Long a survivor in Syria, a Dutch priest is slain

The New York Times reports: The Rev. Frans van der Lugt, a Dutch Jesuit priest who became a symbol of suffering and compassion in the war-ravaged Old City district of Homs, Syria, was shot to death Monday morning by a lone gunman, according to members of his order. The killing came amid growing disputes between Syrian insurgents blockaded in the Old City — those who want to accept an amnesty from the government in exchange for laying down their arms, and those who do not.

After Syrian government forces isolated and laid siege to the rebel-held Old City for more than a year, a truce in January allowed the evacuation of 1,500 people, both civilians and fighters. But Father Frans, as he was known, insisted on remaining in the monastery where he had lived for decades, offering refuge to Muslim and Christian families alike and sharing their deprivation and trauma.

The killer’s identity and motives were not known, but the attack carried a heavy symbolic importance. Though he was European, Father Frans, 72, had come to be considered part of Syrian society and was well known in and around Homs, including among local insurgents in the Old City. He survived there long after foreign fighters from the Islamic extremist group Nusra Front moved in and raised new fears for the few Christians who remained.

But now, something had changed, and he could no longer be protected. Fingers quickly pointed in all directions.

“The death of the priest is a scandal for the rebels,” said Mahmoud Taha, an antigovernment activist in Talbiseh, a village near Homs where the Jesuits run a center for the elderly. Mr. Taha speculated that the local Homs fighters had become radicalized. “They no longer accept anyone but those who are like them,” he said.

The Syrian exile opposition coalition said in a statement that Father Frans was protected by rebels, including a guard from the Free Syrian Army who was shot in the chest in the attack.

Amir Bader, an antigovernment activist in the Old City, said most of the fighters did not regard the priest as an enemy.

“Maybe some fanatic shot him,” Mr. Bader said, “or some regime associate did it, so the regime will show all the Christians: ‘Look what will happen to any of you if you support the revolution like Father Frans.’ ” [Continue reading…]

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ISIL jihadists open new front in Baghdad push

AFP reports: A powerful jihadist group inspired by Al-Qaeda has opened a new battlefront with Iraqi security forces that could see it try to push into Baghdad, officials and analysts warn.

The latest clashes, just weeks before parliamentary elections, raise key questions over the capacity of the army and police to repel militant attacks.

Anti-government fighters currently hold all of Fallujah, a town that is just a short drive from Baghdad, and other pockets of territory.

The push by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) into the Abu Ghraib area, sparking clashes in nearby Zoba and Zaidan, as well as a failed assault on a military camp in Yusifiyah, illustrate the group’s ambition, even with Fallujah under military siege.

In perhaps the most worrying sign of ISIL’s capabilities, anti-government fighters paraded with dozens of vehicles last week in broad daylight in Abu Ghraib, just 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the capital, according to witnesses and videos posted to YouTube. [Continue reading…]

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Kerry places blame on Israel for crisis in peace talks

Haaretz reports: The United States intends on continuing its efforts to promote a peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, but “it is the responsibility of the two sides to make decisions,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told a Senate Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Tuesday.

Kerry placed most of the blame for the crisis in talks on Israel and described the Palestinian application to United Nations institutions as a response to Israeli moves. “Both sides – wound out in a position of unhelpful moves,” he said, and went on to explain how the current crisis was created. “The treaties were unhelpful – and we made that crystal clear to the Palestinians. The prisoners were not released by Israel on the day they were supposed to be released and then another day passed and another day – and then 700 units were approved in Jerusalem and then poof…”

Kerry noted that “there are limits to the amount time the president and myself can put into this considering the other challenges around the world, especially if the parties can’t commit to being there in a serious way.” [Continue reading…]

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Laura Gottesdiener: Fantasy, greed, and housing, the prequel

One simple phrase electrified the financial world this past week: high-frequency trading.

With the publication of his new book, Flash Boys, author Michael Lewis almost singlehandedly transformed the growing practice of high-frequency trading from an obscure form of financial wizardry cooked up in Wall Street’s mad laboratories into a fledgling scandal. What’s high-frequency trading? It’s when lightning-quick computers running complex algorithms race ahead of ordinary human investors — you know, those guys with the funny jackets waving and yelling on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange — to gain the slightest advantage in the trading of stocks. For high-frequency traders, speed means getting valuable market information a few hundredths or millionths of a second early, which in turn can mean millions in profit simply by beating the regular guys to the trade. If it sounds complicated, well, that’s the point. “The insiders are able to move faster than you,” Lewis said on 60 Minutes. “They’re able to see your order and play it against other orders in ways that you don’t understand. They’re able to front run your order.”

Lewis’s Flash Boys tells the story of a Canadian banker and do-gooder named Brad Katsuyama who, outraged over this “rigged” market, did something about it. Judging by the reaction in some corners of the financial world, you’d think Lewis had declared war on Wall Street itself. (See, for instance, this verbal slug-fest on CNBC involving Lewis, Katsuyama, and the CEO of one of the exchanges Lewis takes to task in his book.)

