Fact or Fiction? Ecuador Cools on Edward Snowden Asylum as Assange Frustration Grows

Fact or Fiction?

Ecuador Cools on Edward Snowden Asylum as Assange Frustration Grows

President Correa revokes Snowden's temporary travel document amid concerns WikiLeaks founder is 'running the show'

By Rory Carroll in Quito and Amanda Holpuch in New York

President Correa declared that the safe conduct pass issued by Ecuador's London consul – in collaboration with Assange – was unauthorised. Photograph: EPA
"The Guardian" -- The plan to spirit the surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden to sanctuary in Latin America appeared to be unravelling on Friday, amid tension between Ecuador's government and Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.

President Rafael Correa halted an effort to help Snowden leave Russia amid concern Assange was usurping the role of the Ecuadoran government, according to leaked diplomatic correspondence published on Friday.

Amid signs Quito was cooling with Snowden and irritated with Assange, Correa declared invalid a temporary travel document which could have helped extract Snowden from his reported location in Moscow.

Correa declared that the safe conduct pass issued by Ecuador's London consul – in collaboration with Assange – was unauthorised, after other Ecuadorean diplomats privately said the WikiLeaks founder could be perceived as "running the show".

According to the correspondence, which was obtained by the Spanish-language broadcaster Univision and shared with the Wall Street Journal, divisions over Assange have roiled Ecuador's government.

Ecuador's ambassador to the US, Nathalie Cely, told presidential spokesman Fernando Alvarado that Quito's role in the drama was being overshadowed by the WikiLeaks founder, who has sheltered in Ecuador's London embassy for the past year to avoid extradition.

"I suggest talking to Assange to better control the communications. From outside, [Assange] appears to be running the show."

Earlier this week a senior foreign diplomat in Quito told the Guardian that some – though not all – factions in the government were annoyed with what they saw as Assange grandstanding.

In a message attributed to Assange sent to Ecuador's foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, and other top officials, the WikiLeaks founder apologised "if we have unwittingly [caused] Ecuador discomfort in the Snowden matter." The note continued: "There is a fog of war due to the rapid nature of events. If similar events arise you can be assured that they do not originate in any lack of respect or concern for Ecuador or its government."

Assange appears to have had a strong role in obtaining the travel document for Snowden, dated 22 June which bore the printed name, but not signature, of the London consul, Fidel Narvaez, a confidante. By mid-week Narvaez was reportedly in Moscow.

The document could have helped Snowden, whose US passport has been revoked, leave the transit lounge of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport where he has reportedly holed up since fleeing Hong Kong last weekend.

On Thursday, Correa, who previously has hailed Snowden for exposing US spying, and has earned kudos for defying Washington pressure over the affair, reduced Snowden's chances of making it to Quito.

At a press conference the president declared the travel document invalid and said Ecuador would not consider an asylum request unless Snowden reached Ecuadorean territory, an increasingly remote prospect.

"The situation of Mr Snowden is a complex situation and we don't know how he will solve it."

Correa did however ramp up defiance of the US by waiving preferential trade rights to thwart what officials called Washington "blackmail". Analysts said Correa, an economist who specialised in game theory, had so far skilfully extracted political capital from the saga without drawing US retaliation.

In a TV interview on Friday, Snowden's father said said he was worried about the involvement of WikiLeaks. "I don't want to put him in peril, but I am concerned about those who surround him," Lonnie Snowden told NBC.

"I think WikiLeaks, if you've looked at past history … their focus isn't necessarily the constitution of the United States. It's simply to release as much information as possible."

Snowden said he did not believe his son had betrayed his country. "At this point, I don't feel that he's committed treason. He has broken US law, in a sense that he has released classified information. And if folks want to classify him as a traitor, in fact he has betrayed his government. But I don't believe that he's betrayed the people of the United States."

Snowden said he had told US attorney general Eric Holder through his lawyer that his son might return home if he would not be detained before trial, could choose the location for his trial and would not be subjected to a gag order. It was not clear that Lonnie Snowden was communicating his son's views, as he also said they had not spoken since April.

 
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White House Threatens to Cut-off Aid if Palestine Joins ICC

White House Threatens to Cut-off Aid if Palestine Joins ICC

By Franklin Lamb

Fatou Bom Bensouda, the Gambian-born deputy prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), was never Washington's first choice to succeed the inveterately self-promoting elitist ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

And it is doubtful that key Obama administration officials have changed their minds this week given Ms. Bensouda's impassioned invitation on 6/27/13 to Palestine, urging its accession to the Rome Statute and the ICC, the former signed and ratified, as of this month, by 122 states with 31 additional countries, including Russia, having signed with ratification pending in their legislatures.

Visiting Al Jalil UNWRA high school across from Shatila camp here in Beirut recently, this observer was asked several questions by students and staff and the most frequent inquiry, which came as no surprise,  concerned why the Lebanese government, even those who claim to support the Palestinian cause, still have not acted in Parliament to grant Palestinian refugees the same elementary civil right to work and to own a home that every refugee everywhere, even in Zionist occupied Palestine, have long enjoyed.

The second most commonly asked question, did surprise me a bit and it was why the Palestinian leaders in Ramallah have not joined the International Criminal Court (ICC) in order to challenge the criminal, apartheid regime in occupied Tel Aviv and hold it accountable under international humanitarian law for crimes against Palestinian prisoners and more than a dozen equally brutal campaigns that target the indigenous population increasingly being condemned internationally.

From my time visiting Al Jalil School, it became clear that the students and faculty want their country, Palestine, to join the ICC.  One is advised that this sentiment is the same in all 54 Palestinian refugees' schools in Lebanon and this insistence mirrors virtually all Palestinian, camps, groups and NGO's with whom I have discussed the subject.

The new ICC Prosecutor Bensouda is also encouraging Palestine  to join the International Criminal Court, as she prepares for the cases that are likely to be filed with the ICC in the coming months.   Addressing this week's Transitional Justice and International Justice the Arab World conference, she declared that her office believes Palestine qualifies to join the ICC after the UN General Assembly voted to admit Palestine as a non-member state last November.

The ICC prosecutor's office is rumored in The Hague to be particularly impassioned and focused on those areas in which their chief, Ms. Bensouda, has particular international legal expertise. With the main area being international crimes comprising the category of continuous crimes against humanity, which, arguably, since 1948, have been most egregiously committed by the last 19th century colonial enterprise that still brutally occupies Palestine.

Prosecutor Bensouda and her ICC staff is reported to be particularly intent on investigating continuing violations of basic humanitarian principles, standards and rules and both have spoken about the case  of Palestinian Maysara Abu Hamdiyeh, a cancer-sufferer who died in Israeli custody on 6/25/13  after the  Israeli government rejected repeated international calls and protests for his release. This, even as its officials conceded that Mr. Abu Hamidiyeh was no threat to society and could likely be successfully treated if allowed medical treatment for his life threatening condition.  One ICC investigator, who asked for anonymity, stated that she and her colleagues considered the actions of the Netanyahu government with respect to the Abu Hamidiyeh, and similar cases, to be "sick!"

The White House and its allies are not pleased by prospects for an eventful  next few years at the ICC. What have particularly unnerved outgoing UN Ambassador, Susan Rice and Israeli PM Netanyahu, are the 5/23/13 comments of Ms. Bensouda during the 38th FIDH Congress in Istanbul which celebrated the 15th anniversary of the Rome Statute which created the ICC.

"Gone are the days when those who commit international crimes, could be cleansed of their atrocities through a mere hand shake and a scribble of their initials on a piece of paper which purports to bind them to conditions that they have no intention of ever observing."  She added: "My challenge is to consolidate what has been achieved, to build on from it, and to answer victims' calls for justice. That is the promise made in Rome and that is the promise we cannot fail to fulfill".

