Clueless in Syria

A New York Times report should be deeply encouraging to everyone who is vehemently opposed to U.S. intervention in Syria. The good news is that the CIA still can’t figure out who’s who among the rebels but they’re afraid that the weapons that are flowing into the country are going to the wrong guys. In other words, those who remain convinced that the uprising against Assad is being controlled by puppet masters in Washington can put their fears aside.

Needless to say, I jest, since it’s long been apparent that some people can’t see the words ‘CIA’ and ‘Syria’ in the same paragraph without automatically imputing ‘neocons,’ ‘Iraq,’ and ‘U.S. imperialism.’ To those who negatively deify American power there truly can be no evidence that the U.S. does not control the universe.

Meanwhile, David Sanger — a reporter who seems to remain unaware that news sources who are neither paid government officials nor political party apparatchiks do actually exist — lays out the concerns of those who want their concerns to be made known. That is, concerns about a U.S. effort to support Bashar al-Assad’s opponents that “has increasingly gone awry.”

This operation has gone awry, we are told, because weapons flowing into Syria, thanks to Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are going to “hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster”.

It is not until the end of the article that Sanger reveals how thin the evidence actually is to support these claims.

In several towns along the Turkey-Syria border, rebel commanders can be found seeking weapons and meeting with shadowy intermediaries, in a chaotic atmosphere where the true identities and affiliations of any party can be extremely difficult to ascertain.

Late last month in the Turkish border town of Antakya, at least two men who had recently been in Syria said they had seen Islamist rebels buying weapons in large quantities and then burying them in caches, to be used after the collapse of the Assad government. But it was impossible to verify these accounts, and other rebels derided the reports as wildly implausible.

Moreover, the rebels often adapt their language and appearance in ways they hope will appeal to those distributing weapons. For instance, many rebels have grown the long, scraggly beards favored by hard-line Salafi Muslims after hearing that Qatar was more inclined to give weapons to Islamists.

The Saudis and Qataris are themselves relying on intermediaries — some of them Lebanese — who have struggled to make sense of the complex affiliations of the rebels they deal with.

“We’re trying to improve the process,” said one Arab official involved in the effort to provide small arms to the rebels. “It is a very complex situation in Syria, but we are learning.”

Perhaps this report could have been condensed.

Saudis and Qataris pay for guns going to men with beards in Syria. CIA doesn’t know who these men are. Romney promises that if he becomes president he’ll press the Arab leaders to send weapons to men without beards. Rebels in Syria await the U.S. presidential election result, ready to request additional shipments of razors.

Facebooktwittermail

Pakistan outrage over attack on Malala

BBC News reports: The 14-year-old Pakistani girl shot in the head by Taliban gunmen is being flown to the UK for medical treatment.

Malala Yousafzai has until now been at a military hospital in Rawalpindi, with doctors saying her progress over the next few days would be “critical”.

She remains in a serious condition after the attack, which the Taliban said they carried out because she was “promoting secularism”.

Pakistan’s interior minister has said the attack was planned abroad.

Those involved would soon be caught, said Rehman Malik, without giving further details.

Malala left Pakistan on board an air ambulance provided by the United Arab Emirates, accompanied by a full medical team.

It was not immediately clear whether any of her family were travelling with her.

She is being taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham – an NHS (National Health Service) hospital which has a specialist major trauma centre.

The cost of her care and rehabilitation is being funded by Pakistan.

Facebooktwittermail

The self-destruction of the 1 percent

Chrystia Freeland writes: In the early 14th century, Venice was one of the richest cities in Europe. At the heart of its economy was the colleganza, a basic form of joint-stock company created to finance a single trade expedition. The brilliance of the colleganza was that it opened the economy to new entrants, allowing risk-taking entrepreneurs to share in the financial upside with the established businessmen who financed their merchant voyages.

Venice’s elites were the chief beneficiaries. Like all open economies, theirs was turbulent. Today, we think of social mobility as a good thing. But if you are on top, mobility also means competition. In 1315, when the Venetian city-state was at the height of its economic powers, the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d’Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility. If you weren’t on it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy.

