One-state or two-state solution?
Koch brothers flout law getting richer with secret Iran sales
Bloomberg reports:
In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts.
“I uncovered the practices within a few days,” Egorova- Farines says. “They were not hidden at all.”
She immediately notified her supervisors in the U.S. A week later, Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries dispatched an investigative team to look into her findings, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue.
By September of that year, the researchers had found evidence of improper payments to secure contracts in six countries dating back to 2002, authorized by the business director of the company’s Koch-Glitsch affiliate in France.
“Those activities constitute violations of criminal law,” Koch Industries wrote in a Dec. 8, 2008, letter giving details of its findings. The letter was made public in a civil court ruling in France in September 2010; the document has never before been reported by the media.
Egorova-Farines wasn’t rewarded for bringing the illicit payments to the company’s attention. Her superiors removed her from the inquiry in August 2008 and fired her in June 2009, calling her incompetent, even after Koch’s investigators substantiated her findings. She sued Koch-Glitsch in France for wrongful termination.
Koch-Glitsch is part of a global empire run by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who have taken a small oil company they inherited from their father, Fred, after his death in 1967, and built it into a chemical, textile, trading and refining conglomerate spanning more than 50 countries.
Koch Industries is obsessed with secrecy, to the point that it discloses only an approximation of its annual revenue — $100 billion a year — and says nothing about its profits.
Egypt’s military unsure when it will relinquish power, U.S. says
The New York Times reports:
Not even Egypt’s interim military rulers know when they plan to relinquish power to a new civilian government, the United States ambassador to Egypt, Anne W. Patterson, said Tuesday.
Speaking at a news conference here with Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta after he met with the Egyptian military leaders, Ms. Patterson offered an unusually candid assessment of the haze over Egypt’s path toward democracy after the revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak eight months ago.
Asked if American officials knew whether the Egyptian military council intended to turn over power at the seating of a newly elected Parliament in March, or the planned adoption of a new constitution later in 2012, or the election of a president some months beyond that, Ms. Patterson said, “I don’t think, frankly, the military knows or anyone else knows.”
“This process has really been fraught with uncertainty from the very beginning and decisions are often made on a day-to-day basis, so I would expect that to continue for a while,” she added.
Syria unrest: Western anger at U.N. vetoes
BBC News reports:
Western nations have lamented China and Russia’s vetoes of a UN Security Council resolution condemning Syria’s crackdown on anti-government protests.
France said it was a “sad day” for Syria, while the US ambassador to the UN expressed “outrage”.
The resolution had been watered down to try to avoid the vetoes, dropping a direct reference to sanctions.
Meanwhile, Syrian TV has broadcast images of a woman it said Amnesty International had declared dead.
The proposed resolution, drafted by European states, was the latest effort to pressure Syria over a crackdown in which the UN estimates more than 2,700 people have been killed.
On the run, Gaddafi leaves few footprints
Reuters reports:
Dressed in rags and holding a cellphone, Muammar Gaddafi sits in the shade of an oasis palm in the southern Libyan desert. He gazes wistfully at signs that say “Niger 450 km”, “Burkina Faso 2,700 km”, “Algiers, 650 km”.
The cartoon, displayed on an easel in the lobby of Tripoli’s Mahari hotel, raises a smile from patrons checking their AK-47 assault rifles and machine pistols in the wooden gun rack behind the security desk.
Just about no one knows where the former leader is hiding, six weeks after Libya’s revolution finally broke his hold on the capital in an operation coordinated with NATO and Arab powers.
His aides and some of his sons scattered to provincial strongholds, where at least two — Mutassem and Saif al-Islam — are now believed to be fighting for their survival, respectively in Gaddafi’s coastal home town of Sirte and the inland town of Bani Walid.
Of their father, there is little trace.
But by coincidence rather than design, the mocking portrait of Gaddafi in the Mahari, temporary home to senior revolutionary fighters, illustrates neatly the working assumptions that lie behind the manhunt.