The opprobrium greeting Flash Boys wouldn’t be quite as ridiculous if we didn’t already know how dangerous high-frequency trading can be. As Nick Baumann wrote in Mother Jones magazine, high-frequency trading gone haywire can inflict huge damage, as was the case in the so-called flash crash of 2010, which wiped out almost $1 trillion in shareholder value in a few hours. If several flash crashes occur at the same time, former bank regulator Bill Black told Baumann, “financial institutions can begin to fail, even very large ones.”

If Wall Street’s need for speed doesn’t cause the next Great Crash, TomDispatch regular Laura Gottesdiener knows what might. As she wrote in November, massive investment firms are building a “rental empire,” buying up foreclosed properties by the thousands, renting them back to working people, and bundling up those properties to sell to Wall Street. It’s an ingenious scheme reminiscent of the subprime mortgage machine — and this scheme, too, has the potential to plunge us back into a crisis. Today, Gottesidener turns her sights to New York City, where the rental racket has been underway for years and the results have been instructively grim. Andy Kroll

When predatory equity hit the Big Apple
How private equity came to New York’s rental market — and what that tells us about the future
By Laura Gottesdiener

Things are heating up inside Wall Street’s new rental empire.

Over the last few years, giant private equity firms have bet big on the housing market, buying up more than 200,000 cheap homes across the country. Their plan is to rent the houses back to families — sometimes the very same people who were displaced during the foreclosure crisis — while waiting for the home values to rise. But it wouldn’t be Wall Street not to have a short-term trick up its sleeve, so the private equity firms are partnering with big banks to bundle the mortgages on these rental homes into a new financial product known as “rental-backed securities.” (Remember that toxic “mortgage-backed securities” are widely blamed for crashing the global economy in 2007-2008.)

All this got me thinking: Have private equity firms gambled with rental housing somewhere else before? If so, what happened?

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Does Seymour Hersh understand how hexamine fits into Syrian sarin?

On Democracy Now! today, Amy Goodman provided Seymour Hersh with an opportunity to summarize the contents of his article which appeared at the London Review of Books yesterday.

The only juncture in the interview where Goodman challenged Hersh on the substance of his claims, came when she cited a post written by Scott Lucas which appeared at EA Worldview yesterday. In that post, Lucas reiterated a point he had made last December in response to Hersh’s first article on the chemical attack, referring to one of the many reasons that the scale of the attack was an indication that only the regime had such capabilities:

Reports on the day and subsequently indicated that 7-12 sites were attacked with chemical agents at the same time. In other words, whoever was responsible for the attacks launched multiple surface-to-surface rockets with chemical payloads against opposition-held towns in East Ghouta and one town in West Ghouta, near Damascus.

In part of his response to this challenge, Hersh said:

You have a UN report, you have this independent report, saying [the missiles used in the chemical attack] went no more than one or two kilometres and so I don’t know why we are talking about multiple launched rockets. These were homemade weapons and it seems very clear to most observers, as I say even to the UN team that did the final report — the UN because of whatever rules they have, wasn’t able to say that, who fired what, they could just say, they could just describe the weapons and never make a judgement, but I can tell you, I quote somebody from inside that investigation unit who was very clear that the weapons [that] were fired were homemade and were not Syrian army. This was asked and answered.

Hersh has a habit of making stronger claims in interviews than he is willing to make in writing.

Although on Democracy Now! he said “I quote somebody from inside that investigation unit” in the article itself he merely quotes a “person with knowledge of the UN’s activities.”

If this person was actually inside the investigation unit, why didn’t Hersh put that in print?

In the interview, Hersh says this person “was very clear that the weapons [that] were fired were homemade and were not Syrian army,” yet quoting this individual he wrote: “Investigators interviewed the people who were there, including the doctors who treated the victims. It was clear that the rebels used the gas.”

Note: Hersh’s source refers to “investigators,” not “our investigation” — a suggestion that the source was not in fact inside the investigation — and the source makes no direct reference to the construction method of the weapons.

In tune with the interests of his audience, Hersh prefers to tell political stories. Technicalities serve as nothing more than stage props and for this reason, it should come as no surprise that his televised engagements are generally solo performances, which is to say, he doesn’t get interviewed alongside experts who could quickly expose the weakness of his arguments.

For instance, a pillar of the argument that Hersh is making about the chemical attacks in Ghouta was that the weapons and the sarin they contained were homemade.

hexamineNow if Amy Goodman had wanted to pose a really tough question to Hersh she could have asked: How do you explain the presence of hexamine found on the remains of the missiles used in the chemical attacks?

That’s not the kind of question Hersh is likely to have thrown at him by Goodman or any other interviewer since neither he nor the interviewer would be likely to understand its significance.

