Aleppo: The capital of Western indifference

Thanassis Cambanis writes: For at least a year before the summer of 2016, civilians and fighters in rebel-held East Aleppo prepared for a siege they believed was both avoidable and inevitable. Correctly, it turns out, they calculated that the opposition’s bankrollers and arms suppliers — the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other “friends of Syria” — cared little for the well-being of civilians in rebel-held areas. Through the spring, contacts inside Aleppo prepared for the siege, expending minimal effort on appeals to the international community, which they assumed would be futile.

For all the world-weary resignation of the opposition fighters and other residents of rebel Aleppo, they have a well-earned pride in what they’ve done. They’ve maintained their hold on half of the jewel of Syria, and under withering assault, have cobbled together an alternative to Bashar al-Assad’s rule. “From the beginning of the revolution, we held Aleppo as the role model of the liberated city, that holds free elections, has an elected city council, and elected local committees that truly represent the people,” Osama Taljo, a member of the rebel city council in East Aleppo, explained over the phone after the siege began in earnest. “We insisted to make out of Aleppo an exemplar of the free Syria that we aspire to.”

Unfortunately, Aleppo has become an exemplar of something else: Western indifference to human suffering and, perhaps more surprisingly, fecklessness in the face of a swelling strategic threat that transcends one catastrophic war. [Continue reading…]

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Syria’s ‘White Helmets’: The life savers Putin calls terrorists

Michael Weiss writes: In one of the finer poems ever written about the twentieth century, W.H. Auden managed a careful balancing act between offering a brief, symbolized history of civilization (such as it is) and explaining the strange lure of a heavily internationalized conflict in the form of the Spanish Civil War:

Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag.
Our hours of friendship into a people’s army.

Here it may be worth noting that Auden originally had intended to fight on the Republican side against the Fascist forces of Francisco Franco or, at the very least, drive an ambulance to rescue those who did. (Perhaps fortunately for poetry, neither contingency came to pass, although he did turn up to broadcast anti-fascist propaganda.)

And what was “Spain,” exactly, but a revolutionary struggle against a foreign-backed dictatorship that was coopted and denatured by another murderous totalitarianism?

George Orwell, who didn’t much care for Auden’s romanticized (and slightly Communist-inflected) verses about Catalonia, knew first-hand about the firing squad and the bomb and what cynical agents of Moscow could do to a people’s army.

For these and other surface similarities, the Syria catastrophe has often been likened to the Spanish one, although no poet of distinction has yet emerged to capture the competing devastation and humanity of Aleppo (even if there are many brave Arab Orwells chronicling the catastrophe in real time).

It is also too soon to tell if revanchist imperialism, reactionary politics and waves of refugees will be able to curtain-raise an encompassing world war, although the prospect doesn’t seem as remote as it once did. For all that unpleasantness, we are not without a few moments of tenderness blossoming, as Auden would have it, among altruistic first responders.

“All lives are precious and valuable,” says Mohammed Farah, a former tailor. “A child, even if he is not my son, is like my son. I cannot explain it.”

As a matter of fact, he can, with the help his brother Khaled, a former builder, and Abu Omar, a former blacksmith. All three are volunteers with the Syria Civil Defense, more commonly known as the White Helmets, owing to the identifiable headgear all of these humanitarian rescue workers wear. [Continue reading…]

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Battle for ISIS stronghold could trigger a new crisis: A million displaced Iraqis

The Washington Post reports: The battle for the northern city of Mosul could force a million people to flee their homes. But even before it begins, aid agencies are struggling to shelter families displaced by the conflict against the Islamic State.

The United Nations says it is nowhere near ready to deal with the fallout from the U.S.-backed offensive to retake Mosul from the militants, which could begin in less than a month.

The camps in northern Iraq are full. Debaga camp, 40 miles southeast of Mosul on the edges of the semiautonomous Kurdish region, was built a year ago for 700 families. It now houses 10 times as many people, most of whom fled fighting as Iraqi forces retook territory south of the city.

Crowds gather around reporters, hoping they are aid workers bringing humanitarian assistance. “Register me! Register me!” they shout. They complain they don’t have mattresses, medicine, milk for their children or diapers.

