Iran opens its fist

Gary Sick writes: He came to New York. He saw almost everyone. Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s new president, may not have conquered, but at least he seems to have persuaded John Kerry and Barack Obama that his proposals for negotiating an end to the US-Iran conflict deserve to be taken seriously. When President Obama picked up his phone in the Oval Office on Friday to bid farewell to President Rouhani with the Persian phrase Khodahafez (“God be with you”), there was the sense that a tectonic shift between Washington and Tehran was taking place.

The Rouhani blitz was regarded by many cynics as nothing but a charm offensive. Of course, in one sense that is what it was. Rouhani dominated the media, with half a dozen one-on-one interviews, a well written and conciliatory op-ed in the Washington Post, a seemingly endless series of meetings with curated groups of journalists, scholars, former US government officials, business executives, and a throng of his fellow Iranians, many of whom had taken refuge in the United States from the regime he represents. He spoke to the UN General Assembly (the ostensible purpose of his visit), to the Non-Aligned Movement (which Iran chairs), and to a collection of some two hundred members of the Asia Society and the Council on Foreign Relations at a midtown hotel.

I watched him in the two meetings that I attended and in most of his televised appearances. Rouhani is a man of considerable gravitas. He is serious, businesslike, and fully in command of his brief. Except for the formal speeches, he spoke without notes and responded directly and thoughtfully to the many questions directed at him. He spoke in Persian, except for an occasional English phrase, but he listened to his English-speaking audience without simultaneous translation, and his responses indicated that he grasped not only the words but also the nuances. Rouhani is a cleric, and he wears the robes and turban appropriate to his status. But he prefers to be addressed as Doctor Rouhani, in recognition of his PhD in law from Glasgow Caledonian University. Addressing members of New York think tanks, he reminded them that until recently he was one of them, running the Center for Strategic Research in Tehran. That, however, is only a small part of his résumé.

He was national security adviser to presidents Rafsanjani and Khatami, and he has been the personal representative of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for nearly a quarter of a century. In those capacities, and other senior posts, he has been associated with virtually every security and foreign policy decision made by the Islamic Republic of Iran since at least the end of the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980s. Rouhani’s close ties to Khamenei were on display as he prepared to depart for the United States. Khamenei appeared before the leadership of the powerful and conservative Revolutionary Guards Corps to remind them politely but firmly that their proper concern was national security, not politics. Since the Revolutionary Guards played a major part in undermining both of Rouhani’s predecessors, this was a unique and unequivocal demonstration of solidarity. It does not, however, guarantee indefinite support for Rouhani’s initiatives. The Guards and the senior clerical establishment will look for results and weigh their own interests. Thus far, Rouhani, with the help of the Leader, has stayed ahead of his domestic and foreign opposition, but in New York he and his associates gave every indication of being men in a hurry. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Remember Cairo?

Shadi Hamid and Peter Mandaville write: With the world focused on the crisis in Syria and the possibility of a U.S.-Iranian détente, the fact that Egypt’s political situation is going from bad to worse has flown under the political radar. Much to the relief of the generals in Cairo — and likely also some members of U.S. President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy team — the United States appears to be kicking another difficult regional policy decision down the road.

This is a mistake. By countenancing the July 3 coup and the military’s subsequent crackdown on the supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsy, the United States may be helping to sow seeds that could ripen into a costly and deeply destabilizing insurgency for years to come.

The Obama administration responded to the military crackdown, which resulted in more than 1,000 deaths, with the diplomatic equivalent of a few light raps on the knuckles of Egypt’s generals. It canceled joint military exercises with Egypt and announced that the White House’s national security staff would begin a comprehensive review of bilateral aid. Since late August, a recommendation to suspend the majority of U.S. military assistance to Cairo has been sitting with the president. Meanwhile, Egyptian security forces have re-escalated their campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood, raiding the movement’s strongholds and arresting the few remaining senior Brotherhood figures not already in custody.

The Obama administration knows that things are not going well in Egypt. U.S. officials — privately and rather halfheartedly — tried to walk back Secretary of State John Kerry’s bizarre claim that Egypt’s military leaders were “restoring democracy” and have also delayed delivery of F-16 fighters to Egypt. However, Washington’s overall response to the undoing of Egypt’s democratic process has not come close to matching the gravity of the crisis.

