.

The Energy Department forecasts that U.S. production of crude and other liquid hydrocarbons, which includes biofuels, will average 11.4 million barrels per day next year. That would be a record for the U.S. and just below Saudi Arabia’s output of 11.6 million barrels. Citibank forecasts U.S. production could reach 13 million to 15 million barrels per day by 2020, helping to make North America “the new Middle East.”

Meanwhile Bloomberg reports: Mecca, which hosts millions of pilgrims a year visiting Islam’s most holy shrine, is working toward becoming the first city in Saudi Arabia to operate a utility-scale plant generating electricity from renewables.

The city on Jan. 5 plans to select from a group of at least 20 bidders competing to build and operate facilities producing 385 gigawatt-hours per year of power including 100 megawatts of solar capacity, said Mayor Osama al-Bar.

“No city in Saudi Arabia owns power-generation assets, and we want to be first city that owns power plants and hopefully the first in the Muslim world,” al-Bar said in an interview on Sept. 16 in the nation’s capital, Riyadh.

The plans are the latest indication that the desert kingdom is stepping up efforts to diversify its sources of energy as economic and population growth threaten to erode Saudi Arabia’s status as the world’s biggest oil exporter.

The central government is seeking $109 billion of investment for building a solar industry, aiming to get a third of Saudi Arabia’s power from the sun by 2032 compared with almost none now. The target is almost as much as the $136 billion invested worldwide in solar energy last year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

So, even while most Americans are finally waking up to the reality of global warming and Saudi Arabia is grappling with the challenge of breaking its dependence on oil, the United States is turning itself into a petro-state that wrecks the environment through fracking and tar sands oil extraction.

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The 5 percent whose need is greatest

David Runciman writes: There is some competition to be the person who inspired the slogan of Occupy Wall Street: ‘We are the 99 per cent.’ Joseph Stiglitz thinks it might be him, on the back of an article he wrote for Vanity Fair in 2011 entitled: ‘Of the 1 per cent, by the 1 per cent, for the 1 per cent.’ Others think it was the economist Emmanuel Saez, who helped popularise the idea that 99 per cent of American households have been watching their incomes stagnate or fall while the top 1 per cent pulled away. As Saez reported back in 2007, since the 1970s half of all income growth has been captured by just 1 per cent of the population, leaving everyone else to get by on what’s left. But Rolling Stone magazine identified the originator of ‘We are the 99 per cent’ as David Graeber, the anthropologist and activist, who first spotted its potential as an organising tool.[*] You can see why people might want to lay claim to ‘We are the 99 per cent’: it’s a brilliant slogan and an increasingly successful brand, doing its work on T-shirts and banners around the world. But it’s a half-baked idea.

The problem is that 99 per cent is far too many. Majorities on that scale sound overwhelming, but they always come apart on closer scrutiny. There is nothing on which so many people will ever be able to agree. You often find polling questions to which only 1 per cent of the sample are willing to give their assent – flailing candidates for office can easily plumb those depths – but it would be a big mistake to assume that the other 99 per cent are united on anything at all, even on their dislike of the unpopular candidate (many will never have heard of him). The only time the figure 99 per cent appears in polling data is when the poll is a fraudulent one. It’s a number I still associate with elections in the old Soviet bloc, or with the last remaining dictatorships. Kim Jong Un can get the backing of 99 per cent of his electorate. No one else can.

Occupy Wall Street is not trying to get 99 per cent of the population to vote for anyone or anything. The movement is simply highlighting an experience that the 99 per cent have in common, which is to have been stiffed by the current system. But this is another way in which 99 per cent is too many. Something must have gone very wrong with democracy when so many can be outwitted by so few. The implication of the slogan ‘We are the 99 per cent’ is that we have all been duped. If we had known what was going on we wouldn’t have let it happen. Now that we know about it we can stop it. But how? Any system in which 99 per cent of the population can be duped at the same time is not merely a defective democracy; it is no democracy at all. ‘We are the 99 per cent’ is intended as an accommodating idea, but really it’s a revolutionary one. It implies that we have been the victims of a giant confidence trick. You can’t work to improve a system like that, any more than you can work to improve a Ponzi scheme; you need to scrap it and start again. Some prominent figures associated with Occupy Wall Street are quite happy with this line of thought. Slavoj Žižek is unabashed about the movement’s revolutionary implications. He sees it as a harbinger of the coming transformation, ‘a message from the communist future’. But for all Žižek’s brilliance as a sloganeer, he would be hard-pressed to get many of the 99 per cent to agree with him on that. They don’t want to scrap the democracy we have. They just want it to work better.

So how were we duped? Mainly by not paying attention. The 1 per cent didn’t conspire to rip everyone else off. They got their way by walking through the door we left open for them. We were too distracted and disorganised among ourselves to put up enough resistance. What the 99 per cent have in common is that they don’t have enough in common to make a difference politically, compared to the very rich, who are a well-organised bunch. The 99 per cent are a lot more numerous than the 1 per cent; they are also a lot more divided, and it’s the second fact that counts. [Continue reading…]

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Israel’s war on African asylum seekers

Maya Paley writes: According to Israel’s Anti-Infiltration bill, infiltrators can now be detained for a minimum of three years and a maximum of forever. The detention facility consists of tent cities and constructed buildings in the Negev, which is being run by the Israel Prison Services. Detainees will also not be permitted to work.

