The Lobby Called McCain
Senator John McCain on July 8 2013:“[I]t is difficult for me to conclude that what happened was anything other than a coup in which the military played a decisive role,” McCain said in a statement posted to his Senate website on Monday.Senator John McCain on July 31 2013:“Current U.S. law is very clear about the implications for our foreign assistance in the aftermath of a military coup against an elected government, and the law offers no ability to waive its provisions,” McCain said. “I do not want to suspend our critical assistance to Egypt, but I believe that is the right thing to do at this time.”
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky's amendment to next year's transportation bill would have halted the $1.5 billion in mainly military assistance the U.S. provides Egypt each year.Finally the lobby called McCain and let him know how to vote.
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The vote laid bare a stark division among Republicans, pitting libertarians like Paul against hawks such as Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who plan to visit Egypt next week at President Barack Obama's request to press for new elections. They were joined by Sens. Bob Corker and Jim Inhofe, the top Republicans on the Senate's foreign relations and armed services committees, in speaking out against the amendment."It's important that we send a message to Egypt that we're not abandoning them," McCain said. Right now, Egypt is "descending into chaos. It's going to be a threat to the United States."
Posted by b on July 31, 2013 at 18:36 UTC | Permalink | Comments (18)
Open Thread 2013-16
While I am busy ... Your news & views ...
Posted by b on July 31, 2013 at 18:07 UTC | Permalink | Comments (63)
Syria: Erdogan's Kurdish Problem
Building on the recent progress the Syrian army will have cleared Homs city of insurgents in a week or two. The next step then should be consolidation in Homs governate and a build up for a fight to kick the insurgents out of Aleppo.The various insurgency groups are continuing their competition for the booty they have yet to make. The Muslim Brotherhood faction of the insurgency, the so called free Syrian Army, continues its decline while the Salafi/Wahabi groups and the Al-Qaeda types (only a gradual distinction) of Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria are on the rise:
Today, opposition military forces can be divided into three categories: groups loyal to the SMC, most of whom maintain the FSA brand name; Salafists, whose ranks are dominated by Syrians; and jihadists, who increasingly recruit from across the Islamic world and many of whom have at least sympathy for Al Qaeda.The Syrian Military Council under General Idriss is begging for weapons from "western" states. But as it is losing cloud on the ground it is seeking alliances that will make any weapon delivery less likely:
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As such, Salafist groups, notably Harakat Ahrar Al Sham Al Islamiyya, now represent the most strategically powerful players in the conflict and serious rivals to the moderate SMC leadership.
General Salim Idriss, commander of the FSA, the name under which moderate rebel units fight, appealed to leaders of independent Islamist brigades - which are currently not part of the alliance he leads - to join its ranks, according to a leading figure from one of the armed Islamist factions involved in the talks.It is doubtful that the Obama administration will give serious weapons to the FSA if the FSA is aligning with the Salafists who regularly cooperate with the Al-Qaeda groups:
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Thursday's apparent overture by Gen Idriss appears to have offered to share advanced US-supplied weapons with conservative Salafist factions - on condition they act in concert with the FSA and guarantee not to pass munitions on to the even more radical Jabhat Al Nusra, said another opposition activist who was aware of the meeting.
Buried in this Washington Post article on the recent fighting between a PKK faction on one side, and al Qaeda's affiliates in Syria -- the Al Nusrah Front and the Islamic State of Iraq -- on the other, is confirmation that other groups are allied with al Qaeda in the fighting in northern Syria.The Kurdish PKK aligned group which has taken to fight the Syrian insurgents has intensified its call to arms:
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One of those groups, the Ahfad al Rasoul Brigade, is funded by the Qatari government.
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The US government is fooling itself if it believes it can reliably vet Syrian rebel groups to ensure that arms supplied by the US do not fall into al Qaeda's hands.
"The Committees for the Protection of the Kurdish People called on all those fit to carry weapons to join their ranks, to protect areas under their control from attacks by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant fighters, Al Nusra Front and other battalions," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.The fighting of the Syrian Kurds against the Islamists is a big problem for Turkish prime minister Erdogan. Turkey does not want an autonomous Kurd enclave in Syria but it has little ability to prevent it. It could of course send its own army but then the internal peace process with Kurds in Turkey would immediately break apart and the PKK attacks on the Turkish state would start anew. Likewise - Turkish support for the Islamists fighting the Kurds in Syria will be seen by their blood brothers in Turkey as an attack on themselves.Prominent Syrian Kurdish politician Issa Hisso was assassinated early yesterday outside his home near the Turkish border when a bomb planted in his car exploded.
