Egypt, a country lost in transition

Ian Black writes: Egypt, a Cairo wit quipped recently, is “lost in transition”. The serious point is that although Hosni Mubarak stepped down in February 2011, the country’s progress from autocracy to democracy has been halting and complicated by tensions, divisions and violence at every turn.

Now, just two days before the runoff round of an already polarised presidential election, an extraordinary twist has created profound new uncertainties. The most dramatic interpretation is that it spells a decisive victory for the forces of counter-revolution. “It is like The Empire Strikes Back in the Star Wars saga,” commented the popular blogger Zeinobia. Others denounced it furiously as a judicial coup.

It is not surprising that the constitutional court decided that Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak’s last prime minister, is eligible for the race, having ruled against a “political isolation” law that would have prevented him seeking office as a member of the old regime.

The judges, appointed under Mubarak, are widely seen as representative of the “deep state” that has survived the convulsions of the Egyptian chapter of the Arab spring to manoeuvre, manipulate – and retain power – behind the scenes.

Shafiq’s battle against Mohamed Morsi, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party, has been dubbed a “nightmare scenario” by Egyptian commentators who see it as a throwback to the bad old days when the military-backed presidency was ranged against the world’s oldest Islamist movement, with little else in the way of independent political forces between them.

But the court’s second ruling is far more volatile in its implications. The dissolution of the entire parliament – not just byelections for the third of MPs deemed to have been improperly elected – means that the Islamists who dominate it, from the Brotherhood and the hardline Salafi Nur party, will feel disenfranchised and cry foul.

David Ignatius spoke to Khairat el-Shater, the leading strategist of the Muslim Brotherhood: Shater was conciliatory when he talked about a Brotherhood victory. “Egypt is too big a responsibility for one group to lead it. It has to be a coalition,” he asserted. He didn’t talk about a Muslim state; indeed, the word Islam barely surfaced in the 90-minute conversation. Yet the conversation was scary when he talked about what would happen if the Brotherhood should lose.

But turmoil is ahead for Egypt, he says, if Ahmed Shafiq, a hard-line former prime minister, appears to win Sunday’s runoff. I say “appears” because Shater was already accusing Shafiq of “soft-rigging” the polls before Thursday’s court ruling. And he made a not-so-subtle prediction that if the Brotherhood’s rival should win, there will be violence.

The Egyptian people “will not accept Shafiq as president,” he said flatly. “From the first day of the announcement, people will be back to Tahrir Square. If the choice of the people is to protest, we will join the people.” He warned that foreign countries shouldn’t make quick moves to recognize Shafiq.

“The coming revolution may be less peaceful and more violent” than the one that toppled Mubarak, Shater predicted. “It may be difficult to control the streets. . . . Some parties, not the Muslim Brotherhood, may resort to further violence and extremism. . . . When people find that the door to peaceful change is closed, it is an invitation to violence.”

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If I am elected Egypt’s president, I will serve our revolution

Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate in Egypt’s upcoming runoff presidential election, writes: Despite yesterday’s tumultuous events, millions of Egyptians will nevertheless head to the polls this weekend to pick their first post-revolution president. Egypt’s constitutional court has invalidated the recent parliamentary election but has allowed Hosni Mubarak’s former PM, Ahmed Shafiq, to continue to stand for president . As the only other remaining candidate, I alone represent an unequivocal departure from the old regime that was toppled by the revolution of 2011.

I was nominated and elected by constituents – parties, groups, and individuals – who marched the streets of Egypt calling for change. I was jailed by the old regime. I belong to the middle classes that were sold out by the old establishment. I hold political and social views that are shared by many in our society but were suppressed or criminalised by the old regime. I understand the ambitions, values and standards held by many mainstream Egyptians.

For the sake of the Egyptian people and for the world, we must find the shortest and safest route to a stable, safe and sustainable transition in Egypt. To this end we need a detailed programme for change and renaissance, outlining clear priorities and specific plans. This I can offer.

On the political front, Egyptians revolted against an oppressive regime with the clear aim of regaining their freedom and affirming their liberties. Nothing short of a complete overhaul of the political system will be acceptable. It is not enough to remove a ruler or restructure a police force. We must spread and reinforce freedom, forming new political parties and a free mass media.

At the grassroots, people must be free of government interference, and allowed to choose public officials through fair elections. No party or group or class must ever be allowed to monopolise the political power in the country. As part of this agenda, I will transform the position of the president to an institution, with clear and delineated roles given to a number of vice-presidents (representing political and social forces other than the Freedom and Justice party that nominated me, and including a woman for the first time in modern Egyptian history), as well as a number of presidential aides and a team of advisers, all working in a transparent political environment and subject to oversight by parliament and civil society. [Continue reading…]

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Syria: Fresh evidence of armed forces’ ongoing crimes against humanity

The shocking escalation in unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention and the wanton destruction of homes in Syria demonstrates just how urgent the need for decisive international action to stem the tide of increasingly widespread attacks on civilians by government forces and militias which act with utter impunity, Amnesty International said in a new report today.

