Video: Where is Libya at one year after Gaddafi?
Libya: Bani Walid residents say military in control of surrounding districts as tens of thousands flee
The Libya Herald reports: Displaced refugees from Bani Walid have said that the military now controls the populated districts surrounding the town and are making frequent raids into the centre, using both light and heavy weapons.
The assertion comes amidst an ongoing exodus of civilians fleeing the fighting, with tens of thousands now believed to have left the hill-town.
Relief workers from the International Committee of the Red Cross estimated yesterday that as many as 5,000 families, or some 25,000 people, had fled Bani Walid into the Urban area alone, with the total figure believed to be much higher.
The Bani Walid Crisis Management Centre has claimed that almost 10,000 families have fled in total. It is estimated that Bani Walid and its environs are home to around 80,000 people.
Refugees are fleeing the town in every direction, with thousands known to have headed to Tarhouna with more passing on to other towns including Tripoli.
Few if any native residents are taking the main roads out of the Bani Walid, preferring instead to take the hazardous desert tracks in attempt to evade security forces who have a list of some 1,000 names wanted for arrest.
Egypt’s constitution: Islamists prepare for a long political battle
Nathan Brown writes: Those who follow the Egyptian constitutional process have every reason to be confused and concerned. Leaks, partial drafts, and conflicting accounts make the content of the document hard to follow. But the constitutional stakes in Egypt seem to be very high, and the debate has become emotional and charged. Rhetoric is highly polarized, with non-Islamists claiming that Islamists have hijacked the process. The Islamists retort that their contemplated changes are small. Their critics, the Islamists say, cannot accept election results that indicate strong support for the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi movements.
In a sense, both sides are right. Islamists are correct when they claim to be acting with restraint. The document they are producing will make only limited and subtle textual changes in religion-state relations compared to the 1971 constitution. On the issues on which there has been most controversy, such as explicit mentions of the Islamic sharia, changes will be particularly light. But their critics are also correct. Islamists are dominating the process and are likely to see a constitution that reflects their interests.
This is not so much because of the tools that they are crafting and more because of who will be using those tools if Egypt’s future elections look anything like its most recent ones. The 2012 constitution will be operating in a very different political context, so that even the step of adopting past language is likely to produce very different results. In this way, Egypt’s new constitution will not so much resolve all controversies as it will set up a period of prolonged trench warfare within, among, and over a series of institutions. And Islamist forces are likely to move forward gradually rather than by suddenly capturing the state. This struggle will likely take place over many years, and the outcome will determine what the vague language of the constitution actually means in the lives of ordinary Egyptians. [Continue reading…]
Music: Ranarim — ‘Höga Berg’
Solitary in Iran nearly broke me. Then I went inside America’s prisons.
Shane Bauer writes: It’s been seven months since I’ve been inside a prison cell. Now I’m back, sort of. The experience is eerily like my dreams, where I am a prisoner in another man’s cell. Like the cell I go back to in my sleep, this one is built for solitary confinement. I’m taking intermittent, heaving breaths, like I can’t get enough air. This still happens to me from time to time, especially in tight spaces. At a little over 11 by 7 feet, this cell is smaller than any I’ve ever inhabited. You can’t pace in it.
Like in my dreams, I case the space for the means of staying sane. Is there a TV to watch, a book to read, a round object to toss? The pathetic artifacts of this inmate’s life remind me of objects that were once everything to me: a stack of books, a handmade chessboard, a few scattered pieces of artwork taped to the concrete, a family photo, large manila envelopes full of letters. I know that these things are his world.
“So when you’re in Iran and in solitary confinement,” asks my guide, Lieutenant Chris Acosta, “was it different?” His tone makes clear that he believes an Iranian prison to be a bad place.
