Friday, September 6, 2013. Chaos and violence continue, Nouri lobbies to kill the protest movement, the protests continue, Iran supposedly is ordering an attack on the US in Iraq if the US launches an attack on Syria, Women's Media Center fails the left by funding (and publishing) propaganda which is now being grabbed by conservatives to justify attacking Syria, Glenn Greenwald and others reveal more about Barack Obama's illegal spying programs and more.
At the Washington Post today, conservative Michelle Bernard tries (and fails) to make a coherent case for war on Syria. Her prop of choice? Iraqi women. Bernard's part of the cheap trash who ignore Iraqi women. The women of Iraq suffer and they suffer without any help from world government's so Bernard's lies aren't needed. She insists that women are suffering in Syria. It's similar to the propaganda
Women's Media Center -- in the roll out for war that Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan and Jane Fonda all hope you never call them on -- was featuring a few months back. That shouldn't surprise you.
When The Brides of War enlist to become love slaves of Barack, they run to Lauren Wolfe for information. The hustler also works for The Atlantic. She specializes in "OHMYGOD!WOMENAREBEINGKILLEDSOMEWHEREANDIMUSTANDWILLSTOPIT!"
'journalism.'
Here's some information for all the tricked out sex slaves in the nunnery of St. Barack: War kills.
War kills indiscriminately. There is no 'precision' in war. It is bloody, it is messy and it is deadly.
Do women suffer during war?
Yes, children they do. In
The War Against Women, the late Marilyn French established this with a historical overview of war and how it functions alongside the patriarchy, how the domination sought in war is also sought in society.
I realize this is new ground for Michelle Bernard. And probably for the idiot Lauren Wolfe.
Bernard wants you to know that, in 2003, shortly after the start of the Iraq War, she actually managed to chat with a few Iraqi women in DC who had been brought in, by the Bully Boy Bush administration, to speak to Congress. Guess what they told Bernard? They wished the war had started sooner! Isn't it shocking? Iraqi women, as the war had just started, would be flown to the US to lobby Congress and they supported the war! Well case closed, yet again!
But before Bernard does her victory lap, let's all grasp that the women were propaganda tools of the White House -- which is why they were able to travel to the US to begin with.
And let's further grasp what Michelle Bernard doesn't grasp or won't tell you.
The year is 2013. Michelle insists that Iraqi women told her they were better off due to war ("What took you so long!" she quotes one Iraqi saying) so the US should attack Syria.
What's she leaving out?
How about today?
How about the effects of ten years of war on Iraq and, yes, on Iraqi women? Let's start with
Wednesday's snapshot:
And in southern Baghdad, NINA reports:
Police source told NINA that an improvised explosive device, emplaced
near women beauty salon in Shurta neighborhood, went off wounding the
salon's owner and three other civilians, happened to be nearby, as well
as causing damages to the salon.
That attack is very important. al Qaeda may or may not be responsible
for that attack but for years they have launched attacks in that area.
The attack, if carried out by al Qaeda, may have been an attack on
business or anything. But the best guess is it being an attack on women
who refuse to live in Iraq as though Iraq is Afghanistan.
That attack was and remains important but no western news outlet treated it as such. No one filed a report on it. As always when women are the intended targets, the press looked the other way. In fact, the only time the western press tends to note women dying is when they can (accurately or inaccurately) label them a prostitute.
Zainab Salbi founded
Women for Women International. Last March,
she wrote a column for CNN on the status of women in Iraq:
On the political front, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has not
appointed a single woman to a senior cabinet position, despite the fact
women are guaranteed 25% of the seats in parliament by the constitution.
The Ministry of Women's Affairs, a poorly-funded and mostly ceremonial
department, is the lone ministry headed up by a woman.
Constitutionally, women
were able to secure the ability to pass their citizenship on to their
children by non-Iraqi husbands, making Iraq one of a handful Arab
countries with such a provision for their female citizens.
But on the other hand,
women are no longer guaranteed equal treatment under one law in terms of
marriage, divorce, inheritance and custody. That law, the Family
Statutes Law, has been replaced one giving religious and tribal leaders
the power to regulate family affairs in the areas they rule in
accordance with their interpretation of religious laws.
This not only is making
women more vulnerable, it is giving women from various sects (Sunni or
Shia) or religion (Muslim or Christian) different legal treatments on
the same issues.
Economically, women have
gone from being visibly active in the Iraqi work force in the 1980s --
particularly in the farming, marketing and professional services sectors
-- to being nearly non-existent in 2013.
The women who could
afford it withdrew from the public space due the violence dominating the
streets. 10 years ago Iraq produced much of its own food and had a
productive industrial sector -- but now Iraq imports practically all of
its food, and farmers and factory workers simply found themselves out of
a job as industry ground to a halt. And while both women and men
suffered as a result, the impact on women was greater due to their
limited mobility in the face of poor security.
