Talks with Iran yet to produce a nuclear agreement

The New York Times reports: Marathon talks between major powers and Iran failed on Sunday to produce a deal to freeze its nuclear program, puncturing days of feverish anticipation and underscoring how hard it will be to forge a lasting solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Emerging from a last-ditch bargaining session that began Saturday and stretched past midnight, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, and Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said they had failed to overcome differences. They insisted they had made progress, however, and pledged to return to the table in 10 days to try again, albeit at a lower level.

“A lot of concrete progress has been made, but some differences remain,” Ms. Ashton said at a news conference early Sunday. She appeared alongside Mr. Zarif, who added, “I think it was natural that when we started dealing with the details, there would be differences.”

In the end, though, it was not only divisions between Iran and the major powers that prevented a deal, but fissures within the negotiating group. France objected strenuously that the proposed deal would do too little to curb Iran’s uranium enrichment or to stop the development of a nuclear reactor capable of producing plutonium.

“The Geneva meeting allowed us to advance, but we were not able to conclude because there are still some questions to be addressed,” the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, told reporters after the talks ended.

Neither Ms. Ashton nor Mr. Zarif criticized France, saying that it had played a constructive role. But the disappointment was palpable, and the decision to hold the next meeting at the level of political director, not foreign minister, suggested that the two sides were less confident of their ability to bridge the gaps in the next round. [Continue reading…]

Julian Borger adds: Privately, however, other diplomats at the talks were furious with the role of the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, whom they accused of breaking ranks by revealing details of the negotiations as soon as he arrived in Geneva on Saturday morning, and then breaking protocol again by declaring the results to the press before Ashton and Zarif had arrived at the final press conference.

Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani said on Sunday that its “rights to enrichment” of uranium were “red lines” that would not be crossed and that the Islamic Republic had acted rationally and tactfully during the negotiations, according to Iranian media reports quoted by Reuters.

“We have said to the negotating sides that we will not answer to any threat, sanction, humiliation or discrimination. The Islamic Republic has not and will not bow its head to threats from any authority,” he said during a speech at the National Assembly, Iran’s student news agency said.

French opposition was focused on a draft text agreement that laid out a short-term deal to slow down or stop elements of the Iranian nuclear programme in return for limited sanctions relief. The French complained that the text, which they said was mostly drafted by Iran and the US, had been presented as a fait accompli and they did not want to be stampeded into agreement.

Fabius told France Inter radio yesterday morning that Paris would not accept a “fools’ game”. “As I speak to you, I cannot say there is any certainty that we can conclude,” he said.

Iranian officials insisted that the draft had been written in close collaboration with western officials, and said France was single-handedly holding up progress by dividing the “P5+1” negotiating group, comprising the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China.

Zarif would not comment on the French role directly but said: “Although the questions of the P5+1 should be addressed, a great deal of time is being spent on negotiations within the P5+1 group. This is normal because they are six nations with different views and their own national interests and they need to agree.” He said that when the P5+1 was ready to agree, “we are ready to find a solution”.

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Crackdown on migrants: Saudi Arabia’s self-inflicted crisis

Brian Whitaker writes: Two people died in Riyadh on Saturday in fights involving foreign migrants, Saudi citizens and police.

The rioting, in the Manfouhah district of the capital – a poor neighbourhood where many East Africans live – was the worst outbreak of violence since the Saudi authorities launched their “all-out” campaign to round up “illegal” workers and expel them from the kingdom.

On Tuesday an Ethiopian man was shot dead by police in the same district, reportedly while resisting arrest.

The two who died on Saturday night are said to be a Saudi man who was hit by a stone and a man of African origin who was shot by police. AFP says a further 68 people were injured (28 Saudis and 40 foreigners) and 561 people were arrested.

An Ethiopian official told AFP that trouble broke out when Saudi police attempted to round up Ethiopians who had failed to regularise their status in the kingdom and move them to a camp which had been specially set up in the area, to await deportation.

Arab News reports:

Armed with knives, the rioters gathered in the district’s narrow streets early evening Saturday, threatening policemen, motorists, and pedestrians, witnesses and police said.