He’s right about that. After being apprehended on the Iran-Iraq border, Sarah Shourd, Josh Fattal, and I were held in Evin Prison’s isolation ward for political prisoners. Sarah remained there for 13 months, Josh and I for 26 months. We were held incommunicado. We never knew when, or if, we would get out. We didn’t go to trial for two years. When we did we had no way to speak to a lawyer and no means of contesting the charges against us, which included espionage. The alleged evidence the court held was “confidential.”
What I want to tell Acosta is that no part of my experience — not the uncertainty of when I would be free again, not the tortured screams of other prisoners — was worse than the four months I spent in solitary confinement. What would he say if I told him I needed human contact so badly that I woke every morning hoping to be interrogated? Would he believe that I once yearned to be sat down in a padded, soundproof room, blindfolded, and questioned, just so I could talk to somebody?
I want to answer his question — of course my experience was different from those of the men at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison — but I’m not sure how to do it. How do you compare, when the difference between one person’s stability and another’s insanity is found in tiny details? Do I point out that I had a mattress, and they have thin pieces of foam; that the concrete open-air cell I exercised in was twice the size of the “dog run” at Pelican Bay, which is about 16 by 25 feet; that I got 15 minutes of phone calls in 26 months, and they get none; that I couldn’t write letters, but they can; that we could only talk to nearby prisoners in secret, but they can shout to each other without being punished; that unlike where I was imprisoned, whoever lives here has to shit at the front of his cell, in view of the guards?
“There was a window,” I say. [Continue reading…]
Former CIA officer pleads guilty in leak case
The New York Times reports: A former Central Intelligence Agency officer accused of leaking to journalists the identities of two former colleagues involved in the agency’s detention and interrogation program for high-level Qaeda suspects pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a single charge. The plea deal was a victory for the Obama administration’s crackdown on unauthorized disclosures of government secrets.
The former officer, John Kiriakou, 48, stood in a federal courtroom in the Eastern District of Virginia and told the judge that he had violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by disclosing the name of a former colleague to a reporter, who has been identified as Matthew Cole, formerly of ABC News. Under the terms of the plea deal, Mr. Kiriakou will be sentenced to two and a half years in prison.
But prosecutors agreed to drop several other charges, including accusations that he identified another colleague involved in interrogations to a different journalist, Scott Shane of The New York Times, and that he lied to a C.I.A. publication board reviewing his memoir.
Mr. Kiriakou worked for the C.I.A. from 1990 to 2004. He was a leader of the team that located and captured Abu Zubaydah, a suspected high-level member of Al Qaeda, in Pakistan in 2002. He came to public attention in late 2007 when he gave an interview to ABC News portraying the suffocation technique called waterboarding as torture, but calling it necessary. It later emerged that he significantly understated the C.I.A.’s use of the technique.
Mr. Kiriakou spoke calmly in court as he stood to face the judge, Leonie M. Brinkema. His lawyer, Robert Trout, stood beside him as the judge asked him a series of questions to make sure he understood the details and ramifications of his plea before she asked him how he would plead.
“Guilty,” he said, nodding slightly.
The former C.I.A. officer raised only one objection during the proceedings, questioning why a statement of facts to which he signed included admissions about some of the other charges that prosecutors had agreed to drop. The judge told him that such admissions were “window dressing” that would not change the outcome of the case, and he agreed to keep them in.
Judge Brinkema set a hearing to sentence Mr. Kiriakou formally on Jan. 25. But she indicated that she thought the 30-month term in the plea deal was appropriate, noting that it was the same term that I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, received for obstruction charges in connection with the investigation into the disclosure of the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson. President George W. Bush later commuted Mr. Libby’s prison term.
Does Romney know the location of the Strait of Hormuz?
Saeed Kamali Dehghan writes: Mitt Romney is not particularly new to gaffes but when it comes to one about the relationship between Syria and Iran, he has shown extraordinary courage in repeating it at least six times just in the past year.
During last night’s foreign policy debate, Romney said: “Syria is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world. It’s their route to the sea.”
In fact, Iran, a close ally of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, has direct access to international waters through its large coastline on the Gulf and is not even a neighbour to Syria in order to rely on it as a route to the sea.
