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2011-11-12T21:33:00.000-05:00

Libya's oil-rich east bids for power

2011-10-05T12:10:00.002-04:00

(Reuters) - Libya's eastern city of Benghazi would risk fading back into obscurity after a six-month interlude as the seat of the rebel government were it not for one powerful asset: oil.

Benghazi residents are struggling to convert their wartime sacrifices into economic clout to restore the status of a city once deemed on a par with the capital, Tripoli, and rescue it from its relative obscurity in the Muammar Gaddafi era.

Under Gaddafi, Benghazi was at the mercy of Tripoli for its share of state funding, even though most of this is generated from nearby eastern oil fields. Libya's economy is almost entirely reliant on oil and gas revenue.

Cradle of the anti-Gaddafi revolt, Benghazi had languished low on the deposed ruler's list of spending priorities, which many see as punishment for a tradition of eastern resistance to his 42 years of one-man rule -- and to Tripoli's dominance.

"There's a feeling of entitlement in Benghazi and they want rewards. They held the fort for six months and this came on the back of a period of repression," said a Libyan oil industry source in the city where the interim National Transitional Council (NTC) set up its headquarters early in the revolt.

Youssef Mahmoud, an engineer at Jowef Oil, a subsidiary of the state National Oil Corporation (NOC), typifies the sort of grassroots resource regionalism that has the potential to shake up the North African country's bedrock industry.

He heads a group of about 4,000 state oil workers called the February 17 Oil Committee, and is lobbying Libya's interim rulers for a "greater say in oil policy" that would be symbolized by moving NOC headquarters from Tripoli to Benghazi.

"Gaddafi took it (the NOC) to Tripoli because he wanted control. But where are the fields?" complained Mahmoud, jabbing his finger at a map of Libya, showing a large clump of black circles representing oil fields in the eastern Sirte Basin.

The east supplies more than 60 percent of oil exports and much of Libya's untapped oil is thought to be in this region, including the virgin Kufra Basin near the Sudanese border.

Libya has Africa's largest oil reserves.

Benghazi residents hope oil revenue, worth around $130 million a day at current Brent prices, can fuel an economic revival in the east, from cleaning up the streets to promoting new industries such as tourism.

"It's not just oil, we have beautiful places," said Ali, who works in a youth hostel in Benghazi.

Old postcards in hotel cabinets remind visitors of the city's former charms. One shows the long, crescent-shaped Italian 'Lungomare', or seaside promenade, with its Doric columns and distinctive double-domed Catholic cathedral. Another pictures Juliana Beach full of happy, paddling children.

Today, seafront visitors encounter the near-ubiquitous smell of sewage and rusting carcasses of broken-down cars.

POINT OF NO RETURN

It may be hard for Libya's new rulers to ignore Benghazi's demands, given the role the city played in initiating the revolt against Gaddafi in February and spearheading a NATO-backed military campaign that has pushed his troops back to Sirte.

Eastern Libya's many former rebel brigades will not want to see their region lose out in the post-Gaddafi era -- although fighters from the Western Mountains and Misrata may be just as keen to turn their military exploits into political power.

Benghazi's trump card, however, is oil.

"When armed local stakeholders, and perhaps militias, start saying this oil is on our territory, it becomes an emerging political risk," said Henry Smith, Libya analyst at London-based consultancy Control Risks.

Besides the city's well-documented political and military roles, the Benghazi-based Arabian Gulf Oil Company (Agoco) played a vital role for Libya in selling oil and buying fuel when international sanctions had incapacitated the NOC.

This inverted the relationship between the parent company and its subsidiary, perhaps irreversibly.

A senior NOC source said plans were in place to wrest control back from Agoco by mid-October, but added that the relationship between the two firms would likely have to alter.

"There will be a struggle for power. The NOC wants to go back to its old role and Agoco is saying that it supported the revolution so it wants a bigger say," he said.

"It wants a commercial basis. Agoco wants to get some profits from the operations."

In an indication of the simmering tensions, a source within Agoco referred to the NOC as "Bab al-Aziziya for the oil sector" -- the name of Gaddafi's fortified compound in Tripoli.

OLD AND NEW RIVALRIES

Healing the historical east-west rifts, and new ones that have emerged during the revolution, will be a key test for interim rulers in the factionalized and heavily-armed country.

Cultural divisions between Tripoli and Benghazi pre-date Roman times when Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were separate provinces. Libya's Senussi kings were from the east and Benghazi was seen as Tripoli's equal before army officers led by Gaddafi toppled King Idris in 1969.

Months of conflict have reinforced a sense of distance between Tripoli and Benghazi, 1,000 km (625 miles) apart.

Poor telephone links mean Libyans must dial internationally between the two cities. Gaddafi forces are still holding out in the coastal city of Sirte, impeding traffic on the main east-west highway and forcing travelers to fly via a NATO air corridor in the Mediterranean or to go by ship.

Benghazi's ambitions for economic power in the new Libya may sound aspirational, but some politicians may be listening.

All three foreign leaders who visited Libya in September -- French, British and Turkish -- chose to visit the city.

"(French President Nicolas) Sarkozy has given a message by coming to speak in Benghazi. He is saying that Benghazi should not be ignored," said Nasser Ahdash, head of the National Forum, a political group which has helped organize marches to back demands that Benghazi should be Libya's economic capital.

In another nod to the eastern city, NTC leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil, from eastern Libya himself, has not yet moved to Tripoli from Benghazi. Initially, his foot-dragging was seen as linked to security concerns. Now it looks more political.

The NTC's vice-chairman and spokesman, Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, said the move would not happen until Libya is fully "liberated" from Gaddafi and that the NTC would not abandon Benghazi.

"We will keep a base for the NTC. Benghazi is necessary."

(Additional reporting by Rania El Gamal; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

source

Tribal friction cripples advance on Gaddafi bastion

2011-09-11T20:46:00.001-04:00

(Reuters) - - Secret informants and tribal frictions have stalled efforts by Libyan interim government troops to establish control over one of Muammar Gaddafi's last remaining bastions of resistance.

At Bani Walid, a besieged city still loyal to the deposed leader, anti-Gaddafi fighters said traitors among their ranks were passing information to Gaddafi loyalists inside the city, making progress difficult on one of the last frontlines of Libya's 7-month-long war.

The interim government has sent additional brigades to Bani Walid -- home to Libya's biggest tribe, the Warfalla -- to help take the stubborn city. But some fighters on the ground said the move had only added tension to existing tribal sensitivities.

"Locals don't listen to NTC (interim government) commanders," said one fighter, Esam Herebish. "They do what they like. They want to be seen as the city's liberators."

Others openly accused some local Warfalla fighters of betrayal following days of fierce fighting.

"We believe there are traitors among them," said Muhamed el Gahdi, a fighter from the coastal city of Khoms.

He said suspected informants were feeding information to Gaddafi forces about his unit's movements, leading to an ambush on Sunday in which one fighter was killed.

"When we go into the city we trust no one. We don't need Bani Walid fighters. We need bigger weapons and artillery."

Progress was not visible following days of fighting. Bani Walid is still under Gaddafi's control. Explosions boom around the steep, sun-scorched valleys that surround the city from the north as forces loyal to the deposed leader continue to shell rebel positions.

Inside Bani Walid, loyalist gunmen holed up in the hilly city center fire relentlessly from rooftops and pour oil down the streets to block rebel advances, fighters said.

NATO warplanes bombed Gaddafi artillery positions on Saturday to help anti-Gaddafi forces advance into the city but fighters said the air strikes had done little to change the picture.

Gazing down into a dusty valley from a rocky hill, one fighter said he had not expected remnants of Gaddafi's once mighty force to be still so relentless.

"They are firing mortars. Last night we came under a hail of Grad rockets. I don't know what we are going to do now," said the fighter, Mohamed Ibrahim. "I have to admit they have more experience. This front is very difficult."

Others suggested tensions existed even among committed Warfalla fighters because of their close tribal links to the people inside the city.

"Bani Walid fighters say it's their town, they want to liberate it themselves," said el Gahdi, the Khoms fighter. "But when they see their uncles' or cousins' homes they don't want to shoot. This town is difficult. It's strange."

TRIBAL TENSIONS

Relations between Warfalla fighters and their comrades from other parts of Libya have not been easy even on the surface, adding the element of tribal discord to the already complicated military picture.

Relations between tribes are a sensitive issue in Libya where Gaddafi deliberately magnified tribal divisions to maximise control over a fractured society.

At Bani Walid, these tensions were all too obvious.

A unit from Tripoli, deployed from the capital to help with the advance, was stopped at a checkpoint and made to wait on the side of the road as Bani Walid fighters streamed toward the city waving flags and flashing victory signs.

Tripoli fighters were disgruntled.

"Bani Walid people are not easy to work with. They think it's their town, they want to lead," said Hafid Bellal, a soldier from Tripoli's Tajoura neighbourhood.

"We are fighting for Libya, for freedom. We have liberated Benghazi, Nalut, Zintan. We are all Libyans."

Warfalla fighters themselves deny there are any tribal tensions.

"I am from the Warfalla. Of course if it's possible to liberate Bani Walid on our own, we would love to do that," said Salah Mohamed, a fighter, as he rested on a bench near a mosque north of the city after a day of fighting.

"We are not stopping anyone from helping us. If we have a chance, we would like to lead. But if that is not possible then we welcome help. We are all from the same tribe."

Special report: The secret plan to take Tripoli

2011-09-06T20:13:00.000-04:00

( Source )

(Reuters) - Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's regime was delivered by a caterer, on a memory stick.

Abdel Majid Mlegta ran the companies that supplied meals to Libyan government departments including the interior ministry. The job was "easy," he told Reuters last week. "I built good relations with officers. I wanted to serve my country."

But in the first few weeks of the uprising, he secretly began to work for the rebels. He recruited sympathizers at the nerve center of the Gaddafi government, pinpointed its weak links and its command-and-control strength in Tripoli, and passed that information onto the rebel leadership on a series of flash memory cards.

The first was handed to him, he says, by Gaddafi military intelligence and security officers. It contained information about seven key operations rooms in the capital, including internal security, the Gaddafi revolutionary committees, the popular guards -- as Gaddafi's voluntary armed militia was known -- and military intelligence.

The data included names of the commanders of those units, how many people worked in each center and how they worked, as well as crucial details like the number plates of their cars, and how each unit communicated with the central command led by intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi and Gaddafi's second son Saif al-Islam.

That memory card -- which Mlegta later handed to officials at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) -- provided the basis of a sophisticated plan to topple the Libyan dictator and seize Tripoli. The operation, which took months of planning, involved secretly arming rebel units inside the capital. Those units would help NATO destroy strategic targets in the city -- operation rooms, safe houses, military barracks, police stations, armored cars, radars and telephone centers. At an agreed time, the units would then rise up as rebels attacked from all sides.

The rebels called the plan Operation Dawn Mermaid. This is the inside story -- much of it never before told -- of how that plan unfolded.

The rebels were not alone. British operatives infiltrated Tripoli and planted radio equipment to help target air strikes and avoid killing civilians, according to U.S. and allied sources. The French supplied training and transport for new weapons. Washington helped at a critical late point by adding two extra Predator drones to the skies over Tripoli, improving NATO's ability to strike. Also vital, say western and rebel officials, was the covert support of Arab states such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Doha gave weapons, military training and money to the rebels.

By the time the rebels were ready for the final assault, they were so confident of success that they openly named the date and time of the attack: Saturday, August 20, at 8 p.m., just after most people in Tripoli broke their Ramadan fast.

"We didn't make it a secret," said Mohammed Gula, who led a pro-rebel political cell in central Tripoli and spoke to Reuters as rebels first entered Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziyah compound. "We said it out on the street. People didn't believe us. They believe us now."

THE DIGITAL GIFT

Planning began in April, two months into the uprising. Rebel leader Mahmoud Jibril and three other senior insurgents met in the Tunisian city of Djerba, according to both Mlegta and another senior official from the National Transitional Council (NTC), as the alternative rebel government calls itself.

The three were Mlegta, who by then had fled Tripoli and joined the rebels as the head of a brigade; Ahmed Mustafa al-Majbary, who was head of logistics and supplies; and Othman Abdel-Jalil, a scientist who became coordinator of the Tripoli plan.

Before he fled, Mlegta had spent just under two months working inside the regime, building up a network of sympathizers. At first, 14 of Gaddafi's officers were prepared to help. By the end there were 72, Mlegta says. "We used to meet at my house and sometimes at the houses of two other officers... We preserved the secrecy of our work and it was in coordination with the NTC executive committee."

Brigadier General Abdulsalam Alhasi, commander of the rebels' main operation center in Benghazi, said those secretly helping the rebels were "police, security, military, even some people from the cabinet; many, many people. They gave us information and gave instructions to the people working with them, somehow to support the revolution."

One of those was al-Barani Ashkal, commander-in-chief of the guard at Gaddafi's military compound in the suburbs of Tripoli. Like many, Ashkal wanted to defect, but was asked by the NTC to remain in his post where, Alhasi says, he would become instrumental in helping the rebels enter the city.

The rebel planning committee -- another four men would join later, making seven in all -- knew that the targets on the memory sticks were the key to crippling Gaddafi's forces. The men included Hisham abu Hajar, chief commander of the Tripoli Brigade, Usama Abu Ras, who liaised with some cells inside Tripoli, and Rashed Suwan, who helped financially and coordinated with the tribes of Tripoli to ease the rebels' entry.

According to Mlegta and to Hisham Buhagiar, a rebel colonel and the committee's seventh member, the group initially drew up a list of 120 sites for NATO to target in the days leading up to their attack.

Rebel leaders discussed their idea with French President Nicolas Sarkozy at a meeting at the Elysee Palace on April 20.

That meeting was one of five in Paris in April and May, according to Mlegta. Most were attended by the chiefs of staff of NATO countries involved in the bombing campaign, which had begun in March, as well as military officials from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

After presenting the rebels' plan "from A to Z", Mlegta handed NATO officials three memory cards: the one packed with information about regime strongholds in Tripoli; another with updated information on regime sites as well as details of 65 Gaddafi officers sympathetic to the rebels who had been secretly supplied with NATO radiophones; and a third which contained the plot to take Tripoli.

Sarkozy expressed enthusiasm for the plan, according to Mlegta and the senior NTC official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The leaders slimmed the 120 targets down to 82 and "assigned 2,000 armed men to go into Tripoli and 6,000 unarmed to go out (onto the streets) in the uprising," according to rebel colonel Buhagiar. He joined the opposition National Front for the Salvation of Libya in 1981 and has lived in the United States and trained as a special forces operative in both Sudan and Iraq.

There were already anti-Gaddafi cells in the capital that the rebels knew they could activate. "The problem was that we needed time," the senior NTC official said. "We feared that some units may go out into the streets in a spontaneous way and they would be quashed. We also needed time to smuggle weapons, fighters and boats."

In the early months of the uprising, pro-rebel fighters had slipped out of Tripoli and made their way to the north-western city of Misrata, where they were trained for the uprising, rebels in Misrata told Reuters in June. The leaders of two rebel units said "hundreds" of Tripoli residents had begun slipping back into the city by mid-July. Commander Alhasi and other rebel officers in Benghazi said the number of infiltrators sent into Tripoli was dozens, not hundreds.

"This was not D-Day," Alhasi told Reuters in his office.

"THE OVERSEAS BRIGADE"

Most of the infiltrators traveled to Tripoli by fishing trawler, according to Alhasi. They were equipped with light weapons -- rifles and sub-machineguns -- hand grenades, demolition charges and radios.

"We could call them and they could call each other," Alhasi said. "Most of them were volunteers, from all parts of Libya, and Libyans from overseas. Everybody wants to do something for the success of the revolution."

Although Tripoli was ostensibly under the control of Gaddafi loyalists, rebels said the security system was porous: bribery or other ruses could be used to get in and out. Small groups of men also began probing the government's security system with nighttime attacks on checkpoints, according to one operative who talked to Reuters in June.

It was possible to smuggle weapons into Tripoli, but it was easier and less risky -- if far more expensive -- to buy them from Gaddafi loyalists looking to make a profit before the regime collapsed. The going rate for a Kalashnikov in Tripoli was $5,000 over the summer; in Misrata the same weapon cost $3,000.

Morale got a boost when rebels broke into government communication channels and recorded 2,000 calls between the regime's top leadership, including a few with Gaddafi's sons, on everything from military orders to sex. The NTC mined the taped calls for information and broadcast some of them on rebel TV, a move that frightened the regime, according to the senior NTC source. "They knew then that we had infiltrated and broken into their ranks."

Recordings of two of the calls were also handed to the International Criminal Court. One featured Gaddafi's prime minister al-Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi threatening to burn the family of Abdel Rahman Shalgham, a one-time Libyan ambassador to the United Nations and an early defector to the rebels. Al-Mahmoudi described Shalgham as a slave. The other was between al-Mahmoudi and Tayeb al-Safi, minister of economy and trade; the pair joked about how the Gaddafi brigades would rape the women of Zawiyah when they entered the town.

Several allied and U.S. officials, as well as a source close to the Libyan rebels, said that around the beginning of May, foreign military trainers including British, French and Italian operatives, as well as representatives from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, began to organize serious efforts to hone the rebels into a more effective fighting force.

Most of the training happened in the rebel-held Western Mountains. But Eric Denece, a former French intelligence operative and now Director of the French Center for Research on Intelligence, says an elite rebel force of fighters from the east was trained both inside and outside Libya, at NATO bases and those of other allies. This "overseas brigade" was then dropped back into the country. In all, estimated Denece, some 100-200 foreign operatives were sent to Libya, where they focused on training and military coordination. Mlegta confirms that number.

FRENCH DROPS, BRITISH INFILTRATION

Rebel commander Alhasi insists western special forces were not involved in combat; the main help they gave was with the bombing campaign and training. London, Paris and Washington also say their troops were not involved in combat.

"They complied with our (bombing) requirements, immediately sometimes, sometimes we had a delay," said Alhasi, who has a big satellite photograph of Tripoli on one of his walls. "We had the information on the ground about the targets and relayed it to them."

A European official knowledgeable about such operations said "dozens" of plain-clothes French military advisers were sent to Libya. A French official said between 30 and 40 "military advisers" helped organize the rebels and trained them on basic weapons and more high-tech hardware.

In May, the French began smuggling weapons into western Libya. French military spokesmen later confirmed these arms drops, saying they were justified as "humanitarian support", but also briefing that the aim was to prepare for an advance on Tripoli.

British undercover personnel carried out some of the most important on-the-ground missions by allied forces before the fall of Tripoli, U.S. and allied officials told Reuters.

One of their key tasks, according to allied officials, was planting radio equipment to help allied forces target Gaddafi's military forces and command-and-control centers. This involved dangerous missions to infiltrate the capital, locate specific potential targets and then plant equipment so bomber planes could precisely target munitions, destroying sensitive targets without killing bystanders.

WASHINGTON'S ROLE

In mid-March, a month after violent resistance to Gaddafi's rule first erupted, President Obama had signed a sweeping top secret order, known as a covert operations "finding", which gave broad authorization to the CIA to support the rebels.

But while the general authorization encompassed a wide variety of possible measures, the presidential finding required the CIA to come back to the White House for specific permissions to move ahead and help them. Several U.S. officials said that, because of concerns about the rebels' disorganization, internal politics, and limited paramilitary capabilities, clandestine U.S. support on the ground never went much beyond intelligence collection.

