Gates scoffs at Iran nuclear claim

The New York Times reports:

As Iran’s foreign minister met with the chief of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency here, the United States and Germany rejected Iran’s assertion that it was close to accepting an international compromise on its nuclear program.

Western officials expressed deep skepticism toward Tehran’s contention that a deal was close for having uranium enriched abroad for Iran’s controversial nuclear program.

The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano, said that the Iranians presented no new proposal or counterproposal during a meeting on the sidelines of a security conference here Saturday.

“Dialogue is continuing,” Mr. Amano said. “It should be accelerated. That’s the point.”

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said that actions by Iranian leaders did not back up their conciliatory public statements. “Based on the information that I have, I don’t have the sense we are close to an agreement,” he said at the conclusion of talks with Turkish leaders in Ankara.

Julian Borger adds:

The Tehran government has a gift for the theatrical. The arrival of the foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, at the Munich Security Conference was confirmed at the very last moment, and since he got here, Mottaki has held it in the palm of his hand. On Friday night he claimed a deal on Iran’s uranium was close, but then added that it was up to Iran to decide how much of its enriched uranium would be included in the deal. Jam tomorrow, but perhaps not very much.

Today, Mottaki elaborated on his theme at some length, without saying a whole lot more. Asked whether Iran was still willing to export the 1200 kg of low enriched uranium (LEU) provisionally agreed in Geneva last October, he slipped into the opaque language of the bazaar.

It is very common in business, for the buyer to talk about the quantity, while the seller only offers the price. We determine the quantity on the basis of our needs, and we will inform the [international] bodies about our requirements. Maybe it is less than this quantity you have already mentioned [1200kg] or maybe a little more than that quantity that we may need for our reactor.

Mottaki also said that Iran’s nuclear experts had studied the time interval it would take to turn Iranian LEU into 20% enriched uranium in the form of fuel rods, and endorsed that interval. The talk in Geneva was that this would take a year. A few days ago in a television interview, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad talked of four to five months. Mottaki did not make it clear which time-scale he was talking about.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

An Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program will neither completely stop Teheran’s nuclear march, nor bring down the ayatollahs’ regime, according to former Swiss ambassador to Iran Tim Guldimann.

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post on the sidelines of this week’s Herzliya Conference, Guldimann, who knows the Iranian way of thinking well, expressed – as a personal opinion – his deep concern about the military option against Iran.

Guldimann was Swiss ambassador to Iran and Afghanistan from 1999 to 2004. As ambassador to Teheran, Guldimann – now senior adviser and head of the Middle East Project at the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, Geneva – represented US interests in Iran, acting as a go-between. He gained notoriety for a memorandum he transmitted to the US in 2003, which posited an alleged Iranian proposal for a broad dialogue with the US, with everything on the table – including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian armed groups. The proposal was rejected by the Bush administration.

According to Guldimann, the position that unless the international community stops Iran’s nuclear program, Israel would have to do it alone is based on the unproven assumption that Iran will actually go down the road of having a nuclear weapon at its disposal.

“My understanding is that they will not go as far as that. If you say that there is [in Iran] a clear policy of achieving a nuclear capability, I would fully agree. You can define that as a breakout period. But will they make a political decision to produce a bomb? Such a breakout is an absolutely different question,” he says.

The Washington Post says:

China on Thursday threw a roadblock in the path of a U.S.-led push for sanctions against Iran, saying that it is important to continue negotiations as long as Iran appears willing to consider a deal to give up some of its enriched uranium.

“To talk about sanctions at the moment will complicate the situation and might stand in the way of finding a diplomatic solution,” Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said at a conference in Paris.

The Guardian reports:

Iran has launched a ­research rocket carrying a mouse, two turtles and worms into space – showing that the country can defeat the west in the battle of technology and that it will soon send its own astronauts, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saidtoday.

Iranian state television broadcast images of officials placing the animals inside a capsule in the Kavoshgar 3 (explorer in Farsi) rocket before blast-off, although it did not report where or when the launch took place. The Iranian Students News Agency said the capsule had successfully returned to Earth with its “passengers”.

Western powers fear the technology used by Iran’s space programme to launch satellites and research capsules could also be used to build long-range intercontinental missiles. A US defence expert said the launch underlined the closeness of Iran’s space and military programmes.

