The Skeptic الشكاك

804 ‘Killing Is a Career’

The BBC’s Hugh Sykes talks to leaders of Iraq’s “Awakening movement” who warn that if their men aren’t incorporated into the Iraqi Army and police forces, they may switch sides.

An Ameriya engineer who did not want to give his name is also uneasy. He says the continuing security of the neighbourhood relies on all the Awakening men, not just a few of them.

He fears many will be bored, will lose their status, and may be tempted back to al-Qaeda.

“Killing is a career,” he said.

And al-Qaeda are busy threatening members of the Awakening movement. While I was sitting with him, Abu Ibrahim al Azawi got a mobile phone text message from an al-Qaeda member.

“We will put you in the sewer,” it read, “like all unbelievers who sell their souls for dollars.”

The message continued: “You are the shoes of the worshippers of the cross.” Showing the sole of a shoe is a profound Arab insult. [Full story]

(Had to include that last sentence for Angry Arab, who gets a kick out of foreign journalists explaining that “showing the sole of a shoe is a profound Arab insult.”)

Along the same lines, see Robert Dreyfuss’ phone interview with another Awakening commander:

The commander of the Sunni-led Awakening movement in Baghdad says that attacks by the Iraqi government and government-allied militiamen against Awakening leaders and rank-and-file members are likely to spark a new Sunni resistance movement. That resistance force will conduct attacks against American troops and Iraqi army and police forces, he says. “Look around,” he says. “It has already come back. It is getting stronger. Look at what is happening in Baghdad.” [Full story]

780 Contractor Wants Immunity in Abu Ghraib Suits

Yeah, I’ll bet they do…

HAGERSTOWN, Maryland (AP) — Defense contractor CACI claims it should be immune from lawsuits alleging torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, saying it was doing the U.S. government’s work as a supplier of interrogators.

The Maryland-based company and its sister, CACI Premier Technology, say in court documents that they’ll ask for the charges to be dismissed next week.

Eleven U.S. soldiers were convicted of breaking military laws in the Abu Ghraib scandal but no contractors have faced charges.

CACI and another contractor, L-3 Communications, are accused in separate lawsuits of a conspiracy to torture detainees in 2003 and 2004.

Plaintiffs attorneys said the company’s claim of immunity has no merit.

While we’re on the subject of the United States abroad, see this response to the U.S. presidential debate from Pakistani dentist and blogger Awab Alvi.

768 The Limits of Sanctions on Iran

My former Farsi teacher, Kouross Esmaeli, argues (with Ramin Karimian) that the sanctions on Iran are not having the desired effect:

While the US pressures do pose a nuisance, they are in no way destabilizing the regime. In fact, for the section of the Iranian ruling elite who advocate greater independence from the West, such pressures are only further proof of US injustices. Moreover, the US economic sanctions, putting a Western face on the structural roots of Iran’s economic problems, create a greater opportunity — an impetus as well as an excuse — to advance their domestic and international agenda. So, even as the sanctions compound the changes Iran’s economy is going through, the Iranian government is capable of managing their impacts.

The full article contains some useful reporting from Tehran, as well as this analysis of current Iranian politics:

Despite his image in the West, this is the primary role that President Ahmadinejad is playing inside Iran: he is using the autocratic and repressive state apparatus to privatize public industries, weaken labor laws, and take away government subsidies. He is, of course, doing so with an eye on building a stronger base for the regime and for his own re-election campaign next year. And in that sense, Ahmadinejad is becoming a double-edged sword for the leadership of the Islamic Republic. He is at once re-mobilizing some of the popular support for the regime and building a base for himself in order to operate as independently as possible. He recently voiced frustration at the limitations on the powers of the President to implement his vision, the same frustration that former President Khatami expressed a few years ago and was denounced widely as being out of step with the regime. So, while Supreme Leader Khamenei has proclaimed his pleasure at President Ahmadinejad’s strong stand against the West and has even hinted that the President should expect to be re-elected to a second term next year, establishment politicians such as former President Rafsanjani and former Speaker of the Parliament Nategh-Nouri have deepened their criticism of Ahmadinejad, his economic policies, and his attempts at repressing competitors.

