by Jared Metzker
By now millions of people have seen the video of Yasiin Bey (a hip hop artist and actor formerly known as Mos Def) being strapped to a chair and force-fed in a manner similar to that used daily to treat hunger-striking inmates at Guantanamo Bay.
The video was [...]]]>
by Jared Metzker
By now millions of people have seen the video of Yasiin Bey (a hip hop artist and actor formerly known as Mos Def) being strapped to a chair and force-fed in a manner similar to that used daily to treat hunger-striking inmates at Guantanamo Bay.
The video was produced by the UK group Reprieve, which advocates for prisoners’ rights worldwide and represents a number of the detainees being held in Gitmo.
Last week, along with releasing the video, Reprieve unveiled a report that collates unclassified testimonies of those who are being subjected to the procedure.
These testimonies describe experiences far worse than what Bey endured. Reprieve concludes that they amount to compelling evidence of “unnecessary force” being used on strikers.
In Bey’s video it’s clear that the end of the tube shoved through his nose all the way down into his stomach (traversing his esophagus along the way) is plastic. In the report, prisoners complain that the tips of the tubes used by Guantanamo doctors are metal.
Multiple prisoners say that the tips tear at their noses and throats as they pass through, causing bleeding and vomiting during and after feeding. They also say that doctors intentionally insert the tube too far, which makes it rub painfully against the bottom of the stomach as it discharges the liquid meal.
Strikers who attempt to remain in their cells and resist the force-feeding are given a treatment that the military has abbreviated as FCE — short for forcible cell extraction. This method of compelling the inmates to accept the tubes is by all accounts violent. One striker claims to have had his ribs broken and re-broken by separate FCEs.
The World Medical Association, as well as the American Medical Association, rejects the practice of force-feeding and medical professionals note that it is an unethical way (especially if done through unnecessary force) of ending strikes.
Other methods, such as compromising to address certain remediable prisoner complaints, are considered ethical ways of persuading strikers to quit. Indeed, over half of the forty-five strikers quit on Sunday, reportedly after being given more communal time for Ramadan-related observations.
The large number of views garnered by the Bey video alone is evidence that Americans care about the Guantanamo issue. This on-going concern may put pressure on President Obama to make good on his renewed promise to shut down the prison.
It may also motivate his counterparts in Congress to facilitate the process. (A letter sent by Senators Dianne Feinstein and Dick Durbin last week was a sign that this is already occurring.)
While it is questionable whether force-feeding can be labelled “torture”, that’s how the strikers in Reprieve’s report describe it.
It is nevertheless undeniable that the strikers, none of whom have ever been charged and all of whom have been cleared for release, are experiencing severe pain on a daily basis.
Still awash in the controversy over the Edward Snowden affair, Obama likely doesn’t want to see the public support he won by ending waterboarding at Guantanamo recede due to new accusations of torture.
Faced with enough outrage he might step up his efforts to finally have the prison shut down.
– Jared Metzker is a reporter for IPS and studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced and International Studies. He can be reached by email.
]]>via IPS News
Edward Snowden, a low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), unexpectedly exposed a powerful and seamless segment of the military-industrial complex – the world of contractors that consumes some 70 percent of this country’s 52-billion-dollar [...]]]>
via IPS News
Edward Snowden, a low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), unexpectedly exposed a powerful and seamless segment of the military-industrial complex – the world of contractors that consumes some 70 percent of this country’s 52-billion-dollar intelligence budget.
Some commentators have pounced on Snowden’s disclosures to denounce the role of private contractors in the world of government and national security, arguing such spheres are best left to public servants. But their criticism misses the point.
It is no longer possible to determine the difference between the two: employees of the NSA – along with agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – and the employees of companies such as Booz Allen have integrated to the extent that they slip from one role in industry to another in government, cross-promoting each other and self-dealing in ways that make the fabled revolving door redundant, if not completely disorienting.
Snowden, a systems administrator at the NSA’s Threat Operations Centre in Hawaii, had worked for the CIA and Dell before joining Booz Allen. But his rather obscure role pales in comparison to those of others.
To best understand this tale, one must first turn to R. James Woolsey, a former director of CIA, who appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives in the summer of 2004 to promote the idea of integrating U.S. domestic and foreign spying efforts to track “terrorists”.
One month later, he appeared on MSNBC television, where he spoke of the urgent need to create a new U.S. intelligence czar to help expand the post-9/11 national surveillance apparatus.
On neither occasion did Woolsey mention that he was employed as senior vice president for global strategic security at Booz Allen, a job he held from 2002 to 2008.