One the several "going out the door" comments Ms. Rice made on cleaning out her UN office on her way to become President Obama's National Security Adviser, was basically a reiteration of her livid expressions made following last fall's UN General Assembly vote giving Palestine its new international status. When asked if she considered the UN vote a repudiation of the Obama administration and her personally, Ms. Rice scolded:

"That resolution is not going to take them closer to statehood, or to the ICC!  It may actually make the environment more difficult for them and public references to the "State of Palestine" do not make it a sovereign state. Any reference to the 'State of Palestine' in the United Nations, including the use of the term 'State of Palestine' on the placard in the Security Council or the use of the term 'State of Palestine' in the invitation  do not reflect acquiescence that 'Palestine' is a state," she said.

It may be recalled that in a letter addressed to the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the President of the UN Security Council immediately following the 11/29/12  General Assembly vote, the permanent UN observer of Palestine reiterated his delegation's position that "all Israeli settlement activities are illegal, constituting grave breaches of article 49 (6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention and thus constituting war crimes, as further determined in accordance with article 8 (2) (b) (viii) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Israel, the occupying Power, must be held accountable for all of the war crimes it is committing against the Palestinian people."

This letter was cited by the most recent UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) report of February 2013, which also found Israel, as an occupying power, in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for "transferring parts of its civilian population into territory that it occupies."

Adding to all its currents problems, is this week's announcement that President Obama's "favorite general,"  Retired Gen. James "Hoss" Cartwright will likely cause yet more serious problems for the administration when details of his suspected leaks of information about a covert U.S.-Israeli cyber-attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran's nuclear program, for which he is expected to soon be arrested and indicted. Coming on the heels of the Edward Snowden's NSA leaks case, Washington is said to have no patience whatsoever, for Palestine making more problems and opening an ICC Pandora's box.

Ramallah is being flooded with threats this month from Middle East envoy, Tony Blair,  US Secretary of State, John Kerry, now on his 5th visit to the Middle East in as many months, Jordan's King Abdullah II and reportedly, several others.  The message for Mahmoud Abbas is that the Palestinian Authority risks a cut-off of funds and US dis-engagement from any "peace process" as well as the scrapping of the rumored "mega economic & development  package" which Kerry aids are currently finalizing, if Palestine goes anywhere near the International Criminal Court.

It's a tough call for President Mahmoud Abbas and his supporters because Hamas wants Palestine to immediately file cases against Israel at the ICC and so it appears, do a large majority of Palestinians, in Lebanon and internationally.

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Syria and Lebanon and can be reached c/o fplamb@gmail.com

This article was originally published at Al-Manar
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Building for Armageddon?

 Building for Armageddon?

Syria, The Faces Behind The Terror

By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

In her extraordinarily bold and direct speech addressed to the Irish Parliament, Clare Daly (TD, Dublin North) called Obama a "war criminal"and "hypocrite of the century".

In describing the fawned reception of Obama in Ireland akin to pimping and prostituting of that nation, Ms. Daly hit the nail on the head. Sadly, America dwarfs Ireland and elsewhere in the undignified category of prostitution – the 29 standing ovations from Congress in May 2011 for war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu attests to this tragic fact.

While Daly was quite right in censuring Obama for his criminal policies, including aiding terrorists in Syria, it is worthwhile noting that Obama is merely a willing instrument; the faces and factors behind his handlers and the policies merit greater scrutiny and exposure.

Backing and arming the so-called Syrian opposition distracts from the threat posed by Israel and its expansionist agenda by internalizing the enemy in order to weak the State. As former Israeli Intelligence Chief, Amos Yaldin told the audience at the Israel Policy Forum in February 2013:

"And this military [Syrian], which is a huge threat to Israel , is now also weakening and, in a way, disintegrating. We still have risk from Syria– a risk of being an AlQaeda country, a Somalia-type country — but from military point of view, each one of these are less dangerous than the Syrian regular army."

Perpetuating adversaries to kill each other is a time-tested tactic – one which was used during the bloody eight year Iran-Iraq war; a war which according to Leon Wieseltier[i]was a "distraction" when Israeli boots were on the ground in Southern Lebanon. In that war, the United States was providing arms and intelligence to both sides. When asked what the logic was in aiding both sides in the bloody war, a former official replied: "You had to have been there"[ii]. But why Syria ?

The Need for Water

The primary goal of the early Zionist leadership was to control and secure the region's waters. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Chaim Weizmann declared that 'it was of vital importance not only to secure all water resources feeding the country, but to control them at the sources – and the development of these waters became the primary aim of the Yishuv as a whole[iii]. This policy remained in place. As Israel 's third Prime Minister Levi Eshkol put it, water was "the blood flowing through the arteries of the nation".

As previously stated (Here and Here), the chaos we witness in Syria today has been in the making for years with the aid and backing of Israel-firsters in order to accommodate Israel's agenda – expansion and control of regional water supplies while weakening its adversary/ies.

Israel faced one of its worst droughts in 1990-91. A second more serious drought in 1998, forced it to turn to water rich Turkey . Turkey and Israel engaged in serious negotiations starting in May 2000 to import 50 billion cubic meters of fresh water from Turkey using tanker ships, but using tankers was not cost effective for the transport of water. Alternate plans were suggested.

In September 2000, the same year that young Bashar-al Assad succeeded his father as President of Syria, a strategy paper entitled "The Geopolitics of Water" by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) opined that "Since extensive water planning proposals will necessitate the establishment of pipelines and energy grids stretching across borders, a political and military structure that can ensure the safety and security of the carriers will be the prerequisite to effective water sharing" ….. "But an effective regional system would require political-military cooperation against Syria ".

How to achieve this?

Israeli-Firsters to the rescue

Media mogul Haim Saban became involved in politics in the mid 1990's with a view to support Israel . Saban professes that his greatest concern is the"protection" of Israel . At a conference in Israel , Saban described his method of influencing American politics : 'Make donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and control media outlets'. (Saban penned an opinion piece in The New York Times in support of President Obama in his 2012 re-election bid).

It was no surprised therefore that in 2002, Saban pledged $13 million to start a research organization at the Brookings Institution called the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Saban Center would play an important role in propping up Syrian opposition (as it did in fermenting unrest post-2009 Iran elections with their June 2009 publication titled: "Which Path to Persia ? Options for a New American Strategy Towards Iran "[1]). In 2006, Time Magazine revealed that that the US had been agitating, funding, and supporting "opposition" in Syria . According to the Time, the U.S. was "supporting regular meetings of internal and diaspora Syrian activists" in Europe . The document bluntly expresses the hope that "these meetings will facilitate a more coherent strategy and plan of actions for all anti-Assad activists."

It is worthwhile mentioning here that America 's support of the so-called "opposition" which includes criminals, terrorists, and foreign fighters to effect regime change underscores America 's stark hypocrisy. According to 18 USC § 2385 -Advocating overthrow of Government (Cornell Law), advocating the overthrow of the government, 'organizing or help or attempt to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of the government of the United States or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence'bears serious consequences including fines and prison sentence of up to 20 years.

What is most revealing about the abovementioned Time Magazine piece of 2006 is that America 's efforts to aid the opposition and undermine Assad were run through a foundation operated by Amar Abdulhamid, a Washington-based member of a Syrian umbrella opposition group known as the National Salvation Front (NSF). Abdulhamid was a visiting Fellow at the Saban Center (2004-2006) before moving on to the Neocon-run National Defense of Democracies.

When in 2008, Israel-firster Dennis Ross met with the "opposition" to discuss "Syria in Transition", Saban's fellow – Amar Abdullhamid was present. In February 2009, Dennis Ross joined the Obama Administration team. In April 2009, the US funded, London-based Baraada TV started its anti-Assad propaganda into Syria (The epicenter of the uprisings' was Baraada over water distribution). Baraada TV's chief editor, Malik al-Abdeh, is a cofounder of the Syrian exile group Movement for Justice and Development headed by Anas al-Abdah who was in attendance at the 2008 meeting with Dennis Ross.

