foreignaffairs

On the return flight to Moscow, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov filled in the space left by his Prime Minister Dmitri Medvadev’s silence at the G8 summit Saturday, May 20 with a large dose of skepticism on Iran. Contradicting President Barack Obama’s statement that diplomacy was preferable to military action, he spoke of “many signals that the military option is… realistic.” Less realistic were NATO decisions on the eurozone and the military exit from Afghanistan at the weekend Chicago summit.

The campaigns of the candidates for president of Egypt drew to a close at midnight on Sunday, in preparation for voting on Wednesday and Thursday.

On Sunday, al-Shuruq published an opinion poll on the election. In the poll, a third of Egyptians said their number one concern was security (i.e. law and order). 14.3 percent said their biggest concern was the economic crisis. 8.3 percent said it was education. Given that the economy contracted in 2011 and is only expected to grow 1.4% in 2012, it is quite remarkable that it ranks low as a concern. People are much more worried about an uptick in crime since the revolution.

This is the ranking of the major candidates. (MB means “Muslim Brotherhood”)

1. Undecided: 29.8% (down from 33.6%) in their last poll 2. Ahmad Shafiq 15.8% (slightly up from 15.2%) – Mubarak’s last PM, Air Force Gen. 3. Amr Moussa 15.1% (Slightly down from 16%) – Mubarak FM, Sec. Gen Arab League 4. Abdul Moneim Abou’l-Futouh 13.2% (way down from 20.8%) Liberal Muslim former MB 5. Hamdeen Sabahi 12.3% (way up from 5.7%) Nasserist leftist pan-Arabist 6. Muhammad Mursi 9.5% (up from 5.2%) Muslim Brotherhood

Unfortunately al-Shuruq did not seem to say anything about their methodology, but their last poll, published Thursday, was of 1,000 Egyptians and was scientifically weighted, with men, women, urban, rural, rich and poor in their proportion to the population. If this sample is the same size, then these numbers could be plus or minus 2 points or so.

The presidential election is very important because Egypt, even more than France, has a presidential system that subordinates parliament to the chief executive. The president can dismiss parliament, for instance. The military council will issue a constitutional amendment by fiat on Monday attempting to whittle down those powers, but likely the president will remain very strong.

The big news out of the poll is that the presidential debate between the two then front runners, Amr Moussa (secularist, former foreign minister) and Abdul Moneim Abou’l-Futuh (former Muslim Brother turned Muslim liberal) hurt both candidates, but especially Abou’l-Futuh.

Abou’l-Futuh is accused of trying to be all things to all people, speaking like a fundamentalist to the Salafis and like a liberal to the Coptic Christians and secularists. One Egyptian called him a “cocktail.” This apparent indecisiveness and chameleon-like behavior seemed to help him early on, as he gathered one constituency after another to become the front-runner, but the debate showed him in a poor light as a flip-flopper.

Moussa, in contrast, was only hurt slightly by the debate, but he wasn’t helped by it. As long-serving secretary-general of the Arab League, he has favored foreign policy initiatives that most Egyptians approve of. He did break with Mubarak decades ago, but not everyone forgives him for having been in the cabinet in the 1980s. His rival Abou’l-Futouh says Moussa’s victory would be the victory of counter-revolution.

The fall of the front-runners created a new front-runner, former Air Force general and aeronautical engineer, Ahmad Shafiq, who wrote a dissertation on the military uses of Outer Space (someone should introduce him to Newt Gingrich). He is former minister of aviation and boasts of the good job he did with Cairo’s international airport. Shafiq is considered by many Egyptians, especially in the countryside, as the law and order candidate. Many voters dislike him because of his close association with the overthrown Mubarak regime. But those who feel that security has suffered since the revolution hope his would be a firm hand at the till. In Daqahliyyah a couple of days ago there was a village clash between his supporters and the Muslim Brotherhood, in which several people were wounded and a Muslim Brother was said to have been killed.

On Sunday it was reported that at a couple of news conferences in Cairo critical of Shafiq, his supporters came and broke them up, beating up critics. One event showcased charges that there was corruption at the Aviation Ministry while he headed it.

Also benefiting from Abou’l-Futouh’s plummet and Amr Moussa’s failure to get traction is leftist candidate Hamdeen Sabahi. Younger than several of the other candidates, Sabahi is typically described as a follower of the ideas of Gamal Abdel Nasser. He supports workers and the poor and promotes Arab socialism. He is highly critical of Israel of of what he calls US imperialism. He was one of the founders of the Kifaya! (Enough!) movement against Hosni Mubarak, which began with protests in solidarity with the second Intifada of the Palestinians in 2001 and continued with a huge protest against the Iraq War in 2003, then against the corrupt Egyptian elections of 2005. His numbers have doubled, putting him in the category of a plausible candidate if he continues to surge. He could not impossibly end up in the run-off election between the two front runners, which is envisioned if no one gets a clear majority in the first round.

And, improving somewhat but still not out of single digits is Muhammad Mursi, an unreconstructed Muslim Brother who says he wants to implement Islamic law in Egypt. Mursi did a Ph.D. in engineering at the University of Southern California and claims to have been an assistant professor there briefly. Although the Muslim Brotherhood has a strong party machine and can’t be counted out, Mursi labors under real disadvantages. Many Egyptians fear giving the Brotherhood the presidency, given their control of parliament. Many are angry at the Brotherhood for reneging on its pledge not to run a presidential candidate. Many feel that the Brotherhood has proved bad managers, bollixing up the process of appointing a committee to draft a new constitution and trying to stack it with their members of parliament (a move that the courts have struck down).

