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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During the same BBC documentary, called “Born under a bad sign”, two other Ministry of Health researchers discussed the unpublished study.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.”

31 May 2013

@ WorldTribune.com

LONDON — After two years of civil war, support for the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad was said to have sharply increased.

NATO has been studying data that told of a sharp rise in support for Assad. The data, compiled by Western-sponsored activists and organizations, showed that a majority of Syrians were alarmed by the Al Qaida takeover of the Sunni revolt and preferred to return to Assad, Middle East Newsline reported.

“The people are sick of the war and hate the jihadists more than Assad,” a Western source familiar with the data said. “Assad is winning the war mostly because the people are cooperating with him against the rebels.”

The data, relayed to NATO over the last month, asserted that 70 percent of Syrians support the Assad regime. Another 20 percent were deemed neutral and the remaining 10 percent expressed support for the rebels.

The sources said no formal polling was taken in Syria, racked by two years of civil war in which 90,000 people were reported killed. They said the data came from a range of activists and independent organizations that were working in Syria, particularly in relief efforts.

The data was relayed to NATO as the Western alliance has been divided over whether to intervene in Syria. Britain and France were said to have been preparing to send weapons to the rebels while the United States was focusing on protecting Syria’s southern neighbor Jordan.

A report to NATO said Syrians have undergone a change of heart over the last six months. The change was seen most in the majority Sunni community, which was long thought to have supported the revolt.

“The Sunnis have no love for Assad, but the great majority of the community is withdrawing from the revolt,” the source said. “What is left is the foreign fighters who are sponsored by Qatar and Saudi Arabia. They are seen by the Sunnis as far worse than Assad.”

By Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence

31 May, 2013

@Redersupportednews.org

A few evenings ago, as the sky began to darken here in Kabul, Afghanistan, a small group of the Afghan Peace Volunteers, (APVs), gathered for an informal presentation about WikiLeaks, its chief editor Julian Assange, and its most prominent contributor, Bradley Manning. Basir Bita, a regular visitor to the APV household, began the evening’s discussion noting that June 1st will mark the beginning of Bradley Manning’s fourth year in prison. Two days later his trial will begin, a trial which could sadly result in his imprisonment for a life sentence. June 1st also begins an international week of support and solidarity, aimed at thanking Bradley Manning. #ThankManning!

Basir believes that the vast majority of Afghans are among myriads world-wide who have Manning to thank for information they will need in struggles for freedom, security, and peace. He wishes that more people would find the courage to stand up to military and government forces, especially their own, and act as “whistle-blowers.”

I often hear Afghan individuals and groups express longing for a far more democratic process than is allowed them in a country dominated by warlords, the U.S./NATO militaries, and their commanders. In the U.S., a lack of crucial information increasingly threatens democratic processes. How can people make informed choices if their leaders deliberately withhold crucial information from them? Manning’s disclosures have brought desperately needed light to the U.S. and to countries around the world, including struggling countries like Afghanistan.

Hakim, who mentors the Afghan Peace Volunteers, recalled that Bradley Manning passed on documents that record 91,730 “Significant Actions,” or “SIGACTS” undertaken here by the U.S. /ISAF forces, of which 75,000 were released by WikiLeaks. These SIGACTS include attacks by drones, sometimes invisible drones, and night raids.

Our group turned to discussing the history of WikiLeaks, how it formed and how it now functions. Those most familiar with computers and internet explained the process of disclosing information by anonymously following a computerized route to a “dropbox.”

In fact, the Afghan Peace Volunteers themselves have been communicating with Julian Assange.

Last winter, Nobel peace laureate Mairead Maguire had stayed with them shortly before she traveled to London for a visit to Julian Assange. Through Mairead, they had sent Assange a letter of solidarity.

The APVs heard that Manning has been more isolated than Assange; they all shook their heads when Basir reminded them that Bradley Manning was initially in solitary confinement for eleven months.

Ghulamai thought through the ironic process of how governments designate some documents ‘secret,’ and how he would presume that the person who shares those secrets was a ‘criminal.’ But Ali said that governments chiefly hide ‘secrets’ from the public to maintain power. Hakim asked Abdulhai to imagine himself as the head of a government or of a large family. “If you are working for the good of the family or the state, would you need to do things secretly?” he asked.