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U.S. deaths in Pakistan fuel suspicion

Time magazine reports:

By killing three U.S. soldiers in a bomb attack in a remote corner of northwest Pakistan on Wednesday, Feb. 3, the Taliban scored a political jackpot. With anti-American sentiment cresting in Pakistani public opinion, the presence of the three American trainers in a convoy passing through Koto village when it was struck by a roadside bomb has set off a flurry of questions and even wild conspiracy theories about the U.S. presence in the country. The news left Islamabad in a difficult position, deepened suspicion of the U.S. and further strained an already troubled relationship.

The trainers’ presence had been Pakistan’s worst-kept secret. They’re here at the invitation of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, the front-line force in the battle against the Pakistan Taliban, to help improve its poor counterinsurgency capability. In 2008, Washington dispatched 100 military personnel to train Pakistani officers, who would in turn pass on their skills to rank-and-file soldiers; but local sensitivities precluded the Americans from being given direct access to the troops. As U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke told reporters in Washington, “There is nothing secret about their presence there.”

Noah Shachtman adds:

The U.S. military has 200 troops on the ground in Pakistan. That’s about the double the previously-disclosed number of forces there. It’s a whole lot more than the “no American troops in Pakistan” promised by special envoy Richard Holbrooke. And let’s not even get into the number of U.S. intelligence operatives and security contractors on Pakistani soil.

The troop levels are one of a number of details that have emerged about the once-secret U.S. war in Pakistan since three American troops were killed yesterday by an improvised bomb. The New York Times reports that the soldiers were disguised in Pakistani clothing, and their vehicle was outfitted with radio-frequency jammers, meant to stop remotely-detonated bombs. “Still, the Taliban bomber was able to penetrate their cordon. In all 131 people were wounded, most of them girls who were students at a high school adjacent to the site of the suicide attack,” the paper reports.

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There’s real hope from Haiti and it’s not what you expect

Johann Hari:

In the weeks after a disaster like the Haiti earthquake, journalists always search for an upbeat twist to the tale. You know it by now – the baby found alive after a week under wreckage. But this time, a shaft of light has parted the rubble and the corpses and the unshakeable grief that could last for years. In the middle of the Haitian people’s nightmare, a system that has kept hundreds of millions like them poor and broken might just have shown its first fracture.

To understand what has happened, you have to delve into a long-suppressed history – one you are not supposed to hear. Since the 1970s, we have been told that the gospel of the Free Market has rolled out across the world because the People demand it. We have been informed that free elections will lead ineluctably to people choosing to roll back the state, privatise the essentials of life, and leave the rich to work their magic for us all. We have seen these trends wash across the world because ordinary people believe they offer the best possible system.

There’s just one snag: it’s not true. In reality, this gospel has proved impossible to impose in any democracy. Few politicians have believed in its core tenets more than Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – yet at the end of their long terms, after bitter battles, the proportion of GDP spent by the state remained the same. Why? Because these doctrines are extremely unpopular, and wherever they are tried, they are fiercely resisted. There are majorities in every free country for a mixed economy, where markets are counter-balanced by a strong and active state.

The gospel spread across the poor world because their governments were given no choice. In her masterpiece The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein shows how these policies were forced on the world’s poor against their will. Sometimes rich governments did it simply by killing the elected leaders and installing a servile dictator, as in Chile. Usually the methods were more subtle.

One of the most marked came in the form of “loans” from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The IMF would approach poor countries and offer them desperately needed cash. But from the 1970s on, they would, in return, require the countries to introduce “structural adjustments” to their economy. The medicine was always the same: end all subsidies for the poor, slash state spending on health and education, deregulate your financial sector, throw your markets open.

Here’s a typical example of what happened next. In Malawi, the country’s soil had become badly depleted, so the government decided to subsidise fertiliser for farmers. When the IMF and World Bank came in, they called this “a market distortion”, and ordered Malawi to stop at once. They did. So the country’s crops failed, and famine scythed through the population. Tens of thousands starved to death. The Malawian government eventually listened to the cries of its people, kicked out the IMF, and reintroduced the subsidies – and the famine stopped that year. The country is now an exporter of food again.

When people are living so close to the edge, even small increases in prices can break them. The IMF systematically disregards the fact that every country that has lifted itself out of poverty has done the opposite of its commands. For example, South Korea went from poverty to plenty in just two generations by protecting and heavily subsiding its industries and jacking up state subsidies – to the IMF’s horror.

Even Professor Jeffrey Sachs – one of their former lackeys – calls the IMF “the Typhoid Mary of emerging markets, spreading recessions in country after country”. So why do they carry on like this? Primarily, it is because IMF programmes work very well – for the rich. They ensure that we get access to the cheapest possible labour and can help ourselves to the glistening resources that inexplicably ended up under their soil.