“The source of information about vulnerabilities of and potential attacks on the homeland will not be dominated by foreign intelligence, as was the case in the Cold War. The terrorists understood us well, and so they lived and planned where we did not spy (inside the U.S.),” said Woolsey in prepared remarks before the U.S. House Select Committee on Homeland Security on Jun. 24, 2004.
In a prescient suggestion of what Snowden would later reveal, Woolsey went on to discuss expanding surveillance to cover domestic, as well as foreign sources.
“One source will be our vulnerability assessments, based on our own judgments about weak links in our society’s networks that can be exploited by terrorists,” he said. “A second source will be domestic intelligence. How to deal with such information is an extraordinarily difficult issue in our free society.”
One month later, Woolsey appeared on MSNBC’s “Hardball”, a news-talk show hosted by Chris Matthews, and told Matthews that the federal government needed a new high-level office – a DNI, if you will – to straddle domestic and foreign intelligence. Until then, the director of the CIA served as the head of the entire intelligence community (IC).
“The problem is that the intelligence community has grown so much since 1947, when the position of director of central intelligence was created, that it’s [become] impossible to do both jobs, running the CIA and managing the community,” he said.
Both these suggestions would lead to influential jobs and lucrative sources of income for his employer and colleagues.
The Director of National Intelligence
Fast forward to 2007. Vice Admiral Michael McConnell (ret.), Booz Allen’s then-senior vice president of policy, transformation, homeland security and intelligence analytics, was hired as the second czar of the new “Office of the Director of National Intelligence”, a post that oversees the work of Washington’s 17 intelligence agencies, which was coincidentally located just three kilometres from the company’s corporate headquarters.
Upon retiring as DNI, McConnell returned to Booz Allen in 2009, where he serves as vice chairman to this day. In August 2010, Lieutenant General James Clapper (ret), Booz Allen’s former vice president for military intelligence from 1997 to 1998, was hired as the fourth intelligence czar, a job he has held ever since. Indeed, one-time Booz Allen executives have filled the position five of the eight years of its existence.
When these two men were put in charge of the national-security state, they helped expand and privatise it as never before.
McConnell, for example, asked Congress to alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to allow the NSA to spy on foreigners without a warrant if they were using Internet technology that routed through the United States.
“The resulting changes in both law and legal interpretations (and the) new technologies created a flood of new work for the intelligence agencies – and huge opportunities for companies like Booz Allen,” wrote David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in a profile of McConnell published in the New York Times Jun. 15.
Last week, Snowden revealed to the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald that the NSA had created a secret system called “Prism” that allowed the agency to spy on electronic data of ordinary citizens around the world, both within and outside the United States.
Snowden’s job at Booz Allen’s offices in Hawaii was to maintain the NSA’s information technology systems. While he did not specify his precise connection to Prism, he told the South China Morning Post newspaper that the NSA hacked “network backbones – like huge Internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one”.
Woolsey had argued in favour of such surveillance following the disclosure of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping by the New York Times in December 2005.
“Unlike the Cold War, our intelligence requirements are not just overseas,” he told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the NSA in February 2006. “Courts are not designed to deal with fast-moving battlefield electronic mapping in which an al Qaeda or a Hezbollah computer might be captured which contains a large number of email addresses and phone numbers which would have to be checked out very promptly.”
Close ties
Exactly what Booz Allen does for the NSA’s electronic surveillance system revealed by Snowden is classified, but one can make an educated guess from similar contracts it has in this field – a quarter of the company’s 5.86 billion dollars in annual income comes from intelligence agencies.
The NSA, for example, hired Booz Allen in 2001 in an advisory role on the five-billion-dollar Project Groundbreaker to rebuild and operate the agency’s “nonmission-critical” internal telephone and computer networking systems.
Booz Allen also won a chunk of the Pentagon’s infamous Total Information Awareness contract in 2001 to collect information on potential terrorists in America from phone records, credit card receipts and other databases – a controversial programme defunded by Congress in 2003 but whose spirit survived in the Prism and other initiatives disclosed by Snowden.
The CIA pays a Booz Allen team led by William Wansley, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, for “strategic and business planning” for its National Clandestine Service, which conducts covert operations and recruits foreign spies.
The company also provides a 120-person team, headed by a former U.S. Navy cryptology lieutenant commander and Booz Allen senior executive adviser Pamela Lentz, to support the National Reconnaissance Organisation, the Pentagon agency that manages the nation’s military spy satellites.
In January, Booz Allen was one of 12 contractors to win a five-year contract with the Defence Intelligence Agency that could be worth up to 5.6 billion dollars to focus on “computer network operations, emerging and disruptive technologies, and exercise and training activity”.
