When Chomsky wept

Fred Branfman recounts how he first met Noam Chomsky in Laos in February 1970 and goes on to write: In recent years I have been in regular contact with Noam, mainly by email, but also when staying in his house for 10 days prior to attending Howard Zinn’s April 3, 2010, memorial service. It was a deeply emotional period for both of us, particularly Noam, who had deep ties to Howard, and the visit made a deep impression on me.

I found essentially the same Noam whom I had met 40 years earlier. No interest in small talk. Self-deprecation. Anger at the ongoing refusal of America’s intellectuals and journalists to take a stand on U.S. leaders’ war crimes. Great moral issues of our time. A nice guy, offering to give me a ride back from a meeting in Cambridge, or to pick up some groceries at the supermarket for one of our meals.

I asked Noam how he felt about being routinely criticized for focusing on the crimes of U.S. leaders and not those of other nations. He said he felt this was appropriate since he was an American citizen, and U.S. leaders have by far committed more war crimes abroad than any others since the end of WWII. I agreed, also noting that there are so many prominent public intellectuals and journalists who criticize foreign leaders, so few who dare point out the war crimes committed by their own.

And, as 40 years earlier, I was above all struck by his unrelenting work. He spent almost all his time reading, writing, being interviewed in person or over the telephone, speaking and, in an act of generosity for which he is particularly known, continually answering an unending stream of emails — often for as much as five or six hours a day.

And, I discovered, he continued to speak widely all over the country and world, to the point where his schedule is usually filled up years in advance. At age 82 he kept a schedule that would overwhelm someone 40 years younger.

I was also struck by his asceticism. When I telephoned him I realized he had the same phone number and lived in the same modest suburban home as he had 40 years ago. He wears jeans, and has virtually no interest in food or material possessions. He is periodically visited by friends and family, but engages in no other leisure-time activities.

I was particularly moved one night as I was sitting opposite him at dinner, struck as usual by the enormous distance between what Noam knows about U.S. leaders’ slaughter of innocents around the world and what the public realizes. I suddenly thought of Winston Smith from Orwell’s “1984,” who sees little hope of changing society and focuses only on trying to remain sane and commit to paper the truth in the hope that future generations will remember it. I told Noam that to me, at that moment, he represented Winston Smith to me.

I will always remember his reaction.

He just looked at me.

And smiled sadly.

Noam can be tough on those who he feels support U.S. war-making, but he is even harder on himself. On one occasion I mentioned that I had asked a lifelong political activist with whom we were both friendly whether, looking back on his life, he had any regrets. Our friend had responded that he wished he had spent more time with his family, and pursuing a variety of his non-political interests. “Do you have any regrets?” I asked Noam. His answer shocked me. Muttering more to himself than to me he said, “I didn’t do nearly enough.”

On another occasion I asked Noam how much satisfaction he took from having written so many books, founding a new field of linguistics, being so influential around the world. “None,” he answered grimly, explaining that he felt he hadn’t really been able to convince enough people to understand the true depth of U.S. leaders’ savage and brutal treatment of the world’s non-people. He felt frustrated, for example, that more people did not understand how U.S. leaders’ killing hundreds of thousands of innocents and destroying the very base of South Vietnamese society had succeeded, how they had actually won in Indochina by destroying the possibility of an alternative economic and social model to that of the U.S. emerging.

One evening as I was climbing the stairs to my bedroom I looked into Noam’s office. He spends his time at home these days sitting in a large office chair in front of his computer, and his posture resembled nothing so much to me as a Buddhist monk in meditation.

And then it hit me.

I suddenly realized, “Noam has been living, as I did relatively briefly during the war, for the past 40 years. He has been working around the clock, reading, writing, speaking, not wasting a minute, in a focused attempt to try and stop U.S. killing, to force the world to realize the plight of the ‘unpeople.’” [Continue reading…]

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‘Trust us,’ Egypt’s military rulers say as Muslim Brotherhood wins presidency

The New York Times reports: Faced with the popular election of the first Islamist head of state in the Arab world, Egypt’s ruling generals sought on Monday to soften the appearance of their supreme authority as they entered a period of negotiations with the prospective president over the balance of executive, legislative and military power.