Violence against women -- and the lack of legal protection for women --
is also on the rise. Women's rights groups blame the increase in
violence on the social and economic pressure that families face, the
lack of public and political will to stop it, and the increase religious
conservatism that often justifies the violence.
If you talk to women in war zones anywhere, they’ll tell you that
domestic violence increases in war-time. But in Iraq, violence against
women has also been systematic. And unknown to most Americans, it has
been orchestrated by some of the very forces that the US boosted to
power.
Like religious fundamentalists everywhere, these sectarian militias
and clerics have a social vision for their country that depends on
subjugating women. But because the US wagered that they could deliver
stability, these men were cultivated as allies in Iraq. As we now know,
they never even got the stability they traded women’s rights for.
The dynamic was clearly at work in the drafting of Iraq’s
constitution, heavily brokered by the US. To pass it, the US needed
support from Islamist parties. They got it by trading away women’s
rights. In fact, the current constitution is a huge step backwards for
Iraqi women. It replaces one of the Middle East’s most expansive laws on
the status of women, dating from 1959, with separate and unequal laws
on the basis of sex. They subjected Iraqi women to a newly introduced
Sharia law promoted in an article in the new constitution.
So the ridiculous Michelle doesn't just remain
a groupie in the Cult of St. Barack, she's also a dumb liar who thinks she can trick America into supporting war on Syria by insisting war was what Iraqi women wanted and it made their lives better. And Women's Media Center -- Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan and Jane Fonda -- need to be called out for entering into the dangerous relationship with Lauren Wolfe. You'd think Gloria would especially avoid that relationship which makes it appear that Women's Media Center is nothing but a government propaganda outlet -- she will never escape working for the CIA in college or the rumors that she continued working for them after college. I do not believe she worked for them after college. She would deny the "working for" in college but she received rewards and she did their work, including reporting back afterwards -- a detail that she bragged about repeatedly in the 60s -- check the articles from that era -- but rewrote history a decade later when the Red Stockings went public with Gloria's CIA work. For those unfamiliar with the charges, post-college, a sort of diagram is drawn of Gloria with various CIA and CIA-linked figures. The Red Stockings felt that feminism was being watered down in the seventies and felt Gloria had a great deal to do with it. They began digging around and found Gloria's college CIA link. They raised the issue publicly and it was in all of the feminist press of the era except Ms. magazine (which Gloria controlled -- though one of the charges was that Ms. was a CIA front). Gloria ignored the charges and people began lying for Gloria. When she finally answered the charges, after Betty Friedan had helped publicize them, she suddenly never knew it was a CIA front funding her travel until after the fact. And the media was kind to Gloria and ran with that crap without questioning it. The same MSM printed articles in the 60s where Gloria bragged about her work for the CIA in that era, portraying herself as some sort of Agent 99.
It's very telling that Gloria, Jane and Robin would fund a Syrian project (Wolfe's) to begin with. Feminists should be focused on Iraq where women's rights and status suffered a tremendous blow. You want to speak out against war, how about you chronicle the effects war has had on the lives of Iraqi women. Instead, they've funded alarmist propaganda which, no surprise, is now being used to argue war.
Gloria, Jane and Robin are you really that stupid? (Answer: Yes, they apparently are.)
Gloria, Jane and Robin are silent on Syria. They won't decry an attack on it and they have funded a propaganda mill whose intent is to force action. What's going on here?
Three elderly women have made it their goal to cure male impotency.
At the heart of the arguments for an attack on Syria is the male impotency.
Scott Lemieux (American Prospect) notes today, "At bottom, as James Fallows
notes,
the case for action against Syria is based on the same logical error as
too many foreign-policy disasters past: we have to "do something," and
military action is ... something." That feeling of powerlessness, that heaven forbid, even men might have to feel. Instead of telling the Peter Pans of the world to go with it, explore it, grasp it and become better humans as a result, the elderly Wendys of Jane, Robin and Gloria intend to hover the beds in the nursery at night ensuring ejaculation, no limp noodles on their watch.
There is not a need to do anything. Syria has a civil war. Now Spain had a civil war (1936 to 1939) and the US government stayed out of it. Many of those Americans back then who had a side in that war traveled to Spain and fought. That's certainly an option for Nicholas Kristof and the other saggy penises.
600,000 deaths is considered a conservative estimate of the death toll.
You can also review these stats offered by PBS for the American civil war.
PHIL DONAHUE:
Well, I'm pleased to have this chance to chat with you for a lot of reasons. One, I don’t know who else has more cred than you.
What would a 23-year graduate of West Point offer us now regarding the dilemma in which Obama finds himself, regarding Syria?
