Greece and the troika (the International Monetary Fund, the EU, and the European Central Bank) are in a dangerous game of chicken. The Greeks have been threatened with a “Cyprus-Style prolonged bank holiday” if they “vote wrong.” But they have been bullied for too long and are saying “no more.”
A return [...]]]>
Greece and the troika (the International Monetary Fund, the EU, and the European Central Bank) are in a dangerous game of chicken. The Greeks have been threatened with a “Cyprus-Style prolonged bank holiday” if they “vote wrong.” But they have been bullied for too long and are saying “no more.”
A return to the polls was triggered in December, when the Parliament rejected Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ pro-austerity candidate for president. In a general election, now set for January 25th, the EU-skeptic, anti-austerity, leftist Syriza party is likely to prevail. Syriza captured a 3% lead in the polls following mass public discontent over the harsh austerity measures Athens was forced to accept in return for a €240 billion bailout.
Austerity has plunged the economy into conditions worse than in the Great Depression. As Professor Bill Black observes, the question is not why the Greek people are rising up to reject the barbarous measures but what took them so long.
Ireland was similarly forced into an EU bailout with painful austerity measures attached. A series of letters has recently come to light showing that the Irish government was effectively blackmailed into it, with the threat that the ECB would otherwise cut off liquidity funding to Ireland’s banks. The same sort of threat has been leveled at the Greeks, but this time they are not taking the bait.
Squeezed by the Squid
The veiled threat to the Greek Parliament was in a December memo from investment bank Goldman Sachs – the same bank that was earlier blamed for inducing the Greek crisis. Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi wrote colorfully of it:
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
Goldman has spawned an unusual number of EU and US officials with dictatorial power to promote and protect big-bank interests. They include US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who brokered the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000; Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who presided over the 2008 Wall Street bailout; Mario Draghi, current head of the European Central Bank; Mario Monti, who led a government of technocrats as Italian prime minister; and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, chair of the Financial Stability Board that sets financial regulations for the G20 countries.
Goldman’s role in the Greek crisis goes back to 2001. The vampire squid, smelling money in Greece’s debt problems, jabbed its blood funnel into Greek fiscal management, sucking out high fees to hide the extent of Greece’s debt in complicated derivatives. The squid then hedged its bets by shorting Greek debt. Bearish bets on Greek debt launched by heavyweight hedge funds in late 2009 put selling pressure on the euro, forcing Greece into the bailout and austerity measures that have since destroyed its economy.
Before the December 2014 parliamentary vote that brought down the Greek government, Goldman repeated the power play that has long held the eurozone in thrall to an unelected banking elite. In a note titled “From GRecovery to GRelapse,” reprinted on Zerohedge, it warned that “the room for Greece to meaningfully backtrack from the reforms that have already been implemented is very limited.”
Why? Because bank “liquidity” could be cut in the event of “a severe clash between Greece and international lenders.” The central bank could cut liquidity or not, at its whim; and without it, the banks would be insolvent.
As the late Murray Rothbard pointed out, all banks are technically insolvent. They all lend money they don’t have. They rely on being able to borrow from other banks, the money market, or the central bank as needed to balance their books. The central bank, which has the power to print money, is the ultimate backstop in this sleight of hand and is therefore in the driver’s seat. If that source of liquidity dries up, the banks go down.
The Goldman memo warned:
The Biggest Risk is an Interruption of the Funding of Greek Banks by The ECB.
Pressing as the government refinancing schedule may look on the surface, it is unlikely to become a real issue as long as the ECB stands behind the Greek banking system. . . .
But herein lies the main risk for Greece. The economy needs the only lender of last resort to the banking system to maintain ample provision of liquidity. And this is not just because banks may require resources to help reduce future refinancing risks for the sovereign. But also because banks are already reliant on government issued or government guaranteed securities to maintain the current levels of liquidity constant. . . .
In the event of a severe Greek government clash with international lenders, interruption of liquidity provision to Greek banks by the ECB could potentially even lead to a Cyprus-style prolonged “bank holiday”. And market fears for potential Euro-exit risks could rise at that point. [Emphasis added.]
The condition of the Greek banks was not the issue. The gun being held to the banks’ heads was the threat that the central bank’s critical credit line could be cut unless financial “reforms” were complied with. Indeed, any country that resists going along with the program could find that its banks have been cut off from that critical liquidity.
That is actually what happened in Cyprus in 2013. The banks declared insolvent had passed the latest round of ECB stress tests and were no less salvageable than many other banks – until the troika demanded an additional €600 billion to maintain the central bank’s credit line.
That was the threat leveled at the Irish government before it agreed to a bailout with strings attached, and it was the threat aimed in December at Greece. Greek Finance Minister Gikas Hardouvelis stated in an interview:
The key to . . . our economy’s future in 2015 and later is held by the European Central Bank. . . . This key can easily and abruptly be used to block funding to banks and therefore strangle the Greek economy in no time at all.
Europe’s Lehman Moment?
That was the threat, but as noted on Zerohedge, the ECB’s hands may be tied in this case:
[S]hould Greece decide to default it would mean those several hundred billion Greek bonds currently held in official accounts would go from par to worthless overnight, leading to massive unaccounted for impairments on Europe’s pristine balance sheets, which also confirms that Greece once again has all the negotiating leverage.
Despite that risk, on January 3rd Der Spiegel reported that the German government believes the Eurozone would now be able to cope with a Greek exit from the euro. The risk of “contagion” is now limited because major banks are protected by the new European Banking Union.
The banks are protected but the depositors may not be. Under the new “bail-in” rules imposed by the Financial Stability Board, confirmed in the European Banking Union agreed to last spring, any EU government bailout must be preceded by the bail-in (confiscation) of creditor funds, including depositor funds. As in Cyprus, it could be the depositors, not the banks, picking up the tab.
What about deposit insurance? That was supposed to be the third pillar of the Banking Union, but a eurozone-wide insurance scheme was never agreed to. That means depositors will be left to the resources of their bankrupt local government, which are liable to be sparse.
What the bail-in protocol does guarantee are the derivatives bets of Goldman and other international megabanks. In a May 2013 article in Forbes titled “The Cyprus Bank ‘Bail-In’ Is Another Crony Bankster Scam,” Nathan Lewis laid the scheme bare:
At first glance, the “bail-in” resembles the normal capitalist process of liabilities restructuring that should occur when a bank becomes insolvent. . . .
The difference with the “bail-in” is that the order of creditor seniority is changed. In the end, it amounts to the cronies (other banks and government) and non-cronies. The cronies get 100% or more; the non-cronies, including non-interest-bearing depositors who should be super-senior, get a kick in the guts instead. . . .
In principle, depositors are the most senior creditors in a bank. However, that was changed in the 2005 bankruptcy law, which made derivatives liabilities most senior. In other words, derivatives liabilities get paid before all other creditors — certainly before non-crony creditors like depositors. Considering the extreme levels of derivatives liabilities that many large banks have, and the opportunity to stuff any bank with derivatives liabilities in the last moment, other creditors could easily find there is nothing left for them at all.
Even in the worst of the Great Depression bank bankruptcies, said Lewis, creditors eventually recovered nearly all of their money. He concluded:
When super-senior depositors have huge losses of 50% or more, after a “bail-in” restructuring, you know that a crime was committed.
Goodbye Euro?
Greece can regain its sovereignty by defaulting on its debt, abandoning the ECB and the euro, and issuing its own national currency (the drachma) through its own central bank. But that would destabilize the eurozone and might end in its breakup.
Will the troika take that risk? 2015 is shaping up to be an interesting year.