In a two-hour news conference, members of the ruling military council made no reference to the election results, which by early morning showed that Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood had defeated Ahmed Shafik, a former Air Force general and Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister, in the runoff to choose Egypt’s first democratically elected president. The ballots were counted in front of television cameras and party observers in polling places around the country to prevent fraud, and independent observers concluded that Mr. Morsi had won by a margin of about four percentage points, or about a million votes.

The election officials will not formally confirm the results until later in the week, however, and Ahmed Sarhan, a spokesman for Mr. Shafik, insisted on Monday that the general was the true winner and the Brotherhood had “terrorized” voters. He offered no evidence, and both the state-run and unofficial media reported that Mr. Morsi had a decisive lead in the vote count.

The ruling generals had stunned Egyptians on the eve of the vote by dissolving the Brotherhood-dominated Parliament and claiming all legislative power for themselves in an apparent attempt to foreclose the possibility that Islamists could control both the presidency and the legislature.

Though they acted under the veneer of a court ruling rushed out last week by a panel of Mubarak-appointed judges, the power grab erased their promise to turn over all power to elected civilians by the end of this month, and both liberals and Islamists denounced the move as a military coup. The court ruling dispirited Brotherhood supporters, energized Mr. Shafik’s backers, and led many Egyptians to expect that either the psychological effect of the takeover or more direct intervention would push Mr. Shafik to the presidency.

In the aftermath of Mr. Morsi’s victory — considered an upset by many, despite the Brotherhood’s proven popularity and political clout — the generals sought Monday to reassure the public that they had no intention of re-establishing a military-backed autocracy, although they did not back away from their effective seizure of legislative power.

“Trust the armed forces,” two representatives of the military council, Gen. Mandouh Shahin and Gen. Mohamed el Assar, repeated many times over the course of the news conference. “We don’t want power,” both also said repeatedly, citing the presidential election as proof of their good intentions.

Despite their seizure of Parliament, they promised a grand celebration at the end of the month to mark their formal handover to the new president.

Issandr El Amrani adds: As I warned on Twitter, there should be caution about rushing to think Mohammed Morsi is Egypt’s next president. From my understanding from this morning’s figures, the difference between he and Shafiq is about 900,000 votes with over 3,000,000 votes uncounted. The Presidential Election Commission says it will not give the final results until Wednesday or Thursday and there is likely to be some contestation by both sides, and perhaps even partial recounts. Ultimately what the PEC says will hold, since you cannot appeal their decision.

So one real possibility is that Shafiq will be declared president and the MB, having already announced its victory, will go ballistic. Or that Shafiq will lose and his supporters will go ballistic.

And then there’s the question of parliament. It’s still expected that tomorrow MPs (at least Islamist ones) will march to parliament to hold a session on which they will decide parliament’s response to the court verdict. Except that parliament is surrounded by army troops who have orders not to let anyone in.

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Egyptian generals let Arab Spring wilt

Paul McGeough writes: The jig was up in Cairo when Barack Obama coughed up to the generals a cool $1.5 billion that he might have dangled before them to keep them on democracy’s straight and narrow.

Instead, he threw the money a couple of months back and they’ve been running amok ever since. The military cordon they placed around the Egyptian Parliament on Friday was the latest in a series of staggering events that can be spelt out in a four-letter word – coup.

With hardly a murmur of international criticism, the generals have amassed more power for themselves than the ousted dictatorship had, even to the point of reinstating the worst aspects of the hated emergency laws on Wednesday.
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The generals have been artful in convincing the world that they are well intentioned – since the January day last year, when they sacrificed the dictator Hosni Mubarak as the price for their own power and vested interests, right up to Thursday’s twin rulings by their crony mates on the Supreme Constitutional Court, which sacked the country’s new Parliament and gave a leg-up to another crony mate in the presidential race.

They have scuppered the Parliament and derailed the drafting of a new constitution, and if/when their preferred candidate wins the presidency, they’ll all kick back with a shisha pipe and lock in their vision for the new Egypt – which is very much like the old Egypt.

They are having an each-way bet. In the event their man goes down to the Islamist candidate running against him, the junta will have all the power it needs to nobble the new president through its clench on the new parliamentary elections and the drafting of the new constitution.

