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By Bill Van Auken

13 June, 2013

@ WSWS.org

At least 60 people, including women, children and the elderly, were killed in a massacre of Shia Muslims by US-backed “rebels” in eastern Syria Tuesday.

The sectarian slaughter in the village of Hatlah in the province of Deir Ezzor near the border with Iraq, was reported by both the Syrian government and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based group that supports the Western-backed militias trying to overthrow the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

A video posted online showed Islamist gunmen bragging about killing Shias and burning and looting their homes. A spokesman for the group, a Kuwaiti, declared that they killed for their religion and calling on Sunnis in Kuwait and elsewhere to do the same. Another exposed a covered corpse saying, “Look Shi’ites, this is how you will end up, you dogs.”

The killings came on the same day that a pair of suicide bombers blew themselves up in the busy Marjeh Square in the heart of Damascus, Syria’s capital, killing 15 people and wounding another 31. The terrorist attack took place near a police station.

The Deir Ezzor massacre, in which an estimated 1,500 gunmen took part, underscored the increasingly open sectarian character of the US-backed war for regime change in Syria, under conditions in which the so-called rebels have suffered a series of serious military defeats.

Al Qaeda-affiliated gunmen of the Al Nusra front and other Sunni Islamist militias have become the predominant forces in what pseudo-left elements in the West insist on calling the “Syrian revolution,” with many thousands of Islamist fighters having entered the country from neighboring Arab states as well as from as far away as Chechnya, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere in Europe.

Particularly in the wake of the Syrian army’s retaking of Qusair, the strategically important town in the central province of Homs that served as a conduit for arms and foreign fighters coming into Syria from Lebanon, the “rebels” and their supporters have fomented increasingly rabid sectarianism. The pretext for this has been the aid given to the Syrian government forces by members of the Lebanese Shi’ite Hezbollah movement, who crossed the border to help retake Qusair from Al Nusra and its allies.

In the aftermath of the battle, the media and leading Sunni clerics—particularly in Saudi Arabia and the monarchical Persian Gulf Sunni petrol states that have provided much of the money and arms for the “rebels”—have cast the Syrian conflict as a virtual holy war against Shi’ites.

Well-known Sunni cleric Yusuf al Qaradawi, who is based in Qatar and enjoys the support of its monarchy, called for every able-bodied Sunni across the region to go and fight the Shias in Syria and declared that Iran was determined to “devour” the Sunnis.

Qaradawi’s sectarian fanaticism is a reflection of the increasing desperation of his patrons. Britain’s Channel 4 quoted Qatari Deputy Prime Minister Ahmas Bin Abdullah Bin Zaid al Mahmoud addressing the US-Islamic Word Forum in Doha this week as stating: “Should … the United States fail to offer prompt and decisive assistance to the Syrian people to aid them in fulfilling their aspirations, we fear that the crisis at hand might have even more serious repercussions on neighboring states, the Arab region, and world peace.”

Having laid out an estimated $3 billion to arm and pay mercenaries in Syria, Qatar’s royal house fears its efforts are going up in smoke and that defeat may undermine its own grip on power.

In the wake of the government’s regaining control over Qusair, the Syrian military has begun to push into areas of the central city of Homs held by the Western-backed “rebels.” It is preparing a major offensive to regain full control of Aleppo, Syria’s commercial center near the Turkish-Syrian border.

The fear that the forces that the West and its allies among the Gulf State monarchies have fielded and armed as their proxies in the war for Syrian regime change are losing was also expressed in statements by French officials this week.

“We need to re-balance things because over the past few weeks the troops of Bashar al-Assad and especially Hezbollah and the Iranians, along with Russian arms, have gained considerable ground,” said Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius.

Fabius indicated that this “re-balancing” was to take place through a major escalation of the Western intervention, including France together with Britain and the US directly arming the “rebels.” Ostensibly, Washington and its NATO allies have, until now, supplied only “non-lethal” assistance, but in reality, the CIA as well as British, French and German intelligence have provided direct aid, including the CIA’s coordination of the arms flow paid for by the Saudi and Qatari monarchies.

“We shouldn’t arm them for the sake of arming them, but there has to be a rebalancing,” Fabius continued. “Nobody is talking about sending troops on the ground, but the resistance fighters must be able to defend themselves.”

Fabius said that he had discussed the issue Tuesday with US Secretary of State John Kerry and claimed that Paris would wait until August 1 before sending weapons. This was the date agreed to by the European Union, after Britain and France succeeded in overturning an EU arms embargo on Syria.

Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary William Hague arrived in Washington Wednesday for discussions on Syria. White House officials have indicated that the members of the National Security Council are reviewing options for an escalation of the US intervention this week, including the direct arming of the anti-Assad militias and the imposition of a no-fly zone. That would entail a major US bombing campaign against Syria.

Other meetings on the crisis confronting Washington and its allies were scheduled elsewhere. The Turkish media reported that Tamir Pardo, the director of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, flew secretly into Turkey Wednesday to discuss the Syrian situation with his counterpart, Hakan Fidan, head of the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT).

According to some reports, Pardo emphasized Iran’s role in the Syrian events and also apparently suggested Iranian involvement in the mass protests that have swept Turkey for the past two weeks. Turkey has been one of the main supporters of the so-called rebels, and Syria has repeatedly charged that Israel is giving them covert backing in a bid to overthrow Assad and undermine both Iran and Hezbollah.

British Prime Minister David Cameron also announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin would fly to London next week for talks on Syria.

By Ramzy Baroud

13 June, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

My friend Hanna is Syrian and also happens to be Christian. The latter fact was rarely of consequence, except whenever he wished to boast about the contributions of Arab Christians to Middle Eastern cultures. Of course, he is right. The modern Arab identity has been formulated through a fascinating mix of religions, sects and races. Christianity, as well as Islam, is deeply-rooted in many aspects of Arab life. Needless to say, the bond between Islam and Christianity is simply unbreakable.

“I am Christian, but, in terms of culture, I am equally a Muslim,” he told me by way of introduction to a daunting realization. “But now, I am very worried.”

Hanna’s list of worries is long. Lead amongst them is the fact that Christian Arabs in some Arab societies are increasingly viewed as ‘foreigners’ or ‘guests’ in their own countries. At times, as was the case in Iraq, they are punished by one extremist group or another for embracing the same religion that US-western zealots claim to represent. Churches were blown up in brutal retribution for a savage war that President George W. Bush and many of his ilk maintained to be between good and evil, using the most brazen religious references as they savaged Iraq, sparing neither Muslims nor Christians.

During the early years of the war, many Arab intellectuals seemed wary of the sinister divide that the US was erecting between religions, sects and communities. Many in Arab media referenced past historical experiences when other imperial powers – namely Britain and France – resorted to the ‘divide and conquer’ stratagem. Those attempts in the first half of the 20th century resulted in much bloodshed and lasting scars in many communities. Lebanon is the obvious example with Iraq prevailing.

In response to the colonial attempts at busying the Arabs with internal conflicts, Arab nationalists had then wrangled with a discourse that proved of immense value to modern Arab identity. To escape the pitfalls of religious and sectarian divides, and to unleash the untapped energies of Arab societies, there was an urgent need to articulate a new language expressing a unifying pan-Arab political discourse. In post-World War II, the rise of Arab nationalism was the force to be contended with, from Egypt, to Iraq and to Syria. It was a battle of wills involving imperialist powers, later joined by the United States. It was also local, tribal elites fighting for their own survival. The nationalists’ discourse was meant to inspire, from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s thundering speeches in Egypt, to Michel Aflaq’s eloquent thoughts in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. At least then, it seemed to matter little that Nasser was an Egyptian Sunni Muslim, and that Aflaq was a Greek Orthodox Christian.