In al-Shuruq’s last poll, the Brotherhood suffered a ten point gender gap, with women disproportionately declining to support it, and many youth were not enthusiastic for it either.

That three of the four frontrunners in this poll are secularists, and that two have associations with the overthrown former regime, is quite remarkable, and suggests something of a backlash against the Muslim fundamentalist tide in the parliamentary elections of last fall. Some Egyptians tell me that they are fairly secular-minded and like having a good time, and they didn’t vote for puritanism when they voted for the Brotherhood. They just wanted to make sure the Mubarak regime couldn’t come back. Now they are worried about the tourist industry being scared away by the Brotherhood, and they are worried that their own beer parties are in danger, and they are worried about the rash of burglaries and increase in firearms. So these people want a secularist with political experience instead of more fundamentalism.

Polls are snapshots, and even if this one is accurate, it may not predict the results of the presidential election very well because of the small sample and the very large number of undecided voters. And, my conversations with Egyptians have hardly been scientific. But both the polling and the conversations suggest some real concerns of the public on the fronts of religion-state relations and concerns about security.

Ellen Cantarow writes at Tomdispatch.com

If the world can be seen in a grain of sand, watch out.  As Wisconsinites are learning, there’s money (and misery) in sand — and if you’ve got the right kind, an oil company may soon be at your doorstep.

March in Wisconsin used to mean snow on the ground, temperatures so cold that farmers worried about their cows freezing to death. But as I traveled around rural townships and villages in early March to interview people about frac-sand mining, a little-known cousin of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” daytime temperatures soared to nearly 80 degrees — bizarre weather that seemed to be sending a meteorological message.

In this troubling spring, Wisconsin’s prairies and farmland fanned out to undulating hills that cradled the land and its people. Within their embrace, the rackety calls of geese echoed from ice-free ponds, bald eagles wheeled in the sky, and deer leaped in the brush. And for the first time in my life, I heard the thrilling warble of sandhill cranes.

Yet this peaceful rural landscape is swiftly becoming part of a vast assembly line in the corporate race for the last fossil fuels on the planet. The target: the sand in the land of the cranes.

Five hundred million years ago, an ocean surged here, shaping a unique wealth of hills and bluffs that, under mantles of greenery and trees, are sandstone. That sandstone contains a particularly pure form of crystalline silica.  Its grains, perfectly rounded, are strong enough to resist the extreme pressures of the technology called hydraulic fracturing, which pumps vast quantities of that sand, as well as water and chemicals, into ancient shale formations to force out methane and other forms of “natural gas.”

That sand, which props open fractures in the shale, has to come from somewhere.  Without it, the fracking industry would grind to a halt. So big multinational corporations are descending on this bucolic region to cart off its prehistoric sand, which will later be forcefully injected into the earth elsewhere across the country to produce more natural gas.  Geology that has taken millions of years to form is now being transformed into part of a system, a machine, helping to drive global climate change.

“The valleys will be filled… the mountains and hills made level”

Boom times for hydraulic fracturing began in 2008 when new horizontal-drilling methods transformed an industry formerly dependent on strictly vertical boring. Frac-sand mining took off in tandem with this development.

“It’s huge,” said a U.S. Geological Survey mineral commodity specialist in 2009. “I’ve never seen anything like it, the growth. It makes my head spin.” That year, from all U.S. sources, frac-sand producers used or sold over 6.5 million metric tons of sand — about what the Great Pyramid of Giza weighs.  Last month, Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Senior Manager and Special Projects Coordinator Tom Woletz said corporations were hauling at least 15 million metric tons a year from the state’s hills.

By July 2011, between 22 and 36 frac-sand facilities in Wisconsin were either operating or approved. Seven months later, said Woletz, there were over 60 mines and 45 processing (refinement) plants in operation. “By the time your article appears, these figures will be obsolete,” claims Pat Popple, who in 2008 founded the first group to oppose frac-sand mining, Concerned Chippewa Citizens (now part of The Save the Hills Alliance).

Jerry Lausted, a retired teacher and also a farmer, showed me the tawny ridges of sand that delineated a strip mine near the town of Menomonie where he lives. “If we were looking from the air,” he added, “you’d see ponds in the bottom of the mine where they dump the industrial waste water. If you scan to the left, you’ll see the hills that are going to disappear.”

Those hills are gigantic sponges, absorbing water, filtering it, and providing the region’s aquifer with the purest water imaginable. According to Lausted, sand mining takes its toll on “air quality, water quality and quantity. Recreational aspects of the community are damaged. Property values [are lowered.] But the big thing is, you’re removing the hills that you can’t replace.  They’re a huge water manufacturing factory that Mother Nature gave us, and they’re gone.”

It’s impossible to grasp the scope of the devastation from the road, but aerial videos and photographs reveal vast, bleak sandy wastelands punctuated with waste ponds and industrial installations where Wisconsin hills once stood.

When corporations apply to counties for mining permits, they must file “reclamation” plans. But Larry Schneider, a retired metallurgist and industrial consultant with a specialized knowledge of mining, calls the reclamation process “an absolute farce.”

Reclamation projects by mining corporations since the 1970s may have made mined areas “look a little less than an absolute wasteland,” he observes. “But did they reintroduce the biodiversity? Did they reintroduce the beauty and the ecology? No.”

Studies bear out his verdict. “Every year,” wrote Mrinal Ghose in the Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research, “large areas are continually becoming unfertile in spite of efforts to grow vegetation on the degraded mined land.”