ANDREW BACEVICH:
Well, I mean, if I could have five minutes of the president's time, I'd
say, "Mr. President, the issue really is not Syria. I mean, you're
being told that it's Syria. You're being told you have to do something
about Syria, that you have to make a decision about Syria. That somehow
your credibility is on the line."
But I'd say, "Mr. President,
that's not true. The issue really here is whether or not an effort over
the course of several decades, dating back to the promulgation of the
Carter Doctrine in 1980, an effort that extends over several decades to
employ American power, military power, overt, covert military power
exercise through proxies, an effort to use military power to somehow
stabilize or fix or liberate or transform the greater Middle East hasn't
worked.
“And if you think back to 1980, and just sort of tick
off the number of military enterprises that we have been engaged in that
part of the world, large and small, you know, Beirut, Afghanistan,
Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and on and on, and ask yourself, 'What have we got
done? What have we achieved? Is the region becoming more stable? Is
it becoming more Democratic? Are we enhancing America's standing in the
eyes of the people of the Islamic world?'
"The answers are, 'No,
no, and no.' So why, Mr. President, do you think that initiating yet
another war, 'cause if we bomb Syria, it's a war, why do you think that
initiating yet another war in this protracted enterprise is going to
produce a different outcome? Wouldn't it be perhaps wise to ask
ourselves if this militarized approach to the region maybe is a fool’s
errand.
"Maybe it's fundamentally misguided. Maybe the questions
are not tactical and operational, but strategic and political." You
know, I have to say, I'm just struck by the fact that Secretary of State
Kerry has become the leading proponent for war. It's our secretary of
state's job apparently--
PHIL DONAHUE:
He threw his medal-- he threw his medals back.
ANDREW BACEVICH:
Well, that's why it's doubly ironic. 'Cause the Secretary of State is
the war promoter. And that our secretary of state happens to be a guy
who came into politics basically advertising himself as the guy who
because of his--
PHIL DONAHUE:
Understands war?
ANDREW BACEVICH:
--Vietnam experiences, understands war, understands the lessons of
Vietnam, and is therefore going to prevent us from doing dumb things.
On the contrary, he's the lead cheerleader to go through another dumb
thing.
PHIL DONAHUE:
President Obama would say to you, "These are children being grossly and painfully killed."
ANDREW BACEVICH:
Yeah.
PHIL DONAHUE:
"How can you watch these videos with the foam coming out of the nostrils. And we've got to do something."
ANDREW BACEVICH:
Well, the attack is a heinous act. Now does the fact that they were
killed with chemicals make it more heinous than if they were killed with
conventional ammunitions? I'm not persuaded.
I mean, I think the
issue, one of the issues here, to the extent that moral considerations
drive US policy, and I would say as a practical matter they don't, but
let's pretend that they do to the extent that moral considerations drive
US policy, there's a couple of questions to ask. One would be, "Why
here and not someplace else?"
I mean, just weeks earlier, the
Egyptian Army killed many hundreds of innocent Egyptians. And we sort
of shook our finger at Egypt a little bit, but didn't do anything. So
why act in Syria? Why not act in Egypt? I think that that needs to be
sort of, that needs to be clarified.
And the other question will
be, "Well, if our concerns are humanitarian, why is waging war the best
means to advance a humanitarian agenda?" If indeed US policy is
informed by concern for the people of Syria, let's just pretend that's
the case even though I don't think it is. If it's informed by concern
for the people of Syria, why is peppering Damascus with cruise missiles
the best way to demonstrate that concern?
I mean, a little bit of
creative statesmanship it seems to me might say that there are other
things we could do that would actually benefit the people of Syria, who
are suffering greatly, who are fleeing their country in the hundreds of
thousands. Who are living in wretched refugee camps. Why don't we do
something about that? Why wouldn't that be a better thing to do from a
moral perspective than bombing Damascus?
Sidebar, it's good to see Phil back on TV and while he wanted his down time and enjoys it, it would be great to have him as the permanent guest host on Moyers' program or, if he could be talked into it, the host of his own weekly program. That media note also lets me note that Kim Petersen continues his media critique of The Real News Network with "
TRNN and Intellectual Integrity" (
Dissident Voice).
UPI reports, "An intercepted order from Iran instructs militants in
Iraq to hit the U.S. Embassy and other interests if a military strike on
Syria occurs, U.S. officials said. Officials said the recently intercepted message was sent by Qasem
Soleimani, head of Revolutionary Guards' Qods Force, to
Iranian-supported Shiite militias in Iraq, The Wall Street Journal
reported Thursday." (
Military Times carries a longer UPI report on this topic.)
Reuters adds the US Embassy in Baghdad is thought to be a likely target.
Hispanic Business headlines their report "
Iran Orders Hit on U.S. Embassy if Syria attacked."
At the US State Dept press briefing today, Matthew Lee (AP) attempted to get a statement on these reports from spokesperson Marie Harf.