The Obama administration’s anemic response is indicative of the larger strategic drift of America’s response to the 2011 Arab uprisings. In the immediate aftermath of the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, Obama admitted that the United States had not pushed hard enough for democracy in the Arab world, and he promised a new way of doing business in the region. At arguably every major juncture since then, however, whenever Washington has had the opportunity to demonstrate its support for genuine democracy in Egypt, it has instead opted for some version of the “authoritarian bargain” that characterized U.S. regional policy for decades. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Westerners’ smuggled letters offer glimpse of Egyptian prisons

The New York Times reports on the conditions inside Egypt’s prisons revealed through the accounts provided by several Western prisoners including a United States citizen, Mohamed Soltan.

Mr. Soltan is a 25-year-old graduate of Ohio State University who moved to Egypt in February to work in the petroleum industry, said his sister, Hanaa Soltan, a clinical social worker in Washington, D.C.

Their father, Salah Soltan, a professor at Cairo University, is an outspoken member of the Muslim Brotherhood but hardly a die-hard. He made headlines in September when he publicly apologized for the Brotherhood’s mistakes, including failing to ally with liberal activists. Brotherhood officials dismissed the apology as Mr. Soltan’s personal views, and a few days later he, too, was arrested.

Ms. Soltan said her brother had been an opponent of the Brotherhood “and very vocal about it as well.”

But she said that after Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi responded to a wave of mass protests by ousting Mr. Morsi, her brother joined a Brotherhood-led sit-in at Rabaa Square here to defend what he considered the norms of American-style democracy. “He thought it did not matter how incompetent the elected leaders are,” she said. “There is no hope of realizing the fruits of the revolution if you don’t respect democracy and you throw out the results of the ballots on the basis of displeasure at someone’s missteps.”

Mr. Soltan was shot in the arm on Aug. 14, when security forces broke up sit-ins at Rabaa and another square, killing nearly a thousand people. He was recovering from surgery to remove the bullet when the police raided his home and arrested him, he wrote in his letter, which he addressed to his mother.

Thrown into a group cell nicknamed The Fridge, “a room without seats, benches, windows and lights,” he recalled that one guard joked “that he could get me anything I wanted, drugs, alcohol, prostitutes. Just not due process.”

Mr. Soltan wrote that he was blindfolded and questioned the next morning and told he would be charged with six crimes, none of which, he said, had “any basis in reality,” including “membership in a terrorist organization, membership in an armed militia, disturbing the peace, falsifying and spreading rumors about the internal affairs of Egypt, and finally, the killing of protesters.” (Interior Ministry officials have sometimes argued, implausibly, that Brotherhood snipers fired at the Brotherhood’s supporters.)

Mr. Soltan expressed shock and surprise over a ritual that Egyptians consider standard for criminal suspects: The detainees ran between rows of security officers who struck them with rocks and sticks, known here sarcastically as the Tashreefa, or honoring ceremony.

“The officers stripped off our pants and shirts as they beat us with clubs,” he wrote. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The Guardian’s global ambitions

Ken Auletta writes: At eight-thirty on the morning of June 21st, Alan Rusbridger, the unflappable editor of the Guardian, Britain’s liberal daily, was in his office, absorbing a lecture from Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary to Prime Minister David Cameron. Accompanying Heywood was Craig Oliver, Cameron’s director of communications. The deputy editor, Paul Johnson, joined them in Rusbridger’s office, overlooking the Regent’s Canal, which runs behind King’s Cross station, in North London. According to Rusbridger, Heywood told him, in a steely voice, “The Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the Attorney General, and others in government are extremely concerned about what you’re doing.”

Since June 5th, the Guardian had been publishing top-secret digital files provided by Edward Snowden, a former contract employee of the National Security Agency. In a series of articles, the paper revealed that the N.S.A., in the name of combatting terrorism, had monitored millions of phone calls and e-mails as well as the private deliberations of allied governments. It also revealed, again relying on Snowden’s documents, that, four years earlier, the Government Communications Headquarters (G.C.H.Q.), Britain’s counterpart to the N.S.A., had eavesdropped on the communications of other nations attending the G20 summit, in London.

Such articles have become a trademark of the Guardian. In 2009, it published the first in a torrent of stories revealing how Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids had bribed the police and hacked into the phones of celebrities, politicians, and the Royal Family. In 2010, the Guardian published a trove of WikiLeaks documents that disclosed confidential conversations among diplomats of the United States, Britain, and other governments, and exposed atrocities that were committed in Iraq and Afghanistan; in August, Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, a private in the U.S. Army, was sentenced to up to thirty-five years in prison for his role in the leak.