Still, when the subject is chemical weapons and the media is able to see whether Hersh’s claims can withstand expert analysis, then that is exactly how his reporting should be tested.

It’s safe to assume that Hersh will never divulge the identity of any of his sources and so their credibility cannot be separated from his credibility. But Hersh’s assertion that the weapons and warheads used in the attack were homemade and that they lacked the identifying characteristics of Syrian army weapons, is a substantive claim that has to be supported by evidence.

The only physical evidence Hersh cites is sarin collected by Russian military intelligence operatives and passed on to British military intelligence at Porton Down.

This is worthless. For Hersh to attest to the reliability of this evidence by citing his own source’s claim that “the Russian who delivered the sample to the UK was ‘a good source – someone with access, knowledge and a record of being trustworthy’” is a joke.

Russia is an ally of Syria. The whole point of having UN weapons inspectors gathering evidence is that they are international and independent.

Dan Kaszeta, a former US Army and US Secret Service specialist on chemical, biological, and radiological defense, last year laid out the reasons why neither al Nusra nor any other non-state actor would have the capabilities to produce sarin in the quantity used in the Ghouta attacks.

Having presented the technical reasons why rebel-produced sarin was highly implausible, Kaszeta went on to make an important discovery about a unique feature of the sarin produced by the Assad regime — something that has never been observed before: the use of hexamine.

Sarin used in chemical weapons contains hydrogen flouride — “one of the most corrosive chemicals in existence.” Although hexamine has a diverse array of applications, Kaszeta suspected that Syria was using it as the acid reducer in sarin to mitigate the corrosive effects of hydrogen flouride. That suspicion was confirmed by the UN/OPCW inspection mission.

Ake Sellstrom, the head of the mission, was interviewed by CBRNe World magazine in February and asked:

CBRNe World: Why was hexamine on the list of chemical scheduled to be destroyed – it has many other battlefield uses as well as Sarin? Did you request to put it on the list or had the Syrian’s claimed that they were using it?

Sellstrom: It is in their formula, it is their acid scavenger.

To summarize:

  • The Syrian government has never claimed that it lost control of any of its CW arsenal.
  • It has acknowledged that hexamine was part of its formula for producing sarin.
  • Nobody else has previously used hexamine as a sarin additive.
  • Hexamine was found in the field samples collected by CW inspectors in Ghouta after the attacks.
  • Syria included 80 tons of hexamine in its declared inventory for CW destruction.

Add these facts together and there can be little doubt that, as Dan Kaszeta says, “the Assad regime did the wicked deed.”

Then again, who wants to hear about hexamine when instead they can listen to Seymour Hersh spinning tales about false flags?

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Seymour Hersh’s Volcano problem

Eliot Higgins writes: Yesterday, the London Review of Books published a second piece by Seymour Hersh on the August 21st Sarin attack. In an earlier piece published in December 2013, Hersh had approached the attacks from two angles, that the White House had used dodgy intelligence in the build up to intervention in Syria, and that the evidence suggested the munition used were improvised, and therefore it was likely the opposition was responsible. While the first point is certainly worth exploring, especially in light of information gathered about the attacks since August 21st, the second point was extremely flawed, with there being clear evidence of the government using the type of munitions linked to August 21st going back to late 2012, which I detailed in my piece Sy Hersh’s Chemical Misfire.

In his latest piece on August 21st, Seymour Hersh presents a narrative where the Turkish intelligence services aided the Syrian opposition in carrying out a false flag attack on August 21st, using one “former intelligence” source in particular. EA Worldview has already put together an excellent response highlighting some of the major flaws in Hersh’s piece, in particular the use of one source for most of his accusations, and I’d like to focus on one particular aspect of the attacks that Hersh appears to be ignorant of, or has chosen to ignore.

In the aftermath of the Sarin attack on Eastern Ghouta on August 21st, the remains of munitions that were practically unknown where recorded at several impact sites (shown below)

After months of research it has been possible to gather a significant amount of information about these rockets. [Continue reading…]

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Peter Van Buren: No-fly-list America

Here’s what the president said back in June 2013, while reassuring the American people about the National Security Agency’s collection of their phone metadata: “When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program’s about.  As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content.”

And indeed, the NSA was analyzing the metadata it was collecting from all of us.  Only one small problem (shades of the Bush era): it was also listening in and reading, too.  To be exact, without warrants and using a “backdoor loophole” in the law, the agency repeatedly plunged into massive databases that, while gathering emails and phone calls from “foreign targets,” swept up prodigious numbers of American ones in the process. (Evidently, the CIA and the FBI were using similar backdoors to similar ends.)  It’s true that, strictly speaking, those calls and emails were being collected by a different program than the one the president was referring to; so, if you’re a stickler for details, he didn’t exactly, officially lie.  In any case, it’s nothing you or I should really worry our little heads about, not when it turns out that whatever was done was perfectly “legal.”

