Archives: Articles

News wires are abuzz with the extraordinary allegation of an Iranian “plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the US ”.  In yet another bizarre twist,  according to Haaretz ,  a few months ago prior to the “plot”,  Saudi officials told Argentina about a possible plot against Saudi and Israeli embassies in Buenos Aires .  Curious as this seems, there is reason for this new rumor.

As many Iran experts dismiss the possibility of such an act,  the tried and tested method of rendering the most fantastic rumor credible is being applied.  For decades, the  British and later Americans knew well that the best way to give rumors credibility was to ensure that such rumors were repeated by various “friendly” countries.   Propaganda became ‘fact’ if repeated by different countries.   This  method of propaganda was a well-known and well played tactic of the Allies against Germany .

In dealing with Iran , the allegations of a plot take on a new life when repeated by various allies.    In this new scenario, there is an attempt to give these farfetched allegations credibility, not only are the Saudis and Israelis being involved, but also Argentina .    This reference to Argentina is particularly important.

In the past, Iran had been falsely (and without proof)  accused of the 1994 bombing of  the Jewish community center (AMIA) in Buenos Aires , Argentina .    What is revealing about the 1994 bombing and the accusations made against Iran , is the fact that the far more plausible leads were dismissed in order to promote the “ Iran guilty” narrative.

It has been a well-kept secret that an important project being carried out in the Argentine MIA building was a review of previously secret government  files that reportedly reveal how Nazis entered Argentina following World War  II helped by Argentine officials.  Hitler was not without long-term impact in Argentina .  The country’s military regime kept secret camps decorated with swastikas. [1] The review of the files had gone on for  two years, but had not been completed at the time of the bombing.

Speculation centered on the possibility that former Argentine government  and military officials, fearful of exposure, were responsible for the bomb attack.  In this regard, it is hard to dismiss the views of Rabbi Abraham Cooper,  associate director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles .   Cooper suggested that government and military figures may have sought to embarrass the Menem government because of its decision to release the files [2] .  This crucial lead was buried under the rubbles in order to promote the  foreign policy of Israel – demonize Iran .

Given the prior cooperation between the Israelis, the Argentines, and US to  promote a foreign policy agenda rather than establish the truth,  it is not surprising that once again the three players are involved with an additional, important new player – the Saudis.  Given the fact that the Saudis had previously agreement to allow Israel to use their airspace to attack Iran had met with condemnation,  this new “plot” would justify the Saudi decision to help Israel and the US wage yet another war on fellow Moslems.

By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

16 October 2011

Countercurrents.org

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich has a Master’s degree in Public Diplomacy from USC Annenberg and USC School for International Studies, Los Angeles . She is an independent researcher, public speaker, radio commentator, political columnist, and peace activist living in California .

[1] Esther Schrader, President of Argentina Apologizes for Nation’s Role as Haven for Nazis . Los Angeles Times. : Jun 14, 2000.  pg. 16

[2] The Christian Century.  Chicago : Jul 27, 1994.  Vol. 111

 

Occupy Wall Street, the ongoing demonstration-cum-sleep-in that began a month ago not far from the New York Stock Exchange and has since spread like wildfire to cities around the country, may be a game-changer. If so, it couldn’t be more appropriate or more in the American grain that, when the game changed, Wall Street was directly in the sights of the protesters.

The fact is that the end of the world as we’ve known it has been taking place all around us for some time. Until recently, however, thickets of political verbiage about cutting this and taxing that, about the glories of “job creators” and the need to preserve “the American dream,” have obscured what was hiding in plain sight — that street of streets, known to generations of our ancestors as “the street of torments.”

After an absence of well over half a century, Wall Street is back, center stage, as the preferred American icon of revulsion, a status it held for a fair share of our history. And we can thank a small bunch of campers in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park for hooking us up to a venerable tradition of resistance and rebellion.

The Street of Torments

Peering back at a largely forgotten terrain of struggle against “the Street,” so full of sound and fury signifying quite a lot, it’s astonishing — to a historian of Wall Street, at least — that the present movement didn’t happen sooner. It’s already hard to remember that only weeks ago, three years into the near shutdown of the world financial system and the Great Recession, an eerie unprotesting silence still blanketed the country.

Stories accumulated of Wall Street greed and arrogance, astonishing tales of incompetence and larceny. The economy slowed and stalled. People lost their homes and jobs. Poverty reached record levels. The political system proved as bankrupt as the big banks. Bipartisan consensus emerged — but only around the effort to save “too big to fail” financial goliaths, not the legions of victims their financial wilding had left in its wake.

The political class then prescribed what people already had plenty of: yet another dose of austerity plus a faith-based belief in a “recovery” that, for 99% of Americans, was never much more than an optical illusion. In those years, the hopes of ordinary people for a chance at a decent future withered and bitterness set in.

Strangely, however, popular resistance was hard to find. In the light of American history, this passivity was surpassingly odd. From decades before the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century through the Great Depression, again and again Wall Street found itself in the crosshairs of an outraged citizenry mobilized thanks to political parties, labor unions, or leagues of the unemployed. Such movements were filled with a polyglot mix of middle-class anti-trust reformers, bankrupted small businessmen, dispossessed farmers, tenants and sharecroppers, out-of-work laborers, and so many others.

If Occupy Wall Street signals the end of our own, atypical period of acquiescence, could a return to a version of “class warfare” that would, once upon a time, have been familiar to so many Americans be on the horizon? Finally!

What began as a relatively sparsely attended and impromptu affair has displayed a staying power and magnetic attractiveness that has taken the country, and above all the political class, by surprise. A recent rally of thousands in lower Manhattan, where demonstrators marched from the city’s government center to Zuccotti Park, the location of the “occupiers” encampment, was an extraordinarily diverse gathering by any measure of age, race, or class. Community organizations, housing advocates, environmentalists, and even official delegations of trade unionists not normally at ease hanging out with anarchists and hippies gave the whole affair a social muscularity and reach that was exhilarating to experience.

Diversity, however, can cut both ways. Popular protest, to the degree that there’s been much during the recent past — and mainly over the war in Iraq — has sometimes been criticized for the chaotic way it assembled a grab-bag of issues and enemies, diffuse and without focus. Occupy Wall Street embraces diverse multitudes but this time in the interest of convergence. In its targeting of “the street of torments,” this protean uprising has, in fact, found common ground. To a historian’s ear this echoes loudly.

Karl Marx described high finance as “the Vatican of capitalism,” its diktat to be obeyed without question. We’ve spent a long generation learning not to mention Marx in polite company, and not to use suspect and nasty phrases like “class warfare” or “the reserve army of labor,” among many others.

In times past, however, such phrases and the ideas that went with them struck our forebears as useful, even sometimes as true depictions of reality. They used them regularly, along with words like “plutocracy,” “robber baron,” and “ruling class,” to identify the sources of economic exploitation and inequality that oppressed them, as well as to describe the political disenfranchisement they suffered and the subversion of democracy they experienced.

Never before, however, has “the Vatican of capitalism” captured quite so perfectly the specific nature of the oligarchy that’s run the country for a generation and has now run it into the ground. Even political consultant and pundit James Carville, no Marxist he, confessed as much during the Clinton years when he said the bond market “intimidates everybody.”

Perhaps that era of everyday intimidation is finally ending. Here are some of the signs of it — literally — from that march I attended: “Loan Sharks Ate My World” (illustrated with a reasonable facsimile of the Great White from Jaws), “End the Federal Reserve,” “Wall Street Sold Out, Let’s Not Bail-Out,” “Kill the Over the Counter Derivative Market,” “Wall Street Banks Madoff Well,” “The Middle Class is Too Big To Fail,” “Eat the Rich, Feed the Poor,” “Greed is Killing the Earth.” During the march, a pervasive chant — “We are the 99%” — resoundingly reminded the bond market just how isolated and vulnerable it might become.

And it is in confronting this elemental, determining feature of our society’s predicament, in gathering together all the multifarious manifestations of our general dilemma right there on “the street of torments,” that Occupy Wall Street — even without a program or clear set of demands, as so many observers lament — has achieved a giant leap backward, summoning up a history of opposition we would do well to recall today.

A Century of Our Streets and Wall Street

One young woman at the demonstration held up a corrugated cardboard sign roughly magic-markered with one word written three times: “system,” “system,” “system.” That single word resonates historically, even if it sounds strange to our ears today. The indictment of presumptive elites, especially those housed on Wall Street, the conviction that the system over which they presided must be replaced by something more humane, was a robust feature of our country’s political and cultural life for a long century or more.

When in the years following the American Revolution, Jeffersonian democrats raised alarms about the “moneycrats” and their counterrevolutionary intrigues — they meant Alexander Hamilton and his confederates in particular — they were worried about the installation in the New World of a British system of merchant capitalism that would undo the democratic and egalitarian promise of the Revolution.

When followers of Andrew Jackson inveighed against the Second Bank of the United States — otherwise known as “the Monster Bank” — they were up in arms against what they feared was the systematic monopolizing of financial resources by a politically privileged elite. Just after the Civil War, the Farmer-Labor and Greenback political parties freed themselves of the two-party runaround, determined to mobilize independently to break the stranglehold on credit exercised by the big banks back East.

