Mousavi ready for martyrdom as Iranians defy Khamenei

As Iranians defy Ayatollah Khamenei, Mir-Hossein Mousavi tells supporters he is ready for martyrdom and renews his call for a new election. This from the Telegraph:

He dramatically raised the stakes in the standoff with Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, after publishing a letter to the country's highest electoral authority in which he cited examples of electoral fraud to support his "undeniable right" to call for a re-run of the election.

Mr Mousavi made his defiant call during a speech delivered in southwest Tehran, according to an ally, who telephoned a western news agency shortly afterwards to report: "Mousavi said he was ready for martyrdom and that he would continue his path."

A witness told Reuters that Mr Mousavi had called for a national strike if he was arrested.

It was an unprecedented act in defiance of Ayatollah Khamenei, who has declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner of the June 12 election and on Friday ordered an end to protests by demonstrators who say Mousavi was the winner.

It came as a few thousand protesters defied threats of bloodshed from Iran's rulers and attempted to march through central Tehran - only to be beaten back by riot police. Heavily armed police and militia flooded the streets and used tear gas and batons to attack them.

Only an estimated 3,000 dared to show themselves, far fewer than the hundreds of thousands who filled the streets during the last few weeks. The two main protest leaders, Mr Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, who were beaten by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the disputed poll nine days ago, had both called off their official rallies.

Earlier in the day, the pair had been offered a minor concession when the Guardian Council, which supervises elections, promised to recount 10 per cent of the votes to check for election fraud - a suggestion that had previously been dismissed by protesters as a cynical ploy to buy time.

In their first real show of force since massive street rallies erupted in central Tehran last week, the authorities deployed thousands of riot police and plainclothes Basij militiamen in the city centre. Helicopters buzzed menacingly overhead.

As protesters began to gather near the university campus, chanting "death to the dictatorship", the police set upon them with baton charges, water canons and tear gas.

"Lots of guards on motorbikes closed in on us and beat us brutally," one protester said. "As we were running away the basiji (militia) were waiting in side alleys with batons, but people opened their doors to us. Iran has become Palestine."

Another report described gunfire at a rally and at least one casualty. Separately, there were reports that a man had died in a bomb attack at the Ayatollah Khomeini shrine a few miles south of the city - likely to have been launched by one of the ethnic separatist groups that have carried out periodic attacks in Iran.

Yesterday's violence and Mr Mousavi's continued defiance came after a week of the biggest street protests seen in Iran for 30 years - and divisions between hardliners and reformists that mean the country may never be the same again.

Cordons of riot police, dressed in their military green uniforms with white stripes down the trouser legs and wearing heavy black helmets, stood in lines three deep along Enqelab (revolution) and Azadi (freedom) streets.

Together, the two roads form a long east-west highway bisecting the centre of the city and running past the main gates of Tehran University, a scene of turmoil throughout Iran's modern history.

It was along this street that millions of people surged to accompany Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini when he returned from exile to usher in Islamic rule in 1979.

According to a regular participant in last week's demonstrations, the protesters yesterday hoped to form large groups in side streets before bursting onto the main highway, thwarting attempts to disperse them.

Unconfirmed video footage posted online showed groups of people charging through the streets as teargas and smoke from a burning car swirled around them. Riot police and men with sticks could be seen in the background.

The economy – it’s way too early to return to business as usual

Christina Romer, chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and a scholar of the Depression, warns against a premature return to economic orthodoxy. She sets out the example of how the success of the New Deal economic policies was undermined by a return to orthodox economic practices in 1937 triggering a new recession:

The recovery from the Depression is often described as slow because America did not return to full employment until after the outbreak of the second world war. But the truth is the recovery in the four years after Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933 was incredibly rapid. Annual real GDP growth averaged over 9%. Unemployment fell from 25% to 14%. The second world war aside, the United States has never experienced such sustained, rapid growth.

However, that growth was halted by a second severe downturn in 1937-38, when unemployment surged again to 19% (see chart). The fundamental cause of this second recession was an unfortunate, and largely inadvertent, switch to contractionary fiscal and monetary policy. One source of the growth in 1936 was that Congress had overridden Mr Roosevelt’s veto and passed a large bonus for veterans of the first world war. In 1937, this fiscal stimulus disappeared. In addition, social-security taxes were collected for the first time. These factors reduced the deficit by roughly 2.5% of GDP, exerting significant contractionary pressure.

Also important was an accidental switch to contractionary monetary policy. In 1936 the Federal Reserve began to worry about its “exit strategy”. After several years of relatively loose monetary policy, American banks were holding large quantities of reserves in excess of their legislated requirements. Monetary policymakers feared these excess reserves would make it difficult to tighten if inflation developed or if “speculative excess” began again on Wall Street. In July 1936 the Fed’s board of governors stated that existing excess reserves could “create an injurious credit expansion” and that it had “decided to lock up” those excess reserves “as a measure of prevention”. The Fed then doubled reserve requirements in a series of steps. Unfortunately it turned out that banks, still nervous after the financial panics of the early 1930s, wanted to hold excess reserves as a cushion. When that excess was legislated away, they scrambled to replace it by reducing lending. According to a classic study of the Depression by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, the resulting monetary contraction was a central cause of the 1937-38 recession.

The 1937 episode provides a cautionary tale. The urge to declare victory and get back to normal policy after an economic crisis is strong. That urge needs to be resisted until the economy is again approaching full employment. Financial crises, in particular, tend to leave scars that make financial institutions, households and firms behave differently. If the government withdraws support too early, a return to economic decline or even panic could follow. …

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Now is also the time to think about our long-run fiscal situation. Despite the large budget deficit President Obama inherited, dealing with the current crisis required increasing the deficit substantially. To switch to austerity in the immediate future would surely set back recovery and risk a 1937-like recession-within-a-recession. But many are legitimately concerned about the longer-term budget situation. That is why the president has laid out a plan to shrink the deficit he inherited by half and has repeatedly emphasised the need to reduce the long-term deficit and put the debt-to-GDP ratio on a declining trajectory. In this regard, health-care reform presents a golden opportunity. The fundamental source of long-run deficits is rising health-care expenditures. By coupling the expansion of coverage with reforms that significantly slow the growth of health-care costs, we can dramatically improve the long-run fiscal situation without tightening prematurely.

Paul Krugman made essentially the same argument earlier this week – even though the crisis seems to be easing, don’t abandon the fiscal stimulus effort yet and return to business as usual.

You can read Romer’s entire piece here and Krugman’s column here.

Will Khamenei sacrifice Ahmadinejad to save himself?

Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian analyst for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and formerly for the International Crisis Group, believes Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is in a tough spot. Sadjadpour says Khamenei, “believes that if he compromises too much it could project weakness and invite even more protests. At the same time, if he refuses to compromise at all, he may face his own demise for the sake of saving a very unpopular president in an election that is widely seen as fraudulent.” He may feel he has to sacrifice Ahmadinejad to save himself. Here is his interview at the Council for Foreign Relations website:

The demonstrations and the opposition efforts to overturn the official election results in Iran continue. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has approved a partial recount by the Guardian Council, but opposition candidates are demanding a new vote. What do you think is going to happen over the next several days?

Something historic is afoot today in Iran. The scale of the protests is unprecedented. The depth of people's sense of injustice and rage is palpable. People are continuing to bravely take to the streets, risking their lives, despite the fact that they've been told the Basij [Iranian paramilitary force] and Revolutionary Guards have been authorized to use force. This has not dissuaded them. The fissures we're seeing amongst revolutionary elites are also unprecedented. It's very difficult to see how the status quo ante could prevail no matter what happens.

The supreme leader's decision to delegate responsibility to the Guardian Council was classic Khamenei in the sense that he doesn't cede authority--the Guardian Council is essentially under his jurisdiction--but he buys time and deflects accountability. He was calculating that if he could buy time, the scale of these protests would gradually diminish. So far, that hasn't been the case. He may eventually be faced with a situation of whether to sacrifice President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose "reelection" he announced, or go down himself with the ship.

Some people have speculated, including Professor Arang Keshavarzian, that perhaps Ahmadinejad is running the show and Khamenei is just going along. Do you think that's at all possible?

I don't think that's plausible. If it were, Ahmadinejad certainly wouldn't have gone on an official visit to Russia. He would have stayed in Tehran and directed things. By all accounts, anyone whom you talk to amongst the political elites in Tehran will tell you that Khamenei had become more powerful than he's ever been in his twenty-year tenure as leader. The Islamic Republic's most powerful institutions--the Guardian Council, parliament, the presidency, the Revolutionary Guards--are all currently led by individuals who are either directly appointed by Khamenei or unfailingly obsequious to him. Khamenei has in many ways become a modern-day shah, with a turban instead of a crown. But I believe he miscalculated. This election, or I should say this "selection," was an insult to people's intelligence. Political, economic, and social malaise had been brewing for many years and this "selection" was for many people the last straw.

You mentioned a little earlier that Khamenei might "go down with the ship." What does that mean?

Previously sacred red lines in Iran are now being challenged. People are now beginning to openly question the institution of the velayat-e faqih, or the rule of the jurist, which is the Khomeinist system of governance that was implemented in 1979. It is unprecedented that people would begin to openly challenge Khamenei's legitimacy as supreme leader, and indeed question the legitimacy of the institution of the supreme leader. There are widespread reports that [Akbar] Hashemi Rafsanjani, Khamenei's kingmaker, is trying to assemble a coalition of grand ayatollahs in Qom against Khamenei. Rafsanjani is head of the Assembly of Experts, a body that has the constitutional authority to anoint and remove the supreme leader.

Ayatollah Montazeri--who was Ayatollah Khomeini's former heir apparent, a genuine grand ayatollah, not someone who had mid-ranking credentials and was made an ayatollah overnight like Khamenei--has openly challenged both this election and Khamenei's reign.

People are not calling for a wholesale revolution as they were in 1979. I'm not hearing the word enqelab, i.e. revolution, mentioned by the protestors. There exists a political maturity now that didn't exist then. People don't have the same naïve, utopian dreams that they had in 1979. They want a system that is representative of the people. Many people believe that the Islamic Republic does have important institutions, such as the institution of the presidency and parliament. But what they want to see is the unelected institutions, which currently have the majority of the constitutional authority, to be either removed or their authority seriously limited.

That's a big order. These are the people who have the guns right now. How do you get them out of power?

We shouldn't view the clergy or the Revolutionary Guards as monolithic entities. It's true that the senior commanders in the Revolutionary Guard were handpicked by Khamenei, and they're going to remain unfailingly loyal to him. But the Revolutionary Guards are a huge group--over 120,000 men. I used to occasionally meet with some of them when I was based in Iran, and many of them understand that this "death to America" culture of 1979 is obsolete in 2009. Many among the rank and file were widely thought to have supported Mohammad Khatami's presidency. If the Revolutionary Guards are ordered to massively clamp down on the Iranian people--men, women, children--I'm not sure that they'll remain intact. I believe there are real fissures among them. Mohsen Rezaei [one of the opposition candidates] was the longest-serving senior commander of the Revolutionary Guard and has voiced opposition to Ahmadinejad's election. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, former senior Revolutionary Guard commander and current mayor of Tehran, is one of Ahmadinejad's archrivals. So we shouldn't see the Revolutionary Guards as simply 120,000 crazed Khamenei devotees willing to martyr themselves to retain Ahmadinejad's presidency.

What sequence of events has to happen? Does Ahmadinejad have to be forced to resign? Does Khamenei have to resign? How do you do this without massive bloodshed?

It's important to try and understand the worldview of Ali Khamenei. [He] has long believed that when you're under pressure, you should never compromise. Compromise projects weakness and will invite even more pressure. This is the way he approaches foreign relations, and this is the way he approaches domestic policy as well. And incidentally this was the lesson that many Islamic Republic political elites learned from the 1970s during revolts against the shah. They believe that when the shah started to acknowledge people's discontents--when he famously said "I've heard your revolution"--he thought that was going to pacify the protestors. On the contrary, that's when the revolutionaries smelled blood and pounced. Khamenei is in a very delicate position, because he believes that if he compromises too much it could project weakness and invite even more protests. At the same time, if he refuses to compromise at all, he may face his own demise for the sake of saving a very unpopular president in an election that is widely seen as fraudulent.

This is extremely delicate and the situation is so dynamic. We clearly have to be on the right side of history here, but if we try to insert ourselves into the momentous internal Iranian drama that's unfolding we may unwittingly undermine those whom we're trying to strengthen.

Can he make a deal with the Mousavi forces?

The dilemma that Khamenei faces is that if [Mir-Hossein] Mousavi becomes president, he's not going to be a subordinate president like Ahmadinejad is and like Khatami was. In the 1980s, Mousavi was prime minister when Khamenei was president, and he was widely thought to have been more influential and powerful than Khamenei was. It's widely known, despite the fact that they are [distant] relatives (Reuters), that they have a very contentious relationship. Given what transpired over the last two weeks, Khamenei has lost enormous political capital with the Iranian public. He's lost enormous political capital with the Iranian political elite. He's going to have to calculate whether he wants to save Ahmadinejad's presidency at all costs in order to have a subordinate president who's not going to challenge him, or whether he's willing to compromise by accepting a Mousavi presidency and a potentially much more limited political role for himself.

