The Skeptical Libertarian Blog: It is a comforting story people in the United States tell ourselves when we feel our position in the world challenged, or when chest-thumping nationalists mount the platform to brag about “American exceptionalism”, or when we need to excuse our behavior internationally.
But is it true? How does the United States stack up against other countries in terms of human freedom? [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s purge of the police command spread to other state institutions on Friday, widening a crackdown on what he described as a foreign-backed conspiracy to undermine him and create a “state within a state”.
The crisis, Erdogan’s biggest challenge in 11 years as Turkey’s leader, raised fears of damage to the Turkish economy and a fracturing in his AK Party, helping drive the lira to a historic low.
Erdogan ordered at least 14 senior police officers removed on Friday after the police launched a series of anti-corruption raids and detained senior businessmen close to Erdogan as well as the sons of three cabinet ministers.
The powerful Istanbul chief was sacked on Thursday following the dismissal of dozens of unit chiefs.
The vice chairman of the financial crimes investigation board, a unit of the finance ministry, was also removed on Friday, local media reported, as well as the editor-in-chief and news channel coordinator of state-owned TV channel TRT.
Erdogan has refrained from naming U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, a man with strong influence in the police and judiciary, as the hand behind the raids which shook the political elite. But Gulen’s Hizmet (or Service) movement has been increasingly at odds with Erdogan in recent months. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: Mr. Gulen left Turkey in 1999 after being accused by the then-secular government of plotting to establish an Islamic state. He has since been exonerated of that charge and is free to return to Turkey, but never has. He lives quietly in Pennsylvania, though his followers are involved in an array of businesses and organizations in the United States and abroad, and some of them helped start a collection of charter schools in Texas and other states. He rarely gives interviews, and a spokesman recently said he was too ill to meet with a reporter.
But a lawyer for Mr. Gulen, Orhan Erdemli, said in a statement released to the Turkish news media and shared by Mr. Gulen on Twitter that “the honorable Gulen has nothing to do with and has no information about the investigations or the public officials running them.”
Huseyin Gulerce, who is personally close to Mr. Gulen and is a writer for a Gulen-affiliated newspaper, said Mr. Gulen’s followers have many of the same complaints about Mr. Erdogan that the protesters had this summer. They believe that Mr. Erdogan has become too powerful, too authoritarian in his ways, and has abandoned his earlier platform of democratic overhauls and pursuit of membership in the European Union. “This is not a group that Mr. Erdogan is not familiar with,” Mr. Gulerce said. “He knows all of us personally, from the time he was mayor of Istanbul. He has known Mr. Gulen personally for 20 years.”
“It was the Mavi Marmara crisis that created the first cracks,” in their relationship, Mr. Gulerce said. “Mr. Gulen’s attitude was very clear, as he always suggested that Turkey should not be adventurous in its foreign policy and stay oriented to the West, and that it should resolve its foreign policy issues through dialogue.”
Now, he suggested, their estrangement may be beyond repair.
As Mr. Erdogan has tried to contain the fallout, he is blaming domestic conspirators and foreign meddlers, just as he did during last summer’s protests, which began over plans to raze Gezi Park in central Istanbul and convert it into a shopping mall.
“Such accusations are only absurd speculations,” said Ersin Kalaycioglu, a political science professor at Sabanci University in Istanbul. “In Gezi, he accused the Alevis, interest rate lobbies, opposition powers and international power groups for organizing the protests. And now, he’s trying to build the same links with this corruption investigation. What kind of twisted logic is that?”
Hours after a series of dawn raids unfolded at the offices of several businessmen on Tuesday, Mr. Erdogan appeared before a crowd in Konya, a conservative town in the country’s heartland where he draws many supporters. “Some people have guns and weapons, tricks and traps,” he said, “but we have our God and that is enough for us.” [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: The latest disclosures from the Snowden files provoked exasperation at the European commission, with officials saying they intended to press the British and American governments for answers about the targeting of one its most senior officials.
Reacting shortly after an EU summit had finished in Brussels, the commission said disclosures about the targeting of Joaquín Almunia, a vice-president with responsibility for competition policy, was “not the type of behaviour that we expect from strategic partners, let alone from our own member states”.