Last month, the U.S. Navy picked Booz Allen as part of a consortium to work on yet another billion-dollar project for “a new generation of intelligence, surveillance and combat operations”.
Booz Allen wins these contracts in several ways. In addition to its connections with the DNI, it boasts that half of its 25,000 employees are cleared for top secret-sensitive compartmented intelligence, one of the highest possible security ratings. (One third of the 1.4 million people with such clearances work for the private sector.)
A key figure at Booz Allen is Ralph Shrader, current chairman, CEO and president, who came to the company in 1974 after working at two telecommunications companies – Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning, and RCA, where he served in the company’s government communications system division.
In the 1970s, Western Union and RCA both took part in a secret surveillance programme known as Minaret, where they agreed to give the NSA all their clients’ incoming and outgoing U.S. telephone calls and telegrams.
Minaret and similar snooping programmes led to an explosive series of Congressional hearings in the 1970s by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Frank Church of Idaho in 1975.
* Jim Lobe contributed to this article.
]]>by Bernard Chazelle
Daniel Ellsberg, a man well versed in the matter, calls it “the most important leak in American history.” The scale of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program is indeed staggering. Not to put too fine a point on it, if your phone records and Internet clicks are not [...]]]>
by Bernard Chazelle
Daniel Ellsberg, a man well versed in the matter, calls it “the most important leak in American history.” The scale of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program is indeed staggering. Not to put too fine a point on it, if your phone records and Internet clicks are not already in federal custody, rest assured they soon will be. To add insult to injury, it might all be legal. A 29-year old Booz Allen employee, Edward Snowden, has risked his freedom to expose the mischief.
Not everyone was pleased. Ranting like a mad preacher, David Brooks called it a betrayal no fewer than ten times in one column. Wagging the mighty finger of pop psychology, the Times‘s self-anointed Mother Superior blamed Snowden’s betrayals on a life “unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society,” ie, untutored in the Brooksian view of authority as a call to blind worship. To others, the episode was a discomfiting reminder that the mantle of heroism can make cruel demands on those willing to put it on—especially the young. Snowden has forced open a much-needed debate, one that President Obama openly welcomes. And what better way to echo the sentiment than to have his National Intelligence Director, James Clapper, lie under oath to preempt any such debate?
Not that Snowden’s revelation did more than turn suspicion into confirmation. Ordinary Americans might not have suspected the cosmic scope of the snoopery, but terrorists, a breed to whom suspicion comes naturally, surely did. Indeed, the Pentagon has made no secret of its plan to expand its Global Information Gridpast the “yottabyte” mark. How big is that? Think of a giant vacuum cleaner designed to hoover up the equivalent of one million DVDs for every human being on earth. Now ask yourself: why would anyone need so much storage if not for trawling every critter that swims the waterways of the Internet: emails, tweets, pics, vids, chats, etc? The NSA’s claim to be merely after your metadata (email addresses, phone numbers, durations, etc) is preposterous. Metadata alone could never use up more than one millionth of the storage capacity. The NSA has hopped on the Big-Data bandwagon or, as it were, the All-Data supertrain.
Any terrorist aware of the hazards of Big Data knows that spurious correlations increase faster than data size and so will pray that the NSA keeps a diary of all life forms on the planet. If you’re a needle hiding in a haystack, all you want is more hay, like, say, a yottabyte worth of it. Bad guys will love Big Data. Social activists not so much. If the next J. Edgar Hoover doesn’t fancy the cut of your jib, he’ll come after you, file servers blazing, with more details about your past than you’ll ever remember. No need to be unduly paranoid, though. The craven Chinese may have hacked into the Obama and Romney campaigns, but thank God no American president would ever break into the party headquarters of his rival. Thank God the FBI would never spread lies about a university administrator. Thank God it would never pressure a civil rights leader to commit suicide. Let’s not surrender to cynicism and imagine that anything like McCarthyism could ever happen in the United States. We don’t call it the land of the free for nothing.