U.S. officials acknowledge that as rebel forces closed in on Tripoli, such intelligence "collection" efforts by the CIA and other American agencies in Libya became very extensive and included efforts to help the rebels and other NATO allies track down Gaddafi and his entourage. But the Obama administration's intention, the officials indicated, was that if any such intelligence fell into American hands it would be passed onto others.

A senior U.S. defense official disclosed to Reuters details of a legal opinion showing the Pentagon would not be able to supply lethal aid to the rebels -- even with the U.S. recognition of the NTC.

"It was a legal judgment that the quasi-recognition that we gave to the NTC as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people didn't check the legal box to authorize us to be providing lethal assistance under the Arms Export Control Act," the senior official said.

HELP FROM THE GULF

In some ways the rebels' most unlikely ally was Qatar.

The Gulf Arab state is keen to downplay its role, perhaps understandably given that it is ruled by an absolute monarch. But on the ground, signs abounded of the emirate's support. The weapons and equipment the French brought in were mostly supplied by Qatar, according to rebel sources. In May, a Reuters reporter saw equipment in boxes clearly stamped "Qatar." It included mortar kits, military fatigues, radios and binoculars. At another location, Reuters saw new anti-tank missiles.

Qatar's decision to supply arms to the rebellion, one source close to the NTC told Reuters, was instigated by influential Libyan Islamist scholar Ali Salabi, who sought refuge in Qatar after fleeing Libya in the late 1990s. He had previously worked with Gaddafi's son Saif, to help rehabilitate Libyans who had fought in Afghanistan. Salabi's brother Ismael is also a leader of a rebel militia in Libya.

Salabi "is the link to the influential figures in Qatar, and convinced the Qataris to get involved," said the source close to the NTC.

HIRED GUNS

By early June, Libya seemed locked in a stalemate.

After three months of civil war, rebels had seized huge swathes of territory, but NATO bombing had failed to dislodge Gaddafi. The African Union said the only way forward was a ceasefire and negotiated peace. London joined Paris in suggesting that while Gaddafi must step down, perhaps he could stay in Libya.

But hidden away from view, the plan to seize Tripoli was moving into action.

The rebels began making swift advances in the Western Mountains, out of Misrata and around the town of Zintan. Newly arrived Apache attack helicopters operating from Britain's HMS Ocean, an amphibious assault ship, were destroying armored vehicles. NATO aircraft dropped leaflets to dispirit Gaddafi forces and improve rebel morale.

"The game-changer has been the attack helicopters which have given the NTC more protection from Gaddafi's heavy weapons," a French Defense Ministry official said.

The rebels' foreign backers were eager to hasten the war. For one thing, a U. N. mandate for bombing ran only to the end of September; agreement on an extension was not guaranteed. One U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the main U.S. concern was "breaking the rough stalemate before the end of the NATO mandate".

The Europeans were also burning through costly munitions and Washington was concerned about wear and tear on NATO allies' aircraft. "Some of the countries... basically every deployable F-16 they had in the inventory was deployed," a senior U.S. defense official told Reuters.

But the momentum was shifting in the rebels' favor.

On July 28, the assassination of rebel military commander Abdel Fatah Younes proved a surprise turning-point. The former Interior Minister had defected to the rebels in February. Some believe he had held back their advance from the east, for reasons that remain unclear. Younes' death at the hands of his own men raised questions about the NTC and added impetus to NATO's desire to push things along in case the anti-Gaddafi forces imploded.

The West forced NTC head Mahmoud Jibril to change his cabinet. NATO then took more of the lead in preparations, according to Denece, who said he has contacts within both French and Libyan intelligence.

There was another boon to the rebels. Regional heavyweight Turkey came out in support of the NTC in July, and then held a conference at which 30 countries backed them. "The Turks actually were very helpful throughout this in a very quiet kind of way," said the senior U.S. defense official.

With the morale of Gaddafi troops eroding, the end was clearly near. Mediocre at the best of times, Gaddafi's fighters began fading away. So too did his secret weapon: foreign mercenaries.

After the uprising began, Gaddafi recruited several thousand mercenaries; some formed the core of his best-organised forces. Most of the hired guns came from countries to Libya's south such as Chad, Mali, and Niger, but some were from further afield, including South Africa and the Balkans.

Among them was a former Bosnian Serb fighter who had fought in Sierra Leone as a mercenary and later worked as a contractor in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hired in March, first as an instructor and later as the commander of a 120mm mortar battery, the fighter, who used his nom-de-guerre Crni ("the Black" in Serbian), told Reuters he had been paid regularly in cash in the western currency of his choice.

"I knew Libyans had poor discipline, but what I have seen was dismal in comparison with what we had in former Yugoslavia during our wars," he told Reuters. "They were cowards, at least many of them. Communications were the biggest problem, as they just couldn't figure out how to operate anything more sophisticated than a walkie-talkie, so we resorted to cellphones, when they worked and while they worked."

It was in early August, he said, that "everything started falling apart." The force of which he was a part began retreating from a rebel onslaught. "At some point we came under fire from a very organised group, and I suspect they were infiltrated (by) NATO ground troops," he said. The loyalist units pulled back to a point about 50 km (30 miles) from Tripoli. By mid-August, "I decided it was enough. I took a jeep with plenty of fuel and water and another two Libyans I trusted, and we traveled across the desert to a neighboring country. It took us four days to get there."

A DRONE DEBATE

Foreign agents, meanwhile, were circulating far and wide. At the Tunisia-Libya border in early August, a Reuters reporter ran into a Libyan with an American accent who identified himself as the head of the rebel command center in the Western Mountains. He was accompanied by two muscular blond western men. He said he spent a lot of time in the United States and Canada, but would not elaborate.

As the rebels advanced on Zawiyah, the Reuters reporter also saw western-looking men inside the Western Mountain region traveling in simple, old pickup trucks. Not far away, rebels in Nalut said they were being aided by CIA agents, though this was impossible to verify.

Operation Dawn Mermaid was initially meant to begin on August 10, according to Mohammed Gula, the political cell leader in central Tripoli. But "other cities were not yet ready", the leadership decided, and it was put off for a few days.

A debate flared inside the Pentagon about whether to send extra Predator drones to Libya. "It was a controversial issue even as to whether it made sense to pull (drones) from other places to boost this up to try to bring this to a quicker conclusion," the U.S. defense official said.

Those who backed the use of extra drones won, and the last two Predators were taken from a training base in the United States and sent to north Africa, arriving on August 16.

In the meantime, the rebels had captured several cities. By August 17 or 18, recalls Gula, "when we heard that Zawiyah had fallen, and Zlitan looked like it was about to fall, and Garyan had fallen, we decided now is the time."

Those successes had a knock-on effect, U.S. and NATO officials told Reuters. With much of the country now conquered, Predator drones and other surveillance and strike planes could finally be focused on the capital. Data released by the Pentagon showed a substantial increase in the pace of U.S. air strikes in Libya between August 10 and August 22.

"We didn't have to scan the entire country any longer," a NATO official said. "We were able to focus on where the concentrations of regime forces were."

ZERO HOUR

Days before the attack on Tripoli, the White House began leaking stories to TV networks saying Gaddafi was near the end. But U.S. intelligence officials -- who are supposed to give an objective view of the situation on the ground -- were pushing back, telling journalists they were not so sure of immediate victory and the fighting could go on for months.

Then, on August 19, a breakthrough: Abdel Salam Jalloud, one of the most public faces of Gaddafi's regime, defected. Jalloud had been trying to get out for the previous three months, according to the senior NTC official. "He asked for our help but because he wanted his whole family, not only his immediate one, to flee with him it was a logistical problem. His whole family was around 35."

By now, the mountain roads were under rebel control. They took him and his family from Tripoli to Zintan and across the border into Tunisia. From there, he flew to Italy and on to Qatar.

The rebel leadership was ready. But now NATO wanted more time. "Once they got control of Zawiyah, we were sort of expecting that they would make a strategic pause, regroup and then make the push on into Tripoli," the senior U.S. defense official said.

"We told NATO we're going to go anyway," said a senior NTC official.

The western alliance quickly scaled back its number of bombing targets to 32 from 82, while rebel special forces hit some of the control rooms that were not visible, like those in schools and hospitals.

The signal to attack came soon after sunset on August 20, in a speech by NTC Chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil. "The noose is tightening," he said. A "veritable bloodbath" was about to occur.

Within 10 minutes of his speech, rebel cells in neighborhoods across Tripoli started moving. Some units were directly linked to the operation; many others were not but had learned about the plan.

"We didn't choose it, the circumstances and the operations led us to this date," Alhasi told Reuters when asked why the uprising in Tripoli began then. "There was a public plan in Tripoli that they would rise up on that day, by calling from the mosques. It was not a military plan, not an official plan, it was a people's plan. The people inside Tripoli, they did this in coordination with us."

In the first few hours, rebel cells attacked installations and command posts. Others simply secured neighborhoods, setting up roadblocks and impeding movement.

Ships laden with food and ammunition set off from rebel-held Misrata. Rebel forces began pushing toward the capital from the Western Mountains and from the east. According to French newspapers, NATO cleared a path on the water by destroying pro-Gaddafi speed boats equipped with explosives.

The first rebel soldiers reached the city within a few hours. The rag-tag army didn't look like much: some warriors wore football kit bearing the name of English soccer players. But they encountered little resistance.

One rebel source said Gaddafi had made a fatal error by sending his important brigades and military leaders, including his son Mu'atassem, to secure the oil town of Brega. The Libyan leader apparently feared the loss of the oil area would empower the rebels. But it meant he left Tripoli without strong defences, allowing the rebels easy entry.

The air war was also overwhelming the regime. Under attack, Gaddafi forces brought whatever heavy equipment they still had out of hiding. In the final 24 hours, a western military official said, NATO "could see remnants of Gaddafi forces trying to reconstitute weapons systems, specifically surface-to-air missiles". NATO pounded with them with air strikes.

COLLAPSE

By Sunday August 21, the rebels controlled large parts of Tripoli. In the confusion, the NTC announced it had captured Saif al-Islam. Late the following evening, though, he turned up at the Rixos, the Tripoli hotel where foreign reporters were staying. "I am here to disperse the rumors...," he declared.

U.S. and European officials now say they believe Saif was never in custody. NTC chief Mahmoud Jibril attributes the fiasco to conflicting reports within the rebel forces. But, he says, the bumbling turned into a bonanza: "The news of his arrest gave us political gains. Some countries recognized us, some brigades surrendered ... and more than 30 officers defected."

As the Gaddafi brigades collapsed, the rebels reached a sympathizer in the Libyan military who patched them into the radio communications of Gaddafi's forces. "We could hear the panic through their orders," said the senior NTC official. "That was the first indication that our youths were in control of Tripoli."

As the hunt for Gaddafi got underway, the NTC began implementing a 70-page plan, drawn up in consultation with its foreign military backers, aimed at establishing security in the capital.

Officials in London, Paris and Washington are at pains to say the plan is not based on the experience of Iraq or any other country, but the lessons of their mistakes in Baghdad are obvious.

At a press conference in Qatar, NTC head Jibril said Libya would "rehabilitate and cure our wounds by being united so we can rebuild the nation."

Unity was not hard to find during the uprising. "The most important factor was the will of the people," commander Alhasi told Reuters. "The people hate Gaddafi."

Will Libya remain united once he's gone?

Firms Aided Libyan Spies

2011-08-30T23:09:00.002-04:00

TRIPOLI—On the ground floor of a six-story building here, agents working for Moammar Gadhafi sat in an open room, spying on emails and chat messages with the help of technology Libya acquired from the West.

The recently abandoned room is lined with posters and English-language training manuals stamped with the name Amesys, a unit of French technology firm Bull SA, which installed the monitoring center. A warning by the door bears the Amesys logo. The sign reads: "Help keep our classified business secret. Don't discuss classified information out of the HQ."

The room, explored Monday by The Wall Street Journal, provides clear new evidence of foreign companies' cooperation in the repression of Libyans under Col. Gadhafi's almost 42-year rule. The surveillance files found here include emails written as recently as February, after the Libyan uprising had begun.

One file, logged on Feb. 26, includes a 16-minute Yahoo chat between a man and a young woman. He sometimes flirts, declaring that her soul is meant for him, but also worries that his opposition to Col. Gadhafi has made him a target.

"I'm wanted," he says. "The Gadhafi forces ... are writing lists of names." He says he's going into hiding and will call her from a new phone number—and urges her to keep his plans secret.

"Don't forget me," she says.

This kind of spying became a top priority for Libya as the region's Arab Spring revolutions blossomed in recent months. Earlier this year, Libyan officials held talks with Amesys and several other companies including Boeing Co.'s Narus, a maker of high-tech Internet traffic-monitoring products, as they looked to add sophisticated Internet-filtering capabilities to Libya's existing monitoring operation, people familiar with the matter said.

Libya sought advanced tools to control the encrypted online-phone service Skype, censor YouTube videos and block Libyans from disguising their online activities by using "proxy" servers, according to documents reviewed by the Journal and people familiar with the matter. Libya's civil war stalled the talks.

"Narus does not comment on potential business ventures," a Narus spokeswoman said in a statement. "There have been no sales or deployments of Narus technology in Libya." A Bull official declined to comment.

The sale of technology used to intercept communications is generally permissible by law, although manufacturers in some countries, including the U.S., must first obtain special approval to export high-tech interception devices.

Libya is one of several Middle Eastern and North African states to use sophisticated technologies acquired abroad to crack down on dissidents. Tech firms from the U.S., Canada, Europe, China and elsewhere have, in the pursuit of profits, helped regimes block websites, intercept emails and eavesdrop on conversations.

The Tripoli Internet monitoring center was a major part of a broad surveillance apparatus built by Col. Gadhafi to keep tabs on his enemies. Amesys in 2009 equipped the center with "deep packet inspection" technology, one of the most intrusive techniques for snooping on people's online activities, according to people familiar with the matter.

Chinese telecom company ZTE Corp. also provided technology for Libya's monitoring operation, people familiar with the matter said. Amesys and ZTE had deals with different arms of Col. Gadhafi's security service, the people said. A ZTE spokeswoman declined to comment.

VASTech SA Pty Ltd, a small South African firm, provided the regime with tools to tap and log all the international phone calls going in and out of the country, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and people familiar with the matter. VASTech declined to discuss its business in Libya due to confidentiality agreements.

Libya went on a surveillance-gear shopping spree after the international community lifted trade sanctions in exchange for Col. Gadhafi handing over the suspects in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 and ending his weapons of mass destruction program. For global makers of everything from snooping technology to passenger jets and oil equipment , ending the trade sanctions transformed Col. Gadhafi's regime from pariah state to coveted client.

The Tripoli spying center reveals some of the secrets of how Col. Gadhafi's regime censored the populace. The surveillance room, which people familiar with the matter said Amesys equipped with its Eagle system in late 2009, shows how Col. Gadhafi's regime had become more attuned to the dangers posed by Internet activism, even though the nation had only about 100,000 Internet subscriptions in a population of 6.6 million.

The Eagle system allows agents to observe network traffic and peer into people's emails, among other things. In the room, one English-language poster says: "Whereas many Internet interception systems carry out basic filtering on IP address and extract only those communications from the global flow (Lawful Interception), EAGLE Interception system analyses and stores all the communications from the monitored link (Massive interception)."

On its website, Amesys says its "strategic nationwide interception" system can detect email from Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail and see chat conversations on MSN instant messaging and AIM. It says investigators can "request the entire database" of Internet traffic "in real time" by entering keywords, email addresses or the names of file attachments as search queries.

It is unclear how many people worked for the monitoring unit or how long it was operational.

In a basement storage room, dossiers of Libyans' online activities are lined up in floor-to-ceiling filing shelves. From the shelves, the Journal reviewed dozens of surveillance files, including those for two anti-Gadhafi activists—one in Libya, the other in the U.K.—well known for their opposition websites. Libyan intelligence operators were monitoring email discussions between the two men concerning what topics they planned to discuss on their websites.

In an email, dated Sept. 16, 2010, the men argue over whether to trust the reform credentials of Col. Gadhafi's son, Seif al-Islam, who at the time was widely expected to succeed his father as Libya's leader. One man warns the other that the younger Gadhafi is trouble. "I know that you hope that Seif will be a good solution," he writes. "But … he is not the proper solution. I'm warning you."

Computer surveillance occupied only the ground floor of the intelligence center. Deeper in the maze-like layout is a windowless detention center, its walls covered in dingy granite tile and smelling of mildew.

Caught in the snare of Libya's surveillance web was Human Rights Watch researcher Heba Morayef, who handles Libya reporting for the activist group. Files monitoring at least two Libyan opposition activists included emails written by her, as well as messages to her from them.

In one email, dated Aug. 12, 2010, a Libyan activist implores Ms. Morayef to help him and his colleagues fight a court case brought against them. "The law is on our side in this case, but we are scared," he wrote. "We need someone to help." The email goes into specific detail about the plaintiff, who was a high-ranking member of a shadowy group of political commissars defending the Gadhafi regime.

Ms. Morayef, reached Monday in Cairo, where she is based, said she was last in contact with the Benghazi-based activist on Feb. 16. She said she believes he went into hiding when civil war broke out a week later.

Another file, dated Jan. 6, 2011, monitors two people, one named Ramadan, as they struggle to share an anti-Gadhafi video and upload it to the Web. One message reads: "Dear Ramadan : Salam : this is a trial to see if it is possible to email videos. If it succeeds tell me what you think."

Across town from the Internet monitoring center at Libya's international phone switch, where telephone calls exit and enter the country, a separate group of Col. Gadhafi's security agents staffed a room equipped with VASTech devices, people familiar with the matter said. There they captured roughly 30 to 40 million minutes of mobile and landline conversations a month and archived them for years, one of the people said.

Andre Scholtz, sales and marketing director for VASTech, declined to comment on the Libya installation, citing confidentiality agreements. The firm sells only "to governments that are internationally recognized by the U.N. and are not subject to international sanctions," Mr. Scholtz said in a statement. "The relevant U.N., U.S. and EU rules are complied with."

The precise details of VASTech's setup in Libya are unclear. VASTech says its interception technology is used to fight crimes like terrorism and weapons smuggling.

A description of the company's Zebra brand surveillance product, prepared for a trade show, says it "captures and stores massive volumes of traffic" and offers filters that agents can use to "access specific communications of interest from mountains of data." Zebra also features "link analysis," the description says, a tool to help agents identify relationships between individuals based on analysis of their calling patterns.

Capabilities such as these helped Libya sow fear as the country erupted in civil war earlier this year. Anti-Gadhafi street demonstrators were paranoid of being spied on or picked up by the security forces, as it was common knowledge that the regime tapped phones. Much of the early civil unrest was organized via Skype, which activists considered safer than Internet chatting. But even then they were scared.

"We're likely to disappear if you aren't careful," a 22-year-old student who helped organize some of the biggest protests near Tripoli said in a Skype chat with a foreign journalist before fleeing to Egypt. Then, on March 1, two of his friends were arrested four hours after calling a foreign correspondent from a Tripoli-based cellphone, according to a relative. It is unclear what division of the security service picked them up or whether they are still in jail.

