The master planners of regime change in Syria

The bombs doors are open. The plans have been drawn up.

This has been brewing for a time. The sheer energy and meticulous planning that’s gone into this change of regime – it’s breathtaking.

At least it takes Charlie Skelton’s breath away.

He’s been busy trawling the archives of the websites of Washington and London’s leading think tanks and out of his research has compiled a damning dossier revealing the deep connections between leading figures in Syria’s exiled opposition and policymakers who are being steered in the direction of military intervention.

Central to Skelton’s account is Syrian academic Bassma Kodmani, an Ahmed Chalabi-type figure who was seen attending this year’s Bilderberg conference. Bilderberg! Say no more!

If the revelation of a network of associations between Syrian activists and the U.S./U.K. foreign policy establishment amounts to a smoking gun, then Skelton has certainly succeeded in exposing a nefarious plot.

But there are other ways of measuring the power of this regime-change lobby.

“The plans have been drawn up,” Skelton says. So — we can deduce — the Syrian opposition is united in its goal. It’s just a matter of keeping up the pressure in their push for foreign military intervention.

Somehow that picture doesn’t quite jive with this — an AFP report from just over a week ago:

Syria’s fractured opposition groups on Wednesday wound up talks in the Egyptian capital that descended into chaos and even fist fights as they tried to forge a common vision for a transition in their country.

More than 200 participants from 30 different movements as well as independent figures, civil society groups and activists had gathered in Cairo to form a unified front against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

After two days of meetings hosted by the Arab League, the groups agreed broadly that any transition must exclude Assad and agreed to support the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA).

But they failed to present a united bloc as disagreements led to heated arguments, walkouts and even fist fights, participants said.

And then there is the stream of weapons flowing from the Gulf — absent that supply, some observers repeatedly insist, there would be no armed uprising.

C.J. Chivers reports from Antakya in Turkey, the spigot out of which guns and ammunition are spreading chaos in Syria.

Abu Moayed, a commander in an armed Syrian opposition brigade, stood and waved his arms emphatically at the fellow rebel commanders who filled the sweltering room.

His fighters, he said, needed money and weapons. But they were not getting the support promised from the donors and opposition leaders outside Syria.

“We are borrowing money to feed our wounded!” Abu Moayed shouted. “There is no distribution of the weapons,” he added. “All of our weapons, we are paying for them ourselves.”

The meeting of the rebel commanders, held after Friday Prayer in this Turkish city near Syria’s northern border, said much about the priorities of the Syrian opposition fighting groups at this stage of the conflict, now 17 months old. There was limited discussion of the mass killings in the village of Tremseh the day before — even though the commanders had heard about it and at least one had lost relatives. There was no talk about United Nations cease-fire monitors, the peace envoy Kofi Annan, or endless Security Council debates to halt the conflict. These commanders were focused on the basics of waging war against President Bashar al-Assad.

Abu Moayed, from Idlib, was one of dozens of commanders who converged on the meeting, called by the Idlib Revolutionary Command Council. Held high above the street in a pair of large rooms in an apartment building, the gathering framed both a degree of expanding coordination among anti-Assad fighting groups inside Syria and their frustrations with the opposition’s political leadership outside.

One complaint throughout was that the Syrian National Council, the coalition of exile opposition groups based in Istanbul, was disconnected from the battles fought on the ground. Another was contained in the field commanders’ suspicion that unnamed members of the Syrian political opposition in Turkey were either diverting funds or playing favorites in funneling weapons and money across the border.

“Yesterday we were supposed to receive mortars and cartridges,” said another commander, Issam Afara, addressing his peers. “But we didn’t receive them. I called and demanded: Where are they? Where?”

Where indeed! I thought there was a plan?

“The plans have been drawn up,” Skelton wrote and with these words linked to a 2009 Brookings report whose authors include Iraq-war hawk, Kenneth Pollack.

And what is this plan? Peel Syria away from its alliance with Iran by facilitating a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement.

In 2009 that looked like an objective that was not completely out of reach. After all, in spite of an Israeli attack on an under-construction nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007, in 2008 Turkey had been able to serve as a mediator, laying the foundation for peace talks between Israel and Syria.

So what was the plan? Get Assad to sign a peace treaty with Israel and then foment an uprising to topple Assad?

That sounds like a farcical plan. Then again, Charlie Skelton is a comedy writer.

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Assad’s useful idiots

How can Assad’s useful idiots be characterized?

Firstly, they will offer a perfunctory declaration that they oppose tyranny and tyrants everywhere and have no sympathy for Syria’s president or its government. They will nevertheless refrain from using the term Syrian/Assad “regime” since they are unwilling to pass judgement on the legitimacy of Assad’s rule and have a visceral distaste for the language of Assad’s Western opponents.

Secondly, the idea that an armed uprising could be a legitimate way of challenging authoritarian rule will swiftly be dismissed. Anyone in Syria who carries a gun and does not represent the state must have been provided their weapon by a foreign power — most likely Qatar or Saudi Arabia — and is either simply acting as an agent of Western/Gulf interests or is a Salafist fighting a holy war or is both.