We know this thanks to a legal expert of the first order, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who communicated as much to Senator Ron Wyden by letter recently.  Who, after all, should know better than Clapper, the man in charge of overseeing a secret world that has its own “parallel supreme court” renowned for only listening to one side of any case?  Here’s his statement on the subject of those warrantless searches of our phone conversations and emails: “There have been queries, using U.S. person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.  These queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the FISA court and consistent with the statute and the Fourth Amendment.”

If you don’t understand that, consider yourself English-challenged.  In fact, you should just stop fretting about government surveillance entirely and, while you’re at it, cut back on the overblown paranoia, too.  Americans, it’s time to go back to full-scale online shopping and banking, and to stop telling pollsters you’re doing less of it because of the NSA!

Really, there’s no point in making such a fuss about perfectly legal operations.  Isn’t it simpler just to stop paying attention to what the president, his top officials, and the guardians of our secret world tell us about what they’re doing?  After all, in the end, by hook, crook, or secret “law,” they will find a convenient justification for doing just what they want to do anyway.  Right now, we have a partial picture of what one agency in the U.S. intelligence community, the NSA, has been doing in these years, thanks to the revelations of Edward Snowden.  Someday, perhaps, we’ll have a fuller picture of what the other 16 agencies have been doing and it will surely take your breath away.

In the meantime, it’s rare that we ever get a glimpse of how our expanding secret state really works.  But every now and then, a single case can suddenly illuminate an otherwise dark landscape.  Such is Rahinah Ibrahim’s case, carefully laid out by TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren today.  It should chill you to the bone.  Former State Department whistleblower Van Buren has, by the way, just published quite an original, nitty-gritty novel, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent, which is highly recommended. Tom Engelhardt

How many watch lists fit on the head of a pin?
Post-constitutional America, where innocence is a poor defense
By Peter Van Buren

Rahinah Ibrahim is a slight Malaysian woman who attended Stanford University on a U.S. student visa, majoring in architecture. She was not a political person. Despite this, as part of a post-9/11 sweep directed against Muslims, she was investigated by the FBI. In 2004, while she was still in the U.S. but unbeknownst to her, the FBI sent her name to the no-fly list.

Ibrahim was no threat to anyone, innocent of everything, and ended up on that list only due to a government mistake. Nonetheless, she was not allowed to reenter the U.S. to finish her studies or even attend her trial and speak in her own defense. Her life was derailed by the tangle of national security bureaucracy and pointless “anti-terror” measures that have come to define post-Constitutional America. Here’s what happened, and why it may matter to you.

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Seymour Hersh’s alternate reality

The Pulitzer Prize winning veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was once a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He also wrote for the Washington Post. No more.

Last December he had to turn to the London Review of Books to publish, “Whose sarin?” and his latest piece on Syria appears at LRB today.


A truth-teller shunned by the American mainstream media!

I have little doubt Hersh revels in the image — it plays so well among those who revere him.

But just pause for a minute to think about this: Is Hersh’s reporting so radical, such a threat to the political establishment, that he couldn’t get published by Rolling Stone, or Vanity Fair, or the Boston Review, or Mother Jones, or any of the dozens of new long-form online publications that don’t seem lacking in boldness or creativity?

I doubt it. On the contrary, I think the image of a journalist-in-exile is simply Hersh’s latest vanity.

But if it turns out that there really is no publication this side of the Atlantic that will touch his work, maybe that would say less about a decline in the standards of American journalism and a lot more about the demise of Hersh’s credibility.

When it comes to Hersh’s reporting on Syria, one story that really deserves deeper investigation is whether he has become a stooge for Michael Maloof, a former senior security-policy analyst at the Pentagon who helped gather the bogus intelligence that lay the foundations for the war in Iraq. The fact that both of them have been spinning such similar yarns in recent months seems like more than a coincidence

The most inexcusable feature of Hersh’s reporting is that he effectively functions as his own source. In other words, for readers smitten by his reputation, what he reports is treated as fact for no other reason than the fact that he reported it.

Each time he comes out with a new piece, it’s like Moses coming down from the mountaintop. No one dare ask whether he really heard the voice of God, because no one questions Moses.

For his latest piece, Hersh’s primary source is a “former intelligence official.”

I can picture the two leaning against a bar somewhere in DC as the old hack furiously takes notes. What makes this former official’s word unimpeachable, we’ll never know — suffice to know is that just as Hersh unquestioningly believes his source, we are supposed to believe Hersh, without corroborating sources, without any hard evidence.

Just by chance, a few days ago, Bashar Ja’afari, Syria’s ambassador to the U.N., sent a letter to the Security Council on March 27, saying:

The competent Syrian authorities intercepted a wireless communication between two terrorists in the Jawbar area of Damascus governorate. In that communication, one of the terrorists said that another terrorist named Abu Nadir was covertly distributing gas masks. The authorities also intercepted another communication between the two other terrorists, one of whom is named Abu Jihad. In that communication, Abu Jihad indicates that toxic gas will be used and asked those who are working with him to supply protective masks.