The uprising heightened the regime's efforts to obtain more intrusive surveillance technology. On Feb. 15 of this year, as anti-government demonstrations kicked off in Benghazi, Libyan telecom official Bashir Ejlabu convened a meeting in Barcelona with officials from Narus, the Boeing unit that makes Internet monitoring products, according to a person familiar with the meeting. "The urgency was high to get a comprehensive system put in place," the person said.

In the meeting, Mr. Eljabu told the Narus officials he would fast-track visas for them to go to Libya the next day, this person said. Narus officials declined to travel to Tripoli, fearing damage to the company's reputation.

But it was too late for the regime. One week later, Libyan rebels seized control of Benghazi, the country's second largest city, and the capital of Tripoli was convulsing in antiregime protests. In early March, Col. Gadhafi shut down Libya's Internet entirely. The country remained offline until last week, when rebels won control of Tripoli.

Source ( WSJ )

On Patrol with the Benghazi Brigade

2011-08-28T23:24:00.001-04:00

Source

Under the scorching heat of the Tripoli sun, Masoud Bwisir, 38, and his fellow rebels have just taken control of a checkpoint Friday in the village of Tajura, six miles east of the Libyan capital of Tripoli. All night, local youths manned the barricade — composed of nothing more than a few concrete blocks and some metal railing — but they wanted someone to take over, so they could pray in an adjacent mosque. And so Bwisir and his crew, still relatively fresh off a tugboat from Benghazi, have relieved them.

A fighter signals that a driver is refusing to open his trunk for inspection and Bwisir comes over. When the hatch is lifted, the rebels find 20 pounds of explosives underneath some plastic bags filled with debris. Local residents, who are watching from beyond the traffic circle, begin to panic, but Bwisir, a businessman back In Benghazi, calmly dismantles the bomb. Throughout Tajura, Benghazi fighters are winning the confidence of the residents they have been tasked to protect. In doing so, they have calmed local residents' fears that the Easterners have arrived to lord it over a region long accustomed to ruling Libya. (See pictures of Benghazi during wartime.)

Having fought for six months against forces loyal to deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, units such as Bwisir's have much more combat experience than the newly formed militias sprouting up in the capital over the past few days. They have put their skills to use by stomping out the remaining forces of the deposed strongman still refusing to accept their commander's defeat. "I haven't met many people from Benghazi and was worried that because they made the revolution they would want to own the country," Ashraf Tresh, 34, says. "But the way their fighters have protected us with their courage and expertise, I am happy to welcome them."

Many here share Tresh's sentiments. On Saturday the local buzz was about a weapons depot the brigade found on a farm five miles east of Tajura. Among the fig trees in the fields, Omar Ruba, 34, and his rebels discovered a large warehouse full of GRAD rockets and an assortment of gas masks and grenades. Gaddafi loyalists still active in the region had been using the farm to resupply their fighters, who were spread over rural areas that rebels still have not subdued. "We know Gaddafi brigades are here and want to stop the revolution," explained Riyad Gofar, 43, a Tripoli crane operator, at a checkpoint on the dirt road near the farm. "But we don't have the men to patrol the whole place. These guys do." He then points to a pick-up truck filled with Ruba's Benghazi fighters. "We are so happy they are here." (See pictures of Gaddafi's 40 years in power.)

Tajura residents have expressed their gratitude to the Benghazi brigade in many ways. When the fighters return to their makeshift camp in a local school, hot meals prepared by their neighbors are waiting. Soft goat meat topped with chick peas in a thick red sauce is served, with buckets full of dates on the side "It's much hotter here than in Benghazi and we can't talk to our families" says Ayub Legaha. "But the people here make the pains go away and make us feel like Libya is one?" The 23 year old law student then grabs a handful of dates.

When told about the appreciation Tajura residents have expressed for their new guests, rebel commander Anwar al-Muqrayaf grins. Though he has slept no more than ten hours in the past five days, he is energetically giving orders and greeting locals asking him to solve minor problems. "We came to protect the people here," he mumbles as a subordinate hands him a satellite phone. "Anything we can do to alleviate the problems in Tripoli, that is our task." His adjutant Fawzi Bin Hamid concurs. "We have a mission here and we won't stop until it is complete."

After gobbling down a few morsels of meat and picking at some chickpeas, Bwisir picks up his Kalashnikov and heads out into the courtyard of the school. A group of young men surround him, asking if the bomb sapper who moonlights as a guitar player could put on a short concert for the neighborhood. "Maybe tomorrow," he replies as his fans frown. "Now I have to go out and get more Gaddafi brigades."

NTC Chairman's Speech to the people of Tripoli

2011-08-20T14:43:00.000-04:00

The End ?

2011-08-19T21:29:00.004-04:00

A lot of good news in the last few days; but today seems to have had the biggest share so far of good news and martyrs ( lost the relatives of three friends in one day in Zliten, Gherian and Brega ). The rebels have freed Zawiya, Zliten, Gherian and Brega and are now, reportedly, rising from inside of Tripoli. Not only that; but it seems that some of our brave special forces ( two battalions of 350 each ) who have been under training in Urban warfare from the beginning of the revolution have landed into Tripoli by Sea.
Let's pray that this revolution will end without any further deaths and destruction to our capital and it's population; we have lost enough people as it is!

Our New Door Mat !

2011-06-27T14:56:00.002-04:00

The Danish Foreign Minister ...

One for the girls !

2011-06-03T10:35:00.002-04:00

Seems the flag has even affected the fashion design in Benghazi ... this is something I saw the other day ...

الثورات ..................

2011-05-15T16:54:00.001-04:00

الثورات يقوم بها الحكماء و يموت فيها الشجعان و يستفيد منها الجبناء و المتسلقون

We Will Not Surrender .........

2011-04-05T18:00:00.003-04:00

This is a video montage of a song a friend prepared after the demonstrations in Benghazi. My friend was killed in the events after the demonstrations and this video montage was prepared by another group of friends in memory of him. The martyr is the second one from the left ( third from the rigth at the end of the montage ).

Protestors In Green Square

2011-02-21T22:14:00.002-05:00

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=260259&id=133738650025293

source

Misinformation ? Loss of Credibility ?

2011-02-21T21:02:00.003-05:00

To tired and stressed to type myself; but loss of communications and satellite has created a lot of rumors. And I didn't hear a lot of bombs in Tripoli ( maybe one -not sure- ); but their seems to be some false info being spread to discredit Aljazeera and the Libyans. Not that their aren't deaths or gunshots. That I can confirm. There have also been betrayals in Benghazi and Zawiya even though the traitors in Benghazi are being dealt with : Anyway this post illustrates it ( from Hafed Alghewal ) :

Message from a friend in Tripoli few minutes ago:

Hafed what the hell is going on???

I am in Tripoli and have been following the libyafeb17 site. The posts they have today about bombing and air strikes across Tripoli and Musrata and Zawia is total rubbish. I don’t know who is feeding them this info but it’s not true. I sent them three emails confirming that three areas were not under fire.

It took me about 5 hours to make the three calls to verify. This after a couple of friends freaked out due to the claims that we were being massacred. I fear that this is “cry wolf” strategy.

Across Tripoli nothing much is happing other than we sitting in our homes, glued to the TV and trying to call around and see what is happening. It might be that they will hit hard later on when we are all so fed up and tired of the “isha3at”. We are (a large number of us) afraid that if and when that happens none of the media or countries across the world will believe us.

One thing has been confirmed though, by witnesses and people who were able to contact their families and loved ones in some areas: where ever there are protests, they are shooting at them from helicopters. According to people in Tajoura and in Ben Ashur in Tripoli, the same happened there too. We say these helicopters – the ones that transport soldiers and military gear, fly over Tripoli from west to east and back many many times all day long.

Someone has to contact aljazira and the press (all those who have supported us so far) and make them aware of this. You know how Libyans love drama. Yes terrible things have happened but we fear that there might be worse to come AND that, once it does arrive, it will be too late. Our credibility will be lost. There is no one here to verify these things. Media and the press in Libya are what you know they are: anything but …..

The Libyan TV is regurgitating rubbish and terrible rubbish: they brought on a couple of Tunisians and Egyptians - that they clearly have beaten up - to make them “confess” that they were distributing drugs and pills for free among Libyan youth to lead them to what happened here. Earlier, the so-called ministry of defense is urging people and families to turn in their kids – drug addicts adolescents, they called them – because they looted banks and set public buildings and court houses ablaze to destroy the files in which their crimes are supposedly documented.

So basically, according to our honorable official “hedgehog” tv station, those who took hold of the entire province of Cyrenaica, including airports, barracks, police stations, military police and paid the highest price there is, are druggies and drunkies!!!! Furthermore, the Ganfood TV said that the highest command asked the Dhubbat Ahrar to help the security forces catch them and gun them down because they are being used and manipulated and used by “external” forces to spread confusion in Libya.

Confusion will set in and this is a critical time. Not because of “long arms” linked to heads and bodies outside this country but because of the bitterness that greets all our people every morning when they step out of bed and awaits them at the end of the day. We have a word in Arabic that I don’t know the equivalent of in English, it’s “hassra”… I can think of one thing to describe it: when you heart chokes on a constant feeling that everything in this world is wrong. We have been through a lot. I pray to God that it will soon be over.

For me either with death or clarity don’t really know if there is a difference between them.

Source

Massacre !!!!!!!!!!!!

2011-02-21T08:57:00.000-05:00

Confirmed from inside source ( First Hand Account ): planes from Sirt just left to bomb Benghazi, Ajdabiya, Bieda. flown by Foreign Fighters (Algierian mercenaries).
Please contact Benghazi and inform we can't get to them ! Redistribute Everywhere ! Could be Chemical Weapons !

Rerun of Benghazi in Tripoli

2011-02-21T07:17:00.002-05:00

Tripoli :

Satellite TV blocked in Tripoli except for the channels in the higher frequency bands of Nilesat.
Mobile Communications intermittent or non-existent in some regions.
demonstrators reorganizing in the down town area.
4 military aircraft carrying helicopters just flew over me flying in the direction of the military airport. Probably more soldiers/mercenaries for the government.

Sief's Zief ( Lies in Arabic )

2011-02-20T18:44:00.004-05:00

Quick review :

He started out saying that he would be honest and wouldn't lie.
He says that the number of dead in Benghazi were over exaggerated and never reached 250. My brother, who is still a med student, had to work in the hospitals and clinics of Benghazi because of the sheer number of deaths and the number 250 is an underestimation. And the names and pictures of those killed will be forthcoming.
He is trying to drive a wedge between the Libyan tribes and make it look as if it is only the east of Libya that require freeedom. Even though all the tribes have united against his father and family.
He is trying to frighten the west by claims that there are islamic emirates in the east and that islamists are the ones that stole the weapons in Bieda. His own uncles ( his mothers family ) stood up against his dad in Bieda and it was the local police from Bieda that turned their guns against Khamis's ( his brother ) Battalion after they saw the mercenaries killing Libyans. Then they distributed the weapons to their tribes so they can free Al-Bieda from his brothers battalion. They then moved on
He claimed that the government had nothing to do with the mercenaries. That is a lie ! the mercenaries were brought into Meitiga airport and they put libyan police force suits on in the airport before boarding planes for Benghazi . THEIR ARE EYEWITNESSES AND WE WERE ALERTING THE DEMONSTRATERS IN BENGHAZI AND BIEDA TO INTERCEPT THE PLANES AT THE AIRPORTS WE KNOW THE DETAILS OF THE FLIGHTS.
He said that there were more than 10,000 supporters in Tripoli for his father. They never exceeded 500 and they were all brought in from Sebha and Sirt. Right now they are been kicked out of the green square which has been renamed the martyrs square.
In ending I anticipate that the government will try to sabotage the gaslines that go to europe through Italy to try to get Western support for them to stay in power or at least give their western allies a cause belle to intervene on their behalf.

They are playing with fire .............

Almost Over !

2011-02-20T17:44:00.005-05:00

Al-Zawia tribe that originates ( and controls ) in the south east of the Country have threatened to sabotage the oil fields in the south if the blood shed of innocent Libyans doesn't stop before 24 hours !

Live From Libya Now ! 7 pm 20th Feb

2011-02-20T12:20:00.006-05:00

Internet is crap and I don't know how long it will last, so I'll be posting and updating as I go. Refresh to read.

Benghazi :

Libyanna ( mobile company ) sent a message to all the citizens of Benghazi telling them to go home; as it is their job to defend Benghazi.
Weapons and soldiers arrived from Bieda and its surrounding area.
The 64th battalion and Abdulfath Younis's ( عبدالفتاح يونس) special forces battalion attacking the main revolutionary guard garison in benghazi ( الفضيل بوعمر). Fighting is ongoing.
General Population of Benghazi arming up with everything in their grasp.
People chanting muammer here we come for you, death is coming.
Crowds are larger than ever seen ( they were nearly 100,000 ) three days ago.
Helicopter shot down by the people of Benghazi.

Beni Walid :

We called 20 mintues ago and got confirmation that a battalion from the Werfalla tribe are on their way to Tripoli ( anti - government ).

Zawiya :

Call 15 minutes ago, the city is free and empty of any government battalions. We told them what is happening in Benghazi and they said they are on their way to Tripoli to free it !

Tripoli :

Last night Demonstrators came out in Fashloom ( area in Tripoli ) ( I witnessed it ) and started protesting and pelting the buildings of the revolutionary committe with stones. The police and pro goverments demonstrators didn't approach them; but followed them home and abducted them from their houses . Some of them younger than 14 years old.
today in the morning the parents of the aforementioned demonstrators are in front of the court house in Tripoli ( Siedi Street ) ( شارع سيدي ) trying to get their children released.
Mobile phone coverage is intermittent right now and sometimes non existants.
Heavy fighting and gunshots in ghout Alsha3al and Ghorji in tripoli ( now 8:20 pm Libya time )

Al-Juffra & Wadan :

The head of the tribes in the area have started to organize themselves to counter battalions sent to their areas. ( this was 3 hours ago ). the tribes in these areas have weapons.

gherian :

Dead in protests last night no updates since.

Ajdabiya, Rajban, Zantan :

Haven't been able to get through to anyone from them. Pray for them ............

Benghazi Now !!!!!

2011-02-19T15:38:00.002-05:00

Demonstrators at the gate of the main garrison for the revolutionary
committee in Benghazi. Using a bulldozer to access it.
Demonstrators are getting mowed down by anti aircraft guns and 14.5
guns and the bulldozers are being hit by RPGs.
Abdul fatih younis minister of interior says that what happened in
Benghazi was carried out by mercenaries and bultajia ( thugs ) and as
such resigns ( probably to relieve himself of responsibility and
accountability for what happened ).
A lot of dead ambulances are taking 3 demonstrators at a time and
can't keep up with the dead and injured.
Tanks seen in tripoli heading towards Benghazi, international monitors
required urgently before the massacre becomes worse.
Two military planes headed towards Benghazi with African militia.

Please retweet post on reedit and huffingtonpost and spread everywhere
in english. embarrass western governments !

Gulf Oil Spill

2010-06-04T07:41:00.003-04:00

"We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children"

( Ironically a North American Native Indian proverb )

Women ..............

2010-05-03T00:38:00.003-04:00

How come women only want you when you're not there ? Why can't they appreciate men when they are around ? Why do they have to loose them to want them and appreciate them ?

Google Responds To Privacy Concerns

2010-03-12T05:58:00.002-05:00

source

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Responding to recent public outcries over its handling of private data, search giant Google offered a wide-ranging and eerily well-informed apology to its millions of users Monday.

"We would like to extend our deepest apologies to each and every one of you," announced CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking from the company's Googleplex headquarters. "Clearly there have been some privacy concerns as of late, and judging by some of the search terms we've seen, along with the tens of thousands of personal e-mail exchanges and Google Chat conversations we've carefully examined, it looks as though it might be a while before we regain your trust."

Added Schmidt, "Whether you're Michael Paulson who lives at 3425 Longview Terrace and makes $86,400 a year, or Jessica Goldblatt from Lynnwood, WA, who already has well-established trust issues, we at Google would just like to say how very, truly sorry we are."

Schmidt's apology appeared suddenly at 9 a.m. Monday on Google's homepage, Chrome browser, and YouTube, as well as on every single Android-enabled cell phone, and sought to reassure Americans that the company would take all necessary steps to keep confidential information, from Social Security numbers to Gonorrhea test results, absolutely safe.

Acknowledging that Google hasn't always been open about how it mines the roughly 800 terabytes of personal data it has gathered since 1998, Schmidt apologized to users— particularly the 1,237,948 who take daily medication to combat anxiety—for causing any unnecessary distress, and he expressed regret—especially to Patricia Fort, a single mother taking care of Jordan, Sam, and Rebecca, ages 3, 7, and 9—for not doing more to ensure that private information remains private.

Monday's apology comes after the controversial launch of Google Buzz, a social networking platform that publicly linked Gmail users to their most e-mailed contacts by default.

"I'd like nothing more than to apologize in person to everyone we've let down, but as you can see, many of our users are rarely home at this hour," said Google cofounder and president Sergey Brin, pointing to several Google Map street-view shots of empty bedroom and living room windows on a projection screen behind him. "And, if last night's searches are any indication, Boston's Robert Hornick is probably out shopping right now for the spaghetti and clam sauce he'll be cooking tonight."

"Either that, or hunting down that blond coworker of his, Samantha, whose Picasa photos he stares at every night," Brin added.

While admitting that security measures need to improve, Google officials also claimed that everyone makes mistakes, be it storing confidential data indefinitely or, say, "having a few too many drinks on the evening of Jan. 23, driving home in a haze, striking a pedestrian on the corner of Mercer and Cavendish, speeding off, and then desperately searching online for hit and run laws, right, Karen?"

"Americans have every right to be angry at us," Google spokesperson Janet Kemper told reporters. "Though perhaps Dale Gilbert should just take a few deep breaths and go sit in his car and relax, like they tell him to do at the anger management classes he attends over at St. Francis Church every Tuesday night."

"Breathe in, breathe out," Kemper added. "We wouldn't want you to have another incident, Dale. Not when you've been doing so well."

In an effort to make up for years of alarmingly invasive service, Google will automatically add $50 to all American bank accounts as a gesture of goodwill. The company has also encouraged feedback, explaining that users can type any concerns they may still have into any open browser window or, if they are members of Google Voice, "simply speak directly into [their] phones right now."

Either way, the company said, "We'll know."

So far, Google users across the country have responded cautiously to the company's public admission of wrongdoing, with some claiming they will be careful not to reveal any personal information from now on, and others ripping up their credit cards, unplugging all electronic devices from their outlets, and locking themselves in their bathrooms away from any cameras, keyboards, satellite dishes, or cell phones.

"I forgive Google, I forgive Google, I forgive Google," said Ohio resident Darla Mackenzie, sitting on the edge of her bathtub, her head in her hands. "Please, please, don't tell Jonathan about the things I have done."

Naji Hamdan's Nightmare

2010-03-07T15:29:00.000-05:00

By Anna Louie Sussman

At only one point in his story did Naji Hamdan cry. Sitting in an office chair as he recounted how he was arrested, tortured and ultimately convicted of terrorism charges in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), his voice barely wavered. Only when he described how Emirati interrogators threatened to rape his wife in front of him if he did not confess to charges of supporting Al Qaeda did he lose control, pausing to accept a fistful of Kleenex before he continued his story.