A spokesman added: “This piece of news follows a series of other revelations which, as we clearly stated in the past, if proven true, are unacceptable and deserve our strongest condemnation.”
In Britain, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the chair of the parliamentary committee that provides oversight of GCHQ, said he was “disturbed by these allegations.” He added he could be “examining them in due course as part of the intelligence and security committee’s wider investigation into the interception of communications.”
A prominent German MP, Hans-Christian Ströbele, who met Edward Snowden in Moscow in October, told the Guardian it was becoming “increasingly clear that Britain has been more than the US’ stooge in this surveillance scandal”. He suggested the snooping by GCHQ on German government buildings and embassies was unacceptable.
“Great Britain is not just any country. It is a country that we are supposed to be in a union with. It’s incredible for one member of the European Union to spy on another – it’s like members of a family spying on each other. The German government will need to raise this with the British government directly and ask tough questions about the victims, and that is the right word, of this affair.”
The Liberal Democrats have been inching towards calling for an independent commission to investigate the activities of Britain’s spy agencies and the party president, Tim Farron, said that “spying on friendly governments like this is not only bad politics, it is bad foreign policy”.
“These nations are our allies and we should work together on issues from terrorism to Iran and climate change,” he said. “But we seem to be spying on them in conjunction with the NSA in what seems like an industrial basis.” [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: British and American intelligence agencies had a comprehensive list of surveillance targets that included the EU’s competition commissioner, German government buildings in Berlin and overseas, and the heads of institutions that provide humanitarian and financial help to Africa, top-secret documents reveal.
The papers show GCHQ, in collaboration with America’s National Security Agency (NSA), was targeting organisations such as the United Nations development programme, the UN’s children’s charity Unicef and Médecins du Monde, a French organisation that provides doctors and medical volunteers to conflict zones. The head of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) also appears in the documents, along with text messages he sent to colleagues.
The latest disclosures will add to Washington’s embarrassment after the heavy criticism of the NSA when it emerged that it had been tapping the mobile phone of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.
One GCHQ document, drafted in January 2009, makes clear that the agencies were targeting an email address listed as belonging to another important American ally – the “Israeli prime minister”. Ehud Olmert was in office at the time.
Three further Israeli targets appeared on GCHQ documents, including another email address understood to have been used to send messages between the then Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, and his chief of staff, Yoni Koren.
Prominent names that appear in the GCHQ documents include Joaquín Almunia, a Spaniard who is vice-president of the European commission with responsibility for competition policy.
Britain’s targeting of Germany may also prove awkward for the prime minister, David Cameron: in October, he endorsed an EU statement condemning NSA spying on world leaders, including Merkel.
They have both been in Brussels, attending an EU summit that concludes on Friday.
The names and details are the latest revelations to come from documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. They provoked a furious reaction from the European commission, Almunia and others on the target lists.
• The commission said the disclosures “are unacceptable and deserve our strongest condemnation. This is not the type of behaviour that we expect from strategic partners, let alone from our own member states.” Almunia said he was “very upset” to discover his name was on GCHQ documents.
• Leigh Daynes, UK executive director of Médecins du Monde, said he was “bewildered by these extraordinary allegations of secret surveillance. Our doctors, nurses and midwives are not a threat to national security. There is absolutely no reason for our operations to be secretly monitored.”
• Another target, Nicolas Imboden, the head of an NGO that provides help to African countries, said the spying on him was “clearly economic espionage and politically motivated”.
• Human Rights Watch, Privacy International and Big Brother Watch condemned the targeting.
• Labour said the committee that oversees GCHQ should be given extra powers.
The disclosures reflect the breadth of targets sought by the agencies, which goes far beyond the desire to intercept the communications of potential terrorists and criminals, or diplomats and officials from hostile countries. [Continue reading…]
Pro forma denials from GCHQ and the NSA that they are engaged in economic espionage are to be expected. But agencies that don’t provide clear explanations about what they are doing, can hardly be expected to have such denials accepted without question.
