Bahrain closes Islamist party, cites “violent” cleric
10 July, 2012 – By Andrew Hammond – Reuters

DUBAI: A Bahrain court has dissolved a Shi’ite Islamist political party which has played a role in the Gulf Arab state’s wave of unrest, on the grounds that it answers to a religious authority who calls for violence.

Bahrain, a U.S. ally ruled by the Sunni Al Khalifa family, has been in turmoil since protests, led mainly by majority Shi’ites, broke out in February last year.

The Islamic Action party, Amal, follows a “hostile clerical authority who blatantly calls for violence and instigates hatred”, the Information Affairs Authority said in a statement on Tuesday. The court order came on Monday, it said.

The statement appeared to refer to the Iraq and Britain-based cleric Sayed Hadi al-Modarresi, an Iraqi who lived in Bahrain until he was accusing of plotting a coup in the island state after the 1979 Iranian revolution.

He directed video messages from abroad to Shi’ite protesters in Bahrain during last year’s uprising.

The statement said Amal had also broken regulations by failing to submit a copy of its annual budget to the ministry of justice, by not holding a public convention in four years, and by holding its last convention in a house of worship.

It also said the group had failed to give a “clear and definitive rejection and condemnation of acts of setting fires, sabotage, terrorising citizens, endangering their lives, jeopardising their freedoms and putting them and their property in direct danger”.

Authorities threatened to close Amal and the leading opposition group Wefaq last year during a crackdown on protests that erupted in the wake of uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. Intervention by U.S. officials appeared to thwart the plan.

A spokesman for Amal was not available for comment but Wefaq said the court’s action was part of a campaign to intimidate opposition parties.

“It is another indicator of the slow crackdown that’s going on. Bahrain is swimming against the current; I’m sure this policy will fail,” said Matar Matar, a former Wefaq member of parliament.

Amal has often set itself apart from a coalition of opposition parties led by Wefaq. It has complained of being targeted because it rejected out of hand the idea of a national dialogue with the government aimed at ending political crisis.

Clashes between protesters and police continue daily. Authorities have tried to stop organised protests by opposition parties over the past month by refusing to license them and using tear gas on those who turn up.

The government says youth protesters attack police without provocation and hold unlicensed protests in villages.

The opposition coalition want full powers for the elected parliament and a cabinet fully answerable to parliament. The government, dominated by the Al Khalifa family, has increased parliament’s powers of scrutiny over ministers.

…source

Angry Throngs at a Funeral in Saudi Arabia
Reuters – By KAREEM FAHIM – 10 July, 2012

CAIRO — Thousands of people attended a funeral in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday for a man killed during protests in a restive region of the country’s Eastern Province, a show of popular anger that came amid fears of a renewed crackdown on dissent.

Activists said the man, Muhammed el-Filfil, had been protesting the shooting and arrest on Sunday by government security forces of a prominent Shiite cleric in the Qatif region. Mr. Filfil was one of at least two people killed when security forces fired live ammunition at the protesters in the village of Awamiya, the activists said. A government official denied that any such clash had occurred.

The oil-rich Eastern Province, the stronghold of Saudi Arabia’s Shiite minority, has long been a focal point of anger at the rigidly conservative Sunni monarchy, and for Shiite complaints about a policy of entrenched, official discrimination.

Over the last year and a half, fearing the spread of the Arab uprisings, the government, using a mix of money and arms, moved forcefully to quell the discontent in places like Qatif. Jafer al-Shayeb, a member of Qatif’s municipal council, said despite offers of development from the government, “There have been no solutions to the major issues that people are complaining about.”

The unrest has persisted, fueled by detentions of dissidents and growing calls for political freedoms and civil rights. At least nine people have been killed since February 2011 in bouts of violence that seem to occur every few months, according to human-rights activists.

The latest clashes came after the arrest of the cleric, Sheik Nimr al-Nimr, who was known as a protest leader and a fierce critic of the royal family. There were conflicting accounts about how he was injured, with the government asserting that he was shot during an exchange of gunfire as he resisted arrest. Mr. Nimr’s brother told Reuters the cleric was detained while driving from a farm to his house.