Awash in promises of corporate jobs and easy money, those who lease and sell their land just shrug. “The landscape is gonna change when it’s all said and done,” says dairy farmer Bobby Schindler, who in 2008 leased his land in Chippewa County to a frac-sand company called Canadian Sand and Proppant. (EOG, the former Enron, has since taken over the lease.) “Instead of being a hill it’s gonna be a valley, but all seeded down, and you’d never know there’s a mine there unless you were familiar with the area.”

Of the mining he adds, “It’s really put a boost to the area. It’s impressive the amount of money that’s exchanging hands.” Eighty-four-year-old Letha Webster, who sold her land 100 miles south of Schindler’s to another mining corporation, Unimin, says that leaving her home of 56 years is “just the price of progress.”

Jamie and Kevin Gregar — both 30-something native Wisconsinites and military veterans — lived in a trailer and saved their money so that they could settle down in a pastoral paradise once Kevin returned from Iraq. In January 2011, they found a dream home near tiny Tunnel City. (The village takes its name from a nearby rail tunnel). “It’s just gorgeous — the hills, the trees, the woodland, the animals,” says Jamie. “It’s perfect.”

Five months after they moved in, she learned that neighbors had leased their land to “a sand mine” company. “What’s a sand mine?” she asked.

Less than a year later, they know all too well.  The Gregars’ land is now surrounded on three sides by an unsightly panorama of mining preparations. Unimin is uprooting trees, gouging out topsoil, and tearing down the nearby hills. “It looks like a disaster zone, like a bomb went off,” Jamie tells me.

When I mention her service to her country, her voice breaks. “I am devastated. We’ve done everything right. We’ve done everything we were supposed to. We just wanted to raise our family in a good location and have good neighbors and to have it taken away from us for something we don’t support…” Her voice trails off in tears.

For Unimin, the village of Tunnel City in Greenfield township was a perfect target. Not only did the land contain the coveted crystalline silica; it was close to a rail spur. No need for the hundreds of diesel trucks that other corporations use to haul sand from mine sites to processing plants. No need, either, for transport from processing plants to rail junctions where hundreds of trains haul frac-sand by the millions of tons each year to fracture other once-rural landscapes. Here, instead, the entire assembly line operates in one industrial zone.

There was also no need for jumping the hurdles zoning laws sometimes erect. Like many Wisconsin towns where a culture of diehard individualism sees zoning as an assault on personal freedom, Greenfield and all its municipalities, including Tunnel City, are unzoned. This allowed the corporation to make deals with individual landowners. For the 8.5 acres where Letha Webster and her husband Gene lived for 56 years, assessed in 2010 at $147,500, Unimin paid $330,000. Overall, between late May and July 2011, it paid $5.3 million for 436 acres with a market value of about $1.1 million.

There was no time for public education about the potential negative possibilities of frac-sand mining: the destruction of the hills, the decline in property values, the danger of silicosis (once considered a strictly occupational lung disease) from blowing silica dust, contamination of ground water from the chemicals used in the processing plants, the blaze of lights all night long, noise from hundreds of train cars, houses shaken by blasting. Ron Koshoshek, a leading environmentalist who works with Wisconsin’s powerful Towns Association to educate townships about the industry, says that “frac-sand mining will virtually end all residential development in rural townships.” The result will be “a large-scale net loss of tax dollars to towns, increasing taxes for those who remain.”

Town-Busting Tactics

Frac-sand corporations count on a combination of naïveté, trust, and incomprehension in rural hamlets that previously dealt with companies no larger than Wisconsin’s local sand and gravel industries. Before 2008, town boards had never handled anything beyond road maintenance and other basic municipal issues.  Today, multinational corporations use their considerable resources to steamroll local councils and win sweetheart deals.  That’s how the residents of Tunnel City got taken to the cleaners.

On July 6, 2011, a Unimin representative ran the first public forum about frac-sand mining in the village.  Other heavily attended and often heated community meetings followed, but given the cascades of cash, the town board chairman’s failure to take a stand against the mining corporation, and Unimin’s aggressiveness, tiny Tunnel City was a David without a slingshot. 

Local citizens did manage to get the corporation to agree to give the town $250,000 for the first two million tons mined annually, $50,000 more than its original offer. In exchange, the township agreed that any ordinance it might pass in the future to restrict mining wouldn’t apply to Unimin. Multiply the two million tons of frac-sand tonnage Unimin expects to mine annually starting in 2013 by the $300 a ton the industry makes and you’ll find that the township only gets .0004% of what the company will gross.

For the Gregars, it’s been a nightmare.  Unimin has refused five times to buy their land and no one else wants to live near a sand mine. What weighs most heavily on the couple is the possibility that their children will get silicosis from long-term exposure to dust from the mine sites. “We don’t want our kids to be lab rats for frac-sand mining companies,” says Jamie.

Drew Bradley, Unimin’s senior vice president of operations, waves such fears aside. “I think [citizens] are blowing it out of proportion,” he told a local publication. “There are plenty of silica mines sited close to communities. There have been no concerns exposed there.”

That’s cold comfort to the Gregars. Crystalline silica is a known carcinogen and the cause of silicosis, an irreversible, incurable disease. None of the very few rules applied to sand mining by the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) limit how much silica gets into the air outside of mines. That’s the main concern of those living near the facilities.