Thirdly, the idea that the Syrian uprising should be seen in the context of the Arab Spring will be ignored and the Arab Spring itself viewed with deep suspicion on the grounds that it bears strong similarities with the Western-supported “color revolutions” which accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union.

Fourthly, it is axiomatic that the driving force behind the conflict in Syria is the hegemonic designs of the United States and Israel in their effort to put a stranglehold on Iran.

Lastly, the idea that what is happening in Syria can primarily be understood as the outcome of five decades of Ba’ath Party rule, will be excluded from the discourse.

In a nutshell, for Assad’s useful idiots Syria can be understood by listening to reports from figures like Deputy Foreign Minister Abdulfattah Ammura and without paying much or any attention to the views of ordinary Syrians, least of all to those identify themselves as belonging to the opposition.

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Is Assad dangling WMD bait?

(Update below.)

As much as Bashar al Assad pushes the narrative that he is quelling unrest spawned by foreign agitation, he is also sending a strong message to his challengers. That is, that he has the power to act with impunity, confident that whatever atrocities his forces commit, these actions will never do more than provoke verbal condemnations from outside powers. Indeed, each time there is a massacre, the international expressions of outrage ring increasingly hollow. Condemnation slides into acquiescence.

The same principal — looking for ways to bait the U.S. and its allies and highlight their unwillingness to intervene — may be at play behind a report that Syria’s weapons of mass destruction are on the move. Assad knows that after Iraq, no one in Washington can talk about WMD without being viewed with suspicion. Moving chemical weapons around at this time can therefore serve a dual purpose: it’s another way of trying to sow fear in the opposition, but it also forces Obama administration officials to face questions they’d rather not answer — such as, would Assad’s use of WMD be a red line that would make U.S. military intervention in Syria inevitable.

Keep in mind that as Assad calculates different strategies for survival, the more unrest he faces, the more appealing direct foreign intervention becomes. Nothing would bolster Assad’s credibility more inside Syria than if he could rally the nation to fend off foreign aggression.

The Wall Street Journal reports: Syria has begun moving parts of its vast arsenal of chemical weapons out of storage facilities, U.S. officials said, in a development that has alarmed many in Washington.

The country’s undeclared stockpiles of sarin nerve agent, mustard gas and cyanide have long worried U.S. officials and their allies in the region, who have watched anxiously amid the conflict in Syria for any change in the status or location of the weapons.

American officials are divided on the meaning of the latest moves by members of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Some U.S. officials fear Damascus intends to use the weapons against the rebels or civilians, potentially as part of a targeted ethnic cleansing campaign. But other officials said Mr. Assad may be trying to safeguard the material from his opponents or to complicate Western powers’ efforts to track the weapons.

Some said that Mr. Assad may not intend to use the weapons, but instead may be moving them as a feint, hoping the threat of a chemical attack could drive Sunnis thought to be sympathetic to the rebels from their homes.

Whatever the motivation, the evidence that the chemical weapons are coming into play could escalate the conflict in Syria, some fear. “This could set the precedent of WMD [weapons of mass destruction] being used under our watch,” one U.S. official said. “This is incredibly dangerous to our national security.”

The Obama administration has begun to hold classified briefings about the new intelligence. U.S. officials are particularly worried about Syria’s stocks of sarin gas, the deadly and versatile nerve agent. The officials wouldn’t say where weapons have been moved.

The new intelligence comes as the U.S. and its allies step up pressure on Russia to join an international drive to dislodge Mr. Assad from power. But the new information could cut both ways, officials said: It could bolster calls for international action to remove Mr. Assad, but also underline the risks of intervening against a military armed with weapons of mass destruction.

“This shows how complex this is,” a second official briefed on the matter said.

The Syrian government denied the chemical stockpiles have been moved.

“This is absolutely ridiculous and untrue,” said Syria’s foreign ministry spokesman, Jihad Makdissi. “If the U.S. is so well-informed, why can’t they help [U.N. envoy] Kofi Annan in stopping the flow of illegal weapons to Syria in order to end the violence and move towards the political solution?”

The White House, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon declined to comment.

Damascus is believed to possess one of the largest stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the Middle East. Syria never signed the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention, the arms-control agreement that outlaws the production, stockpiling and use of such weapons.

Despite the new intelligence, U.S. officials said they believe that the weapons remain under Syrian government control.

The State Department reiterated U.S. warnings: “We have repeatedly made it clear that the Syrian government has a responsibility to safeguard its stockpiles of chemical weapons, and that the international community will hold accountable any Syrian officials who fail to meet that obligation,” said spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.

Syrian opposition leaders said that rebels have confiscated equipment from Syrian forces apparently meant to protect them during a chemical weapons attack.

Syria has long had the capability of placing its chemical agents in artillery shells and Scud missiles, U.S. officials have said. But chemical and biological weapons are difficult to deploy effectively. Sarin, for example, can be used either as a gas or to poison water supplies because it is heavier than air, but is hard to control when used as a weapon against a crowd of people.