The targeting of NGOs will probably heighten suspicions that these organizations are being used to provide cover for intelligence agencies and that in turn will undermine relief and development work in countries where populations are in need but their governments feel easily threatened.
The New York Times reports: The reports show that spies monitored the email traffic of several Israeli officials, including one target identified as “Israeli prime minister,” followed by an email address. The prime minister at the time of the interception, in January 2009, was Ehud Olmert. The following month, spies intercepted the email traffic of the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, according to another report. Two Israeli embassies also appear on the target lists.
Mr. Olmert said in a telephone interview Friday that the email address was used for correspondence with his office, which he said staff members often handled. He added that it was unlikely that any secrets could have been compromised.
“This was an unimpressive target,” Mr. Olmert said. He noted, for example, that his most sensitive discussions with President George W. Bush took place in private. “I would be surprised if there was any attempt by American intelligence in Israel to listen to the prime minister’s lines,” he said.
Mr. Barak, who declined to comment, has said publicly that he used to take it for granted that he was under surveillance.
Despite the close ties between the United States and Israel, the record of mutual spying is long: Israeli spies, including Jonathan Jay Pollard, who was sentenced in 1987 to life in prison for passing intelligence information to Israel, have often operated in the United States, and the United States has often turned the capabilities of the N.S.A. against Israel.
The interception of Mr. Olmert’s office email occurred while he was dealing with fallout from Israel’s military response to rocket attacks from Gaza, but also at a particularly tense time in relations with the United States. The two countries were simultaneously at odds on Israeli preparations to attack Iran’s nuclear program and cooperating on a wave of cyberattacks on Iran’s major nuclear enrichment facility.
A year before the interception of Mr. Olmert’s office email, the documents listed another target, the Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an internationally recognized center for research in atomic and nuclear physics. [Continue reading…]
Former CIA Director James Woolsey had harsh words on Tuesday for anyone thinking about giving Edward Snowden amnesty.
“I think giving him amnesty is idiotic,” Woolsey said. “He should be prosecuted for treason. If convicted by a jury of his peers, he should be hanged by his neck until he is dead.”
Amy Davidson explains why Snowden deserves amnesty.
Why should Edward Snowden be given amnesty? The question keeps coming up, though it can be hard to hear the answers amid the outbursts it provokes. That is a shame, because there are really two separate cases for why Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who passed a huge stash of secret documents to reporters, should be allowed to come back to America from Russia, where he has been since the summer, without facing time in jail. The first might be summed up as the good he has done for America; the second as the benefits he can still offer the government. A problem is that those who support one case may be put off, or even enraged, by the other. But, between them, they ought to be enough to get Snowden home safely.
First, those on the government side have to calm down, and also have to be truthful about what their interest in prosecuting Snowden — who has already been charged under the Espionage Act — or not might be. On Sunday, “60 Minutes” broadcast an interview in which Rick Ledgett, the N.S.A. official leading the task forces doing a damage assessment of Snowden’s leaks, said that “my personal view is, yes, it’s worth having a conversation” about amnesty. As for why, when he had just gone on at some length about how much harm Snowden had done, Ledgett suggested that it would be worth it if Snowden could stop any more secrets from coming out: “I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured, and my bar for those assurances would be very high.”
That explanation is either dishonest or deluded. Snowden has said that he doesn’t have “the data” anymore; whether or not the government believes that, and even if there is also some insurance file in the cloud, it is well established that a number of journalists do have the data. Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, has testified before a parliamentary committee that the paper has published only one per cent of what it has. And, as Rusbridger tried to explain when some officials from British intelligence came to the newspaper’s office to oversee the smashing up of various drives and other computer components, there are a number of copies, including in the Guardian’s American bureau. [Continue reading…]
The Washington Post reports: From the moment the government’s massive database of citizens’ call records was exposed this year, U.S. officials have clung to two main lines of defense: The secret surveillance program was constitutional and critical to keeping the nation safe.
But six months into the controversy triggered by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the viability of those claims is no longer clear.
In a three-day span, those rationales were upended by a federal judge who declared that the program was probably unconstitutional and the release of a report by a White House panel utterly unconvinced that stockpiling such data had played any meaningful role in preventing terrorist attacks.