But what’s freedom good for if you’re dead? Some say that global surveillance is the price to pay for staying alive. Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Dianne Feinstein, and her House counterpart, Mike Rogers, credit Big Brother for the capture of Najibullah Zazi and David Headley, two genuine nasties. Alas, if that’s the best our two NSA cheerleaders have to offer, they might as well pack up their pom-poms and go home. A former British foreign office minister dispatched their boast as an illusion: Zazi’s name was caught by British Intelligence the old-fashioned way; likewise, the arrest of David Headley, who was involved in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, came in the wake of a British tip-off of the conventional kind. Former NSA surveillance huncho, William Binney, characterizes the entire spying dragnet as useless. Acting on a Russian tip, the NSA did record phone calls of the Tsarnaev brothers before the Boston bombings, and we all know how effective that was. Almost as helpful as the interceptions of the phone calls that bin Laden’s chief of operations made right before 9/11. The only attacks the Feds seem good at preventing are those it instigates. All-time favorites include the sting operation that netted the crackerjack squad of terrorists whose first step to Armageddon was to order al-Qaeda boots from an FBI informant. (Who would want to meet the 72 virgins with the wrong shoes on?)
Despite our best efforts to create new terrorists by vaporizing their children with our drones, they still remain a rare breed. Matthew Yglesias estimates the number of lives saved annually by airport security measures as approximately zero. Saving zero lives does not come cheap, mind you. Body scanning alone has cost the US taxpayer billions of dollars. No sooner was he done running Homeland Security than Michael Chertoff cashed in the big bucks at Rapiscan Systems by leading thecheers for full-body scans. This revolving-door pathology afflicting the Beltway can appear paradoxical. Ever wondered why the NSA outsources work that falls squarely within its core competencies? No surprise if the agency contracts out its catering, plumbing, and lawn mowing, but… information technology? The NSA employs thousands of IT experts, from seasoned sysadmins to world-class cryptographers. Whatever Snowden did for the agency as a Booz Allen employee, the NSA could do it in-house more cheaply. So why doesn’t it? The answer to this $75-billion question is money, gobs of it floating right under the nose of public servants cruelly kept by law from getting a piece of the action. The revolving door is there to release the tension. It is a legal mechanism for funneling billions of taxpayer dollars into a handful of private wallets. Contractors serve stints in government for the same reasons thieves case a bank before robbing it. There they learn to operate the moola pipeline and keep it flowing into the right pockets.
Booz Allen Hamilton revolves doors better than most. The aforementioned spook-in-chief, James Clapper, is a proud alum. One of his predecessors as National Intelligence director, Mike McConnell, is now vice-chairman of the company. Former CIA director, James Woolsey, was a Booz Allen VP. The company is majority-owned by the Carlyle Group, the private equity giant with long ties to the Bush family. Carlyle has syphoned a cool $2 billion from Booz Allen, which itself derives 98% of its revenues from the US taxpayer. This is crony capitalism at its finest. Being perhaps a bit too obvious, the scheme requires a bevy of propagandists to hide the true motives behind a veil of fear. To point out that lightning outkills terrorism will earn you a stern reminder that “we must kill them over there so they don’t kill us over here.” The propagandists keep at the ready a whole Ptolemaic jumble of rhetorical epicycles with at its center the winning slogan: “Be scared, be very scared!” And thus, with Monty-Pythonesque clarity, can Tom Friedman urge us to surrender our privacy now so a new terrorist attack does not force us to surrender it later.
Politicans play along with this charade for fear of being seen as soft on terrorism, some of them hoping that one day they too will hitch a ride on the gravy train. President Obama gives the spooks a blank check to buy himself an insurance policy: a means to deflect the blame if and when terror strikes. Don’t count on any pushback from the mainstream media. Terrorism makes good copy and, like a four-leaf clover, gets hyped in proportion to its rarity. Thriving on its incestuous relationship with power, the corporate media has blinded itself to the very idea of a conflict of interest. When someone hinted at a sweet deal between Chertoff and Rapiscan on Hardball, a “shocked, shocked” Chris Matthews called it slander.
No one disputes the need to keep secret tabs on terrorists and monitor their communications. What’s at issue is the existence of a cyber-panopticon handing over all details of everyone’s private life to government agencies with no meaningful oversight. The current outrage over the NSA is rightly focused on its Orwellian angle. Yet to sate the vengeful hunger of latter-day J. Edgar Hoovers doesn’t alone explain the rise of the Surveillance State. An important driver is the dominant social engineering project of our time: the upward redistribution of wealth to the one percent. In the case at hand, the project was given a boost by the co-occurrence of two trends: the commodification of Big-Data technology and the post-9/11 resurgence of American paranoia. When your enemy hates you for your freedoms, don’t you want a supersized Big Brother by your side? But here’s the twist: the attendant growth in defense spending ran smack against the neoliberal push for smaller government. The solution? The rise of a bloated industry of overpaid private contractors feeding off the public trough. Bravo, one percent, the maneuver was brilliant!