The weapons are a danger not only to opponents, but also to the government’s own forces. In 2007, an accident at a chemical-weapons facility involving mustard gas killed several Syrians.

U.S. officials have held discussions with the Jordanian military, working on plans to have Jordan’s special operations forces secure the chemical and biological sites in the event that Assad’s government falls.

Because of the faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction that were used to justify the Iraq war, U.S. officials are extremely cautious about using reports of Mr. Assad’s chemical stockpiles to support military intervention.

Some U.S. officials briefed on the matter said the information isn’t conclusive on what Mr. Assad’s forces intend to do with the weapons. These officials said the moves may be aimed at safeguarding the materials from enemies, rather than a sign Mr. Assad is preparing to use them.

Officials point out that Mr. Assad remains in power today largely because of international disagreement over how to handle the crisis. If he used a chemical weapon, they said, Western allies would likely rally around plans to more aggressively intervene and topple him from power.

But some American officials, who hold the view that the U.S. needs to do more to protect the Syrian population, fear that the chemical weapons have been moved in so they can be available for government-allied forces to use, should the rebels make further gains or the Syrian state begin to fall apart.

“The regime has a plan for ethnic cleansing, and we must come to terms with this,” the first U.S. official said. “There is no diplomatic solution.”

Update — Reuters reports: The Syrian government denies carrying out the operation, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, and there is no firm word on the materials involved. Syria’s undeclared [chemical weapon] stockpile reportedly includes sarin nerve agent, mustard gas and cyanide.

But the reports contribute to an impression of crumbling government control in parts of Syria, and are likely to heighten international concern about the security of what is believed to be the Middle East’s largest chemical weapons stockpile.

An Israeli official said however the movements reflected an attempt by President Bashar al-Assad to make “arrangements to ensure the weapons do not fall into irresponsible hands”.

“That would support the thinking that this matter has been managed responsibly so far.”

So, while the word from Damascus is that “terrorists” armed with “Israeli-made machine guns” conducted the massacre in Tremseh yesterday, the word from Tel Aviv is that Syria’s chemical weapons are nothing to worry about so long as they remain in the responsible hands of the government.

There might be a certain amount of truth in that statement. Still, it’s not exactly the rhetoric one might expect from a representative of an alliance that is supposedly gunning for Assad’s downfall. On the contrary, it reflects the fact that Israel would be much happier to see Assad remain in power.

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Eight ways America’s headed back to the robber-baron era

Erik Loomis writes: Over the past 40 years, corporations and politicians have rolled back many of the gains made by working and middle-class people over the previous century. We have the highest level of income inequality in 90 years, both private and public sector unions are under a concerted attack, and federal and state governments intend to cut deficits by slashing services to the poor.

We are recreating the Gilded Age, the period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when corporations ruled this nation, buying politicians, using violence against unions, and engaging in open corruption. During the Gilded Age, many Americans lived in stark poverty, in crowded tenement housing, without safe workplaces, and lacked any safety net to help lift them out of hard times.

With Republicans more committed than ever to repealing every economic gain the working-class has achieved in the last century and the Democrats seemingly unable to resist, we need to understand the Gilded Age to see what conservatives are trying to do to this nation. Here are 8 ways our corporations, politicians and courts are trying to recreate the Gilded Age. [Continue reading…]

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Time for fossil fuel industry and consumers to pay for climate change

2012 drought - the worst 'natural' disaster in U.S. history

Myles Allen writes: The climate may have changed this week. Not the physical climate, but the climate of the climate change debate. Tuesday marked the publication of a series of papers examining the factors behind extreme weather events in 2011. Nothing remarkable about that, you might think, except, if all goes well, this will be the first of a regular, annual assessment quantifying how external drivers of climate contribute to damaging weather.

Some of these drivers, like volcanoes, are things we can do nothing about. But others, like rising levels of greenhouse gases, we can. And quantifying how greenhouse gases contribute to extreme weather is a crucial step in pinning down the real cost of human influence on climate. While most people think of climate change in terms of shrinking ice-sheets and slowly rising sea levels, it is weather events that actually do harm.

This week also saw a workshop in Oxford for climate change negotiators from developing countries. Again, nothing remarkable about that except, for the first time, the issue of “loss and damage” was top of the agenda. For years negotiations have been over emission reductions and sharing the costs of adaptation. Now the debate is turning to: who is going to pay for damage done?

It is a good time to ask, since the costs that can unambiguously be attributed to human-induced climate change are still relatively small. Although Munich Re estimates that weather events in 2011 cost more than $100bn and claimed many thousands of lives, only a few of these events were clearly made more likely by human influence. Others may have been made less likely, but occurred anyway – chance remains the single dominant factor in when and where a weather event occurs. For the vast majority of events, we simply don’t yet know either way.

Connecting climate change and specific weather events is only one link in the causal chain between greenhouse gas emissions and actual harm. But it is a crucial link. If, as planned, the assessment of 2011 becomes routine, we should be able to compare actual weather-related damage, in both good years and bad, with the damage that might have been in a world without human influence on climate. This puts us well on our way to a global inventory of climate change impacts. And as soon as that is available, the question of compensation will not be far behind.