In a short video said to show Mr. Nimr immediately after his arrest, he is lying in the back seat of a car, with blood on his white robe and a uniformed man holding his head. The government said Mr. Nimr had been charged with “sedition.”

During the large protests in Awamiya after the arrest, Mr. Filfil and another man, Akbar el-Shakhoury, were fatally shot during clashes with security officers, according to Waleed Sulais, a human-rights activist in Qatif. Mr. Sulais said that the government was often quick to resort to live ammunition and said that in addition to the deaths over the last year and a half, at least 35 protesters had been injured by gunfire in the same period.

In a statement to Reuters on Monday, an Interior Ministry spokesman said the number of protesters on Sunday was “limited” and “there was no security confrontation whatsoever.”

Mr. Shayeb, the Qatif council member, said that the unrest had come after months of relative calm in the region.

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo. …source

Russia proposes UN Syria mission extension
11 July, 2012 – Al Akhbar

Russia circulated among UN Security Council members on Tuesday a draft resolution to extend a UN mission in Syria for three months so it can shift focus from monitoring a non-existent truce to securing a political solution to the conflict.

The deeply divided council must decide the future of the mission, known as UNSMIS, before July 20 when its initial 90-day mandate expires. International envoy Kofi Annan is due to brief the council on Wednesday on his bid to broker peace in Syria.

The Russian draft resolution is unlikely to satisfy the United States and European council members, who have called for a resolution under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which allows the council to authorize actions ranging from diplomatic and economic sanctions to military intervention.

US officials have said they are talking about sanctions on Syria, not military intervention.

Russia’s Deputy UN Ambassador Alexander Pankin said a resolution under Chapter 7 would be “counterproductive” in what he described as a “delicate situation.” Russia and China have previously vetoed Western-backed UN resolutions designed to pressure Assad.

“There is no mention of Chapter 7 (in the Russian draft) and that’s a matter of principle for us because we believe the special envoy is doing a commendable job,” Pankin told Reuters. “(The draft) is a continuation of the mission bearing in mind the recommendations of the Secretary-General.”

UN chief Ban Ki-moon has recommended the emphasis of UNSMIS’ work shift from military observers – who suspended most of their monitoring activities on June 16 because of increased risk amid rising violence – to the roughly 100 civilian staff focusing on a political solution and issues like human rights.

The mission would keep its current mandate for up to 300 unarmed observers under this option, but significantly fewer likely would be needed to support the new focus.

The Russian draft resolution, obtained by Reuters, does not specify a number but “stresses the need for UNSMIS to have a military observer capability to conduct effective verification and fact-finding tasks.”

It also “calls upon all Syrian parties to guarantee the safety of UNSMIS personnel without prejudice to its freedom of movement and access, and stresses that the primary responsibility in this regard lies with the Syrian authorities.”

The resolution also strongly urges all parties to cease all violence and stressed “that it is for the Syrian people to find a political solution and that the Syrian parties must be prepared to put forward effective and mutually acceptable interlocutors” to work with Annan toward an agreement.

One Security Council diplomat, who did not want to be named, described the Russian draft as “basically a rollover.”

“At the very least it needs to be combined with some real pressure on the parties,” he said. “The council will need to address the Syria situation in a more comprehensive way.”

Annan met with Assad in Damascus on Monday before traveling to Iran and Iraq for talks on the conflict. Annan said Assad had suggested easing the conflict on a step-by-step basis, starting with districts that have suffered the worst violence. …more

…PHOTO GALLERY OF FUNERAL

Thousands mourn slain Saudi protester
11 July, 2012 – Al Akhbar

Thousands took to the streets on Tuesday night in Saudi Arabia’s restive Eastern Province for the funeral of a protester shot dead by Saudi police on Sunday.

Mohammad al-Filfil was killed on Sunday evening along with blogger Akbar Shakhouri in the village of Awamiyeh in Qatif during protests against the violent arrest of prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.