]]>I offer the following longer terms predictions about the Middle East for 2015.
- ISIS will decline in power and influence. I have stated earlier that I do not believe ISIS is viable as a state; it lacks any coherent and functional ideology, any serious political and social institutions, any serious leadership process, any ability to handle the complex and detailed logistics of governance, and any opportunity of establishing state-to-state relations in the region. Additionally it has alienated a majority of Sunni Muslims in the world, regardless of deep dissatisfactions among Sunnis in Iraq and Syria. Ideally ISIS should fail and fall on its own, that is, without massive external, and especially Western, intervention that in some ways only strengthens its ideological claims. To be convincingly and decisively defeated, the idea of ISIS, as articulated and practiced, needs to demonstrably fail on its own and in the eyes of Muslims of the region.
- The role of Iran as an actor in the region will grow. Despite all the hurdles, I feel optimistic about US negotiations with Iran. Both parties desperately need success in this regard. Normalization is ludicrously long overdue and necessary to the regional order. Furthermore, Iran and Turkey, are the only two “real” governments in the region today with genuine governance based on some kind of popular legitimacy—for all their faults. Turkey is democratic, Iran semi-democratic (presidential elections, while not fully representative, really matter.) These two states espouse many of the aspirations of the people of the region in ways no Arab leader does. The Gulf will be forced to accommodate itself to the reality of a normalized Iran; the two sides have never really been to war, despite all the occasional bellicose noises that have emerge from them periodically over the past century. Iran is post-revolutionary power with a vision of a truly sovereign Middle East free of western domination– none of the Arab states truly are. Iran’s influence in the region will also grow in supporting growing regional challenges to Israel’s efforts to keep the Palestinians under permanent domination.
- President Erdoğan in Turkey will find his influence beginning to crumble in 2015. After a brilliant prime-ministership for the first decade of AKP power, he has become mired in corruption charges and has lashed out in paranoid fashion against any and all who criticize or oppose his increasingly irrational, high-handed, and quixotic style of rule. He is in the process of damaging institutions and destroying his and his party’s legacy. I continue to have faith that Turkey’s broader institutions, however weakened by Erdoğan, will nonetheless suffice to keep the country on a basically democratic and non-violent track until such time as Erdoğan loses public confidence—which could be sooner rather than later.
- Russia will play a major role in diplomatic arrangements in the Middle East, an overall positive factor. Russia’s ability to play a key diplomatic (and technical) role in resolving the nuclear issue in Iran, and its important voice and leverage in Syria represent significant contributions to resolution of these two high-priority, high-risk conflicts that affect the entire region. It is essential that Russia’s role be accepted and integrated rather than seen as a mere projection of some neo-Cold War global struggle—a confrontation in which the West bears at least as much responsibility as Moscow. The West has insisted on provoking counter-productive confrontation with Moscow in trying to shoehorn NATO into Ukraine. Can you imagine an American reaction to a security treaty between Mexico and China, that included stationing of Chinese weapons and troops on Mexican soil?
- The Taliban will make further advances towards gaining power within the Afghan government. After 13 years of war in Afghanistan the US failed to bring stability to the country as a whole, or to eliminate the Taliban as a major factor in the national power equation. The Taliban is much more than an Islamist movement; it has in many ways been a surrogate for nationalist Pashtun power within Afghanistan (although not accepted as such by all Pashtun). The Pashtun lost out big when the Taliban government was overthrown by the US in 2001; inclusion of mainstream Taliban within the new government is essential to future Afghan stability. The Taliban will seek to strengthen their power on the ground this year in order to enhance their powers of political demand in any possible future negotiations over power sharing. They cannot be functionally excluded. Desperately needed stability in Pakistan also depends in part upon such a settlement.
OK, that’s enough predictive risks for one year…
Photo: The Middle East at Night (NASA, International Space Station, 06/04/12).
This article was first published by Graham E. Fuller and was reprinted here with permission. Copyright Graham E. Fuller.
]]>by Hooshang Amirahmadi
President Barack Obama’s move towards normalization of relations with Cuba has generated lots of hope and analyses that a similar development may take place with Iran. Jim Lobe, founder of the Lobe Log and Washington Bureau Chief of the Inter Press Service, is one such observer. His recent article offers an excellent elaboration of the arguments. I rarely comment on writings by others, but his article deserves a response.
Lobe writes, “In my opinion, Obama’s willingness to make a bold foreign policy move [on Cuba] should—contrary to the narratives put out by the neoconservatives and other hawks—actually strengthen the Rouhani-Zarif faction within the Iran leadership who are no doubt arguing that Obama is serious both about reaching an agreement and forging a new relationship with the Islamic Republic.”
As someone who has spent 25 years trying to mend relations between the US and Iran, I wish Mr. Lobe and his liberal allies were right, and that their “neoconservative” opponents were wrong in their assessments that after Cuba comes Iran; unfortunately they are not. The truth is that Obama cannot so easily unlock the 35-year US-Iran entanglement that involves complex forces, including an Islamic Revolution.
First, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and President Hassan Rouhani used to tell Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that Obama could be trusted, but after 14 months and many rounds of negotiations, they have now subscribed to Khamenei’s line that the US cannot be trusted. Iran’s nuclear program has already been reduced to a symbolic existence but the promised relief from key sanctions, Rouhani’s main incentive to negotiate, is nowhere on the horizon.
During the meeting in Oman between Kerry and Zarif just before the November 24, 2014 deadline for reaching a “comprehensive” deal, as disclosed by the parliamentarian Mohammad Nabavian in an interview, “[Secretary of State] Kerry crossed all Iranian red lines” and Zarif left for Tehran “thinking that the negotiations should stop.” One such red line concerns Iran’s missile program, which is now included in the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
In a recent letter to his counterparts throughout the world regarding the talks and why a comprehensive deal was not struck last November, Zarif writes that “demands from the Western countries [i.e., the US] are humiliating and illegitimate” and that the “ball is now in their court.” Partly reflecting this disappointment, the Rouhani Government has increased Iran’s defense and intelligence budgets for 2015 by 33 percent and 48 percent respectively (the Iranian calendar begins on March 21).
Second, Zarif and Rouhani could not make the “beyond-the-NPT” concessions that they have made if the supreme leader had not authorized them. The argument that Khamenei and his “hardline” supporters are the obstacle misses the fact that while they have raised “concern” about Iran’s mostly unilateral concessions and the US’s “rapacious” demands, they (particularly the supreme leader) have consistently backed the negotiations and the Iranian negotiators.
Third, Lobe’s thinking suggests that the problem between the two governments is a discursive and personal one: if Khamenei is convinced that Obama is a honest man, then a nuclear agreement would be concluded and a new relationship would be forged between the two countries. What this genus of thinking misses is a radical “Islamic Revolution” and its “divine” Nizam (regime) that stands between Washington and Tehran.
The Islamic Revolution has been anti-American from its inception in 1979 (and not just in Iran), and will remain so as long as the first generation revolutionary leaders rule. The US has also been hostile to the theocratic regime and has often tried to change it. No wonder Khamenei and his people view the US as an “existential threat,” and to fend it off, they have built a “strategic depth” extending to Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and other countries.
Fourth, several times in the past the Iran watchers in the West have become excited about elections that have produced “moderate” governments, making them naively optimistic that a change in relations between the US and Iran would follow. What they miss is that the Islamic “regime” (nizam) and the Islamic “government” are two distinct entities, with the latter totally subordinated to the former.