The presumption in climate change negotiations is that “countries with historically high emissions” would be first in line to foot the bill for loss and damage. There may be some logic to this, but if you are an African (or Texan) farmer hit by greenhouse-exacerbated drought, is the European or American taxpayer necessarily the right place to look for compensation? As any good lawyer knows, there is no point in suing a man with empty pockets.

The only institution in the world that could deal with the cost of climate change without missing a beat is the fossil fuel industry: BP took a $30bn charge for Deepwater Horizon, very possibly more than the total cost of climate change damages last year, and was back in profit within months. Of the $5 trillion per year we currently spend on fossil energy, a small fraction would take care of all the loss and damage attributable to climate change for the foreseeable future several times over.

Such a pay-as-you-go liability regime would not address the impacts of today’s emissions on the 22nd century. Governments cannot wash their hands of this issue entirely. But we have been so preoccupied with the climate of the 22nd century that we have curiously neglected to look after the interests of those being affected by climate change today.

So rather than haggling over emission caps and carbon taxes, why not start with a simple statement of principle: standard product liability applies to anyone who sells or uses fossil fuels, including liability for any third-party side-effects. There is no need at present to say what these side-effects might be – indeed, the scientific community does not yet know. But we are getting there.

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Building on Libya’s electoral success

Sean Kane writes: Libya’s elections did not need to be perfect, but the country plainly needs a popularly elected government to tackle the difficult and unpopular decisions involved in building the new state. The polls thus could have been judged a success merely by taking place without major disruption, a test they aced with flying colors following reports of 65 percent turnout and over 98 percent of polling centers opening without incident. Around the country, the long-awaited vote was justifiably treated as cause for national celebration.

But the seeds for political contention at the next stage may have been sown in the run-up to the polls. Less than 48 hours prior to elections, the National Transitional Council (NTC) stripped the to be elected national congress of its core mandate: supervising the drafting of Libya’s new constitution. Rather than being appointed by the new congress, the constitutional commission actually drafting the charter will theoretically now be directly elected in a second set of polls that give all parts of the country equal representation. This legal bombshell risks acrimony later this year between different parts of the country as well as rejection by the newly ascendant political parties, who on paper find themselves in charge of a congress suddenly relegated to bystander status on constitutional matters.

A Libyan proverb has it that “laws are made in Tripoli, observed in Misrata and die in Benghazi.” It captures Tripoli’s status as the seat of government, the highly organized nature of the commercial port city of Misrata, and the hotbed of activism that is Benghazi. True to form, as a long-running center of opposition to Qaddafi’s rule, Benghazi was the birthplace of the Libyan revolution. It should not then be a surprise that the city sees itself as the watchdog of the revolution and the new authorities in Tripoli.

Normally the vigilance of Benghazi is a healthy thing, helping the country avoid a return to the excessive concentration of power and wealth in Tripoli that marked the Qaddafi regime. But somewhere in the last few months Benghazi took a wrong turn. Following the revolution it was the most stable and institutionally advanced city in Libya, but now residents describe it as increasingly troubled. The city has become a locus of aggressive street actions by federalism supporters, seemingly politically motivated assassinations, and had its international presence targeted by small groups of Islamist militants. Underlying all of this is a deep current of resentment of the more wealthy and populous Tripoli.

Libya has of course been no stranger to unrest since the triumph of its revolution in October, 2011. But what is happening in Benghazi is qualitatively different. Other clashes around the country have generally been micro-conflicts, locally contained and concerned with parochial issues rather than larger ideology or proposed alternatives to the new order.

This is not the case among backers of an Islamic emirate or with the harder core of federalism supporters in eastern Libya. The latter include the self-declared Barqa Council (Barqa is the Arabic name for Libya’s eastern region), who periodically threaten separation from the rest of the country. Both groups have been willing to go outside of the political process to pursue their respective visions. And while high electoral turnout in the East was an emphatic demonstration that neither faction has widespread support, both have shown an ability to exploit broader regional feelings of maltreatment to act as violent spoilers. [Continue reading…]

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Mali: The jihadist behind the destruction of Timbuktu’s tombs

Julius Cavendish reports on Omar Hamaha, whose fighters have been demolishing the historic tombs of Timbuktu: Hamaha occupies an unusual position in Africa’s jihadist firmament. He first fell under the spell of Islamist teachers in the mid-1980s in Algeria — a connection that years later would help propel him to a privileged position in AQIM, the local franchise of the terrorist movement. By 2008 he was one of the few Malians trusted by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a powerful Algerian emir known for his Scarlet Pimpernel–like ability to avoid capture, and who for the most part surrounded himself with fellow nationals. Yet as northern Mali fell apart this spring, and Ansar Eddine muscled aside the secular Tuareg rebels of the Mouvement National pour la Liberation de l’Azawad (MNLA), Hamaha suddenly emerged as a key player among the jihadists of Ansar Eddine. He isn’t the only one. “Omar Hamaha and [Ansar Eddine spokesman] Sanda Ould Bouamama were certainly long-standing AQIM figures before the rebellion,” explains Andrew Lebovich, an analyst with the Navanti Group who focuses on Sahelian issues. “And I’m sure that there are others who fit that mold as well.”

