Manal al-Sharif: fighting against gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia


Guy Adams interviews Manal al-Sharif, the Saudi Arabian woman who became famous around the world last year after posting on YouTube an eight-minute video of her steering a car through the streets of the city of Khobar, railing as she went against the misogyny of laws that make it illegal for women in Saudi Arabia to drive.

We meet in Norway, where she has just given a barnstorming speech to the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual gathering of global human rights activists. A film of her extraordinarily moving presentation, which received an ovation, hit YouTube last week. A quarter of a million people have already watched.

“After I was invited to speak here in Oslo, I asked for four days off and my company refused,” she says of her sacking. “My boss called me and said, ‘If you are going to talk at another conference, you could lose your job. You are not allowed to go. We don’t want our name to be associated with you’.”

Ms Sharif went anyway and, at 33, now finds herself jobless and homeless (her flat was owned by Aramco). A lesser woman might feel ground down by that pressure but, looking impressive and poised in her very un-Saudi business attire, she seems energised instead. In a hotel lobby, she angrily rattles through the daily indignities of life in a country which, despite her university education and high-flying CV, forces her to live according to a set of ultra-conservative Islamic protocols which hark back to the Dark Ages.

The lot of Saudi women is shaped by Wahhabism, the most unbending form of the Muslim faith, she explains. The Koran is effectively her nation’s constitution and gender apartheid is a cultural obsession. Shops, restaurants, schools and workplaces are sexually segregated, while strict rules, enforced by shadowy religious police, govern every aspect of a woman’s existence.

“I’m a single mother and I’m 33 but it’s hard to even rent my own apartment without getting my father to sign a piece of paper saying he gives permission,” she says. “I went to renew my passport the other day and they told me to come back with my male guardian. That is life, for a Saudi woman; wherever we go, whatever we achieve, we are the property of a man.”

A Saudi woman who is beaten or raped by her husband and goes to the police must bring that husband along to formally “identify” her, she adds. Saudi women are forbidden from playing competitive sports and are not due to get the vote until 2015.

The irony of Ms Sharif’s life is that she has a deeply conservative background. Born in 1979, she grew up in Mecca, the holiest of holy cities. Her working-class home had separate entrances for men and women. As a child, she remembers burning her brother’s pop cassettes in the oven after mullahs told her music came from “Satan’s flute”.

Later, at university in Jeddah, her class of 60 women was taught computer science in a segregated campus, by professors lecturing from remote locations via closed-circuit television. In keeping with convention, she wore a vast black niqab and long gloves.

Her life changed, almost overnight, on 9/11, orchestrated by her countryman Osama bin Laden. “The extremists told us it was God’s punishment to America,” she recalls. But on the news that evening, she was sickened by footage of office workers jumping from the twin towers. “I said to myself, ‘something is wrong. There is no religion on earth that can accept such mercilessness, such cruelty.'”

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In Spain ‘there is no future’

El País reports: Con la que está cayendo…” This expression – which literally means “With this downpour,” but metaphorically is used as “With things as bad as they are” – keeps cropping up in conversation, as Spaniards spend their days with one eye on the stock market and the other on the risk premium – “which seems like a member of the family right now,” according to the sociologist Daniel Kaplún, an expert on public opinion.

It’s been like this for many months, and nobody knows when it will end. The economic and financial crisis has brought with it a cloud of social pessimism; a mantle of gloom; a lack of expectations that is cutting deep into the average citizen’s state of mind. There truly seems to be no way out.

“There is no future, and therefore no present either,” says sociology professor Enrique Gil Calvo, from Madrid’s Complutense University.

“We’ve gone from concern to anguish,” adds his colleague José Juan Toharia, from the capital’s Autónoma University. La que está cayendo reflects a collective feeling and individual emotions, as well. The triple whammy of anxiety-anger-depression can easily shoot out of control, warns the psychologist Antonio Cano. General practitioners have already noticed it.

Is there a way out, given the lack of ways out?