To find a way out Turkey has opened talks with the Syrian Kurds:
Turkish intelligence officers met in Istanbul last week with Saleh Muslim, head of Syria's Democratic Union Party (PYD), a Kurdish group whose militias have been fighting for control of parts of Syria's north near the Turkish border.The meeting followed Muslim's declaration that Kurdish groups would set up an independent council to run Kurdish areas of Syria until the war ends. Ankara fears that kind of autonomy could rekindle separatist sentiment among its own, much larger Kurdish population as it seeks to end a 30-year-old insurgency.
These talks were held before Syrian Kurdish politician Issa Hisso was killed by Islamists which will only intensify the fighting.
Now Turkey will have to decide. Will it continue the peace process with the Kurds or will it continue support for the Islamist in Syria by allowing their supplies and fighters to cross the Turkish-Syrian border. It can not achieve both. Any attempt for an alliance with the Kurds while at the same time supporting "non-radical" Syrian insurgents is likely to fail. Those "non-radicals" are clearly in decline and more and more aligned with the radicals and the secular Kurds will never condone the Islamist presence on their grounds.
Preferring peace with Kurds also has its danger. Stopping the logistics for the al-Nusra type Jihadist could bring their wrath onto Turkish grounds. But a Kurdish buffer zone at the border could probably prevent that.
Turkey's problem are also complicated by the increasing burden of Syrian refugees. After for two years practically calling for Syrians to flee to Turkey new refugees now get rejected and the Turkish army now fights them as "smugglers" to prevent them from crossing the border.
So what is it Mister Erdogan? Peace with the Kurds or continued support for the Islamists? Ending the Turkish support for the insurgency in Syria would of course solve most of Syria's problem. One hopes that those who support Syria have a clear picture of how to achieve that.
Posted by b on July 30, 2013 at 19:20 UTC | Permalink | Comments (57)
NSA - Access It All
Some very damaging additional stuff about the NSA domestic spying will come up this week. A preview was given today on Face The Nation and on Meet The Press. The emphasis is now not on "collect it all" but the much more interesting question of how to "access it all". How does the NSA get the information out of the raw data.
@FaceTheNationSenator Udall says that all "phone records" are collected. But that is only half the beef. The NSA is collecting much more."The #NSA is literally collecting every phone record of every American every day...that is a violation of Americans' privacy" @MarkUdall
"Phone records" are the metadata of a call: Date/time of call, call length, originating number, location of originating number, destination number, destination location. If the implicated phones are mobiles additional information about the phone type and serial as well as location changes during the call may be included.
This metadata is useful to find connections between people, to reconstruct where they have been when and to find out about certain habits of the people involved.
But the content of the calls may be much more interesting.
As reckless and untruthful as the people at the head of the NSA have been proven to be there is absolutely no reason to believe that they do not also record the content of every call (and email and web access etc) of everything they could possibly get.
One internal document quotes the head of the NSA, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, on a visit to Menwith Hill in June 2008, asking: "Why can't we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith."Today 99% of call and internet traffic is transported through optical fiber cables. The NSA has access to every major fiber cable hub in the United States and in parts of Europe. It additionally taps into various undersea and land cables by clandestine means. It uses optical splitters that leave the original line working as before but copy the raw datastream onto an NSA line and feed it to some NSA datacenter where all will be recorded. As General Alexander planned five years ago the NSA it is by now really recording nearly all communication data.
But how can one use this data? How can one even access it? This is where the metadata comes in. Any name can be easily connected to a phone number and vice versa. Any IP address can be easily connected to a name. An IP address, a phone number, an email address, a name can then be used to automatically search through the recorded raw data streams to find and display the content data hidden in it. As Glenn Greenwald explained today on Meet The Press:
“The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and email in their databases. What these programs are are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things: it searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered; and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or connected to that IP address do in the future. And it’s all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst.”Access to these search programs is not restricted to NSA personal. The NSA spends 70% of its budget on contractors. They do have, like Edward Snowden had, access to the search capability and thereby access to the meta- and content data.
Thinking further there is no reason to believe that these capabilities is restricted to certain facilities or just small circle of people. It is already known that U.S. and NATO soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan had and have access to these systems and abused them. Does the State Department have access? Has the White House? Do political operatives have access? The very likely answers are "yes", "yes" and "yes".
The NSA claims that it can not search its own emails. I actually believe that to be somewhat true. The NSA task is to spy on others not on itself. Its internal email search capabilities may well be underdeveloped compared with its capabilities to search through the emails of others.
Likewise I doubt that its internal security is as developed as its external security. Trusted people with security clearance will have relative free access to its system (just ask Snowden) while any access from the outside will be heavily guarded.
So how much internal logging and controlling does the NSA have? Will every fishing through the accumulated data by trusted personal be recorded, logged and reviewed? I very much doubt this. Abuse then is likely to be widespread. Look up your nasty neighbor? Look up your former girlfriend? A political enemy? The urge to so will be great and the chance of getting rebuked over it will be small. Herein lies the mother of all scandals still to be unearthed.