The 70-page report Deadly Reprisals, provides fresh evidence of widespread as well as systematic violations, including crimes against humanity and war crimes, being perpetrated as part of state policy to exact revenge against communities suspected of supporting the opposition and to intimidate people into submission.

“This disturbing new evidence of an organized pattern of grave abuses highlights the pressing need for decisive international action to stem the tide of increasingly widespread attacks against the civilian population, including crimes against humanity and war crimes, committed by government forces and militias with utter impunity,” said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s Senior Crisis Adviser, who recently spent several weeks investigating human rights violations in northern Syria.

“For more than a year the UN Security Council has dithered, while a human rights crisis unfolded in Syria. It must now break the impasse and take concrete action to end to these violations and to hold to account those responsible.”

Although not granted official permission by the Syrian authorities to enter the country, Amnesty International was able to investigate the situation on the ground in northern Syria, and has concluded that Syrian government forces and militias are responsible for grave human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law amounting to crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Amnesty International visited 23 towns and villages in the Aleppo and Idlib governorates, including areas where Syrian government forces launched large scale attacks including during negotiations over the implementation of the UN-Arab League-sponsored six-point ceasefire agreement in March/April.

In every town and village visited grieving families described to Amnesty International how their relatives – young and old and including children – were dragged away and shot dead by soldiers – who in some cases then set the victims’ bodies on fire.

Soldiers and shabiha militias burned down homes and properties and fired indiscriminately into residential areas, killing and injuring civilian bystanders. Those who were arrested, including the sick and elderly, were routinely tortured, sometimes to death. Many have been subjected to enforced disappearance; their fate remains unknown.

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50 aid groups demand Israel end siege of Gaza

Reuters reports: Fifty international aid groups and United Nations agencies issued a joint appeal on Thursday calling on Israel to lift its blockade of the Gaza Strip, which is ruled by Hamas Islamists.

“For over five years in Gaza, more than 1.6 million people have been under blockade in violation of international law. More than half of these people are children. We the undersigned say with one voice: ‘end the blockade now,'” the petition said.

Amongst the signatories were Amnesty International, Save the Children, the World Health Organization, Oxfam, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and five other U.N. bodies.

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On racism, Israel’s foreign ministry worried about image, not reality

Yossi Gurvitz writes: Our Foreign Ministry finds itself in a quandary. Israel brutally expels refugees from South Sudan, and runs a vicious and racist campaign against refugees from Sudan. Ministers and MKs are competing to see who can lead a more beastly campaign of hatred. The current winner is Madam MK and former IDF Spokeswomen Miri “I did not intend to compare the refugees to human beings” Regev, but the race is far from over.

This, reports activist Rotem Ilan (Hebrew), is how the Oz Unit (refugee headhunting unit, dregs of Israeli society so low they couldn’t even get in to the police) sounds in action: “Do you want me to fuck you in the ass? You like it, it shows” (Oz officer to an activist); “The father said he does not love you anymore, and you can fly for all he cares” (Oz officer to a mother and daughter held in custody, asking to say their goodbyes to the child’s father); “If you need to go to the bathroom, just piss in your dress” (Oz officer to a priest in traditional African garb, who actually had a residency permit); “What am I, a bell boy? Do I have to carry your luggage? You don’t want to [carry it], see if I care” (Oz officer during an arrest of a family with three children, yesterday).

Veteran journalist Yael Gvirtz described (Hebrew) some of the deportees: “A girl with hideous burns (whose mother and brother are already detained), [to be deported] to a country with no medical infrastructure… A person seriously ill with diabetes, who knows deportation consigns him to death, because there is no insulin to be gotten there. Just two of the stories, because this night is so difficult as it is. And what would the next picture be? The disaster area (and then the Israeli government will surely send an IDF flying hospital, to show the world how humane we are…)”

Oz’s activity has been described by one of its officers, Asaf Khayoun – every criminal has a name – as follows (Hebrew): “Coming into a house, there’s excitement in that. You want to find them. I just love enforcement. A few weeks ago we went to a house in Savion to check information about an illegal nanny. The owner denied it, but we knew she was there, hiding. She was hiding behind a wall. Holding a little boy, three years old. The baby kept mum, but then she started crying. She knew she had to go home. For me, catching her is an achievement.”