The political shift, which had begun nearly two decades earlier, was so striking a change that the Venetians gave it a name: La Serrata, or the closure. It wasn’t long before the political Serrata became an economic one, too. Under the control of the oligarchs, Venice gradually cut off commercial opportunities for new entrants. Eventually, the colleganza was banned. The reigning elites were acting in their immediate self-interest, but in the longer term, La Serrata was the beginning of the end for them, and for Venetian prosperity more generally. By 1500, Venice’s population was smaller than it had been in 1330. In the 17th and 18th centuries, as the rest of Europe grew, the city continued to shrink.

The story of Venice’s rise and fall is told by the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive. Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.

The history of the United States can be read as one such virtuous circle. But as the story of Venice shows, virtuous circles can be broken. Elites that have prospered from inclusive systems can be tempted to pull up the ladder they climbed to the top. Eventually, their societies become extractive and their economies languish.

That was the future predicted by Karl Marx, who wrote that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. And it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further — ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Weasel words that politicians use to obscure terrible truths

Patrick Cockburn writes: “Never believe anything until it is officially denied,” is a useful saying, advising scepticism towards whatever the government claims to be doing. This is the right mental attitude for any journalist or observer of the political scene. But for sniffing out official or journalistic mendacity, evasion and ignorance, a good guide is the use of tired and misleading words or phrases, their real purpose being not to illuminate but to conceal.

Suspicion of an attempt to deceive should be aroused by any sighting of the word “community”, as in “international community” or “Islamic community”: the phrases suggest solidarity and consensus of opinion where it does not exist. More toxic are policies pretending that there is something called “the community” that can look after people hitherto cared for by the state. When care in the community was introduced in Britain, it meant that people living in mental hospitals which were being sold by the government were kicked out to be looked after by a community that either feared or ignored them.

Certain words should set alarm bells ringing. Description of anything as “robust” is usually bad news because it implies effective measures are going to be taken, when this is unlikely. For instance, Patrick McLoughlin, the Transport Minister, seeking to defuse the scandal over the West Coast railway, promised a “robust investigation”. On the other hand, robust, when applied to state security, means something unpleasant, so “robust interrogation” has become synonymous with torture. [Continue reading…]

A phrase in journalism that always irritates me because, defying the odds, it is now so commonplace is: rare glimpse.

The New York Times dishes out rare glimpses so often they have ceased being rare. They purport to offer a privileged view through a window to which no one other than a seasoned Times reporter would have access. What the phrase conceals is that these rare glimpses are invariably spoon fed to reporters who gladly regurgitate information supplied by government officials — officials who make their disclosures to these particular reporters because of their willingness to serve as dutiful stenographers.

Facebooktwittermail

Counting drone strike deaths

The U.S. government should provide an official accounting on who is being killed by drone strikes, said a new report released today by Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Clinic.

Counting Drone Strike Deaths is a systematic review of drone strike casualty estimates provided by media and aggregated by three major casualty tracking organizations: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Long War Journal, and New America Foundation. These organizations have filled the gaps left by the U.S. government, which refuses to officially provide information on casualties; however, their estimates are incomplete and, in the case of the latter two organizations, significantly undercounted the extent of reported civilian deaths in Pakistan during 2011.

“Drone strike casualty estimates are substituting for hard facts and information about the drone program,” said Naureen Shah, Acting Director of the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. “These are good faith efforts to count civilian deaths, but it’s the U.S. government that owes the public an accounting of who is being killed, especially as it continues expanding secret drone operations in new places around the world.” The report warns that low civilian casualty estimates may provide false assurance to the public and policymakers that drone strikes do not harm civilians. According to the report, despite their strong efforts, two of the tracking organizations, the Long War Journal and New America Foundation, significantly and consistently underestimated the potential number of civilians killed in Pakistan during the year 2011.

Recounting the data, the Columbia Human Rights Clinic found reports of between 72 and 155 civilians killed in 2011 Pakistan drone strikes, with 52 of the reportedly civilian dead identified by name – a relatively strong indicator of reliability. By comparison, New America Foundation’s count was just 3 to 9 civilians killed during this period; Long War Journal’s was 30 civilians killed. In percentage terms, the Clinic found 2300 percent more “civilian” deaths than the New America Foundation and 140 percent more “civilian” deaths than the Long War Journal, based on minimum figures for Pakistan in 2011. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s estimates came closest to those found by the Columbia Human Rights Clinic: the Clinic found just 5.9 percent more “civilian” deaths than the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, based on minimum figures.