“No,” Abdulhai replied. “If I have power, and I am truly working for the best interests of my people, I will not need to do things in secret.”

There was a keen conversation about who Bradley Manning was and what he did. Bradley Manning’s own words, which journalists had to actually smuggle out of his pre-trial hearing, described how Bradley’s mind had largely been made up by watching the secret video that he would come to release under the title “Collateral Murder:”

They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as quote “dead bastards” unquote and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers. At one point in the video there’s an individual on the ground attempting to crawl to safety. The individual is seriously wounded. Instead of calling for medical attention to the location, one of the aerial weapons team crew members verbally asks for the wounded person to pick up a weapon so that he can have a reason to engage. For me, this seems similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.

While saddened by the aerial weapons team crew’s lack of concern about human life, I was disturbed by the response of the discovery of injured children at the scene. In the video, you can see that the bongo truck driving up to assist the wounded individual. In response the aerial weapons team crew— as soon as the individuals are a threat, they repeatedly request for authorization to fire on the bongo truck and once granted they engage the vehicle at least six times. Together, the APVs watched the deeply disturbing “Collateral Damage” video itself. They were avid to learn what they could do to support and thank Bradley Manning. Yet they’re aware of the risks faced by people who organize public demonstrations in Afghanistan.

It’s far easier to stand up for Bradley where I live, back in the U.S. I hope many more of us will devote the time and energy we owe this young man for risking everything, as he did, to enlighten us and the world.

The Afghan Peace Volunteers are eager for ways to link with others worldwide to express thanks and concern for a remarkably brave and conscience-driven 25-year old man whose courage and whose light is so acutely needed in this darkening time. I’ve seen the fierce light of these young people and, knowing them, I’m certain that others will be seeing it too in the years ahead. Are we readying signals with which to answer them, are we preparing ways to show people like them, and like Julian Assange, and like Bradley Manning, that they are not alone?

By Mariam Karouny

31 May, 2013

@ Reuters

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia has prevailed over its small but ambitious Gulf neighbor Qatar to impose itself as the main outside force supporting the Syrian rebels, a move that may curb the influence of Qatari-backed Islamist militants.

Though governments in neither Riyadh nor Doha would provide official comment, several senior sources in the region told Reuters that the past week’s wrangling among Syria’s opposition factions in Istanbul was largely a struggle for control between the two Gulf monarchies, in which Saudi power finally won out.

“Saudi Arabia is now formally in charge of the Syria issue,” said a senior rebel military commander in one of northern Syria’s border provinces where Qatar has until now been the main supplier of arms to those fighting President Bashar al-Assad.

The outcome, many Syrian opposition leaders hope, could strengthen them in both negotiations and on the battlefield – while hampering some of the anti-Western Islamist hardliners in their ranks whom they say Qatar has been helping with weaponry.

Anger at a failure by one such Qatari-backed Islamist unit in a battle in April that gave Syrian government forces control of a key highway helped galvanize the Saudis, sources said, while Qatari and Islamist efforts to control the opposition political body backfired by angering Riyadh and Western powers.

The northern rebel commander said Saudi leaders would no longer let Qatar take the lead but would themselves take over the dominant role in channeling support into Syria.

“The Saudis met leaders of the Free Syrian Army, including officers from the Military Council in Jordan and Turkey, and have agreed that they will be supporting the rebels,” he said after attending one of those meetings himself.

Prince Salman bin Sultan, a senior Saudi security official, was now running relations with the Syrian rebels, backed by his elder brother, intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

Qatar also gave ground in the political field, accepting finally, late on Thursday, that the National Coalition should add a non-Islamist bloc backed by Saudi Arabia.

“In the end Qatar did not want a confrontation with Saudi Arabia and accepted the expansion,” said a source close to the liberals who were allowed to join a body which the United States and European Union want to become a transitional government.

The rebels, whose disunity has been a hindrance both in the field and in maneuvering for a possible international peace conference in the coming weeks, still face a huge task to topple Assad, who has long labeled his enemies Islamist “terrorists” and has his own powerful allies abroad, notably Iran and Russia.