Hamaha’s sudden shift in professional identity speaks to the complex tapestry of interests and tensions prevailing in northern Mali, and helps explain how al-Qaeda has exploited the chaos to such effect. To the extent that anyone can control a swath of desert bigger than France, Ansar Eddine, led by a veteran Tuareg troublemaker called Iyad Ag Ghali, is nominally in charge. But the specter of ethnic war weighs heavily over the region, where a previous Tuareg uprising between 1990 and ’96 led to interethnic atrocities. In Timbuktu, where Tuaregs are a minority, putting a local boy — like Hamaha, who hails from the city’s prominent Arab community — in charge makes better sense. Such expedients have allowed AQIM to inject operatives into competing jihadi outfits.

The intermingling makes it hard to tell how extensive al-Qaeda’s gains have been, but in all likelihood there’s more to them than meets the eye. “We have no good sense of how many militants there are, and even in the case of Ansar Eddine, it’s hard to tell how many of them are true Ansar personnel, vs. AQIM fighters or other militants who recently joined the organization,” says Lebovich. “The standard belief is that [Iyad Ag Ghali] has ultimate control over Ansar Eddine, and much of the writing on northern Mali has treated Iyad as the ‘master’ of the region. Personally, I think the situation is more complicated than that.”

Indeed, concern that northern Mali is rapidly becoming al-Qaeda’s most successful effort at establishing a caliphate to date has regional players scrambling for a response. Nigeria, Niger and Senegal have pledged to provide the core of a 3,270-member peacekeeping force to stabilize Mali’s politically fraught south and then tackle the militants. The announcement was promptly met with threats of retaliatory terrorist attacks. Even if such a campaign isn’t the jihadists’ priority, a suicide bombing deep inside Algeria by an AQIM ally called the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa on June 29 showed that it is certainly within their means.

And the fact is any military intervention would be hard-pressed to defeat the jihadists, who are highly motivated, flush with weaponry looted from the arsenal of the fallen regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and have an intimate knowledge of the terrain. Hamaha claims that the jihadists also have a powerful card up their sleeves — surface-to-air missiles seized in Tripoli last year. “We have Russia-made SAM 7A and SAM 7B [missiles] and U.S.-made stingers,” he boasts. “We made more than 20 trips … between Libya, Niger and Mali [last year] with at least 17 vehicles carrying weapons coming from Libya … Western countries are not going to take military action against us in northern Mali, because they know we have the missiles to shoot down airplanes, and it is complicated to deploy troops in the desert. It’s why they say the Malian crisis should be resolved though dialogue.” Although thousands of shoulder-launched missiles disappeared from Gaddafi’s armories, there have been no confirmed sightings of them in northern Mali to date, and Hamaha refused to furnish TIME with pictures of the missiles or their serial numbers. His point about the impregnability of the jihadists’ position, however, rings, for the immediate term at any rate, eerily true.

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Over 200 massacred in Syrian government forces attack: activists

Reuters reports: More than 200 Syrians, mostly civilians, were massacred in a village in the rebellious Hama region when it was bombarded by helicopter gunships and tanks and then stormed by militiamen, opposition activists said.

If confirmed, it would be the worst single incident of violence in 16 months of conflict in which rebels are fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad and diplomacy to halt the bloodshed has been stymied by jostling between world powers.

The Revolution Leadership Council of Hama told Reuters the Sunni Muslim village of Taramseh was subjected on Thursday to a barrage of heavy weapons fire before pro-government Alawite militiamen swept in and killed victims one by one.

“More than 220 people fell today in Taramseh. They died from bombardment by tanks and helicopters, artillery shelling and summary executions,” the regional opposition group said in a statement on Thursday evening.

Syrian state television said three security personnel had been killed in fighting in Taramseh and it accused “armed terrorist groups” of committing a massacre there.

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The influential Syrian general who could bear Assad no more

The Guardian reports on events leading up to the recent escape of Brigadier General Manaf Tlass and his family from Syria: The Tlass family’s complicity in the regime, and that of other Sunni elites, helped to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood revolt in Hama in 1982, but they were not prepared to countenance a repeat of such brutal measures directed against fellow Sunni clansmen from their home town of Rastan in the current uprising. As the regime’s reaction to the Syrian spring became more and more ruthless, Manaf Tlass was cast out of the inner circle to brood in his Damascus home.

A turning point came last August when a delegation of senior Hezbollah officials came to Damascus and was due to eat an Iftar meal, to break the Ramadan fast.

The Hezbollah men asked Manaf what he thought about Assad’s handling of the situation, according to one Syrian source.

“The response came fast and dry – ‘a donkey’,” said the source. “In Arabic, the poor animal occupies a very low level in the hierarchy of the animal kingdom and the term is generally used to denote a clueless person with no intelligence whatsoever.

