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By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

19January,2014
Countercurrents.org

President Obama’s Friday speech on NSA surveillance was a calculated endeavor to calm a furor at home and abroad over the US dragnet surveillance. However, the proposed changes do not provide any fundamental changes in the intelligence gathering activities.

The president called for an end to the government’s current storage of “metadata,” information about many millions of calls made by ordinary Americans. He emphasized that the capacity to search metadata is one that must be preserved, but without government itself holding it. The president directed the U.S. attorney general and the intelligence community to report on the best way to transfer the metadata out of government hands, before the program comes up for reauthorization on March 28. He said during this transition period, the government shouldn’t have access to metadata without judicial approval.

The president endorsed the proposal to appoint a public advocate to represent privacy and civil liberties interests before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The president called for more transparency with respect to National Security letters, which allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation, without court approval, to obtain access to people’s records (such as their bank and credit card information).

In his 43 minutes speech President Obama aggressively defended the NSA surveillance programs as important tools to combat terrorism.

The New York Times pointed out that President Obama made no mention of two of the recommendations of his panel of most pressing concern to Silicon Valley: that the N.S.A. not undermine commercial

Software and that it move away from exploiting flaws in software to conduct cyber attacks or surveillance.

Brian Fung writing in the Washington Post argued that President Obama’s reforms are narrowly targeted at the NSA’s phone metadata program under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. “They don’t cover other programs the government carries out under Section 215, such as the reported scraping of financial information by the CIA. They don’t address the NSA’s counter-encryption activities or any geolocation information that the NSA may have or may be collecting. They also don’t address other programs like those conducted under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which is the authority under which PRISM operates. Some of the reforms, both on the telephony metadata surveillance and others that the President is announcing today, require an act of Congress, and given the Senate’s general support for the NSA throughout the controversy, it’s unclear how much traction these proposals will get. Much of the spying that happens internationally will also remain untouched.”

Washington Post reported that President Obama avoided almost entirely any discussion of overseas intelligence collection that he authorized on his own, under Executive Order 12333, without legislative or judicial supervision. The Washington Post has disclosed in recent months, based in part on the Snowden documents, that the NSA is gathering hundreds of millions of e-mail address books, breaking into private networks that link the overseas data centers of Google and Yahoo, and building a database of trillions of location records transmitted by cell phones around the world. Unless Obama says otherwise in the classified annex to his directive, those programs will carry on unabated.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation scorecard

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) put together a scorecard showing how President Obama’s announcements stack up against 12 common sense fixes that should be a minimum for reforming NSA surveillance. On that scale, President Obama racked up 3.5 points out of a possible 12. Here are the scoreboard points:

1. Stop mass surveillance of digital communications and communication records. Score: 0.2

2. Protect the privacy rights of foreigners. Score: 0.3

3. No data retention mandate. Score: 0

4. Ban no-review National Security Letters. Score: 0.5

5. Stop undermining Internet security. Score: 0

6. Oppose the FISA Improvements Act. Score: 1

7. Reject the third party doctrine. Score: 0

8. Provide a full public accounting of our surveillance apparatus. Score: 0.5

9. Embrace meaningful transparency reform. Score: 0

10. Reform the FISA court. Score: 1

11. Protect national security whistleblowers. Score: 0

12. Give criminal defendants all surveillance evidence. Score: 0

NSA collects millions of text messages daily in ‘untargeted’ global sweep

President Obama’s NSA “reforms” came a day after the Guardian reported that the National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents.

The untargeted collection and storage of SMS messages – including their contacts – is revealed in a joint investigation between the Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News based on material provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The documents also reveal the UK spy agency GCHQ has made use of the NSA database to search the metadata of “untargeted and unwarranted” communications belonging to people in the UK.

The NSA program, codenamed Dishfire, collects “pretty much everything it can”, according to GCHQ documents, rather than merely storing the communications of existing surveillance targets.

On average, each day the NSA was able to extract:

• More than 5 million missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone’s social network from who they contact and when)

• Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts

• More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images.

• Over 800,000 financial transactions, either through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users

The agency was also able to extract geolocation data from more than 76,000 text messages a day, including from “requests by people for route info” and “setting up meetings”. Other travel information was obtained from itinerary texts sent by travel companies, even including cancellations and delays to travel plans.

In the statement to the Guardian, a NSA spokeswoman said: “Dishfire is a system that processes and stores lawfully collected SMS data. Because some SMS data of US persons may at times be incidentally collected in NSA’s lawful foreign intelligence mission, privacy protections for US persons exist across the entire process concerning the use, handling, retention, and dissemination of SMS data in Dishfire.”

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net)

 

By Dr. Ludwig Watzal

18 January, 2014

Countercurrents.org

Neoconservative extremists, Zionist lobbyists from the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and their willing executioners on Capitol Hill driven by the right-wing Israeli government are trying everything to sabotage the agreement between Iran and the five UN Security Council members plus their German annex. This unholy alliance tries to drag the Obama administration into another Middle Eastern war. These lobbyists have raised the stakes so high that Iran’s only alternative to war would be unconditional surrender. After the Iranian government has agreed to normalize its relations with the West, these US extremists demand not only a continuation but a tightening of the sanctions screw.

The newly introduced Menendez-Kirk Iranian Sanctions Bill (S. 1881) can be seen as a roadmap to war with Iran. The Democrat Menendez and the Republican Kirk seem both on the “payroll” of AIPAC; they receive campaign money that makes them susceptible to a particular policy. Fifty eight cosponsors support this de-facto script to war. The rhetoric of this bill requires from the sovereign Iranian nation to drop politically and publically its pants and gives up its legitimate nuclear energy program.

The sponsors of the bill propose that the Congress put the lives of U.S. servicemen in the hands of a foreigner, Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Thus, under item (b) (5) of the Bill, the Congress is asked to pledge unconditional military, diplomatic and economic support to Israel, should its government feel “compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapon program.” How politically deranged Netanyahu is, shows his outrageous historic analogy; he suggests we are now in 1938, and Iran is equivalent to Nazi Germany. As a German, I wish Germany would have been in 1938 in a situation that Iran is in today: World War II would have never happened.

Netanyahu is actually a wolf in sheep’s clothing, who screams constantly ‘stop the thief’, though his government is the one that threatens its neighbors and is armed up to its ears with nuclear and biological weapons. Israel is the only country in the Middle East that has not signed and does not intend to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This omission allows Israel to legally refuse international inspections of its nuclear arsenal. The U.N. General Assembly has repeatedly recommended the establishment of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle-East. Israel is opposed to that recommendation, invoking unique security needs.

On January 15, 2014, the British daily “The Guardian” ran a story on the hypocrisy of the U. S. and Great Britain regarding Israel’s nuclear arsenal and its efforts to acquire the technology and the nuclear material. Despite knowing about Israeli massive nuclear arsenal, the West turns a blind eye on it.

 

President Obama might be well advised not only confront the Zionist lobby head on but also the “Israeli senators” on Capitol Hill who fight for the interests of Israel against their own government and constituencies. Why in the world want even Democratic senators bring Obama’s Iran policy to failure? In a speech, Obama should show to their constituency and to the American people whose interests their elected senators represent. He should not only call out AIPAC but also the Democratic senators who want to destroy Obama’s only foreign policy success as U. S. President. He should follow Chris Hayes example, the young and brilliant reporter from MSNBC, who has challenged AIPAC and the U. S. Democratic senators. Speaking of “Israeli senators”; in 2008, the former U. S. senator Huck Hagel, who holds right now the office of Secretary of Defense, put it this way: “I’m not an Israeli senator; I’m a United States senator.” The majority of the incumbent senators try with tooth and nails to bring the nuclear deal with Iran to failure. If Israel really wants to instigate a war with Iran, the U. S. should let Israel go it alone and not lift a finger when the country gets into trouble. It will show to the whole world that the right-wing Israeli government is the aggressor and a menace to world peace.

Besides attempting to torpedo an agreement with Iran, the Netanyahu government is also not interested in peace with the Palestinians. Defense minister Moshe Ya’alon regards the U. S. security plan “not worth the paper it’s written on”. Kerry “cannot teach me anything about the conflict with the Palestinians”, he said. For the last few months, there have been no negotiations between the Israeli and the Palestinians but between the U. S. and us, said Ya’alon. “The only thing that can ‘save us’ is for John Kerry to win a Nobel Prize and leave us in peace.”