Either of those developments would have been enough to ratchet up the pressure on President Obama, who must decide whether to stand behind the sweeping collection or dismantle it and risk blame if there is a terrorist attack.
Beyond that dilemma for the president, the decision by U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon and the recommendations from the review panel shifted the footing of almost every major player in the surveillance debate.
NSA officials, who rarely miss a chance to cite Snowden’s status as a fugitive from the law, now stand accused of presiding over a program whose capabilities were deemed by the judge to be “Orwellian” and likely illegal. Snowden’s defenders, on the other hand, have new ammunition to argue that he is more whistleblower than traitor.
Similarly, U.S. officials who have dismissed NSA critics as naive about the true nature of the terrorist threat now face the findings of a panel handpicked by Obama and with access to classified files. Among its members were former deputy CIA director Michael J. Morrell and former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke, both of whom spent years immersed in intelligence reports on al-Qaeda. [Continue reading…]
Claire Cain Miller writes: Governments, led by the United States, are increasingly demanding that Google remove information from the Web.
The company received 3,846 such requests to remove 24,737 items in the first half of 2013, an increase of 68 percent over the second half of 2012, according to an update to Google’s transparency report released on Thursday. Google complied with more than a third of all requests.
Often, the requests come from judges, police officers and politicians trying to hide information that is critical of them. The most common request cites defamation, often of officials. Others cite local laws governing religion or hate speech, for instance, as when YouTube received requests to remove the “Innocence of Muslims” video clips.
“Over the past four years, one worrying trend has remained consistent: governments continue to ask us to remove political content,” Susan Infantino, a legal director at Google, wrote in a company blog post. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: MI6 officers were under no obligation to report breaches of the Geneva conventions and turned a “blind eye” to the torture of detainees in foreign jails, according to the report into Britain’s involvement in the rendition of terror suspects.
Even when individual MI6 and MI5 officers expressed concerns about the abuse of detainees they did not pass on their thoughts for fear of offending the US, Britain’s closest intelligence partner.
British officials were reluctant to question sleep deprivation, hooding, and waterboarding for “fear of damaging liaison relationships” – an unmistakable reference to the CIA.
This is the message of the 115-page report by a panel led by Sir Peter Gibson, the former appeal court judge, into Britain’s involvement in the extra-judicial abduction of terror suspects who were flown in secret to prisons where they were ill treated. [Continue reading…]
The Washington Post reports: Americans express near-record discontent and regret over the 13-year war in Afghanistan, during which 2,289 U.S. troops have died and more than 19,000 have been wounded, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Fully 66 percent of Americans say the battle, which began with nearly unanimous support, has not been worth fighting. A majority of respondents have doubted the war’s value in each Post-ABC poll since 2010, with current disapproval only one percentage point below July’s record mark. A record 50 percent now “strongly” believe the war is not worth its costs.
Despite the skepticism, a 55 percent majority favors keeping some U.S. forces in Afghanistan for anti-insurgency operations and training, while just over four in 10 prefer removing all troops. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: Buried in the annex of a United Nations inquiry into chemical weapons use in Syria is information that some outside analysts say could further implicate the government of Syria in the deadliest of the five confirmed attacks.
The investigators, who released their final report last week, said they had found a chemical called hexamethylenetetramine from environmental samples in Ghouta, the Damascus suburb that was the site of the deadliest attack, on Aug. 21. Hexamine, as the chemical is also known, can be used as an additive in the production of chemical weapons using sarin, the nerve agent, according to analysts, along with other commercial uses. The Syrian government happens to have a stockpile of hexamine; it is part of a list of chemicals scheduled to be destroyed as part of the deal to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons program.
United Nations investigators who conducted the inquiry pointedly steered clear of assigning blame for any of the attacks. The investigators have declined to explain Syria’s purpose in amassing the hexamine, a common commercial chemical.
But some experts who reviewed the panel’s final report said the presence of hexamine at Ghouta was in some ways akin to the police finding red lipstick in a woman’s purse that matches collar stains on a murder victim. While considered circumstantial evidence, it added to information in the panel’s interim report on Ghouta released in September, on the type of projectiles used that appeared to implicate the Syrian government.