As his antsy critics swarm out to smear him, Edward Snowden faces a bleak future. He didn’t just expose the powerful: he humiliated them. For that unforgivable sin, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen called Snowden a “cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood.” (As a hack cross-dressing as a journalist, he would know.) House Speaker John Boehner labeled the young whistleblower a traitor. Were he to be extradited to the US, Snowden would face a long prison sentence. Perhaps President Obama will indulge his forgotten love of whistleblowers and pardon him as penance for letting the DOJ prosecute more whistleblowers than all of his predecessors combined. Perhaps he will bestow the medal of freedom upon Glenn Greenwald for shining light on government scandals. Perhaps the NSA will turn its Fort Meade headquarters into a soup kitchen…
– Bernard Chazelle is Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He is currently on sabbatical at the College de France in Paris and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the author of the book, “The Discrepancy Method,” an investigation into the power of randomness in computing, his current research focuses on “natural algorithms” and the algorithmic complexity of living matter. He has written extensively about politics and music.
]]>Those unnamed officials “from a country critical of Iran’s nuclear program” are at it again. This week they leaked an illustration to to the Associated Press which supposedly demonstrates that “Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive [...]]]>
Those unnamed officials “from a country critical of Iran’s nuclear program” are at it again. This week they leaked an illustration to to the Associated Press which supposedly demonstrates that “Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.” The AP headline is sure to bring in hits, but is it accurate reporting?
“The diagram leaked to the Associated Press this week is nothing more than either shoddy sources or shoddy science,” write physicists Yousaf Butt and Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. “In either case, the world can keep calm and carry on,” say the experts, whose article should be read in full.
Butt and Dalnoki-Veress use the word “shoddy”, but that may be an understatement when evaluating the central point of George Jahn’s “exclusive” report:
The graphic has not yet been authenticated; however, even if authentic, it would not qualify as proof of a nuclear weapons program. Besides the issue of authenticity, the diagram features quite a massive error, which is unlikely to have been made by research scientists working at a national level.
The image released to the Associated Press shows two curves: one that plots the energy versus time, and another that plots the power output versus time, presumably from a fission device. But these two curves do not correspond: If the energy curve is correct, then the peak power should be much lower — around 300 million ( 3×108) kt per second, instead of the currently stated 17 trillion (1.7 x1013) kt per second. As is, the diagram features a nearly million-fold error.
This diagram does nothing more than indicate either slipshod analysis or an amateurish hoax.
…this graph – which is only slightly less hilariously primitive than the one Benjamin Netanyahu infamously touted with a straight face at the UN – has Farsi written under it to imbue it with that menacing Iranian-ish feel, but also helpfully uses English to ensure that US audiences can easily drink up its scariness. As The Atlantic’s Robert Wright noted: “How considerate of the Iranians to label their secret nefarious nuke graph in English!”. It’s certainly possible that Iranian scientists use English as a universal language of science, but the convenient mixing of Farsi and English should at least trigger some skepticism.
…the Associated Press story does not change the U.S. Government’s assessment that Iran would require, not a few weeks, but many months to build a deliverable nuclear weapon, if it decided to do so. Secretary of Defense Panetta recently estimated that it would take two to three years, similar to the estimate made by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. In order to implement such a crash program, Iran would need to expel IAEA inspectors, use existing facilities and stockpiles to produce weapons grade uranium, and probably test a nuclear device, all of which would raise the alarm to the international community.
And Greenwald reminds us why journalists need to be especially accurate and skeptical when reporting on Iran’s nuclear program:
The case for the attack on Iraq was driven, of course, by a mountain of fabricated documents and deliberately manipulated intelligence which western media outlets uncritically amplified. Yet again, any doubts that they are willing and eager to do exactly the same with regard to the equally fictitious Iranian Threat should be forever dispelled by behavior like this.
As always, the two key facts to note on Iran are these: 1) the desperation to prevent Iran from possessing a nuclear weapon has nothing to do with fear that they would commit national suicide by using it offensively, but rather has everything to do with the deterrent capability it would provide - i.e., nukes would prevent the US or Israel from attacking Iran at will or bullying it with threats of such an attack; and 2) the US-led sanctions regime now in place based on this fear-mongering continues to impose mass suffering and death on innocent Iranians. But as long as media outlets like AP continue to blindly trumpet whatever is shoveled to them by the shielded, unnamed “country critical of Iran’s atomic program”, these facts will be suppressed and fear levels kept sky-high, thus enabling the continuation and escalation of the hideous sanctions regime, if not an outright attack.
