Egypt’s Tantawi to remain defense minister — general

Reuters reports: Egypt’s armed forces chief will keep his post as defense minister in a new cabinet to be formed by President-elect Mohamed Mursi, a member of the military council said.

Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, 76, who served as defense minister for two decades under ousted leader Hosni Mubarak, will keep his post after Egypt’s first Islamist president takes over, Major-General Mohamed Assar said in a rare appearance on a talk show on privately-owned CBC television on Wednesday night.

“The (new) government will have a defense minister who is head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces,” he said.

Asked if this meant Tantawi would keep his defense portfolio, Assar said: “Exactly. What is wrong with that? He is the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the defense minister and the commander of the armed forces.”

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Syria’s widows: Hungry and homeless, but undefeated

The Guardian reports: With criminals and rebels helping them on their way, Syria’s army of refugees marches by night, in single file and silence, towards the Jordanian border. More than 140,000 desperate people, many of them women and children, have sought sanctuary from their neighbour since the uprising in their homeland began 13 months ago … and most now face an uncertain future.

Unlike Turkey, Jordan does not have a refugee camp and new arrivals are left to fend for themselves. They escape mostly “through the fence”, too frightened to leave Syria by its official borders.

For some this is because their documents were burned when the army torched their homes; for others it is because they are being hunted by the government because someone in their family is, or was, a fighter.

In Jordan most of the aid they are getting comes from local Islamic and Christian charities with limited resources. They get boxes of food from one group; another donates mattresses and kitchen sets. But it is not enough, and many wonder where the international NGOs are.

“They [the international aid agencies] have a lot of meetings,” said the head of one local charity well known to many refugees. “But I don’t see anything on the ground. There is all this talking and still the Syrians need beds and food and stoves.” Many live in buildings that were formerly abandoned and lack basic necessities like water and ventilation. Some of the poorest families are living in tents made from old jute sacks.

The border town of Mafraq in Jordan now hosts around 10,000 Syrian refugees, almost all from rebel neighbourhoods of the city of Homs, where the fighting has left many of the women widowed.

“Everyone from Homs is either dead or escaped,” said Miriam, a resident of the city who came to Mafraq four months ago. “Even the birds left.” [Continue reading…]

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Turkish generals look to life beyond prison bars

As Egypt’s military rulers consider how or if they manage a transition to civilian rule, they will no doubt be clearly mindful of the fate of their counterparts in Turkey.

Reuters reports: They once bestrode Turkey the masters of all they surveyed. Governments were swept aside, a prime minister dispatched to the gallows. Even in quiet times, from their staff headquarters opposite parliament, they commanded obedience.

Now around 20 percent of serving generals are in prison accused of plots against Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, imaginatively codenamed Sledgehammer, Ergenekon, Blonde Girl, Moonlight.

So sudden has been this reversal the generals appear robbed of their voice. Erdogan has for now succeeded in his aim of taming the “Pashas”, officers, who disdain his Islamist roots. But as coup trials stutter over technical appeals, his position ranging over a demoralized military has its perils.

Turkey’s military guards the front line in the West’s campaign against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and may yet be called upon to fight. Last Friday saw a Turkish warplane shot down by Syrian air defenses. Public sympathy may grow as fears of a war spread. An officer in jail is one less in the barracks

“We spend our time writing letters and books,” said one senior officer held at a military prison in the Hadimkoy neighborhood of Istanbul.

“To explain how the future of our country has been darkened, putting the screams of our souls down on paper,” he added in comments relayed to Reuters through his lawyer.

The resort to literature finds an ironic echo in the past.

Bulent Ecevit, a prime minister arrested and interned by the generals in a 1980 army coup, wrote poetry during his captivity, his verse mostly an avowal of love to his wife, Rahsan.

Erdogan himself fell foul of the military in the years before his election and served a jail term for publicly reciting a verse declaring “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets” – words considered by a court to be incitement to religious militancy.

Now the Pashas take their turn in court. Even the 94-year-old leader of the 1980 putsch, general Kenan Evren, is on trial over hangings, torture and disappearances.

“I never really thought that one day I would see this,” wrote Mehmet Ali Birand, author of books on Turkey’s military.