Many don’t have tents, with 1,100 families here waiting for shelter. They bed down in the classrooms and yard of the camp’s school and in the hall of a mosque. Some have slung tarpaulins next to walls in an attempt to shield themselves from the sun. [Continue reading…]

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Why Egypt’s migrants risk their lives

Bel Trew writes: The smugglers forced the last 100 frightened migrants to board a listing ship at knifepoint. They were 12 kilometers (8 miles) off the Egyptian coast and the battered fishing boat was already packed. The smugglers snarled death threats at the appointed “captain” who refused to set sail for Italy because, with over 450 people on board, the vessel was dangerously overloaded.

One we’ll call Mohamed, because he is only 17, is an impoverished Egyptian tuk-tuk driver who waited on the bow of the crammed ship with a dozen of this friends as the fight erupted. It was 4:00 a.m. and nearly light but the new influx of passengers had sparked panic on deck.

The battered ribs of the ship began to groan as the shifting weight rocked the vessel violently to the side. Locked inside a fish refrigerator in the hold, dozens of people clawed at the walls to get out.

Mohamed and his 15-year-old friend, whom we’ll call Osman, were the first to jump into the churning water after failing to coax their best friend Karim, also 15, to join them. Karim, like many others on board the boat, could not swim.

“From the water I saw something snap on top and the boat suddenly flipped on its side. It was as if it was sucked under the waves,” Mohamed said days later from his impoverished hometown of Green Island, east of Alexandria.

“We watched people drowning each other to get air. The living were floating on the dead,” he added, his voice cracking.

Osman spotted Karim, 15, clutching onto a water bottle. “He was slipping. We tried to reach him. But I looked back and he was gone.”

The two boys, who swam for seven hours looking for land, were among the 163 people dragged out of the water by fishermen, who came to their rescue when the Egyptian coastguard failed to show up.

An estimated 300 people from Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, Syria, and Somalia drowned that morning of Sept. 21, although only 202 bodies have so far been recovered. On Tuesday, 33 corpses, some unrecognizable after a week on the sea floor, were pulled out of the hull of the ship, which was finally brought to the surface and towed to shore.

Dozens of Egyptian children like Mohamed were onboard, part of an increasing number of minors leaving alone for Italy, because they cannot be repatriated under Italian law and so can stay to make money to send home.

Over 16,863 unaccompanied children have made the perilous Mediterranean crossing from North Africa to Italy so far this year, nearly double the 8,354 who traveled last year, according to an email sent to me by Save The Children. Over 2,666 of those unaccompanied minors were Egyptian, more than triple the 854 who traveled in the same period last year.

Desperation is driving families to urge their young sons to take the deadly 10-day sea trip. A crumbling economy in Egypt, fueled by five years of unrest and political oppression, means few have opportunities if they stay. [Continue reading…]

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How Vladimir Putin feeds Europe’s rabid right

Anna Nemtsova writes: Victor Orban, the right-wing leader of Hungary, offered his people a simple formula: Come and vote in a referendum against allowing in more asylum-seekers and you will be safe from terrorism in your country.

Prime Minister Orban also promised that if people did not show up for the migration referendum on Sunday, Hungary would have wasted more than $36 million, which is what the authorities were spending to organize the vote to reject the European Union quota of 1,229 refugees. That was the price to stop terrorism, according to Orban. (According to critics, that was $30,000 per head of anti-humanitarian spending.)

As often happens in Europe these days, the results were confusing, and unsettling.

Orban had compared migrants to “poison.” Hungary would “give Europe the finger,” he said, vowing to change Hungary’s constitution so the European Union would have no right to impose any rules on the country without its parliament’s approval.

This is the same country, remember, that just a dozen years ago celebrated its membership in the EU. Now it wants to restructure the whole thing. [Continue reading…]

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How Donald Trump ditched U.S. steel workers in favor of China

Newsweek reports: Plenty of blue-collar workers believe that, as president, Donald Trump would be ready to fight off U.S. trade adversaries and reinvigorate the country’s manufacturing industries through his commitment to the Rust Belt. What they likely don’t know is that Trump has been stiffing American steel workers on his own construction projects for years, choosing to deprive untold millions of dollars from four key electoral swing states and instead directing it to China — the country whose trade practices have helped decimate the once-powerful industrial center of the United States.