This political behavior by Israeli officials should be an eye-opener for the Obama administration. Every year, the American taxpayer gives the Israeli government 3 billion Dollars, not to mention all the other advantages Israel gets on the top of it. The U. S. administration regards Israel as one of its closest allies, but this “ally” often bites the feeding hand.

As long as the U. S. and the U.N. Security Council treat the Iranian nuclear program differently from the Israeli one, the negotiations will fail. Iran will and can’t surrender to the whims of the Zionist lobby and its “Israeli senators” on Capitol Hill. If these forces prevail, even Obama can’t prevent another war that lies not in the interest of the American people.

Dr. Ludwig Watzal works as a journalist and editor in Bonn, Germany. He runs the bilingual blog between the lines. http://between-the-lines-ludwig-watzal.blogspot.de/

 

 

 

By Dr. Ludwig Watzal

18 January, 2014

Countercurrents.org

Neoconservative extremists, Zionist lobbyists from the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and their willing executioners on Capitol Hill driven by the right-wing Israeli government are trying everything to sabotage the agreement between Iran and the five UN Security Council members plus their German annex. This unholy alliance tries to drag the Obama administration into another Middle Eastern war. These lobbyists have raised the stakes so high that Iran’s only alternative to war would be unconditional surrender. After the Iranian government has agreed to normalize its relations with the West, these US extremists demand not only a continuation but a tightening of the sanctions screw.

The newly introduced Menendez-Kirk Iranian Sanctions Bill (S. 1881) can be seen as a roadmap to war with Iran. The Democrat Menendez and the Republican Kirk seem both on the “payroll” of AIPAC; they receive campaign money that makes them susceptible to a particular policy. Fifty eight cosponsors support this de-facto script to war. The rhetoric of this bill requires from the sovereign Iranian nation to drop politically and publically its pants and gives up its legitimate nuclear energy program.

The sponsors of the bill propose that the Congress put the lives of U.S. servicemen in the hands of a foreigner, Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Thus, under item (b) (5) of the Bill, the Congress is asked to pledge unconditional military, diplomatic and economic support to Israel, should its government feel “compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapon program.” How politically deranged Netanyahu is, shows his outrageous historic analogy; he suggests we are now in 1938, and Iran is equivalent to Nazi Germany. As a German, I wish Germany would have been in 1938 in a situation that Iran is in today: World War II would have never happened.

Netanyahu is actually a wolf in sheep’s clothing, who screams constantly ‘stop the thief’, though his government is the one that threatens its neighbors and is armed up to its ears with nuclear and biological weapons. Israel is the only country in the Middle East that has not signed and does not intend to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This omission allows Israel to legally refuse international inspections of its nuclear arsenal. The U.N. General Assembly has repeatedly recommended the establishment of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle-East. Israel is opposed to that recommendation, invoking unique security needs.

On January 15, 2014, the British daily “The Guardian” ran a story on the hypocrisy of the U. S. and Great Britain regarding Israel’s nuclear arsenal and its efforts to acquire the technology and the nuclear material. Despite knowing about Israeli massive nuclear arsenal, the West turns a blind eye on it.

 

President Obama might be well advised not only confront the Zionist lobby head on but also the “Israeli senators” on Capitol Hill who fight for the interests of Israel against their own government and constituencies. Why in the world want even Democratic senators bring Obama’s Iran policy to failure? In a speech, Obama should show to their constituency and to the American people whose interests their elected senators represent. He should not only call out AIPAC but also the Democratic senators who want to destroy Obama’s only foreign policy success as U. S. President. He should follow Chris Hayes example, the young and brilliant reporter from MSNBC, who has challenged AIPAC and the U. S. Democratic senators. Speaking of “Israeli senators”; in 2008, the former U. S. senator Huck Hagel, who holds right now the office of Secretary of Defense, put it this way: “I’m not an Israeli senator; I’m a United States senator.” The majority of the incumbent senators try with tooth and nails to bring the nuclear deal with Iran to failure. If Israel really wants to instigate a war with Iran, the U. S. should let Israel go it alone and not lift a finger when the country gets into trouble. It will show to the whole world that the right-wing Israeli government is the aggressor and a menace to world peace.

Besides attempting to torpedo an agreement with Iran, the Netanyahu government is also not interested in peace with the Palestinians. Defense minister Moshe Ya’alon regards the U. S. security plan “not worth the paper it’s written on”. Kerry “cannot teach me anything about the conflict with the Palestinians”, he said. For the last few months, there have been no negotiations between the Israeli and the Palestinians but between the U. S. and us, said Ya’alon. “The only thing that can ‘save us’ is for John Kerry to win a Nobel Prize and leave us in peace.”

This political behavior by Israeli officials should be an eye-opener for the Obama administration. Every year, the American taxpayer gives the Israeli government 3 billion Dollars, not to mention all the other advantages Israel gets on the top of it. The U. S. administration regards Israel as one of its closest allies, but this “ally” often bites the feeding hand.

As long as the U. S. and the U.N. Security Council treat the Iranian nuclear program differently from the Israeli one, the negotiations will fail. Iran will and can’t surrender to the whims of the Zionist lobby and its “Israeli senators” on Capitol Hill. If these forces prevail, even Obama can’t prevent another war that lies not in the interest of the American people.

Dr. Ludwig Watzal works as a journalist and editor in Bonn, Germany. He runs the bilingual blog between the lines. http://between-the-lines-ludwig-watzal.blogspot.de/

 

 

 

 

By Nick Turse

18 January, 2014

TomDispatch.com

They operate in the green glow of night vision in Southwest Asia and stalk through the jungles of South America. They snatch men from their homes in the Maghreb and shoot it out with heavily armed militants in the Horn of Africa. They feel the salty spray while skimming over the tops of waves from the turquoise Caribbean to the deep blue Pacific. They conduct missions in the oppressive heat of Middle Eastern deserts and the deep freeze of Scandinavia. All over the planet, the Obama administration is waging a secret war whose full extent has never been fully revealed — until now.
Since September 11, 2001, U.S. Special Operations forces have grown in every conceivable way, from their numbers to their budget. Most telling, however, has been the exponential rise in special ops deployments globally. This presence — now, in nearly 70% of the world’s nations — provides new evidence of the size and scope of a secret war being waged from Latin America to the backlands of Afghanistan, from training missions with African allies to information operations launched in cyberspace.
In the waning days of the Bush presidency, Special Operations forces were reportedly deployed in about 60 countries around the world. By 2010, that number had swelled to 75, according to Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post. In 2011, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told TomDispatch that the total would reach 120. Today, that figure has risen higher still.
In 2013, elite U.S. forces were deployed in 134 countries around the globe, according to Major Matthew Robert Bockholt of SOCOM Public Affairs. This 123% increase during the Obama years demonstrates how, in addition to conventional wars and a CIA drone campaign, public diplomacy and extensive electronic spying, the U.S. has engaged in still another significant and growing form of overseas power projection. Conducted largely in the shadows by America’s most elite troops, the vast majority of these missions take place far from prying eyes, media scrutiny, or any type of outside oversight, increasing the chances of unforeseen blowback and catastrophic consequences.

Growth Industry
Formally established in 1987, Special Operations Command has grown steadily in the post-9/11 era. SOCOM is reportedly on track to reach 72,000 personnel in 2014, up from 33,000 in 2001. Funding for the command has also jumped exponentially as its baseline budget, $2.3 billion in 2001, hit $6.9 billion in 2013 ($10.4 billion, if you add in supplemental funding). Personnel deployments abroad have skyrocketed, too, from 4,900 “man-years” in 2001 to 11,500 in 2013.
A recent investigation by TomDispatch, using open source government documents and news releases as well as press reports, found evidence that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in or involved with the militaries of 106 nations around the world in 2012-2013. For more than a month during the preparation of that article, however, SOCOM failed to provide accurate statistics on the total number of countries to which special operators — Green Berets and Rangers, Navy SEALs and Delta Force commandos, specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, and civil affairs personnel — were deployed. “We don’t just keep it on hand,” SOCOM’s Bockholt explained in a telephone interview once the article had been filed. “We have to go searching through stuff. It takes a long time to do that.” Hours later, just prior to publication, he provided an answer to a question I first asked in November of last year. “SOF [Special Operations forces] were deployed to 134 countries” during fiscal year 2013, Bockholt explained in an email.