The main military prison at Hasdal in Istanbul is now so overcrowded that many serving officers were transferred to the smaller Hadimkoy, while retired officers are held at Silivri jail outside the city, where the biggest trials are being held. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian regime tanks amass near Turkish border, says FSA general

Reuters reports: A general in the rebel Free Syria Army said on Friday that Syrian government forces had amassed around 170 tanks north of the city Aleppo, near the Turkish border, but there was no independent confirmation of the report.

General Mustafa al-Sheikh, head of the Higher Military Council, an association of senior officers who defected from President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, said the tanks had assembled at the Infantry School near the village of Musalmieh northeast of the city of Aleppo, 30 kms (19 miles) from the Turkish border.

“The tanks are now at the Infantry School. They’re either preparing to move to the border to counter the Turkish deployment or attack the rebellious (Syrian) towns and villages in and around the border zone north of Aleppo,” Sheikh told Reuters by telephone from the border.

He said the tanks were mostly from the 17th Mechanized Division.

Turkey deployed air defense weaponry along its border with Syria on Thursday, following Syria’s downing of a Turkish warlplane over the Mediterranean on Friday.

“I can confirm there are troops being deployed along the border in Hatay province. Turkey is taking precautions after its jet was shot down,” the official told Reuters news agency condition of anonymity.

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Russia attacks ‘meddling’ on eve of Syrian crisis talks in Geneva

The Guardian reports: Hopes of a political solution to the Syrian crisis suffered a fresh blow on Thursday when Russia insisted it would not endorse an internationally backed plan for a political transition that would require President Bashar al-Assad to surrender power.

Syrian opposition groups warned that Assad would have to step down and leave the country before they would negotiate future political arrangements.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said in Moscow: “We will not support and cannot support any meddling from outside or any imposition of recipes. This also concerns the fate of the president of the country, Bashar al-Assad.”

Lavrov was due to meet Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, to discuss Saturday’s Geneva conference, called in an attempt to agree broad support for a transitional national unity government in Damascus that could include anti-Assad forces.

But the Syrian National Council, the most coherent anti-Assad grouping, said it would reject any plan that did not include the unconditional departure of the president, his family and close allies. The SNC position was “firm and clear,” insisted spokesman George Sabra. Elements of the Syria-based internal opposition who once advocated dialogue with the regime also now say it is too late.

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Why Washington and Moscow want a backroom deal over Syria

Simon Tisdall writes: Months of futile diplomatic tussling, UN deadlock and finger-pointing over Syria have boiled down to a dramatic, last-ditch effort this weekend to cut a deal between the US and Russia that eases President Bashar al-Assad from office and replaces him with an inclusive, transitional government that can halt the spiral towards all-out civil war.

Barack Obama’s administration first floated the idea of ditching Assad while simultaneously guaranteeing Russia’s interests in Syria more than a month ago. Despite Moscow’s rebuffs, the White House has kept at it. Obama spent two hours discussing Syria with a sceptical Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, at this month’s G20 summit in Mexico.

US officials did not pretend Putin was won over. But they did claim headway in identifying areas where US and Russian interests coincide, principally preventing a chaotic implosion and a regional war. “We agreed that we need to see a cessation of violence, that a political process has to be created to prevent civil war,” Obama said. “We have found many common points on this issue,” said Putin.

After follow-up meetings, Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, and Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s foreign minister, have agreed to attend an international summit on expediting Syria’s political transition to be convened in Geneva on Saturday by the UN envoy, Kofi Annan. Clinton and Lavrov will meet privately beforehand in St Petersburg on Friday.

US-Russian agreement on the way forward in Syria is crucial. Russia is the Syrian regime’s most powerful ally and protector, its main arms supplier, and a veto-wielding member of the UN security council. Its influence within the regime is unmatched. For its part, the US is the world’s foremost military and economic power with extensive Middle East interests, including guaranteeing Israel’s security and safeguarding its energy supply.

For the past 18 months they have been at loggerheads. Now, despite hardline statements ahead of the meeting, they appear to be trying to work together.