Specifically, the Nizam (where the House of Leader and revolutionary institutions reside) is ideological and revolutionary, whereas the government has often been pragmatic. Indeed, in the last 35 years, the so-called hardliners have controlled the executive branch for less than 10 years. The division of labor should be easy to understand: the Nizam guards the divine Islamic Revolution against any deviation and intrusion while the government deals with earthly butter and bread matters.
Fifth, to avoid a losing military clash with the US and at the same time reduce Washington’s ability to change its regime or “liberalize” it, the Islamic Republic has charted a smart policy towards the US: “no-war, no-peace.” The US has also followed a similar policy towards Iran to calm both anti-war and anti-peace forces in the conflict. Thus, for over 35 years, US-Iran relations have frequently swung between heightened hostility and qualified moderation (in Khamenei’s words, “heroic flexibility”).
Sixth, the Cuban and Iranian cases are fundamentally dissimilar. True, the Castros were also anti-American and are first-generation leaders, but Fidel is retired and on his deathbed while his brother Raul has hardly been as revolutionary as Fidel. Besides, with regard to US-Cuban normalization, Fidel and his brother can claim more victory than Obama; after all, the Castros did not cave in, Obama did. Furthermore, the Castros are their own bosses, head a dying socialist regime, and are the judges of their own “legacy.”
In sharp contrast, Khamenei subscribes to a rising Islam, heads a living though conflicted theocracy, and subsists in the shadow of the late Ayatollah Khomeini who called the US a “wolf” and Iran a “sheep,” decreeing that they cannot coexist. Indeed, in the Cuban case, the US held the tough line while in the case of Iran, the refusal to reconcile is mutual. Furthermore, the Cuban lobby is a passing force and no longer a match for the world-wide support that the Cuban government garners. Conversely, in the Iranian case, Obama has to deal with powerful Israeli and Arab lobbies, and the Islamic Republic does not have effective international support.
On the other hand, we also have certain similarities between the Cuban and Iranian cases. For example, both revolutions have been subject to harsh US sanctions and other forms of coercion that Obama called a “failed approach.” Obama is also in his second term, free from the yoke of domestic politics, and wishes to build a lasting legacy. Despite these similarities, the differences between the Iranian Islamic regime and the Cuban socialist system make the former a tougher challenge for Obama to solve.
Finally, while I do not think that the Cuban course will be followed for Iran any time soon, I do think that certain developments are generating the imperative for an US-Iran reconciliation in the near future. On Iran’s side, they include a crippled economy facing declining oil prices, a young Iranian population demanding transformative changes, and the gradual shrinking of the first-generation Islamic revolutionary leaders.
On the US side, the changes include an imperial power increasingly reluctant to use force, rising Islamic extremism, growing instability in the Persian Gulf and the larger Middle East, and the difficulty of sustaining the “no-war, no-peace” status quo in the absence of a “comprehensive” deal on Iran’s nuclear program. However, on this last issue, in Washington and Tehran, pessimism now far outweighs optimism, a rather sad development. Let us hope that sanity will prevail.
Photo: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani greets a rally in commemoration of the Islamic Republic’s 35 anniversary of its 1979 revolution in Tehran, Iran on Feb. 11, 2014. Credit: ISNA/Hamid Forootan
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Umar FarooqFor more than thirteen years, Turkey has made a slow but steady transition towards a free and democratic society, despite the occasional pang of apprehension among some about where that road might lead. The men at the helm of that transition, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Fethullah Gulen, began as allies, perhaps the most powerful post-modernist Islamists in world. But now the two are estranged, locked in a downward spiral of distrust that may undo the progress made. At the heart of this estrangement lies a difference over how Turkey should assert its power in the Islamic world.
On December 18, a judge in Istanbul issued an arrest warrant for Gulen, following a week that saw the detention and questioning of dozens of journalists and police officers allegedly linked to the 73- year-old cleric. Gulen lives in Pennsylvania but is thought to lead a movement of millions in Turkey, popularly referred to as the “Hizmet,” or “the Service.” Erdogan has called for Gulen’s extradition, charging that he heads a “parallel state” within the country’s judiciary and bureaucracy.
Turkey has a history of violent crackdowns, but Erdogan claims this one will be clean: “Nobody is being lynched before the process is over,” he said December 20, before launching into a tirade against a statement by European Union that called the recent detentions “incompatible with the freedom of media, which is a core principle of democracy.” But the carrot of EU membership no longer seems important to Erdogan (or to most Turks).
Erdogan now sees the West’s support for Gulen, combined with an apparent indifference towards the military coup in Egypt last year and its reluctance to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as indicators it is not interested in seeing a democratically elected Islamist government in Turkey, or anywhere else.
While tensions between Erdogan and the Gulenists have been mounting for several years, the current crisis heated up last December, when prosecutors announced they would open corruption cases against 53 AK Party allies, including members of Erdogan’s cabinet. Police officers who, according to Erdogan supporters, were loyal to Gulen, had wiretapped hundreds of people’s phones; as well as Erdogan’s own offices. Turkish media had leaked incriminating recordings, providing right-wing and secular opposition parties with powerful ammunition in advance of this year’s presidential elections. The government responded by transferring or sacking hundreds of judges and police, and, in some cases, opening cases of abuse of power against them.
Since then, Turkish media outlets closely tied to the Hizmet have taken an increasingly confrontational stance against Erdogan. Boosted by his victory in August’s presidential election, Erdogan struck back this month, reactivating a three-year-old complaint of slander by Mehmet Doğan, a former Gulen ally who spent 17 months in prison before being exonerated on charges of being a part of al-Qaeda. Dozens of journalists, two top counter-terrorism police officials, and even the writer of a soap opera were hauled to police stations across the country for questioning, not just on the Doğan complaint, but on the wider aims of Hizmet and Gulen as well.
Erdogan and Gulen may both be Islamists, but they have different visions of how and whether Turkey should assert its historical Islamic identity. Erdogan’s popularity stems from his bluntness: “Our minarets are our bayonets, our domes are our helmets, our mosques are our barracks,” recited the then-mayor of Istanbul in 1997, who was successfully prosecuted for “inciting hatred” with those words and soon found himself shuttled off to prison, accompanied by a 2,000 vehicle-convoy of fans.
A self-educated Islamic scholar, Gulen spent much of his youth as a state-appointed imam at mosques in western Turkey. He set up dorms and study centers for pious students from the Turkish countryside who had arrived in cities for study or work. As his popularity increased, Gulen travelled the country, dishing out sermons and advice to crowds of thousands of young Muslims on how their faith could fit into a secular Turkey. During the 1971 military coup, Gulen spent six months in prison for his movement.
In 1999, Gulen found himself unable to return to Turkey after he issued a characteristically guarded statement, directing his followers in public offices to learn the workings of legislative and administrative bodies, but “wait until the conditions become more favorable” to show their Islamist intentions. Gulen’s movement only grew stronger in his absence.
A quarter of private schools in Turkey, as well as hundreds of others across the world, including at least 16 in the United States, are run by the Hizmet movement. Gulen’s political and religious commentary, often distributed by the media outlets currently under scrutiny, is widely read throughout the Muslim world. Hizmet also includes one of Turkey’s most powerful business groups, the Turkish Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialist (TUSKON), and its own Sharia-compliant bank, Bank Asya.
Under the Justice and Development (AK Party) government, which took power in 2002, the 1999 case against Gulen was tossed out, but the cleric preferred to stay in Pennsylvania, watching Erdogan chart a path towards democracy, built on a wide mandate that probably would not have been possible without his movement’s support.
