On Iran, most Americans favor diplomacy but most American Jews favor war — corrected

Correction: As a reader pointed out, the report I linked to at Haaretz is from 2009. My mistake. The 66 percent American Jewish support for an Israeli attack on Iran comes from the 2009 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion conducted by the American Jewish Committee. The 2011 survey puts that level of support at 68 percent and this is in response to the question: If diplomacy and sanctions fail, would you support or oppose Israel taking military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons?

In a new University of Maryland poll of American public opinion, only 24 percent of those polled said they favor an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear program. A national poll of American Jews however, shows that 66 percent of them favor an Israeli attack on Iran.

In an indication that American Jews are out of sync with Israeli Jews, a poll conducted in Israel in November showed that only 43 percent favored an Israeli attack.

When it comes to American Jewish views on the creation of a Palestinian state, opinion is divided with 49 percent in favor and 41 percent against. However, 75 percent agree with the statement: “The goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel.”

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Former Bush officials under investigation for supporting terrorism

Michael Isikoff reports: Speaking firms representing ex-FBI Director Louis Freeh and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Hugh Shelton have received federal subpoenas as part of an expanding investigation into the source of payments to former top government officials who have publicly advocated removing an Iranian dissident group from the State Department list of terrorist groups, three sources familiar with the investigation told NBC News.

The investigation, being conducted by the Treasury Department, is focused on whether the former officials may have received funding, directly or indirectly, from the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK, thereby violating longstanding federal law barring financial dealings with terrorist groups. The sources, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, said that speaking fees given to the former officials total hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“This is about finding out where the money is coming from,” an Obama administration official familiar with the probe said. “This has been a source of enormous concern for a long time now. You have to ask the question, whether this is a prima facie case of material support for terrorism.”

Freeh and Shelton are among 40 former senior U.S. government officials who have participated in a public lobbying campaign – including appearing at overseas conferences and speaking at public rallies – aimed at persuading the U.S. government to remove the MEK from the terror list.

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Senators say Americans would be ‘stunned’ by Obama administration’s secret application of Patriot Act

The New York Times reports: For more than two years, a handful of Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee have warned that the government is secretly interpreting its surveillance powers under the Patriot Act in a way that would be alarming if the public — or even others in Congress — knew about it.

On Thursday, two of those senators — Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado — went further. They said a top-secret intelligence operation that is based on that secret legal theory is not as crucial to national security as executive branch officials have maintained.

The senators, who also said that Americans would be “stunned” to know what the government thought the Patriot Act allowed it to do, made their remarks in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. after a Justice Department official last month told a judge that disclosing anything about the program “could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States.”

The Justice Department has argued that disclosing information about its interpretation of the Patriot Act could alert adversaries to how the government collects certain intelligence. It is seeking the dismissal of two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits — by The New York Times and by the American Civil Liberties Union — related to how the Patriot Act has been interpreted.

The senators wrote that it was appropriate to keep specific operations secret. But, they said, the government in a democracy must act within publicly understood law so that voters “can ratify or reject decisions made on their behalf” — even if that “obligation to be transparent with the public” creates other challenges.

“We would also note that in recent months we have grown increasingly skeptical about the actual value of the ‘intelligence collection operation,’ ” they added. “This has come as a surprise to us, as we were initially inclined to take the executive branch’s assertions about the importance of this ‘operation’ at face value.”

The dispute centers on what the government thinks it is allowed to do under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, under which agents may obtain a secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing them to get access to any “tangible things” — like business records — that are deemed “relevant” to a terrorism or espionage investigation.

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The NSA is building the country’s biggest spy center targeting all communication everywhere

James Bamford writes: Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11—some began questioning the agency’s very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.

In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever. [Continue reading…]

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Assad emails: father-in-law gave advice from UK during crackdown

The Guardian reports: A Harley Street cardiologist has been acting as a close adviser to the president of Syria during his regime’s brutal crackdown on anti-government activists, according to a cache of what appear to be emails sent and received by Bashar al-Assad and his wife.

Dr Fawas Akhras, who is the father of Assad’s wife, Asma, used a private email channel to the Syrian leader to offer advice on how the regime should spin its suppression of the uprising, including how best to rebut graphic video footage appearing to show the torture of children by Syrian forces.

The 66-year-old west London-based consultant has until now been regarded as a modernising influence on his son-in-law. He is co-chair of the British Syrian Society, which has said it is “saddened and appalled at the violence and loss of life in Syria”, where more than 8,000 people are believed to have been killed since the uprising against Assad’s rule began a year ago.