Later in the nineteenth century, Populists decried the overweening power of the Wall Street “devil fish” (shades of Matt Taibbi’s “giant vampire squid” metaphor for Goldman Sachs). Its tentacles, they insisted, not only reached into every part of the economy, but also corrupted churches, the press, and institutions of higher learning, destroyed the family, and suborned public officials from the president on down. When, during his campaign for the presidency in 1896, the Populist-inspired “boy orator of the Platte” and Democratic Party candidate William Jennings Bryan vowed that mankind would not be “crucified on a cross of gold,” he meant Wall Street and everyone knew it.

Around the turn of the century, the anti-trust movement captured the imagination of small businessmen, consumers, and working people in towns and cities across America. The trust they worried most about was “the Money Trust.” Captained by J.P. Morgan, “the financial Gorgon,” the Money Trust was skewered in court and in print by future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, subjected to withering Congressional investigations, excoriated in the exposés of “muckraking” journalists, and depicted by cartoonists as a cabal of prehensile Visigoths in death-heads.

As the twentieth century began, progressive reformers in state houses and city halls, socialists in industrial cities and out on the prairies, strikebound workers from coast to coast, working-class feminists, antiwar activists, and numerous others were still vigorously condemning that same Money Trust for turning the whole country into a closely-held system of financial pillage, labor exploitation, and imperial adventuring abroad. As the movements made clear, everyone but Wall Street was suffering the consequences of a system of proliferating abuses perpetrated by “the Street.”

The tradition the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have tapped into is a long and vibrant one that culminated during the Great Depression. Then as now, there was no question in the minds of “the 99%” that Wall Street was principally to blame for the country’s crisis (however much that verdict has since been challenged by disputatious academics).

Insurgencies by industrial workers, powerful third-party threats to replace capitalism with something else, rallies and marches of the unemployed, and, yes, occupations, even seizures of private property, foreclosures forestalled by infuriated neighbors, and a pervasive sense that the old order needed burying had their lasting effect. In response, the New Deal attempted to unhorse those President Franklin Roosevelt termed “economic royalists,” who were growing rich off “other people’s money” while the country suffered its worst trauma since the Civil War. “The Street” trembled.

“System, System, System”: It would be foolish to make too much of a raggedy sign — or to leap to conclusions about just how lasting this Occupy Wall Street moment will be and just where (if anywhere) it’s heading. It would be crazily optimistic to proclaim our own pitiful age of acquiescence ended.

Still, it would be equally foolish to dismiss the powerful American tradition the demonstrators of this moment have tapped into. In the past, Wall Street has functioned as an icon of revulsion, inciting anger, stoking up energies, and summoning visions of a new world that might save the New World.

It is poised to play that role again. Remember this: in 1932, three years into the Great Depression, most Americans were more demoralized than mobilized. A few years later, all that had changed as “Our Street, Not Wall Street” came alive. The political class had to scurry to keep up. Occupy Wall Street may indeed prove the opening act in an unfolding drama of renewed resistance and rebellion against “the system.”

Steve Fraser is Editor-at-Large of New Labor Forum, a TomDispatch regular, and co-founder of the American Empire Project (Metropolitan Books)

Four Security Forces Martyrs Laid to Rest Oct 25, 2011

DAMASCUS/ HOMS, (SANA) – Four security forces martyrs on Tuesday were escorted from Tishreen and Homs Military Hospitals to their final resting place in their villages and cities after they were targeted by the armed terrorist groups in Daraa and Homs.

Solemn processions were held for the martyrs as they were carried up on shoulders covered with the national flag and wreaths of laurel and flowers to the Military Band playing the music of the “Martyr” and the “Farewell.”

The Martyrs are:

•           Chief Warrant Officer, Ahmad Ibrahim al-Mohammad from Idleb.

•           Sergeant, Osama Dahi al-Ahmad from Lattakia.

•           Conscript, Ahmad Khalaf al-Dali from Raqqa.

•           Conscript, Jasim Abdul-Rahim Shihada from Raqqa.

Relatives of the martyrs expressed pride in their sons’ martyrdom who sacrificed their lives to defend their homeland in face of all the conspiracies targeting its steadfastness, dignity and pride.

They also called for prosecuting the criminals who are trying to undermine Syria’s security and stability, stressing that these criminals will fail to achieve their goals of undermining Syria’s stability and security.

R. al-Jazaeri /

Al-Shara Offers Condolences at the Funeral of Late Saudi Crown Prince Oct 26, 2011 

RIYADH, (SANA) – Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Emir Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz, First Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Defense and Aviation and Inspector General in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday was escorted to his final resting place in al-Oud Graveyard.

Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, senior Saudi officials and delegations representing more than 100 Islamic and Arab countries participated in the funeral ceremony.

After performing funeral prayers over the deceased Crown Prince, Vice President Farouk al-Shara, who attended the funeral representing President Bashar al-Assad, offered condolences to King Abdullah over the death of his brother.

Heads of the delegations also offered condolences to King Abdullah and the deceased’s brothers.

The body of the late Crown Prince arrived in Riyadh on Monday after the Saudi Royal Court announced Saturday his death abroad of an illnes.

English Bulletin

Five Terrorists Confess to Smuggling Weapons, Working among Armed Groups and Committing Criminal Acts in Jisr al-Shughour, Lattakia and Abu Kamal Oct 26, 2011

DAMASCUS, (SANA) – Terrorists Ala’a Ahmad Nanna and Walid Ahmad Nanna and confessed to joining armed terrorist groups in attacking the Military Security Detachment in Jisr al-Shughour in the northern province of and killing its personnel, in addition to smuggling firearms and ammo from Turkey.

Terrorist Mouayad Ghannam confessed to participating in smuggling firearms and ammo from Turkey to the Palestinian neighborhood in al-Ramel al-Janoubi in the coastal province of Lattakia, in addition to smuggling large quantities of fuel to Turkey.

The 26-year old terrorist Alaa Nanna, who lives in al-Raml al-Janoubi in Lattakia and works at al-Zain Company for Food Industry, confessed that he and someone called Hazem Faido from Khirbat al-Jouz village transported 50 pump-action shotguns to protesters in Jisr al-Shughour to help launch their attack on the Military Security Detachment there.

Alaa said that he took a gun and participated in opening fire on the detachment with 700 other armed men while a person called Mustafa Baydaq drove a bulldozer to transport barrels full of explosives into the detachment and then detonated them.

Terrorist Alaa confessed to cutting the hand and the leg of an injured soldier with a cleaver before Baydaq shot him dead with a machine gun.

The terrorist added that having had the detachment under their control, Baydaq used the bulldozer to put the dead security members into cars and threw some of them into the Orontes River, while other bodies were thrown in a waste landfill and in an unknown place.

He also confessed to transporting 50 pump-action shotguns to Lattakia City after Hazen smuggled them into Syria from Turkey.

Alaa said that he and the other armed men were shooting at the army personnel from the buildings’ roofs in al-Ramal al-Janoubi. “I shot an army member in his waist. He fell to the ground and I fled.”

In turn, the 32-year old Walid Nanna, Alaa’s brother, who was born in al-Sleibeh neighborhood and also works at al-Zain Company, confessed to participating in transporting pump-action shotguns in bags from the Turkish borders to al-Hamboshiyeh village to be later taken to Lattakia.

For his part, Mouayad Ghannam, who is from Idleb and lives in Lattakia, confessed to participating in smuggling firearms and ammo from Turkey using his microbus, in addition to smuggling large quantities of fuel in plastic containers to Turkey for 25 days in an area called Harf al-Aass.

He said that he smuggled firearms into Syria four times and each time the shipment included 12 pump-action shotguns.

Two terrorists Confess to Working among Armed Groups and Committing Criminal Acts in Abu Kamal City

Jalal-allah al-Moussa and Mahmoud Faiyyad Ghour confessed to participating with armed groups in perpetrating acts of killing, sabotage, arson and plunder in Abu Kamal city in the northeastern province of Deir Ezzor.

Jalal-allah al-Moussa, who sells cigarette packets at the public square in Abu Kamal, related how he participated in the protests in the city in exchange for money, saying that he once received SYP 10000 from some called Saddam al-Jamal in return for his participation.

He admitted dealing with an armed group who one Friday supplied him with weapons “which they might need to protect the protest.”

Al-Moussa added that he took part with the terrorist group’s members in attacking several government buildings in Abu Kamal.

“We set the city’s prison on fire and helped the prisoners out…We also burned the Security Forces center and the police stations and stole all their contents of confiscated stuff and firearms,” the terrorist explained.

He added that the armed group he was part of seized over 82 military firearms and other hunting weapons, released two prisoners and stole drugs from the prison.

“We also stole money from the Region’s Director’s house, incinerated the Court and the Civil Affairs Institution building and threw gas bottles at the Security Forces Center,” al-Moussa confessed.

He added that they also set up roadblocks which were later removed by the army when it entered the city after few days.

The terrorist Mahmoud Faiyyad Ghour from Abu Kamal city, who was released from prison on a general amnesty by President Bashar al-Assad, confessed to working among an armed group and committing criminal acts.