The hexamine connection was pointed out last week by Dan Kaszeta, an independent security consultant and former officer in the United States Army’s Chemical Corps. He argued that the presence of hexamine pointed to the involvement of the government in the attack on Ghouta. [Continue reading…]
Among the commentators trying to make sense of this issue, Kaszeta is probably the only chemical weapons expert whose knowledge of sarin is not only technical but also includes direct experience in handling the material. He says he “spent weeks debriefing guys who used to make the stuff back in the 1950s.”
In his preliminary analysis of the findings presented by the UN, he writes:
Hexamine was discovered in a wide variety of the environmental samples. Hexamine also appears in the declared inventory of significant chemicals reported by the OPCW after disclosure and inspections subsequent to Syria’s accession to the Chemical Weapons Convention. It would have been informative if the UN and OPCW had explained why they considered hexamethylenetetramine (‘hexamine’) to be considered as a chemical of significance to this investigation. I do not think that hexamine’s normal uses as a heating fuel and component of some conventional explosives do not merit its inclusion as a chemical of concern by the OPCW, nor would it merit inclusion in the declared stockpile that needs to be destroyed.
However, based on numerous sources of information I have deduced the chemical warfare significance of hexamine, both in the numerous environmental samples and in the declared chemical inventory. Hexamine is apparently being used by the Syrian government as an additive to binary Sarin. The inspections subsequent to the UN/OPCW investigation covered by this report reveal that the Syrian concept of operations was to employ binary chemical weapons.
Binary Sarin weapon systems combine methylphosphonic difluoride, also known as DF, with isopropyl alcohol to form Sarin. The resulting mixture has a lot of residual acid in it, in the form of hydrogen fluoride (HF), which is highly destructive, possibly to the point of ruining the weapon system. The US Army’s cold war era Sarin program used isopropylamine to reduce this excess HF. Several chemists and engineers knowledgeable in the matter have confirmed to me that hexamine is useful as a Sarin additive for the same reason. One hexamine molecule can bind to as many as four HF molecules. This would explain the declared Syrian stockpile of 80 tons of hexamine. Interestingly, the same stockpile contains 40 tons of isopropylamine as well.
I consider the presence of hexamine both in the field samples and in the official stockpile of the Syrian government to be very damning evidence of government culpability in the Ghouta attacks. 7 weeks of research on this subject reveal no public domain evidence of hexamine being used in this way in other Sarin programs. The likelihood of both a Syrian government research and development program AND a non-state actor both coming up with the same innovation seems negligible to me. It seems improbable that some other actor wanting to plant evidence would know to freely spread hexamine around the target areas.
Testifying before the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties and Home Affairs via a video link this week, Glenn Greenwald reiterated what has become his central claim about the significance of the documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
The documents reveal, Greenwald says, that: “the ultimate goal of the NSA is … nothing less than the elimination of individual privacy, worldwide.”
He acknowledges that “at first glance that [claim] might seem like it’s a bit hyperbolic, like it’s a little bit melodramatic, but it isn’t. It is a literal description of what the NSA and its closest surveillance partners are attempting to achieve.”
There is of course a glaring obstacle that the NSA will somehow need to overcome in order to accomplish its objective: the ability of people to speak to each other, face-to-face, privately.
Another loophole is the ability of people to communicate privately through the use of handwritten messages exchanged on pieces of paper — that anachronism known as a letter.
Thankfully, the shift to electronic communication has resulted in a rapid decline in the use of the near redundant handheld device called a pen and likewise, skill in composition is also in decline.
Thanks to the global proliferation of mobile phones and other handheld devices, significant strides have already been made in the effort to prevent people meeting and talking to each other.
The proliferation of opinion-driven journalism which functions as a cognitive echo-chamber, has contributed greatly in diminishing people’s capacities to think.
All in all, the NSA can be increasingly confident that however people communicate, they will have less and less to say.
Some observes may remain skeptical about the NSA’s objective of eliminating privacy, but Greenwald assures the skeptics that his claim is well-founded.