QUESTION: Let’s start with embassy security personnel
MS. HARF: Mm-hmm.
QUESTION: -- movements, non-evacuation, evacuations, that kind of thing.
MS. HARF: Mm-hmm.
QUESTION: The – were – are the threats that exist that – or
that you believe to exist to your personnel and interest in Lebanon and –
or Beirut specifically and in Adana – are they related to Syria, or are
they related to something else?
MS. HARF: Well, these are potential threats, as we said in the
statement this morning. Obviously, the tension in region – in the
region, including in Syria, plays a role in this. I think it would be
obvious to most people and would be silly to think otherwise. So clearly
that plays a role there, other regional tensions as well. And we’ll
continue evaluating on a post-by-post basis to see if we have to take
any additional steps.
QUESTION: All right. And are – but are you aware of any specific – a specific Syria-related threat to either of these posts?
MS. HARF: I am not. No. Again, we said this morning --
QUESTION: You’re not. Okay.
MS. HARF: -- that we’re concerned about tension in the region and potential threats.
QUESTION: Right. I understand.
MS. HARF: Obviously, we make decisions on a post-by-post basis
for – with a variety of factors, but I’m not aware of any specifics.
But again, we’re evaluating information every day, and we’ll take
appropriate steps as necessary.
QUESTION: Okay. So there was a report overnight, or last
night, that there had been a threat or intelligence intercept of a
threat to the Embassy in Baghdad.
MS. HARF: Mm-hmm.
QUESTION: Can you – and I noticed that unlike Beirut and – or
unlike Lebanon and Turkey there was no new warning today, no new even
internal thing that went up on the Embassy website in Baghdad. So I’m
just wondering is that – does that – is that report accurate? Is there
such a threat? Are you concerned about it? And if you are, is anything
being done to reduce it?
MS. HARF: Well, I’m not going to comment on reports about
alleged intelligence that may or may not exist. Clearly, we remain
concerned in looking at the security throughout the region. Again, you
noted that we have not taken any action in terms of our posts in Iraq,
so I think I would probably leave it at that for now on that point.
Again, we’ll keep reevaluating, but nothing to announce for any other
posts at this time.
QUESTION: So it would not – can – is it safe to infer from
what you’re saying that the fact that there was no change or there
hasn’t been any announcement – announced change to the posture in Iraq
that that means that the – that you don’t really ascribe – if there
really was such a threat, you don’t ascribe much credibility to it?
MS. HARF: I’m not – I wouldn’t – I would caution you from
inferring anything, I guess. What I would say is that I’m not going to
comment on this alleged piece of intelligence and that we will make
decisions on our posts on a day-by-day basis on a variety of
information. Again, nothing to announce in terms of Baghdad.
QUESTION: Right, except that you said “nothing to announce,” and then you say you’re not going to comment on this one --
MS. HARF: Mm-hmm.
QUESTION: -- alleged threat. But then you point to the fact that there hasn’t been any change in posture in Iraq.
MS. HARF: Right. There hasn’t.
QUESTION: So if you’re not trying to make us or lead us to infer --
MS. HARF: I’m just stating a couple of facts.
QUESTION: -- anything --
MS. HARF: I’m just stating a couple of facts, Matt. You can
infer what you like from it, but I’m just stating the fact that there’s
been no change in Baghdad and that I’m not going to comment one way or
the other on that report.
Northampton, MA – As federal lawmakers and the American people grapple with
the possibility of U.S. military intervention in Syria, National Priorities
Project (NPP) announces the release of a new interactive tool tracking the Cost of National
Security. The site features counters displaying the real-time cost of
U.S. military programs, including the Tomahawk
Cruise Missile – the weapon to be used in a strike on Syria.
Tomahawk Cruise Missiles Will Cost Taxpayers $36,000 Every Hour in
2013
“In 2013, the Pentagon already plans to purchase 200 Tomahawk missiles for a
total cost to U.S. taxpayers of $320 million in just one year, or over $36,000
every hour,” said Jo Comerford, Executive Director at NPP. “That cost would
spike if we ultimately fired hundreds of missiles at Syria, as we did in Libya.”
In 2011, U.S. forces fired 110 Tomahawk missiles in the first hour of the strike
on Libya. That conflict cost the nation upwards of $1 billion.
In addition to the Tomahawk, the new Cost of National
Security site displays rolling counters tracking the cost per hour of
the Iraq
and Afghanistan wars, the entire Department
of Defense, the F-35 Joint Strike
Fighter, Foreign
Military Aid, and Homeland
Security.
The site also allows users to see the local cost of these programs for 9,900
cities and towns, and every state, Congressional District, and county in the
nation. In tandem with NPP’s Trade-Offs
tool, users can see what their city or town could have bought instead – from
police officers to school teachers to Pell grants.
