Informed Comment

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.

45% of middle-aged Saudi women are obese

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

The news is going around breathlessly that 50.4% of births in the US in the past 12 months were to families categorized as ethnic minorities, presaging the time when ‘whites will be a minority’ in the US.

The unselfconscious deployment of these categories just takes your breath away. Who gets to decide which ones are ‘white’ and which ones ‘ethnic minorities?’

As historians such as David Roediger have shown, the idea of ‘whiteness’ is a relatively new racial category, and it has changed enormously over time.

Whiteness as it was constructed in the nineteenth century was not about skin color but about being Protestant and propertied. There were even distinctions within the group. WASP or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant did not refer to all Protestants of English heritage, but rather to a northeast elite that tended to marry within themselves and to have a disproportionate hold on political and business office. The Scottish-American elite was another subgroup (Presbyterian as opposed to Episcopalian).

So not all whites were equally white. Moreover, Catholic immigrants such as the Irish, the Poles and the Italians were either not considered white when they first came or were denoted as a lesser category of white. Jews, Arabs, Japanese and Chinese were also not considered white. Indeed, a special law was made to keep Chinese in particular out of the country.

Over time, the Catholic minorities who immigrated into the US in the big 1880-1924 wave, before racist immigration laws were implemented, became accepted as ‘white.’ In the past 30 years, Jews have been accepted as white. It is even possible, I think, to argue that middle class Blacks on the model of Bill Cosby’s the Huxtables have become ‘white.’ You’ll note that Harry Reid said of Obama the candidate that he ‘had no dialect,’ so for older ‘whites,’ blackness was in part cultural, wrought up with an imagined African-American speech pattern. Thus, the Obamas are in some sense ‘white,’ producing that odd argument about whether Obama is ‘black enough,’ which non-Americans must have found baffling.

In 1965 the US was finally too embarrassed to go on with the racist immigration laws and put a ceiling of 25,000 for each country in the world. That change kick-started a whole new big wave of immigration, which may now be ending. About a million a year had been coming, half of them from Latin America.

The Latinos have for the moment been categorized as non-white, but surely everyone can see how arbitrary that is. Many Latinos in Argentina and Brazil are of Italian ancestry. If they come to the US now, they are a ‘minority’ or ‘brown.’ But their cousins who just came straight to Rhode Island are ‘white.’ For that matter, why is there a difference among people who speak Romance languages and practice Catholicism, such that a Colombian is a ‘minority’ but a Calabrian is not? And consider that if a Sephardic Jewish family of Spanish ancestry immigrates from Israel, they are ‘white,’ but Spanish Catholic families who settled in Mexico and then came to the US recently are not (that’s an interesting reversal!)

Arabs are an interesting case. I’d argue that Lebanese Christians became ‘white.’ Arab Muslims were on the verge of becoming white before 9/11 but may have been at least temporarily demoted. (They are white in the census categories, but social acceptance has fallen). My guess is that demotion is a temporary blip, since they are typically well educated and well off, and over time economic eliteness tends to produce racial eliteness in the US.

And, the old prejudices against the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox ‘Slavs’ has completely collapsed, so no one thinks Poles or other Eastern Europeans are not ‘white.’

So given the history of ‘whiteness,’ likely the new wave of Latinos will be awarded the category over time. My guess is that Asians will be, as well. Remember, it isn’t about ‘race,’ it is about a weird kind of social status. By the way, Apartheid South Africa declared Japanese to be ‘white.’

Ultimately, the whole idea of whiteness can only be kept going through a set of racial and class exclusions. Working-class African-Americans eternally get the short end of the stick. Recent immigrant groups are often excluded along with them.

The better outcome would be to just stop using the word ‘white.’ As should be clear from the above, it doesn’t actually mean anything. If you really had to categorize citizens of the US by ancestry (why?), use geographical terms. We have African-Americans. Why not have European-Americans or Euros? Since there may not be a currency called that much longer, we can repurpose the term.

We should also stop using the phrase ‘ethnic minority’ to refer to post-1965 immigrant groups if we are not going to apply it to the post-1880 wave. Just be specific. If you mean Latinos, say that. If you mean Asian-Americans, say that. And, you may need a term for the new wave of African immigrants other than “African-American,” since they aren’t exactly the same (Africans have complained to me about this issue).