Such clues as exist seem to point south, placing the 69-year-old close to the country’s southern borders with sub-Saharan Africa.
And, as the drawing suggests, those who are tracking him suspect he is seeking a refuge in a Sahelian or sub-Saharan country, the regions where the man who called himself Africa’s “King of Kings” cultivated allies for decades.
A move abroad would place him at risk of arrest by African countries which are signed up to The Hague war crimes court. Many suggest he could outfox his pursuers by hiding in plain sight in an urban setting in Libyan’s north — a tactic employed successfully for years by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden until his killing by U.S. forces in Pakistan in May.
But in many respects the Sahara makes sense.
It may look near-empty from the map, but the world’s biggest desert serves as a contraband superhighway, especially at night when fewer eyes — including satellites — are watching.
The 69-year-old may now calculate he can vanish among the smugglers, shepherds, bandits, illegal migrants and militants who roam this part of Africa without a trace.
From what could be Gaddafi’s last refuge, Reuters reports:
Many residents of Sirte, Muammar Gaddafi’s birth-place, blame Libya’s new rulers and their Western allies for the death and destruction unleashed on their city by weeks of fighting.
Most are reluctant to talk openly about their allegiances, for fear they will be branded as members of a pro-Gaddafi fifth column. Yet their anger and bitterness is clear.
“This country has been built around one man. If he is over, Libya will be over,” said a resident who gave his name as al-Fatouri, standing outside his home on the outskirts of Sirte.
“Gaddafi is like a picture frame. When part of the frame is hit, the whole picture will be destroyed, Libya will be destroyed,” he said.
Sirte is the sternest test yet of the ability of the interim government, the National Transitional Council (NTC), to win over Gaddafi’s tribe and prevent it from mounting an Iraq-style insurgency that would destabilise Libya and the region.
While most cities captured by NTC forces have rejoiced, or at least given that impression, Sirte is different because it is home to members of Gaddafi’s tribe who genuinely back him.
“Let them look for Muammar, but do not kill 50,000 people to change the regime,” said Fatouri. “It is not worth it that thousands die in Sirte for Muammar. This is what saddens us.”
Fatouri said he, like thousands of other people from this city on the Mediterranean coast, had fled his home days ago because of the fighting. He decided later to come back.
“We refuse to leave, we don’t want to suffer… We would rather die here than leave our houses and suffer,” he said.
As he spoke, the sound of shelling and heavy machine guns reverberated around him and a crowd of locals gathered.
“They (NTC forces) used to start their day with bombing us, and finish it with bombing us… The kids used to hear the shelling like music,” said another resident standing nearby.
Occupy Wall Street movement spreads to cities across U.S., Canada and Europe
The Guardian reports:
It began as the brainchild of activists across the border in Canada when an anti-consumerism magazine put out a call in July for supporters to occupy Wall Street.
Now, three weeks after a few hundred people heeded that initial call and rolled out their sleeping bags in a park in New York’s financial district, they are being joined by supporters in cities across the US and beyond.
Armed with Twitter, Facebook and shared Googledocs, protesters against corporate greed, unemployment and the political corruption that they say Wall Street represents have taken to the streets in Boston, Los Angeles, St Louis and Kansas City.
The core group, Occupy Wall Street (OWS), claims people will take part in demonstrations in as many as 147 US cities this month, while the website occupytogether.org lists 47 US states as being involved. Around the world, protests in Canada, the UK, Germany and Sweden are also planned, they say.
The speed of the leaderless movement’s growth has taken many by surprise. Occupytogether.org, one of several sites associated with the protest, has had to be rebuilt to accommodate the traffic.
OWS media spokesman Patrick Bruner said: “We have on our board right now 147 US cities. I don’t know whether they are occupied or they are planning on being occupied. My guess would be over 30 cities are occupied.”
The original call by the Canadian magazine Adbusters to occupy Wall Street drew hundreds of protesters on 17 September and 2,000 attended a march the following Saturday. But the movement, which organisers say has its roots in the Arab spring and in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol protests, has been galvanised by recent media attention.
