The Skeptic الشكاك

792 ‘Amnesia Was Our Preferred State’

I am really trying not to write about the U.S. elections, but I’ll make an exception for Joan Didion, my favorite living American journalist:

Audio via The New York Review of Books. I stopped listening to the other audio clips after I heard Mark Danner’s unintentional parody of a moaning New York intellectual: “We are in the depths of a quadrennial phase which I’m going to call the time of Democratic fear and loathing.” You can’t make this stuff up.

While you’re there, see Peter Galbraith on Iraq: “George W. Bush has put the United States on the side of undemocratic Iraqis who are Iran’s allies. John McCain would continue the same approach. It is hard to understand how this can be called a success—or a path to victory.”

790 Hostages Freed

Thank God. And it’s the top news in Ghana.

787 Sudanese Forces Clash with Kidnappers

Sudanese government officials are telling reporters that the Sudanese forces killed six men accused of complicity in the abduction of 11 tourists and eight Egyptian guides after a high-speed chase through the desert. The Sudanese say they captured two people involved, who said that the hostages had been moved to Chad. If all the reports coming out have been true, then the hostages have been moved from Egypt, across the border to Sudan, across the border into Libya, then back into Sudan, and again across the border into Chad.

785 Ibrahim Eissa to Serve Two Months in Prison

Reuters:

CAIRO (Reuters) – An Egyptian appeals court sentenced the outspoken editor of a local independent daily newspaper to two months in prison on Sunday and the editor said he would show up to serve the sentence.

“I’ve decided to turn myself in,” Ibrahim Issa, executive editor of the al-Dustour newspaper, told Reuters.

Issa was not present when the verdict was announced, according to court sources.

“I believe this ruling opens the gates of hell to Egyptian journalism. It takes us back to square one,” he said.

Issa was sentenced to six months in jail with labour in March for publishing false news about President Hosni Mubarak’s health but was released pending appeal. [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.

776 Two and a Half Disasters

• A car bomb killed 17 people near an important Shia shrine in Syria yesterday, putting a chink in the government’s reputation for keeping the country under lock and key and raising fears of sectarian spillover from Iraq.
• Egypt’s National Theater caught fire last night. Three firefighters were killed. The damage looks bad. Considering the Shura Council fire was only a month ago, it’s easy to see why some see both disasters as symptoms of decay.
• A disaster in the making? Al-Masry al-Youm reports that residents of Istable Antar, a slum in the shadows of Cairo’s Moqattam cliffs, are putting gas tanks and sulfuric acid on their roofs. According to the newspaper, they’re threatening to blow themselves up if the government proceeds with its plans to demolish the neighborhood and move the inhabitants out to the desert for fear of another Manshayat-Nasser-style disaster.
  But can we believe Al-Masry al-Youm anymore? The paper has become more and more unreliable over the past year or so, and this one in particular smacks of sensationalist rumor, or, more charitably, of loose talk from residents defiantly beating their chests in the face of the bulldozers. I’m particularly suspicious because I have heard at least one story of a government journalist spreading false rumors that residents of Manshayat Nasser had stabbed reporters, presumably so the rumor-monger wouldn’t be assigned to go back into the slum on security grounds. Along the same lines, see also Amnesiac‘s account of her middle-class colleague who feared Istable Antar’s poor as a terrifying mass just waiting to extract revenge on his hoity-toity, English-speaking ass.

773 Syrian General ‘Killed for Role in Nuclear Investigation’

The Associated Press:

The chief UN nuclear inspector says a Syrian official taking part in his agency’s investigation of an alleged covert atomic program in the country has been assassinated.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, gave no names or details, but he appeared to be referring to the killing of Brigadier General Mohammed Suleiman last month.

[Full Story]

770 Internet Users of Cairo, Unite!

I originally posted this rant on Facebook, rather than here, because I doubted it would be of interest to most readers. Some of the responses, appended anonymously at the end, were interesting. But it was only when I discovered that Ogle Earth had created a Google Map of cafes still offering free wifi in Cairo that I decided to republish the rant (thank you, Ogle Earth).

Here’s where to take your business and your laptop:

View Larger Map

(If you know of any other places that have yet to fall into the evil Link.net/Mobinil monopoly’s clutches, follow Ogle Earth’s instructions on how to add them to the map.)

Original post follows:

Link.net and Mobinil, having established a near monopoly on what used to be free wifi connections at over-priced coffee shops in Cairo, have now started charging for the service and requiring customers to provide their email address and mobile phone numbers—valuable information for advertisers, spammers, and security agencies. If the companies mine customers’ browsing history for interests and neuroses, that information becomes even more valuable. A clever business plan, but customers don’t need to play along.

I should say first that I know that this is a petty gripe, and that you’re probably not interested. If you don’t live in Cairo, you’re almost certainly not interested. You may want to stop reading now.

Until a few months ago, it was easier to find a free Internet connection in Cairo than it was most anywhere else in the world. Considering that in the year 2000 I used to have to walk an hour and cross a bridge to get a slow connection from a grimy Internet cafe, this was a wonderful and speedy change.