They have created, deliberately I suspect, an electoral mess that is unlikely to produce a legitimate, unifying president – and thereby, they create the justification for their argument that they must retain the power to watch over him. At the same time they have cleverly debased the judiciary, so if anyone has a complaint or grievance, where do they take it? [Continue reading…]

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Time for Egypt to unite against the military

David Hearst writes: Millions of Egyptians went to bed last night thinking they had elected a president with full executive powers and woke up this morning in a military dictatorship. Just after the presidential polls closed, the generals granted themselves sweeping powers in a constitutional declaration that completes the coup started by dissolving parliament.

If the generals have their way, Egypt’s new president will not be able to legislate, control the budget, appoint members to a committee writing the new constitution, declare war or change the membership of the military council which assumes all these powers. The president will be able to appoint a cabinet and approve laws but whole swaths of policymaking – such as defence, national security or indeed the military’s vast commercial empire – will be a closed book to him.

To add insult to injury, the next president will have to swear his oath of allegiance before a constitutional court composed of Mubarak-era place men.

The most important power the military council retains is to prevent the president from changing its membership. Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, Mubarak’s defence minister for 20 years, is, apparently, commander-in-chief for life. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt’s President Morsi?

At The Arabist, Steve Negus writes: Mohamed Morsi’s apparent win is the latest conventional-wisdom-defying turnabout in Egyptian post-uprising politics. Pronounced dead by some after the June 14 parliament-dissolving court verdict and the presumption that Shafiq would win the presidency, the transition has just got out of its sarcophagus for a few more lurches around the burial chamber.

In looking at what brought the victory and what it will produce, I going to assume that the most detailed figures I’ve seen — those released by the Morsi campaign — are substantially correct. That’s a big “if”, but there is some corroboration. Also, the numbers should soon be verifiable. Even if you don’t trust the elections commission, both international observers and candidates’ representatives were allowed much more access to the adding up of votes from different stations than in May, from what I understand.

First, the turnout. Morsi’s numbers say that a supposedly dispirited electorate actually went to the polls in numbers about 20 percent higher than in the first round. Maybe it’s because the choices are now clear, and fear is a more potent motivator than hope. But if you look where the turnout is highest, this suggests rural machine politics on both sides. Upper Egyptian governorates (aka Morsiut) seem to have produced vote counts 150 percent of what they were in May. The Delta (aka Shafiqiya) was also up 20–50 percent. Cairo in contrast dropped a bit, as did Alexandria. Giza was up about 15 percent.

I have heard that both sides were busing in supporters to stations — presumably old NDP party organizers and Coptic groups for Shafiq, Islamists for Morsi. This probably involves improper influence on polling day and is technically an infraction but it’s understandable. A lot of voters live outside areas where they are registered and don’t have the resources to travel to vote on their own, so it’s a question of partisan busing or de facto disenfranchisement.

Morsi’s apparent win means more short-term uncertainty. I don’t think he’s capable of ushering in the Caliphate any more than Shafiq is capable of bringing back the Mubarak era (more on that below). The Islamist’s narrow victory, following the five-way split of the first round, means that his only popular mandate will be that he’s not Shafiq. He’ll be a president with only limited, temporary constitutional powers, facing off against a military who’s quite capable of vetoing whatever he does by means administrative, judicial, and now legislative. He will have very little of either moral or institutional power to shape the drafting of the constitution, and he will live under the Sword of Damocles of another court ruling.

I suspect that the Brothers will acquiesce to the creation of a constitution — any constitution — to give the electoral battles that they are capable of winning, but not using, some permanence. SCAF now essentially controls the drafting process, with the Brothers at best given a spoiling role, so it’s quite possible now that we settle into a Turkey-ten-years-ago or Pakistan-now style of uneasy military-civil government coexistence. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt election: Both sides claims victory

The Guardian summarizes today’s events in Egypt so far:

• Muslim Brotherhood supporters have been celebrating in Tahrir Square after the group claimed victory for its candidate in the presidential election. By the Brotherhood’s count, Mohammed Morsi took 13.2 million votes, or 51.8% with more than 99% of the more than 13,000 poll centres counted. It gave Morsi’s opponent – Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister Ahmed Shafiq – 48.1% out of 25.5 million votes. Shafiq’s campaign challenged the result.