What for Khayoun and the rest of the Oz Unit is “excitement,” is quickly becoming a headache for the Foreign Ministry. Its officials complain (Hebrew) that Eli Yishai, Danon, Regev and the rest are causing “irreparable damage” to the public image of Israel in the United States. They report that for the first time ever, the American media used the term “race riots” in order to describe what happens in South Tel Aviv. Israel’s image, complain the diplomats, suffered a heavy blow in the black community and among American liberals.

And if the diplomats are afraid of what will happen to the Hasbara campaign in the United States – to the glittering lie that claims that the only Jewish state in the Middle East is a democracy, not an ethnocracy with strong theo-fascist elements – this is nothing compared to what will happen to Israel’s image in Africa. Many Africans may remember how Israel connived to help two fading colonial powers in their last attack on Africa, that there never was a dictator that it didn’t like, that it sold weapons to all the darkest regimes, that it was about the only ally of the Apartheid regime, Zionism’s twin. The next time our diplomats bemoan a staunch African anti-Israel position in the UN, maybe they should remember Eli Yishai and his “land of the white man” comment. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s war in Yemen is helping al Qaeda

Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman write: After years of sending drones and commandos into Pakistan, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last week finally admitted the obvious: The US is “fighting a war” there. But American robots and special forces aren’t just targeting militants in Pakistan. They’re doing the same — with increasing frequency and increasing lethality — in Yemen. The latest drone attack happened early Wednesday in the Yemeni town of Azzan, killing nine people. It’s the 23rd strike in Yemen so far this year, according to the Long War Journal. In Pakistan, there have been only 22.

Surely, if America is at war in Pakistan, it’s at war in Yemen, too. And it’s time for the Obama administration to admit it.

For all the handwringing about the undeclared, drone-led war in Pakistan, it’s quietly been eclipsed. Yemen is the real center of the America’s shadow wars in 2012. After the US killed al-Qaida second in command Abu Yahya al-Libi earlier this month, Pakistan is actually running out of significant terrorists to strike. Yemen, by contrast, is a target-rich environment — and that’s why the drones are busier there these days.

The White House has declared al-Qaida’s affiliate in Yemen is to be the biggest terror threat to Americans today. The campaign to neutralize that threat is far-reaching — involving commandos, cruise missiles, and, of course, drone aircraft. It is also, according to some experts on the region, completely backfiring. Since the US ramped up its operations in Yemen in 2009, the ranks of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, have swelled from 300 fighters to more than 1,000. [Continue reading…]

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New political showdown in Egypt as court dissolves newly-elected parliament

The New York Times reports: Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court on Thursday ruled that the Islamist-led Parliament must be immediately dissolved, while also blessing the right of Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister to run for president, escalating a battle for power between the remnants of the toppled order and rising Islamists.

The high court, packed with sympathizers of the ousted president, appeared to be engaged in a frontal legal assault on the Muslim Brotherhood, the once-outlawed organization whose members swept to power in Parliament this spring and whose candidate was the front-runner for the presidency as well. The presidential election runoff is scheduled to go ahead Saturday and Sunday.

“Egypt just witnessed the smoothest military coup,” Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, wrote in an online commentary. “We’d be outraged if we weren’t so exhausted.”The ruling means that whoever emerges as the winner of the runoff will take power without the check of a sitting Parliament and could even exercise some influence over the election of a future Parliament. It vastly compounds the stakes in the presidential race, raises questions about the governing military council’s commitment to democracy, and makes uncertain the future of a constitutional assembly recently formed by Parliament as well.

The decision, which dissolves the first freely elected Parliament in Egypt in decades, supercharges a building conflict between the court, which is increasingly presenting itself as a check on Islamists’ power, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The ruling, by the highest judicial authority in Egypt, cannot be appealed and it was not clear how the military council, which has been governing Egypt since Mr. Mubarak’s downfall in February 2011, would respond. But in anticipation that the court’s ruling could anger citizens, the military authorities reimposed martial law on Wednesday.

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Obama’s death squads operating outside war zones

The Washington Post reports: The U.S. military is expanding its secret intelligence operations across Africa, establishing a network of small air bases to spy on terrorist hideouts from the fringes of the Sahara to jungle terrain along the equator, according to documents and people involved in the project.

At the heart of the surveillance operations are small, unarmed turboprop aircraft disguised as private planes. Equipped with hidden sensors that can record full-motion video, track infrared heat patterns, and vacuum up radio and cellphone signals, the planes refuel on isolated airstrips favored by African bush pilots, extending their effective flight range by thousands of miles.

About a dozen air bases have been established in Africa since 2007, according to a former senior U.S. commander involved in setting up the network. Most are small operations run out of secluded hangars at African military bases or civilian airports.