Now Rusbridger was poised to publish a story about how the G.C.H.Q. not only collected vast quantities of e-mails, Facebook posts, phone calls, and Internet histories but shared these with the N.S.A. Heywood had learned about the most recent revelation when Guardian reporters called British authorities for comment; he warned Rusbridger that the Guardian was in possession of stolen government documents. “We want them back,” he said. Unlike the U.S., Britain has no First Amendment to guard the press against government censorship. Rusbridger worried that the government would get a court injunction to block the Guardian from publishing not only the G.C.H.Q. story but also future national-security stories. “By publishing this, you’re jeopardizing not only national security but our ability to catch pedophiles, drug dealers, child sex rings,” Heywood said. “You’re an editor, but you have a responsibility as a citizen as well.” (Cameron’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)

Rusbridger replied that the files contained information that citizens in a democracy deserved to know, and he assured Heywood that he had scrubbed the documents so that no undercover officials were identified or put at risk. He had also taken steps to insure the story’s publication. Days earlier, Rusbridger had sent a Federal Express package containing a thumbnail drive of selected Snowden documents to an intermediary in the U.S. The person was to pass on the package to Paul Steiger, the former editor of the Wall Street Journal and the founding editor of the online, nonprofit news site ProPublica; if the Guardian was muzzled, Steiger would publish the documents on ProPublica. Besides, Rusbridger reminded Heywood, the government’s reach was limited: Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian blogger and columnist with whom Snowden had shared the documents, lived in Brazil, and was edited by Janine Gibson, a Guardian editor in New York.

“It was a little like watching two Queen’s Counsel barristers in a head-to-head struggle, two very polished performers engaging each other,” Johnson, the deputy editor, said. The Guardian has a reputation as a leftish publication that enjoys poking the establishment; its critics object that it allows commentary to occasionally slip into its headlines and news stories. Rusbridger, who is fifty-nine, has been its editor for eighteen years. He wears square, black-framed glasses and has a mop of dark hair that sprawls across his head and over his ears. He could pass for a librarian. “His physical appearance doesn’t tell you how tough he is,” Nick Davies, the investigative reporter whose byline dominated the Murdoch and WikiLeaks stories, said.

After an hour, Rusbridger ushered Heywood and Oliver out with a thank-you. He had taken what he considered a cautious approach to publishing the Snowden revelations. He consulted Guardian lawyers. He called Davies back from vacation and summoned the longtime investigations editor, David Leigh, out of retirement for advice and to help analyze the documents. He sought the opinion of two associates: the centrist Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins and the liberal Observer columnist Henry Porter. “He doesn’t buckle,” Porter, who is a close friend, said. “He’s extremely calm. He could easily head up any of the three intelligence agencies here.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Syria: Fuel-air bombs strike school

Human Rights Watch: A Syrian government airstrike using fuel-air explosive bombs hit outside a secondary school in the opposition-held city of Raqqa on September 29, 2013, killing at least 14 civilians. At least 12 of those killed were students attending their first day of classes.

A Raqqa resident who went to the school immediately after the attack told Human Rights Watch that he saw 14 bodies, including some without limbs. A doctor from National Hospital in Raqqa said he saw 12 dead bodies, most of them students, and the hospital treated 25 wounded.

The blast wounds and flash burns visible on victims in videos and photographs, coupled with the body positions and few shrapnel wounds, indicates the use of fuel-air explosives (FAE), also known as “vacuum bombs,” Human Rights Watch said. More powerful than conventional high-explosive munitions of comparable size, fuel-air explosivesinflict extensive damage over a wide area, and are therefore prone to indiscriminate impact in populated areas.

“While the world tries to bring Syria’s chemical weapons under control, government forces are killing civilians with other extremely powerful weapons,” said Priyanka Motaparthy, Middle East child rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Even students on their first day of school are not safe.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The DEA thinks you have ‘no constitutionally protected privacy interest’ in your confidential prescription records

ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project: The Drug Enforcement Administration thinks people have “no constitutionally protected privacy interest” in their confidential prescription records, according to a brief filed last month in federal court. That disconcerting statement comes in response to an ACLU lawsuit challenging the DEA’s practice of obtaining private medical information without a warrant. The ACLU has just filed its response brief, explaining to the court why the DEA’s position is both startling and wrong.