Scott Stringer, the Manhattan Borough President, writes:
As the Occupy Wall Street protests stretch into their third week, New Yorkers may still be confused about who the protestors are and what exactly they want. But there should be no mistaking the fears and concerns that motivate them — and continue to bring more into the streets. It would be a mistake to dismiss them as a noisy, disaffected fringe movement, because the grievances that drive them touch a deepening chord with millions of other Americans.
Simply put, many of the protestors are angered by the feeling that government hasn’t done enough to stem the tide of economic fall-out caused by the last recession. They are outraged that millions of Americans from all walks of life are unable to find or keep jobs. They are vocal about the widening chasm between rich and poor in our country. And they believe the government has turned a deaf ear to the fact that today’s middle class must struggle harder every year to keep its head above water.
The empirical basis for the protesters’ angry slogans is not hard to find. For generations, worker wages rose in lockstep with productivity. From 1947-1979, productivity increased 119% while hourly compensation increased 100%. But since 1980, compensation has stagnated, growing only 8%, while productivity has raced along at 80%.
We don’t need to look beyond the Hudson for evidence of this widening inequality. As the Census Bureau recently revealed, my own borough of Manhattan has the largest income gap of any county in the United States, with top 20% of earners making close to 38 times as much as the bottom 20%. For the first time since 2000, more than one in five New Yorkers is living below the federal poverty line ($22,350 for a family of four). The percentage of children suffering in poverty is even worse — a staggering 30%. At the same time, the top 1% of Americans own 35% of the nation’s wealth. As the protesters’ signs say, “We are the other 99%.”
The Guardian reports:
As some of America’s biggest corporations push for a tax holiday on more than $1tn of overseas profits, a new survey has revealed that the last time such a measure was tried it ended in the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs.
The study could be a setback to the aggressive push by a coalition of American businesses, called Win America, which includes big-name firms like Apple, Google and Pfizer. The group has employed more than 160 lobbyists to push its agenda, claiming that the companies will use the tax break to bring back money overseas and invest it in building new facilities and creating jobs.
But a report carried out by the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies has examined the last time such a move was carried out. That was in 2004, when a similar scheme allowed 843 firms to cut their tax rate on repatriating overseas profits from 35% to 5%.
The firms then brought home $312bn and avoided paying $92bn in government taxes in return for a promise to create jobs. The measure was called the American Job Creation Act.
However, the IPS study measured the actions of some of the largest firms who took advantage of the tax holiday, and found that 58 of them had then slashed 591,000 jobs. The companies accounted for a massive 70% of the repatriated funds, and saved around $64bn they would have otherwise paid out in taxes. The firms included Ford, Pfizer, Eastman Kodak, General Electric and Verizon.
Adam Martin writes:
YouTube videos for an operation called Invade Wall Street first appeared on Monday, calling for online activists to download specific software necessary to carry out a denial of service attack against the New York Stock Exchange on October 10. One video, titled "A Message to the Media," said the group had chosen "to declare war against the New York Stock Exchange," adding, "on October 10th, NYSE shall be erased from the Internet." The video carries the Anonymous logo and comes from a YouTube user called The Anonymous Message. The same user has uploaded 13 other videos since joining YouTube in July, including a threat last week to carry out a cyber-attack of the New York Police Department which doesn't seem like it happened.
But on Twitter, where the #InvadeWallStreet hashtag first gained traction on Monday via Anonymous-related accounts, a backlash now warns would-be participants that the attack is a set-up aimed at reaping bad press for Anonymous and the Occupy Wall Street protest. A widely circulated statement warns that "many of our brothers and sisters have gone down in the fight for using such tactics, like the WikiLeaks defendants who took down Visa, Paypal, and Mastercard which led to mass arrests." Another points out that the video "proposes you use depreciated tools that have known flaws," such as a low-orbit ion cannon, a denial of service tool Anonymous members have been busted for using.