Impossible to Predict the Cost of Intervention in Syria
“Back in 2003, Bush administration officials projected $60 billion as a
high-end estimate for the Iraq war,” said Mattea Kramer, NPP’s Research
Director. “A decade later, the cost of the Iraq war has
exceeded $800 billion – including $7 billion this year. Bottom line,
right now, it’s impossible to know if military intervention in Syria will cost
the U.S. $100 million or hundreds of billions.”
Little Support for Military Intervention
According to recent polling, only 26 percent of Americans support military
intervention in Syria, while 40 percent favor humanitarian assistance instead.
In addition to military-related spending, Cost
of National Security tracks humanitarian
aid and spending on a host of domestic
programs. Said Comerford, “National Priorities Project created Cost of National
Security to provoke a national debate about what it takes to be a secure
nation.”
******************************
Jo Comerford
Executive Director
National Priorities
Project
243 King Street, Suite 109
Northampton, MA 01060
413.584.9556
w
413.559.1649 c
@jcomerfordnpp
Isabel Coles and Peg Mackey (Reuters) report, "
Baghdad and foreign
oil companies at work in Iraq's giant oilfields are adopting
extra security measures in anticipation of retaliatory attacks
if the United States strikes neighbouring Syria, industry
sources said on Friday." Again, an attack on Syria solves nothing. As
Amria Mohsen (Huffington Post UK) observes:
Most importantly, we must question what the outcome of any strike on
Syria would be. One would think it would be enough to see the carnage
that this kind of adventurism inflicted on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. A
succession of "wars on terror" and operations to "bring democracy" to
Afghanistan has seen the country literally razed to the ground. Libya
still remains in total chaos, whilst Iraq undoubtedly represents the
greatest human tragedy of our time. Estimates put the death toll at
between 100,000 and one million, with some as high as 2.7 million -
again a bitter war of numbers that totally disregards the suffering
inflicted upon the country. One would be remiss not to mention the
effects that "humanitarian intervention" had on the city of Fallujah
where the "toxic legacy of the US assault" - where there is, ironically,
evidence that the US used chemical weapons - was considered, by international studies, to be "worse than Hiroshima."
Some will speak of the Syrian refugees. They're not the only refugees in the world. The Iraq refugee crisis continues -- internally and externally. On internals,
All Iraq News reports Parliamentary Emigration Committee Chair Liqa Wardi declared today that 110 families in Anbar Province had fled due to the violence.
National Iraqi News Agency reports Parliament's Foreign Relations Committee Chair Homam Hamoudi declared today that a military strike on Syria will not help anything and that the answer is to hold a Geneva II Conference to work towards peace.
But if, for example, your goal,
like David Kilgour's, is regime change in Iran, you want war on Syria. And it's in that context, not humanitarian concern, that
Bomb-Bomb-Bomb-Iran John McCain's support for war on Syria really makes sense.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee bill (giving the White House everything it asked for) makes no sense either when you examine it.
Vote Vets' Jon Soltz (Huffington Post) points out:
Sixty-six American troops killed. Two hundred ninety-five Wounded in Action.
Are those numbers from an American combat operation? Not according to our government,
which said they, and the other 50,000 troops in Iraq (which included
me), were part of the "official end to Operation Iraqi Freedom and
combat operations," under Operation New Dawn, after August 2010.
I thought back to that, today, as I read about one very interesting line in the Senate resolution
authorizing military action in Syria, which passed the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee. Most in the media, and on the Hill, talk about how
the resolution disallows American troops on the ground. That isn't
true. What the bill says is, "The authority granted in section 2 does
not authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in
Syria for the purpose of combat operations."
That is key. Officially, those 66 Americans killed, and 295 wounded
in Iraq were not part of combat operations, either. Yet, for those of
us on the ground, we knew they very much were.
Whenever we send troops to the kind of asymmetrical battlefield that
we had in Iraq, and would definitely see in Syria, they are
automatically combat troops. They can face attack at any time, and
would have to respond appropriately, at any time. To say they will be
in any kind of safe-zone, away from combat, is naïve.
Jes Burns: The US continued its domestic and international push for military
intervention in Syria today. Peace activists across the globe, from
Cairo to Kuala Lumpur, have been marching and holding rallies to oppose
military involvement. And organizers intend to keep up the pressure -
more protests are scheduled today and over the weekend. FSRN’s Mark
Taylor-Canfield has more from Seattle.
Mark Taylor-Canfield: Demonstrations are being held today in Tokyo, Honolulu, San
Francisco, and Seattle to show opposition to a proposed US military
strike on Syria. The latest opinion polls show that the majority of
Americans are opposed to military intervention. Activists will be
gathering in downtown Seattle to hold a rally and march, and in San
Francisco protesters planned to converge on Market Street during rush
hour. Protests are also being organized in Asheville, North Carolina,
Tuscon, Arizona and dozens of other US cities. Activists in Seattle are
also organizing a benefit to raise funds for Syrian war refugees.