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The Siddiqui conviction: A verdict ‘based on fear, not on fact’

It should go without saying but yet again needs to be repeated: in an effective justice system, justice not only must be done but it must be seen to be done. In this respect the trial of Dr Aafia Siddiqui, which ended in New York on Wednesday was a miserable failure.

Although most Americans haven’t even heard the name of this MIT-trained neuroscientist, Dr Siddiqui’s case has captured the attention of much of her native Pakistan. Her conviction on two counts of attempted murder quickly led Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari to direct his government to offer her legal assistance.

AP reported:

Pakistanis shouted anti-American slogans and burned the Stars and Stripes on Thursday in protest of a New York jury’s conviction of a Pakistani woman accused of trying to kill Americans while detained in Afghanistan.

The protests drew thousands in at least four cities, demonstrating the widespread distrust, and even hatred, of the U.S. in this country whose cooperation Washington needs to stabilize neighboring Afghanistan.

The New York Times said:

Defense lawyers argued that an absence of bullets, casings or residue from the M4 [– the rifle allegedly snatched and fired by the accused –] suggested it had not been shot. They used a video to show that two holes in a wall supposedly caused by the M4 had been there before July 18 [the date of the alleged crime].

They also pointed out inconsistencies in the testimony from the nine government witnesses, who at times gave conflicting accounts of how many people were in the room, where they were sitting or standing and how many shots were fired.

Ms. Siddiqui’s lawyers said they had not decided whether to appeal. They suggested that prosecutors had played to New Yorkers’ anxieties about terror attacks.

“This is not a just and right verdict,” Elaine Sharp, one of Ms. Siddiqui’s lawyers, said outside the courtroom. “In my opinion this was based on fear but not fact.”

If the views of jurors were shaped by irrational fears, it seems as though Judge Richard M. Berman suffered the same frailty. Far from recognizing that the conduct of the trial had wider implications for the relations between the US and Pakistan, so-called security considerations meant that journalists with the least interest in covering the case had the best access while those with the greatest interest weren’t allowed into the court room.

As Petra Bartosiewicz reported for Time magazine early in the proceedings:

[Dr Siddiqui’s] case has been major news in much of the Muslim world — and a crush of journalists from Pakistan have been struggling to gain access to a trial hemmed in by security-conscious New York City officials. How the foreign press is able to follow the court proceedings — and thus perceive the fairness of the trial — will have an impact on upcoming high-profile terrorism trials like that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other suspected 9/11 plotters, likely to be held in the same courthouse as the Siddiqui case.

“If we were able to file a transcript of the proceedings they’d probably print it,” Iftikhar Ali, a reporter with the Associated Press of Pakistan, said of the Siddiqui trial. “That’s how much interest there is in this case.” But Ali, like many other reporters from overseas, has been hampered in gaining access to the live proceedings. Journalists from Pakistan on assigment in New York have been largely excluded from the courtroom. Because of tight restrictions observed by the presiding Judge Richard Berman, not a single Pakistani reporter had been granted a press credential when opening statements began on Tuesday. They were instead sent to an overflow courtroom to watch the proceedings via video link.

In the overflow room this week I met journalists from Pakistan with United Nations and U.S. State Department issued press credentials. They work for some of the biggest outlets in their countries, including BBC Urdu, the Associated Press in Pakistan, Jang, Dawn, Geo and Haj TV. None were issued credentials for the trial, though some had applied weeks ago. We watched the proceedings on a flat screen television. The view didn’t include any of the exhibits being offered into evidence, among them multiple diagrams of the scene of the shooting and incriminating documents allegedly written by Siddiqui. At one point a key government eyewitness stepped off the witness stand and out of range of both the camera and microphone to use a visual aid to demonstrate where he was during the shooting. He was permitted to give much of his testimony off camera.

Ali, who has been at the court every day of the trial — including jury selection — was granted access to the main courtroom for about five minutes on the first day, but was escorted out when court security guards realized he was not on the list of approved media. At the time the only other occupants of the four-row press box, which covers half the available seating in the courtroom with room for about 20 individuals, were one each from the The New York Times, The New York Post and the New York Daily News. The court has officially recognized only media who carry New York Police Department issued press passes, traditionally reserved for reporters who regularly cover crime scenes and certain public events in the city. Out of the approximately 30 such individuals from U.S. news outlets who were eligible to attend the trial, most were not present for opening statements.