“The reason that I know that that is what they are attempting to achieve is because this is what they say over and over and over again. On occasion they say it publicly and repeatedly they say it in their private documents, which were written when they thought nobody was able to hear what it was they were saying.”
Meanwhile, as the world’s attention remains fixed on the NSA, there is another intelligence organization operating out of sight which deserves much closer attention.
Regulatory Datacorp, Inc. (RDC), based in King Of Prussia, Pennsylvania, is the world’s number one data source. Some people might think that description belongs to Google, so how do we know it belongs to RDC?
“The World’s #1 Data Source” — there it is in black and white on the company’s website. For an operation that employs only 50 people and whose estimated annual revenue is a modest $3.5 million, it’s quite an accomplishment to have become number one in anything, but who am I to doubt the accuracy of their self-assessment.
They also claim to have compiled an anti-terrorism database which contains more than one million records of individuals and groups, and we all know that the bigger the database, the more useful will be the information it contains.
That’s why we know that if the NSA can collect everything, they will soon know everything.
At this point, no doubt, there are some readers who are wondering why I’ve gone to these lengths to mock Greenwald’s central claim.
Here’s why: it’s a huge distraction from the key issues. He is pandering to a libertarian fear of government that generates an enormous amount of traffic on the internet, and by so doing diminishing the focus on issues that should be of greater concern. Namely, that government officials have repeatedly lied to the public and to our elected representatives and that while claiming to serve the interests of the public they are squandering public resources.
Even if we take at face value the goal of “collect everything,” it’s an unattainable objective in terms of providing real utility.
We have less reason to imagine it poses a real threat to our privacy than it does to the condition of our roads and the quality of our schools.
Americans are paying for a bloated national security apparatus whose principal goal is its own expansion and perpetuation.
You should be less afraid of how much the NSA intrudes into your communications than of the ease with which it empties your pockets.
And on that front, have no doubt that the NSA is still winning.
The panel which just delivered to President Obama its proposals on NSA reform did not even consider questions about the agency’s budget.
How could they?
As everyone in Washington and across America is fully aware, money spent in the name of national security is sacrosanct. To question such spending is regarded as tantamount to questioning the value of American lives.
If the effort to correct the imbalance between privacy and security is successful and yet the security apparatus retains most of its political and institutional power, we won’t have much to celebrate.
Bill McKibben writes: Two years ago, on a gorgeous November day, 12,000 activists surrounded the White House to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Signs we carried featured quotes from Barack Obama in 2008: “Time to end the tyranny of oil”; “In my administration, the rise of the oceans will begin to slow.”
Our hope was that we could inspire him to keep those promises. Even then, there were plenty of cynics who said Obama and his insiders were too closely tied to the fossil-fuel industry to take climate change seriously. But in the two years since, it’s looked more and more like they were right – that in our hope for action we were willing ourselves to overlook the black-and-white proof of how he really feels.
If you want to understand how people will remember the Obama climate legacy, a few facts tell the tale: By the time Obama leaves office, the U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia as the planet’s biggest oil producer and Russia as the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas combined. In the same years, even as we’ve begun to burn less coal at home, our coal exports have climbed to record highs. We are, despite slight declines in our domestic emissions, a global-warming machine: At the moment when physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon brakes, America is revving the engine.
You could argue that private industry, not the White House, has driven that boom, and in part you’d be right. But that’s not what Obama himself would say. Here’s Obama speaking in Cushing, Oklahoma, last year, in a speech that historians will quote many generations hence. It is to energy what Mitt Romney’s secretly taped talk about the 47 percent was to inequality. Except that Obama was out in public, boasting for all the world to hear:
“Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth, and then some. . . . In fact, the problem . . . is that we’re actually producing so much oil and gas . . . that we don’t have enough pipeline capacity to transport all of it where it needs to go.” [Continue reading…]
Alex Kane reports: Henry Swieca is a money man. The New York-based billionaire made his fortune by co-founding Highbridge Capital Corp., a hedge fund that boasted clients like the American International Group.
In 2009, the banking giant JP Morgan Chase, another client of Highbridge, fully took over the flagship hedge fund. Swieca went on to play a role at two more hedge funds: Talpion Fund Management, which he launched, and Clearline Capital, which Swieca joined as a startup investor in February 2013.