The Guardian today about the bellicose rhetoric surrounding the Obama administration’s Iran sanctions policy. In addition to highlighting related policy recommendations from certain hawkish think tankers, I was also able to interview Paul Pillar, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Hooman Majd and Hans Blix. Here’s how I begin:
The United States claims that sanctions against Iran are designed to convince it to change its behavior on a range of issues, but even the language used to describe them tells a different story. Sanctions are central to the Obama administration‘s “dual-track” strategy – explained as a combination of pressure and engagement intended to increase US leverage at the negotiating table. As Iranians struggle with increasingly “crippling” measures, advocates are justifying the resulting pain as the alternative to war.
No single influential figure has made war with Iran seem like a prospect more than Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, despite warnings against the dire ramifications from key Israeli and western security advisers. Yet it was Netanyahu who inspired more standing ovations during a May 2011 hardline speech to Congress (29 in total) than Obama did during his state of union address in January of that year, and it has been Congress that has been pushing forward the harshest measures against Iran.
While Obama criticized the “loose talk of war” that was rampant during the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) conference in March, discussions of sanctions by the administration remain heavily focused on the punitive element – in response to ongoing pressure from Israel and a seemingly pro-Netanyahu Congress. Obama’s unwillingness to match his red line on Iran (acquirement of a nuclear weapon) with Netanyahu’s red line (acquirement of “breakout capability”) is a key reason why relations between the two leaders remain publicly cool. At the same time, the administration’s efforts to project an image of toughness toward the Islamic Republic significantly overshadow any displays of confidence-building diplomacy.
Read more.
]]>Whitaker picks up on some of clues from the State Department that I did when I wrote about this issue last week. He concludes that this is a policy change. It’s difficult to not see this the same way Whitaker does: “a rather petty gesture calculated to annoy Iran.”
]]>At an official level, the UN and various other international bodies recognise “Persian Gulf” as the established and recommended name – presumably based on historical usage. That is also the official position of the US. Or rather, it was until last week.
On 20 October, at a press briefing on arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Andrew Shapiro, an assistant secretary at the state department, referred to “the Arabian Gulf and broader Middle East”.
On its own, this might be brushed off as a slip of the tongue, though Shapiro does seem to have been referring to a prepared statement. And since the phrase “broader Middle East” clearly includes the contentious stretch of water, why was it necessary to mention the Gulf (Persian or otherwise) at all?
Almost immediately, Shapiro’s use of “Arabian Gulf” stirred the National Iranian American Council into action, and in protest they organised a letter-writing campaign to the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Their policy director, Jamal Abdi, also wrote an article about it for the Huffington Post, which appeared on Monday.
It’s difficult to imagine, therefore, that when Kurt Campbell – another assistant secretary at the state department – stepped into another press briefing on Tuesday he was totally unaware of the “Arabian Gulf” rumpus. But he then used the phrase himself, referring to “piracy issues in the Arabian Gulf”.
This is too much of a coincidence to be accidental; it suggests a change of policy. “Persian Gulf” has been the official American term since 1917 and in the absence of any explanation from the state department we can only speculate about why it has suddenly become Arabian. There’s no logical reason for it, except as a rather petty gesture calculated to annoy Iran.
Both of his parents were teachers and union loyalists, inculcating their son with left-leaning liberal politics [...]]]>
Both of his parents were teachers and union loyalists, inculcating their son with left-leaning liberal politics but not much in the way of a religious education. Instead, Goldberg forged his Jewish identity in response to some schoolyard anti-Semitism whose traumas left him longing for the so-called muscle Judaism represented by Zionism.
Jim has written an excellent blog post on the role of humiliation in forming the neocon psyche which, when read in the context of the description of Goldberg’s “Jewish identity,” offers some insights into how Goldberg may have gained his hawkish instincts.
But the points from Berrin’s article which deserve special attention regard Goldberg’s role in the hyping of an Iraq-al-Qaeda link in a 2002 New Yorker article and accusations that he is “peddling Israeli propaganda.”
Berrin writes of the response to Goldberg’s September Atlantic cover story (I blogged about it here) on the likelihood of an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear program (my emphasis):
The story has been both widely praised and reviled. Critics accused Goldberg of warmongering, framing the piece as a question of who would invade Iran — Israel or the U.S.? — rather than challenging the sense of another Middle East incursion. Charges that he was, yet again, prepping America for war stem back to a 2002 piece he wrote for The New Yorker, in which he claimed to have found evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. The piece was widely interpreted as an endorsement for the Iraq war, which, on some level, Goldberg regrets. He now admits having been wrong about Hussein’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction “like everybody else” but maintains the dignity of the story. “I will never regret taking a stand against a genocidal fascist,” he said. “Do I regret the atrocious manner in which the Bush administration prosecuted the war, and its aftermath? Of course.” Citing a report conducted by the Institute for Defense Analyses, he defends his claim connecting Hussein to al-Qaeda.