But a collection of several thousand messages to and from the Assads’ private email accounts obtained by the Guardian appears to show that as the violence escalated in recent months, Akhras offered the Syrian president detailed political and media handling advice as well as moral support in dozens of emails direct to his personal inbox.

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Syria revolt enters second year as world stands feckless

Juan Cole writes: The world community has failed Syria, just as it failed Rwanda and the Congo, though the human toll in Syria is a fraction of those killed in the African events. Russia and China have used their veto to block any effective United Nations Security Council resolution that might lead to regime change. India has also, unlike the Arab League, opposed any call for President Bashar al-Assad, the Butcher of Homs, to step down.

Those on the left and in the libertarian movement who stridently condemned Arab League and NATO intervention in Libya (which forestalled massacres like the one we just saw in the Baba Amr district of Homs) have been silent about al-Assad’s predations and clueless as to what to do practically. Perhaps they do not care if indigenous dictators massacre indigenous protesters, as long as there is no *gasp* international intervention.

The Baath one-party police state, dominated at the top by the minority Allawite Shiite sect, has deployed armor and artillery to bombard city quarters without regard to civilian casualties. Thousands of innocent civilians are dead at regime hands. Some 200,000 Syrians have had to flee their homes. While defectors from the military have formed a Free Syrian Army that has attacked and ambushed the regular army, these attacks have formed a minor part of the violence. Likewise, bombings by “al-Qaeda,” Sunni Muslim radicals, have been few and far between. Mostly, the violence has stemmed from government troops sniping at peaceful protesters. The protests have often been big, and they have been persistent, but they have predominated in medium-sized and smaller cities away from the capital of Damascus. They are unable by themselves to cause the regime to fall.

Many of the protests are economic, not ideological. In much of rural Syria, a persistent drought has deprived farmers and urban food distributors of enough water. The Baath Party, which back in the 1970s was very good at dams and irrigation works, has been unable to get the water flowing, either because the drought is too severe or because the party has become corrupt and inefficient. Likewise in many of the protesting cities, there are many fairly recent labor migrants from the countryside, whose hopes for urban jobs have been disappointed by the world economic crisis since 2008. Many of the demonstrations have been in working class districts of central cities, suffering most from high unemployment. To dismiss these civilian crowds of workers and farmers as “Salafis” and “al-Qaeda” is bad social science and just regime propaganda.

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Did Israel provoke Gaza escalation to test Iron Dome?

Four days ago I suggested that the reason Israel assassinated the Popular Resistance Committee leader Zuhair Qaisi in Gaza may have had less to do with foiling an attack and much more to do with testing Iron Dome. Yousef at The Jerusalem Fund agrees, saying that a successful test of the missile defense system could go a long way to assuage the Israeli public’s fears about retaliation from Iran following an Israeli attack.

The greatest obstacle to Israeli public support for a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran is the belief that the consequences of the attack from Iran, Hezbollah and other factions like Islamic Jihad, would be too high a cost to bear.

What could the Israeli government do to change this perception? Well, a successful large scale live action test of the US funded Iron Dome would probably help, and assassinating a PRC militant would provoke the projectiles to trigger one.

In the glow of the test’s successful outcome, Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak didn’t even seem to think it was worth the effort to perpetuate the narrative that Qaisi had ever posed an imminent threat. After the militant leader’s assassination, Barak said: “it is not completely clear what the plan was and where, or if it had been foiled.”

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Gilad Shalit’s father: I would kidnap Israelis if I were Palestinian

The Guardian reports: The father of an Israeli soldier held in captivity for more than five years by Hamas has said he would kidnap Israeli soldiers if he were a Palestinian.

Noam Shalit, who announced earlier this year that he would be standing for the opposition Labour party in the next Israeli elections, has provoked outrage among the Israeli right with the comments. His son, Gilad, was released in a prisoner swap in October 2011.

Shalit added that the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Hamas militants was comparable to the techniques used by Israeli paramilitary fighters the Haganah against the British, arguing “we also kidnapped British soldiers when we were fighting for our freedom”.

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Victims of Kony2012 slam Invisible Children

The Guardian reports: It had been viewed more than 77m times around the world, but not by those who know the Joseph Kony best: his victims in northern Uganda.

That changed on Tuesday night when thousands flocked to watch Kony 2012, the video made by a US charity urging a grassroots campaign against the fugitive warlord that has gone viral.

The film was projected on to an ersatz cinema screen fashioned from a white sheet, held up by metal poles, in a town park. The reaction? Puzzlement, then anger, which boiled over into scuffles and stone-throwing that sent organisers fleeing for cover.