On the American side, the need for a deal is more pressing. Obama, facing a tough re-election battle this autumn and with his domestic record assailed from all sides, could use a big international win. His handling of the Arab spring was not impressive. Last week, as rightwingers see it, he “lost” Egypt, Washington’s main Arab ally, to the Muslim Brotherhood. Mitt Romney, his Republican challenger, is describing Russia as America’s biggest strategic threat. Thus the meaningfulness of Obama’s attempt to reset relations with Moscow is also in the balance.

A transition deal in Syria would suit Obama for a host of other reasons. It would defuse criticism from American interventionists about US inaction. It would also help secure the stability of Iraq, on which so much American blood and treasure was spent in the past decade. It would prevent the spooked, volatile leaders of Turkey, a valued Nato ally, sliding into some kind of regional conflict.

Most of all, by stabilising Syria under a potentially more amenable regime with less allegiance to Iran, Obama might hope to lessen pressure from and on Israel to attack Tehran’s nuclear facilities this autumn. [Continue reading…]

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The distorted lenses through which the U.S. views the Arab world

Rami G Khouri writes: I was in the United States 16 months ago when an Egyptian national popular uprising forced Hosni Mubarak to quit the presidency. And I was in the United States again this week when Mohammed Mursi was elected as the new Egyptian president. Then and now, Americans remain unsure about how to react to the popular revolutions that felled their longtime autocratic Arab allies, who in most cases were replaced by more legitimate, Islamist-led governments.

At the same time, though, Americans – who helped to define the modern revolutionary and democratic era in the 18th century – instinctively tend to support national populist revolutions that create government systems based on the consent of the governed and democratic electoral pluralism. When Arabs carry out these revolutionary and democratic endeavors, however, American society reacts with obvious hesitancy alongside the flashes of enthusiasm.

It is important for Americans and Arabs alike to understand this phenomenon, because it reflects much deeper perceptions, sentiments or biases that will continue to haunt relations between Arabs and Americans and prevent them from ever fully embracing one another, or simply developing normal relations.

My own sense is that two main underlying problems are to blame: the intrusion of the Arab-Israeli conflict and Washington’s deep pro-Israel bias into American-Arab relations, and the lingering consequences of several unpleasant encounters between the United States and various Arab, Iranian or South Asian parties that defined themselves in Islamist terms (Iran, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda and others).

This was evident this week when I was reading through some “quality” American press coverage of the Mursi election victory (The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The San Francisco Chronicle). One story in The Wall Street Journal’s coverage on June 25 was a textbook case of the recurring bias and confusion in American reactions to the transformational events in the Arab world; and one sentence in a front-page story captured this phenomenon succinctly: “Many secular Egyptians watched uneasily, wondering what Islamist rule will mean for a country that has long been a bulwark of secular, moderate and pro-American governance,” the newspaper observed. [Continue reading…]

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The rebranding of Barack Obama

Louis Proyect writes: After a brief period of relative optimism tied to the “green shoots” of recovery, the woes of the Great Recession continued into 2012 and forced the hucksters running Obama’s re-election campaign to hoist a new message up the flagpole and see if anyone would salute.

That new message amounted to undraping a 60 foot tall bronze statue of Obama as muscular Commander-in-Chief after the fashion of Reagan chopping wood or George W. Bush in a flight suit. If those precious swing voters, perceived as white and centrist, could not be assuaged by a non-existent recovery, then maybe they would vote for Obama since he was able to deliver on at least another element of Teddy Roosevelt’s record, namely his willingness to use the “big stick” against weaker nations.

The campaign kicked into high gear with a speech that the president gave on Memorial Day a couple of weeks ago. It is filled with what the great Edmund Wilson called “patriotic gore”. This paragraph, in particular, sounds like it could have been lifted from the preview to a Rambo movie:

You persevered though some of the most brutal conditions ever faced by Americans in war. The suffocating heat. The drenching monsoon rains. An enemy that could come out of nowhere and vanish just as quickly. Some of the most intense urban combat in history, and battles for a single hill that could rage for weeks. Let it be said — in those hellholes like Briarpatch, and the Zoo and the Hanoi Hilton — our Vietnam POWs didn’t simply endure; you wrote one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of military history.

