Yesterday Glenn Greenwald gave a talk (video) to the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago. At 39:48 into the talk he says this (my transcription):

Another document that I probably shouldn’t but – since it’s not published – but I am going to anyway share with you – and this one is coming soon – but you are getting a little preview. It talks about how a brand new technology enables the National Security Agency to direct, redirect into its own repositories, one billion cellphone calls every single day, one billion cellphone calls every single day.

What we are really talking about here is a globalized system that prevents any form of electronic communication from taking place without it’s being stored and monitored by the National Security Agency. It doesn’t mean they are listening to every call, it means they are storing every call and have the capability to listen to them at any time. And it does mean that they are collecting millions upon millions upon millions of our phone and email records.

It is a globalized system designed to destroy all privacy. And what is incredibly menacing about it is that it is all talking place in the dark, with no accountability and virtually no safeguards.

That the NSA can grab and store one billion calls per day is plausible. Voice can be easily compressed into a quite small data chunks. Automated speech to text transcription allows to make all these calls searchable. Not only their metadata, but the spoken and transcribed content of the calls themselves. Then matching that content to trigger words allows to fish out “targets” for further investigation. Voice recognition and/or metadata analysis will then allow to filter out other calls such “targets” made or will later make.

The NSA, we are told, must set out to find the needle in the haystack, the one terrorist in the midst of all us good people. To find a needle in the haystack is quite easy to do. Get a huge electromagnet, switch it on and the needle will come towards it while the straw will not move. That is what the NSA is set out to do here with one billion cellphone calls per day. To find those bad, bad terrorists. But that electromagnet trick assumes that the needle is made of metal. It will not find the needle made from bone, or plastic, or ceramic or something else. There is no pattern for terrorism. It can not be found and prevented.

The story of the need to find the needle in the haystack using that giant electromagnet is therefore not plausible. Storing and analyzing all global cellphone calls is neither necessary nor sufficient to fight the conflict method of terrorism. But storing those phone calls can be a tool of control. Caught up in a demonstration or accident? Now the state can go back and find out not only to whom you talked when but also what you talked about. Soon not just yesterday’s calls but those you will then have made years ago. There is likely something in all those pasts calls (and emails and chats) that you do not want others to know.

Greenwald is right in saying: “It is a globalized system designed to destroy all privacy.” But destroying privacy is not the primary or ultimate purpose of the system. The only plausible purpose of this striving for total information is its use for total control. It is the foundation of a totalitarian state.

Egypt is blowing up again and this time it is serious.

Sunday will be the anniversary of president Morsi's election. Since he came into office he broke about every promise he had made. Sure, he believed he had to defend himself from some Mubarak remainders in the judiciary and had to take some extralegal steps. But that is no excuse for his amateurish and dilettante handling of other issues.

The economy is nearing a total breakdown with acute electricity and petroleum shortages. The generals security situation is bad. Income from tourism has not come back. Making the head of a former terrorist group, which in the 1990s had blown up tourists, the governor of the tourism heavy governate Luxor didn't help. Nor did a foreign policy that has been all over the field and seemed to change weekly to follow the opinion of that country that was most willing to lend the next billion Egypt urgently needed.

Sectarian verbal attacks from Morsi against the Syrian government were at least partly responsible of the recent lynching of four Egyptians of Shia believe by a sectarian Sunni mob. In a speech shortly thereafter Morsi did not even mention them.

Polls now show that about two third of the Egyptians do not agree with Morsi's policies. The positions are extremely partisan with very little middle ground between the Islamists and their "enemies".

Those in opposition to Morsi now see a chance to take him down. They have called for a huge countrywide demonstration on Sunday and promise to continue their protests until Morsi steps down.

But Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood will fight not only with tooth and nails to stay in power. Over the last year they were able to build arsenals from plundered Libyan weapons and created their own fighting force. The Egyptian army has announced that it will not allow any big unrest but it is not clear on which, if any, side it is standing.