Posted by b on July 28, 2013 at 16:45 UTC | Permalink | Comments (47)
Open Thread 2013-15
News & views ...Posted by b on July 27, 2013 at 18:02 UTC | Permalink | Comments (117)
Snowden Case Reveals Obama's Personal Arrogance
What does it say about a country when it has to assure another country that it will not torture a fugitive should he be returned?U.S. authorities say National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden wouldn't face the death penalty—and also promise he wouldn't be tortured—in a new letter hoping to persuade Russia not to grant him asylum or refugee status.The Obama administration is handling the Snowden case the most stupid way it could. Wasn't there once some bureau for public diplomacy and strategic communication in the State Department?
The administration should have shut up as soon as Snowden went public. Instead it is creating a hero in the eyes of many U.S. people and in the eyes of everyone in the rest of the world. Trying to justify its spying on the whole world, threatening other states over Snowden's asylum and pushing "allies" to bring down foreign presidential planes will endear the U.S. to no one.
Besides that - who will believe anything Holder promises? Wasn't it the U.S. which redefined torture into "enhanced interrogation"? Is that the plan for Snowden? Wasn't it the Obama administration and Holden who refused to prosecute anyone but the victims over torture? Isn't the Obama administration accused by the UN special rapporteur on torture of cruel, inhuman and degrading treating of a prisoner in a case similar to Snowden's?
By writing that Holden letter the U.S. has publicly humiliated itself. It is a total embarrassment.
Putin has made it clear from the very beginning that any extradition of Snowden is not going to happen. Fullstop. Russian officials have repeated that again and even today:
Asked by a reporter whether the government's position had changed, Dmitry Peskov told Russian news agencies that "Russia has never extradited anyone and never will."Is that so difficult to understand? Why then is the U.S. even trying?
It seems that this an Obama personality issue. He personally asked Putin to extradite Snowden even after Putin had publicly (thereby leaving zero chance to later change that decision) said he would not. Now Obama is miffed. How can HE get rebuked by country like Russia?
Two weeks ago, Obama phoned Putin and asked him to send Snowden back to the U.S., but Putin refused, according to one official who was briefed on the call. Following that perceived rebuke, the Obama team doubled down on its new policy to show the Russian government the cold shoulder.Ahh - the rule book is out of the window. Screw public diplomacy. Just don't care how the world sees the U.S.. It is all about Obama miffed that Putin is "thumbing his nose" at him. Who is this President of the Russian Federation that dares to do so to King Obama of the United States?“The Snowden affair is definitely affecting U.S.-Russia relations, no question. When you make it clear that something is very important to the U.S. and we are asking for cooperation and that request is rejected, that rejection is going to have an impact on the broader relationship,” said Samuel Charap, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “There’s only so many times you can thumb your nose at a U.S. president and not expect consequences. When the president himself has gotten involved personally and been rebuffed, the rule book kind of goes out the window.”
Obama's open personal arrogance will cost the U.S. dearly.
Posted by b on July 26, 2013 at 17:36 UTC | Permalink | Comments (53)
NSA Fails To Sync
The NSA's decision to have a four-eyes rule for system administration was predicted to create a lot of hassle. We already appear to see some of the fall out. There are now obvious difficulties in the process of synchronizing the talking points of various administration robots.July 22 - Official: Snowden did not get 'crown jewels'
U.S. intelligence now believes Edward Snowden did not gain access to the "crown jewels" of National Security Agency programs that secretly intercept and monitor conversations around the world, CNN has learned.July 24 - Snowden Damage Still Being Assessed; ‘Deepest Of Deep Secrets’ At Risk, Says STRATCOM’s Kehler
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The ongoing damage assessment indicates he did not gain access to what is called ECI or "extremely compartmentalized information," according to a U.S. official familiar with the review.
[Gen. Bob Kehler, commander of US Strategic Command,] referred to the type of information Snowden released as ”the deepest of the deep secrets.”I sincerely doubt that the NSA knows what Snowden has or does not have. It will have to assume that he accessed everything within is reach. A serious system administrator has ways and means to extend the official reach she is supposed to have. Rules that are supposed to prevent access can be circumvented or temporarily turned off. System logs that may register such action can be manipulated which then would make the access undetectable. These are ways and means the NSA is using itself against the people, organizations and countries it is spying on. The NSA's toolkit is designed to beat the best available protection which necessarily includes the ones the NSA itself is using. If one develops weapons for cyber wars one can be quite certain to n also become a victim of these.While Gen. Kehler was his usual careful self, a former senior allied intelligence official recently described Snowden’s actions to me as “catastrophic.”