Aflaq was profound, and his insistence on the vitality of the Muslim character to Arabs was a testament to a generation of nationalists that since then, has all but completely faded. He spoke of Arab unity, not as a distant dream, but a practical mechanism to snatch liberty from many sinister hands. “What liberty could be wider and greater than binding oneself to the renaissance of one’s nation and its revolution?” he said during a speech. “It is a new and strict liberty which stands against pressure and confusion. Dictatorship is a precarious, unsuitable and self-contradictory system which does not allow the consciousness of the people to grow.”

Many voices echoed that sentiment in Arab nations near and far. Poets recited the will of freedom fighters and artists rendered the language of philosophers. While Arab nationalist movements eventually fragmented, were weakened or defeated, an Arab identity survived. Long after Nasser died, and even Anwar Saddat signed the Camp David accords, thus breaking with Arab consensus, school children continued to sing “Arab homelands are my home, from the Levant to Baghdad, from Najd to Yemen and from Egypt to Morocco.”

The war over Arab identify however never ceased, as it continued to manifest itself in actual and figurative ways. Israel and western powers, vying for military dominance, regional influence and ultimately resources, did the best they could to shatter the few semblances that sustained a sense of unity among Arab nations that survived despite numerous and perhaps insurmountable odds.

The Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) left deep wounds that continue to fester. The Iraq war was particularly painful. While Lebanon civil strife involved well-demarcated sects, the alliances were in constant influx. But Iraq’s civil war, encouraged and sustained with direct American involvement to weaken Iraqi resistance to US-British occupation, was well-defined and brutal. Muslim Shia and Sunni engaged in a bitter struggle as US troops wreaked havoc in Baghdad. Members of all sects paid a heavy price for the fighting, which also damaged the national identity of Iraq and made a mockery of its flag and national anthem. The sociopolitical impact of that war was so severe, it resuscitated a reactionary discourse that forced many communities to see themselves as members of one group or another, each fighting for its own being.

Soon after the Egyptian revolution, I walked the streets of Cairo, reminiscing, with much giddiness – about the past and the encouraging future. A ‘new Egypt’ was being born, one with ample room for all of its children. An Egypt where the poor are giving their fair share, and where Muslims and Christians and the rest would march forward, hand in hand, as equals, compelled by the vision of a new generation and the hopes and dreams of many more. It was not a romantic idea, but thoughts inspired by millions of Egyptians, by bearded Muslim men protecting churches in Cairo against government plots to stir religious tensions, by Christian youth guarding the Tahrir square as Muslim youth prayed, before they all resumed their fight for freedom.

Despite my insistence on optimism, I find the current political discourse hateful, polarizing and unprecedentedly defeatist. While Muslim political elites are sharply divided between Shia and Sunni, assigning layers of meaning to the fact that one is born this way or that, this wrangling has been weaved into a power play that has destroyed Syria, awakened past animosities in Lebanon and revitalized existing conflict in Iraq, further devastating the very Arab identity.

Iraq’s historical dilemma, exploited by the US for immediate gains, has now become a pan-Arab dilemma. Arab and Middle Eastern media is fomenting that conflict using terminology loaded with sectarianism and obsessed with erecting the kind of divides that will bring nothing but mistrust, misery and war.

Resurrecting Nasser’s and Aflaq’s Arab nationalism might no longer be possible, but there is a compelling need for an alternative discourse to the type of intellectual extremism that justifies with disturbing lucidity the butchering of the inhabitants of an entire village in Syria because of their sect or religion. My friend Hanna has every reason to worry, as all Arabs should.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is: My Father was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press).

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By Nadezhda Kevorkova

10 June , 2013

@ Reuters

The outcome of the presidential election in Iran will have a resounding effect across the Middle East and the whole world. While the West dubs the poll unrepresentative, little is done to understand the nature of Political Islam which governs the nation.

The previous 2009 elections came amid a large-scale opposition campaign to review the voting results – but that was before the Arab Spring, while the future elections have dovetailed with a crisis of the revolution in Egypt, a war in Syria and a wave of unrest in Turkey.

In 2009, the Muslim world saw the US as its archenemy, and Iran – mostly as a friend: it persevered in its nuclear program, disagreed with Americans, advocated Palestine’s interests and backed both Hamas and Hezbollah. However, with the Syrian conflict now in full swing, the Muslim world has been virtually forced into a Sunni vs. Shia standoff.

This makes the upcoming vote a turning point for Iran, the Middle East and the whole world.

Now that the US has already panned the elections as fraudulent, will the opposition resort to the methods it used back in 2009? Will it lead to an upheaval in the country? Will the US offer a helping hand to the opposition? We shall find out very soon.

Few in the West have any idea at all of the Iranian political landscape.

To make matters clear, they have labeled the contenders ‘conservatives’ and ‘reformists’ – a deeply flawed classification.

The leading reformist, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was disqualified from the presidential race by the Guardian Council, and ex-president Mohammed Khatami, who reportedly decided not to run, are high-ranking Muslim clericals.

‘Conservatives’, on the contrary, hold strongly secular views. It is Khatami who once introduced the idea of the Dialogue of Civilizations as a response to Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. But when he met the Spanish Queen, he made a point by refusing to shake her hand.

Another reformist, Ayatollah Rafsanjani, leads an important clerical council in the country. His son is a pistachio tycoon, but the ayatollah still lives a modest lifestyle not far from Imam Khomeini’s house in an ex-slum called Jamaran.

An Iranian conservative, President Ahmadinejad in many ways owed his victory in the previous polls and his popularity to his unassuming attitude. When he was a city mayor, he wore a casual jacket and lived in a poor neighborhood. At the same time, a university professor, he could easily plunge into discussing philosophical matters, shocking the political elite into a stupor.

Conservatives in Iran are against the very symbol of what the West calls a conservative regime – putting clericals into high offices.

Now the outcome of the Iranian election is pretty unpredictable – for a number of reasons.

Political preferences of Tehran’s residents and the rest of the country are very divergent: while in the capital the politically active intellectuals would like to see a ‘consensus candidate’ at the helm, Iran on the whole is dominated by adherents of the Islamic Revolution – which stands for refusing to cooperate or enter into any agreements with the West. That’s why Tehran is by no means a thermometer of nationwide sentiments.

Iranians are a highly disciplined nation. And it’s not only about how millions instantly respond to political issues. It’s also about a high voter turnout and observers from all the candidates at the polls. I saw all of this with my own eyes in 2009.

Contrary to what the Western media say, an Iranian does not face a ballot of eight unfamiliar contenders.

Each candidate has a strong background and his own supporters.

A two-week debate offers all the runners an opportunity to answer questions on their vision of economy, politics and culture.

And while a Western viewer will say the debate would do better with a healthy amount of squabbling and wrangling, Iranians are happy with what they have. In Iran, they do not make a show of the elections. The debate enables a politically vocal majority to make their ultimate choice.

Nature of ‘political Islam’

But there is one more thing to remember. Most Iranians are constantly in touch with influential scholars, men and women alike, who know the sharia law and the Quran very well. In one family, husband and wife may well sign up to different schools of thought.

During the holy month of fasting and on holidays, Iranians invite these spiritual teachers to visit them and talk to their friends and family.

Such intellectual exchanges constitute a very important part of life in Iran – one that people abroad are unaware of. They’re not religious events or chatting over a cup of tea, or philosophy clubs – it’s just that people are constantly seeking intellectual discussion.

The scholars themselves have regular contacts with other scholars from their schools of thought and ayatollahs. It’s important to understand that in this respect there’s no uniformity in Iran – there are various schools of thought that don’t agree with either Imam Khomeini’s or Rahbar (The Supreme Leader of Iran) Khamenei’s ideas. (However, people who run for president have to more or less fall in line with Khamenei’s stance.)