“We’ve been coming to all the pretrial hearings and we were never told there was going to be a different system for the trial. We were told the press will be allowed,” Ayesha Tanzeem, a journalist with Voice of America Urdu said. After TIME made inquiries on Thursday, individuals in the overflow room, including the Pakistani journalists, were for the first time ushered into the main courtroom during the afternoon session. But with the exception of a BBC Urdu reporter and a Samaa TV reporter who received official passes, none have been granted a press credential that would guarantee them a seat on future days.

The decision to accept solely the NYPD pass for the Siddiqui trial came from the judge’s chambers, says Elly Harrold of the District Executive’s office, the administrative arm at the federal courthouse. “Of course there are exceptions,” Harrold said, “but I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”

Although Siddiqui is not charged with any terrorism-related crime, security concerns are paramount though the procedures seem to be unevenly enforced. During the lunch break on the first day of the Siddiqui trial a group of Muslim men praying in the waiting areas outside the courtroom were afterwards asked to leave the floor. That prevented them from securing a place in line for the afternoon session. Several Muslim women in hijabs were also given similar instructions, but others in the same area, dressed in business attire, including this reporter, were permitted to stay. On the second day of the trial metal detectors were posted outside the courtroom and individuals were asked for photo identification and their names and addresses were logged by court security officers. At the close of proceedings on Thursday defense attorney Charles Swift protested the practice. “The suggestion is that the gallery may be a threat,” said Swift, calling the measure “highly prejudicial.”

If Charles Swift sounds like a familiar name it’s because he has the rare distinction of having stood up and successfully defended his country while its Constitution faced attack from the Bush administration. In Hamdan vs Rumsfeld, Swift won a major victory for the rule of law.

The case of Dr Siddiqui exposes a moral fallacy that has haunted America throughout the war on terrorism. It is this: that injustice is something that can only be done to the innocent.

We have abandoned what used to be the universally recognized foundation of a just legal system: that it treats the guilty and the innocent with fairness and impartiality.

—

(For fascinating background on the Siddiqui case, read Declan Walsh’s November 2009 report in The Guardian.)

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Deal with the Taliban pragmatists — not the elusive ‘moderates’

Michael Semple, a fellow at the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, says that an attempt to cut a deal with the Taliban should not be conceived as an effort to peel away moderates:

The people with whom any deal would have to be done, those Taliban prepared to contemplate accommodation, have a sense of their movement as a moral force that emerged to fight anarchy and corruption in civil war Afghanistan in an honourable tradition of jihad. They are deeply suspicious of apparent US support for the commanders and warlords against whom they were pitted well before 2001. Reluctant to accept that it was the alliance with al-Qaeda which turned the world against them, they resent their labelling as terrorists. They have a host of grievances, from persecution of Taliban who stayed in Afghanistan to the Guantánamo experience and the United Nations blacklists, which they point to as evidence that neither the US nor the Kabul government can be trusted.

Nevertheless, Taliban pragmatists claim they have little problem with an eventual break from al-Qaeda, that they will accommodate other Afghan political forces and that their stance on social issues is unlikely to be a block to agreement. Quizzed on justice and impunity, they protest that their record is no worse than the current Kabul government. The pragmatists do not expect to renounce jihad but to redefine it. They will not surrender but they hope that the Taliban movement might be rehabilitated as a moral Islamic force inside the Afghan political system.

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Netanyahu faces arrest in Hamas hotel murder if Mossad link proved

From The National:

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, will be at the top of Dubai’s wanted list if the Israeli foreign intelligence service Mossad is proven to be behind the killing of a senior Hamas official, the Dubai Police chief said yesterday.

Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan Tamim told The National that “Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will be the first to be wanted for justice as he would have been the one who signed the decision to kill [Mahmoud] al Mabhouh in Dubai. We will issue an
arrest warrant against him.”

He did not, however, assert that Mossad was definitively responsible for the killing; Hamas has accused the Israeli agency of killing Mr al Mabhouh.

The website of Ireland’s Evening Herald reports:

Members of a hit squad who killed a top Hamas military commander used Irish passports to enter and leave Dubai, it’s been claimed.

The suspected Israeli hit team, including at least one woman, entered the United Arab Emirates using Irish documents, police authorities said.

Before jumping to any conclusions about the nationalities of the assassins in Dubai, it’s worth remembering that when Mossad agents attempted to murder Hamas’ political leader Khalid Meshaal in Jordan in 1997, the Israelis were using Canadian passports.