The first skirmishes between anti-Morsi and pro-Morsi forces have already occurred. Today the Muslim Brotherhood headquarter in Alexandria was burned down. A pro-Morsi demonstration today is likely to intensify the clashes. Sunday's opposition demonstration may end in serious fire fights. The army has already deployed to secure some critical places like the media city and the presidential palace.

There are 90 million Egyptians, half of them under 35. Two big and rather rigid ideological blocs will now seek a violent confrontation and they both have plenty of foot soldiers to put into the fight. The situation can easily evolve into a full blown civil war. I have yet to read anyone who predicts that the outcome of this conflict will be a better and more peaceful Egypt.

The Guardian just published new revelations on past and ongoing data sniffing by the National Security Agency on foreigners as well as U.S. citizens. For now I do not have time to go into those and will leave it to emptywheel and others to comment on them.

But lets think a bit of what all these revelations mean for the NSA and for Snowden's future.

Snowden had system administrator access to a whole bunch, if not all, of network and server equipment at the NSA. Sysadmin access means being in total control of the machine. While a typical Unix computer like those the NSA uses, typically logs all access events a sysadmin can hide that he accessed a machine, loaded stuff up and down or started or stopped this or that process.

Unless the NSA is using some unknown super-tool to supervise and log what its sysadmins do (and who would system administrate that tool?) it will have no clear idea what systems Snowden actually accessed or what he did to those machines.

It is the worst case any Chief Information Officer can think about. What did Snowden take? Did he leave some virus? Did he leave some logic time bomb that could wipe out anything it reaches? Where?

The NSA's damage assessment team will also have lots of questions. What papers or files does Snowden have? What does he know additionally to what is in those files? Who might he have given those files to? Only the Guardian and the Washington Post? What about the Chinese and the Russians? They sure would love to have copies. What about the encrypted "insurance files" Snowden gave to "some people" who will be able to open and publish them should someone capture or kill him?

There are so many questions to ponder. Even if Snowden did not talk with the Chinese and Russian secret services the NSA will have to assume that he did and that they now have access to all the material Snowden acquired including, possibly, secret U.S. communication codes.

In short: For the next years at least the NSA is fucked. It will have to revise all its systems and network components. This as it can no longer trust its system administrators. It will have to go to a "four eyes rule" for sysadmins so any access and change can only be made by two persons working together. This will kill productivity. Sysadmins do not work that way. A four eye rule will also require many new system administrators – by definition a rare commodity – all of whom will have to be highly trained and need high level clearances.

The NSA will have to assume that potential enemies now know exactly what it is doing, how it is doing it and will act on that knowledge. All the now interesting traffic the NSA watches will soon be fully encrypted. As it is now known that the U.S. services copy all internet traffic and have access to all service providers in the U.S. and UK, all interesting foreign stuff that might have been found through such access will now vanish from the NSA's eyes. Other countries will revise and harden their systems making the NSA's future work much more difficult.

The NSA's spying on U.S. citizen may not yet have such consequences. Unless there is a huge case where NSA spying is directly connected to a Watergate like scandal Congress will do nothing to reign the NSA in. But the scandal will come. As a former East German STASI officer says:

“It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used,” he said. “This is the nature of secret government organizations. …"

As for Snowden. He is also fucked. There is no way out for him. The U.S. intelligence community will try to get him now and forever. If only to set an example. Even if he manages to get to Ecuador the country is too small and too weak to be able to protect him. The only good chance he has is to ask the Russians for asylum and for a new personality. They will ask him to spill the beans and to tell them everything he knows. He should agree to such a deal. The NSA already has to assume that the Russians know and have whatever Snowden knows and has. The additional security damage Snowden could create for the U.S. is thereby rather minimal. Snowden can wait and work in the Moscow airport transit area until most of what needs publishing from his cache is published. He can then "vanish" and write the book that needs to be written. How one lone libertarian sysadmin found a conscience, screwed the U.S. intelligence community and regained some internet freedom for the world.