"For two weeks I could not stand on my feet. I had to use the help of a Nepali guard to drag me to the bathroom," he said of a period following a particularly brutal beating, around three weeks into his two-month detention.

Hamdan, 43, was born in Lebanon and moved to the United States in 1984. He studied aerospace engineering, worked at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) as an aircraft mechanic, then for Northrop Grumman, and eventually opened his own auto parts business, HondAcura Palace. In his downtime, he played soccer, camped and hiked, and as of 1992 began raising his son, Khaled. A few years later he became a naturalized citizen. A devout Sunni Muslim, he was active in the Muslim community and helped to found the Islamic Center of Hawthorne, in Southern California.

In 1999 the Federal Bureau of Investigation visited him at home, inquiring about a possible millennial terrorist attack. The bureau also interrogated others in the local Muslim community, asking whether they knew of any imminent plots.

"They asked if I knew any terrorists, would I go and tell them," said Hamdan. "Of course I would. My kids were going to school there. I have businesses there."

Hamdan's brother Hossam, who goes by the name Sam, got a visit too. At the time, he recalled, "We were like, What the hell are they talking about?"

The FBI kept Hamdan on its radar for the next ten years, contacting him, he estimates, on six occasions. Officials asked about his business, his political beliefs and whether he knew Osama bin Laden (he knew bin Laden as well as anyone else did at the time, "from the media," as he put it). During this time, air travel became increasingly difficult for him; he was often stopped and questioned for hours, on one occasion missing a flight out of LAX.

Hamdan moved his family to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates in 2006, where he hoped to expose his children to Islamic culture and the Arabic language, as well as the American culture of business and entrepreneurship. There, he thought, they could have "the best of both worlds." He had heard it was "more modern and developed" than the rest of the region.

"And peaceful," added his wife, a look of pained irony on her face.

Even after relocating, he continued to face harassment at airports and particularly on trips back to the United States, where he and Sam continued to operate the auto parts business. On one visit in March 2007, he says, he was interrogated at LAX for more than four hours, followed by SUVs with tinted windows and repeatedly photographed. He cut his trip short.

"They were kind of pushing me out of the country as if I'm not an American citizen anymore," he said. "And that is sad."

That treatment was gentle compared with the reception he got from the government of the United Arab Emirates. At noon on August 26, 2008, six weeks after FBI agents had summoned him for about four hours of interrogation at the US Embassy in Abu Dhabi, he got a call saying his car, parked downstairs from his apartment, had been in an accident. The sun shining, he went downstairs in shorts and a T-shirt (he had been napping) to check his vehicle. Emirati officials arrived on the scene, handcuffed and blindfolded him, and drove away in custom-made SUVs with tinted windows.

Held incommunicado for one month and twenty-three days, Hamdan says he was subject to near-daily beatings and torture for the first few weeks, after which the beatings slowed to every few days. In between he was left in total isolation.

"I don't know if it's a tactic or not," he said, "but it was painful also to leave me without even the guard talking to me."

The beatings were intended to elicit a confession of in- volvement with a rotating cast of terrorist groups that would change from one day to the next. Initially, Hamdan protested his innocence. But the threat against his wife was too much, and he broke down.

"The interrogator said, You're going to sign a confession that you're with Al Qaeda and put your fingerprint on it," Hamdan remembers. But a few days later, he was taken from his cell to another interrogator, who said he'd received information "from a friendly country" that Hamdan was supporting the Gaza-based Palestinian group Hamas.

"He said, You have to change your confession," said Hamdan. Still fearing for his wife, he told them, "Listen, I'll do whatever you want."

Hamdan quickly came to believe that his Emirati interrogators were acting at the behest of the United States; at one point they questioned him about his recent interview with the FBI at the embassy, asking him why he was tense during their meeting.

"I didn't think of it when I first got detained, but when the beatings started, I knew right away," he said.

During one interrogation, Hamdan said, he believed an American interrogator was present in the room. He identified the man by his accent and his dress, which differed from the rest of the interrogators, who were wearing either white robes, a traditional men's dress in the Gulf, or the uniform that high-ranking military officers wear.

"From underneath my blindfold, I could see feet. He had on gray suit pants and black dress shoes," said Hamdan, "and he had a pure American accent. I encountered the FBI several times before. I have no doubt he was FBI."

As UAE agents introduced him to their full spectrum of torture techniques (a freezing cold isolation room, an electric chair they sat him in and threatened to turn on, kicks and punches to his already frail liver), his family searched in vain to discover his whereabouts. His wife says she went to the State Security offices and was told they'd never heard of her husband. She also says she called the US Embassy and the State Department, where staff claimed they were unaware of his case. Hamdan's brother Sam said he called Joshua Stone, an FBI agent who had interviewed Hamdan in Abu Dhabi.

"They weren't interested in talking about him," Sam recalled. "If he really didn't know what was happening to Naji, he would have been more interested. He'd want to know more," he concluded. At one point, he suggested to Stone that perhaps Naji was suspected of stealing cars, since he dealt in used automobiles.

"The guy laughed and said, 'Criminally? It's not that,'" Sam said.

The Hamdan family reached out to the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a habeas corpus suit in a Washington, DC, district court in November 2008. Although the judge dismissed the case in August 2009, finding a lack of jurisdiction, the suit shone light on Hamdan's predicament for the first time and highlighted the responsibility of the US government to attend to the detention of one of its citizens.

"One month and twenty-three days," said Hamdan incredulously of the time he was held incommunicado. "Normally if [Abu Dhabi authorities] detain a US citizen, they should report it to the embassy right away. But they did not."

After that period, Hamdan met with Sean Cooper, the consular chief for the US Embassy in Abu Dhabi. Three days before they met, his captors took his measurements, and on the day of the meeting gave him a brand-new outfit--shoes, pants, a shirt, underwear and socks--and a warning: "You better behave, because if you tell them anything, you're coming back to us, and you know what's going to happen." Looking spiffy, he arrived to find three Emirati officials, who would be present throughout the interview. He tried to use body language to indicate to Cooper that all was not well.

"He asked if I was being mistreated," remembered Hamdan, "and as I said no, I would turn my face to the side. Later, when I saw him, he said he had no idea something was wrong."

After their meeting, the beatings stopped, although another month passed before Hamdan was transferred to criminal custody. According to his lawyer, Jennie Pasquarella of ACLU Southern California, instead of helping the Hamdans secure Naji's release, the US government put up "major roadblocks at every turn." She and her colleagues were unable to persuade lawmakers to take up Hamdan's case publicly (she imagines they were "skittish" about "championing the case of someone labeled a terrorist") and got "the runaround" both in Washington and the Emitates.

"Even Congress has had little success at obtaining information about people the US has asked other countries to detain. Although our government is responsible for their detention, there is a black hole of information about those cases," she said.

In April 2009 Pasquarella and her colleagues obtained a nugget of information about a prior case that shed light on the possible circumstances of Hamdan's arrest and detention. A Freedom of Information Act request filed by the British House of Commons All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition turned up an e-mail from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement that read, "At this time [redacted] is the only one we can get to. He is currently being held by the UAE pending our ability to do a Extraordinary Rendition." This e-mail, and America's historically warm economic and diplomatic relationship with the UAE, suggests that collusion in the field of counterterrorism would not be unheard of. Hamdan, who was not being held by the US, could not have been subject to extraordinary rendition--in which suspects are transferred from US to foreign custody--but his arrest fits the profile of a "proxy detention," in which the United States requests that someone be taken into custody in a foreign country.

The Bureau of Consular Affairs in Washington, the United Arab Emirates office of the State Department, the US Embassy in Abu Dhabi and an Abu Dhabi government spokesman all declined to comment on the case. Laura Eimiller, a spokeswoman for the FBI's Los Angeles field office, said that the bureau does not confirm or deny investigating Hamdan, but she added that the US government did not request a proxy detention in Hamdan's case.

With Hamdan's trial approaching in Abu Dhabi Federal Supreme Court last year, the FBI continued to investigate his businesses in America. It subpoenaed Daniel Sieu, 49, a former customer of Hamdan's who is the executive director of the Los Angeles-based Asian Pacific Revolving Loan Fund. Sieu had made several small loans to Hamdan as he expanded his business and bought small parcels of real estate. In January 2009 the FBI asked Sieu for everything in his files on Hamdan, which he says consisted of "a few basic loan applications." He was never called in for questioning and has not gotten back any of the material he submitted.

"Naji is a very nice guy," he said. "I consider him a friend."

The FBI also pursued another friend of Naji's, Jehad Suliman, beginning in 2002 with interrogations at HondAcura Palace, where Suliman is the manager. In July 2009, as Hamdan's case was playing out in Abu Dhabi, Suliman estimates that roughly a dozen agents entered his home with a search warrant relating to MediCal fraud. They seized a number of possessions, including documents unrelated to MediCal that referred to Hamdan and HondAcura Palace.

On January 29 of this year, Pasquarella filed a FOIA request for further information on the government's activities related to the Hamdan brothers and Suliman, but she expects it will take substantial litigation before anything comes to light.

Ultimately, after five hearings in front of Abu Dhabi's Federal Supreme Court, Hamdan was convicted of support for and spreading of terrorism. The prosecutor's case relied on Hamdan's signed confessions and a transcript of a chat-room conversation from a jihadi website in which Hamdan says he was not even a participant. According to Hamdan, in the course of the trial, he was accused of membership in six different terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam of Iraq and Fatah al-Islam.

Sitting in their living room in his eighth-floor apartment in Mar Elias, a busy commercial neighborhood in Beirut, and discussing his verdict, Hamdan and his wife still have trouble accepting it. "How could he have had the time" to be involved with all of these groups, his wife wondered aloud, while running an international auto parts business?

"They're six different organizations that are against each other," pointed out Hamdan.

Pasquarella, who was barred from attending one of the sessions on the pretext that the trial chamber's air-conditioning was broken, called the trial "a facade for political processes." A respected human rights lawyer in the UAE, who did not wish to be identified because of previous government harassment, said that while the UAE Supreme Court is generally independent, on national security issues it toes the government line.

According to Hamdan, the prosecutor had sought four counts of the death penalty and four counts of life imprisonment, which he was eligible for under the UAE 2004 anti-terrorism legislation. Instead, the court gave him an eighteen-month time-served sentence, essentially setting him free despite a finding of guilt.

"I knew I was not going to be acquitted, because it would show their guilt, but I was still hoping they would go back to their conscience and acquit me," he said resignedly. "I wasn't relieved at the sentence, though, because now I'm considered a terrorist."

After nine days and a bit of paperwork, he was deported to Lebanon.

Now he mostly spends his days with his wife, mother and son, relaxing and looking after his health. His father died in October 2008; Hamdan said he died of a heart attack upon hearing of his son's detention. Recently his brother Sam received a notice addressed to Naji that his aircraft mechanic's license was being rescinded by the Transportation Security Administration. Hamdan still suffers pains in his wrists, neck and shoulders from the beatings, and he is taking medication for his liver and kidneys. But it is the mental scars that most stubbornly refuse to heal.

"Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, just thinking about it," he said. "What bothers me the most is the unfairness of it all.... I got beaten, tortured and forced to sign something I didn't even read. I left all my wealth over there in that country, and I'm here, empty-handed, with these memories that are eating me alive."

Tripoli's Emerging Skyline

2010-02-05T16:57:00.003-05:00

How China exposed Google's hypocrisy

2010-01-20T16:54:00.001-05:00

By Chad Perrin ( Source )

China’s breach of Google email account security was, in Google’s own words:

limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Where Google’s new stance on China’s censorship and violation of dissidents’ privacy seems at odds with CEO Eric Schmidt’s recent statement that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” an interesting implication of this statement about what information was compromised brings things back into expected focus. That sort of information is exactly the kind of thing that can legally be acquired by United States law enforcement agencies by way of a court order. This suggests that some part of the process of handing over private information to law enforcement personnel serving a court order has been automated, and that security crackers working for the Chinese government found a way to exploit that automated access.

Macworld reports on this disturbing implication in China: Google attack part of widespread spying effort. While the majority of the article focuses on the accusation of “corporate espionage” conducted by the Chinese government, it addresses the implication of poor security policy on the part of Google itself, with regard to its dealings with law enforcement. Speaking of the claim by Google that all the Chinese security crackers were able to access was some identifying account information and email subject lines, the Macworld article says:

That’s because they apparently were able to access a system used to help Google comply with search warrants by providing data on Google users, said a source familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press.

“Right before Christmas, it was, ‘Holy s*, this malware is accessing the internal intercept [systems],’” he said.

Even the most law-and-order leaning security expert should have alarm klaxons sounding in his head at the thought of this state of affairs. Such an automated access system for law enforcement, in effect, creates an entire framework for compromising the privacy of sensitive data, ready-made for use by malicious security crackers. As Julian Sanchez at Cato put it, in Surveillance, Security, and the Google Breach, building automated law enforcement access portals into one’s network architecture is “breach-by-design” and constitutes “a serious security risk.” Julian went on to say:

The problem of volume is front and center in a leaked recording released last month, in which Sprint’s head of legal compliance revealed that their automated system had processed 8 million requests for GPS location data in the span of a year, noting that it would have been impossible to manually serve that level of law enforcement traffic. Less remarked on, though, was Taylor’s speculation that someone who downloaded a phony warrant form and submitted it to a random telecom would have a good chance of getting a response—and one assumes he’d know if anyone would.

Julian Sanchez never quite gets around to making the same statement I have on numerous occasions — that, to a significant degree, privacy is security. He does, however, bring up the problem of misguided efforts to provide greater “national security” by creating increased security risk:

The irony here is that, while we’re accustomed to talking about the tension between privacy and security—to the point where it sometimes seems like people think greater invasion of privacy ipso facto yields greater security—one of the most serious and least discussed problems with built-in surveillance is the security risk it creates.

The irony that is much more specific and relevant to the case of the Google security breach is that, while Google strikes a pose for free speech and privacy, the ink is not even dry yet on CEO Schmidt’s words to the effect that caring about privacy is something criminals do. Worse, it was in fact Google going so far as to create an automated system for violating individual privacy that created the opportunity for China’s attack to succeed in the first place.

More to the point, one might find it ironic that Google takes such a hard-line public stand in favor of Chinese dissidents who wish to evade Chinese law enforcement, but regards potential U.S. dissidents who wish to evade U.S. law enforcement as rightly subject to arbitrary surveillance. This is exactly the sort of cognitive dissonance that one should expect from examining moral judgments made by corporations, though, and will not surprise many of us.

The ultimate result is that security and privacy subject to the inconstant whims of corporate policy cannot be trusted to be consistent or trustworthy. This is one more reason why there is no such thing as a trusted brand.

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

2010-01-18T13:51:00.002-05:00

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

By Scott Horton ( source )

1. “Asymmetrical Warfare”

When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Camp America to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.

Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet. The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS report was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable.

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

Al-Zahrani, according to the report, was discovered first, at 12:39 a.m., and taken by several Alpha Block guards to the camp’s detention medical clinic. No doctors could be found there, nor the phone number for one, so a clinic staffer dialed 911. During this time, other guards discovered Al-Utaybi. Still others discovered Al-Salami a few minutes later. Although rigor mortis had already set in—indicating that the men had been dead for at least two hours—the NCIS report claims that an unnamed medical officer attempted to resuscitate one of the men, and, in attempting to pry open his jaw, broke his teeth.

The fact that at least two of the prisoners also had cloth masks affixed to their faces, presumably to prevent the expulsion of the rags from their mouths, went unremarked by the NCIS, as did the fact that standard operating procedure at Camp Delta required the Navy guards on duty after midnight to “conduct a visual search” of each cell and detainee every ten minutes. The report claimed that the prisoners had hung sheets or blankets to hide their activities and shaped more sheets and pillows to look like bodies sleeping in their beds, but it did not explain where they were able to acquire so much fabric beyond their tightly controlled allotment, or why the Navy guards would allow such an obvious and immediately observable deviation from permitted behavior. Nor did the report explain how the dead men managed to hang undetected for more than two hours or why the Navy guards on duty, having for whatever reason so grievously failed in their duties, were never disciplined.

A separate report, the result of an “informal investigation” initiated by Admiral Harris, found that standard operating procedures were violated that night but concluded that disciplinary action was not warranted because of the “generally permissive environment” of the cell block and the numerous “concessions” that had been made with regard to the prisoners’ comfort, which “concessions” had resulted in a “general confusion by the guard and the JDG staff over many of the rules that applied to the guard force’s handling of the detainees.” According to Harris, even had standard operating procedures been followed, “it is possible that the detainees could have successfully committed suicide anyway.”

This is the official story, adopted by NCIS and Guantánamo command and reiterated by the Justice Department in formal pleadings, by the Defense Department in briefings and press releases, and by the State Department. Now four members of the Military Intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta, including a decorated non-commissioned Army officer who was on duty as sergeant of the guard the night of June 9–10, have furnished an account dramatically at odds with the NCIS report—a report for which they were neither interviewed nor approached.

All four soldiers say they were ordered by their commanding officer not to speak out, and all four soldiers provide evidence that authorities initiated a cover-up within hours of the prisoners’ deaths. Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman and men under his supervision have disclosed evidence in interviews with Harper’s Magazine that strongly suggests that the three prisoners who died on June 9 had been transported to another location prior to their deaths. The guards’ accounts also reveal the existence of a previously unreported black site at Guantánamo where the deaths, or at least the events that led directly to the deaths, most likely occurred.

2. “Camp No”

The soldiers of the Maryland-based 629th Military Intelligence Battalion arrived at Guantánamo Naval Base in March 2006, assigned to provide security to Camp America, the sector of the base containing the five individual prison compounds that house the prisoners. Camp Delta was at the time the largest of these compounds, and within its walls were four smaller camps, numbered 1 through 4, which in turn were divided into cell blocks. Life at Camp America, as at all prisons, was and remains rigorously routinized for both prisoners and their jailers. Navy guards patrol the cell blocks and Army personnel control the exterior areas of the camp. All observed incidents must be logged. For the Army guards who man the towers and “sally ports” (access points), knowing who enters and leaves the camp, and exactly when, is the essence of their mission.

One of the new guards who arrived that March was Joe Hickman, then a sergeant. Hickman grew up in Baltimore and joined the Marines in 1983, at the age of nineteen. When I interviewed him in January at his home in Wisconsin, he told me he had been inspired to enlist by Ronald Reagan, “the greatest president we’ve ever had.” He worked in a military intelligence unit and was eventually tapped for Reagan’s Presidential Guard detail, an assignment reserved for model soldiers. When his four years were up, Hickman returned home, where he worked a series of security jobs—prison transport, executive protection, and eventually private investigations. After September 11 he decided to re-enlist, at thirty-seven, this time in the Army National Guard.

Hickman deployed to Guantánamo with his friend Specialist Tony Davila, who grew up outside Washington, D.C., and who had himself been a private investigator. When they arrived at Camp Delta, Davila told me, soldiers from the California National Guard unit they were relieving introduced him to some of the curiosities of the base. The most noteworthy of these was an unnamed and officially unacknowledged compound nestled out of sight between two plateaus about a mile north of Camp Delta, just outside Camp America’s perimeter. One day, while on foot patrol, Hickman and Davila came across the compound. It looked like other camps within Camp America, Davila said, only it had no guard towers and it was surrounded with concertina wire. They saw no activity, but Hickman guessed the place could house as many as eighty prisoners. One part of the compound, he said, had the same appearance as the interrogation centers at other prison camps.