“We’re experiencing a situation of generalized fear, and rarely were there so many reasons for it: the economy is in free-fall, and jobless claims have grown from 1.8 million to 5.6 million in just four years. Besides, just when we thought we were getting out of a V-shaped crisis, it got worse, and it turns out that it was actually a W,” says Gil Calvo.

This has created a “nightmare” feeling ever since the spending cuts were first introduced in 2010. The bad dream comes with a sense of helplessness that feeds a “general despondency.”

“There is no cure and nobody there to provide a cure. The Socialist Party failed. The Popular Party [PP] is failing too, and there are no firefighters left,” adds Gil Calvo.

And then there is “the Friday syndrome,” says the psychiatrist Julio Bobes. As in, let’s see what cuts the government makes this time at Friday’s weekly Cabinet meeting.

The main victim is the middle class, essentially “those who have lost their job or their source of income, such as small business owners and the self-employed, including those who are unable to collect the money they’re owed. Many of them are on the verge of social exclusion, or already there,” says Kaplún, who calculates that these individuals make up “over a third of the population.” [Continue reading…]

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FBI quietly forms secretive Net-surveillance unit

CNET reports: The FBI has recently formed a secretive surveillance unit with an ambitious goal: to invent technology that will let police more readily eavesdrop on Internet and wireless communications.

The establishment of the Quantico, Va.-based unit, which is also staffed by agents from the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency, is a response to technological developments that FBI officials believe outpace law enforcement’s ability to listen in on private communications.

While the FBI has been tight-lipped about the creation of its Domestic Communications Assistance Center, or DCAC — it declined to respond to requests made two days ago about who’s running it, for instance — CNET has pieced together information about its operations through interviews and a review of internal government documents.

DCAC’s mandate is broad, covering everything from trying to intercept and decode Skype conversations to building custom wiretap hardware or analyzing the gigabytes of data that a wireless provider or social network might turn over in response to a court order. It’s also designed to serve as a kind of surveillance help desk for state, local, and other federal police. [Continue reading…]

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Long-term uncertainty remains in nuclear talks with Iran

Tony Karon writes: Anyone banking on a big-win breakthrough in Wednesday’s nuclear talks with Iran will likely find themselves in the same boat as investors who bet on an instant surge in the Facebook stock price last week. If there’s value to be found in nuclear negotiations with Iran, then — like an investment in Facebook — it’s likely to emerge over time. And in both cases, even the long-term outcome remains uncertain.

After weeks of upbeat assessments, Western officials seemed to tamp down expectations ahead of the meeting that got underway in Baghdad on Wednesday. “If we talk substantively on elements of a deal and agree to meet again in three weeks, Baghdad will have been a success,” a senior U.S. official told al-Monitor on Monday. The spin ahead of the talks in recent weeks has been positive — almost too positive for diplomats, who naturally prefer diminished expectations. At home, Iran’s leaders are proclaiming a great victory in the willingness of Western powers to negotiate while Iran continues to enrich uranium, suggesting that they’re preparing their public for a compromised deal that will be sold as a great victory. The Western narrative paints Iran’s willingness to negotiate as a consequence of ever tightening economic sanctions, implying that such pressure must be maintained to curb its nuclear ambitions.

There are some positive signs: Sunday’s talks in Tehran between IAEA chief Yukiya Amano and Iran’s nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili appear to have yielded an in-principle agreement, not yet inked or finalized, to expand the nuclear-watchdog agency’s access to sensitive sites in Iran. Amano, who has taken a tough line in dealing with Iran, was upbeat, expecting a signed agreement “quite soon.” But the IAEA talks are the undercard to the negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 (the U.S., France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China). Even if they improve the atmosphere for the Baghdad meeting, a breakdown between Iran and the P5+1 would likely imperil any progress made by the IAEA.

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Why nuclear weapons programs often fail on their own — and why Iran’s might, too

It is widely assumed that the only things standing in the way of Iran developing nuclear weapons are either external pressures (sanctions, sabotage, assassinations, the threat of military strikes, and the constraints imposed by the NPT), or that Iran has yet to decide to apply its nuclear know-how to the creation of weapons.

Jacques E.C. Hymans suggests a third obstacle which is an authoritarian political culture that undermines the pursuit of such a goal.