This is interesting news from The Independent which I have not yet seen mentioned in U.S. media.

Once a rebel stronghold, the town of Tal Kalakh on the Syrian side of the border with Lebanon changed sides at the week-end and is now controlled by the Syrian army.

After the Syrian Arab Army cleaned Al Qusayr of insurgents, the area at the eastern border of Lebanon was closed for insurgency logistics. Control of Tal Kalakh now closes the way through the northern Lebanese border and secures the M1 road from the port city of Tartus to Homs.

The insurgents in Homs city and Homs governorate are now cut off from resupplies. It is only a question of time until they will have to give up. There is more success in that area:

#SAA says it now controls Al-Sha’er oil field in #Homs governerate after days of fighting with Islamic rebels who took control of it #Syria

That the town of Al Kalakh fell through negotiations and without a fight is another positive sign for the Syrian government. The continuing radicalization of the insurgency as well as the rampant warlordism lets even people who somewhat dislike the government seek its protection.

Meanwhile a Saudi/Qatari attempt to widen the war into Lebanon largely failed.

There are two more interesting items in the Independent piece. The first is the – again – proven falsehood of insurgency propaganda:

The Syrian opposition denied that the town had fallen, saying that there was still fighting going on there. In a three-hour visit, I saw no sign of it. Soldiers and civilians looked relaxed and there were no indications of recent destruction, though there are plenty of buildings damaged by shellfire or pockmarked with bullet holes from fighting in 2011 or 2012. The pro-rebel Al-Jazeera Arabic satellite television channel claimed smoke was rising from the town. I did not see or smell any.

The second issue is the so far seldom mentioned facts that the insurgents are paid mercenaries:

Soldiers or guerrillas who have switched sides are often an unreliable source of information about their former colleagues because they denigrate them in a bid to impress their new masters. But Khalid al-Eid did say that his men were “paid $1,300 a month and we got an extra $1,000 if we carried out an operation”. He described how he would make Youtube films – “sometimes they show us firing when there was nothing to shoot at” – which would later be shown on al-Arabiya and al-Jazeera satellite television.

Payment for the insurgents will be the largest single cost in the insurgency’s budget, collected in, as described here, or paid directly by the western Persian Gulf countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. That last link also includes this short sentence:

Qatar also provides instructions on battlefield techniques.

That line suggests that Qatari forces, who are mostly recruited from Pakistan (pdf), are on the ground in Syria or at least near its borders. The same folks that trained the Mujahedin and Taliban in Afghanistan are now training the insurgents in Syria. It is then no wonder that one sees the same brutal tactics, suicide bombing and beheading, employed in Syria as one can see in Afghanistan.

News & views …

Zbig on Syria:

Promoting destabilization and turmoil in the Arab world will not create a good longterm outcome for the US or Israel: http://t.co/UxJVSXsWgu

Neither for Syria, which should actually be the primary concern.

The Obama administration sees any leak which it does not itself provides to hype its policies as aiding the enemy. Through its "Insider Threat Program" it pushes this view as an official policy throughout the government:

“Hammer this fact home . . . leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States,” says a June 1, 2012, Defense Department strategy for the program that was obtained by McClatchy.

The administration ruthlessly prosecutes anyone who dares to leak even the tiniest issue.

That is why Edward Snowden had to flee the country after he decided to reveal the unlimited spying of the U.S. government against the whole world as well as its own citizen. The Obama administration wants to prosecute Snowden for "espionage" for revealing U.S. spying to the public. Is that irony intended?

Cont. reading: Obama: Network Spying Is Serious Human Rights Abuse

On June 12 The NYT’s CJ Chivers reported from Syria on workshops that make some ammunition for the foreign supported insurgency in Syria. The piece, starting with the headline, was a long whine about the alleged lack of arms of these poor killers. It included photos from the workshops by Chiver’s sidekick Tyler Hicks.