• But a statement from Ahmed Shafiq’s campaign claimed he was ahead “beyond all doubt“. Shafiq’s media spokesman Ahmed Sarhan accused the Brotherhood of trying to create a “fait accompli” and of risking confrontation on the streets “when official results declare Shafiq to be the winner”. But at a s press conference Sarhan appeared confused suggesting Morsi had 52% of votes so far and Shafiq 51.5%.

‘• The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) has denied that it is engaging in a power grab after it issued a new constitutional declaration tying the hands of the country’s incoming president and cementing military authority over the post-Mubarak era. At a press conference it accused people of “blowing this out of proportion” and urged people to “stop all the criticisms that we are a state within a state”. Despite awarding itself a range of powers including legislative responsibilities and full control of the armed forces, Scaf insisted that it was subservient to parliament. The military rulers also claimed they were unhappy that the supreme court dissolved parliament – “our biggest achievement” – and said they had no control over the armed forces.

• The Muslim Brotherhood labelled the military declaration “null and void“. Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei described it as a “grave setback for democracy“. Human rights activist Hossam Bahgat, said: “Egypt has completely left the realm of the Arab Spring and entered the realm of military dictatorship.”

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American tourists visit West Bank and learn how to kill Palestinians

Ynet reports on a “tourist attraction” in the West Bank settlement block of Gush Etzion where visitors from the U.S. and around the world are taught by former IDF soldiers how to kill “terrorists.”

'First she cried, then she fired'

Michel Brown, 40, a Miami banker, chose to take his wife and three children to the range with the purpose of “teaching them values.”

Upon entering the range, his five-year-old daughter, Tamara, bursts into tears. A half hour later, she is holding a gun and shooting clay bullets like a pro.

“This is part of their education,” Michel says as he proudly watches his daughter. “They should know where they come from and also feel some action.”

Sharon Gat, the range’s manager, says all the instructors at the site have served in elite IDF units.

“This is a special program created due to popular demand,” he says. “Travelers from all over the world come here to meet former combat troops and hear stories about elite units. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

“We heard on the news about shootings in the West Bank,” the mother, Olga, says. “We came to see it in person.”

Her son, Jacob, 24, puts down his rifle and exclaims: “This is an awesome experience. I learned how to stop a terrorist and how to rescue hostages. Now, when I find myself in distress, I will know how to deal.”

Davidi Pearl, who heads the Gush Etzion Regional Council, notes that this kind of experience turns the district into a world-famous “tourist gem.”

At the end of the thrill-filled day, the tourists get a diploma indicating they “completed a basic shooting course in Israel.”

“Boom, boom,” the 13-year-old Riley mutters on the way out of the range.

“Boom, boom!” Jacob responds, knowingly.

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From Arab Spring to military dictatorship

The New York Times reports: The Muslim Brotherhood on Monday projected its candidate as the winner of Egypt’s first competitive presidential election, hours after the ruling military council issued an interim constitution granting itself broad power over the future government, all but eliminating the president’s authority in an apparent effort to guard against a victory by the Islamist candidate.

The military’s new charter is the latest in a series of swift steps that the generals have taken to tighten their grasp on power just at the moment when they had promised to hand over to elected civilians the authority that they assumed on the ouster of Hosni Mubarak last year. Their charter gives them control of all laws and the national budget, immunity from any oversight, and the power to veto a declaration of war.

After dissolving the Brotherhood-led Parliament elected four months ago, and locking out its lawmakers, the generals on Sunday night also seized control of the process of writing a permanent constitution. State news media reported that the generals had picked a 100-member panel to draft it.

“The new constitutional declaration completed Egypt’s official transformation into a military dictatorship,” Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, wrote in an online commentary. Under the military’s charter, the president appeared to be reduced to a powerless figurehead.

Though final results are not available yet, by early Monday morning the Brotherhood was projecting its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, the winner, and its leaders escalated their defiance. After meeting with Gen. Sami Hafez Enan of the military council, the Brotherhood-affiliated speaker of Parliament, Saad el-Katatni, declared that the military had no authority to dissolve the Parliament or write a constitution. He said that a separate 100-member panel picked by the Parliament would begin meeting within hours to write up its own constitution — raising the prospect of competing assemblies. And Saad El Hussainy, leader of the Brotherhood’s parliamentary bloc, said that the group’s lawmakers would show up at Parliament as scheduled on Tuesday morning. The generals having stationed military and riot police to keep the lawmakers out, potentially setting the stage for new clashes in the streets.

