Video: Will the eurozone collapse?
Afghanistan: Charges amended for soldier accused in civilian deaths
The New York Times reports: The Army has amended its charges against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the soldier accused of murdering civilians in southern Afghanistan in March, reducing the murder count by one, to 16, and adding charges of illegal steroid use and alcohol consumption.
In its statement accompanying the amended charges, the Army did not explain why it had eliminated one of the murder counts, though it initially reported 16 dead shortly after the killings.
The added charge of alcohol consumption was expected, as military officials had previously said that soldiers on Sergeant Bales’s combat outpost in Kandahar Province reported seeing him drinking the night of the killings.
But the report of steroid use is new. The Army’s new charging sheet said that Sergeant Bales had illegally possessed and used stanozolol, an anabolic steroid commonly used by athletes to build muscle mass.
While anabolic steroids can promote rapid muscle growth, they carry an array of risks, including for higher blood pressure and cancer, and have been linked to psychological changes.
Video: Listening in at the Leveson Inquiry
The One Percent’s problem
Joseph E. Stiglitz writes: Let’s start by laying down the baseline premise: inequality in America has been widening for decades. We’re all aware of the fact. Yes, there are some on the right who deny this reality, but serious analysts across the political spectrum take it for granted. I won’t run through all the evidence here, except to say that the gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent is vast when looked at in terms of annual income, and even vaster when looked at in terms of wealth—that is, in terms of accumulated capital and other assets. Consider the Walton family: the six heirs to the Walmart empire possess a combined wealth of some $90 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of U.S. society. (Many at the bottom have zero or negative net worth, especially after the housing debacle.) Warren Buffett put the matter correctly when he said, “There’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years and my class has won.”
So, no: there’s little debate over the basic fact of widening inequality. The debate is over its meaning. From the right, you sometimes hear the argument made that inequality is basically a good thing: as the rich increasingly benefit, so does everyone else. This argument is false: while the rich have been growing richer, most Americans (and not just those at the bottom) have been unable to maintain their standard of living, let alone to keep pace. A typical full-time male worker receives the same income today he did a third of a century ago.
From the left, meanwhile, the widening inequality often elicits an appeal for simple justice: why should so few have so much when so many have so little? It’s not hard to see why, in a market-driven age where justice itself is a commodity to be bought and sold, some would dismiss that argument as the stuff of pious sentiment.
Put sentiment aside. There are good reasons why plutocrats should care about inequality anyway—even if they’re thinking only about themselves. The rich do not exist in a vacuum. They need a functioning society around them to sustain their position. Widely unequal societies do not function efficiently and their economies are neither stable nor sustainable. The evidence from history and from around the modern world is unequivocal: there comes a point when inequality spirals into economic dysfunction for the whole society, and when it does, even the rich pay a steep price. [Continue reading…]
Egyptian elections: Choose none of the above
Al-Akhbar English reports: A day after the results of the first round of the presidential election were announced, the ground floor of the Journalists’ Syndicate was buzzing. Unlike the arguments blaring through the capital, the crowd wasn’t concerned with comparing the two candidates that made it to the runoffs. The keyword that evening was “boycott.”
“If you are here, it means you chose to boycott. We are here to discuss suggestions on how to do so,” journalist Rasha Azab told the crowd as the final snippets of sunlight filtered through the glass panels of the syndicate lobby on Tuesday.
Stickers blazoned with the campaign’s title, “Muqateoun” (Boycotters), were passed around. It wasn’t a place to discuss the pros and cons of the boycott; it was time for action.
A day earlier, the Presidential Election Committee (PEC) declared the winners of the first round: The Muslim Brotherhood (MB)’s Mohammed Mursi with 5.7 million votes, 25 percent, and ex-Air Force general Ahmed Shafik with 5.5 million, 24 percent.
Having the two most polarizing candidates as winners left voters grimacing at having to choose between an Islamist or military state. The campaign that materialized later on Tuesday aims to present a third option.