There’s a consensus among the Iranian population on several key issues, such as the fact that the Islamic Revolution offered a new path for the people; that Iran has a right to its nuclear program and development; and that women’s rights are more respected in Islam than in Western law, which is inferior to Sharia law. The rest, like mullahs’ role in politics, the necessity of theocratic rule, the right to protest and dissent, and various cultural and behavioral phenomena, are considered to be topics open for debate. In Iranian people’s experience and tradition, it is necessary to regularly discuss such issues with scholars in order to comprehend them more fully.

A scholar is a central figure for seminars of this kind, but he or she is not a priest and definitely not a deity.

These ties between people – strong, but unseen by the outsiders – pervade Iranian society, strengthening it.

That’s what the Iranians mean by “political Islam”. It existed before the Islamic Revolution, secured its success, allowed dozens of millions of people to receive education and accounted for the country’s rapid progress in scientific and technological spheres.

It’s impossible to tell which school of thought a person adheres to simply by the way they look. For example, public servants of any kind all wear strict hijabs or ordinary suits, but that doesn’t mean they all follow the same school of thought. It doesn’t even mean they are religious or indicate which party they support.

Foreigners assume that Iranian women that wear make-up and have their hair done are somehow protesting against the regime, and find themselves at a loss when they see these same women in mosques. And they are completely stupefied when they see women in strict hijabs taking part in demonstrations. Iran is, indeed, a mystery.

Illegitimate and unrepresentative or..?

So who will be elected the country’s 7th president in the 11th presidential elections heavily depends on this complex mechanism – political Islam. The US State Department has already declared the election illegitimate, claiming that the candidates “do not represent the people”.

Let’s try to determine if that is the case. It should be mentioned that Iranian politics is an exotic and unusual thing for Western people. In order to make sense of it, it is important to know about a politician’s origins, his occupation before and after the Iranian Revolution, his status, which is far more challenging than distinguishing between the Western bipartisan systems, where the differences between the parties boil down to their stances on taxes, abortion and gay rights.

The so called “conservatives” include five candidates: Saeed Jalili, Ali Akbar Velayati, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, and Mohsen Rezaee.

Saeed Jalili

Experts say Saeed Jalili is most likely to win. But predictions don’t always work in Iran. In 2005, analysts didn’t even notice Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the first round, but in the second round he beat Rafsanjani himself.

Saeed Jalili is 47 years old, making him the youngest of the eight candidates. He was born in Mashhad, a home of many Shia holy places. Many revolution minded students came out of this city. He is the main negotiator for the nuclear program, so Iranians hear his name all the time, since the media in Iran and all over the world follow this topic closely.

In 2007, he became secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, making him the chief negotiator for Iran’s nuclear program. With the country’s nuclear policy a topic of intense interest at home and abroad, he is a household name in Iran.

Jalili holds a Ph.D in political science and philosophy from Imam Sadeq University in Tehran.

During the war, he served as a member of the Basij volunteers of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, which certainly wins him some points with the people. He was senior director of policy planning in the office of Iran’s Supreme Leader, and also served as Deputy Foreign Minister.

He didn’t announce his candidacy until very recently. Despite being a member of the Front of Islamic Revolution Stability, he will run as an independent candidate.

Experts say that even though he never was a policy maker per se, he has a strong political will and knows what tough confrontation is like. But this won’t win him people’s votes. However, the fact that a number of registered candidates withdrew in favor of Jalili, shows that he has a serious chance to win.

In the first round of debates, Jalili promised to stand strong against “the arrogant Western countries”. The Iranian people can identify with this, they understand his stance and promise to avoid the policy of compromise. While the West sees it as “entrenched conservatism”, for the Iranians this represents the continuity of Iran’s resistance policy, which most of the people support.

Jalili also commented on a very important issue: “We registered 850 thousand new marriages in the last year, so we need to come up with a housing program in order to accommodate the needs of these new families.” So basically he is going to focus on making sure that young couples can afford to buy or rent a place. In Iran, this is considered a high priority issue.

He also mentioned renovation of old buildings. Few people outside Iran know that Iranians blame the shah for destroying Tehran’s historic streets. Apparently only the Mahdi is allowed to “make streets straight”, so basically the shah played the Mahdi.

Ali Akbar Velayati

Some experts had declared Ali Akbar Velayati as the most likely winner.

Velayati is 67 years old. He was born in a small village outside Tehran. He studied pediatrics in Tehran and Johns Hopkins University in the US. He was arrested when he was 17 – this was during the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah.

In the last two years he initiated a number of summits for Arab Spring leaders, which Iranians call “Islamic Awakening”. He was able to bring together representatives of many different groups – from Taliban to Salafi groups, HAMAS and Hezbollah. Politicians, charismatic leaders, journalists from all over the world, female activists, and even revolutionary poets have come to his summits. Thanks to Velayati’s efforts, Iran has stayed the leader of the Arab revolution.

He used to be a Minister of Foreign Affairs, and today he is the foreign affairs advisor to the Supreme Leader of Iran.

Velayati is part of the “2+1” coalition (Velayati, Ghalibaf, and Haddad-Adel). There is still a possibility that they will withdraw in favor of Jalili. Velayati has already endorsed him.

Bagher Ghalibaf

One of the most vibrant and hard-boiled contenders is Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

Ghalibaf, 51, was also born in Mashhad to a Kurdish father. In Iran, contrary to what Western propaganda is saying, the national/ethnic issue is a minor one, so all the attempts to use it to spur turmoil have failed. Khamenei, for instance, is Azerbaijani.

Previously, Ghalibaf used to stand at the helm of the Iranian police. After that, he headed the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps and was the Iranian Army Commander. Since 2005, he has enjoyed skyrocketing approval ratings as the Mayor of Tehran.

After he announced he’d be running as an independent candidate, a video went viral on the Internet showing Ghalibaf order troops to open fire on student protesters at Tehran University in 2003. Another similar video soon followed.

Ghalibaf has gone hard on his political rival Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who won the 2005 elections. In an interview to Iranian news agency Tasnim he said, ‘Since when has the Holocaust become a leading issue of our foreign policy? Iran has never been against Judaism.’

That was his response to Ahmadinejad repeatedly raising this topic in public.

The truth of the matter is that Ahmadinejad has never spoken against Judaism or Jews and welcomed numerous rabbi delegations. Iran rejects Zionism as a fundamental ideology for the state of Israel, believing that it runs counter to Judaism.

Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel

Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel is unlikely to oppose the coalition.

Adel, 68, comes from Tehran. His daughter is married to the son of the Supreme Leader of Iran. In 2004-2008, he was the first secular Speaker in Parliament. He is a member of the Expediency Discernment Council (resolves differences between the Parliament and the Council of Guardians, headed by Rafsanjani) and the High Council of Cultural Revolution. Odds are that he will withdraw from the race to back the 2+1 coalition candidate.

With his degree in Physics (the most respected profession in Iran), he also holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Tehran University and is a prolific author. He served in various posts like Vice Minister of Culture and Vice Minister of Education.

(Editore’s note: Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel was a candidate at the time of the report’s publication, but he withdrew from Iran’s presidential race on Monday, semi-official Mehr news agency reported.

“With my withdrawal I ask the dear people to strictly observe the criteria of the Supreme Leader of the Revolution [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] when they vote for candidates,” Haddad-Adel said in a statement.)

Mohsen Rezaee

Mohsen Rezaee’s chances to win remain slim, in spite of his revolutionary past.

Rezaee is 58 and comes from Khuzestan. He was born into a semi-nomadic family of Lurs – a Persian ethnic group living in the Southwestern Zagros Mountains.

Shortly after the war with Iraq began, at the age of 27 he became the youngest commander to lead the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, when his predecessor was killed in a terrorist attack. A hero of the war, he resigned from his post in 1981. For several years, he worked as Secretary of the Expediency Discernment Council.