A Twitter account called AnonyOps, which has approximated an official Anonymous mouthpiece in the past, broadcast this message on Tuesday: "#invadewallstreet #IWS possibly a psyop? … Don't get roped in by those who want 2 see #occupywallstreet fail.
Bloggers say Arab Spring has gone global
Al Jazeera reports:
New forms of activism that have evolved in the Arab world in 2011 are being picked up by activists in the West, speakers at the Third Arab Bloggers’ Meeting have affirmed.
The meeting is the first since the uprisings began, and brings some of the most prominent bloggers in the region together for a three-day gathering.
Previous meetings were held in Lebanon. This year, the event was brought to Tunisia, the country where the spree of uprisings began.
Ten months on, as Tunisia heads to an election that is set to rewrite the rules of its political system, protest movements are blazing far beyond the region.
The innovative use of technologies and methods of dissent that had been used so effectively by Tunisian and Egyptian protesters, in particular, were being picked up in Europe and the US, according to Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina.
The forms of civic activism emerging in the region were influencing protesters in other parts of the world, becoming a model for Western countries where citizens had seen an erosion of democracy in recent years, she said.
The parallels between the Tahrir Square protests and the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in the US were clear.
“This is really a very hopeful time in history,” she said.
Assad: Syria will shower Tel Aviv with rockets if attacked by foreign powers
Haaretz reports:
Syria will strike Israel and “set fire” to the Middle East if foreign forces choose to launch a military strike on the protest-ridden country, the Iranian news agency Fars quoted Syrian President Bashar Assad as saying on Tuesday, referring to remarks made by the Syrian leader during a meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu last August.
During a meeting with the Turkish FM, the Fars report claimed, Assad indicated that Syria would not hesitate to strike major Israeli cities if it was attacked.
“If a crazy measure is taken against Damascus, I will need not more than 6 hours to transfer hundreds of rockets and missiles to the Golan Heights to fire them at Tel Aviv,” Assad said.
In addition, Fars reported that the Syrian president told the Turkish FM that he would also call on Hezbollah in Lebanon to launch a rocket attack on Israel, adding: “All these events will happen in three hours, but in the second three hours, Iran will attack the U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf and the U.S. and European interests will be targeted simultaneously.”
Assad’s comments to the Turkish FM came after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said earlier Tuesday he would set out his country’s plans for sanctions against Syria after he visits a Syrian refugee camp near the border in the coming days.
Libya’s new rulers say fall of Sirte will mean war’s end
The Guardian reports:
Libya’s new leaders are poised to declare the country’s “full liberation” is complete and appoint a new transitional government.
The new government will regard the war as won with the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s home town, Sirte – where there is still heavy fighting. It remains one of the last loyalist holdouts, along with Bani Walid, which remains under the control of pro-Gaddafi forces, who are besieged inside.
The declaration and the formation of a new government – with elections planned after eight months – are intended to bring an end to an increasingly dangerous political vacuum in Libya.
The interim prime minister, Mahmoud Jibril, and the head of the National Transitional Council (NTC), Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, plan to step down, having pledged to take no further part in the country’s future government. The NTC constitution specifies that no temporary government figures should serve in any future elected Libyan government.
The latest attempts to bring about an end to the developing political crisis in Libya comes as military leaders described the latest push on Sirte, which began on Monday after a two-day truce, as the “final assault”.
Reuters reports on conditions inside Sirte and the residents’ fears of a protracted fight.
Fleeing besieged Sirte, Ali Durgham couldn’t stop the tears as he described how his father had been killed by a stray shell as he walked to the mosque with his brother.
“He died in my arms,” Durgham said. “I buried him yesterday.”
The young man’s uncle is now in Sirte’s Ibn Sina hospital — but it, too, has been hit in the fighting, residents said.
“The hospital is being attacked with shells,” Durgham said, echoing other people leaving the city. “It’s filled with dirt. There’s only three doctors who are working with patients.”