In this process, one of the interesting outcomes of Ahmadinjead’s leadership is the fact that a layer of the ruling (and relatively more liberal) clerics are being marginalized at the hands of lay technocrats. Many of these technocrats are veterans of the Iran-Iraq war, and they see themselves as, once again, picking up the banner of the Islamic Revolution from the indolence-prone mullahs. They hope to further the independence of Iran while supporting other developing countries suffering under Western imperialism. The nuclear program plays the ideological role of buttressing this sense of independence, and there are no forces inside Iran who are allowed to openly disagree with it. Because of the West’s choice to ignore the Khatami presidency’s desire for rapprochement, President Ahmadinejad can say his own strong stand against the Western pressures is the only way to deal with Iran’s adversaries. And as far as the Iranian establishment is concerned, he has been proven right. The current negotiations between the West and Iran have come to allow Iran a lot more leeway than those under President Khatami, whose nuclear negotiation team was willing to accept the West’s preconditions before starting dialogue. The West rejected President Khatami’s overture, whereas President Ahmadinejad can point to his own success at bringing the West to the negotiating table under more favorable and just terms for Iran.

Interesting. I frankly don’t know enough to comment, but I’m curious to hear better-informed readers’ responses…

760 Detainee Abuse in Iraq

U.S. Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, an interrogation expert, tells the Senate Armed Services Committee what he saw in Iraq:

Kleinman told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his two colleagues forcibly stripped an Iraqi prisoner naked, shackled him, and left him standing in a dank, six-foot cement cell with orders to the guards that the prisoner was not to move for 12 hours. They could intervene only if he passed out, Kleinman said his two colleagues told the guards.

Had the prisoner passed out, he would have hit his head on a wall, Kleinman said. […]

Kleinman also detailed sitting in on another interrogation. An Iraqi prisoner was on his knees in a room painted all black with a light shining in his face. Behind him stood an American guard slapping an iron bar against his palm. After every question the Iraqi answered, his military interrogators slapped him across the face. That had been going on for 30 minutes.

In related news, a federal appeals court has upheld a 2006 ruling that the U.S. Department of Defense must release photographs showing the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. See the ACLU’s press release.

748 Iran and the Arabs, via New York

Everyone likes to make fun of the Egyptian Gazette, perhaps because when they do get a real scoop, such as a proper interview with the President of Iran, they slap this introduction on it:

New York – Probably the most interesting political leader for many is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with his controversial comment over the Holocaust made just a month after he took the office in 2005.

Afwan? Read on for the astonishing spectacle of a government-owned paper printing, on its front page, the accusation that Arab governments’ policies are dictated by the United States. (Sometimes I think the government press may be opening up. And then I remember the “Why do we love you, Mr. President? Let us count the ways” coverage of Mubarak’s birthday in Al-Ahram last May 4. “Arab governments” is just vague enough to make it into the paper.)

On a related note, see CNN’s record of a conversation between five former U.S. secretaries of state. They all agree the next president should talk to Iran. James Baker’s criticism of Bush for not engaging more with Syria to pry it out of its alliance with Iran made headlines. This didn’t:

And I think a well-placed, quiet, private phone call to the Iranian leadership, if you can find out which leaders to talk to, to the effect, “Look, if you do so much as aim a missile or anything else toward Israel or toward anything else, toward Israel or toward us, our strategic nuclear deterrent can be re-aimed in 20 seconds,” they would understand that, I think.

Henry Kissinger, fresh from instructing Sarah Palin on the finer points of clandestine carpet bombing, also chimes in. Worth the detour.

While we’re on the subject of U.S. relations with “Arab governments,” I should note Saad ad-Din Ibrahim’s continued support for conditionality in U.S. aid to Egypt.