Nuclear research and development organizations depend heavily on intense commitment, creative thinking, and a shared spirit of cooperation among large numbers of highly educated scientific and technical workers. To elicit this positive behavior, management needs to respect their professional autonomy and facilitate their efforts, and not simply order them around. Respect for professional autonomy was instrumental to the brilliant successes of the earliest nuclear weapons projects. Even in Stalin’s Soviet Union, as the historian David Holloway has written, “it is striking how the apparatus of the police state fused with the physics community to build the bomb. . . . [The physics community’s] autonomy was not destroyed by the creation of the nuclear project. It continued to exist within the administrative system that was set up to manage the project.”

By contrast, most rulers of recent would-be nuclear states have tended to rely on a coercive, authoritarian management approach to advance their quest for the bomb, using appeals to scientists’ greed and fear as the primary motivators. That coercive approach is a major mistake, because it produces a sense of alienation in the workers by removing their sense of professionalism. As a result, nuclear programs lose their way. Moreover, underneath these bad management choices lie bad management cultures. In developing states with inadequate civil service protections, every decision tends to become politicized, and state bureaucrats quickly learn to keep their heads down. Not even the highly technical matters faced by nuclear scientific and technical workers are safe from meddling politicians. The result is precisely the reverse of what the politicians intend: not heightened efficiency but rather a mixture of bureaucratic sloth, corruption, and endless blame shifting.

Although it is difficult to measure the quality of state institutions precisely, the historical record strongly indicates that the more a state has conformed to the professional management culture generally found in developed states, the less time it has needed to get its first bomb and the lower its chances of failure. Conversely, the more a state has conformed to the authoritarian management culture typically found in developing states, the more time it has needed to get its first bomb and the higher its chances of failure.

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Egypt’s revolution won’t end with the presidential election

Jack Shenker writes: The apartment blocks on my street in downtown Cairo have accommodated many cycles of Egypt’s political tumult in the past 18 months.

A stone’s throw from Tahrir Square, they have been enveloped in teargas, pockmarked by Molotov cocktails, pressed into use as urban barricades by both revolutionaries and pro-Mubarak militias, and provided the backdrop for some of the post-Mubarak military generals’ most violent assaults on the citizens they swore to protect. They gaze over the gardens of the Egyptian Museum – a regular home for one of the army’s pop-up torture and detention centres where those still daring to rally for meaningful change have been brutally acquainted with the realities of a junta-curated “transition” to democratic rule.

This month, my buildings’ latest revolutionary iteration was unveiled – two giant billboards sporting beaming mugshots of Ahmed Shafiq: former Mubarak-era prime minister, current presidential candidate and feloul (“regime remnant”) figurehead par excellence. The elections campaign’s last batch of polls suggests Shafiq could emerge triumphant, sounding what many in the media would describe as the final death knell to the “liberal revolutionaries” of Tahrir who have been steadily battered – by guns at the hands of the state security forces, and by public delegitimisation at the hands of the state media – since those heady images of collective protest conquered global TV screens.

If Shafiq fails to win, the argument goes, then the similarly regime-tarnished former foreign minister Amr Moussa may squeak over the line, or the victor may emerge from one of the two Islamist camps consisting of Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Mursi and a Brotherhood breakaway alternative, Abdel Munim Aboul Fotouh. Any of the above options are said to be a sad body-blow to the spirit of Tahrir, but the very existence of a democratic electoral process is itself trumpeted as a conclusive success for the revolution.

There are a million empirical holes that could be picked in this chronicle – the only results we have so far (from Egyptians voting abroad) put Moussa and Shafiq in fourth and fifth places respectively, while the lazy insistence of characterising Aboul Fotouh as an unreconstructed Islamist (and hence automatically anti-Tahrir) bears little relation to the substance of his support on the ground. But away from the specifics, is this general evaluation even the best way of conceptualising the revolution? Or is the battle for the presidency merely the institutional tip of a far deeper revolutionary iceberg, just one site of contest and dissent among many? [Continue reading…]

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Egyptians cast their votes on historic day

The National reports: Today, and tomorrow, the buzz that has scorched street corners, cafes and offices of Egypt for months will culminate in the country’s first free elections for president.