Anti-riot police fired guns into the air and used truncheons to disperse the large crowds, mostly foreigners who appeared to be Africans, notably Ethiopians …

The injured, mostly Saudis and legal residents, have suffered knife-stabbing wounds and bruises from the rioters, who were among those receiving hospital treatment …

A large security force cordoned off the central Riyadh district and closed its entry and exit points, arresting a number of the violent illegal workers and calling on the rest of them to turn themselves in, according to Brigadier General, Naser al-Qahtani, media spokesman for Riyadh Police.

The Riyadh Connect website has a collection of photos and videos from the scene. Twitter user Mona Kareem has also been posting links to photos and videos.

The crackdown on migrants, which has so far been largely ignored by western media, is rapidly turning into a full-blown and self-inflicted crisis. The authorities have clearly spent a lot of time planning for the mass arrests and deportations but seem to have given almost no thought to the knock-on effects. [Continue reading…]

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Iran nuclear deal remains elusive as split emerges in Western camp

Reuters reports: France warned of serious stumbling blocks to a long-sought accord with Iran as unity among Western powers seemed to fray in talks on getting Tehran to curtail a nuclear program seen as a bomb risk in exchange for relief from economic sanctions.

Iranian media quoted the Islamic Republic’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, as saying “the issues are serious and there is still a gap in stances”, and that the talks would probably end later in the day and be resumed at a later date.

As discussions stretched on, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was doubtful whether they would soon succeed in nailing down an interim deal that would begin to defuse fears of a stealthy Iranian advance towards nuclear arms capability.

“As I speak to you, I cannot say there is any certainty that we can conclude,” Fabius said on France Inter radio, stressing that Paris could not accept a “sucker’s deal”.

His pointed remarks hinted at a rift brewing within the Western camp. A Western diplomat close to the negotiations said the French were trying to upstage the other powers.

“The Americans, the EU and the Iranians have been working intensively together for months on this proposal, and this is nothing more than an attempt by Fabius to insert himself into relevance late in the negotiations,” the diplomat told Reuters, speaking on the condition of anonymity. [Continue reading…]

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Israel tries to undermine possible international nuclear deal with Iran

The Washington Post reports: Israeli officials registered fierce opposition to an emerging international nuclear deal with Iran on Friday, making clear that the Obama administration faced the uncomfortable prospect of reaching an agreement with one of America’s firmest enemies while overriding the objections of one of its firmest friends.

Backed by bipartisan supporters in Congress, Israel is casting a pall over what the White House had hoped was good news — a bargain for Iran to suspend most of its uranium enrichment for six months in exchange for a temporary easing of sanctions. Before meeting Secretary of State John F. Kerry on Friday, however, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the agreement would give up too much too early and that it threatened Israel’s security.

“This is a very bad deal,” Netanyahu said.

Kerry traveled from Israel to Switzerland, where he joined talks with Iranian and European foreign ministers in an attempt to narrow what he said were remaining differences in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. Kerry also bargained directly with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, a clear sign that the Obama administration prizes the deal, and the possibility of better U.S. relations with Iran, despite Israeli objections.

“I want to emphasize there are still some very important issues on the table that are unresolved,” Kerry said in Geneva. “It is important for those to be properly, thoroughly addressed.”

Kerry’s brief remarks contained none of the hopeful rhetoric about a new day in U.S.-Iranian relations that he has voiced before, perhaps in deference to Israel. He did not make any public remarks in Israel, perhaps in hopes of avoiding a public confrontation with Netanyahu. [Continue reading…]

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Firsthand accounts of how NSA surveillance chilled the right to association

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has provided a federal judge with testimony from 22 separate advocacy organizations detailing how the National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass telephone records collection program has impeded the groups’ work, discouraged their members and reduced the numbers of people seeking their help via hotlines. The declarations accompanied a motion for partial summary judgment filed late Wednesday, in which EFF asks the court to declare the surveillance illegal on two levels — the law does not authorize the program, and the Constitution forbids it.