It came as no surprise that John McCain who was a member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI) formed to rid Iraq of Saddam Hossein, and a cheerleader for the Libya intervention, the Egyptian opposition to Mubarak, for bombing Iran, and so on…..visited Syrian "opposition" (via Turkey) in order to encourage more bloodshed. And expectedly, he was de-briefed — not at the White House, but at the Saban Center!

Soon after McCain's presentation at the Saban Center , the White House disputed UN's account and claimed that that Syria had crossed the 'red line' and used chemical weapons.

It is not the intention of this article to exclude the plethora of other individuals, think tanks, forums, and media pundits who have institutionalized Israel's policies and promoted them as 'America's interests'; these are too numerous to mention here. However, a notable other Israel supporter must be named.

 The Evangelical Factor

While various groups in Washington perpetuate and support Israel 's aggressive and expansionist policies — at a cost to America , non have the zeal and the zest of the Evangelicals who support Israel to death. According to the dispensational model, a time of turmoil lies ahead, but believers will be "raptured" away before it begins. This period of tribulation will culminate in the final battle at Armageddon, a valley northwest of Jerusalem .

The close association between American evangelicals and Israel has been a clear goal of Israeli politicians, especially those in the Likud party. According to Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum of AJC, "the evangelical community is the largest and fastest-growing bloc of pro-Jewish sentiment in this country"[iv]. Israel and Jewish organizations continue to rely on the support of Evangelicals to justify Israel 's occupation of Arab land even as Christian Zionists zest for evangelizing Jews remains a point of tension.

For example, within days of the June 1982 invasion of Lebanon (with a green light from Reagan), full-page ads appeared in leading papers requesting Evangelical support for the invasion[v]. In 1998, when Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington , he met with Jerry Falwell and numerous fundamentalist Christians before meeting with President Clinton. Similarly, as recently as April 2013, Pat Robertson warned that brokering peace between Israel and Palestine would bring punishment on America.

It has been alleged that funds raised in America by right wing Christians is funneled to West Bank settlements. The mayor of Ariel on the West Bank had estimated that two thirds of all Jewish settlements were funded by Christian Zionists.[vi]

Building for Armageddon?

While Evangelicals (not all) are rupture-ready and encourage Israel 's expansionist agenda, Israeli politicians are not yet Armageddon-ready; at least, not yet.

In March 2013, Business Insider revealed that the United States is spending hundreds of millions of dollars building bunkers in Israel due to be completed 900 days from February 13, 2013. The project called Site 911 "will have five levels buried underground and six additional outbuildings on the above grounds, within the perimeter. At about 127,000 square feet, the first three floors will house classrooms, an auditorium, and a laboratory — all wedged behind shock resistant doors — with radiation protection and massive security. Only one gate will allow workers entrance and exit during the project and that will be guarded by only Israelis".

Each door of the facility will have a detailed description of the mezuzahs written in"in-erasable ink".

This should be heartwarming news to Americans whose taxes are spent on such projects while the bridges at home are crumbling.

The Future

The political establishment and the media has pimped out the nation. The list of conflicts awaiting us is long and bloody.

Syria will not be the last conflict. This has been a brief and incomplete overview of what drives our nation, and where we are headed, the handlers and the willing instruments (in the words of Clare Daly, pimps and prostitutes).

We continue to sink our head in sand and hope for a hero – for 'something to happen'. There is only one hope for the future, and the only one power that can alter this destructive path: "We, The People".

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is an independent researcher and writer with a focus on U.S. foreign policy and the role of lobby groups in influencing US foreign policy.

Notes

[i] Wieseltier , Leon ," Israel meets Iran in Lebanon ; The Wrong War", The New Republic, Apr 8, 1985

[1]Chapter 6 reads: "The United States could play multiple roles in facilitating a revolution. By funding and helping organize domestic rivals of the regime, the United States could create an alternative leadership to seize power. As Raymond Tanter of the Iran Policy Committee argues, students and other groups "need covert backing for their demonstrations. They need fax machines. They need Internet access, funds to duplicate materials, and funds to keep vigilantes from beating them up." Beyond this, US-backed media outlets could highlight regime shortcomings and make otherwise obscure critics more prominent. The United States already supports Persian language satellite television (Voice of America Persian) and radio (Radio Farda) that bring unfiltered news to Iranians (in recent years, these have taken the lion's share of overt US funding for promoting democracy in Iran). US economic pressure (and perhaps military pressure as well) can discredit the regime, making the population hungry for a rival leadership……"

[ii]Stephen R. Shalom, The United States and Iran-Iraq War, citing Stephen Engelberg, "Iran and Iraq Got 'Doctored Data, U.S. Officials Say," New York Times, 12 Jan. 1987, pp. A1, A6.

[iii]Jan Selby, "Water, Power & Politics in the Middle East ; The Other Israeli-Palestinian Conflict", Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

[iv]Donald Wagner, "Evangelicals and Israel : Theological roots of a political alliance", The Christian Century, Nov. 4, 1998).

[v]Donald Wagner, "Evangelicals and Israel : Theological roots of a political alliance", ibid

[vi]Colin Shindler, "Likud and the Christian Dispensationalists: A Symbiotic Relationship", Israeli Studies, March 31, 2000
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Lifting the Arms Embargo on Syria – A Decision Whose Results Will Be Measured In Hecatombs.

Lifting the Arms Embargo on Syria – A Decision Whose Results Will Be Measured In Hecatombs

By Steve McGiffen

The results of the EU's decision not to extend its embargo on arms sales to Syria will be measured in hecatombs, and not in Syria alone. There is now a real chance that the entire region will descend into civil war, and that any such war will destabilise a world already on the brink of catastrophe.

To begin, anyone who confidently tells you what's going on in Syria, who are the 'good guys' and who the bad, and whether indeed there is any meaning to these handy categories, is either a liar or a fool, at least unless they have lived there for a very long time, speak the languages of a country which is – like Libya - an artificially cobbled-together legacy of French and British imperialism, and know people on all sides of the conflict.

Secondly, while Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' founding texts continue to be the best place to start to understand the world as it is, it is another Victorian author, Lewis Carroll, who seems most appropriate when approaching recent developments in the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region and the western powers' response to them.  Marx and Engels are great when things have at least some semblance of coherence, but here we are in a world in which, as Carroll's Humpty Dumpty tells Alice,  a word can mean just what you 'choose it to mean—neither more nor less.'

So we saw the European Union and its member states acting as major paymasters for the Egyptian and Tunisian dictatorships. Though the European Mediterranean Programme paid lip service to promoting 'democracy', nothing much was done about this, while the so-called 'market economy' and liberalisation were pursued with great enthusiasm. It was clear even to mainstream commentators that the real aim was simply to create and sustain markets for European manufactured goods and services, while ensuring a supply of foodstuffs, oil and other commodities, as well as cheap labour, when such was in demand.  Suddenly, however, when the dictatorships toppled and fell, the EU was all for democracy, and Tony Blair's bizarre statement that Mubarak was 'immensely courageous and a force for good' was revealed clearly for what it was, one criminal speaking out in defence of another.

In Libya we had NATO supporting a set of criminal gangs against a rather brutal dictator, leaving a situation of confusion and, surely, further and ongoing violent conflict. At the same time other parts of the MENA region were exploding into civil conflict building in at least one case to full-scale war. Enter, once more, Carrollian dialectics. Justifying NATO support for the Libyan 'rebels', President Obama tells the world that the US 'cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people there will be no mercy'. In Bahrain, meanwhile, US marines do precisely that. But then Bahrain is a close friend of Saudi Arabia, a country run by tyrants who enjoy the full and unwavering support of the US. You could not, as they say, make this stuff up.