Globalized Special Ops
Last year, Special Operations Command chief Admiral William McRaven explained his vision for special ops globalization. In a statement to the House Armed Services Committee, he said:
“USSOCOM is enhancing its global network of SOF to support our interagency and international partners in order to gain expanded situational awareness of emerging threats and opportunities. The network enables small, persistent presence in critical locations, and facilitates engagement where necessary or appropriate…”
While that “presence” may be small, the reach and influence of those Special Operations forces are another matter. The 12% jump in national deployments — from 120 to 134 — during McRaven’s tenure reflects his desire to put boots on the ground just about everywhere on Earth. SOCOM will not name the nations involved, citing host nation sensitivities and the safety of American personnel, but the deployments we do know about shed at least some light on the full range of missions being carried out by America’s secret military.
Last April and May, for instance, Special Ops personnel took part in training exercises in Djibouti, Malawi, and the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean. In June, U.S. Navy SEALs joined Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, and other allied Mideast forces for irregular warfare simulations in Aqaba, Jordan. The next month, Green Berets traveled to Trinidad and Tobago to carry out small unit tactical exercises with local forces. In August, Green Berets conducted explosives training with Honduran sailors. In September, according to media reports, U.S. Special Operations forces joined elite troops from the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), and Cambodia — as well as their counterparts from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, China, India, and Russia for a US-Indonesian joint-funded coun­terterrorism exercise held at a training center in Sentul, West Java.
In October, elite U.S. troops carried out commando raids in Libya and Somalia, kidnapping a terror suspect in the former nation while SEALs killed at least one militant in the latter before being driven off under fire. In November, Special Ops troops conducted humanitarian operations in the Philippines to aid survivors of Typhoon Haiyan. The next month, members of the 352nd Special Operations Group conducted a training exercise involving approximately 130 airmen and six aircraft at an airbase in England and Navy SEALs were wounded while undertaking an evacuation mission in South Sudan. Green Berets then rang in the new year with a January 1st combat mission alongside elite Afghan troops in Bahlozi village in Kandahar province
Deployments in 134 countries, however, turn out not to be expansive enough for SOCOM. In November 2013, the command announced that it was seeking to identify industry partners who could, under SOCOM’s Trans Regional Web Initiative, potentially “develop new websites tailored to foreign audiences.” These would join an existing global network of 10 propaganda websites, run by various combatant commands and made to look like legitimate news outlets, including CentralAsiaOnline.com, Sabahi which targets the Horn of Africa; an effort aimed at the Middle East known as Al-Shorfa.com; and another targeting Latin America called Infosurhoy.com.
SOCOM’s push into cyberspace is mirrored by a concerted effort of the command to embed itself ever more deeply inside the Beltway. “I have folks in every agency here in Washington, D.C. — from the CIA, to the FBI, to the National Security Agency, to the National Geospatial Agency, to the Defense Intelligence Agency,” SOCOM chief Admiral McRaven said during a panel discussion at Washington’s Wilson Center last year. Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Library in November, he put the number of departments and agencies where SOCOM is now entrenched at 38.

134 Chances for Blowback
Although elected in 2008 by many who saw him as an antiwar candidate, President Obama has proved to be a decidedly hawkish commander-in-chief whose policies have already produced notable instances of what in CIA trade-speak has long been called blowback. While the Obama administration oversaw a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq (negotiated by his predecessor), as well as a drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan (after a major military surge in that country), the president has presided over a ramping up of the U.S. military presence in Africa, a reinvigoration of efforts in Latin America, and tough talk about a rebalancing or “pivot to Asia” (even if it has amounted to little as of yet).
The White House has also overseen an exponential expansion of America’s drone war. While President Bush launched 51 such strikes, President Obama has presided over 330, according to research by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Last year, alone, the U.S. also engaged in combat operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Recent revelations from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden have demonstrated the tremendous breadth and global reach of U.S. electronic surveillance during the Obama years. And deep in the shadows, Special Operations forces are now annually deployed to more than double the number of nations as at the end of Bush’s tenure.
In recent years, however, the unintended consequences of U.S. military operations have helped to sow outrage and discontent, setting whole regions aflame. More than 10 years after America’s “mission accomplished” moment, seven years after its much vaunted surge, the Iraq that America helped make is in flames. A country with no al-Qaeda presence before the U.S. invasion and a government opposed to America’s enemies in Tehran now has a central government aligned with Iran and two cities flying al-Qaeda flags.
A more recent U.S. military intervention to aid the ouster of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi helped send neighboring Mali, a U.S.-supported bulwark against regional terrorism, into a downward spiral, saw a coup there carried out by a U.S.-trained officer, ultimately led to a bloody terror attack on an Algerian gas plant, and helped to unleash nothing short of a terror diaspora in the region.
And today South Sudan — a nation the U.S. shepherded into being, has supported economically and militarily (despite its reliance on child soldiers), and has used as a hush-hush base for Special Operations forces — is being torn apart by violence and sliding toward civil war.
The Obama presidency has seen the U.S. military’s elite tactical forces increasingly used in an attempt to achieve strategic goals. But with Special Operations missions kept under tight wraps, Americans have little understanding of where their troops are deployed, what exactly they are doing, or what the consequences might be down the road. As retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, has noted, the utilization of Special Operations forces during the Obama years has decreased military accountability, strengthened the “imperial presidency,” and set the stage for a war without end. “In short,” he wrote at TomDispatch, “handing war to the special operators severs an already too tenuous link between war and politics; it becomes war for its own sake.”
Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11. Strangely enough, those at the other primary attack site that day, the Pentagon, seem not to have learned the obvious lessons from this lethal blowback. Even today in Afghanistan and Pakistan, more than 12 years after the U.S. invaded the former and almost 10 years after it began conducting covert attacks in the latter, the U.S. is still dealing with that Cold War-era fallout: with, for instance, CIA drones conducting missile strikes against an organization (the Haqqani network) that, in the 1980s, the Agency supplied with missiles.

Without a clear picture of where the military’s covert forces are operating and what they are doing, Americans may not even recognize the consequences of and blowback from our expanding secret wars as they wash over the world. But if history is any guide, they will be felt — from Southwest Asia to the Mahgreb, the Middle East to Central Africa, and, perhaps eventually, in the United States as well.
In his blueprint for the future, SOCOM 2020, Admiral McRaven has touted the globalization of U.S. special ops as a means to “project power, promote stability, and prevent conflict.” Last year, SOCOM may have done just the opposite in 134 places.
Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. He is the author/editor of several other books, including The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyber Warfare, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Tom Engelhardt), The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives and The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan. Turse is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. His website is Nick Turse.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, or Facebook.

By Suresh Shah

18 January, 2014

 

It must have happened to you, as it continues to happen to me. You tell yourself when you get out of bed in the morning, ‘I’m going to be good today. I’m not going to react to any provocation. I’ll keep my cool. I’ll maintain my patience. I won’t back-bite anyone. I won’t gossip today. I’m going to behave as God wants me to.’

Sometimes, it strikes you that there simply is no other way to maintain your sanity but to be good. You know that this is what God wants. You know that this is the way to win God’s pleasure. Being good is the way, you know, if you want to succeed in the Hereafter. You know full well that if you are good, you’ll feel good, too. You know that being good to others is a means for being good to yourself as well.

On such occasions, it also strikes you how disgusted you feel with yourself after you’ve burst out at someone who you think has belittled you; how terrible you feel after you’ve snubbed someone whose done something you don’t like; how you hate yourself for gossiping about someone’s foibles! You know all this isn’t at all good for you. God doesn’t like such things. You know, too, that every such action will work against you in the Hereafter. And you also know that the feelings that such reactions generate within you—hate, anger, tension, irritation, fear and so on—only make you even more miserable than you already are. And so, you tell yourself, ‘I’m not going to lose my temper or get irritated with anyone today. I’m not going to gossip or criticize people or revel in their faults. I’ve done with all this—it’s done me no good, and has only made me miserable. I’m going to turn a new leaf!’

But it isn’t enough just to say that you want to be good.  After all, and contrary to what we think, being good isn’t as easy as we think it is! We have to demonstrate the sincerity of our resolve to be good at every single moment, when, confronted with the choice of being good or bad, we consciously choose the former, even if this means having to defy the urgings of the ego.

Being good isn’t really as easy as it sounds!