Universal dial-up for the cost of a local phone call helped a lot. But why bother with this when you could get free wireless Internet at something approaching broadband speeds in a swish coffee shop? Free wifi and a space where women could drink coffee and even smoke in public without attracting judgmental stares encouraged demand for ridiculously priced, lousy cappuccinos and similarly ridiculously priced, soggy-white-bread sandwiches. Coffee shop empires were born on the back of free Internet and $4 cups of coffee (in a country where a better cup is still widely available for 20 cents).

As a freelancer, I came to depend on these cafes. I made them my office. Yes, the bill for an afternoon of coffee and juice could be 20 percent of what I’d earn from an assignment. Yes, I could probably have done my work more cheaply at an Internet cafe, paying by the hour (or certainly at home… but as any freelancer knows, sometimes it’s worth the money to get out of the house). Yes, the coffee was usually crap masquerading as something with an Italian name. Yes, each coffee cost about as much as a taxi driver grosses in an afternoon if the traffic is particularly bad. Yes, I’d have to spend the afternoon smelling teen hormones and listening to really abysmal music. And yes, I was turning my back on one of the best things about Cairo: its centuries-old cafe culture. But for the price, I’d get natural light, free air-conditioning, a guy bringing me fresh juice whenever I desired, and, most importantly, a decent wifi connection.

When I first logged on to the Internet at one of these places and saw a log-on screen from Mobinil and Link.net, I knew what was coming. The screen didn’t require anything. Just that I press a button saying “Activate” at the beginning of the session. I was annoyed when it didn’t work, which was fairly often at first. But more than anything, I resented the inevitable loss of my free Internet connection. This was the first step in conditioning consumers.

Over the months, more and more of the chains signed up for the Link/Mobinil service. I guessed the companies were offering the cafes free Internet (I can’t think of any other reason why the cafes would sign up). When Link.net and Mobinil established a near total monopoly on the swish-coffeeshop-wifi market, they introduced the next phase: users were required to sell their email address and mobile phone number in exchange for as little as three minutes of free wifi.

Judging from the number of people I still saw with laptops in these cafes, a surprising number of people took them up on the deal. Personally, I made the calculation that the inevitable SMS and email spam wasn’t worth the Internet connection.

At the time, Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas, a local human-rights NGO, and some journalists complained that the new regime robbed users of privacy and anonymity and made it easier for the security agencies to match activity with users. These are valid concerns. But the security agencies could snoop into traffic and match users with activity before. The monopoly just made it easier by centralizing the records on Link.net’s servers. And I haven’t seen any evidence that this initiative was driven by the security agencies, rather than by the capitalistic instincts of the companies involved.

Anyway, I’ve stopped going to the lousy coffee shops, but I hear the Link.net/Mobinil juggernaut has now moved on to the inevitable next step: Charging for access. Now, I already pay Link.net for horrible service at home, not because I want to (I have tried to cancel several times), but because Link.net, perhaps aware that their service is crap, has made it so difficult to cancel their service and to switch to the competition that only the most determined and irate customers will deem it worth their time. I’m not paying Link for the privilege of using their crap service outside the home. (Incidentally, I know two people who successfully got out of Link.net’s incompetent clutches: One got a new phone line—no easy task. The other spent weeks losing work days sitting on hold, having circular arguments, and driving to Mohandisseen, eventually succeeding only by insulting religion. But that’s another story.)

OK, so yes, I’m an unhappy Link.net customer. I’m also a relatively happy Mobinil customer. That’s not the point. I don’t begrudge Link.net and Mobinil their fiendishly clever and well-executed plan. But as a former patron of lousy, over-priced coffeeshops who now spends too much time at home, I have a personal interest in seeing their plan fail. If you’ve read this far, you probably do too.

Here’s what I suggest: If you are a customer, do not patronize cafes with a Mobinil/Link.net connection. Ask if the wifi is provided by Link.net and Mobinil. If it is, leave—ideally after telling the manager why you are leaving. There are still a few cafes who haven’t joined the monopoly. Go there, and ideally tell the manager why you have come. If these last hold-outs disappear, buy a Vodafone wireless modem card and take your laptop to a proper ahwa that makes good, Turkish coffee and serves shisha. Swallow your shame and try to ignore the stares when you open your laptop.

If you are a cafe manager, don’t participate in the monopoly. What are you paying for your broadband Internet connection, anyway? LE 500 a month? How much money, on average, does a regular customer spend at your place? LE 50? How often in the course of a month do they come? Maybe 10 times? If you lose two customers to save LE 500 on your Internet bill, you are losing money.

If you own a cafe that serves good, Turkish coffee and shisha at sane prices, please install wifi on TE-DATA’s network… and let me know. If you are an entrepreneur, please start such a cafe. Make it a place where women could go without feeling uncomfortable. You could even charge LE 15 for a coffee. I’d still come.

Selected comments after the break:
More…

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…

766 Israeli Terrorists Injure 73-Year-Old Professor

From the dangerous nutjob file:

At 1 a.m., Zeev Sternhell went out to the lock his garden gate when a pipe bomb exploded, causing him minor injuries. An unknown organization claimed responsibility and leaflets were found in the area calling for the establishment of “the Judean Kingdom” and a halachic state (based on Jewish, not secular law) in Judea and Samaria. The leaflets also offered a 1.1 million NIS reward (about $333,600) for killing a member of the left-wing organization Peace Now.

[Full story from Babylon and Beyond and Haaretz. Thanks, SP]

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