“On my way back home from prison, I was stopped by a guy who gave money for people to go out to the streets. He gave me a sum of money and I went on the protest,” Ghour said.

He admitted that he was part of an armed group of more than 1500 members, with whom he participated in burning the building of the Region’s Leadership Department, stealing cars belonging to the Security and Police Forces and shooting dead an army member in a narrow street who was on duty to protect citizens.

R. Raslan/ H. Said / H. Sabbagh

Health Ministry: Amnesty International’s Allegations on Abuse Practices against Patients at Hospitals False Oct 26, 2011

DAMASCUS, (SANA) – Ministry of Health refuted the allegations of the Amnesty International on patients undergoing abuse practices at the national hospitals in the cities of Homs and Baniyas as “untrue and full of contradictions and fabrications”.

In a statement published on Tuesday, the Ministry confirmed that till date no complaints of any assaults or any form of abuse practices committed by medical cadres or health staff against patients have been reported to the Ministry by any of the patients or of their relatives.

The statement stressed that there are laws and legislations that regulate the performance of medical cadres and preserve the rights of patients at health institutions and hospitals.

The Ministry denounced such allegations “which aim to distort the reputation of the Syrian health sector and create a state of lack of confidence in the national hospitals to serve biased purposes.”

The statement said that the Amnesty International’s report contradicted itself referring to abuses against patients at a private hospital, while at the same time highlighting the people’s fear to go to government hospitals and preferring to go to private hospitals.

The Ministry affirmed the high occupancy rate at the state hospitals, particularly at the emergency departments, noting that no decrease in the number of admitted patients has been reported all over the past period.

It stressed accessibility of high quality emergency medical services to all citizens, military or civilians, and regardless of their belongings.

It added that the medical teams’ mission is limited to diagnosing the cases and providing patients with immediate treatment.

Concluding its statement, the Ministry referred to the huge human and material losses the health sector has suffered due to the attacks launched by the armed terrorist and sabotage groups against doctors and medical cadres while performing their national duty in transporting injured people to hospitals.

It also cited the abduction of doctors and the sabotaging of several health establishments.

The Ministry said these attacks caused the martyrdom and the injury of dozens of high profile doctors and the damage of 60 ambulance cars and some parts of public hospitals which were burned by terrorists.

R. Raslan/H. Said

Danish Media Delegation Inspecting Hama City: Some Channels Broadcast Fabricated News on Syria Oct 26, 2011

HAMA, (SANA) – Members of the Danish media delegation, visiting the city of Hama, said on Tuesday that some channels are broadcasting fabricated news on the situation in the city.

The delegation, which consists of journalists from Danish newspapers and TV, said that they saw with their own eyes that life in the city is normal which is contrary to the reports broadcast by some foreign channels, pointing out that that they listened to some eyewitnesses in the city about the killing and mutilation crimes committed by armed terrorist groups against the army and security members.

For his part, head of the delegation, Mohammad Mahfoud, said the aim of this visit is “inspecting the reality of events and conveying it to the Danish and international public opinion”.

Governor of Hama, Dr. Anas Naem, reviewed the reality of events witnessed in the city and the sabotage acts carried out by armed terrorist groups, explaining to the delegation the role of the misleading channels in helping those groups through broadcasting fabricated news in advance to push the armed terrorists to go to the streets, block the roads and kill soldiers.

The Governor said Syria is an open country which has never disallowed any media means from seeing the truth on ground; however, some TV channels “see only what they want to see”.

F.Allafi/M.Eyon

Dr. Khaddour Recounts Details of His Abduction by Armed Terrorist Group Oct 26, 2011

HOMS, (SANA) – Dean of the Petrochemical Engineering Faculty at al-Baath University, Dr. Mohammad Khaddour recounted the details of his abduction by an armed terrorist group before authorities released him.

“It was 2:14 pm on October, 23rd. I was on my way to collage with my driver and a laboratory technician. The road was blocked by armed men who spread in bystreets. We tried to return but it was impossible since we were surrounded by them. They kidnapped us and took us to unknown place,” said Dr. Khaddour in an interview with the Syrian TV on Tuesday.

“After 40 hours and exactly at 8:30 pm we were released. I don’t know the place where we were seized since the armed men blind-folded us the moment they kidnapped us,” he added.

Dr. Khaddour’s wife expressed gratitude to the authorities and the people of Deir Ba’labeh neighborhood in Homs for their efforts in getting her husband released.

She also expressed appreciation for the army’s sacrifices to defend the homeland, urging the armed terrorist groups to drop weapons so that things can go back to normal.

R. Raslan/ H. Said

Syrian Human Rights Network Calls for Dealing Firmly with Acts of Violence and Kidnapping

Oct 26, 2011

DAMASCUS, (SANA) -Syrian Human Rights Network said that it backs the appeals of some families in regions which still witness acts of violence and kidnapping at the hands of armed terrorist groups that call on the competent authorities to deal firmly with them and deter the terrorists from perpetrating such acts.

“Acts of kidnapping and terrifying citizens are frequently happening in a way that frightens the civilians and families, and this requires work to restore calm in those regions like other Syrian areas,” The Network said in a statement SANA received a copy of.

It added that those who accuse the Army and security personnel of those acts, they are representing an agenda for foreign countries that don’t want Syria live in calm, but in chaos and destruction.

“It is enough for some sides that pretend to talk by the name of human rights, particularly the London-based the Syrian Human Rights Observatory and some external opposition to make themselves as a trumpet and spokesperson for those terrorist groups that devastate Syria, the land of peace,” the Network concluded.

Mazen

Youth Rally in Damascus to Express Support to Reform Program Oct 26, 2011

DAMASCUS, (SANA) – A group of Syrian youths organized a rally on Tuesday evening with the participation of Syria’s Scouts to express support to the comprehensive reform program led by President Bashar al-Assad, rejecting foreign interference in Syria’s internal affairs.

Heading from al-Qassa’ area toward Bab Touma Sqaure in Damascus, the participants chanted slogans greeting the Syrian army and condemning foreign interference in Syria’s affairs and calling the western countries and their misleading media to stop attempts to spread chaos and sow sedition among the Syrians.

They raised national flags and lit candles in honor of the homeland’s military and civilian martyrs.

R. Raslan/ H. Said 

Talks to Establish Syrian-Iraqi Free Trade Zones on the Syrian-Jordanian Zone’s Model

Oct 26, 2011

DARAA, (SANA) – Talks between officials from Syria and Iraq were held on Tuesday to discuss establishing joint Syrian-Iraqi free trade zones.

The discussions took place during a visit to the Syrian-Jordanian Free Trade Zone in Daraa governorate to inspect the work situation at the Zone and make use of its successful experience in attracting capitals.

Director General of the Syrian-Jordanian Free Trade Zone, Hassan Khairat, said the administration briefed the Syrian and Iraqi sides on the work mechanisms, procedures and legislations regulating the work of the companies included in the Zone to help them in establishing joint free trade zones on its model.

For his part, Director of al-Qaem Free Zone in Iraq, Fanar Hamad al-Ma’adidi, said “We are here today to benefit from the work mechanisms and the existing rules at Syrian-Jordanian Zone to lay out the law we are in the process of formulating between Syria and Iraq.”

The Syrian-Iraqi free trade zone to be established sets an example of partnership between the two countries in terms of creating economic blocs able to face potential changes in the economic system and a spring board for transit trade and exportation movement.

The Syrian-Iraqi trade exchange volume exceeded USD 2 billion in 2010 with expectations that it will increase to USD 3 billion this year in light of the agreements signed during the joint ministerial committee meetings last July.

R. Raslan/ H. Said

Source: The Embassy of Syrian Arab Republic in Kuala Lumpur.

Authorities Rescue Abducted Dr. Mohammad Khaddour in Homs, Arrest Armed Terrorists, Wound Others in Hama Countryside Oct 24, 2011

PROVINCES, (SANA) – The authorities in Homs on Sunday evening managed to rescue Dean of the Petrochemical Engineering Faculty at al-Baath University, Dr. Mohammad Khaddour, after a few hours of his abduction at the hands of an armed terrorist group.

Rector of al-Baath University Dr. Ahmad Mufid Sobh told SANA’s correspondent that Dr. Khaddour was freed and returned to his home.

Earlier, an official source told SANA that the terrorist group intercepted the car of Dr. Khadour and kidnapped him along with a person accompanying him.

An armed terrorist group opened fire on a minibus carrying civilians in Cairo Street in Homs on Sunday evening, martyring Zaynab Yehea al-Hallaq al-Shaar, a student at al-Baath University’s Science Faculty.

In Hama governorate, authorities arrested on two armed terrorists and wounded several others during a fire exchange as the terrorists were trying to attack an oil pipeline and steal fuel near Hama city.

An official source told SANA that three members from the competent authorities were injured during the fire exchange.

Meanwhile, the authorities in Ashira suburb in Homs city seized a weapon cache with several hand grenades, Molotov cocktails, AK-47 rifles and night-vision scopes.