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The war of terror

At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick writes:

…what was once tough on terror is now soft on terror. And each time the Republicans move their own crazy-place goal posts, the Obama administration moves right along with them.

It’s hard to explain why this keeps happening. There hasn’t been a successful terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. The terrorists who were tried in criminal proceedings since 9/11 are rotting in jail. The Christmas Day terror attack was both amateurish and unsuccessful. The Christmas bomber is evidently cooperating with intelligence officials without the need to resort to thumbscrews. In a rational universe, one might conclude that all this is actually good news. But in the Republican crazy-place, there is no good news. There’s only good luck. Tick tock. And the longer they are lucky, the more terrified Americans have become.

I’ve always argued that it’s misleading and dangerous to treat “terror” and “terrorism” as synonyms.

As “the war on terrorism” quickly became “the war on terror” — a contraction that generally seems to have been be viewed as nothing more than a tabloid construction — terror was treated as an inescapable consequence of terrorism, such that there was supposedly no reason to distinguish between the objects of our fear and the fear itself.

The problem with arguing that our fears have grown out of proportion to the threats is that all it will take is for there to be another major terrorist attack in America (note in, not on — the whole country is never in jeopardy of attack) and the fear-mongers will trumpet that they have been vindicated. Indeed, they will inevitably blame — alongside the attackers — those who previously suggested that America’s fears were overblown.

The alternative argument — one that no populist has the courage to press — is that in response to the 9/11 attacks, America plunged into a shameful state of national hysteria.

Al Qaeda presented a challenge to this country in 2001. It tried to find out whether nineteen men were capable of making 600 million knees wobble. It accomplished that feat with resounding success.

The spectacle of a whole nation being so easily terrorized had two immediate effects.

It demonstrated to jihadists that their presupposition that it is quite easy to make Americans afraid was well-founded.

And it led others (mostly Americans themselves) to view American fear as fertile ground in which commercial, political and military opportunities of incalculable value could easily be cultivated.

At no point did anyone of national stature step up and say to the American people: get a grip on yourselves. You should neither capitulate to the terrorists nor to the fear-mongers since they both have the same objective: they want to make you live in fear.

The fear-mongers say that the only way of averting fear is to feel safe and secure. That’s true — but only for about the first ten years in life. After that, as we mature we must learn how to live in a dangerous world without becoming enslaved by our own fears.

So, the first rule when it comes to dealing with terrorism is to remember that we are adults and that life demands a sufficient measure of courage such that we don’t shriek every time someone shouts boo!

Once we have a national consensus on our need to act like adults, then we proceed with all the practical and necessary steps to avoid becoming sitting ducks. Counter-terrorism then becomes a matter of prudence — not a vice for gripping the national psyche.

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Off with his head!

Matthew Yglesias writes:

If the President wants to do something like implement a domestic policy proposal he campaigned on—charge polluters for global warming emissions, for example—he faces a lot of hurdles. He needs majority support on a House committee or three. He also needs majority support on a Senate committee or three. Then he needs to get a majority in the full House of Representatives. And then he needs to de facto needs a 60 percent supermajority in the Senate. And then it’s all subject to judicial review.

But if Scooter Libby obstructs justice, the president has an un-reviewable, un-checkable power to offer him a pardon or clemency. If Bill Clinton wants to bomb Serbia, then Serbia gets bombed. If George W Bush wants to hold people in secret prisons and torture them, then tortured they shall be. And if Barack Obama wants to issue a kill order on someone or other, then the order goes out. And if Congress actually wants to remove a president from office, it faces extremely high barriers to doing so.

Whether or not you approve of this sort of executive power in the security domain, it’s a bit of a weird mismatch. You would think that it’s in the field of inflicting violence that we would want the most institutional restraint. Instead, the president faces almost no de facto constraints on his deployment of surveillance, military, and intelligence authority but extremely tight constraint on his ability to implement the main elements of the his domestic policy agenda.

This kind of presidential power looks “weird” if viewed from a constitutional vantage point but maybe not as weird as an expression of American culture.

Having moved to this country twenty years ago from the country that America successfully wrestled its independence from, it’s often struck me that Americans did not fully reject the concept of monarchical rule; they simply wanted a kind of modified monarchy.

First off, the monarch would need to be a native — a vehement “no” to foreign rule.

Next, the monarch would need to be one of the people, be elected and not restricted to a line of inheritance. It wasn’t that Americans did want a king; they simply wanted everyone to be able to nurture the fantasy that some day they too might become the king.