A Newsweek investigation has found that in at least two of Trump’s last three construction projects, Trump opted to purchase his steel and aluminum from Chinese manufacturers rather than United States corporations based in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. In other instances, he abandoned steel altogether, instead choosing the far-less-expensive option of buying concrete from various companies, including some linked to the Luchese and Genovese crime families. Trump has never been accused of engaging in any wrongdoing for his business dealings with those companies, but it’s true that the Mafia has long controlled much of the concrete industry in New York. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey suspends thousands of police, shuts down TV station as crackdown widens

Reuters reports: Turkish authorities suspended nearly 13,000 police officers, detained dozens of air force officers and shut down a TV station on Tuesday, widening a state-ordered clampdown against perceived enemies in the wake of July’s failed coup.

The police headquarters said 12,801 officers, including 2,523 chiefs, had been suspended because of their suspected links to U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara accuses of orchestrating the attempt to overthrow the government.

Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, denies any link to the putsch which has shaken the country and led to the deaths of more than 240 people.

The suspensions came hours after deputy prime minister Numan Kurtulmus announced that the cabinet had approved a 90-day extension to a state of emergency, renewing President Tayyip Erdogan’s powers to govern by decree at least until January.

The emergency measures, if approved by parliament, mean Erdogan can take decisions without oversight of the Constitutional Court, Turkey’s highest legal body. [Continue reading…]

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Theresa May walks into a Brexit trap

Gideon Rachman writes: Theresa May has one great advantage as a politician. She looks serious and responsible. But appearances can be deceptive. If you examine how the UK prime minister is handling Brexit, a different sort of politician emerges.

By announcing that she will start the formal negotiations for Britain to leave the EU by March 2017, the prime minister has walked into a trap. She has given away what little leverage Britain has in the negotiations — without receiving any of the assurances that she needs to achieve a successful outcome.

The announcement of the decision about when the UK will trigger Article 50 — the process by which Britain gives formal notice that it intends to leave the EU — was made in a statesmanlike fashion. But the actual content of the decision is reckless and driven by politics, rather than Britain’s national interest.

Once Mrs May triggers Article 50, she has precisely two years to negotiate a new deal with the EU. Senior civil servants have told the prime minister that it is highly unlikely that the UK will be able to negotiate both the terms of its divorce and a new trade deal with the EU within the two-year deadline. As a result, they warned the prime minister that she must have assurances on what an interim trade agreement with the EU would look like in the long period between the UK leaving the bloc and a definitive new deal being put into place.

Mrs May has chosen to ignore this advice. In doing so, she has knowingly placed Britain at a massive disadvantage in the forthcoming negotiations. [Continue reading…]

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Alex Jones: ‘Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug’

Poor Alex Jones. He stayed up all night waiting for Julian Assange — who Jones was hailing as a “true liberal” — to deliver Wikileaks’ long-anticipated “October surprise.” The Hill reports: A Tuesday morning WikiLeaks event in Berlin did not produce an “#OctoberSurprise” to derail the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign that many had expected, but Julian Assange said he would release more documents before Election Day.

“I’ve seen the internet and I understand there is enormous expectation in the United States,” said Assange, the site’s editor, via video conference at the event, celebrating the 10-year anniversary of WikiLeaks held at 10 a.m. Berlin time.

“Some of that expectation will be addressed [when I announce upcoming projects]. But you should understand that if we’re going to make a major publication in relation to the United States at a particular hour, we don’t do it at 3 a.m.”

Many observers believed that Assange had planned to announce a document post with damning evidence of corruption, wrongdoing or other scandal.

On Monday, Trump advisor Roger Stone tweeted “I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon #LockHerUp.”

Stone has claimed to be in contact with Assange. [Continue reading…]

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Former president who fought Colombia’s peace deal holds key to its future

The Wall Street Journal reports: Álvaro Uribe found the bullet-riddled body of his father at the family’s farm in 1983. Rebels from the Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, or the FARC, had killed him in a kidnapping attempt.

When he became Colombia’s president 19 years later, Mr. Uribe targeted the FARC with a military offensive. Then this weekend, more than anyone else, he helped scuttle the nationwide referendum that would have sealed a peace treaty between his successor, Juan Manuel Santos, and the Marxist rebel group.

The stunning outcome thrusts Mr. Uribe, now 64 years old and a senator, into a central role shaping what will happen next. Some Colombians see him as the only person who can renegotiate the deal in a way to convince skeptics it isn’t too lenient toward rebels who have gripped Colombia in conflict for 52 years.

Late Sunday night, Mr. Santos said all the political players — a pointed reference to Mr. Uribe, a one-time political ally — would need to “decide among us all what is the path we should take.” The rebels, speaking from Havana, said they wouldn’t return to the battlefield and want to pursue peace.