Starved for Arms, Syria Rebels Make Their Own

“Everybody knows we do not have the weapons we need to defend ourselves,” said Abu Trad, a commander of the Saraqib Rebels Front, shortly before he allowed visitors into this mortar-round plant. “But we have the will, and we have humble means, and we have tools.”

…
[T]he arms plants remain a prominent feature of the opposition’s logistics, as arms flows from the Arab world fail to keep up with demand.
…
“All we need is effective weapons,” [Khaled Muhammed Addibis, a rebel commander,] said. “Effective weapons. Nothing else.”

When Chivers wrote the above the official propaganda line said that the US was not actively arming the “rebels” but that Obama was “withstanding the pressure to do so”. That was nonsense and Chivers knew it was. While he wrote the story of those poor “rebels” who had to make weapons themselves because they do not get them elsewhere, Chivers also saw many modern weapons coming in from Libya and elsewhere and he knwe that the CIA was involved in distributing them. But he never reported on that. Instead he wrote the above lies. How do we know that? Well, just look what Chivers writes today:

Cont. reading: Propaganda Reporting – Kerry’s Failure in Qatar

How stupid the idiotic "western" attack on Syria by sending Jihadi mercenaries actually is can be seen in the crazy arguments used to beg for supporting their fight. Those arguments go like this: "We" should bomb the Syrian Arab Army to prevent its use of hydrocarbons, thereby lessen global warming and prevent the Kiribati atolls from vanishing into the see. Or something like that.

The Washington Post editors believe that Syria must be bombed because Putin is harsh on Russian lunatics, does not heed to Washington demands and fulfills his contracts with the Syrian state:

In an attempt to suppress swelling protests against his rigged reelection and the massively corrupt autocracy he presides over, Mr. Putin has launched what both Russian and Western human rights groups describe as the most intense and pervasive campaign of political repression since the downfall of the Soviet Union.

…

This from the folks who applauded a dictatorial Yeltsin when he ordered tanks to fire on the elected Russian parliament. But back to their high point:

Mr. Putin has devoted himself to thwarting the Western goal of regime change in Syria, a stance that serves his political goals at home as much as it does in the Middle East.

Unless and until President Bashar al-Assad loses Syria’s civil war — something Russia is trying to prevent with massive supplies of weapons — Mr. Putin will not alter this stance.

So to make Putin behave better at his home, the editors say, "we" must bomb Syria just like "we" bombed Serbia. This even when those cases differ in all dimensions.

Even more lunatic are the editors of The Economist, a formerly reasonable magazine. They say "we" must bomb Syria because otherwise Iran will – somehow – get nukes:

The growing risk of a nuclear Iran is one reason why the West should intervene decisively in Syria not just by arming the rebels, but also by establishing a no-fly zone.

There is of course no chain of logic behind that conclusion. How bombing Syria will prevent Iran to do whatever it wants to do within Iran is not explained at all. It is pure believe that Kiribati will be saved if only "we" bomb the Syrian army. It is all pure nonsense.

Just like Obama's "aim" for Syria is pure nonsense:

Cont. reading: Kiribati Drowns? Bomb Syria!

The situation and protests in Turkey have calmed down for now. While Erdogan managed to stay on, the damages to him and his future plans are done. The protesters have won on their initial issue. Gezi park is likely to stay as a park. Even new trees get planted there now. The mayor of Istanbul promised to consult with the public before any major new project is considered:

“I have expressed to my colleagues that we should be an example municipality in sharing projects with the public,” Topbaş said.

He also said that seven municipal employees who were involved in a police raid on Gezi Park in the first days of the protests had been suspended. They are accused of burning the tents of a small group of protesters on May 30, before the street action spread to many provinces across the country.