Posted by b on July 25, 2013 at 16:30 UTC | Permalink | Comments (53)
Egypt: Preparing The Repression
The situation in Egypt keeps escalating. After the military coup against former president Morsi the Muslim Brotherhood decided to not accept it and to regain power. They took to the streets to demonstrate and are holding sit-ins. There was violence against their demonstrations as well as violence coming from them. But the situation seemed somewhat stable as the coup government established itself without much trouble and the protests in Cairo seemed to dwindle.The ruling military though has a different view. For them the situation in the Sinai is a crucial issue. There militant Jihadists, some of them foreigners and equipped with weapons smuggled in from Libya, have attacked army position and camps and seem to develop capabilities that could soon allow them to launch attacks into the Nile delta. Under former president Morsi those Jihadist were relatively safe. Morsi pardoned many of them and freed them from Egypt's jails. The army was not allowed to go after them. This was one of the main motives for the coup.
Three days ago five people, including four army personal, were killed in a coordinated Jihadist attacks in the Sinai. Yesterday 19 army personal were injured in another attack. Today one soldier died in yet another attack. The army has deployed two additional battalions to the area but the Sinai is a wide and whoever wants to hide there will find ways to do so.
The Brotherhood has somewhat endorsed these attacks and suggested that it can control them:
Mohamed el-Beltagy, one of the hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood leaders placed on the wanted list after the ouster of Morsi, took refuge among tens of thousands of Morsi supporters in Cairo. In a televised interview, he stated, "Attacks in Sinai would stop the second President Mohammed Morsi is reinstated."For the military the Muslim Brotherhood protests in Cairo and the threat from the Sinai belong together. It is looking for ways to harshly clamp down on both.
The military chief General Al-Sisi has now called for large demonstrations to support a crack down:
"I urge the people to take to the streets this coming Friday to prove their will and give me, the army and police, a mandate to confront possible violence and terrorism."The military promised to protect the protests. The Muslim Brotherhood swallowed the bait:
The Muslim Brotherhood and other supporters of Mr Morsi say they will go ahead with their own rallies on Friday, despite General Sisi's statement.The Tamarod movement which coordinated the protest in June will take part in the protests Al-Sisi called for. The Salafi Nour Party, again playing smarter than the Brotherhood, called on all Egyptians not to protest on Friday.Senior Brotherhood figure Mohamed el-Beltagy said Gen Sisi was "calling for a civil war... to protect this military coup".
The military, its associated commercial enterprises and the Tamarod wing have proven to be able to bring large numbers into the streets. So is the Muslim Brotherhood. It is likely that the two protests on Friday will meet and clashes are then sure to ensue. The military seems to planning for such clashes to then use them as an excuse to shut down the Brotherhood sit-ins and to delegitimize the organization.
The U.S. has now publicly delayed the delivery of four F-16 fighters to the Egyptian military. But that seems to be just for show. It did not call the coup a coup and still does not do so and that is endorsement enough for General Al-Sisi to proceed as he likes.
But can a violent crack down on the Brotherhood and the Jihadists really suppress them? They do have a somewhat justified grievances and have the means to go for a long violent insurgency. A violent insurgency is not what Egypt needs. But how can it now be avoided?
Posted by b on July 24, 2013 at 17:02 UTC | Permalink | Comments (55)
Musa al-Gharbi On Al-Qaeda's Renaissance
For lack of time just a link to a good writeup of the greater picture in the Middle East. Recommended reading (h/t Sophia): Musa al-Gharbi: Al-Qaeda's renaissanceHowever, so long as the protests remained peaceful, al-Qaeda was, in a sense, sidelined. Ironically, the Western interventions/escalations in Libya and Syria gave them an “in” and subsequently al-Qaeda has played a decisive and growing role in those theaters.Contrary to Western assumptions (fueled by media disinformation), the Libyans did not rise up in great numbers to overthrow Gaddhafi, and there were few military and government defections. Accordingly, the colonel continued to advance on Benghazi despite the NATO-imposed no-fly zone. Foreign fighters from AQIM rushed in to compensate for the lack of indigenous resistance—but even then the local population refused to provide the rebels with provisions or support, forcing NATO allies to overstep their mandate in UNSCR 1973 (just as they did in UNSCR 1441), likely in violation of international law.
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Al-Qaeda was quick to endorse the Syrian "uprising;" they began by bombing targets in Damascus and quickly stepped up their involvement from there. The late Abu Yaya al-Libi called for a “violent jihad” in Syria without compromise or “illusions of peacefulness” until President al-Asad is overthrown. The al-Qaeda affiliated al-Nusra Front was primarily responsible for the rebel gains in Aleppo, which marked a turning point in the rebellion—they have since become the most effective and influential fighting force in the Syrian theater.
