Category Archives: Civil Rights

Links 09 July 2013

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New York Times, Army Kills 51, Deepening Crisis in Egypt:

    “The mass shooting of Islamist protesters by security forces on Monday at a sit-in for Mohamed Morsi, the ousted president, injected new outrage into the standoff over his removal by Egypt’s top generals….
    “Leaders of the Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest Islamist group and best-organized political force, said the generals had now shown their authoritarian colors, using lethal weapons to crush dissent while holding the freely elected president captive. They called for a national ‘uprising’ against the return of a military dictatorship. …
    “Sit-in participants said gunmen had fired on them from atop the military buildings surrounding their camp. Video footage captured by the Islamists showed a soldier firing down from a roof while another calmly filmed the mayhem below.
    “Sandbagged gun turrets were still visible hours later on some rooftops, and the angles of scores of bullet holes in cars, lampposts and the Islamists’ makeshift metal barriers indicated that gunfire hit at an angle from above.
    “Many witnesses said the fighting lasted for hours, with hundreds of heavily armed soldiers chasing mostly unarmed protesters through the streets for blocks while continuing to shoot. Bullet holes, bullet casings and pools of blood dotted the ground hundreds of yards from the presidential guardhouse where the fighting had begun.”

Juan Cole, Egypt: Muslim Brotherhood Calls for “Uprising” as Plan for Elections is Announced:

    [Dr. Cole cites an eyewitness account by a man named Omar Ahmed who is “known to Egyptian friends whom I trust.”]
    “He says that the army [used] a microphone to demand that the crowd near the Republican Guards Barracks disperse, and that the Brotherhood used their microphones to announce that martyrdom so near Ramadan would be a great thing. The army fired tear gas.
    “Then Omar heard firing at the troops and screams from the military side. The sniping was coming from al-Mustafa Mosque. The troops were also being hit with molotov cocktails. Then the microphone of the mosque threatened the troops, saying they are baby-killers.
    “Then a Brother began firing wildly with an automatic weapon. The troops returned fire and after that there were just bodies falling and men being taken into custody by the army. At 5 am, an hour into the clashes, reinforcements of more police and military showed up, and the Brotherhood militants withdrew to the Rabia al-Adawiya square or found refuge with local families in their apartments….
    “The dead include at least three military, and some 51 others, most of them likely non-combatants in the wrong place at the wrong time. …
    “On Monday evening, interim president Mansour tried to change the conversation by setting out a timetable for return to elected government. He said that within 15 days, a council of jurists must be appointed that would have two months to revise the 2012 constitution…. Parliamentary elections must be held by the end of the year or very early in Jan. 2014. The date for presidential elections hasn’t been set yet.”

Sarah Carr in Jadaliyya, On Sheep and Infidels:

    “There is a visceral hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood and its Salafi associates amongst some Egyptians. This hatred spans all social classes and predates current events. It is born out of an arguably justified mistrust and fear of the group, who have lied, put their own interests first, excluded other groups, ramrodded through an excuse for a constitution, attempted to give Morsi dictator powers, flirted with the military and dallied in sectarianism politics in a frightening way. It failed to understand that it was running a country, and it missed the point that for public relations purposes if you are an Arab president who desires to quash dissent through an organized group you better make sure that that group is in uniform.
    “Perhaps most importantly, they were feeble as hell at governing Egypt at a time when amateurs really just would not do.
    “When Morsi supporters attempt to put their case forward their arguments bounce back off a wall of hate, but — deep breath — in my opinion these arguments were not without merit — up until 30 June. … Mendacity, poor governance, self-interest, and sidelining of other political powers are pretty much the watch-words of all political groups and are not, in isolation, enough to justify a president’s removal by the military. …
    “So my position on events pre-30 June has not been changed by events since: the Muslim Brotherhood should have been left to fail as they had not (yet) committed an act justifying Morsi’s removal by the military. The price Egypt has paid and will pay for the consequences of this decision are too high. It has created a generation of Islamists who genuinely believe that democracy does not include them. The post-30 June fallout reaffirms this belief, especially with Islamist channels and newspapers closed down as well as leaders detained and held incommunicado…. It is Egyptian society that will pay the price of the grievances this causes, and the fact that, with a silenced media and no coverage from independent outlets they have been left with virtually no channels to get their voice heard. …
    “Nothing has changed. The real revolution will happen when army involvement in politics is a distant relic of history.”