Buoyed by his success at transforming Istanbul into a cosmopolitan city with infrastructure on par with Europe, Erdogan’s party was swept into power twice with mandates never seen in the country’s history. Opposition parties issued statements lamenting the victory, and a Turkish court even heard a petition to ban the AK Party on grounds that it threatened the country’s secular foundation, but none of that panned out. In 2007, Erdogan stood firm against an implicit coup threat by the military command, sometimes referred to as the “e-coup” or “virtual coup.”
Erdogan and his allies pushed ahead with reforms widely praised as groundbreaking for Turkey and for the Islamic world, putting the country on firm footing towards meeting conditions for accession to the European Union. In 2007, the Israeli President addressed the Turkish Parliament, heaping praise on Erdogan’s reforms and his peace-making efforts between Tel Aviv and its neighbors. A referendum that year and another in 2010 pushed through constitutional revisions that, among other measures, enhanced labor rights, gender equality, and civilian oversight of a military that had a history of toppling democratic governments. In 2008, the government launched the prosecution of nearly three hundred military officers, journalists, and lawmakers accused of plotting to topple the government and spark a military takeover in what became known as the Ergenekon case.
Throughout these years, Gulen and Erdogan were allies, particularly with respect to efforts to subordinate the military.
But by 2010, each showed signs of growing uncomfortable with his partner.
Having broken with Israel over the 2008 Gaza war and re-oriented Turkish foreign policy toward the Arab Middle East with his “zero problems with neighbours” program, Erdogan was making a name for himself in the Islamic world to the growing annoyance of the more cautious and reserved Gulen.
After Erdogan stood behind the Mavi Marmara and its failed attempt to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza, Gulen openly criticized him, insisting that aid should have gone through only with the approval of Israeli authorities. As part of a confidence-building measure with Iran, Hakan Fidan, Erdogan’s head of the National Intelligence Organization (MIT), also reportedly leaked the identities of ten Mossad agents operating in Turkey to Iran, prompting additional murmurs of disapproval from Gulen.
According to Erdogan supporters, Gulen directed his network of followers in the media, judiciary, and police to work together to undermine the prime minister and his hold on the AKP.
An allegedly Gulen-linked prosecutor summoned MIT head Fidan to explain 2009-2010 meetings with Kurdish rebels in Oslo, widely believed to be part of the government’s peace process with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), which is still listed as a terrorist organization in Turkey.
The AK Party, which enjoys an absolute majority in Parliament, responded by changing the law to bar future such oversight of the intelligence agency and floating the idea of shutting down hundreds of Gulen’s private tutoring centers, a move that would decimate the cleric’s grassroots network in Turkey.
When Erdogan took a divisive stand on the civil war in neighboring Syria, calling for the removal of Assad, by force if necessary, prominent Gulenists publicly dissented.
This January, police allegedly loyal to Gulen raided the offices of an AK Party linked aid agency, İnsan Hak ve Hürriyetleri (IHH), in Kilis, near the Syrian border, and told journalists they had arrested 28 suspected members of al-Qaeda. The next month, police stopped a convoy of seven trucks belonging to the MIT near the Syrian border and claimed to have found a cache of weapons intended to supply the Islamic State.
These moves mirrored rhetoric from the cleric himself warning of Erdogan’s stance against Assad. When the Turkish parliament passed legislation authorizing military intervention against ISIS in Syria and Iraq in October, Gulen warned it could drag the country into “a new World War I.” Ali Bulac, writing in the Zaman newspaper, which regularly features Gulen’s views on Turkish politics, called the idea of Turkish intervention in Syria “an ambitious and imperialist project.”
To Erdogan, the Hizmet’s actions—warning against intervention in Syria, linking the AK Party to al-Qaeda and Islamic State, or to Iran, and branding it as a troublemaker in the Middle East—was seen as a betrayal by a former ally in the face of mounting pressure and frustration with the Turkish leaders by western leaders, some of whom have long been skeptical of the Turkish leader’s ultimate aims.
At home, opposition groups have adopted the narrative. When tens of thousands protested against Erdogan in Taksim Square in June 2013, Gulen issued a gentle reminder to Erdogan not to let things get out of hand by ignoring the protesters’ demands. A year later, Erdogan decried the opposition’s embrace of the demonstrators who he accused of being “terrorists who smash things up.”
Those kinds of remarks and the willingness to crack down on civil society seen this month have lost Erdogan a large number of secular allies in Turkey and may just isolate him from his remaining friends in the West. While Erdogan became the country’s first directly elected president with 52 percent of the votes in August, his mandate is built on the lowest turnout rate in Turkey’s history, partly due to millions of secular voters who saw no credible alternative.
Parliamentary elections are due in June of next year. If a viable opposition party springs up, one that can cater to seculars, minorities like Kurds, as well as Hizmet members, it could become a serious challenge to the AK Party. Any opposition would have to draw votes from millions of Turks who do not support the traditional nationalist parties, as well as AK Party voters who see no other Islamist alternative.
For now, however, Erdogan appears convinced that he has popular support for his actions, which he describes as a final purging necessary to save Turkey from an international conspiracy. His crackdown has effectively crippled the Gulen network in Turkey: graduates from the Gulen-inspired Fatih University can’t find jobs; newspapers like Zaman have lost advertisers and hundreds of thousands of readers; and Bank Asya, which caters to his TUKSON business network, lost a third of its worth this year.
For more than a decade, Erdogan has worked to establish what he regards as a stable democratic system to Turkey, and now he wants to reap the rewards of his labor by extending influence far beyond its borders. In his mind, Gulen stands in the way.
Umar Farooq is a freelance journalist based in Turkey whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, and a number of other outlets. He tweets @UmarFarooq_
]]>On December 11, the spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed that his agency was, as Gareth Porter asserted on this website earlier this month, not interested in accepting a recent invitation by Iran to visit Marivan, at least at this time.
The spokesman, Serge Gas, reportedly told Reuters in an email that the agency had “explained clearly to Iran—on more than one occasion—that an offer of a visit of Marivan does not help address specific concerns related to the issue of large-scale high explosive experiments.” No further elaboration was made in the email, according to Reuters.
As someone who has worked at a senior level for the IAEA and who has respect for its mission and its dedicated personnel, I found this statement—and the decision not to accept Iran’s invitation—disappointing and worrisome.
In its 2011 special report on weaponization in Iran that was leaked to the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), among others, the IAEA asserted that it had received generally consistent “information” that “large scale high explosive experiments” for nuclear-weapon development had been carried out “in the region of Marivan” (paragraph 43 of the Annex). The information, which appeared in more than 1,000 pages of documents (paragraph 12), cited hemispherical explosive configuration, fiber optic sensors, and streak cameras, among many other details. Indeed, the IAEA’s description of the experiments allegedly carried out at Marivan was some of the most detailed in the weaponization annex.
The report said the source for this information was an unnamed “Member State” and that more than ten other Member States provided supplementary information (paragraph 13)—including “procurement information, information on international travel by individuals said to have been involved in the alleged activities, financial records, documents reflecting health and safety arrangements, and other documents demonstrating manufacturing techniques for certain high explosive components”—that “reinforces and tends to corroborate the information.”
The report about the large high-explosive experiments involving hemispherical charges at Marivan constitutes a very serious allegation because, if the hydrodynamic experiments were actually conducted using uranium (which is not mentioned in the report), they would constitute not only a violation of the IAEA’s safeguards agreement with Iran, but also a “smoking gun” pointing to the existence of a nuclear weapons program. And while such experiments carried out without uranium would not constitute a safeguards violation, they would unquestionably also support critics’ claims that Iran was indeed developing nuclear weapons.