We represent four patients and a physician in Oregon whose confidential prescription records are contained in a state database that tracks prescriptions for certain drugs. The database, called the Oregon Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP), was intended to be a public health tool to help physicians avoid drug overdoses and abuse in their patients. Despite a state law requiring law enforcement to obtain a probable cause warrant from a judge before requesting records from the PDMP, the DEA has been requesting records using administrative subpoenas, which do not involve judicial authorization or probable cause. Our clients object to the DEA’s warrantless access to the PDMP because their prescription records reveal deeply private information about their health and medical history, including their gender identity (two of our clients are transgender men taking testosterone as part of their transition from female to male sex) and mental illness (one client takes medication to treat anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders).

In July, we explained to the court why people have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their confidential prescription records and the medical information those records reveal. (Under the Fourth Amendment, if there is a reasonable expectation of privacy in an item or location, law enforcement can generally conduct a search only if it first obtains a warrant). In support of our arguments, we submitted sworn declarations from medical privacy experts, including a scholar of medical ethics and a physician who explained that maintaining the confidentiality of doctor-patient communications is vital to the successful practice of medicine, and an authority on the history of medical ethics who explained that principles of medical confidentiality were well established at the time of the writing of the Fourth Amendment and would have been relied on by the Amendment’s framers.

In its latest brief, the DEA ignores these points and instead argues that the mere fact that our clients’ prescription records are held in a database maintained by a third party—the State of Oregon—means that they have somehow given up their privacy interest in the records. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Israel puts ‘Iranian spy’ on display but has yet to charge him after 20 days of detention

Ali Mansouri, an Iranian-born Belgian citizen also known as Alex Mans, was arrested by Israel’s internal security services Shin Bet on September 11. His possession of a couple of nondescript photographs in which the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv can be seen, has been presented as evidence that he was engaged in espionage. (Anyone who wants to find better photos of the embassy just has to use Google.)

The fact that after 20 days in detention (during the first nine of which Mansouri was prevented from consulting a lawyer) investigators don’t appear to have found sufficient evidence to put him on trial, might explain why he has yet to be charged.

At the same time, Israeli authorities were shameless in trying to exploit the political value of holding an Iranian in handcuffs as he was put on display for the press today.

Reuters reports: A man arrested on suspicion of being an Iranian spy appeared in an Israeli court on Monday and some Israeli analysts questioned the timing of the affair, suggesting it was being showcased as part of efforts to discredit Tehran’s new opening to Washington.

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew on Sunday to the United States for a visit focused on Iran’s nuclear program, Israel’s Shin Bet security service announced that Ali Mansouri had been arrested on September 11 on suspicion of spying for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

It said Mansouri, a 55-year-old Iranian-Belgian national, had photographed the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and intended to establish business ties in Israel as a cover for espionage.

An Israeli official told reporters on Netanyahu’s flight that Mansouri’s picture-taking outside the embassy – whose exterior can be seen in numerous images on the Internet – was an attempt “to collect intelligence for a possible terror attack”.

That allegation was challenged by Mansouri’s lawyer, Michal Okabi, after a hearing on Monday in a court in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petah Tikva in which the suspect, who did not speak, was ordered held for eight more days.

“The apocalyptic picture that the Shin Bet is painting is a lot more complicated and the attempt to claim that our client came here in order to carry out attacks in Israel is far from reality and without foundation,” Okabi told reporters.

Some Israeli media commentators questioned the timing of the news, released in a Shin Bet statement that included photographs it said he had taken outside the beachfront mission and at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion airport. No formal charges have been filed.

Asked by Reuters whether the decision to publicize Mansouri’s arrest was influenced by Netanyahu’s U.S. trip, the Shin Bet declined to comment.

Facebooktwittermail

Netanyahu’s Iran dilemma

Larry Derfner writes: By all appearances, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in New York Sunday in a state of near desperation over Iran. By his reckoning, the Iranians are now within arm’s reach — a few months or even just weeks short — of having a stockpile of enriched uranium that, if re-enriched, would be enough for a nuclear bomb. Reports in Israeli media even quote an unnamed government official claiming that Iran already has a bomb. And Netanyahu — who addresses the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday a day after visiting the White House — believes the Obama administration is falling for an Iranian ruse fronted by President Hassan Rouhani to get the West to drop sanctions in return for a deceitful demonstration of nuclear innocence.