In First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA, EFF represents a diverse array of environmentalists, gun-rights activists, religious groups, human-rights workers, drug-policy advocates and others that share one major commonality: they each depend on the First Amendment’s guarantee of free association. EFF argues that if the government vacuums up the records of every phone call — who made the call, who received the call, when and how long the parties spoke — then people will be afraid to join or engage with organizations that may have dissenting views on political issues of the day. The US government acknowledged the existence of the telephone records collection program this summer, after whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked a copy of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order authorizing the mass collection of Verizon telephone records.

“The plaintiffs, like countless other associations across the country, have suffered real and concrete harm because they have lost the ability to assure their constituents that the fact of their telephone communications between them will be kept confidential from the federal government,” EFF Senior Staff Attorney David Greene said. “This has caused constituents to reduce their calling. This is exactly the type of chilling effect on the freedom of association that the First Amendment forbids.” [Continue reading…]

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Feinstein’s NSA bill shows she doesn’t have a clue about intelligence reform

Michelle Richardson writes: Members of Congress have introduced almost 30 separate bills to rein in NSA spying, increase transparency, or rework the secret court process that has sanctioned these programs. Two pieces of legislation, however, have momentum, and they couldn’t be more different.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence – the body charged with oversight of these very programs – advanced legislation introduced by its chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein (Democrat from California), last week that would entrench the current spying programs and give them explicit Congressional authorization to continue.

The legislation would make clear in no uncertain terms that communication records like phone, email, and internet data can be collected without even an ounce of suspicion, pursuant to the so-called privacy rules already in place. Being silent on other types of data like location information or financial records, it passively condones their collection too, but without even the benefit of the paltry protections in place now. For the first time in history, Congress would explicitly and intentionally authorize dragnet domestic spying programs targeting every day Americans.

The Feinstein bill also makes the current situation even worse. It gives the government a 72-hour grace period to warrantlessly spy on foreigners who enter the US, without even the attorney general approval that is currently required in emergency situations. It explicitly states that none of its provisions should be read to prevent law enforcement from digging through massive NSA databases for evidence of criminal activity. By doing so, it authorizes that specific practice in a roundabout way. Finally, it sets up the prospect of all members of Congress accessing important court orders and other information, but then undercuts this requirement by endorsing current rules and practices that have been used to prevent members of the House from reading foundational documents that could inform the votes they must make on whether to continue these programs. [Continue reading…]

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Master of many trades

Robert Twigger writes: I travelled with Bedouin in the Western Desert of Egypt. When we got a puncture, they used tape and an old inner tube to suck air from three tyres to inflate a fourth. It was the cook who suggested the idea; maybe he was used to making food designed for a few go further. Far from expressing shame at having no pump, they told me that carrying too many tools is the sign of a weak man; it makes him lazy. The real master has no tools at all, only a limitless capacity to improvise with what is to hand. The more fields of knowledge you cover, the greater your resources for improvisation.

We hear the descriptive words psychopath and sociopath all the time, but here’s a new one: monopath. It means a person with a narrow mind, a one-track brain, a bore, a super-specialist, an expert with no other interests — in other words, the role-model of choice in the Western world. You think I jest? In June, I was invited on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 to say a few words on the river Nile, because I had a new book about it. The producer called me ‘Dr Twigger’ several times. I was flattered, but I also felt a sense of panic. I have never sought or held a PhD. After the third ‘Dr’, I gently put the producer right. And of course, it was fine — he didn’t especially want me to be a doctor. The culture did. My Nile book was necessarily the work of a generalist. But the radio needs credible guests. It needs an expert — otherwise why would anyone listen?