Lifting the arms embargo on Syria makes any peaceful solution, admittedly improbable as things stood, impossible. The Syrian National Council has said it won't be attending the peace conference planned for August unless the 'international community', for which read the imperialist powers, attack forces from Iran, and Hezbollah, active in the country. Such action has thankfully, however, been ruled out, at least for now.  

What little credibility the EU and its member states might have had has disappeared. Criteria for arms sales supposedly agreed by the member states are frequently flouted, but never before, as far as I can remember, with the full and public approval of Brussels. Arms are not supposed to be sold to countries which practice human rights abuses, which it has to be said in our times would leave few if any potential customers.  They are not supposed to be sold to countries undergoing 'internal conflict', which, forgive me if I'm wrong, would surely include Syria. They are not supposed to be sold in circumstances which might endanger regional stability. In this case I would argue that what is being placed in danger is not only any chance of restoring any kind of stability to Syria, not even only regional stability, but global peace, or what's left of it.

Geopolitical considerations, added to the likely reaction from various sides in the Syrian diaspora, added to the possible involvement of groups with a grudge (often a perfectly understandable grudge) against the 'West', added to Israel's combination of jumpiness and an eye for the main chance in any situation, added to the withdrawal of Austrian UN troops from the Golan Heights and the possible withdrawal of the entire force, added to the involvement of Turkey, of Lebanon, of Jordan…. a peaceful, reassuring solution to this grim calculation is hard to see.

The idea that the weapons will go only to 'moderates' would be very funny indeed, if circumstances weren't so tragic. We are approaching six figures in the tally of death in Syria, and there's nothing moderate about that.  Assad may stay in power, or he may fall. If the latter occurs then the most likely outcome would seem to be that the terrorist mobs who are the real counterforce will replace him, and the country will descend further into ethnic and religious conflict, just as Iraq did after its 'liberation'.

Steve McGiffen is Spectrezine's editor
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C.I.A. Report Finds Concerns With Ties to New York Police.

Four Central Intelligence Agency officers were embedded with the New York Police Department in the decade after Sept. 11, 2001, including one official who helped conduct surveillance operations in the United States, according to a newly disclosed C.I.A. inspector general's report.
http://is.gd/3VEMgy
 
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Head of US cyber-attack on Iran probed over leak of details - source

The four-star general who headed the reported cyber-attack by American and Israeli hackers on an Iranian nuclear site is under a DoJ investigation over leaking the details of the operation to the press, reports NBC News.
http://is.gd/V6YqQN
 

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NATO research team calls Stuxnet attack on Iran an 'act of force'

A group of 20 law and technology experts has unanimously agreed that the Stuxnet worm used against Iran in 2009-2010 was a cyberattack. The US and Israel have long been accused of collaborating on the virus in a bid to damage Iran's nuclear program.
http://is.gd/TMDa1Q
 

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Arrest Barack Obama, says Muslim Lawyers Association in South Africa.

The Muslim Lawyers' Association in South Africa has called for the arrest of US President Barack Obama on war crime and genocide charges when he visits the country from Friday.
http://is.gd/7flabr
 

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Why South Africa's 'NO-Bama Coalition' is protesting Obama's visit.

There is a segment of South Africa that is not happy to see Obama visiting their country and are planning several protests, some of which have already begun
http://is.gd/pzptJt
 

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U.S. military steps up Africa focus.

Nevertheless, with some 4,000-5,000 personnel on the ground at any given time, the United States now has more troops in Africa than at any point since its Somalia intervention two decades ago. That ended in humiliation and withdrawal after the 1993 "Blackhawk Down" debacle in which 18 U.S. soldiers died.
http://is.gd/YcOV6f
 

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Egyptian activists hope for 'second revolution' a year after Morsi's election.

Opposition plans large-scale demonstrations on Sunday, with some hoping army may step in to facilitate transition of power
http://is.gd/OKHOTa

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One killed as clashes, tear gas and massive protests grip Egypt amid 'growing security crisis.

 
One killed as clashes, tear gas and massive protests grip Egypt amid 'growing security crisis.

Security forces used tear gas to break up clashes between rival protesters in Alexandria, according to MENA news agency. Over 70 people were injured there. At least one person was killed by gunfire, a health official told Reuters.
http://is.gd/00k9qo
 
 
 
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Spinal decompression

Jump to: navigation, search Spinal decompression is a term that describes the relief of pressure on one or many pinched nerves (neural impingement) of the spinal column.
Spinal decompression can be achieved both surgically and non-surgically and is used to treat conditions that result in chronic back pain such as disc bulge, disc herniation, sciatica, spinal stenosis, and isthmic and degenerative spondylolisthesis.

Contents 1 Surgical spinal decompression 2 Non-surgical spinal decompression 2.1 Theoretical foundations 2.2 History 2.3 Effectiveness 3 External links 4 References

Surgical spinal decompression

Surgical spinal decompression may be performed using one of these common procedures:
Microdiscectomy (or microdecompression) is a minimally invasive surgical procedure in which a portion of a herniated nucleus pulposus is removed by way of a surgical instrument or laser while using an operating microscope or loupe for magnification.
Laminectomy (or open decompression) is an invasive surgical procedure in which a small portion of the arch of the vertebrae (bone) is removed from the spine to alleviate the pressure on the pinched nerve. This is an elective procedure for patients who have not had relief of back pain through more conservative treatment options.

What is the success rate of back surgery?

In: Back Neck and Spine, Surgery and Hospitalization

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Answer:

It depends on many factors - the problem itself, overall health of the patient, type of doctor performing the surgery, the type of procedure being performed, available technology for the procedure, experience of the surgeon, Murphy, etc.

Having had 3 major spinal fusions over the past 15 years, and having the first two turn out to be botched (something I didn't discover until the 3rd surgery) I think I'm somewhat qualified to comment on this.

Syrians behead Christians for helping military, as CIA ships in arms.

A priest and another Christian were beheaded before a cheering crowd by Syrian insurgents who say they aided and abetted the enemy, President Bashar Assad's military, foreign media reported.

 

http://is.gd/X3GDXT

U.S. Judge Throws Out Abu Ghraib Detainees' Torture Case!!!

"Plaintiffs alleged that torture and war crimes occurred during their detention in Abu Ghraib," he wrote. "Plaintiffs' ATS claims do not allege that any violations occurred in the United States or any of its territories. Therefore, on these facts, the court holds that Kiobel's bar against extraterritorial application of the ATS governs.

http://is.gd/km4qcG

Snowden’s Case for Asylum

Snowden’s Case for Asylum

Despite U.S. government pressure, Russian President Vladimir Putin is balking at demands that he extradite Edward Snowden from Moscow to face espionage charges for leaking secrets about America’s global surveillance operations. Still, Snowden’s status remains dicey, as Marjorie Cohn explains to Dennis J Bernstein.

By Dennis J Bernstein

"Consortium News" - The U.S. government is putting on a full-court press to track down, arrest and prosecute Edward Snowden for blowing the whistle on the National Security Agency’s massive collection of data on phone calls by Americans and Internet use by foreigners.

Big Brother, not Snowden and Greenwald, Is the Story

Big Brother, not Snowden and Greenwald, Is the Story

By Sheldon Richman

"fff" -  “Instead of being adversaries to government power … [the media of Washington, D.C., are] … servants to it and mouthpieces for it.”

Hey, MSM: All Journalism is Advocacy Journalism

Hey, MSM: All Journalism is Advocacy Journalism

By Matt Taibbi

"Rolling Stone" - So New York Times Dealbook writer Andrew Ross Sorkin has apologized to journalist Glenn Greenwald for saying he'd "almost arrest" him, for his supposed aid and comfort of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. "I veered into hyperbole," was Sorkin's explanation.

The personal side of taking on the NSA: emerging smears!