The compound was not visible from the main road, and the access road was chained off. The Guardsman who told Davila about the compound had said, “This place does not exist,” and Hickman, who was frequently put in charge of security for all of Camp America, was not briefed about the site. Nevertheless, Davila said, other soldiers—many of whom were required to patrol the outside perimeter of Camp America—had seen the compound, and many speculated about its purpose. One theory was that it was being used by some of the non-uniformed government personnel who frequently showed up in the camps and were widely thought to be CIA agents.

A friend of Hickman’s had nicknamed the compound “Camp No,” the idea being that anyone who asked if it existed would be told, “No, it doesn’t.” He and Davila made a point of stopping by whenever they had the chance; once, Hickman said, he heard a “series of screams” from within the compound.

Hickman and his men also discovered that there were odd exceptions to their duties. Army guards were charged with searching and logging every vehicle that passed into and out of Camp Delta. “When John McCain came to the camp, he had to be logged in.” However, Hickman was instructed to make no record whatsoever of the movements of one vehicle in particular—a white van, dubbed the “paddy wagon,” that Navy guards used to transport heavily manacled prisoners, one at a time, into and out of Camp Delta. The van had no rear windows and contained a dog cage large enough to hold a single prisoner. Navy drivers, Hickman came to understand, would let the guards know they had a prisoner in the van by saying they were “delivering a pizza.”

The paddy wagon was used to transport prisoners to medical facilities and to meetings with their lawyers. But as Hickman monitored the paddy wagon’s movements from the guard tower at Camp Delta, he frequently saw it follow an unexpected route. When the van reached the first intersection, instead of heading right—toward the other camps or toward one of the buildings where prisoners could meet with their lawyers—it made a left. In that direction, past the perimeter checkpoint known as ACP Roosevelt, there were only two destinations. One was a beach where soldiers went to swim. The other was Camp No.

3. “Lit up”

The night the prisoners died, Hickman was on duty as sergeant of the guard for Camp America’s exterior security force. When his twelve-hour shift began, at 6 p.m., he climbed the ladder to Tower 1, which stood twenty feet above Sally Port 1, the main entrance to Camp Delta. From there he had an excellent view of the camp, and much of the exterior perimeter as well. Later he would make his rounds.

Shortly after his shift began, Hickman noticed that someone had parked the paddy wagon near Camp 1, which houses Alpha Block. A moment later, two Navy guards emerged from Camp 1, escorting a prisoner. They put the prisoner into the back of the van and then left the camp through Sally Port 1, just below Hickman. He was under standing orders not to search the paddy wagon, so he just watched it as it headed east. He assumed the guards and their charge were bound for one of the other prison camps southeast of Camp Delta. But when the van reached the first intersection, instead of making a right, toward the other camps, it made the left, toward ACP Roosevelt and Camp No.

Twenty minutes later—about the amount of time needed for the trip to Camp No and back—the paddy wagon returned. This time Hickman paid closer attention. He couldn’t see the Navy guards’ faces, but from body size and uniform they appeared to be the same men.

The guards walked into Camp 1 and soon emerged with another prisoner. They departed Camp America, again in the direction of Camp No. Twenty minutes later, the van returned. Hickman, his curiosity piqued by the unusual flurry of activity and guessing that the guards might make another excursion, left Tower 1 and drove the three quarters of a mile to ACP Roosevelt to see exactly where the paddy wagon was headed. Shortly thereafter, the van passed through the checkpoint for the third time and then went another hundred yards, whereupon it turned toward Camp No, eliminating any question in Hickman’s mind about where it was going. All three prisoners would have all reached their destination before 8 p.m.

Hickman says he saw nothing more of note until about 11:30 p.m, when he had returned to his preferred vantage at Tower 1. As he watched, the paddy wagon returned to Camp Delta. This time, however, the Navy guards did not get out of the van to enter Camp 1. Instead they backed the vehicle up to the entrance of the medical clinic, as if to unload something.

At approximately 11:45 p.m.—nearly an hour before the NCIS claims the first body was discovered—Army Specialist Christopher Penvose, preparing for a midnight shift in Tower 1, was approached by a senior Navy NCO. Penvose told me that the NCO—who, following standard operating procedures, wore no name tag—appeared to be extremely agitated. He instructed Penvose to go immediately to the Camp Delta chow hall, identify a female senior petty officer who would be dining there, and relay to her a specific code word. Penvose did as he was instructed. The officer leapt up from her seat and immediately ran out of the chow hall.

Another thirty minutes passed. Then, as Hickman and Penvose both recall, Camp Delta suddenly “lit up”—stadium-style flood lights were turned on, and the camp became the scene of frenzied activity, filling with personnel in and out of uniform. Hickman headed to the clinic, which appeared to be the center of activity, to learn the reason for the commotion. He asked a distraught medical corpsman what had happened. She said three dead prisoners had been delivered to the clinic. Hickman recalled her saying that they had died because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them was severely bruised. Davila told me he spoke to Navy guards who said the men had died as the result of having rags stuffed down their throats.

Hickman was concerned that such a serious incident could have occurred in Camp 1 on his watch. He asked his tower guards what they had seen. Penvose, from his position at Tower 1, had an unobstructed view of the walkway between Camp 1 and the medical clinic—the path by which any prisoners who died at Camp 1 would be delivered to the clinic. Penvose told Hickman, and later confirmed to me, that he saw no prisoners being moved from Camp 1 to the clinic. In Tower 4 (it should be noted that Army and Navy guard-tower designations differ), another Army specialist, David Caroll, was forty-five yards from Alpha Block, the cell block within Camp 1 that had housed the three dead men. He also had an unobstructed view of the alleyway that connected the cell block itself to the clinic. He likewise reported to Hickman, and confirmed to me, that he had seen no prisoners transferred to the clinic that night, dead or alive.

4. “He Could Not Cry out”

The fate of a fourth prisoner, a forty-two-year-old Saudi Arabian named Shaker Aamer, may be related to that of the three prisoners who died on June 9. Aamer is married to a British woman and was in the process of becoming a British subject when he was captured in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in 2001. United States authorities insist that he carried a gun and served Osama bin Laden as an interpreter. Aamer denies this. At Guantánamo, Aamer’s fluency in English soon allowed him to play an important role in camp politics. According to both Aamer’s attorney and press accounts furnished by Army Colonel Michael Bumgarner, the Camp America commander, Aamer cooperated closely with Bumgarner in efforts to bring a 2005 hunger strike to an end. He persuaded several prisoners to break their strike for a while, but the settlement collapsed and soon afterward Aamer was sent to solitary confinement. Then, on the night of June 9, 2006, Aamer says he was the victim of an act of striking brutality.

He described the events in detail to his lawyer, Zachary Katznelson, who was permitted to speak to him several weeks later. Katznelson recorded every detail of Aamer’s account and filed an affidavit with the federal district court in Washington, setting it out:

On June 9th, 2006, [Aamer] was beaten for two and a half hours straight. Seven naval military police participated in his beating. Mr. Aamer stated he had refused to provide a retina scan and fingerprints. He reported to me that he was strapped to a chair, fully restrained at the head, arms and legs. The MPs inflicted so much pain, Mr. Aamer said he thought he was going to die. The MPs pressed on pressure points all over his body: his temples, just under his jawline, in the hollow beneath his ears. They choked him. They bent his nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it would break. They pinched his thighs and feet constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out.

The treatment Aamer describes is noteworthy because it produces excruciating pain without leaving lasting marks. Still, the fact that Aamer had his airway cut off and a mask put over his face “so he could not cry out” is alarming. This is the same technique that appears to have been used on the three deceased prisoners.

The United Kingdom has pressed aggressively for the return of British subjects and persons of interest. Every individual requested by the British has been turned over, with one exception: Shaker Aamer. In denying this request, U.S. authorities have cited unelaborated “security” concerns. There is no suggestion that the Americans intend to charge him before a military commission, or in a federal criminal court, and, indeed, they have no meaningful evidence linking him to any crime. American authorities may be concerned that Aamer, if released, could provide evidence against them in criminal investigations. This evidence would include what he experienced on June 9, 2006, and during his 2002 detention in Afghanistan at Bagram Airfield, where he was subjected to a procedure in which his head was smashed repeatedly against a wall. This torture technique, called “walling” in CIA documents, was expressly approved at a later date by the Department of Justice.

5. “You All Know”

By dawn, the news had circulated through Camp America that three prisoners had committed suicide by swallowing rags. Colonel Bumgarner called a meeting of the guards, and at 7 a.m. at least fifty soldiers and sailors gathered at Camp America’s open-air theater.

Bumgarner was known as an eccentric commander. Hickman marveled, for instance, at the colonel’s insistence that his staff line up and salute him, to music selections that included Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the reggae hit “Bad Boys,” as he entered the command center. This morning, however, Hickman thought Bumgarner seemed unusually nervous and clipped.

According to independent interviews with soldiers who witnessed the speech, Bumgarner told his audience that “you all know” three prisoners in the Alpha Block at Camp 1 committed suicide during the night by swallowing rags, causing them to choke to death. This was a surprise to no one—even servicemen who had not worked the night before had heard about the rags. But then Bumgarner told those assembled that the media would report something different. It would report that the three prisoners had committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells. It was important, he said, that servicemen make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the official report. He reminded the soldiers and sailors that their phone and email communications were being monitored. The meeting lasted no more than twenty minutes. (Bumgarner has not responded to requests for comment.)

That evening, Bumgarner’s boss, Admiral Harris, read a statement to reporters:

An alert, professional guard noticed something out of the ordinary in the cell of one of the detainees. The guard’s response was swift and professional to secure the area and check on the status of the detainee. When it was apparent that the detainee had hung himself, the guard force and medical teams reacted quickly to attempt to save the detainee’s life. The detainee was unresponsive and not breathing. [The] guard force began to check on the health and welfare of other detainees. Two detainees in their cells had also hung themselves.

After praising the guards and the medics, Harris—in a notable departure from traditional military decorum—launched his attack on the men who had died on his watch. “They have no regard for human life,” Harris said, “neither ours nor their own.” A Pentagon press release issued soon after described the dead men, who had been accused of no crime, as Al Qaeda or Taliban operatives. Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Gordon, the Pentagon’s chief press officer, went still further, telling the Guardian’s David Rose, “These guys were fanatics like the Nazis, Hitlerites, or the Ku Klux Klan, the people they tried at Nuremberg.” The Pentagon was not the only U.S. government agency to participate in the assault. Colleen Graffy, a deputy assistant secretary of state, told the BBC that “taking their own lives was not necessary, but it certainly is a good P.R. move.”

The same day the three prisoners died, Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly completed a reporting trip to the naval base, where, according to his account on The O’Reilly Factor, the Joint Army Navy Task Force “granted the Factor near total access to the prison.” Although the Pentagon began turning away reporters after news of the deaths had emerged, two reporters from the Charlotte Observer, Michael Gordon and photographer Todd Sumlin, had arrived that morning to work on a profile of Bumgarner, and the colonel invited them to shadow him as he dealt with the crisis. A Pentagon spokesman later told the Observer it had been expecting a “puff piece,” which is why, according to the Observer, “Bumgarner and his superiors on the base” had given them permission to remain.

Bumgarner quickly returned to his theatrical ways. As Gordon reported in the June 13, 2006, issue of the Observer, the colonel seemed to enjoy putting on a show. “Right now, we are at ground zero,” Bumgarner told his officer staff during a June 12 meeting. Referring to the naval base’s prisoners, he said, “There is not a trustworthy son of a bitch in the entire bunch.” In the same article, Gordon also noted what he had learned about the deaths. The suicides had occurred “in three cells on the same block,” he reported. The prisoners had “hanged themselves with strips of knotted cloth taken from clothing and sheets,” after shaping their pillows and blankets to look like sleeping bodies. “And Bumgarner said,” Gordon reported, “each had a ball of cloth in their mouth either for choking or muffling their voices.”

Something about Bumgarner’s Observer interview seemed to have set off an alarm far up the chain of command. No sooner was Gordon’s story in print than Bumgarner was called to Admiral Harris’s office. As Bumgarner would tell Gordon in a follow-up profile three months later, Harris was holding up a copy of the Observer: “This,” said the admiral to Bumgarner, “could get me relieved.” (Harris did not respond to requests for comment.) That same day, an investigation was launched to determine whether classified information had been leaked from Guantánamo. Bumgarner was suspended.

Less than a week after the appearance of the Observer stories, Davila and Hickman each heard separately from friends in the Navy and in the military police that FBI agents had raided the colonel’s quarters. The MPs understood from their FBI contacts that there was concern over the possibility that Bumgarner had taken home some classified materials and was planning to share them with the media or to use them in writing a book.

On June 27, two weeks later, Gordon’s Observer colleague Scott Dodd reported: “A brigadier general determined that ‘unclassified sensitive information’ was revealed to the public in the days after the June 10 suicides.” Harris, according to the article, had already ordered “appropriate administrative action.” Bumgarner soon left Guantánamo for a new post in Missouri. He now serves as an ROTC instructor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

Bumgarner’s comments appear to be at odds with the official Pentagon narrative on only one point: that the deaths had involved cloth being stuffed into the prisoners’ mouths. The involvement of the FBI suggested that more was at issue.

6. “An Unmistakable Message”

On June 10, NCIS investigators began interviewing the Navy guards in charge of Alpha Block, but after the Pentagon committed itself to the suicide narrative, they appear to have stopped. On June 14, the interviews resumed, and the NCIS informed at least six Navy guards that they were suspected of making false statements or failing to obey direct orders. No disciplinary action ever followed.

The investigators conducted interviews with guards, medics, prisoners, and officers. As the Seton Hall researchers note, however, nothing in the NCIS report suggests that the investigators secured or reviewed the duty roster, the prisoner-transfer book, the pass-on book, the records of phone and radio communications, or footage from the camera that continuously monitored activity in the hallways, all of which could have helped them authoritatively re-construct the events of that evening.

The NCIS did, however, move swiftly to seize every piece of paper possessed by every single prisoner in Camp America, some 1,065 pounds of material, much of it privileged attorney-client correspondence. Several weeks later, authorities sought an after-the-fact justification. The Justice Department—bolstered by sworn statements from Admiral Harris and from Carol Kisthardt, the special agent in charge of the NCIS investigation—claimed in court that the seizure was appropriate because there had been a conspiracy among the prisoners to commit suicide. Justice further claimed that investigators had found suicide notes and argued that the attorney-client materials were being used to pass communications among the prisoners.

David Remes, a lawyer who opposed the Justice Department’s efforts, explained the practical effect of the government’s maneuvers. The seizure, he said, “sent an unmistakable message to the prisoners that they could not expect their communications with their lawyers to remain confidential. The Justice Department defended the massive breach of the attorney-client privilege on the account of the deaths on June 9 and the asserted need to investigate them.”

If the “suicides” were a form of warfare between the prisoners and the Bush Administration, as Admiral Harris charged, it was the latter that quickly turned the war to its advantage.

7. “Yasser Couldn’t Even Make a Sandwich!”

When I asked Talal Al-Zahrani what he thought had happened to his son, he was direct. “They snatched my seventeen-year-old son for a bounty payment,” he said. “They took him to Guantánamo and held him prisoner for five years. They tortured him. Then they killed him and returned him to me in a box, cut up.”

Al-Zahrani was a brigadier general in the Saudi police. He dismissed the Pentagon’s claims, as well as the investigation that supported them. Yasser, he said, was a young man who loved to play soccer and didn’t care for politics. The Pentagon claimed that Yasser’s frontline battle experience came from his having been a cook in a Taliban camp. Al-Zahrani said that this was preposterous: “A cook? Yasser couldn’t even make a sandwich!”

“Yasser wasn’t guilty of anything.” Al-Zahrani said. “He knew that. He firmly believed he would be heading home soon. Why would he commit suicide?” The evidence supports this argument. Hyperbolic U.S. government statements at the time of Yasser Al-Zahrani’s death masked the fact that his case had been reviewed and that he was, in fact, on a list of prisoners to be sent home. I had shown Al-Zahrani the letter that the government says was Yasser’s suicide note and asked him whether he recognized his son’s writing. He had never seen the note before, he answered, and no U.S. official had ever asked him about it. After studying the note carefully, he said, “This is a forgery.”

Also returned to Saudi Arabia was the body of Mani Al-Utaybi. Orphaned in youth, Mani grew up in his uncle’s home in the small town of Dawadmi. I spoke to one of the many cousins who shared that home, Faris Al-Utaybi. Mani, said Faris, had gone to Baluchistan—a rural, tribal area that straddles Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—to do humanitarian work, and someone there had sold him to the Americans for $5,000. He said that Mani was a peaceful man who would harm no one. Indeed, U.S. authorities had decided to release Al-Utaybi and return him to Saudi Arabia. When he died, he was just a few weeks shy of his transfer.

Salah Al-Salami was seized in March 2002, when Pakistani authorities raided a residence in Karachi believed to have been used as a safe house by Abu Zubaydah and took into custody all who were living there at the time. A Yemeni, Al-Salami had quit his job and moved to Pakistan with only $400 in his pocket. The U.S. suspicions against him rested almost entirely on the fact that he had taken lodgings, with other students, in a boarding house that terrorists might at one point have used. There was no direct evidence linking him either to Al Qaeda or to the Taliban. On August 22, 2008, the Washington Post quoted from a previously secret review of his case: “There is no credible information to suggest [Al-Salami] received terrorist related training or is a member of the Al Qaeda network.” All that stood in the way of Al-Salami’s release from Guantánamo were difficult diplomatic relations between the United States and Yemen.

8. “The Removal of the Neck Organs”

Military pathologists connected with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology arranged immediate autopsies of the three dead prisoners, without securing the permission of the men’s families. The identities and findings of the pathologists remain shrouded in extraordinary secrecy, but the timing of the autopsies suggests that medical personnel stationed at Guantánamo may have undertaken the procedure without waiting for the arrival of an experienced medical examiner from the United States. Each of the heavily redacted autopsy reports states unequivocally that “the manner of death is suicide” and, more specifically, that the prisoner died of “hanging.” Each of the reports describes ligatures that were found wrapped around the prisoner’s neck, as well as circumferential dried abrasion furrows imprinted with the very fine weave pattern of the ligature fabric and forming an inverted “V” on the back of the head. This condition, the anonymous pathologists state, is consistent with that of a hanging victim.

The pathologists place the time of death “at least a couple of hours” before the bodies were discovered, which would be sometime before 10:30 p.m. on June 9. Additionally, the autopsy of Al-Salami states that his hyoid bone was broken, a phenomenon usually associated with manual strangulation, not hanging.

The report asserts that the hyoid was broken “during the removal of the neck organs.” An odd admission, given that these are the very body parts—the larynx, the hyoid bone, and the thyroid cartilage—that would have been essential to determining whether death occurred from hanging, from strangulation, or from choking. These parts remained missing when the men’s families finally received their bodies.