Tuesday’s peaceful march descended into Riyadh Street and Al-Quds Street, the two main streets in Qatif, with no reports of clashes with Saudi police.

…more

…SEE PHOTO GALLERY HERE

Sure, we as a nation have always killed people. A lot of people. But no president has ever waged war by killing enemies one by one, targeting them individually for execution, wherever they are. The Obama administration has taken pains to tell us, over and over again, that they are careful, scrupulous of our laws, and determined to avoid the loss of collateral, innocent lives. They’re careful because when it comes to waging war on individuals, the distinction between war and murder becomes a fine one. Especially when, on occasion, the individuals we target are Americans and when, in one instance, the collateral damage was an American boy.

The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama
July 9, 2012 – By Tom Junod – Esquire Magazine

Anwar al-Awlaki was nowhere near his son. He was in the mountains of Jawf province, hundreds of miles away. Over the previous year and a half he had survived two drone attacks that had killed thirty-two of the wrong people. Now he was with Samir Khan, another American citizen who’d betrayed his country and was working as an Al Qaeda propagandist. He was not on a kill list, but it didn’t matter. On September 30, Khan was riding in a convoy taking al-Awlaki and others down a mountain road. They had heard and seen Predator drones scouring their refuges before. They probably didn’t hear the one that killed them … or maybe they did. “They fired seven rockets into those cars,” Nasser al-Awlaki says. “They destroyed the cars and everything of the car and the people in the car. The people there told us they were all cut to pieces. They collected their remains and put them in two graves. At least they were given a proper Muslim funeral.”

The next day, Abdulrahman called his mother from the ancestral village near the Arabian Sea. He had heard about what happened to his father. He was coming home.

You were proud that you were able to kill Anwar al-Awlaki. You were proud because his death marked “another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat Al Qaeda and its affiliates”; because by killing him you almost certainly saved American lives; and because you obeyed the law.

This is the consuming irony of the Lethal Presidency. You have become the Lethal President because you are also the Rule-of-Law President. You have been able to kill our enemies because you have forsworn waterboarding them. You have become the first president to execute without trial an American citizen because you hired David Barron and Martin Lederman — the constitutional lawyers renowned for their blistering attacks on the legal memos that justified the Bush administration’s use of torture — to write the legal memos that justified the execution without trial of an American citizen.

“President Bush would never have been able to scale this up the way President Obama has because he wouldn’t have had the trust of the public and the Congress and the international community,” says the former administration official familiar with the targeting process. “That trust has been enabling.”

There have been thousands killed as the result of direct orders of the Lethal Presidency. How can each death be said to be the end product of rigorous review when there are so many of them? And most importantly, how can the care given to the inclusion of individual terrorists on CIA and DOD kill lists be extended to those who are killed without the administration ever knowing their names — those who are killed in “signature strikes,” based on data, rather than “personality strikes,” based on human intelligence?

The simple answer: It can’t, especially when, in the words of a former senior CIA official, “the increase in signature strikes is what accounts for most of the increased activity.” The Lethal Presidency is using intelligence to put people to death, but when the official familiar with targeting is asked about the quality of the information, there is a long pause before the answer.
…more

Distorted Morality: America’s War on Terror?
Noam Chomsky – Delivered at Harvard University – February 2002

[excerpted]

…the hypocrite is the person who applies to others standards that he refuses to apply to himself. So if you are not a hypocrite you assume that if something is right for us then it’s right for them and if it is wrong when they do it, it is wrong when we do it. That is really elementary and I assume that the President would agree and all of his admirers as well. So those are the principles that I would like to start with.

…unless we can rise to that minimal level of moral integrity we should at least stop talking about things like human rights, right and wrong, and good and evil, and all such high afflatus things because all our talk should be dismissed, in fact, dismissed with complete repugnance unless we can at least rise to that minimal level. I think that’s obvious and I hope there would be agreement on that, too.