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Ecuador snubs US trade ‘blackmail’ over Snowden, offers human rights training

Ecuador snubs US trade ‘blackmail’ over Snowden, offers human rights training

By RT

Ecuador renounced trade benefits which the US threatened to revoke over the Latin American country’s consideration of harboring NSA leaker Edward Snowden. It offered $23 million a year to fund human rights education for Americans instead.

NSA collected US email records in bulk for more than two years under Obama

• Secret program launched by Bush continued 'until 2011'
• Fisa court renewed collection order every 90 days
• Current NSA programs still mine US internet metadata

 

By Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman

 "The Guardian" - The Obama administration for more than two years permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans, according to secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The Truthseeker: Obama's arrest, Bush's trial (E18)

The Executive Branch of the U.S. Government World's Most Evil and Lawless Institution?

The Executive Branch of the U.S. Government
World's Most Evil and Lawless Institution?

Executive Branch leaders have killed, wounded and made homeless well over 20 million human beings in the last 50 years, mostly civilians.

By Fred Branfman

America has a secret. It is not discussed in polite company or at the dinner tables of the powerful, rich and famous.

Parents do not teach it to their children. Best-selling authors do not write about it. Politicians and government officials ignore it. Intellectuals avoid it. High school and college textbooks do not refer to it.

Israel / Palestine: What will Obama do?

Israel / Palestine: What will Obama do?

By Alison Weir

Whenever a US president begins a term of office many people round the world are curious about what policies he may pursue on Israel-Palestine. They wonder if he will once again call on Israel to reduce its settlement activities as almost every president has done at least once.

Will he condemn Israeli aggression, or only Palestinian rockets? Will he push a “peace process” in which virtually all the American mediators are Israel partisans[1] or will a few non-Zionists be permitted to play a role?

Horrific video of beheading raises questions of arms supply to Syrian re...

Syria: the Art of Standing on the Right Side of History

Syria: the Art of Standing on the Right Side of History

By Oriental Review

The ongoing Syrian crisis will be certainly viewed by future generations as a classic example of how a completely false reality, as presented by the dominant Western political class and corporate media, has inscrutably resulted in the moral and political reinforcement of the opposing party, which was desperately defending the principles of law and justice under unprecedented pressure from a transnational party of war.

Worship Alone

Worship Alone

It is Friday and my one thought today is about the society of evil people we live in.  My search to find very religious people in Jordan is exhausted and I have only met a very few who follow the guidelines of Islam I believe in.  People pray, but they put all their earnings in their pocket and give only zakat once a year which they rarely have.

People read Quran, but they neglect to remember the river of Kawthar near Prophet Mohammad, PBUH.  Who are those who will drink from this river? Those who submit? What does submit mean? Those who follow the sayings and actions of our most beloved Prophet.  He was and practiced Islam.  He only did what Allah had taught him and he went away from bad people and actions.

Simple things he taught us, people are forgetting.  How many people build new construction, when Prophet Mohammad frowned on such things.  He taught us to eat and not to eat milk with meat and yet millions of people eat Mansef and this is a celebration meal.  He taught us not to eat sour fruit with sweet fruit and yet people will continuously bring you a plate of oranges and bananas after the meal.  He taught us to eat fruit before the meal and to eat melon alone.  Have we submitted when we do not follow his actions?

I frown on people who do not give charity, as charity is the basis of many poor people's existence.  I see many posts about Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan.  I remember reading about Pakistan and after the huge earthquake years ago, many had no shoes, no blankets and no heaters in the coldest winter ever.  Thousands died wanting only the simplest of necessities and here we sit with warm homes and our stomachs full of food.

My heart is always tender for Afghanistan as my husband fought there as a jihadist and when I hear about people feezing in the winters, my heart aches.  I see the mountains there and I wonder how could anyone survive.

Abu Bakr (RA) stated that, "Solitude is better than the society of evil persons." We are also told that we will regret the days that blessings were not sent on Prophet Mohammad, PBUH, when we are in a gathering and to shun groups where Allah is not remembered.  When Allah and Prophet Mohammad, PBUH, are mentioned, angels run to tell Allah what was spoken.  Although Allah already knows, I am sure he smiles.

When the people speak bad about their neighbors, complain about the dunyah and curse their families this is also told to Allah and the Angels write and record these things.  Black spots accumulate on your heart and your life becomes hard.  Whatever comes to us comes from our own doings.  Now sometimes we are tested to see our faith and not always from our own doings.

If your child dies, does that mean you did something wrong? Indeed it does not and you should not confuse this point.  Everyone has a time on this earth and not one moment can be taken away.  Allah knows the decisions you will make and he knows when you will die.  A parent who is patient when their child dies and says Al-hamdulilah has a palace in Jannah.  I hate to see women beating their chests, kicking cars and screaming when a tradjedy strikes.

I never cried when my husband died.  I was sad, but also happy Allah called him home.  My husband said to me many times, "Whatever Allah is happy with, I am happy with."  I remember that as the 10th anniversary of his death nears.  He died on January 24th, 2002.  He had dreams of an impending death and I saw an Angel.  The Angel pointed to my husband and I woke my husband up and I told him that an angel was pointing at him.  He told me, "If it is the angel of death, I don't mind."  Five days later he died.

Allah has been most generous to me in these years since his death.  I have learned very much about Islam and grew in my faith.  I have learned to be self-sufficient and to take care of myself.  A man asked me once, why I post recipes on this Islamic website.  I told him I post what I write. There is nothing wrong in Islam for a woman to support herself and this is what I know.  It is better for me to work than to take charity, which I did for many years.

I am blessed and even though Abu Bakr instructed us that solitude is best, we are also taught to be tolerant of those not on the straight path.  I am not close to those who do not practice Islam on the straight path, but we must make salam and to be kind.  Just maybe our actions will make someone change their ways.

Many Muslims do not think of death.  They think of cars, women and money.  I cringe at some pages when I see such horrible things said.  Sheik Yasin had a dream 7 days before his death.  He saw Prophet Mohammad, PBUH, and in the dream Prophet Mohammad, PBUH stated that in that week 7000 Muslims died, but they were not really Muslims.  People need to pray more, read Quran more, be good to their parents and give more charity.  I find that in today's society this is true.

Are you really practicing Islam and are you submitting to the commands of your Prophet?  Do you really love Allah and his Messenger more than your own life? Would you forsake your parents, your wife and your dunyah for Islam?  I think we as Muslims should gather together to remind each other that death comes quickly.

The angel of death visits everyone three times a day.  I wonder what you are doing when he comes?  Are you smoking, chatting or simply sleeping your life away?  I wonder what the angel says and writes during those times?  I love the Angels and I make my house welcoming for Angels. There are no pictures, no statues or any kind in my home.  Even on oatmeal cans I tape over eyes.  Magazines are turned over not to show people and have love for them.  They are as much part of Islam as anything.

So on this Friday as I am about to thank everyone who follows me, I just wanted to share some thoughts on my belief, on my life and my love for you guys.  All I ask is that I can help one single person. That one single person changes their life and that one single person sends dua for someone because of what they have learned here.  Now if I affect two, it is smorgasborg!!
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The British Man and The Sheikh

A British man came to a Sheikh and asked:
Why is it not permissible in Islam for a woman to shake hands with a man?

The Sheikh replied:
Can you shake hands with Queen Elizabeth?

The British man responded:
Of course no, there are only certain people who can shake hands with Queen Elizabeth.

Sheikh said:
Our women are queens and queens do not shake hands with strange men.

Then the British man asked:
Why do your girls cover up their body and hair?

The Sheikh smiled, he brought out two sweets and opened one and left the other closed. He threw them both on the dusty floor and asked the British man:
If I ask you to take one of the sweets which one will you take?

The British man replied:
The covered one.