Authorities seized a car loaded with vegetables and fruit with advanced weapons and explosives concealed among its cargo on Damascus-Quneitra highway.

Authorities managed to apprehend the driver and kill the accompanying gunman.

By English Bulletin

Terrorist al-Assaf Confesses to Attacking Government Establishments and Army Checkpoints, Kidnapping, Torturing and Murdering Citizens Oct 24, 2011

DAMASCUS, (SANA) Terrorist Muhannad Fouad al-Assaf, a leader of an armed terrorist group in Homs, confessed to attacking government establishments, kidnapping, torturing and murdering citizens, shooting and killing demonstrators to frame the army and security forces, attacking army checkpoints, and vandalizing public and private property.

In confessions broadcast by the Syrian TV on Sunday, al-Assaf said that he was a neighbor of Bilal al-Ghen who invited him to his home and asked him to join him in demonstrations, to which al-Assaf agreed.

Al-Assaf, a barber born in 1974, said that al-Ghen tasked him with collecting money from specific people, two of which gave him a total of SYP 300,000 while the third, a woman named Fadia al-Jandali, have him a box of medicine, a box of ammo and SYP 500,000 she collected as donations from rich people she worked for as a cook.

“Bilal would go out in his pickup truck on which he mounted a machinegun and opened fire on the Police Command. we also broke street and traffic signs. he told us that he will arm us and indeed he gave us weapons and I formed an armed group consisting of 9 people while Bilal’s group contained more than 20 gunmen,” he said.

“We began by opening fire on protestors, killing ten of them to accuse the government of killing them. we also attacked the Trade Union and the Workers Pharmacy which we attacked ten times. we attacked an infirmary in al-Khalidiya and opened fire on it,” al-Assad elaborated, adding that Bilal’s cousin Majed al-Ghen fired an RPG round at the infirmary.

“We attacked dozens of checkpoints in Homs. We attacked the school of Yousuf al-Azma in al-Khalidyah neighborhood. We were about 100 gunmen. we had AK-47 rifles and pump-action shotguns. Bilal had a machinegun. Bilal used to give me money to buy rifles, pump-action shotguns, RPG rounds, grenades and ammunition from ‘Khalid al-Zoubi’ from Tel Kalakh area.” He confessed.

He indicated that the weapons were coming to them through vehicles transporting vegetables from Lebanon, smuggling weapons from Beirut to Tel Kalakh to Bab Amro in Homs, then they would phone Bilal to receive them.

“In one operation, we smuggled 15 RPG rounds and about ten hand-made explosive charges. Bilal had two Thuraya satellite phones and several mobile phones,” al-Assaf said, pointing out that the group of Bilal al-Ghen abducted people and took them to a house in Old Homs, where they beat them up and tortured them before putting them in a car.

“I would drive this car to distant areas. We killed several people and dumped their bodies. I knew some of the people whom we killed. One of them was Ahmad al-Abrash and another was called Bashar. I was among the group that killed al-Abrash,” he said.

On the attack on the Homs Police Command, al-Assaf said “Bilal phoned Abdul-Minim Kolko, AKA Abu Hassan, then Bilal asked us to go by car to observe if there are nearby army or law-enforcement personnel. Bilal then went in his pick-up truck with a machinegun mounted on it and opened fire on the Police Command along with his cousins.”

He concluded that “Once, we attacked the Police Command with grenades and RPG rounds. Bilal’s group also killed a policeman at night on Hama Road.”

By M. Nassr / H. Sabbagh

Academics & Jurists: Formulating New Constitution Draws General Outline for Transitioning into a Modern, Democratic Country Oct 24, 2011

DAMASCUS, (SANA)

A number of academics, jurists, politicians and various social figures said that the presidential decision on forming a committee to prepare a new constitution for the country comes in response to the Syrians’ aspirations and hopes, constituting a starting point for transitioning into a modern, democratic country serving as a role model in the region.

In a statement to SANA, Dean of Damascus University’s Law School Dr. Mohammad Wassel said that the decision to form the committee is part of the reforms announced by President Bashar al-Assad and meets the requirements of comprehensive change since the constitution forms the basis for the ruling system and the country’s policies and principles, in addition to guaranteeing basic rights and liberties.

Wassel stressed the need for the constitution to guarantee freedom and rights on the bases of equal opportunities and the rule of law.

In a similar statement, head of the National Initiative of Syrian Kurds Omar Osi said that formulating a new constitution is the most important if the reform steps and decrees, saying that it should have a positive impact on economy.

For his part, Syrian Human Rights Network (SHRN) spokesman Ahmad al-Khazem said that the SHRN views the forming of the committee as a positive and constructive step the optimal expression of popular democracy.

In turn, lawyer Fayssal Surour said that the decision marks the beginning of a new stage, with the new constitution helping to bolster the development of citizens’ rights to good life and self-expression.

Authorities arrest terrorists and seize weapons in different Syrian regions

DAMASCUS, DARAA, (SANA)-Competent authorities on Monday seized a Hyundai Truck loaded with weapons and explosives on Damascus-Quneitra Highway at Sasa’a region.

Upon suspicion of the car, covered by vegetables and fruits, the driver rejected to stop for verification, his companion shot fires at the security personnel.

Later, the security members responded to the fires and killed the driver’s fellow and arrested the driver while investigation is underway to know the source of weapons.

The seized weapons include 15 Russian rifles, 13 pump-action and 3 M16 guns, 4 RPG, advanced snipers, explosives and different ammunitions.

Meanwhile, in Daraa, security forces arrested several members of an armed terrorist group at a farm in Tseil town, seizing a big quantity of ammunitions, weapons and modern communication sets.

The weapons are different machine guns, one of them an Israeli made, rifles, pump-action guns, RPGs and hand-made bombs. Competent authorizes in Daraa also dismantled two hand-made explosives, prepared to be bombed on Nawa-Tseil highway.

Competent Authorities Detect Phone Call between Terrorists

The competent authorities detected a phone call between two terrorists planning to dispatch gunmen to open fire at protesters and citizens in Homs.

Terrorist Muhammad al-Kurdi, who lives in the old al-Wa’r neighborhood, says to the terrorist Ahmad al-Hussein from al-Khalidiyyeh neighborhood in the phone call broadcast by the Syrian TV that Adel al-Zir gave his group a white Serato car to open fire at the protesters in al-Insha’at neighborhood after the black Kia Rio car, which opened fire at protesters, disappeared.

In the phone call, Al-Kurdi demands that al-Hussein inform his group in al-Insha’at about the matter so as to be alarmed.

By Mazen/M. Ismael

Uncle of Martyr Muhammad Kabbani Refutes Claims of Armed Groups

HOMS, (SANA)_Abdulhamid Kabbani, Uncle of martyr Muhammad Kabbani who was martyred yesterday after being kidnapped by a terrorist group in Idleb, related to the Syrian TV on Monday the details of the crime.

Kabbani said ”Muhammad was in the company of friends at an Internet café when five people entered and asked for his ID card, then they dragged him outside the café and beat him to death.”

Kabbani refuted the claims of the armed terrorist groups that Muhammad was killed by the security forces, affirming that it was an armed terrorist group who committed the crime.

By M. Ismael

Six Army and Security Forces Martyrs Laid to Rest

DAMASCUS,HOMS, IDLEB (SANA) – Six army and security forces  martyrs on Monday were escorted from Tishreen and Homs Military Hospitals to their finals resting place in their cities and villages after they were targeted by armed terrorist groups in Daraa, Homs and Hama.

Solemn processions were held for the martyrs as they were covered with the national flag and flowers while Military Band was playing the music of the “Martyr” and the “Farewell”.

The martyrs are:

·         Captain, Aktham Ali Tarraf from Lattakia.

·         Chief Warrant Officer, Ali Durgham Alloush from Hama.

·         Chief Warrant Officer, Mohammad Ahmad Darwish from Idleb.

·         Sergeant Major, Nasser Taher Ibrahim from Hama.

·         Sergeant, Mohammad Nizar Issa from Lattakia.

·         Policeman, Samer Ahmad al-Ahmad from Homs.

Relatives of the martyrs expressed pride in their sons’ martyrdom who sacrificed their lives to defend their homeland in face of all the conspiracies targeting its steadfastness, dignity and pride.

They also called for prosecuting the criminals who are trying to undermine Syria’s security and stability, stressing that these criminals will fail to achieve their goals of undermining Syria’s stability and security.

The martyrs’ family members stressed that the vicious attack against Syria calls for all honest Syrian to unity and foil the plots against their country, saying that Syria will remain immune to conspiracies thanks to the unity and banding together of its people and army.

By H. Zain / R. al-Jazaeri / H. Sabbagh

Turkish Director: Presence of Large Numbers of Syrian Refugees in Turkey before Events in Syria Prove Pre-Planned Conspiracy

ANKARA, (SANA) – Turkish Director, Semir Aslanyurek, stressed on Monday that the fact that thousands of people from Jisr al-Shughour and other towns took refuge in the Turkish borders before events outbreak in Syria proves that the refugees’ issue has already been prepared.