Instead, Syria gives Iran a physical access to Lebanon and its Hezbollah militia which is strategically important for Tehran leaders because of the group’s geographical position in respect to Israel.
It is not the first time that governor Romney has referred to Syria as a country that provides Iran with a route to the sea.
In March, Romney made the exact gaffe at AIPAC conference.
Video: Aleppo struggles to survive amid violence
Egypt: When protest serves power
Issandr El Amrani writes: Last Friday, thousands of protesters affiliated with Egypt’s secularist parties took to the streets for what may have been the country’s first specifically anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstration. Grievances concerned the performance of the current government, the “Brotherhoodization” of state institutions and a draft constitution produced by a Brotherhood-controlled constituent assembly that is peppered with Islamic references and conservative language on freedom of expression and women’s rights. Most of all, though, it was a protest against the way in which the previous Friday, Brotherhood activists had tried to foil a secularist demonstration against President Mohamed Morsi’s policies.
At the same time, by taking on the Brotherhood, this latest demonstration also officially consecrated the group as the new regime and the secularists as the new opposition.
The Brotherhood, which has just held internal elections for the Freedom and Justice party, its political arm, is still figuring out how to be in power. The F.J.P. is widely seen as remote-controlled by the Brotherhood’s Guidance Council, a politburo of about a dozen members, even though the party’s new leader is making noise about reinforcing the separation between the party and what is supposed to be a religious advocacy group. Elected officials, starting with Morsi, are scrambling to take control of the unwieldy helm of state and quickly realizing the difficulties ahead.
Even after more than eight decades in the opposition, the Brotherhood arguably still was not ready to govern. It just seemed more ready than anyone else.
The secularists — a broad term that includes socialists, liberals, conservatives and figures from the era of Hosni Mubarak — are united in only one thing: their hatred of the Brotherhood. Their ability to stage protests is, by the standards of post-Mubarak Egypt, limited. Only a few thousand people joined last Friday’s protests, when earlier demonstrations against Mubarak or the military council that ruled between Mubarak and Morsi typically attracted tens of thousands. And even when it comes out against the Islamists, the secular opposition bickers with itself. Radical secularists object to the presence of more conservative ones, for example: last week, a group of revolutionaries called April 6 jeered a delegation of supporters of Amr Moussa, a foreign minister under Mubarak. [Continue reading…]
Video: Osama Hamdan on Qatari emir’s Gaza visit
Modern American economic history in a few charts
Matt Stoller writes: The big economic strategy for the next term of whoever is Presidenti is essentially, “turn those machines back on”. It’s fracking to replace cheap oil and a new real estate bubble in housing. Essentially, the idea is to turn America into more and more of a resource extraction economy, or a petro-state. If American politics seems more and more oligarchical, that’s because the American political system is beginning to reflect the Middle Eastern oil states its economic investment implies it should. Here are a series of charts explaining what is going on.
First, this is data showing investment in various investment sectors.
American politics looks increasingly like a petro-state, and this chart shows why. In the 1990s, particularly the late 1990s, the Clinton economy showed parity between manufacturing of computers/electronic products and mining (mostly oil and gas extraction). The Bush economy, starting in 2003 when the invasion of Iraq went sour, saw enormous hockey stick like investment in fracking, tar sands, and other types of extractive mining. Technology investment showed a slight decline. Obama by and large has sustained these trends. [Continue reading…]
The war we aren’t debating
Michael Massing writes: It’s a social policy that, many experts agree, has failed miserably since it was introduced more than forty years ago, tearing apart families and communities across the United States, consuming tens of thousands of lives abroad, and squandering huge sums of money. Yet hardly any national politician is willing to challenge it, and it’s been completely ignored during the 2012 presidential campaign.