The IAEA report and its annex have never been published by the Agency. In fact, a search for “Marivan” on the IAEA website turns up nothing. Nonetheless, no one has questioned the authenticity of the leaked version of the report that includes the paragraph referencing “the region of Marivan.” Since then, the story has been picked up by think tanks, NGOs, and media reports all of which breathlessly describe the alleged experiments but fail to mention their allegedly having taken place in Marivan.
As Porter reported, Iran’s Permanent Representative to the IAEA, Reza Najafi, informed the agency’s Board of Governors on November 21 that Iran was ready to give the IAEA “one managed access” to the Marivan region to verify the information included in the Annex. But the IAEA has now rejected the invitation. As noted by Reuters, “…the IAEA’s main priority for its long-stalled investigation into Iran’s nuclear program has been to go to another location, the Parchin military base [sic] southeast of Tehran, where the Vienna-based agency says other nuclear-related explosives tests may have been conducted, perhaps a decade ago.”
I addressed at some length in a previous post the many reasons why I find it quite improbable that the building that the IAEA has asked to visit at Parchin (which is actually not a base at all, but rather a sprawling complex of military factories) would be the site of sensitive nuclear weapons-related testing. Moreover, it bears noting that the alleged Marivan tests cited in the IAEA’s report are of too great a magnitude to be conducted at the Parchin site, which was purportedly designed to combine uranium and high explosives in much smaller experiments. The IAEA’s insistence to visit Parchin under the circumstances is puzzling, to say the least.
Marivan is important. In fact, it is the litmus test for the credibility of the IAEA’s 2011 report. If the IAEA claims detailed knowledge of a test and its location, it is critical that it work with Iran to verify that information. If, however, the information turns out to be false, irrelevant, inactionable or beyond the scope of IAEA’s expertise, then the agency should either withdraw its 2011 “Weaponization Annex” or issue a revised report after a thorough vetting of the rest of its contents. As noted above, the large-scale high explosive experiments are the most detailed claim in the agency’s weaponization report. That claim needs to be investigated and resolved, and the IAEA’s reluctance to do so is deeply disturbing.
Marivan is also important because if, indeed, the report was based on false information, it further weakens the already-thin case for visiting Parchin, which, in my view, constitutes a quixotic quest that threatens to derail far more important talks and agreements involving Iran’s nuclear materials The Agency’s strong suit has always been tracing and accurately reporting the quantities of nuclear materials of Member States, and it should focus on that mandate as a priority.
Bob Kelley is a professional nuclear engineer licensed in California. He spent the early years of his career in the nuclear weapons program of the US on topics such as plutonium metallurgy, vulnerability of nuclear warheads and warhead engineering. He has worked on a number of isotope separation schemes for the actinides including uranium separation by gas centrifuge and plutonium laser isotope separation. In mid-career he switched to analysis of foreign nuclear weapons programs. This included the use of satellite imagery and other kinds of intelligence information. This led to becoming Director of the Remote Sensing Laboratory in Las Vegas, the premier nuclear emergency response and aerial measurements laboratory for image and radiation sensing in the USDOE. He later applied this knowledge for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna as a Director for challenging nuclear inspections in Iraq and many other countries.
]]>A supreme challenge to US policies in the Middle East—especially in the Arab world—has been dealing with the no-win dilemma of leadership in the Arab world. As we look out across the wreckage of the present scene in the Middle East, many observers, including myself, highlight the striking absence of any genuine Arab leadership in the region today.
Yet “leadership” is a highly subjective word. What kind of “leadership?” And from whose perspective? The painful answer is that most of the foreign policy goals sought by the people of the region are not in synch with US preferences and goals. And leadership that does promote popular goals will likely be on a collision course with Washington.
If you ask US government officials what the ideal foreign policy of a Middle Eastern state should be, the answer is well known: full engagement in the struggle against terrorism and Islamic extremism, stability, normalization of relations with Israel, open markets, and membership in the “global community.”
Yet this well-rehearsed list is tailored first and foremost to meet western, and especially US, goals. Muslims might buy into some of them, as far as they go. But they represent a consolidated package of specifically western interests. We’ve all heard them—to us these goals are the norm. But taken together they do not constitute a comprehensive package of foreign policy priorities remotely acceptable or sufficient to most Muslims. Part of the constant grief of US policy stems from our outright ignorance, or deliberate dismissal, of alternate goals by other states and societies in the world. Americans somehow assume that America’s goals represent a self-obvious and universal good for the world. We are offended when they are rejected by others as being neither—even when a few of those goals, under the right circumstances, could be a part of a much larger basket of Muslims’ own goals.
Of course, the Muslim world (or Arab world) is not a homogeneous bloc; different preferences and ideologies exist. But overall it is evident to everyone that most Arabs (and other Muslims) are clearly deeply alienated and disillusioned. So if Washington’s agenda does not represent their package of foreign policy goals, what does?
A Muslim package would highlight the following principles for international policies. First and foremost, the exercise of genuine independence and national sovereignty free of foreign control, external intervention or suppression via great power politics—qualities long absent in the Muslim world today. The free choice of national leaders without external pressure, intervention, or countermanding western actions is another key goal. The freedom to avoid serving as pawns in some larger global geopolitical game between great powers is an additional essential prerequisite for national self-determination and preservation of local interests.
Muslims are similarly hostile to manipulation by US autocratic allies that seek to impose a particular regional agenda; Saudi Arabia in particular comes to mind with its propagation of Wahhabi/Salafi religious values, and its promotion of an ugly and essentially bogus sectarian confrontation between Sunni and Shi’a. Additionally, nearly all Muslims undoubtedly favor unremitting pressure on Israel to accept the establishment of a fully sovereign Palestinian state after fifty years of harsh Israeli occupation; they seek the freedom to articulate such demands in responsible international fora without being shut out.
Sad to say, articulation of such views in the past has primarily resided in the “rogue states”—under anti-American leaders such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Ayatollahs in Iran, Assad in Syria, or Qadhafi in Libya—none of whom feared defying US policies. They were all dictators in their own right of course, but Washington has never objected to that as such; they were “rogue” because they resisted imposition of a US-dominated regional order. It is “sad to say” that these values had to be promoted primarily by rogue states because such values are hardly radical at all: genuine sovereignty, freedom from foreign intervention, justice in Palestine. There is hardly a nation that does not seek them.
Thus any leader who aspires to be “legitimate” and offer genuine leadership in the Middle East will predictably be required to promote precisely these “radical values.” Yet almost none of the Arab world’s rulers today speak out in their favor—demonstrating thereby a key indicator of their own “illegitimacy.”
Regrettably, western foreign policies—UK, France, then the US—over the past century in the Middle East have given short shrift to any of these local values. Indeed, they have often viewed local pursuit of such values as harmful to the maintenance of Western hegemony in the region. The West has never truly even sought genuine elections in the Arab World if there was a possibility that leaders might be elected who would not remain responsive to western interests.
What do Muslims want on the domestic agenda? They want what most people in the world want. The first fundamental human and social need anywhere is of course reasonable order, stability and basic personal safety, without which few other good things can proceed. In that sense, nearly all of the region’s dictators indeed did traditionally provide state-imposed order and stability, albeit often harshly, and always self-serving. But that’s not enough for human satisfaction. Other basic needs call for jobs, housing, food, health and education—nearly all would agree on that. Thereafter peoples’ priorities might begin to diverge, depending on the individual: certainly creature comforts, human intimacy, a modicum of toys, entertainment, an interesting and creative environment, opportunities and choices, connectedness with the broader world—all come into play.