The monopathic model derives some of its credibility from its success in business. In the late 18th century, Adam Smith (himself an early polymath who wrote not only on economics but also philosophy, astronomy, literature and law) noted that the division of labour was the engine of capitalism. His famous example was the way in which pin-making could be broken down into its component parts, greatly increasing the overall efficiency of the production process. But Smith also observed that ‘mental mutilation’ followed the too-strict division of labour. Or as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: ‘Nothing tends to materialise man, and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind, more than extreme division of labour.’ [Continue reading…]

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Syrians on both sides of the war increasingly see Assad as likely to stay

The New York Times reports: A growing number of Syrians on both sides of their country’s conflict, along with regional analysts and would-be mediators, are demanding new strategies to end the civil war, based on what they see as an inescapable new reality: President Bashar al-Assad is staying in office, at least for now.

They say the insistence from the United States-backed opposition that Mr. Assad must go before peace talks can begin is outdated, failing to reflect the situation on the ground. Rather, they say, a deal to end or ease the violence must involve Mr. Assad and requires more energetic outreach to members of his government and security forces, with concrete proposals and reassurances that could bring compromise.

They also contend that the American-backed exile opposition coalition that remains at the center of Washington’s policy has little relevance and no respect from combatants on either side. These critics of American policy say that the United States and its coalition ally are helping guarantee that diplomacy remains paralyzed as Syrians die.

On Friday, the exile coalition declared it would not attend a meeting in Moscow that would have brought it together with Syrian government officials for the first time, albeit to focus narrowly on addressing Syria’s deepening humanitarian crisis. The sticking point: Moscow also invited Assad opponents who are more willing to compromise.

The critics say there is no indication that Mr. Assad is headed for imminent defeat; indeed, he seems to be increasing his grip on parts of the country. So they are reluctantly embracing a scaled-down goal of a transitional government that in the medium term includes Mr. Assad. [Continue reading…]

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Taking the lead, Hezbollah girds for key Syria battle on Assad’s behalf

Time reports: Throughout the bloody Syrian conflict, the ruling regime of President Bashar Assad has derided the armed opposition for its reliance on foreign fighters, usually seasoned militants that come from the battlefields of Chechnya, Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq. But as a new campaign is set to start in the mountainous corridor between Damascus and the Lebanese border, it is becoming increasingly clear that the government is just as dependent on outsiders for success. In Qalamoun, a strategic region that has been in rebel hands for most of the war, the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia Hizballah is preparing to take on rebels in a drawn-out fight that could dictate the outcome of the Syrian conflict.

The government’s plan to wrest Qalamoun from rebel hands has been long in the planning, an obvious extension of June’s successful campaign to take, with Hizballah’s help, the town of Qusayr, a key rebel stronghold just north of Qalamoun. In regaining Qalamoun, the regime hopes to secure a vital corridor linking Damascus to the coastal province of Latakia, home to the Mediterranean port of Tartous and inhabited by Assad’s Alawite sect. The rebels depend on Qalamoun’s shared border with Lebanon to smuggle in supplies and weapons from supporters in Lebanon. “If the regime takes Qalamoun, it could cause a lot of damage to rebel groups,” says Phillip Smyth, a research fellow at the University of Maryland who specializes in Hizballah and Shi‘ite militias in Syria. [Continue reading…]

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The secret diaries of Abu Zubaydah

Jason Leopold reports:

Al Jazeera has obtained a copy of the secret personal diaries of Abu Zubaydah, one of the highest-profile prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. The six notebooks, which were obtained from a former U.S. government intelligence official who worked with the CIA and FBI on Al-Qaeda’s rise to power, were discovered at a safe house in Pakistan where Abu Zubaydah was captured in 2002. Repeatedly cited by U.S. officials in making the case for holding a number of prisoners at Guantanamo, the diaries, which were never officially released, cast fresh light on Abu Zubaydah and challenge some of the Bush administration’s accounts of its “war on terror.” Below are some of the highlights of the first notebook.

Arriving in Afghanistan in 1991, the young computer-science student Zain Abidin Mohammed Husain Abu Zubaydah had no idea of the fateful journey he was embarking on — a journey that, 10 years later, would land him in a CIA black-site prison and then in Guantanamo Bay, branded by President George W. Bush as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.”

“I am actually scared,” he conceded in his diary. “Not of a bullet or a shell, rather of the future itself. If I decide to settle here, it means that I will cancel my education and there is no harm in that, God willing; jihad is a good thing, and I will stay.”