All the families requested independent autopsies. The Saudi prisoners were examined by Saeed Al-Ghamdy, a pathologist based in Saudi Arabia. Al-Salami, from Yemen, was inspected by Patrice Mangin, a pathologist based in Switzerland. Both pathologists noted the removal of the structure that would have been the natural focus of the autopsy: the throat. Both pathologists contacted the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, requesting the missing body parts and more information about the previous autopsies. The institute did not respond to their requests or queries. (It also did not respond to a series of calls I placed requesting information and comment.)

When Al-Zahrani viewed his son’s corpse, he saw evidence of a homicide. “There was a major blow to the head on the right side,” he said. “There was evidence of torture on the upper torso, and on the palms of his hand. There were needle marks on his right arm and on his left arm.” None of these details are noted in the U.S. autopsy report. “I am a law enforcement professional,” Al-Zahrani said. “I know what to look for when examining a body.”

Mangin, for his part, expressed particular concern about Al-Salami’s mouth and throat, where he saw “a blunt trauma carried out against the oral region.” The U.S. autopsy report mentions an effort at resuscitation, but this, in Mangin’s view, did not explain the severity of the injuries. He also noted that some of the marks on the neck were not those he would normally associate with hanging.

9. “I Know Some Things You Don’t”

Sergeant Joe Hickman’s tour of duty, which ended in March 2007, was distinguished: he was selected as Guantánamo’s “NCO of the Quarter” and was given a commendation medal. When he returned to the United States, he was promoted to staff sergeant and worked in Maryland as an Army recruiter before settling eventually in Wisconsin. But he could not forget what he had seen at Guantánamo. When Barack Obama became president, Hickman decided to act. “I thought that with a new administration and new ideas I could actually come forward, ” he said. “It was haunting me.”

Hickman had seen a 2006 report from Seton Hall University Law School dealing with the deaths of the three prisoners, and he followed their subsequent work. After Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, he called Mark Denbeaux, the professor who had led the Seton Hall team. “I learned something from your report,” he said, “but I know some things you don’t.”

Within two days, Hickman was in Newark, meeting with Denbeaux. Also at the meeting was Denbeaux’s son and sometime co-editor Josh, a private attorney. Josh Denbeaux agreed to represent Hickman, who was concerned that he could go to prison if he disobeyed Colonel Bumgarner’s order not to speak out, even if that order was itself illegal. Hickman did not want to speak to the press. On the other hand, he felt that “silence was just wrong.”

The two lawyers quickly made arrangements for Hickman to speak instead with authorities in Washington, D.C. On February 2, they had meetings on Capitol Hill and with the Department of Justice. The meeting with Justice was an odd one. The father-and-son legal team were met by Rita Glavin, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; John Morton, who was soon to become an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security; and Steven Fagell, counselor to the head of the Criminal Division. Fagell had been, along with the new attorney general, Eric Holder, a partner at the elite Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, and was widely viewed as “Holder’s eyes” in the Criminal Division.

For more than an hour, the two lawyers described what Hickman had seen: the existence of Camp No, the transportation of the three prisoners, the van’s arrival at the medical clinic, the lack of evidence that any bodies had ever been removed from Alpha Block, and so on. The officials listened intently and asked many questions. The Denbeauxs said they could provide a list of witnesses who would corroborate every aspect of their account. At the end of the meeting, Mark Denbeaux recalled, the officials specifically thanked the lawyers for not speaking to reporters first and for “doing it the right way.”

Two days later, another Justice Department official, Teresa McHenry, head of the Criminal Division’s Domestic Security Section, called Mark Denbeaux and said that she was heading up an investigation and wanted to meet directly with his client. She went to New Jersey to do so. Hickman then reviewed the basic facts and furnished McHenry with the promised list of corroborating witnesses and details on how they could be contacted.

The Denbeauxs did not hear from anyone at the Justice Department for at least two months. Then, in April, an FBI agent called to say she did not have the list of contacts. She asked if this document could be provided again. It was. Shortly thereafter, Fagell and two FBI agents interviewed Davila, who had left the Army, in Columbia, South Carolina. Fagell asked Davila if he was prepared to travel to Guantánamo to identify the locations of various sites. He said he was. “It seemed like they were interested,” Davila told me. “Then I never heard from them again.”

Several more months passed, and Hickman and his lawyers became increasingly concerned that nothing was going to happen. On October 27, 2009, they resumed dealings with Congress that they had initiated on February 2 and then broken off at the Justice Department’s request; they were also in contact with ABC News. Two days later, Teresa McHenry called Mark Denbeaux and asked whether he had gone to Congress and ABC News about the matter. “I said that I had,” Denbeaux told me. He asked her, “Was there anything wrong with that?” McHenry then suggested that the investigation was finished. Denbeaux reminded her that she had yet to interview some of the corroborating witnesses. “There are a few small things to do,” Denbeaux says McHenry answered, “then it will be finished.”

Specialist Christopher Penvose told me that on October 30, the day following the conversation between Mark Denbeaux and Teresa McHenry, McHenry showed up at Penvose’s home in south Baltimore with some FBI agents. She had a “few questions,” she told him. Investigators working with her soon contacted two other witnesses.

On November 2, 2009, McHenry called Mark Denbeaux to tell him that the Justice Department’s investigation was being closed. “It was a strange conversation,” Denbeaux recalled. McHenry explained that “the gist of Sergeant Hickman’s information could not be confirmed.” But when Denbeaux asked what that “gist” actually was, McHenry declined to say. She just reiterated that Hickman’s conclusions “appeared” to be unsupported. Denbeaux asked what conclusions exactly were unsupported. McHenry refused to say.

10. “They Accomplished Nothing”

One of the most intriguing aspects of this case concerns the use of Camp No. Under George W. Bush, the CIA created an archipelago of secret detention centers that spanned the globe, and authorities at these sites deployed an array of Justice Department–sanctioned torture techniques—including waterboarding, which often entails inserting cloth into the subject’s mouth—on prisoners they deemed to be involved in terrorism. The presence of a black site at Guantánamo has long been a subject of speculation among lawyers and human-rights activists, and the experience of Sergeant Hickman and other Guantánamo guards compels us to ask whether the three prisoners who died on June 9 were being interrogated by the CIA, and whether their deaths resulted from the grueling techniques the Justice Department had approved for the agency’s use—or from other tortures lacking that sanction.

Complicating these questions is the fact that Camp No might have been controlled by another authority, the Joint Special Operations Command, which Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had hoped to transform into a Pentagon version of the CIA. Under Rumsfeld’s direction, JSOC began to take on many tasks traditionally handled by the CIA, including the housing and interrogation of prisoners at black sites around the world. The Pentagon recently acknowledged the existence of one such JSOC black site, located at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, and other suspected sites, such as Camp Nama in Baghdad, have been carefully documented by human-rights researchers.

In a Senate Armed Services Committee report on torture released last year, the sections about Guantánamo were significantly redacted. The position and circumstances of these deletions point to a significant JSOC interrogation program at the base. (It should be noted that Obama’s order last year to close other secret detention camps was narrowly worded to apply only to the CIA.)

Regardless of whether Camp No belonged to the CIA or JSOC, the Justice Department has plenty of its own secrets to protect. The department would seem to have been involved in the cover-up from the first days, when FBI agents stormed Colonel Bumgarner’s quarters. This was unusual for two reasons. When Pentagon officials engage in a leak investigation, they generally use military investigators. They rarely turn to the FBI, because they cannot control the actions of a civilian agency. Moreover, when the FBI does open an investigation, it nearly always does so with great discretion. The Bumgarner investigation was widely telegraphed, though, and seemed intended to send a message to the military personnel at Camp Delta: Talk about what happened at your own risk. All of which suggests it was not the Pentagon so much as the White House that hoped to suppress the truth.

In the weeks following the 2006 deaths, the Justice Department decided to use the suicide narrative as leverage against the Guantánamo prisoners and their troublesome lawyers, who were pressing the government to justify its long-term imprisonment of their clients. After the NCIS seized thousands of pages of privileged communications, the Justice Department went to court to defend the action. It argued that such steps were warranted by the extraordinary facts surrounding the June 9 “suicides.” U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson gave the Justice Department a sympathetic hearing, and he ruled in its favor, but he also noted a curious aspect of the government’s presentation: its “citations supporting the fact of the suicides” were all drawn from media accounts. Why had the Justice Department lawyers who argued the case gone to such lengths to avoid making any statement under oath about the suicides? Did they do so in order to deceive the court? If so, they could face disciplinary proceedings or disbarment.

The Justice Department also faces questions about its larger role in creating the circumstances that lead to the use of so-called enhanced interrogation and restraint techniques at Guantánamo and elsewhere. In 2006, the use of a gagging restraint had already been connected to the death on January 9, 2004, of an Iraqi prisoner, Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Jameel, in the custody of the Army Special Forces. And the bodies of the three men who died at Guantánamo showed signs of torture, including hemorrhages, needle marks, and significant bruising. The removal of their throats made it difficult to determine whether they were already dead when their bodies were suspended by a noose. The Justice Department itself had been deeply involved in the process of approving and setting the conditions for the use of torture techniques, issuing a long series of memoranda that CIA agents and others could use to defend themselves against any subsequent criminal prosecution.

Teresa McHenry, the investigator charged with accounting for the deaths of the three men at Guantánamo, has firsthand knowledge of the Justice Department’s role in auditing such techniques, having served at the Justice Department under Bush and having participated in the preparation of at least one of those memos. As a former war-crimes prosecutor, McHenry knows full well that government officials who attempt to cover up crimes perpetrated against prisoners in wartime face prosecution under the doctrine of command responsibility. (McHenry declined to clarify the role she played in drafting the memos.)

As retired Rear Admiral John Hutson, the former judge advocate general of the Navy, told me, “Filing false reports and making false statements is bad enough, but if a homicide occurs and officials up the chain of command attempt to cover it up, they face serious criminal liability. They may even be viewed as accessories after the fact in the original crime.” With command authority comes command responsibility, he said. “If the heart of the military is obeying orders down the chain of command, then its soul is accountability up the chain. You can’t demand the former without the latter.”

The Justice Department thus faced a dilemma; it could do the politically convenient thing, which was to find no justification for a thorough investigation, leave the NCIS conclusions in place, and hope that the public and the news media would obey the Obama Administration’s dictum to “look forward, not backward”; or it could pursue a course of action that would implicate the Bush Justice Department in a cover-up of possible homicides.

Nearly 200 men remain imprisoned at Guantánamo. In June 2009, six months after Barack Obama took office, one of them, a thirty-one-year-old Yemeni named Muhammed Abdallah Salih, was found dead in his cell. The exact circumstances of his death, like those of the deaths of the three men from Alpha Block, remain uncertain. Those charged with accounting for what happened—the prison command, the civilian and military investigative agencies, the Justice Department, and ultimately the attorney general himself—all face a choice between the rule of law and the expedience of political silence. Thus far, their choice has been unanimous.

Not everyone who is involved in this matter views it from a political perspective, of course. General Al-Zahrani grieves for his son, but at the end of a lengthy interview he paused and his thoughts turned elsewhere. “The truth is what matters,” he said. “They practiced every form of torture on my son and on many others as well. What was the result? What facts did they find? They found nothing. They learned nothing. They accomplished nothing.”

Mexican woman tells of ordeal with cross-border child traffickers

2010-01-11T18:35:00.001-05:00

source

A young Mexican woman who escaped from human traffickers has told US special agents how she witnessed babies and children being "sold to order" to US citizens.

America's Department of Homeland Security in Washington says the girl, known only as Maria, had "significant ~information" and possessed a "remarkable memory" of her experiences inside the gang.

In an interview with Channel 4 News, to be broadcast tonight, the teenager tells of a cross-border trade in babies and young children, where Mexican and US gangs worked together to supply a demand in the United States.

As a result of the interview, US officials and Mexican authorities have begun an investigation into the alleged trafficking.

Maria says she was 16 when she was lured into the gang by a man on the streets of the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez.

Since the 1990s, thousands of women have disappeared from the town. Hundreds of bodies bearing signs of rape and sexual mutilation have been dumped on waste ground in the city; thousands more have never returned.

In 2009, 55 teenage girls vanished in the town, which has been gripped by violence as two drug cartels fight a lethal turf war over cocaine smuggling routes into the US.

Maria, who was in hiding when she talked to Channel 4 News, said she had been given presents and promised a job in an office by the gang member but was instead drugged and raped and sold to men.

In late December, US special agents flew the teenager to the US for a full interview.

Describing what the gang did to one girl who tried to escape, she said: "They took a gallon of gasoline and started pouring it over her. One of the men told me, 'If you don't do as I say, I will do the same to you.' I wanted to look away – but they didn't' let me.

"Even though the girl was on fire, they kept hitting her. They were laughing as if they were enjoying what they were doing. They burned her alive."

Maria, which is not her real name, said the gang had held young women in a house on the Mexican border until they were sold to the US as sex slaves. But she said they also dealt in children, and told of one occasion when the gang was contacted by a woman in New York. "She said she needed a seven-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy – and she needed them in three days," Maria quoted the woman as saying.

Maria told special agents the gang would prowl the streets of poor areas looking for children.

"They stole the children," she said. "One of the gang members took a six-year-old kid. I had to look after him for three hours. He told me he wanted to see his mummy. Then I started crying. I said: 'I don't think you're ever going to see your mummy again.' All he kept saying was, 'I want to see my mummy.'"

Maria, who escaped after a gang member left her alone in a house, says children were often around. But not for long.

"I saw the Americans taking kids," she said: "a four-year-old and another boy. He barely walked. He was only about two years old. They took them to New York."

The US state department estimates that more than 20,000 young women and children are trafficked across the border from Mexico each year. But conviction rates remain low.

Mexico's attorney general, Arturo Chaves, has been accused of failing to do enough to bring human traffickers to justice, he has insisted the country is "definitely focusing" on the issue.

Maria has been told she may have to give evidence against the gang if they are caught. It is something she says she is determined to do.

"Women are sold. They are abducted, bought and even killed by these men. If these men are ever found, jail won't be enough to make them pay for the way they have made us feel."

Back from the Dead: Maria's Story will be broadcast on Channel 4 News tonight, from 7pm.

John Prescott defends China's role at Copenhagen climate summit

2009-12-28T18:12:00.002-05:00

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In a letter to the Guardian, former deputy PM John Prescott defends China and blames the US and Barack Obama for Copenhagen's flawed outcome. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

John Prescott has defended China's role in the climate change summit, saying the blame for its flawed outcome must lie with the United States and Barack Obama.

The former deputy prime minister helped negotiate the Kyoto protocol in 1997, and was in Copenhagen acting as an informal bridge between the Chinese delegation and others.

As a frequent visitor to China, who knows many of its officials personally, Prescott fears privately that the Chinese will walk away from the talks if they continue to be singled out for blame.

In a letter to the Guardian, Prescott criticises the US climate change special envoy, Todd Stern, who "said at Copenhagen emissions weren't about 'morality or politics', they were 'just maths', with China projected to emit 60% more CO₂ than the US by 2030".

In his letter Prescott claims that Stern's arguments "ignored the more transparent measure of pollution per capita, which shows the US emits 20 tonnes per person every year, compared to China's six tonnes, whilst America's GDP per person is almost eight times greater than the Chinese". He also attacks President Barack Obama for suggesting there had been a period of "two decades of talking and no action. That might have been true in America, which refused to sign up to Kyoto, but not in the case of China or Europe, who followed a lot of that protocol's policies. Indeed Obama's offer of a 17% cut is wholly dependent on Congressional approval and will still be less than Kyoto targets." Prescott is climate change convenor for the Council of Europe, with the role of exploring how to keep the talks on the road.

China itself defended its "crucial role" in saving the Copenhagen conference from failure, according to the state media's first blow-by-blow rebuttal of European claims that China wrecked a climate deal.

In a florid account of prime minister Wen Jiabao's 60 hours in Copenhagen, the Xinhua news agency said the premier staved off the "unrealistic and unfair demands" of Britain, Germany and Japan.

There is no direct criticism of the US, but Obama is described as "awkward" in the presence of the Chinese premier.

According to the lengthy defence of China's actions, European nations repeatedly tried to impose secret drafts, unscheduled meetings and a hidden agenda on China and other developing nations.

The article, likely to have been approved at the highest level of government, notes that Wen walked out of a state dinner after hearing that an unscheduled meeting of leaders was being arranged soon afterwards to discuss a new draft text.

"It was really absurd that the country who called for the meeting never informed China," the report says. "Premier Wen concluded that this was no small matter.

"Since the start of the conference, there had been cases where individual or small group of countries put forward new texts in disregard of the principle of openness and transparency, arousing strong complaints from other participants."

Such accusations infuriate senior European negotiators, who claim China was fully informed ahead of Copenhagen of the plan for a new document, though it never agreed to the content.

Xinhua avoids mention of how and why China killed attempts to impose 2050 targets for reducing emissions. Beijing has consistently rejected such long-term goals, which it sees as a threat to itseconomic growth.It also fails to address claims that China torpedoed the inclusion of a 1.5C maximum global temperature rise, requested by small island states and African nations. Instead, it says, Wen showed sincerity by accepting a rise of no more than 2C by 2050.

Israel harvested organs in '90s without permission

2009-12-20T17:59:00.000-05:00

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By MARK LAVIE (AP)

JERUSALEM — Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of their families.

The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge.

Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said, "We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family."

The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place. "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer," the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.

In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies. "We'd glue the eyelid shut," he said. "We wouldn't take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids."

Many of the details in the interview first came to light in 2004, when Hiss was dismissed as head of the forensic institute because of irregularities over use of organs there. Israel's attorney general dropped criminal charges against him, and Hiss still works as chief pathologist at the institute. He had no comment on the TV report.

Complaints against the institute, where autopsies of dead bodies are performed, at the time of Hiss' dismissal came from relatives of Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as Palestinians. The bodies belonged to people who died from various causes, including diseases, accidents and Israeli-Palestinian violence, but there has been no evidence to back up the claim in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians for their organs. Angry Israeli officials called the report "anti-Semitic."

The academic, Nancy Sheppard-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, said she decided to make the interview public in the wake of the Aftonbladet controversy, which raised diplomatic tensions between Israel and Sweden and prompted Sweden's foreign minister to call off a visit to the Jewish state.

Sheppard-Hughes said that while Palestinians were "by a long shot" not the only ones affected by the practice in the 1990s, she felt the interview must be made public now because "the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, (is) something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered."

While insisting that all organ harvesting was done with permission, Israel's Health Ministry told Channel 2, "The guidelines at that time were not clear." It added, "For the last 10 years, Abu Kabir has been working according to ethics and Jewish law."

A Cloud Still Hangs Over Bhopal

2009-12-04T04:36:00.001-05:00

By SUKETU MEHTA

IN the Mumbai kindergarten my son went to, the children never had to clean up after themselves; that was the servants’ job. So I really liked the school my son attended when we moved back to Brooklyn, where the teachers made the children tidy up at the end of the day. “Cleanup time, cleanup time!” my 6-year-old sang, joyfully gathering his scraps. It’s a wonderful American tradition: you always clean up the mess you made.

This is the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster, an epic mess that started one night when a pesticide plant owned by the American chemical giant Union Carbide leaked a cloud of poisonous gas. Before the sun rose, almost 4,000 human beings capable of love and anguish sank to their knees and did not get up. Half a million more fell ill, many with severely damaged lungs and eyes.