Me, I don’t want to be called ‘white’ and I hope we can get rid of the whole idea of whiteness. You go back a thousand years and all of us have diverse ancestries. Most Europeans are part Arab and many are part Jewish. In the US, a lot of people have Native and African ancestors that they don’t know about anymore.

Best of all if we can just say that in the US, we are all Americans and stop categorizing people with regard to their adaptation to ultraviolet waves. It is anyway a temporary adaptation. If you took Swedes and left them in the Congo for 13,000 years, the mothers that could shield their embryos from harsh ultraviolet rays better would be selected for, and they would be darker, and eventually the group would be ‘black.’ If you took Congolese to Sweden, the mothers that could provide their embryos vitamin D more reliably in a low UV environment would be selected for, and over time the group would get ‘white.’ (In fact, we’re all from Africa, so that is exactly what happened historically). It is a minor epidermal health issue, not a matter of character or essence. Get rid of it.

Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi addressed Egyptian troops on Wednesday and attempted to raise their morale for praising them as the guarantors of Egypt’s security.

Al-Masrawi reports:

“Field Marshal Tantawi said, “We are heading in the right direction.” He deplored the allegations that sometimes issue from activist organizations “that we are in enmity with this state or that or that we will abrogate a treaty with such-and-such country”… He added, “We do not enter into war save if we are forced to and because we feel there in danger. For that reason, we must always keep our eyes wide…”

Some Egyptians are afraid that the army will attempt to tamper with the elections so as to bring Ahmad Shafiq to power. (He is a man of the old regime and only barely survived politically). He appears to have been attempting to allay those suspicions.

Incredibly, Tantawi’s speech was misinterpreted in Israel as a threat of some sort. The speech was just trying to reassert control over the troops, and to encourage them to pride in country. He implicitly criticized Egypt’s Left and far right, insisting on the foreign policy status quo, and reaffirming that Egypt’s hefty army would never be deployed aggressively.

I singlehandedly keep
this bar afloat.
My heart has bled
with repentance
a couple thousand times.
But if I don’t go on sinning,
what would divine mercy do?
He can’t bestow forgiveness
unless I keep falling
off the wagon.

Translated by Juan Cole
from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, [pdf] Whinfield 130

Angus Stickler writes at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism:

British troops have been banned from transferring suspected Taliban prisoners to the Afghan authorities because of claims of torture by local forces.

The move, which follows a ruling by the British High Court, is a blow to Nato countries that want to formalise their detainee transfer process, and potentially throws the UK’s strategy for leaving Helmand by the end of 2014 into disarray.

It is a breach of international law to transfer prisoners to the custody of another state where they may face a risk of torture. To date, NATO forces have attempted to comply with their human rights obligations by obtaining written assurances from the Afghan government that torture will not take place. These assurances are known as memorandums of understanding, or MOUs.

The High Court banned transfers to the Afghan National Directorate of Security in Kabul following claims of systematic abuse.

Last year a joint investigation by the Bureau and the New Statesman magazine revealed that despite condemnation by the UN that such MOUs are ‘utterly meaningless’, the world’s most powerful military nations were attempting to undermine 60 years of the Geneva Convention and codify the use of MOUs under international law.

Since signing an MOU in 2006 the British government has continued to transfer detainees in Afghanistan despite an overwhelming body of evidence that torture is rife.

But now, the British High Court has ruled that an Afghan detainee who alleges he was subjected to torture can challenge the legality of his transfer. In a highly embarrassing about-turn, the defence secretary Philip Hammond has stopped all transfers of detainees.

Serdar Mohammed, 24, was given leave to seek judicial review by Mr Justice Collins, sitting at the High Court in London. His lawyers told the court he signed a confession stating that he was a member of the Taliban following torture by the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghanistan intelligence service. The ill-treatment including being hung by handcuffs from bars, and beatings with sticks and electric cables when he fell asleep.

The judge ruled that the father of two, who was jailed for six years, had ‘an arguable case’ that should go to a full hearing, but stressed his decision did not guarantee the challenge would succeed.

Serdar Mohammed’s barrister, Ben Jaffey, argued that his situation was particularly relevant because his transfer came in 2010 – immediately after British courts demanded safeguards for detainees following another case brought by peace activist Maya Evans two years ago.

The Evans case exposed the fundamental failings of the British government’s MOU with the Afghan authorities, but was only a partial victory. The High Court banned transfers to the NDS in Kabul following claims of systematic abuse. However it ‘hesitantly’ allowed prisoners to be sent to the Afghan facility in Lashkar Gah, as long as there were safeguards that it would be monitored.

In the new case of Serdar Mohammed, the court heard evidence that the Afghan NDS operated an underground interrogation chamber near the British headquarters in Lashkar Gah and that ‘torture was entrenched’ in the organisation.

The judge said that in part as a result of the case, defence secretary Philip Hammond had now stopped all transfers of detainees from British forces to the Afghan authorities ‘as part of an ongoing review’.

Mr Justice Collins also gave Evans permission to bring a linked legal challenge. Both cases are being brought on legal aid. The judge rejected Ministry of Defence submissions that the twin challenge was too costly for the public purse and that only one case should have been given the go-ahead.

An MoD spokesman said: ‘Detention operations are an important part of our force protection measures protecting our people, our allies and partners, and the Afghan civilian population. They also directly contribute to the success of the NATO ISAF mission in Afghanistan and ultimately to UK national security.

‘In response to a recent UK inspection there is a temporary hold on transfers while we assure ourselves that UK detainees are not at risk of serious mistreatment or torture.’

Highlighting the dilemma faced by the British military, Mr Justice Collins said: ‘If our troops are attacked by the Taliban insurgents and there is the capture of some rather than being killed, then after 96 hours they have to go free. That is a somewhat worrying situation to say the least.’

However, he added an equally serious issue was that the UK could not be seen to be complicit in torture or mistreatment.

As Nato-led forces plan to withdraw from Afghanistan, the focus on how western armies can hand over detainees without breaching international law will intensify.

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Mirrored from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

1. The Department of the Interior has given the green light to a power transmission line that is intended to bring power from Google, Inc.- backed offshore wind farms in the Northeast of the US to the mainland. Environmental impact studies will take 18 months to two years. The US, unlike Germany, so far has no offshore wind farms, and the US electricity grid needs to be re-done so as to bring power from such sources to consumers.

2. Inexpensive natural gas is being preferred to coal in the US, so that coal electricity generation has fallen 19 percent in the past year and now accounts for only 36% of US power. Natural gas is cleaner than coal, though it still pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is sort of like getting the good news that you’re being poisoned, but it isn’t with arsenic but rather something much more slow-acting.

3. Coal burning in the US will likely soon be phased out, since natural gas will likely stay inexpensive and EPA limits on carbon dioxide emissions are harder and harder for coal plants to meet. This according to a new Blooomberg Report.

4. The average American is willing to pay a 13% premium for power from wind and solar, over dirty sources such as coal, petroleum and natural gas.

5. A new design for a power-generating buoy powered by ocean waves is showing promise.

6. ReNew Power Ltd. is investing $1.1 billion in wind farms to generate electricity in India. Indian has little petroleum or natural gas so far, but enormous potential for wind and solar power generation.

7. “Big Solar” ran into some problems in the US, but the wave of the near future may anyway be “small solar”.

8. Saudi Arabia is investing $100 billion in solar energy for domestic electricity generation. Since it doesn’t have so much gas or coal, Saudi Arabia uses petroleum to generate electricity, which is relatively rare. But the more its uses its oil for such domestic purposes, the less money it can make from selling its oil abroad. Hence, solar for electricity generation in the kingdom.

9. Eight automakers have agreed on standardized electric vehicle charging.

10. Two geothermal companies have signed contracts worth $700 million to explore geothermal energy in Kenya. Underground steam could bring electricity to many parts of rural Kenya.

Jack Serle writes at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism:

Two suspected US drone strikes have killed up to 12 civilians in the south of Yemen.

Reports vary but between 14 and 15 people have been killed in a double air strike on the southern city of Jaar. Of these, as many as a dozen are being reported as civilians. Up to 21 civilians have also been reported injured.

Witnesses said the first strike targeted alleged militants meeting in a house. Civilians who had flocked to the impact site were killed in a follow-up strike. Although the attack is unconfirmed, if accurate this tactic would echo the grim hallmarks of US drone tactics in Pakistan.

Earlier this year the Bureau exposed a CIA practice of ‘follow-up’ strikes in an investigation with the Sunday Times. On at least a dozen occasions twin strikes killed at least 50 civilians. The civilians died when they rushed to help victims of an initial attack and were hit by a second, follow-up strike.

Civilians who had flocked to the impact site were killed in a follow-up strike.

While the CIA alone is responsible for the American drone campaign in Pakistan both the Agency and US special forces launch attacks with pilotless aircraft in Yemen.

Two to three suspected ‘al Qaeda militants’ were killed in the double strike which Xinhua initially reported as ‘a botched air strike carried out by Yemeni warplanes.’ But three Yemeni security officials have since told CNN it was a drone strike.

This is the highest number of civilians killed in a strike in Yemen attributed to the US since 30 died on 14 July 2011 in a strike on a Mudiya police station.

These are the first civilian strike victims reported killed in Yemen since March 30. The Bureau has recorded up to 753 people killed in US strikes in the country since 2002. As many as 117 are civilians, 24 of them children.

EU Attack
In other developments, today the European Union anti-piracy armada off East Africa launched an attack on the coast of Somalia. Helicopters and ‘maritime aircraft’ attacked an alleged pirate base in a night-time raid that destroyed five fast-attack boats with no reported casualties.

An EU force has been deployed in the seas off Somalia since 2008. On March 23 this year the EU Council voted to expand the fleet’s mandate so it can attack pirate installations on shore.

Helicopters and ‘maritime aircraft’ attacked an alleged pirate base in a night-time raid that destroyed five fast-attack boats.

The commander of the EU fleet Rear Admiral Duncan Potts said: ‘The EU Naval Force action against pirate supplies on the shoreline is merely an extension of the disruption actions carried out against pirate ships at sea.’

The fleet is made up of nine ships and five reconnaissance aircraft supplied by six EU member states including Germany, Spain and France. Fleet spokesman Timo Lange told the Bureau he could not reveal what forces took part in the raid.

This assault is also not the first time action has apparently been taken against pirates on land. On April 17 two reported fishermen were injured when a two unidentified ‘warplanes’ fired on the coast of semi-autonomous Somali region of Puntland. Initial reports said the mystery jets fired missiles on a suspected pirate base.

A spokesman told AFP the EU ‘was not involved whatsoever.’ The French and British governments denied any involvement in this mystery strike and the US Department of Defense told the Bureau it was aware of reports of the strike but would not comment on operational details.

The United States is known to have at least two aircraft carriers in the region and is understood to have aircraft and unmanned drones stationed at an airbase in Djibouti, to the north of Somalia.

For the past five years the US military and intelligence services have been fighting a covert war against the al Qaeda-linked group al Shabaab.

The Bureau has identified at least ten US operations targeting militants. American air strikes by manned aircraft and unmanned drones as well as ground operations by special forces and a naval bombardment have killed between 58 and 169 people since 2007. Up to 57 were civilians, at least one of them a child.

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Mirrored from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

College students and graduates in the United States have a debt crisis on their hands, owing a trillion dollars.

Some 80% of university students attend public colleges and universities, which were set up to provide inexpensive education.

These public institutions are increasingly expensive, however, in large part because [pdf] state legislatures have systematically cut their contributions to their state universities since 1990, by 26%.

At the same time, states have vastly increased their prison populations and prison costs, primarily because of the so-called ‘war on drugs,’ which everyone throughout the Americas recognizes as a complete failure except Barack Obama, Eric Holder and most other US politicians of both parties. Many of us suspect that the liquor corporations or private prison owners are bribing them through campaign contributions to keep marijuana illegal.

So here is a fix for the student debt crisis and the crisis in public education funding.

1. Legalize marijuana (Belgium, the Netherlands and Peru have not suffered from doing so, and it has been decriminalized in places like Portugal and Argentina with no ill effects; Portugal’s drug addiction rate has actually fallen).

2. Tax marijuana farms and dedicate the tax receipts solely to public higher education and student debt forgiveness

3. Pardon the hundreds of thousands of prisoners in state penitentiaries whose sole crime was using or selling marijuana. Save $40,000 per year per prisoner. Dedicate savings solely to public higher education and student debt relief.

4. Allow multiple sclerosis sufferers to use medical marijuana as a treatment, and let those with cancer, glaucoma and other conditions proven treatable via marijuana by science to use it for that purpose (as even conservative Arizona is now doing).

5. Tax medical marijuana clinics and dedicate their receipts solely to public higher education and student debt relief. (In California alone, pot is a $12 billion a year industry, and a ten percent tax would yield $1.2 billion a year to state coffers, helping save the University of California system).

6. Employ fewer narcotics police, achieve savings, apply those to, you guessed it.

7. Finance the education of new poor but outstanding students with the tax receipts on the marijuana industry, helping restore some of America’s former upward mobility.

These steps would not only solve the student debt crisis and allow universities to lower tuition, but would strengthen higher education in the US and allow us to remain competitive with Europe and rising nations in Asia (we are not keeping up). Our current declining investment in higher education will otherwise cause us to start falling behind in scientific and technological innovation and in cultural contributions, so vital for a dynamic democracy.

We travelled far and wide
over desert wastes,
and journeyed 
toward the horizon.
We never met anyone
coming from other direction.
When once they set out
on that path,
no one ever returned.

Translated by Juan Cole
from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, [pdf] Whinfield 129

The Pentagon brass are condemning a course on Islam taught at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va., which mischaracterized mainstream Muslim persons and organizations as radical, violent extremists, and called for treating the Muslim civilian populations the way the Japanese at Hiroshima were treated. Those who took the class were encouraged to think of themselves as a ‘resistance movement to Islam.’ A review has been ordered of that class and of hundreds of others taught within the Department of Defense.

Note that there are 1.5 billion Muslims and only 310 million Americans, and Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia are now in the G20, so this is not a fight you’d want to pick with the Muslim mainstream.

Spencer Ackerman of the Wired War Room reported on the course and also shared some of its powerpoint slides on line.

Aljazeera English also received material and broadcast on the controversy:

What is odd is that the US military is deeply dependent on Muslim allies, and Muslim officers train all the time at places like Ft. Bragg, where I have met them. That is, American officers and Muslim ones are most often colleagues and do a lot of things together. How could they sit there and listen to Lt Col Matthew Dooley’s bull crap?

In my experience, the US officer corps is made up largely of very bright people and most of them are well informed, about the Muslim world and many other subjects. I’ve had the privilege of addressing them myself at think tank events in Washington DC on subjects such as al-Qaeda’s recruitment videos and the fringe groups’ ideas about cosmic war. But since there are lapses in any organization, here are some helpful suggestions to the military about courses on Islam:

1. Such courses should be taught by people with academic credentials in the study of Islam. Many officers do a Master’s degree in Middle East studies at major universities (I’ve taught them at Michigan). They have the training to teach. But why not also bring in civilian university teachers with Ph.D.s from good universities?

2. Bringing in the Imam of the local mosque, or better, doing a field trip to a mosque, should be an essential part of such a course. Meeting living breathing American Muslims is necessary if Americans are to understand Islam.

3. Some bigot who happens to have been stationed somewhere in the Muslim world, has read Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes and Brad Thor fiction, and has a lot of crazy ideas is not a proper teacher of such a course.

4. The less our officer corps sounds like Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, the better.

5. Deliberately killing civilians is a war crime. Officers who openly advocate such a course of action should be cashiered.

6. The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt now has the largest number of seats in parliament in Egypt. It is not an extremist, violent organization, and US political relations with Egypt now depend on Washington getting up to speed in understanding it. A kindred group, the Nahdah or Renaissance Party, has the prime ministership in Tunisia. Officers who provoke international incidents with foreign governments by making false allegations against their parliaments should be drummed out of the service.

7. If you can’t say it about Jews or Catholics, you can’t say it about Muslims.

8. The one thing that would guarantee a century-long war of religions and massive terrorism against the United States would be for it to bomb Mecca. Why Muslim-haters are fixated on this tactic baffles me. Would Christianity disappear or be weakened if someone nuked the Church of the Nativity? Sunni Muslims don’t have a pope-like figure or a central bureaucracy, and neither is at Mecca. It is just a place they visit on pilgrimage. The Kaaba or cube-shaped building that they walk around has been destroyed many times by flash floods and they have just rebuilt it. By destroying it, you’d just enrage them (the very threat enrages them) and provoke them to revenge on the US, without weakening them in any way.

9. If intelligent officers sit through a course in which the teacher seems to be a maniac and says hateful and implausible things, they should, like, object.

10. The Iraq War is over. The Afghanistan War is winding down. The US military is unlikely to be fighting ground wars against Sunni Muslims in the next decade. Turkey is a NATO ally that the US is sworn to defend from attackers. Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Bahrain and Afghanistan are non-NATO allies of the United States. An officer advocating war on mainstream Muslims is making policy that only a president and a Congress can make. He should be drummed out of the service.

You wouldn’t think Bahrain and Syria were much linked. Both are Arabic-speaking countries, though about half of Bahrain’s residents are non-citizen guest workers who speak anything but Arabic. One is a geographically fairly large country of some 23 million abutting the eastern Mediterranean. The other is a set of tiny islands in the Mideast’s Gulf.

But Bahrain and Syria are tied in destiny, since they are numbers 5 and 6 of the series of Arab Spring countries that staged major rallies against their government. (The successful such movements were Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen). Bahrain and Syria are in some ways mirror images of one another. Syria has a Shiite, secular ruling elite and a Sunni majority that is treated like a minority. Bahrain has a Sunni ruling elite and a Shiite majority that is treated like a minority. Syria is backed by Russia and Iran, and has given the Russians a naval base on the Mediterranean at Tartous. Bahrain is backed by the United States and Saudi Arabia; it has given the US a naval base as HQ for the Fifth Fleet at Manama, and has garrisoned 1,000 Saudi troops on its soil.

Both governments have brutally repressed their popular revolts. In Bahrain a little less than a hundred have been killed, whereas in Syria it is something like 9,000. But Bahrain is so small that proportionally the death toll there per capita is in the same league with Syria’s.

The United States government has blasted Syria over its repression of its popular movement for democracy, placing a series of sanctions on Syrian leaders.

The US has been virtually silent about the dirty little police state that is Bahrain and its outrageous tactics, such as trying physicians for so much as treating wounded street protesters. The US has not placed sanctions on Bahrain and has done no more than tut-tut the government violence.

It is now worse. The US is now selling Bahrain Coast Guard and F-16 jet equipment.

Just ask yourself if the US would sell coast guard and F-16 equipment to Syria today.

This unnecessary and pernicious arms sale has only one purpose, and it isn’t to beef up Bahrain’s defenses. It is to reassure the Sunni king and his uncle, the prime minister, that the US forgives them for their jack boot tactics and will continue to support them.

There is no difference between the US acting this way and Russia running interference for Syria. Each is following its geopolitical interest. Neither has any morality. They are great powers.

So US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice has just had her legs cut out from under her. When she goes to the UN and argues that Syria should be sanctioned, and she is blocked by Russia and China, you can be assured that Bahrain will be thrown in her face. The US is trying to make a case to other countries for the principled character of its stand. The Obama administration has just made itself a laughingstock in that regard, and I should think its Syria position will be a cause for snickering given that it is selling arms (albeit not crowd control supplies) to Bahrain.

The US and Saudi Arabia are afraid that the Bahrain Shiite majority leans toward Iran and that if it succeeds, that victory will benefit Iran. But most Bahrainis are Akhbaris and don’t even believe in ayatollahs, and they are Arabs and wouldn’t want Persian dominance. Bahrain Shiites are distinctive and have their reasons not to act as Iran’s cat’s paws.

The arms sale to Saudi Arabia is therefore bad for the Syrian opposition, since it announces the hypocrisy of American support for it.

Bahrain’s bloodthirsty government, long accused of using torture and jailing people for thought crimes, doesn’t need US coast guard cutters to protect it from Iran. That is the job of the fifth fleet. And since the US is doing that job for the king, Washington should expect a little cooperation on the human rights front, not to be further taken advantage of.

Meanwhile, the US statements on Bahrain sound just like those of Iran on Syria. It is all about fifth columns and hooligans and outside agents. It is a crock.

Aljazeera English has a video news report on the sale:

The intrepid Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian reveals the secret campaign waged behind the scenes by the greasy oil billionaires, the Koch brothers, and other Big Oil interests to fight wind and solar power and to undermine President Obama’s clean energy policy.

In an America where second-hand smoke has led to a ban on smoking in public places because it has bad health effects on others, especially children, it is truly bizarre that we still let people burn coal, oil and gas, which is far worse for people than smoking. Putting high levels of carbon dioxide into the air is causing global climate change, including extreme weather events already. There are some children born today who as elderly persons will live in a world where the average surface temperature of the earth is 2 to 3 degrees C. (3.6 to 5.4 degrees F.) hotter than now, and where the seas likely will have risen six feet to nine feet (2 to 3 meters). Even by mid-century, high winds and sea surges could inundate coastal areas with 4 feet of water from time to time.

And that’s only the beginning. As the decades roll by thereafter, the temperature will likely go up to 5 degrees C. more than now (9 degrees F.). The ultimate sea rise with run through the hydrocarbons is likely to be at least 50 meters (150 feet). If we do go up 5 degrees C. typically in the past every 1 degree C. increase has equaled 10 to 20 meters sea rise (about 30 to 60 feet). We’ll lose a third of the earth’s land mass, all coastal areas, and everywhere will be tropical. Much sea life will die of acidity. Many plants will die. It is not clear that human beings could survive such extreme changes.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is right that the big banks need to be reformed and held accountable. But the banks are a minor problem compared to Big Coal and Big Oil. Where is the activism around those issues? Where are the consumer boycotts of the people who are playing dirty tricks on us?

George Carlin on the Separation of Religion and State

Mitt Romney, accused of harassing gay students when he was in high school, tried to get out of the charge by pretending that being gay was not a big issue in the 1960s.

“Romney moved quickly to counter any suggestion he had targeted students because they were gay.”

“That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case,” he said, adding that the students involved “didn’t come out of the closet until years later.”

As Andrew Sullivan asks, “And there was no homophobia in the 1960s?”

Romney’s attempt to deny that there was consciousness of gayness in a past era resembles the denial by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that there is any consciousness of gayness in Iran today.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies that there are any gays in Iran. “I don’t know who told you we have this:

Egyptians watched their first national presidential debate with great interest on Thursday evening. The event, sponsored by two television channels and two newspapers, was preceded by an overview of the concept of presidential debates as practiced in America that even showed a clip from Saturday Night Live.

As in the US, the debates are a way for the candidates to position themselves with regard to the various constituencies in the electorate. In Egypt, these are the constituencies over which former Egyptian foreign minister and Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa and former Muslim Brotherhood leader Abd al-Moneim Abu’l-Futuh were fighting:

1. The youth vote, including the left of center youth revolutionaries

2. The secular middle classes

3. Women

4. The Muslim Brotherhood voters (the mainstream religious Right)

5. The Coptic Christians (10% of the population)

6. The Salafis or hard line Muslim fundamentalists

So Abu’l-Futuh knows that the New Left youth do not forgive Moussa for having served under Mubarak and at one point, and he stressed Moussa’s background in this regard. He also promised to appoint very large numbers of young people to high positions, noting that in 2008 the US got a young president but that Egypt is ruled by the geriatric set. Abu’l-Futuh tried to reassure the secular middle classes and the Copts, both of which probably favor Moussa, that he wouldn’t turn Egypt into a religious state like Saudi Arabia. He knows that the Salafi leaders have already endorsed him. But the Muslim Brotherhood has its own candidate, Muhammad al-Mursi, who will likely draw votes away from Abu’l-Futuh.

Moussa stressed both respect for Islam and the important role Islamic law plays in underpinning most Egyptian laws. This was his attempt to steal some votes of the committed Muslims from Abu’l-Futuh. But he also stressed that these Islamic laws could not be applied to Coptic Christians, who have their own personal status laws. He reminded the audience that Abu’l-Futuh had long been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which back in the 1940s and 1950s resorted to violence. Abu’l-Futuh broke with the Brotherhood years ago and has a more moderate interpretation of Islam than they do. But Moussa tried to hang the Brotherhood around his neck, so as to scare away from him the secular middle classes, students, women and Coptic Christians.

Chris Woods writes at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism:

Sunday’s death of Fahd al-Quso in a CIA drone strike was a significant US success. The admitted al Qaeda bomber had long been sought for his role in the deadly attack on the US navy ship the USS Cole back in 2000.

At the Bureau we logged al-Quso’s name – along with his nephew Fahed Salem al-Akdam – in our Yemen database. Another two names added to the many hundreds we’ve now recorded for the US covert war in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

A day earlier, a CIA strike in Pakistan also killed around ten people. Here the information was less clear, with reports vague about who had died. While most claimed that a militant training camp had been struck, a single source claimed those killed were ‘local tribesmen.’ This clearly needs further investigation.

Although we’re not alone in recording US covert drone strikes, the Bureau also tries to identify by name all of those killed – both civilian and militants. And those names – which the Bureau recently presented at a Washington DC drone summit – reveal some startling truths about the US drone campaign.

To date in Pakistan, we have been able to identify 170 named militants killed by the CIA in more than 300 drone strikes. Among them are many senior figures, including Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistan Taliban; Ilyas Kashmiri, an al-Qaeda linked strategist; and Nek Mohammed, once a militant thorn in Pakistan’s side.

Certainly these drone strikes have severely affected the ability of militants to operate openly in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The recently-declassified ‘bin Laden papers’ talk of the impact of the CIA’s attacks, with the Taliban ‘frankly exhausted from the enemy’s air bombardments.’

Yet there’s a darker side to this coin. The Bureau has also been able to name 317 civilians killed in US attacks in Pakistan. Between 170 and 500 further civilians have yet to be identified.

On October 30 2011, for example, we know that the CIA killed four chromite miners in Waziristan – foreman Saeedur Rahman, and miners Khastar Gul, Mamrud Khan and Noorzal Khan. And on July 12 last year, field researchers working for the Bureau found that drones returned to attack rescuers, killing four Taliban and four civilians we named as Shabbir, Kalam, Waqas and Bashir.

US Lists
We’re not alone in keeping lists of the covert war dead. Just a few days ago, the Washington Post reported that ‘U.S. officials have said that more than 2,000 militants and civilians have been killed in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere since Obama took office in 2009.’

The Bureau’s data indicates that between 2,300 and 3,290 people have died in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia strikes under Obama.

Given that the Bureau’s base estimate for the total killed in Pakistan drone strikes is close to the CIA’s own, what clearly irks the US intelligence community is the light we continue to shine on civilians reported killed.

Since we began publishing our reports on civilian deaths from drone strikes, the US intelligence community has aggressively sought to attack our findings. Our media partners have been leaned on. The CIA claimed that we were getting our information from a ‘Pakistani spy’ (a barrister representing drone strike victims). And when we definitively showed, with the Sunday Times, that the CIA had been bombing rescuers and funeral-goers, it was suggested that we were ‘helping al Qaeda.’

Redefining ‘civilian’
At stake may be the very definition of a ‘civilian’ in the modern battlefield. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos recently pressed US chief counter terrorism adviser John Brennan on his remarkable claim in June 2011 that the CIA had not killed ‘a single non-combatant in almost a year.’

In reply, Brennan said that ‘over a period of time before my public remarks [that] we had no information about a single civilian, a noncombatant being killed.’

Even a cursory examination of credible media reports between June 1st 2010 and June 29 2011 (when Brennan made his original claim) shows that dozens of civilians were reported killed in that period. Among those who died were more than 40 tribal elders and villagers in a single disastrous CIA strike in March 2011. That attack led to public protests from Pakistan’s president, prime minister and army chief.

Perhaps the CIA’s own human intelligence-gathering abilities are so poor in Pakistan that it can no longer identify civilians killed on the ground. Perhaps the Agency has been misleading Congress and the President about the true extent of civilian deaths. Alternatively, the very definition of civilian may have been radically changed. If the latter is true – and it seems the most likely scenario – then this has worrying implications.

New phase
The covert drone war appears to be entering a new phase. Until recently, strikes were carried out with the tacit co-operation of host governments. But now Islamabad is saying no. Recent CIA strikes in Pakistan have been publicly condemned by the government as being ‘in total contravention of international law.’ The strikes are carrying on regardless.

Yemen’s new president appears more pliant. Yet in a little-reported comment, the nation’s prime minister Muhammad Salem Basindwa recently told a local newspaper: ’The government has never asked the US to carry out drone attacks on the Yemeni soil because there should not be external meddling in Yemen’s own affairs.’

Part of the justification for the US carrying out drone strikes without consent is their reported success. And naming those militants killed is key to that process. Al Qaeda bomber Fahd al-Quso’s death was widely celebrated.

Yet how many newspapers also registered the death of Mohamed Saleh Al-Suna, a civilian caught up and killed in a US strike in Yemen on March 30?

By showing only one side of the coin, we risk presenting a distorted picture of this new form of warfare. There is an obligation to identify all of those killed – not just the bad guys.

Follow @chrisjwoods on Twitter

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Mirrored from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.