Erdogan's central government has yet to see such light and continues with its authoritarian and repressive ways. Some 94 people, mostly from leftist organizations, were imprisoned and later released for allegedly instigating the protests. These were just the "usual suspects". The police ordered new riot control gas cartridges after some 130,000(!) were used during 20 days of protests. The powers of the police are now to be expanded. A new law to "regulate" social media is being introduced which will likely take away any online anonymity. Several media organizations have been fined for broadcasting pictures from the protests and riots and one non-AKP TV station has been ordered off the air over quite flimsy "license issues". The Gülen paper Today Zaman was threatened by the government and AKP officials after it published a poll that showed a harsh drop in support for Erdogan:

Cont. reading: Turkey: The Protest’s Fall-Out

After a first attempt of negotiations between the United States and the Taliban failed in 2012 – the U.S. did not fulfill an agreed upon prisoner release – a new attempt was started yesterday and immediately ran into difficulties.

The U.S. military handed over "full responsibility" to the Afghan security forces in Kabul on the same day as the Taliban announced the opening of an office in Doha, Qatar:

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan simultaneously follows military and political actions and aims which are limited to Afghanistan. The Islamic Emirate never wants to pose harms to other countries from its soil, nor will it allow anyone to cause a threat to the security of countries from the soil of Afghanistan.

…
Of course the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan considers it its religious and national duty to gain independence from the occupation and for that purpose has utilised every legitimate way and will utilise it in future too.

The statement from the Qatari officials is a quite telling:

Cont. reading: Afghanistan: The Beginning Of The End Game

In the United States Congress the House Select Committee On Intelligence is "the primary committee in the U.S. House of Representatives charged with the oversight of the United States Intelligence Community". The committee is the elected legislative part of the government which set and controls the limits of the executive.

It is currently holding a open hearing about the recent disclosures of various activities and programs of the National Security Agency.

Congress hearings have titles. What is the title of the currently ongoing hearing?

a. To Evaluate Recently Disclosed NSA Activities, and The Necessity Of Intelligence Gathering Reform

b. Structure And Legal Limits Of Domestic Signal Intelligence Activities

c. How Disclosed NSA Programs Protect Americans, and Why Disclosure Aids Our Adversaries

d. Role And Limits Of The NSA Within The Intelligence Community

e. Why Data Protection Is Hindering Intelligence Collection, and How More Data Collection Will Expand Our Freedoms

Cont. reading: House Select Committee On Intelligence Propaganda

The German premier daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung just published a long interview (in German) with the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Below is a translation by me of four of the twenty nine questions and answers:

Q: How long will the war take?

A: Since its first days I get asked when the crisis will end. My answer was that the crisis could last a long time. Because the external factor is obvious. An internal crisis either gets totally solved or develops into a civil war. Neither happened here. The reason for that is the external factor which is keen to prolong the crisis militarily and politically.

…

Q: There are centrifugal powers in Syria. Some regions of the country orientate themselves to neighboring countries. Will the borders within the Levant change?

A: If you take the cap stone from a stone arc – and Syria is the cap stone, then the whole arc will collapse. Every gaming with the borders of the region means the creation of a new map. This has a domino effect no one can control. It is possible that one of the great powers will start this process. But nobody will be able to stop such a process at a defined point. In today's Middle East new social contours – denominational and (ethnic-)national, next to the political borders. They make the situation complicate. No one can imagine how the region will look. It will likely be a map for uncountable wars in the Middle East and possibly elsewhere which no one will be able to stop.

Q: How will the regional order look in the coming years?

A: When we exclude the scenario of a destructive division of Syria, I believe in a different, positive scenario. The first challenge is the restoration of security and stability, the second the reconstruction. But the biggest and most important challenge is to stand against extremism. One can observe in some societies of this region a shift towards extremism and a distancing from moderation, especially in matters of religion. The question is if we can we achieve to reposition these societies towards their historical position. Some speak of tolerance, some say its co-existence. If someone is tolerant he may suddenly no longer tolerate the other. It also not just pure co-existence but the assembly of the parts of society. That has characterized this region. The other challenge is the reform we want to achieve. The constant question is which is the best political system that keeps our society together – a presidential or a half-presidential system? The parliamentarian one? What is the fitting system of parties? We can not have religions parties here – neither christian nor muslim. For us religion is an invitation for personal believe, not an instrument to make politics. The most important is to accept the other. If one does not do that there can be no democracy even if we have the best constitution and the best laws.