“The tracking organizations are all credible institutions, and the discrepancies in their counts show just how hard it is to get an accurate understanding of the impact of drone strikes from media reports alone,” said Chantal Grut, lead researcher and 2012 L.L.M. graduate of the Human Rights Clinic.

The tracking organizations’ estimates are based on news reports of particular strikes. The news reports suffer from common flaws. For example, they often rely on anonymous Pakistani government officials or unnamed witnesses for the claim that “militants” — rather than civilians — were killed. In Pakistan, more in-depth reporting is all too rare because of limited access for journalists, and it is likely that some deaths and possibly even entire strikes are not captured.
“Accuracy and access are problems for any war-time reporting,” said Grut. “But with drone strikes, we’re seeing the labels ‘militant’ or ‘terrorist’ used to describe people killed, despite the limited information and on-the-ground reporting.” The report explains the ambiguity of these terms and cautions media and observers against repeating “militant” estimates without more information and greater qualification.

In the rare but significant cases where on-the-ground reporting has offered evidence of civilian deaths from drone strikes, the U.S. government has failed to officially respond or provide information about whether it conducts its own investigations into potential civilian deaths. The report calls on the government to investigate reports of civilian casualties, track and release drone strike casualty information, and disclose the standards and definitions it uses to categorize individuals as subject to direct attack. Investigations are a crucial first step toward recognizing and dignifying the loss of families and local communities.

See the complete report, Counting Drone Strike Deaths.

Facebooktwittermail

Questions on drones, unanswered still

The New York Times‘ public editor Margaret Sullivan writes: Understanding American drone strikes is like a deadly version of the old telephone game: I whisper to you and you whisper to someone else, and eventually all meaning is lost.

You start with uncertain information from dubious sources. Pass it along, run it through the media blender, add pundits, and you’ve got something that may or may not be close to the truth.

How many people have been killed by these unmanned aircraft in the Central Intelligence Agency’s strikes in Yemen and Pakistan? How many of the dead identified as “militants” are really civilians? How many are children?

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism in Britain has estimated that, in the first three years after President Obama took office, between 282 and 535 civilians were credibly reported killed by drone strikes — including more than 60 children. The United States government says the number of civilians killed has been far lower.

Accurate information is hard to come by. The Obama administration and the C.I.A. are secretive about the fast-growing drone program. The strikes in Pakistan are taking place in areas where reporters can’t go, or would be in extreme danger if they did. And it is all happening at a time when the American public seems tired of hearing about this part of the world anyway.

How does The New York Times fit into this hazy picture?

Some of the most important reporting on drone strikes has been done at The Times, particularly the “kill list” article by Scott Shane and Jo Becker last May. Those stories, based on administration leaks, detailed President Obama’s personal role in approving whom drones should set out to kill.

Groundbreaking as that article was, it left a host of unanswered questions. The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed Freedom of Information requests to learn more about the drone program, so far in vain. The Times and the A.C.L.U. also want to know more about the drone killing of an American teenager in Yemen, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, also shrouded in secrecy.

But The Times has not been without fault. Since the article in May, its reporting has not aggressively challenged the administration’s description of those killed as “militants” — itself an undefined term. And it has been criticized for giving administration officials the cover of anonymity when they suggest that critics of drones are terrorist sympathizers.

Americans, according to polls, have a positive view of drones, but critics say that’s because the news media have not informed them well. The use of drones is deepening the resentment of the United States in volatile parts of the world and potentially undermining fragile democracies, said Naureen Shah, who directs the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia University’s law school.

“It’s portrayed as picking off the bad guys from a plane,” she said. “But it’s actually surveilling entire communities, locating behavior that might be suspicious and striking groups of unknown individuals based on video data that may or may not be corroborated by eyeballing it on the ground.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Incensed by Malala attack, jirga declares war on Taliban

The Express Tribune reports: Incensed by the attack on teenage child activist Malal Yousafzai, a local jirga has declared war on Taliban until the elimination of militancy from the picturesque valley.