Washington and EU powers have been reluctant to send arms, partly for fear of them reaching anti-Western rebels, including some aligned with al Qaeda. But Britain and France this week ended an EU arms embargo and tighter, Saudi supervision of supply channels could make it easier for London and Paris to start sending weapons if planned peace talks fail.

SAUDI CONTROL

Describing the shift in military supervision, several sources from the political and military leadership of the Syrian opposition and a Saudi source said that anyone, whether a state or among wealthy Arabs who have been making private donations to the rebel cause, would now need the Saudi princes’ approval over what is supplied to whom if they wish to send arms into Syria.

Qatari help was still expected. But a division between a Qatari sphere of influence on the northern border with Turkey and a Saudi sphere on the southern, Jordanian border was over.

“The goal is to be effective and avoid arms getting into the wrong hands like before,” said a senior Saudi source. “Saudi and Qatar share the same goal. We want to see an end to Bashar’s rule and stop the bloodshed of the innocent Syrian people.”

Qatar and Saudi Arabia are close allies in many respects: both armed by the United States, as Sunni Muslims they share an interest in thwarting Shi’ite, non-Arab Iran and its Arab allies – Shi’ites in Iraq and Lebanon and Assad’s Syrian Alawites. Both also want to preserve the absolute domestic power of the ruling dynasties and Western demand for their vast energy resources.

But their interests diverge, particularly over Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups viewed with suspicion by Western powers and in Riyadh. As in Syria, Qatar has delivered extensive financial and other support to Islamists who have risen to prominence in Egypt and Libya as a result of the Arab Spring pro-democracy protests of 2011.

Keen to punch above its weight in the world, independent of its dominant Saudi neighbor, Qatar hosts both a major U.S. air base and influential Islamists exiled from other Arab states; while preserving autocracy at home it has also aided liberals abroad, not least through its Al Jazeera satellite TV channel.

Saudi Arabia, whose king enjoys special status with the Sunni rebels as guardian of the holy city of Mecca, has long been suspicious of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the Cold War, it lent it support as a counterbalance to leftist Arab nationalism which threatened the traditional Gulf monarchies. But the U.S.-allied kingdom now sees political Islam as a graver threat.

Riyadh’s view of Syrian Islamist rebels is also influenced to some extent by its experience backing Arabs who flocked to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s; some returned home, like the Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, to wage a campaign of violence intended to topple the house of Saud.

“FINAL STRAWS”

Two events finally prompted Saudi Arabia and the United States to lose patience with Qatar’s Syrian role – one on the battlefield and another among the political opposition in exile.

In mid-April, Assad’s troops broke a six-month rebel blockade of the Wadi al-Deif military base on Syria’s key north-south highway, after a rebel brigade that was seen as close to Qatar broke ranks – exposing fellow fighters to a government counterattack that led to the deaths of 68 of their number.

A rebel commander, based near Damascus and familiar with the unit which buckled, said its failure had been due to its leaders having preferred using their local power to get rich rather than fighting Assad – a common accusation among the fractious rebels:

 

“Qatar’s bet … failed especially in the Wadi al-Deif battle. The regime managed to break through them after they became the new local warlords, caring for money and power not the cause,” the senior commander told Reuters. That battlefield collapse infuriated Qatar’s allies in the anti-Assad alliance.

“The straw that broke the camel’s back was the failure to take over Wadi al-Deif camp,” the commander said.

In diplomatic struggles, Western nations were angered by the appointment by the opposition in mid-March of Ghassan Hitto as the exiles’ prime minister. He was seen by Western diplomats as Qatar’s Islamist candidate and Hitto’s rejection of talks with Assad’s government was seen as a block to negotiating a peace.

For one Western diplomat familiar with deliberations in the Friends of Syria alliance that backs the rebels, choosing Hitto was “the final straw” in galvanizing the Western powers behind the move to rein in Qatar by promoting Saudi leadership.

“They wanted to clip the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood,” the Syrian commander from the north said.

For Saudi Arabia and its Western allies, concerned that the fall of Assad might mean a hostile, Islamist state, Qatar’s flaw was an enthusiasm for winning the war – as it helped Libyan rebels do in 2011 – without ensuring how any peace might look.

A Syrian rebel military source who has been close to Saudi officials expressed it thus: “Qatar tried to carve out a role for itself. But it did so without wisdom: they had no clear plan or a view of what would happen later. They just want to win.”