Q: What is the meaning of secularism in a surrounding in which islamic tendencies gain in strength?

A: The Middle East is a region bound to ideology. The Arabic society has two pillars. One is pan-Arabism and the other is Islam. Nothing else has this significance. For us in Syria secularism means the freedom of the religions: Christians, Muslims and Jews with all their manifold denominations. The secularism is necessary for the unity of the society and for the sense of citizenship. There is no alternative to that as, at the same time, the religions in this region are very strong. That is nice and not bad. Bad is when fanaticism changes into terrorism. Not every fanatic is a terrorist, but every terrorist is a fanatic. That is why I say: The concept of a secular state is that everyone has the right to freely practice his religion. Nobody will be treated differently because of religion, denomination or race.

—End of FAZ translation —

Other parts of the interview are about the history of the crisis, Hizbullah and Qusayr, chemical weapons, the external powers and the Geneva process. Most of these questions but the last have been covered in previous interviews and the answers have not changed. On Geneva Bashar Assad warns that there are many who have interests in sabotaging the Geneva process. These are external forces but also the so called opposition which gets handsomely paid and fed as long as the crisis keeps going. What Assad wants to achieve in Geneva is a compact to prohibit foreign weapons and fighters to come to Syria. If that could be achieved the conference would be a successful one. If that can not be achieved the crisis will spread throughout the region. A more detailed draft of Syria's aims in that conference can be found at Qifa Nabki.

B.Raman was a Indian senior intelligence agent and after his retirement a rather nationalist-hawkish but straight commentator on South-East Asian geopolitics. Reading his blog, following his tweets and watching this or that lecture by him helped me understand the issues of that area. I quoted him several times in my postings here.

In 2009 B. Raman was diagnosed with cancer. He fought his illness and very openly communicated about it. I admired that. His last tweet went out on May 30 when he was again admitted to a hospital.

I will miss his comments. Such direct senior insight into a far away place, even when sometimes partisan, is much more valuable than the usual biased fiction the media is trying to sell.

So I just ordered crow for dinner. I was wrong with my Iran election prediction. While I expected that Hassan Rowhani would get the highest vote count in the first round of the election, I did not expect him to get over 50 % and thereby win outright. I had expected 35+% for Rowhani and 25%+ for Ghalibaf. Rowhani won with 50.76% and Ghalibaf conceded after having reached only some 16.56% of the votes. The total voter turnout was 72.7%. Rowhani will be inaugurated as president on August 3 2013.

I take some consolation in that fact that I was not as wrong as the Washington Post editors:

Mr. Rouhani, who has emerged as the default candidate of Iran’s reformists, will not be allowed to win.

Or as wrong as the Israeli-Iranian expert Meir Javedanfar

[I]t is safe to say that moderate candidate Hassan Rowhani has no chance of success. There is little doubt that Mr Rowhani and the Stanford educated reformist Mohammad Reza Aref are far more popular than the conservative candidates. However, the supreme leader would not allow votes in their favour to be counted.

As I have maintained all long: Iran is a democracy, the Supreme Leader is not a dictator and in Iran the votes do count.

So who is Hussein Rowhani (Rouhani/Rohani)?

Cont. reading: “Ahmadi Bye Bye, Rowhani Hi Hi”

The New York Times and others try to paint a picture of a president Obama who only reluctantly took the decision to escalate the war on Syria by no longer just helping to arm the Syrian insurgency but to deliver its own weapons and to thereby commit the U.S. into a prolonged war.

Mr. Obama came around to the idea of arming the rebels, at least modestly, only months after rejecting it. In part, that was because of confirmation by intelligence agencies that Mr. Assad’s forces had used sarin gas against his people.