The valley wriggled out of the clutches of Taliban following the 2009 military operation against notorious militant commander Mullah Fazlullah aka Mullah Radio who claimed responsibility for the attack on Malala.

“The attack on Malala Yousafzai and other girls was a cowardly act which should be condemned on every platform,” Saifullah Khan, the chairperson of the Nepkikhel Aman Jirga, told a news conference at Swat Press Club on Saturday.

“The attack shows that even children are not safe from the evils of terrorists. But we clearly extend our message to anti-Pakistan elements that such cowardly acts will not deter us from fighting against terrorism,” he said.

Khan added that the Nepkikhel Aman Jirga had stood firm in the battle against terrorism. “We invite the entire nation to stand with us against terrorists. We have made countless sacrifices for the restoration of peace and we are ready to render more for maintaining peace in our region,” he said.

Criticising the attack on schoolchildren, Khan said if the Taliban were bold enough, they should dare to come out of their hiding holes and fight.

“It is not bravery to attack innocent children. They are only defaming Islam, Pakistan and our nation in the name of their own version of Islam,” he said.

Facebooktwittermail

America: ruled by the rich

Nicholas Carnes writes: Elections are supposed to give us choices. We can reward incumbents or we can throw the bums out. We can choose Republicans or Democrats. We can choose conservative policies or progressive ones.

In most elections, however, we don’t get a say in something important: whether we’re governed by the rich. By Election Day, that choice has usually been made for us. Would you like to be represented by a millionaire lawyer or a millionaire businessman? Even in our great democracy, we rarely have the option to put someone in office who isn’t part of the elite.

Of course, many white-collar candidates care deeply about working-class Americans, those who earn a living in manual labor or service-industry jobs. Many are only a generation or two removed from relatives who worked in those fields. But why do so few elections feature candidates who have worked in blue-collar jobs themselves, at least for part of their lives? The working class is the backbone of our society, a majority of our labor force and 90 million people strong. Could it really be that not one former blue-collar worker is qualified to be president?

My research examines how the shortage of working-class people in public office affects our democracy and why there are so few former blue-collar workers in government in the first place. The data I’ve studied suggest that the working class itself probably isn’t the problem. It’s true that workers tend to score a little lower on standard measures of political knowledge and civic engagement. But there are many more workers than there are, say, lawyers — so many more, in fact, that there are probably more blue-collar Americans with the qualities we might want in our candidates than there are lawyers with those traits. If even only half a percent of blue-collar workers have what it takes to govern, there would still be enough of them to fill every seat in Congress and in every state legislature more than 40 times — with enough left over to run thousands of City Councils.

Something other than qualifications seems to be screening out people with serious experience in the working class long before Election Day. Scholars haven’t yet confirmed exactly what that is. (Campaign money? Free time? Party gatekeepers?) But we’re starting to appreciate the seriousness of the problem.

If millionaires were a political party, that party would make up roughly 3 percent of American families, but it would have a super-majority in the Senate, a majority in the House, a majority on the Supreme Court and a man in the White House. If working-class Americans were a political party, that party would have made up more than half the country since the start of the 20th century. But legislators from that party (those who last worked in blue-collar jobs before entering politics) would never have held more than 2 percent of the seats in Congress. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Why the U.S. used nuclear weapons against Japan for political, not military reasons

Washington’s Blog: Like all Americans, I was taught that the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to end WWII and save both American and Japanese lives.

But most of the top American military officials at the time said otherwise.

The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey group, assigned by President Truman to study the air attacks on Japan, produced a report in July of 1946 that concluded (52-56):

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

General (and later president) Dwight Eisenhower – then Supreme Commander of all Allied Forces, and the officer who created most of America’s WWII military plans for Europe and Japan – said:

The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.

Newsweek, 11/11/63, Ike on Ike

Eisenhower also noted (pg. 380):

In [July] 1945… Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. …the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude….

Admiral William Leahy – the highest ranking member of the U.S. military from 1942 until retiring in 1949, who was the first de facto Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and who was at the center of all major American military decisions in World War II – wrote (pg. 441):

It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.