“Taking it as an insult, the Hezbollah team got up and apologised for not being able to have dinner there as they made up other excuses.

“As Firas and Manaf stood up to accompany their hosts out, which is customary in these events, their father asked to sit down and let the guests leave unaccompanied, a sign of derision in Arab customs.”

The breach had become public, displayed in front of foreigners, but Manaf’s wife, Thala Khair, nevertheless appears to have kept up an amiable email correspondence with Assad as least until January this year, perhaps as an insurance policy for the protection of her family.

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Syrian regime must be ousted, says diplomat defector Nawaf al-Fares

The Guardian reports: Syria’s former envoy to Iraq has dismissed the international peace plan prepared to stop the violence and called for the regime of Bashar al-Assad to be violently removed. One day after leaving his post in Baghdad and fleeing to Qatar, the ambassador, Nawaf al-Fares, told al-Jazeera TV that only force could remove the Syrian dictator. He had earlier denounced the embattled regime and called on other ambassadors to do the same.

The defection of Fares, a leading member of Syria’s diplomatic corps, drew an angry response from Damascus, which claims he was sacked and will face “judicial” measures.

Fares is a leading tribal member from Syria’s eastern desert region and is the most significant figure to flee the regime in almost 17 months of uprising. “Every Syrian man has to join the revolution to remove this nightmare and this gang,” he said. The main opposition group, the Syrian National Council, claims it has been talking to other Syrian diplomats, who will soon follow suit.

The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said a dialogue had started with a second high-profile defector, Brigadier General Manaf Tlass, who was regarded as a confidant and friend of the Assad family until he fled to Turkey last Thursday.

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Al-Qaeda brings the fight to Yemen’s capital

Time reports: The doctor’s trembling hands were still wrapped in blood-stained surgical gloves. Outside the gate of the Yemeni capital’s police academy, Dr. Ahmed Idrees was speaking to a crowd of cameras and microphones about the latest assault on Sana’a. Two hours earlier, an assailant later identified as Mohammed Nasher al-Uthy, 20, hurled an explosive into a crowd of cadets leaving the academy for a weekend at home. Ten were killed and fifteen wounded. Al-Uthy himself lost several limbs in the blast, dying in a hospital an hour after the attack. Noting similarities with an incident in May, Idrees said, “The characteristics of this attack are the same we saw in Saba’een Street.” The suicide attack on Saba’een had been massive: 96 soldiers were killed while rehearsing for a military military parade commemorating Yemen’s unification. In both cases, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Yemen-based franchise of the terrorist organization, claimed responsibility.

After the Yemeni army’s lighting campaign forced Al-Qaeda from its strongholds in the south of the country, AQAP is striking at the heart of the government. Assaults in Sana’a are on the rise. In the space of less than two months, five bombings have been attempted by Al-Qaeda-affiliates. The first was Saba’een Street. Weeks later, a bomber wearing an explosive belt panicked moments before blowing himself up in a post office, throwing his belt over a wall and fleeing. Early this month, Colonel Mohammed Al-Qudami of Yemen’s Political Security was killed by a car bomb as he drove through the capital. Two days later a Sana’a police chief, Saleh Al-Mustafa, watched his car explode minutes after getting out. The police academy is only the latest target in a wave of attacks Al-Qaeda has vowed to keep up.

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‘I Vote Israel’ campaign says outcome of 2012 U.S. elections matters more to Israelis than average Americans

Will Israelis cast the key votes determining who becomes the next U.S. president?

The campaign, ‘I Vote Israel,’ is trying to persuade as many American Israelis as possible to cast a vote for Israel in the 2012 elections:

“I’m an Israeli now,” you might be thinking… “Voting should be left to real Americans.” But actually, the next president and Congress will have a huge impact on your future and the security of Israel.

Indeed, the campaign asserts that the outcome of the election matters more to Israeli-Americans than it does to the average American.

The Times of Israel reports:

According to I Vote Israel national campaign director Elie Pieprz, 30,000 US-Israelis voted during the 2008 elections. His goal for the current campaign is to have up to 100,000 dual citizens cast absentee ballots before the November 6 vote that will decide whether Barack Obama will remain in the White House or be replaced by his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.

“The biggest reason why people don’t vote is because it’s cumbersome. People don’t know how to do it,” Pieprz said. He and his team of paid staffers and volunteers attend events in Israel with heavy American participation to sign them up for absentee ballots. They also go “door to door” to convince people to vote and help them with the paperwork, he said.

“Each week, we’re bringing hundreds if not thousands [of voter registration forms] over to the American Embassy,” according to Pieprz. Currently, the organization running the campaign — a nonprofit called “Americans for Jerusalem,” which was incorporated in Delaware in August of 2000 — employs eight paid full-time staffers and at least one paid political strategist.

In addition to hosting the website, which features professionally produced YouTube clips, the organization also pays for office space in central Jerusalem, advertising, events, printing, travel, communication and other day-to-day expenses.