Swieca, whose net worth is $1.2 billion as of September 2013, is well-known as a financial guru. His every move is covered by the financial press. But he’s less known for what his foundation pours money into: right-wing, pro-Israel causes. Along with a host of charitable groups and domestic Jewish centers, the Swieca Family Foundation, which he runs with his Israeli-American wife Estee, has poured tons of cash into pro-Israel groups–including to religious extremist groups that operate in the most sensitive of holy places. Swieca did not return requests for comment on his donations.
According to tax records reviewed by AlterNet, Swieca, an Orthodox Jew, has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the American Israel Education Foundation, the non-profit offshoot of the powerful lobbying group called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He’s also handed over cash to groups like the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces; the right-wing, anti-Muslim David Horowitz Freedom Center; and the Hebron Fund, a Brooklyn-based organization that funnels American money into illegal Israeli settlements in Hebron, a big city in the West Bank that has the most intense regime of settler violence and enforced segregation in the occupied Palestinian territories.
But perhaps most alarmingly is Swieca’s funding of the Temple Institute, an organization that promotes the building of the Third Temple on the third most holy site for Muslims. [Continue reading…]
Ali Gharib reports: Three top senators, including two Democrats, have begun circulating a draft of a new Iran sanctions bill that critics say could violate the terms of an agreement struck between Iran and the United States in Geneva last month. The bill, set for introduction by the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, along with top sanctions hawks Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), defies the Obama administration’s repeated requests for Congress to hold off on any new legislation that could imperil last month’s interim nuclear pact with Iran while talks continue toward a comprehensive final deal.
A copy of the bill, dubbed the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013*, was obtained by Foreign Policy. The new sanctions are unlikely to come to a vote in the Senate this week in the final days of the 2013 session.* Instead, the Senate would likely consider the measure after it returns on Jan. 6.
The legislation would broaden the scope of the sanctions already imposed against Iran, expanding the restrictions on Iran’s energy sector to include all aspects of its petroleum trade and putting in place measures targeting Iran’s shipping and mining sectors. The bill allows Obama to waive the new sanctions during the current talks by certifying every 30 days that Iran is complying with the Geneva deal and negotiating in good faith on a final agreement, as well as meeting other conditions such as not sponsoring or carrying out acts of terrorism against U.S. targets.
In accordance with goals laid out frequently by hard-liners in Congress and the influential lobbying group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the bill sets tough conditions for a final deal, should one be reached with Iranian negotiators. Among those conditions is a provision that only allows Obama to waive new sanctions, even after a final deal has been struck, if that deal bars Iran from enriching any new uranium whatsoever. The bill states Obama may not waive sanctions unless the United States and its allies “reached a final and verifiable agreement or arrangement with Iran that will … dismantle Iran’s illicit nuclear infrastructure, including enrichment and reprocessing capabilities and facilities.” (Congress could also block Obama’s waivers by passing a “joint resolution of disapproval” against a final deal.) [Continue reading…]
Trita Parsi, Bijan Khajehpour and Reza Marashi write: The historic interim agreement between the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) and Iran over its nuclear dispute is not just about enrichment, centrifuges and breakout capabilities. Ultimately, it will help determine who and what will define Iran’s foreign and domestic policies for decades to come. Will it be the security-oriented, confrontational and internally repressive orientation preferred by the Iranian hardliners? Or will the more cooperative, moderate and win-win approach favored by President Hassan Rouhani and the majority of the population take root and prevail?
In a new report published today (“Extending Hands and Unclenching Fists“) — which relies on in-depth interviews with senior Iranian political officials, intellectuals and members of business community — we show that the West can weaken the hardline Iranian narrative of confrontation and resistance and facilitate a comprehensive nuclear deal by collaborating with Iran on scientific projects that carry no proliferation risk.
For the U.S. and Europe, this means augmenting a successful nuclear deal through other areas of mutual interest can help usher in a more cooperative and less threatening Iran whose domestic political liberalization positively impacts the Middle East as a whole. In the past, we have seen Iran take important steps in this direction, but without reaching the desired results.