The nature and extent of the missions, as well as many of the bases being used, have not been previously reported but are partially documented in public Defense Department contracts. The operations have intensified in recent months, part of a growing shadow war against al-Qaeda affiliates and other militant groups. The surveillance is overseen by U.S. Special Operations forces but relies heavily on private military contractors and support from African troops.

The surveillance underscores how Special Operations forces, which have played an outsize role in the Obama administration’s national security strategy, are working clandestinely all over the globe, not just in war zones. The lightly equipped commando units train foreign security forces and perform aid missions, but they also include teams dedicated to tracking and killing terrorism suspects.

The establishment of the Africa missions also highlights the ways in which Special Operations forces are blurring the lines that govern the secret world of intelligence, moving aggressively into spheres once reserved for the CIA. The CIA has expanded its counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering operations in Africa, but its manpower and resources pale in comparison with those of the military. [Continue reading…]

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The imperial agenda of the U.S.’s ‘Africa Command’ marches on

Dan Glazebrook writes: “The less they see of us, the less they will dislike us.” So remarked Frederick Roberts, British general during the Anglo-Afghan war of 1878-80, ushering in a policy of co-opting Afghan leaders to control their people on the empire’s behalf.

“Indirect rule”, as it was called, was long considered the linchpin of British imperial success, and huge swaths of that empire were conquered, not by British soldiers, but by soldiers recruited elsewhere in the empire. It was always hoped that the dirty work of imperial control could be conducted without spilling too much white man’s blood.

It is a lesson that has been re-learned in recent years. The ever-rising western body counts in Iraq and Afghanistan have reminded politicians that colonial wars in which their own soldiers are killed do not win them popularity at home. The hope in both cases is that US and British soldiers can be safely extricated, leaving a proxy force of allies to kill opponents of the new regime on our behalf.

And so too in Africa.

To reassert its waning influence on the continent in the face of growing Chinese investment, the US established Africom – the “Africa Command” of the US military – in October 2008. Africom co-ordinates all US military activity in Africa and, according to its mission statement, “contributes to increasing security and stability in Africa – allowing African states and regional organizations to promote democracy, to expand development, to provide for their common defense, and to better serve their people”.

However, in more unguarded moments, officials have been more straightforward: Vice Admiral Robert Moeller declared in a conference in 2008 that Africom was about preserving “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market”, and two years later, in a piece in Foreign policy magazine, wrote: “Let there be no mistake. Africom’s job is to protect American lives and promote American interests.” Through this body, western powers are resorting to the use of military power to win back the leverage once attained through financial monopoly. [Continue reading…]

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Libya needs more than elections to prevent civil war

Ranj Alaaldin writes: The past month has been a tumultuous one for Libya. Successful local elections in Benghazi, in which voter turnout was impressive and a female candidate secured the largest number of votes, showed that the country can move towards becoming a state with viable democratic processes and representative leaders.

Yet, with every step it takes forward, Libya takes another two back. The security situation has deteriorated rapidly over the past two weeks. On Tuesday, it was the turn of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Misrata to come under attack. On Monday, the British ambassador’s convoy in Benghazi was hit, with two bodyguards injured in the ensuing gun battle. Last week there was an attack on the US diplomatic mission in the same city.

Apart from terror attacks such as these, Libyans are fighting each other. Militiamen act with impunity, as the recent seizure of Tripoli airport showed, while clashes continue in the southern town of Kufra, where pro-government militiamen are locked in an armed conflict with tribal forces over smuggling routes. The clashes have so far claimed at least 20 lives.

Civil war and increased bloody lawlessness in Libya is now a real possibility, with all indicators suggesting the worst may be yet to come because of the continued lack of state control and failure to stabilise the security environment. [Continue reading…]

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Russia sets out tough terms for resolving Syria’s ‘civil war’

Tony Karon writes: The notion that Russia might soon abandon Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime may prove mistakenly optimistic: Moscow is now supplying attack helicopters to Damascus. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced on Tuesday that the U.S. confronted Russia about the new arms deliveries, but Moscow insisted that the shipment was unrelated to Syria’s political conflict. The news was confirmed by the U.N.’s deputy head of peacekeeping, Hervé Ladsous. “Clearly what is happening is that the government of Syria lost some large chunks of territory, several cities to the opposition, and wants to retake control,” he told reporters. “Now we have confirmed reports not only of the use of tanks and artillery but also attack helicopters.”

There is, of course, no U.N. authorized arms embargo against Syria, and Russia is legally entitled to continue arming the regime. But the news suggests an escalation and, indeed, Ladsous called the conflict a “civil war.” The distinction between a popular rebellion and a civil war in Syria is more than semantics, because a civil war is resolved not simply by settling the fate of the leader of one of the sides but must also address the fate of the community that fights on his behalf. The situation in Syria appears nowhere near the point of a mediated settlement, despite fears that a civil war could imperil regional security and the reluctance of Western powers to accept the burden of de facto ownership of an unraveling Levant by intervening militarily to change the balance of power.