Imprisoned in America
In a review of The Collapse of American Criminal Justice by William J Stuntz, David Garland writes: The scandal of criminal justice in the United States is by now a familiar one, its facts are well known, its causes extensively canvassed. So what can another book tell us that we don’t already know? A surprising amount, as it turns out. The existing analyses are mostly conducted by sociologists and political scientists. William J. Stuntz brings the perspective of a law professor – focused on substantive law, procedural rules, and the evolution of legal doctrine. He reminds us that, whatever its underlying social, political and cultural causes, the build-up of racialized mass imprisonment was the product of legal actors – police, prosecutors and judges – and the legal rules and organizational incentives that governed their actions. And if America’s astonishing levels of imprisonment, its harsh sentencing, and its racial disparities are tolerated, it is because the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that they comply with constitutional law.
The book also offers a different political perspective. Most critiques of American criminal justice are by liberals and progressives, but Bill Stuntz – who died, aged fifty-two, shortly before this book was published – was a registered Republican, an evangelical Christian, and a revisionist thinker with a fondness for “law and economic” perspectives. His viewpoint is refreshingly unpredictable and runs against the grain of conventional wisdom. It is a devastatingly critical account nevertheless. American criminal justice is, he writes, devoid of the rule of law, “wildly unjust” and the “harshest in the history of democratic government”.
The core problem, Stuntz says, is the massive and unrestrained power of police and prosecutors. Over the past forty years, criminal law in the US has become all-encompassing. There are now 40,000 federal criminal offences – above and beyond the state crimes that constitute the vast majority of offences (and which also grow apace). Many of these new offences, above all, drug and gun legislation, require little evidence, no proof of criminal intent, admit of little mitigation, and carry harsh penalties. Instead of restraining officials, criminal law provides them with an extensive battery of weapons which they can use as they see fit. [Continue reading…]
Video: Obama’s and Brennan’s ‘kill list’
Israeli journalist Uri Blau to stand trial for holding leaked documents
Dimi Reider writes: Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein announced on Wednesday his intention to indict Uri Blau, one of Israel’s top investigative reporters, for possession of classified materials without permission. The materials in question are documents given to Blau by whistleblower Anat Kamm; Kamm, then a conscript clerk in the office of GOC Central Command, copied them from the GOC’s computer, believing they constituted evidence of war crimes carried out in defiance of international law and Israel’s own Supreme Court, including summary executions of terrorism suspects who could have been detained.
Kamm is presently serving a four and a half-year prison sentence following a plea bargain in which she admitted to possession and transfer of classified documents.
The decision today marks a crucial milestone in a process that has been dragging on for more than two years, as prosecutors considered the implications of indicting a journalist for doing something well established in his trade. Almost every journalist with claims to be anything but a stenographer for the army spokesman has held onto classified information – written or otherwise – that was received outside official channels, without authorisation.
Although Blau, in the early days of the investigation into the leak, had already given over to the state all the documents he used to publish the story on summary executions, the state demanded the rest of the cache. During the investigation, Blau spent time in political exile in London, waiting while his lawyers negotiated with the state the terms of a deal under which he would not be prosecuted. Once the deal was struck and Blau did his part, however, the state got greedy, and demanded full access his entire archive, amassed over a decade of investigative work. Then it said it might prosecute him anyway. Blau remained in limbo, his ability to work severely curtailed: few sources would go out on a limb for a journalist likely to be tightly monitored by the security agencies. He only began writing regularly a few months ago, publishing a few stories on the behind the scenes workings of the Israeli right, mostly through deft use of freedom of information requests.