According to the Interoccupy website, more than 250 rallies and direct
actions for peace in Syria have been scheduled since reports of a
chemical weapons attack emerged. Mark Taylor-Canfield, FSRN, Seattle.
The
International Action Center and
A.N.S.W.E.R. are organizing a series of protests:
Now is the time for the people to step up
pressure on Congress and demand that they vote NO to any resolution
authorizing a military attack on Syria.
On Saturday, September 7, people are
descending on Washington, D.C., for a major demonstration that will
assemble at the White House and march on the Capitol Building as
Congress returns to Washington, D.C., and prepares to vote. This
demonstration is initiated by a broad ad hoc coalition called the Vote
No War Against Syria Coalition. If you or your organization would like
to be an endorser of the Sept. 7 demonstration, email votenowaronsyria@yahoo.com.
Those who can will stay over in Washington
for daily demonstrations, and to maintain a round-the-clock visible
anti-war presence at the U.S. Capitol building beginning Saturday,
September 7 and continuing daily as Congress meets to take up and vote
on the resolution.
Syria shares a border with Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Iraq. It's largest border is the eastern border, where Syria and Iraq meet.
Asia News reports:
War "is a terrible experience" that "we have already had" and
therefore "we feel a lot closer" to Syria," said Mar Raphael Louis Sako.
Speaking to AsiaNews, the Chaldean
patriarch called on the bishops, priests and faithful of Iraq "to fast for
peace in Syria and the Middle East."
Stressing
"the suffering" of the Syrian people, His Beatitude said, "We saw a similar thing
ten years ago." From hindsight, after the United States-led war in 2003 ended in
Saddam Hussein's fall, "we have had neither democracy nor freedom." Instead,
"confusion and security are getting worse. . . . Every day, more people die in
Iraq."
Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has proposed an eight-point peace plan for Syria.
Iraqi Spring MC notes that before Nouri can resolve the crisis in Syria, he first needs to resolve the crises in Iraq. Iraqi Spring MC is the protest movement's media outlet. Protests have been continuous in Iraq since
December 21st.
Tom Peterson (Christian Science Monitor) reports of last Saturday's protests:
Many Iraqis are worried that democracy, never firmly rooted here, is sliding away from their country. On Saturday, Iraq’s security forces stopped demonstrators from protesting against the parliament’s pension program, which activists say is excessive. In Baghdad, police closed off several main roads and bridges to stop protesters from reaching designated gathering places.
Despite the prohibition, hundreds of demonstrators took to the
streets in several cities where protest leaders say police beat and
arrested some participants. Iraqi officials said they forbade the
protests because a large gathering would have been susceptible to a
terrorist attack.
“We were expecting big support from the
government, because we saw the government on the media in favor of
pension reforms, but instead, they beat some of our friends and arrested
them. It’s shocking,” says Akeel Ahmad, a protester who could not reach
the demonstration due to police checkpoints.
The ban on Saturday’s protests is the latest evidence of growing authoritarianism in Iraq.
Nouri has actively attempted to shut down the protests -- including by attacking them. The most infamous attack would be the
April 23rd
massacre of a sit-in in Hawija which resulted from Nouri's federal forces storming in.
Alsumaria noted Kirkuk's Department of Health (Hawija is in Kirkuk) announced 50
activists have died and 110 were injured in the assault.
AFP reported the death toll rose to 53.
UNICEF noted that the dead included 8 children (twelve more were injured). While slaughtering peaceful demonstrators in public, Nouri lobbied in private to shut down the protests.
Ali Mamouri (Al-Monitor) reports:
In previous protests and in the latest one as well, the Iraqi government resorted
to religious authorities to issue fatwas that forbade participation in
protests, under the pretext of tough conditions in the region and in
Iraq specifically.
However, Najaf’s four authorities rejected this demand and criticized
the government. The latter had previously succeeded in obtaining fatwas
from figures close to Iran, including Sheikh Muhammad Mahdi al-Asefi,
the official representative of Khaminei in Iraq, and Muhammad Kazem
al-Haeri, who is close to the Iranian leadership. Both issued fatwas warning people not to take to the streets, thus stirring even more distress.
The government made yet another attempt, when it sent a special delegation including prominent figures in the Islamic Dawa Party and
the government, like Sheikh Abdel Halim Zuheiri, special adviser to the
Iraqi prime minister, and Tareq Najem, former director of the prime
minister’s office. A source close to the office of Muhammad Said
al-Hakim told Al-Monitor that the latter received the delegation after Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani refused — a sign of anger toward the government’s constant failure and massive corruption.