I’m speaking of the war on drugs. Since 1971, when Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one” and stated his intention of waging a “new, all-out offensive” against it, the government has spent an estimated trillion dollars on the war. Much of that money has gone to street-level drug arrests, undercover raids, intelligence taskforces, highway patrols, and—most costly of all—prison beds. Of the 2.3 million people in prison in the United States today, nearly half a million are there for drug offenses, many of them of the low-level, nonviolent variety. In 2010, 1.64 million people were arrested for drug violations—80 percent of them for possession.
In Latin America, the war on drugs has sown misery across a vast swath of territory stretching from the coca fields of Peru to Mexico’s border with the United States. Billions have been spent on crop eradication, commando units, military training, unmanned surveillance drones, and helicopters. The result has been endless bloodshed, widespread corruption, and political instability. In Mexico alone, an estimated 50,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in the nearly six years since Mexican President Felipe Calderón (encouraged by Washington) declared war on his nation’s drug cartels. One result of the crackdown has been to push traffickers into Central America, where they now terrorize Guatemalans and Hondurans. All the while, drugs continue to flow unabated into the United States. In 1981, a pure gram of cocaine cost $669 (adjusted for inflation); today, it goes for $177.
As for consumption, cocaine use has decreased considerably since its peak in the mid-1980s, and methamphetamine use has also subsided after a destructive surge in the 2000s. But the abuse of prescription drugs, especially of opioid painkillers, has grown to what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls “epidemic” levels, and the number of accidental overdose deaths from such substances has soared. This spurt underscores that the real source of our drug problem lies not in Mexico or Colombia but inside our own borders, and that arresting and locking up users is a singularly ineffective way of addressing it. [Continue reading…]
The Arab Struggle
Even if the wave of upheaval reshaping the Middle East and North Africa was not inspired by Western puppet-masters, the fact that it was quick to be named the Arab Spring clearly sent out the wrong message and fueled some false expectations. The brand name was naively and glibly applied.
Smooth transitions to democracy have proved elusive and thus Spring been turned by some to Winter. Anyone who now finds it deeply depressing to survey the condition of the region should look at Hussein Agha and Robert Malley’s latest piece in the New York Review of Books. It reads like a long suicide note:
Darkness descends upon the Arab world. Waste, death, and destruction attend a fight for a better life. Outsiders compete for influence and settle accounts. The peaceful demonstrations with which this began, the lofty values that inspired them, become distant memories. Elections are festive occasions where political visions are an afterthought. The only consistent program is religious and is stirred by the past. A scramble for power is unleashed, without clear rules, values, or endpoint. It will not stop with regime change or survival. History does not move forward. It slips sideways.
Games occur within games: battles against autocratic regimes, a Sunni–Shiite confessional clash, a regional power struggle, a newly minted cold war. Nations divide, minorities awaken, sensing a chance to step out of the state’s confining restrictions. The picture is blurred. These are but fleeting fragments of a landscape still coming into its own, with only scrappy hints of an ultimate destination. The changes that are now believed to be essential are liable to be disregarded as mere anecdotes on an extended journey.
New or newly invigorated actors rush to the fore: the ill-defined “street,” prompt to mobilize, just as quick to disband; young protesters, central activists during the uprising, roadkill in its wake. The Muslim Brothers yesterday dismissed by the West as dangerous extremists are now embraced and feted as sensible, businesslike pragmatists. The more traditionalist Salafis, once allergic to all forms of politics, are now eager to compete in elections. There are shadowy armed groups and militias of dubious allegiance and unknown benefactors as well as gangs, criminals, highwaymen, and kidnappers.
Alliances are topsy-turvy, defy logic, are unfamiliar and shifting. Theocratic regimes back secularists; tyrannies promote democracy; the US forms partnerships with Islamists; Islamists support Western military intervention. Arab nationalists side with regimes they have long combated; liberals side with Islamists with whom they then come to blows. Saudi Arabia backs secularists against the Muslim Brothers and Salafis against secularists. The US is allied with Iraq, which is allied with Iran, which supports the Syrian regime, which the US hopes to help topple. The US is also allied with Qatar, which subsidizes Hamas, and with Saudi Arabia, which funds the Salafis who inspire jihadists who kill Americans wherever they can.