Obtaining and retaining classified information is the bread-and-butter of a civilian journalists monitoring the country’s most powerful and insulated institution – the military. Although Israel has no laws to protect journalists, in most cases (barring one prosecution concerning the revelation of cooperation between the Israeli and Morrocan intelligence agencies half a century ago, and an attempt to prosecute a senior military correspondent after the Gulf War for revealing the regrettable fact the much-lauded “Patriot” missiles failed to intercept a single SCUD), the state has not gone after journalists for doing something so essential to their work – until now. [Continue reading…]
Gaddafi’s torture centers continue
Jamie Dettmer writes: Najat Taweel’s jet-black eyes fill with tears as she describes seeing her jailed brother, Abdul Taweel, shortly after his arrest. The Libyan mother of three had managed to talk her way into Tripoli’s notorious Ain Zara prison where 29-year-old Abdul was being held, charged with killing a fellow revolutionary this past February. Najat, 41, holds up photographs she says a fellow prisoner took of her brother, using a smuggled mobile phone. The pictures show a man whose back is covered with deep bruises and ugly wounds. Najat, 41, says Abdul told her he had signed a confession, but only because he couldn’t take the beatings anymore—and because his interrogators had threatened to rape and kill his family.
Libyan revolutionaries captured and killed Muammar Gaddafi more than seven months ago, but the dictator’s brutal tactics and antidemocratic ways live after him. Human-rights workers say that’s true not only within the high walls of the dictator’s former Ain Zara torture center but at other jails and penitentiaries across the country. Abdul is among at least 20 Ain Zara inmates whose relatives accuse guards of subjecting detainees to severe and regular beatings with everything from fists to sticks, metal rods, and chains. Family members say some of the prisoners have been repeatedly beaten on their genitalia, a form of punishment that—in addition to being excruciatingly painful—could leave its victims infertile. Others, according to relatives, have been tortured with Taser-style electroshock weapons.
Part of the problem may be that the country’s transitional government is only gradually managing to assert its authority over the patchwork of rival militias that overthrew the Gaddafi regime. Ain Zara remained under the control of one of those militias until less than four months ago. At the Feb. 2 handover ceremony, the facility’s new director—himself a former political prisoner at Ain Zara under the dictatorship—promised that the prison would break from its dark past and shake off its grisly reputation. “We no longer hit the detainees,” Burawi al-Guebaili declared, and he boasted of improvements such as hot meals and stalls with doors being added in the restrooms. Since then, journalists and human-rights investigators have visited the prison, but they have not been given the opportunity to speak alone with the 50 or so accused Gaddafi loyalists held there or any of the other inmates. [Continue reading…]
Video: Yemen activists say torture continues
Nothing’s too highly classified to stop it serving Obama 2012
If Bradley Manning ever gets a chance to read two new books — Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, by Daniel Klaidman, and Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, by David E Sanger — he’ll be wondering: how do these guys get away with it? In other words, how can top government officials reveal highly classified information to prominent journalists who then use this information to publish what will likely become best-selling books and these major breaches of secrecy take place without anyone even getting a slap on the wrists?
Of course Manning and everyone else already knows the answer: this administration like all its predecessors has no compunction about revealing secrets whenever these revelations serve the administration’s interests.
Obama’s secret wars and his comfort in the role of chief assassin aren’t secrets because these revelations will supposedly improve his chances of getting re-elected. The Obama 2012 campaign is determined that when it comes to national security issues, Mitt Romney and the GOP will never freely be provided with opportunities to cast this president as insufficiently tough. Neither is it conceivable that any Republican will ever accuse Obama of being too tough on terrorism or Iran.
So Klaidman and Sanger’s books seem to be coming out conveniently timed to help frame the general election. Earlier this week the New York Times presented the most detailed account thus far made available about Obama’s hands-on approach to drone warfare, and today we are getting a kind of companion piece on Obama’s hands-on approach to cyberwarfare.
The speculation about the Stuxnet computer worm is over: it was a U.S. operation with Israel as a junior partner — the operation was called Olympic Games. And when Stuxnet went out of control and started spreading around the world, some in the administration were swift to assign blame:
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.”
The idea that the Israelis needed to be kept on a leash is really a side note in the general narrative here. The overarching story is that Obama took on two policies that had been initiated by George Bush — the use of drones to assassinate suspected terrorists, and the use of cyberwarfare to disable Iran’s nuclear program — and he showed more daring and imagination than Bush and proved himself not merely another wartime president, but a president dedicated to advancing America’s position as the most advanced war-fighting nation in the world.