On Monday, the FARC’s leader, Rodrigo Londoño, called on the peace pact to proceed and said it couldn’t be undone despite Sunday’s vote. “Peace with dignity arrived and will remain,” he said.

Mr. Uribe also sounded magnanimous after the results were announced. He said all Colombians “want peace, no one wants violence.” He called for protection for the FARC rebels who have expressed fear of being targeted by right-wing gunmen and he said his Democratic Center party wants “to contribute to a national accord” on the question of resolving the conflict. [Continue reading…]

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The Syrian trauma

Peter Harling writes: Arguably, all conflicts are traumatic. More than 25 years after their civil war, the lifestyle and worldview of Lebanese are still shaped by the experience, influencing how they position themselves politically, how they assess strangers and in which neighborhoods they choose to live, down to where they shop and on which roads they drive. They are also passing much of this down to their offspring, who more often than not draw the same mental map, blotting out whole swaths of their own society; even when they interact in neutral spaces, young Lebanese from different backgrounds tend to know precious little about each other. Iraqis, who arguably were subjected to greater violence still, are scarred in ways that could shape their destiny for generations to come. A new generation that grew up in cantonized communities often has only the faintest, most stereotyped understanding of their brethren across the communal wall.

Syria seems nonetheless to bring in something different, hard to pin down — an elusive truth that is precisely what we should not fail to understand. Indeed there are many layers to the Syrian trauma. First, Syrian culture, in normal times, is remarkably civil. The Syrian dialect of Arabic is ravishingly polite. Education is a source of national pride. Unlike many other parts of the Arab world, urbane mores permeated the countryside more than a rural ethos reshaped the city. Communal coexistence, edgy on occasions, was nevertheless a profession of faith.

Violence was there, no doubt, but only occasionally burst forth from beneath the surface: honor killings in the countryside, sporadic clashes between Kurds and Arabs, and failed uprisings led by the Druze or elements of the Muslim Brotherhood were among the rare exceptions. The most pervasive species of violence — the detentions, torture and executions perfected by the regime’s security apparatus — was all the more sinister for its absolute secrecy. Then, after 2011, violence became all-encompassing: swelling, escalating, engulfing and ravaging everything Syrians once believed in. All the horrible exceptions of the past were now the norm, shaking to its core the Syrian sense of self.

Second, Syrians are devastated by their own delusions. The sublime revolutionary illusion, which still drives many of them five years on, has degenerated beyond redemption. Meanwhile, on the other side, most presumed “loyalists” discern, deep down, that the regime has committed the irreparable and unforgivable, hurtling down a path from which there is no return. They know, although they can’t admit it, that what is left of a state is a fallacy and a fraud. And still, all continue to make immense sacrifices in the name of a cause however corrupted. There is, seemingly, no way back for anyone.

Third, the war has been bewildering in its sheer density and hybrid nature, borrowing from every conceivable genre of human cruelty. Organs were eaten, heads chopped off, children gassed, and whole neighborhoods starved to death. Untold numbers have disappeared in a gulag of prisons. Volunteers from around the world have joined both camps, contributing new varieties of horror (with the Islamic State keen not to be outdone). States have intervened and interfered, to make things unfailingly worse.
The Syrian war is, so to speak, the defining conflict of the era: a confusing mix of sub-dynamics that seem to have no overarching structure beyond a hodgepodge of failed agendas from the past – Western democratization, Russia reenacting the cold war, Turkey’s promotion of Islamists and containment of the Kurds, and so on. All parties seem to fight on like automatons, because they are incapable of formulating any attainable vision for the future, and hence take pride simply in exploiting their opponents’ own crimes.

Fourth, therefore, is the incredible sense of waste that comes from a conflict where no one appears to be even trying to achieve anything, other than stay the course – an unusual war where the endgame is left generally undefined. If defined at all it is through vague, aspirational goals – topple the regime, take back the country, stop the violence, defeat terror – divorced from any serious strategy. Syrians and foreigners alike are guilty of this, leaving everyone in a state of limbo that is awkward for outsiders but excruciating for the concerned. The former have other things going on in their lives. For the latter every day is a torment. And unlike the tantalizing punishments of Greek mythology, theirs is one for which there is no apparent reason.