The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

[Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Stress: The roots of resilience

Nature reports: On a chilly, January night in 1986, Elizabeth Ebaugh carried a bag of groceries across the quiet car park of a shopping plaza in the suburbs of Washington DC. She got into her car and tossed the bag onto the empty passenger seat. But as she tried to close the door, she found it blocked by a slight, unkempt man with a big knife. He forced her to slide over and took her place behind the wheel.

The man drove aimlessly along country roads, ranting about his girlfriend’s infidelity and the time he had spent in jail. Ebaugh, a psychotherapist who was 30 years old at the time, used her training to try to calm the man and negotiate her freedom. But after several hours and a few stops, he took her to a motel, watched a pornographic film and raped her. Then he forced her back into the car.

She pleaded with him to let her go, and he said that he would. So when he stopped on a bridge at around 2 a.m. and told her to get out, she thought she was free. Then he motioned for her to jump. “That’s the time where my system, I think, just lost it,” Ebaugh recalls. Succumbing to the terror and exhaustion of the night, she fainted.

Ebaugh awoke in freefall. The man had thrown her, limp and handcuffed, off the bridge four storeys above a river reservoir. When she hit the frigid water, she turned onto her back and started kicking. “At that point, there was no part of me that thought I wasn’t going to make it,” she says.

Few people will experience psychological and physical abuse as terrible as the abuse Ebaugh endured that night. But extreme stress is not unusual. In the United States, an estimated 50–60% of people will experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives, whether through military combat, assault, a serious car accident or a natural disaster. Acute stress triggers an intense physiological response and cements an association in the brain’s circuits between the event and fear. If this association lingers for more than a month, as it does for about 8% of trauma victims, it is considered to be post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The three main criteria for diagnosis are recurring and frightening memories, avoidance of any potential triggers for such memories and a heightened state of arousal.

Ebaugh experienced these symptoms in the months after her attack and was diagnosed with PTSD. But with the help of friends, psychologists and spiritual practices, she recovered. After about five years, she no longer met the criteria for the disorder. She opened her own private practice, married and had a son.

About two-thirds of people diagnosed with PTSD eventually recover. “The vast majority of people actually do OK in the face of horrendous stresses and traumas,” says Robert Ursano, director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. Ursano and other researchers want to know what underlies people’s mental strength. “How does one understand the resilience of the human spirit?” he asks.

Since the 1970s, scientists have learned that several psychosocial factors — such as strong social networks, recalling and confronting fears and an optimistic outlook — help people to recover. But today, scientists in the field are searching for the biological factors involved. Some have found specific genetic variants in humans and in animals that influence an individual’s odds of developing PTSD. Other groups are investigating how the body and brain change during the recovery process and why psychological interventions do not always work. The hope is that this research might lead to therapies that enhance resilience. [Continue reading…]

Note that while this report focuses on advances in the biological understanding of trauma and resilience, Ebaugh’s recovery did not result from conventional medical treatment.

Ebaugh, who now specializes in therapy for trauma victims, agrees that drug-based treatments could aid in recovery. But some people may find relief elsewhere. Religious practices — especially those that emphasize altruism, community and having a purpose in life — have been found to help trauma victims to overcome PTSD. Ebaugh says that yoga, meditation, natural remedies and acupuncture worked for her.

Facebooktwittermail

A diarist of the Syrian revolution

Samar Yazbek in Zurich

Aida Edemariam interviews that Syrian writer, Samar Yazbek, who comes from an Alawite family that used to be among the grandest and wealthiest on the Syrian coast.

At first, before Yazbek’s novels were published, and before she became well known as a TV presenter, documentary-maker and journalist, she lived in one room just outside the city [Damascus], working in admin for 12 hours a day, keeping herself and her daughter just above the poverty line, refusing family connections because she didn’t want to owe them anything.

It was then that she began to carry a flick-knife to defend herself, which came in handy last year, when security forces came to her home, blindfolded her and took her to a commanding officer in a place she did not recognise. He grabbed her wrists so tightly they burned, she writes, and hit her so hard she fell to the ground and stayed there. The third time he hit her, she took out the knife and he backed away, but it did not stop him from demanding she recant and fall into line with her kind. Two men took her on a tour of the cells, as a warning: she saw three young men, “their hands hanging from metal clamps, and the tips of their toes barely touching the ground”. They pushed her forward, and one raised his head. “There was a blank space where his nose should be, no lips.” More cells, a young man with his back split open, bodies stacked behind bodies, terrible sounds, terrible sights, terrible smells.