The old mold of Middle East politics has thus demonstrably failed to provide these things, nor has the West helped—except to support unstable “stability” until the stability exploded—as in the Arab Spring. The Arab world in particular has not yet found its new voice and vision. If the Middle East region is in need of sharp, even radical change—political, social, economic, intellectual—then precisely such “radical” new policies are likely what are required to constitute genuine new leadership.
Not surprisingly, the emergence and early spectacular successes of ISIS represent one form of breaking the old mold—the rethinking of old institutions in drastic, revolutionary, even violent new ways. But not all radical change needs ape the ISIS “model.” But it does suggest that a major break with the past in many respects is still needed—and when frustrated, takes radical form. This may not be welcome news in the West, but if our policies are to have any chance of even partial success they will have to accord with what the people of the region themselves need and want. However self-evident, that would still seem to be a somewhat “radical” concept to Washington.
Such a situation poses a genuine dilemma for the West at this point. Western-engineered stability and western-appointed or -backed “leadership” has not delivered what most in the region want. We’ve been there before, and we’ve seen what that has brought us over the past decade or more. Surely it’s time for a hard rethink. Real leadership in the Middle East will offer primarily tumultuous times as the countries of the region struggle to gain experience at more genuine self-rule, mistakes and all, and overcompensate for past grievances against the West. It may be—at least for now—that only Turkey and Iran today possess the foundational qualities to provide some kind of regional leadership.
There are serious doubts as to whether the US is any longer even capable of achieving its own tradition goals as in the past. Long range stability in the Middle East must come on Middle East terms, not western versions. This recognition needs to be one of the foundations of US policy formulation.
(See my latest book, “Turkey and the Arab World: Leadership in the Middle East,” for a more extended discussion of this problem of absence of leadership in the Arab world today.)
This article was first published by Graham E. Fuller and was reprinted here with permission. Copyright Graham E. Fuller.
]]>My first story for Countdown to Zero, back in 2013, was on paediatric HIV and I felt up to the task.
In fact, I was ready to file the story that same day. After all, this was not my first story on HIV, I had done many before. And no one had [...]]]>
My first story for Countdown to Zero, back in 2013, was on paediatric HIV and I felt up to the task.
In fact, I was ready to file the story that same day. After all, this was not my first story on HIV, I had done many before. And no one had ever burnt my effigy.
But I had not worked with Mercedes Sayagues, the Countdown editor. She wanted me to think outside the box. Very difficult.
As Countdown to Zero winds down, Nairobi-based journalist Joyce Chimbi reflects on what 15 months of reporting on HIV and AIDS have meant for her. Credit: M. Sayagues/IPS
After 30 years of HIV/AIDS reporting in Africa, what could I tell that hadn’t been told before?
I did not know then that this story would set me up on a journey of ten stories, and in each one of them, I would be surprised at how little I knew about the new developments in HIV.
I was even more surprised at the attention that the stories were receiving from readers as well as other media outlets that reprinted and rerun my stories.
There is a perception that the media and the public are saturated with HIV/AIDS information, possibly because there is too much focus on what has gone wrong.
The failed vaccines. The startling new infections. The need for viral load testing. The deaths.
But there is much more than that. Stories of people who are rising above the challenge. Countries adopting new and better HIV guidelines. Cutting-edge technologies.
Each story was unique and close to my heart because in each you could hear the voice of many Kenyans and many Africans affected or infected with HIV. And you could also see their faces.
Researching and writing
I researched extensively on every story and got a lot of help along the way. Zenawit Melesse, of UNAIDS, linked me up with experts across the region who were eager to talk to me.
Researching was hard work but rewarding. I loved researching on young women bearing the brunt of HIV, and on viral load testing as the gold standard in treatment.
As a reporter, I had attended many support groups for people living with HIV, who were always happy to share their CD4 count – the higher, the better.
Yet many were still sickly. They had been on drugs for years but had never had a viral load test, which catches people who are failing on treatment before they develop drug resistance.
Countdown introduced new angles but that was half of it. New angles demanded a new style of writing. The stories had to be punchy.
Yet I still told them the same way I had told them before, same narrative, same flow, same structure, because I didn’t know any better. The editor worked tirelessly with me and, with time, I caught on.
Mercedes is well informed on HIV/AIDS, and strict with accuracy. I could not sneak in an ambiguous sentence without her demanding that I either attribute it or back with statistics. That was hard. She doesn’t compromise on statistics or quality.
Working with Countdown pushed me to do much more than I thought I had the capacity to, and while at it, I have learnt to clarify, attribute and qualify every statement in the story.
You know how people say that there are more women than men on treatment, but you have no idea when or where that conclusion was arrived at or what it implies?
It happened to me several times with Countdown stories, until I learnt to first find out who came up with the statistics, how credible they are and to seek the most recent statistics. At times, it was very frustrating.
This process has had a great impact on how I report on other topics too. My stories have become more comprehensive and well researched.
Fifteen months of Countdown, and I still feel we have just scratched the surface.
HIV/AIDS is still a serious health challenge for humankind, especially for Africa. There is need for and a lot of room for more stories about how we are tackling it.
Joyce Chimbi is a Kenya-based jack of all trades reporter. HIV/AIDS is her primary focus and, when not reporting on it, she is tracking down economists, climate change experts, educationists, activists, demonstrators ….basically, if you have an opinion on something, she is probably looking for you too!
Undoubtedly, there are many aspects of the just-released summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program that can and should be pondered.
But, having written on the national U.S. defense and national security sector’s use of private contractors for over twenty years, I naturally focus my attention on the CIA’s reliance on private contractors for the devising and implementation of an “enhanced interrogation” — i.e., torture – program.
It is worth emphasizing that the use of contractors described in the committee summary — including the roles played by what the Washington Post Friday called the “two questionably credentialed advisers, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen,” who were paid more than $80 million before the CIA cut its ties with them — focused only on the use of contractors in the interrogation program. It did not look at other contractor uses, such as their involvement in the rendition of suspected terrorists
The United States has used torture, both psychological and physical, going back decades, as historian Alfred McCoy richly detailed in his 2012 book Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogations. And it is not as if the military did not know how to do harsh interrogations as the Army’s 519th Military Intelligence Battalion demonstrated at Abu Ghraib. The government recognized long ago that some activities are so sensitive and consequential that they should be done only by the government, not the private sector.
In his 2008 book Spies For Hire, Tim Shorrock quotes Eugene Fidell, then president of the National Institute for Military Justice, who was troubled by the CIA’s and Pentagon’s use of private contractors to interrogate enemy prisoners. “That’s’ really playing with fire,” he said. “That kind of activity, which so closely entails the national interest and exposes the country to terrible opprobrium, is something that ought to be done only by people who are government employees.”
So, why would the government turn to the private sector for this, and what does that say about governmental control of and accountability, or lack thereof, for the use of private security and military contractors?
I don’t ask this rhetorically. There has been lots of debate over what constitute inherently governmental activities – things only the government should do. But almost nobody, outside of companies that are paid to do it, believes that the private sector should be involved in interrogation.
In 2010, for example, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy issued a proposed policy memo to agencies instructing them to use the definition of “inherently governmental” in the 1998 Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act (FAIR). The FAIR Act classifies an activity as “inherently governmental” when it is so intimately related to the public interest that it must be performed by federal employees.
When my book, Shadow Force, on the use of private security contractors in Iraq was published in 2009, I noted that “An Army policy directive published in 2000,” and still in effect today, classifies any job that involves “the gathering and analysis” of tactical intelligence as “an inherently governmental function barred from private sector performance.”