This information … confirms that armed terrorist groups are preparing to use toxic gas in Jawbar quarter and other areas, in order to accuse the Syrian government of having committed such an act of terrorism.

“Terrorists” talking about gas masks who knows when and this “confirms” another gas attack is on the way.

The false flag industry remains as busy as ever — or so the Syrian government’s interlocutors would have you believe.

Those who find Hersh persuasive will probably find the ambassador’s warnings equally persuasive, but in each case it’s not that either is presenting a compelling case. On the contrary, they merely know how to feed their target audience exactly what it wants to hear.

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Crimes against humanity: The genocidal campaign of the climate change contrarians

Robert L. Nadeau and Donald A. Brown write: When scientists make presentations at meetings or conferences on the existing and projected impacts of climate change, they describe in jargon laden language and in emotionally neutral terms what their research has revealed about these impacts. But during informal conversations over a few beers during the evening or late at night, these scientists no longer feel obliged to divorce their scientific heads from their human hearts. On these occasions, they use colorful and often profane language to express their disdain and contempt for the small number of scientists known as global warming skeptics who are well compensated by conservative think tanks for misinterpreting and abusing scientific knowledge.

The scientists involved in these conversations also vent their anger toward the oil and energy companies that sponsor massive disinformation campaigns on radio and television designed to convince Americans that their security, peace and economic well-being are utterly dependent on the consumption of increasing amounts of “clean and plentiful” fossil fuels. They say unkind things about the mangers of the American news media for running endless stories about the human suffering and financial losses caused by extreme weather events and saying nothing about the fact that climate change is contributing to the frequency and intensity of these events. But if the conversation goes on long enough and the hour is late, one or more of these scientists will say what the others firmly believe but are reluctant to admit—the fate of the Earth is sealed by the ignorance, lack of compassion, and inexhaustible greed of its human inhabitants and life on this planet for our children and grandchildren will be little more than a brutal struggle for survival.

The reasons why these empirically oriented rational thinkers have come to this dire conclusion are abundantly obvious in recent scientific research on the existing and projected impacts of climate change. This research has not only shown that massive reductions in worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases over the next two decades will be required to prevent the most disastrous impacts of climate change. It has also revealed that if we fail, as now seems likely, to accomplish this feat, there is a high probability that life on this planet for our children and grandchildren will be little more than a brutal struggle for survival. (Hansen et al. 2013) But as the scientists involved in the late night conversations know all too well, this research is largely ignored by the mainstream media, rarely discussed by political leaders and economic planners, and conspicuously missing in the rancorous public debate about climate change.

The usual explanation why this insane situation exists, as climate scientist Michael Mann put it in a recent article in the New York Times, is that there is a “violent strain of anti-science” in this country which “infects the halls of Congress, the pages of leading newspapers and what we see on television.” (Mann, 2014) What Mann did not say in this article but knows very well is that the primary source of this infection is the well-financed, highly coordinated, and very effective campaign of the climate change contrarians.

This campaign began in the 1980s when some of the same scientists that had been paid by the tobacco industry to challenge the scientific evidence that smoking is harmful to human health were hired by oil and energy companies to challenge the scientific evidence about climate change. [Continue reading…]

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The Muslims are coming!

Robin Yassin-Kassab just reviewed Arun Kundnani’s new book, The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror, for The Guardian. He knew that some of his observations would be challenging for a section of the paper’s readership — and its editors and columnists.

He writes: I like the Guardian’s books section and its G2 section, not least because they sometimes pay me to write. I also like some of their brave correspondents, such as Martin Chulov. What I don’t like at all is the idiotic, orientalist, conspiratorial, fact-free, and sometimes racist narrative against the revolutions in Syria and Libya which is so common in the Guardian’s comment sections. Blanket-thinking statist leftists like Seamus Milne and Jonathan Steele dominate, alongside ignorant polemicists like Tariq Ali. The last lines of my review target people like them, who are unfortunately influential in ‘liberal’ Britain. I am not at all surprised that the Guardian cut these lines from the review, although I name no names. These lines: “….the new Islamophobia of sections of the left, the notion that US imperialism and ‘al-Qa’ida’ are in league to destabilise imagined ‘secular’, ‘resistance’ regimes. Those who defended Iraqi Islamists in the Blair years now point to the Allahu Akbar chant as evidence of an agenda far more benighted than that of the genocidal neo-liberal dictatorships.” (I just spoke to the good man who commissioned the piece. He says the issue was space in the print edition. Fair enough. But why cut the lines which apply to Guardianistas?)

Arun Kundnani’s “The Muslims Are Coming”, vastly more intelligent than the usual ‘war on terror’ verbiage, focusses on the war’s domestic edge in Britain and America.