Before the Revolution, he studied engineering at the Iran University of Science and Technology. In 2001, he earned a PhD in Economics.

In 2006, Argentina issued an arrest warrant for Rezaee and six more Iranians in connection with a  1994 suicide bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Buenos-Aires. Rezaee’s son, Ahmad, defected to the United States and reportedly told officials that his father was behind the attack. Argentina has never asked Iran to extradite Rezaee.

This invalidates his presidential bid: in spite of his enormous popularity, a future president cannot be blacklisted by the Interpol or face a risk of arrest abroad.

Hassan Rouhani

The reformists have promised to unite behind one presidential nominee by June 8. As Aytollah Rafsandjani is no longer running for office, there are three possible candidates left.

Hassan Rouhani is considered to be the conservatives’ main rival, but he is a cleric and as such will not be able to provide serious competition.

Hassan Rouhani is 64. He was born in Sorkheh. He used to be a member of the Assembly of Experts, as well as the Expediency Council and the Supreme National Security Council.  He has been the head of the Center for Strategic Research since 1992.  He also took part in negotiations regarding Iran’s nuclear program.

He is an independent candidate, but the reformist leaders, former president Mohammad Khatami and Hashemi Rafsanjani, have supported his bid.

During the debates on the economic situation he raised the unemployment issue, saying there are 3 million unemployed people in Iran, 800,000 of whom hold college degrees.

Last week, during Rouhani’s campaign rally in Jamaran Mosque, several of his supporters were arrested. Saeedollah Badashti, the head of the youth branch of Rouhani’s followers, and others were arrested for chanting slogans in support of Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi – the opposition candidates who led demonstrations after 2009 presidential election. Both of them are currently under house arrest.

“With your support, we will open all the locks which have been fastened upon people’s lives during the past eight years. You, dear students and heroic youth, are the ones who support economic recovery and improving living standards. We will restore our country’s dignity,” Rouhani said.

Mohammad Reza Aref

Mohammad Reza Aref is 61. He was born in Yazd. He was Vice-President under Khatami, from 2001 to 2005. He is an electrical engineer and a professor at the University of Tehran and Sharif University of technology.  Currently Mohammad Reza Aref is a member of the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution and the Expediency Discernment Council.

The polls show that Aref could become a successful candidate, but since the key reformist politicians have supported Rouhani he is likely to withdraw from the race.

During the debates Aref blamed Ahmadinejad for the country’s economic and political problems. He is in favor of privatization, which, in his view, is the only way to ensure economic growth. He hasn’t stop at criticizing Ahmadinejad, however, and proceeded to say that all of Iran’s problems are the conservatives’ fault. Nevertheless, he promised that as president, he would not tolerate criticism towards his predecessors, i.e. Ahmadinejad, Khatami, Mousavi and Rafsanjani.

The least known candidate is Mohammad Gharazi, who is also likely to withdraw from the race.

During a press conference before the debates Gharazi said, “I have no money or campaign managers, but I have an anti-inflation strategy”.

Gharazi is in Rafsanjani’s circle – he was Minister of Communication under Rafsanjani and Minister of Petroleum under Mousavi. He hadn’t been very politically active, so his bid for presidency was quite unexpected, and quite unexpectedly approved.

Out of 75 million Iranians, just over 50 million have a right to vote in the upcoming presidential election that will be held on Friday, June 14. Polling stations have been set up in schools, mosques and colleges. All the candidates will have their observers at every polling station.

Nadezhda Kevorkova is a war correspondent who has covered the events of the Arab Spring, military and religious conflicts around the world, and the anti-globalization movement.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

A 2012 World Health Organization study on congenital birth defects in Iraq has still not been released to the public.

By Mozhgan Savabieasfahani

06 June, 2013

@ Al-Jazeera

Sterility, repeated miscarriages, stillbirths and severe birth defects have increased in parts of Iraq [EPA]

Iraq is poisoned. Thirty-five million Iraqis wake up every morning to a living nightmare of childhood cancers, adult cancers and birth defects. Familial cancers, cluster cancers and multiple cancers in the same individual have become frequent in Iraq.

Sterility, repeated miscarriages, stillbirths and severe birth defects – some never described in any medical books – are all around, in increasing numbers. Trapped in this hellish nightmare, millions of Iraqis struggle to survive, and they call for help.

At long last, public pressure and media attention to this public health catastrophe prompted a joint study by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Iraqi Ministry of Health to determine the prevalence of birth defects in Iraq. This study began in May-June 2012 and was completed in early October 2012.

The WHO website says that this large-scale study was conducted in Baghdad (Karkh and Rasafa), Diyala, Anbar, Sulaymaniyah, Babel, Basrah, Mosul and Thi-Qar, with 10,800 households from 18 districts and a sample size of 600 households per district.

The Independent (UK) reported that this study was due to be released in November 2012. But the report has not yet come out.

Report kept secret

In March 2013, a high-ranking official at the Iraqi Ministry of Health in Baghdad discussed the issue with the BBC and said that “all studies done by the Ministry of Health prove with damning evidence that there has been a rise in birth defects and cancers” in Iraq.

During the same BBC documentary, called “Born under a bad sign”, two other Ministry of Health researchers discussed the unpublished study. They confirmed that that cancers and birth defects constitute a major crisis for the next generation of Iraqi children. They specifically confirmed simultaneous increases in cancers and congenital anomalies in three governorates – Nineveh, Anbar and Najaf – linking those increases to munitions used during the war.

Why should such an important report be kept secret?

In a serious health emergency, as we see in Iraq, such an extensive survey of public health must be widely publicised to attract international support and expertise. Medical experts, epidemiologists, environmental toxicologists, remediation staff and environmental cleanup specialists must be summoned to address this crisis and save lives.

A delay of six months in the release of such a critical report has left many of us anxious and fearful that it may be suppressed.

In response to this costly delay in releasing the WHO report, 58 scientists, health professionals and human rights advocates recently wrote to the WHO and the Iraqi Health Ministry, asking for the immediate release of their report. We requested that this globally significant report be released at once. We received no response to this letter.

The letter was signed by Iraqi, Iranian, Lebanese, Japanese, European, Australian and North American academics and public figures. They included Noam Chomsky, Ken Loach, John Tirman, Human Rights Now (Japan), Health Alliance International and a board member of BlackCommentator.com.

We are still waiting for an answer from the WHO. Why is this important report being held up?

One possible answer was suggested on May 26 by the Guardian. It reported the recent comments of Hans von Sponeck, the former assistant secretary general of the United Nations: “The US government sought to prevent WHO from surveying ares in southern Iraq where depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and environmental dangers.”

It would be deeply distressing if this WHO report is delayed for any such reason. After so many years of sanctions and war, the public health of 35 million Iraqis must not be held hostage. Instead, we must strive to save lives today and prevent any further contamination of the earth with war pollutants.

Deadly UN sanctions on Iraq

Recall the deadly UN sanctions on Iraq. By 1995, those sanctions had devastated the Iraqi public health infrastructure and may have killed as many as 576,000 children, according to UN Food and Agriculture Organization scientists.

In that vulnerable state, Iraq was invaded. MSNBC reported: “Between 2002 and 2005, US forces shot off 6 billion bullets in Iraq (something like 300,000 for every person killed). They also dropped 2,000 to 4,000 tonnes of bombs on Iraqi cities, leaving behind a witch’s brew of contaminants and toxic metals, including the neurotoxins lead and mercury.”

Since 2003, mother-and-child health has further deteriorated in Iraq, and the country’s health indicators are now among the poorest in the world. The current state of mother-and-child health in Iraq will be further damaged if the WHO report on congenital birth defects continues to be inaccessible to the public.

The WHO report will clarify the magnitude and trend of congenital birth defects in several Iraqi governorates, identify possible risk factors for these birth defects, and assess the public burden of these conditions on the Iraqi nation. The information contained in this report is essential to inform and prioritise public health policy in Iraq and in the region at large.