According to the source, Zuheiri expressed his concern regarding the
protests that are being organized by activists from several cities in
Iraq and asked Hakim to assist in halting them. However, Hakim strongly
opposed Zuheiri in this regard and censured the Iraqi government, asking
Zuheiri, “Why didn’t you respond to the demands of the protesters
instead of trying to stop protests, which are a legitimate right for
everyone?”
Sistani’s official representative, Seyyed Ahmad Safi, proceeded with his criticism
for the failure and corruption of the government during the Friday
prayer ceremony in Karbala. Moreover, he supported the protests that
were meant to be held on the following day and asked the Iraqi
government to implement a clear plan to solve the situation, in case it
was sincere in its attempts to overcome the current problems. Sistani had supported the
demands of the protesters in the past and described them as legitimate,
while asking the Iraqi government to respond to them through providing
services and security and canceling any unaccepted privileges that the
MPs and ministers granted themselves.
Turning to the US where's there no end to the revelations regarding Barack Obama's illegal spying programs.
Joseph Menn (Reuters) reports, "The U.S. National Security Agency has secretly developed the ability to
crack or circumvent commonplace Internet encryption used to protect
everything from email to financial transactions, according to media
reports citing documents obtained by former NSA contractor Edward
Snowden."
Jon Healy (Los Angeles Times) offers this call:
The latest Edward Snowden-powered exposé published by the New York Times, ProPublica and the Guardian is, to me, the most frightening. It reveals that the National Security Agency
has moved beyond its historic role as a code-breaker to become a
saboteur of the encryption systems. Its work has allegedly weakened the
scrambling not just of terrorists' emails but also bank transactions,
medical records and communications among coworkers.
How bad is it?
CNN explains:
According to the reports,
the NSA, alongside its UK equivalent, Government Communications
Headquarters, better known as GCHQ, has been able to unscramble much of
the encoding that protects everything from personal e-mails to banking
systems, medical records and Internet chats.
The agencies' methods
include the use of supercomputers to crack codes, covert measures to
introduce weaknesses into encryption standards and behind-doors
collaboration with technology companies and internet service providers
themselves.
That's a lot of new information to absorb and sometimes the best way to
understand new information is for it to be broken down into a
discussion. Yesterday evening, on
KPFA's
Flashpoints, guest host
Kevin Pina explored the latest revelations with
The Bill of Rights Defense Committee's Shahid Buttar:
Kevin Pina: Well, Shahid, am I right in saying that people should
not be complacent just because we're getting -- sort of getting used to
the news now? That we should still be concerned about this?
Shahid Buttar: Absolutely. You know, every day, more trickles out.
And the latest revelations that the NSA and its British counterparts
have essentially cracked commercially available encryption codes has
dramatic implications for everything from online commerce to our most
private communications. And it is absolutely essential that the
American people stay very loud and engaged to force a long overdue
change and for us to restore fundamental rights.
Kevin Pina: Well so what does this mean that they've cracked basic
encryption codes? It means that no data can ever be secure now?
Shahid Buttar: For all intents and purposes. There are some strong
versions of encryption that remain, at the moment, uncracked by the
NSA. But one of the implications of today's revelations is that the NSA
is much further along in its crypto-analysis project to essentially
de-encrypt everything than anyone at this point had realized. There was
a famous saga from the 90s, the crypto-wars, when essentially Silicon
Valley had essentially outflanked the Pentagon and now the tides have
changed and until the latest revelations no one had even realized that
that had happened.
Kevin Pina: Well I'm also wondering, you know, there's a G-20 that's
going on now and you know if it weren't for Syria pushing it off the
board now, Edward Snowden would probably be high up there on the list of
what Russia and the United States would be discussing. But with Syria,
there's no peep whatsoever about it, just a few mentions here and
there. But Edward Snowden did a great contribution. Did he not make a
great contribution to our understanding of exactly the full extent of
NSA spying on its own citizens?
Shahid Buttar: No question. Absolutely. An enormous contribution.
The only quibble I would have is we still don't know the full extent
and even the entire corpus of his disclosures would not itself about the
latest revelations was the fact that the NSA describes American
consumers as "adversaries" and has worked not only to rig the
international encryption standards to suit its own ends and also
collaborated in secret with the tech companies to engineer
vulnerabilities into their own commercially available programs but also
that they'd actually employed spies -- human intelligence operatives
into the tech companies which is deeply disturbing. And the fact that
all of this is happening in secret yet still available to contractors --
like Edward Snowden -- is especially disturbing. It's disturbing in a
lot of different directions. The idea that we, the American people are
paying our tax dollars to an agency that regards us as adversaries is
certainly a problem in itself.
So the selfish (and criminal) actions of the NSA have put the entire internet at risk? Yes.