Nikolas K. Gvosdev in The National Interest, U.S. Values and Interests Clash in Egypt:

    “Of course, one of the main problems was that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were classic “illiberal democrats”—prepared to accept the necessity of elections and to have some policies put to the voters for validation but in no way inclined to endorse the full panoply of civil and political rights and ready to impose limits on freedom of speech and assembly. They were, in other words, prepared to accept opposition—but only on their terms. …
    “This creates a new dilemma for Washington. Certainly American interests are served by having the Egyptian military—much more of a known quantity, compared with the Brotherhood, ‘back in the saddle,’ but it also means accepting the armed forces as a clear counterweight to the possible excesses of the popular majority or of political leaders like the Brotherhood—and allowing the army to set ‘red lines’ for politics and to enforce them. … To some extent, what has happened in Egypt resembles the ‘soft coups’ that used to occur in Turkey, where the military would intervene and where such intervention usually coincided with U.S. interests, even if it offended U.S. values.”

Human Rights Watch, Egypt: Judge Government on Respect for People’s Rights (from July 4):

    “Egypt’s new government should break decisively from a pattern of serious abuses that has prevailed since the January 2011 uprising, and make a commitment to respect the rights to free expression and peaceful assembly. Authorities should protect and promote the rights of all Egyptians, and halt arbitrary arrests of members of the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliated Freedom and Justice Party. …
    “‘Egyptians suffered enormously under the generals and then under President Morsy’s government, which shoved human rights to the sidelines,’ said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. ‘One test of whether Egypt can return to a path of democratic development will rest on whether the Freedom and Justice Party can operate without political reprisals against its members.’ …
    “Egypt’s new interim president and the military leadership should immediately end reprisals against Muslim Brotherhood political leaders, including arrests or travel bans, and should allow the Freedom and Justice Party to fully exercise freedom of association, Human Rights Watch said.
    “The new government needs to make it clear immediately that it and all state bodies, including the armed forces, will respect all basic rights that apply within Egypt at all times.”

Agence France Presse, Morsy Ouster in Egypt Crushes Hamas Dreams: Analysts.

BBC News Magazine, Hikikomori: Why Are So Many Japanese Men Refusing to Leave Their Rooms?

Afrik.com, Homosexuality: Tariq Ramadan Drops a Bomb in Dakar (in French).

    “In a country with a 95% Muslim population who are radical with regard to any recognition of homosexual status, one must be brave, yes, very brave to dare to integrate gays into the ranks of ‘followers of Islam.’ And that’s what the Swiss citizen of Egyptian origin did in confiding that ‘it isn’t because one is homosexual that one isn’t Muslim.’ A remark that continues to provoke controversy in the country. Tariq Ramadan didn’t stop there. … ‘All scholars are unanimous on the question. Islam forbids homosexuality, as do all the monotheistic religions. But, being homosexual doesn’t mean that one isn’t Muslim. There is no witch hunt,’ noted Tariq Ramadan, who went further. ‘We need to promote a discourse of responsibility and avoid judging.”

The Whole Truth

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This article by Zied Boumaiza on the Nawaat Tunisia website is a shade more pessimistic than I am, but it comes close to capturing my feelings. The original is in French, so I’ve taken the liberty of translating the whole thing for my English-only readers.

— • —

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It can’t stray from its path, nor change its essence according to context, affinity, or mood. There’s only one justice, too, for everyone and from every angle. It can’t keep quiet in the depths of a noble soul without risk of suffocation.

So let’s tell it like it is, despite the pain of defending today what we’ve always fought. It’s torture, isn’t it, to take the side of yesterday’s oppressor. What to do if today he’s the oppressed? Power changes sides, but principles remain unchangeable.

A coup d’état, a putsch, a usurpation, a betrayal. That’s what it is. Without any euphemism, let’s not try to cover up what just happened in Egypt with pretty words.

Military men who depose a president elected through universal suffrage, who put him in prison and all the leaders of his party with him — a party, let us note in passing, that swept more than 60% of the seats in democratic elections — who suspend a constitution ratified by popular referendum with more than 67% of the vote, or in other words, a plebescite.

The Egyptian “people” have clearly filled the streets and squares of Egypt with a dramatic surge unique in History to demand the fall of the regime, but is that enough to force out a regime installed by the will of the people?

The will of the people is measured in number of votes, not in square meters nor in decibels. More than 12 million voted for Shafik last time, enough to fill Tahrir Square five times, yet he wasn’t the winner. Isn’t that democracy? Do we need to reread our classics?

    “Election: an operation by which free citizens choose their masters.”