That picture is incorrect. As the Washington Post reports:

U.S. officials said that the determination to send weapons had been made weeks ago and that the chemical weapons finding provided fresh justification to act.

The insurgency is already well armed with tanks, artillery and modern anti-air weapons. Throughout the last months many new wire guided anti-tank missiles reached the northern front. The decision to arem them with more and better weapons was taken month ago and had nothing to do with chemical weapons. That chemical weapons fake did not convince Russia and not even the usually compliant United Nations:

[U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon] cautioned that “any information on the alleged use of chemical weapons cannot be ensured without convincing evidence of the chain of custody.”

U.S. officials admit that they have not established the chain of custody for the medical tests that were done to "prove" chemical weapons use. Experts also doubt that Sarin, as the U.S. alleges, has been used:

Cont. reading: War On Syria: “Exactly Like Iraq”

The White House now claims that the Syrian Arab Army has used chemical weapons:

Following a deliberative review, our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year. Our intelligence community has high confidence in that assessment given multiple, independent streams of information.

Remember that such "high confidence" and "multiple, independent streams of information" were also claimed when the United States attacked Iraq over such claims of chemical weapons. None of the alleged weapons were ever found. The claims were proven false.

The U.S. is trying the same lame trick again. It has provided no evidence but statements from the insurgents for any chemical weapon use by the Syrian army. It provided no explanation why its assessment has changed. This "mushroom cloud" lie is used as an "excuse" to now provide weapons and ammunition to the insurgents. That is another lie. The U.S. had decided on that earlier than it now claims. Over the last months the insurgents received powerful wire guided anti-tank missiles. So many indeed that the Syria weapon watcher Brown Moses tweeted:

The Syrian opposition in the north appears to have wire-guided missiles coming out of their ears.

There IS some evidence that chemical weapon have been used in Syria. But everything we know about them points to their use by the insurgents, not by the Syrian Arab Army.

Late last year the insurgents in Syria threatened to produce and use chemical weapons. They uploaded videos in which they demonstrated the use of gas to kill animals while threatening to do the same with their enemies in Syria.

In March 2013 16 Syrian army soldiers guarding a barrier were killed when they were attacked by insurgents with Chlorine gas. According to Alex Thomsen of the British Channel 4 insurgents had sourced the gas from an earlier captured factory near Aleppo.

Carla Del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney-general and prosecutor with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), is a member of the UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria. On May 6 she declared that according to investigations she had seen insurgents in Syria had used the nerve gas Sarin:

Cont. reading: What We DO Know About Chemical Weapons In Syria

After the candidates for Iran's election presented themselves in in their short campaigns and three TV discussion rounds the polls have firmed up a bit and the picture becomes clearer.

On the side of the several "Principlists" in the race the mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, is the strong leader. On the side of the "Reformists" the cleric Hassan Rowhani is now the sole candidate after the other candidate in that camp was pressed to stand down to thereby increase the chance for a reformist candidate reaching the second round of the vote. Rowhani has now taken the lead in the polls with some 30+ percent. The first election round on Friday will likely leave these two to run against each other in the second round a week later.

The Iranian political continuum does not fit well into the western left and right scheme. The principlists are socially conservative and in that fit into the western right wing camp. But their economic policies are socialist, or to the left, as the whole Iranian revolution has been about populist redistribution of Iran's oil wealth. The reformists camp appears socially more liberal but its economic policies are strongly market oriented with neo-liberal tendencies. Outgoing president Ahmedinejad was a mixture of these features. Economically he was a social-democrat who successfully introduced several redistribution programs. At the same time he was socially more liberal than the principlists establishment. The Iranian population, especially the relative poor people who form the majority, tends to be more socially conservative and more economically socialist than the usual western observer assume.