Abu Zubaydah arrived in Afghanistan from Mysore, India, where he had gone against his father’s wishes to study computer science.

“But,” his diary continues, “I am scared that I’ll be left high and dry in the future, God forbid. At that point, I will have no contingent plan to resort to, a degree or a job to lean on.” His fear was not martyrdom but surviving the war in Afghanistan, particularly if he was wounded. “What would I do if the party is over and there is no more jihad in Afghanistan! Where would I go when I have no job and no college degree?”

He was distrustful of the few friends he had, describing many of them as backstabbers. “Friendship is a fantasy, friendship is false.”

So in the diary — which offers deep insight into a man portrayed by the Bush administration as a seminal figure in the “war on terror” — Abu Zubaydah created a friend he could talk to.

“Dear 30-year-old Hani,” the diary begins, referring to himself by a childhood nickname and making clear that the audience is himself 10 years in the future, “Today I have decided to write my memoirs and these words are to you. So, this will be the letter in which I complain to you, get things off my chest, and cry in your arms whenever I feel the need to share my burden, from this silly world, with someone.”

He states that he intends to reread the diary only after he reaches that age. “So, I will be you; the 30 years old Hani, provided that I get to live to meet you.”

Perhaps mindful of how others might interpret his literary device, Abu Zubaydah writes, “I am not a schizophrenic, which is a split personality disease; rather, I am trying to divide myself into two parts because; I believe that everything changes with time, even human beings. Therefore, it is inevitable that you Hani 2 at 30 years of age are different than Hani 1 … Me… at 20 years old.”

FBI agents who read the diaries said that Abu Zubaydah’s writing to a different version of himself proved that he had a “schizophrenic personality.” The correct term for the exhibition of multiple personalities is dissociative identity disorder, however, not schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a disease often characterized by hallucinations or delusions but not by multiple personalities. [Continue reading…]

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Yassin Kadi’s ordeal at the hands of the U.S. security services is Kafka incarnate

Giles Fraser writes: As I am walking out of Temple tube station, past a row of young men in uniform selling poppies – men who look as if they have seen too much bloodshed in places like Afghanistan – I can’t help but speculate to myself about the identity of the person I am about to meet.

Will he really be what he claims to be – an innocent victim of post 9/11 panic? Or is he a “specially designated global terrorist”, previously connected to Osama Bin Laden and a financier of international terrorism, as US law continues to maintain? It feels odd to be meeting him in central London.

And yet, except in the very vaguest of terms, no one has ever told Sheikh Yassin Abdullah Kadi what he is supposed to have done. The US evidence against the Saudi Arabian former architect is classified. His lawyers cannot see it. He cannot see it. And so, for 11 years, Sheikh Kadi has been fighting an invisible charge.

When Franz Kafka wrote The Trial back in 1914/5, he thought his story far-fetched, more an existentialist dystopia than a prophecy of future events. Joseph K is arrested on an unknown charge and brought before a secret court where the charge is never explained. But a century later, this doesn’t feel at all far-fetched. [Continue reading…]

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Britain needs a First Amendment

Kenan Malik writes: Last month, two figures at the heart of Britain’s political and journalistic establishment went on trial.

Rebekah Brooks is the former chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International and a close friend of Prime Minister David Cameron. Andy Coulson was editor of the now defunct tabloid News of the World and Mr. Cameron’s former director of communications.

Ms. Brooks and Mr. Coulson face various charges of conspiracy to intercept voicemail, bribe public officials and pervert the course of justice, counts that arise from the “phone hacking” scandal, in which journalists were discovered illegally tapping mobile phones of both celebrities and the public. It will be one of Britain’s most significant criminal trials in years.

On the same day that Ms. Brooks and Mr. Coulson appeared in court, Mr. Cameron issued barely veiled threats against the Guardian newspaper. If the Guardian did not “demonstrate some social responsibility,” he warned, “it would be very difficult for the government to stand back and not to act.” What drew Mr. Cameron’s wrath was the newspaper’s role in publishing the revelations of the American whistle-blower, Edward Snowden.