So this people had the chance three times over to hand the Muslim Brothers a stinging defeat. Three attempts to reject political Islam, three bullets to shoot down that mediocrity, and instead, this great people propelled the Brotherhood to the throne of Egypt three times in a row. So there’s no surprise that the Brothers would think they had a blank check. And even then, not a television station was censured, not a word in a newspaper was crossed out by those in power, despite an out-of-control press. For good or ill, they respected the freedom of the press a thousand times better than their successors. That’s a fact.

So this great people has to own up to its choices — and by the way, there are millions who still do own up to them, and who today feel like they’ve been stabbed in the back. Those people don’t resemble me. I believe they’ve been duped, blinded, and are completely wrong, but I understand their rage perfectly.

The rest of you, progressives, democrats, and activists for the rule of law, isn’t it shameful, this complicit silence or this unseemly gloating? Isn’t it a betrayal of the values you’ve defended your whole lives? So shake off your discomfort and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

As far as Egypt is concerned, that country I love so much — it will never again raise its head. The democratic process has stalled out, injustice is accomplished, and trust is forever shaken. There’s no way to turn back. The anger is churning and will keep churning, and the resentment will always be there. The fury has begun, and God alone knows how many corpses it will take before it’s over.

Links 06 July 2013

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Daniel Levy in Al Jazeera English: Mubarak’s Children Come Home:

    “The man undoubtedly cooing as he watched the military coup against Mohamed Morsi…was his authoritarian predecessor Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak’s prison cell must now be a cheerier place, and one reason stands out. For all of their vocal hatred of the ex-leader and apparent objection to everything ‘Mubarakist’, the Tahrir revolutionaries have just proven themselves to be the most faithful followers of his core legacy — anything but the Brotherhood. …
    “The Morsi year was hardly a success story…. But to embrace the army as the great liberator just as it was busy deposing a democratically elected president and upper House of Parliament, moving tanks against rival protestors, arresting political leaders and shutting down TV stations, surely that requires a large dose of pre-existing prejudice. From day one of Morsi’s election to day 366 (when the military coup ultimatum was announced) it was more the opposition than the presidency who rejected power-sharing and compromise, insisting instead on zero-sum politics. …
    “The Tahrir protesters abandoned at least two key democratic principles — respect for outcomes expressed at the ballot box and the non-interference of the military in politics. If the Tamarod (rebel) movement, behind the latest anti-Morsi mobilization, really had 22 million supporters as it claimed, then that should have been translated into votes in parliamentary elections scheduled by President Morsi for later this year. If there were grounds for doing so, a new Parliamentary majority could then have impeached the President. …
    “This is not a victory for freedom but for the old regime, or more precisely the Egyptian deep-state — a bureaucratic, military, and business elite, that never went away, is considered to be the real power in Egypt, and that just reasserted its interests.”

Mark Levine in Al Jazeera English: L’Etat, C’Est Nous — Who Will Control the Egyptian State?

    “For its part, the military clearly considers itself, if not coterminous with the Egyptian state, then the primary conduit through which the needs and desires of the people can be realised…. Its main strategy for maintaining the ‘legitimacy’ that Morsi so quickly lost is to serve as the grand mediator of contending social and political forces that, left to their own devices, risked tearing Egypt apart.
    “In so defining its role the military has taken a page from the Arab world’s deepest state, Moroccan monarchy and the Makhzen, the political and economic elite that surrounds, is managed by and serves it. … By defining itself above partisan politics and economic interests, the King and Makhzen have been able to rule Morocco for centuries, weathering challenges that sent many other regimes to the historical dustbin and ensuring a level of entrenched political power and corruption that is the envy of most autocratic regimes. It’s a record the Egyptian military would love to emulate.
    “The question is, will the Egyptian people accept the Makhzenification of the Egyptian military? … As for the one revolutionary group within the leadership, the Tamarod movement represented by El Baradei, he and senior Tamarod leaders such as Mahmoud Badr have showered the military with praise in recent days, an attitude that has angered many revolutionary activists. Yet it’s hard to imagine Badr or any other leader of the ‘rebellion’ actually believes in the good intention of the military or other remnants of the old order. … Perhaps it is Tamarod and the millions of other protesters in the streets of Egypt…who are playing the military and the deep state, and not the other way around.
    “Who’s playing whom will become clear in the coming months. The only way the ‘rebellion’ will complete its revolutionary transformation is if it fundamentally transforms the Egyptian economy and the deeply buried political networks that still control it. And the military will do whatever it can to prevent this from happening.”