…let me formulate a thesis. The thesis is that we are all total hypocrites on any issue relating to terrorism. Now, let me clarify the notion “we.” By “we,” I mean people like us — people who have enough high degree of privilege, of training, resources, access to information — for whom it is pretty easy to find out the truth about things if we want to. If we decide that that is our vocation, and in the case in question, you don’t really have to dig very deep, it’s all right on the surface. So when I say “we,” I mean that category. And I definitely mean to include myself in “we” because I have never proposed that our leaders be subjected to the kinds of punishment that I have recommended for enemies. So that is hypocrisy.

…what is terrorism? Got to say something about that. That is supposed to be a really tough question. Academic seminars and graduate philosophy programs and so on — a very vexing and complex question. However, in accordance with the guidelines that I mentioned, I think there is a simple answer, namely, we just take the official U.S. definition of terrorism. Since we are accepting the pronouncements of our leaders literally, let’s take their definition. In fact, that is what I have always done. I have been writing about terrorism for the last twenty years or so, just accepting the official definition. So, for example, a simple and important case is in the U.S. army manual in 1984 which defines terrorism as the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious or ideological in nature.

…what they called state-supported international terrorism a “plague spread by depraved opponents of civilization itself” in a “return to barbarism in the modern age” — I’m quoting [Secretary of State] George Shultz who was the administration moderate. The other guideline is that we will keep to the moderates, not the extremists.

…full text

A recent comment made by Syria’s Information Minister, Adnan Omran, frames these problems in a provocative, yet also precise and urgent, way: “The Americans say either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. That is something God should say.” The original title given to the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan ? “Operation Infinite Justice” ? seems to confirm Omran’s concern.

Defining Terrorism
29 November, 2001 – by Phillip Cryan – CounterPunch

“Terrorism” may be the most important, powerful word in the world right now. In the name of doing away with terrorism, the United States is bombing Afghanistan and talking about possible attacks elsewhere. Political leaders from many countries are at once declaring support for the new U.S. war and seeking to re-name their own enemies as “terrorists.”

According to polls, many people in the U.S. believe that war on the al’Qaeda network is justified in retaliation for the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. The defined enemy of the U.S. military campaign has not, however, been just the people responsible for the September 11 attacks, but “terrorism” in general. The U.S. has declared a “War on Terrorism”–a war which also includes as enemies, as President Bush has made clear since his first public address on the afternoon of the 11, “all those who harbor terrorists.” What exactly do these words, “terrorism” and “harboring,” mean? What definitions are we using?

Legal definition: seeking international consensus

The difficulty of answering this question was stated concisely in a recent New York Times article: “immediately beyond al’Qaeda, the high moral condemnations of global terrorism rapidly become relative, and the definition blurred.” The international community has been actively seeking consensus on the definition of “terrorism” for many years, to no avail.

Twelve separate international conventions have been signed, each covering a specific type of criminal activity ? seizure of airplanes, political assassination, the use of explosives, hostage-taking, etc. Broad ratification of these treaties has been difficult to achieve; and the more fundamental issue of creating a comprehensive, binding international convention against terrorism has been set aside, after repeated efforts, as practically unresolvable. As the UN puts it, “the question of a definition of terrorism has haunted the debate among States for decades.”

One of the points of heated contention in this debate has been whether the term “terrorism” should apply to the actions of States in the same way that it applies to the actions of non-State groups. It’s easy to see why this question would be so contentious: whatever one’s overall view of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, for example, it’s pretty easy to admit that unjustifiable acts of terror and murder have been committed by both sides. Should the two sides be held equally accountable, even though one is an already-recognized State and one is a national liberation movement? These kinds of questions have been repeatedly raised ? as will be described below ? not only in regard to the Middle East but in regard to State-sponsored acts of terrorism throughout the world. …more

No Wonder So Many Drone Strikes Gang Aft Aglay
By Russ Wellen – 11 July, 2012 – FPIP

In a July 6 piece for the New York Times on the training of drone operators titled The Drone Zone, Mark Mazzetti wrote: The increased use of drones in warfare has led the Air Force to re-engineer its training program for drone pilots.