“It’s a revolution of the poor against the rich, but as they began killing people and got increasingly cruel, more people are joining the rebellion,” she says. It doesn’t matter that she is from a privileged background, and has little in common with many of those fighting. “It’s a problem of conscience. It’s not a problem of Sunni, Shiite or anything else.”

She reiterates this later. “It’s not a sectarian war. It’s a revolution. The regime makes it a sectarian crime between the people. It’s not true.

“There is a big risk, now, for the revolution – they are confronting much more repression. It’s dividing the societies in Syria and the opposition is becoming much more cruel.”

Is she losing hope of establishing the structures of civil society? “I don’t think all hope is gone. I think there are many in Syrian society who are working to keep the civil institutions. We are at a very risky point … I’m afraid that if the world doesn’t help the Syrian people now, and help to make the regime fall, Syria will be in great danger. If we get rid of Assad today, not tomorrow, it would help us to build the country normally.

“That is my hope and also my fear, because Assad takes strength from Iran, from Russia and from the non-reaction of Europeans and Americans. There is a complicity with Assad in the west, even if it’s not official, or said, or clear. But they are helping him to stay. And that is very dangerous for the Syrian people.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Iran hostage crisis insider, Gary Sick, reviews Hollywood thriller ‘Argo’

Gary Sick writes: The American embassy in Tehran was attacked and its residents imprisoned almost exactly 33 years ago, November 4, 1979. The 444-day ordeal of the hostage crisis burned itself into the American collective consciousness. It was America’s first contact with radical Islam. It was our first televised foreign policy crisis. It was the subtext for Jimmy Carter’s unsuccessful reelection campaign. And it has shaped US attitudes and policies toward Iran ever since.

Most Americans — even the under-33 generation — have some recollection of those events: photos of blindfolded diplomats; angry crowds of bearded young men waving their fists at the TV cameras; wreckage of helicopters in the Iranian desert after the failed rescue mission; triumphal homecoming parades.

Several episodes, however, have largely been forgotten. Who recalls that 13 blacks and women were released by the Iranians in the first few weeks of the crisis in a crude bid to polarize American public opinion? And how many people remember the six Americans who hid out in the Canadian embassy after evading capture, and who were later smuggled out of Iran in full sight of the militiamen at Mehrabad Airport?

This latter part of the story, dubbed the “Canadian Caper,” was a brief burst of good news in the midst of an otherwise grim daily dose of frustration and anger. Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor rightly became an American hero. However, the details of the rescue were classified. Any direct connection of the CIA to the operation, or even excessive gloating, could have been dangerous to the remaining 53 hostages. So it was not until many years later that the full story was revealed. For most Americans, it receded to the status of a footnote.

No longer. Ben Affleck has taken the essence of the story, given it the full Hollywood treatment, and released it this weekend to excellent reviews. Affleck directs and stars as Tony Mendez, the CIA disguise specialist who came up with the unlikely cover story and personally shepherded the six through the airport on January 28, 1980, in the guise of a Canadian film crew exploring sites for a sci-fi thriller named Argo.

Viewed simply as a spy thriller, Argo is brilliantly edgy and entertaining. Affleck doesn’t overplay his role. He resists what must have been a temptation to inject a large dose of James Bond into his character. Instead, he plays a talented guy separated from his young son, as he and his wife take some “time off.” As Mendez, he comes up with an outlandish plan and sells it with some difficulty to a skeptical bureaucracy as, admittedly, the “best bad idea we’ve got.” It was a time, after all, when almost all options available to the US administration were unattractive. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Christian leaders ask Congress to condition Israel military aid on human rights compliance

Presbyterian News Service reports: Fifteen religious leaders representing many major faith groups in the country, have written a letter to Congress seeking to make U.S. military aid to Israel contingent upon its government’s “compliance with applicable U.S. laws and policies.”

Signers of the letter include Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assembly Stated Clerk Gradye Parsons.