But dynasties are OK. In fact, the occasional dynasty helps burnish the executive’s regal image.

And what’s more befitting of the powers of an American king than that he should be able to occasionally proclaim: “Off with his head!”

Who knows, maybe in a few years the old regal custom of hosting public executions will be re-instituted. No doubt they’d get excellent ratings on cable news.

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Murder with impunity

Glenn Greenwald writes:

… even if you’re someone who does want the President to have the power to order American citizens killed without a trial by decreeing that they are Terrorists (and it’s worth remembering that if you advocate that power, it’s going to be vested in all Presidents, not just the ones who are as Nice, Good, Kind-Hearted and Trustworthy as Barack Obama), shouldn’t there at least be some judicial approval required? Do we really want the President to be able to make this decision unilaterally and without outside checks? Remember when many Democrats were horrified (or at least when they purported to be) at the idea that Bush was merely eavesdropping on American citizens without judicial approval? Shouldn’t we be at least as concerned about the President’s being able to assassinate Americans without judicial oversight? That seems much more Draconian to me.

It would be perverse in the extreme, but wouldn’t it be preferable to at least require the President to demonstrate to a court that probable cause exists to warrant the assassination of an American citizen before the President should be allowed to order it? That would basically mean that courts would issue “assassination warrants” or “murder warrants” — a repugnant idea given that they’re tantamount to imposing the death sentence without a trial — but isn’t that minimal safeguard preferable to allowing the President unchecked authority to do it on his own, the very power he has now claimed for himself? And if the Fifth Amendment’s explicit guarantee — that one shall not be deprived of life without due process — does not prohibit the U.S. Government from assassinating you without any process, what exactly does it prohibit?

Greenwald makes a series of excellent points but I would add one major point that really should come in front of the whole discussion: the idea that a legal distinction should be made between American citizens and non-Americans is a thoroughly un-American idea.

The Declaration of Independence does not say:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Americans are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It didn’t say “Americans”, it said “all men” — a declaration of what were taken to be universal human values.

To be concerned about whether the president has claimed to right to murder Americans is really missing the point. What in practice this and the former president are doing is not exercising any kind of specially fabricated legal right; they are committing murder exclusively where they believe they can get away with it.

Assassinations taking place in the tribal areas of Pakistan, in Yemen and Somalia, are all occurring in environments whose lawlessness means that US government officials can be reliably confident that they can act with relative legal impunity.

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The world according to Bronner is a Jewish one

Philip Weiss writes:

Toward the end of Ethan Bronner’s appearance at Vassar last night, a woman in the aisle melted down yelling at him. “What I’m hearing from you is only one side. Your son is in the IDF. You are Jewish… The way you talk is totally pro-Israel.” Then Fanny Prizant of Woodstock demanded, What is it about the New York Times? Why don’t they have someone else to at least put across the other side of the story?

Prizant was quite upset, and I found myself nodding in agreement. It had been a bizarre evening. It was like a lecture in a Hitchcock film, the setting a gaunt Edwardian-era hall at an upstate NY college, and only a few people in the room are in on the story and the man on the stage is clueless. Prizant’s was the third or fourth hostile question. I wondered why Bronner went through with the lecture to begin with. He must be a little masochistic, or he has a strong sense of journalistic duty. That is how he came off, as a dutiful New York Timesman, a little hectic, with little sense of the new American scene. When the story of his son being in the Israeli army broke, I said it was going to dog him and the Times, and you can see that that is happening.

The problem isn’t the son. It’s Bronner’s degree of identification with Israel. I kept looking at my watch waiting for him to say One Palestinian Name. Finally it came at about minute 45: university president Sari Nusseibeh. I’m pretty sure it was the first mention of any Palestinian he knows. The world according to Bronner is a Jewish one. There was the friend who invited him to an orthodox Westchester congregation. His writer friend in Israel who counseled him to tell Jewish audiences back here that Israel is an apartheid state (and to tell college audiences the opposite; Israeli dissimulation). There was a string of Israeli generals and officials’ names. Meridor, Ben Gurion, Barak, Netanyahu. And Michael Oren–favorably of course.

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The CIA: a continuing threat to U.S. persons or interests?

The Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair reassured the House Intelligence Committee yesterday that he understands that killing Americans is a “very sensitive issue” and that the agency must always “get specific permission” to do so.