Further on the writers lament: “Something is wrong. Something is unnatural. It cannot end well.”
This tragic account begs a reasonable question: What were they expecting?
Or more widely I would ask of those who view Libya as being on the brink of anarchy and Syria on the road to a decade or more of civil war: If one rejects the idea that dictatorial rule can be justified in the name of stability, do you really believe that there can be such a thing as a smooth transition in which an iron grip gently yields?
Even now, journalists conjure up images of a political reconfiguration that in theory could be like a change of clothes where nothing more than a few creases need ironing out.
The proliferation of militant jihadi groups across the Arab world is posing a new threat to the region’s stability, presenting fresh challenges to emerging democracies and undermining prospects for a smooth transition in Syria should the regime fall.
Such a smooth transition might not always have been pure fantasy but it always seemed so improbable it should have been discounted — not given the weight of a prospect that could be undermined.
There never was an Arab Spring and thus now no Winter — it began and continues as a struggle.
Most Israeli Jews support apartheid regime in Israel
Gideon Levy reports: Most of the Jewish public in Israel supports the establishment of an apartheid regime in Israel if it formally annexes the West Bank.
A majority also explicitly favors discrimination against the state’s Arab citizens, a survey shows.
The survey, conducted by Dialog on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, exposes anti-Arab, ultra-nationalist views espoused by a majority of Israeli Jews. The survey was commissioned by the New Israel Fund’s Yisraela Goldblum Fund and is based on a sample of 503 interviewees.
The questions were written by a group of academia-based peace and civil rights activists. Dialog is headed by Tel Aviv University Prof. Camil Fuchs.
The majority of the Jewish public, 59 percent, wants preference for Jews over Arabs in admission to jobs in government ministries. Almost half the Jews, 49 percent, want the state to treat Jewish citizens better than Arab ones; 42 percent don’t want to live in the same building with Arabs and 42 percent don’t want their children in the same class with Arab children. Continue reading
The death of the Israel-Palestine two-state solution brings fresh hope
Rachel Shabi writes: We could argue over who killed it, but what’s the point? It’s increasingly obvious that a continued insistence on zombie peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians is deluded, because the two-state principle framing them is dead. To précis: it’s now impossible to remove half a million Jewish settlers and infrastructure from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem; the international community is opposed to settlements on paper but does nothing in practice, and after 19 years of failed two-state talks, the fault plainly lies in the plan, not the leadership.
This view has grown more vocal on both sides, from unlikely quarters and for different reasons. In recent months, prominent Israeli commentators have declared the end of the two-state period, the latest to do so being the mainstream, veteran journalist Nahum Barnea, who in August wrote in the mass-circulation daily Yediot Aharonot that the Oslo two-state peace process is dead. His view – “Everybody knows how this will end. There will be a bi-national [state],” he clarified on Israeli TV – is shared by others once supportive of the Oslo framework but now calling time on it. “I do not give up on the two-state solution on ideological grounds,” wrote Haaretz columnist Carlo Strenger last month. “I give up on it because it will not happen.”
Alongside that, we’re starting to see the practical consequences of those Jewish settlers who, surprisingly, started talking about one-state approaches two years ago. Last week, a Palestinian village in an Israel-controlled area of the West Bank was given building permits – the first time that’s happened during a 45-year Israeli occupation – thanks to petitions from their Jewish settler neighbours. [Continue reading…]
Will Damascus go the way of Baghdad?