Nathan Brown in The New Republic: Egypt Coup — A Roadmap for Backseat Drivers:

    “[General Abdel Fattah] Al-Sisi’s statement [deposing President Morsi] was immediately blessed by the Sheikh of al-Azhar, Egypt’s top religious official. And the country’s largest Salafi party fell into line as well. Al-Azhar and the Salafis are rivals to the Brotherhood to be sure, but why were they so quick to sign off on deposing Egypt’s first Islamist president?
    “Here’s the unspoken secret: the military, al-Azhar, and the Salafis got exactly what they wanted in the 2012 constitution. There are provisions on the military (no real civilian oversight), al-Azhar (a muscular supervisory role over Islamic legal issues), and the Islamic sharia that each of these actors want to protect. The Brotherhood had allowed these clauses in order to get necessary support for a constitution that other political forces had bitterly come to oppose.
    “So when it comes time to suggest constitutional amendments, today’s happy family of Morsi opponents may turn into a rather dysfunctional group. This is precisely where the 2011 revolution began to go off the rails…. It could happen again.”

Reuters: Egypt Left Leader Backs Military Role, Sees Short Transition:

    “Egypt’s leading left-wing politician endorsed military intervention to oust elected Islamist President Mohamed Mursi and said he expected a short transition to a new democratic president and parliament.
    “Hamdeen Sabahi, leader of the Popular Current movement…said the army had implemented the will of the people and was not seeking power for itself. …
    “Those who called Mursi’s removal this week a military coup were insulting the Egyptian people, who had turned out in their millions to demand his ouster, Sabahi said. …
    “Sabahi, a firebrand orator who models himself on former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, spelled out the sequence of steps he said had been agreed for the transition.
    “‘We have agreed on a roadmap that has a new constitution that will be drafted by a committee to amend the suspended constitution and change the disputed articles, after which people will vote on it in a referendum. Then, there will be a presidential election, then a parliamentary election,’ he said.”

Jack Whelan in After the Future: Egypt and the Problem of Democratic Legitimacy:

    “According to the civics text books, a democracy is a government in which the people are sovereign. … [Yet] it’s been demonstrated time and time again that majorities often get it wrong. … The ancient Greeks thought democracy was a form of government that inevitably devolved into tyranny precisely because of its vulnerability for majorities to be manipulated by demagogues who used popular support to obtain power, and then used that power to establish an autocracy. …
    “And so it should be obvious that because a government was democratically elected, it does not mean that it has legitimacy. The ballot box confers what I would describe as a provisional legitimacy; it’s not absolute. Ultimately legitimacy is conferred in the streets. …
    “There isn’t something sacred about democratic elections. If 50% + 1 of your electorate is insane, ignorant, and easily manipulable, you probably shouldn’t have them. … Democratic elections, I’d argue, have legitimacy only in societies with majorities that possess a basic level of decency, maturity, and civic mindedness…. Legality does not equal legitimacy.”

Jack Whelan in After the Future: Sirota v. Brooks on Egyptians’ Mental Capacity:

    “What if the Christian fundamentalists in Mississippi completely dominated the state Republican Party in the next election cycle, win in a landslide, and ram through the substitution of Biblical Law for its state constitution? Would that be ok just because a majority supported it in a democratic process? Or would it be a sign that most Mississipians lacked the mental capacity to govern in the modern world? Why is it different in Egypt, and why is it wrong to question the mental capacity of any country, state, or party that allows itself to be governed by religious fanatics? …
    “Democracy is not an end it itself; it is a means to an end, namely to deliver within the framework of a contemporary, pluralistic society a basic level of sanity and decency. If I live in a society in which power resides with an entrenched faction dominated by actors who are not sane and decent, even if they are democratically elected, then democracy has failed. If insanity and indecency have clotted the system with majority approval, then the decent, sane people in the minority cannot be blamed for looking for other than democratic means to fix the problem.”

(Yes, but who decides who the “sane and decent” people are — and who gives them that right? Apparently, they just know who they are, and they give themselves that right. This “right to know better” is the flaw of liberal elitism, which led to the Christian fundamentalist backlash in the US in the first place. A similar arrogance can be seen today among certain secular-minded people in the Arab world. They only support democratic outcomes if those outcomes break their way. See the quote from Daniel Levy above: “It was more the opposition than the presidency who rejected power-sharing and compromise, insisting instead on zero-sum politics.”)

Michael Plitnick in Souciant: Egypt’s Elusive Democracy.

Lakome.com: Egyptian Crisis and Eventual Repurcussions for Morocco — What Do Moroccan Politicians Think? (in French).