Jews in the Diaspora, overall, have responded to this negative media attention as just another biased and unwarranted attack on Israel. Others have dismissed the asylum problem as an issue Israel needs to deal with on her own without meddling by those of us in the Diaspora. Some say vaguely that they worry about Israel’s demographics. And still others say it’s not a priority issue when we have Iran and Hezbollah threatening us.

Unfortunately, these are all excuses.

According to the Refugee Convention of 1951, which Israel helped establish and then signed, the Africans entering Israel through Sinai are “asylum seekers.” Strangely, the only people calling them asylum seekers are the Israeli humanitarian organizations. Even the international news agencies call them “migrants.” The Israeli government and Israeli news agencies call them “infiltrators.” The numbers of asylum seekers entering Israel has steadied since the fence has been built along the border, and the reality is that, according to a recently published Knesset report, they are only 0.75% of the population.

Words carry weight in national and international policy. According to the Refugee Convention, asylum seekers cannot be criminalized for entering a country, as they are not illegally crossing the border. They are seeking asylum and should, therefore, undergo a process through which they apply for refugee status and end up either accepted as refugees or denied status. This process, termed Refugee Status Determination, does not exist in Israel (although the government will claim otherwise). [Continue reading…]

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In Jerusalem, Carter derides Netanyahu and Obama

The New York Times reports: Three decades after leaving the White House, former President Jimmy Carter still functions inside the trappings of power, cruising through fiercely contested areas of this city on Monday in a 12-car motorcade, with Secret Service agents stationed strategically as he surveyed the view from the Mount of Olives.

But at 88, Mr. Carter, trying to nudge his agenda without an official platform, no longer filters his words for politics or diplomacy. On Monday, he ramped up his years of criticism of Israeli policy by saying that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lacked the courage of his predecessors and that he had abandoned the two-state solution that has been the accepted framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades. And just two weeks before the American election, he was almost as critical of President Obama, saying his administration has shirked the historical role played by the United States in the region.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that Netanyahu has decided the one-state option is the one he’s going to pursue,” Mr. Carter said, despite Mr. Netanyahu’s professed commitment to two states, notably in a 2009 speech at Bar Ilan University.

As for Mr. Obama, a fellow Democrat, the former president said, “The U.S. government policy the last two to three years has basically been a rapid withdrawal from any kind of controversy.”

He added: “Every president has been a very powerful factor here in advocating this two-state solution. That is now not apparent.” [Continue reading…]

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Envoy announces tentative cease-fire in Syria, but doubts remain

The New York Times reports: Lakhdar Brahimi, the international envoy trying to broker a peace deal in Syria, announced on Wednesday a tentative cease-fire between the two sides to mark the main Muslim holiday of the year, but numerous do-it-yourself aspects of the plan immediately called into question whether it would quiet any fighting.

Open uncertainties included the time frame of what was designed to be a temporary cease-fire for the Id al-Adha, the Islamic Feast of Sacrifice, expected to start Friday for much of the Muslim world. Different nations and different sects can observe the holiday for anywhere from one to five days, however, so it was not clear exactly how long any truce should last.

On a more basic level, it was not quite clear who would respect it among the warring parties. Syrian state television announced that Damascus was studying the proposal and would make an announcement on Thursday, according to wire service reports. Various leaders among the fractious rebels issued their own statements saying they doubted it would hold.

It was also unclear that there would be anyone around to police it — the United Nations withdrew its observers last summer and would probably not be able to deploy new ones in 48 hours.

Mr. Brahimi seemed to be relying on the fact that both sides in the civil war, which grew out of a peaceful protest movement that started in March 2011, would respect it all on their own.

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Syria’s black market in housing adds to the nation’s turmoil

Hassan Hassan writes: Forty-six per cent of Syria’s buildings are illegally constructed, according to a government study in 2007 – and this includes the homes in which more than half the population live. The problem was mostly seen around the large cities but, amid a widening gap between rich and poor, the authorities generally turned a blind eye to it.

Particularly since this summer, though, they have been bulldozing illegal buildings – but only in restive areas. In other areas, the authorities have been selective in their demolition orders. The campaign against illegal construction is thus being used to send a message: if you rebel against the regime, you will no longer enjoy the favours bestowed by it.

A further complication is that officials also accept hefty bribes from internally displaced people to allow them to use abandoned or partly demolished buildings. Additionally, the regime’s militias and rank-and-file officers are raiding houses, ransacking and then fraudulently selling or leasing them.

Besides adding to people’s suffering amid the current conflict, these practices are reshaping neighbourhoods across the country, from large cities to small villages – which is a recipe for future clashes between the old and new owners. Many will feel their properties have been usurped by other people or bought cheaply and at some point may try to retake them. [Continue reading…]

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