There was particular criticism of the Stop Kony campaign’s use of merchandise, such as bracelets and T-shirts, which victims said they find offensive.

“People were very angry about the film,” said Victor Ochen, director of a local charity, the African Youth Initiative Network (Ayinet), which arranged the screening. “They were all saying, ‘This is not about us, it does not reflect our lives’.”

Ochen said he had wanted to provide an opportunity for victims to see the film made by the charity Invisible Children, mindful that less than 2% of Ugandans have internet access.

The video, posted on YouTube on 5 March and narrated by one of Invisible Children’s founders, Jason Russell, had drawn the support of celebrities including George Clooney and Angelina Jolie, but provoked criticism for oversimplifying the conflict and not making clear that Kony was driven out of Uganda several years ago.

Before sunset on Tuesday two metal rods were hammered into dry dirt and grass and a white sheet hoisted to create an open-air cinema in the mayor’s gardens in the centre of Lira, 220 miles north of the capital, Kampala.

Word about the “premiere” spread on local radio, drawing a crowd on foot and bicycle that grew over several hours and was estimated at more than 35,000 by Ochen, though others put it at more like 5,000.

The expectant, excited spectators, many of whom cannot speak English, included victims who have been left scarred and maimed by Kony’s atrocities.

But Ochen, whose own father and brother were abducted by Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), said on Wednesday: “Reacting to the film, there was a strong sense that the video was definitely not produced for an African audience, and that it was not sensitive enough to the victims.

“It was very hurtful for them and their families to see posters, bracelets and buttons, all looking like slick campaign ads of the person most responsible for their shattered lives. One young man who lost four brothers and one of his arms said afterwards: ‘How can anybody expect me to wear a T-shirt with Kony’s name on it?'”

He added: “For all the victims, the attempt to make Kony famous so as to prop up public support for his apprehension is laudable but the way this goal is pursued in the video is inappropriate and ignores their feelings.

“That fame is not what Kony deserves for causing so much suffering was one overwhelming reaction. People were asking: Why give such criminals celebrity status? Why not prioritise addressing the plight of the victims whose sufferings are visible?”

The screening ended amid jeers and scuffles, with some angry viewers throwing stones. Ayinet has decided to suspend planning screenings of Kony 2012 in other parts of northern Uganda indefinitely due to the hostile reaction.

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Game over in Afghanistan

Fred Kaplan writes: The game is over in Afghanistan. An American presence can no longer serve any purpose. Or, rather, it can only extend and exacerbate the pathologies of this war. It is time to get out, and more quickly than President Obama had been planning. The consequences of leaving may be grim, but the consequences of staying are probably grimmer.

Sunday’s massacre in Kandahar province, in which a veteran U.S. Army staff sergeant sneaked out of his base at 3 a.m., strolled into a village, and methodically gunned down 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, is but the latest sign of a massive unraveling.

Two weekends earlier, an Afghan gunman killed two U.S. officers inside the Interior Ministry’s headquarters (making the ninth and tenth Americans who have lost their lives this year at the hands of Afghans they’d been training). Shortly before then, violent riots broke out when Americans were discovered burning copies of the Quran. Just two days before the Kandahar rampage, NATO helicopters flying over Kapisa province, in eastern Afghanistan, fired on a group of civilians, killing four and injuring three, prompting large street protests.

Finally, the New York Times reported over the weekend that Afghan president Hamid Karzai is starting to enforce a law banning the use of private security guards to protect foreign business and aid workers, requiring that Afghan police be used instead. Even before the incident in Kandahar, Western officials were predicting that the new law would force a shutdown of nearly every development project; no civilians would want to stick around without someone reliable guarding their backs—and after the string of incidents, no Afghan can be regarded as reliable, any more than Afghans can regard any American as reliable.

And there’s the problem. The U.S. and NATO strategy in Afghanistan relies on building trust, and those bonds of trust—always tenuous at best—are now severed, perhaps irreparably.

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Afghans angry over removal of accused U.S. soldier whose name remains concealed

The Associated Press reports: Afghan lawmakers expressed anger Thursday over the U.S. move to fly an American soldier accused of killing 16 civilians out of the country to Kuwait, saying Kabul shouldn’t sign a strategic partnership agreement with Washington unless the suspect faces justice in Afghanistan.

Negotiations over the agreement, which would govern the presence of U.S. forces in Afghanistan after most combat troops withdraw by the end of 2014, were tense even before the shooting deaths of the civilians, including nine children, in southern Kandahar province on Sunday.

The killings came in the wake of violent protests last month triggered by American soldiers who burned Qurans and other Islamic texts. Over 30 people were killed in those demonstrations, and Afghan forces turned their guns on their supposed allies, killing six U.S. soldiers.