Aside from the inevitable landing accents that result when you rush a pilot — virtual or not — into action, other problems have arisen.

Then there is the fact that the movement shown on a drone pilot’s video screen has over the years been seconds behind what the drone sees — a delay caused by the time it takes to bounce a signal off a satellite in space. This problem, called “latency,” has long bedeviled drone pilots, making it difficult to hit a moving target. Last year senior operatives with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula told a Yemeni reporter that if they hear an American drone overhead, they move around as much as possible. (Military officials said that they have made progress in recent years in addressing the latency problem but declined to provide details.)

Jeez, as if drone strikes weren’t already enough of a guessing game what with signature strikes* and all.

*”Signature strikes target groups of men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren’t always known. The bulk of CIA’s drone strikes are signature strikes.” …more

President Obama the agency extraordinary authority in Pakistan. Now it wants these powers in Yemen too.

Expanding CIA Drone Strikes Will Likely Mean More Dead Innocents
By Conor Friedersdorf – 19 April 2012 – Reuters

An eye-opening report published last November in the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Obama Administration was permitting the CIA to kill people in Pakistan without even knowing who they were: “Signature strikes target groups of men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren’t always known. The bulk of CIA’s drone strikes are signature strikes.” As I noted at the time, this is the same CIA that is known to have jailed innocent people, subjecting them to harsh interrogation tactics and years of wrongful imprisonment. Despite those errors, and the CIA’s lack of transparency and accountability, the Obama Administration loosed it in Pakistan, where we’ve killed lots of innocent people. And while it’s been operating in Yemen for some time, the CIA now wants official permission to kill people whose identities it can’t confirm in that country either.

Is President Obama going to agree? “If approved, the change would probably accelerate a campaign of U.S. airstrikes in Yemen that is already on a record pace, with at least eight attacks in the past four months,” The Washington Post reports. “For President Obama, an endorsement of signature strikes would mean a significant, and potentially risky, policy shift. The administration has placed tight limits on drone operations in Yemen to avoid being drawn into an often murky regional conflict and risk turning militants with local agendas into al-Qaeda recruits.”

It’s worth pausing at that line about the “tight limits” on current drone operations in Yemen. Here’s how Jeremy Scahill, who reported on the ground there, described the reality of American policy:

For years, the elite Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA had teams deployed inside Yemen that supported Yemeni forces and conducted unilateral operations, consisting mostly of cruise missile and drone attacks. Some of the unilateral strikes have killed their intended targets, such as the CIA attack on Awlaki. But others have killed civilians–at times, a lot of civilians. And many of these have been in Abyan and its neighboring province of Shebwa, both of which have recently seen a substantial rise of AQAP activity. President Obama’s first known authorization of a missile strike on Yemen, on December 17, 2009, killed more than forty Bedouins, many of them women and children, in the remote village of al Majala in Abyan. Another US strike, in May 2010, killed an important tribal leader and the deputy governor of Marib province, Jabir Shabwani, sparking mass anger at the United States…

The October drone strike that killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, a US citizen, and his teenage cousin shocked and enraged Yemenis of all political stripes. “I firmly believe that the [military] operations implemented by the US performed a great service for Al Qaeda, because those operations gave Al Qaeda unprecedented local sympathy,” says Jamal, the Yemeni journalist. The strikes “have recruited thousands.” Yemeni tribesmen, he says, share one common goal with Al Qaeda, “which is revenge against the Americans, because those who were killed are the sons of the tribesmen, and the tribesmen never, ever give up on revenge.” Even senior officials of the Saleh regime recognize the damage the strikes have caused.

Put another way, the status quo, with its relatively greater protections, resulted in dozens of dead innocents and, according to some experts, created the conditions for blowback. And since Scahill did his reporting, the pace of drone strikes has increased, “with about as many strikes so far this year as in all of 2011,” the Post reports. “Which U.S. entity is responsible for each strike remains unclear.” Also secret are the identities of the people targeted and the people killed, a confluence of opacity that make abuses likely and more dead innocents all but certain.