By John Robertson, War in Context, October 23, 2012
For centuries, the region that we have come to refer to (with unduly homogenizing overgeneralization) as the “Arab world” was dominated, and energized, by three great and ancient cities: Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo. Cairo (Arabic “al-Kahira,” or “victorious”) was founded officially by the new Shi’i conquerors of Egypt during the 10th century (although the area roundabout had been a heartland of great cities for millennia, going back to Memphis, the capital of the earliest pharaohs). Founded a couple of centuries earlier by the Arab conquerors of Mesopotamia, Baghdad too lay in the original heartland of cities (to borrow the phrase of the great American anthropologist/archaeologist Robert M. Adams); Babylon lies close by. Damascus is the most ancient city of them all, its roots extending into the Early Bronze Age, but its fame is most associated with the first truly imperial Muslim Arab dynasty, the Umayyads, who in 661 made Damascus the capital of their already vast, yet still-expanding empire.
Today, all three cities are pale reflections of what they were at their respective apogees. Cairo’s impoverished population are awash in trash, even as the new Islamist-led government likewise tries to dig itself out from under a long-depressed national economy and decades of corrupt authoritarianism under Egypt’s preceding military-based rulers.
Anyone who’s paid attention over the last few decades knows of the devastation the people of Baghdad have endured, beginning with Saddam Hussein’s war launched against Iran in 1980. Those horrors culminated in the Anglo-American conquest of the city in 2003, which touched off a massive breakdown of political and social order that led to Baghdad’s self-cannibalization. With the demons of Iraq’s sectarianism resurrected, the city’s Sunni and Shi’i populations turned against each other – and against the American occupiers of the city. The evidence of the carnage looms everywhere across the city, which has lost a huge portion of its Sunni Arab – and Christian – population.
As this New York Times report today indicates, Damascus is now poised at the brink of its own self-cannibalization. The civil war that has been tearing at what was an already loosely woven Syria national fabric is now beyond Damascus’ lintel and making its way into the city’s ancient interior. Like Baghdad, Damascus has been the abode of a plethora of sectarian groups, all of whom had been living in relative harmony. That harmony is fraying:
The reality of war has crept into daily life, and there is a sense of inevitability. Even supporters of the government talk about what comes next, and rebels speak of tightening the noose around this city, their ultimate goal.
Damascus was once known for its all-night party scene. Now, few people venture out after dark, and kidnappings are rampant. Gasoline is increasingly scarce, and as winter approaches, people are worried about shortages of food and heating oil. Streets are closed at a moment’s notice, traffic diverted, bridges shut down. Even longtime residents and taxi drivers get lost and have to weave in and out of parking lots to avoid barriers and dead-end streets. Shelling and machine-gun fire are so commonplace, children no longer react. Continue reading
From hope to fear: 2008 versus 2012
Richard Falk writes: In 2008, Barack Obama rekindled faith in the American electoral process for many, and revived the deeper promise of American democracy, bringing to the foreground of the national political experience a brilliant and compassionate African American candidate.
When Obama actually won the presidency, it was one of the most exciting political moments in my lifetime, and rather reassuring as a sequel to the dark years of George W Bush’s presidency.
Of course, many Americans didn’t share such positive feelings. An important embittered minority believed that the election of a liberal-minded black man was the lowest point ever reached in national politics, challenging this segment of society that now was deeply alienated from the prevailing political current to mobilise their forces so as to win back control of the country on behalf of white Christian Americans, and also a time to indulge such absurd scenarios as an imminent Muslim takeover of the society.
Such polarisation, gave rise to an Islamophobic surge that revived the mood of fear and paranoia that followed upon the 9/11 attacks and was reinforced by evangelical enthusiasm for Israel. In this regard, the Obama phenomenon was a mixed blessing as it contributed to a rising tide of rightest politics in the US that poses unprecedented dangers for the country and the world.
Nevertheless, as mentioned, Obama’s campaign and election was at the time a most welcome development, although not entirely free from doubts. From the outset, my hopes were tinged with concerns, although I did my best to suspend disbelief.
All along I found little evidence that Obama’s leadership would liberate the governing process from its threefold bondage to Wall Street, the Pentagon and Israel. Such a political will to mount such a challenge was never in evidence and never materialised. [Continue reading…]