*

That day, I had resolved to be good all day. I was tired of succumbing to nasty thoughts about others, of indulging in petty gossip, of wasting time making polite conversation, of wallowing in self-pity and agonizing over the past. And so, I decided I was going to be as good as I could that day, and even for the rest of my life!

I have to admit I was reasonably good for much of the day, or so I’d like to think. I didn’t speak very much unnecessarily. I kept myself busy in office. I tried not to indulge in idle chatter. I overlooked minor irritants. If someone wanted to gossip, I made an effort to change the topic. If someone said something silly, inane or provocative, I overlooked it. I smiled and wished people I met that day. And I felt all so very good with myself!

It had been, on all counts, a wonderful day! But that evening, as I curled into bed after a day of being reasonably good, I couldn’t get to sleep! From the room just above mine, I heard the sound of water dripping. Now, I’m a very light sleeper, and the slightest sound, even of a leaking tap, can keep me awake almost all night.

And then do you know what happened? Well, I can’t tell you everything. I certainly won’t tell you all the awful things I thought about the lady whose room the noise was coming from—such terrible things, and that, too, on a day when I had resolved to be so very good! Ugh! If you knew all that I thought about the poor thing, you’d really, really hate me!

I tossed about in my bed as my irritation rapidly mounted. The sound of the water was driving me mad! I tried to reason with myself, ‘You must not react to this provocation. If you do, you’ll be going back to your old crabby, selfish self. This is a test of the sincerity of your resolve to not to get provoked, to not let things or people irritate you. It is a test of your patience and your compassion and tolerance. Don’t worry, you’ll soon be fast asleep and the sound won’t trouble you anymore.’

But you know how cunning the ego is. You know how skillful it is in being able to invent the most alluring excuse to justify the most appalling behavior. And that’s just what my ego did that night, as it launched a full-scale attack on my conscience and insisted:

‘What nonsense is this? How dare this woman behave like this? She’s got no manners at all! No civic sense! And she is so very irritating! She’s absolutely good-for-nothing! I have to tell her off for own good. She’ll learn how to behave, and that’s good for her!’

Thinking such (and worse) thoughts, I leapt out of my bed and rushed upstairs, forgetting completely all the principles that I had resolved to observe that day—equanimity, patience, love, respect, tolerance, non-provocation and so on. I rudely knocked on the lady’s door, and when she opened it, I gave her a piece of my mind. I didn’t shout my head off, but I was caustic and curt. The poor thing was shocked, hurt and deeply apologetic, and you won’t know what sadistic joy I derived at that pathetic sight.

I went back to my room, very pleased with myself for telling the woman off. It was as if I had scored a major moral victory. The tap stopped leaking, and I drifted off to sleep.

But the next morning, I can’t tell you how horrible I felt about myself. How I regretted having lost my cool the night before! How I hated myself for being so weak, for giving up trying to be good over just a minor inconvenience! How I agonized for having insulted my neighbour and for taking malicious pleasure in putting her down! How I berated  myself for being such a miserable, selfish, mean hypocrite—with all my talk about God, the Hereafter, kindness and goodness and ethics, and yet caring nothing at all for thinking terrible thoughts about my neighbour and lambasting her over such a trivial matter as a leaking tap!

Later that day, when I met my neighbour, I profusely apologized for my awful behavior. It was really wrong of me to scold her like that, I said. I pleaded with her to forgive me. She laughed it off—she had the large-heartedness to do so. That didn’t make me feel much better, though. My falling in my own estimation was the punishment I had to suffer for my despicable behavior.

*

Whoever said that being good was easy?

 

By Chandra Muzaffar

When a nation with a multi-ethnic population is confronted with a serious economic challenge, it has to be concerned about how it will impact upon ethnic relations. This is especially true when the ethnic situation, prior to the economic challenge, is already problematic.

The rising cost of living in our country could have repercussions for ethnic relations in at least two ways. One, the tendency to put the blame for any escalation in the price of goods and services on one party or the other — rather than looking at the total picture — could result in a segment of the people criticising the mainly Malay government for their plight while another segment may choose to condemn a largely Chinese business community for their difficulties. These are perceptions which exacerbate the ethnic situation. Two, sometimes, elites, unable to arrest the decline of the economy, may deliberately manipulate ethnic fears in order to divert the people’s anger and perpetuate their own power.

We should not fall into this ethnic trap. Responsible men and women in all spheres of Malaysian society should turn around this economic challenge into an opportunity to improve ethnic relations. There are perhaps 10 steps that can be taken in that direction.

One, all communities in Peninsular Malaysia and Sabah and Sarawak should be mobilised to combat the rising cost of living. It should be a truly multi-ethnic mobilisation which would identify the causes of the rising cost of living and act firmly and expeditiously to overcome the problem.   If say profiteering and cartels have aggravated issues of demand and supply, effective punitive measures should be implemented immediately.  This would also be the right occasion to initiate a nation-wide ‘people’s price-alert movement’ which would be a powerful pressure group against unscrupulous traders.

Two, this would also be the time to reiterate our commitment to a policy that extends support and assistance to everyone regardless of ethnicity, based upon needs. This should apply not only to poverty eradication, health-care and welfare— where it already exists — but also to education, housing, bank-loans and the like.

Three, there should also be a concerted effort to reduce the gap between the ‘have-a-lot’ and the ‘have-a-little’ which is essentially a socio-economic challenge. Its resolution will impact positively upon inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic disparities.  Implementing a minimum wage policy; providing facilities for the poor such as child-care centres and kindergartens, IMalaysia clinics and IMalaysia shops; and creating a comprehensive public transport system are commendable moves but much more has to be done. Building more affordable houses for the middle and lower income groups would be one such endeavour. At the same time, incomes will have to rise further for 60 to 70 percent of the working population while emoluments for the top brass which are sometimes astronomical will have to be reviewed.

Four, as part of this attempt to close the gap between the very affluent and those who are struggling to make ends meet, the level of education and skills of 75 percent of the Malaysian workforce who possess only a School Certificate (SPM) and other lower qualifications will have to be improved considerably. Here again, the effort should be multi-ethnic. Polytechnic education would be a critical component of this elevation of skills.

Five, raising skills and educational standards should go hand in hand with massive investments in scientific research. In spite of current economic difficulties, the budgetary allocation for research and development (R & D) should continue to increase. This is what will spur invention and innovation in the future. The private sector which has been lagging behind in this field should play a bigger role in this national mission that should transcend ethnic barriers.

Six, it follows from this that recognising and rewarding ability and excellence, regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation, should be an integral aspect of the national psyche. This is a principle that should be observed in both the public and private sectors. The national economy as a whole will benefit from this. Needless to say, it will undoubtedly result in greater inter-ethnic harmony.

Seven, recognising ability is linked to some extent to the question of recruitment and promotion in the public sector. In the last four or five years there has been a more earnest drive to recruit more non-Malays and non-Muslim Bumiputras from Sarawak and Sabah into the public services. The mobility they enjoy, as provided for in the Federal Constitution, should enable them to hold high positions of responsibility. At the same time, Chinese captains of industry and leading entrepreneurs should demonstrate a commitment to strengthening entrepreneurship among Malays and other non-Chinese Malaysians through mentorship programmes and by facilitating accessibility to their business networks. This has not been done in an organised, systematic manner by any Chinese entity since Merdeka.  And yet this is the sort of cooperation that will reduce the distance between communities.  It underscores the principle of reciprocity which is a fundamental prerequisite for harmony in any multi-ethnic society.

Eight, indeed, the nurturing of reciprocity and other such positive values will be a tremendous boost to inter-ethnic relations. We have not done enough to harness the potential of values such as cooperation, respect and integrity — or reciprocity for that matter— in our economic policies and programmes. Leaving aside the tokenism in corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes, economic activities, by and large, have been dominated by the credo of profit maximisation and crass competition. The present economic situation is a good time as any to explore alternatives. Perhaps cooperatives which can also be a conduit for promoting multi-ethnic sharing may be a way of evolving new economic structures in the future that are more orientated towards justice and compassion.

Nine, it is because values that would ennoble the economy and society have not been accorded the importance they deserve that a lack of professionalism and a lack of competence appear to be more glaring today than in the past.  This is obvious in the Auditor-General’s annual reports on the performance of government departments and public agencies. Malaysians of all shades and stripes are incensed by disclosures of wastage, leakages and extravagance in these reports. They are also united in wanting the Government to punish the culprits as harshly as the law would permit — and yet the response of the authorities has always been below public expectations.