While I haven’t seen many critics attack Goldberg for “taking a stand against a genocidal fascist,” I have seen a fair number of criticisms of Goldberg’s reporting. His critics assign him considerable responsibility for having given mainstream acceptance to the false narrative that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and was forming ties with al-Qaeda.
Investigative journalist Ken Silverstein wrote in 2006:
In urging war on Iraq, Goldberg took highly dubious assertions — for example, that Saddam was an irrational madman in control of vast quantities of WMDs and that Iraq and Al Qaeda were deeply in bed together — and essentially asserted them as fact. From these unproven allegations, he demonstrated that an invasion of Iraq was the only rational policy.
While Goldberg had plenty of company in being mistaken about the WMD’s and al-Qaeda ties, “everybody else” was not wrong — just the power players in DC As Michael Massing chronicles in his excellent 2004 New York Review of Books article “Now They Tell Us,” dissent was all around. Knight Ridder reporters questioned the premise for the war, but their newspapers were not read in DC. Rereading Massing’s take, Goldberg’s response is a lot like that of disgraced journalist Judith Miller.
Goldberg’s half apology, in which he defers blame to the “atrocious manner in which the Bush administration prosecuted the war,” closely mirrors the avoidance of responsibility displayed by neoconservatives like Richard Perle, David Frum, Kenneth Adelman, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, Michael Rubin, James Woolsey, Eliot Cohen and Danielle Pletka when they publicly decried the Bush administration’s execution of the war to Vanity Fair‘s David Rose in late 2006. The fact that the war was, in large part, engineered by these very neoconservatives (or colleagues who, quite-literally, worked down the hall) was conveniently overlooked.
Goldberg still stands by his 2002 New Yorker article in which he depended on Mohammed Mansour Shahab, a prisoner in a Kurdish town in northern Iraq, as his source to confirm the Saddam Hussein-al-Qada link. But, as reported by The Guardian‘s Jason Burke, Shahab is a liar and very little of his story which established the al-Qaeda link for Goldberg holds up to closer scrutiny.
In contrast, liberal interventionists (and Goldberg likes to portray himself as one) have offered more thoughtful apologies for their involvement in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. The editors of the The New Republic issued an apology in which they said “The New Republic deeply regrets its early support for this war” and in may 2004, The editors of The New York Times issued an apology in which the editors took responsibility for, among several failures, depending on “Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on ‘regime change’ in Iraq,” as trusted sources. The information provided by these sources was often misleading and, at times, completely wrong, and the Times admirably took responsibility for not fulfilling basic reportorial duties of double checking their stories.
Goldberg played an important role in convincing the U.S. public that invading Iraq was necessary and well-grounded in factual data about what turned out to be Saddam’s nonexistent ties to Al Qaeda and pursuit of chemical and biological weapons. That Goldberg “maintains the dignity of the story” — a story which served to disseminate falsehoods and brought the U.S. into a preemptive war which resulted in the deaths of over 4,000 Americans and, according to the Iraq Body Count project, 98,585 to 107,594 confirmed civilian casualties — raises questions about Goldberg’s own (to borrow the term) integrity as a journalist. It certainly should make readers of his recent cover story on Iran ask themselves if Goldberg is reporting based on facts or finding facts to conform to his ideologically driven narrative. (Noam Sheizaf, an Israeli blogger, has written about how Goldberg, instead of cherry-picking intelligence, seems to have cherry-picked interview subjects.)
Berrin also touches upon that very question but then lets Goldberg off the hook.
She writes:
But the more insidious critique came when others denounced him for peddling Israeli propaganda, charging him with a deep, subconscious bias. As if somehow his Jewishness makes him unfit to write fairly about Israel.
In fact, Goldberg’s most salient critics don’t attack “his Jewishness” as a bias, but rather his seeming ideological bent in support of aggressive military actions against the enemies of Israel. Connected to this, but not the sole source of the charge, is Goldberg’s service in the Israel Defense Force, where he was a corporal and guarded Palestinian prisoners during the first intifada. A more apt example of criticisms, however, might be Goldberg’s apologia for the Israeli right-wing at every turn, such as his whitewashing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal rhetoric against Iran, or how he masks Bibi’s intransigence on an issue — settlements — which Goldberg himself claims to take a liberal stand against.
More importantly, Goldberg’s history of pushing for preemptive wars in the Middle East should give readers pause when he makes the case for an Israeli or U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. When viewed in that context, the title of Berrin’s piece could be downright sinister–”Journalist Goldberg changing the world one story at a time.”