The Guardian: Morsi’s Downfall Determined by Coffee Shop Rebels Rather than Army:

    “‘The economy was being wrecked by the [Brotherhood] movement,’ [said a senior western diplomat who had spent time with Morsi]. ‘They were spending at least $1.5bn per month more than they should have. They were using months and months of reserves at a critical level. You couldn’t deny the underlying trend that the government was heading for bankruptcy.’ …
    “By March, serious diplomatic efforts had started to convince Morsi to form a government of national unity.
    “‘We were trying to convince them to broaden the base of political participation,’ said the diplomat. ‘After much negotiation, they declined and then went about making it even worse by maintaining a technocratic government run by newly promoted lower-grade officials with bad ideas.’ …
    “By mid-June, with other state institutions now sharing the military’s alarm, the tide was clearly turning against Morsi. Tamarod claimed to have received more than 20m petition signatures.
    “Within a week, citizens experienced shortages of essentials, especially food and fuel. Long queues for fuel are rare in Egypt, where the military…is usually a guarantor of supply. But in the leadup to the first anniversary of Morsi’s swearing in — June 30 — …the shortages seemed specially severe.”

(Doesn’t this last bit belie the headline, which claims that youth, not the army, are responsible for the fall of Morsi? Doesn’t it raise the suspicion that the army may have engineered fuel shortages, to stoke popular discontent with Morsi’s government at a crucial time?)

Links 05 July 2013

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Roger Cohen in New York Times: Political Islam Fails Egypt’s Test:

    “Morsi misread the Arab Spring. The uprising that ended decades of dictatorship and led to Egypt’s first free and fair presidential election last year was about the right to that vote. But at a deeper level it was about personal empowerment, a demand to join the modern world, and live in an open society under the rule of law rather than the rule of despotic whim. …
    “Instead, Morsi placed himself above judicial review last November, railroaded through a flawed Constitution, allowed Brotherhood thugs to beat up liberal opponents, installed cronies at the Information Ministry, increased blasphemy prosecutions, surrendered to a siege mentality, lost control of a crumbling economy and presided over growing sectarian violence. For the Brotherhood, the pre-eminent Islamist movement in the region, the sudden shift from hounded outlaw to power in the pivotal nation of the Arab world proved a bridge too far. …
    “This was Morsi’s core failure. He succumbed to Islamic authoritarianism in a nation whose revolution was diverse and demanded inclusiveness. The lesson for the region is critical. …
    “‘The rejection went far beyond the liberal community,’ [Heba] Morayef [director of Human Rights Watch in Cairo] said. ‘The vast majority of the women at the demonstrations were veiled. Practicing Muslims, non-Westernized Egyptians, were saying no to political Islam and religious authoritarianism. We have never seen anything like this in the Arab world.'”

David Denger in BagNews: Scenes Before the Toppling of a Government (Once Again) — great photos, insightful commentary.

Mark Levine on Facebook:

    “At what point does justifying the military’s actions by declaring there to be ‘exceptional circumstances’ as Beradei and other Tamarod leaders have said, become mere excuses for authoritarian and undemocratic actions against one’s political opponents who have not committed any crime? I personally fear — and this is something that people like Heba Morayef of HRW Egypt have been warning in the last 48 hours — that the military is putting the revolutionaries in a situation where they are forced to support actions that will come back to haunt them severely in the near future.
    “Is not the final battle of the revolution still to be fought — that between revolutionary forces and the military and the deep state? Can there be any real transition to democracy, never mind ‘freedom, dignity and social justice’ without a systematic and wholesale transformation of Egypt’s political economy towards the kind of sustainable and downwardly redistributive model (in terms of wealth, resources and political power) that is an anathema to the global neoliberal order, never mind the existing Egyptian elite? … What would happen if Beradei spoke honestly to the Egyptian people about the military and the deep state and the existing political economy from his new position of power and demanded their tranformation? Would the tens of millions in the streets this week support him? Would the military allow itself to be declawed and its power severely curtailed? Will the elite willingly allow a new system to emerge that would channel a significant share of their wealth and power away from them?
    “Ultimately, is what we’ve just seen still not the warm-up for an even bloodier and more monumental fight?”

Congratulations Egypt, and Shame on You

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Larry Derfner writes on the progressive Israeli blog +972:

    “Look at what ‘people power’ just did in Cairo. It overthrew the first elected president in Egypt’s history — a year after he got elected. It was a military coup — backed deliriously by the people. And look at what’s happening now — the army has arrested the elected president, Mohammed Morsi, and all the other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, and is calling the shots again with its old buddies from the pre-revolution era, who are back in business. And “the people,” the millions who filled Tahrir Square this week, are triumphant. They willed the return of military dictatorship to Egypt, after willing its downfall two-and-a-half years ago.
    “And good people everywhere are supposed to sympathize with them. Sorry. This is demoralizing.”