The U.S. flew the suspect out of the country on Wednesday evening, said U.S. officials. The U.S. military said the transfer did not preclude the possibility of trying the case in Afghanistan.

But that didn’t appease Afghans upset at the move.

“It was the demand of the families of the martyrs of this incident, the people of Kandahar and the people of Afghanistan to try him publicly in Afghanistan,” said Mohammad Naeem Lalai Hamidzai, a Kandahar lawmaker who is part of a parliamentary commission investigating the shootings.

The AP also reports: The U.S. serviceman suspected in the massacre of more than a dozen Afghan civilians is a 38-year-old father of two who served three tours in Iraq and is based in Washington state. Still, days after the slayings, the military has kept under wraps one of the most salient details — his name.

Military officials said it was military policy not to release the name until charges are filed. But military experts said this case seems unusual.

“This is unprecedented in my experience,” said Eugene Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale University. “It’s very strange.”

Fidell speculated that the military was focused on ensuring the safety of the soldier’s family.

Information has also been limited inside the military. Jill Barber, a wife of a staff sergeant in the same battalion as the suspect, said she learned of the Sunday shooting only from news coverage. She said her husband wasn’t allowed to call her for more than a day after the shooting and that soldiers can get in trouble for talking about it.

“They shut everything down over there,” Barber, of Yelm, about 60 miles south of Seattle, said Monday. “I didn’t even find out about it from him. They’re not allowed to say anything.”

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Syria’s torture survivors speak out

‘I wanted to die’: Syria’s torture survivors speak out [PDF] is a newly-released Amnesty International report in which former detainees describe their treatment in Syria’s detention centers since the predominantly peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad’s government began in March 2011.

Fairly usual over many years and continuing to be so is the torture method known as the dulab (tyre), whereby the victim is forced into a vehicle tyre which is often then hoisted up and the individual is beaten on the feet – a method of abuse itself often referred to as falaqa – or elsewhere on the body with fists, sticks, whips or cables.

More common now than in recent years is shabeh, whereby the victim is hung in one of a number of ways, for example from a raised hook or handle or door frame, or by manacled wrists, so that the feet just hang above the ground or so the tips of toes touch the floor. The individual is then often beaten with various instruments. Other forms of suspension, such as crucifixion, were also reported.

There have been more frequent reports of some torture and ill-treatment methods that were previously rare, including electric shock. Survivors interviewed by Amnesty International in Jordan described three forms of electrocution: after water is sprayed onto detainees and the floor, an electric charge is applied to the floor and the current rushes through to those covered in water; via electric prods; and in one case in a metal “electric chair”. Such methods often cause the victim to collapse and pass out.

A method also reported was bisat al-rih (flying carpet), whereby the victim is strapped faceup onto a foldable wooden board, the two ends of which can be moved towards each other bringing the head towards the feet and causing significant pain to the lower back, during the process of which the victim is beaten. Another method described was being slashed, including with the fixed bayonet on a Kalashnikov-type rifle. Also more frequent than in recent years are cigarette burns.

Rape and other torture and ill-treatment of a sexual nature have been reported more frequently than for many years. Several of those interviewed in Jordan said it was quite common to be hit in the genital region with truncheons, including while hanging in the shabeh position. In one case, a former detainee told Amnesty International that he was forced to watch as a male detainee was raped in front of him. One released detainee said that he shared a cell with a young man who had been forced to have a glass bottle with a broken top inserted into his anus. One said that his cellmate had been raped with a metal skewer. Others spoke of a detainee with whom they had shared a cell who, while hanging in the shabeh position, had a cord attached to a large bag of water tied around his penis.

Amnesty International also heard accounts of methods of torture and other ill-treatment not heard of for many years. One man showed lesions on his leg and ankle that he said were caused by a pincer. Another said he was kept for a night in a cell with what seemed to be a corpse.

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Syria loses 20,000 troops as deserters flee, Turkey says

Bloomberg reports: About 20,000 Syrian soldiers have deserted from President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in less than a month, according to Turkish intelligence reports cited by a Foreign Ministry official.

The desertions are in addition to 40,000 military personnel who left before Feb. 20, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in accordance with government rules. The Syrian armed forces have a strength of 295,000 active personnel, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ 2012 Military Balance.

They have been at the forefront of Assad’s bid to stamp out the yearlong uprising, which yesterday resulted in the seizure of the rebel-held city of Idlib. Some of the soldiers are joining the opposition Free Syrian Army, whose commanders reside in Turkish refugee camps.

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