An additional 15,000 people have since died from the aftereffects, and 10 to 30 people are said to die every month from exposure to the hundreds of tons of toxic waste left over in the former factory. But amazingly, the site still has not been cleaned up, because Dow Chemical, which since acquired Union Carbide, refuses to accept any responsibility. The groundwater is contaminated; children of the survivors suffer from genetic abnormalities; and the victims have long since run out of their measly compensation and are begging on the streets.

I have traveled to Bhopal and seen the post-apocalyptic devastation, seen the sick, seen the factory. Methyl isocyanate is a deadly chemical used to kill insects. The night that 40 tons of it wafted out of the factory is, for the survivors, a fulcrum in time, marking the before and after in their lives. They still talk about “the gas” as if it were an organism they know well — how it killed buffalo and pigs, but spared chickens; how it traveled toward Jahangirabad and Hamidia Road, while ignoring other parts of the city; how it clung to the wet earth in some places but hovered at waist level in others; how it blackened all the leaves of a peepul tree; how they could watch it move down the other side of the road, like a rain cloud seen from a sunny spot.

All over India, when misfortune strikes — when a child is ill, for example — people burn chilies to drive away the evil eye. The gas smelled like chilies burning, and people said to one another, it must be a powerfully evil eye that’s being driven away, the stench is so strong.

Fleeing the gas, the Bhopalis clutched their children. Some babies fell, gasping, and their parents had to choose which ones to carry on their shoulders. One image still comes up over and over in their dreams: in the stampede, a thousand people are stepping on their child’s body.

In 2001, the maker of napalm married the bane of Bhopal: Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide for $11.6 billion and promptly distanced itself from the disaster. If Union Carbide was at fault, that was too bad; it had just ceased to exist. In 2002, Dow set aside $2.2 billion to cover potential liabilities arising from Union Carbide’s American asbestos production. By comparison, the total settlement for Bhopal was $470 million. The families of the dead got an average of $2,200; the wounded got $550; a Dow spokeswoman explained, that amount “is plenty good for an Indian.” As Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey observed in 2006, “In Bhopal, some of the world’s poorest people are being mistreated by one of the world’s richest corporations.”

Union Carbide and Dow were allowed to get away with it because of the international legal structures that protect multinationals from liability. Union Carbide sold its Indian subsidiary and pulled out of India. Warren Anderson, the Union Carbide chief executive at the time of the gas leak, lives in luxurious exile in the Hamptons, even though there’s an international arrest warrant out for him for culpable homicide. The Indian government has yet to pursue an extradition request. Imagine if an Indian chief executive had jumped bail for causing an industrial disaster that killed tens of thousands of Americans. What are the chances he’d be sunning himself in Goa?

The Indian government, fearful of scaring away foreign investors, has not pushed the issue with American authorities. Dow has used a kind of blackmail with the Indians; a 2006 letter from Andrew Liveris, the chief executive, to India’s ambassador to the United States asked for guarantees that Dow would not be held liable for the cleanup, and thanked him for his “efforts to ensure that we have the appropriate investment climate.”

What’s missing in the whole sad story is any sense of a human connection between the faceless people who run the corporation and the victims. In 1995, a Bhopali woman named Sajida Bano sent a handwritten letter to Union Carbide. The factory had killed her husband in 1981 in an accident, and then, on the night of the disaster, her 4-year-old son. “You put your hand on your heart and think,” she wrote, “if you are a human being: if this happened to you, how would your wife and children feel?” She never received a response.

The survivors of Bhopal want only to be treated as human beings — not victims, not greedy money-grabbers, just human beings who’ve gone through hell and are entitled to a measure of dignity. That includes concrete things like cleaning up the mess and providing health care for the sick, and also something more abstract but equally important — an acknowledgment that a wrong was done to them, and an apology, which Bhopalis have yet to receive.

That was another fine thing my son learned in the Brooklyn school: when you’ve done something bad, you should say you’re sorry. After a quarter of a century, Dow should acknowledge that it is responsible for a very big mess. And now, it’s cleanup time.

Suketu Mehta, a journalism professor at New York University, is the author of “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.”

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Child-Man in the Promised Land

2009-10-24T16:58:00.002-04:00

By Kay S. Hymowitz ( source )

It’s 1965 and you’re a 26-year-old white guy. You have a factory job, or maybe you work for an insurance broker. Either way, you’re married, probably have been for a few years now; you met your wife in high school, where she was in your sister’s class. You’ve already got one kid, with another on the way. For now, you’re renting an apartment in your parents’ two-family house, but you’re saving up for a three-bedroom ranch house in the next town. Yup, you’re an adult!

Now meet the twenty-first-century you, also 26. You’ve finished college and work in a cubicle in a large Chicago financial-services firm. You live in an apartment with a few single guy friends. In your spare time, you play basketball with your buddies, download the latest indie songs from iTunes, have some fun with the Xbox 360, take a leisurely shower, massage some product into your hair and face—and then it’s off to bars and parties, where you meet, and often bed, girls of widely varied hues and sizes. They come from everywhere: California, Tokyo, Alaska, Australia. Wife? Kids? House? Are you kidding?

Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood’s milestones—high school degree, financial independence, marriage, and children. These days, he lingers—happily—in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. Decades in unfolding, this limbo may not seem like news to many, but in fact it is to the early twenty-first century what adolescence was to the early twentieth: a momentous sociological development of profound economic and cultural import. Some call this new period “emerging adulthood,” others “extended adolescence”; David Brooks recently took a stab with the “Odyssey Years,” a “decade of wandering.”

But while we grapple with the name, it’s time to state what is now obvious to legions of frustrated young women: the limbo doesn’t bring out the best in young men. With women, you could argue that adulthood is in fact emergent. Single women in their twenties and early thirties are joining an international New Girl Order, hyperachieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, traveling, and dining with friends [see “The New Girl Order,” Autumn 2007]. Single Young Males, or SYMs, by contrast, often seem to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3, and, in many cases, underachieving. With them, adulthood looks as though it’s receding.

Freud famously asked: “What do women want?” Notice that he didn’t ask what men wanted—perhaps he thought that he’d figured that one out. But that’s a question that ad people, media execs, and cultural entrepreneurs have pondered a lot in recent years. They’re particularly interested in single young men, for two reasons: there are a lot more of them than before; and they tend to have some extra change. Consider: in 1970, 69 percent of 25-year-old and 85 percent of 30-year-old white men were married; in 2000, only 33 percent and 58 percent were, respectively. And the percentage of young guys tying the knot is declining as you read this. Census Bureau data show that the median age of marriage among men rose from 26.8 in 2000 to 27.5 in 2006—a dramatic demographic shift for such a short time period.

That adds up to tens of millions more young men blissfully free of mortgages, wives, and child-care bills. Historically, marketers have found this group an “elusive audience”—the phrase is permanently affixed to “men between 18 and 34” in adspeak—largely immune to the pleasures of magazines and television, as well as to shopping expeditions for the products advertised there. But by the mid-1990s, as SYM ranks swelled, marketers began to get their number. One signal moment came in April 1997, when Maxim, a popular British “lad magazine,” hit American shores. Maxim strove to be the anti-Playboy-and-Esquire; bad-boy owner Felix Dennis sniffed at celebrity publishers with their tired formulas. Instead, he later observed, the magazine’s creators adopted the “astonishing methodology of asking our readers what they wanted . . . and then supplying it.”

And what did those readers—male, unmarried, median age 26, median household income $60,000 or so—want? As the philosophers would say, duh. Maxim plastered covers and features with pouty-lipped, tousled-haired pinups in lacy underwear and, in case that didn’t do the trick, block-lettered promises of sex! lust! naughty! And it worked. More than any men’s magazine before or since, Maxim grabbed that elusive 18- to 34-year-old single-college-educated-guy market, and soon boasted about 2.5 million readers—more than GQ, Esquire, and Men’s Journal combined.

Victoria’s Secret cover art doesn’t fully explain the SYM’s attraction to Maxim. After all, plenty of down-market venues had the sort of bodacious covers bound to trigger the young male’s reptilian brain. No, what set Maxim apart from other men’s mags was its voice. It was the sound of guys hanging around the Animal House living room—where put-downs are high-fived; gadgets are cool; rock stars, sports heroes, and cyborg battles are awesome; jobs and Joni Mitchell suck; and babes are simply hot—or not. “Are there any cool jobs related to beer?” a reader’s letter asks in a recent issue. Answer: brand manager, beer tester, and brewmaster.

Maxim asked the SYM what he wanted and learned that he didn’t want to grow up. Whatever else you might say about Playboy or Esquire, they tried to project the image of a cultured and au courant fellow; as Hefner famously—and from today’s cultural vantage point, risibly—wrote in an early Playboy, his ideal reader enjoyed “inviting a female acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” Hearing this, the Maxim dude would want to hurl. He’d like to forget that he ever went to school.

Maxim happily obliges. The editors try to keep readers’ minds from wandering with articles like “Confessions of a Strip Club Bouncer.” But they rely heavily on picture-laden features promoting the latest skateboards, video games, camcorders, and other tech products, along with an occasional Q-and-A with, say, Kid Rock—all with the bare minimum of print required to distinguish a magazine from a shopping catalog or pinup calendar. Playboy’s philosophy may not have been Aristotle, but it was an attempt, of sorts, to define the good life. The Maxim reader prefers lists, which make up in brevity what they lose in thought: “Ten Greatest Video Game Heroes of All Time,” “The Five Unsexiest Women Alive,” “Sixteen People Who Look Like They Absolutely Reek,” and so on.

Still, Maxim is far from dumb, as its self-mockery proves. The Maxim child-man prides himself on his lack of pretense, his unapologetic guyness. The magazine’s subtext seems to be: “We’re just a bunch of horny, insensitive guys—so what?” What else to make of an article entitled “How to Make Your Girlfriend Think Her Cat’s Death Was an Accident”? “The only thing worse than a show about doctors is a show about sappy chick doctors we’re forced to watch or else our girlfriends won’t have sex with us,” the editors grumble about the popular (with women) Grey’s Anatomy.

The Maxim child-man voice has gone mainstream, which may explain why the magazine’s sales were flat enough for Dennis to sell it last summer. You’re that 26-year-old who wants sophomoric fun and macho action? Now the culture has a groaning table of entertainment with your name on it. Start with the many movies available in every guy-friendly genre: sci-fi flicks like Transformers, action and crime movies like American Gangster, comedies like Superbad, and the seemingly endless line of films starring Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, and the “Frat Pack,” as USA Today dubbed the group of young male comedians that includes Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Owen and Luke Wilson, Jack Black, and Steve Carell.

With a talent for crude physical comedy, gleeful juvenility, and self-humiliation, the Frat Packers are the child-man counterparts to the more conventional leads, like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, whom women and Esquire editors love. In Old School (2003), three guys in their thirties decide to start a college fraternity. Frank the Tank (the moniker refers to his capacity for alcohol), played by Ferrell, flashes his saggy white derriere streaking through the college town; the scene is a child-man classic. In 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Carell plays a middle-aged nerd with a large action-figure collection but no action. In one guy-favorite scene, a beautician painfully waxes Carell’s hirsute chest; as Carell pointed out later, this was a “guy thing, this sadistic nature that men have to see other men in non-life-threatening pain.”

Even though the networks must be more restrained, television also has plenty of “stupid fun” (as Maxim calls a regular feature), gross-out humor, and even low-level sadism for child-man viewers. This state of affairs is newer than you might think. Apart from sports programming and The Simpsons, which came along in the early 1990s, there wasn’t a lot to make young men pick up the remote. Most prime-time television appealed to women and families, whose sensibilities were as alien to dudes as finger bowls.

Today, the child-man can find entire networks devoted to his interests: Spike TV runs wrestling matches, Star Trek reruns, and the high-tech detective drama CSI; Blackbelt TV broadcasts martial arts around the clock; sci-fi is everywhere. Several years ago, the Cartoon Network spied the potential in the child-man market, too, and introduced Adult Swim, late-night programming with “adult” cartoons like Family Guy and Futurama, a cult favorite co-created by Matt Groening of The Simpsons fame. Adult Swim has cut into the male Letterman and Leno audience, luring gold-plated advertisers Saab, Apple, and Taco Bell; child-men, it should come as no surprise, eat lots of fast food.

One can also lay the success of cable giant Comedy Central at the child-man’s sneakered foot. In its early-nineties infancy, Comedy Central had old movie comedies, some stand-up acts, and few viewers. The next several years brought some buzz with shows like Politically Incorrect. But it was in 1997—the same year that Maxim arrived in America—that the network struck gold with a cartoon series starring a group of foul-mouthed eight-year-old boys. With its cutting subversion of all that’s sacred and polite, South Park was like a dog whistle that only SYMs could hear; the show became the highest-rated cable series in that age group.

In 1999, the network followed up with The Man Show, famous for its “Juggies” (half-naked women with exceptionally large, well, juggies), interviews with porn stars, drinking songs, and a jingle that advised, “Quit your job and light a fart / Yank your favorite private part.” It was “like Maxim for TV,” one network executive told Media Life. Comedy Central’s viewers, almost two-thirds of them male, have made both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report cultural touchstones and launched the careers of stars like Bill Maher, Jimmy Kimmel, Dave Chapelle, and, most notably, Daily Show anchor Jon Stewart—who has already hosted the Academy Awards and is set to do so again, a perfect symbol of the mainstreaming of the SYM sensibility.

Nothing attests more to the SYM’s growing economic and cultural might than video games do. Once upon a time, video games were for little boys and girls—well, mostly little boys—who loved their Nintendos so much, the lament went, that they no longer played ball outside. Those boys have grown up to become child-man gamers, turning a niche industry into a $12 billion powerhouse. Men between the ages of 18 and 34 are now the biggest gamers; according to Nielsen Media, almost half—48.2 percent—of American males in that age bracket had used a console during the last quarter of 2006, and did so, on average, two hours and 43 minutes per day. (That’s 13 minutes longer than 12- to 17-year-olds, who evidently have more responsibilities than today’s twentysomethings.) Gaming—online games, as well as news and information about games—often registers as the top category in monthly surveys of Internet usage.

And the child-man’s home sweet media home is the Internet, where no meddling censors or nervous advertisers deflect his desires. Some sites, like MensNewsDaily.com, are edgy news providers. Others, like AskMen.com, which claims 5 million visitors a month, post articles like “How to Score a Green Chick” in the best spirit of Maxim-style self-parody. “How is an SUV-driving, to-go-cup-using, walking environmental catastrophe like yourself supposed to hook up with them?” the article asks. Answer: Go to environmental meetings, yoga, or progressive bookstores (“but watch out for lesbians”).

Other sites, like MenAreBetterThanWomen.com, TuckerMax.com, TheBestPageInTheUniverse.com, and DrunkasaurusRex.com, walk Maxim’s goofiness and good-natured woman-teasing over the line into nastiness. The men hanging out on these sites take pride in being “badasses” and view the other half bitterly. A misogynist is a “man who hates women as much as women hate each other,” writes one poster at MenAreBetterThanWomen. Another rails about “classic woman ‘trap’ questions— Does this make me look fat? Which one of my friends would you sleep with if you had to? Do you really enjoy strip clubs?” The Fifth Amendment was created because its architects’ wives “drove them ape-shit asking questions that they’d be better off simply refusing to answer.”

That sound you hear is women not laughing. Oh, some women get a kick out of child-men and their frat/fart jokes; about 20 percent of Maxim readers are female, for instance, and presumably not all are doing research for the dating scene. But for many of the fairer sex, the child-man is either an irritating mystery or a source of heartbreak. In Internet chat rooms, in advice columns, at female water-cooler confabs, and in the pages of chick lit, the words “immature” and “men” seem united in perpetuity. Women complain about the “Peter Pan syndrome”—the phrase has been around since the early 1980s but it is resurgent—the “Mr. Not Readys,” and the “Mr. Maybes.” Sex and the City chronicled the frustrations of four thirtysomething women with immature, loutish, and uncommitted men for six popular seasons.

Naturally, women wonder: How did this perverse creature come to be? The most prevalent theory comes from feminist-influenced academics and cultural critics, who view dude media as symptoms of backlash, a masculinity crisis. Men feel threatened by female empowerment, these thinkers argue, and in their anxiety, they cling to outdated roles. The hyper-masculinity of Maxim et al. doesn’t reflect any genuine male proclivities; rather, retrograde media “construct” it.

The fact that guys cheer on female heroines like Buffy the Vampire Slayer as much as they do Chuck Norris tells against this theory somewhat. But there’s an ounce of truth to it. The men of the new media are in backlash mode, largely because they believe that feminists have stood in their way as media gatekeepers—that is, agents, editors, producers, and the like—who don’t understand or accept “men acting like men.” They gleefully stick their thumbs in the eyes of politically correct tsk-tskers. In one South Park episode, the Sexual Harassment Panda, a mascot who teaches schoolkids the evils of sexual harassment, is fired after his little talks provoke a flood of inane lawsuits. In Maxim, readers can find articles like “How to Cure a Feminist,” one of whose recommendations is to “pretend you share her beliefs” by asking questions like, “Has Gloria Steinem’s marriage hurt the feminist agenda?”

Insofar as the new guy media reflect a backlash against feminism, they’re part of the much larger story of men’s long, uneasy relationship with bourgeois order. The SYM with a taste for Maxim or South Park may not like Gloria Steinem, but neither does he care for anyone who tells him to behave—teachers, nutritionists, prohibitionists, vegetarians, librarians, church ladies, counselors, and moralists of all stripes. In fact, men have always sought out an antisocial, even anarchic, edge in their popular culture. In a renowned essay, the critic Barbara Ehrenreich argued that the arrival of Playboy in 1953 represented the beginning of a male rebellion against the conformity of mid-century family life and of middle-class virtues like duty and self-discipline. “All woman wants is security,” she quotes an early Playboy article complaining. “And she is perfectly willing to crush man’s adventurous freedom-loving spirit to get it.” Even the name of the magazine, Ehrenreich observed, “defied the convention of hard-won maturity.”

Ehrenreich was right about the seditious impulse behind Playboy, but wrong about its novelty. Male resistance to bourgeois domesticity had been going on since the bourgeoisie went domestic. In A Man’s Place, historian John Tosh locates the rebellion’s roots in the early nineteenth century, when middle-class expectations for men began to shift away from the patriarchal aloofness of the bad old days. Under the newer bourgeois regime, the home was to be a haven in a heartless world, in which affection and intimacy were guiding virtues. But in Tosh’s telling, it didn’t take long before men vented frustrations with bourgeois domestication: they went looking for excitement and male camaraderie in empire building, in adventure novels by authors like Robert Louis Stevenson, and in going to “the club.”

By the early twentieth century, the emerging mass market in the U.S. offered new outlets for the virile urges that sat awkwardly in the bourgeois parlor; hence titles like Field and Stream and Man’s Adventure, as well as steamier fare like Escapade and Caper. When television sets came on the market in the late 1940s, it was the airing of heavyweight fights and football games that led Dad to make the big purchase; to this day, sports events—the battlefield made civilized—glue him to the Barcalounger when he should be folding the laundry.