I feel about the same way. I didn’t like Morsi. He was incompetent, clannish, authoritarian, failed to address the economic and security problems of Egypt — and most importantly, he began alienating potential supporters almost from the moment he took power, rather than broadening his coalition as he would have had to, to tackle the enormous problems facing Egypt in this time of upheaval.

Yet despite this, I feel sad, even ashamed, that Egypt’s “revolutionaries” have called on the military to step in and fix things for them, rather than sticking things out through the political process, and organizing for parliamentary elections in the fall. If Morsi’s support had really withered to the point that it seems obvious that it has, then wouldn’t the opposition parties have won a strong parliamentary majority, and have been able to set the country on a new, more progressive course? Instead, we have a complete end-running of the electoral process, just one year after Egypt chose its first democratically elected leader in its 5000-year history!

The argument is that the 22 million signatures claimed by the youth movement Tamarrod (“Revolt”), and the massive crowds on June 30 who outnumbered even those opposing Mubarak in his last days, amounted to a popular referendum against Morsi that obliged the army to act. Indeed, given the way tensions have been increasing among Egyptians over the past weeks and months, perhaps there was no time to waste, and no other way to avoid a far more explosive crisis.

And yet — and yet, I can’t help but wonder how it all came to this. Was it really so impossible for either side to reach out to the other, and make compromises that would permit the different factions to work together, sharing the same political space since they are all Egyptians, until the people could once again be consulted in elections, on schedule and in due time?

So, congratulations to the Egyptian people for toppling your second dictator — and shame on you for how it went down. Let’s hope this is the last time you settle your differences in this way! May those who claim to be democrats stick to democracy from now on.

Links 04 July 2013

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McClatchy: Hints Surface That NSA [Is] Building Massive, Pervasive Surveillance Capability:

    “Despite U.S. intelligence officials’ repeated denials that the National Security Agency is collecting the content of domestic emails and phone calls, evidence is mounting that the agency’s vast surveillance network can and may already be preserving billions of those communications in powerful digital databases. …
    “The administration is building a facility in a valley south of Salt Lake City that will have the capacity to store massive amounts of records — a facility that former agency whistleblowers say has no logical purpose if it’s not going to be a vault holding years of phone and Internet data. …
    “‘What we are really talking about here is a globalized system that prevents any form of electronic communication from taking place without it being stored and monitored by the National Security Agency,’ [columnist Glenn] Greenwald said in a webcast to the Socialism Conference in Chicago. ‘It means they’re storing every call and have the capability to listen to them at any time.'”

Moon of Alabama: The Empire Against the World:

    “Why, do Germans and others ask, does the U.S. need to collect 6 billion (!) German communications each year? What is going on here? Even the Stasi would have settled for 600,000. …
    “But having pissed off major European partners is not enough for Obama. This is unprecedented:
      “‘The plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales was rerouted to Austria after various European countries refused to let it cross their airspace because of suspicions that NSA leaker Edward Snowden was on board, Bolivian officials said Tuesday. …
      “‘A furious Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca said France and Portugal would have to explain why they canceled authorization for the plane, claiming that the decision had put the president’s life at risk. …
      “‘In a midnight press conference, Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia…described Morales as being ‘kidnapped by imperialism’ in Europe.'”

Corrente: So Who, Exactly, Re-Routed Evo Morales’s Plane?

Craig Murray: All Law Is Gone, Naked Power Remains:

    “The forcing down of the Bolivian President’s jet was a clear breach of the Vienna Convention by Spain and Portugal, which closed their airspace to this Head of State while on a diplomatic mission. It has never been thought necessary to write down in a Treaty that Heads of State enjoy diplomatic immunity while engaged in diplomacy…. But it is a hitherto unchallenged precept of customary international law, indeed arguably the oldest provision of international law.
    “To the US and its allies, international law is no longer of any consequence. … I have repeatedly posted, and have been saying in public speeches for ten years, that under the UK/US intelligence sharing agreements the NSA spies on UK citizens and GCHQ spies on US citizens and they swap the information. As they use a shared technological infrastructure, the division is simply a fiction to get round the law in each country restricting those agencies from spying on their own citizens.
    “I have also frequently remarked how extraordinary it is that the media keep this ‘secret’ which they have all known for years.”

Ian Black, The Guardian: With This “Roadmap” Egypt Enters Risky Territory:

    “Egypt has entered a volatile and potentially dangerous new phase with the army moving swiftly and decisively against President Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to take control — though only temporarily — of the Arab world’s largest country. …
    “Morsi’s overthrow is a hammer blow for Egyptian Islamists who spent the long decades of authoritarian rule under Mubarak and his predecessors building up the Brotherhood organisation and dreaming of the day when they could take power. The worry must be that this experience will reinforce their sense of victimhood — that despite winning a free election they have been betrayed and prevented from exercising legitimate power. It clearly creates a dangerous precedent.”