China backs Annan’s call for Iran role in Syria talks
11 July, 2012 – By Douglas Hamilton – Reuters

BEIRUT: China threw its weight behind U.N. envoy Kofi Annan on Wednesday, backing his call to include Iran in internationally-brokered talks to resolve Syria’s crisis, in the face of strong Western opposition.

“China believes that the appropriate resolution of the Syria issue cannot be separated from the countries in the region, especially the support and participation of those countries that are influential on relevant sides in Syria,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said in Beijing.

U.N. Security Council veto-holders China and Russia have for the past year blocked efforts by Washington and its European and Gulf Arab allies to turn the screws on Syrian President Bashar Assad, fighting to defend his mostly Alawite ruling establishment against an uprising dominated by Sunni Muslims.

Assad’s opponents say just under 13,000 armed and unarmed opponents of Assad, and around 4,300 members of security forces loyal to Damascus, have been killed since he launched a crackdown 16 months ago, using tanks and helicopter gunships to attack rebel strongholds inside Syria’s biggest cities.

Activists on Wednesday reported a new bombardment of rebel areas of Homs, a hotbed of opposition to Assad, as well as fighting in many other parts of the country.

Annan was due to brief the Security Council at 1530 GMT on Wednesday on the results of a lightning diplomatic shuttle this week to Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad – three capitals forming a Shi’ite Muslim axis of power in the Middle East.

Annan plunged into a tussle between the major powers on Tuesday, insisting that Iran, which strongly backs Assad and is regarded as an adversary of the West and Gulf Arabs, had a role to play in the drive to relaunch stalled peace efforts and begin talks towards a political transition.

In Baghdad, Annan also won backing from Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who like Assad has close ties to Tehran.

Washington’s reaction was not encouraging for the envoy.

“I don’t think anybody with a straight face could argue that Iran has had a positive impact on developments in Syria,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.

…more

Russia refuses to budge on Assad, Syria clashes kill 9
11 July, 2012 – Agence France Presse

DAMASCUS: Syria’s main opposition group on Wednesday failed to convince Russia to drop its support for long-time ally President Bashar Assad, as fresh clashes in Damascus challenged his beleaguered regime.

Russia refuses to shift its controversial position on the crisis in Syria, the exiled opposition Syria National Council (SNC) said after talks in Moscow with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

“We have not seen a development in the Russian position. I was here one year ago and the position has not changed,” Burhan Ghalioun, SNC executive committee member and its former chief, told reporters after the meeting.

Abdel Basset Sayda, the SNC’s new head, earlier compared the conflict in his country to the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

“The events in Syria are not disagreements between the opposition and the government but a revolution,” Sayda told Lavrov, whose country has seen itself cast as the last protector of its Arab ally, Syria.

Underlining the gulf between the SNC and Moscow, Lavrov said Russia wanted to understand in the talks if there were “prospects” of the opposition groups uniting and joining a platform for dialogue with the Syrian government.

On Tuesday, Moscow proposed a U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria that would extend the U.N. observer mission in the country without any threat of sanctions, diplomats in New York said.

The resolution was sent to the council’s other 14 members ahead of a briefing on Wednesday by U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan on efforts to revive his peace plan, Russia’s deputy U.N. envoy Igor Pankin told reporters.

Russia is Assad’s main ally apart from Iran and has fiercely resisted international action against the Damascus government as proposed by Washington and European powers.

Moscow has repeatedly said Assad’s fate is up to the Syrian people and defied calls by the West and the SNC to urge him to step down.

On Tuesday, Annan warned that the conflict could spread across the region as he held talks in Iran and Iraq aimed at shoring up support for his tattered peace plan, starting with an April ceasefire that has failed to materialize.

But in an implicit rebuff, the United States renewed its opposition to any role for Tehran in resolving the conflict.

“I don’t think anybody with a straight face could argue that Iran has had a positive impact on developments in Syria,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.

…more