In an interview with Sol Postal website, Aslanyurek said that he has documented information that prove the Turkish authorities allow only Turkish officials to visit the Syrian refugee camps, while the refugees are not satisfied because of the Turkish unfulfilled  promises.

He noted that the refugees do not know what they want, and if they were asked about that, they would answer they only want their wages which the Turkish Government promised to pay.

The director described those people’s endeavor to reach the Turkish camps as “rushing for gold”, adding that those people did not find there anything they have dreamt of, which is why they decided to come back home; however the Turkish authorities did not allow them to come back.

He stressed that some refugees were forced to go to the Turkish camps by armed terrorist groups, pointing out that what happened is “a scenario written in advance”.

Aslanyurek added that he saw in his own eyes more than 20 ambulance vehicles entering the refugee camps in one day, noting the vehicles cannot be used to succor patients or wounded refugees because of a fight.

He stressed that some people said that the vehicles were carrying weapons into the camps.

By F.Allafi/M.Eyon

Group of Youths Visit Injured Army Members, Stress National Unity

TARTOUS, (SANA) – DAMASCUS, (SANA) – A number of youths, lawyers and artists in Damascus and Aleppo organized solidarity visit to the injured army and armed forces members at Tishreen Military Hospital in Damascus who were targeted by the armed terrorist groups while performing their national duty in defending Syria’s stability and security.

The participants gave flowers to the injured members in appreciation of their sacrifices for the sake of the homeland in the face the conspiracy aimed at undermining the unity of the Syrian people.

Organizer of the campaign Yaser Qanawati said in a statement to SANA that the campaign was launched a month ago with wide national and popular participation to express support to the comprehensive reform program in Syria.

Qanawati added that these activities contribute to enhancing national unity and independence of the Syrian national decision, in addition to exposing the reality of instigative campaigns led by satellite channels.

Lawyer Suha Abboud condemned the international silence over the crimes committed by armed groups in Syria, calling upon misleading channels not to follow the foreign agendas that only serve the Israeli occupation.

The campaign’s media coordinator Daleen Yousef referred in a statement to SANA to the several activities carried out by the 200-member campaign such as visiting the martyrs’ families, honoring excelled students and visiting schools , in addition to setting future plans for organizing volunteer and charity campaigns in the next stage.

The social and youth activities also visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and put a wreath of flowers on it.

By R. Raslan/ H. Said

Foreign, Arab Delegation in Tartous. Syria, Rich in Tourism and Archeological Sites

TARTOUS, (SANA) – Members of the foreign and Arab delegation visiting Tartous governorate on Monday stressed Syria’s richness in archeological and tourist destinations.

The delegation comprises scientific and economic figures from universities of Bulgaria, Italy, Belgium, Iraq and Algeria and Syrian expatriates in the US.

Dr. Fateha Hajjo from Algeria indicated to Syria’s historical importance, adding that this is her first visit to Syria and she felt the solid social texture among the Syrian people.

For his part, a Bulgarian professor said that Syria is one of the best tourist destinations in the Arab world due to its charming nature, mild climate and great heritage and civilization.

Researcher Mohammad Salem from al-Mossel University in Iraq said that Safita Old City should be enlisted as a world heritage site.

Director of Administrative Affairs at Tartous Port Jihad Shaaban said “We want to convey a message to the whole world that Syria is a safe and stable country unlike the false claims of some satellite channels on events taking place in Syria.”

The visit also aims at introducing the delegation to the cultural, tourism sites in the governorate and conveying the real image of the Syrian people, in addition to tourism marketing and promotion.

By R. Raslan/ M. Ismael

Over SYP 8 Millions Set to Be Smuggled into Lebanon Confiscated

DAMASCUS, (SANA) – The Customs authorities confiscated on Saturday a Kia Cerato car carrying amounts of currency of different types set to be smuggled into Lebanon through al-Jdeida border crossing point.

A source at the General Directorate of Customs said in a statement to SANA the confiscation was carried out after receiving information about the car, adding that “upon searching the car, a secret hiding place was found in the back seat containing an amount of money wrapped in nylon.

The source said the bundles, which were opened by a special committee from the Customs Directorate, were found to include 6050 pieces of SYP 1000 banknotes, 300 pieces of Saudi Riyal (SAR) 500 banknotes, 33 pieces of USD 50 banknotes and a Jordanian Dinar (JOD).

The total amount of confiscated money was estimated at SYP 8,135 million.

By H. Said

Palestinians Organize Stand in Solidarity with Syria in Shefa’-Amr

OCCUPIED JURALESM, (SANA) – The Popular Committee for Solidarity with Syria organized a solidarity stand at Shefa’-Amr city in Palestinian territories occupied since 1948.

The activity came to stress standing by Syria’s people and leadership in the face of the conspiracy targeting its pan-Arab and national stances.

Several political and religious figures participated in the stand, in addition to dozens of inhabitants from Shefa’-Amr and the neighboring areas.

The participants raised banners that condemn targeting Syria and its resistant approach.

They wanted to Stress the Palestinian people’s standing by the Syrian people who have always supported the Arab issues, particularly the Palestinian cause.

Source: The Embassy of Syrian Arab Republic in Kuala Lumpur.

The criminal complaint against Manssor Arbabsiar, who is said to have targeted the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. for assassination on behalf of the Iranian government, has several conspicuous gaps in its most pivotal and controversial arguments

In the wake of the Obama Administration’s announcement that an Iranian-American used car salesman had set up a plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., a number of Iran and intelligence experts have raised questions about the plausibility of the alleged Iranian plot.

But few have commented on problems in the legal case presented against the used car salesman, Manssor Arbabsiar, and his alleged co-conspirators from Iran’s Quds Force, a branch of its special forces. There is a handful of what appear to be holes in the complaint. Though individually they are small, taken together they raise difficult questions about the government’s case. The apparent holes also seem to match up with some of the same concerns raised by skeptical Iran analysts, such as Arbabsiar’s rationale in confessing and the extent of his connection to the Quds Force.

The government claims that Arbabsiar sought out someone he thought was a Mexican drug cartel member in May; he was actually a Drug Enforcement Agency confidential informant. Over a series of meetings, the government alleges, Arbabsiar arranged to forward $100,000 to the informant as down payment for the attack, promised $1.5 million more, and agreed that the informant should kill Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir with a bomb blast at a DC restaurant, one that would possibly be full of civilians and U.S. members of Congress.

In the complaint against Arbabsiar, the government has described four pieces of evidence to support its allegations (it undoubtedly has more intelligence that it doesn’t describe in the complaint):

Taped conversations and phone calls between the informant and Arbabsiar

Details about a $100,000 bank transfer described as a down payment for the assassination

Taped conversations Arbabsiar had with his alleged co-conspirator, Quds Force member Gholam Shakuri, while Arbabsiar was in FBI custody

A confession Arbabsiar made after he was arrested on September 29

Two of the conversations between Arbabsiar and the informant, on July 14 and July 17, include very damning comments. Arbabsiar tells the informant, “he wants you to kill this guy” and goes on to say that it is “no big deal” if the informant kills hundreds of civilians and some Senators in the course of the assassination.

But there is a problem with each of these four key pieces of evidence.

 

Take the recorded calls between Arbabsiar and the informant. Whenever the government uses confidential informants, it is a good idea to pay attention to which conversations get taped and which don’t (in one terror case in Oregon, for example, the FBI had a recorder malfunction on precisely the day when, their informant claims, the accused person first agreed to participate in a terror plot). If no tape is made, then the only evidence to the substance of a conversation comes from someone paid by the government to produce evidence of criminal activity.

In this case, the complaint first describes the informant taping conversations with Arbabsiar on July 14, 2011, the first of the two really damning conversations. It admits that the informant taped neither the initial meeting between them on May 24 nor a later series of meetings in June and July. This means, among other things, that the tapes do not include an account of how the plot was first initiated and how it evolved from the kidnapping plot, which Arbabsiar said in his confession that he was he first instructed to set up, to an assassination. Who first raised the idea of using explosives in the assassination? Arbabsiar is charged with intent to use weapons of mass destruction — in this case, the bombing. But with these key conversations never recorded, it’s difficult or impossible to prove who first suggested the most damning details that legally turned a kidnapping plot into a terrorism plot.

The taped conversations start after the $100,000 down payment, which government sources have told reporters was the first convincing piece of evidence in this case, got transferred to a middleman. So the government doesn’t provide quoted conversations describing what agreement the parties had about that down payment.

In short, there were a number of critical conversations the government chose not to record (or at least, not to have the informant record). Particularly given the complaint’s revelation that a number of other crimes were discussed, and reports that the parties also discussed an opium deal, the government’s choice not to record these earlier conversations raises significant questions about what Arbabsiar set out to do and what the down payment represented.

The details provided about the $100,000 in the complaint also do not implicate Quds Force as strongly as they might. The complaint describes an unnamed person calling Arbabsiar to tell him the money would be transferred to “Individual #1.” And it describes Arbabsiar telling the informant that Individual #1 had received the money the morning before the first taped July 14 conversation. Then, it describes the money being sent from two different “foreign entities” through a Manhattan bank into an FBI account. The complaint doesn’t even specify that these two foreign entities were Iranian, much less tied to Quds Force.

Furthermore, the complaint doesn’t describe who Individual #1 is, though the way that the complaint is written suggests that he or she was not a member of Quds Force: three Quds Force members are described as “Iranian Officials” in the complaint and Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani is named explicitly. More curiously, Individual #1, who allegedly served as middleman for the down payment on the planned assassination, was neither charged for his role nor was he among the five people sanctioned for this operation by the Treasury Department. What the complaint describes about this key piece of evidence, in other words, is money being transferred from someone not even charged in this case to the FBI. But if the plot began with the Quds Force hatching it in Iran and extended to Arbabsiar acting on their behalf in the U.S., and if the U.S. government appears to be either charging or sanctioning everyone involved, why would this middleman, Individual #1, go unnamed and untouched?

Two other pieces of evidence described in the complaint do tie the transfer to Arbabsiar’s alleged Quds Force collaborators. First, a footnote states that Arbabsiar confessed that Individual #1 told him the money came from Gholam Shakuri. The criminal complaint named Shakuri, who is at large and believed to be in Iran, as the Iranian official working as Arbabsiar’s case officer of sorts. Second, the taped conversations between Arbabsiar and Shakuri show that Shakuri was aware money had been transferred.

But there are two significant problems with those conversations between Arbabsiar and Shakuri. First, they’re all in code, so Shakuri never describes the assassination directly. They appear to use two codes — “Chevrolet” and cars generally, and “the building.” While Arbabsiar confessed “Chevrolet” signified the assassination, the complaint mentions no such confession explaining the meaning of the “building” code. Furthermore, Shakuri claims someone — the name is inaudible — has “brought [him] another car.” If car is code for assassination, then who got killed or targeted for assassination?

Shakuri also makes an odd reference to paying $50,000 or $100,000 to someone if the informant (whom Arbabsiar was attempting to hire) doesn’t carry out the agreed job. “You guaranteed this yourself … of course, if we give it, we’ll give it to you. Okay? If he gives it, fine; if not we must provide the 100 [or] 50. Tell him [unintelligible].” Perhaps Shakuri was telling Arbabsiar that, if the informant refused to carry out the job without more money, they’ll have to pay it. But there are other possibilities as well — perhaps Shakuri believed they’d have to pay back the down payment if the crime never got committed. Ultimately, though the government tried, they didn’t get Shakuri to send any more money.

All of these problems might be less troublesome if the terms of Arbabsiar’s cooperation were explained. Arbabsiar did confess he tried to set up the assassination at the direction of the Quds Force, but under what circumstances?

But we don’t yet understand why a man arrested — purportedly for an assassination attempt — waived his right to a lawyer and within hours started to give the government all the evidence it needed to fill in any gaps in their case. His cooperation is all the more curious given that four of the five charges against him (the fifth is using interstate commerce to arrange a murder for hire) are conspiracy charges that probably couldn’t have been charged before Arbabsiar implicated Shakuri. The government surely could have charged him with other things, such as wire fraud, without the conspiracy charges. So why would Arbabsiar provide the evidence for four new charges against him that could put himself in prison for life?

One document that might explain Arbabsiar’s motives for cooperating is the original complaint in this case. The document that’s been publicly released is actually an amended complaint written 12 days after his arrest, presumably written to incorporate Shakuri in the charges based on Arbabsiar’s cooperation. But in a rather unusual move, the first complaint against Arbabsiar remains sealed — meaning we don’t know when the government first charged him or for what — with the approval of the Chief Judge in Manhattan, possibly in an entirely different docket (the amended complaint is entry number 1 in this docket). Thus, it is possible that Arbabsiar was originally charged for a completely unrelated crime — perhaps the opium deal. And it is possible Arbabsiar was charged much earlier than his arrest on September 29. As a result, we don’t know what kind of incentives the government might have offered Arbabsiar for his testimony.

Most of the problems with the legal case against Arbabsiar could be fixed. The government could — and should — unseal the original complaint against Arbabsiar. The government could describe the complete chain of transfer from Quds Force custody through Individual #1 to the FBI account. And while the government implies it doesn’t have recordings of these conversations, it could at least provide explanations of the earlier discussions between Arbabsiar and the informant that led to the $100,000 down payment and that led a kidnapping plot to evolve into an assassination plot. In addition, it could provide more background that distinguishes this assassination plot from the several other plans discussed, including the opium deal.

But until the government does those things, it has offered not just a plot that appears implausible to a number of Iran experts, but one with significant weaknesses in the legal case.

By Marcy Wheeler

@ The Atlantic

Forgotten soldiers. We all know about Gallipoli; hopelessly conceived mess, dreamed up by Churchill to move the Great War from the glued trenches of France to a fast-moving invasion of Germany’s Ottoman allies in 1915.

Embark a vast army of Australians, New Zealanders, Brits, French and others east of Istanbul in order to smash “Johnny Turk”. Problem: the Turks fought back ferociously as Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk, titan of the 20th century, etc) used his Turkish 19th Army Division to confront the invaders’ first wave. Problem two: most of the division were not Turks at all.

They were Arabs. Indeed, two-thirds of the first men to push back the Anzac forces were Syrian Arabs from what is today Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and “Palestine”. And of the 87,000 “Turkish” troops who died defending the Dardanelles, many were Arabs. As Palestinian Professor Salim Tamari now points out, the same applies to the Ottoman battles of Suez, Gaza and Kut al-Amara. In the hitherto unknown diary of Private Ihsan Turjman of the Ottoman Fourth Army – he would today be called a Palestinian Arab – there was nothing but scorn for those Arab delegations from Palestine and Syria who sent delegations “to salute the memory of our martyrs in this war and to visit the wounded”.

What, he asked in his secretly kept diary, were these Arabs playing at? “Do they mean to strengthen the relationship between the Arab and Turkish nations… truth be told, the Palestinian and Syrian people are a cowardly and submissive lot. For if they were not so servile, they would have revolted against these Turkish barbarians,” he wrote. This is stunning stuff.

Far more Arabs fought against the Allies on behalf of the Ottomans than ever joined Lawrence’s Arab revolt, but here is Private Turjman expressing fury at his masters.

Year of the Locust is an odd little book, terribly short but darkly fascinating, concentrating on the Great War diaries of three Ottoman soldiers, one of them an actual Turk, the others Palestinian Arabs. We are used to British and German soldiers’ accounts of the Great War; scarcely ever do we read of the personal lives of our Ottoman opponents. The Turjman family home, by extraordinary chance, is the very same Jerusalem building, in ruins since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war but now transformed into an art gallery, which I visited in Jerusalem just three weeks ago today.

In 1917, when Turjman was shot dead by an Ottoman officer, Palestinian Arabs were less concerned about the Balfour Declaration than whether the British would give them independence, annex them to Egypt or allow them a Syrian homeland. How wrong could they have been? Britain had no intention of adding to its Egyptian interests when it had already given its support to a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Later, as Tamari recounts, the lives of the other two diarists, one Turkish, the other Arab, would revolve around Palestinians who came to believe that it was Jewish immigration that would threaten their future. But it is the Great War that dominates their memoirs.

In the anti-Ottoman literature that permeated the Arab world (and the West) after the war, it is important to remember these Ottomans, Turkish or Arab. There is a touch of Robert Graves here. Turjman’s diary records the plague of locusts that settled upon Jerusalem, the cholera and typhus and the 50 Jerusalem prostitutes sent to entertain Turkish officers, the Ottoman troops hanged outside the Jaffa Gate for desertion, the Turkish aircraft that crashes (“badly trained pilots or badly maintained engines”). Turjman even has a crush on a married woman.

Long forgotten now are the Arab-Turkish Ottoman inmates of the Tsarist prison camp at Krasnoyarsk, in Russia, where Lieutenant Aref Shehadeh, born in Jerusalem in 1892, ended up. Islam united them; class divided them. But there were concerts, sports clubs, football teams, a camp library, a Great War version of all the stalags and oflags made famous in the Second World War. Come the Bolshevik revolution, Shehadeh high-tailed it back to the Middle East – via Manchuria, Japan, China, India and Egypt via the Red Sea.

But the most impressive text in this tiny book is not a diary but a letter from Shehadeh’s wife, Saema, in Jerusalem when, 30 years later, he had set off for Gaza as a British mandate officer. “I woke up early this morning,” she writes. “I walked around in the garden for a while. I picked up some flowers and leaves. I picked up some beans to cook for myself. While I was milling around, you were always on my mind. It is your presence that makes this garden beautiful.

“Nothing has a taste without you. May God not deprive me of your presence, for it is you who makes my (our) life beautiful. When you left us last time I noticed that you had a little cold. I am thinking about it. Let me know about your health. Your life’s partner, who loves you with all her heart. Saema.” Now that’s quite a love letter to get from your wife.

By Robert Fisk

15 October 2011

@ The Independent

Tripoli University: The people I had hoped most to be able to find upon returning to Libya were eight students from Fatah University (now renamed Tripoli University) who became my friends during three months in Libya this summer. They had all been strongly opposed to what NATO was doing to their country (NATO bombs destroyed some classrooms at the University during final exams in late May) and I was very keen to sit with them again if possible since the August 23rd fall of Tripoli when most of them scattered given the uncertainties of what would happen and we lost contact.