Ten, Malaysians are also united, irrespective of ethnicity, in their desire to see the government eradicate corruption — a scourge that is again a reflection of the weakening of society’s moral fibre. While institutional arrangements and processes directed at fighting this scourge are stronger than ever before, elite corruption remains a challenge. Unless there is more transparency and accountability — honest adherence to the culture of open tenders for instance — corruption will continue to make a mockery of the nation’s professed commitment to the virtues of integrity. Worse, it will continue to erode the trust that the ruled must have in their rulers if governance is to lead to justice and peace.

Indeed, it is trust between rulers and the ruled that will enable us to overcome the challenge posed by the rising cost of living just as it is trust that will ensure harmonious inter-ethnic relations.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Yayasan 1Malaysia.

Petaling Jaya.

17 January 2014.

By Dr. Ghoncheh Tazmini

Iranian Heritage Foundation, Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow

Centre for Iranian Studies,

London Middle East Institute,

SOAS

16, January 2014

 

A plethora of analyses have surfaced making wild assumptions about President Rouhani’s diplomatic manoeuvres, translating his diplomatic overtures as reminiscent of Gorbachev’s era of Perestroika and Glasnost. Is Rouhani an Iranian Gorbachev? asks Jochen Bittner of Die Zeit. The Wall Street Journal asks the same question, featuring an article titled, ‘Is Rouhani the New Gorbachev?’ Meanwhile, Stephen Kotkin writes about ‘Rouhani’s Gorbachev Moment’ in Foreign Affairs.

Such analogies shed very little light on the direction of Iran’s political evolution. While Rouhani is comparable to Gorbachev in the sense that he too, is an agent of change, the exercise of reforming Iran presents a more complex picture. Not only are such comparisons gratuitously redundant (when Mohammad Khatami launched his reform programme, numerous works sprung up comparing the reformer with the former Soviet leader), they are often dangerously subjective in nature.

In ‘Why the Democratic Party is Doomed’, for example, Richard Miniter compares President Barak Obama to Gorbachev in an effort to betray a conviction that the U.S. is in a state of decline under a leader who is accelerating that trajectory through his efforts at reform. Walter Russell Mead raises a similar concern in ‘The End of History Ends’, in American Interest, in which he warns of Obama’s Gorbachev-like attempt to correct the country’s past. Mead argues that Obama’s attempts to disengage from the over-commitments of the George W. Bush presidency have emboldened what he calls the Central Powers: Russia, China and Iran. With the U.S. in seeming retreat, these rivals ‘think they have found a way to challenge and ultimately to change the way global politics work’.

Analogies with Gorbachev are often carried out disparagingly and are very much pejorative. After all, although Gorbachev was attempting to change an outmoded, outdated system, the country over which he ruled disintegrated. The fact is that Gorbachev remains in the mind of his compatriots a tragic figure whom some deify and others hate; some see him as a great reformer, others as a perfidious destroyer. For many Russians, Gorbachev’s legacy was national humiliation, or what President Vladimir Putin has called the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’.

The other problem with such comparisons is the element of wishful thinking. For the West, Gorbachev was the visionary leader who tackled the economic and political failings of the Soviet Union’s authoritarian system, introducing an era that ended Communist oppression, brought down the Berlin Wall, ended the Cold War and expanded Europe’s community of democracies. Mainstream media and Iran bashers and detractors often make these dubious analogies in the hope that some Gorbachev-esque character will suddenly turn up to unravel the Islamic Republic at the hems. Others make cynically protestations, contending that in fact, Rouhani is No Gorbachev! And that he is really is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, cut from the same cloth as the conservative, traditional establishment and is therefore, alas, unlikely to bring the country to disintegration!

This short expository underscores the problem with Gorbachev-analogies. Either way you look at it comparisons with Gorbachev are bound to be riddled with bias and partiality. Iran’s pathway to reform is far more complex and variegated. Since the revolution, the political inclination of Iranian heads of state has been very much determined by the prioritisation, instrumentalisation or sometimes the interplay of these four principles: (1) Republicanism: This element was central to Mohammad Khatami whose reform movement symbolised an effort to consolidate the rule of law and to stimulate civic activism; (2) Development: This was the cornerstone of Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani’s presidency, which focussed on reviving the post-war economy; (3) Justice: The pursuit of justice was one of the main pillars of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s political platform, which was founded on tackling poverty and corruption, and redistributing wealth; and (4) Independence: The emphasis is on resistance of foreign encroachment. This was the goal of the father of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini with the revolutionary slogan – ‘Esteghlal (independence), Azadi (freedom), Jomhouri Islami (Islamic Republic)’.

Iran stands at the intersection of multiple factors that shape its political reality. President Rouhani’s challenge is to strike a balance between these factors and to achieve a balance point or the ‘nokhteh taadol’. If we are to understand Iran’s transformation, we need a solid understanding of ideational factors and historical legacy rather than simplistic and platitudinous analogies made by so-called serious analysts. The task ahead of the President means finding a balance between continuity and change – this is a challenge Gorbachev never lived up to, love him or loathe him.

Dr. Ghoncheh Tazmini is a Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow at the Iranian Heritage Foundation. She is a Just member.

By Fred Mazelis

03 January, 2014

@ WSWS.org

Lynne Stewart, the 74-year-old veteran civil liberties lawyer serving a ten-year term on trumped up charges of aiding terrorism, was granted “compassionate release” this week and returned to her home in New York City.

Stewart, who suffers from late-stage breast cancer, was finally released from federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas on New Year’s Eve. She returned to New York on New Year’s Day, where she was met at LaGuardia Airport by a crowd of family, friends and supporters, including her husband Ralph Poynter, two daughters, and several grandchildren. She will be living with a son in Brooklyn.

Lynne Stewart is well known in legal circles as a passionate defender of civil liberties and committed advocate for her clients. The charges against her stemmed from a technical violation on her part of prohibitions on communications between prisoners and the outside world. Stewart distributed press releases from the blind Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was convicted in 1995 of conspiracy to blow up several New York landmarks.

Stewart was indicted years later and did not stand trial until 2004. She was found guilty in February 2005 after a seven-month trial and jury deliberations that stretched over 13 days, in which a number of jurors reportedly held out for many days for acquittal.

The prosecution of Stewart was both a vindictive attempt to punish her for her militant advocacy and a transparent effort to intimidate other lawyers who take on the cases of unpopular clients. The government went so far in the campaign against Stewart as to lobby for a longer sentence when District Judge John G. Koeltl imposed a penalty of 28 months in prison. The Court of Appeals upheld the verdict but sent the case back to the lower court for re-sentencing, and Koeltl later lengthened the term to 10 years.

All of this was despite the fact that Stewart had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, shortly after her conviction. The breast cancer recurred in 2012 and has reportedly spread to her lungs and bones.

After the exhaustion of appeals, Stewart entered prison in November 2009. She thus served four years of her ten-year sentence. Last summer, Judge Koeltl refused to set her free on compassionate grounds because the federal Bureau of Prisons had not yet agreed to the request. Finally, Koeltl received a motion from the Bureau of Prisons this week based on a diagnosis of a terminal, incurable illness with a life expectancy of less than 18 months.

“The defendant’s terminal medical condition and very limited life expectancy constitute extraordinary and compelling reasons that warrant the requested reduction” in sentence to time served, said Koeltl’s order.

Although Stewart’s family had been hoping for favorable action, when it came it arrived on very short notice and she left the prison within a few hours. As Stewart said on her arrival in New York, she feared that the authorities would finally release her only when she had days or weeks to live, as they have with other prisoners. In the end, however, supporters of the imprisoned lawyer were able to win an earlier discharge.

Stewart’s release is a bittersweet victory under the circumstances. She was jubilant on her return to her family and appeared to be in reasonably good condition. Her family has plans for her to continue chemotherapy for her illness at New York’s Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Stewart, who has been disbarred as an attorney, said that she hoped to continue working on behalf of political prisoners.

By Bill Van Auken

03 January, 2014

@ WSWS.org

Heavy fighting erupted Thursday between Iraqi government troops and Sunni militants who seized large parts of Fallujah and Ramadi, two cities in Iraq’s western Anbar province that were at the center of the armed resistance to the US occupation a decade ago.

The renewed fighting came as figures released by the United Nations and other agencies indicated that the 2013 death toll in Iraq has risen to its highest level since the US military “surge” of 2007-2008.