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In Libya and Syria, the U.S. and its allies essentially ceded the narrative to al-Qaeda, agreeing that there can be no talk of democratic reforms while "dictators" remain in power. This message is further underscored by the recent military coup in Egypt, and subsequent persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood; to many Sunni Islamists, these developments serve as definitive proof that oppressive regimes cannot be purged through a peaceful political process as they (and their international supporters) have no respect for the popular will, and they are too corrupt to be reformed.
Posted by b on July 23, 2013 at 18:14 UTC | Permalink | Comments (33)
The I-P Negotiation Scam
May 19, 2011 - Obama Sees ’67 Borders as Starting Point for Peace DealMr. Obama declared that the prevailing borders before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war — adjusted to some degree to account for Israeli settlements in the West Bank — should be the basis of a deal. While the 1967 borders have long been viewed as the foundation for a peace agreement, Mr. Obama’s formula of land swaps to compensate for disputed territory created a new benchmark for a diplomatic solution.July 20, 2013 - Palestinian officials say Kerry gave guarantees that 1967 borders are basis for new talks
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas agreed to resume peace talks with Israel only after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry gave him a letter guaranteeing that the basis of the negotiations will be Israel’s pre-1967 borders, two senior Palestinian officials said Saturday.So Obama, for once, actually did what he said? The "Western official" in the above is likely an Israeli. The article later refers to an "U.S. official" distinguishing it from the "Western official" source. The Israeli may be lying. But what did Kerry guarantee or not?A Western official, however, later denied that the ‘67 lines would be the basis of negotiations.
July 22, 2013 - Analysis: How Netanyahu averted coalition crisis
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu succeeded in preventing his governing coalition from unraveling over the weekend following the announcement of forthcoming negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.It seems to me that Kerry (and Obama) are giving each side diverging promises. That shows that they are not serious about finding any solution. The scam of negotiations between the two already very unequal sides continues with the U.S. putting its weight as always on the already too strong side of the Israelis. Meanwhile the colonizing of Palestine continues.Netanyahu kept Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett satisfied by receiving a commitment from the Americans that they would not say the talks would be based on pre-1967 borders.
Posted by b on July 22, 2013 at 18:20 UTC | Permalink | Comments (88)
Anna Barnard And The Dwarfs Of Damascus
Anne Barnard writes for the NYT. Here recent piece, Enlisting Damascus Residents to Answer Assad’s Call, is datelined "Damascus". As usual in the NYT Barnard's piece emphasizes sectarianism again and again. But how believable is this sectarian tale?One may estimate how credible Barnard's writing is from this vignette:
At the entrance to a Shiite Muslim quarter, Mr. Lotof inspected a new checkpoint guarded by a baby-faced 18-year-old clutching a rifle nearly his height.The usual AK-47 has an overall length of 87cm (34.3 in). The slightly larger U.S. M-16 has an overall length of 99.0 cm (39.0 in). Even rather large snipper rifles do not exceed 125cm (49.2in). But they are mostly useless for a checkpoint guard.
Are we therefor to believe that the Syrian government has dwarfs guarding the streets of Damascus? And that everything in the war on Syria is about sectarianism?
Posted by b on July 21, 2013 at 11:03 UTC | Permalink | Comments (47)
"Collecting The Haystack" And Almightiness
The NSA will now push new internal rules to protect data it illegally collects from being accessed by its own staff. Those rules will include an additional layer of encryption, four-eyes rule for system administration and more compartmentalized access. That is fine because it will kill the NSA's productivity and effectiveness.The NSA's says it needs all teh data it collects to find "terrorists". If one believes that the NSA genuinely wants to find terrorists one should be worried that it has chosen the wrong method for the false problem:
General Alexander spoke in defense of the N.S.A.'s surveillance programs, including its collection of a vast database of information about all phone calls made and received in the United States. “You need a haystack to find a needle,” he saidThe assertion that one needs a haystack to find a needle is incredibly stupid. It assumes that there is a needle (or "terrorist"). Something neither given nor provable. Even if there were a needle how will making the haystack bigger it easier to find it? And why is the needle the danger that must be found? Edwald Snowden set the NSA's haystack on fire. Alexander now has his house burning because of the much too large haystack he accumulated.
That General Alexander comes up with such implausible assertions makes one wonder about the real motives behind the obsession with data collection. My hunch is that the only real reason behind it is "because we can".
People under total observation change their behavior and change in their characters. But total observation also changes the behavior and character of the observer. It creates fantasies of unlimited power, of almightiness and leads to total arrogance.
I believe that Alexander and the politicians' defending him show the symptoms of this disease. They assume that they are unbeatable and can act without any consequences. It is up to us to teach them that they are wrong.