The 2013 presidential election unexpectedly catapulted centrist leaders into power that have sought an opening to the West on numerous occasions. Such efforts include the 2001 collaboration with the U.S. in Afghanistan, the 2003 Grand Bargain offer, and the 2005 offer to limit Iran’s enrichment program to 3,000 centrifuges (Iran currently has 19,000). These offers were all made prior to the West imposing crippling sanctions. By rejecting this outreach, Washington strengthened the hand of Iranian hardliners who believe the only way to compel the U.S. to deal with Iran is not by sending peace offers, but rather by resisting American power. [Continue reading…]
Rami G. Khouri writes: I have learned in life that when you have a problem to ponder or stress to overcome, you should resort to one of three options: take a nap, listen to music, or just wait and let some time pass. The last option is particularly helpful when you are trying to understand the significance of political developments of the day, such as this week’s third anniversary of the initiation of the current Arab uprisings by Mohammad Bouazizi’s self-immolation. The passage of three years allows us to better understand what is going on across the Arab region in a way that was not so clear in December 2010.
When the fruit and vegetables peddler Mohammad Bouazizi set himself on fire in the rural Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2010, his spontaneous act comprised a combination of protest, self-assertion and defiance that resonated instantly and widely across the entire Arab world. It launched a series of rolling protests and revolutions that have morphed into wars and chaotic conditions in some countries, and slow constitutional transformations in others.
Dramatic and unpredictable developments almost certainly await us in the years ahead. For now, though, here is my assessment of how to appreciate what has been going on across the Arab world during the last three years.
1. The initial sense that we experienced spontaneous popular revolutions to overthrow dictators and replace them with more democratic governance systems was certainly correct for those heady days in early 2011. The slow and erratic progress to that end in different Arab countries indicates that this remains a goal across most countries, but also that we are dealing with much bigger processes and deeper forces than merely linear democratic governance transitions, such as were experienced more smoothly, for example, in post-Franco Spain or post-military junta Greece.
2. It seems clear now that democratization is only one technical aspect of a much wider historical transformation that is playing itself out in different ways across the region, and that relates much more powerfully to the two foundational elements of national and personal life—the concepts of modern Arab statehood and citizenship. Neither statehood nor citizenship were ever defined by the collective will of free Arab men and women, but now we witness some Arab countries grappling with these issues for the first time ever, and in most cases this is occurring in a very messy and inconsistent way. That is the historical norm across the world, and Arabs finally are resuming their place in world history, after a century of absence due to colonial or homegrown dictatorships.
Rather than dealing mainly with democratic revolutions, as was the perception three years ago, it now appears clearer with hindsight that we are dealing with far more complex issues related to how individual men and women shape and ensure their rights as citizens within the larger units of their own ethnic, tribal and sectarian identities and their own sovereign state. All of these levels are being defined and anchored at the same time. [Continue reading…]
Steven Rosenfeld writes: Pundits across the political left should be careful about heaping too much praise on U.S. District Judge Richard Leon for this week’s dramatic ruling that the National Security Agency’s electronic dragnet capturing Americans’ online activities is “significantly likely” to be unconstitutional, even though it is a powerful rebuke to America’s spymasters.
That’s because Leon, a longtime Republican warrior, is as much of a legal loudmouth and rightwing activist judge as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. More importantly, his elbows-out 68-page opinion is not going to be the last word on the government’s data mining. Leon’s ruling is one of several NSA-related suits moving through the federal courts, including rulings that have reached the opposite conclusion.
“It should be noted that last month Judge Jeffrey Miller of the Southern District of California found the NSA business records program to be constitutional,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman, said Tuesday. “Leon’s opinion also differs from those of at least 15 separate federal district court judges… Only the Supreme Court can resolve the question on the constitutionality of the NSA’s program.”
These conflicts will likely trigger a review by the Supreme Court, where the conservative majority already has sanctioned NSA electronic eavesdropping and is known for elevating government searchs over individual rights. In other words, Leon’s rebuke may help put the issue in front of a court majority that is poised to codify national security over privacy rights. [Continue reading…]