Amira Nowaira: This Is Not a Coup, but the Will of Egypt’s People:

    “The most dangerous aspect of Brotherhood rule was probably its discourse of fear and loathing. In fact, Morsi wagging menacing fingers against Egyptians has become emblematic of his brief rule. Incitement against Copts, Shias and anyone who dared oppose him was rampant and unchecked. …
    “After an excruciating year of mismanagement, sectarian rhetoric and state violence, it is understandable that Egyptians should rise in full force against a regime that seemed to hold them hostage. Morsi has shown himself to be incapable of governing or even understanding the fundamentals of managing a modern state. What he succeeded in doing was to dispel any illusions that Egyptians might have had about the Muslim Brotherhood as a morally and spiritually superior faction….
    “Morsi and his supporters have argued that his overthrow was a violation of the legitimacy of the ballot box. In his last speech as president, Morsi repeated the word legitimacy over and over again. What he did not realise, however, was that the legitimacy of a ruler springs from popular consent.”

Issander El Amrani, Democrats vs. Liberals or Democrats vs. Republicans?

    “The dilemma facing Egypt is that it’s a limited, electoral democracy whereas many want it to be a republic. The difference being that in a republic the individual has guarantees in the context of a socio-political compact, whereas in a democracy the minority has little if any voice. Egypt is formally a republic, and has been since 1956, over several iterations of a compact…. It might have turned into a more democratic republic after 2011 except the new social compact was left to elections. Because elections are not very accurate indicators of national sentiment…and the voting public has still mostly few lasting allegiances in post-revolution Egypt, this was always a bad idea. A lot of people have changed their mind.
    “However Egypt comes out of this crisis, hopefully a republican pact — hopefully based around a bill of rights — will form a more stable base for its political system.”

Mother Jones: Morsi Is Out: Images from the Egyptian Leader’s Final 48 Hours in Power

Stephen Emmott: Humans — The Real Threat to Life on Earth:

    “If we discovered tomorrow that there was an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and – because physics is a fairly simple science – we were able to calculate that it was going to hit Earth on 3 June 2072…governments worldwide would marshal the entire planet into unprecedented action. Every scientist, engineer, university and business would be enlisted: half to find a way of stopping it, the other half to find a way for our species to survive and rebuild if the first option proved unsuccessful. . We are in almost precisely that situation now, except that there isn’t a specific date and there isn’t an asteroid. The problem is us. Why are we not doing more about the situation we’re in – given the scale of the problem and the urgency needed – I simply cannot understand. … The biggest and most important experiment on Earth is the one we’re all conducting, right now, on Earth itself. Only an idiot would deny that there is a limit to how many people our Earth can support. The question is, is it seven billion (our current population), 10 billion or 28 billion? I think we’ve already gone past it. Well past it.
    “Science is essentially organised scepticism. I spend my life trying to prove my work wrong or look for alternative explanations for my results. It’s called the Popperian condition of falsifiability. I hope I’m wrong. But the science points to my not being wrong. We can rightly call the situation we’re in an unprecedented emergency. We urgently need to do – and I mean actually do – something radical to avert a global catastrophe. But I don’t think we will. I think we’re fucked.”

Shadow State

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Blogger Golem XIV (David Malone) writes in “The New Praetorians and the New Cold War“:

    “There is a New Cold War but it is not like the old one. It is not country against country. It is the shadow state in every nation against its own people, with the collusion of an inner core within the regular State.”

The subject is governments spying on their own citizens, as revealed most famously in recent weeks by Edward Snowden. Malone’s thesis is that all supposedly democratic governments do it, and even help each other to do it, by sharing data with each other in ways that enable each nation to evade its own legal framework of checks and balances. A nation’s spy agencies get around the limits placed on them under the law by spying on the citizens of other nations, then sharing this data with those same nations, in exchange for data on their own citizens. Convenient!

So we are now in a position where we can no longer trust our own governments, which are ruled by what Malone calls a “shadow state” that is unaccountable to, and frequently even invisible to, our elected officials. The elected officials are either kept in the dark, or simply don’t want to know, so they can avoid uncomfortable questions. Who watches the watchmen, indeed.

Standoff in Egypt

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Last night, the Egyptian president wrote this on his official Twitter account:

    “President Mohamed Morsi asserts his grasp on constitutional legitimacy and rejects any attempt to deviate from it, and calls on the armed forces to withdraw their warning and refuses to be dicatated to internally or externally.”