The United Nations put the number of Iraqi civilian lives lost to violence last year at 7,818, with another 1,050 members of the security forces killed over the same period. Another estimate by the British-based group Iraq Body Count (IBC) put the civilian death toll at 9,475.

In releasing the UN’s estimate, the head of the UN mission in Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, said: “This is a sad and terrible record which confirms once again the urgent need for the Iraqi authorities to address the roots of violence to curb this infernal circle.”

Noting that last year’s death toll was roughly equivalent to that of 2008, Iraq Body Count pointed out that the 2008 figure “represented a decline in violent deaths (down from 25,800), whereas now it represents an increase; it has more than doubled since last year, when the recorded civilians deaths were 4,500.”

IBC added that “If current violence levels continue unabated throughout the coming year, then 2014 threatens to be as deadly as 2004, which saw the two sieges of Fallujah [by the US military] and Iraq’s insurgency take hold.”

The violence and fatalities have soared since last April, when the Shia-based government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered a violent crackdown on a Sunni protest camp erected in the northern town of Hawija, resulting in the deaths of roughly 50 civilians.

A similar crackdown on Monday against a protest encampment in Ramadi touched off the upheavals that left that city, Fallujah and several smaller towns largely in the hands of antigovernment insurgents.

In a crude attempt to defuse popular opposition, Maliki followed Monday’s dispersal of the protest camp, in which at least 10 people were killed, with an apparent concession to one of the protesters’ demands, announcing Tuesday that he was removing army troops from Sunni population centers in Anbar and leaving security to the regular police.

By Wednesday, however, heavily armed militants laid siege to police stations in Ramadi and Fallujah, releasing at least 100 prisoners, grabbing weapons stocks and burning a number of buildings. For the most part, the police abandoned their positions without putting up a fight.

Maliki then reversed his earlier decree and ordered the reinforcement of army units in the area, which prepared to lay siege to the towns, with artillery shelling parts of Fallujah by Thursday and air strikes reportedly carried out against both that city and Ramadi.

“Half of Fallujah is in the hands of ISIL [the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant] and the other half is in the control” of armed tribesmen, an Interior Ministry official told the AFP news agency. He said that in Ramadi there was a similar situation, with some areas controlled by ISIL and others controlled by tribesmen.

AFP quoted one of its correspondents in Ramadi as saying he witnessed “dozens of trucks carrying heavily armed men driving in the city’s east, playing songs praising ISIL” and carrying “black flags of a type frequently flown by ISIL.”

ISIL, a Sunni Islamist militia movement linked to Al Qaeda, has become one of the main components of the “rebels” fighting in the Western-backed war for regime-change in neighboring Syria. Having seized control of territory in northern Syria, it has proven capable of moving forces back and forth across the Syrian-Iraqi border to stage car bombings, assaults on military and police units, and sectarian attacks. Its stated aim is the establishment of a Sunni Muslim caliphate spanning both countries.

Maliki had seized upon the actions of the ISIL forces as a pretext for violently suppressing the wider Sunni protest movement that has been provoked by the Baghdad government’s sectarian bias, which has resulted in political marginalization and repression against the Sunni population.

This has included the persecution of Sunni politicians and their aides as “terrorists.” On the eve of the latest crackdown, security forces raided the home of parliament member Ahmed al-Alwani in Ramadi, arresting him and killing his brother and five guards. The move prompted the resignation of 44 members of parliament, most of them Sunni.

Issuing an ultimatum last month for the dispersal of the protest camp, Maliki described it as “the headquarters for the leadership of Al Qaeda.”

This self-serving government narrative seeks to obscure the fact that Maliki’s own sectarian policies have fueled bitter resentment within the Sunni population, driven by lack of services, indiscriminate “terror” raids, imprisonment of thousands without charges, and a de-Baathification program that has been used to expel public workers from their jobs.

The pretense that the government is simply engaged in a war on Al Qaeda terrorism has been utilized to secure backing from both Iran and Washington. The latter recently ordered shipments of Hellfire missiles and other advanced weaponry to the Iraqi security forces. Some of these missiles were reportedly used Thursday in the government assault on Fallujah.

New acts of violence were recorded elsewhere in Iraq as the military confrontation shaped up in Anbar. A suicide bomber detonated a pickup truck filled with explosives on a crowded commercial street Thursday night in Balad Ruz, about 45 miles northeast of Baghdad. At least 19 people were killed in the blast and 37 were wounded. Such attacks have become a daily occurrence, targeting both Shia and Sunni populations.

The Iraqi people are paying the terrible price for more than a decade of US imperialism’s predatory wars and colonial-style aggression. The eight-year American occupation claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, while imposing a political system that utilized sectarianism as a means of dividing and conquering the country’s population. The Maliki regime is the product of that system.

Now, the US-instigated sectarian civil war in neighboring Syria has provided a new and powerful impulse for civil war in Iraq itself, with Washington’s allies, Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf monarchies, providing material aid to Sunni Islamist fighters on both sides of the border, even as Washington itself continues to prop up the Maliki regime with military aid.

By R.B. Sreekumar

07 January, 2014

@ Countercurrents.org

An appeal for initiation of concrete measures for expeditious justice delivery and genuine relief and rehabilitation of 2002 communal riot victims in Gujarat state.

Respected Chief Minister Shri Narendra Modi ji,

The unequivocal expression of deep pain and anguish by you about limitless human agony during 2002 protracted communal riots in Gujarat , in your thousand word blog-post has evoked widespread hope, optimism and expectation among riot victim survivors and Government functionaries, who are still persecuted and victimized for performing their mandatory duties diligently. You had claimed that “I had to single handedly focus all the strength given to me by Almighty on the task of peace, justice and rehabilitation, burying the pain and agony I was personally wracked with” . But the ground reality is dismal and frustrating because much remains to be done to ensure establishment and consolidation of durable peace, adequate social cohesion and genuinely intrinsic rehabilitation and resettlement of riot victim survivors in the pre-riot conditions.

There are sound grounds and obvious reasons for doubting your declaration about your commitment to maintain public order and protect minorities in the days of communal disturbances in 2002. Firstly, “the mindless violence of 2002” (to use your terminology), on a ghastly scale, was enacted only in two Commissionerates (Ahmedabad and Vadodara cities) and 11 districts (in all there were 30 police administrative units – districts – in Gujarat in 2002 February – March). In the remaining 19 units (2 Commissionerates and 17 districts, there were no manslaughter in 11 districts and casualties were negligible in 6 districts and Commisionerates of Surat and Rajkot cities. Significantly, loss of lives in 2002 riots in these areas were lesser than deaths in the previous riots, particularly during post Babri Masjid demolition disturbances. The illustrative case is of Surat city, where nearly 300 people were killed in the post Babri Masjid demolition riots in 1992, while there were only 7 killings in 2002. The Commissioners of Police, District Magistrates and Supdts. Of Police in areas of nil or negligible violence had scrupulously implemented the Standard Operating Procedure(SOP) and taken effective administrative and operational measures, sending a clear message to rioters and activists of Sangh Parivar that police would not act as abettors and collaborators in the perpetration of anti-minority pogrom. This was a vital factor responsible for the lesser violence in these regions.

None can find any veracity and validity in your unsubstantiated claim that you had “to single handedly focus all the strength … on the task of peace, justice and rehabilitation”. In fact, many of the conscientious and effective law enforcers were transferred in the thick of riots (March 2002) by you and they were given shabby treatment afterwards. Transfer of Rahul Sharma (Supdt. of Police – Bhavnagar district), M D Anthany (Bharuch), Vivek Shrivastava (Kutch) and Himanshu Bhat (Banaskantha), in March 2002 was reportedly for not implementing the covert anti-minority agenda of the Sangh Parivar during the riots. These officers were also allegedly intimidated by the state government for not revealing anything specific about their operational strategies, grass root level tactics and purposeful micro-management methodology adopted for achieving durable maintenance of public order and total normalcy in their jurisdiction, to the JNC, probing into riots and other investigating bodies. So, except Rahul Sharma, none has revealed truth about their meritorious ways of handling riots to the JNC. Had they narrated the nuances of their success stories, the non-performers, abettors, facilitators of riots and enablers of criminals, who unleashed mass violence against minority (nearly 2000 people killed and 500 odd Islamic socio-cultural and religious monuments built from the 16 th century onwards were destroyed), could have been exposed and brought under the clutches of law.