Kundnani’s starting point is this: “Terrorism is not the product of radical politics but a symptom of political impotence.” The antidote therefore seems self-evident: “A strong, active, and confident Muslim community enjoying its civic rights to the full.” Yet policy on both sides of the Atlantic has ended by criminalising Muslim opinion, silencing speech, and increasing social division. These results may make political violence more, not less, likely.

The assumptions and silences of the counter-radicalisation industry end up telling us far more about particular ideological subsections of Anglo-American culture than they do about the Muslims targetted. The two dominant security approaches to Muslim citizens described by Kundnani – ‘culturalist’ and ‘reformist’ –focus on ideology rather than socio-political grievances.

Culturalism’s best-known proponent is Bernard Lewis, Dick Cheney’s favourite historian, who locates the problem as Islam itself, a totalitarian ideology-culture incompatible with democratic modernity. So Mitt Romney explains the vast divergence between Israeli and Palestinian economies thus: “Culture makes all the difference” – and decades of occupation, ethnic cleansing and war make none. Writer Christopher Caldwell believes residents of the Paris Banlieu rioted in 2005 because they were Muslims (although many weren’t), and not because of unemployment, poor housing, and police violence. Perhaps the silliest culturalist intervention was Martin Amis’s “The Second Plane”, where Amis breezily admitted he knew nothing of geopolitics but claimed authority nevertheless from his expertise in ‘masculinity’ – 9/11 was explained by Islamic sexual frustration. Such discourses are part of an influential tradition of silliness. [Continue reading…]

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The McCutcheon decision: If this is not corruption, what is?

Robert Reich writes: The supreme court is composed of five justices appointed by Republican presidents, and four appointed by Democratic ones. In the McCutcheon v FEC case decided on Wednesday, the five Republican appointees interpreted the first amendment to protect the right of individuals to pour as much as $3.6m into a political party or $800,000 into a political campaign.

The decision by those justices allows individual donors to buy – and federal officeholders to solicit – unparalleled personal influence in Washington. McCutcheon drowns out the voices of ordinary citizens.

Presumably, the individuals who were of concern to the majority of the court have incomes larger than the median US family income of roughly $50,000 a year and wealth in excess of the median American family’s wealth of approximately $70,000. It is very likely that these individuals have huge incomes and enormous wealth.

The decision rests on the court’s dubious finding that such spending does not give rise to corruption. That’s baloney, as anyone who has the faintest familiarity with contemporary American politics well knows. As Justice Stephen Breyer noted in his dissenting opinion: “where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard”.

The majority’s decision to open the floodgates to big money would be less important if the distribution of income and wealth in America were more equal. But it has become extraordinarily unequal. Together, the richest 400 Americans now possess more wealth than the bottom half of the American population. A handful of billionaires are, at this moment, deciding on whom to place their multi-million dollar bets in the 2014 midterm election. The McCutcheon decision makes it easier for them to do so than ever before. They don’t need to go through political action committees or so-called “social welfare” organizations. The rich can now make their bets directly.

We have returned to the gilded age of the late 19th century, when the lackeys of robber barons placed sacks of money on the desks of pliant legislators. If this is not corruption, what is? [Continue reading…]

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Putin’s rejection of the West, in writing

Leonid Bershidsky writes: What kind of country is Vladimir Putin’s Russia? The third year of his third presidential term has offered plenty of clues: the Crimea invasion, the shuttering of uncensored media outlets, prison terms for protesters. Now, Putin is planning to put the intellectual and ideological foundations of the new regime into words.

A document called “Foundations of the State Cultural Policy” has been under development since 2012. A special working group under Putin’s chief of staff Sergei Ivanov will soon roll it out for a month of “public debate” before Putin gets to sign it. Quotes from the culture ministry’s draft, presumably the basis for the final one, have leaked out.

“Russia must be viewed as a unique and original civilization that cannot be reduced to ‘East’ or ‘West,'” reads the document, signed by Deputy Culture Minister Vladimir Aristarkhov. “A concise way of formulating this stand would be, ‘Russia is not Europe,’ and that is confirmed by the entire history of the country and the people.”

Russia’s non-European path should be marked by “the rejection of such principles as multiculturalism and tolerance,” according to the draft. “No references to ‘creative freedom’ and ‘national originality’ can justify behavior considered unacceptable from the point of view of Russia’s traditional value system.” That, the document stresses, is not an infringement on basic freedoms but merely the withdrawal of government support from “projects imposing alien values on society.”

The draft goes on to explain that certain forms of modern art and liberal Western values in general are unacceptable and harmful to society’s moral health. [Continue reading…]

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Why history never repeats itself

Nothing ever happens twice, yet the rhythm of life is defined by repetition. Where there are spirals we see circles.

But imagine if life was reduced to just 52 different parts — not only would limitless possibility seem to instantly vanish; one would expect there to be lots of repetition.