The military’s moves were “a new episode of a complete military coup against the revolution and the popular will,” said Mohamed El Beltagy, a leading Brotherhood lawmaker, said in a statement online. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s secret hypocrisy

Trevor Timm, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “I know how strange all this must sound. We have been taught, particularly in the past generation of spy scares and Cold War, to think of secrets as secrets — varying in their ‘sensitivity’ but uniformly essential to the private conduct of diplomatic and military affairs and somehow detrimental to the national interest if prematurely disclosed. By the standards of official Washington — Government and press alike — this is an antiquated, quaint and romantic view.” — Former New York Times Washington correspondent Max Frankel, 1971

Since the New York Times published two important stories containing classified information two weeks ago — one being U.S. President Barack Obama’s “kill list” and another regarding a series of U.S. cyberattacks against Iran — Congress has been replete with bipartisan outrage. Embarrassingly, this outcry has not been directed toward debate of the potentially unprecedented constitutional implications brought about by the stories, but about who leaked the classified information to reporters.

Congress’s call for increased government secrecy by way of prosecution, which has led to Attorney General Eric Holder assigning two Justice Department attorneys to investigate the alleged leaks, threatens the very foundation of reporting on U.S. national security and foreign policy. Leaks have been the lifeblood of investigative journalism — and Washington politics — for decades. If they become criminalized on a large scale, it could do irreparable damage to both freedom of the press and the public’s right to know what the government is doing abroad in its name. [Continue reading…]

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Libya descends into militia chaos as hostages still held

The Sydney Morning Herald reports: As the casualties mount from fresh clashes in southern Libya between soldiers and tribesmen, the security situation in the capital Tripoli, Zintan, Misrata and the eastern city of Benghazi remains shaky as militia groups extend their control.

Militia from former rebel strongholds have mounted a series of attacks over the last week, including a blast at the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Misrata on Tuesday.

A convoy carrying the British ambassador to Libya was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Benghazi on Monday, and days earlier, a rocket-propelled grenade was also fired at the US consulate in the eastern city. Two weeks ago, the international airport in Tripoli was seized by armed militia.

In the midst of this instability that has plagued Libya since the revolution that ended Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year rule, a delegation from the International Criminal Court, including Australian lawyer Melinda Taylor and her Lebanese-born interpreter Helene Assaf, was detained in Zintan on June 7.

Ms Taylor was in Zintan to visit Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, who has been held by the Zintani militia since they captured him in November last year. The ICC charged Muammar Gaddafi, Saif al-Islam, and Libya’s former intelligence chief Abdullah al- Senussi with crimes against humanity.

Ms Taylor and her ICC colleagues have been placed in “preventive detention” for 45 days as Libya investigates the alleged threats to its national security the Zintanis claim she committed.

“We have had a steady deterioration of the security situation in Libya in the past couple of weeks,” said Dr Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, head of Middle East and North Africa Program at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.

“The proliferation of the militia is one of the key elements destabilising Libya – they are young men roaming around, heavily armed and with a sense of entitlement about the paternity of the revolution.

“This should have been tamed by the NTC months ago and the militia channelled into civilian organisations.”

Libya is at a crossroads, Dr Ould Mohamedou said, and the continuing threats from the militia calls into question the authority of the national interim government that operates under the auspices of the National Transitional Council.

He says Tripoli is in danger of becoming like Baghdad in 2005, with different groups controlling turf and instituting neighbourhood political economies. The government’s decision to delay elections for a national congress scheduled for June 19 until July 7 was a symptom of the chaos.

“To be fair to Libya and to the NTC, these are not easy issues, this cannot be engineered overnight – there were no political parties, no civil structures – in effect Gaddafi left a booby-trapped society.”

But the NTC had contributed to the deteriorating security situation by repeatedly capitulating to the militia and as a result, he said, it was “losing its grip on the situation as the months go by”. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt’s transition to military rule

Al Jazeera‘s Sherine Tadros writes: As I was crashing to make the deadline for my elections piece on the first day of voting, I trawled through the raw pictures the cameraman had collected from various polling stations looking for that classic woman-holding-up-purple-finger-and-smiling shot.