A fifth and related source of trauma for Syrians is the horrifying spectacle of an outside world watching on as their country is pointlessly and endlessly tortured. They have learned the hard way how shallow and callous our media and politics can be. People who remember every sorrow in every detail must contend at best with generalized amnesia, at worst with conventional wisdom dismissing their life experience. Their misery is met with fatigue; their flight to safety with hysteria. They are asked a thousand times the same questions by a carrousel of journalists and officials always reinventing the wheel. And they are told to be “pragmatic” and “realistic” by outsiders who have themselves unfailingly ignored the practical realities on the ground. [Continue reading…]

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Study suggests human proclivity for violence gets modulated but is not necessarily diminished by culture

A new study (by José Maria Gómez et al) challenges Steven Pinker’s rosy picture of the state of the world. Science magazine reports: Though group-living primates are relatively violent, the rates vary. Nearly 4.5% of chimpanzee deaths are caused by another chimp, for example, whereas bonobos are responsible for only 0.68% of their compatriots’ deaths. Based on the rates of lethal violence seen in our close relatives, Gómez and his team predicted that 2% of human deaths would be caused by another human.

To see whether that was true, the researchers dove into the scientific literature documenting lethal violence among humans, from prehistory to today. They combined data from archaeological excavations, historical records, modern national statistics, and ethnographies to tally up the number of humans killed by other humans in different time periods and societies. From 50,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, when humans lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers, the rate of killing was “statistically indistinguishable” from the predicted rate of 2%, based on archaeological evidence, Gómez and his colleagues report today in Nature.

Later, as human groups consolidated into chiefdoms and states, rates of lethal violence shot up — as high as 12% in medieval Eurasia, for example. But in the contemporary era, when industrialized states exert the rule of law, violence is lower than our evolutionary heritage would predict, hovering around 1.3% when combining statistics from across the world. That means evolution “is not a straitjacket,” Gómez says. Culture modulates our bloodthirsty tendencies.

The study is “innovative and meticulously conducted,” says Douglas Fry, an anthropologist at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. The 2% figure is significantly lower than Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker’s much publicized estimate that 15% of deaths are due to lethal violence among hunter-gatherers. The lower figure resonates with Fry’s extensive studies of nomadic hunter-gatherers, whom he has observed to be less violent than Pinker’s work suggests. “Along with archaeology and nomadic forager research, this [study] shoots holes in the view that the human past and human nature are shockingly violent,” Fry says. [Continue reading…]

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How Putin and Assad are promoting extremism

The Daily Beast reports: The U.S. quickly is running out of options to stop the regime and Russia on Syria’s eastern Aleppo, U.S. officials concede, and they fear that abandoned U.S.-backed rebels could increasingly turn to jihadists groups, like al Qaeda, for protection.

In addition, two U.S. officials told the Daily Beast, they fear the defeat of rebels in Syria’s largest city could weaken U.S.-backed groups in other areas around including Idlib, Hama and Latakia.

That is, the collapse of rebel held areas of eastern Aleppo could mean not just a stronger position for Syrian President Bashar al Assad but radical terror groups, the last remaining opposition forces still standing. The fate of Aleppo could be the turning point of the five-year civil war.

“The rebels have been willing to go along with the coalition up until now. But how long can they hold out against a [Russian] assault?” one distraught U.S. official asked.

If that happens, it will validate a long standing Russian narrative that U.S. backed rebels are not moderate as the U.S. claims but radical elements seeking to destroy Syria. And forcing such groups toward more radical elements may be the very intent behind their aggressive assault on eastern Aleppo for the last week, which was launched after the collapse of the latest cease fire. [Continue reading…]

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Two U.S. diplomats drugged in Russia last year, deepening Washington’s concern

RFE/RL reports: Two U.S. officials traveling with diplomatic passports were drugged while attending a conference in Russia last year, and one of them was hospitalized, in what officials have concluded was part of a wider, escalating pattern of harassment of U.S. diplomats by Russia.

The incident at a hotel bar during a UN anticorruption conference in St. Petersburg in November 2015 caused concern in the U.S. State Department, which quietly protested to Moscow, according to a U.S. government official with direct knowledge of what occurred.

But it wasn’t until a dramatic event in June, when an accredited U.S. diplomat was tackled outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, that officials in Washington reexamined the November drugging and concluded they were part of a definite pattern.