The Sheikh said:
That's how we treat and see our women.
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On The Incessant Attacks On Islam and Muslims

Despite the relentless attacks on Islam, the World-over in the name of Westernisation, Globalization and Hatred, Muslims should not be discouraged to invite the Ignorant to Islam for these attacks has been there since time immemorial just as God declares in the Quran:

Invite MANKIND, (O Muhammad) to the way of your Lord (Islam) with Wisdom and Fair Preaching, and Argue with Them in a Way that is Better. Truly, your Lord Knows Best who has gone Astray and He is the Best Knower of those who are Guided".

Quran 16:125.
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The virtue of Friday

The virtue of Friday:

Narrated Abu Huraira,

I heard God's Apostle (PBUH) saying,
'We (Muslims) are the last (to come) but (will be) the foremost on the Day of Resurrection though the former nations were given the Holy Scriptures before us. And this was their day (Friday), the celebration of which was made compulsory for them but they differed about it. So God gave us the guidance for it (Friday) and all the other people are behind us in this respect.

The Jews' (holy day is) tomorrow (i.e. Saturday) and the Christians' (is) the day after tomorrow (i.e. Sunday).'

Volume 2, Book 13, Number 1


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US Rulers Fear American People

US Rulers Fear American People

By Finian Cunningham

What the disclosures of former CIA contractor Edward Snowden show perhaps above all else is just how petrified the leaders of the United States have become - of ordinary citizens both in the US and around the world. When we say "leaders" we mean the ruling elite - the top one percent of the financial-corporate-military-industrial complex and its bought- and paid-for politicians.

The international manhunt by the US authorities for Snowden, which has accelerated with his flight to Moscow to evade extradition from Hong Kong, is indicative of the desperation in Washington's elitist establishment to quash him and what he is revealing about their despotic rule.

Today, the US has evolved into a dystopia, not a democracy, where obscene wealth and privilege stand in the face of massive poverty and misery. One indicator of this abysmal inequality is the fact that the 400 richest Americans have more material wealth than 155 million of their fellow citizens combined. Another datum: some 50 million Americans - a sixth of the population - are surviving on food handouts. Unemployment, homelessness, suicide rates, prescription drug addiction, rampant gun crime all speak in different ways of social meltdown.

American society is collapsing from the sheer weight of its decrepit capitalist economy. The social system is unsustainable. It is like a distended rotten sack that is coming apart at the seams from inexorable burgeoning pressure. This is not unique to the US. All around the world, people are rebelling against the inequity of crony capitalism - there is only one form of capitalism - from Europe to the Arab Middle East, from Turkey to Brazil.

But the US is a phenomenal case in point of collapsing capitalist society. It's hard to believe that not so long ago, within living memory; the US was regarded as the economic paradigm of the world. Now it more and more resembles a giant sprawling ghetto of unremitting poverty that is interspersed with a few gated rich communities, the latter populated by the top one percent of society.

This is the historical context for fully understanding the significance of gargantuan state surveillance by the elite against the citizenry, as revealed by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The American ruling class, as with their elite counterparts around the world, are figuratively sitting within their privileged niches and petrified by the mounting discontent "outside". Through their criminal ransacking and rigging of wealth, the powers-that-be have through their own insatiable greed created a powerful potential enemy -virtually the entire population, both in the US and around the world.

In this highly unstable situation of elites and masses that bankrupt capitalism has furnished, "democracy" can no longer be tolerated by the rulers. That is why the rulers have embarked on massive information gathering, monitoring, spying and surveillance. It is all about maintaining "control" of a precarious and explosive disequilibrium.

One basic duty of any state is to protect its citizens from foreign enemies. Enemies are conventionally understood to be state militaries or non-state terrorist groups. But from Snowden's revelations of US government surveillance of telecommunications, the vast bulk of America's spying is on civilians. The phone calls, emails, cyber chats and photos of billions of people all around the world are vacuumed up and stored for analysis. Snowden disclosed in one instance how Chinese hospitals and universities - not military installations - were among the many international civilian targets for American government snooping.

US national security officials defend this global dragnet method as a necessary way to trawl for terrorists. Last week, the chief of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander told the American Senate that more than 50 terrorist plots against the US had been foiled by the NSA's interception of civilian communications. The evidence for the alleged thwarted terrorist attacks cited by General Alexander was sketchy at best, so we are obliged to accept the NSA's dubious word on its self-serving claims of success.

Even if we accept this claim on face value, an alleged terror threat numbering 50, gleaned from billions of communication files, is a negligible ratio, akin to a needle in a haystack. That means two things. First, the statistical terror threat against US citizens is likewise negligible to the point of being virtually non-existent. As Snowden himself pointed out, the chances of Americans dying from slipping in their bathtub are far great than from terrorism. The second thing is that the official pretext for global, industrial-scale infringement of privacy - that is, national security of its citizens - is grotesquely disproportionate, and therefore unjustifiable.

In the aftermath of these revelations, US President Barack Obama and his security officials are claiming that the infringements of individual privacy are minor. "No-one is listening to your phone calls," said Obama. He also added that there must be a trade-off between national security and what he called "minor breaches" of civil liberties.

These assurances from Obama and US National Intelligence Director James Clapper, among others, are rejected by Snowden and other NSA whistleblowers, as well as by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is litigating against the American government over the recent revelations. Official claims of limited surveillance and breaches are also repudiated by various digital privacy advocates, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as by common knowledge of American constitutional rights.

Edward Snowden says that when he was working at the NSA, he had clearance to hack into anyone's email "including the president's". That is far from "minor".

Another former senior employee of the NSA, Thomas Drake, who was prosecuted under the US Espionage Act for similar whistleblowing in 2011, says that the American government and its secret agencies have systematically "subverted the constitution" by arrogating the power to tap into all and any communications that they desire. In a narrow sense, Obama may be right that "no-one is listening to your phone calls". Not yet, at least, but the executive powers and technology are in place for this totalitarian system of eavesdropping to be switched on.

Drake writes, "The supposed oversight, combined with enabling legislation - the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court, the congressional committees - is all a kabuki dance, predicated on the national security claim that we need to find a threat. The reality is: they [the US government] just want it all, period." He added: "They have this extraordinary system: in effect, a 24/7 panopticon on a vast scale that it is gazing at you with an all-seeing eye."

It seems an incredible lack of judgment among some alternative commentators who have dismissed Snowden's revelations as trivial. Worse still, some commentators have even insinuated that the former NSA analyst is a witting or unwitting player in an elaborate CIA hoax aimed at intimidating citizens from using mass communications.

Such views badly underestimate the extent of American government criminality towards its own sacrosanct constitution and the deeply corrupting implications that has for democracy.

Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Snowden story earlier this month, has said, "The people who have learned things they didn't already know are American citizens who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence, as well as hundreds of millions of citizens around the world about whom the same is true. What they have learned is that the vast bulk of this surveillance apparatus is directed not at the Chinese or Russian governments or terrorists, but at them."

Greenwald adds, "And that is precisely why the US government is so furious and will bring its full weight to bear against these disclosures. What has been 'harmed' is not the national security of the US but the ability of its political leaders to work against their own citizens and citizens around the world in the dark, with zero transparency or real accountability."

Since the US Espionage Act was instituted nearly a century ago in 1917, there have been a total of 10 prosecutions against American government employees deemed to have broken the law and compromised national security through whistleblowing. One of those was former State Department staffer Daniel Ellsberg who released the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, revealing the spurious legal grounds for the American genocidal war on Vietnam.

Seven out of the total 10 prosecutions against whistleblowers - 70 percent - have occurred under the Obama administrations. That figure alone tells of a growing anxiety within the American ruling class. That anxiety is related to their increasingly criminal secret powers and the ongoing subversion of democracy. The American rulers are jealously guarding their criminal behaviour and that is why they are hunting down with a vengeance people like Snowden who are seen to be exposing this criminality. It is something of an irony that this week Snowden had to flee to Russia (the former "evil empire" in the words of late American President Ronald Reagan) in order to avoid extradition to the US where he is charged with felonies under the Espionage Act.