Posted by b on July 19, 2013 at 16:15 UTC | Permalink | Comments (133)
Navalny
Today a judge in Russia found Alexey Navalny, together with two others, guilty of defrauding a state company. It was alleged that the boss of a state forestry company colluded with some broker to sell state owned wood for lower-than market prices to the broker who then sold it at market prices to other companies. Navalny was the one who brought the broker and the company boss together, arranged the business and allegedly got illegal profits from it.I have no idea if Navalny is guilty or not. Neither have, judging from their "Navalny Über Alles" pieces, so called journalists who write in the "western" media. They claim, without presenting any evidence, that Navalny was only accused and judged guilty because he had become a nuisance to the Russian Federation state and its president Putin.
Navalny gained some notoriety when he, in 2011 and 2012, arranged for some rather small demonstrations in Moscow. "Western" media often call him a blogger who is muckracking about alleged bribes and improprieties in various state institutions. They claim that he is a popular opponent of Putin.
But Navalny is not popular, at least not in Russia. Out of those 47% of Russians who have at all heard of him twice as many have a negative view on him than a positive opinion one. Since that Pew poll his popularity has shrunk further.
Navalny certainly has some dark sides. He was expelled from the liberal Yabloko opposition party for colluding with the Russian neo-Nazi movement. Navalny is a arch nationalist who wants "Russia for the Russians" excluding all other ethnic groups. Only last week he publicly endorsed a race riot against Russians of Chechen heritage.
As said above I have no idea if Navalny is guilty or not. A Russian court found him guilty and that is about all we known about the case. But I do have an idea what Navalny is not. He is not a serious politician with some laudable program who a majority of Russians would vote into any office. He is rather a racist, rightwing authoritarian who, for the best interests of the Russians and the "west", should be kept as far from any public office as possible.
Posted by b on July 18, 2013 at 18:01 UTC | Permalink | Comments (74)
Various Issues
As I am currently very busy with not blogging just various links:China and Russia finally getting smart over Iran. No more UN sanctions:
Two small but interesting developments in Syria. Palestinians and Kurds against the Jihadis:
- Palestinian refugees training to liberate camps from foreign-backed militants
- PYD gains control of Syrian border village
On Egypt. There was an alternative though the IMF issue may have been the deal breaker:
The U.S. seems not to understand how this incredible bullying over Snowden is seen in the rest of the world. That bullying is doing more damage than whatever Snowden released:
The NSA is taking and checking data up to 3 hops away from any suspect. On the Internet you are only 4.71 hops away from anyone else.
Posted by b on July 17, 2013 at 17:13 UTC | Permalink | Comments (76)
Syria: The "West's" Muddled Policy
We know that the CIA is long involved in distributing weapons and intelligence to the Syrian insurgents. The CIA organized weapons from Croatia and Libya and distributed those. The bills for those weapons were payed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. New weapons are still arriving. There are also U.S. military special operation detachments in Jordan and Turkey training some of the insurgents. As this involvement is already well known and has been reported on by several outlets it is a bit weird that the Obama administration is now somewhat agonizing about "officially" delivering weapons to the insurgents:A month ago Obama administration officials promised to deliver arms and ammunition to the Syrian rebels in the hope of reversing the tide of a war that had turned against an embattled opposition.There is a lot of whining in that piece about "legal restrains" and question of who the weapons should go to. The legal restrains, which the Wall Street Journal explores in detail, are not the real issue. As usual international law means nothing to the U.S. and Obama simply ignores it. The real reason the weapons are a no go is that some grown ups are holding them up in fear of putting them into the wrong hands:But interviews with American, Western and Middle Eastern officials show that the administration’s plans are far more limited than it has indicated in public and private.
The plan — made possible after Mr. Obama signed a secret “finding” that circumvents international laws prohibiting lethal support to groups trying to overthrow a sitting government — continues to face bipartisan skepticism in Congress.
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“One of the biggest impediments has been the cohesion and the organization of the opposition relative to the Assad forces,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview.
The Free Syrian Army is nothing but a marketing front for a whole bunch of disunited criminal and jihadi groups. Weapons flowing to it would certainly end up in hands of those the "west" would not like to be armed too much or to win the war. The administration has no real plans for Syria. It has no strategy and no idea who it wants to come out winning the war. But as long as the country gets destroyed it seems to be fine with the war proceeding endlessly.
While Washington is still hand wringing over the issue London has decided and prime minister Cameron will not, for political resistance in his own party, give any weapons to the insurgents:Mr Cameron has been told by Tory whips that there is little prospect of winning a vote on arming rebels in the Commons.Good luck finding those "moderate elements". They are an illusion.