732 UN Agency Eyes Curbs on Internet Anonymity

While all eyes were elsewhere:

A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.

The U.S. National Security Agency is also participating in the “IP Traceback” drafting group, named Q6/17, which is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. Members of Q6/17 have declined to release key documents, and meetings are closed to the public.

The potential for eroding Internet users’ right to remain anonymous, which is protected by law in the United States and recognized in international law by groups such as the Council of Europe, has alarmed some technologists and privacy advocates. Also affected may be services such as the Tor anonymizing network.

“What’s distressing is that it doesn’t appear that there’s been any real consideration of how this type of capability could be misused,” said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. “That’s really a human rights concern.” [Please read the full article from CNet]

Meanwhile, back in Egypt:

• Residents of Dowaiqa, the slum flattened by falling rocks last week, have again clashed with police in the neighborhood. When you hear that the government deployed heavy security, but left rescue efforts largely to the residents themselves while rescue workers napped in the shade, you can understand why. Two stories in English stand out: This one, from AP’s Lee Keath and Maggie Michael, and this one, from The National‘s Nadia Abu al-Magd.
• Hossam Badrawy, chairman of the ruling NDP’s Education Committee, and an MP widely touted as one of the party’s leading reformers: “No new policies at NDP conference.”
• Allegations that “all the people were tortured” ahead of a State Security trial for the Mahalla detainees. For first-hand accounts from the trial, see journalist Sarah Carr’s blog.
• The Economist, taking a broad view of fin-du-regime Egypt, asks “Will the dam break?”

653 A 9/11 Carpetbagger Speaks

After September 2001, foreigners in Egypt, as a group, began to change. They used to be a motley collection of scholarly oddballs with an interest in Medieval weaponry, hieroglyphics, or Ottoman bureaucracy, scam artists with an interest in getting rich on oil or USAID contracts, or Marines with an interest in getting the hell out of here, and, if possible, getting drunk and laid in the meantime. I liked the scholarly oddballs and the Marines best.

International flotsam and jetsam of the kind you find the world over—criminals, pill-freaks, pot-heads, freeloaders, misfits, adventurers, fallen priests—would also drift in and out of town. Let’s call them “Flo” and “Sam” for short. Flo and Sam used to (and perhaps still do) congregate at the fleabitten Hotel al-Shams, which had a decent cafe where local parasites thronged to take advantage of them. I went once to find my old roommate, a shifty felucca captain with a criminal record and a good heart, after he disappeared with some of my girlfriend’s money. I watched the little symbiotic ecosystem in that cafe for hours and wasn’t once bored.

Flo and Sam would also drift into Bab al-Luq’s landmark Cafeteria al-Hurreya, where they would rub shoulders with artists, revolutionaries, real-estate agents, informers, human-rights lawyers, small-time crooks, slow suicides, journalists, and other undesirables with a shared interest in beer.

To be fair, Hurreya also catered to chess players and distinguished gentlemen such as the one who once graced the masthead of this blog. And to be fair, Flo and Sam sometimes stopped drifting, got serious and got respectable jobs: Even the former U.S. ambassador sometimes recalled his days as a shaggy-haired backpacker in Egypt, and I genuinely believe those days gave him an affinity for the country that few of his predecessors shared.

Other times, Flo and Sam got motorcycles and set off on the road to South Africa, often without any inkling that it would end somewhere in the violent and pestilential swamps of southern Sudan or, for them, at a checkpoint somewhere outside of Assiut.

Stupid, yes, naive, OK—but also adventuresome and interesting! The past few times I’ve been to Hurreya myself, I’ve been driven off by huge groups of straight-laced arriviste interns from Virginia. The kind of kids voted “most likely to run for student office, again.” Resume-padding, self-promoting bounders.