Former NSA employee Thomas Drake says that when he was working as an analyst during the Cold War he was assigned to monitor the espionage activities of Stalinist East Germany and its secret Stasi police. Drake says that the Stasi had an obsession to "knowing everything" about its citizens and kept a huge archive of paper files. However, this voluminous archiving is a fraction of what is stored and accessible by American secret services owing to the internet and digital technology. Drake describes the American NSA as "a Stasi on steroids".

In the 1970s, US Senator Frank Church led a groundbreaking investigation into illicit American government covert operations. Church warned then that if the secret powers of the NSA were to ever become deployed against the American public - as opposed to "foreign enemies" - then that country's democracy would be finished. That is precisely the present abysmal outcome of secret US state powers.

 There are two corollaries of the imploding capitalist system, for which the US still remains the lynchpin for historical reasons. The first is the increasing militarism of the US and its Western allies to compensate for this economic demise. This militarism has evolved over the past decade since the purported 9/11 terror attacks on the US in 2001 to become a condition of "permanent war". The present US-led covert war in Syria and underway against Iran are part of a continuum of imperialist war-making that connects Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, as well as Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Mali. This state of permanent war is needed by the waning capitalist powers to try to assert control of natural resources, markets, finance and investment against perceived rivals, such as Russia and China.

The other corollary of the historic failure of capitalism, and in particular in the US, is the imperative to assert control over social meltdown and rebellion. That is why the growth in militarism abroad has gone hand-in-glove with the intensification of surveillance powers and repression against citizens at home. American, and Western, democracy is, for all intents and purposes, a dead corpse. Only criminal wars and repression of its citizens are keeping the moribund system on a life-support system.

As Thomas Drake noted, "Since the [US] government unchained itself from the constitution after 9/11, it has been eating our democracy alive from the inside out."

The rulers of America are despotic elites who are living in fear and trepidation of their own people and of people power around the world rising in rebellion against the misrule of capitalism.

Finian Cunningham, is a prominent expert in international affairs. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. He is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring.He co-hosts a weekly current affairs programme, Sunday at 3pm GMT on Bandung Radio
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Latin America is Ready to Defy the US over Snowden and Other Issues

Latin America is Ready to Defy the US over Snowden and Other Issues

Latin America has long lived in the US shadow, but the fact that some countries might take Snowden shows how that's changed

By Stephen Kinzer

"The Guardian" ----  No offense to Iceland, but Latin America is where the fugitive leaker Edward Snowden should settle.

He apparently has the same idea. News reports suggest that he is in Moscow awaiting transport to Cuba, Venezuela, and / or Ecuador. A Facebook post suggests Bolivia may have granted Snowden asylum. Nothing has been heard from Nicaragua, Peru, Brazil, or Argentina, but any or all might also welcome him.

Any country that grants asylum to Snowden risks retaliation from the United States, including diplomatic isolation and costly trade sanctions. Several don't seem to care. The fact that Latin America has become the favored refuge for a United States citizen accused of treason and espionage is an eye-popping reminder of how fully the continent has emerged from Washington's shadow.

"Latin America is not gone, and we want to keep it," President Richard Nixon told aides as he was pressing the covert operation that brought down the Chilean government in 1973. A decade later, the Reagan administration was fighting proxy wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. In the 1980s the US Army invaded two Caribbean countries, Grenada and Panama, to depose leaders who had defied Washington.

During the 1990s the United States sought to impose the "Washington Consensus" on Latin American governments. It embodied what Latin Americans call "neo-liberal" principles: budget cuts, privatization, deregulation of business, and incentives for foreign companies. This campaign sparked bitter resistance and ultimately collapsed.

In spite of these military, political, and economic assaults – or perhaps because of them – much of Latin America has become profoundly dissatisfied with the made-in-USA model. Some of the continent's most popular leaders rose to power by denouncing the "Washington Consensus" and pledging to pull their countries out of the United States orbit.

Because President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela was the most flamboyant of these defiant leaders, some outsiders may have expected that following his death, the region would return to its traditional state of submission. In fact, not just a handful of leaders but huge populations in Latin America have decided that they wish for more independence from Washington.

This is vital for Snowden because it reduces the chances that a sudden change of government could mean his extradition. If he can make it to Latin America, he will never lack for friends or supporters.

One would be the American-educated President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, an avowed socialist and admirer of Fidel Castro. In 2009 Correa forced the United States to abandon its military base in his country, despite repeated protests from Washington. He has already granted a form of asylum to Wiki-leaks founder Julian Assange, who is living inside the Ecuadoran embassy in London. Having publicly welcomed Assange to "the club of the persecuted," he would presumably embrace Snowden as another member.

Ecuador, with its long coastline, majestic mountains, and lush rain forest, is an ideal place for such a club to assemble. It is more than twice the size of Iceland and considerably warmer. Its people, not just its president, are known for gentle hospitality.

From Ecuador, Snowden could travel widely. Everything from the splendor of Bolivia's Lake Titicaca to the vibrancy of teeming Caracas awaits him. With luck, he might even be able to visit Guatemala in September to attend the grand festival being planned for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jacobo Arbenz, the reformist president who the United States deposed in 1954.

Snowden would have much to celebrate upon landing in Latin America, and much to anticipate. He might not be truly free, however. Some in Washington have raised his case, like those of Assange and Corporal Bradley Manning, into major national security tests. They might press for a "rendition" in which Snowden would be snatched and brought home for trial.

Two breathtakingly different possible lives await Snowden. If the United States has its way, he will probably end up with something like the long prison sentence that is being prepared for Corporal Manning. If not, he could spend years in an Ecuadoran beach town like Playas, where the lobster is cheap, the sunsets are spectacular, and internet connections could keep him on the front line of the information war for years.
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Excerpts From Snowden’s Letter Requesting Asylum in Ecuador

Excerpts From Snowden's Letter Requesting Asylum in Ecuador

By ROBERT MACKEY

Watch live streaming video from cancilleriaec at livestream.com
Spanish-language video of Ecuador's foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, at a news conference in Vietnam on Monday, posted online by the Ecuadorean government.

"NY Times" -- Speaking at a news conference in Vietnam on Monday, Ecuador's foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, said that his government was considering a written request for asylum from Edward J. Snowden, the former national security contractor accused of espionage by the United States.

In remarks the foreign ministry streamed live from Hanoi, Mr. Patiño suggested that Mr. Snowden "is being persecuted" for revealing the vast scale of the National Security Agency's surveillance of electronic communications worldwide. "The word treason has been batted around in recent days," Mr. Patiño said, "we need to ask who has betrayed who?"

Here, based on a simultaneous translation from Spanish to English broadcast by the BBC, are excerpts from the letter Mr. Snowden sent to President Rafael Correa, as read aloud by Mr. Patiño:

I, Edward Snowden, citizen of the United States of America, am writing to request asylum in the Republic of Ecuador because of the risk of being persecuted by the government of the United States and its agents in relation to my decision to make public serious violations on the part of the government of the United States of its Constitution, specifically of its Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and of various treaties of the United Nations that are binding on my country.

As a result of my political opinions, and my desire to exercise my freedom of speech, through which I've shown that the government of the United States is intercepting the majority of communications in the world, the government of the United States has publicly announced a criminal investigation against me. Also, prominent members of Congress and others in the media have accused me of being a traitor and have called for me to be jailed or executed as a result of having communicated this information to the public.

Some of the charges that have been presented against me by the Justice Department of the United States are connected to the 1917 Espionage Act, one of which includes life in prison among the possible sentences.

