Glenn Greenwald on the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki
September 30th, 2011 § 1 Comment
For more on the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, see Glenn Greenwald’s article The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality.
Thomas Friedman: Imperial Messenger of the Arab Spring
September 30th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
(Photo: AFP-Mark Ralston)
The following is an article I wrote for the Beirut-based Al Akhbar English.
It took Thomas Friedman — New York Times foreign affairs columnist and three-time Pulitzer Prize recipient for reporting and commentary on the Middle East — approximately 46 days after the outbreak of the Arab Spring in Tunisia to weigh in on the matter.
Noted champion of the notion that Iraqis should be made to “Suck. On. This” by the US military in order to “try to build one decent, progressive, democratizing society in the heart of the Arab East”, Friedman eventually turns up in a Tel Aviv hotel to discuss ramifications of the Egyptian uprising with a retired Israeli general. He then proceeds to Egypt itself, an experience that subsequently merits significant reflection:
When I was in Cairo during the Egyptian uprising, I wanted to change hotels one day to be closer to the action and called the Marriott to see if it had any openings. The young-sounding Egyptian woman who spoke with me from the reservations department offered me a room and then asked: ‘Do you have a corporate rate?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I work for The New York Times.’ There was a silence on the phone for a few moments, and then she said: ‘Can I ask you something?’ Sure. ‘Are we going to be O.K.? I’m worried.’
I made a mental note of that conversation because she sounded like a modern person, the kind of young woman who would have been in Tahrir Square. We’re just now beginning to see what may have been gnawing at her — in Egypt and elsewhere.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
September 29th, 2011 § 3 Comments
the Free Syrian Army logo
This was first published at Foreign Policy.
From the start of the Syrian revolution, the Assad regime’s media have portrayed the overwhelmingly peaceful grassroots protest movement as a foreign-backed military assault. Its preferred catchall term to describe the tens of thousands of patriots it has kidnapped and tortured, as well as the thousands it has murdered, is “armed gangs.” Despite a series of televised “confessions,” the regime has not provided any serious proof of the supposed American-French-Qaeda-Israeli-Saudi-Qatari plot against the homeland. Nor has it explained the evident contradictions between its narrative and the thousands of YouTube videos and eyewitness accounts of security forces shooting rifles and artillery straight into unarmed crowds.
Of course it hasn’t. Yet its propaganda is taken seriously by Russian and Chinese state media, certain infantile leftists, and a vaguely prominent American academic.
Tragically, the propaganda is also taken seriously by members of Syria’s minority sects — not by all of them by any stretch, but perhaps by a majority. It’s tragic because perceived minority support for this sadistic regime will inevitably tarnish intersectarian relations in Syria in the future.
Those Sunni Syrians who are (understandably) enraged by the minorities’ siding with the dictatorship should remember first that many Alawis and Christians, as well as many more Druze and Ismailis, have joined the revolution and that many have paid the price. Second, Sunnis should remember that Alawis and Christians have good reason to fear change, if not to believe the propaganda.
Syria: Inside the Secret Revolution
September 27th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
After Libya, will Syria be the next Arab dictatorship to fall to people power? For months, a popular uprising has been fighting an unseen and bloody battle against the Syrian regime. Panorama has been filming inside Syria, and can now tell the full story of those struggling against President Assad and the truth about his brutal crackdown against his own people.
Erdogan on Israel, Syria and Iran
September 26th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks to Freed Zakaria on CNN’s GPS. He has some strong words for Israel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHU3HgV-JEQ
Zainab al-Hosni
September 25th, 2011 § 11 Comments
She was eighteen, from Homs. The regime wanted to get its hands on her brother Muhammad, an activist on the run, so it arrested her instead, as bait. Shortly afterwards the insecurity forces caught Muhammad, and shortly after that they summoned Muhammad’s mother to pick up his corpse. The corpse was burnt and punctured by bullets. While in the morgue, by chance, the mother found Zainab’s corpse too. Zainab’s arms had been cut off. Part of her body had been skinned. She had been decapitated.
During the battle between the Muslim Brotherhood and the regime in the early eighties the regime committed massacres. But it never tortured children and women to death. This style of barbarism is an innovation. Does it need to be said that it’s an innovation which doesn’t suit Syrian values? There are still some people, astoundingly, who tell us that this regime of the psychopathically ill is capable of ‘reform’.
Hafez al-Asad was a ruthless dictator of great but flawed intelligence. His sons do not qualify as dictators. To call them dictators is to insult dictators. They are a foul mix of pervert, monster, idiot, and spoiled brat. Each moment they remain at liberty is another catastrophe.
Beyond that, for Zainab, I can say nothing more.