Immediate release of this report will be the first step towards mobilising global efforts to protect public health from further degradation in Iraq and in the entire region. Once released, the report will enable researchers to collaborate, ask the most relevant questions and spearhead research to remedy this health emergency.

Dr Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, a native of Iran, is an environmental toxicologist based in Michigan. She is the author of over two dozen peer reviewed articles and the book, Pollution and Reproductive Damage (DVM 2009).

By Noam Chomsky

June 6, 2013

@ AlterNet

On Mother’s Day, May 12, The Boston Globe featured a photo of a young woman with her toddler son sleeping in her arms.

The woman, of Mayan Indian heritage, had crossed the U.S. border seven times while pregnant, only to be caught and shipped back across the border on six of those attempts. She braved many miles, enduring blisteringly hot days and freezing nights, with no water or shelter, amid roaming gunmen. The last time she crossed, seven months pregnant, she was rescued by immigration solidarity activists who helped her to find her way to Boston.

Most of the border crossers are from Central America. Many say they would rather be home, if the possibility of decent survival hadn’t been destroyed. Mayans such as this young mother are still fleeing from the wreckage of the genocidal assault on the indigenous population of the Guatemalan highlands 30 years ago.

The main perpetrator, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, the former dictator who ruled Guatemala during two of the bloodiest years of the country’s decades-long civil war, was convicted in a Guatemalan court of genocide and crimes against humanity, on May 10.

Then, 10 days later, the case was overturned under suspicious circumstances. It is unclear whether the trial will continue.

Rios Montt’s forces killed tens of thousands of Guatemalans, mostly Mayans, in the year 1982 alone.

As that bloody year ended, President Reagan assured the nation that the killer was “a man of great personal integrity and commitment,” who was getting a “bum rap” from human-rights organizations and who “wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice.” Therefore, the president continued, “My administration will do all it can to support his progressive efforts.”

Ample evidence of Rios Montt’s “progressive efforts” was available to Washington, not only from rights organizations, but also from U.S. intelligence.

But truth was unwelcome. It interfered with the objectives set by Reagan’s national security team in 1981. As reported by the journalist Robert Parry, working from a document he discovered in the Reagan Library, the team’s goal was to supply military aid to the right-wing regime in Guatemala in order to exterminate not only “Marxist guerrillas” but also their “civilian support mechanisms” – which means, effectively, genocide.

The task was carried out with dedication. Reagan sent “nonlethal” equipment to the killers, including Bell helicopters that were immediately armed and sent on their missions of death and destruction.

But the most effective method was to enlist a network of client states to take over the task, including Taiwan and South Korea, still under U.S.-backed dictatorships, as well as apartheid South Africa and the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships.

At the forefront was Israel, which became the major arms supplier to Guatemala. It provided instructors for the killers and participated in counterinsurgency operations.

The background bears restating. In 1954, a CIA-run military coup ended a 10-year democratic interlude in Guatemala – “the years of spring,” as they are known there – and restored a savage elite to power.

In the 1990s, international organizations conducting inquiries into the fighting reported that since 1954 some 200,000 people had been killed in Guatemala, 80 percent of whom were indigenous. The killers were mostly from the Guatemalan security forces and closely linked paramilitaries.

The atrocities were carried out with vigorous U.S. support and participation. Among the standard Cold War pretexts was that Guatemala was a Russian “beachhead” in Latin America.

The real reasons, amply documented, were also standard: concern for the interests of U.S. investors and fear that a democratic experiment empowering the harshly repressed peasant majority “might be a virus” that would “spread contagion,” in Henry Kissinger’s thoughtful phrase, referring to Salvador Allende’s democratic socialist Chile.

Reagan’s murderous assault on Central America was not limited to Guatemala, of course. In most of the region the agencies of terror were government security forces that had been armed and trained by Washington.

One country was different: Nicaragua. It had an army to defend its population. Reagan therefore had to organize right-wing guerilla forces to wage the fight.

In 1986, the World Court, in Nicaragua v. United States, condemned the U.S. for “unlawful use of force” in Nicaragua and ordered the payment of reparations. The United States’ response to the court’s decree was to escalate the proxy war.

The U.S. Southern Command ordered the guerillas to attack virtually defenseless civilian targets, not to “duke it out” with the Nicaraguan army, according to Southcom’s Gen. John Gavin testimony to Congress in 1987.

Rights organizations (the same ones that were giving a bad rap to genocidaire Rios Montt) had condemned the war in Nicaragua all along but vehemently protested Southcom’s “soft-target” tactics.

The American commentator Michael Kinsley reprimanded the rights organizations for departing from good form. He explained that a “sensible policy” must “meet the test of cost-benefit analysis,” evaluating “the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end.”

Naturally, we Americans have the right to conduct the analysis – thanks, presumably, to our inherent nobility and stellar record ever since the days when the continent was cleared of the native scourge.

The nature of the “democracy that will emerge” was hardly obscure. It is accurately described by the leading scholar of “democracy promotion,” Thomas Carothers, who worked on such projects in the Reagan State Department.

Carothers concludes, regretfully, that U.S. influence was inversely proportional to democratic progress in Latin America, because Washington would only tolerate “limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been allied (in) quite undemocratic societies.”

There has been no change since.

In 1999, President Clinton apologized for American crimes in Guatemala but no action was taken.

There are countries that rise to a higher level than idle apology without action. Guatemala, despite its continuing travails, has carried out the unprecedented act of bringing a former head of state to trial for his crimes, something we might remember on the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Also perhaps unprecedented is an article in The New York Times by Elisabeth Malkin, headlined “Trial on Guatemalan Civil War Carnage Leaves Out U.S. Role.” Even acknowledgment of one’s own crimes is very rare.

Rare to nonexistent are actions that could alleviate some of the crimes’ horrendous consequences – for example, for the United States to pay the reparations to Nicaragua ordered by the World Court. The absence of such actions provides one measure of the chasm that separates us from where a civilized society ought to be.

(Noam Chomsky’s most recent book is “Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire. Conversations with David Barsamian.” Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.)

By Nadeen Shaker

5 June 2013

@ Ahram Online

Turkish author and activist Ozan Tekin is editor at Marksist.org – a Turkish leftist news site. Ozan describes to Ahram Online the dynamics of the ongoing anti-government protests in Turkey and similarities and differences between the Turkish process and the Arab Spring

Ahram Online (AO): Can you give us a picture of how protests were transformed from a four-people stand against park destruction to an outpouring of nation-wide anti-governmental protests?

Ozan Tekin (OT): A few dozen activists rushed into Gezi Park when the bulldozers arrived on Tuesday night last week to start cutting trees. The bulldozers retreated later that day and a few thousand people occupied the park. The police started attacking the park in the early hours of the morning to let the bulldozers in again. On third day, this sparked an explosion of protest, and tens of thousands joined the struggle in Taksim Square to keep the park safe and protest against police violence.

AO: What are the reasons behind the discontent with Erdogan’s policies?

OT: The government’s plans to restructure Taksim Square are a part of a broader neo-liberal program. They want to turn Taksim, the centre of the city, into a place for the upper classes and push ordinary people out. This is a conservative, neo-liberal government and people were increasingly fed up not only with the plans for Taksim Square, imposed with no consultation at all with citizens, but also with the whole spate of neo-liberal policies, the unchecked proliferation of shopping centers, last months’s legislation to ban the sale of alcohol after 10pm, and the frequent heavy-handed use of the police against perfectly democratic protests. Prime minister Erdogan’s arrogance and heavy-handed attitude also stoked the discontent.

AO: How large is the scope of the protests? Who is taking part in them?