I didn’t find it. There were lots of purple fingers (the ink stain you get showing you’ve voted) but nobody held theirs up to the cameraman with pride, the hallmark shot of previous election days.

There is a distinct lack of energy or enthusiasm surrounding this vote. It’s safe to predict that most of those eligible to vote will not cast their ballots this time around – a mixture of apathy, confusion and active boycott.

There are of course those who tell me they are voting Mohamed Morsi or Ahmed Shafik out of conviction but ask a few more questions and you’ll find the conviction is more about the other not winning than belief in the candidate they are voting for.

For many others, the deep seated depression surrounding the vote comes from the realization that whoever wins, it’s the military rulers or SCAF that will end up running the country.

February 12th was not the start of a transition to democracy, it was a military takeover.

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America’s dangerous love affair with counterinsurgency

Adam Curtis writes: At the beginning of this year one of the weirdest characters ever to become involved in the present Afghan war died. He was called Jack Idema and he was a brilliant con-man. For a moment, during the early part of the war, Idema persuaded all the major TV networks and scores of journalists that he was some kind of special forces super-hero who was using all kinds of “black ops” to track down and arrest the terrorists.

In reality, before 2001, Idema had been running a hotel for pets in North Carolina called The Ultimate Pet Resort. He had been in prison for fraud, and had tried to con journalists before about being some kind of super-spy. But September 11th gave him his chance – and he turned up in Kabul dressed like this.

And everyone believed him and his stories. In the process Idema brilliantly exposed the emptiness and fakery of much of the TV and newspaper reporting of the war on terror.

He told the journalists and the TV presenters all kinds of lies and fantasies. He even became the central, heroic figure in a book called The Hunt for Bin Laden.

Then Idema charged journalists fortunes for what he said was an “al qaeda” video of a “a training camp” – where strangely many of the terrorists spoke in english, and allegedly you could hear Idema’s voice on the soundtrack. Few of the journalists did anything to really check if any of what he was saying was true.

CBS did a special programme about the tapes fronted by Dan Rather, called “Heart of Darkness”. They did check on the tapes – the producers went to some of the new breed of “terror experts” that were spawning after 2001. CBS’s press office said that they “showed the tapes to three former British Special Forces officers, who verified the tactics being practiced in the video were consistent with those of Al Qaeda”.

The BBC did a report that showed the tapes. And they travelled to the village where they had been recorded – and found an old man who said, yes there had been Arabs there.

But much later a number of journalists did investigate Jack Idema properly – and the consensus now is that the tapes are probably fakes. [Continue reading…]

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Robert Mangabeira Unger: Obama must be defeated

Roberto Unger, who has been a tenured professor at Harvard Law School since 1976 and taught Barack Obama — a student in his “Reinventing Democracy” class — says the president “has failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States.”

  • “His policy is financial confidence and food stamps.”
  • “He has spent trillions of dollars to rescue the moneyed interests and left workers and homeowners to their own devices.”
  • “He has delivered the politics of democracy to the rule of money.”
  • “He has disguised his surrender with an empty appeal to tax justice.”
  • “He has reduced justice to charity.”
  • “He has subordinated the broadening of economic and educational opportunity to the important but secondary issue of access to health care in the mistaken belief that he would be spared a fight.”
  • “He has evoked a politics of handholding, but no one changes the world without a struggle.”

(Huffington Post)

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We can’t crush Iran

Jordan Michael Smith reports: This month’s Vanity Fair has a feature on Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu. “An Israeli strike against Tehran’s nuclear facilities gone awry may pose the single greatest peril to his political future, which may be the biggest guarantee — more than American opposition to any move or the effectiveness of sanctions — that it won’t happen,” the article reads. Indeed, gradually and without fanfare, the possibility of a military strike against Iran, which only a few months ago seemed imminent, has lately receded from view. It seems that perhaps the U.S. and Israel came to their senses and realized that an attack on Iran would be disastrous.

The turning tide against a military strike is underscored by three new reports on the problems of an attack. Taken together, they suggest that significant parts of the U.S. establishment are pushing back against the notion that, in senior Romney adviser John Bolton’s words, “There is no doubt that Washington could shatter Iran’s nuclear program,” and that “Iran’s real options, post-attack,” would be “limited.”