All along, Russia has made it clear that, while it is willing to see the departure of Assad if that’s what the Syrians agree to at the end of a peaceful political dialogue, it’s not prepared to countenance the armed overthrow of that regime — hence Moscow’s blocking of U.N. authorization for an intervention in the Syrian conflict and its continued arms supplies to the regime. It also consistently challenges those outside powers, particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar, supplying weapons to rebel forces. Russia joined with Western and Arab states in backing special envoy Kofi Annan’s six-point plan for a cessation of hostilities and political dialogue in April, but that plan has never been implemented, and both sides continue to violate its cease-fire provisions.

The Assad regime has clearly opted to fight a sectarian civil war rather than open up democratic political space for its opponents and engage in a dialogue that would threaten his political survival. Rallying the Alawites, Christians and other minorities to back a vicious crackdown on the basis of fear of an Islamist Sunni rebellion clearly appeared the safer bet to Assad. But the rebellion has proved resilient: in almost a year and a half, some 15,000 Syrians have reportedly been killed in what has become an increasingly vicious sectarian civil war. Massacres like the one in Houla have claimed the headlines, but they don’t tell the full story of daily cycles of communal retribution at local levels and mounting fears on both sides that are fueling even greater violence. Syria, in short, is being torn apart, and the inevitable Bosnia comparisons contain within them a chilling portent: the collapse of a single polity composed of multiple ethnicities and sects into separate ethnic and sectarian fiefs. [Continue reading…]

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This time, Europe really is on the brink

Niall Ferguson and Nouriel Roubini write: Is it one minute to midnight in Europe?

The failure of German public opinion to grasp the dire state of affairs in Europe today is inviting a repeat of precisely the crisis of the mid 20th century that European integration was designed to avoid.

With every increase in the probability of a disorderly Greek exit from the monetary union, the pressure on the Spanish banks increases and with it the danger of a Mediterranean-wide bank run so big that it would overwhelm the European Central Bank. Already there has been a substantial re-nationalization of the European financial system. This centrifugal process could easily continue to the point of complete disintegration.

We find it extraordinary that it should be Germany, of all countries, that is failing to learn from history. Fixated on the non-threat of inflation, today’s Germans appear to attach more importance to the year 1923 (the year of hyperinflation) than to the year 1933 (the year democracy died). They would do well to remember how a European banking crisis two years before 1933 contributed directly to the breakdown of democracy not just in their own country but right across the European continent.

Astonishingly few Europeans (including bankers) seem to remember what happened in May 1931 when Creditanstalt, the biggest Austrian bank, had to be bailed out by a government that was itself on the brink of insolvency. The ensuing European bank crisis, which saw the failure of two of Germany’s biggest banks, ushered in the second half of the Great Depression. If the first half had been dominated by the American stock market crash, the second was all about European banks going bust.

What happened next? The banking crisis was followed by President Hoover’s one-year moratorium on payment of World War I war debts and reparations. Nearly all sovereign borrowers subsequently defaulted on all or part of their external debts, beginning with Germany. Unemployment in Europe reached an agonizing peak in 1932: In July of that year, 49 per cent of German trade union members were out of work.

The political consequences are well known. But the Nazis were only the worst of a large number of extremist movements to benefit politically from the crisis. “Anti-system” parties in Germany — including Communists as well as fascists — had won 13 percent of votes in 1928. By November 1932, they won nearly 60 percent. The far right also fared well in Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania. Communists gained in Bulgaria, France and Greece.

The result was the death of democracy in much of Europe. While 24 European regimes had been democratic in 1920, the number was down to 11 in 1939. Even bankers know what happened that year. [Continue reading…]

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A few thoughts on Stuxnet, leaks, and cyberwarfare

After reading posts by Philip Weiss and Marcy Wheeler on the Stuxnet-Sanger story, I want to make a few comments to add some perspective.

In David Sanger’s report, this, supposedly, was one of the key revelations:

In the summer of 2010, shortly after a new variant of the worm had been sent into Natanz, it became clear that the worm, which was never supposed to leave the Natanz machines, had broken free, like a zoo animal that found the keys to the cage. It fell to Mr. Panetta and two other crucial players in Olympic Games — General Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Michael J. Morell, the deputy director of the C.I.A. — to break the news to Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden.

An error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an engineer’s computer when it was hooked up to the centrifuges. When the engineer left Natanz and connected the computer to the Internet, the American- and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed. It began replicating itself all around the world. Suddenly, the code was exposed, though its intent would not be clear, at least to ordinary computer users.