OT: Those who started the resistance at the park were leftists, environmentalist, independent activists, etc. The police’s violence against them triggered a reaction in much wider sections of society. Thousands of independent young activists – many taking part in political activity for the first time – came out onto the streets in anger. All the parties of the left were there. Some trade unions – though perhaps not on a massive scale – joined in as well. The main opposition party (CHP) and other right-wing nationalist/pro-army groups also joined the protests. But their influence was very limited on Friday and Saturday.

AO: What is the so-called ‘Turkish Spring’? What are its broader implications in the region?

OT: Erdogan claims to support the revolutionary movements in the Middle East . But facing a wave of riots on a much smaller scale, his government managed to use brutal police violence for hours against the protesters. This is his hypocrisy – it shows that the Turkish government can in no way be a “model” for the demands of the Egyptian or Syrian masses.

But 50 percent of Turkish society votes for AKP [Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party] because they think it is slowly doing what the movements from below in the Middle East are achieving. Turkey has a long tradition of the army intervening in politics by bloody military takeovers. The generals also plotted to overthrow the AKP government, claiming that it was turning Turkey into “ Iran ” by imposing sharia law.

Many sections in the AKP’s electoral base want change and support Erdogan because they believe he will deliver that – the army’s exclusion from politics, a peaceful solution to the Kurdish question, improvements in social justice. This puts the AKP in a contradictory position – a neo-liberal right-wing agenda on one hand, and many millions voting for a “hope” of freedom on the other. Even at the peak of the protests, Taksim Square was nowhere near Tahrir in terms of numbers, and its political content was much more like “Tahrir against Morsi” than “Tahrir against Mubarak”.

AO: How is Erdogan’s response to the situation impacting the course of the protests? Are more strikes reflecting other grievances being planned?

OT: An AKP spokesman admitted that they had “only achieved to bring together many disparate groups in the streets.” Erdogan’s arrogance and insistence on never stepping back helped the protests to grow bigger. This was the real cause of his first serious defeat in 11 years – the police retreated from Taksim and tens of thousands of people occupied the park to turn it into a festival area. Now the movement’s main aim is to save the park from being destroyed and to oppose the government’s plans to restructure Taksim as a whole.

AO: What about the kind of police brutality used and the fresh demand for the removal of the interior minister?

OT: The interior minister has said that 1,730 people were arrested during the protests. Hundreds were injured by police attacks which were truly brutal, not only in Istanbul but across the country. So the resignation of the interior minister, the governor of Istanbul and the chief of police are important demands.

AO: What about your own experience of the protests? Did you really call Taksim Square Tahrir?

OT: Mass protests on the streets were really very inspiring for two days – Friday and Saturday. The soul of the movement was like that of Tahrir. Many activists were explicitly referring to Tahrir Square . Tens of thousands resisted the police with no fear.

When Gezi Park was won, many ordinary people celebrated and then went back to their homes and work. Then came the growing influence of pro-army nationalists, mostly CHP voters, trying to turn the protest into something that pushes the military to take action against the government. These people are hostile to Kurds and Armenians, oppose the peace negotiations with the Kurds (which is a historic turning point for democracy in Turkey ) and call the prime minister “a national traitor”.

In 1997, mass protests led by the left against the “deep state” were used by the military to force the Islamist government of the time to resign. There are some groups who are trying to do that now – their presence is a growing threat for the mass movement. It splits and weakens us. But they have not so far succeeded in hijacking the movement.

This is a serious ideological struggle we need to win. We are against this government not because it is Islamic, but because it is conservative and neo-liberal. It is a legitimate, elected government and therefore we do not want it to be overthrown by unelected armed forces. We want it to be overthrown by the mass movement of the people.

By Nile Bowie

June 04, 2013

Fresh allegations of hacking and cyber-theft between China and the United States as well as resources channeled into cyber-warfare and digital troops by both superpowers show uncertain diplomatic terrain ahead.

As the Obama administration imposes gouging cuts on fundamental social spending, the White House is allocating $13 billion for the US Cyber Command, tasked with waging ‘offensive cyber strikes’ to defend the homeland. In ‘Pentagonese’ that translates to building malicious computer viruses designed to subvert disable, and destroy targets and their computer-controlled infrastructure.

Gen. Keith Alexander, who leads both the Cyber Command and the NSA, even claimed that 13 of the 40 existing cyber battalions are tasked specifically with waging pre-emptive attacks against other countries.

In keeping with the logic of American exceptionalism, which supposes that the US maintain unrivalled supremacy in every tactical or military field, the Pentagon is now working in earnest to extend its dominance to cyberspace.

It’s no secret that China has made the modernization of its armed forces a top priority. As Beijing develops new types of hardware, including aircraft carriers, strategic missile submarines and advanced aircraft, white papers issued by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) highlight the desire to digitalize the nation’s military by utilizing modern information technology.

Washington is no stranger to scare tactics, and as establishment figures routinely warn of America’s power grids and financial systems being overtaken by e-terrorists, the US is positioning itself to enact that same scenario onto others under the guise of national defense.

While the US gives itself the space to pre-emptively cyber-strike others with impunity, the Pentagon says that any computer-based attacks and hacking from foreign countries can be considered acts of war, which could merit a ’use of force’ retaliation.

The US Cyber Command is part of a worldwide offensive cyber warfare system that includes all branches of the US military, in addition to our friends in NATO – its chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, even went as far as saying that he wants to “extend the definition of attacks which trigger activation of the alliance to include cyber attacks.” While the US devises ways to warmonger through programming code, President Obama provocatively phoned Chinese President Xi Jinping immediately after his inauguration in March to demand that Beijing stop hacking, a charge China vehemently denies. Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas Donilon, also called out China by name during a speech, lamenting how “the international community cannot tolerate such activity from any country.” (Except the United States, obviously.)

Crying foul over China

The Obama administration accuses Chinese hackers of waging cyber-attacks on a number of US entities, including billion-dollar corporations and governmental departments, and Beijing has recently been charged with stealing blueprints for combat aircraft as such the F/A-18 fighter jet and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, in addition to specs on naval vessels and missile defense systems.

The Chinese Defense Ministry dismissed the accusations as ridiculous, saying that the US underestimates the intelligence of the Chinese people and their capacity to develop tactically competitive military technology.

US security experts also previously claimed that a 12-story office building on the outskirts of Shanghai was the headquarters of an elusive squadron of the PLA operating under the name Unit 61398, tasked with attacking international computer networks and engaging in espionage.

Beijing claims that findings lack technical proof, because the report relied solely on suspicious IP addresses that originate in China, which the Defense Ministry suggests can be easily usurped by hackers outside of China. In truth, there is a glaring absence of any cyber-smoking gun that definitively corroborates US claims. However, it remains highly plausible that Beijing would have an interest in obtaining the intimate tech-specs of Washington’s military hardware to reverse engineer it and build more reliable defensive mechanisms for itself. After all, China is being encircled by a pivoting military power that has waged aggressive wars outside of international law – any Beijing-backed espionage seen through this perspective becomes understandable. Ironically enough, the Chinese embassy in Washington claims it is a victim of computer hacking that originates in the United States.

Let’s ask the Iranians

Its common knowledge that Israel and the United States engineered the Stuxnet virus that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear facility in Natanz, it was even claimed by people close to the matter that it was President Obama’s personal directive. Stuxnet remains the most sophisticated malware discovered thus far, the virus targets industrial systems such as nuclear power plants and electrical grids from a Microsoft Windows-based PC. The virus exploits security gaps referred to as zero-day vulnerabilities to attack specific targets; the Pentagon reportedly pays top dollar to get its hands on such programming vulnerabilities, which are the essential ingredient in any cyber-weapon.

An aerial view of the Pentagon building in Washington (Reuters / Jason Reed JIR / CN)

Upon delivery of the Stuxnet payload via USB, the malicious malware manipulated the operating speed of centrifuges spinning nuclear fuel to create distortions that deliberately damaged the machines, while disabling emergency controls. Stuxnet took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges spinning uranium at the facility, while numerous Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated.