In Cairo, the boys sometimes wear beards and sandals to look more Muslimy, as if passersby will not see their blue eyes and rich-boy smirks, their mall-bought clothes, their straight, white teeth, or their glowing, pink, oxygen-fed complexions. Bent over Al-Kitab in Starbucks back in Washington or New York, sustained through dreary hours of memorizing conjugation tables by lattes and glamorous dreams of being a CIA agent or testifying to Congress, they lose the beards and the sandals in favor of outfits from Banana Republic™ or Urban Outfitters™. They remind me of Gary Johnston on his daring trip to Cairo.

I admire their sense of purpose and their discipline, but I don’t trust this new crop of Americans learning Arabic. Many of them seem to be learning Arabic because they want jobs with the CIA or with outfits that cherry-pick the worst of Arab writing to bolster the case for Israel. I met one such Israeli-American at a student party here once. I wasted five minutes listening to him telling me how genetically rotten Egyptians were and how glad he was to be going back to Israel before I was able to extricate myself from the conversation.

It’s great that Americans, including wannabe CIA agents, are learning Arabic. It’s too bad it took a terrorist attack to inspire them. But America needs honest reporters. The Israelis already supply information on the Arab world with an Israeli agenda. No need to duplicate their efforts.

Maybe all this stored-up irritation is why this Washington Post op-ed written by Alan Dershowitz‘s research assistant, Joel Pollak, has been irritating me like sand in my swimsuit over the past few weeks.

While I don’t love Al-Kitab (I blame that book for my premature hairloss), Pollak’s assertions about it don’t hold water. Where Pollak finds totalitarian propaganda, most everyone else who has used the book finds only anodyne language exercises. Pollak tells us how he, like the ancient Israelites refusing to bow to Caesar, heroically refused to read a passage about Nasser to practice his pronunciation because it was propaganda. Here’s the passage as translated by a commenter on Matthew Yglesias’ blog:

Gamal Abdel Nasser was born in Egypt in 1918 and spent his childhood in Alexandria where his father worked in the post office. When his mother died, his father sent him to his uncle in Cairo. After his graduation from high school, he joined the Egyptian army and became an officer. He and a group of young officers called the ‘Free Officers’ ejected King Faruq from Egypt on 23 July 1952 and thus Egypt became a republic. In 1954 Abdel Nasser became the first president of Egypt, and remained president until his death in 1970. Afterwards, Anwar al-Sadat assumed the presidency of Egypt. Nasser’s most noted achievements included the nationalization of the Suez Canal, the United Arabic Republic, and the High Dam in Aswan.

Dangerous, downright un-American stuff.

In fact, Pollak’s article is thin on what he finds objectionable in Al-Kitab. His teacher showed a movie (apparently unrelated to Al-Kitab) on the life of (12th Century Andalusian Aristotle scholar) Averroes. Pollak was upset the movie didn’t mention that Jews translated Averroes’ writings into Latin. An interesting fact, and another important contribution the Jews have given to Western civilization, but hardly a fact that is essential to comprehending irregular Arabic verbs. By Pollak’s logic, Al-Kitab should also include at least a footnote in the section on reading menus that explains that Israelis also call felafel “Israeli cuisine.”

Pollak complains that Al-Kitab introduces students to Arab culture through a central character, Maha (“Maha Muhammed Abulaal, [Note the scary Muslim name!] to be precise”), whose fictional life he finds depressing. Maha is comically morose, it’s true. But so what? And if Pollak finds Maha’s life straddling New York and restaurants on the banks of the Nile depressing, he should try the life of the millions who don’t have mothers working at the United Nations and who can’t afford visas and plane tickets to New York.

He complains that the book is full of pre-September 11 biases. I’m not sure what this means. Perhaps it should be updated: Maha could dream of coming to the United States, spend months begging family members for the requisite funds to deposit in her bank account to get a visa, be denied that visa after the first attempt, succeed on a third attempt after enduring hours of rudeness and interminable waits at the U.S. Embassy, then be fingerprinted, photographed, and interrogated for hours in the “Muslim Room” at JFK. Then she could be briefly detained on a TIP for “talking Middle Eastern” on Atlantic Avenue. Are these the post-September 11 biases a language textbook should reflect?