Do you think this will go on for another week before such a decision is made? Does it require the people to face continuous threats and everything else to go out on the streets?

People are paying an enormous cost for this. I have tremendous admiration for the bravery of these people, not just in Tehran but throughout the country. They're risking their lives every day for a very simple request: a greater political voice to rectify the profound sense of injustice they're feeling. What we saw in the 1979 revolution was that when the shah's government clamped down and began killing people, the protests actually mushroomed and the scale of the demonstrations increased.

One important distinction between the shah's regime and the current regime is that many of the political, military, and intelligence elite of the shah's era had alternative options when the going got tough. Many were educated in the United States and Europe and could subsist outside of Iran. But for the Islamic Republic's political and military elite, Iran is all that they have. They weren't educated in Europe; their formative years were in the seminaries of Qom and in the battlefield against Iraq. They have always known that if they want to stay in power, there are going to be times when they have to use force. But again, having themselves been on the other side of history in the late 1970s, they're cognizant of the fact that if the force isn't properly calibrated, it could augment their vulnerabilities rather than their security.

Given your analysis, what should the Obama administration do? Should it stay hands-off rhetorically or should Obama condemn the efforts of the Iranian authorities to crack down? Should it call for a new election?

This is extremely delicate and the situation is so dynamic. We clearly have to be on the right side of history here, but if we try to insert ourselves into the momentous internal Iranian drama that's unfolding we may unwittingly undermine those whom we're trying to strengthen. Historically that's often been the case in Iran.

It goes without saying that the Obama administration should clearly not acknowledge the results of these contested elections. This would demoralize people. We should also be pushing all of our allies not to acknowledge the results of these elections until justice prevails in Tehran. I was disappointed that Turkey's Abdullah Gul and Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai did not hesitate to congratulate Ahmadinejad.

But again, if we overtly take sides the regime could well react with a massive and bloody crackdown on the demonstrators using the pretext that they are acting against an American-led coup. And the sad thing is that much of the global media would focus more on what Obama said than what the Iranian government did.

That said, the president should condemn the flagrant violence against innocent civilians, including women and the elderly. The Iranian regime likes to talk a lot about justice, and we should make it clear we want to see justice and the will of the Iranian people prevail.

You can read the entire interview here.

What WE should do about Iran

Michael Walzer on what we – not the government – should do about the situation in Iran:

I AM a statist in many ways and in many areas. I believe that government has an important role to play in the economy, in health care, in protecting the environment, and certainly in foreign policy. But reading about the mass demonstrations in Iran, my first thought isn’t about what the U.S. government should do or what President Obama should say. It is about what the rest of us should do and say.

We boast of our lively civil society, and those of us on the liberal left call ourselves internationalists. So let’s use all our organizations and associations to act internationally—in support of liberals and leftists, friends of democracy, wherever they are. Confronting mass protests in Iran, where at least some of the protesters, perhaps many of them, are our political friends, let’s help them through our parties, and unions, and religious groups, and magazines. Let’s write about them, publish their stories, raise money for their activities, condemn their arrests, hold meetings, sign petitions, picket Iranian embassies in every country where we can mobilize the picketers. Let’s explore every possible means of agitation and advocacy on behalf of our principles and our friends.

This is an ideological struggle, and that kind of struggle isn’t first of all the business of governments. It is the business of politically committed men and women. We need to be clear about who we are and what we stand for and why we oppose the religious zealots and tyrants who have ruled Iran for the last decades.

Over much of those same decades, I have been arguing that our government should establish diplomatic relations with the Iranian zealots and tyrants. For liberals and leftists—opposition and nothing else; for state diplomats—handshakes and negotiation. The difference in the two roles is important. It doesn’t mean that heads of state cannot defend political principles, but they also have other things to do. Right now, the most important task of the U.S. government with regard to Iran is not regime change. The most important task is to persuade or coerce the Iranian government to give up the effort to produce nuclear weapons. Doing that will require some mix of toughness and conciliation—and that necessary mix will still be necessary whoever actually won and whoever finally wins the Iranian election. What Obama says must be guided by what he has to do.

The rest of us are much freer. We can distinguish between the Iranian presidential candidates, all of whom were approved by the religious leadership, and their followers, many of whom have dissident views that the religious leaders would not approve. The dissidents are the people we should be supporting, whose stories we should be telling. And we should be talking to them about the kind of support they want and need. They and we are aiming at, and have every right to aim at, regime change. Organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, though they can’t acknowledge it, aim at regime change whenever they condemn the practices of tyrannical regimes; and so should union members and democrats of every sort, and religious moderates committed to freedom, and faculty members and students who believe in the integrity of the university. Regime change (it used to be called revolution) is our business, and we should embrace it.

Is Iran approaching a Tiananmen Moment?

Mark LeVine has these thoughts:

… regardless of whether there was significant fraud the power elite could decide collectively that the protests are not motivated by broader concerns and thus do not threaten the stability of the system.

This could also lead them to agree to a broad recount or run-off, even at the risk of a Mousavi win, and it is worth mentioning here that Mousavi is no liberal; the "core values" of Khomenei's revolution - to which he advocates a return - are well within the mainstream of Iran's clerical culture.

Alternatively, if the protests do not lose steam in the coming days, the leadership could decide that the opposition is too broad and deeply rooted to attempt to crush it.

In this case, it would have little choice but to cave in to the protesters' demands or face losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the broader Iranian public, particularly if large numbers of protesters are arrested, injured or killed.

The greatest degree of uncertainty surrounds a scenario in which the power elite both concludes that the mass protests reflect deep-seated discontent by a large segment of the population, yet at the same time believes it has a narrow window of opportunity to deal with this situation forcibly before losing control to the rapidly encroaching street politics.

In this case, Iran could quickly approach a Tiananmen moment, in which the Iranian government calculates that crushing the pro-reform opposition will give it time to push the reformers back in the closet for the foreseeable future, and push the cosmopolitan liberal-cultural elite who have the ability to leave, to do so.

The problem is that Iran can't follow China's path.

It is true that if oil prices continue rising, they will produce enough revenue for the government to keep the poor and working classes happy, or at least quiescent.

But what allowed the Communist party in China to maintain its hegemony rather than merely dominance over Chinese society was its willingness to liberalise culturally at the same time as it closed down politically.

Cultural liberalisation became the safety valve that allowed the emerging generation of Chinese citizens to accept the continued power of the Communist party.

Needless to say, no such safety valve exists in the Islamic Republic, where a cultural perestroika is precisely what Ahmadinejad and his supporters in the leadership and among the people want to prevent.

In China the government struck a bargain with the people, telling them: "You can do whatever you want as long as you don't challenge the power of the state."