I wonder how much comfort that provides to the family of Jim and Veronica “Roni” Bowers and their two children, six-year-old son Cory and infant daughter Charity, who under the CIA’s watch were shot down by the Peruvian Air Force while flying over Peru in 2001. Veronica Bowers and her daughter Charity were killed. The video below shows what happened:

ABC News reports:

…for almost nine years, the CIA misled Congress, the White House and the dead woman’s parents about how and why the agency defied the rules established to make sure innocent people were not killed.

“I want to know the truth,” Garnett Luttig, father of Roni Bowers, told ABC News. “I want to know why. I wonder why my baby’s gone. Don’t they understand that?”

Said Gloria Luttig, Roni’s mother, “I want somebody to have to stand up and say I was responsible. I want him to know what a mother’s heart is like.”

On Wednesday, the CIA said its nine-year long investigation had determined that 16 CIA employees should be disciplined, including the woman then in charge of counter-narcotics.

Many of them are no longer with the CIA, and one of those involved said his discipline was no more than a letter of reprimand placed in his file, which he was told would be removed in one year.

So what are we to understand from DNI Blair? That while the CIA engages in extrajudicial killings, it does so with great caution but if mistakes are made, those responsible certainly face the risk of receiving a letter of reprimand?

Either we live in a land governed by law or we don’t. A determination by an intelligence operative is by no stretch of the imagination a substitute for due process.

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Israeli report claims $2bn stolen from Palestinians

Jonathan Cook writes:

Over the past four decades Israel has defrauded Palestinians working inside Israel of more than US$2 billion (Dh7.4bn) by deducting from their salaries contributions for welfare benefits to which they were never entitled, Israeli economists revealed this week.

A new report, “State Robbery”, says the “theft” continued even after the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994 and part of the money was supposed to be transferred to a special fund on behalf of the workers.

According to information supplied by Israeli officials, most of the deductions from the workers’ pay were invested in infrastructure projects in the Palestinian territories – a presumed reference to the massive state subsidies accorded to the settlements.

After the recent easing of restrictions on entering Israel under the “economic peace” promised by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, nearly 50,000 Palestinians from the West Bank are working in Israel and continue to have such contributions docked from their pay.

Complicit in the deception, the report adds, is the Histadrut, the Israeli labour federation, which levies a monthly fee on Palestinian workers, even though they are not entitled to membership and are not represented in labour disputes.

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Hamas denied entry to Dubai after killing

From The National:

Dubai’s chief of police, Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan Tamim, confirmed that a Hamas delegation would not be allowed to enter the UAE following the slaying of one of its senior operatives in the emirate.

Mahmoud al Mabhouh was killed in his hotel room on January 20.

Gen Tamim said: “We will not allow a Hamas delegation to enter the country, and we will only deal with the Palestinian Embassy and consulate, which are the official representatives in the country. We do not acknowledge the differences. For us, there is only one Palestine, not two.”

There is frustration in Hamas’ Damascus offices over the way the UAE has handled the killing of al Mabhouh, who they say was a frequent visitor to Dubai.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one senior Hamas official questioned the speed of Dubai’s response to the killing.

“Al Mabhouh was killed on January 20, but there was no announcement until 29 January. That’s almost 10 days. What was the reason for the delay?” he asked. “Such delays gave lots of time for the murderers to escape.”

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Mousavi: the Iranian revolution has failed to eradicate tyranny

From The National:

Iran’s main opposition leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi, declared yesterday that the 1979 Islamic Revolution had failed to “eradicate the roots of tyranny and dictatorship” that marked the shah’s era.

His scathing remarks represented his strongest challenge to the Tehran government in months and came at an acutely sensitive time – as Iran marks the 31st anniversary of the revolution.

“Dictatorship in the name of religion is the worst kind. The most evident manifestation of a continued tyrannical attitude is the abuse of parliament and the judiciary. We have completely lost hope in the judiciary,” Mr Mousavi said in an interview on his website, Kaleme.org.

The government’s hardline supporters will be infuriated by Mr Mousavi’s suggestion that Iran is labouring under the yoke of a dictatorship similar to that under the ousted, western-backed shah, and his remarks will increase the risk of his arrest.

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Lebanon’s AK-47 index may be pointing to war

From The National:

[Abu Mahdi, an arms dealer in southern Beirut] says the high point for the price of the AK-47 was in the period of major Sunni and Shiite sectarian tension that preceded the May 2008 clashes between Hizbollah and its allies against groups of Sunnis loyal to the government.