But this history suggests an uncomfortable fact about the new SYM: he’s immature because he can be. We can argue endlessly about whether “masculinity” is natural or constructed—whether men are innately promiscuous, restless, and slobby, or socialized to be that way—but there’s no denying the lesson of today’s media marketplace: give young men a choice between serious drama on the one hand, and Victoria’s Secret models, battling cyborgs, exploding toilets, and the NFL on the other, and it’s the models, cyborgs, toilets, and football by a mile. For whatever reason, adolescence appears to be the young man’s default state, proving what anthropologists have discovered in cultures everywhere: it is marriage and children that turn boys into men. Now that the SYM can put off family into the hazily distant future, he can—and will—try to stay a child-man. Yesterday’s paterfamilias or Levittown dad may have sought to escape the duties of manhood through fantasies of adventures at sea, pinups, or sublimated war on the football field, but there was considerable social pressure for him to be a mensch. Not only is no one asking that today’s twenty- or thirtysomething become a responsible husband and father—that is, grow up—but a freewheeling marketplace gives him everything that he needs to settle down in pig’s heaven indefinitely.

And that heaven can get pretty piggish. Take Tucker Max, whose eponymous website is a great favorite among his peers. In a previous age, Max would have been what was known as a “catch.” Good-looking, ambitious, he graduated from the University of Chicago and Duke Law. But in a universe where child-men can thrive, he has found it more to his liking—and remarkably easy—to pursue a different career path: professional “asshole.” Max writes what he claims are “true stories about my nights out acting like an average twentysomething”—binge drinking (UrbanDictionary.com lists Tucker Max Drunk, or TMD, as a synonym for “falling down drunk”), fighting, leaving vomit and fecal detritus for others to clean up, and, above all, hooking up with “random” girls galore—sorority sisters, Vegas waitresses, Dallas lap dancers, and Junior Leaguers who’re into erotic asphyxiation.

Throughout his adventures, Max—like a toddler stuck somewhere around the oedipal stage—remains fixated on his penis and his “dumps.” He is utterly without conscience—“Female insecurity: it’s the gift that keeps on giving,” he writes about his efforts to undermine his prey’s self-esteem in order to seduce them more easily. Think of Max as the final spawn of an aging and chromosomally challenged Hugh Hefner, and his website and best-selling book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, as evidence of a male culture in profound decline. Playboy’s aspirations toward refinement still hinted at the call of the ego and a culture with limits on male restiveness; Max, the child-man who answers to no one except his fellow “assholes,” is all id—and proud of it.

Now, you could argue that the motley crew of Maxim, Comedy Central, Halo 3, and even the noxious Tucker Max aren’t much to worry about, and that extended adolescence is what the word implies: a temporary stage. Most guys have lots of other things going on, and even those who spend too much time on TuckerMax.com will eventually settle down. Men know the difference between entertainment and real life. At any rate, like gravity, growing up happens; nature has rules.

That’s certainly a hope driving the sharpest of recent child-man entertainments, Judd Apatow’s hit movie Knocked Up. What sets Knocked Up apart from, say, Old School, is that it invites the audience to enjoy the SYM’s immaturity—his T-and-A obsessions, his slobby indolence—even while insisting on its feebleness. The potheaded 23-year-old Ben Stone accidentally impregnates Alison, a gorgeous stranger he was lucky enough to score at a bar. He is clueless about what to do when she decides to have the baby, not because he’s a “badass”—actually, he has a big heart—but because he dwells among social retards. His roommates spend their time squabbling about who farted on whose pillow and when to launch their porn website. His father is useless, too: “I’ve been divorced three times,” he tells Ben when his son asks for advice about his predicament. “Why are you asking me?” In the end, though, Ben understands that he needs to grow up. He gets a job and an apartment, and learns to love Alison and the baby. This is a comedy, after all.

It is also a fairy tale for guys. You wouldn’t know how to become an adult even if you wanted to? Maybe a beautiful princess will come along and show you. But the important question that Apatow’s comedy deals with only obliquely is what extended living as a child-man does to a guy—and to the women he collides with along the way.

For the problem with child-men is that they’re not very promising husbands and fathers. They suffer from a proverbial “fear of commitment,” another way of saying that they can’t stand to think of themselves as permanently attached to one woman. Sure, they have girlfriends; many are even willing to move in with them. But cohabiting can be just another Peter Pan delaying tactic. Women tend to see cohabiting as a potential path to marriage; men view it as another place to hang out or, as Barbara Dafoe Whitehead observes in Why There Are No Good Men Left, a way to “get the benefits of a wife without shouldering the reciprocal obligations of a husband.”

Even men who do marry don’t easily overcome child-manhood. Neal Pollack speaks for some of them in his 2007 memoir Alternadad. Pollack struggles with how to stay “hip”—smoking pot and going to rock concerts—once he becomes a father to Elijah, “the new roommate,” as he calls him. Pollack makes peace with fatherhood because he finds that he can introduce his toddler to the best alternative bands, and also because he has so many opportunities to exercise the child-man’s fascination with “poop.” He is affectingly mad for his little boy. Yet his efforts to turn his son into a hip little Neal Pollack—“My son and I were moshing! Awesome!”—reflect the self-involvement of the child-man who resists others’ claims on him.

Knocked Up evokes a more destructive self-involvement in a subplot involving Alison’s miserably married sister Debbie and her husband, Pete, the father of her two little girls. Pete, who frequently disappears to play fantasy baseball, get high in Las Vegas, or just go to the movies on his own, chronically wields irony to distance himself from his family. “Care more!” his wife yells at him. “You’re cool because you don’t give a shit.”

And that “coolness” points to what may be the deepest existential problem with the child-man—a tendency to avoid not just marriage but any deep attachments. This is British writer Nick Hornby’s central insight in his novel About a Boy. The book’s antihero, Will, is an SYM whose life is as empty of passion as of responsibility. He has no self apart from pop-culture effluvia, a fact that the author symbolizes by having the jobless 36-year-old live off the residuals of a popular Christmas song written by his late father. Hornby shows how the media-saturated limbo of contemporary guyhood makes it easy to fill your days without actually doing anything. “Sixty years ago, all the things Will relied on to get him through the day simply didn’t exist,” Hornby writes. “There was no daytime TV, there were no videos, there were no glossy magazines. . . . Now, though, it was easy [to do nothing]. There was almost too much to do.”

Will’s unemployment is part of a more general passionlessness. To pick up women, for instance, he pretends to have a son and joins a single-parent organization; the plight of the single mothers means nothing to him. For Will, women are simply fleshy devices that dispense sex, and sex is just another form of entertainment, a “fantastic carnal alternative to drink, drugs, and a great night out, but nothing much more than that.”

As the title of his 2005 novel Indecision suggests, Benjamin Kunkel also shows how apathy infects the new SYM world. His hero, 28-year-old Dwight Wilmerding, suffers from “abulia”—chronic indecisiveness—so severe that he finds himself paralyzed by the Thanksgiving choices of turkey, cranberry sauce, and dressing. His parents are divorced, his most recent girlfriend has faded away, and he has lost his job. Like Will, Dwight is a quintessential slacker, unable to commit and unwilling to feel. The only woman he has loved is his sister, who explains the attraction: “I’m the one girl you actually got to know in the right way. It was gradual, it was inevitable.” Like Hornby, Kunkel sees the easy availability of sex as a source of slacker apathy. In a world of serial relationships, SYMs “fail to sublimate their libidinal energies in the way that actually makes men attractive,” Kunkel told a dismayed female interviewer in Salon. With no one to challenge them to deeper connections, they swim across life’s surfaces.

The superficiality, indolence, and passionlessness evoked in Hornby’s and Kunkel’s novels haven’t triggered any kind of cultural transformation. Kunkel’s book briefly made a few regional bestseller lists, and Hornby sells well enough. But sales of “lad lit,” as some call books with SYM heroes, can’t hold a candle to those of its chick-lit counterpart. The SYM doesn’t read much, remember, and he certainly doesn’t read anything prescribing personal transformation. The child-man may be into self-mockery; self-reflection is something else entirely.

That’s too bad. Men are “more unfinished as people,” Kunkel has neatly observed. Young men especially need a culture that can help them define worthy aspirations. Adults don’t emerge. They’re made.

Kay S. Hymowitz is a contributing editor of City Journal and the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her latest book is Marriage and Caste in America.

Israel push to change laws of war

2009-10-21T18:48:00.001-04:00

source

Israel's prime minister has instructed his government to draw up plans for a "world wide campaign" to lobby for changes in the international laws of war.

The order from Binyamin Netanyahu follows a special cabinet meeting on Tuesday to discuss Israel's response to the UN's Goldstone report, which condemned Israel's actions during the 22-day war on Gaza earlier this year.

The meeting also called for the formation of a special committee to deal with the international legal consequences of the report and the prospect Israeli officials could face war crimes trials abroad.

The Israeli government contends international law needs to be amended in order to fight global terrorism.

"The prime minister instructed the relevant government bodies to examine a worldwide campaign to amend the international laws of war to adapt them to the spread of global terrorism," Netanyahu's office said in a statement following Tuesday's meeting.

It added that the cabinet had also instructed justice ministry officials to form a committee to deal with the prospect of "legal proceedings abroad against the state of Israel or its citizens".

"We need to keep punching a hole in this lie that is spreading with the help of the Goldstone report," Netanyahu was quoted as saying in the statement.

'Freedom of action'

The statement was backed by Israel's defence minister, Ehud Barak, who said a change in the international laws of war was "in the interest of anyone fighting terrorism".

He added that the government wanted to give the Israeli military "the full backing to have the freedom of action."

The UN-backed Goldstone report – compiled by South African jurist Richard Goldstone - accuses Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during last winter's war in Gaza, but is more critical of Israeli troops for "terrorising and targeting" civilians.

Goldstone recommended that the conclusions of the report be forwarded to the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court at The Hague if the two sides fail to conduct credible investigations into the conflict within six months.

On Friday, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) endorsed the report, but Netanyahu has promised that it will be vetoed at the UN General Assembly.

Israel has previously called the report unbalanced, while Netanyahu has promised a lengthy fight to "delegitimise" the findings by the UN commission.

An Israeli official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said the issue of establishing an official inquiry into the conduct of the military during the Gaza campaign was not raised at Tuesday's meeting.

Goldstone attacked

Richard Goldstone himself has faced a storm of personal attacks inside Israel since the report's publication.

But on Monday he urged the Israeli government to comply with calls for a full investigation into the war, rejecting suggestions that the report risked sinking the stalled Middle East peace process.

"It's a shallow, utterly false allegation," Goldstone said during a meeting with a group of rabbis in the United States.

"What peace process are they talking about? There isn't one."

About 1,400 Palestinians – the majority of them civilians - and 13 Israelis were killed during Israel's three-week war on Gaza between December and January, which had the stated aim of stopping rocket attacks by Palestinian fighters from the coastal territory.

Mum and Dad on Facebook

2009-10-18T16:48:00.000-04:00

Mums .....

Dads ..........

Muslim Diaspora's Silence

2009-10-17T09:27:00.004-04:00

Ever wondered why most Muslim's abroad rarely complain about the Iraq war or mention the war crimes committed against Muslim's nor do they ever question/complain about their governments acts of terrorism committed in the ME ( at least not publicly ) ? They can only speak when it's carried out by Israel; but never when it is a Western State's terrorism. Well we Muslims know why; but here is further proof for everyone else :

Government anti-terrorism strategy 'spies' on innocent

by Vikram Dodd
source

The government programme aimed at preventing Muslims from being lured into violent extremism is being used to gather intelligence about innocent people who are not suspected of involvement in terrorism, the Guardian has learned.

The information the authorities are trying to find out includes political and religious views, information on mental health, sexual activity and associates, and other sensitive information, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Other documents reveal that the intelligence and information can be stored until the people concerned reach the age of 100.

Tonight Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, branded it the biggest spying programme in Britain in modern times and an affront to civil liberties.

The intelligence is being gathered as part of the strategy Preventing Violent Extremism – Prevent for short. It was launched three years ago to stop people being lured to al-Qaida ideology and committing acts of terrorism.

The government and police have repeatedly denied that the £140m programme is a cover for spying on Muslims in Britain. But sources directly involved in running Prevent schemes say it involves gathering intelligence about the thoughts and beliefs of Muslims who are not involved in criminal activity.

Instances around the country include:

• In the Midlands, funding for a mental health project to help Muslims was linked to information about individuals being passed to the authorities.

• In a college in northern England, a student who attended a meeting about Gaza was reported by one lecturer as a potential extremist. He was found not to be.

• A nine-year-old schoolboy in east London, who was referred to the authorities after allegedly showing signs of extremism – the youngest case known in Britain. He was "deprogrammed" according to a source with knowledge of the case.

• Within the last month, one new youth project in London alleged it was being pressured by the Metropolitan police to provide names and details of Muslim youngsters, as a condition of funding. None of the young Muslims have any known terrorist history.

• In one London borough, those working with youngsters were told to add information to databases they hold to highlight which youths were Muslim. They were also asked to provide information, to be shared with the police, about which streets and areas Muslim youngsters could be found on.

• In Birmingham the programme manager for Prevent is in fact a senior counter- terrorism police officer. Paul Marriott has been seconded to work in the equalities division of Britain's biggest council.

• In Blackburn, at least 80 people were reported to the authorities for showing signs of extremism. They were referred to the Channel project, part of Prevent.

• A youth project manager alleges his refusal to provide intelligence led to the police spreading false rumours and trying to smear him and his organisation.

• One manager of a project in London said : "I think part of the point of the [Prevent] programme is to spy and intelligence gather. I won't do that." In another London borough wardens on council estates were told to inform on people not whom they suspected of crimes, but whom they suspected could be susceptible to radicalisation. One source, who has been involved in Whitehall discussions on counter-terrorism, said: "There is no doubt Prevent is in part about gathering intelligence on people's thoughts and beliefs. No doubt." He added that the authorities feared "they'd be lynched" if they admitted Prevent included spying.

Ed Husain, of the Quilliam Foundation, who has advised both Labour and the Conservatives on extremism, said: "It is gathering intelligence on people not committing terrorist offences." Husain, whose group receives £700,000 in Prevent funding, believes it is morally right to give law enforcement agencies the best chance of stopping terrorists before they strike.

Serious concerns that the Prevent programme is being used at least in part to "spy" on Muslims have been voiced not just by Islamic groups, but youth workers, teachers and others. Some involved in the programme have told the Guardian of their fears that they are being co-opted into spying. They did not want to be named, fearing they would lose their job.

Some groups have refused its funding. In several areas the provision of funding is explicitly linked to agreeing to sharing of information, or intelligence, with agencies including law enforcement.

Traditionally in Britain intelligence is gathered by the police and security services. Prevent is trying to turn community, religious and voluntary groups into information or intelligence providers.

Prevent is run by the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism, part of the Home Office. It is widely regarded in Whitehall as being an intelligence agency.

The OSCT is headed up by Charles Farr, a former senior intelligence officer, with expertise in covert work. Also senior in the OSCT is another former senior intelligence officer. The Guardian has been asked not to name him for security reasons.

Chakrabarti said she was horrified by the revelations. "It is the biggest domestic spying programme targeting the thoughts and beliefs of the innocent in Britain in modern times," she said.

"It is information-gathering directed at the innocent and the spying is directed at people because of their religion, and not because of their behaviour."

The Home Office said: "Any suggestion that Prevent is about spying is simply wrong. Prevent is about working with communities to protect vulnerable individuals and address the root causes of radicalisation."

Who should we bomb next ?

2009-10-14T17:17:00.002-04:00

Supposedly embedding of this video is disabled so I don't how long it will last on this page; but here is the original link in case it - somehow - becomes disabled.

"We can never forgive, and we can never forget the terrorism perpetrated against our citizens."

2009-10-10T19:23:00.002-04:00

I read the above statement from the US ambassador to Libya and it reminded me of another sentence I had read on ibeebarbie's blog a few days ago :

Yew, we still have places such as Iraq and Afghanistan that were subdued by military might, but he outrage of the world was heard, and these countries are being given back to the people that inhabit them.

Can you compare the two statements ? Somehow the Iraqi's are to forgive the Americans for the acts of terrorism committed against them. Be it the innocent people killed during the sanctions or those killed during the invasion and continued occupation ( when did they give it back ? ) or the people killed, while trying to overthrow Saddam, during the Iraq-Iran war as a result of Americans sharing intelligence with Saddam to keep him in power. They're also to forgive them for all the deaths that resulted from the - American Funded - coup that led to Saddam's uncle to come to power. But the American's don't forget their dead or forgive their killers !
People speak of peace and forgiveness but nobody in the west has ever even sincerely apologized or admitted their acts of terrorism - a fascist doing it for oil doesn't count - . I mean who is to compensate the Iranian's for all the deaths that resulted from the overthrow of their democratically elected government ? and everything that followed it including the current regime. Why should they have to change to meet America's expectations of them when it was the US that messed everything up in the first place ? What makes America so right that it is allowed to overthrow, kill and provoke civil wars simply because its companies aren't getting first class treatment or that the governments in place don't suit them. I mean the fact that a dictator/war-criminal like Bush got elected twice should be enough for anyone with any two-cents of brain to stop swallowing this rubbish, or do they have their heads so high up their asses ( a phrase used to describe Libyans by an American nonetheless ) that that is too much to expect ? They think they have a democracy when after nearly a year of election debates and propaganda and millions of dollars wasted - when their economy is failing - they still have the same government in place doing the same thing, except with different faces. That's basically all democracy is; putting puppets to take the blame in front of the mass media while the real "rulers" are pulling the strings from behind the scenes and whenever people catch onto your puppet change him.
I won't even get started on the Goldstone report and how the Americans because they support Israel said it was biased and then continued to pressure the PA traitors into stopping any criminal action against the Israeli's, who is going to avenge the dead in Gaza ? Come to think of it who is going to avenge all the dead who have been killed as a result of the installation of this foreign western outpost into our region ? Americans have been constantly overthrowing Middle-Eastern regimes to make sure that those in power aren't a threat to Israel at the expense of the average Middle-Easterner for at least 50 years now !
Peace isn't just a word. When you take my land and throw me out on the street don't expect peace or negotiations before you give it back. It's not peaceful of me to live homeless on the street just so you can live "peacefully" in my house. When you kill my loved ones or inact a crime that results in their death, peace doesn't come by me forgetting them especially not when you don't stop killing more people.
The funny thing is that even though a lot of people get angry at me for being provocative, especially the expat/green-zone kids crowd, and for bringing up anti-American articles that they think provoke hate and terrorism and stand in their way of promoting "peace" and "mutual understanding" the single greatest provoker of terrorism and hate is the US of A everytime it does something stupid ( which seems to be the only thing it knows how to do ) in the ME it provokes more hate. I remember before 9/11 people were angry at our governments and blaming them for everything and when you invoke an example of Western interference you would be silenced by "conspiracy theory" or "it's history" or something along that line as if there are two sides to the story; but the West continues to remind its victims of its past atrocities by repeating them over and over again they're worst than Al-Qaeda - which is probably why they've taken a back row seat lately .
Bottom line to those who speak of peace, stop invading us and killing us and sticking your noses in our business through your NGO's and stop empowering minorities that represent less than .0001% of our population as if they speak for us, when they are nothing more than your lackeys then we can talk about peace ..................... after all there's no peace without justice !