The State Department suggested the harassment has become a particular concern in the past two years. [Continue reading…]

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15 years in the Afghan crucible

Carlotta Gall writes from Kabul: There is an end-of-an-era feel here these days. Military helicopters rattle overhead, ferrying American and Afghan officials by air rather than risk cars bombs in the streets. The concrete barriers, guarding against suicide attacks, have grown taller and stronger around every embassy and government building, and whole streets are blocked off from the public.

It has been 15 years since American forces began their bombing campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda on Oct. 7, 2001, and sometimes it feels as if we are back to square one, that there is nothing to show for it.

The recent American military drawdown has been drastic — from over 100,000 troops a few years ago to a force of 8,500 today. Thousands of Afghans have been made jobless as bases and assistance programs have closed. Meanwhile tens of thousands of Taliban are on the offensive in the countryside, threatening to overrun several provincial towns and staging huge bombings here in the capital.

Afghan forces have been bearing the brunt, suffering unsustainable casualties. Communities talk of hundreds of coffins returning from the front line. Civilians have suffered no less — thousands of families have been displaced anew by fighting, and aid workers warn that their access is deteriorating. Business executives have been leaving, selling off their property, and whole families have swelled the refugee columns heading to Europe.

The political mood is shifting, too, as Afghans sense the declining American influence and start casting around for new patrons or renewing old alliances. The politicking is intense: “Hot, very hot,” as a former minister described the political climate.

For Afghans, and for many of us who have followed Afghanistan for decades — I have been visiting the country since the early 1990s — the times are reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s withdrawal in 1989 after a 10-year occupation. The Communist government and army that the Soviets left behind survived only three years before they were overthrown by the mujahedeen in 1992. [Continue reading…]

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How the Pentagon paid a British PR firm $500 million for top secret Iraq propaganda

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports: The Pentagon gave a controversial UK PR firm over half a billion dollars to run a top secret propaganda programme in Iraq, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal.

Bell Pottinger’s output included short TV segments made in the style of Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos which could be used to track the people who watched them, according to a former employee.

The agency’s staff worked alongside high-ranking US military officers in their Baghdad Camp Victory headquarters as the insurgency raged outside.

Bell Pottinger’s former chairman Lord Tim Bell confirmed to the Sunday Times, which worked with the Bureau on this story, that his firm had worked on a “covert” military operation “covered by various secrecy agreements.”

Bell Pottinger reported to the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Council on its work in Iraq, he said.

Bell, one of Britain’s most successful public relations executives, is credited with honing Margaret Thatcher’s steely image and helping the Conservative party win three elections. The agency he co-founded has had a roster of clients including repressive regimes and Asma al-Assad, the wife of the Syrian president.

In the first media interview any Bell Pottinger employee has given about the work for the US military in Iraq, video editor Martin Wells – who no longer works for the company – told the Bureau his time in Camp Victory was “shocking, eye-opening, life-changing.”

The firm’s output was signed off by former General David Petraeus – then commander of the coalition forces in Iraq – and on occasion by the White House, Wells said. [Continue reading…]

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Tunisian men detail CIA black site torture involving electric chair and more

The Guardian reports: Two Tunisian men held in secret CIA prisons for more than a year have told a leading human rights organization they were tortured with gruesome and previously unknown techniques.

The men, who were released to Tunisian custody in 2015, described being threatened with placement in an electric chair at a black site prison in Afghanistan in 2002; being beaten with metal batons while their arms were suspended by a bar above their heads; and having their heads pushed into barrels of water.

One of the men, Ridha al-Najjar, was a pivotal detainee for the CIA, which believed him to be a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden. Najjar was the first man taken by the CIA to the black site, which was code-named Cobalt and was where at least one detainee is known to have died. His interrogation became a template for others at the site, according to the CIA inspector general. Najjar said the interrogators forcibly inserted something into his anus.

According to a footnote in the 2014 Senate intelligence committee’s investigation into torture, John Brennan, now CIA director, was among the senior CIA officials briefed in the summer of 2002 on the interrogation plan for Najjar. According to the Senate report, the plan included isolation, “‘sound disorientation techniques’, ‘sense of time deprivation’, limited light, cold temperatures, and sleep deprivation”.

“There was a barrel full of water, and they kept submerging [my head] in the water,” the other Tunisian man, Lotfi al-Arabi El Gherissi, told Human Rights Watch, which shared the two men’s accounts with the Guardian. [Continue reading…]

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