Activist Jack A. Smith, an editor at the radical newsweekly The Guardian in the 1960s who soldiers on for the cause of peace in upstate N.Y., commented on Vietnam war revisionism in the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter:

The Pentagon has just launched a multi-year national public relations campaign to justify, glorify and honor Washington’s catastrophic, aggressive and losing war against Vietnam — America’s most controversial and unpopular military conflict.

President Barack Obama opened the militarist event, which was overwhelmingly approved by Congress four years ago, during a speech at the Vietnam Wall on Memorial Day, May 28. The entire campaign, which will consist of tens of thousands of events over the next 13 years, is ostensibly intended to “finally honor” the U.S. troops who fought in Vietnam. The last troops were evacuated nearly 40 years ago.

One of the more disgusting passages in this altogether disgusting speech had to do with the peace movement’s alleged abuse of returning GI’s:

You were sometimes blamed for misdeeds of a few, when the honorable service of the many should have been praised. You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated. It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened. And that’s why here today we resolve that it will not happen again.

David Sirota, one of the nation’s more principled liberals and hence a trenchant critic of Obama, told Salon.com readers:

It’s undeniable that chronic underfunding of the Veterans Administration unduly harmed Vietnam-era soldiers. However, that lamentable failure was not what Obama was referring to. As the president who escalated the Vietnam-esque war in Afghanistan, he was making a larger argument. Deliberately parroting Rambo’s claim about “a quiet war against all the soldiers returning,” he was asserting that America, as a whole, spat on soldiers when they came home — even though there’s no proof that this happened on any mass scale.

In his exhaustive book titled “The Spitting Image,” Vietnam vet and Holy Cross professor Jerry Lembcke documents veterans who claim they were spat on by antiwar protestors, but he found no physical evidence (photographs, news reports, etc.) that these transgressions actually occurred. His findings are supported by surveys of his fellow Vietnam veterans as they came home.

Keep in mind that Obama’s speech sounds exactly like the kind of thing that John McCain would have written–a product of his captivity in Vietnam and his yahoo Republican Party politics. That this Ivy League “liberal” could spew out the same kind of rightwing bullshit, while in all likelihood knowing that it is bullshit, epitomizes the political impasse facing voters. You vote for someone enlightened and you end up with a Chuck Norris wannabe. It really doesn’t matter what you voted for, after all. The people who run the country have their own agenda and it doesn’t include you. [Continue reading…]

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A president we can’t believe in

David Bromwich writes: I went to see Barack Obama speak in New York, in spring 2007, at a preliminary ‘sounding’ for donors and assorted others. This was a few weeks after he announced his candidacy, and the audience of a hundred or so, in a spacious Upper West Side apartment, were brought in close enough to let everyone have a glimpse. Impartial curiosity was the mood about Obama then. There was no fuss at his entrance; he shook a few hands, chatted with the friendly strangers, and stayed within himself. He talked for something under half an hour, and what we heard was an attitude more than a programme.

It was a bad time, he said. We had to get the country going in the right direction. The wars were taking a heavy toll and drawing us away from our responsibilities towards each other. He spoke fluently and agreeably, without passion. George W. Bush had lately ignored the advice of the Baker Commission to withdraw from Iraq, and had ordered the ‘surge’ of additional troops headed by General Petraeus; there was a feeling close to despair among the arts and media crowd in the room, but Obama mentioned none of that: you might have thought the year was 1992 and his opponent George H.W. Bush. What struck me was his proficiency at blending in. Yet his sense of crisis was impersonal and oddly minimal. A woman with a worried look said afterwards: ‘I’m not sure he’s what we need.’

The glamorous Obama who emerged in 2008 – the greetings to whole cities with a celebrity shout, ‘Hello, Miami!’, the faithful cry of ‘Fired up, ready to go!’: none of this seemed to fit the man we heard, though his 2004 convention address had given hints of another side that accounted for the loyalty of his warmer enthusiasts. But as it has fallen out, most of his presidency has been conducted in the style of that living-room talk. Ceremonial speeches like the State of the Union or the occasional solemn bulletins from the Oval Office or orations such as he offered after the Tucson shootings in 2011 have marked episodic returns to the grand style, but when you hear those speeches you wonder what office he thinks he occupies, and in what country. The dignified and commanding presentation suits a theatrical impulse that lies deep in Obama’s idea of his proper powers – an impulse he has always recognised, which, at most times in his life, he has taken great care to repress.