One rather suspects that Pollak is studying Arabic so he can find the worst things written or said in that language. In starting with his textbook even before he’s finished learning, he has ejaculated prematurely. My advice to him would be, “Sit tight. As you continue to read Arabic, you will find plenty of ignorant, racist, or otherwise offensive garbage—as you will in English—and plenty of bonafide propaganda for dictatorships. Patience, young Israel-firster. Your career is assured by Dr. Dershowitz.”

Pollak’s slight of hand has been dissected elsewhere (here, here, here, and here), and his piece has been satirized here. I’ve been gratified by the response from other students of Arabic (see especially this wonderfully nerdy discussion of Al-Kitab‘s pedagogical shortcomings). It has reassured me that not all the students I see turning a venerable Cairo cafe into a dormitory mess hall are wannabe MEMRI translators.

For them, the honest ones who nonetheless are studying Arabic for careerist purposes, I have one word of advice: Mandarin.

644 ‘Crap Cannon’

As one who sometimes monitors demonstrations in Egypt, I hope this isn’t on the Egyptian government’s U.S.-military-aid shopping list:

FOX News: Political activists planning protest rallies at the upcoming Democratic Convention in Denver have their stomachs in knots over a rumor about a crowd control weapon – known as the “crap cannon” – that might be unleashed against them.

Also called “Brown Note,” it is believed to be an infrasound frequency that debilitates a person by making them defecate involuntarily.

Mark Cohen, co-founder of Re-create 68, an alliance of local activists working for the protection of first amendment rights, said he believes this could be deployed at the convention in August to subdue crowds.

“We know this weapon and weapons like it have been used at other large protests before,” he said.

Update: It’s a myth. Can’t believe anything you see/read on Fox.

643 Obama on the Nile (and just West of it)

Recently I visited Cairo and ate a sumptuous dinner by the Nile with some American-educated guys the government sent my way because they can “talk the talk,” and everyone knows the Americans eat that shit up. There was also a rich businessman with good political connections, likely a member of the American Chamber of Commerce. Knowing that I’m a columnist at a Democrat newspaper, they seemed excited at the prospect of an Obama presidency.

I met with an Embassy guy who privately liked Obama. He told me about many similar dinners with similar people, but I also met with our local bureau chief, who told me about an encounter he’d had with an ordinary person once. I talked to a few people who complained about Obama’s stance on Israel, on his casually asserting that Jerusalem is the “eternal, undivided” capital of Israel. They complained about America’s policy on Israel in general, but we won’t get in to that. What I really want to talk about is how we can all give ourselves a pat on the back for letting a black man get this far.

Come to think of it, this is boring. Let’s talk about Col. Muammar al-Qadhafi instead. He’s predictably zany and insulting. I’m just predictable.

If we’re going to talk about North African views on Obama, let’s hear from a (albeit eccentric) North African. According to Brother Leader, “our Kenyan brother’s” comments on Jerusalem were either a lie to help him get elected or stemmed from insecurity about the color of his skin.

“We tell him to be proud of himself as a black and to feel that all of Africa is behind him,” Brother Leader said.

I’m still chuckling. For the sake of harmony between nations, I hope Obama is too.

640 ‘The Lobby’ in the News

Two items:

• Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, barred from speaking at many American universities, are going to Israel to talk about the Israel lobby.
• Sen. Barack Obama’s nauseating performance at AIPAC, in which he gave away occupied East Jerusalem with one careless line in exchange for votes and campaign contributions he probably already had. Disappointing because he set a policy on Jerusalem that will come back to haunt him and the Arab residents of East Jerusalem should he become president. Disappointing because after all his talk about standing up to the poisonous influence of lobbies in Washington, Obama paid obeisance to one of the most poisonous, only hours after clinching the Democratic nomination. I suppose he was talking about the evil clean-air lobby, the sinister no-nuke lobby, and those fifth-columnists, American farmers.
  The remarks were noticed in the Egyptian press.

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