BBC News video of Ecuador's foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, reading a letter from Edward Snowden.
According to Mr. Patiño, Mr. Snowden also made reference to the fact that charges were filed against him by Justice Department officials in the Eastern District of Virginia, in Alexandria, close to the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, which is "the same district that has been conducting the Justice Department investigation against Wikileaks." Mr. Snowden's letter continued:

Ecuador granted asylum to the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, in relation to this investigation. My case is also very similar to that of the American soldier Bradley Manning, who made public government information through Wikileaks revealing war crimes, was arrested by the United States government and has been treated inhumanely during his time in prison. He was put in solitary confinement before his trial and the U.N. anti-torture representative judged that Mr. Manning was submitted to cruel and inhumane acts by the United States government.

The trial against Bradley Manning is ongoing now, and secret documents have been presented to the court and secret witnesses have testified.

I believe that, given these circumstances, it is unlikely that I would receive a fair trial or proper treatment prior to that trial, and face the possibility of life in prison or even death. — Edward J. Snowden

Mr. Patiño told reporters that he did not have and could not share specific information about Mr. Snowden's whereabouts, but he said that Ecuador had been in contact with the authorities in Russia, where Mr. Snowden reportedly arrived from Hong Kong on Sunday. As my colleagues David Herszenhorn and Ellen Barry reported from Moscow, Mr. Snowden has not been photographed or seen in public in Russia.
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The Palestinians' Last Option: A Struggle For Equal Rights

The Palestinians' Last Option: A Struggle For Equal Rights

Palestinians must shed the illusion of the current peace process and at least push for equitable rights.

By Ghada Karmi

"Al Jazeera" ---  Once upon a time, Palestine was the Arab world's unifying cause. Justice for the Palestinians was considered a basic pre-requisite for regional stability and peace, and it was an idea that had global resonance. Today, the picture is different and the Palestinian cause has been falling off the political agenda ever since the onset of the Arab Spring, the Syrian conflict, and Israel's success in placing Iran's nuclear programme at the centre stage.

This month, a study by the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies confirms this slide. A survey of over 20,000 respondents in 14 Arab countries revealed a widespread engagement, not with Palestine, but with the Arab revolutions and their future, with Syria and the need for democratic systems of government. Only a third cited Israel as the greatest regional threat, about the same percentage as Iran amongst those living in Iraq and the Gulf.

This change comes on top of a gradual loss of Palestinian unity due to the fragmentation of Palestinian society into those under occupation, divided between the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, those in Israel, those in refugee camps and the rest in exile. The result has been increasingly to replace the national cause with local causes. For example, in November 2012 and again last week demonstrations against economic hardship erupted in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority has a $4.2 billion debt and a World Bank report in March found an economic slowdown, with low exports and long term unemployment; Gaza is isolated and besieged and survives largely on a tunnel smuggling economy. In such circumstances it is hardly surprising that people's top priority should be how to feed their families, and Palestinian communities elsewhere will have likewise developed their own local priorities.

Palestinians will need to act urgently if their cause is not to be finally buried. The fact that the West is still engaged in trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a cause for optimism. It does not signify a revival of the Palestine cause's centrality, but a push for an end to the conflict on terms most favourable to Israel. The US and Europe, with the recent addition of China, have been urging a renewal of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, has visited the region half a dozen times in this endeavour, and has pledged $4 billion in aid to encourage the PA. In April, an Arab delegation was in Washington to present a revised Arab Peace Plan which offered Israel a land swap with the Palestinians, hoping to draw it into peace talks. More recently Sweden, with the same aim, decided to punish the Palestinians for failing to negotiate with Israel by possibly reducing their aid by 200 million kronor ($30 million).

What these parties are pushing for is the two-state solution which has dominated the political discourse for decades and has never, even partially, been realised. Nevertheless, the international consensus still holds that this solution is the only way forward. Yet a glance at the map will show that no such solution is possible.

Currently, the West Bank and East Jerusalem house some 500,000 Jewish settlers living in more than 130 settlements dispersed throughout these areas. In Jerusalem, many settler groups have infiltrated the Old City and the Arab neighbourhoods still left unoccupied by Israel. Another thousand settler homes are planned for June. Gaza, an essential part of any future Palestinian state, is besieged and cut off from the West Bank, and is governed by a Hamas government split off from the Fatah-dominated PA in the West Bank and likely to remain so.

Two-state solution unlikely

Since the reality on the ground precludes a two-state solution as envisaged in the Arab peace plan - a Palestinian state on the 1967 territories with East Jerusalem as its capital - what is the basis for the continued push towards this solution? It can only be that a variation that suits Israel better is the real plan. This would allow for Israel to keep Area C, 62 percentof the West Bank, as repeatedly advocated by Israel's trade minister, Naftalie Bennett, leaving a Palestinian "state" of West Bank enclaves separated by Israeli-held territory, to which Gaza might possibly be connected.

Since these West Bank enclaves could not be viable on their own, their economic and social ties and their access to the outside world would be with Jordan. Gaza's extension would be towards Egypt, as Israel has always wanted, and Jerusalem would remain under Israel's total control. Many reports have quoted such ideas, vigorously repudiated by Jordan and Egypt. But one must assume that the US is pushing for a way to appease Israel and yet offer the Palestinians something, hoping thereby to wrap up the Palestine issue for good. No other land permutation is possible if Israeli settlements remain and no pressure is applied to make Israel remove them.

The fear many Palestinian have is that their leadership, currently unelected and unrepresentative, and they suspect only wishes to stay in power whatever the cost to the national cause, might agree to a version of such a plan whatever their patriotic utterances. In such circumstances, Palestinians must realise that time is not on their side and doing nothing in the face of these plots is not an option for them. The present situation could not be better for Israel and its allies: a docile Palestinian leadership which creates an illusion of equivalence between occupier and occupied, relieving Israel of its legal responsibilities as an occupying power; an endless peace process that gives cover for Israel's colonisation; international inaction; and a fragmented Palestinian people unable to resist. They are the big losers in this arrangement, and they must be the ones to bring it down. What should they do?

An apartheid state

Israel/Palestine is today one state. But it is an apartheid state which discriminates against non-Jews in favour of Jews. The Palestinian task now is to fight against this apartheid and mount a struggle, not for an impossible Palestinian state, but for equal rights under Israeli rule. They would need to dismantle the Palestinian Authority, which is now a liability that only camouflages the true situation, and then confront Israel, their actual ruler, directly. As stateless people under military occupation, they must demand equal civil and political rights with Israeli citizens, and apply for Israeli citizenship if necessary. That puts the onus on Israel to respond: either to ignore the five million Palestinians it rules, or vacate their land, or grant them equal rights.

Israel will reject all of these, but whatever it does will be against its own interests. And Palestinians at one stroke will have broken up Israel's hegemonic hold on the political discourse and changed the rules of the lethal game being played against them.

This strategy will not be popular amongst Palestinians, nor will they want to become second-class Israeli citizens. But are their lives now under occupation any better? And is there another option given the present conditions? I would argue that by adopting this plan, they will lose nothing but their illusions, and at this serious juncture in Palestinian history, it may be the only way to avert the annihilation of their cause. It will be a hard road, but the one chance to build a democratic state that replaces apartheid Israel and eventually enables the refugees to return to their ancestral homeland.

Dr Ghada Karmi is the author of  Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine.  

Follow her on Twitter:  @ghadakarmi

Sent via BlackBerry by Union Paradise

On Prayer As Two Raka'as

Yahya related to me from Malik from Salih ibn Kaysan from Urwa ibn az-Zubayr that A'isha, the wife of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, "The prayer was prescribed as two rakas, both when settled and when travelling. Then the travelling prayer was kept as it was, and an increase was made in the prayer when settled."

[Malik 9.2.9]

Russia Refuses To Hand Over Snowden, Rips U.S. For Making Ominous Threats And Insinuations

Russia Refuses To Hand Over Snowden, Rips U.S. For Making Ominous Threats And Insinuations

inSha

Libya Herald

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov.