Jul 14, 2011
Arab world’s ratings of Obama, US plummet: Poll Two years after US President Barack Obama delivered his groundbreaking speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, his popularity among Arabs has hit a low point.

WASHINGTON – TWO years after US President Barack Obama delivered his groundbreaking speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, his popularity among Arabs has hit a low point, a poll released on Wednesday shows.

An overwhelming majority of more than 4,000 people surveyed in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, told the Arab American Institute that they felt that Mr Obama had not met the expectations he had set forth in the June 2009 Cairo speech, the poll found.

Mr Obama called in his Cairo speech for a ‘new beginning’ to end a cycle of ‘suspicion and discord’ between the United States and the Muslim world In the speech, the US leader laid out a new US blueprint for the Middle East, including a new Palestinian state and efforts to defuse a nuclear showdown with Iran.

But the poll found that Arabs see the Obama administration’s handling of key Middle East policy issues as having made no contribution to improving relations between them and the United States.

In fact, the two issues on which the US administration has invested ‘considerable energy – the Palestinian issue and engagement with the Muslim world – receive the lowest approval ratings,’ the survey found.

Less than nine per cent of the people polled said the Obama administration has handled the two key issues well. The Arab world’s image of the US as a whole has also soured to become even less favourable than during the last year of the administration of president George W. Bush, under whom the United States led an international coalition that invaded Iraq, the survey found. — AFP …source

A Fork in the Road of U.S.-Pakistani Ties
By Barbara Slavin

WASHINGTON, May 3, 2011 (IPS) – The U.S. discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden in a compound some 50 kilometres from Islamabad is a “defining moment” for a U.S.-Pakistan relationship fraught with duplicity and dashed expectations.

U.S. and Pakistani officials and foreign policy experts struggled Tuesday to find something positive to say about the relationship following bin Laden’s dramatic denouement. Some suggested that Pakistan would now have to be more forthcoming in rolling up remaining al Qaeda elements in the country and cutting back on sanctuary for Afghan militants.

Concerns mounted, however, that the fact that the al Qaeda leader had found sanctuary in Abbottabad for as long as six years would destroy what little trust remains between the two countries and dash hopes to forge a long-term relationship anchored by 7.5 billion dollars in U.S. economic aid over 10 years.

U.S. officials have not explicitly accused Pakistan of harbouring bin Laden but said that it strains credulity to believe that the Saudi fugitive – who had a 25-million-dollar price on his head – could have stayed in an Islamabad suburb that is also home to Pakistan’s most prestigious military academy and numerous military retirees without, as President Barack Obama’s intelligence adviser John Brennan put it Monday, “some kind of support system”.

On Tuesday, Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters, “It’s kind of hard to imagine the [Pakistani] military or police did not have ideas about what was going on inside [the compound].”

The president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, denied the allegations in a Washington Post op-ed, calling it “baseless speculation”. But given the historic power of the military and Pakistani intelligence services compared to elected civilian governments, it is possible, even likely, that Zardari and much of the rest of his cabinet had no knowledge of bin Laden’s whereabouts until U.S. Navy Seals entered his hiding place. …more

Panetta: Kill 20 Leaders, End the War on Terror
By: emptywheel Saturday July 9, 2011 6:48 am

Leon Panetta kicks off his new job as Secretary of Defense with a trip to Afghanistan. On the plane over there this morning, he told reporters that we just need to kill 10 or 20 leaders of al Qaeda and we will “strategically defeat” al Qaeda. (h/t Spencer)

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared Saturday that the United States is “within reach” of “strategically defeating” Al Qaeda as a terrorist threat, but that doing so would require killing or capturing the group’s 10 to 20 remaining leaders.

Heading to Afghanistan for the first time since taking office earlier this month, Panetta said that intelligence uncovered in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May showed that 10 years of U.S. operations against Al Qaeda had left it with fewer than two dozen key operatives, most of whom are in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa.

“If we can be successful at going after them, I think we can really undermine their ability to do any kind of planning to be able to conduct any kinds of attack on this country,” Panetta told reporters on his way to Afghanistan aboard a U.S. Air Force jet. “That’s why I think” that defeat of Al Qaeda is “within reach,” he added.

To kill or capture those 20 leaders, mind you, we’ve got 100,000 troops in Afghanistan–where none of these key al Qaeda leaders are, according to Panetta–and will have 70,000 there after we withdraw the surge troops. So I’m guessing Panetta isn’t really promising we’ll end the war; we’ll just have tens of thousands of troops in harms way to do … something.

Compare Panetta’s characterization of what we’re up against with Charlie Savage’s description of the government’s justification for capturing Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame. As you read this, remember that Warsame was captured on April 19, over a week before the government killed Osama bin Laden and started analyzing the intelligence at OBL’s compound. Though, according to ProPublica, we already knew that OBL nixed a suggestion to make Anwar al-Awlaki the head of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Savage suggests that we nabbed Warsame on his way back to Somalia from a meeting with al-Awlaki.

Meanwhile, new details emerged about Mr. Warsame’s detention on a Navy ship after his capture in April aboard a fishing skiff between Yemen and Somalia, and about internal administration deliberations on legal policy questions that could have implications for the evolving conflict against Al Qaeda and its affiliates.

A senior counterterrorism official said Wednesday that Mr. Warsame had recently met with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical cleric now hiding in Yemen.

The Administration justified capturing Warsame based on an argument not that we’re at war against al-Shabaab as a group, but that a handful of al-Shabaab leaders adhere to al Qaeda’s ideology and “could” conduct attacks outside of Somalia.

While Mr. Warsame is accused of being a member of the Shabab, which is focused on a parochial insurgency in Somalia, the administration decided he could be lawfully detained as a wartime prisoner under Congress’s authorization to use military force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to several officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss security matters.

But the administration does not consider the United States to be at war with every member of the Shabab, officials said. Rather, the government decided that Mr. Warsame and a handful of other individual Shabab leaders could be made targets or detained because they were integrated with Al Qaeda or its Yemen branch and were said to be looking beyond the internal Somali conflict.

“Certain elements of Al Shabab, including its senior leaders, adhere to Al Qaeda’s ideology and could conduct attacks outside of Somalia in East Africa, as it did in Uganda in 2010, or even outside the region to further Al Qaeda’s agenda,” said a senior administration official. “For its leadership and those other Al Qaeda-aligned elements of Al Shabab, our approach is quite clear: They are not beyond the reach of our counterterrorism tools.”

Now, logic dictates that this handful of leaders of a group that did not exist on 9/11 (and therefore couldn’t logically be included in the authorization of force against those who planned the attack) includes the Somalian al-Shabaab leaders included in Panetta’s 10-20 targets. ..more

Strikes likely as Israel forces curriculum on East Jerusalem schools
Jillian Kestler-D’Amours – The Electronic Intifada – Jerusalem – 12 July 2011

OCCUPIED EAST JERUSALEM (IPS) – Widespread strikes could be in store for East Jerusalem at the start of the next school year as an Israeli-controlled municipality moves ahead with its plan to implement an Israeli curriculum in Palestinian schools.

“I expect that the beginning of the new school year will not be a normal one,” Samir Jibril, director of the East Jerusalem Education Bureau said. “There will be lots of problems. There will be lots of demands, strikes. All [Palestinian] institutions are going to stand hand-in-hand against this implementation.”

In March of this year, the Jerusalem municipality sent a letter to private schools in East Jerusalem that receive financial allocations from the Israeli authorities. The letter stated that at the start of the 2011-12 academic year, the schools would be obliged to purchase and only use textbooks prepared by the Jerusalem Education Administration (JEA), a joint body of the municipality and the Israeli Ministry of Education.

Imposing an identity

These textbooks are already in use in East Jerusalem schools managed by the JEA. According to Jibril, however, Palestinians in East Jerusalem have at all levels rejected the plan to use them in private schools since it is viewed as being politically motivated.

“The real reason behind all this story of the curriculum is actually political,” Jibril said. “We’re talking about a radical [Israeli] government that is trying to impose its own identity on the Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Knowing that Israel doesn’t recognize Palestinian identity, it is a political reflection rather than [for] any kind of educational or pedagogical [reason].”

The move to introduce the Israeli curriculum came after an Israeli parliament (Knesset) member Alex Miller from the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, who heads the Knesset’s education committee, stated during a meeting about unauthorized curricula in the education system that, in East Jerusalem, “the whole curriculum should and must be Israeli.” …more

US-IRAN – Tensions Mount Over Iraq, Nuke Sanctions
By Barbara Slavin

WASHINGTON, Jul 12, 2011 (IPS) – Reviving U.S.-Iran friction over Iraq may have more to do with deteriorating relations over Iran’s nuclear programme than with uncertainty over U.S. troop levels in Iraq beyond the end of this year.

In recent weeks, a chorus of U.S. officials has accused Iran of providing lethal weapons to Iraqi Shiite militias that have targeted U.S. soldiers and caused a spike in U.S. death tolls. Similar charges have been made against Iran in the past.

Last month, Robert Gates, then U.S. defence secretary, said Iran- backed Shiite militias were responsible for the deaths of five U.S. soldiers on Jun. 6, the single largest toll for the U.S. in two years. Overall, 15 U.S. servicemen were killed in Iraq in June, also a two- year record.

Gates’s successor, Leon Panetta, repeated the charges this week during his first trip to Iraq as defence secretary.

“We’re seeing more of those weapons going in from Iran, and they’ve really hurt us,” Panetta told reporters in Baghdad on Monday. He threatened Iran with unspecified retaliation if the attacks did not cease.

Panetta did not reveal any concrete evidence for the charges. U.S. officials and military experts say he was referring to rocket-assisted mortars.

“The main mass casualty producer for U.S. troops has been the IRAMS (improvised rocket-assisted munitions) which have been around for several years, and which I believe are used exclusively by Iranian- supported groups,” said Michael Eisenstadt, an Iraq expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank closely tied to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

“There are indications that they may have gotten more lethal lately, though I don’t know if this is a function of modifications to the weapons or to improved training,” he said.

U.S. accusations are hard if not impossible to prove given the fact that Iraq is awash with weapons and smuggling across the border with Iran is rampant. Iran denies the allegations. ..more

On Two Torture Investigations
By: emptywheel Wednesday July 13, 2011 5:24 am

Across the pond–in the investigation of British complicity with the torture of Binyam Mohamed and others–the Supreme Court has told the government it can’t present secret evidence.

The supreme court has outlawed the use of secret evidence in court by the intelligence services to conceal allegations that detainees were tortured.

The decision will be seen as a significant victory for open justice, but the panel of nine judges pointed out that parliament could change the law to permit such “closed material procedures” in future.

The appeal was brought by lawyers for MI5 seeking to overturn an earlier appeal court ruling that prevented the service from suppressing accusations British suspects had been ill-treated at Guantánamo Bay and other foreign holding centres.

And here in the land where such secrets have become the norm, Apuzzo and Goldman reveal one of the reasons why DOJ is taking a closer look at Manadel al-Jamadi’s death: because the CIA guy in charge of an unofficial interrogation program in Iraq went beyond clear directions from HQ.

Steve Stormoen, who is now retired from the CIA, supervised an unofficial program in which the CIA imprisoned and interrogated men without entering their names in the Army’s books.

The so-called “ghosting” program was unsanctioned by CIA headquarters. In fact, in early 2003, CIA lawyers expressly prohibited the agency from running its own interrogations, current and former intelligence officials said. The lawyers said agency officers could be present during military interrogations and add their expertise but, under the laws of war, the military must always have the lead.

This detail is interesting for another reason. The AP notes that Stormoen asked to use torture tactics. …more

Al-Jazeera Says its Journalists Threatened
Sunday, July 10, 2011 AFP

The Al-Jazeera satellite news channel today condemned what it called a campaign of threats against its journalists because of its coverage of uprisings in the Arab world. “Al-Jazeera presenters have been the targets of a campaign of threats, with in some cases their own safety and that of family members being threatened,” the Doha-based channel said in a statement.

The campaign “is aimed at influencing Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the uprisings and protests that have swept many Arab countries,” it said. “Al-Jazeera now knows the source of these threats which convey nothing but the moral bankruptcy of those behind them,” it added.
The statement did not name the source, but did say it was planning to take legal action.

However, a source at the broadcaster said the threats emanated from Syria, which has been rocked by protests calling for the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad since mid-March.

Syrian authorities have sealed off the country to most international media as they crack down on coverage of anti-Assad protests. The authorities there accuse Al-Jazeera and other international satellite channels of exaggerating the protests and of broadcasting footage without verifying their authenticity. Because few foreign journalists gain entry to Syria, international media rely heavily on video footage filmed and released by the protesters themselves on Internet sites such as YouTube.

The pan-Arab satellite television channel has been in hot water with several autocratic Arab regimes over its coverage of uprisings sweeping the region since January. During the protests in Egypt that toppled president Hosni Mubarak, the channel was banned from operating inside the country and nine of its journalists were briefly detained. In Libya, Al-Jazeera cameraman Ali Hassan al-Jaber was killed on March 12 in an ambush near Benghazi which the rebels blamed on Muammar Gaddafi’s forces, and several Al-Jazeera journalists have also been arrested covering the revolt. ...source

Tunisia: New Decree on Access to Administrative Documents Rolls Back Culture of Secrecy
Monday, July 11, 2011

Article 19
As part of ARTICLE 19’s ongoing work in support of Tunisia’s democratic transition, the organisation is today releasing its analysis of the Tunisia Decree on Access to Administrative Documents, which was adopted by the Interim Government in May 2011.

ARTICLE 19 welcomes the adoption of the Decree and its many positive features as an important step in the process of democratic transition in Tunisia. At the same time, ARTICLE 19 is concerned that the exceptions to the right to access to information are overly broad and as such, can largely undermine the impact of the Decree in assuring transparency and accountability.

ARTICLE 19, therefore, calls on the Interim Government to urgently develop and adopt Guidelines clarifying the limited scope of these exceptions in order to assure a progressive interpretation of the Decree, in line with international freedom of expression standards.

ARTICLE 19 also calls on the Interim Government to develop – as soon as possible – a comprehensive action plan on the implementation of the Decree, in order to assure that the Decree can be made operational within the shortest time possible.

“Tunisia is now the second country in the Middle East to have adopted an access to information legislation. ARTICLE 19 welcomes the efforts of the Tunisian Interim Government in adopting the Decree on Access to Administrative Documents only a few months after the revolution. This is potentially another milestone in the historic process of democratic transition in Tunisia, committing the country to building a culture of transparency, the right to know and strengthening accountability,” said Dr Agnes Callamard, ARTICLE 19 Executive Director.

“For the Interim Government to turn its back on the culture of secrecy, censorship and impunity that has plagued Tunisia, access to information should be subject to limited and specific exceptions. To enable the Decree to play its functions, the Tunisian Government must, as a matter of priority, clearly and narrowly define the Decree’s exceptions and commit to making it operational as soon as possible,” continued Dr. Callamard.

ARTICLE 19’s analysis highlights a number of positive features of the Decree. In particular, it provides people – regardless of citizenship – with a right to access administrative documents; it requires public authorities to proactively disclose information about their activities; it outlines a satisfactory procedure for access to information; and it establishes that access to documents is in principle free of charge. …more

Libyan Rebels Accused of Pillage and Beatings
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Published: July 12, 2011

ZINTAN, Libya — Rebels in the mountains in Libya’s west have looted and damaged four towns seized since last month from the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, part of a series of abuses and apparent reprisals against suspected loyalists that have chased residents of these towns away, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday.

The looting included many businesses and at least two medical centers that, like the towns, are now deserted and bare.

Rebel fighters also beat people suspected of being loyalists and burned their homes, the organization said.

The towns that have suffered the abuses are Qawalish, which rebels seized last week, Awaniya, Rayaniyah and Zawiyat al-Bagul, which fell to the rebels last month. Some of the abuses, Human Rights Watch said, were directed against members of the Mashaashia tribe, which has long supported Colonel Qaddafi.

The organization’s findings come as support for the war has waned in Europe and in Washington, where Republicans and Democrats alike have questioned American participation on budgetary and legal grounds.

They also raise the prospect that the NATO-backed rebel advances, which have stalled or slowed to a crawl, risk being accompanied by further retaliatory crimes that could inflame tribal or factional grievances, endangering the civilians that NATO was mandated to protect. …more

Human Rights First Urges FIFA, U.S. World Cup Team to Condemn Bahrain’s Attack on Athletes
For Immediate Release: July 12, 2011

Washington, D.C.— In anticipation of Wednesday’s World Cup semifinals game, when the U.S. Women’s soccer team will take on France, Human Rights First calls on the members of the U.S. women’s world cup team and the international sports community at large to condemn Bahrain’s attack against its own athletes. Several Bahraini soccer players, including stars from the national team, were among those arrested for their participation in pro-reform protests in March. Many are now reporting that they were humiliated and tortured while in prison.

These reports of torture and intimidation against soccer players are emerging as the Bahraini government is holding a widely-criticized national dialogue with civil society to promote reconciliation and reform. “At a time when unity as a country is being emphasized by the Bahraini government as part of national dialogue, the attack against athletes undermines any notion of national unity,” said Human Rights First’s Brian Dooley, who left Bahrain today after a one week visit. …more

Urgent; Ayat al-Gormezi, the Poet of Bahrain Movement Released

Ayat al-Gormezi, 20, a poet and student arrested months ago after reading out a poem at a prodemocracy rally, and went on trial before a military tribunal released now.

Urgent; Ayat al-Gormezi, the Poet of Bahrain Movement Released

(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) – 20 year-old poet Ayat al-Gormezi who had a one-year prison sentence unjustly imposed on her 12 June 2011 for reading a poem released this afternoon.

Bahrain’s National Safety Court of First Instance claimed in sentencing Ayat that she was guilty of “inciting hatred of the regime and of being involved in a rally to commit crimes.” Masked police arrested Ayat at her home on 30 March for reciting a poem critical of the monarchy during a pro-democracy rally in the capital Manama in February.

No crime deserves such debasing and inhumane treatment — and certainly not the “crime” of reciting a poem, no matter how critical it is of the ruling government or its leader. …source