One reward of David Maraniss’s biography of Obama’s first 27 years is that it confirms a hunch about Obama’s self-invention. His vagabond life with a bohemian intellectual mother, and the charismatic and reckless father who went back to Africa, belong to an early childhood that the Maraniss book recalls in detail and others have explored too, but those years explain less than has been supposed. Young Barack was always cared for, and from the age of ten, his education saw a passage with apparent ease through elite institutions. The Punahou school in Hawaii is one of the top preparatory schools in the United States, Occidental College in Southern California is a small liberal arts school of high quality, and for his last two years Obama transferred to Columbia. By the age of 22 his ambition encompassed the presidency – a hope that emerged with matter-of-fact seriousness in a conversation with a New York friend. During his last year at Columbia, and at a low-level corporate job that followed, Obama brooded over his need to acquire a black identity – a sign was the copy of Ellison’s Invisible Man which he took with him everywhere. He had never thought of himself as black before. The two girlfriends of those years whom Maraniss has traced, and an unnamed third in his first year in Chicago, were white, and so were many of his friends.

Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father condensed several partners into one, and offered a scene of mutual alienation between the hero and his girlfriend over divided reactions to a play about black Americans. Here, Maraniss indicates, an incident from another time and place, with another person, was transferred for the sake of narrative economy. It went down more easily to have his temporary estrangement from white society follow a single arc with a single romantic foil. More generally, the data of Obama’s early years, Maraniss has found, are so stretched and tweaked in his memoir, the incidents and characters so altered and transposed that Dreams from My Father is best thought of as a ‘work of literature’ rather than personal history. [Continue reading…]

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Top CIA spy accused of being a mafia hitman

Danger Room reports: Enrique “Ricky” Prado’s resume reads like the ultimate CIA officer: veteran of the Central American wars, running the CIA’s operations in Korea, a top spy in America’s espionage programs against China, and deputy to counter-terrorist chief Cofer Black — and then a stint at Blackwater. But he’s also alleged to have started out a career as a hitman for a notorious Miami mobster, and kept working for the mob even after joining the CIA. Finally, he went on to serve as the head of the CIA’s secret assassination squad against Al-Qaida.

That’s according to journalist Evan Wright’s blockbuster story How to Get Away With Murder in America, distributed by Byliner. In it, Wright — who authored Generation Kill, the seminal story of the Iraq invasion — compiles lengthy, years-long investigations by state and federal police into a sector of Miami’s criminal underworld that ended nowhere, were sidelined by higher-ups, or cut short by light sentences. It tracks the history of Prado’s alleged Miami patron and notorious cocaine trafficker, Alberto San Pedro, and suspicions that Prado moved a secret death squad from the CIA to Blackwater.

“In protecting Prado, the CIA arguably allowed a new type of mole — an agent not of a foreign government but of American criminal interests — to penetrate command,” Wright writes.

In this sense, there are two stories that blur into each other: Prado the CIA officer, and Prado the alleged killer. The latter begins when Prado met his alleged future mob patron, Alberto San Pedro, as a high school student in Miami after their families had fled Cuba following the revolution. Prado would later join the Air Force, though he never saw service in Vietnam, and returned to Miami to work as a firefighter. But he kept moonlighting as a hitman for San Pedro, who had emerged into one of Miami’s most formidable cocaine traffickers, according to Wright. [Continue reading…]

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Can the U.S. and Russia agree on how to end Syria’s war?

Tony Karon writes: Beleaguered U.N. peace envoy Kofi Annan will host an international conference to address Syria‘s rapidly escalating civil war, but the meeting in Geneva on Saturday appears to have only lukewarm backing from the U.S. — and then only after Washington put the kibosh on the attendance of Iran, whose participation had been deemed vital by Annan. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton indicated Wednesday that the U.S. would join representatives from Russia, China, Britain, France, Turkey, the EU and the Arab League in Geneva. The purpose of the meeting, per Annan, is to forge a consensus on the terms for a political solution among international players with stakes and influence in the Syrian conflict over terms for a political solution. The U.N. envoy believes that the best hope of pressing the combatants on the ground to observe his peace plan to which they signed up in April but have not implemented, is for the foreign powers on whose support they variously depend to agree on terms.