The Iranian government has over the last two decades negotiated a very different and more narrow bargain with its citizens: "You can do what you want behind closed doors, as long as you keep the music down. But we own the street and the public sphere. So put your headscarf on before you leave the house, and don't think about challenging cultural or political limits publicly."

That bargain has now collapsed as hundreds of thousands of Iranians have, at least for the moment, reclaimed the streets.

If Ahmadinejad has been railing against "velvet revolutionaries" since he took office, he is today counting on the situation in Iran resembling the Czechoslovakia of 1968 rather than 1989.

Yet with one of the world's youngest populations and an increasingly urban, educated and sophisticated citizenry, it is hard to know how long the Iranian government can continue to impose its conservative moral values upon a bourgeois-aspiring, culturally open technocratic class whose expertise and loyalty will be crucial for Iran's long-term social, economic and political development.

You can read his entire article here.

Supporting universal values in Iran

George Packer on President Obama’s remarks on Iran:

Obama’s carefully chosen remarks about Iran yesterday made just the right points in just the right tone. And not a moment too soon. He said that the U.S. won’t interfere in Iranian politics, but that the violence inflicted on unarmed demonstrators violates “universal values” and demands a response; that the U.S. didn’t monitor the elections and has no direct evidence of fraud, but circumstances and Iranian public opinion seem to point in that direction; that none of this will change current American policy to seek a dialogue with the regime in Tehran. Finally, and most powerfully, he said: “I think it would be wrong for me to be silent about what we’ve seen on the television over the last few days. And what I would say to those people who put so much hope and energy and optimism into the political process, I would say to them that the world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was. And they should know that the world is watching.”

Just when Obama seemed to have fallen a step behind events, he emerged from his silence to do what no politician in our time could have managed: emphasize American respect for Iranian sovereignty and yet, in measured terms, make it clear that the U.S. cannot be indifferent to the tragedy unfolding in Iran. He spoke with calm eloquence to the millions of people who have filled the streets at great risk—spoke to their hopes and their courage. He proved that an American President can lend his voice to “universal values” without sounding like a self-righteous fool. And he showed the emptiness of the eternal argument between realism and idealism. When foreign policy is articulated by a thoughtful politician in the middle of an intense and unfolding drama, the abstractions melt away. It’s actually possible to be pragmatic without being indecent. Why shouldn’t it be?

And yet the crisis in Iran has flushed out all the pathologies of American foreign-policy thinking, or feeling, in the post-Bush era. It’s become weirdly difficult for commentators on both the right and the left to have anything close to a normal reaction to what the world is seeing. Instead, everything gets filtered through what you think about Bush, Iraq, Obama, Israel, and other subjects that have extremely tenuous connections to internal politics in Iran and the actions of the people and the state there….

You can read the entire piece here.

The limits of democracy in American government

Matthew Yglesias contemplates the undemocratic representation and Rube Goldberg-esque nature of our national government:

…the entire structure of the US Congress with its bicameralism and multiple overlapping committees is biased toward making it easy for concentrated interests to block reform. Between them, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Chuck Schumer, Kristen Gillibrand, Bill Nelson, Dick Durbin, Roland Burriss, Arlen Specter, Bob Casey, Sherrod Brown, Carl Levin, Amy Klobuchar, Kay Hagan, Bob Menendez, Frank Lautenberg, Mark Warner, Jim Webb, Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Evan Bayh represent 50 percent of the country’s population. But that only adds up to 22 Senators—you need thirty-eight more to pass a bill.

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The American presidency is a weird institution. If Barack Obama wants to start a war with North Korea and jeopardize the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, it’s not clear that anyone could stop him. If he wants to let cold-blooded murderers out of prison, it’s completely clear that nobody can stop him. But if he wants to implement the agenda he was elected on just a few months ago, he needs to obtain a supermajority in the United States Senate.

He continues:

… if you add together the two Republican Senators from Wyoming with the one from Alaska, one from South Dakota, one from New Hampshire, two from Maine, two from Idaho, two from Nebraska, one from Nevada, two from Utah, two from Kansas, two from Mississippi, one from Iowa, two from Oklahoma, two from Kentucky, one from Louisiana, two from South Carolina, and two from Alabama, the 28 of them collectively represent (on a system in which you attribute half the population of a given state to a senator) 11.98 percent of the American population.
Meanwhile, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein together represent 11.95 percent of the American population.

Now of course Texas is also a big state (though at 7.81 percent of the population it’s a lot smaller than California) and there are small states (like Vermont and North Dakota) that have two Democratic Senators. So the point here isn’t a narrowly partisan one, though the wacky apportionment of the Senate does have a partisan valence. The point is that this is an unfair and bizarre way to run things. If you consider that the mean state would contain two percent of the population, we have just 34 Senators representing the above-average states even though they collectively contain 69.15 percent of the population. The other 66 Senators represent about 30 percent of the people. If the Iranians were to succeed in overthrowing their theocracy and set about to write a new constitution, nobody in their right mind would recommend this system to them.

Then you add in the filibuster…

And let’s not forget the Electoral College and lifetime appointments of Supreme Court justices. It is a system devised through compromise in the 18th Century that barely serves the needs of a nation confronting the issues of the 21st Century.

Was the Iranian election stolen?

News from Iran during the past week or so looked promising for reformers to alter the direction of their nation. Mir Hossein Mousavi had become a serious challenger to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mousavi, a popular former Prime Minister (1981-1989), had rallied those dissatisfied with Ahmadinejad’s handling of the economy and confrontational attitude with the West as well as reformist elements in general in Iran. President Ahmadinejad hard line policies were divisive at home and abroad.

Recent polls and the size of crowds at campaign rallies led to expectations that Mousavi would win. Announcements that Ahmadinejad had won by a landslide has sparked riots. Mousavi and his followers have rejected the results charging that the election was stolen.

Election results should be respected but only if the electoral system has integrity. It is still too early to know what all has transpired during the election across Iran on Friday but there are reasons to suspect Ahmadinejad’s victory was not based on the votes cast. Juan Cole puts together the possible evidence that the election was fraudulent:

Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen

1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province.

2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers.

3. It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran's western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he would get less than one percent of the vote. Moreover, he should have at least done well in the west, which he did not.

4. Mohsen Rezaie, who polled very badly and seems not to have been at all popular, is alleged to have received 670,000 votes, twice as much as Karoubi.

5. Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations.

6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results.

I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad's upset that does not involve fraud. For instance, it is possible that he has gotten the credit for spreading around a lot of oil money in the form of favors to his constituencies, but somehow managed to escape the blame for the resultant high inflation.

But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene….

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The public demonstrations against the result don't appear to be that big. In the past decade, reformers have always backed down in Iran when challenged by hardliners, in part because no one wants to relive the horrible Great Terror of the 1980s after the revolution, when faction-fighting produced blood in the streets. Mousavi is still from that generation.