Despite the shelling and a deeper push into the city by interim government forces ahead of what may be a final battle, he said he was determined to go back into Sirte on Wednesday to bring his uncle out.
The stories told by the people streaming out of Muammar Gaddafi’s hometown, mostly recounted at checkpoints manned by anti-Gaddafi forces, provide a grim snapshot of life inside.
“It is unimaginable back there,” Masoud Awidat, who had just driven out of the town in a car with a bullet-riddled windscreen and door, told Reuters.
“It gets worse every day. There’s no food. There are fires, apartments are destroyed.”
Terrified residents are sleeping in the streets and under stairs for fear that their roofs will fall in overnight.
People talked of two families whose cars had been hit by rocket propelled grenades as they tried to flee the city.
One man showed a piece of string holding up his trousers because he had not eaten for so long.
“These used to fit me,” he said.
A Red Cross team who managed to deliver medical supplies to Sirte’s hospital has reported that the city of about 100,000 people has no power. Civilians say many streets are flooded.
Sirte has been under attack for about three weeks, the target of a couple of all-out assaults and near-constant shelling by interim government forces and NATO air strikes.
Pro-Gaddafi fighters inside are putting up fierce resistance and, NATO and some civilians say, forcibly recruiting locals to fight alongside them and preventing people from getting out.
“We reached the outskirts of the city but the militia stopped us from leaving,” Awidat said of a previous attempt he made to leave. He managed to slip out on Tuesday morning.
“Where we live there are still families trapped,” he said.
Sirte presents a conundrum for the ruling National Transitional Council (NTC) and for NATO, whose mandate in Libya is to protect of civilians.
The NTC must strike a balance between a prolonged fight that would delay their efforts to govern and a quicker but bloody victory that would worsen regional divisions and embarrass the fledgling government and its foreign backers.
Some civilians say pro-Gaddafi fighters are hiding in residential areas, raising fears of vicious street battles ahead.
“Sirte is not going to be like Tripoli,” said NTC medic Mashallah Al-Zoy, referring to the relatively easy manner in which anti-Gaddafi fighters swept into the capital.
“It will be street-to-street, house-to-house, like (Gaddafi) said.”
Occupy Wall Street ends capitalism’s alibi
Richard Wolff writes:
Occupy Wall Street has already weathered the usual early storms. The kept media ignored the protest, but that failed to end it. The partisans of inequality mocked it, but that failed to end it. The police servants of the status quo over-reacted and that failed to end it – indeed, it fueled the fire. And millions looking on said, “Wow!” And now, ever more people are organising local, parallel demonstrations – from Boston to San Francisco and many places between.
Let me urge the occupiers to ignore the usual carping that besets powerful social movements in their earliest phases. Yes, you could be better organised, your demands more focused, your priorities clearer. All true, but in this moment, mostly irrelevant. Here is the key: if we want a mass and deep-rooted social movement of the left to re-emerge and transform the United States, we must welcome the many different streams, needs, desires, goals, energies and enthusiasms that inspire and sustain social movements. Now is the time to invite, welcome and gather them, in all their profusion and confusion.
The next step – and we are not there yet – will be to fashion the program and the organisation to realise it. It’s fine to talk about that now, to propose, debate and argue. But it is foolish and self-defeating to compromise achieving inclusive growth – now within our reach – for the sake of program and organisation. The history of the US left is littered with such programs and organisations without a mass movement behind them or at their core.
So permit me, in the spirit of honoring and contributing something to this historic movement, to propose yet another dimension, another item to add to your agenda for social change. To achieve the goals of this renewed movement, we must finally change the organisation of production that sustains and reproduces inequality and injustice. We need to replace the failed structure of our corporate enterprises that now deliver profits to so few, pollute the environment we all depend on, and corrupt our political system.
We need to end stock markets and boards of directors. The capacity to produce the goods and services we need should belong to everyone – just like the air, water, healthcare, education and security on which we likewise depend. We need to bring democracy to our enterprises. The workers within and the communities around enterprises can and should collectively shape how work is organised, what gets produced, and how we make use of the fruits of our collective efforts.