However, the group is determinedly mum on the subject of who specifically stands behind I Vote Israel and where the money for its activities comes from. Key staffers refused to reveal any names even when it was suggested that a lack of transparency might raise questions as to the campaign’s stated nonpartisan nature.

By US law, I Vote Israel does not have to divulge donor rolls because of the tax bracket it is registered under.

“We’re fundraising in Jewish communities and pro-Israel groups across the US,” said Aron Shaviv, I Vote Israel’s campaign strategist. “There are literally hundreds of donors, perhaps even more. They are quite diverse. They are giving in small increments. There is no one who stands out.”

Asked whether this wide donor community could be considered more on the left or the right end of the political spectrum, the British-born Shaviv replied that it was “quite balanced between the two groups.”

Pieprz, on the other hand, said he believes most donors usually give to more politically conservative causes, both in the United States and in Israel. “Is it more right-of-center? I would say yes,” he told The Times of Israel in an interview. Yet he, too, declined to offer more information about who was behind the initiative.

“These are many pro-Israel people, Republicans and Democrats, who all want to have an impact on the election. They want Israel to have more of a voice,” Pieprz said. “The issue is not who’s behind it. Let’s just say they are Republicans and Democrats. Some people feel passionate about it but for their personal reasons don’t want to be associated with something that’s so pro-Israel.”

I Vote Israel is about giving Israel higher visibility in the American political discourse, and any discussion of its founders or funders would distract from its core mission, Pieprz added. “Some people perceive this is as somewhat more of a right-wing thing and as a result many Democrats, people who are very politically active in DC, may not want to be associated as it may hurt them professionally,” he said.

An article in +972 Magazine suggested that right-wing philanthropists could be behind I Vote Israel. Shaviv is quoted in the piece saying that much of the donated money comes from the “[Sheldon] Adelsons of the world.” One of the wealthiest Jews in the world, Adelson has given hundreds of millions to Jewish and Israeli causes over the years. He has also given tens of millions to Republican politicians, most recently $10 million to a political action committee linked to Romney’s presidential campaign.

Shaviv, who is CEO of Shaviv Strategy and Campaigns, says Adelson has no connection to “Americans for Jerusalem.” “I never met him and have no connection to him,” he said, adding that he had merely meant to say that the group’s donations come from Jewish philanthropists and that Adelson would be a good example of a Jewish philanthropist.

Both Shaviv and Pieprz have a history of working with right-wing parties. Shaviv kicked off his career as a staffer on Yisrael Beytenu’s campaign for the 2006 elections and later won Campaigns and Elections magazine’s “Rising Star 2011″ award for his work running “research-driven campaigns for center-right candidates in Central and Eastern Europe.”

Pieprz used to be active in the Republican Jewish Coalition and, after immigrating to Israel, in Republicans Abroad Israel.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

The lack of support for US President Barack Obama from Jews in Israel acted as a harbinger for their counterparts in the United States, Republican Jewish Coalition executive director Matt Brooks and GOP strategist Ari Fleischer told The Jerusalem Post on a visit to Israel Tuesday.

Brooks and Fleischer came to Jerusalem to support the IVoteIsrael campaign, which aims to register as many as possible of the 150,000 American citizens in Israel who are eligible to vote in the November 6 election.

They cited polls in the Post going back to June 2009, which found that only a small percentage of Israelis considered the Obama administration more pro- Israel than pro-Palestinian.

“The polls in The Jerusalem Post reverberated around the Jewish community in America,” Fleischer said. “They were an early warning signal in the US that there were cracks in Obama’s armor. In 2009 American Jews were so pro-Obama. Israelis saw the cracks first, and now the American Jewish community is going through a significant case of buyer’s remorse.”

Brooks said they came to Israel because the number of eligible voters in the Jewish state was similar to key battleground cities like Fort Lauderdale, Florida or Dayton, Ohio. He noted that thousands of votes from American-Israelis would be counted in those states.

“I am a survivor of the 2000 election in the US [that George W. Bush won thanks to 537 votes in Florida],” Fleischer said. “If this race will be equally close, there is a possibility that a large number of absentee ballots coming into Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio can make the difference. It is also important to plant a flag on Israeli soil. Politicians notice a massive boost in voting like there could be here.”

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DoD report reveals some detainees interrogated while drugged, others ‘chemically restrained’

Jeffrey Kaye and Jason Leopold report: Detainees in custody of the US military were interrogated while drugged with powerful antipsychotic and other medications that “could impair an individual’s ability to provide accurate information,” according to a declassified Department of Defense (DoD) inspector general’s report that probed the alleged use of “mind altering drugs” during interrogations.

In addition, detainees were subjected to “chemical restraints,” hydrated with intravenous (IV) fluids while they were being interrogated and, in what appears to be a form of psychological manipulation, the inspector general’s probe confirmed at least one detainee – convicted “dirty bomb” plotter Jose Padilla – was the subject of a “deliberate ruse” in which his interrogator led him to believe he was given an injection of “truth serum.”