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A source close to Downing Street last night confirmed that Mr Cameron is not planning to arm Syrian rebels.British forces will instead draw up plans to help train and advise moderate elements of the opposition forces fighting the regime.
But at least the Brits have lost two other illusion. The first is that the U.S. knows what it is doing, the second one is that the Syrian government will lose the fight:
John Kerry, the US Secretary of State is attempting to push rebels and the regime to the negotiating table.The "west" has somewhat recognized that its policies on Syria were deeply wrong. But it seems difficult to publicly acknowledging that and to openly change course. We therefore get a muddled policy with a lot of agonizing and, like in other cases, no real strategy behind it. From Syria's perspective this muddled "western" policy is not as bad as others could be.However, British government sources have expressed frustration that they have little idea what he is seeking.
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Ministers believe it could take 18 months before President Assad is forced to the negotiating table, although it could take significantly longer after the advance of the Syrian government forces.
Posted by b on July 15, 2013 at 17:25 UTC | Permalink | Comments (106)
"Collect It All" Is Illegal, Stupid And Dangerous
The Washington Post has a somewhat schizophrenic piece on General Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency and of the military Cyber Command. The piece starts with lauding Alexander for a few paragraphs but then goes into some rather unflattering details of what the man has been doing. The general's approach is to "collect it all" and it started not in the United States but in Iraq where the U.S. military was totally unable to control the insurgency and tried in vane to get ahead of the game with total spying:[T]he NSA director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, wanted more than mere snippets. He wanted everything: Every Iraqi text message, phone call and e-mail that could be vacuumed up by the agency’s powerful computers.What is good for unsuccessfully fighting an insurgency in Iraq, as earlier in other places, must also be good for controlling U.S. citizens and the rest of the world. Thus the "collect it all" scheme was extended to the United States as well as the globe:“Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, ‘Let’s collect the whole haystack,’ ” said one former senior U.S. intelligence official who tracked the plan’s implementation. “Collect it all, tag it, store it. . . . And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.”
[A]s he did in Iraq, Alexander has pushed hard for everything he can get: tools, resources and the legal authority to collect and store vast quantities of raw information on American and foreign communications.Glenn Greenwald correctly points out that the phrase "outer edge of his legal authority" is Washington code for "clearly illegal".
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“He is absolutely obsessed and completely driven to take it all, whenever possible,” said Thomas Drake, a former NSA official and whistleblower. The continuation of Alexander’s policies, Drake said, would result in the “complete evisceration of our civil liberties.”
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[E]ven his defenders say Alexander’s aggressiveness has sometimes taken him to the outer edge of his legal authority.
But the "collect it all" philosophy is not only illegal. It is stupid and dangerous.
"Collect it all" makes the haystack bigger than it needs to be. It collects data that is certain to never be "relevant" in any criminal case. The bigger haystack makes it more difficult to find the needles. The program eats up huge resources which would likely be more effective if they would be spend elsewhere. All the money spend on it creates a lobby that will make it difficult to shift such resources.
It is also a huge danger to personal freedom. How long will it take until all that personal data will be searched during each and every job application? First for those who want to work for the NSA itself, then for all government jobs, then for the "important" industries and then for all positions. Some nerdy or angry tweet you made years ago may then exclude you from any well paying future position. How long until automatic "triggers" will be attached to the algorithms that sift through all the data? What consequences will it have if some "trigger" switches, for whatever reason, from your data? Will it immediately put you on some disposition matrix?
The NSA's "collect it all" attitude is not only illegal, a vast waste of public resources and dangerous to personal and political freedom. It is an invitation to abuse.
What general will withstand the urge to use this information if it could help him avoid a budget cut? What administration will NOT use the power this information gives to its political gains? What can be abused will be abused. And we all will be, one way or another, casualties of this.
Posted by b on July 15, 2013 at 13:00 UTC | Permalink | Comments (32)
Syria: The "Moderate" Insurgents
It is well known that the Syrian insurgents have received, with U.S. help, many new weapons from various Arab states:Salim Idriss, head of FSA’s military command, said that the new weapons have allowed the rebel army to “destroy more than 90 armored vehicles for Syrian regime.”But even those new weapons are not enough for them. They, and their Arab and "western" supporters, are still pressing for more weapons. Obama seems to be willing to give more weapons:
President Barack Obama told Saudi Arabia’s king on Friday that he is committed to providing U.S. support to Syrian rebels who have been waiting for shipments of light arms that have been stalled in Washington.Congress has so far blocked any official U.S. supplies. To change the opinion of some Congress leaders the war on Syria must now be redefined. From the left of the stage now appears the "moderate rebel". Instead of asking for weapons to fight the "bloody dictator" the "moderate rebel" will now request weapons to fight the "dangerous terrorists" with whom they have partnered all along.