First on the table is a monograph from the staunchly pro-Israel think tank the Washington Institute on Near East Policy. The report is called “Beyond Worst-Case Analysis,” suggesting that it intends to avoid what it calls “apocalyptic” conclusions about an attack on Iran. And yet, as former CIA analyst Paul Pillar notes, the paper’s ideas suggest that the “consequences would be very bad indeed.” The report’s authors, Michael Eisenstadt and Michael Knights, write that Iran would “respond in a way that deters additional Israeli strikes and U.S. intervention.” They suggest Iran would strike against any attacking country, which even if it is meant to be “limited” could easily escalate into a full-blown regional conflict. Iran would want to make retaliation as “painful as possible” for Israel, employing direct and indirect measures.

It would use Hezbollah and other proxies to sabotage petrochemical infrastructure in the Gulf, and attack “commercial ships or elements of the U.S. Fifth fleet in the area.” In other words, it would attack the United States military. Iran also “would likely respond almost immediately with missile strikes on Israel, to punish it and deter follow-on strikes.” The Persian nation would attack Israeli military and civilian population centers with its hundreds of long-range conventional missiles. Hezbollah could launch thousands of rockets from Lebanon, and attacks could be forthcoming from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and even beleaguered Syria. Israeli or Jewish targets around the world would not be immune. The list goes on: terrorism against U.S. targets on several continents, attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, kidnapping American citizens, strikes against neighboring countries, harassment of U.S. vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and a revitalization of the popularity of the Iranian government. And all of this, according to the report, is far from a worst-case scenario. [Continue reading…]

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Israel’s fear of free discussion exposed by email intrusions

Joseph Dana writes: Israel’s famed airport security has just become tighter. American tourists have recently reported that their personal emails have been targeted by Israeli officials upon arrival in the country.

Strict and unapologetic airport security is closely associated with Israel’s international image, despite the fact that such caution borders on the absurd when it comes to foreigners of Palestinian origin or those suspected of Palestine-related activism. In the post-September 11 environment of security paranoia, the Israeli model is among the most stringent. It is a model some in the United States wish to emulate.

The dark side to this security, which includes racial profiling and in most cases a complete disregard of civil rights, is becoming increasingly difficult to conceal. This past April, with much international fanfare, Israel deported a number of European activists who attempted to travel to the occupied West Bank through Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. Their experience of detainment, interrogation and deportation symbolised Israel’s approach to maintaining control of the West Bank. The treatment that some tourists receive at Tel Aviv’s airport is deeply connected to Israel’s infrastructure of occupation.

Israel’s image as a small country surrounded by enemies has been carefully designed to rationalise its extensive programme of racial profiling. From West Bank checkpoints to queues outside of bus stations in Tel Aviv, anyone with even indicators of anything associated with Palestinians is subjected to interrogation by the security apparatus.

Last week, security officials deported Sandra Tamari, an American of Palestinian origin, after eight hours of questioning. Ms Tamari was targeted because of her involvement with Palestinian solidarity organisations that support the global campaign to boycott Israel. In the course of hours of questioning, officials demanded that Ms Tamari open her personal email account for review. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt: New constitutional annex within 48 hours, says official source

Al Ahram reports: A new constitutional annex defining the powers of Egypt’s incoming president will be in place within the next 48 hours and before presidential election runoff results are officially announced Thursday, an official source close to the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) told Ahram Online.

According to the source, the annex will give the new president the power to appoint the prime minister, ministers and their deputies, state representatives at home and abroad, civil servants, military attaches and diplomats.

The new president will also have the authority to call parliamentary elections and joint sessions of the People’s Assembly and Shura Council.

The High Constitutional Court on Thursday declared the parliamentary elections law, under which the first parliament was elected, unconstitutional. The ruling resulted in the immediate dissolution of the Islamist-dominated People’s Assembly. Fresh elections should take place within 60 days.

The new annex is expected to amend article 30 of the constitutional declaration, issued by the SCAF in March 2011, which would allow the coming president to take the presidential oath of office before the High Constitutional Court instead of parliament.

The president will also be able to grant pardons.

According to the source, the SCAF will not be handing over all its powers to the elected president and will retain the legislative role until a new parliament is elected. It will also preserve the right to approve the general budget.

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