Yet, that is a restriction that seems more honored in the breach. A Georgetown University law review article last year noted:
Private companies are hired to train troops, collect and analyze intelligence, and carry out special operations. For instance, one company allegedly participated in an extraordinary rendition through a contract for air transport. Two Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contractors helped design and oversee the interrogation of Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida. Employees of CIA contractors CACI and Titan have allegedly been involved in the oversight and torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib facility. One source estimates that “more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS)–the heart, brains and soul of the CIA–has been outsourced to private firms.
In fact, the outsourcing to the private sector that the government used to reserve for itself has been gathering momentum for decades. With regard to national security functions, it started, at least conceptually, in the Reagan era, gathered steam in the Clinton Administration, and rocketed up into the stratosphere in the years after 9/11. Currently, contractors are so entwined with the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, the Department of Homeland Security and numerous other agencies that they are similar to the creature in the Alien movies; trying to remove them would kill the patient.
The reasons for this are many, but some stand out. First, government, whether Republican- or Democratic-led, has bought into the neo-liberal orthodoxy of the “magic of the marketplace,” as Reagan put it, with the presumption that the private sector just does things better. Like the Bionic Man, it is supposedly cheaper, more agile and more efficient.
This is debatable when it comes to municipal services. It becomes even dodgier when applied to the national security sector. For some twenty years now, I have been asking advocates of the private military and security contracting industry to show me empirically based, methodologically sound studies that prove this point. I have not yet been shown any.
Peter Singer, a former scholar at the Brookings Institution, once wrote an article in Foreign Affairs journal in which he noted:
Unfortunately, the Pentagon’s current, supposedly business-minded leadership seems to have forgotten Economics 101. All too often, it outsources first and never bothers to ask questions later. That something is done privately does not necessarily make it better, quicker, or cheaper. Rather, it is through leveraging free-market mechanisms that one potentially gets better private results. Success is likely only if a contract is competed for on the open market, if the winning firm can specialize on the job and build in redundancies, if the client is able to provide oversight and management to guard its own interests, and if the contractor is properly motivated by the fear of being fired. Forget these simple rules, as the U.S. government often does, and the result is not the best of privatization but the worst of monopolization.
Common sense, if nothing else, should tell people that economic rationales for using contractors for interrogations are nonsense. Free markets require competitive environments and numerous customers, yet the government is often the only customer. And even private contractors have their limits on what they are willing to do. In September 2005, CACI announced that it would cease providing interrogation services when its contract expired at the end of that month.
Another, far more likely reason that the intelligence community would use contractors is that it is easier to keep things secret. A government agency carrying out torture could be subject to congressional oversight, weak and ineffective as it often is. But a private company generally doesn’t have to worry about that.
Despite a decade’s worth of strong reporting on the subject, the deep involvement of private contractors in our national-security apparatus is only dimly acknowledged — and even less appreciated — by the general public. One has only to ask how many casualties the U.S. has suffered in Afghanistan and Iraq. The body count almost never includes contractors — nearly 1500 in Afghanistan as of the end of 2013, according to the Department of Labor. In Iraq, the toll was higher. If people don’t care about contractors when they are actually dying on behalf of the government, the probability that anyone cares when they violate law on behalf of the government is practically zero.
Torture has been illegal in the United States since the Senate ratified the UN’s Convention Against Torture in 1994. So, the temptation for the CIA to employ contractors to further hide U.S. government use of torture must have been almost irresistible.
Furthermore, the use of private contractors may well have served as a way to satisfy U.S. government officials’ bloodlust — torture for torture’s sake — even though, according to the Senate committee’s report, it did not help to gain enough useful intelligence to justify its use. As New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote this week:
And why the private contractors? Maybe because the actual government interrogators didn’t believe torture worked either. Some complained that, after Mitchell and Jessen arrived, reasonably cooperative prisoners were suddenly brutalized under the theory that the original approach had been too “sissified.”
Nor is the use of contractors in intelligence for troubling purposes limited to torture. In fact, as I write this, the Associated Press is running a story that about how the U.S. Agency for International Development used contractors for more than two years to secretly infiltrate Cuba’s underground hip-hop movement, recruiting unwitting rappers to spark a youth movement against the Castro government.
The idea was to use Cuban musicians “to break the information blockade” and build a network of young people seeking “social change,” documents show. But the operation was amateurish and profoundly unsuccessful.
On at least six occasions, Cuban authorities detained or interrogated people involved in the program; they also confiscated computer hardware, and in some cases it contained information that jeopardized Cubans who likely had no idea they were caught up in a clandestine U.S. operation. Still, contractors working for the U.S. Agency for International Development kept putting themselves and their targets at risk, the AP investigation found.
The program is laid out in documents involving Creative Associates International, a Washington, D.C., contractor paid millions of dollars to undermine Cuba’s communist government.
The worst truth, however, is this: as the National Security Agency surveillance scandal confirms, private companies are so comfortably and deeply embedded with the national security state — and happily making billions in the process — that separation, let alone divorce, seems almost entirely out of the question.
Every day, private contractors are breaking scores, if not hundreds, of domestic and foreign laws. And why wouldn’t they, considering that the government is willing to grant them immunity or indemnify them against any charges that might be brought against them?
Of course, not all contractors are bad or doing bad things. Most, in fact, are doing their best to implement whatever contact they are working on. But as long as a government is allowed by its own public to do things in the name of ensuring public safety, we can expect similar atrocities in the future. To paraphrase what Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar:
The fault, dear American public, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
David Isenberg is an independent researcher and writer on U.S. military, foreign policy, and national and international security issues. He a Senior Analyst with the online geopolitical consultancy Wikistrat and is a U.S. Navy veteran., He is author of Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq. His blog, The PMSC Observer, focuses on private military and security contracting, a subject he has testified on to Congress.
Image Credit: Mike Licht
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The nation’s current attempt at catharsis through a gargantuan report prepared by the Democratic staff of a Senate committee exhibits some familiar patterns. Most of them involve treating a government agency as if it were Dorian Gray’s portrait, which can take on all the hideous marks of our own transgressions while we present ourselves as pure and innocent. The saturation coverage of the report and most early comment about it have displayed several misconceptions and misdirections.
One misconception is that we, the public, and our representatives in Congress are learning something new from this report that better enables us to make policies and set national priorities—better than we already could have done, based on what we already knew about this whole unpleasant business. In fact, the main directions of the activity in question and even many of the relevant gory details have long been public knowledge. Many people seem to believe that wallowing in still more gory details is a form of expiation. The basis for that belief is hard to understand.
The report itself and almost all the coverage of it misses what is the main, big story—missed perhaps because we ourselves are characters in it. The story is that the American people, and thus our political leaders, have had a major change in fears, mood, and priorities from the early days after the 9/11 until the present. In the aftermath of 9/11 Americans were far more militant, more willing to take on costs and risks, and more willing to compromise long-held values in the name of counterterrorism. The interrogation techniques that are now the subject of controversy and abhorrence were condoned or even encouraged back then by our political leaders in both the executive and legislative branches. As time has gone by without another terrorist spectacular in the U.S. homeland, pendulums have swung back, moods have changed again, and old values have reasserted themselves. It is difficult for anyone, but perhaps most of all for elected politicians, to admit this kind of inconsistency. Thus we get the current effort to focus ignominy on a single agency, where people who were on the tail end of that entire political process happened to work, as a substitute for such admission.