Even after acts of overt hostility and open sabotage, Iran’s response has been completely muted. If the shoe was on the other foot, could the United States ever exercise the same restraint? By the Pentagon’s definition, it would have the legal right to retaliate with force if ever found itself on the receiving end of a Stuxnet-type virus.

When asked about the Stuxnet worm in a press conference, former White House WMD Coordinator Gary Samore boasted, “I’m glad to hear they are having troubles with their centrifuge machines, and the US and its allies are doing everything we can to make it more complicated.” Never in any of the detailed exposés published in the New York Times and elsewhere on the Stuxnet episode, is there any moral or legal questioning of Washington and Tel Aviv’s blatantly illegal tactics; mainstream reports on the subject read more like White House press statements than anything that resembles journalism.

Who’s hacking who?

Congress claims that poor internet security has surpassed terrorism to become the single greatest threat to the homeland, and ironically, US tax dollars are flowing to skilled hackers affiliated with criminal groups who supply government agencies with vulnerabilities in existing software programs. Because these vulnerabilities are the main components of cyber-weapons, security holes in widely used software remain unrepaired. Reuters has even suggested that Washington is “encouraging hacking and failing to disclose to software companies and customers the vulnerabilities exploited by the purchased hacks.” 

Despite the posturing and scare tactics, US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that there was only a “remote chance” of a serious cyber-attack on the US. Clapper also spoke about how cyber-theft directly threatened “America’s economic competitiveness and innovation edge,” suggesting that the US Cyber Command serves a dual economic purpose.

Washington’s Cyber Command takes a two-prong approach: it’s tasked with churning out malicious cyber-weapons like Stuxnet while stringently guarding the intellectual property and data of major US corporations. Claims of China being involved in hacking and cyber-theft should not be dismissed off the bat, but if Beijing is indeed stealing military secrets from the US, it is likely motivated by genuine defensive concerns and its own IT sovereignty. Just as Washington partners itself with questionable figures and organizations to execute its foreign policy objectives, the Pentagon’s warm embrace of hackers is bound to create some form of e-blowback in due time. This much is clear – Cyber-Imperialism is the highest stage of Capitalism – somebody pass Lenin the memo.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Nile Bowie is a political analyst and photographer currently residing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

3 June, 2013

@ BBC News

A Saudi prince is reported to have spent some 15m euros ($19.5m) during a private visit to the Disneyland resort near Paris.

Prince Fahd al-Saud is said to have booked entire areas of the park over the 22-24 May period, to celebrate getting his degree.

Euro Disney, which runs the theme park, confirmed that a prince had spent three days there with a number of guests.

The company says it regularly organises private events for firms or people.

The festivities included tailor-made events involving “rare Disney characters”, a source told the AFP news agency.

Special security was put in place for the prince, one of the park’s top customers, AFP said.

The theme park attracted 16 million visitors last year, but Euro Disney says it has not made any profits since it was set up in 1992.

Last year, it lost 120.9m euros in the first half of its financial year compared with a net loss of 99.5m euros in the same period a year earlier.

By Eli Lake, The Daily Beast

03 June 13

@ Readersuppprtednwes.org

The U.S. Army private’s court-martial finally gets under way today, nearly three years after his leak to WikiLeaks unmasked the war on terror’s secret diplomacy. Eli Lake reports.

On Monday, the military court-martial begins for Bradley Manning, the military-intelligence analyst who is accused of sending 700,000 U.S. documents and at least one video to a drop box in cyberspace belonging to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks. His trial, three years after his arrest, will provide a fresh account of how a young U.S. Army private laid bare the secret diplomacy underpinning the global war on terror and whether the disclosures caused grave harm to America’s ability to fight that war.

Protester in support of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning outside Fort Meade, Maryland, June 1, 2013. Manning, who is to face a court-martial beginning June 3, is accused of sending hundreds of thousands of classified records to WikiLeaks while working as an intelligence analyst in Baghdad. (Patrick Semansky/AP)

For Manning’s supporters, he is a whistleblower and a hero who endured cruel and unusual punishment from the military even before his trial. For the U.S. military, Manning is akin to a spy. He faces 22 charges, including aiding the enemy and violating the Espionage Act, crimes for which he could receive life in prison.

But many Americans are hearing about him for the first time.

The leak of the documents, many of them classified, which Manning has admitted, was not the gravest intelligence breach in U.S. history, but it was the most expansive. The disclosures included detailed diplomatic cables providing the minutes of meetings with heads of state; spot intelligence reports from the front lines of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; and a video claiming to show a deliberate airstrike on a Reuters photojournalist in Iraq.

Manning was able to do all of this in a secure classified facility at a U.S. Army base in Iraq. In some cases he did so by disguising the files on a CD containing the music of the cross-dressing pop singer Lady Gaga.

Alexa O’Brien, an independent journalist who has posted detailed transcripts of the Manning court-martial at Fort Meade, Maryland, said the temporary sensitive compartmentalized information facility where Manning worked was leaky. “The facility where Manning worked did not meet the Defense Department’s own information-assurance standards,” she said. “Manning’s supervisor testified at the pretrial that soldiers would play pirated versions of movies they purchased from Iraqi nationals on their classified work stations at the facility.”

Manning’s defense lawyers would later tell a pretrial hearing that he suffered from gender-identity disorder, creating an alter-ego, Breanna Manning.

Some commentators have credited Manning’s leak with providing a spark for the revolutions that toppled the governments of Egypt and Tunisia and triggered uprisings in Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen, collectively known as the Arab Spring. Files leaked by Manning disclosed a secret relationship between the U.S. government and President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, to allow drone strikes inside the country where the United States was not in a declared war. Another cable detailed the private investments and holdings of the Tunisian ruling family.

Still other files revealed secret talks between Arab governments and Israel; the lavish spending habits of Muammar Gaddafi’s family; and suspicions from the U.S. ambassador to Georgia that Russia’s intelligence services directed a secret war in the country for much of the last decade.

The Manning leak also ushered in a new era within the Obama administration to crack down on leakers and what they deemed the “insider threat,” a term that historically referred to spies who sold or shared secrets with foreign governments. On November 28, 2010, as WikiLeaks was doling out the diplomatic cables Manning leaked to selected partner news organizations, including The New York Times and The Guardian, Jacob Lew, then Obama’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, issued a memorandum (PDF) to all government agencies that generate classified information to reform systems for protecting those secrets.

“Any failure by agencies to safeguard classified information pursuant to relevant  … is unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” it said.

After the order, major defense contractors began marketing software with names like “sureview” and “checkmate,” promising to actively monitor classified computer networks to spot the next Bradley Manning. Inside the government, spokespeople for government agencies were instructed not to acknowledge any of the information from the government documents now sprouting up throughout the Internet on WikiLeaks mirror sites.

“WikiLeaks was an enormous wakeup call for the government,” said Lucy Dalglish, the dean of the University of Maryland’s college of journalism. In the past, she said, reporters from the mainstream media who obtained classified information would negotiate the details they would publish with senior government officials. Manning, she said, “uploads it to an anonymous site and it goes around the world almost instantly. They see that and say, ‘Oh my God, we are screwed.'”

One concern for many in the U.S. government was that WikiLeaks did not at first redact the names of individuals who provided sensitive information to U.S. diplomats and military officers. (The partner organizations that selectively posted information did make such redactions.)

Beginning in late November 2010, the State Department was forced to start making arrangements to move some sensitive sources in hostile countries and war zones as a result of the WikiLeaks, said P.J. Crowley, who served at the time as the State Department spokesman.