By the end of year 2002, nearly 40,000 riot victim survivors were dwelling in sub-human habitats, without basic amenities, due to opposition from local militant Hindu sections to their resettlement in the pre-riot residential areas and intentional neglect by the state authorities, in violation of measures envisaged in Govt. regulations about rehabilitation and resettlement of disaster affected people. However, by the middle of 2013, about 30,300 persons were rehabilitated, thanks exclusively to the sincere efforts by the NGOs. Still, as on today, nearly 8,700 people are forced to stay in the unhealthy ambience, deprived of even standard basic facilities, normally extended to those below the poverty line by the Government. Media often has projected their plight, but your Government remained inhumanly insensitive to the pitiable and pathetic living conditions of these citizens. This is the painful naked and bitter truth about the status of rehabilitation of riot affected, in Gujarat , despite your articulation of compassion for them.

Honorable Chief Minister Sir, you should not hide under the deceptive self projected canopy of propaganda, by not recognizing the ground realities during riots because communication system through police and home department control rooms had provided you hourly situation reports about communal disturbances. Who will then believe your claim that you were not aware of many grass root level conditions?

Another deplorable policy of your government is towards your collaborators in mass action against minorities. Practically all chief facilitators of anti-minority massacre in administrative bureaucracy and police were rewarded by you with prestigious postings, during riots, out of turn promotions and important post retirement assignments, Nearly seven IAS officers and seventeen IPS officers were favored for their “loyalty” to you and being committed to your hidden agenda, and not to their oath to the Constitution of India. Significantly, practically all of them had avoided filing affidavits to the JNC regarding additional Terms of Reference dated 20 th July 2004 , on the role of CM and senor bureaucrats in the riots. No departmental action was initiated against them for their flagrant violation of SOP narrated in numerous governmental regulations, Gujarat Police Manual (GPM), judgments of higher judiciary and recommendations of judicial commissions.

In contrast is your persistent harassment and victimization of 3 IPS officers, namely R. B. Sreekumar, former DGP, Rahul Sharma, DIG and Sanjeev Bhat, suspended DIG, who have provided truthful evidence, since July 2002, about the culpable role by you, Govt. officials and the Sangh Parivar in riots, subversion of the Criminal Justice System (CJS), unprofessional investigation of riot cases by Gujarat police and fake encounters. On the basis of evidence by one of them the Central Election Commission (CEC) had deemed the data presented by the state government on the public order situation and rehabilitation of riot affected victims as false in its order dated 16 th August 2002 . The CEC had tasked the State government to satisfy certain conditions before deciding about the time schedule of state assembly elections in 2002, after rejecting the state government’s proposed election schedule. All these officers were superseded in promotion and numerous departmental proceedings were started against them from 2004 onwards. These disciplinary actions are not closed even after the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) in Ahmedabad had quashed charges against some of them. After the retirement of one of these officers in February 2007, a case of departmental proceeding is still vigorously pursued by the state government.

On the other hand, senior officers in the rank of Dy. SP to DGP and Taluka Magistrate to Chief Secretary, who had acted as enablers and abettors of rioters and impeded prompt and proper justice delivery to the riot victims, through numerous deliberate acts of omission and commission or criminal negligence of duties were not even asked to explain for their failure to implement SOP delineated in GPM, booklet on containment of communal riots by DGP Joseph, Central Govt. circulars captioned “Communal peace” etc.

Do these facts give any credibility to your affirmation in the blog about your empathy and sensitivity for the riot victims?

In this context, following the letter and spirit of Article 51(A) of our Constitution, I appeal to you to immediately initiate the following concrete administrative measures (most of them are mandatory) to establish that you are really considerate and sympathetic to the riot affected and to those government officials tortured and tormented by your government since 2004, for their “sin” of not supporting illegal and unethical covert plans of you and the Sangh Parivar against the minority population, in violation of the cannons of the Rule of Law.

•  In February 2012, Hon’ High Court of Gujarat indicted the Sate Government for its failure to protect Islamic monuments during the riots, and directed the government for their reconstruction. The total destruction of the famous Dargah of Sufi saint and Urdu poet, Vali Gujarati, located in front of Ahmedabad Police Headquarters by brigands is an inerasable black mark on the image of Ahmedabad city police. Strangely, your Government instead of implementing the High Court orders had gone for appeal to the Apex Court…………. In this matter, acting in pursuance of your widely expressed regrets about riots, please withdraw the petition challenging the High Court orders and start rebuilding of all Islamic monuments destroyed by the Sangh Parivar-led rioters.

•  Secondly, constitute a Special Task Force (STF) for identifying and properly rehabilitating riot victim survivors who had become orphans and refugees in their own motherland – nearly 8700 persons are dwelling in unhealthy slums at the cost of their health, human dignity and socio – economic empowerment.

•  Thirdly, please constitute a team of officers from Police, Law and Home departments to probe into lopsided implementation of the Apex Court order of 2004 for reinvestigation of 2000 odd riot cases closed by Gujarat Police by not even issuing a statutory notice to the complainants. It was an unprecedented move by the Apex Court in the judicial history of India . Reportedly only less than 35 cases could be charge sheeted and in the rest the police had filed closure reports as in most of these cases main witnesses, even the complainants, who provided FIRs, had turned hostile. It is a shame on the CJS of Gujarat , particularly for the senior police officers, home and law departments and public prosecutors. So far, no action against police officers, who allegedly pressurized and intimidated witnesses to turn hostile for torpedoing these riot cases, was taken by the state government. Do not you find anything strange in the phenomenon of witnesses not supporting prosecution cases after giving truthful deposition initially in the riot cases investigated by Gujarat police, while such a trend is almost non-existent in major carnage cases investigated by the Apex Court appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT)? In SIT investigated cases, nearly 116 persons including a former state minister was convicted with life imprisonment for their culpability in anti-minority violence.

Reportedly, the witnesses had succumbed to the intimidation of police and did not support the prosecution case as the police had ……….intimidated them to support the accused, as a quid-pro-quo for their rehabilitation and resettlement in pre-riot areas and vocations. Recently, there is an instance of the State Home Minister (2011) convening a meeting of accused of fake encounter case with the State Advocate General, the Principal Secretary to the CM etc. for conspiring as to how accused in encounter cases can be saved from CBI action. Sir, can you prove your keenness for justice delivery and welfare to riot victims by fixing criminal or departmental liability and accountability of officers, in this matter, who had allegedly committed offences under sections 186 and 188 IPC and violated their charter of duties envisaged in Chapter 4 & 5 of GPM vol-III and other instructions regarding efficacy and professionalism of police officers. Will you venture to do this against officers, who had committed intentional professional lapses for helping the rioters from the majority community in their crimes, to prove your sympathy for riot victims?

•  Fourthly, initiate departmental action against DGP and senior officers in Home department, who deliberately did not act upon specific intelligence assessment reports by the State Intelligence Branch (SIB) about extensive subversion of CJS by functionaries at cutting edge level in police and specific suggestions towards curative action (reports dated 24-01-2002, 15-06-2002, 20-08-2002 and 28-02-2002 – Addl. Chief Secretary admitted that all these reports were shown to you – audio tape available). Your inaction affected the justice delivery to riot victims and had forced them to approach higher courts for correcting ills of CJS. The higher judiciary issued many interventionist orders for disciplining the Gujarat government. They are i) Transfer of 2 riot cases for trial to Maharashtra state, ii) Entrusting investigation of Bilkis Bano mass rape case to CBI, iii) Reinvestigation of 2000 odd riot cases improperly closed by Gujarat police, iv) Appointment by SIT to probe into 9 major carnage cases and complaint by Mrs. Zakia Jafri, widow of former Congress MP killed by rioters and so on. Are you not keen in disciplining and penalizing officials who brought shame and insult to Gujarat government, due to comments of Judiciary that the state officials acted like Neros during riots?

•  Fifthly take action against officials in police and home department who did not prosecute publishers and distributors of communally inciting materials, despite specific proposals by jurisdictional police officers and ADGP (Intelligence) in 2002. This inaction is in violation of rule 59(9) of GPM vol-III, Press Council Act, Prevention of Objectionable matters act etc.