At the same time, Obama is presented ambiguously as a commander disinclined to initiate. The portrait appears intended to convey an amalgam of boldness and caution.
Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons — even under the most careful and limited circumstances — could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks.
“We discussed the irony, more than once,” one of his aides said. Another said that the administration was resistant to developing a “grand theory for a weapon whose possibilities they were still discovering.” Yet Mr. Obama concluded that when it came to stopping Iran, the United States had no other choice.
If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.
The problem with Obama’s lead-from-behind approach is that he is setting precedents in the use, for instance, of assassinations and cyberwarfare, where not in spite of but because they are not being enshrined in an Obama doctrine, these precedents seem even more likely to become standard practice — they will not be seen as Obama’s way but instead unquestioningly accepted as the American way.
Video: Is a ‘new’ al-Qaeda posing a bigger threat?
America’s spy state: How the telecoms sell out your privacy
David Rosen writes: You need to know one simple truth: you have no privacy with regard to your electronic communications.
Nothing you do online, via a wireline telephone or over a wireless device is outside the reach of government security agencies and private corporations. Your ostensible personal communication — whether a phone call, an email, a search, visiting a website, a credit card purchase, a 140 character Tweet, a movie download or a Facebook friending — is a public commodity, subject to the dictates of the security state and market opportunists.
Corporate surveillance has begun to raise consumer, Congressional and regulatory concerns – a major case, Amnesty v. Clapper, is now before the Supreme Court. One can only wonder why it is not an issue in this year’s election?
Corporate spying takes a variety of forms. GPS tracking over a wireless device is widespread. Google’s efforts to commercialize its users’ keystrokes resulted in a $25,000 fine from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Potentially more consequential, a growing chorus of criticism over its recently introduced data-harvesting program seems to have contributed to a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation of Google; the FTC retained Beth Wilkinson, a high-powered outside counsel, to oversee a possible anti-trust prosecution of the company. On March 1st, Google introduced a new program that collects user data from its 60 services. Google stores “cookies” (i.e., code that compiles a record of an individual’s web browsing history) on a growing number of communications devices, whether a home PC, tablet, smartphone and a growing number of TV sets. These cookies track every website a person visits or function s/he uses. As the New York Times wrote, “The case has the potential to be the biggest showdown between regulators and Silicon Valley since the government took on Microsoft 14 years ago.
The surveillance state is a multi-headed hydra. Corporate spying is intimately linked to the surveillance state, an omnipresent system consisting of federal, state and local security agencies. This spying system is made up of many of the leading private telecommunications and Internet companies working closely with the Department of Justice (DoJ), NSA, FBI, DHS, FCC and still other entities. This increasingly integrated federal system is complemented by an ever-growing army of state and local police “intelligence” agencies. Individual entities work either on their own, together with others and/or with private companies, many that financially benefit from commercial data harvesting. [Continue reading…]
Video: Pakistan — Imran Khan: Next man in?
Paul Fussell: The culture of war
Energy assets in front line of cyber war
Reuters reports: Global energy infrastructure is more vulnerable than ever in an escalating cyber war thanks to “sons of Stuxnet” electronic missiles, which can be created from the virus designed to sabotage Iran’s nuclear programme.
Cyber espionage is on the rise, with Chinese hackers stealing field data and cutting-edge technology from energy companies around the world since at least 2009, according to leading security firm McAfee (part of Intel Corp ).
But the biggest threat to everything from power grids to digital oilfields may come from malware based on the Stuxnet worm, widely thought to have been sponsored by western government agencies, security experts say.
Cyber weapons like Stuxnet that can take control of plants appear to be more of an operational danger than the recently-discovered Flame virus, which seems designed to gather data.
“Stuxnet really showed people you could do this, that is the problem. I cannot imagine any major government agency not developing an offensive capability,” Eric Byres, a leading authority on critical infrastructure security, told Reuters.