It turns out, however, that this is not the case, because this is how many different ways 52 different units can be rearranged:

80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Here’s the math:

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Leak the CIA report: it’s the only way to know the whole truth about torture

Trevor Timm writes: In a seemingly rare win for transparency, headlines blared on Thursday that the Senate Intelligence Committee had voted to declassify key findings of its massive report on CIA torture. Unfortunately, most news articles waited until the final two paragraphs to mention the real news: the public won’t see any of the document for months at minimum, and more than 90% of the investigation – characterized as “the Pentagon Papers of the CIA torture program” – will remain secret indefinitely.

In reality, only the executive summary and its conclusions – 480 out of some 6,300 pages – were even included in the vote, and they’re nowhere close to being published: it now heads to the White House for “declassification review”, an arduous process that will involve multiple government agencies taking a black marker to the documents, including the CIA, the same agency accused in the report of systematically torturing prisoners and lying about it for years. The spy report’s subjects and suspects will now become its censors.

It’s possible the only way the public will ever get to see the entire landmark report is the same way we’ve learned everything we know about it: if someone leaks it. [Continue reading…]

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Ethiopia: How communications technology has become a tool of oppression

One day they arrested me and they showed me everything. They showed me a list of all my phone calls and they played a conversation I had with my brother. They arrested me because we talked about politics on the phone. It was the first phone I ever owned, and I thought I could finally talk freely.
— Former member of an Oromo opposition party, now a refugee in Kenya, May 2013

Human Rights Watch: Since 2010, Ethiopia’s information technology capabilities have grown by leaps and bounds. Although Ethiopia still lags well behind many other countries in Africa, mobile phone coverage is increasing and access to email and social media have opened up opportunities for young Ethiopians—especially those living in urban areas—to communicate with each other and share viewpoints and ideas.

The Ethiopian government should consider the spread of Internet and other communications technology an important opportunity. Encouraging the growth of the telecommunications sector is crucial for the country to modernize and achieve its ambitious economic growth targets.

Instead, the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), a coalition of ethnically-based political parties in power for more than 20 years, continues to severely restrict the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly. It has used repressive laws to decimate civil society organizations and independent media and target individuals with politically-motivated prosecutions. The ethnic Oromo population has been particularly affected, with the ruling party using the fear of the ongoing but limited insurgency by the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) in the Oromia region to justify widespread repression of the ethnic Oromo population. Associations with other banned groups, including Ginbot 7, are also used to justify repression.

As a result, the increasing technological ability of Ethiopians to communicate, express their views, and organize is viewed less as a social benefit and more as a political threat for the ruling party, which depends upon invasive monitoring and surveillance to maintain control of its population.

The Ethiopian government has maintained strict control over Internet and mobile technologies so it can monitor their use and limit the type of information that is being communicated and accessed. [Continue reading…]

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Syria seen through the eyes of a British journalist and a Dutch jihadist

Emblematic of the feeble condition of Western political thought these days are the indications that there is more agreement about the evil of terrorism than there is about the value of democracy.

Witness an observation made recently by Patrick Cockburn, a British journalist admired by many on the Left, who wrote in The Independent:

The “war on terror” has failed because it did not target the jihadi movement as a whole and, above all, was not aimed at Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two countries that had fostered jihadism as a creed and a movement.

For those who want to distance themselves from the crude lexicon of Bush and Cheney, jihadism is supposedly a word with less charge, signalling that the term’s user is not on a crusade. Yet under this veneer of objectivity there is sometimes a surprising concordance with the neoconservative perspective.

Over a decade ago, I wrote:

Richard Perle, in quasi-theological terms, posits a “unity of terror.” In the same spirit, an editorial in Sunday’s Jerusalem Post, in reference to the terrorists who killed three Americans in Gaza this week, goes so far as to say:

Whether it was Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or perhaps even al-Qaida itself matters little and in fact tends to distract from what the West knows but often does not like to admit: The tentacles all belong to the same enemy.

Within this conception of terrorism, a phenomenon that is scattered across the globe has been turned into a beast of mythological proportions. The explicit connection is militant Islam, but whether the “tentacles” linking Islamic terrorists amount to concrete connections through finance and organization, or whether we are looking at bonds that have no more substance than a common cause or simply the common use of particular techniques of terrorism, these are all distinctions that the unitarians dismiss as distractions.

Cockburn now writes:

These days, there is a decreasing difference in the beliefs of jihadis, regardless of whether or not they are formally linked to al-Qa’ida central, now headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri. An observer in southern Turkey discussing 9/11 with a range of Syrian jihadi rebels earlier this year found that “without exception they all expressed enthusiasm for the 9/11 attacks and hoped the same thing would happen in Europe as well as the US”.

When a veteran reporter makes this kind of observation, even though he does not identify his source in any way at all, there will be many readers who treat Cockburn’s word (and thus that of an unidentified “observer”) as definitive. In so doing, they ignore the fact that this characterization of the Assad regime’s opponents perfectly mirrors the regime’s own propaganda.