The man who takes the helm at this political transition, from sixty years of autocratic rule by military men to a representative democracy, will forever stand as a symbol of the popular uprising that forced the abdication of President Hosni Mubarak.

“This is a foundational election in the creation of Egypt’s first democratic government,” said Lisa Anderson, a political-science professor and the president of the American University in Cairo (AUC). “Like any democratic government, it will be flawed. But what’s important about this is the process of creating an accountable president and parliament … The biggest change is that Egyptians are realising they have a responsibility as citizens to elect a leader.”

The campaign ignited a nationwide debate about Egypt’s future. Candidates have criss-crossed the country in past weeks in an unprecedented exercise in democracy. There have been countless media appearances and sponsored viewings of campaign videos in public squares.

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What do Egyptians want?

The 2012 Public Opinion Survey in Egypt was conducted from May 4-10 by the Brookings Institution.

Attitudes toward the United States

Attitudes toward the United States continue to be unfavorable (85%).

Asked to name the two steps by the United States that would improve the views of the US the most, 66% identified brokering Middle East peace and establishing a Palestinian state, 46% identified stopping economic and military aid to Israel, and 44% identified withdrawal of American forces from the Arabian Peninsula. Only seven percent identified withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan as one of the two top steps, 12% identified an American push to spread democracy in the Middle East, and 18% identified providing more economic assistance to the region.

Although Egyptians in the past year have been understandably preoccupied with their own political and economic situation and have not been paying as much attention to the American elections as usual, and they probably know less about the republican candidates for president, that has not prevented them from giving their opinions. Presented with a choice between President Obama and likely Republican candidate Mitt Romney, 73% said they preferred Romney, and only 25% chose Obama. It is unlikely that most Egyptians know much about Romney, and the choice is more likely to be an expression of disappointment with Obama. When Obama first came to office in 2009, even before his important speech in Cairo, Egyptian public opinion of the President was more favorable than unfavorable. This contrasted with Israeli public opinion, which was more suspicious of Obama. Since then, there has been a reversal of fortune, where in a poll we conducted in Israel last February, Israeli Jews expressed preference for Obama over all the leading Republican candidates (although his lead over Romney was within the margin of error).

Attitudes toward Israel

Respondents were almost equally divided among those who would like to see Egypt maintain its peace treaty with Israel (46%) and those who would like to see it cancelled (44%). 10% would like to see the treaty amended. With regard to the prospects of lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, 55% indicated that they don’t believe this will ever happen, while only five percent said it will happen in the next five years, and 40% said it is inevitable, but it will take more time.

Attitudes toward Iran and its Nuclear Program

When asked in an open question to identify the two countries that posed the biggest threat to them, 97% included Israel in that list of two, 80% included the United States, and 20% included Iran. While Iran remains far behind Israel and the United States as a perceived threat, which is consistent with our polls over the past several years, those who identified Iran as one of the two biggest threats have increased from 8% in 2009 and 15% in October 2011 to 20% in the current poll.

If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, 61% of respondents say they would like Egypt to build its own weapons program, while 32% want Egypt to push for a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East that includes Iran, Israel, and Arabs. Even if Iran does not build nuclear weapons, but Israel retains its own, 49% of respondents say they would like Egypt to build its own, while 45% say they prefer pushing for a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East.

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Our universe could be merely one of billions

Newsweek: “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in creating the world.”

That’s how Albert Einstein, in his characteristically poetic way, asked whether our universe is the only possible universe.

The reference to God is easily misread, as Einstein’s question wasn’t theological. Instead, Einstein wanted to know whether the laws of physics necessarily yield a unique universe—ours—filled with galaxies, stars, and planets. Or instead, like each year’s assortment of new cars on the dealer’s lot, could the laws allow for universes with a wide range of different features? And if so, is the majestic reality we’ve come to know—through powerful telescopes and mammoth particle colliders—the product of some random process, a cosmic roll of the dice that selected our features from a menu of possibilities? Or is there a deeper explanation for why things are the way they are?