Western media had proclaimed that Saeed Jalili, the current negotiator over nuclear issues, as Supreme Leader Khamenei's favorite and the leading candidate. They fell for a campaign by Jalili himself who knew how to "manage" the western press. It did not work for him with the Iranian people. Now the western media will focus on the reformist Rowhani, who was endorsed by former presidents Rafsanjani and Khatami, and will try to proclaim him the leading candidate. Rowhani is likely to lose in the second round as the whole principlists vote share is about 2/3 of the total, though now split over several candidates, while the reformist vote share is about 1/3. But when Rowhani will lose the western media will likely declare, without any base in facts, that the elections were fraudulent.

The short Iranian election cycle, with only three weeks of campaigning allowed, makes it somewhat difficult for outsiders to "get a feeling" for who might be winning. Surprises are possible and polls may be wrong. Mohsen Rezaei may have some unknown support and beat Ghalibaf in the principlist position. But that would not change the greater picture. For now I do expect Ghalibaf to win and to then, like Ahmedinejad did, turn out to be more independent and unique than the west as well as the political establishment in Iran today expect.

While there is much talk and hand wringing if or when or how the “west” should or will or not supply new weapons to the Syrian insurgency, some new types of weapons have already recently appeared on the battlefield. We can be sure that Washington, London and Paris are aware of this and that the current political talk about eventually delivering further arms is just pretending.

Over the last weeks videos uploaded by the insurgents showed increasingly hits on Syrian government tanks with wire-guided anti-tank missiles. These weapons are new arrivals. The sole anti-tanks weapons so far have been unguided rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) and M-60 recoilless rifles. This stuff is new.

In this video mix several successful hits on tanks can be seen. An anti-tank missile can be seen as it starts at 0:44min. It appears to be an old French SS-11 like type of missile on a ground mount. At 0:30min an SA-7 Grail/Strela man-portable anti-air missile is fired against a helicopter and seems to hit. At 2:07 a launcher for a different type of (likely) an anti-tank guided missile is shown.

These weapons have only recently appeared. Weapons like the SS-11 can not be used without at least some professional training. Who sponsored and who delivered these weapons? Who is training the insurgents how to use them?

P.S. Dear Syrian Arab Army tank commanders. Some tank tactic 101: You are targets. Do NOT EVER park your tank on the top of a hill. ALWAYS get your hull down as deep as possible and secured from at least three sides. If possible hide your tank behind a hill and have your gunner or loader on the ground with binoculars watching surroundings from the rim. When you see an anti-tank missile launch flash immediately fire your canon roughly in that direction. Don’t waste time aiming. Your shot is not supposed to hit the missile but to distract the guy who guides it. Then throw fog and get away or flank and attack. Your welcome.

Thomas Friedman has the most logical argument on why acceptance of the government's infringement on privacy is necessary. Without that we might get another 9/11 and then, yes then, people could really press for government infringement on privacy. Wouldn't that be really bad?

To quote (slightly adopted):

I’m glad I live in a country with people who are vigilant in defending civil liberties. But as I listen to the debate about the disclosure of the government's global program for scull implemented nanobombs (SIN) designed to track and blow up terrorists, I do wonder if some of those who unequivocally defend this disclosure are behaving as if 9/11 never happened — that the only thing we have to fear is government intrusion in our heads, not the intrusion of those who gather in secret cells in Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan and plot how to topple our tallest buildings or bring down U.S. airliners with bombs planted inside underwear, tennis shoes or computer printers.

Yes, I worry about potential government abuse of a SIN program designed to prevent another 9/11 — abuse that, so far, does not appear to have happened. But I worry even more about another 9/11. That is, I worry about something that’s already happened once — that was staggeringly costly — and that terrorists aspire to repeat.

I worry about that even more, not because I don’t care about civil liberties, but because what I cherish most about America is our open society, and I believe that if there is one more 9/11 — or worse, an attack involving nuclear material — it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it. If there were another 9/11, I fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: “Do whatever you need to do to, our headaches from scull implemented nanobombs be damned, just make sure this does not happen again.” That is what I fear most.

To imagine that some people pay to read such nonsense …