One can treat Assad’s claim that he is fighting terrorists as a statement of fact. Or, one can treat it as a cynical and effective piece of political messaging — messaging one of whose purposes is to corral some sympathy from those in the West who, paradoxically, both vehemently reject the military adventurism that the neoconservatives initiated after 9/11 and yet also fully embrace a neoconservative view of unified terrorism.

When labels like jihadist and terrorist get used with sufficient frequency, the mere fact that the terms are used so frequently solidifies the sense that we know what they mean.

Any label applied to a person, however, calls out for a corrective: the voice of that person — a voice which may reinforce or undermine the stereotypes that repetition has created.

When it comes to the jihadists in Syria, we rarely hear what they have to say about themselves and if Cockburn is to be believed there’s little reason why we should be interested in hearing such individuals speak, since they all think alike and are all enemies of the West.

Earlier this year, a rare glimpse of foreign jihadists in Syria came in the form of an interview with a Dutch jihadist. Speaking in English, he provided a more nuanced picture of what has led young men like him to leave their families and join the fight against the Assad regime. Indeed, he spoke at length characterizing this more as a fight for Syrians than as one against their government.

His is just one voice. To what extent he can be taken as representative of others is open to question. Young men can easily be blinded by their own convictions or become servants of the agendas of others.

But while it’s perfectly reasonable to view with skepticism anyone’s claim that Islamic law would provide the panacea that can heal all of Syria’s wounds, the account that this former Dutch soldier gives of himself suggests to me that he knows his own mind.

He’s the kind of jihadist that both Patrick Cockburn and Bashar al-Assad would have you believe does not exist.

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U.S. still believes terrorism is more dangerous than authoritarian rule

Reuters reports: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Thursday Washington was looking to increase its security assistance to Algeria to help it tackle militancy in the vast Sahel region to its south, home to one of the world’s most active branches of al Qaeda.

Algeria, a major gas supplier to Europe, is already a key partner in Washington’s campaign against Islamist fighters who have tried to spread across the Maghreb after the French military drove them out of Mali last year.

Kerry was originally scheduled to visit Algeria late last year but arrived just weeks before President Abdelaziz Bouteflika runs for re-election in a vote in which he is widely expected to win a fourth term.

“We really want to work in a cooperative way, and we want to do this so that Algerian security services have the tools and the training needed in order to defeat al Qaeda and other terrorist groups,” Kerry told a news conference.

Algeria’s Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra said the United States should give the region more access to its intelligence.

“What the U.S. can do, because nobody else can do it, is for instance, share electronic intelligence with the armed forces and security agencies in the region. This is a qualitative edge that only the US can provide,” he said.

Neighbouring Libya is struggling to curb the turmoil that has continued unabated since the 2011 revolt against Muammar Gaddafi. Islamist fighters have exploited the chaos, taking shelter in Libya’s southern deserts but also in remote mountains in Tunisia.

Attacks in Algeria are rare since the country ended an 11-year conflict with Islamists in 2002, but the risks are still high. Last year, al Qaeda fighters raided a gas plant in the Algerian southern desert, killing 40 oil workers, all but one of whom were foreigners.

Kerry also said the United States would do more to build stronger commercial and investment ties between the countries. He said large-scale youth unemployment in Algeria was troubling and greater investment would help bolster job creation.

He was due to meet later on Thursday with Bouteflika, the 77-year-old independence veteran who has governed Algeria for 15 years since helping to end the North African state’s war which killed around 200,000 people.

Bouteflika is expected to easily win another five-year term after 15 years in power in the vote on April 17, despite concerns over his health since suffering a stroke last year.

Some in the Algerian opposition described the timing of Kerry’s visit as odd, saying it was an indirect statement of support to Bouteflika’s election bid.

“We look forward to elections that are transparent and in line with international standards, and the United States will work with the president that the people of Algeria choose,” Kerry said.

Human Rights Watch: On April 15, 2011, after popular protests ousted authoritarian rulers in Egypt and Tunisia and were challenging Libya’s, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika promised a package of political and legislative reforms. But the new law on associations, promulgated in January 2012, has in numerous ways proven more restrictive than the law it replaced, Human Rights Watch found.

The vacuity of Kerry’s pro forma endorsement of a democratic process becomes clear when you understand the powers of the Algerian presidency and the fact that Bouteflika has removed the obstacles to his holding such powers for the rest of his life.

Ahmad Shahine writes: The Algerian presidency has such importance because of the vast authority the constitution accords the post. The president of the republic is head of the executive branch, and he is assisted by the prime minister (head of government). The president also serves as the head of the judiciary, being the chief magistrate of the country. He appoints one-third of the members of parliament’s upper house, has the right to issue decrees between parliamentary sessions and can dissolve the parliament. These rights practically make him absolute ruler.

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