]]>- New York Post: Disgraced Iranian journalist Amir Taheri writes that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki “seems set to strike a Faustian bargain to cling to power: He is ready to dine with the devil.” Judging from the headline, “Iraq: Letting Iran Call the Shots,” the “devil” here is clearly Iran. Taheri, known to have fabricated stories in the past, makes errors in his Post article as well. He writes, “Tehran helped the deal by ordering its oldest Shiite clients, the so-called Supreme Islamic Assembly of Iraq [ISCI] (and its armed wing, the Badr Brigades), to back Maliki.” Historian Juan Cole noted that Badr “peeled away from it’s parent,” and that ISCI stayed out of Maliki’s coalition.
- The Guardian: Michael Knights, a fellow at Washington Institute for Near East Policy, writes that “Tehran [has] become the most influential outside power in Iraq.” He says, however, that the issue is not closed: “Iran, like the United States, will have to continue to vie for influence in Iraq.” He assesses Iranian interests in Iraq and concludes, “Tehran seeks to prevent Iraq from recovering as a military threat or as a launchpad for an American attack.” He sees the Islamic Republic accomplishing this through trade, particularly energy, and influencing Iraq’s “ fragmented and unregulated” politics.
- The Washington Post: A neoconservative editorial writer at the Post make a thinly-veiled call for regime change in Iran, writing that the Islamic Republic has “no interest in a ‘grand bargain’ with the United States or an accommodation with the Security Council… [A]s long as these rulers are in power, Iran will not give up its ambition to exercise hegemony over the Middle East.” Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Southern Lebanon is seen to demonstrate that “Tehran can use its client to trigger a new war in the Middle East at any time; it’s a lesser form of the intimidation that it hopes to exercise around the region with an arsenal of nuclear weapons.” This show of force is viewed as a deterrence against an Israeli or U.S. strike on Iran.
- The Wall Street Journal: Senior Claremont Institute Fellow Mark Halperin writes that Israel’s unique experience as a country “repeatedly subjected to calls for its extinction” and “the steadily improving professionalism of the Arab air forces, their first rate American and European equipment, their surface-to-air-missile shield, and most importantly their mass,” pose a “mortal threat” to Israel’s existence. Halperin observes that “the military strategy of Israel’s enemies is now to alter the conventional balance while either equipping themselves with nuclear weapons or denying them to Israel, or both.” Saving a discussion of Israel’s own nuclear capabilities until the last sentence, Halperin concludes that the only source of security for a Jewish state under “a continual state of siege is the nuclear arsenal devoted solely to preserving its existence.”
- The Wall Street Journal: Dow Jones Newswire reporter Benoit Faucon writes that oil companies Total SA and Royal Dutch Shell contacted Iranian authorities last week to reassure Tehran that their long-term business interests in Iran will remain. The messages to Iranian authorities appear to have been intended to assuage concerns over the Obama administration’s announcement that the two companies had no further investment plans in the Islamic Republic. European nations have historically had a different take on sanctions. “Given the size and global importance of Iranian hydrocarbon resources, Shell finds it hard to see a future in which production of these resources would not, at some point, play an important role in the global energy supply and demand balance,” Shell said in its 2009 annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, according to Faucon.
- The Washington Times: Ben Birnbaum reports that Bahrain’s ambassador to the U.S., Houda Nonoo, told the paper she “fears her country” would be a target for a nuclear-armed Iran, given its proximity to Iran and past Iranian claims on its territory. Bahrain is also home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. While Nonoo only expressed concern about Bahrain’s security, Birnbaum interviews hawks from both the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Israel-based Institute for Policy and Strategy Studies, and Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who expressed their positions that the U.S. has not gone far enough to remove the Iranian nuclear threat.
- The Guardian: Iranian-born Israeli Meir Javedanfar does a round up of views on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s upcoming trip to Lebanon. He cites the Israeli and U.S. governments, as well as a bloc in Lebanon’s parliment, who describe the trip as possibly “provocative”. He says the trip could confirm some Israeli fears “that the Iranian regime has truly arrived on its doorstep.” But ultimately, he writes, the trip is about Iranian domestic concerns with Israel and the US “further down his list of priorities”: ”The Iranian president is visiting Lebanon mainly because of his growing unpopularity at home.” He says another goal of the trip is to help solidify a somewhat weak anti-Israeli sentiment within Iran; the opposition has been explicit that they are more concerned with their own fates than those of the Palestinians. Javendanfar concludes that the trip may cause ”more trouble and headache for Hezbollah, both at home, and in the Arab world.”