So in November 2011, Jamie Gregar and ten other citizens sent a 35-page petition to the DNR. The petitioners asked the agency to declare respirable crystalline silica a hazardous substance and to monitor it, using a public health protection level set by California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. The petition relies on studies, including one by the DNR itself, which acknowledge the risk of airborne silica from frac-sand mines for those who live nearby.

The DNR denied the petition, claiming among other things that — contrary to its own study’s findings — current standards are adequate. One of the petition’s signatories, Ron Koshoshek, wasn’t surprised. For 16 years he was a member of, and for nine years chaired, Wisconsin’s Public Intervenor Citizens Advisory Committee.  Created in 1967, its role was to intercede on behalf of the environment, should tensions grow between the DNR’s two roles: environmental protector and corporate licensor. “The DNR,” he says, “is now a permitting agency for development and exploitation of resources.”

In 2010, Cathy Stepp, a confirmed anti-environmentalist who had previously railed against the DNR, belittling it as “anti-development, anti-transportation, and pro-garter snakes,” was appointed to head the agency by now-embattled Governor Scott Walker who explained: “I wanted someone with a chamber-of-commerce mentality.”

As for Jamie Gregar, her dreams have been dashed and she’s determined to leave her home. “At this point,” she says, “I don’t think there’s a price we wouldn’t accept.”

Frac-Sand vs. Food

Brian Norberg and his family in Prairie Farm, 137 miles northwest of Tunnel City, paid the ultimate price: he died while trying to mobilize the community against Procore, a subsidiary of the multinational oil and gas corporation Sanjel. The American flag that flies in front of the Norbergs’ house flanks a placard with a large, golden NORBERG, over which pheasants fly against a blue sky.  It’s meant to represent the 1,500 acres the family has farmed for a century.

“When you start talking about industrial mining, to us, you’re violating the land,” Brian’s widow, Lisa, told me one March afternoon over lunch.  She and other members of the family, as well as a friend, had gathered to describe Prairie Farm’s battle with the frac-sanders. “The family has had a really hard time accepting the fact that what we consider a beautiful way to live could be destroyed by big industry.”

Their fight against Procore started in April 2011: Sandy, a lifelong friend and neighbor, arrived with sand samples drillers had excavated from her land, and began enthusiastically describing the benefits of frac-sand mining. “Brian listened for a few minutes,” Lisa recalls. “Then he told her [that]… she and her sand vials could get the heck — that’s a much nicer word than what he used  – off the farm.  Sandy was hoping we would also be excited about jumping on the bandwagon. Brian informed her that our land would be used for the purpose God intended, farming.” 

Brian quickly enlisted family and neighbors in an organizing effort against the company. In June 2011, Procore filed a reclamation plan — the first step in the permitting process — with the county’s land and water conservation department. Brian rushed to the county office to request a public hearing, but returned dejected and depressed. “He felt completely defeated that he could not protect the community from them moving in and destroying our lives,” recalls Lisa.

He died of a heart attack less than a day later at the age of 52. The family is convinced his death was a result of the stress caused by the conflict. That stress is certainly all too real.  The frac-sand companies, says family friend Donna Goodlaxson, echoing many others I interviewed for this story, “go from community to community. And one of the things they try to do is pit people in the community against each other.”

Instead of backing off, the Norbergs and other Prairie Farm residents continued Brian’s efforts. At an August 2011 public hearing, the town’s residents directly addressed Procore’s representatives. “What people had to say there was so powerful,” Goodlaxson remembers. “Those guys were blown out of their chairs. They weren’t prepared for us.”

“I think people insinuate that we’re little farmers in a little community and everyone’s an ignorant buffoon,” added Sue Glaser, domestic partner of Brian’s brother Wayne. “They found out in a real short time there was a lot of education behind this.”

“About 80% of the neighborhood was not happy about the potential change to our area,” Lisa adds. “But very few of us knew anything about this industry at [that] time.” To that end, Wisconsin’s Farmers’ Union and its Towns Association organized a day-long conference in December 2011 to help people “deal with this new industry.”

Meanwhile, other towns, alarmed by the explosion of frac-sand mining, were beginning to pass licensing ordinances to regulate the industry. In Wisconsin, counties can challenge zoning but not licensing ordinances, which fall under town police powers.  These, according to Wisconsin law, cannot be overruled by counties or the state. Becky Glass, a Prairie Farm resident and an organizer with Labor Network for Sustainability, calls Wisconsin’s town police powers “the strongest tools towns have to fight or regulate frac-sand mining.” Consider them so many slingshots employed against the corporate Goliaths.

In April 2012, Prairie Farm’s three-man board voted 2 to 1 to pass such an ordinance to regulate any future mining effort in the town. No, such moves won’t stop frac-sand mining in Wisconsin, but they may at least mitigate its harm. Procore finally pulled out because of the resistance, says Glass, adding that the company has since returned with different personnel to try opening a mine near where she lives.

“It takes 1.2 acres per person per year to feed every person in this country,” says Lisa Norberg. “And the little township that I live in, we have 9,000 acres that are for farm use. So if we just close our eyes and bend over and let the mining companies come in, we’ll have thousands of people we can’t feed.”

Food or frac-sand: it’s a decision of vital importance across the country, but one most Americans don’t even realize is being made — largely by multinational corporations and dwindling numbers of yeoman farmers in what some in this country would call “the real America.”  Most of us know nothing about these choices, but if the mining corporations have their way, we will soon enough — when we check out prices at the supermarket or grocery store. We’ll know it too, as global climate change continues to turn Wisconsin winters balmy and supercharge wild weather across the country.

While bucolic landscapes disappear, aquifers are fouled, and countless farms across rural Wisconsin morph into industrial wastelands, Lisa’s sons continue to work the Norberg’s land, just as their father once did. So does Brian’s nephew, 32-year-old Matthew, who took me on a jolting ride across his fields. The next time I’m in town, he assured me, we’ll visit places in the hills where water feeds into springs. Yes, you can drink the water there. It’s still the purest imaginable. Under the circumstances, though, no one knows for how long.

Ellen Cantarow’s work on Israel/Palestine has been widely published for over 30 years. Her long-time concern with climate change has led her to investigate the global depredations of oil and gas corporations at TomDispatch. Many thanks to Wisconsin filmmaker Jim Tittle, whose documentary, “The Price of Sand,” will appear in August 2012, and who shared both his interviewees and his time for this article.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook. 

Copyright 2012 Ellen Cantarow

__________ Mirrored from Tomdispatch.com

Two congressmen are attempting to insert a provision in the National Defense Authorization act that would allow the Department of Defense to subject the US domestic public to propaganda. The bipartisan amendment was introduced by Rep. Mac Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State.

Nothing speaks more urgently to the creeping fascism of American politics than the assertion by our representatives, who apparently have never read a book on Germany in the 1930s-1940s or on the Soviet Union in the Stalin period, that forbidding DoD and the State Department from subjecting us to government propaganda “ties the hands of America’s diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible way.” And mind you, they want to use our own money to wash our brains!

As Will Rogers observed, “This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.”

I love our guys and gals in uniform, but they can be extremely obnoxious in any discussion about US government policy that ‘gets off point’ or ‘doesn’t serve the mission.’ At Washington think tank events, I’ve seen them repeatedly close down discussions among e.g. State Department foreign service officers. You don’t want most of the DoD types providing information to us, because it won’t be in any way balanced.

Of course, having a Pentagon propaganda unit at all is highly anti-democratic. The best defense of the truth is a free press. It should also be remembered that nowadays everything in Washington is outsourced, so government propaganda is often being turned over to Booz Allen or the American Enterprise Institute, which have a rightwing bias.

Doing propaganda abroad has the difficulty that it doesn’t stay abroad. False articles placed in the Arabic press in Iraq were translated into English by wire services, who got stung.

Then, another problem is that the Defense Intelligence Agency analysts *also* read the false articles placed in the Arabic press by *another* Pentagon office, which they did not know about. So the analysts were passing up to the White House false information provided by their own colleagues!

I was told by an insider that one reason Washington analysts often read my blog in the Bush years was that I had a reputation for having an accurate bull crap meter, and thus my judgments on what was likely to be true helped them fight the tendency to believe our own propaganda!

Not only should this amendment be gotten rid of quick, but their constituents should please vote out of office Reps. Thornberry and Smith next November.

The largest demonstrations held in Syria’s second city, Aleppo, since the beginning over a year ago of the revolutionary movement in that country, were held on Friday. In part, they were provoked by the brutality of regime troops toward student protesters at the university in Aleppo on Thursday. The Baathist regime of President Bashar al-Assad responded with tear gas and batons, and there were some injuries reported. Tens of thousands of people came out in the streets in other cities as well on Friday in a continued effort to topple the regime.

Aleppo is a city of about 2 million (roughly the size of Houston) in a country of about 22 million, and is the most populous urban area (the capital, Damascus, has slightly fewer people but is obviously more politically important). About 12 percent of the population of Aleppo is Christian, and it has Kurds among its Sunni Muslims.

Because the Syrian Christians had been fearful of Muslim extremists coming to power if al-Assad were overthrown, they haven’t been active in the revolt for the most part. (Some of the Christians there are refugees from Iraq, who have horror stories of what happens to Christians when a secular ruling party like the Baath is overthrown, and they have helped induce caution in their coreligionists in Syria and Lebanon). And many Sunni business families in Aleppo, of a secular bent, had the same fears.

But if the regime is going to send uniformed thugs onto the college campus and rough up their children, the Aleppines can be provoked. And they were, on Friday.

If Aleppo continues to turn against the regime, it is a perhaps fatal blow to the Baath. Eventually Damascus itself is likely to be radicalized, and once the capital turns on its government, it is hard for the President to avoid being put on a helicopter. That development still does require that the officer corps split or remain neutral, which is difficult in Syria because the president’s brother, Maher al-Assad, commands the tank corps. A coup against Maher by a combination of reformist Allawite junior officers and Sunni colleagues would probably be necessary to achieve that result. (The upper echelons of the Baath civilian and military elite is disproportionately drawn from the Allawite Shiite majority, about 10% of the Syrian population).

The Syria crisis is on the NATO agenda for its Chicago meeting this weekend, as is the Iran crisis. Russia warned the West against any military intervention in Syria or Iran. Russia is backing the Baath regime, which buys Russian weaponry and leases to Moscow a naval base on the Mediterranean at Tartous.

This huge demonstration in Aleppo shows that the strategy of the urban protesters in Syria, of simply being tenacious and non-violent, has a real chance of success, because as the regime represses more and more people, it provokes bigger and bigger crowds all over the country. The minority who have taken up arms and the fringe that has set off bombs have been far, far less successful politically. In fact, the Free Syrian Army, made up of defectors with weapons, which has tried to assert control in some city districts throughout the country, has just provoked artillery barrages and tank attacks from the well-armed Baath army, and the rebels have repeatedly been annihilated when they have tried to stand their ground.

The demonstrations and violence (some 23 people were killed, mainly protesters, on Friday) came as some 250 UN observers continued to fan out throughout the country. The mission has had some success in deterring massive artillery assaults by the regime on urban areas, but it seems pretty clear that the presence of the observers is not making a huge difference. The idea that the Baath regime will negotiate with the revolutionaries and give up some power in favor of a more pluralistic system (as happened in Yemen) is somewhat fantastic. The Baath in Syria is an old twentieth-century style one-party police state and does not play well with other children. In contrast, Yemen had already had a transition to multiparty elections in the 1990s, however fragile.

AP has a report on the continued shelling of Rastan near Homs. The situation in Syria is murky because the regime has tried to exclude journalists, but it is likely that the Free Syrian Army has a position in Rastan from which the Baath army is trying to dislodge it.

Violence in Aleppo, Rastan Amid Observer Warning by associatedpress

Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak have decided to stand back for Barack Obama to put his interim deal with Iran to the test, debkafile’s sources report. They are going along with it despite reservations after receiving assurances from the White House that Iranian violations would result in the immediate termination of negotiations and bring military action forward as the sole remaining option for stopping a nuclear Iran. Saturday, debkafile exclusively revealed the eight-point interim deal the US put before Iran.

Chris Woods and Jack Serle write at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Though the hour was late, Yemen’s social media was still very much awake.

A US drone’s missiles had just slammed into a convoy of vehicles in a remote part of Yemen, killing three alleged militants.

The attack – like all other US drone strikes outside warzones – was supposed to be clandestine. Yet within minutes Sanaa-based lawyer Haykal Bafana was reporting the strike in almost-realtime. Just after 1am on May 17 he posted the following on Twitter:

#Yemen NOW | Missile strike on car in Wadi Hadhramaut. Near city of Shibam. Suspected US drone attack.

— Haykal Bafana (@BaFana3) May 16, 2012

As Bafana later explained to the Bureau, his relatives live in Shibam, a town of 30,000. ‘When the drone struck, the town – which was then experiencing a power cut – had completely lit up. My relatives got straight on the phone to tell me about the attack.’

‘No attacks so far’ The day prior to the strike Bafana had already tweeted that drones were behaving suspiciously in the area. Hadhramaut province, a sparsely-populated former sultanate, is far from Yemen’s troubled south, where most of the fighting and US drone strikes are currently taking place.

There has been militant activity there for some years, report locals, and surveillance drones have been active at night since 2010. But until now there had never been a drone strike. ‘But suddenly four or five days ago, my relatives were reporting drones over them in daylight, all the time, which was rare. Militants were also being seen moving about in the area, maybe preparing the way for an evacuation from the fighting in the south. Everyone was expecting something to happen’, Bafana recalls. He tweeted the news to his followers.

#Yemen | Hearing multiple claims of drone sightings in Hadhramaut, especially in Shibam/Qatn directorates (KSA route). No attacks so far. — Haykal Bafana (@BaFana3) May 15, 2012

When the deadly attack finally came in the early hours of Thursday morning, the target itself was hardly a secret.

Earlier, Arabic-language online media in the provincial capital of al-Mukalla had reported that a convoy of alleged al Qaeda rebels was heading north. That news was also swiftly tweeted.

Others were clearly also charting the convoy’s progress. As the vehicles approached Shibam at around 1am local time, at least one car, a Toyota Hilax, was destroyed by missiles from above. Yemen’s own air force has neither the know-how nor the equipment to launch a precision strike on moving vehicles in the dark.

Lawyer Haykal Bafana

News agencies would later report the attack as a drone strike, naming two of the dead as Zeid bin Taleb and Mutii Bilalafi, both described as local al Qaeda leaders. Like the dozens of US drone strikes in Yemen that preceded it, Thursday’s attack was supposed to be secret. Yet Twitter and other social media were tracking in near-real time the events surrounding the operation.

‘It is incredible how the same type of technology used by the CIA to kill people with drones in the Yemen, is empowering the Yemenis to tweet the attacks as they are happening,’ Noel Sharkey, professor of robotics at the University of Sheffield told the Bureau.

‘They can send us all pictures and bring us closer to the horror they are experiencing. Technology in the small may eventually bring down the over-use of military technology in the large.’

#NoDrones Social media tools like Facebook and Twitter – which played an important role in Yemen’s Arab Spring uprising – are now being used by activists to draw attention to a large increase in US drone strikes in recent weeks.

As Haykal Bafana notes, within minutes of his tweeting Monday’s attack the news was also posted on Facebook and on local Arabic micro-news sites. ‘Web use is as low as 2% here in Yemen. But it still makes a big difference. Many people get their news from the small local media sites rather than from foreign or state agencies. And Twitter is increasingly important.’

When President Obama’s chief counter terrorism adviser John Brennan visited Sanaa on Sunday, Twitter witnessed an online protest with the hashtag NoDrones.

Brennan do you hear us?!!! We say #NoDrones #NoDrones #NoDrones. You are killing innocent people and creating more enemies in #Yemen. — نون عربية (@NoonArabia) May 13, 2012

Yemen-based youth activist Sadam al-Adwar (@sadamtweety), for example, said ‘I’m against #terrorism & #extremism, i’m also against #drones. It’s counter-productive & fuels more extremism.’

And @WomanFromYemen, otherwise known as NGO consultant Atiaf al-Wazir, told her more than 8,000 followers: ‘For every headline you read regarding “militants” killed by drones in #Yemen, think of the civilians killed that are not reported. #NoDrones.’

Liveblogging without knowing it Yesterday’s Yemen drone strike appears to be the first in which events were reported on in real time.

‘I’ve never heard of an example of people tweeting while drones were actually in the area,’ said Dr Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Policy, an expert on Yemen security issues.

‘It really gets to the myth that you can keep these strikes covert, and if you do not have an information campaign that supports their use, you leave yourself flat-footed by people reporting what is being done in real time.’

There is a precedent. Last year a Pakistani man unknowingly tweeted the presence of US Special Forces attack helicopters on the way to kill Osama bin Laden. On May 1 last year Pakistani IT consultant Sohaib Athar tweeted the following.

Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).

— Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) May 1, 2011

After a ‘huge window shaking bang’ he debated the significance of the night’s events on Twitter, even as US Special Forces carried out their controversial raid. He quipped to a follower that ‘moving to Abbottabad was part of the ‘being safe’ strategy.’

But as the news of Bin Laden’s death broke Athar lamented ‘Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.’

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_____

Mirrored from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

A federal judge has ruled unconstitutional portions of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which provided for indefinite imprisonment for journalists and activists who reported on organizations deemed ‘terrorist’ by the US government.

Judge Katherine Forrest ruled,

“The statute at issue places the public at undue risk of having their speech chilled for the purported protection from al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ‘associated forces’ – i.e., ‘foreign terrorist organizations.’ The vagueness of Section 1021 does not allow the average citizen, or even the government itself, to understand with the type of definiteness to which our citizens are entitled, or what conduct comes within its scope.”

The vagueness is such that prominent figures such as Rudy Giuliani have palled around with the MEK (Mojahedin-e Khalq or People’s Holy Jihadis) of Iran, which was on the terrorism watch list for years, with no adverse reaction from the government. But now the Israel lobbies have succeeded in getting the MEK, which has a secret alliance with Israeli intelligence, removed from the list! So could you meet them before? Report on their views? Now? Note that remaining on the list is Lebanon’s Hizbullah, a national liberation organization that got back Lebanese territory from an illegal Israeli invasion and occupation that killed tens of thousands of people.

If we let the US government determine to whom we can speak and what we can say, assuming our words represent no clear and present danger of provoking violence, we may as well just trade in our US passports for an Iranian one.

You know, the Right Wing in Congress has been pulling this stuff for decades, and it only stops when the real Americans put their feet down. Ted Kennedy used to just rule this kind of bullcrap out of bounds in the Senate. But apparently Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi just don’t care, and neither does Barack Obama. There are a whole series of bad decisions that the three of them could have stopped if they had bothered.

Cenk Uygur interviews journalist Tangerine Bolen on the implications:

h/t @Amirmizroch

The Facebook IPO may or may not be a good business investment, but the Facebook phenomenon hasn’t faded in one area of the world– the Middle East. The social networking site, along with Twitter, was deployed by the young revolutionaries in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria as an aid to toppling the sclerotic old kleptocracies that were ruining their lives, and they are so far 4 for 2.

While General Motors recently pulled its advertising from Facebook, expressing skepticism that it was selling many cars, Middle East advertisers are still flocking to the site. They caution, however, that you can’t just pile up robot-induced ‘likes’– you have to set up an interactive site (probably with an employee to run it). Arab advertisers are interested in the site’s vast expansion, and it has implications even for gaming. (“Game over” and similar phrases played a role in the 2011 revolutions).

The site continues to grow in popularity in the region. Facebook users jumped from 19 million at the end of 2010 to 43 million today. Arabic is the fastest growing language at Facebook.

Egypt is the single largest source of subscribers, with nearly 11 million. That is about 13% of the population, and about 63 percent of the online population. Egypt is number 20 in the world for Facebook usage.

For women in a conservative society where public space is defined as male, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube offer significant avenues for public speaking and leadership. Likewise, because the old men of the military council and the political parties are not adept at the internet, it is an arena of youth leadership and culture. People also use it a lot for cultural purposes, as with advertising music concerts or public talks of wide interest. The Egyptian newspapers, bewilderingly, lack any announcements of events of that sort (I don’t even see many movie ads in them).

The next few countries by absolute numbers in the region are Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates and Tunisia. But note that the UAE is tiny in population, so that the proportion of the population using Facebook must be enormous.

The users, as one might expect, are mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings, and about 65% are male, while 35% are female.

There is no correlation between Facebook penetration and revolutionary politics. Algeria has seen only small demonstrations, and the National Liberation Front (FLN), the old line party that made the 1962 revolution, won last week’s parliamentary elections. Morocco saw some demonstrations in the thousands, and the king announced some small reforms (he will now appoint the prime minister from the ranks of the largest party in parliament), but there hasn’t been a big change.

I don’t know of any trouble in the UAE at all. In Saudi Arabia there were some demonstrations last year, and there have been rallies in the Shiite Eastern Province, but the Kingdom increased social welfare benefits and pumped more oil, and seems to have bribed the population to stay quiet. In the face of the twin threats to the Gulf oil monarchies of the Arab Spring and of Iranian power, the Saudis have launched an initiative to turn the Gulf Cooperation Council (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia) into a European Union-type entity. The policy especially emphasized a Saudi-Bahrain union to contain the restive Bahrain Shiite majority. But the initiative appears to have faltered on GCC fears of Saudi hegemony. In any case, Facebook hasn’t been used except in Bahrain (which has relatively low penetration) for revolutionary purposes in the Gulf.

Facebook is a tool of communications. It can be used for lots of purposes. Where the young people wanted to use it to make a revolution, as in Tunisia and Egypt, it helped them. But it doesn’t cause anything to happen in and of itself. Political will is still primary.

In Egypt, it is ominous that a committee is looking in to UAE-style filtering of the internet, allegedly to block pornographic sites. But filters, once set, and can be used politically. The committee noticed with dismay, however, that when the Mubarak government pulled the plug on the internet in Egypt, Twitter usage surged by 30,000 in that country, suggesting that people had workarounds (probably mainly satellite-based services).

I find it interesting that Facebook does not seem to be important in the Egyptian presidential race. I can’t see that any of the candidates have active sites with large numbers of likes. It is mostly campaign posters and one televised debate, and newspaper and t.v. reporting on speeches. You wonder if the young people maybe are not that interested, since most of the plausible candidates are rather ancient.

Angie Zambarakji writes at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism:

A girl’s school in Saudi Arabia has defied a ban on sport for girls by letting pupils play basketball. This comes comes after Human Rights Watch has claimed that women’s limited access to sport was contributing to rising obesity in the country.

Under the Kingdom’s strict Islamic legal system, girls are not allowed to play sports at state-run schools, although some private girls’ schools have sports programmes. Powerful Saudi clerics have also issued religious rulings against female participation in sports.

Sports minister Prince Nawwaf al-Faisal, who is also the head of the Saudi National Olympic Committee, told Al-Watan recently that the kingdom will not send female athletes to participate in the London Olympics. Like Qatar and Brunei, Saudi Arabia has never had a female athlete compete in the Olympics. However, Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that bars women from competitive sports in general.

There is nothing in the Qur’an that forbids Muslim women from exercising, but in conservative Muslim countries women are often banned from exercising uncovered, and from having physical contact with men.

Besides facing discrimination in schools and competitive sports, Saudi women also encounter obstacles when exercising for their health or playing team sports for fun. In 2009, the kingdom announced a ban on licensing gyms for women, and the government went as far as closing established women’s gyms.

In 2009, Sheikh Abdullah al-Maneea, who sits on the official Supreme Council of Religious Scholars, said the ‘movement and jumping’ needed in football and basketball might cause girls to tear their hymens. This might give the appearance that they had lost their virginity.

In Saudi Arabia, women must also have the permission of a male ‘guardian’, usually the closest male relative, to travel, work and have elective surgery. They are also banned from driving. The country’s religious police, the mutawwa’in, often subject women to harassment and physical punishment if they break any of these laws.

These laws, together with cultural and religious expectations, effectively limit women to a sedentary lifestyle – and this has contributed to rising obesity among Saudi women.

Forty-five per cent of middle-aged Saudi women are obese, according to a 2010 study conducted by the Saudi Diabetes and Endocrinology Society. The study showed that a number of factors have contributed to the spread of obesity among Saudis, one of them being the lack of physical activity. The prevalence of obesity among women was found to be far greater than among men.

In February, Human Rights Watch published a report, Steps of the Devil: Denial of Women’s and Girls’ Rights to Sport in Saudi Arabia, on the systematic discrimination against women in sport in Saudi Arabia, and the impact this has had on rates of obesity and diabetes, especially among women and girls.

Although Saudi Arabia has signed treaties that recognise the rights of women and girls to physical education, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Human Rights Watch found that in practice women are systematically excluded from sport and exercise.

The report found that while there are plans to improve access to sport in girls’ schools, there are few options for staying fit for women: the few health clubs that have sports or fitness equipment can be prohibitively expensive, while team sports for women are almost non-existent.

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____ Mirrored from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Greece in political limbo

With Greece in political limbo ahead of a new election in June, what is the the economic and political future of that country and the eurozone? How feasible is for Greece to leave the euro, and how are other European countries managing the increasingly anti-bailout mood in Athens?

The Iranian leadership is torn by a serious debate over a preemptive strike on Israel. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei fears it will jeopardize his credibility and upend his direct confidential dialogue with Barack Obama. He faces tough opposition from Iran’s war faction.

The Obama administration has invested major diplomatic and military efforts into persuading the Persian Gulf emirs to unite in a federation and mutual defense treaty according to two alternative Saudi blueprints – a NATO or a EU style pact. But those efforts were met with extreme reluctance.

A Digest of debkafile Round-the-Clock Exclusives in Week Ending May 18, 2012

US reservists are put on standby for transfer to the Middle East at 36 hours notice as the Obama administration gets set for a potential midsummer war if Iran stalls on a nuclear accord or fails to deliver on its commitments – or Israel goes to war on the Islamic Republic.

Ecstasy and agony: UK PM David Cameron, US President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso and French President François Hollande watching the European Champions League final between Chelsea and Bayern Munich. Photo PA

Angela Merkel has not had a good weekend. She was close to being isolated at the Group of Eight summit. Barack Obama, François Hollande and David Cameron all ratcheted up the pressure on Germany to go for “growth” in Europe. This the Germans suspect, with some reason, is code for pouring more German money into southern Europe, tolerating higher inflation and monkeying around with European Central Bank independence.

Then Bayern Munich lost, at home, to Chelsea in the final of the Champions League. German officials had campaigned for a big-screen television to be put up at the Camp David summit, so the chancellor could watch the game. In the event the Bavarians lost, after dominating the whole match – and Ms Merkel was photographed looking like she was sucking on a lemon, while next to her Mr Cameron punched the air, and Mr Obama grinned inanely.