But if the Israeli leader is feeling desperate, don’t expect him to show it in his U.N. speech; that, after all, is what his opponents expect. There will likely be no over-the-top gimmicks this time, no cartoon bomb audio-visuals. Neither should anyone wait for explicit, drawn-out analogies to the Holocaust. Instead, Netanyahu is likely to speak very quietly and starkly as he lays out his case that it’s too late to slow Iran’s advance to nuclear capability, that the only remaining choice for the world’s leaders is to force Iran to relinquish its capability to build nuclear weapons, or live with a nuclear-armed regime in Tehran.

Netanyahu’s dilemma is this: Not only does he have no trust in Tehran’s peaceful declarations, he is not confident that the U.S. and Europe are willing to escalate a confrontation in order to force Iran to give up its enriched uranium and dismantle its key nuclear facilities. It is not sufficient for Netanyahu for Iran to accept caps on its enrichment levels, because it’s nuclear infrastructure puts it within “a turn of the screwdriver” of weaponization if it followed North Korea’s example and broke out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The Israeli leader believes the only acceptable scenario is for Iran to be presented with the choice of either dismantling its nuclear program or being bombed to ruins — and that’s not a likely outcome of renewed negotiations between the West and Iran, which are focused on limiting but not entirely eliminating Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Iran hawks gear up

Mitchell Plitnick writes: Not everyone shares the optimism surrounding the recent communication between Presidents Barack Obama and Hassan Rouhani. From Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Monarchies and, of course, Washington, DC, voices of war are in a panic that tensions between the U.S. and Iran might be reduced by some means other than further devastation of the Islamic Republic.

The concern that Iran might emerge with a better relationship with the United States is quite vexing for the Gulf rulers and for Israel. For some years now, the drive to isolate Iran has focused almost entirely on the nuclear issue. In fact, regionally, much of the concern has been the ascendancy of Iran as a regional player more broadly, with revolutionary rhetoric that challenges the dominance of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Since the destruction, by George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, of the dual containment policy, the issue for these parties has been how to contain Iran and its regional influence.

Iran has been cast as an “aggressor nation,” and this has been sold by illustrating Iran’s support for Hezbollah and other militant groups, its often bombastic rhetoric, and for the past decade, Iran’s ducking from some of its responsibilities to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). What gets left out is that Iran has never initiated an attack on another nation, its threats to “wipe Israel off the map” are factually known as (just not in mainstream discourse) to be a de-contextualized mistranslation of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s words, and even Iran’s failures with the IAEA have been part of a back and forth exchange, where they refuse or neglect to comply with some things in response to what they see as US-led unfair sanctions or restrictions. That doesn’t mean Iran has not caused some of these problems itself, it has. Lack of transparency on nuclear issues tends to raise the hackles of one’s enemies. But all this has hardly been the one-way street that’s been portrayed. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Syrian militant Islamists denounce SNC and form ‘Islamic Alliance’

Charles Lister writes: In a video issued late on September 24, the chief political leader of Liwa al-Tawhid, Abdulaziz Salameh, speaking on behalf of 12 other Islamist militant groups in Syria, condemned the “unrepresentative” Western-backed Syrian National Coalition (SNC) and called explicitly for “an Islamic framework based on sharia [Islamic law].”

The video was issued along with a scanned statement, personally signed by the senior leadership of all 13 groups, encorporating existing members of the SNC, members of the hardline Salafist coalition the Syrian Islamic Front, and also Jabhat al-Nusra. As such, a new “Islamic Coalition” was formed.

All 13 groups – specifically, Jabhat al-Nusra, Harakat Ahrar al-Sham al-Islamiyya, Liwa al-Tawhid, Liwa al-Islam, Suqor al-Sham, Liwa al-Haq, Harakat Fajr al-Sham al-Islamiyya, Harakat al-Nour al-Islamiyya, Kataib Nour al-Din al-Zinki, Liwa al-Furqan, Liwa al-Ansar, Tajamu Fastaqm Kamr Umrat and Forqat al-Tisaa Ashr – represent Syria’s most sizeable and powerful insurgent groups. The inclusion of the core of the SNC force – incorporating Liwa al-Tawhid, Liwa al-Islam and Suqor al-Sham – effectively depletes the SNC’s armed wing, the Syrian Military Council (SMC). As all four groups were also members of the SNC-linked Syrian Islamic Liberation Front coalition, with Suqor al-Sham leader Sheikh Ahmed Abu Issa its leader, it is likely that that moderate Islamist coalition has ceased to exist as a single organisational structure.