We therefor now read about Pakistani Taliban setting up shop in Syria and can see some insurgents raise a monster size white "Taliban flag" at the Turkish-Syrian border. Suddenly there are many, many, many reports about strife between the "moderate" insurgents and the "terrorists":
Kamal Hamami, the Free Syrian Army commander killed on Thursday in the coastal province of Latakia, had just met with others in the group about getting weapons.At least some of these stories are false. But they will be used for a new push to arm the "moderate" insurgents.
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Last week, members of the Islamic State were accused of beheading two Free Syrian Army fighters and leaving their severed heads beside a garbage can in a square in Dana, a rebel-held town in Idlib Province near the Turkish border. The attack came after clashes broke out at a demonstration against the Islamic State, leaving 13 people dead.Recently, a fighter from the area, Abu al-Haytham, claimed that the rebel dispute began when a foreign fighter with the Islamic State raped a local boy — “the last straw,” he said — and Free Syrian Army commanders complained.
But there are reasons to doubt that small local clashes over loot between some factions are really showing a principal split between the various insurgency groups:
Despite growing frictions, moderate factions and jihadist groups do still coordinate on the ground, said Charles Lister, an analyst at IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center. He said that is unlikely to change, although the FSA may use the assassination for political gain.These groups have been working together from the very beginning of the insurgency. While the Syrian locals may have been a bit more moderate in the beginning they were still religious radicals who named all their battalions after historic Sunni warriors. Their differences with the foreign jihadis fighting in Syria is smaller than with the general Syrian population. That infamous guy who was filmed eating the raw lung of a dead Syrian soldier? A "moderate" local Free Syrian Army guy. Is he now supposed to get more weapons because he also clashes with some other jihadis about his share of the loot?“Moderate forces could use this as a way to prove to the West that they are willing to break relations with jihadis in order to get more Western assistance,” he said. “The reality is very different for the commanders on the ground.”
To suggest that there are "good" and "moderate" insurgents is falling for a trivial ploy. If there are at all ideological differences between the various groups they are only gradual. Besides - any weapon given to any insurgent will be matched by the government and only cost more blood and lives.
Posted by b on July 13, 2013 at 14:43 UTC | Permalink | Comments (82)
As Predicted - Snowden Stays In Russia
The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden just announced that he requested temporary asylum in Russia. He said that this is the only way he can have guaranteed safety. Some other upright countries also offered asylum - Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador - but there is currently no safe way for Snowden to reach them. ACLU points out that the U.S. with its threats towards those countries willing to grant asylum to Snowden is thereby destroying a guaranteed human right.
Snowden's asylum in Russia is exactly what I predicted two weeks ago:
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.Snowden may take a while to recognize that the "temporary" asylum will have to be indefinite one. The change of personality and the spilling of the beans the Russians will ask in return may have to wait for a while.
The Russian president Putin had asked that Snowden stop publishing the NSA secrets if he wants to stay in Russia. Most secrets of public interest are likely already in the hand of trustworthy journalists who will publish what they deem to be publishable. Anything additional that Snowden says or publishes only helps the NSA with its damage assessment. That is not in Russia's interest.
I want to thank Edward Snowden, wish him a good time in Russia and success in writing his book.
Posted by b on July 12, 2013 at 13:45 UTC | Permalink | Comments (92)
Open Thread 2013-14
(while i am busy)
News & views ...
Posted by b on July 11, 2013 at 16:54 UTC | Permalink | Comments (85)
Egypt: Today's Developments
Some developments in Egypt:Over night the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces put out a new constitutional declaration and the path to a rewritten constitution and new elections. A first analysis shows that it is along the line of the not well written old constitution but with some changes that the Salafis had demanded. It is not good on rights and vague on essentials. The winner here are the judges, the military and the Salafis. There were some rather candid comments about this process and the "liberal" organizers of the protests that brought the coup called it "dictatorial".
There is a list of some 16 senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders that the army had put under house arrest or arrested.
The New Yorker found a witness who saw yesterday's shooting in Cairo in which some 50 people lost their life. It seems that indeed the army was attacked by some unknown men on motorcycles who did not belong to the Muslim Brother demonstrators who were holding a sit in. The army then shot back and likely in error hit lots of demonstrators. There are surely several parties who might have had a motive to instigate this clash.
A former finance minister was named for the premier minister position and former IAEA official ElBaradei was named as vice president for foreign affairs.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE promised $8 billion, partly as gift, partly as loan, for the Egyptian state and economy. The lasted offer from Qatar before the coup against Morsi was $5 billion. Egypt should reject all such offers.
Twenty-two AlJazeerah staff have resigned over the channels partisan pro-Muslim Brotherhood reporting on Egypt.
Posted by b on July 9, 2013 at 16:55 UTC | Permalink | Comments (109)