•  Sixthly, please order departmental action against officers responsible for serious dereliction of duties violating provisions of CRPC, India Police Act 1861 and rule 271 and 272 of GPM vol-III , who were criticized by courts in their judgments on riot cases. There were severe strictures against bias of police officers towards the victims of riots from minority community in the judgment of the Special Court on Naroda Patia, Ahmedabad city massacre (96 people killed during curfew hours) and Dipla Darwaza (Mehsana district) mass murder cases.

•  Seventhly, please initiate departmental action against officials in police and executive magistracy, who permitted high voltage anti-minority violence during communal disturbances in 2002, in 9 districts and 2 Commissionerates, by not following scrupulously the SOP. Why mandatory supervisory duties on maintenance of law and order, investigation and prosecution of offenders were ignored by these hierarchically senior supervisory police officers?

•  Eighthly, take action against officers responsible for handing over dead bodies of 54 Hindus killed in Godhra train fire incident on 27 th February 2002 to the state VHP leaders ,…………… in violation of rule 223 of GPM vol-III and other governmental regulations

•  Ninthly, please initiate action against officers who did not submit affidavits on the second Terms of Reference to the JNC dated 20 th July 2004 and this default was in violation of notification by JNC dated 05-08-2004 .

•  Tenthly, please initiate action against officials in revenue, home and police departments for making false and misleading presentation to the full bench of the CEC on 09-08-2002 . The CEC had assailed this serious misconduct by state government officials in its order dated 16-08-2002 . The false data by the officials was relating to law and order situation, status of misplaced persons, refugee camps, relief and rehabilitation and so on.

•  Eleventh line of action by you would be to initiate action against all officials from DGP to the Chief Secretary, who avoided maintenance of minutes of meetings convened by DGP to the Chief Minister during the 2002 riots. How could follow up action on decisions taken in the meetings be monitored without preparing minutes?

•  The twelfth delinquent and culpable act is by DGP, who gave illegal written orders to ADGP intelligence for not reporting details of an anti-minority sensitive speech affecting the communal harmony by you in Sep 2002 in Mehsana district to the National Constitutional Body – the National Commission of Minorities. This action of DGP was in violation of rule 461 of GPM vol-III on charter of duties of SIB. Please initiate action against the delinquent officers.

•  The thirteenth guilty act is by two home department officials and Government pleader to the JNC relating to their intimidation and tutoring of a senior police officer, who was summoned by the JNC for cross examination, for speaking in favor of the Government and suppress information regarding governments……. incriminating role in the planning and execution of anti-minority violence in 2002. This misconduct would go against the letter and spirit of the Terms of Reference to JNC, Government instructions to all officials to cooperate with the JNC and the Notification by JNC dated 05-08-2004 . Please take action against the officers who had deviated from the framework of government instructions.

Your government do vigorously pursue disciplinary proceedings, prosecution and other acts of persecution against 3 whistle blower IPS officers – R. B. Sreekumar, Rahul Sharma and Sanjeev Bhat. But if your are committed to your emotional outburst in the blog about riots and are serious to give up your revengefulness against those who performed their duties for normalization of the situation, please take action to end all on-going process of victimization against these 3 officers and establish that you are neither vindictive and sadistic, nor you do nurture personal grudge against those who are critical of your actions.

The massacre of 2000 citizens in the genocidal violence in 2002 in Gujarat was like the disrobing of Maharani Draupadi, depicted in the great Indian epic of The Mahabharata. The proverbial Rule of Law in Gujarat was Draupadi and the architects of riots are in the position of i) Planners (senior Sangh Parivar leaders and political bureaucracy in the state government), ii) Organisers (middle level Hindu militants), iii) Ground level mobilisers of foot soldiers, resources and weapons (BJP leaders, MLA etc), iv) Facilitators and enablers (police and officers in executive magistracy in areas of high voltage anti-minority crimes and v) Perpetrators of ghastly crimes (about 116 persons from this category was convicted with life imprisonment). These deviants were fully aware of their duties. You must also be quite conscious of Raj Dharma. But the architects of 2002 violence did not move on the road map of goodness and harmony and they acted like Duryodhana and his cohorts. Duryodhana admitted, while he was sinking in the battlefield, to Lord Krishna that he knew what was righteousness but had never followed it. On the other hand he had knowingly taken the path of unrighteousness. II Gnanami dharmam na cha me pravarti | Gnanami adharmam na cha me nivarti ||. Those in the political and administrative bureaucracy, who remained merely inactive without helping the rioters were like Bheeshmacharya and other Maharathis in Kaurava court, who for selfish careerist reasons did not dare to stop molestation of Draupadi. Bheeshma had admitted that he was obliged to Kauravas for wealth (means position and power). The sloka in Bheeshmavadhaparva of the Mahabharata goes thus || Arthasya purushodasaha | Dasastvarthena kasyachit | Iti satyam maharaja | Baddhostharthena kauravey || (everybody is slave to urge for wealth (position and power) but wealth is never indebted to anybody. This is truth, Oh, Maharaja. I am obliged to Kauravas for wealth). You have written in the blog that you are inspired by the scriptures. This had prompted me to pen the above anecdotes from the epic and request you to do introspection as to how you and your partners in riots are analogous to the characters in the Mahabharata.

Your political rivals have characterized your expression of remorse about riots as an exercise of hypocrisy. My humble submission and appeal to you is for appreciating and accepting my above noted suggestions in this representation and take follow up action for their actualization. For implementing my proposals, you do not require any clearance form judiciary or the Union government. Moreover, such an empathetic gesture would be in tune with the fundamentals of Raj Dharma, which India ‘s scholar statesman – Atal Behari Vajpayee wanted you to adhere to. Let your words pass and your deeds prove.

The etymological import of the Sanskrit word “Raja” (ruler) is explained in Brahmandpuranam thus : The person who provides contentment to citizens (praja) is Raja – Prajanam ranjanath raja. Literary giant, Mahakavi Kalidasa wrote “The normal nature of a ruler is to make subjects happy – Raja prakurte ranjanath. Kamandakiya Nitisara (compilation of wisdom for rulers) in the chapter 5 – duties of king – slokas 82-83 caution the administrators to protect the citizens from “the favorites” (chamchas and sycophants) – || Ayuktakemyaschoremyah Paremyo Rajavallabhat | Pruthaviptilobhachcha prajanam pinjadha bhayam | Panchprakarampiyet dapohyam nrupatebhryam || (the subjects require protection against wicked officers of the king, thieves, enemies of the king, royal favorites (such as the queens, princess etc.), and more than all, against the greed of king himself. The king should secure the people against these fears). Will you continue to favor your favorites or implement my proposals? Since you get inspirational enlightenment from Indian scriptures as a Hindu Nationalist (as claimed by you in your interview with Reuters in July 2013), I am quite confident that you will accept my suggestions for giving amelioration to the riot victim survivors and unwarrantedly harassed officers.

In case you reject my suggestions and do not do anything to help the riot victims, any well-informed citizen in India will adjudge your expression of “pain” about riots as a mere soulless self-marketing drama, full of sound and fury without any substance and significance, merely for hoodwinking gullible secular sections of voters. By not apologizing and initiating any action to assuage suffering of riot victims and persecuted officials you can, perhaps, further consolidate your support base among the Sangh Parivar brain washed Hindu radicals. But sensible secular Indians will remain outside the ambit of your support base and they would damage the prospects of your securing the chair of the Prime Minister of India after the next Lok Sabha elections.

The immortal and basic holy treatise of Hinduism – The Bhagvad Gita, exhorted everybody thus “Let the shastras (laws) be your authority in deciding what you should do and what you should desist from doing” – chapter 16, sloka 24 – || Tatasmacchastram pramanam te karyakaryavyavasthitau | Jntva sastravidhanoktam karma kartumiharhasi ||. Therefore, there could not be any confusion or ambiguity in the further line of action to be decided by you to help the enfeebled, voiceless and orphaned riot victims and distressed government servants.

Kindly favor me with a reply on the follow up action being taken by you on the suggestions in this representation.

With respectful regards

Yours sincerely

R. B. Sreekumar

The writer is a a former DGP of Gujarat. He can be reached at

Email: rbsreekumar71@yahoo.com

Website:- www.harmonynotes.in

To,

Shri. Narendra Modi ji,

Hon’ Chief Minister of Gujarat State

Sachivalaya, Gandhinagar

Gujarat – 382010

Dr. Shrimati Kamalaji (for Kind Information)

Her Excellency The Governor of Gujarat State

Raj Bhawan, Gandhinagar,

Gujarat – 382020