But even such key players as the U.S. and Russia can’t agree on a mechanism to resolve the conflict, and the exclusion of Iran and Saudi Arabia after the Obama Administration blocked Tehran’s participation suggests that Saturday’s meeting will simply restate the diplomatic stalemate.

“I have made it quite clear that I believe Iran should be part of the solution,” Annan said in Geneva last Friday. “If we continue the way we are going and competing with each other, it could lead to destructive competition and everyone will pay the price.”

The Obama Administration cited Iran’s role in backing up Syria’s bloody crackdown to declare Tehran’s involvement a “red line” for participating in the Geneva talks, and Annan presumably left out Saudi Arabia as a compensatory gesture to Russia which insists that those countries arming and funding Syria’s rebels share major responsibility for escalating the conflict. But it’s precisely because Iran and Saudi Arabia are playing out their preexisting regional and sectarian rivalries in the Syrian civil war that Annan wanted them at the table if there was to be any hope of achieving a solution without further bloodshed. Many in Washington, however, see the Syrian conflict through the same prism as Saudi Arabia does, seeking the ouster of Assad — Iran’s most important Arab ally — precisely in order to weaken Tehran.

Reuters reports: Turkish troops and military vehicles deployed towards the border with Syria on Thursday as a precaution after Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan gave orders to react to any Syrian threat approaching the frontier.

Erdogan, who has given shelter in the border area to rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, announced the new rules of engagement for Turkish troops on the border after Syrian air defenses shot down a Turkish warplane last Friday.

“I can confirm there are troops being deployed along the border in Hatay province. Turkey is taking precautions after its jet was shot down,” a Turkish official said on condition of anonymity.

He said he did not know how many troops or vehicles were being moved but said they were being stationed in the Yayladagi, Altinozu and Reyhanli border areas of Turkey’s southern Hatay province. He said anti-aircraft guns were also being stationed along the border.

The Associated Press reports: A strong explosion rocked the Syrian capital Thursday, sending black smoke billowing into the sky.

The state TV said the explosion was in the parking lot of the Palace of Justice, a compound that houses several courts. The nature of Thursday’s blast was not immediately clear.

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Hamas says member killed in Damascus home

Reuters reports: Hamas said on Thursday that one of its members, Kamal Husni Ghanaja, had been killed in his home in Damascus and that it was trying to find who was behind what the Palestinian Islamist group described as a “cowardly murder”.

Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, said in a statement that it was trying “to identify the party behind the deplorable crime”, but did not immediately accuse Israel, its long-time enemy, of involvement in the killing.

A Palestinian source with ties to Hamas said Ghanaja’s charred body was found in a cupboard above the ceiling of his ransacked apartment in the Qudsia neighborhood of Damascus. A Hamas source said there were marks of torture on his body.

“The charred, scarred, body was concealed in a ceiling closet and a fire had engulfed the house which apparently the assassins had started,” said the source. The body was found on Wednesday, but most indications suggested Ghanaja was killed a day earlier, the source said.

Hamas’ political bureau abandoned Damascus some time ago and the organization has aligned itself with the uprising. It’s not too hard to guess who is the most likely culprit behind this murder. No, not Israel.

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In a Syrian souk, support for the regime falters

Deborah Amos reports: In Syria’s capital, Damascus, the Hamidiyah souk is a landmark — a centuries-old covered market linked to a maze of alleyways in the heart of the capital. Over the 15-month uprising, Syria’s merchants have supported the regime of President Bashar Assad. But that support is crumbling.

Shops selling everything from cold drinks, ice cream and spices to wedding dresses and electric guitars line Hamidiyah’s cobblestone streets.

Everyone in the traditional market is keen to sell something, so when these merchants closed their shops in May to protest a massacre of more than 100 people in Houla, a remote village far from Damascus, it was unprecedented.

A merchant who participated in the strike — who is too afraid to give his name — is still angry enough to say he was part of the strike the security police tried to end by force.

These merchants are mostly Sunni Muslims, who form the core of Syria’s business community. For decades, they were regime loyalists — the backbone of Assad’s Alawite-dominated regime — but no longer, says another merchant, who also wouldn’t give his name.