Byres, who advises governments and multinationals on cyber security, said government agencies could seek to infiltrate energy infrastructure in case of political tension. “That is one of the risks, that we are weaponizing our entire energy industry, or leaving weapons inside it, just in case.”
Governments are concerned that energy and communications networks would be the first victims of any conflict with a cyber-savvy aggressor.
“It is believed that would be part of any form of warfare – that they would take out private sector infrastructures as part of knocking out a country,” said Paul Dorey, who managed BP’s digital security until 2008 and is now professor of information security at the University of London.
The stable relationship between the United States, Russia and China, means there seems little chance of they will try to disrupt one another’s energy networks any time soon.
But Iran has been bombarded with cyber bugs during its intense nuclear standoff with the west, with the virus known as Flame detected in April and a worm called Duqu, designed to gather intelligence on industrial infrastructure for future attacks, found last year.
Was Flame virus that invaded Iran’s computer networks made in USA?
NBC News reports: As the United Nations and Iran warn that the newly discovered Flame computer virus may be the most potent weapon of its kind, U.S. computer security experts tell NBC News that the virus bears the hallmarks of a U.S. cyber espionage operation, specifically that of the super-secret National Security Agency.
The Flame virus, which is intended to gather intelligence — not destroy equipment or data, as was the case with the notorious Stuxnet virus — is too sophisticated to be the work of another country, said one U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It was U.S.,” said the official, who acknowledged having no first-hand knowledge of how the virus operates or was introduced into the Iranian computers.
The U.S. was also believed to have a hand in the creation and insertion of the Stuxnet virus, which targeted Iran’s uranium-enriching centrifuges.
The newly discovered Flame virus essentially “colonizes” the targeted computers, giving hackers control over critical data stored on them, according to cybersecurity experts who spoke with NBC News.
U.S. intelligence officials declined to discuss the virus. “We have no comment,” said one. Israeli officials, suspected in previous attacks, denied involvement.
ABC News reports: Clues in the code, such as the names of processes like “Beetlejuice” and “Platypus,” led some experts to believe it could have been written by native English-speakers, but others pointed out that English is a common coding language in many countries.
Roel Schouwenberg, a senior researcher at Kasperky Labs, told ABC News today some monikers used in coding mean nothing at all or are just inside jokes among the programmers.
“We are talking about a very high stakes operation here, covert cyber ops, but that doesn’t mean these guys aren’t just having fun sometimes,” he said.
Another possible clue in the code, Schouwenberg said, is that even though the program’s structure and capabilities are very different, Flame shares some sophisticated techniques and geographical targets with another infamous cyber weapon, Stuxnet. Stuxnet was an offensive cyber weapon that was only discovered in 2010 after it had reportedly infected and caused physical damage to an Iranian nuclear facility.
Schouwenberg said Kaspersky Labs is operating under the theory that Stuxnet and Flame were created by different development teams but likely under the direction from the same backer and with access to each other’s work. A researcher with the U.S.-based cyber firm Symantec told ABC News that scenario was a “definite” possibility and in its report Crysys said it could not be ruled out.
Iraq’s ‘kingmaker’ will back no confidence vote in Maliki
Middle East Online reports: Influential Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said on Wednesday that his parliamentary bloc would back a motion of no confidence in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki if that gave it the support of a majority of MPs.
In the latest twist in a political crisis that has dogged Iraq ever since US troops completed a pullout in December, Sadr denied that he opposed moves by MPs of the Sunni-backed Iraqiya faction to bring down the Shiite premier.
“This is not true,” Sadr said in a written answer to a question from one of his followers.
“I promised my partners that if they got 124 votes, I will complete the 164 votes,” he added, referring to the 40 MPs who belong to his parliamentary bloc.
Under the Iraqi constitution, a no confidence motion can be put before parliament either by the president or by 50 MPs. To pass, it must be approved by an absolute majority in the 325-seat parliament.