Thanks to Ahmad who was waiting for me we re-united quickly. Some excerpts and impressions from yesterday’s all night gathering with Ahmad, Amal, Hind, Suha, Mohammad and Rana:

“I know Sanad al-Ureibi”, Ahmad said disgustedly about the 22 year old who is claiming he fired two bullets at close range into Muammar Gadhafi on October 22nd.

Amal, Ahmad’s fiancée interrupted him: “We are very angry but not really surprised by what Sanad did. He’s a stupid guy and I am sure someone whispered in his ear that he would become famous and rich if he did NATO’s dirty job by killing Colonel Gadhafi. NATO did more than 1000 bombing attacks “to protect Libyan civilians” but killed thousands of us instead. For sure NATO and their puppets want as many of our leader’s dead as possible in order to avoid years of a court trial that would expose NATO’s many crimes and those of certain western leaders.”

Ahmad: “Sanad told my cousin the day after he assassinated Colonel Gadhafi that he is promised protection and that the TNC will not arrest him despite their, for western ears only, announcement of a planned “investigation” of how Muammar and Mutassim died. Everyone in Libya knows that the investigation of the assassination of the rebel military commander Abdel Fattah Younes last July has gone nowhere because the Islamist faction who committed the Younes murder is close to Jalil.”

Ahmad continued, “Like some of his friends, Sanad did fight for a while with the rebels and he sometimes changed units because it was fun and now he plans to form a gang to protect rich Libyans and foreigners as they continue to arrive here to help, as they claim, to rebuild our destroyed country and make democracy. Now we all so exhausted from all the needless killing I am not sure what kind of democracy we will have or even want. American democracy? It’s very great? Sometimes it seems you have more problems than we do. At least we have free education, free medical care, and homes and are not living on the streets without jobs.

Mohammad joined in: “One Israeli-American Company has offered Sanad and other young men who refuse to give up their guns a job recruiting former fighters for proper training as Libyan police. There are some Blackwater (XE) people here are also trying to do business with NATO agents for private police forces around Libya. Anyone who thinks NATO is going to leave us in peace is mistaken. More of them arrive every day.”

Hind, who has not wavered since last summer in her opposition to what she calls “NATO’s team” also voiced strong offense and condemnation of certain pro-rebel Sheiks who have declared that Gadhafi was not a Muslim. “Everyone knows he was a devout Muslim. His last Will stated, “I do swear that there is no other God but Allah and that Mohammad is God’s Prophet, peace be upon him. I pledge that I will die as Muslim.”

Hind added, “Please tell me who are these TNC Sheiks to say who is are and who is not a Muslim. In Islam it’s between each of us and Allah and nobody else’s business. If these Sheiks were better Muslims they would have opposed what has been done to his body and that of his son and friend in Sirte and Misrata. It is haram. I am very angry and disgusted.”

Suha complained about “the views of NTC leader Mustafa Abdul-Jalil toward women and that with the already announced repeal of the marriage law, Libyan women have lost the right to keep the family home if they divorce. It is a disaster for Libyan women. Under Gadhafi leadership women in Libya had more rights than in any other country in the Middle East.”

Ahmad explained: “ I am ashamed of what some Muslims are doing. Our religion does not allow for this mutilation and the freak show the TNC put on in that refrigerator. I was in Misrata with friends to pay our respects and was surprised how many others were doing the same as our group and for the same reasons. When the bodies were first exhibited curious people came and some said bad insults. But by the next day the atmosphere has completely changed. People came to honor Colonel Gadhafi for his courage in dying for what he believed was best for Libya and that was to keep Libya free from colonialism. I don’t believe the media is accurately reporting this. Our leader died a hero like Omar Muktar in my opinion and history will prove this someday.”

Again, his fiancée Amal interrupted Ahmad, “As Colonel Gadhafi revealed in his Will, NATO made him several offers if he would abandon his country to them. Foolish and criminal NATO established our leader forever as a great resister to colonialism and a patriot for Libya, for all of Africa and for the Middle East. I believe that Colonel Gadhafi died a far more honorable death than the leaders of NATO will. He has more dignity in death than Hilary Clinton and her absence of dignity shown by her stupid comments about his death.”

Amal then said, “I became ill when I left him. His skin was almost black and his body was rotting quickly with fluids leaking on the floor. They must give him immediately to his family and ask Allah to forgive themselves for their haram. One of the guards told me Colonel Gadhafi was sodomized with a rifle by NTC fighters. He showed the video on his mobile but I would not look. ”

Suha spoke: “We also visited the Mahari Hotel in Sirte where we saw more than 50 bodies of Gadaffi supporters. Some had their hands behind them bound by plastic handcuffs and were executed at close range. Others had been taken from hospital beds and murdered. This crime is just one more example of the lies of the NTC and NATO. NATO forces commanded and controlled their rebels and knew what they have been doing. NATO is responsible for destroying much of our country and for what will surely happen in the coming days.”

I first met Ahmad what now seems like a couple of years ago, but in actuality it was only last June. We sat at an outdoor cafe on Green Square (now renamed Martyrs’ Square) and talked about NATO’s obvious plans for Libya. Since August 23rd and the precipitous collapse of the loyalist resistance in Tripoli, which Ahmad had been organizing some of the neighborhoods to participate in, he has been on the lam as friends got word to him that NTC death squads were on his trail even staking out the Radisson Hotel lobby where he used to meet with journalists and western friends. Ahmad blames the lack of a real defense of Tripoli, that took us all by surprise, as “our incompetence and some high ranking traitors” for the non-implementation of plans to defend Tripoli from NATO’s rebels.

His first words after we hugged were: “Now the real resistance will begin! The Libyan people are now even surer than they were during this summer that the NTC sold our country to the NATO colonial countries. As NATO continues to hunt down Saif al Islam, many around our country are making Saif the new leader of the resistance to colonialism in Libya and in Africa. I personally pledge my support for him and pray that Allah will protect him. Watch what the Gadhafi tribe and my Waffala tribe do together in the coming weeks—but also starting today. Maybe NATO can be said in some ways to have won round one. But let’s see what happens in the many rounds to come.”

By Franklin Lamb

Franklin Lamb is reachable c/o fplamb@gmail.com

 

 

The protracted global economic depression is sending the economies of even advanced capitalist countries such as the United States and members of the European Union on a tailspin.  Despite fits of financial convulsions due to the bursting of economic bubbles and now EU countries threatening to default on their sovereign debts if not bailed out, most official quarters still minimize the extent and depth of the crisis of global capitalism.

But the average person-on-the-street in the perennially underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East as well as the most advanced capitalist countries in the West knows from experience that this global economic depression is for real.

It is making life harder and harder even for the touted “middle class”. Worse it is unclear how or when the crisis will end and how or if the people’s situation will improve.

All over the world, what is becoming exceedingly clear for a growing number of working people and their families – wage workers, salaried employees and the bourgeoning underclass of unemployed, under-employed and self-employed individuals trying to scrape together a living – is that they are being made to unfairly bear the burden of this crisis.

And they are fighting back.  They are demanding changes that mean something to them and are not mere empty promises.

In this country, students, teachers and school officials are marching in the streets to decry budget cuts for state colleges and universities.  Health care workers are up in arms over slashed budgets of public hospitals and public health programs.

They denounce the Aquino government’s budget priorities: debt servicing, conditional cash transfers aka dole-outs and military outlays that go down the drain of corruption and failed counter-insurgency programs.

They reject the privatization and commercialization of basic social services such as education, health care and housing and public utilities such as water, electricity and public transport.

Militant transport workers, in particular jeepney drivers and operators, along with the riding public have staged protests and strikes to dramatize their opposition to run away oil prices. They attribute this to the foreign and domestic oil cartel and speculators in the oil futures market manipulating the oil price and raking in super profits, together with the oil deregulation law and the national government’s “hands-off” policy even as it collects windfall value-added-tax on higher oil prices.

The protesters are demanding the scrapping of deregulation policies, centralized government procurement of crude oil to take advantage of the cheapest prices, the scrapping of VAT on oil and for the government to take the commanding heights of developing a sustainable and people-oriented energy policy that is free from foreign domination and control.

Workers are on a warpath against the policy of contractualization that is ravaging their jobs, security of tenure, wages and benefits leading to labor being at the complete mercy of capital.  They are calling for the implementation of the twin policies of land reform and national industrialization to optimize the utilization of the country’s natural and human resources and to create jobs and livelihoods for the army of unemployed and underemployed, especially the youth.

Homeless people living in shanty colonies in urban centers are resisting spontaneously against violent demolitions of their make-do residences only to be literally thrown into the streets.  They reject so-called government cum private development projects which exclude them but instead cater to commercial and financial big business interests.

In the US, there have been work stoppages and mass protests over lay-offs, budget cuts, withdrawal of entitlements and subsidies both in the public and private sectors.  Migrant workers and other immigrants have denounced job discrimination, police racial profiling and severe restrictions as well as harassment from immigration authorities.