“We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” one of the briefers told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that activity.”

Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. “It’s got to be the Israelis,” he said. “They went too far.”

In fact, both the Israelis and the Americans had been aiming for a particular part of the centrifuge plant, a critical area whose loss, they had concluded, would set the Iranians back considerably. It is unclear who introduced the programming error.

In the report, Sanger is summarizing the prologue of his book and rendering his pulp fiction prose into the stodgy English the New York Times prefers.

In Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, he writes:

In the background, everyone could hear someone sucking air through his teeth. It was Joe Biden, the vice president, whose occasional outbursts were often a tension-relieving contrast with Obama’s typically impassive reaction to bad news.

“Oh, goddam,” he said, according to the account of one participant. “Sonofabitch. It’s got to be the Israelis. They went too far.”

Based on Biden’s understanding of the code running a programmable logic controller, it must have seemed obvious that the Israelis had tweaked the code so the worm would jump the fence. (Sorry, but I can’t help but get tangled in Sanger’s mixed zoological metaphors.)

But let’s be serious. Sanger describes Obama as “a new president with little patience for technological detail”. And I expect Obama’s “patience” with such detail probably exceeds Biden’s.

I imagine the Olympic Games briefings in the White House Situation Room to have involved a cascade of dumbing down as technical information got translated into a narrative that the principles could understand.

Biden’s certainty about the role of the Israelis in the worm breaking loose most likely reveals much more about what he thinks about the Israelis than it reveals about his understanding of Stuxnet.

Ralph Langner understands Stuxnet — he and his colleagues cracked the code — and he compliments Sanger as “by far the best informed journalist on the Iranian nuclear program that I have talked to.”

But Langner doesn’t buy the story about the Israelis going too far.

One technical detail that makes little sense is the theory that Stuxnet broke out of Natanz rather than into due to a software bug introduced by the Isrealis; this sounds like an attempt (of one of the sources) to put the blame for a non-anticipated side effect of a design feature on somebody else.

It also sounds like an element in a wider political narrative: that Obama needs to keep Netanyahu on a tight leash because without American restraint the Israelis are bound to launch a military strike on Iran.

This image suits both the U.S. and Israel. It provides a plausible explanation for why Israel hasn’t attacked Iran already (for Netanyahu, imminent is an amazingly elastic concept) and it supposedly gives the U.S. leverage as it tentatively negotiates with Iran. The threat forever looms of Israel getting unleashed. Obama retains his position as the aloof statesman in the foreground with Mad Dog Netanyahu lurking in the shadows.

As for the leak story, Senator Dianne Feinstein seems to have volunteered herself as a prime suspect. When she talks about the cunning of “very sophisticated journalists” she seems to be claiming she got conned:

[Sanger] assured me that what he was publishing he had worked out with various agencies and he didn’t think that anything was revealed that wasn’t known already.

What’s that supposed to mean? In conversation with Feinstein, Sanger refers to some classified information, Feinstein has some reservations in talking about it but Sanger assures her it’s all kosher, that’s he’s got the thumbs up from the NSA and the CIA and it’s all information that’s already in the public domain. Having thus been briefed on how to handle classified information by a very sophisticated journalist from the New York Times, Feinstein then tells Sanger a few things he hasn’t heard before.

At the same time, what Feinstein and most of Sanger’s other sources probably understood was that the book he was researching was as he puts it, “the story of a presidency in midstream” — which makes the upcoming election sound, at least in Sanger’s mind, like a formality. They weren’t just talking to a very sophisticated journalist but also a very friendly journalist.

Sanger’s Stuxnet story is part of a portrait of a president he’s presenting as bold and daring yet also cautious and diligent in oversight. Obama the hot shot replaced Bush the klutz. In that context Stuxnet is described as a limited success.

Rather than assess that claim based on reports about numbers of centrifuges disabled, it would however make more sense to view the operation’s success in terms of its aims. And rather than assess those aims based on the claims made by Sanger’s government sources after the fact, it actually makes more sense to look at the objectives of the malware as revealed directly by its design. The operation’s objectives are literally written in the code.

In a technical presentation, Langner highlights two principal features of the design:

1. The attackers are obsessed with disguise
2. Death by a thousand cuts rather than a clean shot between the eyes.

For instance, while Sanger describes centrifuges being run faster and slower so suddenly that they self destruct, Langner says Stuxnet would, at the appointed time, make the centrifuges run at speeds that would cause metal fatigue. A malfunction might then follow only one or two weeks later. It wasn’t just about trying to make centrifuges break but just as crucially controlling how and when they broke.

In other words, the goal of Stuxnet was not to destroy Iran’s enrichment facility but to frustrate the Iranian’s efforts to make it operate effectively. To that end, the attacks would not cause spectacular damage but they would never end — so long as they could continue undetected. The key was to make a succession of centrifuge problems all look like mechanical problems. Detection meant failure.