Truthout obtained a copy of the report – “Investigation of Allegations of the Use of Mind-Altering Drugs to Facilitate Interrogations of Detainees” – prepared by the DoD’s deputy inspector general for intelligence in September 2009, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we filed nearly two years ago.

Over the past decade, dozens of current and former detainees and their civilian and military attorneys have alleged in news reports and in court documents that prisoners held by the US government in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan were forcibly injected with unknown medications and pills during or immediately prior to marathon interrogation sessions in an attempt to compel them to confess to terrorist-related crimes of which they were accused.

The inspector general’s investigation was unable to substantiate any of the allegations by current and former detainees that, as a matter of government policy, they were given mind-altering drugs “to facilitate interrogation.”

But the watchdog’s report provides startling new details about the treatment of detainees by US military personnel. For example, the report concludes, “certain detainees, diagnosed as having serious mental health conditions being treated with psychoactive medications on a continuing basis, were interrogated.”

Leonard Rubenstein, a medical ethicist at Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health and Human Rights and the former president of Physicians for Human Rights, said, “this practice adds another layer of cruelty to the operations at Guantanamo.”

“The inspector general’s report confirms that detainees whose mental deterioration and suffering was so great as to lead to psychosis and attempts at self-harm were given anti-psychotic medication and subjected to further interrogation,” said Rubenstein, who reviewed a copy of the report for Truthout. “The problem is not simply what the report implies, that good information is unlikely to be obtained when someone shows psychotic symptoms, but the continued use of highly abusive interrogation methods against men who are suffering from grave mental deterioration that may have been caused by those very same methods.”

Shayana Kadidal, the senior managing atty of the Guantanamo Project at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the report, which he also reviewed, “reinforces that the interrogation system at Guantanamo was a brutal system.” [Continue reading…]

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As Golden Dawn rises in Greece, anti-immigrant violence follows

The New York Times reports: A week after an extremist right-wing party gained an electoral foothold in Greece’s Parliament earlier this summer, 50 of its members riding motorbikes and armed with heavy wooden poles roared through Nikaia, a gritty suburb west of here, to telegraph their new power.

As townspeople watched, several of them said in interviews, the men careened around the main square, some brandishing shields emblazoned with swastikalike symbols, and delivered an ultimatum to immigrants whose businesses have catered to Nikaia’s Greeks for nearly a decade.

“They said: ‘You’re the cause of Greece’s problems. You have seven days to close or we’ll burn your shop — and we’ll burn you,’ ” said Mohammed Irfan, a legal Pakistani immigrant who owns a hair salon and two other stores. When he called the police for help, he said, the officer who answered said they did not have time to come to the aid of immigrants like him.

A spokesman for the party, Golden Dawn, denied that anyone associated with the group had made such a threat, and there are no official numbers on attacks against immigrants. But a new report by Human Rights Watch warns that xenophobic violence has reached “alarming proportions” in parts of Greece, and it accuses the authorities of failing to stop the trend.

Since the election, an abundance of anecdotal evidence has indicated a marked rise in violence and intimidation against immigrants by members of Golden Dawn and its sympathizers. They are emboldened, rights groups say, by political support for their anti-immigrant ideology amid the worst economic crisis to hit Greece in a decade.

As the downturn deepens across Europe, the political right has risen in several countries, including France, the Netherlands and Hungary. But the situation in Greece shows how quickly such vigilante activity can expand as a government is either too preoccupied with the financial crisis or unable or disinclined to deal with the problem. Greece’s new prime minister, Antonis Samaras, has said he wants to put an end to the “invasion” of illegal immigrants, but “without vigilantism, without extremism.” Yet, as attacks mount even against legal immigrants, he has addressed the violence infrequently.

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Syrian ambassador defects — then gets fired

The New York Times reports: Syrian authorities said on Thursday that their ambassador to neighboring Iraq had been dismissed. It was the first official, if roundabout, confirmation that the diplomat had defected in a new fracturing of the government of President Bashar al-Assad, which has faced a slow but growing rash of desertions in the uprising against him.

In a statement, the Foreign Ministry in Damascus said that the envoy, Nawaf Fares, “has been relieved of his duties” and “no longer has any link with the Syrian Embassy in Baghdad” or with the ministry, the official SANA news agency reported.

The declaration came a day after the envoy made his own announcement in a statement from an unidentified location that he had defected and renounced his membership in Mr. Assad’s Baath Party, urging “all honest members of this party to follow my path because the regime has turned it to an instrument to kill people and their aspiration to freedom.” The Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, said on Thursday that Mr. Fares was currently in Qatar, Iraq’s Al Arabiya channel reported.

In its statement on Thursday, the Syrian Foreign Ministry said the ambassador had “made press statements that contradict the duties of his position of defending the country’s stances and issues, which demands legal and behavioral accountability.” It also accused him of leaving his embassy in Baghdad without prior consent.

Mr. Fares was the first Syrian ambassador to defect since the uprising broke out in March 2011, and the second high-ranking exit from Mr. Assad’s government in less than week, following the departure last Thursday of Manaf Tlass, a general in the elite Republican Guard who is the son of a former defense minister.

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