James Ball, Julian Borger and Glenn Greenwald (Guardian) report:
"Backdoors are fundamentally in conflict with good security,"
said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and senior policy
analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. "Backdoors expose all
users of a backdoored system, not just intelligence agency targets, to
heightened risk of data compromise." This is because the insertion of
backdoors in a software product, particularly those that can be used to
obtain unencrypted user communications or data, significantly increases
the difficulty of designing a secure product."
This was a view echoed in a recent paper by Stephanie Pell,
a former prosecutor at the US Department of Justice and non-resident
fellow at the Center for Internet and Security at Stanford Law School.
"[An]
encrypted communications system with a lawful interception back door is
far more likely to result in the catastrophic loss of communications
confidentiality than a system that never has access to the unencrypted
communications of its users," she states.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, welcome back to Democracy Now! We haven’t spoken to
you since your partner, David Miranda, was held at Heathrow for nine
hours, the airport in Britain, and we want to get to that. But first,
talk about the significance of this latest exposé that both The Guardian, The New York Times and ProPublica have published today.
GLENN GREENWALD:
First of all, I think there’s significance just in the partnership
itself. It’s very unusual for three media organizations to work so
closely on a story of this magnitude. And that happened because the U.K.
government tried forcibly to prevent The Guardian from reporting on these documents by pressuring The Guardian editor-in-chief in London, Alan Rusbridger, to destroy the hard drives of The Guardian which contained these materials, which is why they ended up making their way to The New York Times and ProPublica.
So I think it clearly backfired, now that there are other media
organizations, including probably the most influential in the world, The New York Times, now vested in reporting on the story.
The significance of the story itself, I think,
is easy to see. When people hear encryption, they often think about
what certain people who are very interested in maintaining the
confidentiality of their communications use, whether it be lawyers
talking to their clients, human rights activists dealing with sensitive
matters, people working against oppressive governments. And those people
do use encryption, and it’s extremely important that it be safeguarded.
And the fact that the NSA is trying to not
only break it for themselves, but to make it weaker and put backdoors
into all these programs makes all of those very sensitive communications
vulnerable to all sorts of people around the world, not just the NSA,
endangering human rights activists and democracy activists and lawyers
and their clients and a whole variety of other people engaged in
sensitive work.
But encryption is much more than that.
Encryption is really the system that lets the Internet function as an
important commercial instrument all around the world. It’s what lets you
enter your credit card number, check your banking records, buy and sell
things online, get your medical tests online, engage in private
communications. It’s what protects the sanctity of the Internet. And
what these documents show is not just that the NSA
is trying to break the codes of encryption to let them get access to
everything, but they’re forcing the companies that provide the
encryption services to put backdoors into their programs, which means,
again, that not only the NSA, but all sorts of
hackers and other governments and all kinds of ill-motivated people,
can have a weakness to exploit, a vulnerability to exploit, in these
systems, which makes the entire Internet insecure for everybody. And the
fact that it’s all being done as usual with no transparency or
accountability makes this very newsworthy.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:
But, Glenn, going back to the mid-1990s in the Clinton administration,
when the government tried to establish these backdoors into
communications on the Internet, there was a public debate and a
rejection of this. What has happened since then now in terms of how the NSA operates?
GLENN GREENWALD:
Right, it’s interesting. If you go back to the mid-'90s, that debate
was really spawned by the attack on Oklahoma City, which the Clinton
administration—on the Oklahoma City courthouse by Timothy McVeigh, which
the Clinton administration immediately exploited to try and demand that
every single form of computer security or human communication on the
Internet be vulnerable to government intrusion, that it all—that there
be no encryption to which the governments didn't have the key. And as
you said, a combination of public backlash and industry pressure led to a
rejection of that proposal, and the industries were particularly
incensed by it, because they said if you put backdoors into this
technology, it will make it completely vulnerable. If anyone gets that
key, if anybody figures out how to crack it, it will mean that there’s
no security anymore on the Internet.
And so, since the NSA
and the U.S. government couldn’t get its way that way, what they’ve
done instead is they resorted to covert means to infiltrate these
companies, to pressure and coerce them, to provide the very backdoors
that they failed to compel through legislation and through public debate
and accountability. And that is what this story essentially reveals, is
that the entire system is now being compromised by the NSA and their British counterpart, the GCHQ,
systematic efforts to ensure that there is no form of human commerce,
human electronic communication, that is ever invulnerable to their
prying eyes. And again, the danger is not just that they get into all of
our transactions and human communications, but that they are making it
much easier for all kinds of other entities to do the same thing.
iraq
free speech radio news
jes burns
mark taylor-canfield
democracy now
amy goodman
national iraqi news agency
reuters
isabel coles
peg mackey
iraqi spring mc
upi
all iraq news
reuters
joseph menn
the los angeles times
jon healey
kpfa
flashpoints
kevin pina
the guardian
james ball
julian borger
glenn greenwald