Sanger waits right until the very end of his report to add this caution:

[N]o country’s infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States. It is only a matter of time, most experts believe, before it becomes the target of the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against Iran.

Langner makes a similar warning:

It does not require the resources of a nation state to develop cyber weapons. I could achieve that by myself with just a handful of freelance experts. Any U.S. power plant, including nuclear, is much easier to cyberattack than the heavily guarded facilities in Iran. An attacker who is not interested in engaging in a long-term campaign with sophisticated disguise (which rogue player would be?) needs to invest only a tiny fraction of effort compared to Stuxnet.

He also warns that the danger Stuxnet unleashed does not derive from the code itself but simply the concepts enshrined in the cyberweapon’s design. We still don’t know the scope of the Stuxnet failure.

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U.S. drones deeply unpopular around the world

Glenn Greenwald writes: Last night I wrote about how Obama’s drone attacks and other forms of militarism in the Muslim world are making another Terror attack on U.S. soil more likely, while my Salon colleague Jefferson Morley documented the mass political instability those policies are spawning. A newly released international polling survey from the Pew Research Center sharply underscores both points.

The new multi-nation poll finds that “in predominantly Muslim nations, American anti-terrorism efforts are still widely unpopular.” Beyond Muslim nations, “in nearly all countries, there is considerable opposition to a major component of the Obama administration’s anti-terrorism policy: drone strikes.” Specifically, “in 17 of 20 countries, more than half disapprove of U.S. drone attacks.” As usual, “Americans are the clear outliers on this issue – 62% approve of the drone campaign, including most Republicans (74%), independents (60%) and Democrats (58%).” But in every other surveyed country besides India (which naturally supports any attacks in Pakistan), more people disapprove of Obama’s drone strikes than approve, usually by very wide margins. Indeed, “the policy is unpopular in majority Muslim nations, but also in Europe and other regions as well”; specifically, “at least three-in-four [are opposed] in a diverse set of countries: Greece (90%), Egypt (89%), Jordan (85%), Turkey (81%), Spain (76%), Brazil (76%) and Japan (75%).”

Just as is true in the U.S., Obama — revealingly and unsurprisingly — finds ample support for his policies among the European Right, with substantial opposition on the Left. “A majority (56%) of those who describe themselves as being on the political right in Britain favor U.S. drone strikes against extremists, but just 31% on the left agree.” And “a similar gap emerges in France, where about half of those on the right (49%) approve of the drone attacks, compared with about one-quarter (26%) among people on the left. Double-digit differences are also found in Italy, the Czech Republic and Germany.” [Continue reading…]

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Why weren’t they grateful?

Pankaj Mishra reviews Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup by Christopher de Bellaigue: In 1890, an itinerant Muslim activist called Jamal al-din al-Afghani was in Iran when its then ruler, Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, granted a tobacco concession to a British businessman called G.F. Talbot, effectively granting him a monopoly on its purchase, sale and export. Al-Afghani pointed out, to a chorus of approval from secular-minded intellectuals as well as conservative merchants, that tobacco growers would now be at the mercy of infidels, and the livelihoods of small dealers destroyed. He set up pressure groups in Tehran – a political innovation in the country – which sent anonymous letters to officials and distributed leaflets and placards calling on Iranians to revolt. Angry protests erupted in major cities the following spring. Helped by the recently introduced telegraph, the mass demonstrations of the Tobacco Protest, as it came to be called, were as carefully co-ordinated as they would be in Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution a hundred years later, when cassette-tapes played a similar role and women participated in large numbers.

Al-Afghani also wrote to Ayatollah Mirza Hassan Shirazi in Najaf, giving the greatly influential but apolitical Shiite cleric an early lesson in the ‘structural adjustments’ that Western financiers would come to enforce in poor countries: ‘What shall cause thee to understand what is the Bank?’ he asked. ‘It means the complete handing over of the reins of government to the enemy of Islam, the enslaving of the people to that enemy, the surrendering of them and of all dominion and authority into the hands of the foreign foe.’ Al-Afghani may have been exaggerating. But he knew from his experiences in India and Egypt how quickly the West’s seemingly innocuous traders and bankers could turn into diplomats and soldiers. The feckless shah had already compromised Iran’s relative immunity to Europe’s informal imperialists. In 1872, with the country starved of capital and suffering from a massive budget deficit, he had granted a monopoly in the construction of railways, roads, factories, dams and mines to another British citizen, Baron Reuter (founder of the news agency). Even Lord Curzon was appalled twenty years later when he was told the terms, describing it as ‘the most complete surrender of the entire resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has ever been dreamed of much less accomplished in history’. Protests by Russia, Iran’s neighbour and Britain’s great rival in the region, sank this particular arrangement; Reuter anyway had other irons in the fire.

Coming only eight years after the British occupation of Egypt, the award of the tobacco concession struck al-Afghani as ominous. Expelled from Iran by the shah, he kept up a barrage of letters to leading Shiite clerics in the shrine cities of Mesopotamia, asking them to rouse themselves out of their apathy and move against the shah. A few months later, Shirazi wrote his first ever letter to the shah on a political subject, denouncing foreign banks and their growing power over the Muslim population as well as the commercial concessions given to Europeans. The shah, desperate to keep the ulema on his side, sent intermediaries to plead with Shirazi. Far from relenting, the cleric issued a fatwa effectively making it un-Islamic to smoke until the monopoly was withdrawn. He was astonishingly successful – even the shah’s palace became a smoke-free zone. Finally, the shah capitulated to an alliance between intellectuals, clergy and native merchants and, in January 1892, cancelled the tobacco concession.

Muhammad Mossadegh was at the time the precocious nine-year-old son of a high official working for the shah. Homa Katouzian, his previous biographer in English, ascribes his consistent opposition to ‘any concession to any foreign power’ to this early impression of popular anger at European encroachments on Iran’s sovereignty. Mossadegh, whose family belonged to the nobility and who was honoured as a child with the title, mussadiq al-saltaneh, ‘certifier of the monarchy’, was an unlikely leader of Iran’s transition from dynastic monarchy to mass politics. But then he grew up during a period of unprecedented political ferment across Asia.

Asian intellectuals and activists had begun to challenge the arbitrary power of Western imperialists and their native allies in the late 19th century. The first generation contained polemicists like al-Afghani, who gathered energetic but disorganised young anti-imperialists around him in Kabul, Istanbul, Cairo and Tehran. The next generation produced men like Mossadegh, who had been exposed to Western ways or trained in Western-style institutions and were better equipped to provide their increasingly restless compatriots with a coherent ideology and politics of anticolonial nationalism. [Continue reading…]

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Google continues to dodge questions on Street View private data collection

The New York Times reports: Google has long prided itself on not being a conventional company. But there is one characteristic it apparently shares with the most sclerotic bureaucracy: the willingness of its employees to say, “Not my job.”

The company on Tuesday released a trove of documents related to a federal investigation of its Street View mapping project. Although the project was intended to photograph the world’s streets, from 2007 to 2010 Google gathered unencrypted Internet data from wireless networks, including the content of private communications, as its specially equipped cars passed through neighborhoods.

Among the documents released Tuesday are sworn declarations by nine people — their names and titles redacted but most of whom appear to be Google engineers — who said they were not aware of the data collection either because it was not part of their job or they did not review the project documentation, even when it was provided to them.

Also Tuesday, Google confirmed that the Information Commissioner’s Office in Britain had reopened its investigation of the Street View project and had asked the company for additional information about the data it collected there.

In April, the Federal Communications Commission said Google had “deliberately impeded and delayed” its inquiry into the data collection and assessed the company a $25,000 fine. The documents released Tuesday were originally provided to the F.C.C. as part of its investigation into Street View. Employee names were redacted; in a few cases, nearly the entire document was blacked out.

While each of the employees who provided sworn declarations acknowledged participating in some aspect of Street View, nearly all said they first became aware that the company was collecting Internet data only when it was publicly reported in May 2010.

For example, one person whose job was to review the computer code that operated the data collection program said that while he checked syntax and debugged the code, he had “no recollection of reviewing the Wi-Fi project design document” and that “it was not part of my duties to do so.”

Another said, “I am aware there was a design document prepared for the Wi-Fi collection, but I do not recall reading it.”

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‘Dead’ al Qaeda leader appears in ‘new’ video

ABC News reports: A new video surfaced online Tuesday featuring al Qaeda commander Abu Yahya al-Libi — the same terrorist that American officials declared dead last week — but the video doesn’t appear to reveal whether it was made before or after his reported death.

In the new footage, which was posted in jihadi forums with captions referring to al-Libi in honorific titles generally reserved for the living, al-Libi discusses the ongoing violence in Syria but makes no specific reference to any dates or significant events there. A bloody struggle between Syrian opposition groups and the government has been ongoing for over a year, since well before al-Libi’s reported death.

Al-Libi was declared dead by U.S. and Pakistani officials last week following a series of drone strikes in Pakistan. Other al Qaeda leaders have not confirmed nor denied al-Libi’s death, and an analyst with the terrorist tracking group IntelCenter said that it is “not unknown for groups to release videos of key figures that were filmed prior to their death but had not yet been released.”

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