“In the days before the action, I knew that something was going to happen because prices jumped to $1,300 per AK,” he said. “It’s come down just a little but business is too much for this peace to last. Everyone is walking the streets acting all good, but they’re lying.”

This prediction is based on several factors, according to Mr Mahdi. The first is a widespread concern by Hizbollah that al Qa’eda-style groups, who cannot resist having their biggest enemies – the Shiite and Israel – in such close proximity, will target Lebanon. The second problem is a lack of faith in Lebanon’s government.

“There is no government, those people are useless,” says Mr Mahdi. “No one trusts them to keep the peace, so everyone buys weapons to protect their homes and families. Normally I sell about 30 to 40 machine guns a month but right now, it’s double that. And the price is $1,200 for a gun in good condition, almost as high as May 2008.”

“But I know there is a real problem on the streets right now not just because of the machine guns but because I am selling so many RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) launchers. People only buy grenades when they think war is coming. An RPG isn’t really a weapon you use to protect your house, but everyone is buying them anyway. Not good.”

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Arab politicians ‘facing increased persecution’ in Israel

Jonathan Cook:

Leaders of the Arab minority in Israel warned this week that they were facing an unprecedented campaign of persecution, backed by the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu, designed to stop their political activities.

The warning came after Said Nafaa, a Druze member of the Israeli parliament was stripped of his immunity last week, clearing the way for him to be tried for a visit to Syria three years ago.

In recent weeks legal sanctions have been invoked against two other Arab political leaders, following clashes with the Israeli security forces at demonstrations against the occupation, and pressure is growing for two more MPs to be investigated.

Arab politicians are particularly concerned about a bill introduced last month requiring all parliamentary candidates to swear loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state. If passed, the seats of the 10 Arab MPs belonging to non-Zionist parties in the 120-member parliament, or Knesset, would be under threat.

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On Israel-Palestine, no more of the same

Yossi Alpher:

President Obama and Mr. Mitchell must recognize that in the current regional strategic lineup, Syria is more relevant than Palestine. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, declares himself ready to deal. A Syrian-Israeli process has a better chance of getting underway than a Palestinian-Israeli process. A successful Syrian-Israeli effort offers the United States, Israel and the moderate Arab states immediate benefits by reducing Iran’s penetration of the Levant, weakening its regional proxies and allies and rendering the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq — a major strategic event of the coming year — more likely to succeed. The mere fact of Israel-Syria negotiations would hurt Hamas, thereby strengthening Mr. Abbas.

Such a potential payoff justifies applying some pressure if necessary on Mr. Netanyahu. It justifies the risk of failure. And it justifies devoting more U.S. diplomatic energy to Damascus instead of Ramallah.

A second revised priority should address Hamas itself. It’s time to recognize that all the strategies mustered against the Hamas “emirate” in Gaza since the takeover of June 2007 have failed. The economic warfare policy invoked by Israel, the Quartet powers — the European Union, the United States, Russia and the United Nations — and Egypt has punished 1.4 million Gazans, impoverished the moderate middle class and empowered and enriched Islamist smugglers, yet has failed to dislodge the Hamas regime. It is plainly counterproductive. Israel’s use of military force in Gaza, most recently a year ago, may have bought it some deterrent time but proved devastating for its international image. Egypt finally acknowledges that its mediation efforts with Hamas have failed. And the fiction that the P.L.O. will soon return to power in Gaza is just that — a fiction.

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How to talk to a jihadist

Andrew Sullivan:

Watching senators and pundits huff and puff about Mirandizing terrorists when they should apparently be declared enemy combatants and tortured at length is a depressing spectacle. To see political leaders in the West have such a low view of the American judicial system and such an elevated view of the world-historical significance of these pathetic, twisted, religious nutjobs … well, they look like a bunch of scaredy cats to me. What the hell happened to “Live Free Or Die?” What happened to the confidence of a society that its ancient traditions are perfectly capable, indeed precisely tailored, to cut down to size these narcissistic, fundamentalist celebrity-seekers?

Which reminds me. One of the high points in the West’s defense against these losers was the trial of one Richard Reid, an unspeakably ugly and deeply stupid Brit whom Dick Cheney decided should – gasp – be treated as a terrorist under the criminal law in the months after 9/11. Not an enemy combatant to be flown to Gitmo and tortured. A terrorist brought to justice in the light of day. Eight years later, Cheneyites are drumming up panic that the Obama administration would do exactly the same thing for exactly the same reasons. But that they have lost their shit is no reason for the rest of us to lose ours.

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