If we believe democracy is the best way to govern our residential communities, then it likewise deserves to govern our workplaces. Democracy at work is a goal that can help build this movement.
Israel has hit brick wall, and it’s called isolation
Larry Derfner writes:
Whenever things take a turn for the worse in Israel, whenever I think the country has become too filled with fear and aggression to ever be ready to make peace, I remind myself: The way we’re going leads to a brick wall, and one day we’re going to run into it. After the pain subsides and we dust ourselves off, we will see that the brick wall is still standing. And at that point, we will have no choice but to change direction.
The brick wall up the road is international isolation to the point of pariah status, together with a continual escalation in severe security threats and no reasonable hope of overcoming them by military force.
Two weeks ago at the United Nations, Israel took another giant step toward that wall. At the same time, by enforcing Israel’s opposition to the Palestinian statehood bid, the United States appears to have dealt itself out of influence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and maybe even in the Middle East as a whole.
Backed by the Republican Party, the American Christian right and the American Jewish right, the Israeli government bent U.S. President Barack Obama too far this time. By blocking the Palestinian drive for statehood, he’s no good to Israel anymore. He’s lost the trust of even a moderate Palestinian leader like Mahmoud Abbas. So he can’t pressure the Palestinians to be more conciliatory, like he could before.
It’s questionable whether he has much sway left with Egypt, Turkey and Jordan, either, whom Israel used to count on as bulwarks against its radical enemies.
This is not good for Israel. And if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thinks a Republican in the White House will come riding to his rescue, I doubt that any of the Republican candidates will be able to win any more friends or influence people for this Israeli government than Obama currently can – and I am, of course, understating matters.
On the world stage, Obama the idealist has taken fright
Simon Tisdall writes:
Candidates run on hope. Incumbents run on their record. But Barack Obama, lining up for a second term at the White House next year, has little to offer on either score. The heady optimism of 2008 has dissipated. At home, Obama is primarily associated with hard times: only 34% of voters approve of his handling of the economy, according to a recent poll. Abroad, his presidency has come to stand for impotence and incompetence. He promised new beginnings; what he has delivered, for the most part, is waffle, dither and drift.
If this verdict seems harsh, take a quick tour round the globe. Everywhere the pillars of American superpower are crumbling. The old habit of hegemony, formed in the postwar decades and confirmed in 1989 as Soviet power imploded, is fading as fast as a Honolulu sunset.
Part of the explanation is faltering industrial and financial clout, reflecting the rapid rise of rivals like China and India. But that is compounded by another central element: Obama’s persistent failure to stand up, in practical, substantive ways, for the values, beliefs and interests he so eloquently espouses.
Obama’s early, anguished indecision over keeping his promise to close Guantánamo Bay now looks like a grim portent. So, too, does his administration’s failure to support the Iranian students whose “green revolution” was so cruelly suppressed in Tehran in 2009. When the Arab spring took hold this year, the man who in Cairo had preached the pre-eminence of the democratic ideal took fright. Tunisia did not matter much. But when he faced accusations of becoming the president who “lost” Egypt, Obama’s dither default setting was triggered anew.
Syria accused of torturing relatives of overseas activists — Amnesty report
Syrians in the UK are being threatened by Syrian embassy officials in the UK, apparently as part of a systematic effort by the Syrian regime to intimidate those who protest against the government in various countries, said Amnesty International today.
In a new report, The Long Reach of the Mukhabaraat (PDF), Amnesty cites more than 30 cases where activists in eight countries – Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the USA – have said they’ve faced intimidation from embassy officials and others, and that in some cases their relatives in Syria have been exposed to harassment, detention and even torture.
Syrian embassy staff have reportedly filmed and photographed protests outside the embassy, phoned protesters and visited them at their homes in the UK, made threats against them (including that they would face the death penalty on return to Syria and that their families in Syria would be harmed), and have encouraged them to spread pro-regime propaganda and join pro-regime rallies. Several have said that security forces have visited and questioned family members in Syria, in at least one case briefly detaining one of them and in another vandalising the family home.