The announcement is potentially extremely significant for the long-term nature of the Syrian opposition. The SNC has long been accused of retaining minimal on-the-ground control of insurgent groups technically under its command, and this public renunciation of its leadership and its political foundations will likely prove extremely damaging for its long-term role inside Syria. The group’s 13 signatories currently play the lead roles in insurgent theatres across Syria, particularly throughout the north, in Homs, Damascus and as far south as al-Quneitra governorate.

While the significant Aleppo-based Asifat al-Shamal did not sign into the alliance, it issued a written statement expressing support for its objectives. Meanwhile, moderate forces Alwia Ahfad al-Rasoul and Jabhat al-Asala wa Tanmia will likely remain the SMC’s most significant multi-governorate-level actors, although the latter notably without one of its key constituent groups, Kataib Nour al-Din al-Zinki. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Libya: In search of a strongman

Nicolas Pelham writes: It is perhaps a measure of how close Libya is to breaking apart that two years after ousting one dictator, many Libyans are craving another. Rapacious brigades of armed volunteers, who are based in Misrata and Benghazi in the east, and the creaking military inherited from the old regime, which is based in the capital city of Tripoli and the west, are hurtling toward a new civil war, and the country’s ineffectual authorities seem unable to stop them. Local militias have captured the oil fields and ports, starving the government of 90 percent of its revenues; Benghazi is rife with political assassinations; in the south, Colonel Qaddafi’s kinsmen have plugged the Great Man-Made River that funnels water from the Sahara’s vast aquifers to the coast; and tribesmen across the country sporadically cut off the roads or close the airports that tie the provinces to the capital. Libya’s current prime minister, Ali Zeidan, threatens to restore order with force, but his men retreat after a few shots. Confusion about whether to rely on the armed irregulars who revolted against Qaddafi or the instruments of the old regime only compounds his powerlessness.

Libyans overwhelmingly aspire to the dream of a new democratic order that animated the ideals of the revolution. But increasingly many consider such a system too delicate to overcome the country’s deep fissures. Since antiquity Libya has been a composite of separate principalities—Tripolitania in the west, Cyrenaica in the east, and Fezzan in the south—a division that has played out not only geographically and historically, but also ideologically, with the west gravitating towards the more laissez-faire Maghreb, and the east spawning religious movements, from early Christian communities to Omar Mukhtar, the warrior Muslim mystic who led the revolt against Italy’s colonial conquest. In July 2012, great numbers of the country’s six million people braved the lawless streets—where alarming numbers of weapons have proliferated since the revolution—to register and vote in the first free national election in half a century. As multiple forces assert power in different parts of the country, however, the old regional divisions have reemerged. Only a strongman, many feel, can hold Libya together. But who could it be?

The souqs buzz hopefully with names. Khalifa Haftar, Colonel Qaddafi’s old commander-in-chief, who led Libya’s army into a brutal but woefully unsuccessful invasion of Chad in 1987, appeals to those nostalgic for the old order. After abandoning his men in the Sahara, he fled to Virginia, and, backed by the CIA, schemed with little apparent success to usurp Libya’s crown. When Libya’s revolution erupted in February 2011, he returned with pomp and a convoy of plush cars as commander of Libya’s rebel ground forces.

Raised in the ways of Qaddafi, however, Haftar has failed to shake off criticism that he acts like him. A Western spy recalls meeting him during the revolution in a Libyan oil company’s offices in Benghazi, where he proudly displayed his battle plans for the assault on Tripoli on a tourist roadmap of Libya. Might the agent have a few radios to spare, he asked, so that he could talk to the front? His convoy continues to circle Libya like a medieval travelling court. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Libya: Must it get worse before it gets better?

The Economist reports: “The only road to paradise,” runs a joke doing the rounds in the cafés of Tripoli, Libya’s seafront capital, “is the one to the international airport.” Most Libyans still revel in the freedom and sense of possibility brought on by the NATO-backed war that ousted Colonel Muammar Qaddafi two years ago. “Yet before, when someone disappeared, you knew they were with Qaddafi forces,” reminisces a rebel-turned-security man. “Now we have no idea.” That was made clear earlier this month when the government denounced the kidnap of the daughter of Abdullah al-Senussi, Qaddafi’s former spy chief, only to discover that one of its own forces had nabbed her; she was freed a few days later.