My own guess is that you have to get a leadership born after the revolution, who does not remember it and its sanguinary aftermath, before you get people willing to push back hard against the rightwingers.

So, there are protests against an allegedly stolen election. The Basij paramilitary thugs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will break some heads. Unless there has been a sea change in Iran, the theocrats may well get away with this soft coup for the moment. But the regime's legitimacy will take a critical hit, and its ultimate demise may have been hastened, over the next decade or two.

You can read Cole’s entire blog piece here and his related article in Salon on here.

Israel's interest in leaving the West Bank

Josh Marshall on why it is to Israel’s advantage to leave the West Bank:

Mort Zuckerman, owner and publisher of US News & World Report, has a lengthy opinion piece out in the magazine entitled: "Obama Should Not Abandon Israel in His Effort to Court Muslims."

The title summarizes the premise, which is that while Obama has reasons to court Muslims he is endangering or threatening Israel in order to do it. The core flaw to the reasoning though is that getting out of the West Bank doesn't endanger Israel. It's actually critical to the country's future well-being, even its survival.

There are a few core points to note in this regard. People who argue that the Palestinians and other Arab states are either unwilling or unable to make peace buy into a basic fallacy -- namely that 'giving up' the West Bank is a sacrifice that must be reciprocated by some meaningful and confirmable sacrifice on the other side. In other words, land for peace, as the phrase goes.

But are several levels of problem with his formulation. First, strategic considerations. It used to be argued that Israel couldn't surrender the West Bank because without it, the country would lack 'strategic depth.' In other words, the country's 'waistline' would be too narrow and an invader from the east could easily cut the country in half. But hardly anyone makes this argument any more. And for good reason: successive Israeli generals and members of the country's security establishment say this isn't true.

Next, the settlements themselves, particularly the outlying ones sometimes called 'political' settlements are a security liability in themselves since they're isolated population centers that must be defended in any conflict and occupation duty tends to degrade an army's war-fighting capacity.

But these pale in comparison to the real heart of the matter. Israel doesn't have enough Jewish citizens to make Jews the clear majority in both Israel proper and the Occupied Territories. Therefore, whatever the morality or international law of the matter, holding the Occupied Territories permanently puts Israel on a course to one of two options: becoming a binational state in which Jews make up half or less of the population or a non-democratic state which probably cannot survive under the norms governing first world countries in the 21st century.

Let's be clear what that means: a country that permanently holds territories with residents who lack citizenship, the vote and many of the rights of the citizens of the country in question. You can throw around inflammatory words like 'apartheid' which I don't think is appropriate or apt because of the very different origins of the two situations. But it strikes me as naive to believe that such a situation can be maintained peranently without growing international pressure and isolation that will strangle the country.

What this logic tells me is that getting out of the West Bank isn't a prize to be exchanged for peace if and when you can find a leader on the Palestinian side who you have perfect trust in. Getting out of the West Bank is quite simply necessary to the survival of Israel as a Jewish state. So ideally you get out in exchange for a durable peace. And you try to do it in the smartest and most orderly manner. But you get out regardless. And realizing the necessity of leaving means, at a minimum, as a first step, stopping doing things that make it harder, perhaps nearly impossible, to leave. And the first thing on that list is continuing to build new settlements and infrastructure which creates a growing constituency to stay in the settlements forever.

There's nothing remotely original about this argument. It's the same inexorable logic that has led former 'Greater Israel' advocates like Tzipi Livni and Ehud Olmert to come to more or less the same conclusion.

And let me note, to be emphatically clear, that there are many other reasons for Israel to leave the West Bank -- the prospect of a durable peace, which I think is probably achievable, its contribution to regional stability which is a real advantage to the US, the rights of the Palestinians to their own self-determination, etc. etc. etc. But I've focused on this point because at the end of the day it is undeniably in Israel's interest to leave the West Bank.

U.S. post-Cold War military spending

The graph to the right from the Economist shows U.S. military spending in 2008 compared to other nations. The U.S. easily surpasses the next 14 biggest spenders combined. Only Israel spends more per person.

The United States has very legitimate defense needs and, of course, is currently involved in a nasty conflict in central Asia overlapping Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. The United States may soon find itself in a military conflict on the Korean peninsula. Still, twenty years after the end of the Cold War, this level of spending by any measure is huge.

Remembering the Tiananmen Square protests twenty years later

This is the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests that took place in April, May and June of 1989 in Beijing, China. The protests were for a liberalization of China’s politics and culture to coincide with the liberalization that was already taking place in the economy. The conservative forces in China’s ruling Communist Party panicked at the possibilities of some form of political democracy and brutally crushed the movement.

Jack Kemp and voter restoration for felons

The late Jack Kemp was a Republican who believed advocacy for voting rights, especially for minorities, was a conservative idea. The problem was this ran contrary to his party’s “southern strategy” and had few takers in the GOP. However, Kemp never backed down from what he believed was in the best interest of the country for the sake of political expediency including advocacy for voting rights of society’s least popular citizens – convicted felons.

Kent Willis, the Executive Director of ACLU of Virginia, remembers Kemp for his passion about voter restoration reform:

Much has been written about Jack Kemp since his passing a couple of weeks ago. Kemp was a former football star turned congressman who served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under the first President Bush and was the 1996 Republican vice-presidential nominee. He was a pragmatist who became well known for reaching across party lines to get things done and, in particular, for his passionate efforts to include more people of color in the Republican Party.

But Mr. Kemp had a less well-publicized passion that occupied much of his time in recent years -- restoration of voting rights for formerly incarcerated persons -- and I had the honor of working with him, albeit all too briefly, on this issue here in Virginia.

I first met Mr. Kemp, via telephone, while he was on vacation a couple of years ago. He had agreed to take part of his day to discuss voter disfranchisement in Virginia with a handful of advocates.

While we were prepared to educate Mr. Kemp on the issue in Virginia, it became clear at the beginning of the conversation that he was no novice to the subject. He was well aware that Virginia was one of only two states in the nation -- Kentucky is the other -- that permanently disfranchises every person convicted of a felony, requiring an order of the Governor to regain the right to vote.

He knew that as many as 300,000 people in Virginia who had completed their sentences and returned to their communities were unable to vote because of Virginia's antiquated law. He also knew that the Virginia law was a product of the Jim Crow era, and that, along with poll taxes and literacy tests, its purpose was to make it more difficult for African-Americans to vote.

And, he knew perhaps the most important thing for any pragmatist -- that voter restoration works. According to studies, formerly incarcerated persons who vote are far less likely to commit another crime and return to prison. Participating in our democracy as a voter, it seems, is a valuable part of the rehabilitation process and contributes to public safety.