In Einstein’s day, the possibility that our universe could have turned out differently was a mind-bender that physicists might have bandied about long after the day’s more serious research was done. But recently, the question has shifted from the outskirts of physics to the mainstream. And rather than merely imagining that our universe might have had different properties, proponents of three independent developments now suggest that there are other universes, separate from ours, most made from different kinds of particles and governed by different forces, populating an astoundingly vast cosmos.

The multiverse, as this vast cosmos is called, is one of the most polarizing concepts to have emerged from physics in decades, inspiring heated arguments between those who propose that it is the next phase in our understanding of reality, and those who claim that it is utter nonsense, a travesty born of theoreticians letting their imaginations run wild.

So which is it? And why should we care? Grasping the answer requires that we first come to grips with the big bang. [Continue reading…]

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How did genocide denial become a doctrine of the internationalist left?

George Monbiot writes: The term genocide conjures up attempts to kill an entire people: the German slaughter of the Jews or the Herero, the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians, the near-extermination of the Native Americans. But the identity of the crime does not depend on its scale or success: genocide means “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

Though, in 1995, the women and children of Srebrenica were first removed from the killing grounds by Bosnian Serb troops, though the 8,000 men and boys they killed were a small proportion of the Bosnian Muslim population, it meets the definition. So the trial of Ratko Mladic, the troops’ commander, which began last week, matters. Whatever one thinks of the even-handedness of international law, and though it remains true that men who commissioned or caused the killing of greater numbers of people (George Bush and Tony Blair for example) have not been brought to justice and are unlikely to be, every prosecution of this kind makes the world a better place.

So attempts to downplay or dismiss this crime matter too, especially when they emerge from the unlikely setting of the internationalist left. I’m using this column to pursue a battle which might be hopeless and which many of you might regard as obscure. Perhaps I have become obsessed, but it seems to me to be necessary. Tacitly on trial beside Mladic in the Hague is a set of ideas: in my view the left’s most disturbing case of denial and doublethink since the widespread refusal to accept that Stalin had engineered a famine in the Ukraine.

I first raised this issue a year ago, when I sharply criticised a book by two luminaries of the left, Edward Herman and David Peterson. The Politics of Genocide seeks to downplay or dismiss both the massacre of Bosniaks at Srebrenica in 1995 and the genocide of Tutsis committed by Hutu militias in Rwanda in 1994. Their claims are extraordinary: that the cause of death of the “vast majority” of the Bosniaks at Srebrenica remains “undetermined”; that rather than 800,000 or more Tutsis being killed by Hutu militias in Rwanda, “the great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million”, while members of the Hutus’ Interahamwe militia were the “actual victims” of genocide.

What has changed since then is that the movement to which I thought I belonged has closed ranks: against attempts to challenge this revisionism, against the facts, in effect against the victims of these genocides. My attempts to pursue this question number among the most dispiriting experiences of my working life. [Continue reading…]

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America’s permanent state of war

Peter Maass writes: The phrase “war on terror” is rarely heard these days. Our fight in Iraq ended last year with the pullout of the remaining troops. Combat forces are set to be withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2014, and their fade-away has been highlighted by the fact that more private contractors are getting killed in the country than GIs. President Obama has declared, with apparent justification, that the end of our post-9/11 wars is near. Quite soon, Dover Air Force Base, where the fallen are brought home, will no longer have its grim intake of Americans who have seen the true end of war. The flow of flag-draped coffins ceased long ago; although Obama overturned a Bush-era ban on photos of them, they have been infrequently shown in newspapers or even on the web. No one cares to look.

That does not mean we’re done with war, however. There is talk of attacking Iran and Syria; American forces all but led the NATO assault in Libya, drone strikes are taking place from Pakistan to Somalia and Yemen, prisoners continue to be held at Guantánamo Bay, a shadowy game of cyber-war rages around the globe and the US government, in the name of national security, is prosecuting more whistleblowers than ever before while accumulating (or trying to accumulate) wide powers to conduct domestic surveillance of computers and cellphones. The paradox is that although war is waning in the classic configuration of brigades fighting an enemy on foreign shores, we are not rid of its specter, burdens, threats, costs and restrictions. What should we make of wartime that has the appearance of peacetime?