The warning referred to was an ultimatum to President Morsi that if he and opposition forces were unable to reach a negotiated settlement by 3:00 p.m. Egyptian time today — a deadline that has already lapsed as I write this — they would step in and impose their own “political road map” for Egypt, including the forced resignation of the president, the installation of the head of the Supreme Court as interim president, an interim government of civilian technocrats, suspension of the constitution until it is rewritten, and new elections for the presidency and parliament within nine months to a year.

In response to Morsi’s refusal of their ultimatum, the armed forces today posted a message entitled “Final Hours” to their Facebook page:

    “We swear to God that we will sacrifice even our blood for Egypt and its people, to defend them against any terrorist, radical or fool.”

The message went on to quote the military’s top officer, General Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, as saying, “It is more honorable for us to die than to have the people of Egypt terrorized or threatened.”

Can this story possibly have a happy ending? If your goal is simply to get the Islamists out of power, perhaps it will. Reports are that top leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood are already being placed under house arrest. But if your idea of democracy is broad, inclusive government representing all sectors of society, validated at the ballot box, resulting in negotiated solutions in which principled opponents can preserve their mutual respect, this isn’t looking so good.

The NSA Maps Your Brain

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This story on NSA surveillance of Americans, by Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman of The Guardian, contains a quote from Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute:

    “The calls you make can reveal a lot, but now that so much of our lives are mediated by the internet, your IP logs are really a real-time map of your brain: what are you reading about, what are you curious about, what personal ad are you responding to (with a dedicated email linked to that specific ad), what online discussions are you participating in, and how often?
    “Seeing your IP logs – and especially feeding them through sophisticated analytic tools – is a way of getting inside your head that’s in many ways on par with reading your diary.”

Also see this story from Business Insider, “The NSA Has Processed 1 Trillion Pieces of Internet Metadata,” which provides background on a program called ThinThread, authored around the year 2000 by top NSA analyst (and later whistleblower) William Binney. To Binney’s regret, ThinThread ended up providing the core functionality for the massive unauthorized data collection of the Bush years. (The Business Insider article, and this one, also include many useful links you may follow for further information.)

For a more in-depth discussion of ThinThread, William Binney, and fellow whistleblower Thomas Drake, see this May 2011 New Yorker article by Jane Meyer. Despite the recent publicity given to the NSA’s data collection by the revelations of Edward Snowden, much of this information has been circulating in the public domain for years!

Personally I think it’s exciting, not frightening at all, that the NSA is able to know anything about anyone, anywhere in the world, in real time. In fact, I think they should add face recognition technology from surveillance cameras, GPS data from cars and cell phones, medical records, electronic purchase and ATM records, and so on to the data they already have — though I doubt they’ve been waiting for my advice on this. I have only two provisos: 1) the data collection system itself should be completely visible to the public; and 2) the information it collects on individuals should be freely available to everyone, so we can all track each other in real time! We’re already living in a world where secrets and privacy are no longer possible — or necessary, or even useful — so let’s just make that transparency complete and put all data on everyone in the public domain. In this sense, the NSA is doing us all a public service, in building the tools for us to do this. We just need to liberate them from the control of the spymasters!

“The Strongest Weapon”

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President Obama addressed the anti-Mohammed hate video yesterday in his speech to the United Nations. I feel that he got the balance just about right.

    [Over] the last two weeks…a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world. I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity. It is an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well — for as the city outside these walls [New York] makes clear, we are a country that has welcomed people of every race and religion. We are home to Muslims who worship across our country. We not only respect the freedom of religion — we have laws that protect individuals from being harmed because of how they look or what they believe. We understand why people take offense to this video because millions of our citizens are among them.
    I know there are some who ask why we don’t just ban such a video. The answer is enshrined in our laws: our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech. Here in the United States, countless publications provoke offense. Like me, the majority of Americans are Christian, and yet we do not ban blasphemy against our most sacred beliefs. Moreover, as President of our country, and Commander-in-Chief of our military, I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day, and I will always defend their right to do so. Americans have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their views — even views that we disagree with.
    We do so not because we support hateful speech, but because our Founders understood that without such protections, the capacity of each individual to express their own views, and practice their own faith, may be threatened. We do so because in a diverse society, efforts to restrict speech can become a tool to silence critics, or oppress minorities. We do so because given the power of faith in our lives, and the passion that religious differences can inflame, the strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression, it is more speech — the voices of tolerance that rally against bigotry and blasphemy, and lift up the values of understanding and mutual respect.