“The strike, of course, it is unusual. It is something very new in the Syrian society, because it’s a police regime here,” he says. “You cannot express yourself. You cannot speak up.”

So, for the businessmen to strike was a big statement, he says.

“Yes … it’s a message to the regime that merchants are not with him anymore,” he says.

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Egyptian activists meet Morsi, discuss goals of revolution

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports: A number of activists met with President-elect Mohamed Morsy on Wednesday to work toward implementing the partnership document that was launched at the National Front conference as a platform for achieving the goals of the revolution.

Activist Wael Ghonim said the meeting discussed transparency with the people in all decisions made by the government, while activist Wael Khalil said the meeting was to express support for Morsy.

Activist Asmaa Mahfouz said Morsy’s promises are calculated but he seems to mean well for Egypt.

The National Front issued a statement after the meeting, saying that it was agreed power should be handed over on 30 June and that the president should be sworn in before the Egyptian people and not behind closed doors.

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Egypt to sue Iran news agency over ‘fabricated’ Morsi interview

Al Ahram reports: Egypt plans to sue an Iranian news agency for having allegedly fabricated an interview with President-elect Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s official MENA news agency reported on Wednesday.

MENA quoted the Islamist leader’s spokesman, Yassir Ali, as saying that Iran’s Fars news agency had “made up” a widely quoted interview in which Morsi said he planned to improve ties with Iran and revise Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel.

“Legal action will be taken against the Iranian Fars news agency, which fabricated the interview,” Ali said.

The Egyptian presidency on Monday denied that Morsi had given an interview to Iran’s Fars news agency, in which he reportedly pledged to strengthen ties with the Islamic republic.

“Mr. Morsi did not give any interview to Fars; everything that this agency has published is without foundation,” a spokesman for the Egyptian presidency told MENA.

Earlier this week, Fars published what it said was an interview with Morsi in which Egypt’s first democratically-elected civilian president said he wanted to build ties with Iran, severed in 1980.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone at Fars or any of their friends in the Revolutionary Guards thought they could fake an interview and get away with it. My guess is that Fars was itself duped into believing they were conducting a phone interview with Morsi while in fact they were speaking to someone else. Note that it was the state-controlled Islamic Republic News Agency which was swift to report a denial of the authenticity of the interview. So, if Fars was led into a trap, the question is: who set the trap?

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Israel subjecting Palestinian children to ‘spiral of injustice’

The Guardian reports: A belief that every Palestinian child is a potential terrorist may be leading to a “spiral of injustice” and breaches of international law in Israel’s treatment of child detainees in military custody, a delegation of eminent British lawyers has concluded in an independent report backed by the Foreign Office.

The nine-strong delegation, led by the former high court judge Sir Stephen Sedley and including the UK’s former attorney-general Lady Scotland, found that “undisputed facts” pointed to at least six violations of the UN convention on the rights of the child, to which Israel is a signatory. It was also in breach of the fourth Geneva convention in transferring child detainees from the West Bank to Israeli prisons, the delegation said.

Its report, Children in Military Custody, released on Tuesday, was based on a visit to Israel and the West Bank last September funded and facilitated by the Foreign Office and the British consulate in Jerusalem.

It makes 40 specific recommendations concerning the treatment of Palestinian child detainees.

The issue has come under increasing scrutiny by human rights organisations and visiting delegations over the past year. In January the Guardian highlighted the use of solitary confinement in a report on the experiences of children under the military justice system.

The Independent adds: Last night the Foreign Office, which backed the report, said it would be taking up the claims with the Israeli authorities:

“The UK government has had long-standing concerns about the treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli detention, and as a result decided to fund this independent report. While recognising that some positive recent steps have been made by the Israeli authorities, we share many of the report’s concerns, and will continue to lobby for further improvements.”

While the legal team said it was in no position to prove the truth of the claims of cruelty made repeatedly by Palestinian children, but denied by the Israeli authorities – which offered unprecedented access to the delegation – it pointed to the disparity in the law.

Israeli children must have access to a lawyer within 48 hours and cannot be imprisoned under the age of 14. But Palestinian children as young as 12 are jailed and can be kept for three months without legal representation. Between 500 and 700 are jailed each year.

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