The signers say they “have worked for decades to support both Israelis and Palestinians in their desire to live in peace and well-being” and “have witnessed the pain and suffering of Israelis as a result of Palestinian actions and of Palestinians as a result of Israeli actions.”

Though they recognize that both Israelis and Palestinians bear responsibility for the prolonged violence in the region, “unconditional U.S. military assistance to Israel has contributed to deteriorating conditions in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories which threaten to lead the region further away from the realization of a just peace. Furthermore, such aid sustains the conflict and undermines the long-term security interests of both Israelis and Palestinians.”

The signers urge an immediate investigation into possible violations by Israel of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act and the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, which respectively prohibit assistance to any country which engages in a consistent pattern of human rights violations and limit the use of U.S. weapons to “internal security” or “legitimate self-defense.”

They urge Congress to hold hearings to examine Israel’s compliance, and request regular reporting on compliance and the withholding of military aid for non-compliance. [Continue reading — full text of the letter follows]

Facebooktwittermail

J Street sells its soul, completes evolution to AIPAC Lite

M.J. Rosenberg writes: It was inevitable. Constantly under pressure from the Jewish center-right (Reform rabbis, for instance), J Street has thrown in the towel. Read its document of surrender.

In response to the letter from Christian denominations urging that aid to Israel be compliant with U.S. law, J Street has joined Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation league and the half-million a year hacks that run the other Jewish organizations to blast the Christians. (See Foxman letter).

J Street agrees with them that aid to Israel is an entitlement. It must never be questioned unless you also add “criticism of Israel’s behavior with appropriate criticism of, for instance, rocket fire from Gaza into Israeli civilian areas.” You must also “put the present situation into a historical or political context that might provide a fuller appreciation for the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over many decades.”

Blah, blah, AIPAC, blah. The church letter is about the $2.5 billion aid package to Israel. As far as I know, the U.S. does not provide the rockets fired from Gaza. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Did Foreign Policy run a false story — leading to an Israeli diplomat getting kicked out of Washington?

Philip Weiss writes: Here’s some high level intrigue, with the stakes being no less than Our Next War.

You might have seen the bombshell piece by Foreign Policy editor David Rothkopf, “A Truly Credible Military Threat To Iran,” saying that Obama and the Israelis are at last getting on the same page for a surgical strike on Iran that would only last a couple of hours and bring regional benefits to everyone.

The article was a bombshell because it seemed the first real evidence of joint military planning. But it has apparently mislanded, and led to a clash inside the Israeli embassy between Michael Oren and his former deputy, Baruch Bina, and in turn led Israeli P.M. Netanyahu to dismiss Bina.

Here’s the story as I understand it.

Rothkopf’s piece electrified D.C. because it had the kind of detailed, nuanced language that usually accompanies a well-sourced and authoritative account. And indeed, Rothkopf is a Washington insider. He is the former roommate of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren.

The money graf:

Indeed, according to a source close to the discussions, the action that participants currently see as most likely is a joint U.S.-Israeli surgical strike targeting Iranian enrichment facilities. The strike might take only “a couple of hours” in the best case and only would involve a “day or two” overall, the source said, and would be conducted by air, using primarily bombers and drone support. Advocates for this approach argue that not only is it likely to be more politically palatable in the United States but, were it to be successful — meaning knocking out enrichment facilities, setting the Iranian nuclear program back many years, and doing so without civilian casualties — it would have regionwide benefits.

Of course we Americans would be doing the heavy lifting:

While this approach would limit the negative costs associated with more protracted interventions, it could not be conducted by the Israelis acting alone.

And here’s the rosy neocon vision. A joint strike, Rothkopf wrote, would have a

“transformative outcome: saving Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, reanimating the peace process, securing the Gulf, sending an unequivocal message to Russia and China, and assuring American ascendancy in the region for a decade to come.”

Rothkopf’s article first made headlines in Israel as a piece of investigative journalism, but doubts ensued. “A Truly Credible Threat” was soon being retailed as an opinion piece. It slid off the front page of the Times of Israel; and even Foreign Policy seemed eager to let the scoop disappear. Comments on the piece were turned off.

What happened? [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail