Sinai torture fields

I traveled to Al-Arish last weekend, to do some research on Islamic militancy in Sinai. I’ll spare you the horror stories of torture I heard from relatives of terror suspects. I may post something about it in the future, but for now you can check out HRW’s report on the security crackdowns against Sinai Bedouins following the October 2004 Taba bombings: Mass Arrests and Torture in Sinai.

While I was there, I decided to visit the Tagammu Party office, located in downtown Arish, to follow up on the case of detained Kefaya activist Hassan Abdallah, the coordinator of Sinai Youth For Change.

Ashraf Ayoub in front of Tagammu office

State Security agents broke into Hassan’s house in Arish last month, and kidnapped him. Later, they issued death threats against his two brothers Wael and Mohamed who have taken refuge in the Tagammu office, and have been staging a continuous sit-in.

At the office, I was met by veteran leftist activist Ashraf Ayoub, who’s been civil rights and pro-Palestinian campaigner in Arish since 1984, his 19-year-old son and Sinai Youth For Change activist Shadi, Hassan’s two brothers, mother and sister.

Sinai Youth For Change activist Shadi Ayoub

Hassan and his family joined the Tagammu Party during the post-Taba bombings security crackdowns. Hassan’s mother, Kawthar, and his sister Soheir who works as a school teacher, led spontaneous demos by the mothers and women relatives of detainees to protest the widespread torture and kidnappings by State Security agents. They teamed up later with veteran activists like Ashraf Ayoub, and decided to become active members in the left-wing party branch.

Hassan's mother Kawthar, and his sister Suheir

“The threats never stopped,” Kawthar said. “State Security Colonel Essam Amer and Major Hussein Mansour told us several times to leave the party, but we refused.”

Hassan’s brother Wael, 22-year-old English literature graduate, had been detained by security 29 October, 2004, part of the mass crackdown on Arish. He was kept for three months at the State Security bureau in Arish, and another three months in Damanhour prison. He told me he was brutally tortured by interrogators, who stripped him off his clothes, threatened him with rape, suspended him from the ceiling with his hands tied to the back, applied electric shocks on several parts of his body—before releasing him saying, “Ma3lesh (never mind), you are not involved.”

Hassan's brother Wael

The other brother Mohamed, a 32 year old school teacher, was also picked up by State Security on 7 December 2004, and detained for three months, where he received similar treatment.

Hassan's brother Mohamed

The younger brother Hassan, attracted the security’s attention, while chanting “Down with Hosni Mubarak” during pro-Lebanese resistance demos in Arish last July.

“State Security officers phoned Hassan several times, with threats and intimidation to leave Tagammu and quit activism,” his mother Kawthar said.

Finally, State Security agents stormed the family’s house on the dawn of 7 September, while Hassan was asleep, his mother recalled. “He was asleep, in his underwear, when they grabbed him. He shouted requesting to see a judicial warrant. They told him, ‘We are State Security. We don’t need a warrant.'”

Hassan was taken in his underwear and thrown into the police van. He was not allowed to take his eyeglasses with him. His two brothers Wael and Mohamed were present in the house, but security agents were not interested in them. On the following day, State Security Major Hussein Mansour phoned in with more threats if the Abdallahs don’t cease their activism, and requested the two brothers to show up the SS Arish bureau for questioning, and to “bring clothes for their naked brother,” the mother said. The two refused, saying the officer’s actions were illegal. Fearing for their safety, the Abdallahs took refuge in the Tagammu office, and said if SS wanted them they could come and get them from the office. For a week, security forces used to raid their empty house every night and smash its furniture. They also told the mother several times her two sons were “considered fugitives now, and if they are seen anywhere in the streets they will be killed.”

Posters demanding Hassan's release at Tagammu office

Hassan was kept in State Security Arish bureau for a week, then he was transferred to Bourg Al-Arab prison, still without his clothes or eyeglasses–just his underwear, according to his mother, as State Security officers refused to receive the clothes and food his sister and his friend Shadi Ayoub tried to bring him while he was still locked up in Arish.

Hassan has not been presented to the prosecutor still, and his two brothers are still holed up in the Tagammu office for fear of their safety

Merchant of death

The Observer profiles Monzer al-Kassar, arms dealer extraordinaire. Someone needs to write a good book on arms dealers in the Middle East, some of the stories you hear are incredible. Said Aburish’s first book (unfortunately out-of-print, and considering its second-hand price now I can’t believe I’ve misplaced my copy) in the early 1980s was a very entertaining account of being a middleman in the region, but imagine what you could do if you added everyone since then. Khashoggi alone could be a book, and once you add all the Israeli, Egyptian, Syrian, etc. dealers you could basically have a parallel underground history of the Middle East. Of course not to forget their Western counterparts — people like Donald Rumsfeld who either facilitated arms deals as government defense officials or chairmen of corporations like Raytheon. Imagine that: an account of how Egyptian arms dealers with top government connections sold small arms to both sides of the Rwandan genocide, or Israeli arms dealers (including a very close friend of Ariel Sharon) sold weapons to South Africa’s Apartheid government and its various militias operating in southern Africa, or indeed how European companies, acting through Palestinian or Lebanese middlemen, sold all kinds of military systems to Saddam Hussein. This industry goes to the heart of virtually of every regime in the region.

Stating the obvious – for once

You can always rely on Haaretz to publish obvious truths, such as the fact that Israel is the chief culprit in the failure to achieve an Arab-Israeli or Israel-Palestinian peace, that you are unlikely to ever, ever see in a major American newspaper:

These are naive observations, however: Israel missed and continues to miss opportunities to normalize relations with the Palestinians and with the Syrians not because of mental blocks, but rather because of domestic political considerations. Mahmoud Abbas and Bashar Assad are defined as non-partners not because Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz have an emotional problem preventing them as partners in dialogue, but because they do not have the political power to do so. The real deterrent factor acting upon Israeli leaders, including Ehud Barak, Bejamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, has come from within the domestic political system: They feared the residents of the Golan Heights and the West Bank settlers more than they did the plotting of Arafat, Hafez Assad and his son. Olmert and Peretz suffer from the same weakness.

There is no way of knowing whether Israel’s willingness to withdraw from the West Bank and the Golan Heights would result in reliable, long-term peace agreements, but it can be confirmed that Israel is largely responsible for the fact that such moves have not been seriously considered or formulated. Israeli governments since 1967 have preferred domestic tranquility over the possibility of unrest on the foreign fronts. Defining the Palestinian and Syrian enemies as non-partners is a direct consequence of that order of priorities.

I would add, as a non-Israeli observer, it is not clear to me that the opposition to changing Israel’s devastating policy towards the territories it occupies and the region at large is only among settlers. As a casual observer of Israeli politics and the Israeli media, it also seems like there’s plenty of support for a maximalist Israel from people within the 1967 borders. I hope I’m wrong.

Jesus, the hidden imam

This, written and sent by a friend at AFP in Baghdad, is just bizarre:

Iraq-US-Shiites-Jesus-offbeat Iraq Sadr City residents insulted by ‘Buddy Jesus’

BAGHDAD, Oct 1, 2006 (AFP) – Iraqi Shiite residents of Sadr City expressed anger on Sunday over a picture of a grinning Jesus they mistook for a Shiite holy figure that appeared in their neighborhood following a joint US-Iraqi operation.

Residents found a picture of “Buddy Jesus” from the 1999 film “Dogma” posted in the streets, accompanied by a badly photocopied pamphlet bearing a crude approximation of a US military crest and outlining a US “plan” to subjugate the area.

“That picture abuses our Imam Mahdi and his holy character, and mocks our sacred figures,” said resident Abu Riyam, apparently mistaking the satirical movie still of Jesus for one Shiism’s historical imams, whose images adopt a Jesus-like iconography.

The grinning, winking model of Buddy Jesus giving a thumbs-up sign appeared in the comedic film as a fictional attempt by the Catholic Church to present a kinder, more accessible image of Christianity.

“If it wasn’t so serious, it would be funny,” said a coalition spokesman Major Will Willhoite.

The pamphlets outlined a plan to discredit the militias in the sprawling two million person Baghdad slum, a stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

“Destabilize security in the militia areas with explosions and assassinations to create panic” and “killing, raping and kidnapping women” were all measures the pamphlet recommended for causing people to lose faith in the militias.

“Do not tell the suspect militias of these plans but keep them among friendly forces,” admonished the pamphlet.

The US military did not confirm that it had conducted a raid into Sadr City in the early hours of the morning, but said that an Iraq force with coalition advisors did conduct an operation in “northeast” Baghdad.

Much of Baghdad’s violence has been laid at the feet of Shiite militias, many of whom are based in Sadr City, but US forces have yet to enter the neighborhood in force.

And here’s the poster:

Buddyjesus

Always look on the bright side of life

There’s a long article by Bob Woodward in the WaPo about the discrepancies between what the Bush administration knew was going on in Iraq from secret military reports and what was publicly being stated in upbeat presidential speeches and other public information. Here’s a bit from an interview with Jay Garner, the first military governor of Iraq:

On June 18, 2003, Jay Garner went to see Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to report on his brief tenure in Iraq as head of the postwar planning office. Throughout the invasion and the early days of the war, Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general, had struggled just to get his team into Iraq. Two days after he arrived, Rumsfeld called to tell him that L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, a 61-year-old terrorism expert and protege of Henry A. Kissinger, would be coming over as the presidential envoy, effectively replacing Garner.

“We’ve made three tragic decisions,” Garner told Rumsfeld.

“Really?” Rumsfeld asked.

“Three terrible mistakes,” Garner said.

He cited the first two orders Bremer signed when he arrived, the first one banning as many as 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party from government jobs and the second disbanding the Iraqi military. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganized, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around.

Third, Garner said, Bremer had summarily dismissed an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term. “Jerry Bremer can’t be the face of the government to the Iraqi people. You’ve got to have an Iraqi face for the Iraqi people.”

Garner made his final point: “There’s still time to rectify this. There’s still time to turn it around.”

Rumsfeld looked at Garner for a moment with his take-no-prisoners gaze. “Well,” he said, “I don’t think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are.”

He thinks I’ve lost it, Garner thought. He thinks I’m absolutely wrong. Garner didn’t want it to sound like sour grapes, but facts were facts. “They’re all reversible,” Garner said again.

“We’re not going to go back,” Rumsfeld said emphatically.

Later that day, Garner went with Rumsfeld to the White House. But in a meeting with Bush, he made no mention of mistakes. Instead he regaled the president with stories from his time in Baghdad.

In an interview last December, I asked Garner if he had any regrets in not telling the president about his misgivings.

“You know, I don’t know if I had that moment to live over again, I don’t know if I’d do that or not. But if I had done that — and quite frankly, I mean, I wouldn’t have had a problem doing that — but in my thinking, the door’s closed. I mean, there’s nothing I can do to open this door again. And I think if I had said that to the president in front of Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld in there, the president would have looked at them and they would have rolled their eyes back and he would have thought, ‘Boy, I wonder why we didn’t get rid of this guy sooner?’ “

“They didn’t see it coming,” Garner added. “As the troops said, they drank the Kool-Aid.”

There’s also some very interesting passages about the influence Henry Kissinger has had over Dick Cheney, notably pressing the argument that US troops should stick it out in Iraq and defeat the insurgency militarily before leaving. According to Woodward, Kissinger sees Iraq as another Vietnam, and thinks that Vietnam could have been won if the US had stayed longer. Senior military officials completely disagreed with this view, saying “we’ve got to get the fuck out.”

Finally, former White House Chief of Staff seems to have had a pretty accurate reading of the situation, even if he was unwilling to actually internalize it:

Card put it on the generals in the Pentagon and Iraq. If they had come forward and said to the president, “It’s not worth it,” or, “The mission can’t be accomplished,” Card was certain, the president would have said “I’m not going to ask another kid to sacrifice for it.”

Card was enough of a realist to see that there were two negative aspects to Bush’s public persona that had come to define his presidency: incompetence and arrogance. Card did not believe that Bush was incompetent, and so he had to face the possibility that, as Bush’s chief of staff, he might have been the incompetent one. In addition, he did not think the president was arrogant.

But the marketing of Bush had come across as arrogant. Maybe it was unfair in Card’s opinion, but there it was.

He was leaving. And the man he considered most responsible for the postwar troubles, the one who should have gone, Rumsfeld, was staying.

Even The Economist, which in 2002/2003 was largely pro-war and pro-Bush (and is now eating humble pie), had called for Rumsfeld to resign on its cover. One of the lessons of the Bush presidency will be that, as well as all the corruption, pork-barreling for big industry and ideological blindness, Bush’s personality will have been a key to his policy failures: he is a man unable to admit mistakes or consider that he may have been wrong. He confuses arrogance and groundless optimism with dogged resolve. You can imagine these meetings with the president, surrounded by his favorite yes-men, singing the Monty Python song “Always look on the bright side of life” in unison as they are delivered pessimistic report after pessimistic report from the uniformed professionals in Iraq. What a catastrophe.

Torpedo the 14 Dem sell-outs

Since I’ve been traveling I haven’t been following the fuss over Senate’s recent approval of a bill that allows the use of torture because Article 3 was just too vague to W.’s liking (the Arab world’s torturers-in-chief nod on in approval), but as this WaPo editorial points out the Democrats have once again lacked the guts to stand up and fight the bill their party supposedly opposed. The worst case consequence with this kind of legislation (which really retroactively absolves the Bush administration of having already carried out torture more than anything else) is not so much that torture will be used against those few Guantanamo prisoners, but that over a long period of time the use of torture and detention without charges will became the norm rather than the exception. This was the case in Egypt, when until the 1980s and the Gamaa Islamiya’s insurgency torture was something reserved almost entirely to political prisoners. As Egyptian rights groups have documented — and retired police and security officers have confirmed to journalists — since then the use of torture has become general. It might be used to get a confession out of a petty thief just as it was used to get names from Islamist terrorists 20 years ago. It would be presumptuous to believe that what happened in Egypt can’t happen in the US, despite the obvious superiority (for now) of the American legal process.

What people need to do now is punish the Democrats who voted for this bill just as they want to punish Republicans over the past few years. This is difficult to do in the absence of a credible third party (although I believe there are a few independents to vote for out there), but at least there are 14 Democrats who should be targeted. You can find their names in the roll call for the bill.

The great sharpening

Tell me your metaphor, I’ll tell you what kind of third-rate mind you are. Condoleeza Rice’s new talking point is that the Middle East is going through a “great sharpening” of differences between the voices of extremism and the voices of moderation. Except that her moderates are people like the Saudi, Egyptian and Jordanian regimes and hapless clientelist buffoons like Fouad Seniora of Lebanon and Abu Mazen of Palestine. She says, don’t pay attention to all the violence and “day-to-day” news. There’s a wider change at hand that’s much more important than that. And it won’t be done anytime soon. So basically her argument is that the Bush administration doesn’t need to be held accountable for its disastrous Middle East policy because in fact it has a master plan and in 20 years everything will come out fine and dandy, you just wait.

Extended quotes from recent interviews with Rice after the jump — don’t miss the special goodness from Fox News at the end.

Continue reading The great sharpening

New Pentagon outfit wants more agitprop in Iran

Not being satisfied with the fact that Voice of America/Radio Farda broadcasts to Iran are already the most popular in the country, the Bush administration would like to see lies and disinformation inserted just as they do in Iraq:

WASHINGTON – In another indication that some in the Bush administration are pushing for a more confrontational policy toward Iran, a Pentagon unit has drafted a report charging that U.S. international broadcasts into Iran aren’t tough enough on the Islamic regime.

The report appears to be a gambit by some officials in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s office and elsewhere to gain sway over television and radio broadcasts into Iran, one of the few direct tools the United States has to reach the Iranian people.

McClatchy Newspapers obtained a copy of the report this week, and it also has circulated on Capitol Hill. It accuses the Voice of America’s Persian TV service and Radio Farda, a U.S. government Farsi-language broadcast, of taking a soft line toward Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime and not giving adequate time to government critics.

U.S. broadcasting officials and others who’ve read the report said it’s riddled with errors.

They also see it as a thinly veiled attack on the independence of U.S. international broadcasting, which by law is supposed to represent a balanced view of the United States and provide objective news.

“The author of this report is as qualified to write a report on programming to Iran as I would be to write a report covering the operations of the 101st Airborne Division,” Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Larry Hart, a spokesman for the board, which oversees U.S. non-military international broadcasting, said that the radio and TV operations have covered Iran’s human rights abuses extensively and have featured appearances by dissidents – who sometimes telephoned from Iranian jails.

Surveys have shown that Radio Farda is the most-listened-to international radio broadcast into Iran, Hart said.

Three U.S. government officials identified the author of the report as Ladan Archin, a civilian Iran specialist who works for Rumsfeld.

Archin was out of town this week and unavailable for comment. She works in a recently established Pentagon unit known as the Iran directorate.

Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros, a Pentagon spokesman, said last week that the unit was established this spring as part of a government-wide reorganization aimed at better promoting democracy in Iran. He confirmed Tuesday night that Archin had been asked to prepare the report. “It was meant to be a look at how the program was working and to determine if it was an effective use of taxpayer dollars,” Ballesteros said.

Critics charge that the unit resembles the pre-Iraq-war Office of Special Plans, which received intelligence reports directly from Iraqi exile groups, bypassing U.S. intelligence agencies, which distrusted the exiles. Many of the reports proved to be fabricated or exaggerated. Some of the directorate’s staff members worked in the now-defunct Office of Special Plans, and some intelligence officials fear that directorate also is maintaining unofficial ties to questionable exiles and groups.

That is so 2002! Ladan Archin, by the way, was a Wolfowitz protégé from SAIS (surely by now one of the most discredited academic institution that does international relations, considering its alumni) involved in the Iraq war run-up and a connection with Ahmed Chalabi.

The coming fight over the Nile

This has been playing out for a few years already, and is worth keeping an eye on. For Egypt, Sudan’s political future is crucial to this issue and is one reason Cairo is so adamantly opposed to the partition of Sudan and to foreign intervention in Darfur. The thing is, this year had the biggest volume of water coming into the Nile in decades (presumably a consequence of climate change), and I’m not sure what the scientific impact of diverting more water upstream would be on Egypt. But no matter what, Egypt will fight tooth and nail to preserve the status quo:

The distribution of Nile River water has been regulated by the 1929 Blue Nile agreement between the United Kingdom and Egypt, and the 1959 agreement between Sudan and Egypt. The latter gave Cairo a de facto right to veto any project using Nile water in other riparian states. Although this treaty remained unchallenged over the years, this is no longer the case. Indeed, many African states have experienced robust G.D.P. growth rates in recent years — with the notable exception of Eritrea, which suffers immensely due to its border war with Ethiopia and its devastating economic policy of self-reliance — and this has increased their need to develop their infrastructure, produce more energy, and provide more water to their populations. Understandably, the majority of the Nile River countries now want to re-negotiate the decades-old treaties.

Considering Egypt’s considerable fall in regional stature over the past few years, it won’t be in a great position to re-negotiate the treaty when the time comes. And while in the past some officials have threatened military action over this issue, I can’t imagine they would really be able to carry them out considering that the other states have a pretty strong case that they would be righting an unfair treaty.

Map of Tunisian political prisons

There’s a fascinating post over at Global Voices on the Tunisian blogosphere. As many of you know, Tunisia is one of the most information-repressive countries in the Arab world. It has what’s probably the most advanced censorship authorities in the region, and very actively monitors the internet, taps phones, follows dissidents and threatens them. The very nature of the regime is that it is a police state, run by the police for the police — this is not a military regime or ruling family type regime.

One exiled Tunisian blogger, Sami Ben Gharbia, has put together with some Google Maps magic a map of Tunisian political prisoners. This kind of information is rarely available publicly, and banned in Tunisia (and not discussed in the Arab and international media, in which the Tunisian regime buys positive coverage every time it can). A few months ago I attended a meeting of North African human rights activists. There were some Tunisians there who told horrible stories of detention and attacks against the families of political detainees. In the case of one of Tunisia’s most prominent activists, Siham ben Sedrine (whose husband is still in jail), the Tunisian media waged an extremely nasty campaign accusing her of prostitution and published doctored porn pictures of her. While other countries, such as Egypt, have more political prisoners Tunisia has one of the nastiest attitudes to dissidents in the region.

Commenting on the map at nawaat.org, the site Sami runs, astrubal is pretty scathing about Tunisian bloggers’ reaction to the new site – he says there has not been one mention of the site since it was launched a few days ago, and calls the Tunisian blogosphere the ‘lobotomisphere’. Bear in mind that, according to some sources, the Tunisian government is currently holding an estimated 350 political prisoners in prisons around the country, and there are regular human rights reports focusing on the treatment and welfare of the prisoners. Something you’d think was a really major topic of interest for Tunisian bloggers, but astrubal seems to be right – when I checked just now, not one of the French or English blogs aggregated at the Tunisian Blogs aggregator mentioned or linked to Sami’s site. I asked Sami by email why he thought this was the case:
I really do not expect to see the so-called “Tunisian bloggers” or Blogosphere talking about this issue. Most of them have chosen the self censorship and have decided to avoid discussing and writing about political content that may hurt the Tunisian regime. They talk about everything except Tunisians’ interior affaires. It is The Taboo of the Tunisian blogosphere. Besides, I’m part of the banned bloggers who do not save the Tunisian regime and who are not recognized as “member” of the Tunisian blogosphere. As the blogger and journalist Wael Abass wrote last week on the Deutsche Presse Agentur: “Sami Bin Gharbia, the Tunisian owner of Kitab.nl, is destined to become a refugee both physically and virtually. He lives in Holland as a political refugee and he is banned from the Tunisian blog aggregator (…) so he took refuge in the Egyptian blog aggregator hosted by Manalaa.net.”
Not only we are censored in Tunisia, we have also been censored on the Tunisian blogger aggregator and even on the periodic “Echoes from the Tunisian blogosphere” which is published on Global Voices. They do not hear our “Echoes” only because we write politics! We do understand their fear to talk about those issues, especially those living in Tunisia. Hopefully, they understand our concern to defend our citizenship and rights? Remember, this is the Web! And we are committed to defend this extraordinary tool against the censorship and its passive ally: the self censorship.
As Sami says, those within Tunisia who speak out on human rights live in a climate of fear. During the World Summit on the Information Society, Ethan Zuckerman gave a vivid account of meeting with the Tunisian Human Rights League. Tunisian bloggers may not yet be in a position to create or discuss a site like Sami’s, but according to one site that linked to Tunisian Prisoners Map, users from Tunisian ISPs are clicking through.

It’s a very interesting debate, and again do check out the map of Tunisian political prisons — someone needs to do that for every Arab country.