The Guardian revelations have led to a concerted campaign of denunciation by the security forces and politicians. Andrew Parker, head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, claimed that the Guardian had handed “the advantage to the terrorists.” Lord Carlile, the government’s former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has accused the newspaper of committing a “criminal act.”

What links the trials of Ms. Brooks and Mr. Coulson and the political campaign against the Guardian is that both are key moments in the fraught debate in Britain about press regulation — and the schizophrenia among commentators toward such regulation. Both left and right demand freedom for journalism of which they approve. Both want to regulate the press they deplore. And both are helping erode the freedoms of Britain’s newspapers. [Continue reading…]

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A British subservience to government

Jonathan Freedland writes: Think of it as the ‘‘Skyfall’’ session. In a committee room of the House of Commons, the heads of the British secret services appeared on Thursday before a panel of M.P.’s in what might have been a re-enactment of that scene from the latest Bond movie — minus the shootout.

Even without gunfire, it was not short of drama. The mere sight of the heads of Britain’s domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, along with the director of its listening post, G.C.H.Q., was spectacle enough. This was their first joint appearance in public, addressing a parliamentary intelligence and security committee whose hearings had, until now, always been held behind closed doors. (Indeed, little more than 20 years ago even the names of the intelligence chiefs were a state secret.)

That fact alone guaranteed coverage on the evening news. Which meant a rare focus on the topic that provided the session’s most electrifying moments: the Edward Snowden affair. Rare because the dominant British reaction to the revelations provided by Mr. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, has been a shrug of indifference. The Guardian helped break the story — that the N.S.A. and G.C.H.Q. (Government Communications Headquarters) have engaged in mass surveillance of American and British citizens online — and has covered it intensely, but the rest of the British media have largely steered clear. In Parliament, a few maverick individuals have raised concerns about civil liberties and privacy. When others have mentioned the subject, it’s mostly been to accuse The Guardian of damaging national security, rather than to ask whether the intelligence agencies have gone too far.

What explains this reaction — so at odds with the response in the United States, where Congress is reviewing its oversight arrangements and where everyone from President Obama on down has acknowledged that a debate is necessary, if not overdue, and so at odds with, say, Germany, where memories of Stasi eavesdropping ensure revulsion at the notion of all-seeing surveillance? The answers say much about the current political landscape of Britain — and much of what lies beneath. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi nuclear weapons ‘on order’ from Pakistan

Mark Urban writes: Saudi Arabia has invested in Pakistani nuclear weapons projects, and believes it could obtain atomic bombs at will, a variety of sources have told BBC Newsnight.

While the kingdom’s quest has often been set in the context of countering Iran’s atomic programme, it is now possible that the Saudis might be able to deploy such devices more quickly than the Islamic republic.

Earlier this year, a senior Nato decision maker told me that he had seen intelligence reporting that nuclear weapons made in Pakistan on behalf of Saudi Arabia are now sitting ready for delivery.

Last month Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, told a conference in Sweden that if Iran got the bomb, “the Saudis will not wait one month. They already paid for the bomb, they will go to Pakistan and bring what they need to bring.” [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu slams U.S. offer on Iran nukes

Politico: Tensions between the Obama administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu surfaced publicly on Thursday, as Netanyahu unambiguously denounced a proposal the U.S. and other countries have made to roll back some sanctions against Iran if Tehran agrees to halt its nuclear program.

During a meeting in Jerusalem Thursday night with a visiting delegation of U.S. lawmakers, Netanyahu warned that the offer is a “grievous historic error” that could be “the deal of the century for Iran.”

“Iran is essentially giving nothing and it’s getting all the air taken out—the air begins to be taken out of the pressure cooker that it took years to build in the sanctions regime,” the Israeli leader told the American visitors, according to his official website. “What we’re having today is a situation that Iran is giving up, at best, a few days of enrichment time, but the whole international regime’s sanctions policy has the air taken out of it,” he added.[Continue reading…]

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