Although Kemp was a politician, there were no politics behind his forceful support for restoration of voting rights. He simply believed restoring voting rights was the fair thing to do for the individual and that the results benefitted everyone.

Mr. Kemp first spoke out on the issue several years ago when testifying at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the re-authorization of the Voting Rights Act. When asked by a member of Congress if he supported the right to vote for formerly incarcerated persons, he unhesitatingly responded "yes," saying "voting in America is the quintessential part of our democracy."

After he made that statement, voting rights advocates reached out to Kemp to involve him in felon enfranchisement work throughout the country, and he became an important partner in the fight to expand the right to vote to all Americans.

Inspired by his work with prison ministries and because the issue, in his words, "is a matter of simple fairness," he supported legislation to require automatic restoration of voting rights for persons participating in federal elections, urging Congress to take action on what he deemed a "historic civil rights reform."

By the time we were following Mr. Kemp's advice on how to bring about voter restoration reform in Virginia, he had already helped immeasurably in Florida and Maryland, which significantly updated and expanded their voter restoration procedures in recent years. He had also worked for reform in Kentucky, Virginia's voter disfranchisement twin.

In the future, when Virginia has finally shed itself of this shameful and counterproductive law, I believe we will look back over the last 12 months as the time in which Virginia finally started in earnest on the path to voter restoration reform.

Last summer, for example, Governor Kaine promised to expedite the process for restoration of rights so that disfranchised persons could vote in the November elections. The 2,535 individuals who managed to have their rights restored in 2008 are a drop in the bucket of 300,000 disfranchised voters, but the number is a record for one year, exceeding the totals of most Virginia governors during their entire four-year tenure.

In the General Assembly this year, there was, finally, a concerted effort to reform the restoration process. Eight bills were introduced, more than ever before. One measure easily passed the Senate, while its companion in the House was barely killed when a committee blocked it from a floor vote by a narrow 12-10 margin.

A few weeks ago, at a forum in Richmond, all three Democratic Party gubernatorial hopefuls said they supported automatic restoration of rights for most felons after they complete their sentences. This is remarkable not only because of the uniformity of thought on this issue, but the mere fact that it is a campaign issue. In the recent past, I cannot recall this subject even surfacing in a statewide political campaign.

Unfortunately, our work with Mr. Kemp in Virginia was cut short by his untimely passing. I only hope that we will honor Mr. Kemp's memory by moving forward on voter restoration reform, as he wanted us to do.

I think it is best to end this piece with Mr. Kemp's own words:

“For a nation that depends on the participation of its citizens, it is fundamentally un-American to deny the vote to people who are living and working as law-abiding citizens…The continuing expansion of the franchise - to the poor, women, minorities and young people - is one of the greatest stories in our country's history.”

What did Nancy Pelosi know about torture and when did she know it? (And, why is this important?)

What are the defenses congressional Republicans use to defuse the controversy about the use of torture by the Bush administration? First they denied torture took place. Then they admitted torture took place but claimed it wasn’t that bad plus it produced useful intelligence. Finally they admitted the torture was pretty bad and produced very little useful intelligence but Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi knew all about it!

E. J. Dionne in the Washington Post is just bewildered by the attention on Pelosi:

There is something very strange about seeing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the middle of a controversy over the Bush Administration’s policies on torture. Pelosi had nothing to do with the policy, yet she is facing all of the what-did-she-know-when questions. Republicans who opposed disclosure of the memos on the torture policy now want Pelosi to tell all about herself. …

And Matthew Yglesias in the Daily Beast thinks congressional Republicans are working a little too hard to be clever:

… Under George W. Bush, the United States government embarked on the repeated torture of terrorism suspects in violation of American and international law. This fact was kept secret from the American people for the normal reason presidents like to keep illegal activity secret. It's illegal, after all, and "keeping it secret" is what people normally try to do after they commit crimes.

That basic logic hardly amounts to a proof that Pelosi was kept in the dark, and she almost certainly knew more about what was going on at the time than, say, I did. But it does suggest deception is a plausible scenario. And more to the point, it gets us refocused on the real issue here, which is not about what briefings were or were not given to Congress but about the underlying activity that was the subject of the briefings. We've had, for example, a steady drip of evidence, most recently from Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, indicating that one main use of Bush-era torture was to compel people to "confess" to the existence of various ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

And here's where the right's tactical acumen comes up short. Various conservative commentators have expressed their hope that gunning for Pelosi will blunt progressive calls for a "truth commission" to thoroughly investigate what really happened on Bush's trip to the "dark side". Fox's Neil Cavuto said we might be in a "Mexican standoff" wherein Pelosi would agree to drop the idea of investigations to prevent herself from attracting scrutiny. Steven Hayes, Dick Cheney's official biographer, said, "Democrats who have been so enthusiastic about truth commissions have to be stopping and saying, OK, wait a second." What conservatives are missing here is that this is a fight they were winning before they started gunning for Pelosi. Their best ally in this fight was Barack Obama, whose desire to "move forward" rather than focusing on the past had been the subject of much consternation. Had conservatives simply reached out to grab the hand that was being extended to them, they could have gotten what they wanted.

But in their zeal to score a tactical win, the right has made a truth commission more likely not less likely. Obama wanted to avoid a backward-looking focus on torture in part because it distracted from his legislative agenda. But if we're going to be looking backward anyway, thanks to conservatives' insistence on complaining about Pelosi, then the move forward strategy lacks a rationale. And far from forcing a standoff in which Pelosi will abandon her support for an investigation, the right has forced her into a corner from which she can't give in to moderate Democrats' opposition to such a move without looking like she's cravenly attempting to save her own skin.

There's no sign that Pelosi or anyone else is backing off the truth-commission idea. And, indeed, by suggesting that Pelosi could be a target of an investigation, conservatives have helped cleanse the idea of the odor of victor's justice. The question of CIA briefings of congressional leaders would, after all, be a legitimate subject of inquiry. And it's very possible that, done rigorously, Pelosi and other Democrats, such as Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), could wind up getting a black eye or two. But however bad an investigation might make the members of Congress who were supposed to be preventing illegal conduct look, the people actually doing the misdeeds are going to look even worse. Today, the congressional Republicans look extremely clever. But in a few months' time, we'll look back on this as yet another example of a conservative tactical victory that winds up backfiring. …

It’s time for a truth commission to investigate this whole sordid affair of the use of torture including what exactly happened, who ordered it, and how is it that certain leaders and agents working on behalf of this country felt they were above both American and international law.

A revival of the belief in witchcraft in Papua New Guinea leads to the torture and murder of an increasing number of women

Papua New Guinea hosts hundreds of indigenous ethnic groups who speak over 800 different languages. The majority of the population lives in traditional societies and practice subsistence level agriculture in an area that is mostly mountainous. The country occupies the eastern half of the island New Guinea in the southwestern Pacific Ocean and gained its independence from Australia in 1975.