This is by no means the first time that waves of fear in America have resulted in deviation from liberal values, with the deviation later becoming a source of shame and regret. There is a long history of this, going back at least to the Alien and Sedition Acts in the eighteenth century. Another example, now universally seen as a black mark on American history, was the internment during World War II of American citizens of Japanese ancestry.
Another misconception is that because a report comes from a Congressional committee or some ad hoc commission, it is the Voice of God and the ultimate source of truth on whatever subject it addresses rather than what it really is, which is one particular set of perspectives or opinions. Another official pronouncement is the CIA’s report on the report, which for anyone who bothers to look at it comes across as a sober and balanced treatment of the subject that carefully differentiates between the valid observations in the Senate committee staff’s report and the significant errors in it. The CIA’s report was prepared under senior officers who had no stake in the interrogation program. It is by no means the reaction of someone in a defensive crouch. Unfortunately few people will look at that report and make any effort to learn from it. The Washington Post barely mentioned its existence, let alone any of the substance in it, in its saturation coverage of the Senate committee report.
Anyone who did bother to look and learn from the CIA report would realize how mistaken is another notion being widely voiced: that the abusive interrogation techniques were the result of an agency or elements within it “running amok.” The program in question was authorized by the topmost authorities in the executive branch, as those authorities have confirmed in their public statements or memoirs. Congressional overseers were informed, according to the instructions of those topmost authorities and according to standard practice with sensitive covert actions. Overseers had ample opportunities to object but did not.
A final misconception being displayed from people on various sides of this issue is that the question of whether any useful information was gained from application of the controversial techniques has to be treated in an all-or-nothing manner. People, including authors of the Senate committee report, wishing to make an anti-torture statement seem to believe that they have to argue that the techniques never gained any useful information. They don’t have to argue that. In acting as if they do, they are exhibiting another American trait, which the political scientist Robert Jervis noted almost four decades ago, which is to resist recognizing that there are trade-offs among important values. The coercive interrogation techniques involve such a trade-off. One can accept that the techniques did yield some information that contributed to U.S. security and still oppose any use of such techniques because they are contrary to other important American values, as well as hurting the standing of the United States abroad and yielding bad information along with the good. This is the position expressed by former CIA director Leon Panetta.
Amid all that is misleading in the committee report itself and in reactions to it, some kudos are in order for other reactions. One compliment should go to the Obama White House, which provided in its statement on the subject a principled declaration that torture is wrong along with some recognition of the public emotions and moods that underlay what was done several years ago. A particularly graceful touch was a reference to how “the previous administration faced agonizing choices” in how to secure the United States amid the post-9/11 fears. This fair and correct way of framing the recent history was the opposite of what could have been a partisan “those guys did torture and we didn’t” approach.
Also worthy of compliments in the same vein is Senator John McCain, who made an eloquent speech on the floor of the Senate opposing any use of torture. McCain often is as hard-minded a partisan warrior as anyone, but on this matter he spoke on the basis of principle.
Finally, kudos should go to the CIA for not going into a defensive crouch but instead recognizing deficiencies in performance where they did exist and, unlike the Senate committee report, coming up with specific recommendations for improvement. This response, too, represented important American values. As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper noted in his own statement, “I don’t believe that any other nation would go to the lengths the United States does to bare its soul, admit mistakes when they are made and learn from those mistakes.”
This article was first published by the National Interest and was reprinted here with permission.
]]>The stated rationale for the United States casting on Tuesday one of the very lonely votes it sometimes casts at the United Nations General Assembly, on matters on which almost the entire world sees things differently, warrants some reflection. The resolution in question this time endorsed the creation of a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East and called on Israel to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to renounce any possession of nuclear weapons, and to put its nuclear facilities under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency. A nuclear weapons-free Middle East and universal adherence to the nonproliferation treaty are supposedly U.S. policy objectives, and have been for many years. So why did the United States oppose the resolution? According to the U.S. representative’s statement in earlier debate, the resolution “fails to meet the fundamental tests of fairness and balance. It confines itself to expressions of concern about the activities of a single country.”
You know something doesn’t wash when the contrary views are as overwhelmingly held as on this matter. The resolution passed on a vote of 161-5. Joining Israel and the United States as “no” votes were Canada (maybe the Harper government was thinking of the Keystone XL pipeline issue being in the balance?) and the Pacific powers of Micronesia and Palau. The latter two habitually cast their UN votes to stay in the good graces of the United States; they have been among the few abstainers on the even more lopsided votes in the General Assembly each year calling for an end to the U.S. embargo of Cuba.
An obvious problem with the United States complaining about a resolution on a topic such as this being an expression of concern about the activities of only a single country is that the United States has been in front in pushing for United Nations resolutions about the nuclear activities of a single country, only just not about the particular country involved this time. The inconsistency is glaring. Iran has been the single-country focus of several U.S.-backed resolutions on nuclear matters—resolutions in the Security Council that have been the basis for international sanctions against Iran.
One could look, but would look in vain, for sound rationales for the inconsistency. If anything, the differences one would find should point U.S. policy in the opposite direction from the direction it has taken. It is Iran that has placed itself under the obligations of the nonproliferation treaty and subjects its nuclear activities to international inspection. Since the preliminary agreement to restrict Iran’s nuclear program that was negotiated last year, those inspections are more frequent and intrusive than ever. Israel, by contrast, has kept its nuclear activities completely out of the reach of any international inspection or control regime. As for actual nuclear weapons, Iran does not have them, has declared its intention not to have them, and according to the U.S. intelligence community has not made any decision to make them. Neither Israel nor the United States says publicly that Israel has nuclear weapons, but just about everyone else in the world takes it as a given that it does, which would make it the only state in the Middle East that does.
One might look, but still in vain, for justifying discrepancies that go beyond the respective nuclear programs of the countries in question but still involve questions of regional security and stability. What about, for example, menacing threats? Iran and Israel have each had plenty of unfriendly words about each other. Iran’s words have included bloviation about wiping something from pages of history; Israel’s have included more pointed threats of military attack. What about actual attacks? Israel has initiated multiple wars with its neighbors, as well as launching smaller armed attacks; The Islamic Republic of Iran has not started a war in its 35-year history. Terrorism? Well, there were those assassinations of Iranian scientists, with some later attacks against Israelis being an obvious (and not very successful) attempt by Iran at a tit-for-tat response against those responsible for murdering the scientists. And so forth.
Singling out one country in a multilateral context can indeed cause problems. The resolution the General Assembly passed this week need not involve a problem, however, since it was not calling for differential treatment of anyone—only for Israel to get with the same program as any state in the Middle East that does not have nukes and adheres to the international nuclear control regime.
Iran, by contrast, is being treated much differently from anyone else. Tehran already has acquiesced to some of that differential treatment, but Iranians unsurprisingly wonder why Iran should be subjected to more such treatment, or indeed to any of it. They wonder, for example, why Iran should be subject to unique restrictions that several other non-nuclear-weapons states that also are parties to the nonproliferation treaty and enrich their own uranium are not. Such wonderment is almost certainly a factor in Iranian resistance to making the sorts of additional concessions that many in the United States are expecting or demanding that Iran make. The differential treatment should be kept in mind in any discussion in the United States about who has made bigger concessions than whom and about what would or would not constitute a fair and reasonable final agreement.
Then there is the irony—although Iranians might use a more bitter word than irony—of Israel leading the charge in constantly agitating about Iran’s nuclear program (and by trying to torpedo an international agreement to restrict that program, making the issue fester and thus making it more possible for Israel’s agitation to go on forever).
This article was first published by the National Interest and was reprinted here with permission.
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