UPDATE: – It now appears the regime is playing a clever sick game. Zainab has turned up on regime TV alive. The regime did kill her brother, and did label some other person’s dismembered corpse as Zainab’s, no doubt to discredit the accounts of the revolutionaries. So whose corpse did they dismember? This theatre reminds me of the time a few months ago when a French TV channel received a communication from a known contact at the Syrian embassy in Paris telling them the ambassador had resigned. The channel reported the story, then the next day the ambassador turned up to denounce the ‘lies’. Here’s Rime Allaf’s comment on Facebook:
The Zeinab story: the lie is the regime’s and the regime’s alone. The regime first came to arrest her (the real Zeinab), then first returned the body of her brother to the family (he died under torture), then told the family come take your daughter too – and gave them a burned beheaded body, unrecognizable, in pieces. That body, of course, still is a martyr, we just don’t know whose it is. The family was told by the regime that this was their daughter, they didn’t just find the corpse in the street, and it’s not the opponents of the regime who made this up. And after everyone got all worked up, they deliver “the victim who simply ran away” because – to boot – her brothers (who must be “extremists”) were abusing her.
The point is that the regime is not only criminal but criminally stupid, as if these games can prove anything about the “armed terrorist gangs” and about the “lying activists” and as if we’re supposed to forget the whole sequence of events, and only watch the Syrian television clip like idiots and say oh, the opposition lied. (Ironically, the criminal Taleb Ibrahim the other day claimed on television these same gangs had killed Zeinab.)
Drugs and justice in Panama
September 23rd, 2011 § 2 Comments
Former US installed president Guillermo Endara enabled Panama to become a province of the Cali drug cartel (Photo: EPA)
The following is my latest article for Al Jazeera:
Prior to his death in 2003, my grandfather – a former intelligence officer in the US military and a veteran of D-Day, Korea, and Vietnam – experienced regular flashbacks to his bellicose career.
These manifested themselves in various ways, such as via his suspicion that the other inhabitants of his assisted-living facility were using their oxygen tanks for communist purposes. In other cases, the ideological foundations of perceived threats were less readily detectable, and he exhibited intermittent concern about potential plots being concocted by the Mexican Air Force.
Another recurring fear was that of being dropped from a helicopter by ex-Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who had in his pre-dictatorial incarnation as director of military intelligence under Omar Torrijos been a frequent visitor to my grandfather, himself the director of intelligence from 1971-76 for the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), then headquartered in the Panama Canal Zone. The visits often took place in the “Tunnel”, the local US nuclear bunker at Ancon Hill, which was equipped with numerous amenities useful in the event of Armageddon, such as air conditioning, a church, and an SUV-sized paper shredder.
Though accused by some of orchestrating Torrijos’ death in a plane crash, Noriega was not known for dropping human beings from aircraft into bodies of water – the practice of which art was generally restricted to US-backed dictators in the Southern Cone and was concurrent with the curriculum of the US-run School of the Americas, also located in the Canal Zone. According to my grandfather, however, Noriega dabbled in the application of such techniques as well, capitalising on the convenient proximity of the Bay of Panama prior to being deposed by the US invasion of 1989.
Meltdown – The men who crashed the world
September 21st, 2011 § 3 Comments
The first of Al Jazeera’s four-part investigation into a world of greed and recklessness that brought down the financial world.
UPDATE: Our readers Delia and Richard inform us that this excellent series is actually a production of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).
Al Jazeera Correspondent – Haiti: After the Quake
September 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
If you watch only one documentary on Haiti, watch this. It is about the country’s past, its present and the inefficient, corrupt world of large, non-governmental organizations and international organizations that often do more to compound problems in developing nations than alleviate them. I hope Al Jazeera’s Sebastian Walker is appropriately recognized for his brave investigative coverage of life in Haiti after its devastating earthquake.
William Hague Endorses Linkage for the UK
September 20th, 2011 § 1 Comment
First published on Lobe Log
Last night during an interview with Charlie Rose British Foreign Secretary William Hague endorsed linkage — the notion that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will help promote U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East. Here’s what was said:
CHARLIE ROSE: But also you know that the Israelis have said that’s not acceptable, ‘67 borders are not acceptable, shared Jerusalem as a capital is unacceptable. The Prime Minister has said that.WILLIAM HAGUE: If they want as I believe they do want long term security for their country then they will have to embrace those things, arrive at a settlement around those parameters. And I think it’s vital for Israel that they do so.
Look, the Arab Spring brings many benefits. It has many — it’s a hugely positive thing for the world on the whole but I don’t think Israel would want the democratic politics of Egypt, in Libya, in Tunisia, to come in the years to come a bidding war among different parties about who can become more hostile to Israel because the Palestinian issue is not being settled. That is a danger for Israel.
Also they affect Iran, their nuclear program is a major threat to peace in the region and the world. And to focus on facing up to that threat also requires making the agreement with the Palestinians. It is vital for Israel’s security that they do so.
Hague thus joins the highest levels of the U.S. military in arguing that solving the Israel-Palestine conflict is central to progressing on other heated issues in the Middle East, such as Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions. A secure and independent Palestine would not only remove one of Iran’s main rallying causes, but also undermine the impression that Washington permits Israel to behave with impunity in the region, leading to a less polarized and therefore more stable environment.
Hague’s words will likely be received negatively by neoconservatives who propagate reverse linkage, the argument that pressuring Israel to make peace should be postponed until the U.S. has dealt with Iran’s nuclear program and other potential challenges to Israel’s military dominance of the region.