When bad things happen on a communal scale all too often scapegoats of one sort or another are sought out in different societies around the world. The reasons a person or group of people are singled out doesn’t have to be rational and often these reasons can be a cover for ulterior motives. The repercussions of being scapegoated can range widely but sometimes it becomes violent.

As reported here two years ago, women have been singled out as witches in Papua New Guinea for the AIDS epidemic. According the Sunday Herald there is a revival in the belief of black magic and evil curses and according to a story in today’s Independent witch-hunting along with the torture and murder of women is overwhelming efforts of the police.

This from the Sunday Herald:

Once hailed as an untouched Shangri-La, the mist-shrouded highlands of Papua New Guinea are undergoing a dramatic resurgence in sorcery and witchcraft.

Age-old beliefs in black magic and evil curses are back with a vengeance in jungle-clad mountain valleys which were unknown to the outside world until the 1930s.

The revival is being fuelled by a spiralling Aids crisis and the collapse of health services, sapping villagers' faith in Western medicine.

Barely educated villagers living in remote mountain valleys are blaming the increasing number of Aids deaths not on promiscuity or not using condoms, but on malign spirits.

Alleged witches - mostly women but also some men and even children - have been subjected to horrific torture before being hanged or thrown off cliffs.

The number of witch killings has been estimated at 200 a year in the neighbouring province of Simbu alone, although definitive figures are impossible to come by. A report by Amnesty International in September found there was a "conspiracy of silence" surrounding the murders.

"The police do little to penetrate this silence. Very few sorcery-related deaths are investigated and the perpetrators are rarely brought to justice," the report concluded.

Belief in magic is ubiquitous in Papua New Guinea, where more than 850 languages are spoken by 5.5 million people. In the highlands they are known as "sangumas" and can assume the form not only of humans, but animals such as dogs, pigs, rats and snakes.

When Papua and New Guinea were separate Australian colonies, colonial patrol officers and their native auxiliaries suppressed sorcery killings. But since independence in 1975, the old ways have gradually undergone a gruesome renaissance along the spine of saw-toothed peaks which divides Papua New Guinea in two.

A surge in the illegal growing of marijuana in the emerald green valleys has contributed to black-magic paranoia, experts say. The recent acquisition of automatic weapons, replacing traditional bows and arrows, has also emboldened the groups of young men who typically carry out the torture.

"We're seeing a big rise in witchcraft cases. We hear of a killing almost every week," said Hermann Spingler, a German Lutheran pastor who heads the Melanesian Institute, a cultural study centre in Goroka.

"If someone in Papua New Guinea dies prematurely, people ask not what caused the death, but who. They take the law into their own hands and torture people to make them confess'. They drag women on ropes behind vehicles, burn them with hot wire, chop off hands, fingers. People have been buried alive."

As in mediaeval Europe, accused sorcerers face a ghastly Catch-22 predicament. "If you don't confess, you die. If you do, they'll kill you," said Spingler.

He expects more witch murders as Papua New Guinea's Aids crisis worsens. The country has the highest rate of Aids in the Pacific region, with the government estimating that 2% of the population is HIV-positive. That is almost certainly an underestimate.

"The problem is far worse than the official statistics show. In some antenatal clinics 30% of women are positive," said Claire Campbell, an Australian Aids campaigner working for the World Health Organisation. The fear is that promiscuity, prostitution, sexual violence and a tradition of men having several wives could drive the country into an Aids epidemic of African proportions, with half a million infected with the disease by 2025.

The problem is exacerbated by the remoteness and less developed nature of the highlands, which were only penetrated by Australian gold prospectors in 1930. The Australian colonial government had assumed that the highlands were too wild to be inhabited; instead the prospectors stumbled on a thriving culture of more than a million people, living in a "land that time forgot" which had never been encountered before.

More than 75 years on, most villages are still miles from the nearest road, their inhabitants subsisting on a traditional diet of sweet potato, pigs and the game they can hunt in the forest.

Schools and aid posts established by the Australian colonial authorities have been abandoned, their funding siphoned off by corrupt politicians. Three decades after independence, there is still no road linking the capital, Port Moresby, with any major town.

To travel from the south coast to the north you must catch a plane - or, if you are a local, take to the vast network of paths that wind their way through the jungle.

***

"Villagers believe they have to kill the so-called witches, otherwise the whole clan is at risk from black magic," said Jack Urame, a member of the Dom tribe who has researched sorcery killings for the Melanesian Institute in Goroka.

Witchcraft killings, once confined to the highland provinces, are now occurring in coastal areas as mountain people migrate to towns such as Lae and Port Moresby in search of jobs.

You can read previous blog post referred above here, the Sunday Herald article here and the Independent article here.

Civilized people can be moved to indecent, uncivilized behavior

Lillian B. Rubin on the implications of the torture memos:

…Wasn’t the I-was-just-following-orders line the defense of the guards in the Nazi death camps when we tried and convicted them at Nuremberg?

If it didn’t count then, why should it count now? Yes, I know that we can’t compare the systematic torture that was the policy of the German government then with American CIA agents who tortured a few prisoners? But where do we draw the line? Is it okay to torture two but not ten, ten but not one hundred? Is waterboarding a prisoner once acceptable, but 183 times crossing the line?

And who should be held accountable? The torture memos make clear that the actions on the ground rested directly on the green light from the American government’s Justice Department. True, our government wasn’t targeting a whole people, just a few terrorists who may have had information that endangered our security and the lives of our people. But whether the few or the many, those who torture always have what they think is a good reason to do so.

What’s so interesting about it is how decent, civilized people can be moved to indecent, uncivilized behavior by the fear that enables them to dehumanize the other. It’s what makes war and torture possible. Ironically, the torturer doesn’t get off scot free. For in dehumanizing another, we must inevitably dehumanize some part of our self. How else is it possible to inflict unbearable pain on others, to listen to their screams, their pleas for mercy, if not to step outside the self we’ve known—the good son, father, husband, colleague, friend? We become, for that time, someone else, someone whose sadistic impulses are given free rein, and we don’t return to the self we knew without psychological consequences. We see it in our returning warriors who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It isn’t just what others did to them that plagues their inner l lives, it’s also what they did to others.

Whatever the psychological consequences, the release of the torture memos has opened a spirited debate among Americans, revealing yet again the ideological chasm that separates us. Indeed, we can’t even agree on whether we actually tortured detainees. So while some of us are aghast at the revelations; others insist that we didn’t torture anybody—that waterboarding, a torture technique that despotic governments have used since the Spanish Inquisition, was just another one of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” we needed to get information that was vital to our national security. And anyway, it’s not torture if you’re careful not to step over some imaginary line that’s so thin it’s indistinguishable.