After protesting outside the Syrian embassy in London one Syrian was phoned and told: “You are with the Israelis and the Muslim Brotherhood and so will get the death penalty too.” Soon after his brother in Dera’a was taken away from his home by men believed to be from Military Intelligence (part of the mukhabaraat, or network of Syrian intelligence services). He was released after four hours but has since gone into hiding.
Amnesty International Syria researcher Neil Sammonds said:
“Expatriate Syrians have been trying, through peaceful protest, to highlight abuses that we consider amount to crimes against humanity – and that presents a threat to the Syrian regime.
“In response the regime appears to have waged a systematic – sometimes violent – campaign to intimidate Syrians overseas into silence.”
“This is yet more evidence that the Syrian government will not tolerate legitimate dissent and is prepared to go to great lengths to muzzle those who challenge it publicly.”
Pakistan’s blasphemy laws have left even judges in fear of their lives
Declan Walsh writes:
So he’s going to swing – perhaps. On Saturday a Pakistani judge sentenced Mumtaz Qadri, the police bodyguard who assassinated the Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer, to death by hanging. The young policeman smiled and thanked God. “My dream has come true,” he reportedly said.
It was a predictably theatrical turn from Qadri, a former nobody who murdered Taseer in cowardly fashion – shooting the governor 27 times in the back – and who has since revelled in the notoriety of his blood-stained celebrity. Equally predictable, alas, was the reaction on the streets outside.
Close to the courtroom in Rawalpindi, angry young men attacked a monument to the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, defacing her image on the spot where she died in a suicide bombing in 2007. Down in Lahore, turbaned men with long sticks surged through the ancient Anarkali bazaar, thrashing traders who refused to shutter their shops in sympathy for Qadri.
Meanwhile the clerics engineering the protests – old men with soft palms and tinder-dry beards – issued po-faced statements decrying the sentence. Qadri was a good Muslim, they insisted, and Taseer got what he deserved. The governor had offended them by advocating reforms to Pakistan’s antiquated blasphemy laws. In particularly they hated him for defending Aasia Bibi, a Christian mother-of-five sentenced to death under those laws last November. He deserved to die, they said.
Taseer’s wife and children, in contrast, were silent. They stayed at home, busy worrying about their son and sibling, Shahbaz. The 27-year-old was kidnapped in August as he purred through Lahore in a sports Mercedes – his father’s old car, in fact. Word has it he is being held in the tribal badlands of Waziristan; whether his captors are religious extremists, common criminals, or both, remains unclear.
The family is also reeling from character assaults. When Taseer was still alive, conservatives circulated photos of his children, lifted from their Facebook pages, showing them engaged in objectionable activity, such as dating and swimming in a swimming pool. After Taseer died, Qadri’s lawyers aired allegations about his sex life, drinking habits and apparent taste for pork – proof, they said, of a licentiousness that justified his cold-blooded murder.
The distasteful spectacle is partly a product of Pakistan’s social gulf. The Taseers inhabit the gilded bubble of a tiny elite whose westernised lives play out in Hello!-style photospreads of society magazines. In fact the Taseers own one of the most popular magazines. But it also goes to the heart of a bigger ideological crisis.
In theory, Pakistan is a country that welcomes all creeds and castes. But in practice it is proving to be anything but.
Inside Story – Kabul’s new strategy for peace
Saudi police open fire on protesters
Iran’s Press TV reports:
Anti-regime demonstrations in eastern Saudi Arabia have turned violent following brutal measures taken against protesters by security forces of the US-backed kingdom.
Clashes broke out in Qatif and Awamiyah in the Eastern Province after security forces opened fire to disperse hundreds of protesters chanting slogans against Riyadh policies.
Several protesters, including women, were injured during the clashes.
The demonstrators called for an end to the crackdown on dissidents and demanded the release of political prisoners.