Fed-up ordinary Americans are staging an ongoing “Occupy Wall Street” campaign wherein hundreds if not thousands of people have been conducting a daily sit-in protest at the heart of the financial district in New York City, pointing their fingers at the behemoths of finance capital for their economic dislocation and immiseration.

Greece, Spain, France and Italy have witnessed hordes of their people pouring out into the streets to reject government austerity measures after the public coffers have been emptied in bail-outs for the banks and other financial institutions and other failed neo-liberal policies as well as profligacy of their ruling elites.  They are also demanding jobs and social justice against the corporate elite and their political backers who continue to control the highest levers of power.

In North Africa and the Middle East, the political upheavals that have removed or are trying to depose entrenched authoritarian regimes continue.  The workers and youth in Egypt, for example, will not settle for the mere removal of their previous ruler, Mubarak, but are calling for his trial and those of his cohorts to account for their crimes against the people.

They reject the military’s hold on power and demand greater political representation of ordinary people in decision-making.  They call for an end to failed policies that have only managed to deepen their people’s impoverishment and misery and the backwardness and stagnation of their economy.  They vigorously call the US to account for backing the Mubarak regime and its policy of rapprochement with the Zionists in Israel.

Sooner than expected, the real objectives of US-NATO in invading Libya are revealed.  For one, Libya is being turned into their newest field of investment (read: dumping ground of surplus capital), with the IMF-World Bank “asked” to “rehabilitate” the Libyan economy using the billions of dollars the Libyan government has invested in foreign banks, and to repair its infrastructure damaged by the US-NATO bombings.

All these developments are rooted in the inability of the global capitalist system to fully recover from the global economic crisis triggered by the financial meltdown in 2007-08. The continuing and intensifying paroxysms in the very centers of capital belie all claims that the world economy has recovered or is on the way to recovery.

This is not at all surprising since none of the neoliberal policies that have brought about the crisis has been reversed. Measures have not been put in place for regulating transactions in financial derivative long identified as one of the major culprits that brought about the meltdown. Worse, the US and European governments, invariably beholden to and directed by finance capital, continue to conspire to this day in diverting public funds meant for housing, education and other basic social services to rescue the latter.

Corporate media and bourgeois propaganda may have succeeded for some time in conjuring the illusion of recovery and brighter times ahead, the reality of continuing joblessness, rising prices and loss of social security inevitably catches up and bursts whatever bubble of false hope remains.

Thus while it can be argued that the people’s protests are long overdue and still need to gain strength and momentum, these have so far been the only forces that have mitigated the greed and avarice of the big capitalists and their agents in the bureaucracies.

In the medium and long run, they are bound to grow and gain more strength as the crisis worsens and the hardships become more intolerable worldwide.

By Carol Pagaduan-Araullo

29 September 2011

Carol Pagaduan-Araullo  is the Chairperson of BAYAN-Philippines.

Source

http://www.bworldonline.com/content.php?section=9&title=Protests-are-good&id=39145

 

Anti-Wall Street protests continued to spread yesterday to cities across the US. According to the web site Occupy Together, as of Friday evening “Meetups” to plan protests had been established in more than 900 cities.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, which began last month in New York, has expanded now to dozens of towns, including Tampa, Florida; Norfolk, Virginia; Washington, DC; Boston; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Chicago; St. Louis, Missouri; Minneapolis; Houston, San Antonio and Austin, Texas; Nashville; Portland, Oregon; Anchorage, Alaska; and a number of California cities.

The demonstrations—fueled by anger over social inequality, unemployment and a vast decline in living standards for the overwhelming majority—are also gaining international support. There are calls on Facebook for a global demonstration on October 15 in cities in more than 15 countries, from Dublin to Madrid, Buenos Aires to Hong Kong.

“Occupy Melbourne” in Australia is planning an October 15 protest in City Square, and similar calls are being organized on Facebook for protests in Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. The “Occupy the London Stock Exchange” Facebook page has more than 6,000 followers, and has announced plans to occupy Paternoster Square beginning October 15.

The spontaneous outburst of anger at the banks and big business, which has struck a chord with wide layers of the population, has been met with arrests and police harassment and brutality in a number of areas. It has also come under attack from sections of the political establishment, and has been given generally short shrift in the mainstream media.

In comments to the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, Republican presidential contender Herman Cain denounced the protesters as “anti-capitalism,” and added, “Don’t blame Wall Street. Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job, and you’re not rich, blame yourself.”

His sentiments were echoed on Friday by US House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia. Speaking at a “Values Voter Summit” in Washington, he decried “the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country.”

Cantor’s remarks followed President Obama’s comments the day before, in which he claimed to “feel the pain” of the protesters, but defended the $750 billion TARP bailout of the banks, and affirmed his support for “a strong, effective financial sector in order for us to grow.” He stated that the actions of the banks and speculators were not “necessarily illegal” and that it wasn’t his job to prosecute them.

In New York City where the Occupy Wall Street protest began, Mayor Michael Bloomberg lashed out at the protesters in comments on his weekly radio address Friday. He claimed, “The protesters are protesting against people who make $40,000-$50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet.”

Presumably the mayor was referring to service workers, not the corporate billionaires who have earned the wrath of the thousands of people mobilized in the anti-Wall Street protests. He also made the fantastic claim that “we all” shared the blame for the economic meltdown and recessionary crisis by taking on too much risk.

Bloomberg defended the violence that has been meted out against the protesters by New York City Police Department, stating, “The one thing I can tell you for sure is if anybody in the city breaks the law, we will arrest them and turn them over to the district attorneys.”

New York’s Occupy Wall Street has been met with excessive police force since the protest began last month. Just last Saturday, some 700 demonstrators were arrested after they had been led into a trap by police on the Brooklyn bridge.

By Kate Randall

 

Pakistani border guards gesture during the “Beating the Retreat” ceremony at the India and Pakistan joint border check post

India and Pakistan are preparing for the biggest liberalisation in bilateral trade since partition more than six decades ago, reviving commercial ties that have been strangled ever since the end of British rule in 1947.

Senior officials on both sides of the border say Pakistan’s politicians and generals have softened their traditional insistence that expanded business links with India be conditional upon resolution of a bitter territorial dispute over divided Kashmir.

Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan’s foreign minister, told the Financial Times that her government would press ahead with granting India ‘Most Favoured Nation’ status in an effort to break a long-standing deadlock in trade and investment that has hurt both economies. Details of the deal are expected to be agreed at a meeting of commerce secretaries in Delhi in November.

“In today’s world it’s not possible to not recommend freer trade to anyone,” Mrs Khar said.

“One single country cannot emerge economically or politically as a powerhouse in a region that has conflicts that have been festering for years,” she said. “It is in everybody’s selfish interest to be able to resolve these conflicts.”

Despite having a combined population that is bigger than China’s, India and Pakistan’s official bilateral trade is estimated at just $2.7bn with another $3bn in illicit flows, which are often routed through third countries in the Gulf. In contrast, Pakistan’s bilateral trade with China during the last financial year (July-June) was $9bn.

India and Pakistan have agreed to a target of raising bilateral trade to $6bn within three years. Mrs Khar told parliament last week the ‘Most Favoured Nation’ status was agreed “in principle”.

Earlier this month the countries’ commerce ministers resumed talks suspended three years ago, after the Mumbai terrorist attack carried out by Pakistani militants.

The move by Pakistan to hold out the promise of improved trade terms comes only a week after New Delhi struck a high profile strategic partnership with Kabul, a move distrusted by many in Pakistan’s security establishment who have long questioned India’s intentions in Afghanistan.

Progress, however, remains vulnerable to militant attacks in India that often accompany peace initiatives between the two neighbours. While Mrs Khar said “forward movement” in dialogue with India had to be made “uninterruptible” by strong political commitment, she also warned of looming disagreements over shared water resources.

Pakistan’s relations with the US have faced further strains in recent weeks since Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, accused Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence of supporting attacks on US and Nato facilities by Pakistan-based Haqqani militants.

Mrs Khar, who was appointed in June, said Pakistan had been encouraged by India’s acquiescence to preferential European Union market access for Pakistan after last year’s devastating floods. She said Pakistan wanted to improve its regional connectivity with energy pipelines and roads, adding that “one day it would be possible” for Indian trade with central Asian nations to transit through Pakistan.

Visa restrictions that have long frustrated business leaders in both countries are also expected to be lifted in coming weeks.

The two countries’ principal land crossing, at Wagha, is being modernised with the construction of a new freight handling facility. Cross border banking facilities are also planned to support greater trade across the Line of Control in Kashmir.

Indian officials and businessmen are encouraged by the prospect of improving trade ties, which has been strongly backed by Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, and Narayana Murthy, founder of outsourcing group Infosys.

Azim Saigol, a Lahore-based industrialist, said the relaxation in restrictions would open new markets for Pakistan’s cement, textiles and engineering industries: “It’s very healthy. We are eying the Indian market and the Indians are eying our market. We will definitely benefit from the Indian market. We have lost our own market because the purchasing power of the people has been eroded.”

By James Lamont and Farhan Bokhari

17 October 2011

@ The Financial Times