Mary Dudziak’s new book, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, is a crucial document. Dudziak, a legal historian at the University of Southern California, argues that we are experiencing “not a time without war, but instead a time in which war does not bother everyday Americans.” Her smooth foray into legal and political history reveals that in not just the past decade but the past century, wartime has become a more or less permanent feature of the American experience, though we fail to recognize it. She doesn’t say so explicitly, but we are experiencing a reverse Orwellian situation, in which the state, rather than elevating war to perpetuate itself, obscures war to perpetuate itself.

Dudziak assembles an intellectual Rubik’s Cube, playing with ideas of time, law, killing and politics, and arranging them into a pattern that all but eliminates the distinctions we long assumed to have existed between war and peace. “We tend to believe that there are two kinds of time, wartime and peacetime, and history consists of moving from one kind of time to the next,” she writes. “Built into the very essence of our idea of wartime is the assumption that war is temporary…. When we look at the full time line of American military conflicts, however, including the ‘small wars’ and the so-called forgotten wars, there are not many years of peacetime. This shows us that war is not an exception to normal peacetime, but instead an enduring condition.” [Continue reading…]

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Hizbollah appeals for calm after Syria kidnapping

The Associated Press reports: The leader of Lebanon’s Shiite militant group Hizbollah has appealed for calm after people blocked roads and burned tires in Beirut to protest the kidnapping of 11 Lebanese Shiites in neighboring Syria.

Tuesday’s abductions in Syria’s northern Aleppo province threatened to ignite dangerous sectarian tensions and fueled fears that Lebanon is getting drawn into the chaos next door.

The Lebanese were on their way home from a religious pilgrimage in Iran when Syrian rebels intercepted their vehicles, Syria’s state-run SANA news agency said. The rebels abducted the 11 men and a Syrian driver. The women were released.

Lebanese security officials confirmed the kidnapping.

As the news of the kidnappings spread, residents of the southern suburbs of Beirut, a Shiite area, took to the streets and burned tires and blocked roads in protest. The leader of Hizbollah, a strong ally of the Syrian regime, appealed for calm and warned his followers against revenge attacks targeting Syrians.

“This is strictly prohibited,” Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised speech.

He said the Lebanese government must press for the pilgrims’ release.

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Palestinian writer says Syrian detention facilities are ‘human slaughterhouses’

The Associated Press reports: A prominent Palestinian writer who was jailed in Syria for nearly three weeks described the facilities as “human slaughterhouses,” saying security agents beat detainees with batons, crammed them into stinking cells and tied them to beds at night.

Salameh Kaileh, 56, was arrested April 24 on suspicion of printing leaflets calling for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who is fighting a 15-month-old uprising against his rule. Kaileh’s story offers a rare inside glimpse into the conditions faced by detainees held by the country’s feared security services.

“It was hell on earth,” Kaileh told The Associated Press on Sunday, nearly a week after Syrian forces released him and deported him to Jordan. Speaking at his friend’s home in an Amman suburb, Kaileh had bluish-red bruises on his legs, which he said were the result of beatings with wooden batons that were studded with pins and nails.

“I felt I was going to die under the brutal, savage and continuous beating of the interrogators, who tied me to ropes hung from the ceiling,” said Kaileh, a soft-spoken man with a shock of white hair who appeared frail, barely able to stand on his feet.

Born in Birzeit, West Bank, Kaileh has suffered under the regime in Damascus before. He was imprisoned by the Syrian government in 1992 for eight years because of his alleged links to underground Syrian communist and leftist opposition groups. A well-known leftist, he has written books on subjects ranging from Marxism to Arab nationalism.

This time, he was held in at least four detention centers after security forces arrested him at his home in Damascus, the Syrian capital where he’s lived for more than 30 years.

Kaileh denied printing the leaflets, which he said angered the regime because they read: “For Palestine to be free, Syria’s regime has to fall.”

Syria often has touted its support of the Palestinian cause to boost its credentials as a bastion of Arab nationalism.