They also condemned Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in the neighboring Bahrain to assist the US-backed Manama regime with the suppression of popular anti-government protests in the tiny Persian Gulf Sheikhdom.
This comes after hundreds of Saudis took to the streets in Qatif on Sunday to protest against the detention of two senior citizens. Saudi security forces took the two men hostage in a bid to force their sons, who are wanted by Saudi authorities for participating in anti-government protests, to surrender themselves to authorities.
Former Mossad chief: Iran far from achieving nuclear bomb
Haaretz reports:
Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan said Monday that a military strike on Iran was “far from being Israel’s preferred option,” telling the Council for Peace and Security that “there are currently tools and methods that are much more effective.”
Dagan also said Iran’s nuclear program was still far from the point of no return, and that Iran’s situation is “the most problematic it has been in since the revolution” in 1979.
But Israel’s strategic situation is also “the worst in its history,” he warned, adding that Israel itself has contributed a lot to this deterioration. As an example, he cited Deputy
Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon’s decision to humiliate the Turkish ambassador last year by demonstratively seating him on a low chair.
Dagan made his remarks on the same day that visiting U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta passed on a clear message from his boss in Washington: The United States opposes any Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
At a joint press conference with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Panetta stressed that any steps against Iran’s nuclear program must be taken in coordination with the international community.
The United States, he said, is “very concerned, and we will work together to do whatever is necessary” to keep Iran from posing “a threat to this region.” But doing so “depends on the countries working together,” he added.
He repeated the word “together” several times in this context.
Panetta cited Iran’s nuclear program as number one on the list of issues he had discussed with Barak. He voiced concern not only about the nuclear program, but also about Iran’s support for terror, its efforts to undermine regional stability and the fact that it had supplied weapons that were used to kill American soldiers.
At the press conference, which took place at Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv, Panetta also stressed America’s deep commitment to Israel’s security.
His message for Barak, at their second meeting in two weeks, appeared to be simultaneously embrace and restrain: America is standing by Israel, but an uncoordinated Israeli strike on Iran could spark a regional war. The United States will work to defend Israel, but Israel must behave responsibly.
Hamas leader differs with Iran’s leader on Palestinian bid for statehood
Richard Silverstein has a report which hasn’t appeared elsewhere in the English-language media. The article which originally appeared in Farsi on Iran’s Radio Farda says:
Khaled Meshal, head of the political office of Hamas in Syria said that the request of Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, for recognition of an independent Palestinian state and full membership in the United Nations is a courageous act that must be appreciated and supported. Meshal, who was speaking in the 5th international conference in support of Palestinian Intifada in Tehran, said regarding Abbas’ request, “We cannot deny that this action has had symbolic and moral achievements.”
Meshal expressed his position while Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rejected, at the same conference, Abbas’ suggestion for an independent Palestine, which recognizes partitioning of the historical Palestine. Last week, Abbas asked the UN to recognize an independent Palestine based on the pre-1967 war borders that will consist of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. An independent Palestine within this area has been agreed on internationally, but so far Israel and Palestinians have not been able to reach any agreement in their peace negotiations. The main reason for the disagreement is Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the problem of Palestinian refugees.
Regarding Mahmoud Abbas’ action at the UN, Ayatollah Khamenei said in his speech at the conference, “Our aim is freedom for [all of] Palestine, not part of it. Any plan that aims to partition Palestine must be completely rejected. The idea of two states that has been covered up with membership of the Palestinian government in the UN is nothing but acceding to the Zionists demands, meaning accepting a Zionist government in the Palestinian land.”
But, describing Abbas’ action, Khaled Meshal said that it has “isolated the Zionist regime and the United States, there is a good international consensus that has revealed the [true] ugly face of the U.S.policy and Israel’s position.” At the same time, Meshal said that the action has its limitation and should not be considered as an end by itself. He demanded to “first liberate Palestinian lands and then ask the United Nations Security Coucil for UN membership.” He also warned against some of the consequences of Abbas’ action.