“In all cases where we highlighted, not a high-level official well-known globally, but an activist or someone who would be placed in harm’s way if published, the mainstream media was willing not to publish those names,” said Crowley. “While some individuals inside WikiLeaks shared that concern, Julian Assange did not at first and only acknowledged this danger relatively late in the process. Eventually he lost control of the archive and lots and lots of names were put out there.”

Crowley would later resign his post after publicly criticizing the treatment of Manning after his arrest, when the private was placed on suicide watch at a maximum-security militar detention center at Quantico, Virginia, between July 29, 2010, and April 2011. In this period Manning spent months confined to a cell for 24 hours a day in only his underwear. Every five minutes guards had to ask if he was OK. He was allowed only one book at a time and was given no pillows or sheets for when he slept.

While President Obama would say he believed Manning’s treatment was in accordance with U.S. military code, the judge in Manning’s case criticized the decision to keep him under suicide watch during this period, and advocates for the young private saw the conditions he was kept under as proof that he was being punished even before being convicted.

Earlier this year, Manning pleaded guilty to 10 lesser offenses in relation to WikiLeaks of mishandling information he was required to protect. But the government has continued to press its topline charges, while Manning has denied that he did his leaking to aid an enemy of the United States or in any way violated the Espionage Act. In an audio statement that surfaced in March from one of his pretrial hearings, during which he admitted to the leaks, Manning said he was moved to disclose the information to spark a wider debate about foreign policy. He observed that a 2007 video he leaked captured from a helicopter before an airstrike in Iraq showed that his fellow soldiers “dehumanized the individuals they were engaging in and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as ‘dead bastards’ and congratulating themselves on their ability to kill in large numbers.”

“With Manning’s offer of a plea bargain, which carries up to 20 years in jail, this satisfies the imperative to reinforce to those in uniform that they have a solemn responsibility to protect the national interest,” said Crowley on Sunday. The former spokesman said he believed Manning harmed the national interest with his leak. But he also said the prosecution ran the risk of taking the case too far by seeking to imprison Manning for the rest of his life for the crime of aiding the enemy. “My apprehension is that as the prosecution begins to present its case tomorrow, it risks making Bradley Manning into a martyr,” he said.

By JULIAN ASSANGE

1 June, 2013

@ The New York Times

“THE New Digital Age” is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.

The authors met in occupied Baghdad in 2009, when the book was conceived. Strolling among the ruins, the two became excited that consumer technology was transforming a society flattened by United States military occupation. They decided the tech industry could be a powerful agent of American foreign policy.

The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not. The prose is terse, the argument confident and the wisdom — banal. But this isn’t a book designed to be read. It is a major declaration designed to foster alliances.

“The New Digital Age” is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to position itself as America’s geopolitical visionary — the one company that can answer the question “Where should America go?” It is not surprising that a respectable cast of the world’s most famous warmongers has been trotted out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement to Western soft power. The acknowledgments give pride of place to Henry Kissinger, who along with Tony Blair and the former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden provided advance praise for the book.

In the book the authors happily take up the white geek’s burden. A liberal sprinkling of convenient, hypothetical dark-skinned worthies appear: Congolese fisherwomen, graphic designers in Botswana, anticorruption activists in San Salvador and illiterate Masai cattle herders in the Serengeti are all obediently summoned to demonstrate the progressive properties of Google phones jacked into the informational supply chain of the Western empire.

The authors offer an expertly banalized version of tomorrow’s world: the gadgetry of decades hence is predicted to be much like what we have right now — only cooler. “Progress” is driven by the inexorable spread of American consumer technology over the surface of the earth. Already, every day, another million or so Google-run mobile devices are activated. Google will interpose itself, and hence the United States government, between the communications of every human being not in China (naughty China). Commodities just become more marvelous; young, urban professionals sleep, work and shop with greater ease and comfort; democracy is insidiously subverted by technologies of surveillance, and control is enthusiastically rebranded as “participation”; and our present world order of systematized domination, intimidation and oppression continues, unmentioned, unafflicted or only faintly perturbed.

The authors are sour about the Egyptian triumph of 2011. They dismiss the Egyptian youth witheringly, claiming that “the mix of activism and arrogance in young people is universal.” Digitally inspired mobs mean revolutions will be “easier to start” but “harder to finish.” Because of the absence of strong leaders, the result, or so Mr. Kissinger tells the authors, will be coalition governments that descend into autocracies. They say there will be “no more springs” (but China is on the ropes).

The authors fantasize about the future of “well resourced” revolutionary groups. A new “crop of consultants” will “use data to build and fine-tune a political figure.”

“His” speeches (the future isn’t all that different) and writing will be fed “through complex feature-extraction and trend-analysis software suites” while “mapping his brain function,” and other “sophisticated diagnostics” will be used to “assess the weak parts of his political repertoire.”

The book mirrors State Department institutional taboos and obsessions. It avoids meaningful criticism of Israel and Saudi Arabia. It pretends, quite extraordinarily, that the Latin American sovereignty movement, which has liberated so many from United States-backed plutocracies and dictatorships over the last 30 years, never happened. Referring instead to the region’s “aging leaders,” the book can’t see Latin America for Cuba. And, of course, the book frets theatrically over Washington’s favorite boogeymen: North Korea and Iran.

Google, which started out as an expression of independent Californian graduate student culture — a decent, humane and playful culture — has, as it encountered the big, bad world, thrown its lot in with traditional Washington power elements, from the State Department to the National Security Agency.

Despite accounting for an infinitesimal fraction of violent deaths globally, terrorism is a favorite brand in United States policy circles. This is a fetish that must also be catered to, and so “The Future of Terrorism” gets a whole chapter. The future of terrorism, we learn, is cyberterrorism. A session of indulgent scaremongering follows, including a breathless disaster-movie scenario, wherein cyberterrorists take control of American air-traffic control systems and send planes crashing into buildings, shutting down power grids and launching nuclear weapons. The authors then tar activists who engage in digital sit-ins with the same brush.

I have a very different perspective. The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism. This is the principal thesis in my book, “Cypherpunks.” But while Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen tell us that the death of privacy will aid governments in “repressive autocracies” in “targeting their citizens,” they also say governments in “open” democracies will see it as “a gift” enabling them to “better respond to citizen and customer concerns.” In reality, the erosion of individual privacy in the West and the attendant centralization of power make abuses inevitable, moving the “good” societies closer to the “bad” ones.

The section on “repressive autocracies” describes, disapprovingly, various repressive surveillance measures: legislation to insert back doors into software to enable spying on citizens, monitoring of social networks and the collection of intelligence on entire populations. All of these are already in widespread use in the United States. In fact, some of those measures — like the push to require every social-network profile to be linked to a real name — were spearheaded by Google itself.

THE writing is on the wall, but the authors cannot see it. They borrow from William Dobson the idea that the media, in an autocracy, “allows for an opposition press as long as regime opponents understand where the unspoken limits are.” But these trends are beginning to emerge in the United States. No one doubts the chilling effects of the investigations into The Associated Press and Fox’s James Rosen. But there has been little analysis of Google’s role in complying with the Rosen subpoena. I have personal experience of these trends.

The Department of Justice admitted in March that it was in its third year of a continuing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks. Court testimony states that its targets include “the founders, owners, or managers of WikiLeaks.” One alleged source, Bradley Manning, faces a 12-week trial beginning tomorrow, with 24 prosecution witnesses expected to testify in secret.

This book is a balefully seminal work in which neither author has the language to see, much less to express, the titanic centralizing evil they are constructing. “What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century,” they tell us, “technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st.” Without even understanding how, they have updated and seamlessly implemented George Orwell’s prophecy. If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces — forever. Zealots of the cult of consumer technology will find little to inspire them here, not that they ever seem to need it. But this is essential reading for anyone caught up in the struggle for the future, in view of one simple imperative: Know your enemy.

Julian Assange is the editor in chief of WikiLeaks and author of “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.”