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World not doing enough for Syria, says Turkey’s president

AFP reports: The international community is not doing enough to help resolve the Syrian crisis, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said Tuesday as he urged an orderly transition to democracy.

“The international community as whole has so far performed poorly in providing an effective response to the crisis at hand,” Gul said in a public address following the NATO summit in Chicago.

Gul said Turkey is doing “all it can to alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people,” including hosting close to 25,000 Syrians who “fled from the regime’s campaign of violence.”

He deplored the fact that “scores of people are dying in pursuit of their rights and dignity” in Syria and said it is the responsibility of the international community to support the Syrian people’s journey to democracy.

“The six-point Annan Plan might still be the last chance for an orderly transition in Syria if it is urgently implemented in all its aspects, including an effective ceasefire, free political activity and exercise of democratic rights,” Gul told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

“Once this is achieved, I believe a relatively peaceful political transition can be reached in Syria.”

Turkey is “highly concerned” about nuclear proliferation and continues to call for the establishment of a “weapons of mass destruction free zone” which would include both Iran and Israel, Gul said.

The Associated Press reports: United States and NATO officials say the North Atlantic alliance has no intention of intervening militarily to quell violence in Syria.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder said members of the alliance continue to seek ways to pressure Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime so it abides by a peace plan brokered by special envoy Kofi Annan.

Reuters reports: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed concern on Monday that violence from the 14-month conflict in Syria could spread to neighbouring Lebanon, and reiterated his fear that the Syrian violence may erupt into a full-scale civil war.

In a readout of a meeting between Ban and new French President Francois Hollande on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Chicago, the U.N. press office wrote that Ban said the world is at “a pivotal moment in the search for a peaceful settlement to the crisis.”

Ban was “extremely troubled about the risk of an all-out civil war (in Syria) and was concerned about the outbreak of related violence in Lebanon,” the U.N. statement said.

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Drones, missiles and gunships: Welcome to the 2012 London Olympics

Dave Zirin writes: As many as 48,000 security forces. 13,500 troops. Surface-to-air missiles stationed on top of residential apartment buildings. A sonic weapon that disperses crowds by creating “head-splitting pain.” Unmanned drones peering down from the skies. A safe zone, cordoned off by an 18-kilometre electrified fence, ringed with trained agents and 55 teams of attack dogs.

One would be forgiven for thinking that these were the counter-insurgency tactics used by U.S. army bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. But instead of being used in a war zone, they in fact make up the very visible security apparatus in London for the 2012 Summer Olympics.

London, which has the most street cameras per capita of any city on Earth, has since the terror attacks of 7/7/05 been a city whose political leaders spare no expense to monitor its own citizens. But the Olympic operation goes above and beyond anything we’ve ever seen when a western democracy hosts the Games.

Not even China in 2008 used drone planes or ringed the proceedings with a massive, high-voltage fence. But here is London, preparing a counter-insurgency, and parking an aircraft carrier right in the Thames. Here is London adding “scanners, biometric ID cards, number-plate and facial-recognition CCTV systems, disease tracking systems, new police control centres and checkpoints.”

The number of troops will exceed the forces the U.K. has had in Afghanistan.

It’s not just the costs or the incredible invasion into people’s privacy. It’s the powers being given to police under the 2006 “London Olympic Games Act” which empowers not only the army and police, but also private security forces to deal with “security issues” using physical force. These “security issues” have been broadly defined to include everything from “terrorism” to peaceful protesters, to labour unions, to people selling bootleg Olympic products on the streets, to taking down any corporate presence that doesn’t have the Olympic seal of approval. To help them with the last part, there will be “brand protection teams” set loose around the city. These “teams” will also operate inside Olympic venues to make sure no one “wears clothes or accessories with commercial messages other than the manufacturers who are official sponsors.

And, as the Guardian reported: “Officers have powers to move on anyone considered to be engaged in anti-social behaviour, whether they are hanging around the train station, begging, soliciting, loitering in hoodies or deemed in any way to be causing a nuisance.”

Not to shock anyone, but there are no signs that any of the security apparatus will be dismantled once the Olympics are over. [Continue reading…]

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