Well, I don’t know if the Japanese guards who waterboarded American prisoners during the Second World War were careful or not, but I bet they told themselves similar tales about why what they did wasn’t torture. Or if it was, it was okay because our guys were the enemy, invading their territory and trying to destroy their way of life. Unfortunately for them, the American government considered waterboarding prisoners of war in pursuit of information reason enough to try and execute the Japanese soldiers who did it.

So where does this leave us? I’m not sure. But I’m reminded of Abu Ghraib and Lynndie England, who was tried and convicted for violating military regulations about the treatment of prisoners. Depending on which side of the torture argument you were on, it either seemed appropriate to the crime or a travesty of justice. In fact, it was both. Appropriate, because she brutalized people over whom she had complete power; a travesty, because those who created that atmosphere in which her behavior was acceptable—the officers both on the ground and in Washington—were never held accountable.

You can read the entire piece here.

Civilians suffer as the army surrounds rebels in Sri Lanka

Civil war has plagued Sri Lanka since 1983. The on-and-off conflict in this multi-religious and multi-ethnic nation has pitted a separatist movement led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or Tamil Tigers) against the central government. The Tamils make up one of the larger ethnic groups on the island nation and are concentrated in the north and east of Sri Lanka.

The Sri Lanka army has now surrounded Tamil Tiger fighters in a tiny area less than three square miles. Trapped in this war zone are thousands of civilians. The Tamil Tigers are accused of holding these people as human shields while the army indiscriminately bombs the area. In the meantime, another 200,000 civilians who already fled the fighting are overwhelming displacement camps in the north. A humanitarian crisis is very much in the making on this island.

This from the Christian Science Monitor:

As the fighting has shrunk to a narrow strip of rebel-held land, currently less than three square miles, Sri Lanka's military has framed its offensive against the LTTE as the world's "largest hostage rescue mission." On Friday, it air-dropped leaflets into the area that urged Tamil civilians to seek sanctuary in the cleared areas.

That's what happened here on Apr. 20. Overnight, Army commandos crossed the shallow lagoon and captured the LTTE's defensive embankment. The next morning, watched by spy drones, huge crowds of ragged men, women and children streamed out on foot. By 10 a.m., 5,000 had crossed into government-held territory. At 10 p.m., the number rose to 35,000, in addition to those who escaped north along the sands. In total, 115,000 civilians escaped this way, the military says.

Commanders say that if they can penetrate the final LTTE redoubt, the remainder of the trapped civilians can flee, leaving the rebels to surrender or die. More than 3,000 have surrendered so far. The military insists that no bystanders are harmed in the rescue efforts. "We continue this operation with the aim of not causing any casualties to civilians," Gen. Dias said.

A recent internal UN report, however, estimates that nearly 6,500 civilians had died in the war zone prior to the Apr. 20 outflow. On Saturday, medical officials in the LTTE-held area told the BBC and other news agencies that scores had died during two days of government shelling that hit a makeshift hospital. The government denied the claim.

It has also pushed back against leaked UN satellite data that appeared to show recent aerial bombardment of civilian areas. The release of the satellite images, which Sri Lankan officials say are inconclusive, appear to be part of an internal UN row over how far to expose what some UN officials are calling war crimes by both sides.

Human rights groups and other observers warn that any final offensive would spell disaster for those caught in the crossfire. A repeat of the Apr. 20 exodus is complicated by the area's topography and the ruthlessness of the LTTE, which is killing anyone caught escaping by boat or land, says another aid worker in direct contact with civilians there.

Ramani Hariharan, a retired Army colonel who was an intelligence chief during India's 1987-1990 peacekeeping operation in Sri Lanka, says it would be almost impossible to distinguish civilians from fighters in the densely packed area. "It's not a neat operation. It's going to be messy. Messy operations lead to casualties," he says.

Outwitting internet censorship around the world

The cyberwar continues. As governments set up new barriers to censor free speech citizens find new ways to bypass the digital equivalent to the Berlin Wall. Software created by Global Internet Freedom Consortium, the Tor Project, and Psiphon among others allow users to avoid various roadblocks set up by governments to block unrestricted access to information.

This from today’s New York Times:

The Iranian government, more than almost any other, censors what citizens can read online, using elaborate technology to block millions of Web sites offering news, commentary, videos, music and, until recently, Facebook and YouTube. Search for “women” in Persian and you’re told, “Dear Subscriber, access to this site is not possible.”

Last July, on popular sites that offer free downloads of various software, an escape hatch appeared. The computer program allowed Iranian Internet users to evade government censorship.

College students discovered the key first, then spread it through e-mail messages and file-sharing. By late autumn more than 400,000 Iranians were surfing the uncensored Web.
The software was created not by Iranians, but by Chinese computer experts volunteering for the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that has beem suppressed by the Chinese government since 1999. They maintain a series of computers in data centers around the world to route Web users’ requests around censors’ firewalls.

The Internet is no longer just an essential channel for commerce, entertainment and information. It has also become a stage for state control — and rebellion against it. Computers are becoming more crucial in global conflicts, not only in spying and military action, but also in determining what information reaches people around the globe.

More than 20 countries now use increasingly sophisticated blocking and filtering systems for Internet content, according to Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based group that encourages freedom of the press.

Although the most aggressive filtering systems have been erected by authoritarian governments like those in Iran, China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Syria, some Western democracies are also beginning to filter some content, including child pornography and other sexually oriented material.

In response, a disparate alliance of political and religious activists, civil libertarians, Internet entrepreneurs, diplomats and even military officers and intelligence agents are now challenging growing Internet censorship.

The creators of the software seized upon by Iranians are members of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, based largely in the United States and closely affiliated with Falun Gong. The consortium is one of many small groups developing systems to make it possible for anyone to reach the open Internet. It is the modern equivalent of efforts by organizations like the Voice of America to reach the citizens of closed countries.

Separately, the Tor Project, a nonprofit group of anticensorship activists, freely offers software that can be used to send messages secretly or to reach blocked Web sites. Its software, first developed at the United States Naval Research Laboratories, is now used by more than 300,000 people globally, from the police to criminals, as well as diplomats and spies.

Political scientists at the University of Toronto have built yet another system, called Psiphon, that allows anyone to evade national Internet firewalls using only a Web browser. Sensing a business opportunity, they have created a company to profit by making it possible for media companies to deliver digital content to Web users behind national firewalls.

The danger in this quiet electronic war is driven home by a stark warning on the group’s Web site: “Bypassing censorship may violate law. Serious thought should be given to the risks involved and potential consequences.”

You can read the entire article here.