Libya has hit its rockiest patch since Qaddafi’s demise. No one has managed to reassert full authority over the tribes, regions and groups welded together under the colonel’s iron rule. Institutions of state, absent under Qaddafi, have yet to take firm shape. In the past few weeks the country’s key oil ports have been blockaded by disgruntled workers and militias. Assassinations and carjackings are rife. Water and electricity have been cut off in Tripoli for the past week. On September 11th a bomb was defused in Tripoli; another went off in Benghazi, the cradle of the anti-Qaddafi revolt and the main city of the east.

Security is the biggest complaint. “A state at its most basic has a monopoly of force,” says Anas al-Gomati, who runs Sadeq, a Libyan think-tank. “Here you can argue that the government works for the militias.” The authorities, with Western help, are in the process of building an army and police force which are supposed to take over from the militias on its payroll, most notably the Supreme Security Committee (SSC), a collection of former rebels which functions as a temporary police force, and the Libyan Shield, a group of Islamist militias that form a quasi-army. But a third of the men in these groups will refuse to drop their guns and come under the authority of the new security forces, reckons Hasham Bisher, who heads Tripoli’s SSC. Islamists in particular are loth to disband, fearing they may then be suppressed, as they were under Qaddafi.

So the government’s ability to keep law and order outside Tripoli is weak—“and arguably within it too,” says Claudia Gazzini of International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think-tank. The starkest illustration of this is the authorities’ inability to end the blockade that has reduced oil exports, the government’s main source of revenue, to under a tenth of the 1.6m barrels a day produced before the uprising. Some factions appear to be trying to sell oil to fund a campaign for federalism, with Benghazi as the capital of an autonomous eastern region. Others are protesting against the government’s general incompetence. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

NSA stores metadata of millions of web users for up to a year, secret files show

The Guardian reports: The National Security Agency is storing the online metadata of millions of internet users for up to a year, regardless of whether or not they are persons of interest to the agency, top secret documents reveal.

Metadata provides a record of almost anything a user does online, from browsing history – such as map searches and websites visited – to account details, email activity, and even some account passwords. This can be used to build a detailed picture of an individual’s life.

The Obama administration has repeatedly stated that the NSA keeps only the content of messages and communications of people it is intentionally targeting – but internal documents reveal the agency retains vast amounts of metadata.

An introductory guide to digital network intelligence for NSA field agents, included in documents disclosed by former contractor Edward Snowden, describes the agency’s metadata repository, codenamed Marina. Any computer metadata picked up by NSA collection systems is routed to the Marina database, the guide explains. Phone metadata is sent to a separate system. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

For scientists in a democracy, to dissent is to be reasonable

George Monbiot writes: It’s as clear and chilling a statement of intent as you’re likely to read. Scientists should be “the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena”. Vladimir Putin? Kim Jong-un? No, Professor Ian Boyd, chief scientific adviser at the UK’s Department for Environment.

Boyd’s doctrine is a neat distillation of government policy in Britain, Canada and Australia. These governments have suppressed or misrepresented inconvenient findings on climate change, pollution, pesticides, fisheries and wildlife. They have shut down programmes that produce unwelcome findings and sought to muzzle scientists. This is a modern version of Soviet Lysenkoism: crushing academic dissent on behalf of bad science and corporate power.

Writing in an online journal, Boyd argued that if scientists speak freely, they create conflict between themselves and policymakers, leading to a “chronically deep-seated mistrust of scientists that can undermine the delicate foundation upon which science builds relevance”. This, in turn, “could set back the cause of science in government”. So they should avoid “suggesting that policies are either right or wrong”. If they must speak out, they should do so through “embedded advisers (such as myself), and by being the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena”.

Shut up, speak through me, don’t dissent – or your behaviour will ensure that science becomes irrelevant. Note that the conflicts between science and policy are caused by scientists, rather than by politicians ignoring or abusing the evidence. Or by chief scientific advisers. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Audio: Proto-Indo-European reconstructed

Here’s a story in English:

A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses.” The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool.” Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

And here is “a very educated approximation” of how that story might have sounded if spoken in Proto-Indo-European about 6,500 years ago:

(Read more at Archeology.)

Facebooktwittermail